Windows Weekly 972 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell are here. We're going to talk about the big changes that just happened at Xbox. Paul says no cause for concern in all likelihood. His new book just came out. We'll tell you what it is and how to get it. And then Richard has a local whiskey that sounds pretty sweet. All of that coming up next on Windows Weekly Weekly.

Leo Laporte [00:00:29]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell, episode 972, recorded Wednesday, February 25th, 2026. I'm a Tolkien scholar. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, you winners and you dozers. You can doze through this if you want, but you won't want to because looky, looky, it's Paul Thurrott from Thurrott.com. He is in beautiful Mexico City.

Leo Laporte [00:01:06]:
Hello, Paul. Are there any cars burning in your neighborhood? Any cartels?

Paul Thurrott [00:01:10]:
I don't think there are any cars actually burning in the entire country. I'm not saying this is fake news, but I am saying I'm safer here than I am in the United States. And one more person reaches out to me I know, I bet. You tell me, I gotta come home immediately.

Leo Laporte [00:01:22]:
I bet. Richard Campbell is in war-torn British Columbia. I'm sorry about the hockey thing.

Richard Campbell [00:01:32]:
You know what, it was a lucky bounce, it happens. They played a good game.

Leo Laporte [00:01:35]:
And you guys, you know, you got a bronze in curling and that's the sport that really made you popular.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:39]:
At least the US hockey team got a gold.

Leo Laporte [00:01:42]:
Men got a gold, it was the women got the bronze, okay.

Richard Campbell [00:01:44]:
Yeah, now Homan got the bronze and Jacobs got the gold.

Leo Laporte [00:01:48]:
I think curling got a big boost in the Winter Olympics this year.

Richard Campbell [00:01:51]:
It always does. Yeah, I end up explaining curling a lot.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:55]:
I'm reasonably sure curling doesn't occur other than the Olympics, and I refuse to believe otherwise.

Leo Laporte [00:02:01]:
We were at a pub bar having dinner, and Lisa was looking over, and of course they have— it's a sports pub, so they have all the TVs on, and it just happened to be that every single event was curling.

Richard Campbell [00:02:12]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:02:13]:
And, uh, Lisa said, that's the dumbest looking sport I've ever seen. I said, well, if you understand it, it's really like chess on ice.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:19]:
Well, wait to see flag football this summer. Um, you'll see, we'll see.

Leo Laporte [00:02:27]:
Helly Buck was a brick wall, says Joe. Was it a—

Paul Thurrott [00:02:31]:
like, don't even pretend this is interesting, guys.

Leo Laporte [00:02:35]:
Hey, I do— before we go too much farther, I owe an apology. I know nobody who listens to MacBreak Weekly listens to Windows Weekly, but in case any of you do, there was a mix-up on the factory floor yesterday. We have to reset our no accidents, uh, number That the— would something terrible happen with the feed? And the— what I really think is terrible, and we're not sure how this happened, we think Apple somehow screwed up its caching, but everybody who's trying to download the free version of MacBreak Weekly, which is almost everybody, yeah, uh, was getting a notice that it's not free anymore. And I got a lot of—

Paul Thurrott [00:03:07]:
boy, panic sounds like a— like a Kevin thing to me. If you're going to investigate it, yeah, no, I would start there.

Leo Laporte [00:03:14]:
I'm blaming Apple. Anyway, all of our shows, every show I'm on anyway, is free for downloads. We encourage you to join the club and you get an ad-free version of the show, but we have no plans to put anything behind a paywall, and that was just a mistake. So if you did get that error, try again. I think it's been fixed, and our apologies. And if you ever get it again, Uh, it's not us, it's Apple, and we, uh, we, we apologize.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:48]:
Uh, ironic that it was MacBreak Weekly.

Leo Laporte [00:03:51]:
Yeah, isn't it?

Richard Campbell [00:03:52]:
It is funny.

Leo Laporte [00:03:52]:
Yeah, yeah. Um, boy, big news right after the show last week.

Richard Campbell [00:03:59]:
Pretty close. Yeah, it was really this weekend.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:02]:
Yeah, they waited till Friday, Friday night at 5 PM, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:04:06]:
Well, is it bad news?

Richard Campbell [00:04:07]:
Take it up the garbage.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:09]:
It's not good news. I mean, we'll see, right? I will say, I mean, look, I didn't predict this or anything, but I did bring up last week, haven't heard from Phil Spencer in a while.

Richard Campbell [00:04:20]:
Yeah, you did.

Leo Laporte [00:04:21]:
In fact, a number of people gave you credit.

Richard Campbell [00:04:22]:
Like, last ad piece or last news piece was like October. It had been a while.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:27]:
It's been a while.

Leo Laporte [00:04:28]:
Like, people saying Paul called it.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:30]:
Well, I didn't call it. I just thought it was odd. And I I guess if pressed, I would have said something to the tune of something's happening with Xbox and they've required him to be quiet, you know.

Richard Campbell [00:04:44]:
And there was a bunch of rumors in July last year about Spencer, and they said no, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:04:49]:
But right now I wasn't thinking retirement. I—

Richard Campbell [00:04:52]:
no, at all. Although he's 58, like, and he's been at Microsoft a long time. Like, where are you gonna go? Although, to be clear, I have a number of friends who have retired out of Microsoft and appeared somewhere else within a month.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:05]:
I— yeah, that's the thing. So I hope he doesn't pull a Peter Moore and end up at Sega or whatever, you know, or some other company. But I— look, from my perspective, this is a real loss because Phil Spencer was a gamer's gamer. But more importantly to me— yep. Uh, but he was also so plain-spoken and honest, and to the point where it was problematic, I think, for Microsoft. You know, he didn't mind— in fact, he openly would discuss things that they were thinking about doing, they were planning on doing. You know, he didn't want to disappoint anybody, uh, who was a gamer who cared about Xbox. And, um, you know, I, I do think he had a, a Panos Panay and maybe even Terry Myerson type problem, meaning there's this broader strategy above him that he has to fit in his square peg into the circular hole that is Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:59]:
And that constrains some of the things you can do. And we don't know the full story and maybe we never will, but one of the things we do know is that he wanted to release Xbox hardware that was portable hardware. And the senior leadership team or the board, I can't recall, said no, it's too expensive. It's not going to make any sense financially. We're not doing that. And that's why we have the Xbox ROG Ally from, uh, from who?

Richard Campbell [00:06:25]:
Hardware never made money. It was just a facilitation for selling games, right? No console hardware makes money.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:34]:
Yeah, so I mean, right, um, the goal is to cost reduce over time and try to make the, uh, the hardware profitable, you know, at least in, in that slice of time. They've never done it, Microsoft. Um, Sony has done it and Nintendo has done it, but it takes time, you know. You don't, you—

Richard Campbell [00:06:52]:
you're not profitable. You have to sell millions of units.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:56]:
Right. But they have a razor blade model, right? The idea going in was always like, look, we're going to lose money in the hardware, but we're going to sell games and we're going to have that 30% fee from every game maker on each title. And that's how we're going to make money. You know, when you make good hardware to sell good games and, you know, that floats all boats, etc. So it's never really worked. You know, that's the problem. The closest they ever came was the 360. That was kind of the shining high point.

Richard Campbell [00:07:22]:
Red ring of death.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:24]:
Right. Which is kind of amazing, but also showed you how loyal Xbox fans were at that time anyway.

Richard Campbell [00:07:30]:
Where Microsoft also did it right. Like I know people who got their 360 replaced 3 times.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:36]:
Yeah. Including me, by the way. So across, I don't know the number anymore. Somewhere I've written this down, but across multiple billion dollars was the right. No, but I'm no, I mean what I meant, my number, like I had multiple Xbox 360 consoles and returned all of them at least once and some of them twice. And, um, yeah, so they figured that one out eventually. Uh, but anyway, that was pre-Phil Spencer, by the way. Not that that means anything, but, um, I— look, I— you're, you're given hands— a hand to play, so to speak, and he was given a hand to play, and I think he has, or did, the best he could do with the cards he was dealt.

Richard Campbell [00:08:18]:
But you don't— I mean, no hardware strategy was Phil's strategy. They were going to outsource the hardware thing. That Phil led that, that's his deal.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:29]:
Now the goofy thing is they may temporarily reverse on that. And I— look, I— we've had this conversation many, many times. Um, ideally Xbox as a console would be great. It would sell well, it would compete effectively against PlayStation especially. It doesn't, it hasn't for 3 generations. Um, they lose money on the hardware and it's getting worse and worse and worse and worse. And, um, I think this business would be fantastically successful if they didn't make hardware.

Richard Campbell [00:09:02]:
Well, and that seems to be the direction Phil was going in. So why is he out? Because there's also the rumor that that he's forced out, not—

Paul Thurrott [00:09:10]:
Yeah, so the— yeah, the re— right. So the reason I mentioned Panos Panay and Terry Myerson was that both of those people who ran Windows respectively ran into the situation where the, the broader corporate strategies were constraining them too much, you know. And we know that in Panos's case, you know, they, they had so many cuts to Surface and cuts and cuts and cuts, and he was like, guys, I can't— you know, this doesn't make sense. I can't this business doesn't make sense the way you're just, you know, the way you're forcing it to be so limited, right? And, uh, that was a big chunk of her— or the reason why he left. Um, you know, in Terry's case, it might have been a showdown moment.

Richard Campbell [00:09:46]:
It's like, you've made it no way for me to succeed, why should I stay?

Paul Thurrott [00:09:50]:
Right, right, right. You're just setting me up for failure here, you know? Maybe in time we'll know the full stories of all these people. We don't really know. So I, I can't imagine it was the handheld Xbox hardware. I'm sure that was a passion project for him or whatever. It was never going to save Xbox, so to speak. I do feel like, you know, there was and maybe still is some version of an Xbox console that is sort of like the Switch where you can plug it in and use it on a TV or you can take it with you. And, you know, that type of thing might make sense.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:23]:
But I don't know. It doesn't matter anymore, right?

Richard Campbell [00:10:26]:
Because nobody's got— Nobody knows, right? There's no— You have to do it and find out.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:29]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:10:30]:
There's really no other way around this.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:33]:
So what we have, what we're left with, is he decided to retire, whatever that means. You know, we'll someday maybe we'll find a little bit more, find out a little bit more. His presumed successor, Sarah Bond, who also, by the way, gamer, you know, well-liked in the industry, etc.

Richard Campbell [00:10:53]:
And big on the whole, we don't make hardware anymore. Like, she was part of that narrative.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:01]:
Left as soon as he was out. Like, and by the way, the day this happened, we got to see the memos or emails or whatever it was that Nadella sent out, that the new person running Xbox— we'll talk about her in a moment— sent out, that Phil Spencer sent out. Didn't hear anything from Sarah Bond, which was to me very telling and sad.

Richard Campbell [00:11:25]:
She did later post the job, and when she didn't, she's like, what am I doing here? Yeah, she is also, I mean, very much Phil's lieutenant. She was part of that plan. So if there is a new plan, that's the thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:38]:
You have to sort of imagine that that might be part of the deal, that she was maybe too closely aligned with Phil Spencer, um, that if I'm right, that, you know, uh, requirements were coming down from on high, he was not interested in those requirements. I mean, she wouldn't be either, and But, you know, she didn't get a send-off, which I felt kind of bad about.

Richard Campbell [00:11:59]:
She's going to land somewhere great. She's an extraordinary person, and any gaming company would be delighted to have her.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:07]:
True.

Richard Campbell [00:12:08]:
Absolutely. I think Sarah Bond got the short end of the stick here and probably didn't deserve it, and I'm not worried about her at all.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:15]:
Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. And she's young enough that she'll— I'm sure she'll pop up somewhere. I mean, Phil Spencer will at least advise some companies or do whatever. We know, we'll see, we'll, you know, we'll see what happens.

Richard Campbell [00:12:26]:
But you'll see her appear somewhere important in gaming. Yeah, it's time for her to go lead something, whatever it may be.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:35]:
So yeah, uh, this was announced very late on Friday, which is when you announce things that might materially impact your stock price, and you don't want that to happen. So that's kind of how that happened. Um, this guy, by the way, uh, Phil Spencer, was at Microsoft for 38 years. He was running gaming, Microsoft gaming for 12 years. He didn't really hit my radar until the beginning of 2015. So this is 11 years ago when they did that consumer event for Windows 10 ahead of the launch. And he was one of the people that presented and he talked about the Xbox app on Windows and whatever. And this is where they showed off the HoloLens.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:13]:
I think there was a Surface Hub device of some kind, probably Surface I don't remember what that was, but HoloLens was a big chunk of that, obviously. And that's where we heard about the Windows as a Service stuff and everything changed and Windows was going to be free as an update and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But I hadn't heard— I wasn't— I didn't know him. I still don't know him, but I didn't know who he was. I didn't know what to make of him. And he had the kind of vibe, and I— and because I think this is accurate, where He was drinking coffee in a cafe somewhere on the campus and they were like, uh, Phil, you need to be on stage in 5 minutes. And he just ambled over and talked, you know, right? And that was his style. He was just a person, and that's what I liked about him.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:58]:
So this has, uh, this has caused a lot of problems, um, out in the world. Now, Xbox fans, if you weren't full of angst enough, um, you will be delighted to know that the woman now running Xbox I'm sorry, running Microsoft Gaming, um, uh, was a former executive of Instacart. And, um, her last 2 to 4 years or whatever it was at Microsoft, uh, was spent working in— they made it sound like she ran it. I don't think she actually ran this business, but she was in Core AI, which is under the game with Jay, right?

Leo Laporte [00:14:35]:
So he—

Paul Thurrott [00:14:36]:
she worked, right? So she, uh, She reported directly to him. He is in charge of— it's kind of a— well, actually, what I was going to say I think might be wrong, but it's consumer AI, right? It's not Microsoft AI, which is the Suleiman Copilot stuff. It's, I guess, Core AI is the name of it, right?

Richard Campbell [00:14:57]:
But I— Yeah, so he's above Core AI is one of his groups that that's what Asha was running.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:04]:
Okay. Well, Her name is Asha Sharma. She's young, doesn't appear to know anything about gaming, is not a gamer. And of course, what people are— because she came out of Core AI, the fear is like, oh, here we go. Obviously, Satya Nadella is sending some message here that AI is so important that the person running Xbox has to previously have been deeply involved with AI. We'll get to this in a moment. They claim otherwise, by the way. I— the thing— well, there's a lot of things that are interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:41]:
First of all, I just want to say I want to give this woman a chance. Sure. There has been a lot of hate dumped on her, which I feel is unfair.

Richard Campbell [00:15:49]:
She jumped in the fire and I don't even know that she knew she was.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:52]:
I mean, she had to have some idea, but it's like when you have a kid, you can train or read as much as you want, but You don't really know until you do it. And yeah, this is a passionate community of extremely opinionated people, and they are not happy with her. And maybe that's a little unfair.

Richard Campbell [00:16:08]:
Before she had a chance at anything, right? I mean, immediately, she's only been at Microsoft for 2 years. She came in as a VP and then was promoted to president of Core AI. Like, she's moved very quickly. She clearly manages up well.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:22]:
Yes. So This could be complete BS in the sense that she just presents well and people like her and she's advanced, but maybe she knows what she's doing too. I mean, like I said, we got to give her a chance. I don't like the reaction I've seen to her, although I too am not, you know, former Instacart. You know, you're like, what are you doing? You had people in place that were already really good. The one thing that is the little asterisk to this is that her second in command is Matt Booty. He's been around for a long time. He's a gamer, a gaming guy, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:01]:
And, you know, this is like if you have like an unqualified president, but the vice president has been around for a long time and he's got all the experience, and maybe it's going to be okay. And, you know, we'll see. But, uh, yeah, this kind of came out of— well, it felt like it came out of nowhere. So So we will see. Um, now there has been a bunch of reporting on this, of course, um, some good, some bad, some indifferent. But, um, one of the stories that came out of this was that IGN had gotten hold of the information that this was happening, um, and they had to come out early. Originally they were meant to announce this a little bit later. I don't know what to say to that.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:44]:
Um, Sarah Bond allegedly was behind this Xbox Everywhere strategy. And this is, you know, again, I don't actually agree with this, but there were a lot of criticism of the ads that were like, this is an Xbox and this is an Xbox and this is an Xbox. And people are like, what are you talking about? That console is an Xbox. It's like, guys, this is the new— it's a new business. The point of this is you can play these games anywhere.

