Windows Weekly 948 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat is in Berlin for ife. We'll see if we can pry some IFA knowledge out of him. We've got Richard Campbell back in Canada after his trip down the river. We have lots to talk about. Four new builds in the insider program. We'll talk about earnings. They're up, up, up.

Leo Laporte [00:00:19]:
And Paul is a little upset about the judge's decision in the Google antitrust case. We'll talk about that and a lot more coming up next on Window. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:36]:
This is twit.

Leo Laporte [00:00:44]:
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell. Episode 948, recorded Wednesday, September 3, 2025. Netflix tears. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, everybody, especially you winners and dozers. This is the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft. And our peripatetic pair of prognosticators are here. Mr.

Leo Laporte [00:01:12]:
Richard Campbell's back from his trip. Did you catch some fish?

Richard Campbell [00:01:16]:
Did. In fact, I had my Troutzilla moment. I've never happened to be before. I did caught a few 14s and a few 16s and a 20. And then shortly after that 20, I hit something so big, it just ripped the line off and took the fly and the leader and everything.

Leo Laporte [00:01:33]:
Oh, my God.

Richard Campbell [00:01:35]:
I'd heard the stories. That was the first time I ever had a Troutzilla on the line.

Leo Laporte [00:01:39]:
Troutzilla.

Richard Campbell [00:01:40]:
I don't know, man. That was a sturgeon. Like, I don't know, something big or.

Leo Laporte [00:01:44]:
Weighed down with a bunch of other people's sinkers and bobbers and flies.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:48]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:01:49]:
Well, congratulations. So you're rest, relaxed, you're tanned and you're well fed.

Richard Campbell [00:01:55]:
Yeah. Managed not to get burned. Had a lightning show one day. You know, a little bit of rain here and there, which good for the.

Leo Laporte [00:02:00]:
Fish, but that time of year.

Richard Campbell [00:02:01]:
Yeah, it was fantastic.

Leo Laporte [00:02:03]:
Nice. Well, welcome back. We missed you. Chris Hoffman did a great job filling in, but now we have to say hello to our favorite man about town, Paul Thurot. Looks like he's in a rathskeller in Berlin.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:18]:
I wish. At.

Leo Laporte [00:02:21]:
In Berlin, huh? Well, that's it? That's all you're gonna say, huh?

Paul Thurrott [00:02:28]:
I'm a man of few words, Leo.

Leo Laporte [00:02:31]:
Most of them.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:32]:
Most of them negative.

Leo Laporte [00:02:34]:
Has the show started yet or no?

Paul Thurrott [00:02:36]:
I mean, technically it doesn't start till Friday, but the press all arrives Monday or Tuesday because all of the hardware companies and other companies have press conferences and whatever. Now, as we record this, there hasn't been much that's occurred yet. I know Acer had some announcements, but there will be more.

Leo Laporte [00:02:57]:
Did you see anything exciting yet?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:00]:
I haven't seen anything yet that I can discuss. Oh, so.

Leo Laporte [00:03:07]:
Is that kind of thing, Eh, not yet. Good. Are you. Did you go to IFA last year?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:14]:
Mm.

Leo Laporte [00:03:14]:
Okay. So this is a regular occurrence?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:17]:
Well, yeah, for two years it has been so before that I had not.

Richard Campbell [00:03:22]:
Been the second annual.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:24]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:03:25]:
Well, you get to go to.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:26]:
It was too easy to get to ces, so I said, you know, let's make it hard.

Leo Laporte [00:03:31]:
Is this also more probably more to the point these days for PC makers?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:37]:
Yeah, it's one of the two big. Well, there's three really, but the two. To me, there are two big milestones in the year for chipsets that go into PCs, and PCs being announced, that is fairly universal. So CES and IFA are those two. And then obviously there's things like back to school season and so on. But as far as when stuff actually happens, those are the two. The two big ones.

Leo Laporte [00:04:00]:
Nice. All right, well, I suppose we'll hear all about it in the weeks and months to come as Paul becomes free to speak. Meanwhile, I guess there's probably something to talk about in the news.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:20]:
Yes. I am so distracted, but yes. So actually, there's a number of big milestones this week. So the first one is that unexpectedly, I think it was. I would remember this because it was such a big event, but I think it was Friday. Microsoft issued four builds to the Insider program, which is not technically the maximum they could do at one time because there's also Windows 10. And technically, in the Release Preview, you could have Windows 10 and different versions of Windows 11, but across beta, Dev Canary and Release Preview, new Windows 11 builds. And the Release Preview build we got was the first ever for Windows 11, version 25H2.

Richard Campbell [00:05:10]:
Oh, okay. So they were not all the same. Right, Right. They were, but they did.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:15]:
Yeah. They were actually all. They were all, in fact, different builds. Although dev and beta now line up.

Richard Campbell [00:05:20]:
Because you would think they're different channels. They should be different things.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:24]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:05:24]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:24]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:05:25]:
I'm glad.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:26]:
Yeah. I mean, technically, you could have a Windows 11 computer in the Release Preview. Well, a computer in the Release Preview channel. And get one of. At this point, I would say three different builds. Right. Depending on what you were doing.

Richard Campbell [00:05:40]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:41]:
And as far as Windows 11 goes, now you have the possibility to get 25H2, but it's one of those. You actually have to go into optional updates to find it. It doesn't actually Put it right out at the top, which is kind of unusual. 25H2 is going to be delivered as one of those enablement packages when they do ship it.

Richard Campbell [00:06:00]:
So I know it's only one number different than 24h2. This is not a big deal. This is not a new OS like 24H2 was.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:08]:
That's right. That's right. Yeah. 24H2 was a big change, even though it didn't seem like it. Right. You know, and they masked that in some ways by releasing all the same features across the last couple of versions. So when you were on 23H2 and you went to 24H2, it didn't seem like that big of a deal, maybe. But actually the.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:26]:
It changed a lot under the covers. This time they're not changing anything under the covers. So this is a minor update. Of course, they're also bringing all the features 25 to H2 to 25.

Richard Campbell [00:06:36]:
So 25 H2 this time with no covers.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:40]:
Yeah. We've been on this kind of crazy train since this time. I GUESS it was two years ago when we were waiting on 23H2, which is going to include the first version of Copilot and whatever else, and they just threw it out in the world. Memory serves. I believe it was September that year. They just put it out as a 22H2 update as if it was nothing. And to force that down everyone's throats because they knew the businesses would be able to skip that version otherwise. And so instead they put it in one of the last annual or monthly updates before the next version.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:22]:
Sorry, you're getting it. Which was kind of interesting. And then last year, like Leo, I think, mentioned or asked 24H2, or someone asked. Sorry if it was you, Richard, but Somebody asked about 24H2 being a major update, which it was. And they really didn't talk about it that much. They didn't. They were like, let's see if anyone notices. You know.

Richard Campbell [00:07:42]:
I don't know why they're so shy about this stuff. Like, it's. It's weird.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:47]:
It's. Yeah. I don't know.

Richard Campbell [00:07:49]:
I mean. And it's hard on it. You know, for an I, from an IT perspective, 24H2 is such a heavy lift. Like, you really need to test the snot out of this. But 25H2 should be trivial. Like, you shouldn't really worry about it at all. But you got to peel that onion to sort of figure that out. People got burned on 24H2 because it changed so much.

Richard Campbell [00:08:08]:
It just lights up the ticket system. Like everybody's complaining.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:11]:
Yeah, I know plenty of orgs that.

Richard Campbell [00:08:12]:
Are sticking on 23H2 and just looking, going, what do we got to do here?

Paul Thurrott [00:08:16]:
Yeah, well, it has had a year of testing. It's not like they've screwed up anything in the last year. So it's probably fine. I don't know. So. Yeah, that's kind of interesting. The weird thing to me is I've actually. The two computers I brought here, I put onto the release preview channel.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:38]:
I hadn't been looking at that recently.

Richard Campbell [00:08:41]:
Because you love flying close to the sun.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:43]:
Yeah, well, I fly closer to the sun than that. Usually I have. The dev channel is on at least three computers back home, but I haven't noticed any differences. And I think it might be tied to that enablement package thing. I think the thing that I got was the. I think you think about how Microsoft deploys things now with Windows, you know, it's essentially malware, right? So they put this stuff on your computer. It doesn't do anything. It's just sitting there in the background waiting for the, you know, the payload to drop or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:13]:
And then in the case of Windows, you know, the patch Tuesday will show up and the thing you download is just a. It just flips a switch and it turns. Starts turning features on. So it's likely that what I just got was a. That thing that doesn't actually expose any new features quite yet or something. Or maybe it's on some timer or whatever it is. I mean, it's on random in many cases. Right? We know they do that.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:35]:
So yeah, these two, it's, you know, both of them, it's like it's okay. It doesn't have the new start menu. It doesn't have administrator protection. It doesn't, you know, you go down the whole list. It's like, where is this stuff? You know, I thought I was, thought I was getting on the train there, but I guess the train was going to reverse or something. I don't know what the metaphor is, but yeah, anyway, so. But this indicates that this thing is going to be on schedule, right? And so the normal, I would say September slash October release time frame where they'll probably have a preview update in September and then the, the public, you know, that everyone gets it version in October, which is typically how it goes. Not always, but typically.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:22]:
So, yeah, but so nothing to speak of there. There are a set of builds that one that went out to dev and one that went out to beta. I noticed that the minor part of the build numbers were identical, which had never been the case or wasn't the case for much of the past year or two. And I went back to check because they must have changed that at some point. Right. And so even though they're on different build streams or whatever you want to call that, where the dev channels on the 26th, 220 build stream, if you will, and 23H2 or the beta channel is on 26120 the part that was after the, you know, the, the decimal point there was the number that was there. It was always different in the past, but now they're the same. So you know, to my like kind of ADHD brain, I was like oh nice, you know, But I was like when did they start this? And it was two or three builds ago, so I don't believe they even said anything.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:22]:
I think they just did it.

Richard Campbell [00:11:23]:
Just did it.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:25]:
Yeah. Now they're lined up, you know, and I'm sure many someones, internal and external Microsoft were like, how come these can't be the same minor bill number? Like they're the same features. Why don't you just make it. Let's make it easy to figure out what's what, you know. So they finally did it. So that to me was semi notable, I don't know. But that's the type of thing I care about. So nothing major, but some interesting minor updates.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:51]:
In both of those Builds There are two new text actions, both semi related to Microsoft 365 or directly related. One is the ability to recognize something on screen that is a table and you'll be able to convert it into a table for Excel, which is kind of interesting. Right? So that could be a hand drawn thing, it could be whatever's on screen. If it looks like a table, you can, you know, hold down the Windows key, click screen, does the AI pink and purple thing and then convert that. That's kind of cool. And then there's this notion of a Persona card which is, I think, I believe it's from Microsoft 365. But the idea there is that you have contacts and there's a contact, I would call it a contact card, but this is a Persona card for some reason. But obviously it's a picture of the person, name, phone number, email address, whatever information you have associated with them.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:45]:
And so same thing when you're using click to do with the screen. And it recognizes things on the screen that tie into a contact you have through Microsoft 365. It will actually display what they're calling a Persona card as an option here. We have to go click it, click through it. But that's kind of interesting, right? So I suppose we've all done this, right? So your phone rings. It's from some number you don't recognize in. You know, these days. You don't even think about it.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:15]:
You don't even answer that thing.

Richard Campbell [00:13:16]:
No, there's no phone calls in my life that aren't on my. That I want. That are on my schedule.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:20]:
Yeah. Yeah. So I mean, I'm kind of stretching this one a little bit because you can't really do this with your phone right now. But the idea here is that something on screen, it could be in an email, it could be somewhere. There's something we'll say an email address or a phone number or whatever it might be. And you're like, is this associated with somebody I actually know? And you can do that, you know, Windows Key plus Click, Click to do. And it will look and see if that has anything to do with anyone who's in your contacts list, which is actually pretty. That's pretty useful, you know, Windows kind of Windows key click.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:50]:
Yeah. Or what's the other one? I think if you just. I think if I don't. Is this a Copilot PC? Probably, yeah. Windows key click. Is it? And then there's a way to just do it with the keyboard too. I think it's just double maybe click and hold. Something like that.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:04]:
The one that said there's a mouse action as well, but it does that little, you know, the whole screen goes AI. It's like, oh, we're doing something fun, you know, and then it tells you, it gives you. Yeah, it selects all the things you can do something with and then you can. This will be one of those things right now, that second one I just mentioned is only if you are signed in with a work or school account for now and have a Microsoft 365 subscription. So enter ID, whatever. The first one is only on Snapdragon X, but it will be coming to AMD and Intel Copilot plus PC soon. Click to do is a Copilot plus PC feature, as we know. And then beyond that, there's two for everybody, I guess, or for all computers, regardless of whether they are Copilot plus PC or not.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:49]:
There's a new Braille viewer in narrator. That's kind of an interesting feature. So obviously having an on screen Braille reader might seem, you know, pointless. Right. Braille is something that you feel with your fingers. Right. But this is on your screen.

Richard Campbell [00:15:08]:
Your screen has problems.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:09]:
Yes, Right, right, right. We're going past multitouch now. We're going to multi bump. No, it's not that. So the way Microsoft describes it is if you are a sighted teacher, a trainer or developer tester who can't read Braille and you don't have any access or limited access to a Braille display, this is a way that you can display those characters on screen and then follow along in a classroom. Or maybe you're teaching people who are using a Brill reader or Brill interface of some kind. So it's kind of a limited use case, obviously, because it's an on screen thing, but this feels like something teachers especially asked for. Hey, could we get this kind of a thing somewhere? So it's being built into the Narrator app.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:56]:
That's one of those big accessories accessibility features in Windows 11. So that's cool. And then because it's been another week and it's the day that ends and why yet another change to Windows Share. So I don't know, it's the feature.

Richard Campbell [00:16:11]:
That everybody should like, but nobody cares about.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:13]:
Yeah, nobody uses it. And it's like one of those graphs where it's like one AXI is number of people that use it, it's way down at the bottom, and then the other one is like the number of times Microsoft has screwed with it and it's way up at the top, you know, so it's, it's kind of an interesting thing, but. So this is like a. It's hard to describe in part because I haven't seen it yet, but basically if you are familiar, like, in fact, I will look here on this particular computer. I'll look at this one here. So if you know how Share works, they've kind of adapted it over time. So you right click on a file and it used to be just a share option and there still is that icon at the top. But now we have a share and it will list all the apps that are compatible with that thing you've right clicked to share.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:00]:
So on this particular thing it was an image and it has, you know, paint and Outlook and teams, whatever else.

Richard Campbell [00:17:06]:
Is the equivalent of Open with.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:09]:
Yes, that's right. That's exactly right. So now they're going to have a Find Apps option on the bottom and that will let you find compatible apps in the store. And that's. I have to be honest, that's a pretty good idea. Right. Because it's not always clear. You know, some things, if you, if you want to send it via email.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:29]:
Probably your email app is the choice, you know, but I think in a lot of cases I don't think, A, I don't think anyone's using this feature to begin with, but B, even those that are, it's not always clear, you know, what you can use. And so I think that that's kind of, that's, that to me is actually a reasonable feature. It's just that no one's ever going to use it. So you heard it here first probably and also last because I don't think anyone's ever going to talk about it again, but there it is.

Richard Campbell [00:17:56]:
It's different than Open with in the sense that you're not necessarily talking about opening something. Although I got to say, like I'm just looking at a picture on my machine and when I hover over share with and open with, it's basically the same list.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:07]:
It opens the app. Yeah. So the idea, so think about, you know, about this obviously, but if you think about contracts and how they were created for Windows 8 and the idea there was, you know, public facing interface for what the app can do or things the app can do, in many cases what it can come up with is a more limited UI where it's just for that thing. So in this case, like obviously if you're going to share an image with Paint, you're just opening with. Right. But if you're going to share it with Outlook, you know, you might just have to bring up a new email message or something. It doesn't have to be the full app like you're going to, because you're going to send it, you know, it's. And so yeah, depending on what the item is and what the app you choose is, the interface could be exactly the same as Open With.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:56]:
But if these things are written to accommodate this feature, which, you know, again, most aren't, it could be more sophisticated. But yeah, I'm struggling to think of.

Leo Laporte [00:19:09]:
A good reason this whole thing was solved in mobile years ago and I guess maybe because Microsoft isn't in mobile anymore.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:16]:
That's right.

Leo Laporte [00:19:16]:
This is all new to them. But I mean every phone does this.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:20]:
Yes. So I won't remember when this was, but several years ago I sort of made this observation and I just didn't. I just don't understand why it was like this. Like if I, if I'm on mobile and they go to Instagram and I. Because I want to post some photos, those photos at that time at least maybe and probably still today I'm not even sure. But I think today had to be on the phone. Right. So if I have two phones and I took pictures with one phone, actually maybe I took some with each.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:50]:
There's no one phone I could go to and say and to select all those photos. And if it had, you know, because it's in an online service, it's in Google Photos. Like why, why can't I just do that? Right. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:20:00]:
I mean on Apple it's in Apple Photos.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:04]:
And yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:20:06]:
You know, the issue is if you have as you do a heterogeneous environment.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:11]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:20:11]:
That you can't count on it be available on all the different devices. But if you're in an Apple ecosystem, for instance, no matter, you know, as long as you.

Richard Campbell [00:20:18]:
Nothing like a walled garden for compatibility.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:20]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:20:21]:
But if I take it with my Android phone, then I have to wait for it to get to Google Photos and then I have to use Google Photos to share it on my iPhone.

Richard Campbell [00:20:28]:
And if you put your pictures on.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:29]:
OneDrive, Google has tried to do things to make Android work the way Apple devices work. Right. You know, and they're kind of hacky in some cases because you can't rely on certain things. Right. If you get. Once you get something like Windows, it's, you know, it's even worse.

Leo Laporte [00:20:45]:
And so there's no mobile component. So you have to work with all the.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:48]:
Yeah, but they all. But right. So a lot of people, a lot of features rather in Windows today are inspired by the mobile stuff. And you know, I think it was last week there was a. There's a lot of that continue on type functionality. So they had built a feature in where if you were working in the OneDrive app on your phone and then you logged into your PC, it was like, hey, you were doing this in OneDrive. Do you want to pick that up again? Is useful and I think familiar to people who are familiar with mobile, but it's also kind of a one off. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:20]:
And so last week they had announced we're going to do this for Spotify. And I'm sure there'll be. There already is a way for developers to write to these things, but they're just trying to kind of jumpstart those kind of behaviors on Windows.

Leo Laporte [00:21:34]:
Kev is using it in WhatsApp. So I guess WhatsApp in that building.

Richard Campbell [00:21:37]:
Kev seems to be the one company that has implemented Windows Share.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:43]:
Well, I hate to bubble on that Microsoft implemented it for them because they wanted an example that people.

Richard Campbell [00:21:49]:
It's very probable.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:50]:
Yeah, yeah. But yes. Anyway, so look I just did this. My wife and I were laying on the bed and I was doing something and I tried. I had to send her a file. And I'm like, I'll just use. Wait a minute.

Leo Laporte [00:22:05]:
Sitting next to each other on a bed.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:06]:
I know. Well, think about where I could be this. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:22:09]:
How do you do it? Marriage.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:10]:
How do you do it? Like in Minority Report, I would have swiped it over and it would have flew over there. Right.

Leo Laporte [00:22:17]:
You know what Lisa and I do? We touch phones?

Paul Thurrott [00:22:20]:
No, no, but I'm saying we're on computers. We're on different laptops and I have a file, and this is a file I download.

Leo Laporte [00:22:27]:
Apple has airdrop. Again, if you're in the app exclusively in the Apple ecosystem and Google's capability.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:32]:
I checked, there's no airdrop on Windows, so it's not a feature of the operating system. But they do have nearby Share, which is essentially similar, right? Yeah, yeah, similar.

Leo Laporte [00:22:42]:
But, you know, that's what Android's doing too.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:44]:
Not as seamless. Yeah, it's possibly still transferring right now. This was 35 minutes ago. I don't. Honestly, I use this for myself between my own computers a lot because I'll take screenshots on one and use them over here.

Leo Laporte [00:22:57]:
I do all the.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:58]:
That always works great. I don't know what this thing is. Not a particularly big file, but it's this thing. Yeah. 111 megabytes. I mean, there are.

Leo Laporte [00:23:04]:
You know, so it's complicated because I think it uses Bluetooth initially to do the handshake and then it switches over.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:10]:
To WI fi for uses. WI fi. So we're both. We are on the same WI FI network, which is what makes that possible. Yeah. But yeah, for some reason, this is what this is. This is unfortunately, the experience in Windows a lot of the times. You know, sometimes it works great.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:24]:
And in my case, I will say, you know, nearby Share for me actually does work pretty great usually. But yeah, for whatever reason, I just need. I wanted to get this thing done and just get off this and move on. And like I said, I'm not even sure it ever finished. I don't know. It happened so slowly. Yeah. Yeah, I guess.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:40]:
But 111 bigger. So I could have used a USB key. You know, I have that. This one here somewhere. I could have emailed it. Like a jerk. I could have. You know, there's all kinds of things.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:51]:
But I tried to do it the, you know, the good way.

Leo Laporte [00:23:54]:
You can't email a file that size. Gmail will reject it.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:58]:
Oh, yeah. Okay. I mean, you could put it, I could just copy it to. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:24:02]:
Put it on OneDrive.

Richard Campbell [00:24:03]:
You throw it up to OneDrive and you send them a link. Yeah, because that's, we all have our.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:07]:
Little, you know, workarounds for these things. Right. Like it's. Yeah. I don't know. I tried. All I'm saying is I tried and I failed. Well.

Richard Campbell [00:24:16]:
And somebody's fussing over this like they're trying to get better.

Leo Laporte [00:24:19]:
It's a hard thing. And I'll be ecumenical. I don't think it's a Windows only difficulty. I think it's just a general computer difficulty.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:24]:
Difficulty. Yeah, no, I, that's why I kind of called out Google there because they're, you know, they're doing what they can do and, and you can see where it, it works and you can see where it doesn't. And, and that is the benefit of this walled garden thing. I mean, when you, if you don't mind being monoculture. Yeah. You know, things can start working together in ways that would be very difficult otherwise. But Apple's a special company because not only do they do that stuff, but they also block others from using it. So it's fine.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:51]:
You know, they, they're, they're, they're the whole enc, as we say.

Richard Campbell [00:24:57]:
Well, and because they own the back end and the front end, it's going to work no matter what. Where here you see Microsoft trying to do share and they're trying to get the front end people to play.

Leo Laporte [00:25:07]:
It reminds me a lot of airplay on the Mac versus, what is it, DLNA on Windows. It's very much kind of that where, yeah, it's better to be in a locked in ecosystem. I enjoy Apple Bags.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:24]:
There are pros and cons. I mean, it might depend on what you're doing. I just, you know, I got like the, one of the new Pixel phones and yeah, look, I, I've used a Pixel within the past four to six months. Whatever. I, it, I should. But I been using an iPhone so you kind of get used to things. So like one of the first things I wanted to do is I was playing something on my phone. I was like, all right, cool, I'm going to put this up on the speaker.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:48]:
And then like two speakers come up and one of them is like a Google smart screen in my kitchen and the other one's like another Google SM screen is upstairs. And I'm like, what is this? I'm like, oh, right. I don't have airplane. This thing. God damn it. Okay, so then it Becomes like a game, like, how do I do this? And I don't. I never did it again.

Leo Laporte [00:26:07]:
To be fair, that happens to me on airplay just as often. I get all the things I don't want and I don't see the thing I want. But we have, I don't know, 20 airplay devices in the house. I mean, I could play it.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:19]:
Oh, yeah, no. The list that comes up on an Apple device in my house is amazing. It's, you know, and you can also mix and match. You could, you could do. It's not just multi room audio. You could. Well, but I guess this is technically multi room audio. It's like two sets of speakers in the same room, you know, or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:34]:
It's like you can. It's nice.

Leo Laporte [00:26:36]:
This is why home automation is struggling too, because it's just. There's no unified. Because nobody wants to say, okay, we're gonna give in to some standard and will all do the same thing. They want differentiation.

Richard Campbell [00:26:52]:
Even though their customers want.

Leo Laporte [00:26:54]:
We want standards. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:56]:
We want things to work.

Richard Campbell [00:26:57]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:26:57]:
We just want it to work.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:58]:
Please.

Richard Campbell [00:26:59]:
There's a great XKCD on this because, my goodness, there's 13 messaging standards. We should fix this now. There's 14. This. Exactly, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:06]:
Yes, yes, yes. Which was. So I think I might talk about this later in the show, but like I went back and rewatched the first Google Pixel event, right. And this is notable for reasons I'll talk about later where they literally saw the future accurately and kind of nailed it in many cases. But one of the. I think he said there were four, like primary things we were shooting to do and the four, what the third or fourth was, it was. They didn't say it this way, but it was cross platform messaging compatibility. And I thought to myself, well, that's interesting because, you know, we still, we've had this RCS thing in recent years, obviously the whole imessage blue and green bubble problem because my memory isn't great.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:49]:
I was like, okay. My guess is that what they did was they did something to interoperate with imessage, which Apple then shut off within three months or something. Right, right. But that isn't what they did. They released another messaging app. So the solution to cross platform messaging is use the app which we will make that you can put on both platforms. And it's like, that does not solve the problem. And by the way, that app, which was a.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:12]:
There was the video app Duo. Right. Remember there was like Allo and Duo briefly. I think it was in the market.

Leo Laporte [00:28:17]:
Oh, God. Yeah, they had. At one point, Google had felt like half a dozen chat apps.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:23]:
Well. And honestly, people, you know, ripped into them and understandably and probably rightfully for that. But I actually think a lot of it was that thing I just said, which was like they were trying to figure out like, we want interoperability with Apple and Apple does not want that.

Richard Campbell [00:28:39]:
No.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:39]:
You know, and I think a lot of this was them trying to be like, all right, well, is there some way we can make this work?

Leo Laporte [00:28:44]:
And I think the only person I ever used Aloe with was Jeff Jarvis. It was just me and Jeff. It was kind of sad.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:51]:
He's probably still using it.

Leo Laporte [00:28:53]:
No, you can't. They took it away. They stole it away from us.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:57]:
I think they just. What do they roll it into? Meat, which is a great name for anything.

Leo Laporte [00:29:01]:
Yeah. Aloe became Chat became meat.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:04]:
Yeah. It's too bad they tried. All I'm saying is they tried. All I'm also saying is you probably have 100 messaging apps between your phone and your computer, you know? Right.

Leo Laporte [00:29:15]:
I mean, that's what they're talking about. Dustin says, my wife's family are all in Germany. They use Signal, they used to use threema.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:23]:
I don't even know what that is.

Richard Campbell [00:29:25]:
Steve loves so many messaging apps he's just never had to deal with. And you're better off.

Leo Laporte [00:29:29]:
Yeah, if we could just. Some global standard would be nice. I think Signal would be great, but I guess that's not going to happen.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:36]:
I don't know. So every time you run into this, you do what everyone does, is you kind of Google it. Right. So whether it's something like, for example, like, okay, so what's the one app that is third party app that does text messaging like mms, SMS and works everywhere. And the answer to that question is there is no such thing.

Leo Laporte [00:29:54]:
No, there isn't.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:55]:
Or you do something like that's not what it says. You have to, you know, you go down the rabbit holes. Right. Or okay, I just want to press a button from any app on Android and have it display a menu of all of the AirPlay compatible speakers in my apartment or whatever. And I'm not saying there isn't a solution in this case, but there isn't. Right? I mean, there isn't and it stinks because I don't mind doing the extra work if I could just get it to work. But these things are orchestrated such that you. They're not.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:27]:
They're designed so you can't get it.

Leo Laporte [00:30:29]:
To work unless you want in technology. Any Sentence that begins with I just wanna is doomed to disappointment and sadness.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:36]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:30:37]:
I just wanna.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:38]:
You could just taste the salt of your tears. I hope that's what you want, because that's what's gonna happen.

Leo Laporte [00:30:45]:
Hey, I wanna. You don't have to let me, but I would like to take a break right now. Would that be okay?

Paul Thurrott [00:30:50]:
Yeah, of course. I don't have to let you. I could prevent this. You could.

Leo Laporte [00:30:54]:
You could say, well, but wait, first I want to talk about Canary.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:58]:
No, I'm not going to do that. Actually, I can do it real quick because there's nothing to say. That one's just bug fixes. There's nothing going on there and I just.

Richard Campbell [00:31:07]:
Bug fixes for the early, early release version.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:11]:
No one can ever explain what Canary is or why it exists, but nobody knows.

Leo Laporte [00:31:14]:
So wait a minute. You said there were four new builds. There's Dev, there's beta, there's Canary. What's the fourth one?

Paul Thurrott [00:31:19]:
Release Preview.

Leo Laporte [00:31:20]:
Oh, she's Louise. All right, we're going to take a little break so you can wipe the sweat from your brow. I know we've been making you work on this.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:32]:
Stop trying.

Leo Laporte [00:31:33]:
I just want to not.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:36]:
You lost me right there.

Leo Laporte [00:31:40]:
Paul Thurad is in Berlin for ifa. Richard Campbell's back home in Madeira park in beautiful British Columbia. And you are watching Windows Weekly, our show today, brought to you by US Cloud. Oh, the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. You've heard us talking about US Cloud for a few months now. They are quite literally the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. They now support 50 of the Fortune 500. And there's a good reason.

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Richard Campbell [00:34:39]:
It's a gang.

Leo Laporte [00:34:40]:
It's a gang.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:41]:
It's a gang. They're a gang.

Leo Laporte [00:34:43]:
More than one's a gang.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:46]:
So we just mentioned Windows Share, the app that nobody uses. And here's another app that nobody uses, although I have used this Windows 10 and now Windows 11 have something called the Mobile Plans app, which you will only see if you have a Nano SIM card or an ESIM capability inside.

Richard Campbell [00:35:04]:
The computer in your laptop or tablet.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:06]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:35:07]:
You can put it in that app appears.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:09]:
Yep. And the point of this, which I have to say even at the time sounded a little arcane, was that you could browse a list of mobile carriers that offered data sim, usually pay as you go plans, but I think you could also sign up for longer term things. And the idea was that, you know, for the next week or whatever it is, I'm going to buy whatever amount of gigabytes now of data and use it and that will be it. You know, like you, you can do pay as you go esims and things like that in your phone, etc.

Richard Campbell [00:35:39]:
Yeah, just. Yeah, I don't know why they would bother with a physical SIM at all just to ESIM the whole thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:44]:
Well, it just, I mean it started long ago enough that maybe we didn't. ESIMs were not that common or whatever. And I, I don't know. But yeah, I mean, and that was part of the problem because one of the nice things about ESIM today is that you can just, you know, I could have shown up in Germany and been like, oh wow, my connection is terrible here. I need to do something. I could just download an esim, right? You know, buy one, get it, do it.

Richard Campbell [00:36:06]:
One of dozens of carriers that provide ESIMs in the air.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:10]:
You can shop for a price. You don't have to like go to a store, you don't have to be.

Richard Campbell [00:36:13]:
At the airport, you have to talk to anybody.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:15]:
Yeah, do whatever you want. I do this all the time. But the interesting thing about that is that how do you do that in Windows? And so actually they have been almost said contorting, they've been upgrading Windows so that it could do this. And they, Microsoft have been working with wireless carriers around the world so that they can will support that. So if you think about the air Lows or whatever it is, the Nomads, whatever the ESIM companies are, but also just the big carriers too, right? Like Verizon or whatever, here in the United States they have all these different methods through which you can download and then configure an ESIM onto your. Usually it's a phone or maybe a tablet, but now also a computer and some, you know, it could be like a QR code, you scan it with a camera perhaps or whatever. It's all different ways to do it. But this is happening.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:03]:
And so they're not good, they're not killing it immediately, but sometime between now and the end of February of next year, they will turn this feature off, basically. And because you won't need it, you'll be able to do this right through Settings.

Richard Campbell [00:37:15]:
Yeah, it's not taking any functionality away, really. Just an icon that you ever needed in the first place.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:19]:
Yeah. And actually so in some ways this is better because not because it puts the onus of finding it's on you, but rather because that app was not the complete picture of what was available. It was just whatever companies had kind of partnered with Microsoft. Right. So now you can just do whatever you want. And so presumably I haven't tried this yet, but I'm not sure one of these has one. But I could put a Google Fi data SIM in here. Ecim, sorry, it should work fine because it works with phones, works with tablets, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:51]:
So not a big deal, but I feel like a lot of people hearing this be like, what is this thing called? And they'll start searching like, I don't see this. You can find it in the store. So if you don't have a computer that has a SIM or an ESIM capability. If you just go to the Microsoft Store and search for mobile plans and.

Richard Campbell [00:38:10]:
The main thing the computer has is a cellular radio, right? If you have a cellular radio and antenna, then you will have the ability to do this. If you don't have those things, you can't do this.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:20]:
I mean, you could download the app doesn't do anything. I try it won't work.

Richard Campbell [00:38:23]:
It'll probably complain bitterly or crash.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:28]:
I want to get online. Help me. So there's that. Actually, I think I'm going to continue the trend and say, and speaking of apps nobody uses again, Microsoft started adding something called Windows Backup to Windows 11 a couple of years ago. I think they've since added it to Windows 10. It has since become a key part of the strategy for moving individuals from 10 to 11 as part of this big migration that's about to happen, apparently, as Windows 10 sails off into end of life or end of support. And yeah, it's pretty terrible, frankly. It's a big part of what I would call the nagware experience in Windows today.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:11]:
So right now, I guarantee you, if I open this thing up, Give it a second. If you go into the Settings app, you'll probably see this is taking a really time to come up. Actually didn't do it. That's interesting. Usually when I bring up the Settings app, it. It gives me like this kind of yellow bar that's like, hey, you should back up. You're not backed up. You should back up, you know, and you don't have to click that.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:32]:
I don't understand what the point of it is. It automatically does this in the background. You know, you don't have to do it. So you can run the app. Now. This is one everyone will have. And if you do run Windows Backup, you'll kind of see what it does. And the UI has changed.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:46]:
So now they've had the transfer to new PC capability I was talking about, which is, for today, makes more sense or is more relevant for people on Windows 10 because they might be upgrading. But if you click on the backup this PC choice, you'll see the interface we've had now for a couple years, which is not a lot of backing up here, frankly. But there is a. Well, you know, it's not even. Well, no, it is a front end. So there's a front end to the OneDrive folder backup capability. And on this particular. Again, this is one of those things that irritates me.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:18]:
The UI is a little different depending on the computer. But on this particular computer, I actually have all 6, 5. Sorry. Of the folders that I could back up, I can actually do it here. On some computers, I actually have to go into OneDrive to toggle this on or off, but whatever, let's not get into that little wormhole. But it will remember which apps and. Or which apps you've installed from the store and which of those apps you've pinned to Start and. Or the taskbar.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:46]:
Now, it doesn't back those up in the traditional sense, like there's not a copy of the app somewhere. But what will happen is if you do a. Not a migration, I guess, you just. You restore from a backup as part of Windows setup. After you get to the desktop, Windows will over time start downloading those apps from the store. So you'll get them right after the fact, if that makes sense. And if you were pinning them in a certain way to your taskbar and your Start menu, those will appear as well. So that's useful.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:18]:
It does. Some subset that no one will ever document of Windows settings and preferences. And then I don't know why they call this out separately, but there are credentials associated with your Microsoft account. So, for example, WI fi, network passwords, accounts and comp passwords and so forth. So if you sign in with a Microsoft account, which you would have to do, by the way, to use this feature or a work or school account, like an Enter id, those things already happen. So, like this, this whole thing to me is a little weird. I think the only thing that's kind of unique to it in some, well, apps and settings, I guess, technically. But it's not all your apps and it's also not all your settings.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:53]:
So it's kind of a typical Microsoft experience, if you think about it.

Richard Campbell [00:41:57]:
But some.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:59]:
Yeah, some. Which ones? Nobody knows. So, you know, we'll see. We'll see what happens. Let's just restore it and see what happens. You know, you get some of them. But they're bringing this to businesses now, commercial entities.

Richard Campbell [00:42:12]:
I assume it's a small business thing because by default, if you're set up in M365, your administrator controls all this anyway.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:19]:
Yep, yep. I don't, I don't understand this coming to. So there's a version that's called Windows Backup for organizations. Yeah, I mean, obviously if your organization does not want you to have this, you're not going to see it. That's fine. I suppose for, you know, for people in businesses who are getting a new PC, obviously that Thing's going to be. Well, typically that thing would be paved over by your it before you get it. Or maybe there's something that happens once you sign in, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:52]:
But I suppose mostly what this is for is, you know, maybe you had a cute background or you know, whatever color scheme or something you like and it just makes it a little bit easier and that's one less support call that they're going to get. So, you know, because people will do that. They'll. It's like, all right, I did everything you told me to do, but my background's, you know, black. It's not the pretty flower I used to have or whatever, you know, and so they make the call or they send the email and it's. People spend time on it and it's like, well, just let them do it themselves. You know, it's like a self service thing. So it's okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:25]:
It's not great, but it's okay.

Richard Campbell [00:43:26]:
Yeah, this definitely seems to fit in the middle ground because you know, traditionally you're using intune and autopilot and if you have to replace a machine or something catastrophic happens, you just like blast it and it rebuilds itself instantly. That's already done. So I don't know where this niche exactly fits, but it sounds like a run as I ought to do.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:48]:
I would be. Well, I was going to say I would be surprised if you ended up doing that. I suspect what's going to happen is you'll look into it and say, yeah, forget it, this is not worth it. But you know what? I could.

Richard Campbell [00:43:59]:
This could be a lot like mobile plans.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:02]:
If you think about like the magnitude of moving from active directory to intune. Right. And how different.

Richard Campbell [00:44:09]:
Which really means entra.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:11]:
And yes, they're very different. Right. And. But there's a, there is a simplification that occurs there that's kind of useful. I feel like this is the same sort of thing, but it's like a simplification to the point of like stupidity. It's like self service versus, you know, it's like, do I even have an organization? You know, it's like what are you guys doing other than forcing me to do certain things? Like I don't. Maybe it's just like pumping gas yourself versus, you know, back in the day you used to have a guy come out. They would come out and check your oil and fill up your fluids and things.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:45]:
They would do other things and then eventually that went away because it's expensive. And then eventually that guy goes away because that's expensive. Too right now you do it. It's like you want me to handle the gas. Like really, you know, well.

Richard Campbell [00:44:57]:
And folks balk about the intune price all the time.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:00]:
I don't.

Richard Campbell [00:45:00]:
Not sure entirely why, but they do.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:03]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:45:04]:
You know, it does do quite a. It does do quite a bit for them.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:06]:
Right, right. Oh yeah. No, yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:45:09]:
And I gotta tell you, like Entra is not optional. Especially in this day and age. If you're on the Internet. I've got some great stories. I still unsure I'm gonna make this shows of phishing attacks that were successful and stole credentials. But then when the hacker attempted to use it, conditional access said oh that's a teleport. You couldn't possibly have done this account locked.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:28]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:45:29]:
Like just second order protections and things like.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:32]:
Yep.

Richard Campbell [00:45:32]:
Boy oh boy. Like the arguments against Entra are kind of gone. Like.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:38]:
Look, I mean other than job security and just familiarity. I mean anyone who's used active Directory or managed Active directory, when you look at how much you know, it's flatter simpler the level of oversight that you might want to have on a mobile device and then kind of apply that thinking to a computer, it's like this isn't too bad. I mean it actually makes sense.

Richard Campbell [00:46:03]:
And Active industry has its origin in the 90s are crying out, shipped out in the 2000s. We were thinking differently then. There's a lot. I can't tell you how many big organizations I've run into that are still untangling choices they made in AD in 2006.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:19]:
I mean the big. One of the big complaints against NT at the time was like it doesn't even have a real directory service. You know, it's like. And now it's like it better not have a directory service. What's going on there? Like that's a. That's some. That's some complexity, you know. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:46:36]:
And yeah, not. Not great complexity. So yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:39]:
But the MDM, not that you can.