Richard Campbell [00:18:09]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:11]:
And I, again, given the cards they were dealt, given the situation out in the market, given the way the world has gone, um, there's a reason they bought Activision Blizzard. You don't spend $68 billion for no reason. Um, it was to transform Xbox, or really Microsoft Gaming, but Xbox, into a game publisher, right? Right. Um, way down at the end of the show, uh, this— there's a nice report about video game sales from last year, and it's kind of interesting in a couple of ways how Xbox actually is still doing really well. Which I think is going to surprise some people if you haven't seen it already.

Richard Campbell [00:18:45]:
I think there's another side to this as well, which is that part of making that deal with Activision Blizzard was saying we are going to publish all games everywhere, which is good for the game studio business but kind of bad for Xbox. Like, you basically said Xbox gets no exclusives.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:03]:
Yes, but the— so the way that people get wrapped up in exclusives when it comes to video game consoles is kind of— kind of freaks me out. The, the best games I play are not games that are limited to one piece of hardware ever, you know, like ever. The best thing that ever happened to like a game like Call of Duty was letting me play first against PlayStation guys and then later also PC guys, because that dramatically expands the audience. That makes that more for everyone, including the people who have an Xbox. So if you are going to sell Xbox hardware I guess one of the goals should be to optimize your own games so that they look as good as they can look on that console. I think one of the things that stalled in this generation was that they came out of the gate, I'm going to say a little bit behind PlayStation. Sony advanced the PlayStation with a, what do you call it, the Plus model, what's that, Pro model, whatever, you know, raising the bar a little bit yet again. That's something Microsoft had done in the past, did not do this generation.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:05]:
And one thing we saw kind of repeatedly, it didn't matter where the game came from, but most games basically ran and looked better on PlayStation than they did on Xbox. And I— that was not by design on Microsoft's part, other than the fact that they did at one point very clearly just kind of give up, you know. They did a mild refresh, remember, but they didn't advance the technology in any way, right?

Richard Campbell [00:20:28]:
No. And we've kind of been at a wall for a while. Hardware-wise. Like, yeah, one of the arguments has been we can't afford better hardware because we can't afford to use the hardware we have. It costs too much, right, to make a game that presses the limits of the PS5 and the— and the—

Paul Thurrott [00:20:44]:
yeah. And it's, it's a little bit worse than that too, because in essence what they've done is made that wall higher by raising prices of the Xbox twice in the United States last year, by the way. Um, and, you know, again, I a lot of what Microsoft is doing is not some warped strategy that anyone logical would look at and say, this doesn't make any sense. It is a response to what's happening out in the world, right? Sure. And so, you know, in many ways, that's, that's been the problem. And that's what I mean by when I talk about, you know, you play the hand you're dealt. A lot of it is just, you know, external forces. And, you know, yeah, maybe they made some mistakes here and there as well.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:20]:
But I think a big chunk of this is just—

Richard Campbell [00:21:22]:
One of the arguments for having the core AI leader in there is that AI technology needs to be applied to game development. Game development costs for tier 1 games need to go down.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:33]:
Yes.

Richard Campbell [00:21:33]:
For there to be a window to a next generation set of consoles.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:38]:
Um, interestingly, she went, uh, out of her way to claim that that's not what she's going to do, right?

Leo Laporte [00:21:45]:
Although, again, she said AI slop, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:21:48]:
Exactly. That was— I was going to say there's always an asterisk, and the asterisk is she said AI slop. The, the thing that She— the three focuses that she said were great games, okay, uh, the return of Xbox, interesting, uh, and the future of play. Now that may sound— look, great games, okay, we can throw that one in the trash. Every— everyone that makes games wants to make great games. The return of Xbox sounds like the return of the console, but they were talking about consoles, right? Like, even though Microsoft didn't come out the gate with the first Xbox-branded portable gaming machine. They still intended to make one, uh, that would be part of this family of things. We know they're— they've been talking for the past 2 years about it.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:30]:
There's a next-gen console is coming, so that's not actually new. Um, the future of play— the hell could that be? I don't even know what that means. To me, the future of play is what they're already doing, which is the Xbox Everywhere strategy that everyone seems to hate so much. The future of play is not limiting the play to that one device, right? Which, look, if you have an audience of tens of, you know, almost 100 million people, whatever it is, PlayStation or a Nintendo Switch, yes. I mean, limiting, so to speak, is not really limiting at that point because you have a built-in audience. It's great. It's a nice virtuous cycle kind of a thing. You know, the Xbox doesn't get to benefit from that.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:14]:
Um, and so taking the, you know, AAA games or franchises that they have internally and bringing them, if they're not already there, to other platforms actually does make sense. So yeah, we'll see. I apparently Sarah Bond was not very well liked internally.

Leo Laporte [00:23:34]:
Um, that explains maybe, yeah, maybe why she wouldn't be the next person.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:40]:
Um, That said, she was really easy to work with if you were outside of Microsoft. So if you were a partner, a developer, a game publisher, whatever, they loved her, right?

Richard Campbell [00:23:49]:
I gotta tell you, I hear this theme over and over again lately, that the most important thing you can do as a senior person at Microsoft is have a great relationship with Satya. Like, that has a very strong effect on your outcome, more than your performance as I work.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:07]:
Nope. Any leader of anything, whether it's a country, a company, whatever, needs the friction of someone second-guessing you, and then needs to be able to admit when they're wrong. You know, when confronted by evidence that shows that the path you're on is incorrect, you need to have the self-awareness, or whatever you want to call it, to reverse course. That's not flip-flopping. It's not, you know, that's smart.

Richard Campbell [00:24:32]:
Yeah. Um, and so that's my concern here is that it's starting to feel like if you don't say yes to Satya, you haven't a chance.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:39]:
No, I— we can apply that logic to Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond, by the way. I mean, one of the complaints there was if you weren't on board with her Xbox Everywhere strategy, you were on the outs with her, and that those people didn't like that. And look, it— I, I don't mean to say I champion— I sort of agree that this is the right path forward given, again, the way the market's gone. But I'm not the be-all end-all of anything. So I hope that she was listening to criticism, and then could— if the criticism was incorrect, she could answer that. And if she was incorrect, she would change course, you know, if possible. Yeah, I don't know.

Richard Campbell [00:25:14]:
I don't know. I don't know her enough to have a CEO of Xbox though. This is killing me, this— all these CEOs.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:19]:
Like, yeah, this is—

Leo Laporte [00:25:21]:
look, I Maybe they're there to run interference with Sacha.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:26]:
No. So this is just the title thing. This is like at some point, I don't remember who it was. Somebody. Title creep. Yeah. If you look at a product like Windows, which has had 7 to 10 different product versions over the years, however you want to count it, whatever it is, small, right? You could look at a browser like Firefox just came out, I think with version 148, and it's like version numbers don't mean anything anymore. Yeah, no, they do.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:49]:
They actually mean quite a bit. You're just, you're still in the old world. You gotta, it's okay. It's okay that this thing is on a 6 or 4 week product strategy or product release cycle, whatever. It's a different kind of product. You know, it's not Windows, although Windows has to adjust too, right? So if you kind of apply that thought to why do we have, like a CEO is the leader of a company, you know, like which is the traditional view of a company. It's like, yeah, no, I agree with you. Rich and I both have talked about this a lot, this notion that over time, there are too many people of one title.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:25]:
It's like, all right, we have to invent the new title. We have too many. We have all these product managers and product managers, project— no, they say product and program managers. So it's like, all right, now we have directors. Now we have whatever. And then it's like senior vice president, vice president, and then it's like—

Richard Campbell [00:26:42]:
Right now, the chain at Microsoft is VP, then corporate vice president, then president, and then executive vice president.

Leo Laporte [00:26:50]:
There you go.

Richard Campbell [00:26:51]:
Crazy.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:51]:
So now we also have these CEOs. So we have a CEO of Microsoft AI, we have, right, CEO of Microsoft Gaming apparently, um, Microsoft Commercial. Yeah, when Phil Spencer came in, he used to just call himself the head of Xbox, you know, that's the way he talks, you know, he's like, I'm in charge of Xbox, you know, I'm responsible for Xbox. Yeah, I'm the parent. I don't know. If you are familiar at all with the history of Xbox, you may know that one of the characters who was part of the core group in the early days was Seamus Blackley, gigantic redheaded— well, formerly redheaded— gentleman who is friends with all of the people that were in the industry 25 years ago still. And like a lot of people from the old days, there's a woman who I don't know her name, but she's an ex-Xbox person I never heard of, but has been heavily critical of the Xbox under Phil Spencer because it's not like what it was, the vision they had, you know. Although I would point out that the vision they had failed, but you know, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:56]:
Was incredibly critical of this woman, and while also sort of admitting like, you know, the old way of thinking about things doesn't work, which is sort of what I was just saying, right? That, you know, we live in a different world today. Microsoft's world is very much focused on AI. And like Richard said, it's not difficult to understand how generative AI could be used to improve games, or at least to help develop games, right? If you may disagree about it being an improvement. An overly simplistic version is the thing I always bring up, which is some kind of an open world game where there's like an infinite number of side quests that you could go on that maybe parts of are generated by AI as you go. The buildings, the land, the actual quest itself, the people you interact with, the conversations you have or whatever it might be. I mean, to me, this just makes sense. I talk about Call of Duty and how all these levels and all these games are all the same. It's the same, it's the same, it's the same.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:04]:
But, you know, some of them work better than others. Some of them work really, really well. And I feel like one of the things AI is good at is taking existing content, putting it in a churner, and, you know, spitting out something like it. And I got to be honest, I mean, if you look at the whatever 16 multiplayer titles or maps rather that the most recent Call of Duty launch with, I mean, 4 of them are really good. Could we have 8 more that are like those? You know, they don't have to be the same level, they don't have to be the same, they don't look the same, they don't have, you know, but I mean, maybe there's something there. Um, but like I said, uh, this woman, uh, Sharma, has, you know, been very careful to separate herself from her past. You know, don't assume that just because now I'm doing this that I'm going to pull in all that, you know, the slop, as she said, which is a word Microsoft really doesn't like, which is kind of what makes that interesting that she said that. Anyway, Seamus Blackley's advice for this woman is twofold.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:05]:
One is that if she can't develop a passion for games, she should leave. Okay. And also that she needs to gain the trust of the community. And that one I completely— well, I guess I technically agree with both, although I feel like the first one's a little harsh. We don't know what her passion is. But gaining the trust of the community, that may be an impossible task. And I wonder, you know, it seems to me, you know, think about like Satya Nadella when he came in, right? He didn't actually bring in anything new from like ideas or business models or anything like that.

Richard Campbell [00:30:43]:
He was the kinder, gentler Microsoft, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:30:45]:
Well, but that's— that happened— that, that happened as he came in. And but if you look at him like when he when he just came in, right? You know, from the outside, what he was doing, what he did, and then what he did do, I mean, really was stuff that all started on Steve Ballmer. And if you have watched or read any of the recent Steve Ballmer interviews, it's actually very insightful. He basically came to understand that I couldn't push this stuff through the board myself because we had a history and they weren't going to listen to me. And that what we needed was new blood. And so Satya was like this younger kind of breath of fresh air kind of a thing, um, and helped, I think, revitalize the outside impression of Microsoft as a company. It wasn't this stodgy software maker— Office, Windows, Server— from the past. Yeah, he had that—

Richard Campbell [00:31:38]:
he had a much more new age vibe, but he at that time was president of Server and tools, which included Azure. So he was the cloud guy with Guthrie as his architect.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:49]:
No, I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just, I'm just, I just mean from the perspective of Wall Street or customers, investors, whatever.

Richard Campbell [00:31:56]:
No, and part of this was, you know, Ballmer had been the guy who said Linux is a cancer and now Linux was a primary product on Azure.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:04]:
Yep. Yeah, it makes it hard for you to go. Steve Ballmer could not appear at a open source convention and give a speech. Right? He just, it just wouldn't happen. He couldn't do it. The history was just bad, even though the company had changed under him. And so maybe what we should be doing is looking at her in that light. Does she bring, is she a breath of fresh air? Is she younger? She may be dynamic and has new ideas that maybe, maybe, again, I'm not saying I don't know anything about her.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:36]:
Um, but I feel like we need to give her that chance.

Richard Campbell [00:32:39]:
Um, I agree. She's in her 30s.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:42]:
Yeah, geez. I mean, I mean, I don't know what the demographics of gamers are, but something going for that.

Richard Campbell [00:32:48]:
She's, you know, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:50]:
And we're going to find out if it's real. Well, yeah, or, and, or we're going to find out if it's applicable to gaming, maybe is the better way to say it.

Richard Campbell [00:32:57]:
Well, in some ways it's like we kind of need a new vision for gaming because the old one has been mired in the muck for a while.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:04]:
So yeah, I hope— and again, I just— but I want to be clear, like, like Steve Ballmer, I think it— people might look at this and think, well, this was Phil Spencer's fault. And I'm like, I don't, I don't think so. I, I, I, I, I think we have Xbox today, we have Activision Blizzard today because he was able to push that stuff through. I, I feel like had someone else been running that business, it would have been spun off maybe, which I know some people want, or would have failed in some other way or would have failed sooner or whatever, however you want to say it. I feel like he— it's possible that he is a— I compared him earlier to, uh, you know, Terry Myerson and Pano Spinelli. Maybe the better comparison is Steve Ballmer, right? I feel like we're going to find out more in the future, but for now we have this thing, you know, we have what we have. Um, so this new Microsoft Gaming CEO, uh, Asha Sharma, was interviewed by Windows Central, which is— she really went to the hard-hitting place first, I guess. Um, and she said all the right things, right? Um, she talked about the return to Xbox as a return to the spirit that the team was founded on, not the return to console, by the way.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:15]:
I think that's kind of interesting. Um, she was a baby when this was, uh, when this happened, but You know, she, in her words, she's said she's heard the terms renegade, rebellion, and fun, and, and she's like, that's what I was thinking when I wrote that. Um, you know, this year is going to be the 25th anniversary, by the way, of the OG Xbox, you know, which was a PC, by the way, just like all the modern ones are.

Richard Campbell [00:34:39]:
All of them.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:40]:
Yeah, all of them, except for the 360, right? Which oddly was the one that did great.

Richard Campbell [00:34:45]:
Um, but yeah, but it was also a bear to write games for. Yeah, because PlayStation done the same thing, and they both came back with the gaming industry going, don't do that again.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:55]:
Yeah, and I, I don't think this is unique to 360, but I think it was exaggerated with the 360 that the initial games that came out for it didn't necessarily take advantage of the hardware, and that over time you could see that improve. Yeah, by that time that thing ended its run It, it was a different thing altogether. Like, it had really gotten a big boost.

Richard Campbell [00:35:17]:
Well, there were two problems. One is it took a long time to get the hardware ready, so the game developers were running on emulators for a long time. Yeah, right.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:25]:
Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, what am I—

Richard Campbell [00:35:27]:
got the hardware, a lot of their games didn't run properly, and they tried to fix things. And if you— it's a while to learn how to use that stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:34]:
Yes. Uh, PowerPC, um, architecture is crazy. I mean, at the time that seemed like the future, I guess, but I do.

Richard Campbell [00:35:41]:
That was the VLSI era, the make-your-own-chips era, very much so. And then it went to, no, the standard general-purpose chips are fast enough, if not faster, and cheaper to make.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:53]:
Well, that's— yeah, that's the beauty where we are getting back to custom chips again. Well, I mean, we're at the point now where mainstream, uh, PC microprocessors, which are really SoCs that have a GPU, NPU, and a CPU are fantastic for—

Richard Campbell [00:36:09]:
well, they're deeply integrated, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:36:11]:
Yeah, they're fantastic.

Richard Campbell [00:36:12]:
Now, plus they also have the TSMCs of the world, so making custom hardware has never been easier. If you—

Paul Thurrott [00:36:17]:
yeah, until China— we'll see what happens there. Yeah. Um, but yes, uh, fair enough. So we'll see.

Richard Campbell [00:36:24]:
The thing is, we're here, we are talking about new console hardware when you can't get anything made right now.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:30]:
If you read this interview and you look for any hint about new console hardware you almost will not find it. I mean, even that one, the one of the three goals, which was return to Xbox, which I know for an Xbox fan who believes that consoles will be all in and end all, their ears perk right up. She's very careful to explain what she means by this. You know, we're going to make sure Xbox is a great place for developers and players. Yeah, that's what we've been doing all along. We want to invest in reducing the divide between different types of devices that they want to use with us. That's exactly what Xbox Anywhere is. Everywhere.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:06]:
We're going to invest more in breaking down those barriers and helping developers build once and show up across different hardware experiences. That to me says Windows in the console. I don't think anything's changing there. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean that nothing changes. It's just that I don't see the thing where it— she very explicitly says, sorry, I just— this is like maybe the key point. This is her words. I believe Xbox starts with its fans and will grow from there.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:32]:
That's what I wanted to signal with the return to Xbox. In other words, I mean, yes, I mean, you could say, well, their fans want a console.

Richard Campbell [00:37:42]:
I'm telling you what you want to hear.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:45]:
That's all that is.

Richard Campbell [00:37:45]:
Yeah, right. And now, now your, your bomber point is well set, right? It's like, hey, Spencer and Bond set them on this course. Yep. But are almost obstacles delivering it.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:58]:
And so, yeah, so I look, the thing is like, will this woman have the same impact on this business that Satya did on Microsoft more broadly? Does she have— because, you know, you got to remember this business, whatever it is, is, is not the enterprise, the cloud slash now AI audience. Big business, whatever. These are people. These are a lot of men, a lot of now middle-aged men probably. They have their— they're kind of set in their ways with what they think Xbox is or should be. I don't know. I mean, it's not her fault, but necessarily we'll see. But in other words, if she follows through on what Phil and Sarah Bond would have done anyway, if that's all she does, does that help sell it somehow? Does that make it better for people? I don't, I don't see how it could.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:56]:
So I don't know, I'm worried for her. Um, I mean, I'm more worried for Xbox, not because I feel like she's unqualified necessarily, although we're going to find out. But I, I do feel like the Matt Booty thing is this, uh, fallback, the escape hatch, right? So, right, uh, when she goes to get a job at, uh the next food delivery service upstart or whatever it is. We have this guy and this guy, unfortunately, or seriously, for better or worse.

Leo Laporte [00:39:28]:
It's always a parade at your place, isn't it?

Paul Thurrott [00:39:31]:
Well, not always, but like for some reason during this podcast. Sorry. Oh, that's the I don't know how to say this, but it sounds almost racist and I apologize, but unfortunately, or whatever, just matter of circumstance, I think for a lot of Xbox gamers, the guys, and it is guys, who feel the most strongly about consoles and whatever nonsense that we all care about, see themselves in the mirror when they look at this guy, Matt Booty. They do not see themselves in her.

Leo Laporte [00:40:04]:
That's what Gamergate was all about.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:06]:
Yep, it sure was. No, I know, I don't think we're ever going to escape it. I, this is the un— this is what I mean. It's sad. It's unfortunate. It's not fair. It's not right.

Leo Laporte [00:40:14]:
It also ruins the culture. I'll be honest for everybody except those guys.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:20]:
100%. So I, my knee-jerk reaction to Seamus Blackley, for example, or anyone, there was a guy on Twitter I lost my mind on who was talking about how she's Indian and that's why she was like, stop, please, dear God. It's DEI, man. Yeah. It's like, what are you talking? Are you mental? Like, this is letting the worst of the worst have their moment in the sun, and they don't deserve that moment. And she deserves a chance, and we'll see. And, and look, if she fails or she does something I disagree with, I will be critical of that. But it's not because she's a woman, it's not because she came out of AI, it's not because she's Indian or whatever she is, because I don't care about that.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:02]:
I do care about Xbox and the business, and I want it to survive and thrive. And I hope that This gets us there. And I don't see anything— well, I like Phil Spencer, but what I see is the negativity like that Pavan Davaluri got when he was like, we're going to talk about AI and Copilot at Ignite because of course we are. We're Microsoft. That's what we do. And the world lost their mind on this guy. And that was unfair.

Richard Campbell [00:41:32]:
Yeah, it was unfair, but it was also not reading the room, the lashback Against AI is large, I guess.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:40]:
But I mean, it was a fairly innocuous tweet, and it just like—

Leo Laporte [00:41:44]:
what she said actually makes sense. Now, we're not going to fill it with slop just because we can, and there's a— I think there is clear— there's a role for AI.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:50]:
It's the right thing to say, right?

Leo Laporte [00:41:53]:
Uh, you know, I— our 23-year-old son, who's a serious gamer, um, is adamant, I don't want to play games with AI in it. You know, I think that that is a commonly held point of view. I don't think it's going to wear, age well.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:09]:
No. And Leo, you—

Leo Laporte [00:42:10]:
I understand why.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:11]:
I mean, you better than anybody, I think, because you're deeply invested in AI and using it and you see it. I think you would agree that people are going to have or have already had in some cases a moment where they're like, oh, oh, actually that's— Yeah. That's pretty amazing, right? You know what I mean?

Leo Laporte [00:42:30]:
The thing I always bring up is in Skyrim, when you meet an NPC who says, "I used to be a warrior like you, but then I got an arrow through the knee," and the 500th time you hear that, you wish some AI would come in and write some new dialogue for that NPC.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:45]:
That's what I mean. It could be like that. It could be in that wheelhouse.

Leo Laporte [00:42:50]:
That's totally fine.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:52]:
And there will be awful uses of AI, And I said this really early on, AI will win awards for writing, for making music, for making videos. It will win awards for video games. And this whole, the AI has such a, and again, I'm not like an idiot about it. Like I don't mean everything AI is awesome. It never makes any mistakes. It's fantastic, whatever. I don't mean that, but it has a bad rap. And if, you know, I look at some things that people say about AI and I think if you replace the term AI with spellcheck or just technology, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:32]:
But people hear AI and they stop listening. They lose their minds.

Leo Laporte [00:43:36]:
This is the world. Get ready. I mean, we're going to see this big split, this schism in the world between haters and lovers of AI. And there's really very little middle ground, unfortunately.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:50]:
But this is the— yes, this is basically politics. It's, yeah, we have to make the people who disagree with us look like non-humans.

Leo Laporte [00:43:58]:
Yeah, that's what's happened, hasn't it?

Paul Thurrott [00:43:59]:
And that makes them— then we don't even have to pay attention anymore. We're not going to debate anything. We're not going to find middle ground. We're not going to arrive at some consensus. We're just going to say, no, you're an idiot, and you have no— you have nothing of value to offer, I've stopped listening to you. And I— it— I— that makes me not— it's not sad is not the word. It's— that's horrific. Yeah, it's— it's a very bad outcome.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:25]:
It's the worst possible outcome. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:44:31]:
Um, let's take a little break, what do you say? And, uh, we will continue on. We did the Xbox segment first. That's a That's a good thing.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:40]:
Well, I did that. We have— yeah, we just— there's the one story.

Richard Campbell [00:44:43]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:44:43]:
And there's brown liquor and all sorts of good stuff ahead. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mr. Richard Campbell. Richard and I are heading to Florida next week. Micah will be in, uh, filling in for me. Richard and I are going to Zero Trust World, which is ThreatLocker— one of our sponsors, ThreatLocker's big security conference. Should be a lot of fun. Steve Gibson and I are going to do a presentation there.

Leo Laporte [00:45:07]:
And Richard will be— we got him a— you know, all these conferences now have podcast centers, right?

Richard Campbell [00:45:13]:
Booths.

Leo Laporte [00:45:14]:
So we got him a little— I don't know what it'll be like— a little podcast booth.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:19]:
It's actually a booth.

Richard Campbell [00:45:19]:
It's more of a lounge, but it'll do.

Leo Laporte [00:45:21]:
It'll do.

Richard Campbell [00:45:21]:
I've seen the layout of it.

Leo Laporte [00:45:22]:
Oh, you've seen it?

Paul Thurrott [00:45:23]:
Okay.

Richard Campbell [00:45:23]:
I'll give a run as well.

Leo Laporte [00:45:24]:
I'm there too. I will not be able to be there. I have to go do things. But I will be back 2 weeks hence. And Micah loves doing this show.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:35]:
It's good. Well, we love Micah.

Leo Laporte [00:45:36]:
Yeah, he's great.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:37]:
So that'll be the last Micah. Who doesn't love Micah? Who does? That's a way to judge somebody, you know. You don't like Micah? Something wrong with you, man.

Leo Laporte [00:45:44]:
They should put him in charge of Xbox.

Richard Campbell [00:45:46]:
That's right.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:49]:
Yeah. Yeah. We're not— what do you mean we're not doing shooters anymore?

Richard Campbell [00:45:54]:
He is.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:55]:
He's—

Leo Laporte [00:45:55]:
that's probably would be the negative. He's He's a very kind, gentle—

Paul Thurrott [00:45:58]:
Yeah, he's a little too gentle. You know, no, I want to kill somebody.

Leo Laporte [00:46:00]:
By the way, that's the argument for Asha is let's get a woman in there. It can only help video games to add some diversity, different points of view. I think there are a lot of people like me who are, you know, I like a good first-person shooter once in a while, but I'd like to see more gaming styles out there.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:20]:
Of course. I mean, this is the thing, like, this is what people are upset about, some feature in Windows 11. It's like, I don't want that in there. It's like, but you don't mind that it's in there for other people, right? Like, if you can, if you can turn it off or ignore it, you don't want to eradicate it for everybody, right? You just don't want to see it yourself. And they're like, no, I want to get rid of it entirely. Like, yeah, you're the problem then. It's you, it's you.

Leo Laporte [00:46:42]:
It's all about me. Yep. Our show today brought to you by our sponsor Bitwarden. Love these guys. The trusted leader in passwords, passkeys, and secrets management. You know, uh, Steve Gibson yesterday did a, uh, whole segment on SecurityNow about that ETH Zurich finding. It was related to Bitwarden, Dashlane, and LastPass. They said those are— we had to use these three because these are the only ones that had open-source client-side software so that we could in fact test this.

Leo Laporte [00:47:16]:
And what they tested is what happens if a malicious actor gets control of the vault, right? And in all three cases, there were bad things a malicious actor could do. I loved Bitwarden's response. And I just wanted to mention this, 'cause I know you probably saw this and maybe you just read the headline and thought, oh no. Bitwarden's response is, thank you to ETH Zurich. This is why we're open source. This is why we have people audit our code. It helps us get better. Their response was not defensive.

Leo Laporte [00:47:45]:
It was not, oh no, you guys are making it up. It was, we're gonna fix this. It is, and Steve's point during the show was, it is not a hair on fire situation. This is not something anybody needs to really worry about. But this is why I love Bitwarden and why I think open source is so important for stuff like this, for anything that uses crypto. People have to be able to look at it. They have to be able to bang on it. They have to be able to find flaws so they can be fixed.

Leo Laporte [00:48:14]:
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Leo Laporte [00:48:46]:
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Leo Laporte [00:49:36]:
Bitwarden also cares a lot about individual users. For instance, they just created Bitwarden Lite. I love this, a lightweight, self-hosted version of Bitwarden's password manager. It's built for home labs, personal projects, any environment that wants a quick setup with minimal overhead. So you can host your own vault, which is great, and it's very easy to do. Bitwarden supports direct import from— by the way, a lot of people, you have, you know, get into password managers by using their browser. Not necessarily the best, not only in terms of security, but in terms of convenience, because it's on, you know, one machine. Maybe it syncs to another, but is it on your phone? Is it everywhere? Bitwarden is.

Leo Laporte [00:50:16]:
So Bitwarden supports direct import from the browser—Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi—into the encrypted vault without that separate plaintext export. So that simplifies migration, but also reduces the exposure associated with that manual export. You got to make sure you delete the in-the-clear password dump that you just put there on the hard drive. You don't have to do that. It just goes straight from the browser into Bitwarden. G2 Winter 2025 reported Bitwarden continues to hold strong as number 1 in every enterprise category. And that wasn't just for the last quarter, that was for the last 6 straight quarters. People love it.

Leo Laporte [00:50:56]:
Bitwarden setup is easy. It imports from most password management solutions. So the move, the migration is simple. Took Steve Gibson and me minutes to do it when we did it a few years ago. And I've never looked back. Bitwarden's open source code is regular— this is important again— regularly audited by third-party experts. Bitwarden welcomes that, publishes the results of those reports. You can look at it too.

Leo Laporte [00:51:18]:
It's, it's right there, GPL licensed on GitHub. Bitwarden meets SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA standards. It's ISO 27001:2002 certified. Bottom line, get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a Teams or Enterprise plan for your business. Or as an individual free for life forever across all devices, all for free as an individual user at bitwarden.com/twit. That's bitwarden.com/twit.

Richard Campbell [00:51:49]:
Bitwarden.com/twit.

Leo Laporte [00:51:50]:
It's the best. Bitwarden.com/twit. We thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. Oh, Paul left and came back, so now you've rotated, so I'm going to rotate you back.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:04]:
I'm comfortable with it, and I know that our viewers around will also handle this in a mature fashion. No, they won't.

Leo Laporte [00:52:11]:
No, they won't.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:12]:
What happened, Bull?

Leo Laporte [00:52:16]:
Let's— I guess we should talk about Windows. What you got?

Paul Thurrott [00:52:21]:
Yeah, interesting week. Um, the first one is the Wall Street Journal had a report about Nvidia entering the PC market again with a new system-on-a-chip design, and they completely screwed everything up. They'd have no idea what talking about. Nice.

Richard Campbell [00:52:36]:
It's like they described it wrong. Just a bad article.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:39]:
Yeah. You can tell when people don't know what they're writing about. So there are two different things happening. NVIDIA invested, I think it was $5 billion in Intel, probably to please the US government. They certainly have nothing to offer NVIDIA. But one of the things that Intel is going to do is make a, which they don't even need to do. I don't know why they're doing this, but they're going to integrate an NVIDIA GPU into one of their processor SoCs in the future. So today, if you think about like Intel Core Ultra CPUs of the Panther Lake generation, they have really nice— actually, the GPU is awesome.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:15]:
But CPU, GPU, NPU on board on the die. So imagine that, but with an NVIDIA GPU, which would be a step up for sure. But okay.

Richard Campbell [00:53:26]:
Yeah, it's just that they run hotter and they're bigger. Like, one of the things about those integrated chips is that they're really, really efficient, right? Like, they might not be the fastest things, but they are capable of sitting in a die and not overheating it.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:39]:
I don't have this in front of me, but the computer I'm using now is whatever, it's an Intel Core Ultra 7-something. It does have a dedicated NVIDIA GPU. 16-inch screen, which I love. I do have a Panther Lake laptop. That one's a 14-inch screen, so maybe they're not directly comparable.

Richard Campbell [00:53:59]:
And they use the Xe3, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:54:01]:
Yep, that's the one with the nice— yeah, the really— the nice one. Um, I will— they're not 100% indistinguishable. The NVIDIA one's a little bit better, but honestly, they're close enough where it's like, oh my God, this is actually really interesting. Um, I haven't written about this yet, but I got in a— it's a Lenovo ThinkPad P series, um, Portable workstation, 60-inch screen. This thing is like an inch thick. I haven't seen a laptop this thick in possibly 15 years or more. I don't know. It's been a long time.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:29]:
But this thing has— I already forgot the name of it. It's whatever the latest RTX Broadwell gen. It's a high number. It's like— I didn't even know this existed. This is not designed to play video games, right? This is a workstation. But I put Call of Duty on it. I got to tell you, I keep having this experience where you play games and you start seeing things you've never seen in the game you play every single day, and you're like, what is happening? Like, um, I fell down on the ground in the game on purpose, and there's grass in front of me and there are bees buzzing around, and I'm like, I have never seen bees in this game. What is happening? Like, there's like a whole new— like, you know, it's like your eyes were improved or something.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:08]:
Like, it's, it's, it's the next level. Like, it's amazing. Makes it looks basically as good as like Battle— what do you call it? Battlefield 6 looks like it's really good. So there are levels of these things, right? But so that's Intel and Nvidia, right? And that partnership, you know, we'll see what happens. But we also know that Nvidia has been trying to get into the market for ARM-based SoCs. And we've heard reports now and the CEO of Nvidia confirmed this on stage one day last late last year. They are working with MediaTek. MediaTek is a company that put out a Copilot Plus PC level ARM-based SoC last year for Chromebook Plus machines, right? Which if you put Windows on that thing, if you could, it would be a Copilot Plus PC.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:59]:
Like it has the powerful and the good GPU. That kind of thing.