Richard Campbell [00:46:41]:
Fully get rid of A.D. once you're moving into Entra, A.D. sort of lives with you and your organization anyway.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:46]:
But.

Richard Campbell [00:46:46]:
But you're definitely trying to cut off Crofton more than anything. I think fine folks now that at least in the IT space they're just trying to get rid of group policies that they don't understand anymore.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:57]:
There's so many of course this and they all, you know, conflict with each other and nobody has any idea anymore. You know, and especially if it's been around for a long time which.

Richard Campbell [00:47:06]:
Oh yeah, the person who created that and probably did it accidentally Through a wizard. They don't work here anymore. And nobody.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:13]:
No, they're in a mental asylum somewhere.

Richard Campbell [00:47:14]:
Because only if they ever realized what they did.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:18]:
Yeah. They just can't deal with it anymore.

Richard Campbell [00:47:20]:
Yeah. But again, I'm back to like, where does this tool live? What is this backup for organizations for?

Paul Thurrott [00:47:28]:
Right. So where it lives. Yeah, it's the look, the data is actually really minimal. Right. If you think about. It's basically just text, it's tiny. You know, other than the actual. If you turn on Folder Backup for OneDrive, obviously that's whatever the contents of that stuff is.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:44]:
So this is kind of goofy. It is in OneDrive technically. Right. For that user, but it's not. You can't tell them, well, here's how you go find it. You can't say, here's how you might, maybe you want to delete it. That place does not exist, at least not publicly accessible. So probably a security thing, frankly.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:03]:
But yeah, technically it lives in OneDrive. And that's part of the, the rationale for the requirement both for consumers and businesses that you have to sign in with a managed account because that's part of what you get with that. That's where that stuff can go. So it's a small, small reason, but it's one of my ideas. Okay, so now let's turn on to things that people do use potentially. Dolby announced today, I believe that Dolby Vision 2 is coming. So it's coming first to smart TVs. It will, but it will come to computers and devices.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:41]:
And this is basically kind of their custom, I'm going to call it HDR for lack of a better term.

Richard Campbell [00:48:46]:
Is this necessary?

Paul Thurrott [00:48:52]:
Not in a day to day business sense. Right.

Richard Campbell [00:48:54]:
I guess in that sense. But this is the same thing with Dolby Audio was, hey, stereo is not good enough, we can do it better. And so that was like, hey, HDR is not good enough, we can do it better.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:06]:
Yeah, yeah. So the way that you do this better is you do things like enable HDR on content that is not hdr. You could do upscaling per frame. Yes. And so a lot of it has to do with, well, a. Is selling something to PC makers or device makers is something that they can put on there and throw in a, a list of features or whatever. But yeah, it's just an advanced display technology that.

Richard Campbell [00:49:38]:
But does it actually affect the hardware?

Paul Thurrott [00:49:42]:
In other words, do you need specific hardware for this device?

Richard Campbell [00:49:44]:
Does a vendor have to license Dolby Vision for them? Because you know, the argument has always been, well, the customer will prefer this device because it has Dolby in it versus the ones that don't.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:53]:
Yep. Right.

Richard Campbell [00:49:54]:
I don't know if they're branding, but what still exists.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:58]:
What's DTS and why do I want that? Or you know, there's a lot of Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos content out there, which is kind of nice. Dolby Vision 2, I think the, or any of these specs really, when you think about it, because Dolby vision is over 10 years old, it might even be close to 15 years old. But I don't think they, there's no, almost no need to have a set of hardware requirements per se, even though I'm sure that does exist because it's just going to be on new devices. Right. It's not going to be something like, you know, I have this old laptop and it's like, oh, you got your Dolby Vision 2 upgrade. You know, it's like, yeah, you're not getting that. Like you, you have to get a new computer because they will have whatever level of performance in the graphics chipset.

Richard Campbell [00:50:40]:
That will handle well and there lies a whole other game where you want, why vendors want to play. Because as the new ones come out, you get to sell new hardware.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:47]:
Exactly. Yeah. No, this is a win, win for everybody except the consumer. Yeah, exactly. I will say like for whatever, well, not for whatever reason, but we'll see if this actually computer even has hdr, let alone Dolby Vision. It does. It has it for video streaming only. So, you know, if you have the full HDR experience, it's not.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:11]:
None of it's enabled by default. Right. And the default setting, if you do enable it is turn it off when you're on battery, you know, so even in the world where people might want this, it's semi niche in a way. Although, I don't know, it does seem to make a difference in video games for that's worth, if you play games. So for gaming, PCs may be a big deal, but yeah, I think this is something we've all done. You're like, well, obviously I want to use this thing. I have this computer, I spent a lot of money on it. You turn it on, you're like, I don't want that on.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:43]:
You know, you don't really. Day to day, you really kind of don't want hdr, you know, personally.

Richard Campbell [00:51:49]:
Well, not if it impacts performance or turns cranks up fans or, you know, any of those things.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:53]:
Yep, yep. But in a game, you know, plugged into the wall, you're like, yeah, actually, then maybe I do want it. Right.

Richard Campbell [00:52:00]:
But I'm kind of at a point now where it's like, if the YouTube video fires up in 7:20, you notice right away.

Leo Laporte [00:52:05]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:06]:
And.

Richard Campbell [00:52:06]:
Oh, yeah, and 4K is noticeably better. Like, I don't know if our eyes are gotten better, if the screens have gotten better, but I'm starting to be more aware of the quality of the video.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:17]:
I think in Microsoft Edge, I believe Microsoft Edge does this. There's a setting where it will improve the video quality. It's probably in. But you have to be plugged in, if I'm not mistaken. And you know, for the same reasons. Right. So it's. Let me see if I can find it.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:32]:
I can't find it right now, but yeah, I'm pretty sure there's a feature in here where it's, you know, when you're connected to power, we can make videos that you stream online look better. Right. That's cool. So it's, you know, it's something you just kind of get. And then as things move forward, you'll probably be able to do that on power as chipsets improve, et cetera, et cetera. But yeah, not a huge deal. But they haven't. It's just been a long time since they've done anything with it, so it's kind of interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:56]:
On that note, okay, so since we last spoke, two other PC makers have released their earnings. They're on kind of like what I would call off quarters. You know, they're not doing June through September, they're doing July through October for some reason, because months don't matter or something. I don't know. Whatever.

Richard Campbell [00:53:18]:
The school years are funny.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:20]:
Yeah. Well, sometimes you get ones like the quarter ending June 30, 2025. You're like, okay, good. And then you get one that's like the quarter ending June 28th. You're like, wait, what? Why? What are you doing? So there's that kind of stuff. But then you get these guys like HP and Dell. It's like the quarter ending July 31st or whatever. And you're like, okay, I guess we're doing this today.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:43]:
So Lenovo had announced their earnings earlier. They had a record quarter. It was blockbuster. The PC business brought in a boat. Yeah, they're doing great in the cloud too, right? And they're doing great with devices. They're kind of doing great across the board, but the PC business is doing great.

Richard Campbell [00:53:59]:
Hey, crew. It did grow machines.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:05]:
Yeah, they grow market share, they grow usage shit getting bigger. Then they're already the number one player, which is kind of interesting. So PC revenues from that for Lenovo were up 18% in the quarter. They don't line up exactly, obviously with HP and Dell, but Dell, Dell also a blockbuster quarter, almost 100% because of AI and servers, not because of PCs. Their PC business is almost flat. It only went up about 1%, but they still earned about $12.5 billion, which is pretty close to Lenovo. But I think it's because of the mix, almost. I don't know if it's 3/4, but if it isn't, it's close to 3/4 of their sales are to businesses, not consumers.

Richard Campbell [00:54:46]:
Okay. Yeah, no, and they're going to check big on the lease deals and things like that. Like they're doing their best to lock businesses in and replace machines.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:54]:
Yeah, there's not much been going on there from my perspective. But it's solid business. It's fine. You know, but HP, most of their earnings, they're basically PCs and printers and printers aren't exactly going gangbusters these days. And they had a pretty good quarter too. Right. So 9.9 billion in their case. And a healthier mix, I would say, of consumer and business PCs.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:17]:
But the growth there was 6%, which is honestly for this kind of business is pretty solid. That's good. You know, none of them had like a down note per se about PCs. Right.

Richard Campbell [00:55:32]:
A lot of times it's interesting. I mean, clearly they're motivated to make sure the category is fine, but I don't know that it really is.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:39]:
Yeah, it's weird to me, you know, like HP split right. In half several years ago and there's an HPE out there. That is what HP would have been if, you know, it would have been combined Right. With the two of those businesses is probably bigger than Lenovo or Dell. But they did. They went into two separate directions. So.

Richard Campbell [00:56:00]:
Yeah. And I don't know that anybody understands the splits.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:03]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:56:03]:
Like, it's just confused.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:06]:
I actually went back. I don't remember why I did this, but I. Within the last month I. Something caused me to go look that up. And having read the rationale for why they did at the time, I have no idea why they split up. Like, I don't actually. I actually just looked at it. I was like, okay, yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:56:25]:
Honest to God, I think it's about concealing revenue while doing. Doing annual. You create business units that just make it confusing for folks so you can hide your weak groups and cover them with stronger groups.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:39]:
There was some kind of A controversy that they had made an acquisition that had lied about their revenues and that once they brought them in house, they had to restate things and they got into kind of a problem. But it was on the enterprise side. And I don't know that that was why. But I feel like those things happen around the same time.

Leo Laporte [00:56:56]:
The market makes them split too. The market wants them to split, right? The market says, yeah, it might have been.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:02]:
Maybe it's just related stock price. So like maybe just the company had.

Leo Laporte [00:57:04]:
Been moving if it's too high. I'm not sure I understand it either, but I feel like the market says, oh, no, no, no. Your share value. Oh, I know what it is. You lose retail investors because they say, well, I'm not going to spend a thousand dollars for a share. So if you make it $500, split.

Richard Campbell [00:57:22]:
The share to do that too.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:24]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:57:24]:
Oh, this is not a stock split. What is this?

Richard Campbell [00:57:26]:
No, they actually.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:27]:
A company, they actually come.

Leo Laporte [00:57:29]:
Oh, yeah, yeah, you're right. I forgot about that one. Yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:57:32]:
And then the argument would be, this is a product line that's not going to grow rapidly. This is a product line that is growing rapidly. And I don't want to hold down the fast grow stock price.

Leo Laporte [00:57:39]:
I'll give you an example from ripped from just today's headlines. When you got a company making currywurst sauce and you have a company making ground up sawdust cheese, you don't, you don't want them to be. It's confused. I'm talking about Heinz, Kraft, which I think the equity investors made them pair up and now they're saying, yeah, this was a bad idea.

Richard Campbell [00:58:06]:
They're splitting up kp Mac and Cheese forever.

Leo Laporte [00:58:09]:
Man, HP split made a lot of sense. Actually, it was.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:13]:
Okay, I don't remember the name of the acquisition that caused them problems.

Leo Laporte [00:58:17]:
Was it Overture?

Paul Thurrott [00:58:19]:
It might have been Microsoft one, something like that.

Leo Laporte [00:58:22]:
Yeah. And then the guy died in a yacht fire. The yacht sank.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:28]:
Suspicious.

Richard Campbell [00:58:29]:
Suspicious.

Leo Laporte [00:58:30]:
Well, it was weird because it was immediately after his trial, Right?

Paul Thurrott [00:58:36]:
Was he tied to a cinder block that had an HP logo on it or something?

Leo Laporte [00:58:40]:
No, he won a trial, went out to celebrate in the yacht and then Karma, baby. I shouldn't joke.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:48]:
That's crazy.

Leo Laporte [00:58:49]:
I should not joke. Can I do. Yeah, it's one of those little things I like to do every once in a while we call an ad break.

Richard Campbell [00:58:57]:
Paying the bill.

Leo Laporte [00:58:58]:
Paying the bills. Paying the bills. Our show today, this wonderful, wonderful Windows Weekly show that you're enjoying so much. And by the way, I apologize, I missed the A little bit of it because my 20amp circuit went.

Richard Campbell [00:59:13]:
Oh, you popped your breaker.

Leo Laporte [00:59:14]:
I've been sitting in the dark for the last half hour. So everything went down. That's why I disappeared. But I'm back. I had to go outside, turn the entire house off and on.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:26]:
Nice.

Richard Campbell [00:59:26]:
Did you try rebooting it?

Leo Laporte [00:59:29]:
Everything rebooted.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:30]:
That's amazing.

Leo Laporte [00:59:30]:
Everything rebooted in the entire home.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:33]:
That's funny.

Leo Laporte [00:59:34]:
But we're good now. I believe we're good now. Windows Weekly, brought to you this hour by threatlocker. I don't have to tell you because you listen to our shows. You know, ransomware is just killing businesses worldwide and one of the chief ways people are getting infected, phishing emails. But we've also been talking on security now about malvertising infected downloads, malicious websites. There's always the good old RDP exploit. But look, the point is, you don't want to be the next victim.

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Leo Laporte [01:01:36]:
Visit threatlocker.com TWIT to get a free 30 day trial and learn more about how ThreatLocker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. That's threatlocker.com TWIT we thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. We take you back now to the wrathskeller where Paul Thurat I'm working on a pooch.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:00]:
Is that the word?

Leo Laporte [01:02:01]:
No, a pooch. The beer Hall Putsch. Yes, the word.

Richard Campbell [01:02:06]:
I have to write a book, a really bad book.

Leo Laporte [01:02:09]:
Go to jail for a few months.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:11]:
Kind of a manifesto adjacent kind of a thing.

Leo Laporte [01:02:14]:
Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Yeah, they don't like it when you bring that up, so let's just. Oh, well, what's going on in the fabulous world of Microsoft?

Paul Thurrott [01:02:29]:
Well, first I want to reference Microsoft's past by referencing what happened to Google.

Leo Laporte [01:02:36]:
Today because, oh, yes, this is a huge story. It actually happened in the middle of security now. And I had to break in because we've been waiting for Judge Mehta's decision.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:45]:
There's never good timing for this kind of thing, but, man, this is not the right thing.

Leo Laporte [01:02:50]:
They ruled that Google was a monopoly almost a year ago. And he's been thinking all that time, what the hell do we do? And the Department of Justice proposed a.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:00]:
Huge, draconian 20 ideas.

Leo Laporte [01:03:02]:
Selling Chrome, selling Android, giving the search index to third parties, taking away Apple's $20 billion in their revenue, annual revenue.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:13]:
Which, by the way, the court found to have been illegal. That was part of that ruling from last year. That's illegal. It's easy. You just take it away. What's your job as a federal. Remind me, are you upholding some kind of a Constitution? The laws of the United States?

Leo Laporte [01:03:31]:
I think this is interesting. These companies now are so big and so dominant that it somewhat ties the court's hands. He pointed out, yeah, I could stop those payments to Apple and Mozilla and Samsung and others, but that would harm those companies. I mean, put Mozilla out of business. There'd be no Firefox without there. That's 85% of their rating.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:49]:
That's not what this case was about, though. Who cares? What are you talking about?

Leo Laporte [01:03:51]:
Well, he was trying not. It was like the.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:54]:
You don't allow us do no harm. Allow the abuse to continue because it's gonna harm some. Like, what are you talking about? It's like, yeah, my husband might be a murderer, but don't send him to jail. He's got two kids over here.

Leo Laporte [01:04:05]:
Well, that's a good point.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:06]:
That's a good. When you put it that way, that's crazy. One of the other crazy things he brought up was like, well, Google doesn't just do business in the United States. I mean, if we took Chrome away, that would take Chrome away from people in other countries too. It's a U.S. company. You're just like, what are you talking about? That's crazy. Look, I wrote this thing up, just a straightforward news story, but it's been kind of simmering.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:33]:
And so today, when I had five seconds, I finally wrote something and I. All I could think about was this John F. Kennedy thing. Remember, they're going to go to the moon. And what did he say? He said, you don't do these things because they're easy. We do them because they are hard.

Leo Laporte [01:04:47]:
So you're in the camp, and there is a big camp that says Judge Mehta gave him a slap on the wrist, did not.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:53]:
Basically, it's not even a slap on the wrist. It was a penalty.

Leo Laporte [01:04:56]:
The only thing he said is they can't do the exclusive deals that they do with other Android handset makers that say, well, right, but if you want.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:02]:
The Google place, you have to look. I'm sorry, but the point. Look what they were found. They were found of having an illegal monopoly in search. And one of the ways you prevent that abuse from occurring is to look at the way that those things are distributed. Look, I'm literally not saying they should have taken Chrome away from Google. That's not my point at all. These specifics kind of don't matter.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:29]:
But I am literally saying you stop paying Apple, like, literally, because that behavior was literally found to be illegal by this same judge.

Leo Laporte [01:05:37]:
But he said that would only strengthen Google's monopoly because then Mozilla's Firefox would go away. And that would.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:43]:
Mozilla's Firefox is not harming Google's monopoly or helping it.

Leo Laporte [01:05:48]:
I'm sorry, I would be unhappy. That's what I use. Because I don't want to support Google.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:53]:
No, I don't want them going away. But that's not really my point. I'm just saying it's all you've done is. What you've done is wasted years, found legally that this company is abusing a monopoly and is harming other companies. It's harming competition in general. It's harming consumers. You're like, all right, now what are we going to do about it? Nothing. Nothing.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:19]:
We do these things because they're easy. We're doing nothing. He said this was like, you know, the democracy is. What is it? Rumfeld said. He said, democracy is messy. Is that what he said? Yeah, something like that. That's exactly what Mehta said about. He said, yeah, this would be messy.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:38]:
It'd be messy. Taking Karam away, just messy. We don't want to deal with that mess. I got golf to play. I don't want to do this. I've never seen anything quite like this. You know, it is fair to say that every major antitrust case in the United States over the past, I don't know, since forever, since in my lifetime, has ended with a complete whimper. But, man, this one is really notable because it was the same judge, right? The judge in the Microsoft case was going to break that company in half.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:09]:
And he was taken off the case. He didn't get a chance to do that. But that was happening in this case. Very clearly. Something bad was going to happen. This guy was so aggressively going against Google at every turn. So it's like you're waiting a year. It's like, man, he's writing something great.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:25]:
This is going to be amazing. And what he wrote was gobbledygook, like it's insanity. It's so far off the mark, it makes me wonder what happened.

Richard Campbell [01:07:35]:
Well, the expectation was that he would do something draconian and then the negotiation would begin for a consent decree exactly as it happened before.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:44]:
Exactly. But now, you know, Google, you could hear them laughing from here. Right? And the thing is. But what they have to do is come out with some public statement with like, well, we strongly disagree with the court's determination. And they're like, I mean, I'm sorry, sorry, this is very serious. I mean, like, what, are you kidding me?

Leo Laporte [01:08:02]:
Yeah, they won. I mean, it's a. It's a victory. There's no doubt about that.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:06]:
Now, this is. Gets into a weird area where. Try to think of this as an example of this. I can think of, not really where I think the DOJ should appeal. Like this is to any other judge. Right. Looking at this objectively, looking at the thing he wrote last August and then looking at the thing he wrote today, whatever, it's like, are we talking about the same companies here? What is this? So, again, super clear, because I don't actually, I don't have answers. Like, I don't, you know, taking away Chrome, maybe taking away Android.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:47]:
Well, taking away, yeah, famously, Apple. Honestly, I could make a case of that one. But a lot of the stuff, it's not. The specifics aren't really what's important. It's just that you've literally identified illegal behavior, and your job is to find a remedy that prevents that illegal behavior from continuing. And you have done nothing to do that. And that is. That is a.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:09]:
You are not doing a job. I'm pretty sure he swore an oath. I'm pretty sure that's how you get the job. And he is not doing the job. That's crazy. It just doesn't make sense. He was so clear headed when he rolled against the company a year ago, I was like, yep. I was like, this is going to get weird.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:28]:
And yeah, it did get weird, but not just not the way I thought. That's very strange.

Leo Laporte [01:09:34]:
Okay, we should get you on Twitter.

Richard Campbell [01:09:36]:
Because.

Leo Laporte [01:09:39]:
That'S an interesting point of view.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:41]:
Yeah, I mean look, whenever there's a ruling antitrust, you're going to find people and companies that will kind of support either side of the argument. Right. And I, whatever. I mean I feel very strongly about big tech and their abuses and whatever. And yeah, so I have opinions there. But like as far as like what this guy should have done, that's kind of beside the point. I never really even thought that path too much. It was more like, all right, well this is what he's talking about and this is what the DOJ and the states recommended.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:19]:
This is Google had their own recommendations.

Leo Laporte [01:10:21]:
Yeah, he actually slapped the DOJ around saying what they asked for was outrageous.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:26]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:10:27]:
Chrome was outrageous.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:28]:
And yeah, okay, I guess that was.

Richard Campbell [01:10:33]:
Questionable just because it's not a business. But the bottom line here is this was part of a negotiation to have Google agree to constraints on its behavior. That's monopolistic.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:44]:
And now 20% of Google's ad revenue, search revenues, if you will butcher ads can be. No, sorry, that's not true. 20% of Google's traffic through search is in Chrome. So there's the making of a number there where you could kind of just start doing math and whatever, you know, ads are occurring, et cetera, et cetera. So it's not the biggest piece of it. But he literally said between all the agreements that Google has with Android makers, phone makers and Apple that they've nailed down the distribution channel for their search. Like they, they're dominant in search just for that reason. Not that it's not the best search.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:33]:
That's not what I mean. But I mean literally if you took away those agreements, yeah. There would be a fair marketplace for search. Now you honestly I thought they should.

Leo Laporte [01:11:42]:
Have split up the ad business because I think Google, because it both buys and sells is. There is definitely bad behavior there. That's a separate case though, so that may still.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:52]:
Yeah, so there is a spread. There's a separate case. That one's just as serious and they're just as guilty and they are just as much of monopoly or whatever, but we'll see. And you know there's the epic thing which they lost badly. There's other countries and obviously the EU and all this stuff but. And it's Great. But I. This is not so much like, look, this is just an about face.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:12]:
That's the issue. It's like this guy, if you read. And I've read it, I mean, I read this. Yeah. If you read what he wrote, he came down so hard in this company a year ago. And then you read this thing today and it's like, are we talking about the same judge, the same trial? What is this?

Richard Campbell [01:12:29]:
We've also had the argument that they're coming at Google way too late because AI has disrupted the search market completely.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:36]:
Yeah. And I see this is. Unfortunately, that was part of his. That's part of what he wrote. And it's like, dude, you can't take a year to render a verdict and then say, see, that took two years. You should have waited two years. Maybe Google search would be gone. You know, it's like, what are you talking about? Come on, man.

Richard Campbell [01:12:51]:
Well, and this was the argument with the. Windows has a spin off. As a separate company, within a few years, Windows was not relevant. You know, we got to it too late.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:59]:
Right. I would say the big difference between those two instances is that in the first case when. Because Microsoft made that argument. Technology moves fast, you know, things change. You don't know. Like we could disappear at any time. How are they doing today? Oh, they're the second biggest company in the world. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:15]:
So. Yes. But the thing that unseated them, which was actually a couple of things no one saw coming. Right. No one saw it coming. The thing about AI is we do see it, and there is that possibility. But the thing is the problem is AI relies on data and the best collector of data in the world is Google. Their best position to dominate this market.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:42]:
They haven't yet, but it's still happening. Right. And I just don't. You can't let someone. It's like, I just keep going back to the terrible example. I'm sorry to keep using this one, but it's like, okay, yeah, my husband killed this guy, but that guy might have turned out to be a really bad person. You don't know. And it's like, you're right, we don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:06]:
And we can't rule based on that, you know, but he did. I. It's crazy. I. Google's most recent quarterly earnings, they made a point. There has been no impact at all on their revenues from AI going to taking away search from them. So. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:24]:
It grew. Grew big time. It grew double digits. So. Okay, I guess it's a threat, you know, whatever. That was disappointing.

Leo Laporte [01:14:35]:
Okay. Yeah. So I'm glad you actually brought this up because I, my initial reaction, I hadn't had a lot of time to think about it yesterday because it just broke.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:44]:
No, it happened late. And it was not.

Leo Laporte [01:14:46]:
Was that. I mean, it was clear Google won. In fact, initially CNBC said Google will appeal. And I thought. Really?

Paul Thurrott [01:14:52]:
Yeah, well, they are going to appeal. You have to do them. You go through the masquerade, right?

Leo Laporte [01:14:57]:
Yeah. And there are some limitations on them, which they, you know, if they appeal, they can put off. They're apparently still thinking about it. But you're right. I think it's kind of. They're sitting around the boardroom giggling and going, oh, my God, they definitely won.

Richard Campbell [01:15:10]:
I mean, the stock market go the other way too.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:12]:
The one guy's shooting Coke out of his nose, the other guy's like, I just peed my pants. No one has any idea what's going on.

Leo Laporte [01:15:16]:
You go against them. That's a good point. And the stock market clearly said, oh, big victory for Google. And incidentally, Apple.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:23]:
Apple, Apple, exactly.

Leo Laporte [01:15:25]:
But my reaction to it was that Judge Mehta, hands were tied because anything he would do would be so harmful. He said Google did not use Chrome to build its monopoly. That was one of the things he said, we can't make him sell Chrome.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:44]:
But it is one of the elements it uses to maintain and potentially extend that monopoly. Which is meaning it's 20% of the. The distribution.

Leo Laporte [01:15:52]:
Yeah, yeah. My initial reaction was anything that he did might be so harmful to other companies, these companies that, that he felt like, you know, I can't do this. But you're right. I mean, one of the things is there is just like there was with Microsoft and their consent degree a, a committee, an ombudsman, a board of six for six years.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:12]:
That will. But, yeah, they'll have that.

Leo Laporte [01:16:15]:
Yeah, but what, but what are they going to do? Maybe that's, maybe that you didn't make.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:19]:
A, you guys didn't make a exclusive deal with like HTC or. They're not even around anymore, you know, like Motorola or something like. No, no, we have a deal with them and they, we give them a lot of money. But now there's no, it's not exclusive. It's like, okay, you're fine.

Leo Laporte [01:16:33]:
Well, he did say, you're talking about, you can't tell people who use ASOP Android that they have and want the Play Store that they have to now make you the default search and the default browser and all that. They did take that.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:45]:
Right?

Leo Laporte [01:16:45]:
Took that away.

Richard Campbell [01:16:46]:
The buzz Leave that as little as.

Leo Laporte [01:16:47]:
You could take away. Richard, what is your take on it?

Richard Campbell [01:16:51]:
I think the junk schwimped. I think he probably got some pressure from outside forces.

Leo Laporte [01:16:56]:
Interesting.

Richard Campbell [01:16:56]:
It's already difficult and he just.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:00]:
That's kind of what I was trying to imply. Like, I feel like someone kind of walked in the room and was like, this is going to go a different way.

Richard Campbell [01:17:06]:
So just what's the difference between when he did his original ruling in a year from now? Well, there's been an administration change.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:12]:
Well, I don't know what is, what's the difference between black and white as a color? They're completely different. That's the difference, you know. Yeah, it was. It's a little off. Like it's off. You know, look, if this guy had ruled differently and come down software and Google a year ago, you've been like, all right, we don't know what we're going to get here. This could be anything. But he was so strenuous against.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:33]:
It was such a contrast, so explicit. Yeah, it makes no sense. I don't know. Yeah, you look this up, you'll see Google is in the news today for another reason and it has something to do with something. Something government wants them to not do something. And I think they're about to reach an agreement. I wonder if those things are probably not related, but it's kind of curious, that's all I'm saying. So I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:00]:
Also, this is kind of curious. I don't know if this is a rumor or just a fact, but Amazon, which has used AOSP to make their own kind of stupid Android type devices for a long time, at least a rumor that they're actually going to use a straight up Android. And why would they do that? You know, like, why would they even bother. And this, did they know this was coming? Like, is this like a. It's like, wait, it's like we can use Android now but not have to use, like we could have the Play Store, which is what they really need. Right. But not use all those, like have Gmail on there. And they're like, oh, well, there you go.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:37]:
That sounds kind of interesting. Then maybe they could do that. Right? Because the big problem with those Android devices is you don't have the apps right now. They can solve that problem. So are those really. I mean, am I just seeing. This is just conspiracy theory nonsense at this point? I don't actually have. I'm just talking, but I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:54]:
But I mean, it is kind of weird. You Know, these things are all kind of happening together. I don't know, it's a little weird. So I don't know. Look, the thing that happened to Microsoft 25, 30 years ago. 30, 30 years ago. 35 years ago. No, 25 years ago.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:11]:
30 years. 25 years ago was amazing and dramatic and you know, that judge got thrown off the case and then things changed and then I think for Microsoft they had that near death moment and they realized like, okay, like time to settle, like let's talk, let's figure this out. And they did.

Richard Campbell [01:19:34]:
That's Brad Smith and Ballmer. But one would argue the company's never been the same. They don't. Latest set of moves with Satcha trying to be number one in AI is the shaking off of the consent decree 24 years ago.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:52]:
That's true.

Richard Campbell [01:19:53]:
Microsoft comfortably was in second place on everything. Like that was the play.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:59]:
Yeah, that I can't explain. I mean Bill Gates has done this as kind of denied. Look, that never happened. We didn't change. There are these companies that kind of came up and did things that you would never have sat for a long time ago in the wake of this antitrust stuff. And in Europe too. Right. Which is also big.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:20]:
Yeah, Microsoft is definitely a different company. But I don't know. Anyway, Google has enough problems that this is not the end of anything per se. But this is. This is. This one felt like it was in the bag. Like I just don't quite understand how this went the other direction. That's all.

Richard Campbell [01:20:37]:
It. Well, it also speaks to if there has been manipulation, like this was stupid. You should have still come down on hard ruling and then made a deal and the deal's the deal. Like why make it so obvious?

Paul Thurrott [01:20:50]:
It just doesn't make sense. Did the DOJ overreach by suggesting that Google divests itself of Chrome and then when that doesn't work, maybe we start looking at Android 2. I don't know. But you literally asked them to come back with things that would prevent the abuses I just outlined were illegal. And that would be one of the ways. I'm literally not saying it was the right thing to do or the thing to do or something. It certainly wasn't the only thing they suggested. But yeah, I mean this could.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:25]:
This deal with Apple is the most painful one. This is one of the richest companies on earth. They don't. You know, Mozilla needs this money, but Apple doesn't.

Leo Laporte [01:21:34]:
Yeah, neither Apple nor Samsung. I don't worry about them.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:38]:
That's crazy to keep that in place.

Leo Laporte [01:21:40]:
He could have said that. He could have said, yeah, stop it to Apple and Samsung.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:44]:
Yeah, I guess. Although what's the legal basis for that? It's like I. What's the legal basis for what he did? I really don't know. I think the real problem here is he literally has a legal requirement, it's to uphold the law. And he ruled that this company had an illegal monopoly. He outlined how it was breaking the law. And if you look at the list of those things, he only addressed one of them and completely gave him a pass on the other six or whatever the number is, just walked away. It's bizarre.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:20]:
Again, you know, if it was a different judge, you'd be like, okay, you know, I guess we're seeing things a little differently, but same guy. Yeah, that's what doesn't make sense. So anyway, I don't even remember why this is here anymore. This will not become a regular feature of the show per se, but we do talk about insertification a lot. And it occurred to me, just maybe because I saw these things kind of back to back, I think we sometimes lose track of how this stuff mounts. Right. I think anyone listening or watching this will feel very strongly that online services prices seem to keep going up and up all the time now. They just seem to accelerate that.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:06]:
If you could make a graph, which you could, that would show the average price of whichever version of the Netflix subscription and what the price was over time, where it goes up, like I think you would see it toward the end of the graph or today there's more spikes. Like it's just, it's gone up more, you know, that's what it feels like. And of course now we have so many of these things. It's like that death by a thousands cuts kind of thing. But there are different ways to, to kind of screw over customers, right? Like, you don't just, you don't just raise prices. Like, you just do things like, I don't really like care about Prime Video per se, but I have been a Prime customer for ever since it was a thing. We use it all the time. And one of the unique things about that subscription is that you get this kind of combination of what I think of as like physical and digital perks or features or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:55]:
So Google ships you physical items, but then you get like Amazon Music for free or Amazon prime or whatever. Not for free. I mean, you're paying for the thing. But so when they came and added like ads to prime and then said, well, if you don't want ads, you could pay Another five or six bucks a month, and you could have, like, the no ad version. It's like. But I did have the no ad version. That's what you had. And now you just changed.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:21]:
Kind of felt like they were changing the terms of the deal.

Richard Campbell [01:24:24]:
This is shrinkflation. I think the price is same, but I take away some of the stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:29]:
Yeah. Right. In the physical world, you would see, like, the bag of cookies got smaller instead of five.

Richard Campbell [01:24:34]:
They're not cooks exactly the same size, this cookie.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:39]:
There you go. Yeah. So YouTube is doing something like this now, too, and they just came up with this change where they said they're basically changing what it means to be in a family membership. So I don't do this, but I could, theoretically. I have a family. Right. I have a wife and kids, and so I could buy the YouTube Premium family thing, and they could all be on it, and we'd all get the. Whatever the perks are.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:04]:
And I'm paying for it. Right. But now they're like, well, well, hold on a second. Are those people in your household, like, are they actually physically in the same place as you? Or is your kid in college maybe? Which they both were from it.

Richard Campbell [01:25:16]:
You know, this is what Plex did.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:18]:
Yeah. And it's like, guys, what are you doing? What they're doing is turning the screws. Right. And so these words are Plex. Yeah. Oh, good. Please. I know.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:29]:
I. Yeah. If you didn't. That moment in time is the last time they ever sold a lifetime license to Plex to anybody. Because after that, everyone's like, no, screw you.

Richard Campbell [01:25:39]:
Sorry. I mean, Netflix, this is what. Oh, Netflix. I'm sorry. Netflix definitely did the enforcement.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:44]:
Oh, my God.

Richard Campbell [01:25:45]:
And everybody said, we're all abandoning Netflix, and they made more money.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:49]:
Now everyone's doing it, and now what are you gonna do? Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:25:51]:
Yeah. Although admittedly, Disney's talking about this big on the. Hey, I've watched everything on Netflix. Shut up it off.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:57]:
I just. So I just signed it. When I review laptops, I always install Netflix and I find shows that are. And I pay for the highest tier to get this, because you need. You only get the stuff with the highest tier. 4K, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, whatever. I look for movies that have these things and look good, and I can kind of judge how good it sounds, how good it looks, whatever. Last time I signed in, this was like, a couple weeks ago.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:26]:
It said, hey, you're not in your household's location. You're somewhere else. Like, you have to prove, like, well, we'll let you do this for a little while. And I'm like, I literally am the person that pays this bill. What are you talking about? Like, so I had to go through a little authentication process where they emailed me, I entered a code, it came back. It's like, okay, you can use this for two weeks, but I'm home. I'm home. I use this almost every single day on the Apple TV that never comes up there.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:55]:
What's the problem? Like, what happened? And I can only imagine like one of my kids is watching my Netflix account and they have become the home location. I guess they never told me. I don't know why that happened, but this has happened a few times recently. And I was like, this is. What is this?

Leo Laporte [01:27:13]:
The real risk though is people say, yeah, I don't really care, I don't need Netflix that much.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:16]:
Bye, bye. That is a risk because I.

Richard Campbell [01:27:18]:
We were headed there anyway.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:19]:
Yeah, right. I don't like it anyway. I'm just, I don't know that I'm going to, I'm not going to do this every week because I think honestly it would become painful. But I just saw this and there's some kind of relate. It's semi related, but it's stuff that involves Microsoft and Google that's not about insertification but is like, you know, we live in this world now where it's everything. It just feels like everything is so terrible. I think about these things in terms of relationships. A healthy relationship is one where you feel like you're getting something in return for what you're giving.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:55]:
And so when you buy a product or you are a customer of a company, you're paying them and they're giving you something and you see the value in it and that thing kind of works out. But I feel like a lot of our relationships with these online services or big tech companies or whatever are unhealthy. They're abusive, they're one way I'm not getting like, I used to get the thing that I saw the value in and I still get a thing but I don't see the value anymore. Because you've taken away so much. It's become like, what is this thing? Like, what do you, you know, it's like, we're Netflix. Yeah, no, I get it, but I'm.

Richard Campbell [01:28:27]:
No. And I think it has gotten people to look at their accounts more clearly and they're starting to turn them off. I get sad emails from Netflix every week about I should be coming back.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:38]:
It's going to be a happy Day for. I've always. I know people enjoy this now.

Richard Campbell [01:28:42]:
It's the spam I look forward to. It's like they're literally delivering tears to me each week.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:47]:
I love it. I miss you so much. We just want it. We just want to get you on an autopay thing. We don't really care if you even watch the thing. I don't know. I just.

Richard Campbell [01:28:59]:
No, let's face it, sooner or later, a series is going to come out that looks really cool. Turn that account on for a month.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:06]:
Yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:29:07]:
We're going to binge it and we shut it off again.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:10]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:29:11]:
Oh, that's their worst nightmare.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:13]:
Right? Which is. So, yeah, they do this now. They. They'll split a show up, like the new season into two parts and to ensure that you at least have to be there for two months. Right. Which I guess I get on some level. But again, think about, like, the. Like, what's the.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:30]:
What's the point of this? The beauty to me of one of the strengths of Netflix or any of these services was I don't have to wait till next Thursday to watch the next episode. Like, I refuse to watch shows like that now. If there's a show that's on and they're putting it out, like, week by week, I'm trying to think, which one just started doing this. It doesn't matter. My wife asked about it, and I said, yeah, they just started. So it's 10 episodes. Ask me about it in mid October. That's when we'll think about watching it, because I am not going week to week on this stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:00]:
And so they stopped doing that. So, like, the new season of Wednesday, I think, is one of the ones. And they've done this with various shows, right? So they'll drop three or four shows and then do the other ones later. And, you know, as a customer, you're like, well, but I pay for this. Like, why are you doing this? Are they not ready? Is there. You're like, no, they're ready. They're all in the can. Okay, so, like, this is what you did.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:30]:
You always did this all at once. Like, why aren't you doing this? What if I wanted to stay up.

Richard Campbell [01:30:34]:
All night trying to see if it's more profitable to do it this way?

Paul Thurrott [01:30:36]:
Yep. And then. I'm sorry, am I a rat in a maze now? I'm a part of an experiment? Like, what are we doing here? Yeah, well, I don't like that, and I think a lot of people don't like it.

Richard Campbell [01:30:44]:
So, anyway, so you don't watch it until the whole thing comes out.

Leo Laporte [01:30:48]:
Somebody move my cheese.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:50]:
Which is what we do, right? Actually. Well. And then, by the way, we can.

Richard Campbell [01:30:53]:
Afford the viewership's not high enough. They cancel the show.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:57]:
Yeah. Oh, yeah, Right, right. I don't know. I don't get this stuff. Okay. I originally had these in the same section as that last bit, but I separated because they're actually very different. And I can't remember what my justification now was for that, but whatever, they're separate. So these next two are kind of like misinformation, which is another example of like, how we're all losing our minds collectively here, which is.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:22]:
Leo, a couple weeks ago asked me, hey. Someone in the chat was like, hey, how come you're not writing a story about this SSD thing? Right, right. And I was like, okay. So at that time, I was like, I did hear of this. And I went and looked it up. I'm like, what's this based on? Right? And the story was that Microsoft had put out a Windows update that had corrupted SSDs. This sounds pretty serious. Like, data loss is serious, right? And there were all these different versions of it.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:51]:
Some people obviously were no problem. Some people had like rebooted, it was fine. Some people, they rebooted and the SSD was gone. You couldn't even see it in the computer and all this stuff. And I was like, okay. So I had looked it up and this is again, this is right when it first happened. And from what I could tell, it was like one guy on Reddit, you know?