Richard Campbell [00:56:05]:
They're doing highly integrated SoC as well. Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:08]:
So the, the Wall Street Journal report is commingling these things. These are two different things. Right now, I'm going to read between the lines a little bit because I know that the Intel thing is not happening anytime soon. But according to this publication, Dell, Lenovo, and others will begin selling Windows 11 PCs based on this new Nvidia/MediaTek chip. This is happening in the first half of the year, so soon. It's a return to the consumer market, which they don't— I don't think they explain in the article, but They were the chip behind Windows RT, right? When Microsoft was developing Windows 8 and RT side by side, which is the same system essentially, right? They looked at using TI, Qualcomm, and NVIDIA. And I want to say one more that I'm forgetting. I don't remember the other one.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:52]:
I think there was one more. They went to market with NVIDIA, and they chose NVIDIA because of the graphics. Windows RT and Surface RT obviously failed. But it wasn't— I wouldn't say it was NVIDIA's fault, right? I mean, a big chunk of this was Microsoft, but a big part of it too is just the state of ARM at the time. There was no way for the ARM chips of that day to emulate x86 code. So that wasn't on the table. What was— well, it wasn't possible. They just didn't do it.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:20]:
But you have to think that they looked at this. I mean, it's such an obvious capability, but they weren't capable of that at the time. Now that's not the true— that's not the case anymore, obviously.

Richard Campbell [00:57:30]:
Um, that line's been passed a while ago now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:34]:
And of course, thanks to the success of Snapdragon X and the Prism emulator that Microsoft has, the platform is just elevated dramatically. And it's— to me, it's actually the best way, route to go. Um, but the Wall Street Journal doesn't know that apparently. Um, they don't mention that. Um, they do say that this new partnership that they have will result in hardware that runs Windows but can compete more directly with the latest MacBook book model. So it's like, okay, I mean, that's what Snapdragon— it doesn't matter. Okay, whatever. Uh, competition's good, that's fine.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:03]:
I'm glad to see it. I'm, I'm curious. Um, Mobile World Congress is any day now, right? It's sometime in March. That seems like the obvious time to announce anything. So when they talk about computers coming out in the first half of the year, I have to believe that MediaTek/NVIDIA/Microsoft will announce something maybe at Mobile World Congress. I've not heard that. I don't know that for a fact.

Richard Campbell [00:58:25]:
It's the first week of March, same time that we're at, uh, okay.

Leo Laporte [00:58:29]:
I hope they support Linux too. This would be that.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:32]:
Yeah, that I don't know. Um, I do know on the Qualcomm side, uh, that they talk about that a lot. I mean, there's, you know, there's a big push there for that. Um, that said, running Linux on those machines is actually incredibly difficult.

Leo Laporte [00:58:46]:
Um, in my experience it is. No, you're right. Um, but I would imagine traditionally been really good with Linux, but NVIDIA less so.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:54]:
So, well, oh, that's interesting. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Um, X2, I would think same time frame. I mean, we're expecting first half of the year, etc., etc. So we'll see what that looks like. Um, I, I just say I, I'm upset by how the person that wrote this has no idea what they're talking about, obviously, but I But they clearly— something is about to happen. So that's why that report appeared.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:20]:
So that's good news. So if you've been waiting for this, you've been wondering when's that reported exclusive contract, you know, between Qualcomm and Microsoft going to run out. I think it just did. So it looks like we're going to finally get this. So we'll see what that looks like. We're not going to see that from the Wall Street Journal report, but we'll see it soon.

Leo Laporte [00:59:39]:
So who is the author?

Paul Thurrott [00:59:40]:
Just so we know who to not— I don't know. I don't— look, this is— I don't know. And please, if someone's going to throw it in the discard, it doesn't matter. It's— this is an esoteric niche part of our market. It's not— it's not— still, it's not to be unexpected that— well, look, you—

Leo Laporte [00:59:57]:
but that's why we have you, Paul, and that's why you guys exist.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:00]:
Yeah, I mean, look, I— you're in— yeah, I know too much about this stuff, right? So these guys, they know that because they announced it, Intel and NVIDIA have a partnership and they're going to work on this thing. That's a fact.

Leo Laporte [01:00:10]:
Like, this is happening, and that's a scoop.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:11]:
I mean, that's good, right? It's happening, right? So, and then, you know, there have been reports and the guy, like I said, Jason, whatever his name is, the guy from NVIDIA basically confirmed this on stage one day, working with together on ARM-based chips as well that will compete with Qualcomm and run, you know, Windows 11 on ARM, etc. So this has been, these things have been in the works, you know, so they're both happening. They're both separate, but they are both happening. I think the ARM one's going to happen first.

Richard Campbell [01:00:44]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:44]:
Uh, all right, so it's Week D. Happy, happy Week D, everybody. Um, my favorite. I assume by now we're all on board what that means. Um, but, uh, last month, you may recall, uh, they released the Week D update for Windows 11 late. I think it was Thursday or Friday that week. Uh, this week it came out on Tuesday when it's supposed to. Um, so that's good.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:03]:
So that suggests that the next Patch Tuesday update is on track. There's nothing new here. We've talked about this stuff multiple times, but this is a preview of the Patch Tuesday update we're going to get in 2 weeks. So this is things like Sysmon, you know, the Mark Russinovich system internals tool, camera settings for pan and tilt if you have that in your camera, the network speed test that is not really in the taskbar, but that's what we're going to call it, improvements to quick machine recovery, which, um, is the way it should have been from the beginning.

Richard Campbell [01:01:34]:
Hey, RSAT for ARM's a big deal, dude.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:36]:
I mean, for a system admin it is anyway. Yep, yep. Isn't that the one they said they were never going to make on ARM? I think—

Richard Campbell [01:01:43]:
I think— well, it's RSAT, which is the more secure version of RCP, but yeah. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:51]:
Um, you can use WebP images in the background. Um, that's fun. Emoji 16 2.0, which I know all of us are super excited about. And this is just— I don't even know why this is listed, but it says BitLocker improvements, but it's really a fix. There was a problem with BitLocker that I've never experienced, despite the fact that, by the way, I do this every week. You enter your recovery key in that blue screen, and then— not blue screen of death, like the screen is blue— and then you move on. Apparently a lot of people were doing that and the device stopped responding. So they fixed that, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:28]:
Um, not for the first time, but notably, um, Windows 11 26H1 was part of the patch or the weekly updates. Okay, so that, you know, that impacts 3 or 5 people. Um, both guys. Yeah, both guys. Yeah. Um, but that also hints at the fact that the Snapdragon X2 is imminent, that, you know, there's a laptop sitting there waiting to go out into the world. So I think that's going to happen pretty quick. Want one? Yeah, me too.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:54]:
So there's that. Then in the Insider Program, I'm getting ready to give up, folks. I like— I'm trying, right? I'm— this is a test of how much illogical behavior my brain can handle. And I got to tell you, it's overflowing at this point. Like, I can't deal with this anymore. God, how do I even explain this? So once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away, we had this thing called the Windows Insider Program. And you would— at the time there were rings, but they became channels, but let's not worry about that too much. And then I missed Gabe.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:33]:
Yeah, we all miss Gabe. Uh, the— we missed the engineering part of it, you know. It's like, remember when this was about engineering? Yeah, uh, I mean, it is, but just now the engineering is ridiculously stupid. Um, so we have whatever you want to call them— Rings, Channels, whatever— and typically these things target some version of Windows. But you get into these weird situations where, um, you have two versions of Windows that are supported. Um, they are new features are being tested in different channels, but they're the same features. And then a Release Preview build will come out, which is the thing that comes out before the weekly update, which is the thing that comes out before Patch Tuesday. And depending on which version of Windows you're testing in the Release Preview, because it could be one of two at any given time, you're going to get the same build, same features, but you have a different version of Windows.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:24]:
And if you don't understand what I just said, please just don't worry about it. It's ridiculous. It doesn't matter. Um, we get into situations where dev and beta are testing exactly the same build and features for a long time, and then they split. And now for the first time ever, they're both on different build streams of Windows, the same version of Windows. And you're like, what is it? Why on earth are you doing this? And the assumption is that they'll move on to the next version of Windows, which is 26H1. But now we know that's not happening. So the assumption is maybe they're going to move on to 26H2.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:57]:
Nobody knows. And then we have Canary. Right. Canary, the name Canary suggests that you will be the person testing the furthest out features first, right? You're the canary in the coal mine. That's the point. That's the name. That's why that name exists. You're going to hit it first.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:18]:
But if you enrolled a PC in Canary, you will have discovered that you were testing things last. And we'll get to that in a moment because there's a new Canary build, but whatever. Now, given everything I just said, and I glossed over a lot of details because seriously, there's now two part— there's two different— they're not channels, they're sub-channels, I don't know, of the Canary channel. So last week they released an optional update that if you accepted it, if you went in and got it— you had to go get it, you won't just get it automatically— you are on a different build series, just like Dev and Beta are on a different build series, but of the same version of Windows. But now within Canary, you can be on this different build series for 26H1, which is a system that will only ship for Snapdragon X2-based computers. But you today can test it on x86 computers for some reason. Okay. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:17]:
I don't know what to tell you anymore.

Richard Campbell [01:06:18]:
Like, it doesn't make any sense. You're not talking about the release preview at all? Like, it's We thought, and maybe this is just you and me, yeah, canary got it first, then dev, yeah, yeah, then beta, right, then release candidate.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:31]:
The reason you think that is because your brain works and you're logical, and that makes sense, and that is the right way to test software. It doesn't matter what we call these things, it doesn't matter how many of them are there, are, but you start the one that's the furthest out get feedback, maybe you change a little bit, maybe you don't. You bring it to the next one, the next one, and then eventually you release it to the public. That is not the way the system works. It's not what it literally is, like just an explosion of nonsense.

Richard Campbell [01:06:59]:
Well, way back when we talked about— I think there's a bunch of different teams here, and now it's becoming clearer, like the ARM folks are on a different stream, and maybe they need to be because this is only the second one of these Snapchatters. Processors.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:13]:
The thing is, it is going to come together at some point, right? And that point will almost certainly be— well, except it won't be, right? So we talked about this, it's going to be 26H2, but also maybe Windows 12, you know what I mean? We don't know. Anyway, you know, like some, uh, societies have— or less societies, but some, like, you could go to a palm reader or something and they read like tea leaves in the bottom of a cup This is like reading vomit, you know? It's like, uh, oh yeah, look at that, there's a new feature over there in the corner, looks like some corn, uh, and there's some more over there. It's just all over, it's gross.

Richard Campbell [01:07:51]:
It's, I mean, you're, you're in the Insiders to get an insight into what's coming for Windows, and at the moment it's hard to tell.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:58]:
Yeah, no, it's, it's absolutely ridiculous. Um, and then, uh, before they announced that little bit of stupidity. Um, there were 3 Windows Insider builds last week: Canary, Dev, and Beta. Okay, Dev and Beta, despite being whatever they are, are the same. They're both 26H2 but different versions or something. I don't know. It's fair. I know, it's crazy.

Richard Campbell [01:08:24]:
Canary Beta one's the later version than the Dev one.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:26]:
And this is something I can't— I swear to God, even just talking about this gives— I think my— if I should have like a constant blood pressure monitor, it would be like Abort, abort! Stop talking about this, your brain is hurt, you're hurting yourself. Um, so if you're, if you're in Canary, God love you and God help you. Um, what you got in this build— this is before the split— um, was a bunch of stuff we already have everywhere else, right? Cross-device resume improvements, we talked about this a million times for Snapdragon 2.

Richard Campbell [01:08:54]:
That's—

Paul Thurrott [01:08:55]:
well, no, well, I mean, but also x64 because the only people in the Insider program are, you know, It's both.

Richard Campbell [01:09:01]:
Yeah, I mean, even, even though this Dragon 2 right now to be doing testing on Canary.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:05]:
I know, I know, I, I did. Like I said, it makes me crazy, you know, the Windows Hello ESS stuff where you can have like an external fingerprint reader if one only existed.

Richard Campbell [01:09:15]:
Um, I ordered one. Oh, you do?

Paul Thurrott [01:09:16]:
Look at the— okay, great, that's great.

Richard Campbell [01:09:18]:
So it's a USB little—

Paul Thurrott [01:09:19]:
please send me the, uh, the—

Richard Campbell [01:09:21]:
I don't know that it works. I just ordered one. It's—

Paul Thurrott [01:09:23]:
yeah, no, I want— I'm dying to see this. Um, anyway, who cares, right? This is stuff we've already seen. Who cares if it works? Well, I mean, no, no, I mean, who cares what's in Canary? It's all— there's nothing new. I don't have anything to tell you. This is— you could just rewind it to 4 weeks ago and we talked about all of it already. Who cares? Um, the, the stuff that went into Dev and Beta, which again, different build paths or whatever, same features, uh Yep, there's no end to the noise that can happen here. Oh, there it is. So that was, uh, two whales communicating with each other.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:00]:
I guess now they're chatting. Um, close to the ocean. Yeah, I know, and I did— I didn't think so either.

Leo Laporte [01:10:07]:
Um, there is very good sushi though in Mexico City, so there must be some seafood somewhere.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:11]:
Well, it's the Paris of Mexico. I mean, they get everything here, right? There you go. Uh, anyway, uh, there is, um improvements across context menus, settings, and taskbar. I wouldn't describe any of these as major, but if you— I can't do this easily here— but if you were to right-click on a file and open, right? Actually, let me just look at that. Let me see what it looks like. Uh, it's— well, it already is in the right. I don't even know what they're talking about. Anyway, the open icon will have the right icon for the default app for that file type, which is exactly what I just saw when I tried it here.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:43]:
So I don't know what that's all all about. And then whatever, none of this is major. Last week we talked about an update to the Paint app, but only in the beta channel for some reason, is now rolling out to the dev channel because of course it is. It should have happened last week. No one knows why. Who cares? I just, I'm losing my mind with the inside of work stuff. Like I, I can't—

Leo Laporte [01:11:08]:
is it— why do they have 3 channels?

Paul Thurrott [01:11:10]:
Is it, uh, 4, sorry, or 5 depending on how you look at it, right?

Leo Laporte [01:11:14]:
Because there's Dragon channels and the—

Paul Thurrott [01:11:16]:
well, no, I mean there's like Canary is split in half now, although that will eventually rectify itself. Um, there's Dev and Beta which used to be the same but are different. And then if you're in the Release Preview program, you could be on 24 or 25H2 because those are both supported versions of Windows, even though you get the same KB, the same what we used to call cumulative update, uh, Are they doing like A/B testing?

Leo Laporte [01:11:39]:
Is that—

Paul Thurrott [01:11:40]:
I mean, you know what, see, that too. Again, you— I can, I can tell you what your problem is.

Richard Campbell [01:11:45]:
You're smart, you have logic, that makes sense. Gonna end in tears.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:49]:
And of course you have to— you can't accept that it's not something like that. It's not. There's no logic to it. There is nothing that makes sense in the Insider Program. Nothing.

Leo Laporte [01:12:00]:
I mean, is it different people?

Richard Campbell [01:12:04]:
I mean, or is it all— that's— well, that's been my thought, that there's various teams.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:09]:
Yeah, there has been some.

Leo Laporte [01:12:10]:
Uh, with each team gets their own channel.

Richard Campbell [01:12:12]:
I don't know if that—

Paul Thurrott [01:12:13]:
well, I don't know about that.

Richard Campbell [01:12:16]:
I, uh, I don't know. Keep looking for this and see Leo, and it just doesn't seem to be any. My error.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:23]:
I do feel like, uh, you know, there was this complexity that occurred during the development of Longhorn where they couldn't build the product anymore. The system they had didn't scale past some number of product groups all putting code into the system at the same time, right? So before Longhorn, I'll just make up numbers 'cause I don't know what they are, but maybe there were 20 groups and that worked fine. But when they got to Longhorn, maybe it was 100 and it was like, nope, this is not working. And this is what caused Jim Allchin essentially to come back to Bill Gates and say, look, This isn't going to work. We need to start over. This— we've, we need— we've bitten off too much. We need to scale this whole thing back. And, you know, Vista was the result.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:03]:
I'm oversimplifying, but I, I look at what is happening in the Insider Program and I'm like, we only have Windows 11 now. Like, how is it like this? But it is like this. It's, it's—

Richard Campbell [01:13:16]:
I just don't know if Pavan's had his hands on this yet. Like, I love that you keep giving this guy the I really want the benefit of the doubt.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:25]:
I do too.