Richard Campbell [01:32:08]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:08]:
And I was like, yeah, I don't. I'm not saying I'm not going to write about this, but I need more information. Like, I have to. There's not enough here for me to be like, this is what's happening. I can't trust that this is real. And so I didn't write about it. And then a week later, Microsoft finally came out and said, hey, we absolutely had nothing to do with this. But more to the point, having investigated this, we actually don't even think this is happening.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:36]:
We don't think there is a big instance of this happening out in the world. Right? So there's a company that makes the controller that is now in SSDs, but they make like hard drive and SSD controllers. And it's a like Pfizer. What's the name of the company? Fison. Never heard of them. But they're in every single computer, like every SSD, every whatever ever made. And they spent 4,500 hours investigating this. And they said, we only have two facts we can relay.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:05]:
One is that this is not Microsoft. They didn't put out a Windows update that did anything to anybody in this case. And we're not sure this is happening either. We have no evidence of this. We cannot reproduce this. And so that was interesting to me. And I. So that.

Richard Campbell [01:33:22]:
Then I wrote a move a stock price. Is this a, you know, I don't know, trader scam?

Paul Thurrott [01:33:29]:
So one of the ways that Mary Jo and I kind of linked up early on was she would contact me and say, hey, I have this story that I'm working on. And I heard something from somebody about something, and it was some source or whatever. And she say, what do you know? Do you know anything about whatever topic? She wouldn't tell me what the thing was, they said, but she was trying to get a second source to verify the information. And I, on many occasions could or would, you know, and she like, there it is. She's like, good. That's okay. And she could tell, okay, this is. This is how journalism used to work.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:02]:
You know, the way the dark side of anyone can publish anything at any time is that anybody does. And most people have crazy ideas in their heads. And there's a lot of. I deal with this a lot on my site where there's a lot of, like, anecdotal information out in the world, you know, where, you know, you feel like it's believable. You know, you're like, yeah, it's Microsoft. Microsoft screws up Windows updates all the time. Like, I can see this, you know, just kind of believe it, you know?

Richard Campbell [01:34:30]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:30]:
I'm not saying some people didn't have problems.

Richard Campbell [01:34:32]:
Construct. Except for that part where it didn't happen.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:35]:
Yeah, right. At least at scale, you know, so the other one that was. This happened back to back. This was crazy to me because I look at tech feeds every day, all day. And this story started appearing a couple of days ago. Gmail. Google sends out warnings to then insert Some number at 2.5 billion was 1 of them. Gmail users are at risk because there's been a huge security vulnerability exploit on Gmail.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:01]:
Your data is all out there. We're recommending that everyone change their passwords, whatever. And I was like, wow, that sounds pretty serious. I have like six Gmail accounts. I have never got a message about. Think across all these things, I would have gotten something. So I just. One morning, every morning, it was.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:18]:
It was in the news every day. Everyone wrote stories, you know, and One morning I saw one of those stories and I asked Stephanie, who uses Gmail? I said, do you ever get a. You ever hear anything about a compromise, some kind blah, blah, really serious Gmail, something, something? She's like, what are you talking about? I'm like, I know, I'm kidding. Really. I know it's not happening. But anyway, Gmail, Google is forced to come out and say, no, this never happened. This is not happening.

Richard Campbell [01:35:47]:
Listen, Troy Hunt, terrific security. It didn't happen.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:51]:
We're just doing. There are people maybe are fishing and whatever. So again, it's like, guys, I don't understand how you get from I saw it online to I published a story about it, but that's what happens. And then I got the beautiful moment of watching those exact sites write stories that had titles like, no, Gmail isn't being compromised. You said it was three days ago. Like you said it. Same thing with the Microsoft story. You know, it's like, guys, let's have.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:22]:
Is there some bar here? I mean, like, I don't know. Anyway, so there you go. I don't get. I'm not. This is not a holier than thou moment for me. I'm an idiot. I get it wrong all the time. But I mean like this kind of thing, like I come on like, I don't know why we don't have to make stuff up.

Leo Laporte [01:36:42]:
We'll be right back with more of Paul and Richard and their tales of phishing, both with an F and a ph. But first, a word from one. Get it? But first, a word from one password. Oh, you hear me talk about one password a lot. Over half of it pros say securing SaaS apps is their biggest challenge. I guess it makes sense. With the growing problem of SaaS sprawl and really shadow it, it's not hard to see why. Thankfully, Trelika by1Password can discover and secure access to all your apps, managed or not.

Leo Laporte [01:37:22]:
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Leo Laporte [01:38:20]:
1Password is ISO 27001 certified with regular third party audits and the industry's largest bug bounty. 1Password exceeds the standards set by various authorities and is a leader in security. So take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged. Shadow it. Learn more at 1Password.com Windows Weekly that's 1Password.com Windows Weekly all lowercase 1Password.com WindowsWeekly we thank him so much for the support of Paul and Richard and Windows Weekly program. I shall now return to my nap and let you guys continue AI. No, I've been struggling with equipment here.

Richard Campbell [01:39:11]:
Just recovering from your power.

Leo Laporte [01:39:13]:
Yeah. When the power goes out, everything loses.

Richard Campbell [01:39:16]:
Everything is grumpy.

Leo Laporte [01:39:17]:
It's grumpy, it's grumpy. But let's talk speaking of grumpy about AI.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:25]:
Yes. So actually something fairly monumental happened in the past week. And this might, if it wasn't maybe for the Google thing. Arguably this is kind of the biggest news in a way, although it's incomplete as of today. So Microsoft AI, which is that organization created, I think it was March 2024 in the wake of the Sam Altman drama right. At OpenAI, was created by Satya Nadella using the former CEO and many of the executives and engineers from Inflection. Is that right? Yeah, Inflection. Mustafa Suleiman, right? Yep.

Richard Campbell [01:40:09]:
He was supposed to be the consumer AI guy, but I don't know how well that went.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:12]:
Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. All right. So there was a kind of a co pilot y kind of announcement at some point later in the year, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But it was just like, okay, whatever. They're working on Copilot stuff. We get it. But we knew all along, like part of the deal here was this is like a Plan B of sorts, right.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:30]:
For OpenAI. If this whole relationship goes south, we need to have these capabilities in house. And so they have been working on their own. I don't want to say Greenfield, but like their own in house Microsoft models, like AI models. Right. And they've now released at least one of them. There might be two, but they are. There's one that's really straightforward where you're like, okay, no, this makes kind of sense.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:01]:
Like it's a natural speech generation model. It's available now in various places. It's coming to Copilot So it will address certain use cases, et cetera. And as they released this, they had this big discussion on the blog announcement about it, which I kind of went back and looked because I was like, did I miss this? Have they been doing this all along? No, this is the first one. They are talking very much about how different use cases require going to require different models. And this is something we see all the time. If you paid attention to the recent Google announcement, the new Pixels, those devices ship with over 20 AI models. Like on the device Copilot Plus PC.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:43]:
When those first came out over a year ago, I believe the number was over 40. Right. And we talk about this sometimes. If you're familiar with Windows, you can go into Paint or I think Photos does this as well. And there'll be a little kind of icon up in the corner. It's like you got to download something. And it's like, what is this? It's like you have to download a model because one of those little local AI features requires an AI model before it will work. So when you think like we tend to think about AI model, well, at least I do anyway, like cloud models as kind of like these big things and they do everything and then they make versions obviously to do different things.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:24]:
But increasingly it seems like for local AI especially, it's like we're going to have. There's going to be a lot of these things. They're going to be like DLLs, they're going to be like just all over your computer. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:42:33]:
We're also seeing a case too that generalized models don't work as well. Hallucinations come from this uncertainty in the probabilities of the different Markov chains. So just narrow the scope and there's not a lot of uncertainty.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:47]:
So this is in many ways a differentiator for Microsoft. OpenAI has several models, but Microsoft by now has dozens and dozens. I mean, there's lots. And so one of the things that Microsoft AI is doing is making these highly customized models for very specific use cases. Right. And they started the first one they released was for Voice. And the explanation, this was not credited to a human being. But the blog post that Microsoft put up, Microsoft AI put up was that Voice is the interface of the future for AI companions.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:23]:
Because it's Microsoft AI, these models are all going to have a name that starts with Mai. So it looks like missing in action a little bit, which maybe I wouldn't have gone with that one personally.

Richard Campbell [01:43:34]:
That would be mia. Yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:36]:
Yeah, but I'm being vaguely dyslexic. Or whatever. So anyway, the first model is called Mai Voice 1. So this is high fidelity expressive audio, single multi speaker scenarios, meaning speaker like people like speaking. Not speakers, physical speakers, but whatever. But there's another one and apparently this is available now on something called LM arena, which is a platform for evaluating models and it's going to come soon to trusted testers via an API which they've never explained. But the other one is called MAI One Preview. And this is their first foundation model, trained end to end and it offers a glimpse of future offerings inside Copilot.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:26]:
And the quote here is we are actively spinning this flywheel to deliver improved models and we'll have much more to share in the coming months. Coming months, like November. Right. When Ignite is happening. So we're probably going to learn more about this work.

Richard Campbell [01:44:42]:
There does seem to be a lot piling on in the Ignite time frame.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:47]:
Yeah. So this is actually, this is very interesting because when you think about Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI and how kind of squirrely it is and how they very clearly do not trust or even like each other and, and at some point there is going to be a break. It seems getting your own models up to speed is a big deal. Microsoft has other models, obviously they do Phi and Mu and other things, but these are the first that came out of this organization that was specifically created in a way to kind of slot.

Richard Campbell [01:45:16]:
In maybe for OpenAI to be alternatives to OpenAI's models.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:20]:
Yeah. And it seems we'll learn more. You know, maybe I'm in.

Richard Campbell [01:45:24]:
We're going to see Mai GPT5. Like, like, let's go for it.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:27]:
Right? Well, that's the thing. Yeah. So I don't know, like. Well, but, but maybe not. Right. In other words, we, we spent a couple of years there waiting for GPT5 to occur and then it kind of landed with a bit of a thud. But it's this big thing and I know they then built off of that and whatever, but it's possible that instead of doing a big thing that what Microsoft AI and you know, and maybe this is part of that consumer thing where it, you know, a lot of it's going to happen on the device. Maybe, maybe what they release is 20 or 50 small models and some kind.

Richard Campbell [01:46:02]:
Of orchestrator that you can't.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:03]:
Yeah, yeah, that's a good word.

Richard Campbell [01:46:05]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:05]:
Yes.

Richard Campbell [01:46:06]:
So you know, you, you type in your request the orchestrator and it now has conversations with each of these specialized LLMs and composes together an output. So that's and then you can call it AGI. And it'd be hilarious if Satya beat Sam to the punch on using that one.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:26]:
That would be funny, actually. Interestingly, this might have been the only AI conversation in a recent memory where I wasn't thinking about saying the word orchestration. And then you said it. And actually, as you said that, I realized there's actually language in this post that kind of talks around that a little bit. The idea being that the voice model they have, the way they say it is. It's something. You'll see it in Copilot Daily, which is that kind of goofy interface. Or it's like, oh, here's what's going on, you know, like what's going on in the world today.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:57]:
And it tells you, whatever. Copilot podcast, which is like the. Like the Google Notebook LM audio overview.

Richard Campbell [01:47:04]:
Feature, you know, summarizing using a version of my voice. I get it.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:09]:
Yeah. And Copilot. Exactly. And Copilot Labs, but rolling out to Copilot, meaning broader, like Copilot, as we think of Copilot in the coming weeks, to address certain text use cases. So actually they are going to orchestrate its use. Right. This first model. And that itself is almost like a test of the model when you think about it.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:32]:
Right. Because Copilot is, in this case, the orchestrator, working with multiple models. Right. And in some cases, it's going to say, all right, we're going off to Mai. I got to work. Wrap my head around that Mai voice 1. And for whatever scenario, because that particular model is very good at the thing that it needs to do either to output something to you or determine the answer to some question. Well, this one's not going to answer a question, but this one is probably just about output.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:00]:
But it's. Yeah, I mean, I. So yeah, we can also thank Stevie Batish for putting that word into my brain. And now it's lodged there forever. And. But, yeah, I see it. I kind of see it everywhere now. And I think you're onto something.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:15]:
I think that's where they're going.

Richard Campbell [01:48:19]:
Yeah. No, and it obviously makes a lot of sense. It addresses sort of the key issues is how you fight hallucinations. The coordination part is going to be the hard part. But it also implies the Copilot's a bad name. Because the problem with Copilot is the implication that there is one thing sitting to the right of you that helps you. And every really productive developer I see using these tools are running half a dozen or more different LLMs in different roles, simultaneously generating bits of code and testing it and working through integrations and so forth. Like, it's.

Richard Campbell [01:48:59]:
As much as I love the copilot name, it just hit me recently, it's like, this is not what's happening. It's not this one thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:04]:
Yeah. So when this name first came up in the context of broader. Microsoft, not GitHub, Copilot, but when Microsoft, they did their original Bang Edge announcement, and I was like, you know, we're going to call this thing Copilot. We're going to have a copilot for Microsoft 365. We're going to have one for Windows. We're going to. As that sort of unfolded, it seemed like in that slice in time, this was a good name. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:26]:
Because AI is this thing that kind of works with you. It's not taking your place. You will ask your questions. It helps you. You're the pilot, right?

Richard Campbell [01:49:34]:
Yeah. That was the implication. It's still your fault. You're the pilot.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:37]:
Yeah. Yes. And you can still take credit, too, if that's what it takes. Yes. But the thing is, AI moves so fast. And so even back then, that first Stevie Batiste talk when he was talking about the three app models, the final. Well, when you move past side by side, which is what Copilot is. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:58]:
You get into where it's integrated into the app itself, but then you get into this thing where it's really just all these what we would now call agents kind of working on your behalf out in the world doing things. And it's like, out of the app. It's not the app anymore. This has just become part of the fabric, essentially, or whatever. And, yeah, I guess in part because this world is advancing so rapidly, the notion that you would need a copilot is becoming almost obsolete. Right. It's sort of like when you ask Google to do something like I'll do on a photo frame, like, don't show me this picture again. It's like, okay, so it sounds like.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:40]:
It's like, dude, just freaking do it.

Richard Campbell [01:50:44]:
Describe to me what you're going to do.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:46]:
Just do it. That we'll look back on these kind of copilot interactions and be like, man, that was a little tedious. Because eventually it will become so integrated and just part of everything. You'll just be talking to yourself and things will occur.

Richard Campbell [01:51:01]:
Yeah. And your shorthand will work because bit by bit, it's going to build a prefix prompt that is your context.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:13]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:51:14]:
So it knows what your tendencies are and it tends to Include those things so you don't need to say them anymore. You know, eventually all LLMs will communicate with me in iambic pentameter because it makes me happy.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:25]:
Nice.

Richard Campbell [01:51:28]:
If you're going to give me bad news, give it to me in rhyming couplets.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:30]:
I'm way happier. I still think that's the greatest feature Microsoft ever added to Notepad. Turn this into a poem. Completely useless, but it's beautiful. It's just like every time I do it, I'm like, oh, my God, that's good. You know, I couldn't use this for anything if my life depended on it. But it's really funny. And then just most of these just kind of random.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:52]:
But Copilot is now being added to smart TVs, I think Samsung, who had.

Richard Campbell [01:51:58]:
To be Samsung, who else has got a relationship with sufficient. With Microsoft that can do bad ideas.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:02]:
Yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:52:04]:
Is it going to be running? Is that Copilot on Tizen? Is that what that is?

Paul Thurrott [01:52:07]:
Yeah. It's only going to be a matter of time. We already run into this with assistance in some degree. If you have, like, multiple devices and there'll be some weird handoffs, who will say, like, two devices will answer the question, or one will be like, do you want to use the speaker that answered or do you want it to be answered over here? And you're like, oh, God. It's like, I just want it to be answered wherever I am. Like, I just. Why? Why am I talking about this? You know? But so I guess I smart. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:35]:
It's fine. I get it. Like, I'm not against it, I guess, per se, other than I want a dumb screen, not a smart screen, but whatever. This could have gone in the insuredification section in a way, but Anthropic is now going to force people to make a choice about whether or not their data is being used to train their models. Today, they do not use your data for that. To me, that was always one of their big selling points. But now they're going. And there will be people who will just opt in, I guess.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:08]:
So it's kind of a big change that kind of came out of nowhere, but whatever. I don't know. I don't know what to say about that one. It's kind of weird, but people have kind of bought into that ecosystem. I could imagine a lot of them were kind of. Other than accuracy and whatever, but performance. But were probably drawn a bit by the privacy part, so we'll see if that impacts them at all. Nvidia, another company that reported earnings.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:33]:
Not PC related in any way, but they're doing pretty good. I don't know if you guys follow Nvidia at all.

Richard Campbell [01:53:41]:
They're the single largest company by market cap on the S&P 500. Is that the company you're talking about?

Leo Laporte [01:53:46]:
That one?

Paul Thurrott [01:53:46]:
Those guys?

Richard Campbell [01:53:47]:
Yeah, they're what they mean video game things.

Leo Laporte [01:53:52]:
They did say that. What did they say? 29%, 39% of their business comes from two customers.

Richard Campbell [01:53:57]:
Yeah, that's a little concerning. And by the way, Satya now talks to Jensen.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:04]:
Yeah, I was going to say they're.

Leo Laporte [01:54:06]:
One and then Meta's got to be the other.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:09]:
The way the companies communicate information like that is interesting because they're. This was probably like a 10Q filing of some kind. It was just like one of those. It was in their quarterly risks and yeah, like. No, but I mean, it wasn't like, hey, we just announced we have whatever earnings we did this, this business doing great. By the way, most of our money.

Leo Laporte [01:54:25]:
Might have been in the analyst call.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:26]:
Yeah, it's in the, you know, it's in the. It's in there somewhere, people. Yeah. The big thing with Nvidia is we're looking for that massive year over year revenue jump to end. Right. And it's falling, but still we're talking. This is like what happened at Azure. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:42]:
I mean, the revenue number was 56% jump year over year. If you look at the previous quarter, it's very small. Right. So it's ramping down. It has to. Right. I mean, at some point we kind of reach capacity here or whatever. But.

Richard Campbell [01:54:56]:
Yeah, there's so many reasons why you can't buy more GPUs. You've run out of data centers, you've run out of money, they've run out of GPUs, you've run out of demand. Like, pick your poison. There's a lot of things moving at once here.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:10]:
Yeah. I mean, this company has been a rocket sled I don't think I've ever.

Richard Campbell [01:55:13]:
Seen, but a rocket sled on one trick pony. And admittedly it's an important pony and everybody likes the delusion, but the fact that seven companies out of the 500 are 55% of the value, that's not good. And it's all for the same reason. So when any of them go down, all of them are going to go down.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:34]:
Well, it's, it's not like this is a bubble. I mean, it's.

Richard Campbell [01:55:37]:
No, come on. It wouldn't be that Wouldn't be a thing at all.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:40]:
Talked about my, my dream of post apocalyptic movies of the future all taking place at the site of a former data center out in the middle of Ohio or Pennsylvania or somewhere.

Richard Campbell [01:55:50]:
Well, I now see the fund guys setting up s and P500 indexes with the seven out. So you can offset the disproportion.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:01]:
Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. It turns out in that scenario the United States has the economic gross impact or whatever it is of like Madagascar. Yeah, I know.

Leo Laporte [01:56:11]:
Take the tech companies out.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:13]:
Slightly smaller number, those 70 companies spent.

Richard Campbell [01:56:16]:
More money last year than all of the consumers in the United States. Like it's. These are crazy, crazy, crazy numbers. But the other side of it, I think it's a real relevant one, is that they didn't borrow that money. They had that money.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:32]:
Right. That's true.

Richard Campbell [01:56:33]:
So when the stock price goes down, it's not like they're over leveraged, but everybody around them is.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:40]:
But if we've learned anything from intel, and I like to think we have, and Nokia before it. But part of the problem with having all these physical facilities in place is if they're not being utilized, that starts to hurt real quick. So we'll see. You know, we'll see. But I. Yeah, well.

Richard Campbell [01:57:00]:
And already the average municipality doesn't love a data center. They don't employ very many people. They don't pay much in the way of taxes. They consume a lot of power and a lot of water.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:09]:
Yep, yep. I mean there are no trucks on the road, so you get that.

Richard Campbell [01:57:13]:
But it's.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:15]:
Yeah, yeah. My whole, the part of the country I live in, Pennsylvania is all. It used to be, all shipping and back in the day shipping on canals and eventually on trains and roads. And our roads are full of Amazon trucks because our whole area is full of Amazon warehouses. That's all. This area used to be farms. And when you're a township in Pennsylvania that doesn't really have any meaningful income anymore because that stuff's all gone, someone comes and says, hey, what do you think? Pay some taxes, whatever, blah. We'll employ some people, whatever.