Richard Campbell [01:13:25]:
Glad there's a boss. Somebody called the ball.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:27]:
I know, I know. He seems competent. He seems smart. He seems like he has logic in his brain. I, I'd like him to apply it to this program, you know, and just bring it back to what it was.

Richard Campbell [01:13:39]:
Um, but no, at least I don't even care if it's what it was, just consistent.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:45]:
Yeah, well, that's what I— but that is what it was. It used to be like logical and consistent. I Obviously, this thing expanded over time and changed and evolved, maybe devolved or however you want to say it. But it's gotten to the point now where it's like, I don't know that I can point to any single part of it and make sense of it. There's a beautiful story in here that's tied to enterprises wanting to stay on whatever version of Windows and not upgrade. And Microsoft said, yeah, we can figure that out. We'll just make a new version of Windows and we'll have the same features in both and you can stay on your stupid version that you think you want. That's what happened with 24H2, right? Yeah, 24H2.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:25]:
It might have been 23H2. Well, I don't remember. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:14:28]:
Well, with Copilot, like, oh, you can stay on 23H2, but you're still getting patches for that. So we're just going to patch you to 24H2 with Copilot.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:35]:
The way it started, literally the beginning of this little form of insurtification was Copilot was coming into Windows and it was going to come in the— then I guess it was 23H2. And, uh, Enterprise was like, yeah, we're not installing that damn thing, we're going to wait till next year. And Microsoft's like, yeah, we don't want you to wait for a year. And they shipped the September cumulative update that year with every feature but one that was going to be what 23H2 was. Yeah. And so 23H2 eventually came out, it was a nothing burger, there was nothing there, but you already had it. Forced. And it was a way to force those people to get this thing they didn't want.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:10]:
And now that's the— now that's the strategy. That's all they do now. This is the—

Richard Campbell [01:15:16]:
again, version numbers mean nothing.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:18]:
Not a violent person, but, uh, goddamn it.

Richard Campbell [01:15:21]:
Okay, you're surrounded by violent acts.

Leo Laporte [01:15:23]:
I'll tell you, you want to go crazy with version numbers, just start trying to pay attention to what's going on in an AI. It's impossible.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:31]:
Yeah, it's going to make the browser thing look reasonable. Oh, it's crazy.

Leo Laporte [01:15:35]:
Yep. Uh, let's take a little break. We will talk about your new book. Yep, it's coming.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:40]:
And actually, it's, it's here. It's here. It's not complete, but it's— yeah, I decided.

Leo Laporte [01:15:45]:
Lots more to come. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. Our show today brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. I mean, if you listen to any of our shows, it's become pretty clear that any business has to take a look at AI in the business. I don't care if it's Xbox or what. The potential rewards of AI are just too great to ignore, but so are the risks, especially with exfiltration of sensitive data, attacks against enterprise-managed AI. And then of course, there's also the issue that generative AI increases opportunities for threat actors. It means they can easily and quickly create phishing lures, write malicious code, automate data extraction.

Leo Laporte [01:16:30]:
I just saw that a new attack today where the, the bad guy, uh, uses, uh, AI to create a very effective, uh, malware attack. It's, uh, it's rough out there, isn't it? That's why you need— yes, Zscaler. There were 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked, to AI applications last year. ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot together saw nearly 3.2 million data violations. So it's coming from inside the house, it's coming from outside the house. It's clearly time to rethink your organization's safe use of public and private AI. But you should probably ask people who've done that. For instance, Siva, the Director of Security and Infrastructure at Zuora.

Leo Laporte [01:17:22]:
Uh, just here's what he says about using Zscaler to prevent AI attacks. Watch.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:28]:
With Zscaler being in line in a security protection strategy, helps us monitor all the traffic. So even if a bad actor were to use AI, because we have tight security framework around our endpoint, helps us proactively prevent that activity from happening. AI is tremendous in terms of its opportunities, but it also brings in challenges, we're confident that Zscaler is going to help us ensure that we're not slowed down by security challenges, but continue to take advantage of all the advancements.

Leo Laporte [01:17:57]:
With Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI to boost productivity across the business. Their Zero Trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI-related data loss, protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity, and compliance too. Learn more at zscaler.com/security. That's zscaler.com/security. We thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. Paul's latest book is much needed—

Paul Thurrott [01:18:37]:
De-enshitify Windows. I, um, I don't know, maybe I just said this to my wife, but the other day I was— I said to somebody, I was like, you know, this book is good because it's going to be short. You know, it's about 100 pages now, it might be 150 at most when I'm done. So, you know, compared to 1,100, 1,200 pages for the Windows 11 Field Guide, like, you know, reining it in. Like, I like that. And then I think other people are going to look at it and be like, wait, I need to read a 100-page book to figure out how to de-enshitify Windows? Like, what? Why is it so long? You know? And it's like, uh, I can't— yeah, I don't know. It's got a lot of screenshots, I guess. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:13]:
Anyway, yeah, I've been, as I think people know, I've been working on this. So I've been publishing chapters to the site. I decided this morning, I was going to wait until I have two more chapters I want to get in there. One about security and one about just fixing annoyances across the system apps and experiences. And I was going to wait till the security chapter was done. And I was like, yeah, I'm just going to put it out there. So it is available. Leanpub supports this publishing format where the book is not complete yet, right? And you can buy it and then you get the updates and yeah, you can fix it as you go.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:48]:
I made a fun little googly-eyed piece of poop image for the COVID which I'm particularly proud of. So anyway, just trying to keep it Whatever. So it's cheap. It's only, it's $4.99 if you want to buy it. If you don't, don't worry about it. But there you go. And so I just, I don't know, the other day, I guess maybe Monday, I think it was Monday, I probably published the chapter about Copilot and AI. And right now, even though there are thousands probably of utilities that do things like clean, debloat, de-enshirtify, whatever, however you want to say it, Windows 11.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:30]:
There is no one good tool that does this for AI. There are many tools that do part of it, right? And WinDbloat, which is the one I like the most for just general de-enshirtifying, does that as well. And so they do a pretty good job. But if you really want to get in there and remove all of the AI stuff in Windows 11, there's nothing that does it in an automated fashion. I don't actually think that's a good idea anyway, honestly, because I feel like you may— maybe the, um, I don't know, the, the AI features in Notepad are offensive to you for some reason. You can turn that off pretty easily in the app, right? Um, I wouldn't— you can't, by the way, turn off any of the AI features in, uh, the Photos app, which is kind of interesting. Um, you can turn off some but not all of the, uh, AI editing features in Paint, which by the way will differ depending on whether or not you have a Copilot Plus PC or a non-Copilot Plus PC. That's curious.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:27]:
And so I don't know, maybe someday we'll have, this is an area I suspect I'll be updating as we go. But for now, I basically describe how you can disable, turn off, or whatever, every one of those things. So there's that. And then sort, yeah, well no, definitely tied to this. The reason I wrote this is because I've spent a lot of time my entire adult life testing alternatives to Windows, going back to the floppy disk-based versions of Linux in the 1990s when Apple brought Steve Jobs back and they announced OS X. I bought an iBook so I could test that. And I think I've owned more Macs in the past 25 years than most Mac fans. I've owned so many Macs.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:14]:
I've tried every version of Linux imaginable. I've tried a few I hadn't tried in recent days. There's a Microsoft engineer who makes one called, what's it called? Anduin OS, which is kind of interesting. Things like Debian.

Leo Laporte [01:22:31]:
Is that another reference to the Lord of the Rings, Anduin? Isn't that?

Paul Thurrott [01:22:34]:
It sounds like it is. Anduin. Yeah. Like the, no. Well, Anduin might be, is that the name of the river?

Leo Laporte [01:22:40]:
Because the sword, Aragorn's sword was Anduril. Anduril. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:22:45]:
Anduril.

Leo Laporte [01:22:45]:
You're right. It's the river that crossed most of Middle-earth. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:48]:
It's the river Anduin. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:22:50]:
I am a Tolkien scholar. Yes, you are.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:55]:
So, I'm trying to do a focus each month. So, my February focus was and is this book. But I don't know if it's going to be March or April, probably, but I'm going to go into a lot of these things. There are some really interesting— you can do things like Chrome OS Flex if you can find a laptop that actually works with it. You can run Linux, right? And so you get this like full desktop version of Chrome plus thing, whatever Linux apps you might want to run, which is actually very interesting. So I just wrote a big thing about the stuff I've done so far in that area, but there'll be a month. I don't know. Sometime in the first half of this year where I kind of focus on that stuff.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:37]:
But if anyone has any recommendations about whatever alternative, I mean, obviously macOS 10 or macOS, which is, I hate, but whatever, it's out there and it is a thing, or even the iPad can be a good laptop now, various versions of Linux, whatever. But anyway, okay. Related to Windows semi, Last week we had Lenovo's earnings. They warned about RAM prices extending through the end of the year. HP reported their earnings and they extended that warning into 2027. Yay. So they had a good quarter, actually, 6.9% gain on revenues to $14.4 billion, over $10 billion of which came from their PC business. The rest of it, the $4.2 billion that remains, came from printing.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:24]:
Not surprisingly, printing's not doing great.

Richard Campbell [01:24:27]:
Well, it's generating $4 billion. They blame themselves for that.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:29]:
They've made everybody hate printing in every way. Yeah. And HP is one of the— when Cory Doctorow talks about certification, he actually mentions the HP printer ink scandal, which is this— they force you to use their ink. It's like, guys— and this is why the DMCA and reverse engineering is such a huge problem right now, because you should be able to, as a consumer, you own the printer. You should be able to put— squirt water into there if that's what you want, but they don't let you do that. So whatever.

Richard Campbell [01:24:58]:
There was a malware that would force your printer head to stroke over a point of paper so small it actually set fire to the paper.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:06]:
That's awesome. That is awesome. Wow. Which is what should— well, you know, like, we were promised the paperless office in the 1970s, you know. Um, I told you guys the story about the printer here, right? Like the— did I tell you this story? I needed to print a return label for Amazon here. Amazon here works exactly like the US. You get next day, same day, whatever. It's great.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:31]:
But when you return, there's fewer options. And I don't even remember the name of the store. It's not very close to here, the closest one. But I had to print a label. I couldn't go there and just give them like a barcode or something or QR code.

Richard Campbell [01:25:43]:
I had to print it. Put it on the box.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:44]:
So we don't have a printer, obviously. There's an older American guy in the building we're friends with. I figured he must have a printer.. And he does not. And he said— and he told me what I already knew, which is that there are all these businesses. I mean, I swear to God, within a 2-block radius in any direction, there are 8 to 10 printing stores, like papelerías. And they don't just do printing, but they do all kinds of paper stuff, right? Because paper is humongous here because we live in the 1970s again. And so we went to the closest one, and I brought it on a USB key.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:12]:
I had it on my phone, and the USB key, no problem, put it in the computer. "Uh, do I want black and white in color? I want black and white. It's, uh, 2 pages. There's the thing you put in the box, the thing you put in, right? You know, you know the drill." And then I asked him, I said, "Quanto costa?" which is the "How much does it cost?" And he said, "2 pesos." Oh geez. And I was like—

Leo Laporte [01:26:32]:
It's like a nickel.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:35]:
I'm like, "2 pesos?

Richard Campbell [01:26:35]:
You don't have a 2 peso coin." I was like, "I don't—

Paul Thurrott [01:26:39]:
I, I, I asked him to repeat it. There's no way I heard that correctly." It's 10 cents. And I looked at my wife and I was like, do we have dos pesos? So she got out her little change purse like an old lady, and she's going in there, she's looking around, she pulls out this coin, it was like this big. I gave it to the guy and he went into his drawer and he handed me 3 even smaller coins back because it was— and I was like, I should have gotten color. I don't know what— what is it? So here's the thing, how much, how much printing would I have to do where it would make sense to own a printer here? Yeah, that's why There's no way. I like— even if the page is ridiculous, look, I mean, maybe you could get a good printer for $150, maybe, right? Like, how much would I have to print? And the thing is, it's the only time I've had to print here in 4 years. I— if the thing sat here and didn't print, I'd have to replace the ink.

Richard Campbell [01:27:28]:
I would never catch up. You'd have to buy a printer each time you wanted to do that.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:32]:
Yeah, exactly. It's like dos pesos. I'm like, I don't even— do they make money that small? They do.

Richard Campbell [01:27:38]:
They don't. Anyway, the UPS— the place where I have to drop off my Amazon returns, which is the UPS Restore, has a printer. There you go. Because they know.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:46]:
They probably have a fax machine too. I'm just like, in the United States, a lot of times with Amazon, I could just go to Whole Foods and I— they scan a QR code on my phone and we're done. You know, they just— they don't— I don't even need the box. They just do all that stuff for you. So I— look, I could bring something to Kohl's and I, I I assume I printed some labels in the— I guess I must have, but I don't— doesn't happen a lot. It certainly doesn't happen a lot here. I don't know. Anyway, that's one of the many humorous things about Mexico.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:16]:
Okay. And then speaking of humorous or ironic or hypocritical, I don't know. I just want to remind everyone that Tim Cook infamously said you could converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but that's probably not going to be very pleasing to the user. He was referring to Surface and this, this combining of tablet and PC into one device. At that time, I said, you know what else you could combine is a toaster and an oven, and that could be very useful. Turns out those sell pretty well. He later referred to Surface over in different times that year as compromised, confusing, and diluted. So I wrote diluted like a fox because now Apple's doing it.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:58]:
Apple later this year will release touchscreen-based MacBook Pro models for the first time. So it took them, let's see, Surface RT and Windows RT came out in what, 2012? So 14 years later, diluted has become genius. So we'll see what the other thing that this is not the same. I know I'm surprised nobody called me on this. According to Mark Gurman, the guy from Bloomberg now who reported on this, the macOS software will be dynamic, meaning that you can switch between an interface that's optimized for touch and one that's optimized for point and click, which is what, two modes? Which was one of the primary complaints about Windows 8, right? There were two modes. There was desktop and touch. They're not going to do it that way, obviously. Um, but I guess if you go to touch a control on the screen, it will kind of expand or something.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:00]:
Who cares? I don't know. Anyway, I, I've, I often wondered why they didn't do touch on Mac, if only for developers, because to develop for all those touch devices that Apple does make, like the iPad, iPhone, whatever, it was one of the most compelling reasons to do it. Yeah, that would be the reason. Yeah, you'd want to touch the thing like that, you know, that makes the emulator work better. To me. I don't know, but I don't think that's why they're doing it. I, I'm gonna guess people ask for it. I don't know, into customer demand.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:26]:
Yeah, I guess so. I mean, uh, Steve Jobs referred to this, uh, that a multi-touch laptop is ergonomically terrible. But of course, this— the, the new Apple, today's Apple, made something called Liquid Glass, which is just terrible, uh, ergonomic or otherwise.

Leo Laporte [01:30:44]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:45]:
No relation to Aero Glass, right? Well, well, I mean, funny you say that because a lot of people have actually compared it to that, right? Um, one of the, the things that was weird to me as a Windows guy at that time, when this was when Windows Vista came out, uh, Longhorn, and into Vista was where we got Aero Glass, uh, was they had at that time, remember this was late, late 2006 when that came out. So 5 years of experience with transparent and translucent effects in Mac OS X at the time, right? If you think back to the first version of Mac OS X, the first couple of versions, one of the things that was wrong with it was that you could see like what was behind a menu would bleed into the menu and it made it look muddy, right? So they fixed that over time. It took a couple years, but if you go back and look at screenshots of the first, you'll see it like it's weird. Like If there's text underneath a menu that's displaying over something in an app, it bleeds through and looks terrible.

Leo Laporte [01:31:42]:
Yeah, Microsoft made exactly that same problem with Liquid Glass, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:31:47]:
So Microsoft, right, Microsoft made that same mistake with Vista, and it— they fixed it over time. I mean, like, the, the glass that was in 7 was an improvement over the glass that was in Vista, and then they got rid of it in 8, but whatever. Um, and yeah, so now we have Liquid Glass, and it's like You have these weird glass, I don't know, whatever they are, dynamic glass controls that expand as you touch them for some reason, and then it blocks content. It's like, didn't you, you made this mistake before, like what are you doing? But I don't know, different, different generation, different people, I guess. I don't know. I don't have too, too much on the AI front, but I'm just going to blow through this quick because I don't think people care too, too much. Gemini 3.1 Pro came this week. I think this is a response to stuff that Anthropic especially, but Anthropic and OpenAI are doing.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:38]:
And this is just another week, so another leapfrog and blah, blah, blah.