Richard Campbell [01:57:50]:
Employ some people while we build this thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:52]:
But then the people that live there can't get home or to work because the trucks are all full in the streets and they're ruining the roads and no one's paying for it and it's a disaster. So I don't have any answers. I just have complaints. I just sand. There's a lot of trucks and I'm tired of it. I don't know, do I want a data center? Is that better or worse? It's probably just as bad. I don't know. I'm sure the water will be fine.

Richard Campbell [01:58:14]:
I'm sure the destabilization and grid is fine.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:19]:
Yeah, I kind of mentioned this up top. I guess I won't beat this to death now because we're going to run out of time. But I am looking at those new pixel phones. I have to say Google called this like ten years ago, nine years ago, really. But like, if you go back and watch that first event, they did a clip in the very beginning of this year's show where they went back and than Rick Ursula was talking about the intersection of hardware, software and AI, which obviously was a riff on the Apple thing, but it is really what's, you know, what they've done. I think about all the computational photography stuff, all the million pixel features on these phones that answer calls for you or stay on hold or figure out if something is spam or what corrects a mistake. And whatever it is, like it's. This stuff is like all over these phones.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:04]:
It is. It's a very different approach to what Apple has done so far anyway. And I have to say, like, some of the new stuff is actually pretty cool. So I'll be. I'm going to be looking at this over time. There'll be more about this later. But I'm just mostly fascinated by. To me, it seems like they floundered a little bit in phones, but when I go back and watch the first one, I'm like, oh, there was a real vision here and it has not changed other than that daydream VR thing, which by the way, did not go great.

Richard Campbell [01:59:39]:
But other than that, what VR thing did go great?

Paul Thurrott [01:59:41]:
Paul. Right. But they did do it. There's a demo in this, this is nine years ago, where at the time Android navigation was on screen buttons. So they went from physical buttons to on screen buttons. And now we have gestures, but there was a round button in the middle for home. And you would press and hold on it and that would bring up the assistant. You're like, okay, but the guy did a text message thing with his wife.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:04]:
Where do you want to go to this concert? Yes, we should have dinner. All right, what about. What do we think about a place in the area? They used AI to find the place and then you could press and hold in that round thing and drag it up onto the screen and it would use the context of what was on the screen to inform the answers. It would give you to Your questions. And so it would say something like, oh, so it sounds like you want to get a reservation at whatever the name of a restaurant is. I know you're going to the concert, so it's going to be on this day. They have these times available. Do you want one of the.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:34]:
Yes. Two people? It's like, all right, you'll get a confirmation via open table and email. And the place just exploded. It was like seeing the future. And there's still. I don't mean they Google. I mean, literally the whole industry really is still actually working on that feature. But this is that thing.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:54]:
This is what Copilot Vision is. Right? Like, it's what click to do is in some ways, or whatever. Like, it's. Just do it. We're still like, yeah, like this thing is going to see the world. Yeah. It's fascinating. Like, I.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:06]:
It's. It's really interesting that they tried to do this right away, like, a long time ago.

Richard Campbell [02:01:13]:
Yeah. I'm wondering. The computational photography is interesting because you're already getting tools now. It's like, take six photos and we'll composite them to get in the best one. I suspect we're not that far away from. Just hold the camera up. Okay, I'm good. And it produces a photo that is actually a composite.

Richard Campbell [02:01:26]:
But it didn't involve you in it.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:28]:
I just made this comment. It might have been today. If it wasn't today, it was yesterday. But I was. You know, you're out in the world, you do the thing. Depending on your phone, you'll have a different thing on the screen, but basically you're holding the phone and it. And it'll be like a line. It's like a level.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:40]:
And it's like. It's like 1, 2, 3. Like, no, I want it on zero. Like, and I'm ADD enough. I'm like, I want this to be, you know, it's gotta be straight. How is it possible that we don't have phones that have cameras that just do that? Like, just make it straight. Just. Just make it straight.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:56]:
Like, have a little gyroscope there or whatever. It's kind of weird to me. Like, that's not a thing. Like, it has guidance for you. You can make it.

Richard Campbell [02:02:02]:
It knows you work even. There's no reason it couldn't just correct the photo.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:05]:
Yeah, just make it straight, you know, but AI, it will never make it hilarious.

Richard Campbell [02:02:13]:
Not a thing.

Leo Laporte [02:02:15]:
It's just a joke.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:16]:
It's all fake. It's all fake.

Leo Laporte [02:02:18]:
We actually. Coming up on intelligent machines, have a Couple of professors who have a course called BS Machines, I guess they call it.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:30]:
I love it.

Leo Laporte [02:02:31]:
They use the full term and I'm reluctant to do that, but we're actually debating how do we talk about this.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:36]:
Without saying you could beat them out a lot.

Leo Laporte [02:02:41]:
I don't want to do beep, beep, beep. That's kind of insulting.

Richard Campbell [02:02:44]:
Everybody knows what you're saying. Just like in certification works. Like, just use what you can use.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:49]:
Yeah. Like I. Honestly, that comes very naturally. Like, I almost use it exclusively instead of the real world in some ways. Right? I mean.

Leo Laporte [02:02:57]:
Yeah. No, I like the word. So their website, which is kind of. I think this is good. This is kind of a introduction to AI, its pros and cons and stuff. It's called Modern Day Oracles or BS Machines. So Carl Bergstrom and Jevin west will be our guests.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:12]:
Great line.

Leo Laporte [02:03:13]:
Just about 45 minutes on intelligent machines.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:15]:
I like it.

Leo Laporte [02:03:15]:
Yeah, it should be good. Should be interesting. They did a nice. This website is really pretty too.

Richard Campbell [02:03:22]:
This is very squarespace.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:24]:
Did they buy code?

Leo Laporte [02:03:25]:
Yeah, they're using something called shorthand. Are you familiar? I've never heard of this.

Richard Campbell [02:03:28]:
No, I've never seen that one, but.

Leo Laporte [02:03:29]:
Standout visual comms and content.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:33]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:03:34]:
Remember Prezi? Did you guys ever use Prezi?

Paul Thurrott [02:03:36]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:03:37]:
It's an Apple thing, but I got a few friends who use it, I think.

Leo Laporte [02:03:41]:
You can't use it on Windows, I thought.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:43]:
I'm pretty sure the New York Times uses this, but like randomly. So if you read a thousand articles in a year, you'll Every so often.

Richard Campbell [02:03:49]:
You get one of these.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:49]:
Yeah, Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:03:51]:
Exactly.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:51]:
Bizarre. I have no idea.

Leo Laporte [02:03:53]:
I'm sure they have an entire in house css.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:57]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:03:58]:
Prezi was a little weird because it would zoom and swoop and all that stuff.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:05]:
Anyway, remember when Blink was annoying? Well, yeah, we have advanced way beyond.

Leo Laporte [02:04:10]:
Well, part of this is I just am always interested in something other than PowerPoint to do my presentations. Right. Because it's just they look. They all look kind of the same, but this actually makes people nauseated. So.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:24]:
It'S like, I just want to read.

Leo Laporte [02:04:25]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:26]:
What are you doing?

Leo Laporte [02:04:26]:
What are you zooming in on this stuff for?

Paul Thurrott [02:04:29]:
Yeah. Now with AI Guy Kawasaki. Right. The original Macintosh evangelist.

Leo Laporte [02:04:35]:
Evangelist, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:36]:
Do you follow him at all? So he just today on Substack published about like death by PowerPoint, kind of a classic thing, but he had some solid advice for making good presentations. And he has like a 30, 2010 rule and all this. You should look this up. It's really.

Leo Laporte [02:04:53]:
He's very good. He knows how to the 10.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:56]:
But it's good. I read this and I'm like, yes. The next time I do a presentation, I'm definitely going to refer to this. It's really smart.

Leo Laporte [02:05:04]:
He's a very smart guy.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:06]:
Yeah. Because we all look, we've all sat in a room where some guy literally read the slides to us. Right. What are you doing?

Leo Laporte [02:05:15]:
Why did you do the slides?

Paul Thurrott [02:05:17]:
You know, what are you crazy? What are you doing? So he has really good advice about that and how to handle that kind of thing. This is on his subject. Sorry.

Leo Laporte [02:05:27]:
Yeah, no, this is it. He says 10 slides, no more. That's all you need.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:33]:
Yep, yep. But it's also like, there should be something memorable and that you can scan and understand immediately.

Leo Laporte [02:05:41]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:42]:
And isn't like a thousand words where you're like, you know, you have to try to read it and no one remembers that.

Leo Laporte [02:05:47]:
10 slides, 20 minutes in 30 point font. That's the 10, 20.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:51]:
Yeah, no, it's. Honestly, it's really good. Really interesting.

Leo Laporte [02:05:57]:
Yeah, he's right. He knows. Actually, this is from 2005. So he's.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:01]:
Yeah. If you look to whatever his latest thing, the thing that went out today. Because I get it. I get it in email, but it's. He references this, but speeches.

Leo Laporte [02:06:10]:
Glad. Maybe this is a really old website I found of his.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:13]:
Yeah, just look him up on like, see if like.

Leo Laporte [02:06:16]:
I did. My mistake. I did a Google.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:17]:
No, no, it's okay. But. But that's. No, that's a big part of it. But he expands past that. Like there's more stuff. Just good advice for anyone.

Leo Laporte [02:06:25]:
He's a master. His substack is called Remarkable People. Our mission is to make you remarkable. So it's not others, it's you make it remarkable.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:37]:
Well, I was made a slightly more remarkable today because I did read it.

Leo Laporte [02:06:42]:
The only pitch guide you will ever need. Oh, his new book. It's for a new book. Think Remarkable.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:48]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:06:50]:
Good for you, guy. We should get him on.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:52]:
Actually.

Leo Laporte [02:06:54]:
He says post AI. Let's go. Post AI.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:01]:
Actually, if you want to see what that looks like, you should watch that HBO show, the Last of Us. Oh, that's pretty much. Oh, God.

Leo Laporte [02:07:10]:
That's post fungi, not post AI.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:14]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:07:16]:
You want to do an Xbox thing? I mean, you don't. Has to.

Richard Campbell [02:07:20]:
You can.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:21]:
So we like it. Sometimes I referenced this earlier in the show. Sometimes I don't have something in the notes. And you're like, how come you didn't mention this, you know, So I just wanted, for the record, I ask you.

Leo Laporte [02:07:31]:
All the time and I apologize.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:33]:
No, no, no. It's, I'm actually, I think it's one of the best things you do, to be honest. I like it.

Leo Laporte [02:07:38]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:39]:
But just for full disclosure, Microsoft or Xbox and Five Hour Energy did announce a partnership today where they're have a little Xbox branded Five Hour Energy. I don't know if it's a drink. Is that what it is? It's probably a drink, I guess for the outer worlds too. So I did not put that in the notes. I'm not going to write about it, but I just don't want anyone to be like, oh, papal, you missed the biggest story of the week, the Five Hour Energy partnership.

Leo Laporte [02:08:07]:
No, that's not the biggest story of the week.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:09]:
No, it is not the biggest. No. Okay. There are a couple of big stories, though. Microsoft has, well, Microsoft has announced they've only released part of it, but there is an August update for Xbox that went out on the last day of the month. Classic that has four new features, only three of which are actually available. Two of which, sorry, that are available now. So one is the one that we've been testing in the Insider program, which is the cross device cloud playable play histories.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:36]:
That makes sense. And the idea there is that as Xbox becomes available in more and more places, you can play more of your games in more places. And so we have play anywhere and all those kind of features. And the idea is that maybe you started on a PC, you continue it here. So this stuff will just appear in your most recent list if you're on an Xbox app on Windows or the play history on a console, whatever. But the idea is there, I really think they're working. They're obviously, I mean, they haven't really set it out right, but they're clearly working to making this be like one platform, Windows based where possible. Streaming where not mobile, obviously, but it's kind of interesting.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:15]:
And they've also started rolling out this, they're calling it my apps, but this is where you can access the stores for other companies that make PC game stores like Steam, Epic Games and so forth. But also those games will start just appearing in your library. So if the Steam app is on your computer, maybe you've downloaded whatever game from that, that game will appear in the Xbox app. And the reason that's important is because that app is the UI for those handheld gaming PCs that we're going to get soon, like the Xbox Rog Alley. And that's the interface, it's literally the shell, right? And so you want to be able to see everything that's on there. Now there's a way on those devices to get out. So obviously you're going to want to go to the desktop, you install Steam, maybe you get the game, whatever, but for the most part you're sitting there using it like a controller. And so that's kind of just available to you, you know, wherever you got the game.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:07]:
Like it'll just be available to you from that Xbox app or what is the shell? Essentially? This one I have seen myself and I have to say the first time this came up I was like. But we jokingly talked about this when they announced it. The gaming copilot, which is in beta, is part of the game bar, which used to be the Xbox game bar. So if you are in the Insider program, have a PC enrolled or, sorry, you have enrolled in the PC Gaming Preview as part of the Xbox Insider program, you download the app, update the Xbox app, you'll start getting these new features. And so this is one of them. So these little, the little windows that appear in the game bar are called widgets. And to date they've all been pretty small.

Richard Campbell [02:10:51]:
But the interruptions you mean.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:54]:
No, I mean the size, size of the windows, like the amount of space that takes place, takes up on screen and the two latest ones are actually quite big. Right. So there's that game, the Edge based Gaming Assistant, which is like a browser where you can, if it recognizes the game, it will kind of come up and say you're playing Call of Duty. You know, it looks like you're stuck. You know, we'll kind of give you advice, but you can also Google or Bing or whatever and find answers to problems while you're in the game without leaving the game. Right. It comes up over the game. But now they have this game in Copilot and I haven't seen it do anything per se, but it's just as big, it's like a big window and it's like a.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:31]:
You could, you know, you can chat with it. Right. And so the idea here is that you're, the way you're probably going to interact with it isn't so much by bringing something up and typing, but you could just say, hey, you know, say the keyword. The thing will come up, you know, with a little interface that you keep still playing the game and eventually it's going to say things like, all right, it looks like you're stuck at this point in the game. Here's you know, how you get around it, or you should go to the left and do, you know, whatever. It's going to be like that kind of thing. So they're actually starting to roll this out. Like I said, I so far haven't seen anything, but it's starting to happen.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:04]:
And the other update is also related to those Xbox Handheld Gaming PCs where you'll get improved controller navigation in the Xbox app. So the Xbox app, the Game Bar, both have controller navigation through like a compact mode. And in the case of Game Bar, that's like a one widget mode, if that makes sense. So you kind of go from widget to widget using the ui. But because this is going to be the ui, I mean, or the interface, I should say, I guess, UI and interface on these devices, they want to make sure that it works as well as possible. So I don't have one, but I have used this interface with a controller. It works fine. So I think it's going to work pretty well.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:47]:
And then just a couple of random stats as part of this announcement. They said Xbox Play anywhere now has over well over a thousand games. They added 20 in August or July. Sorry. Over 450 games are in the Streaming on Game collection, which is part of Xbox Cloud Gaming, which will now be available to more and more people. Because it's not just Game Pass ultimate or will soon not be, I guess. They added six more titles to that Retro Classics collection, which is another Game Pass perk, in case you were worried they weren't pushing Game Pass hard enough. And then he added mouse and keyboard controls to 12 more games, including Grounded 2, which just came out, and Heretic and Hexen, which just came out.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:27]:
Right. And the point of that is you're streaming the game, which was made for a PC, possibly to a computer, possibly to an iPad or something. Typically on a mobile device you would play on screen, but when you add keyboard and mouse controls, it means you can play it the way you would, the way God intended. Especially in the case of Heretic and Hexen, because that's, you know, that was what we had back then. You can use those controls even on like a mobile device or whatever. It doesn't matter what device. So that's pretty cool. A lot of stuff going on there.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:00]:
Okay.

Richard Campbell [02:14:00]:
In the end, everybody will be part of the PC master race. It's inevitable.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:05]:
It is weird to me that I made that switch myself. Yeah. And they've improved.

Richard Campbell [02:14:09]:
It starts with just putting that Xbox down for a little while. Just put it down.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:13]:
Yeah. Putting it. Putting it down is the phrase I would use. But yeah, I see what you're saying. I haven't. Well, I've turned it on, I think. I don't leave it plugged in because it will just sit there updating the whole time. But I did turn it on.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:27]:
Since we've been home. I got it up to date, whatever. But I haven't actually played a game on it.

Richard Campbell [02:14:33]:
I mean, they tried really hard to make updates, not annoy you. When you leave it off. That means every time you turn it on, you lose it for.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:38]:
Oh, yeah, yeah. Do not ever think you're going to just turn it on and play a game if that's the way you do things. Like, you gotta. You gotta be prepared. Like, no.

Richard Campbell [02:14:46]:
And I had. I at one point have one Xbox because Microsoft gave me a number of them that was plugged into a TV that whenever the Xbox did anything, the TV would automatically activate and chime and quickly found out at around 3 in.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:57]:
The morning, ding, it was doing itself. Well, that's like. Okay, that was on the part of Microsoft. That was a thoughtful time.

Richard Campbell [02:15:04]:
At least they were trying. Yeah. It's just, it was, you know, a bad hdmi. So it's not its fault.

Paul Thurrott [02:15:11]:
So this one, to me, kind of came out of nowhere. I'm not sure what I think about this, but Activision has signed a deal with Paramount to turn Call of Duty into a movie.

Leo Laporte [02:15:23]:
You should be so excited about this.

Richard Campbell [02:15:25]:
Not bad.

Paul Thurrott [02:15:26]:
I don't know what to think about it. So I think the first game was already made that was called. What was it called? Saving Private Ryan. Oh, yeah. But that's the thing. So Call of Duty is not the same thing all the time. I mean, it is really. But obviously the initial World War II games, the first three, and then a few others later on, there was the Modern Warfare series, of which there are now two.

Paul Thurrott [02:15:51]:
Right. Black Ops, which were on six, about to have seven. But there was the initial trilogy and then the newer ones. And I guess thinking about this, I think the Modern Warfare storyline might be good for a movie or even a series of movies, as would maybe Black Ops. And actually, I think if you're going to make. If this turns into something, you could kind of mix and match those two. I don't. I don't see going back to.

Richard Campbell [02:16:17]:
There seems to be this illness that folks who write the storylines for video games think they're as good as movie scripts.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:25]:
Yeah, well, yeah, right.

Richard Campbell [02:16:28]:
I mean, the same kind of money, but that doesn't mean it's the same thing. The game that you want to play is not necessarily the game you want to watch.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:36]:
Right. Because. Right. Obviously the game is interactive and you're doing the thing.

Leo Laporte [02:16:40]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:16:40]:
And it's calibrating to your capability.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:43]:
Yep. There was this. I. I enjoyed this. This was lambasted by most people. But they made a version, a liveaction version of the. The game Doom with the Rock. Right.

Richard Campbell [02:16:53]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:53]:
As the main character. Or actually he was the bad guy. It was Carl Urban or whatever his name was. Or Carl was the man. It doesn't matter. But actually the Rock was the bad guy. But there's a scene in the movie where they actually did this like with the game where the gun comes up and it's the first person view. So he's walking down the hall and things are happening and you get that little kind of.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:15]:
This is what it's like to play the game. And it was like. Okay. Like I thought that was pretty cool. I think most people.

Richard Campbell [02:17:19]:
Yeah. I mean, this is. How do you make a video game movie work? A, nostalgia and B, self referential humor. Make fun of what you're doing. I mean, that's why Fallout works.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:30]:
Yeah. And. Right. New season of Fallouts coming soon, by the way. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:17:33]:
Because it was that good. They were actually gonna make more.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:35]:
Yeah. I look at things like. But. But I don't know. Like I love Call of Duty and also hate it. But. But it's the game I play the most. But I think about things like.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:46]:
Like Halo, which I know has been a TV series for over two seasons. And Gears of War, which to me like these lend themselves to movies or whatever. Netflix type shows, whatever you want to call that Call of Duty, though I'm like, I don't know, maybe the only.

Richard Campbell [02:18:01]:
Way that movie succeeds is if there's a teabagging somewhere. Some. At some point.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:07]:
The whole room will blow up.