Richard Campbell [01:32:43]:
It's funny because Gemini 3 is really quite good. Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:47]:
And that was big, big news. And then Gemini 3.1 Pro was like, like nothing. I think we're just getting used to it.

Richard Campbell [01:32:54]:
It's just like, oh yeah, it's It's awesome. Just expecting greatness now.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:57]:
Is that right? Yep. That's where we're at. And it's everywhere. So if you have the Gemini app, NotebookLM, whatever, it's everywhere. If you're a developer, enterprise consumer, you're going to see it everywhere and you're not going to notice. Who cares? Late last year, Mozilla replaced their CEO. The new CEO said, we're going to put an AI kill switch in Firefox. That has just been released.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:18]:
I'm sad that it's not called the AI kill switch, by the way, but there is a switch. You can block all AI enhancements with one click, which is pretty good.

Richard Campbell [01:33:27]:
I was going to say, so what does it do? Like all AI dies, but it's just like does not appear in the browser.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:32]:
So here's what they did right. This reminds me of, you know, anyone who, anyone, so anyone on Earth, I guess I was going to say anyone who has used a mobile device and has been on a plane may have noticed, and Windows does this too. You can put the device in airplane mode and then you can enable like Wi-Fi. Or enable Bluetooth or both, right? And you're still in airplane mode, but that thing has come on. This is the thing Microsoft never did with S mode, remember? Like, let's have S mode, but we'll have an exception for Chrome or something, right? The little insight there is that the next time you're in airplane mode, and I believe this is true of all these platforms like mobile and on Windows and Mac, maybe, I don't know the Mac, but it will remember what you did last time. So the next time that you go into Airplane mode, it will leave on Wi-Fi if that's how you had it configured, because maybe you're going to connect to the Wi-Fi in the plane. That makes sense. The way this thing works is you can block all AI enhancements, which should say AI kill switch, but whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:31]:
Then there's a selection of the AI features that's in the browser. You can go in and say, well, actually, I want translations to work. You're still blocking all AI but translations in this case. Now, someday in the future, Firefox may release some other AI innovation or feature, whatever. That thing will be off by default, but the thing you've said you want on will remain on. So that's, to me, is like the right way to do it. Like, it's, you know, that's good. It seems good.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:00]:
I don't think we're ever going to see anything like this in Chrome or Edge, you know. Pretty sure. I'm pretty sure. Yeah, just knowing, you know, the strategy there. And then Duck AI is DuckDuckGo's private AI chatbot. It's actually pretty good, by the way. You could use it to create images as of, I don't know, a month or two ago. And then just this past week, they added the ability where you can upload an image and then edit it using generative AI.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:28]:
So you can, the obvious use case is here's a photo of you or you and your wife or something or whatever it is and say like, make this a watercolor. "Make this an anime," or make whatever the style is you're looking for. And I tested it with it. It's actually pretty good. So this is completely private. It's free. I mean, obviously you run into limits if you use it too, too much.

Richard Campbell [01:35:50]:
You just pay for it if you want to use it more.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:53]:
Yep. Yeah. And if you want something that's anonymous, but it's not locally, it's using cloud AI or whatever. I think it's using I think the underlying— I believe it's OpenAI. I think it's using— I think so. Um, but whatever it is, uh, it's— I was like, okay, this is actually, you know, and this is that little AI, little tech thing. Like, I— it, it's getting to the point where that stuff is, you know, actually pretty good. Just works.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:19]:
Yeah. So it's there.

Richard Campbell [01:36:20]:
It's there if you want it. That's interesting.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:25]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:36:26]:
Well, well, well. Indeed. Indeed, indeed. Would you like to do an Xbox segment? I would.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:32]:
And I would like it to be all good news.

Leo Laporte [01:36:33]:
What do we got coming any minute now? You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Trombone Throt. And I don't know what I'm going to call you, Richard Campbell. Richard Aouga Campbell.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:51]:
Yes, that's what he is. The old-fashioned hornet.

Leo Laporte [01:36:55]:
Aouga Campbell.

Richard Campbell [01:36:57]:
Richard Glissando Campbell.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:57]:
I thought that was happening in my room.

Leo Laporte [01:37:00]:
I'm surrounded by AI. This is Windows Weekly. We're glad you're here, all you winners and dozers. We're especially glad for our club members. We appreciate your support. Now on we go with, um, let me think.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:17]:
Oh, the Xbox segment, Paul. Can you do this? There was a little change at the top. We did a little bit beginning of the story, uh, the beginning of the podcast rather. Uh, nothing to worry about. I, you know, everything Xbox going gangbusters. Um, but, uh, the first two, uh, stories I have in here are actually related. So, um, the February update for Xbox is out. Um, if you have an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription you can now stream games from your console.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:49]:
This could be Xbox Series S, X, or S, or Xbox One X and S, interestingly, um, elsewhere to where whatever endpoint, you know, it could be like your Fire TV Stick, a PC, whatever, at 1440p.

Richard Campbell [01:38:02]:
Because that was previously limited to 1440.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:04]:
The X was the 2160. I'm not going to remember that anymore. I mean, I, I believe the way they marketed X was it could sort of do 4K. It was 4K. Just kidding. It can display 4K still images. We're just kidding. Uh, but you know, I mean, obviously these things have improved over time, but, uh, I don't remember anymore what they— I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:27]:
I do remember liking the Xbox One X quite a bit, but a bit also the Xbox One S. But, um, anyway, there's that. Um, they've added, uh, some like new sounds to— if you have a ROG Xbox LA, which is a non-event. And then the second story I had in the— because I had that there originally— if you are in the Xbox Insider Program and you have the Xbox app on your PC and you play a game, the Xbox app will appear after the game's over and give you like a game recap, which in my experience is completely pointless. Um, but it is there. I have seen it. I see it.

Richard Campbell [01:39:01]:
Play the game again.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:02]:
Yeah, I wish there was a— can I— I can't bring it up on this thing. Um, yeah, no, so it was like, it's sort of, it's like an AI thing. It's like, oh yeah, you did pretty good. Like you had like 25 points in that game, you know, had positive KD, like, you know, keep it up, buddy. You're doing great.

Richard Campbell [01:39:16]:
And only teabagged by 12-year-olds 4 times. Exactly.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:20]:
Um, and one of the times it was just lag. It's not even your fault. Um, yeah, no, it's just, it's pointless, but now that's, I guess it's out. So that was available to insiders. Now I think it's just coming to everybody. So. There is that. Um, okay, actually, I guess the sounds are for everyone on Windows, so that's not just the ROG Xbox Ally.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:42]:
Uh, there's some little minor improvements in there actually. So, uh, removable storage formatting support, advanced shader delivery indicator— come on, man— um, and then some other small improvements. No big deal. Um, and then the recap thing, you know, which again, ridiculous, but whatever, you can turn it off if If you don't want it, and you will turn it off, I guarantee it. I'm not sure I even know who this company is or that I've ever heard of them, but there's a company called Sensor Tower, which is an analyst firm. And they took a look at 2025 video game sales. And there's some really interesting data in here. And this is across mobile, PC, and console.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:20]:
They often commingle PC and console, which is incredible to me. But okay, I mean, fair enough. PC gaming had a record year across units sold, premium game revenue, premium game growth, and units— no, I said that— and Steam. Steam revenues were $11.7 billion, up 13% year over year. To put that in perspective, Apple App Store game revenue was over $50 billion. And Google Play Store game revenue was over— it was almost exactly $30 billion. Um, there were 225,000 games released last year. That means an average of 617 new games every day.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:04]:
Think about that. I know, it's almost like podcasts. Yep, we're calling those shows now, by the way.

Leo Laporte [01:41:10]:
I don't know if you heard. Please don't call them pods. I hear more and more people calling it pods. Is that just me?

Paul Thurrott [01:41:17]:
No, the worst usage of that term is people who make podcasts. If I could reach through the internet and punch them, that makes me crazy.

Leo Laporte [01:41:26]:
It seems to be the new crowd, the bros. I know, exactly.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:31]:
Today on the pod, Jason, we got some guys together to make a pod. You're like, oh, I will murder you. Okay, good. I'm glad that makes—

Leo Laporte [01:41:39]:
it bugs me. We're old school. We call them podcasts.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:43]:
Yeah, we call them what they're called. Shows. This is the logic thing again. Like, it has a name, idiot. Anyway, I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte [01:41:49]:
So even the show would be preferable to pod. That's true, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:41:54]:
Right. It's like we need a new term for video podcast. No, we don't. It's a video podcast.

Leo Laporte [01:41:59]:
Done. A show. She's done. This is why I never liked the word podcast, because it implies how it's delivered. It's just a show. You get it on the internet.

Richard Campbell [01:42:07]:
Might be video, might be audio.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:11]:
I think the confusion is like, wait, yeah, a lot of people—

Leo Laporte [01:42:15]:
not a podcast.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:15]:
Yeah, so if you have a video podcast, you could— it could be just be on YouTube, you know? Yes. Yeah, so to you it's like a video, like, yeah, I hear you.

Leo Laporte [01:42:23]:
Yeah, whatever.

Richard Campbell [01:42:23]:
But you don't call it an audio. No, you don't.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:27]:
You don't. You also, you know this, you don't call it an odd.

Leo Laporte [01:42:30]:
It's an odd. Today on the odd—

Paul Thurrott [01:42:33]:
well, are we so— it's like when you see a sign, it's on a giant space and they truncate the term. If you have enough space, yeah, spell it out, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:42:43]:
It's like I'm too— I'm—

Paul Thurrott [01:42:46]:
things are moving too fast for me. Yeah, I'm too—

Leo Laporte [01:42:48]:
I'm too cool for that. I don't have enough time to say podcast. That's right.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:52]:
I can say the pod. That's why we say the whole thing. We're slow moving. We're old, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:42:57]:
Yeah, I get it.

Richard Campbell [01:42:59]:
We got, um, how they counted these game titles happening.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:04]:
Wow, this is the— these numbers, when I say these numbers, it's going to be hard to conceptualize. Yeah, because they're all over the map. So for example, I mentioned that Steam was $11.7 billion in revenues, and that is one-third or a little bit over one-third of what Google Play Store game revenues were. It's a little over one-fifth of what Apple App Store game revenues were. However, 20 or 52.2 billion game downloads on mobile Overall, of those, $42 billion were on Android. So there were far more on Android, but Apple made far more money. Not, well, not quite double, but $7.8 billion on iPhone. Of those— oh no, I'm sorry, not of those.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:52]:
$52.2 billion on mobile, or $50 billion, we'll call it. $2 billion on PCs and consoles combined. Right. 1/25th What? Yeah. Okay, this is where things get interesting to me and to anyone who cares about Xbox. Of those 2 billion downloads across PC and console, 546 million were on Xbox, 626 million were on PlayStation. Those aren't that far off. No, that's— you would not expect that, right? I mean, you would— might think it would be half or less.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:25]:
But it's not. It's like whatever that is, 80% or 75%, something like that. 857 million were on PC. So PC is bigger, but not bigger than the two combined. And maybe half again as big is the right way to say that, if that makes sense. There's a lot of other—

Richard Campbell [01:44:44]:
I've read a bunch of this stuff. But what is this, 7 billion smartphones in use in the world today? Yeah, and there are 52 billion games, mobile games downloaded last year, right? So what is that, 6, 7 games per person?

Paul Thurrott [01:44:59]:
I'd like to know what the hell you people are doing on your phones, because I— to me, a phone is, well, phone calls and texts, which both are irritating, um, other forms of messaging, photos, you know, take pictures, I post them to social media, so that's on there. I think that might be it. Let me look at my phone. What else do I have on here? Is there anything? Well, email. Okay, I got email there. Uh, Maps. Yeah, Maps are good. Uber, right, which I only have on my phone when I'm here.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:29]:
A browser because, you know, you might want to read something. Uh, Google Translate because I'm in Mexico. Yeah, it's about it. Weather. Weather is fun. I like looking at the weather. Anyway, you guys are apparently downloading 6 games every month. I don't know, that's like, I guess you're— I don't know, whatever you're doing, that's fine.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:49]:
Fine, you do, you be you, it's okay. Uh, last year was the first time that in-app purchases in games exceeded in-app purchases in apps by revenue. That's almost $86 billion just in-game in-app purchases and games, um, uh, across the board. Battlefield 6 was the best-selling game last year. The top 3 games, by the way, all made by EA. The other 2 were versions of EA Sports FC, which is the, you know, soccer as we would call it in the United States, but football, right? Football club. Football club, yep. But Fortnite is the top game by size of player base on both PC and console.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:30]:
Yeah, but you've already got Fortnite. Yep, but, but the activity is still humongous, right? And I have to say, having played it recently, it's actually pretty good.

Leo Laporte [01:46:38]:
It's a fun game.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:39]:
Yeah. Here's the thing though, what do you think number 2 is? This is number 2 of, uh, most played games on PC/console. What would you guess number 2 would be? Call of Duty.

Leo Laporte [01:46:50]:
Call of Duty's number 5.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:54]:
Oh, what's bigger than Call of Duty in the world? Nobody guessed GTA. That's number 4. Minecraft is number 3, but you know what number 2 is? This is— sit down, this is crazy. Counter-Strike 2.

Richard Campbell [01:47:06]:
Ah, that's interesting.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:08]:
3-year-old game. What? Counter-Strike 2 is Half-Life Engine 2. Like, what?

Leo Laporte [01:47:13]:
Does that include like the mods like TF2 and stuff like that?

Paul Thurrott [01:47:17]:
I don't know, it doesn't. That— I don't know, I'm sorry. Probably not. I don't know. Um, top shooters on PC and console by monthly average users. Fortnite, Counter-Strike 2, right? Call of Duty, PUBG, and Battlefield 6. Um, top shooters by downloads though— this resets things in a very strange way— Marvel Rivals. What? Which I wouldn't play on your computer.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:43]:
Um, Battlefield 6, Delta Force, which is a remake, uh, ARC Raiders. Yeah, which is new. Yeah, I was gonna say it's a remake. It's not a remake, I'm sorry, it's new. And then Call of Duty. Um, so there's a lot of data here, obviously there's more. I mean, they, they, they go in, there's a lot in there about like, uh, the way that mobile games are, um, uh, monetized and I, you know, whatever advertising and I don't really care about that stuff. But the thing that the one thing that sticks out to me is the, the PC/console game downloads numbers, 546 million on Xbox, 626 on PlayStation.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:20]:
Those are close.

Richard Campbell [01:48:21]:
Those are way closer than I would have thought. I'm fascinated by those numbers. Is this where the games acquisition that Microsoft's done so that if you have Game Pass, you're getting new games?

Paul Thurrott [01:48:34]:
You're getting— exactly. And, and the other thing that's not clear there is— well, no, maybe it is clear. I don't know. Uh, they say on PC. I don't know if on PC they mean broadly on PC across, you know, Steam, Epic Games, and then By the way, also Xbox on PC, right? Or if Xbox, if that number includes the PC part of Xbox, it's not clear. I went and searched through it to find out if, to see if I could find that out and I couldn't. It's not really there. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:49:03]:
But, you know, Tencent, number one game publisher. It's also a generational thing here. Like one of the reasons I think Marvel Rivals does so well is that kids, you've got a generation of kids that grew up with MCU.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:12]:
And they all want to play Iron Man, right? Speaking of MCU, I, I might highlight the MCU as the first actual version of AI slop, and you people are all idiots. All right, so just throwing it out there. Yeah, let's, uh, make the same movie over and over again. How many alien threats to planet Earth can we have? I don't know, how many MCU movies are there? Because literally, yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:49:36]:
Anyway, interesting stuff, I think. Crazy. Yeah, I'm wondering about those numbers, especially when you talk about EA numbers because they're private now.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:43]:
They don't have to report their numbers. Yeah, well, they're about to be private. So that's happening later this year. So they just released their financial report, one of the last ones. I remember the last time, yeah. That's going to disappear. But whatever anyone thinks of the little investment group that's buying this company or why they would spend so much money on EA, Actually, they're doing pretty good. And of course, they have those evergreen franchises in sports, right, with all the—

Richard Campbell [01:50:11]:
which you're gonna need because you paid a lot to buy all that stock back.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:14]:
That's a lot of money. Yeah, yeah, interesting.

Leo Laporte [01:50:18]:
Stay tuned, kids, because coming up in just a little bit, right after Windows Weekly, if you're watching live, uh, we're gonna have Jeff Atwood, who created Stack Exchange.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:28]:
You're not going to talk about the Samsung thing instead? Because super interesting and completely new and different.

Richard Campbell [01:50:35]:
And oh God, what was I saying? Anyway, it's a great guy. Ask him about yo-yos. He's big into yo-yos.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:44]:
Oh, I'll ask about yo-yos. I didn't know that.

Richard Campbell [01:50:46]:
He's got— he gets—

Leo Laporte [01:50:47]:
he goes all in on stuff, man. He also, uh, started Discourse, which does our forum software, twit.community. And he has a new initiative, uh, rural basic income initiative that I think is really cool. He's pledged to give away half of his fortune, and, uh, we have a lot of fun talking about AI with the guy who basically was the first victim of AI with Stack Exchange, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:51:14]:
He was like, thank God AI is so popular with developers. Oh wait, damn it.

Leo Laporte [01:51:19]:
Uh, that's coming up in just a little bit. I want to do a little shout out to our Club Twit members who make this show and everything we do possible. Nowadays, Club Twit is, I think, more than— it was 25% of our operating expenses. I think it's more like a third of our operating expenses come from our club members. And while that, you know, some may say, well, that's not, you know, wouldn't you want to come from advertisers? Actually, frankly, I'd love it if we're 100% from club members. I love that idea. It's your way of voting, right? Of saying, hey, we support what you're doing. We want to hear more of it.

Leo Laporte [01:51:56]:
If you like the programming, you hear on TWiT, whether it's Windows Weekly or any of our other shows. If you'd like to get ad-free versions of those shows, including this plug, I, you know, we will always offer most of our content for free. I don't like paywalls. We stream everything we do live. We make it all available on audio. I think video is held back for some shows, but I really— we want you to have the shows for free. But I also would love it if you would think it's worth enough to pay $10 a month for the ad-free versions of the shows and to get into the Club Twit Discord, which is a great hangout and talk with us, to get access to the special programming we put out in the club. Coming up tomorrow, Johnny Jet's back to talk travel.

Leo Laporte [01:52:39]:
Uh, we, we just did, uh, Micah's, uh, crafting workshop. That was a lot of fun. Um, I mean, we just do a lot of stuff in the club. It's a social group as much as anything else. So if you like the programming, you want to be part of the social scene, You don't have to, but you could. twit.tv/clubtwit. We would love to have you. Please join the club.

Leo Laporte [01:53:01]:
It really makes a big difference to what we do on TWiT. Now, what we're going to do on the TWiT is the very famous back of the book, starting off with Paul Therrott and his— oh, let me put you in the middle again—

Paul Thurrott [01:53:18]:
his tip of the week, Paulie. I don't know, I guess like these are up. I don't know what I, I guess what I really have is tip of the week. No, you're correct. And what I wrote was an epic. Um, I do have a tip. I do. No, that was— I screwed it up.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:35]:
Um, I do have a tip request. This is something I— this has been driving me crazy. Um, I know a little bit about Windows, you know, and I know a little bit about how it works and and yada yada yada. There's been a problem that has been getting bigger and bigger for me that I feel should be a solvable problem, and it is not. Unless I, I, I maybe I'm missing something really obvious, I don't know. But touchpads are getting bigger and bigger on laptops, right? The one that's on— you can't see the laptop, but there's a— this is a normally sized 16-inch ThinkPad P-Series kind of portable workstation. The touchpad is the size of a Volkswagen Bug, and I have big hands, so clicking, you know, single-clicking to me should be easy. I always configure a touchpad to support only two-finger right-click, and that means I turn off the option that's in the Settings app to do a one-finger right-click over in the corner or on the side of it over there.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:37]:
It doesn't matter who makes the laptop. It could be Lenovo, HP, or whatever. It does not matter. But what I'm seeing more and more of is I click toward the middle of the thing and I get a double— I get a right-click. And I believe I raised this issue sometime last year where if you bring up an interface that doesn't support a right-click, for example, a context menu, It should never register right-click on that thing because it doesn't support it. But you can right-click in there and it will just— it will make the menu disappear and you don't do it. You never go anywhere. And my argument to that would be like, well, if you're going to register the click, register it as a click.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:21]:
So what I'm asking for, and I, I'm kind of hoping there's a third-party utility that does this. I don't understand why this doesn't work on any laptop I've ever used. I want to be able to single-click anywhere on this touchpad by touching the touchpad, right? In other words, I don't want to be on the left half of it, although I could be. I want to be anywhere on it. I've disabled one-finger right-click. Why can't I one-finger single-click reliably anywhere on this touchpad? I don't know. I know it sounds like the stupidest thing. It's making me insane.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:57]:
So if you're out there and you have an answer for this, something that actually works, dear God, please help me, because this is making me— it makes me insane. It makes me insane. Epic. So Microsoft is in the process of updating OneDrive on the Mac, and this is hearkening back to the late 1990s. Remember Microsoft's Mac apps back in the '90s were these kind of weird pseudo-code apps where it was really the Windows app, but they recompiled it on the Mac. So it kind of looked like Windows, but everyone hated it. And then they finally went native. But someday soon, if you're an insider, you'll get it now, but someday soon you will get this update if you have OneDrive on the Mac.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:42]:
The dialogues and the controls and everything look and feel like macOS. They're actually using native Mac controls. What were you using before? That doesn't make any sense to me. There's a— I don't know, they gave it a name, but the, uh, the Mac, as people probably know, has like a persistent menu bar at the top. So you get like a little status icon for OneDrive, and when you click that, you get kind of a little menu of choices, which is very similar to when you click the OneDrive icon in Windows. They have named that the Activity Center for some reason, but whatever, it's just a little menu. It looks like— it will look like liquid glass if you have macOS 26 and higher. So yeah, okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:25]:
And then Microsoft and Google just released new versions of their flagship desktop web browsers, both of which have new features. The Microsoft stuff is not particularly interesting, but summarize and explain actions for PDFs and an improved PDF read aloud experience. On the Chrome side, this feature, I feel like this is in browsers already. I know this is in Brave, but they finally added a split view feature. And this is where you can have two different webpage views in one tab. So you don't have to snap windows side by side or whatever. They just put them side by side. I mean, obviously you'd probably want to have a pretty big screen for this, but whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:10]:
I think Edge has had this for a long time too. Um, and then some good PDF stuff, um, highlight text, add notes directly in PDFs right from the app, which, you know, we're getting to the point where we can say goodbye to Acrobat finally. Um, and then you can also save PDFs directly to Google Drive instead of saving them to the local computer. So hallelujah. But seriously, touchpad, help me. I don't know what's going on. I don't know why I can't figure this out. It's making me crazy.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:42]:
I scream at my computer every day now, not for the normal reasons.

Leo Laporte [01:58:49]:
Yeah, these are the abnormal reasons. Yeah, I scream, you scream, we all scream. A piece of help, please help me, help me, help me. Uh, okay, I'm confused. That was your tip and your app.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:05]:
Yeah, so sorry, the tip was I need, I need you to give me a tip and then I have some app picks.

Leo Laporte [01:59:11]:
Yes. Yeah, okay, that's good. That means it's time for Richard Campbell and Run As Radio.

Richard Campbell [01:59:18]:
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've had Steve Buchanan back on the show to talk about software as a service on multiple clouds, but not what you're thinking. Not I want redundancy between the clouds because sometimes they go down. That's not what was happening here at all. Steve works on a particular product called Jamf. And he, this, these product was originally built on AWS. And that's great for a certain number of customers, but there are a bunch of customers who wanted access to the product through Azure. And so he is leading the group that's re-implementing it in Azure, trying to have a common code base and a common configuration, like trying to make make it as manageable as possible.

Richard Campbell [01:59:59]:
And so this was really a combination conversation about what's in common while not actually trying to do failover, any of that kind of craziness. And so it was the kind of going cloud agnostic around— it was mostly containers, Kubernetes is everywhere, but what's your deployment pipeline? Because they're going to be different. How does your identity system work? What's your instrumentation telemetry look like? And so that is really— we got to the meat and potatoes of What does it take to actually do a common dashboard for looking across all of your customers while running on more than one cloud, as well as making it as manageable as possible? So when a build happens, it's going to appear in all of the different versions.

Leo Laporte [02:00:43]:
Very nice. Yeah, it was great. Very happy with it. Now, the moment many of us have been waiting for. Time to drink.

Richard Campbell [02:00:53]:
Oh yeah. Uh, well, look, I've been home. So last week we've been doing Canadian whiskeys, and last week we did Lot 40, which J.P. Wiser, which actually Hiram Walker— like, talk about the oldest school of old school Canadian whiskeys. So this week I thought I'd go completely the other way and go totally craft whiskey. Now there's always been some small distilleries, but it used to be really, really difficult to be a small distiller. You had to get big to survive.. And so the entry point got harder and harder and harder.

Richard Campbell [02:01:24]:
But craft distilling really starts in the 2000s, the modern version of it anyway. It really started in California. It was a guy named Bill Owens who found this thing called the American Distilling Institute, and it was about mostly about training new distillers, creating classes and curriculum and so forth for doing that. But it spawned up the West Coast. Both Oregon and Washington had more permissive rules for small producers.. And so Oregon had always been pretty hands-off with distillers in general, but they did have rules for if you're small, you don't— you can— it's pretty easy. So if you're like less than 25,000 liters a year and you only sold no more than a handle, a 1.75-liter, to any given person, and you could do tastings up to a couple of ounces, that's about it. They've changed those laws since then.

Richard Campbell [02:02:15]:
But Washington State in 2008 did this full-on craft distiller licensing program where as long as you're producing less than 150,000 gallons a year, which to be clear, you know, places like Brown-Forman, like Jack, produce more than that a day, uh, you could do— have a tasting room and do on-site sales and so forth. And it, by the way, it worked. Within 5 years, by 2013, there were more than 60 craft distilleries in Washington. Like, in, in the— it's happened elsewhere in the US since, but Washington State really led the ball on that. California, which originated the idea, didn't get around to passing craft distillery laws until 2015. But next door to Washington in British Columbia, same thing happened. So seeing the explosion of craft distilleries in Washington put a lot of pressure on. And so they came up with the same kind of craft distilling rules in 2013.

Richard Campbell [02:03:07]:
And we talked about this in the context of Okanagan Distillers with their great whiskey, which I had a chance to try because they sort of drove that. Right at the very beginning. And so if we've talked about this a little bit before, but in British Columbia you can get a craft distilling license if you only use BC products. So grain, fruit, whatever produce you use in fermentation, you do all the fermentation and distillation yourself in BC. No additives, no preservatives, no artificial flavors, no neutral grain spirits. You can qualify to basically be tax-exempt from the— at what they call the excise tax, which in BC is 124%. So it costs you $10 to make a bottle of whiskey. You pay an additional $12.50 to the government to be allowed to sell it.

Richard Campbell [02:03:58]:
So starting your breakeven then at a $22.50 bottle. But if you're under 50,000 liters, there's no tax at all. That 124% goes away. And then as you go up to 100,000 liters, it's graduated. So you pay a little bit more, a little more, and after 100,000 liters, you're no longer considered a craft distiller. You pay the full excise taxes and you can't direct sell. I mean, it's one of the measures of mainstream distilleries is they only sell through third party, right, through retailers. And again, most commercial producers in Canada are making more than 100,000 liters.

Richard Campbell [02:04:34]:
In a day because they're all so very, very large. But this craft distilling was for small production, typically under 50,000 liters. And you are allowed to sell direct. You can sell through licensees, you can go to private liquor stores, and you can have a tasting room where you're allowed to serve, but you're not really a bar and can sell some bottles. And so this story falls on— is about a whiskey called— that comes from a distillery called the Sons of Vancouver. So very, very local., and the founders are James Lester and Richard Claus. Now, these two met in Fort St. John, which is in the central east side of British Columbia, really close to Alberta on the Peace River.

Richard Campbell [02:05:17]:
This is oil patch country. So they both work the oil patch, made a lot of money because oil patch is oil patch, but, you know, weren't loving what they were doing. James had been the one who really studied process control as part of his apprenticeship, so he knew about flow systems and things, and they decided to bail out of the oil patch and sort of took a, took a few months off, went to Mexico and partied. James went down to Australia, Richard went to Colombia. They all both bartended on the side and did some home brewing and things like that. And after a while, we're kind of headed back home again. James started working at a distillery in Seattle. I don't know exactly which one, couldn't find that out, but this is in that period of the craft, craft brew distilling exploding in Washington State.

Richard Campbell [02:06:06]:
And so he got really keen to do that in BC. And when those rules came into play, it became possible. He got on board right in 2013 as the first set of laws passed. But in some of the interviews that I've read of his, he did take some whiskey-making classes down in Washington State as well, and he thought they were kind of a waste of time. One of his quotes was, I spent 4 days in a classroom with 20 other people staring at PowerPoint slides. Slides and still wasn't equipped to open a distillery. But he tried. He got into it.

Richard Campbell [02:06:33]:
He found some used dairy equipment, a 1,000-liter stainless steel pasteurizer, which works basically as a mash tub, and a little 700-liter column still. And he started making whiskey in 30-liter barrels. So very small barrels, which is typical for small production. So James and Richard, with their experience in bartending, they very much came up with a vision of the kind of alcohol they liked to work with when they were bartending. And he said right off the bat that they had 3 main cocktails in mind: the Dirty Martini, which is just good vodka chilled down with a little bit of olive; the Caesar, which is a Canadian classic of the spicy version of the Bloody Mary with clamato juice; and the Amaretto Sour. And an Amaretto Sour is a classic sour. So it's a whiskey and the liqueur, although it's typically more, you know, when you think about a margarita, which is, is tequila with a little bit of liqueur, the Amaretto Sour is the other way around. There's more liqueur than there is bourbon in it, but also a little bit of egg white and some, and some citrus, so forth.

Richard Campbell [02:07:44]:
Amaretto is an interesting liqueur. The name literally means little amaro, and the Italians, of course, make amaros. Every town's got their own unique version. The origin story of amaretto goes back to 1525 in the town of Serrano in Italy, where a woman steeped apricot pits in brandy. Now, why apricot pits? Well, certain droops and apricot kernels bitter almonds, peach stones, all of them have benzaldehyde, which has a very distinctive flavor to it.

Leo Laporte [02:08:22]:
That's got to be good for you. Yeah, you know, I'll drink anything with the benz in it, seems like.

Richard Campbell [02:08:29]:
Benzaldehyde, yeah, it's a natural occurring thing, right? But I would also point out that apricot kernels, until you treat them a little bit, also have cyanide. Yeah, don't drink that. Yeah. Yeah, so, uh, and it actually comes up a bit sweeter, although they tend to add sweeteners to it. And it's a little relatively low alcohol, 21 to 28%. I love amaretto, actually. Yeah, amaretto is pretty special. And, uh, at the time, I always thought it was almond flavor, not apricot flavor.

Richard Campbell [02:08:54]:
Uh, it tastes like almond but doesn't typically have almond in it. Also, some do. I didn't know the version of amaretto that the Sons of Vancouver started making, because of course they immediately made whiskey when they got started. Right? I mean, as you always do, but it takes time, you know, minimum 3 years to even call it whiskey. And you've got a still, so you get to work. And the first thing, of course, you make is vodka because it's the easiest. And then you're trying to make other things, and they fell on this idea of making an amaretto. They called it Number 82 Amaretto, where they take apricot pits, vanilla bean, and orange peels, they steep it in the vodka they've made, and then after it's matured a bit, they add a little bit of demerara sugar and a bit of blackberry honey, which is very British Columbia to get the flavor profile they want.

Leo Laporte [02:09:36]:
This is really good.

Richard Campbell [02:09:38]:
It's also a hit at 26%. Uh, it was the first sort of craft-made amaretto in North America. Yeah, I've always had Amaretto di Serrano, the Italian version. Well, di Serrano is an amaretto from Serrano. Serrano, right? Yeah, the original, original, right? But so, uh, they also made a chili vodka that was a, was a hit as well. Very much the product you want for the Caesar. So they got the amar— they've got the the, the martini, the Caesar, and the amaretto sour nailed. So this is their moneymaker while they're trying to stay afloat.