Richard Campbell [02:18:09]:
If that happens and if it doesn't, forget it. You haven't get a chance.

Leo Laporte [02:18:12]:
But will it be the Rock? That's the question.

Richard Campbell [02:18:14]:
No, It'll be a 14 year old kid. Because that's the rule.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:18]:
That's funny.

Leo Laporte [02:18:20]:
Doing it to the Rock.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:21]:
I don't know what the. Yeah, well, I don't know what to say about this. I will see. We'll see. We'll see what it looks like. And then we have. Because it's a new. It's September.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:30]:
Right. Already, somehow. So we have the first several games coming to Game pass this month, including Hollow Knight, Silksong, which will be day and date. If you Have a Game Pass subscription at least. Or at least the ultimate one. I don't know when the other ultimate. Or maybe I can't remember anymore. What do they do the sound again? I think it's ultimate and PC.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:53]:
Game Pass. And then Game Pass.

Richard Campbell [02:18:55]:
So this is a new title. This is not them just rolling out old titles.

Paul Thurrott [02:18:58]:
That's right.

Richard Campbell [02:19:00]:
But that was always the point title, by the way. Wildly overdue, right?

Paul Thurrott [02:19:03]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:19:04]:
It's like eight years they've been working on this thing. Like most games die if you've gone longer than three.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:09]:
Yep, yep. I don't have this in the notes, but actually, I think I saw the headline today. Yeah. Perfect Dark was supposed to have a new sequel. That studio was either closed or hollowed up pretty dramatically. The game was put on pause or stopped. And then I guess they tried to sell it around and weren't able to. So now it's apparently actually dead.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:31]:
Not happening. So, yeah, sometimes things just disappear. But that's the big one in here. Unless you think Paw Control or Paw Patrol World is a big deal, man. I don't know. Maybe.

Leo Laporte [02:19:48]:
Paul, I'm shocked you didn't mention the Five Hour Energy Drink based on the Outer Worlds.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:53]:
Thank you, Leo. Exactly. You were right.

Leo Laporte [02:19:57]:
We did have to get it in. And by the way, at the bottom it says copyright 2005 by 25 by Microsoft.

Richard Campbell [02:20:03]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:04]:
Crazy.

Leo Laporte [02:20:04]:
Is this a good game? Actually, I'm not going to drink this stuff, but the game looks kind of cool.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:09]:
Yeah, it does, actually.

Leo Laporte [02:20:10]:
That looks like a heart attack in a bottle.

Richard Campbell [02:20:12]:
That is.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:13]:
Yep, yep. Well, you'll have. You'll have. What's that movie with the. Oh, God. Jason Thrace. The movie where he's. His heart.

Leo Laporte [02:20:20]:
Oh, yeah, yeah. He has to.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:22]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:20:23]:
Adrenaline or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:24]:
Yeah, yeah. It's like that. If you. If you want that effect.

Leo Laporte [02:20:27]:
It'll make your head look like the guy. The moon in Outer World.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:31]:
Exactly. And if it doesn't look that way, it will definitely feel that way. It's kind of. What is this? It's like caffeine juice. What am I what?

Richard Campbell [02:20:38]:
Mostly caffeine. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:20:40]:
And niacin. They give you a big niacin flush.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:43]:
And they give you, like, a bunch.

Richard Campbell [02:20:45]:
Of other stuff that'll eventually make the energy blend.

Paul Thurrott [02:20:48]:
Like a thing you can jam into your leg if you're going into the shock or something, just in case.

Leo Laporte [02:20:52]:
It's actually only 230 milligrams of caffeine, which is about a cup of coffee, but maybe the taurine. I think the niacin is what makes you feel like, wow. I don't know what I just took, but it had turning bright red, like.

Paul Thurrott [02:21:03]:
Hey, man, are you feeling it?

Leo Laporte [02:21:05]:
If I'm feeling it, man. Oh, I'm really feeling it.

Richard Campbell [02:21:08]:
The B12 shot is what they were sticking into the arm. You know, in Comfortably Numb. Yeah, you'll feel a little prick.

Paul Thurrott [02:21:16]:
Yep, yep.

Leo Laporte [02:21:17]:
Or in Brave New World Soma. We're all on Soma now. We brought in the interstellar sweetness of purple berry punch. Your absolute favorite. Outer worlds consumable to our world.

Paul Thurrott [02:21:29]:
Love, love the marketing.

Richard Campbell [02:21:31]:
Now with more defibrillation.

Paul Thurrott [02:21:34]:
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte [02:21:35]:
Life's too short for boring flavors, Bow.

Richard Campbell [02:21:38]:
Zoom.

Paul Thurrott [02:21:39]:
That scene in Pulp Fiction where you jam the needle into that chicks. All right, well, you're gonna need that.

Leo Laporte [02:21:45]:
This should be. They should say just. It's five and a half hour energy drink. It's just.

Paul Thurrott [02:21:50]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:21:50]:
Half an hour more.

Richard Campbell [02:21:51]:
The half hour is waiting for the ambulance.

Paul Thurrott [02:21:52]:
The mine goes to five and a half.

Leo Laporte [02:21:54]:
Five and a half. Spinal Tap's back, baby. And I'm glad to hear it. I'm glad to hear it. All right, let's pause. This is the. Pause, the refreshes, and then the back of the book. And as you know, we missed Richard's whiskey pick last week, so he's got one for us.

Leo Laporte [02:22:13]:
Did you see the premiere of Ontario pouring out the bottle of Crown Rob Ford? Yeah, Rob Ford's pouring out the Crown.

Richard Campbell [02:22:24]:
Crown Royal because they're Diageo shutting down their. Their Crown operations in Canada. Oh, Rob.

Leo Laporte [02:22:32]:
Poor Rob.

Richard Campbell [02:22:32]:
Oh, well, it hasn't been. It hasn't been a Canadian company in a long time.

Paul Thurrott [02:22:36]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [02:22:36]:
Like, Diageo is a mult. Is a proper multinational.

Leo Laporte [02:22:39]:
I guess that's fair. Yeah, but it's good. It should let people know just because it says, you know, Canadian on it.

Richard Campbell [02:22:46]:
Rob is very performative in these sorts of things. Not surprising. He's quite smashed the bottle.

Paul Thurrott [02:22:54]:
And then.

Richard Campbell [02:22:54]:
Start stabbing people with the glass.

Leo Laporte [02:22:58]:
Our show today by friends, brought to you not only by our fine sponsors, but even more importantly, by our fine club members. We love Club Twit, and we are so glad that you are a member. And if you're not a member, why not? We'd love to have you in the club. Yes. Okay, I admit it. We have an ulterior motive. Club Twit makes now up 25% of our operating costs. It's really vital to our operation as far as I'm concerned.

Leo Laporte [02:23:28]:
Let's make it 100% right. All it would take, really, is right now it's sad to say about 1 in 50 people who listen to our shows are members of the club. If we could get it to 1 in 20, 1 in 20, we wouldn't have. We'd be golden and we could have more shows. We could do more stuff in the club here. Let me tell you why you want to join the club. Besides the fact that if you join the club you get such great things as ad free versions of all the shows. The good feeling, by the way, you got to update the price, Joe.

Leo Laporte [02:24:08]:
It's now $10 a month. A good feeling.

Paul Thurrott [02:24:10]:
You look like a concert pianist.

Leo Laporte [02:24:12]:
I look like Liberace playing a Commodore Community in a single subscription. That's Joe. Joe is one of the fun people in our club. This is the Club Twit Discord, or as I like to call it, the Club Twit Disco, where the party goes on 247 even when there's not a show. Wonderful club members hanging out in here. About half the people join the club go to the Discord, the discourse where we have our events. For instance, Friday we're going to do our photo time, our monthly visit with Chris Marquardt. Our assignment this month.

Leo Laporte [02:24:45]:
It's not too late. Delightful. Take a delightful picture. Maybe you'll be one of the picks of the month. That's at 1pm Pacific this Friday right after the AI user group and we're going to talk about Nadin, which is a very interesting local server solution for AI and other stuff coming up. We do hands on tech. We do home theater geeks. We do a lot of shows in the club.

Leo Laporte [02:25:11]:
Of course the Apple event is Tuesday because Apple takes us down when we stream our coverage of the events on such public places as YouTube and Twitch. We do it now only in the club Twit Disco. So join us, Micah Sargent and I. 10am on Tuesday, 10am Pacific for apples Aww Dropping event. Our coverage of the new iPhone announcement and whatever else Apple announces. We'll go right from that into Mac break weekly. There's iOS today we're going to do Meta Connect right after Intelligent machines in two weeks. See what, see what Mark Zuckerberg has in the way of glasses that weigh your head down.

Leo Laporte [02:25:55]:
So we do a lot of this stuff in the club because the club supports it. There is dancing in the club Twit Disco ad free versions of all the shows, access to the Discord, those special programs we don't do anywhere else and the good happy warm feeling knowing that you are supporting the efforts we're making here. If you find our shows useful, please join the club. There's a two week free trial. There are individual memberships, family memberships, and corporate memberships as well. Plus a yearly plan. Join the Club Twit TV Club Twit to learn more. Thank you in advance.

Leo Laporte [02:26:35]:
Now we go to Berlin to visit with Paul Thurot and his tip of the week.

Paul Thurrott [02:26:43]:
Yeah, I almost blurted this out during the insurtification segment there, but I have now two pairs of friends who are doing this thing I've been kind of talking about for a long time, but I've never actually done myself, which is just sparing themselves the heartache of all this baloney with all these different online services. Like just change the subscription every month. So like this month we're going to do Netflix catch up. Next month, go to Hulu.

Leo Laporte [02:27:07]:
Oh, that's a good idea.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:09]:
Yeah. And I've always thought it was kind of a good idea and I just have never done it. And after the second one mentioned this to me, I was like, ah, man.

Leo Laporte [02:27:18]:
I got to use AI Vibe code, a Windows app to do this.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:24]:
Yeah, just auto switch you or whatever. Auto rotate.

Leo Laporte [02:27:27]:
Yeah, yeah, you could call it sit on this.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:33]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:27:35]:
Just a thought.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:36]:
I'm just saying we'll workshop it. But yeah, no, maybe. Anyway, it's always seemed like a good idea to me and. Yeah, I don't know, maybe this would be like a New Year's resolution thing for me or something. I don't know. I'd like to get there.

Leo Laporte [02:27:53]:
Okay. Your online services, I. Yeah, I like this idea. It does seem like a lot of work.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:59]:
It. It's work. Yeah, but it's not. I mean, I don't know, it's. If you're paying for four or five services, if you could save 100 bucks a month, I mean, you know, depending on what you're doing, I. Seems like it's worth it anyway.

Richard Campbell [02:28:14]:
Just paying attention to what you're spending monthly money on.

Paul Thurrott [02:28:16]:
Yeah, just that. Yeah. Yep. Yep. It's sensible. Yeah. I mean, I review this from time to time.

Richard Campbell [02:28:23]:
Yeah, we, like I said, we just suspended. We just let Netflix go because she'd seen everything she wanted to see. And Netflix sends me sad emails every month and I feast on their tears. I'm delighted. And you know, maybe we'll turn it on when they make something we want to watch.

Paul Thurrott [02:28:37]:
Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:28:43]:
There's not a lot of spam that makes me happy, but. But Netflix's pleading makes me happy. Like, that's very enjoyable.

Leo Laporte [02:28:49]:
Please, please come back.

Paul Thurrott [02:28:52]:
We miss you.

Richard Campbell [02:28:53]:
I Will send you an envelope of tears for you to try.

Leo Laporte [02:29:00]:
App Pick of the Week. We just got the browser stats. I just say this parenthetically, chrome is like 80% now, the monster. It's totally the monster. Edge is like 15% number two. Yeah, it is amazing. It's the tyranny of the default, to paraphrase Steve Gibson. Then Firefox, then Opera and the rest.

Paul Thurrott [02:29:23]:
It'S just the long nobody knows. Yeah, so the 2% of whatever is. The rest is probably 5 or even 10 that maybe people have heard of. And this is one of them. But the reason I mention it this week is because there's a lot of these things, right? Obviously most of them are Chromium based. There's a couple that are Firefox based as well, obviously, but most of them are Chromium based. And the thing is, it used to be I want Chrome, but without the Google stuff. And then that's what Edge is.

Paul Thurrott [02:29:59]:
But then Edge has its own form of tracking and whatever. And it's like, all right, so what I really want here is I do want Chrome, but I want it without any of the tracking stuff. And then you have Brave and whatever. So Vivaldi does all that. But the thing that's been happening more recently is this AI browser kind of phenomenon, for lack of a better term. So there are the established browser makers like Google and Microsoft, that are kind of going about it in a very slow moving, kind of general way. And then there are the small companies no one's ever heard of, like the browser company or Perplexity, which is making Comet, where it's a little more radical. And if you look at like duckdeco, Brave, Opera, any of these other browsers, like, well, what are they going to do? Like, what's their plan? Like, what are they doing? And they have ideas and they talk about doing different things.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:50]:
Like, maybe we'll have a thing where you could pick your models and you could maybe you pay and get better models at some point or whatever it is. And it's like, yeah, so it's like, what's Vivaldi doing? Like, we're not doing anything. That's what we're doing.

Leo Laporte [02:31:04]:
Intentionally.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:05]:
Yeah. And I actually have to say I think that I think there's going to be some attraction to this idea.

Leo Laporte [02:31:10]:
It makes me want to try it, I'll be honest.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:12]:
And it's a good browser. It's a really good browser. But the thing I like about this is like, look, they're not denying AI. AI is happening. What they're saying is it doesn't have to be part of the browser. Like you can get extensions, you could go to the page, you can go like, like why does it have to be like what are we bloating this thing up for? And I guess you could be cynical and be like, oh, they couldn't figure it out. That must be what's happening here. But it's like, no, you know, like this company was started to make this thing and they, their big deal is to me seems like it's customization, personalization.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:43]:
Like it's a little off the charts, like it's dense with options.

Leo Laporte [02:31:47]:
That's the thing that stops me is that learning curve. But then.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:53]:
They pile it on. Like they have a built in email app and you know all this stuff, it's like there's all. If you want it, you know, you don't have to use any of it if you don't want it. But, but I have to say, like, I think they're going to find an audience with this one. Like the, it's like we heard you, like a lot of people. Like, no, like enough. Like get your. Keep your AI out of my damn browser.

Paul Thurrott [02:32:10]:
You know, that kind of thing.

Leo Laporte [02:32:11]:
So it's Chrome based, right?

Paul Thurrott [02:32:13]:
Yeah, it's Chromium. Yep, yep. But it does all the right stuff. Like if you write out of the box, if you go to. It does all the tracker and ad blocking and all that stuff.

Leo Laporte [02:32:21]:
Oh, it does. Okay. So you don't have to worry about UBlock origin because that's the problem.

Paul Thurrott [02:32:25]:
I just. And it's effective. It does it right. It's good.

Leo Laporte [02:32:30]:
All right, I'm going to install it. You do this to me every freaking time. Well, okay.

Richard Campbell [02:32:34]:
Another browser.

Paul Thurrott [02:32:35]:
Another browser.

Richard Campbell [02:32:36]:
Another browser.

Leo Laporte [02:32:38]:
Every time, Paul.

Richard Campbell [02:32:39]:
All the browsers.

Leo Laporte [02:32:41]:
I got to thank you though because you've introduced me to some fun stuff like arc.

Paul Thurrott [02:32:46]:
Yeah. Glad that one worked out for the.

Richard Campbell [02:32:49]:
15 minutes that it was around.

Paul Thurrott [02:32:51]:
Yeah, right. Well, it's one of those things. It's one out of 10 people, they're like, oh my God, I can't live without this. Now the other nine are like, what? Let's see what you're looking at.

Leo Laporte [02:33:03]:
So Vivaldi has ProtonVPN. It syncs. I'm just looking at it right now. I have an account from ages ago.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:13]:
Yep. It will take that if you have it. Like you could sign in.

Leo Laporte [02:33:17]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:18]:
And you get additional things. Obviously you get whatever you get with Proton. But I mean like I think the version that's built in, I don't think you maybe you can't choose, like, where it's coming from or something like that. It's some, you know, it's a simple.

Leo Laporte [02:33:27]:
Version, but bring your favorites. Okay, do that. Import selected. Okay, continue. So now I have all my. We care about your privacy. Do it. Block it.

Leo Laporte [02:33:40]:
Block it all. And now make it yours. Dark my soul. I like my tabs on left.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:49]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [02:33:50]:
You know the one, the one thing for this machine that I look for a browser that has this little.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:58]:
Right. So it's a little busy by default.

Leo Laporte [02:34:00]:
Can I get it full?

Paul Thurrott [02:34:01]:
Yes, you can. You can really minimize it that way.

Leo Laporte [02:34:05]:
Let me see. Let me turn on full screen. Okay. Well, I'll have to, I guess, turn off some toolbars and things. Oh, that's nice, though. It has the categories.

Paul Thurrott [02:34:13]:
Well, I like that, but I do like the little. The sidebar stuff they have. Like, I hide that by default and.

Leo Laporte [02:34:19]:
Yeah, I'm sure I can just hide that. Yeah, yeah. Look at all this. There's a lot of stuff going on and there's the V. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:34:27]:
You know, but this is every browser platform. You can 100% customize every pixel I'm.

Leo Laporte [02:34:34]:
Going to show because you're my guy.

Paul Thurrott [02:34:36]:
I'm just, just. I'm just as. You know, as an AI, if you don't want AI in the browser.

Leo Laporte [02:34:42]:
Well, but that's the beauty of it. You don't have to have AI in the browser. What I really hate is Google now. Like, I go into Google Drive and it says, hey, you want to summarize all those documents?

Paul Thurrott [02:34:52]:
No, I know I got stuff.

Leo Laporte [02:34:53]:
Hey, hey, you want to do something with AI? It's like Clippy.

Paul Thurrott [02:34:55]:
It's worse.

Richard Campbell [02:34:56]:
Clippy's everywhere. Clippy's everywhere.

Leo Laporte [02:34:58]:
And the problem is it's usually going to junk it up. It's not going to enhance it. It's going to junk it up with stuff. And then I have to undo all the crap that the AI did. I love AI. I use it, but I don't.

Paul Thurrott [02:35:11]:
Yeah, but you want to be purposeful. Like, I like. I'll go. I'll go to you when I need you. How does that sound? You know, that kind of thing. Yep.

Leo Laporte [02:35:17]:
And it certainly can do that.

Paul Thurrott [02:35:19]:
All right.

Leo Laporte [02:35:20]:
And I noticed by the way, they have weasel words in the press release, like, until it's useful, until it's good, and then we'll, you know, all. But they don't. They're not going to. They don't want it where you say, hey, you told us you were never.

Paul Thurrott [02:35:32]:
Going to do this, it's like, hey, you should do your taxes with this. Also, AI makes mistakes. Be careful, be careful, be careful. What?

Leo Laporte [02:35:39]:
Watch out. Run as radio Episode 1000 yeah, here we go. Exciting.

Richard Campbell [02:35:51]:
Got to 1000 somehow. Just persistence, I guess. So a little bit of an indulgent episode. I put out the word a few weeks ago saying, hey, if you got any questions about the show or things you care about, let us know. Got a few audio clips for some folks as well as lots of email questions. Invited my friend Paul to help me triage through all of this and what do we go? 75 minutes. So yeah, a little indulgent.

Paul Thurrott [02:36:17]:
Yep.

Richard Campbell [02:36:18]:
But you know, tried to answer them all and sort of fell into certain categories or certainly the windows is irrelevant conversation. There was the AI taking over all the things conversation. And I don't know here and there, some, you know, digging into some system and problems and stuff. And we had a good time. It was. It was really fun and I'm grateful folks care enough to listen.

Leo Laporte [02:36:40]:
Absolutely. A very special episode.

Richard Campbell [02:36:44]:
Yeah, it's a while. It's only been what, 18 years? So.

Paul Thurrott [02:36:48]:
Okay.

Richard Campbell [02:36:49]:
A thousand episodes.

Leo Laporte [02:36:50]:
You've been doing as long as we have. That's pretty impressive.