Richard Campbell [02:10:12]:
Although in 2014, talk about being craft, they do an Indiegogo fundraiser to raise $10,000 to build out the tasting room to make it a nice place to go. And they basically offer gift cards and private tours and used barrels and things like that as the for contributing and they, they raised successfully $10,000. And that while they're laying up their whiskey, they've got this tasting room and they're making cocktails and things in there and, and selling their amaretto and so forth does very well. They do another Kickstarter a couple of years earlier in 2016 to raise another $15,000 to get a bigger mash tun. So the little 1,000-liter one that they had that was actually an old pasteurizer, they now got— brought a proper 8,000-liter mash tun because they were selling well. They started barrel aging their amaretto too. Also, James started a course. He'd been training, teaching.

Richard Campbell [02:11:08]:
He'd been writing class, making notes about his experiences starting making a distillery, frustrated with the classes that he had taken. And so started setting up curriculum to teach whiskey making as well. And so in 2017, it all came together. He started with a group called the Distillery School. They did a one-week class. Class on distilling. They did a lot of interviewing before you started. They specifically said no long lectures or PowerPoint, you're all hands-on, you're going to make whiskey out of it.

Richard Campbell [02:11:34]:
And in fact, one of their new partners, a lady by the name of Jenna Diablo, took that class. She had intended to start a distillery in Manitoba and ultimately by '22 becomes a partner in Sons of Vancouver. Also in 2017, there was competition, the Diageo Reserve World Class Cocktail Competition. It was in Mexico. In Mexico, and the winner was a lady named Caitlin Stewart, and her winning cocktail was called Spilt Milk, and it featured Sons of Vancouver Amaretto, and it just sent that Amaretto flying off the shelves. Like, those guys carried the ball for several years on the back of their craft Amaretto, including by 2018 they had these barrel-aged versions of, of Amaretto to add even more character to it. Then they of course, they hit the, the pandemic and in 2020 they shut down production and start making hand sanitizer, which is the thing you did if you had a still back then. And that quickly, you know, don't need to do that anymore.

Richard Campbell [02:12:37]:
In 2021, they do another Indiegogo, this time trying to raise $20,000, although they raised $40,000 because they're ready to release their very first whiskey. So they laid up their first bottles. Back in 2013, 2014, their first barrels. And these are little barrels, so they age quickly and they release their first whiskey they called Right Here and win gold at the Canadian Artisan Spirit Competition in '21. So on the back of all of that excitement, they go, okay, we're ready to buy bigger barrels. We want to lay up a bunch of more barrels. We need some money. They succeed in raising that money.

Richard Campbell [02:13:14]:
The perks, the pledges you would get if you contributed to this fundraiser was to get bottles of their new whiskey, which they had already tentatively named Cigarettes on a Leather Jacket. They're so hip. Something people would be very hip. Very Vancouver of them. Yes. And then in 20— by the end of '21, because Right Here had done so well, they did their second release, which they called Marshmallows Over a Campfire. This was 98% rye, aged in American oak and ex-Amaretto casks.

Leo Laporte [02:13:50]:
You have to wonder where'd they get the Amaretto casks from?

Richard Campbell [02:13:54]:
Oh, interesting. Waste not, want not. Yeah, they had taken these old barrel whiskey barrels that they'd aged their Amaretto in and made a special barrel-aged Amaretto and then used them again to make this special edition, which is sold out. Immediately, but they only made 190 bottles, right? This is still very small operation. We talk about you have to stand at 50,000 liters. They're not even close to these kinds of quantities. So in '22, they release a new whiskey. It's, it's 100% rye aged American oak and bourbon finished in Caribbean rum casks.

Richard Campbell [02:14:29]:
And the name— this is release number 3.

Leo Laporte [02:14:33]:
Palm trees and a tropical breeze. Okay. They're good at marketing.

Richard Campbell [02:14:37]:
Are they good at making— got a name question. By the way, they also make an excellent whiskey because in '23 they win Canadian Whiskey of the Year. Oh, wow. First time a craft distillery had ever won that prize. Wow. Tiny little place. Wow. All rye.

Richard Campbell [02:14:54]:
They won the barrel finished. They won it and they made 178 bottles of this that were gone in 2 minutes. Oh yeah, for sure. So time for another Indiegogo. In May '23, they do another Indiegogo, this time to increase production across the board. They raise $100,000. So from $10,000 to $20,000, now $100,000. They also release a new liqueur they call—

Leo Laporte [02:15:26]:
and guess what this is? Quadruple sec. Now I know triple sec. Yes, I use that in my margaritas and other mixed drinks.

Richard Campbell [02:15:36]:
What is quadruple sec? It is like triple sec, only better. One better. But you see the pattern here where they're starting to get whiskey. They've only made small batches, taking years to produce. Only that earlier fundraise where they laid up 20 barrels are they starting to get some quantity there, and that's probably going to do— that's likely the whiskey that I had. They're bootstrapping. That's— you laid out back then. Yeah, because now, in last year was the year that they finally said, okay, 90% of our production is now— is now whiskey, because that was the intent all along.

Richard Campbell [02:16:07]:
They just had to build up the quantities.

Leo Laporte [02:16:09]:
And by the way, the whiskey names keep coming. I just like their front page, which says, the whiskey you want You're good friends to drink when you're dead.

Richard Campbell [02:16:22]:
Yes, that's this bottle here. The Wheated Rye literally says it on the label. There are other bottles though, the special editions. There's the Homemade Upside Down Apricot Cake Amaretto Cask Whiskey. I'm buying it. Rolling Hills in the Morning Mist Islay.

Leo Laporte [02:16:39]:
Palm trees in a tropical storm. But so they still— so they, they still—

Richard Campbell [02:16:44]:
they only make whiskey or They still make the amaretto. They're making them all right. Okay, good. Their primary thing that they're running right now on their existing still and so forth is whiskey. And their whiskey making process is interesting. So they have that big mash tun and the mash is where you normally extract the sugars out of, right? Yeah. And then in a big production, you would then drain that, that, that sugary water out into a fermenting barrel. Right? A big open thing where you'd put the yeast in and it would ferment.

Richard Campbell [02:17:17]:
They don't do that. They do everything in the same container. So they leave that mash at the bottom while they're doing their fermentation on top. And they do a long fermentation. A, they're using champagne yeast instead of regular brewer's yeast. So they're kind of away from the beer, gives it a little different flavor. But they do like a 7 or 8 day fermentation until the yeast is really done. Before they then run it twice through their column still, which gets it up into the high, into the high 70s, cut it with water down to 60% before they put it in a barrel.

Richard Campbell [02:17:51]:
So they long fermentation and a low barreling. Now they're using small barrels, so they age a little more rapidly, but they're starting to use the bigger barrels. And most of them today are now ex-bourbon barrels. So those would be 200-liter barrels and new American oak, probably made in the same size, along with these odd duck that they do with the rum and, and they've even got a sherry casking and so forth. So they've done a bunch of interesting things here. But this particular whiskey is sort of the first commercial-scale whiskey they made back that, that kick, that Indiegogo they did where they laid up the 20 barrels. That's this stuff. This is the wheated rye whiskey.

Richard Campbell [02:18:29]:
So it's 75% rye and 25% wheat. Which begs the question, that's an interesting mash bill. Like, how did they break this down into sugar? So they're almost certainly— they don't talk about anywhere, but they're almost certainly using some kind of custom enzyme to do the breakdown. Ah, interesting. And then they're doing that very long fermentation. Again, this was years ago, and, uh, now it's coming up. It's on the back here. It says, uh, 3 to 5 years.

Richard Campbell [02:18:57]:
And the fermentation type is on-grain, which is to say they, like I described, they're combining the mash time and the fermentation into a single stage. And right on the back there, hope you can see that, is the whiskey your friends will try, uh, when you're dead. So 3 to 5-year-old, not that old a whiskey. This one last year, whiskey, rye whiskey of the year. No heat, real easy on the nose, and lots of really caramelly kind of rich flavors.

Leo Laporte [02:19:31]:
This is such nice whiskey to drink.

Richard Campbell [02:19:33]:
My goodness, this is the whiskey you want to give your kids. Well, I don't know about that. It's still an adult whiskey in the sense of it's alcoholic, it warms up going down. It's 50%, 5-0.

Leo Laporte [02:19:50]:
Wow. Okay.

Richard Campbell [02:19:51]:
That is— that's 100 proof. That's 100 proof. Yeah. You— and the problem is you wouldn't know it till you're a couple of drinks in. Oh, it's dangerous is what you're saying. It comes at you. But boy, for their first production whiskey, they have nailed it. It's just, you know, all of these other whiskeys, they're small batches, like 100, 200 bottles.

Richard Campbell [02:20:11]:
That's it. And if you— and if you're in the club, you can get one. They go really quick. I bet this is the one you can actually find in stores. Unfortunately, there are only stores in British Columbia. They have not gone to other provinces and they have not gone in other nations at all. You need to— if you want one of these, you need to come to Vancouver. I got this in my local liquor store.

Leo Laporte [02:20:34]:
So, and, you know, wow.

Richard Campbell [02:20:36]:
You know, I'm actually quite tempted that that would be worth a trip to Vancouver for, I have to say. So the story is awesome. Awesome. The whiskey is lovely. Like, this is what you wanted when you thought about craft—

Leo Laporte [02:20:49]:
little craft whiskey distillers. Good for them.

Richard Campbell [02:20:51]:
What a great— and they're still under 50,000 liters, so they're still tax-exempt and so forth. Like, what a— it's, it's such a small operation.

Leo Laporte [02:21:01]:
It's like 3 people doing this. So in November, they're going to release their next barrel-aged amaretto.

Richard Campbell [02:21:06]:
I might get on the list for that. I love amaretto.

Leo Laporte [02:21:08]:
Now I know get you for Christmas. Fine.

Richard Campbell [02:21:12]:
That would be a wonderful Christmas gift. Not that I could ship it.

Leo Laporte [02:21:14]:
I'm just going to have to bring it down. So even the—

Richard Campbell [02:21:17]:
even everything else, you can only get it in BC? You can't? Yeah, they've just not done— they've not produced sufficient quantities. When you're making 100 and less than 200 bottles of something, it's going to sell here. Like, why would you spend any money trying to move it anywhere else?

Leo Laporte [02:21:32]:
They make their version of Midori, a melon liqueur. They make Blue Curaçao. Curaçao. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:21:37]:
Uh, I don't even know what Falernum is. Uh, these are all on you, and this is the bartender background, right?

Leo Laporte [02:21:44]:
These are— yeah, you can see it, right? These are all—

Richard Campbell [02:21:46]:
and these are all things you put in mixes. What's happened to these guys is they've become very hip with high-end bartenders for all of these specialties. So they've been adding these products because that's what the bartenders are asking them for. It's like, I need a better version of And that's what they're doing.

Leo Laporte [02:22:03]:
Their London Dry Gin will punch you in the face with juniper on juniper on juniper. It's intended to be enjoyed after mixing by proper juniper heads. Please proceed with caution, and for the love of God, use good tonic. Yeah, no kidding. Now I really want to go up to Vancouver.

Richard Campbell [02:22:27]:
I might come back with a Wow, that's great. You see the model here, right, of you get that little rig, you lay up your whiskey.

Leo Laporte [02:22:35]:
They, they bootstrapped it.

Richard Campbell [02:22:37]:
It's been bootstrapping with no money, bit by bit by bit. A lot of personal labor to build out stuff and to keep aging that whiskey until it gets to a place that's good and then do a batch. And meantime, you've got these cocktail mixers, these liqueurs and things, and vodkas to have some cash flow. That's so smart. Very clever model.

Leo Laporte [02:22:59]:
They've really done a great job. Uh, wow, that's, that's really neat. And I love it that they're the, they're the local guys for you.

Richard Campbell [02:23:04]:
That's great. Yeah, they're super local to me. It was a great find. I'm sure these stories exist elsewhere. British Columbia has more craft distillers per capita than anywhere else in Canada. We have almost as many as Ontario with a third the population. Yeah, and it's because we got these new rules in place first. Oh, that's smart.

Richard Campbell [02:23:24]:
So, you know, other parts of the country are catching up, but in the meantime, these guys and many others like them— there's 60 of them, you've only heard me talk about 4 or 5 guys, like Bearface. And, you know, there's some very cool whiskeys being made in BC, and this was just another awesome find. And not out in the woods, they're in North Vancouver, they're in a very nice area of town actually. Hopefully.

Leo Laporte [02:23:45]:
Although apparently it's behind the Canadian Tire.

Richard Campbell [02:23:49]:
So, okay, everything's behind a Canadian Tire. That's awesome. I mean, it could have been by a Tim Hortons, but it's almost the same thing.

Leo Laporte [02:23:58]:
Really awesome. Really great stuff as usual. Uh, what a fun show. Thank you, Paul Theriot. You'll find him at theriot.com. Don't forget to become a premium member, support his work, and get great extra content. Of course, the books at leanpub.com. Now 3 of them: Field Guide to Windows 11 with Windows 10 built right in, Windows Everywhere: A History of Windows Through Its Programming Frameworks, and his newest, De-Enshitify Windows, 100 pages of goodness for only $5.99 or something.

Leo Laporte [02:24:32]:
$4.99. $4.99. Cheap at any price.

Paul Thurrott [02:24:36]:
No, cheap at— never mind.

Leo Laporte [02:24:39]:
Yep. It's cheap. Wait, what are we doing? It's a good book you must read. Mr. Richard Campbell is at runasradio.com and.NET Rocks is there as well, the show he does with Karl Franklin. We are going to head out to Orlando, Florida, where you're going to get a few.NET Rocks recorded and do Windows Weekly. We're doing a Run As and a Windows Weekly.

Richard Campbell [02:25:02]:
I'm sorry, Run As rather. And I have a particular Floridian whiskey in mind I'm hoping I can find while I'm there.

Leo Laporte [02:25:08]:
I will do my homework. Lisa and I might help you out with that if you need some help. Let's see what else. We do this show every Wednesday, 11 AM Pacific, 2 PM Eastern. That's 1800 UTC. Next week, again, I won't be here. Mike will be filling in with Richard and Paul. After the fact, you can get on-demand versions of the show.

Leo Laporte [02:25:32]:
You can watch— I didn't mention where you can watch us— in the Club Discord, YouTube, X.com, Twitch, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. On-demand versions of the show always available at our website, twit.tv/ww. You can also get it at YouTube. There's a video there at YouTube, and that's a good way to share clips after the fact. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it the minute it's that's available. Simple enough. Thank you, Paul.

Leo Laporte [02:26:01]:
Thank you, Richard. Have a wonderful week. Uh, stay away from the car fires and the cartel bloodbath that is not going on.

Paul Thurrott [02:26:10]:
I was having a terrific Eggs Benedict when all my American friends started telling me I needed to flee the country, and I was like, yeah, I don't think you understand what it's like here.

Leo Laporte [02:26:19]:
Now, you guys were in PV, and I know, Richard, you like to go PV every year. I—

Paul Thurrott [02:26:22]:
are you worried about that? By the way, we have two friends in PV right now, and they were there during this, and they said you wouldn't know anything happened.

Leo Laporte [02:26:31]:
So I'm not sure what these news reports are about, but it's cartel propaganda.

Paul Thurrott [02:26:35]:
It's like they're trying to say— I don't know what it is, but they're like, we just go to clubs every night, we sit on the beach, there's no cops, there's no fires, there's no cars, there's no nothing. Like, I don't know.

Leo Laporte [02:26:44]:
So I don't know. I don't know. So this is A tale as old as time, I guess.

Richard Campbell [02:26:50]:
News really likes to blow things up. And also that riots are more local than you think. Yeah, yeah, that's true.

Paul Thurrott [02:26:56]:
One block. I had a riot when I couldn't get salmon on my Eggs Benedict, am I right?

Leo Laporte [02:27:02]:
I don't know. Well, I'm glad you're safe and sound, uh, and I will see you both in a couple of weeks on Windows Weekly.

Paul Thurrott [02:27:10]:
I'll see you, Richard, uh, next week.

Richard Campbell [02:27:12]:
Have a good time in Florida.

Leo Laporte [02:27:12]:
That's It's gonna be lots of fun. Thanks everybody, see you next time. Hi there, Leo Laporte here. I just wanted to let you know about some of the other shows we do on this network. You probably already know about This Week in Tech. Every Sunday I bring together some of the top journalists in the tech field to talk about the tech stories. It's a wonderful chance for you to keep up on what's going on with tech, plus be entertained by some very bright and fun minds. I hope you'll tune in every Sunday for This Week in Tech.

Leo Laporte [02:27:42]:
Just go to your favorite podcast client and subscribe. This Week in Tech from the TWiT Network. Thank you.