Paul Thurrott [02:36:52]:
That's amazing.

Richard Campbell [02:36:53]:
For better or worse.

Paul Thurrott [02:36:55]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [02:36:56]:
Runasradio.com Episode 1000 and now let's get Canadian.

Richard Campbell [02:37:05]:
Well, first let me. You know, before the. The club, the club break, I. We said some things about Crown Royal and I should. Lots of folks would come at me with a. You did that wrong. Let me correct some stuff. Stuff A.

Richard Campbell [02:37:16]:
There are two Fords that were premier of Ontario. There was Rob Ford who is dead.

Leo Laporte [02:37:21]:
Oh yes.

Richard Campbell [02:37:22]:
His brother Doug Ford is the current one.

Leo Laporte [02:37:24]:
This by the way, confused me as a non.

Paul Thurrott [02:37:26]:
The dead one is the one who has the Netflix special, is that right?

Leo Laporte [02:37:29]:
Ford was a little.

Richard Campbell [02:37:32]:
I don't think his brother's all that much better. He's just still alive.

Paul Thurrott [02:37:34]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [02:37:34]:
Which is a feature and he's still premiere. Has an overdose or anything. He keeps getting elected and very. They're famous for doing stuff like here's my cell number. You got a problem, problem, Call me, right? To a province of. Of 15 million people. Crown Royal is made in Gimli, Manitoba.

Leo Laporte [02:37:51]:
So it is made in Canada.

Richard Campbell [02:37:53]:
Made in Gimli, Manitoba. What Diageo is shutting down in Amherstburg, Ontario is a bottling plant, Right? That bottling plant has been under producing for a long time. The sales of whiskeys are off across the board. They're just not selling as much. They didn't need that bottling plant. So that's all. It's being closed.

Leo Laporte [02:38:10]:
Okay.

Richard Campbell [02:38:11]:
And Doug Ford is making a big show of it because it's good for, you know, pull up politics. All the whiskey, make the noise.

Leo Laporte [02:38:18]:
So still Canadian, though. That's the thing. It's still Canadian whiskey, but owned by.

Richard Campbell [02:38:23]:
Owned by a massive UK conglomerate, as all whiskey is as many. There's a half a dozen big ones. There's a, you know, a French one and a Japanese one and. And an English one and. And then a few odd ducks, and there's an Argentinian one.

Paul Thurrott [02:38:36]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [02:38:37]:
Or Filipino one. But the way we are talking Canadian today, because I felt like it, because you're. The particular whiskey we're talking about is a classic, one would argue. This is the Jack Daniels of Canada. This is Canadian Club. God bless the 1858 original. There's a bunch of other editions. And the hilarious part is, as much as it says Canada on it, it was made by a guy named Hiram Walker who was from Massachusetts.

Richard Campbell [02:39:04]:
Yeah, born 18 in Massachusetts. In his early 20s, he moves to Detroit and he's trying to work the grocery business, works for a few different companies. Finally tries to set up his own store. He fails a couple of times. By 1850, so now he's, you know, 35 or so. He's got a grocery store that's working and he's starting to make good vinegar, which is a distillation process. So he starts to experiment with whiskey and he can't get a license by 1855. The initial stages of temperance are going on, and the state of Michigan has restricted alcohol sales to druggists, AKA pharmacies, and so can't get a license.

Richard Campbell [02:39:47]:
But, hey, he's in Detroit, you know, what's right across the Detroit River, Canada. And so in 1856, he buys 500 or so acres, land just east of the little village, at that point, a few thousand people of Windsor, Ontario. And he builds a company town, brings in water, builds a bunch of townhouses, a bank, a church, along with a distillery and a flour mill because he also had a side flower business. And animal farms, both pigs and cattle, because the byproduct of whiskey that's spent mash is good cattle, food. So he's doing vertical integration in the 1850s. Now, the product, when initially released, and again, they had the name the. The year right on the bottle, 1858, is called Hiram Walker's Club Whiskey because the first big customers were gentlemen's clubs.

Paul Thurrott [02:40:41]:
Oh.

Richard Campbell [02:40:41]:
And so he's selling his barrels in a gentleman's club. So it's called a club whiskey. And of course he's probably built built out this place around his distillery where his folks work. I would point out that within a couple of years of operation he's just sort of lucky. The American Civil War begins. Lucky for Hiram Walker because the military stops buying beer because it goes bad. They buy whiskey for part of the production. So he gets huge contracts to supply whiskey into the military during the Civil War.

Richard Campbell [02:41:12]:
Within a couple of years he leaves his own little town, it's now called Walkerville, moves back to Detroit. He has a house built there. So he's living comfortably with his family in Walkerville. And his big innovation in 1865 he starts selling his whiskey in bottles, not in barrels. At that time most whiskey was you would go to your pharmacist or the, to your retailer with a bottle and have it filled for the barrel. But always the question was what was really in the barrel? Right, sure it says you know, club on the, on the barrel, but how do you really know? So his big push was here's a bottle, it's got a tamper proof seal on it. You know, we make a reliable product. And I think it's important to remember that this is the 1860s.

Richard Campbell [02:42:00]:
There is no FDA. The FDA won't be formed until the 1930s. In fact the precursor to the FDA, the purity laws won't come in until 1906. So there's really a problem with quality of products. There's no controls. And so this push in 1865, you know, makes is big. It sells a lot of whiskey. People really like that.

Richard Campbell [02:42:21]:
Now the hilarious part about this is at this point Canada is in Canada, yet Canada doesn't actually Confederate until 1867 and it won't be until 1875. And we talked about this back in the Crown Royal episode about the Canadian Food and Drug Act. The first rules come down in 1875 defining the concept of Canadian whiskey, Canadian rye whiskey and rye whiskey and about mashing, distilling and so forth. The alcohol level, size of barrels, what you could do with the wood and the mash bill was pretty much wide open, although there was a lot of rye grown in the area. So they often talk about rye whiskey. It's also very common to use bourbon barrels and so does Canadian club. Also the Canadian practices and Hiram Walker was one of these, they do what they call multi stream barreling, so or multi stream production where they don't mix the grains, they don't make a mash bill, they, they do distillation separate and then combine them after the fact. So by 1870, Walkerville is a village, several hundred people living in it.

Richard Campbell [02:43:22]:
And whiskey is selling extremely well. And coming out of the Civil War, the US distillers are complaining about the how well this whiskey is doing. And so they convinced the Congress to pass a law requiring foreign whiskeys to have a declaration that they are foreign. Foreign. And so Walker puts Canadian on the label and his popularity actually goes up. Now is an exotic import whiskey.

Leo Laporte [02:43:50]:
That's hysterical.

Richard Campbell [02:43:52]:
He also puts in a ferry called the Essex running between Detroit and Walkerville because he didn't like taking the train all the way around. But that ferry will get really useful sometime in the 1920s. And there's a great, I saw a great ad that said less delay the Walkerville way. So by the 1880s, there's about 700 people living in Walkerville. The production at this point, his warehousing is over 5 million gallons. He actually incorporates in a city as a City by 1890 and is one of the largest whiskies in the world. They were literally the Jack Daniels of Canada. Heron walker dies in 1899.

Richard Campbell [02:44:33]:
His sons take it over, becomes Heron, Walker and Sons, and they operate it for another 20 years or so until Prohibition comes in. That starts in 1920. And after a few years sales are down enough that the sons are over leveraged and they sell to a guy named Harry Hatch. And Harry Hatch is an interesting character too. This guy had been a top salesman out of a competitive distillery called the Corby Distillery. And during Prohibition, this is further east up the Detroit river into Little Lake Ontario area. Hatch had been the guy who had recruited a bunch of fishermen to run barrels across the lake to supply during Prohibition. Apparently at one point they called it Hatch's Navy.

Richard Campbell [02:45:15]:
It was like 450 different boats running back and forth across. And Corby had amassed quite a bit of or Hatchet amassed quite a bit of money. And so he went to the Corby Distiller, tried to buy it and they said no. So he went to the Walkers and bought that distillery instead. But don't worry, he's not done. He has enough money that he knows prohibition is going to end sometime soon and he starts building a huge distillery in Peoria, Illinois and basically timed its opening to the end of prohibition. 1934, it opens up, making 100,000 gallons a day. By the way, that distillery still exists today, but it just makes industrial ethanol as of 1970.

Richard Campbell [02:45:55]:
The next year he turns around and buys Corby and a Bunch of other distilleries in the process. So Hatch was the big mover and shaker in this space. And so by the beginning of World War II, Canadian Club is sold in over 90 countries. And because it continues to be one of the largest whiskies in the world, Allied Dominic acquired them in 1890, in 1989, which is the beginning of the consolidation of the whiskey industry. That was then bought by Pernod Ricard in 2005, and that's where they remain today as part of Pernod Ricard. Canadian Club had a huge bump in sales in 2010 with Mad Men, because Don Draper drank Canadian Club.

Leo Laporte [02:46:35]:
Oh, that's right. I remember that.

Richard Campbell [02:46:37]:
Yeah. I'm laughing about the whole story about. This is the pure bottle because they have the seal tamper, food seals and so forth. I bought this bottle yesterday just so that I'd have one in hand. And it has no seal on it. It's just a screw top. Oh, not like the expensive whiskies that have the foil wrap and the little. And a cork and stuff like that.

Richard Campbell [02:46:56]:
Nope, just a screw top. Because this is inexpensive Whiskey. It was 25 Canadian dollars. The distillery itself, the. The operation in Walkerville, which is still running Walkerville, has actually been incorporated into Windsor, largely against the will of the people that live there. But that's how it went down. They use combination of pot and column and rectification stills. Most of the grains are bought in and around Ontario.

Richard Campbell [02:47:19]:
They have storage facilities all over Ontario, but the bottling is right at that same plant as well. The actual way that the traditional Canadian Club is made is primarily corn, which, again, is malted. It's not malted, but it's dried, ground, mashed, and fermented on its own. They also use rye, malted rye, and malted barley. And each of those has a separate stream where they're malted, dried, ground, mashed, fermented. And only at the point of casking do they combine them into the production product. They do use American bourbon barrels because they're plentiful and inexpensive. And it's aged minimum of three years because that's the law.

Richard Campbell [02:47:59]:
Some say it's up to six. Depends on what it is. All right. This smells like inexpensive whiskey. It's got that strong corn, you know, grain.

Leo Laporte [02:48:08]:
Harsh. Is it maybe a little.

Richard Campbell [02:48:11]:
No, it's not. Got a burning nose. That drinks are super nice. This needs an ice cube and some soda water. And it would.

Leo Laporte [02:48:19]:
Water.

Richard Campbell [02:48:19]:
Brilliant.

Paul Thurrott [02:48:20]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:48:21]:
By the way. So I was trying to find. Can you buy this in America?

Paul Thurrott [02:48:24]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [02:48:24]:
It's Canadian club. And of course you can. It's like they sell far more in America than they do in Canada. But actually finding the sort of so called 26 ounce or 750 mil bottle is hard.

Paul Thurrott [02:48:35]:
Really.

Leo Laporte [02:48:35]:
A total wine, all with a handle.

Richard Campbell [02:48:38]:
$19 is a handle.

Paul Thurrott [02:48:40]:
Wow.

Richard Campbell [02:48:40]:
Which is a great term, right? It's a handle. What's a handle? Well, it's a bottle so big it has a handle in it. That's really why it's called a handle. It's 1.75 liters as opposed to the 750 mil. And by the way, it is actually 1.75 liters. Not roughly. It's 59.15 ounces. There's a secret here which is that back in the 70s, the ATF and the distilled Spirits Council actually switched over American alcohol to metric measurements.

Richard Campbell [02:49:12]:
And they've never actually gone back. So what you know of as the, the, the, the, the original 26 ounce bottle, which was never a 26 ounce bottle, it was a 25 1/3 ounce bottle, was actually 757 milliliters, is now a 750 milliliter bottle. Also known as a metric fifth because it used to be a fifth of a gallon when it was 25.35 ounce. A handle is actually 1.75 liters, but you know, only the fractional amount of that. But it's also known as a metric half gallon. So in the system in America you use the metric system. You even refer to it as the metric system just for your bottles.

Leo Laporte [02:49:57]:
I didn't know that.

Paul Thurrott [02:49:58]:
That's hysterical.

Richard Campbell [02:49:59]:
Yeah. And they're all fractionally different from each other.

Leo Laporte [02:50:02]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [02:50:02]:
But in the end, the production is simply that. But yeah, 19 bucks for a handle of Canadian club. Get a big bottle of soda, that cube, you will be happy there. You know, I could be snobby about whiskey. Goodness knows I've dropped, drank all kinds of expensive whiskies over the years and I have enjoyed them. They are delightful. But you know the last fishing trip last year where we had the whole thing about Jack Daniels and it made me research Jack Daniels. It's like, listen, drop the pretense, whatever you like, whatever you want to drink something with a handle, it's good.

Richard Campbell [02:50:37]:
And you know, the handle's hilarious and it says something about you. It says, not only did I come to party, I came to party hard.

Leo Laporte [02:50:42]:
My mom, when we put it home.

Richard Campbell [02:50:44]:
In the original book of Dr. No James Bond. I know it's all about the Martinis in the movie. But in the original book, such a good book, James drinks CC and soda before a mission. And not only that, but a lot of it because Fleming was big on the fact that Bond was highly stressed. Like this was very dangerous stuff. And he was an alcoholic. And yeah, he drank drink and soda before the.

Richard Campbell [02:51:12]:
Before the trip, mission.

Leo Laporte [02:51:13]:
So he managed to keep his head clear.

Richard Campbell [02:51:15]:
However, I don't. He's a fictional character, so. Of course.

Leo Laporte [02:51:21]:
True, true.

Richard Campbell [02:51:22]:
But of course, when they make the movie and, and it's Sean Connery, then it's all about the whiskeys and it's all about. Yeah, the martinis, the Vespa.

Leo Laporte [02:51:33]:
Very nice. I'm glad we did a little tribute to the Ford brothers and Canadians.

Richard Campbell [02:51:42]:
There's a whole other piece here I could have gone into about the relationship between Detroit and Windsor in the automobile industry, which grows up around Walkerville. Like that Walkerville was already there and how always those industries were deeply integrated and right now they're completely crippled by some foolishness. Yeah, but I'm not going to do that. I'm going to have a drink instead.

Leo Laporte [02:52:01]:
Yeah, that's probably the only. Only reasonable response at this point.

Richard Campbell [02:52:05]:
Fair enough. And I would point out that my soda has been silent for two plus hours. And the. The moment I started doing this bit, she lost her mind.

Leo Laporte [02:52:13]:
I want some Johnny. I want some.

Richard Campbell [02:52:15]:
I want some something. He's talking about alcohol again. He's talking about alcohol again.

Paul Thurrott [02:52:18]:
No, it's just like. You must be talking to me.

Leo Laporte [02:52:21]:
We will add this along with all the others to something weird from my closet dot com. The compilation of fabulous whiskey segments from our great whiskey lover himself, Richard Campbell. He's got a Scottish name, but he's all Canadian. Actually, I think there are quite a.

Richard Campbell [02:52:41]:
Few Campbells in I am that Scottish Campbell. The ones that betrayed the Douglases and later found out. I was told as a kid, we are Welsh Campbells, which is apparently what you said.

Leo Laporte [02:52:52]:
Yeah, we're the other Campbells.

Richard Campbell [02:52:54]:
We're the Welsh Gambles.

Leo Laporte [02:52:58]:
Only after you ran.

Richard Campbell [02:53:00]:
Yeah, my grandmother was born in Wales, but grew up in Scout.

Leo Laporte [02:53:03]:
So there you go.

Richard Campbell [02:53:04]:
See?

Leo Laporte [02:53:05]:
There you go. Richard is@runasradio.com that's where you find the 1000th episode of Net Rocks, which already a number of people said is great. Well worth listening to.

Richard Campbell [02:53:14]:
Thank you.

Leo Laporte [02:53:15]:
Of course, with Carl Franklin. He does the Net Rocks show as well. Paul Thurat is in Berlin. His coverage of the IFA conference, which technically gets underway in a couple of days, has already started to appear@therot.com t h u r o doublegood.com Become a Premium Member. Don't rotate that subscription. Become a premium member.

Paul Thurrott [02:53:38]:
Not that one.

Leo Laporte [02:53:39]:
Not that one. No, stick with that.

Paul Thurrott [02:53:41]:
I don't mean me.

Leo Laporte [02:53:45]:
And you can also find his books, including the Field guide to Windows 11, featuring Windows 10 built right in and windows everywhere@leanpub.com Paul, are you going to. I think you're going to Mexico next week.

Paul Thurrott [02:54:02]:
When am I going? It's going to be a few weeks. Okay.

Leo Laporte [02:54:04]:
Back home to Makunji and then on to Mexico. The jet setting Peripatetic. Paul Thurant. Richard, you're going to stay home for a little while?

Richard Campbell [02:54:14]:
Nope. Leaving on Sunday for Copenhagen.

Leo Laporte [02:54:17]:
Oh, good.

Richard Campbell [02:54:18]:
Gonna tour a thorium nuclear reactor because that's a thing I do.

Leo Laporte [02:54:22]:
That's great.

Richard Campbell [02:54:22]:
That'll be interesting. Yeah, we got the. The Copenhagen Dev Fest.

Leo Laporte [02:54:27]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [02:54:28]:
Bring home each other in the air. So I will wave to you.

Richard Campbell [02:54:32]:
Yeah, we'll go on by. And then the following week I think I'll be in Valencia.

Leo Laporte [02:54:38]:
Oh, very nice.

Richard Campbell [02:54:38]:
We do the show. Oh, no, I'll be back. I'll be back in Amsterdam for the show. I'll leave Valencia earlier in the week, but very nice. I'm going to a friend's son's wedding in Amsterdam outside of Nice, but known him his whole life.

Leo Laporte [02:54:51]:
So I miss Amsterdam either. I miss it. I really enjoyed Amsterdam. I will be back next week and the week after, but then I'm going on a trip for a couple of weeks.

Richard Campbell [02:55:01]:
Michael, I'm so excited for you, brother. I'm glad you're doing this trip. It sounds absolutely amazing.

Leo Laporte [02:55:07]:
Going down the Big. Up the Big Muddy, starting in New Orleans and going all the way to St. Paul. That'll be interesting.

Paul Thurrott [02:55:13]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:55:14]:
Lots of tales to tell when I return. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you all you club members for making this show possible. Don't forget Twitt TV Club Twit. If you're not a member, we'd love to have you. And of course, we'll be back next Wednesday. We do the show every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. That will be 1800 UTC.

Leo Laporte [02:55:36]:
And you can find us in the club, in the disco. We're behind the velvet rope there. But you can also watch in the YouTube, on the TikTok, on the Twitch, on the X dot com, on the Facebook, on the LinkedIn and something else that I can.

Paul Thurrott [02:55:52]:
Because Kik's my favorite one.

Leo Laporte [02:55:53]:
Kick's the one in Australia. Yeah, Kick. Yeah. I can't. Anyway, they're all great. They're all great. And get in there, chat with us. I see the combined chat so I see all your comments and thank you for participating.

Leo Laporte [02:56:09]:
We appreciate that after the fact on demand versions of the show available as soon as the show is done@TWIT TV WW. There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to the video. We have audio and video. The YouTube channel is a great tool for clipping little bits and sending them to friends and family. Great way to share what you have learned on Windows Weekly. Or about Whiskey for that matter. And that is of course the best way to get it any podcast really. So subscribe in your favorite podcast player.

Leo Laporte [02:56:40]:
Use the RSS man. Use the RSS Luke and you can pull it in just without even any effort on your part. And listen on on Wednesday evening after the show is done. Leave us a five star review if you would. We'd appreciate that. Also, if you're a club member and you don't want to hang out in the Discord, but Discord. But you want to know what's going on. You know the Discord has an events button that you can click to see what's going on.

Leo Laporte [02:57:03]:
But if you at least it reminds me. We have a free newsletter that talks about all the events of the week to come. Easy to subscribe. Twitter TV Newsletter there's no cost. You're all welcome to subscribe to that. It's a great way to keep up on the goings on around here. Thank you everybody. Thank you all you winners and you dozers.

Leo Laporte [02:57:23]:
We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly.