Windows Weekly Episode 755 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word.
Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott's here. Mary Jo Foley's here. We're going to go run down a lot of the latest Windows news, including Log4j patches antitrust issues over Edge, but then we get serious. Maybe not so serious with Microsoft's Chief Marketing Officer. It's our annual visit from Chris Capossela coming up next.
New Speaker (00:00:22):
Podcasts you love from people you trust.
Leo Laporte (00:00:29):
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley episode 755 recorded Wednesday, December 15th, 2021. Chris Caps the Year. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by Podium. Join more than 100,000 businesses that already use podium to streamline their customer interactions. Get started for free at podium.com/ww you or sign up for a paid podium account and get a free credit card reader restrictions plot. And by Andela. Andela is a global talent network. Connecting innovative companies like yours with quality technical talent.
Leo Laporte (00:01:16):
So you have more time to focus on your core business. Visit andela.com/for-companies to schedule a complimentary consultation and receive a two week no risk trial with their vetted technical talent. And by userway.Org. Userway ensures your website is accessible, ADA compliant and helps your business avoid accessibility related lawsuits. The perfect way to showcase is your brand's commitment to millions of people with disabilities. It's not only the right thing to do. It's also the law go to userway.org/twit for 30% off Userway's AI powered accessibility solution. It's time for Windows Weekly. The show we cover the greatest latest from Microsoft with the greatest Microsoft-tees, the, the dynamic dual of Microsoft reportage from allaboutmicrosoft.com, her ZDnet blog, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mary Jo Foley on the right. On the left PT Paul Thurrott from thurrot.com. Hello, Paul. Today is a very special Windows Weekly.
Paul Thurrott (00:02:29):
A Christmas end Cap.
Leo Laporte (00:02:31):
Oh, I like it. Oh. Oh, very nice. Chris cap pace. Microsoft's Chief Marketing. My, my voice even breaks when I say it. Chief Marketing Officer is joining us. That's exciting. Our annual visit. How many years have we done this now?
Mary Jo Foley (00:02:49):
I know I was trying to think of that too.
Leo Laporte (00:02:51):
It's five or something.
Mary Jo Foley (00:02:52):
Five. Yeah. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:02:53):
It's at least since 2017, 2016, 2015.
Leo Laporte (00:02:59):
<Laugh> wow. 2015.
Mary Jo Foley (00:03:00):
Wow. Really?
Leo Laporte (00:03:01):
So seven years,
Paul Thurrott (00:03:02):
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 years. Six. This will be the seventh.
Leo Laporte (00:03:05):
Seventh. Wow. Yeah. He's not sick of us yet. Huh?
Paul Thurrott (00:03:09):
Since Windows 10.
Leo Laporte (00:03:11):
Wow.
Mary Jo Foley (00:03:11):
One of these years, he'll be like yeah you know what <laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:03:15):
We were how naive we were then. Exactly. So in a isn't well, there's, there's lots to talk with him about, but we do have a full slate of stuff to talk about without him. So this is gonna be a busy show. We better get, get to it. Yeah. Yeah. I saw there's been a discussion over how you pronounce Log4j yeah. Some people actually say, and I didn't, I always said Log4j, but some people say, log forge, log forge. Yeah. Log forge. It's not log forge. It's Log4j I've checked. <Laugh>.
Paul Thurrott (00:03:49):
The guy who invented GIF told us.
Leo Laporte (00:03:51):
No, actually the guy who writes it Log4j said, I call it Log4j. So now we know,
Paul Thurrott (00:03:57):
Well he's wrong Leo.
Leo Laporte (00:03:58):
It's kind of a pun. <Affirmative> it's also according to some, the worst vulnerability in a decade. Woo.
Paul Thurrott (00:04:05):
Take that Intel.
Leo Laporte (00:04:06):
Congratulations.
Paul Thurrott (00:04:07):
You thought meltdown inspector were bad. Nope. You had nothing.
Leo Laporte (00:04:11):
Well, meltdown inspector are bad, but the pro, but the difference is not, they've not been much exploited cuz they're hard. It's trivial to exploit Log4j because just a malformed URL do it. And and unfortunately it's very widely run software for logging comes from the Apache foundation, but it's not just with Apache first discovered with Microsoft's Minecraft servers. Yeah. But now everybody, I mean, you know, iCloud, Amazon mm-hmm <affirmative>, it's all Cisco, Cisco, everybody. Yeah. And interesting. It's trivial to exploit and it gives you com full control, arbitrary code execution, and it's already being you. Yeah. Wow. It's really kind of hit the trifecta there. They hit the trifecta vulnerabilities. Yeah, what's the latest
Mary Jo Foley (00:05:09):
And one of the, one of the groups using it is half NEM, which is the Chinese hacking group that was responsible for the exchange server flaws this year.
Leo Laporte (00:05:19):
<Laugh> we jumped right on this one. Yeah.
Mary Jo Foley (00:05:21):
They were on it. Yeah. In fact, Microsoft said today, like a lot of different state attacks are happening. They can see from their analysis. So yeah. It's already a big deal. Oh
Leo Laporte (00:05:34):
Yeah. <Laugh> wow. Yeah,
Mary Jo Foley (00:05:37):
I know.
Leo Laporte (00:05:38):
Did it affect one guy?
Mary Jo Foley (00:05:39):
What, what did Steve say yesterday?
Leo Laporte (00:05:41):
Oh, we did a whole thing on it. It's fascinating. You know, there are a couple of lessons learned here. One. Yeah. This is a open source project maintained by volunteers, unpaid volunteers. And yet some of the
Paul Thurrott (00:05:57):
Most valuable infrastructure in the world, most of it runs on it. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I hope that means we're all gonna move off opensource off where, which I think we can all agree is crap. <Laugh> <laugh> I'm just kidding.
Leo Laporte (00:06:09):
Uh yeah. I mean, well, you know's so there are some people, you know, you're not the only one who said that there are some people who say in seriousness,
Paul Thurrott (00:06:16):
Well said, I said a joke.
Leo Laporte (00:06:17):
Yeah. And but I guess, I mean credit to the maintainers because they've been working around the clock to fix it, the patch is out. Right. Although.
Mary Jo Foley (00:06:29):
You're right. I was gonna say, but now everybody else has to take that patch and patch their stuff with
Leo Laporte (00:06:34):
Yeah. Right. Yeah. And some of the mid are not effective. It's really easy to exploit, unfortunately. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, you know, it's pretty bad.
Mary Jo Foley (00:06:46):
We, we just put it at the top because we know a lot of our listeners are it pros and they're having a heck of a week. Yeah. With this
Paul Thurrott (00:06:53):
Already. Yeah. This, this, so you're gonna wanna stick around for the drink part at the end, because exactly.
Mary Jo Foley (00:06:58):
<Laugh>,
Paul Thurrott (00:07:00):
We will, we're calling it log for gin and it's gonna be good. It's gonna be good. Yeah, it's just terrible. So yeah. Acknowledgements to all the people who are working long hours to solve this over the weekend, they worked to the volunteers who are fixed log or fixing log for Jay and wow. Yeah. I'm just I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah.
Mary Jo Foley (00:07:24):
Not, not a great week, especially right before the holidays, you know, a lot of people are like, oh, I can take this week off. This is great. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:07:30):
Not so much. Sometimes people say, oh, the hackers take the Christmas off. You can, <laugh> just relax. <Laugh> no. Oh man. Yeah, no, no. That's when the getting's good. Everyone's getting their new devices. Yeah. You know, setting them up. Yeah. Well, okay. That's it. There's nothing else to say really. There
Mary Jo Foley (00:07:53):
Really isn't much to say. Right. I, no,
Paul Thurrott (00:07:55):
It's not. It's nice that it's not just a Microsoft problem. It's oh God. Yeah. Right. I mean, you know, not to be weird about it, but I mean, you know, a lot of times this year, I think we can agree any year, end recap should address the fact that it's been kind of a tough year for Microsoft from a security standpoint. So this is more of a, it's the whole industry, which is actually, you know, worse really, but yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well it's the most wonderful time of the year. So there's that <laugh>
Mary Jo Foley (00:08:28):
Right.
Leo Laporte (00:08:34):
Ringing the antitrust bells is segment two. Yep. You, yeah. Part, this is that Edge, Edge, Edge is the gift that keeps on giving.
Mary Jo Foley (00:08:44):
It is. Yeah. <Laugh>.
Paul Thurrott (00:08:46):
This is, this is fun for me because it's the combination of two of the worst stories of the past month coming together into one thing.
Leo Laporte (00:08:54):
Aw, isn't that wonderful,
Paul Thurrott (00:08:55):
Which is really, which is really neat. So just the first bit, we don't have to spend too much time on this part of it, but Vill Valdi founder CEO, John Benner published a blog post over the weekend, complaining about the behavior. That Edge is exhibiting in Windows 11. So there's no new inform per per se. He goes into great detail about how difficult Microsoft makes it to change it your default browser, et cetera, et cetera. So I think it's, it's important for the companies that are being harmed in their perception by this, that they speak out, you know, whatever.
Paul Thurrott (00:09:30):
So, okay, fine. But the, the weirder one to me is consider these two stories that we've discussed in great detail over the past few months. Microsoft made it much more difficult to change the default browser in Windows 11. Right. And in some cases made it impossible because there were secret things in the background that would still launch Edge. Even if you chose, you know, Google or Mozilla or whatever. Microsoft then issued a a Windows insider build. I think it was back in early November from not mistaken that blocked the attempts that some had made like Mozilla and Brave. And then that Edged deflector third party utility to bypass this behavior. And then when confronted by the fact that they were doing this, they said, yeah, no, we, we, we know we're doing it and we're gonna, we're doing it on purpose and we're gonna keep doing it.
Paul Thurrott (00:10:19):
So if you keep coming out with little work rounds, we're gonna keep working around you like, yikes. And then last week we talked about this kind of in interesting circumstance where two weeks, two weeks ago. So a week previous to last week, Microsoft had insert, inserted some language in a blog post where they said that they could, could update Windows 11 before the second version of windows 11 in late 20, 22. And I wrote a post about that and I wrote it a little more definitively. Right. I wrote that Microsoft will update windows 11 and then I think it was Markman, sorry, Hackman, hatch, Hackman, Hackman, sorry. Yeah. Mentioned on Twitter, you know, the languages in that definitive and he's right. You, you know, if you go and read it, they, Microsoft says they could, but Barry Jo and I think, yeah, I think we agreed that they almost certainly will. Good news. I was right. They did. They released the first feature update to windows love yesterday as part of past Tuesday. That feature is the blocking of the workaround. <Laugh> that feature? Oh, no, that's the feature. The one. Yeah. Oh boy. Yep. So yeah, there you go. And then by the way on windows,
Mary Jo Foley (00:11:21):
I have two little for you by the way. Okay. Yeah. And windows 10. Okay. Yep. You're gonna like this, the plot thickens. Okay,
Paul Thurrott (00:11:29):
Good. I was hoping there was more <laugh>.
Mary Jo Foley (00:11:32):
So I went back and I went back and looked at the blog post where Microsoft first talked about the fact that it, it considered the blocking of edge to be something they had to fix. And they have removed that from the blog post. The wording is gone.
Paul Thurrott (00:11:47):
So to clarify, you're saying a week ago they had a language in a blog post that said what you just said. Right. And since then they have quietly deleted it and not pointed out the fact that they've deleted that. Correct. That's interesting. Now, what do you think that to mean?
Mary Jo Foley (00:12:01):
<Laugh> well then today and there was a new windows, 11 test bill that came out right before the show. There's a note ha about halfway down in that blog post, this note says, note, some fixes in insider preview builds from the active development branch may make their way into servicing updates for the release version of windows 11 that became available October 5th. So they're acknowledging that they may take things in the dev channel that haven't gone to the other channels and suddenly just put them out as fixes in cumulative updates.
Paul Thurrott (00:12:37):
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I think that was their, that's why I wrote that post. I wrote a few weeks ago, a week ago, whatever that
Mary Jo Foley (00:12:42):
Was. Yeah, no, this is, this is slightly different wording
Paul Thurrott (00:12:45):
For oh, it is. I'm sorry. So, oh, so what's, I'm sorry. What's the difference. Yeah.
Mary Jo Foley (00:12:49):
So I think what they're saying now is like, we may have dev channel, not like specific dev channel features that yeah. Won't go to release channel or preview channel and we're just gonna, oh, they'll just go channel. Oh. And put 'em into a cumulative update.
Paul Thurrott (00:13:05):
I, by the way, I think that literally happened yesterday, because if I'm not, I could be mistaken about this, but I think this, no, it did blocking people. Okay. So I don't, I don't believe it ever went to, so they felt, so it didn't strongly about this, that they slip streamed it right. To the public. Yikes. Yeah.
Mary Jo Foley (00:13:21):
So, yeah. So that's kind of curious, right? That they mm-hmm <affirmative> have started deciding that that's a thing. And then I'm sure the way they get around the idea of is the, a feature or a fix is they could say, well, this is just a, a fix because of what those we're doing was wrong. Right. And we're fixed
Paul Thurrott (00:13:37):
<Laugh> so how dare you give back users choice <laugh> yeah. So just so people clear about what you're saying, I just, just so we can kind through this, the, the, the insider program uses a channel system that is very similar to what web browser is used. Right. So mm-hmm, <affirmative>, you know, think about something like Chrome has, you know, Canary and dev and beta and stable or whatever, and probably other channels. And Microsoft has whatever channels it has. And the windows insider program has channels. And typically a feature will appear first in this case in dev make its way to beta. Right. And then hit his release preview, and then it goes to stable. So there's a process. Yeah. And in this case, I possibly, for the first time ever, I don't believe, I don't remember person this ever happening they've released a new feature or fix whatever to the dev channel and then pushed it literally a week later. I think, I think it's only been around one week to the stable meeting, the public version, the, the version that millions of people using out in the world. Right. Right. I mean, that's the importance of this. Okay.
Mary Jo Foley (00:14:36):
Is right. And the reason I think they took the wording out of the original blog post where they, where they said they were blocking, this is because then subsequently they released a dev channel bill that looked like it was gonna give users browser choice. Right. So they're like, oh, that's right. No, we should probably should take the wording out because it makes it look like we're doing something bad. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and now we're doing something good. Right. That's my guess why they took it out because I, the reason I even looked for it was I saw your post about this. I went back, I clicked on, on their blog post and I did a search for the exact wording, which I cut and pasted into my blog post and, and it's, and you couldn't find it <laugh>,
Paul Thurrott (00:15:12):
It's gone. <Laugh> so what's interesting, you know some people will point to another feature that they're testing in the dev channel, which is that default, you know, make default button that they've added yeah. To a browser page under apps, default apps. Yeah. That is not part of the PA patch, Tuesday thing that's not there. Right. So you still have to go, well, you still, it honestly anyone who thinks that solves the problem is, is either, has never used it or is not really paying a lot of attention because it really only change changes the association of four file tips. Well, two, five types and two protocols
Mary Jo Foley (00:15:46):
The four most important ones, right. Like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. It goes pretty far. It doesn't go complete the way, but it, I I'm happy to see them do that.
Paul Thurrott (00:15:54):
At least it's a, it's a positive step. Yeah. It's not as good as it used to be, but yeah. Okay. That's fair.
Mary Jo Foley (00:16:00):
<Laugh> yeah. So yeah, I it's very I just, I wish somebody would just maybe, and maybe Chris will do this a little bit today. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> but like, somebody needs to just explain why they're doing what they're doing and why they think it's the right thing to do. I just would like to hear that explanation <laugh> I
Paul Thurrott (00:16:19):
About Betty says absolutely nothing.
Mary Jo Foley (00:16:21):
What we'll ask him know, ask
Paul Thurrott (00:16:23):
Him and see, you know, yeah. It's not a marketing problem, is it? I mean, it is ultimately, I mean, so the, the CEO and founder of Phil Valdi basically says they're desperate, you know, that the only way they can get people to use edge and thus the backend services liken and, and Bing is to fool them, you know? And you know, there's a, there's an, there's an argument to be made there. And by the way, there's a lot of other things I don't really talk about this kind of stuff a lot. I, I just set up a new Microsoft account for the book for screenshot purposes. Cause I wanted to start fresh. I did that for the windows 10 book back in the day as well. And one of the first things you see when you go to accounts, microsoft.com with a brand new account is the stuff they, they advertise to you.
Paul Thurrott (00:17:06):
So they advertise things like Microsoft, 365 and Xbox and all that. Okay. That's not surprising, but they're also things like Microsoft rewards, you know, Microsoft rewards is another kind of sly way that Microsoft gets you to use their browser, you know, because you were in points for doing things, you know, and I, and I'm sure you can use Microsoft rewards with other browsers, but, you know, they're kind of creating this cohesive ecosystem of sorts. I don't think anyone could make an argument that is, it is as cohesive or as maybe be useful to users is what Apple's doing, you know, with, with how they bind things together. And they have services and hardware and software that all works better. If you have multiple apple devices or whatever, but you know, it, it's sort of the same thing. The idea is you want to go down this one way road and just do Microsoft stuff, you know? And that's good for Microsoft. I, and no one could argue otherwise, but I think the question we have is more along the lines of, is it good for users is, and, and is not respecting their wishes with regards to default browser. Good for users. I don't think so. Yeah. Yeah. And is it good for competition? And is there an issue there regards to the competition question?
Mary Jo Foley (00:18:11):
Yeah. I never feel bad about them doing things like offering rewards or doing, you know, ethical shopping, blah, blah, blah, whatever I'm like. Yeah. That's all sure. It's all. Yeah. It's all tactics to try to get people, to use their browser and use their search engine and that's all fair. Right? Like that's marketing the fact when the fact is when you make it really convoluted for somebody to choose a browser, to the point where it's basically impossible. Right? well, that's where I have a problem with it.
Paul Thurrott (00:18:38):
<Laugh>, you know, we, we can debate the the notion of putting like a by now pay later type feature in, in edge. And that's very specific. But if you look at whatever features Microsoft is at it, and we'll add to edge, the, the argument you can make generally speaking is this adds value to the product. It differentiates it from the competition. And to me, this is a fair way to compete. Yeah. When Microsoft owns the platform, you're running the browser on and they make it really hard not to use edge, it gets into a trickier area. That ethically or legally is questionable. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, that's all. So I don't know, you know, you may or may not like the edge features <laugh>, that's fine. That's one conversation. Yeah. but this, this other stuff is, is to me a little more troubling.
Leo Laporte (00:19:25):
Yeah. So yeah, Steve took back his commendation this week. Oh, hedge. Yeah. Last week. He, yeah, he committed Microsoft on oh boy. Backing down. <Laugh>
Mary Jo Foley (00:19:42):
<Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:19:44):
Yeah.
Mary Jo Foley (00:19:44):
This week he so he thinks they didn't go far enough. Is that what he, yeah. He says,
Leo Laporte (00:19:47):
They're not, this is not well, I,
Paul Thurrott (00:19:49):
I, I, I still think, and I think I liken this to this last week when we talked about it to the privacy stuff in windows 10, which I referred to as privacy theater, this is like default app theater. It looks a lot of people see the picture of the make default button. They think, oh, they did it. They did. They, they, they responded to your complaints and it's like, guys, they, they really didn't <laugh> but not completely. So
Leo Laporte (00:20:12):
Yeah, yeah, last week I think you and I decided that it, what they had chosen to do was kind of reasonable. Like with one button, you can change the main web stuff. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, but things like PDFs and stuff with main edges and that's property, unless you explicitly
Paul Thurrott (00:20:29):
Say otherwise. Yes. And, and, and, and there's a, there's a lesser to own behavior and windows that occur. Although people will understand it when you kind of walk through it, that if you install an image app of some kind, the next time you double click on a JPEG file, you'll get one of those. What do you wanna open it with dial, right. It's, it's kind of a weird looking windows, eight thing, but you get this dialogue and actually that's how PDF works as well. So if you install fire Firefox, navigate into this weird system, click the set as default, and then you double click a PDF, even though that is associated with edge still, you'll actually be given the choice. And to me, that's the correct behavior, but that's only for that one and file type. So the thing is for the, those secret protocols, right? Which windows is now actively working to block you from circumventing. So if you do something in widgets via Cortana, start search, et cetera, those things are gonna open an edge, regardless of what you're feeling is on that. And I think you can make a really good argument that when you're opening a webpage and a browser, and it doesn't in the thing you just said, make my default, that's not acting on behalf of that's not doing what you expected it to do. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> just isn't right.
Mary Jo Foley (00:21:36):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (00:21:40):
Yeah. <laugh>, it's complicated.
Mary Jo Foley (00:21:45):
It is. It is complicated. I, I, I can see no, they keep saying the reason they are making edge, the only choice for widgets and search is if they don't do that, then it breaks the experience. Okay. That's technically correct. Right. That
Paul Thurrott (00:21:59):
Is true. Well, how, how does it break the experience? Because
Mary Jo Foley (00:22:02):
It's so hard wired into it. Like, like the way that the search thing works, Microsoft search is you have to actually be using edge and be signed into your Microsoft account. Like otherwise it doesn't work at all. Right. It doesn't work. I don't mean Bing. I mean, this thing called Microsoft search.
Paul Thurrott (00:22:18):
Right. I understand. I, I,
Mary Jo Foley (00:22:21):
That's how they designed it. It's like it would break by design, right? Like they hardwired it, you know,
Paul Thurrott (00:22:26):
A break when, when right. I mean, when windows 10 was still kind of a new thing and Microsoft was still heavily pushing Cortana mm-hmm <affirmative> Amazon, at least they might have been the only one, but there, there was this, no Amazon released there was creating and then released an Alexa app on windows 10. And at that time I sort of said, you know, there should be a default in there for digital assistant as well. And you could kind of make the case from a system level that there should be a default for search engine as well. It's something you set in the browser, which is probably why they don't want you pushing it to Chrome, because then it will go through Google, not through Bing. Right. but there's no reason that you couldn't trigger a web search from a start menu search that launches Google search and gives you exactly what you were looking for.
Paul Thurrott (00:23:16):
They literally just don't want you to do that. So, and, and I, you know, we could kind of argue about this or not. I don't think many people would argue otherwise, but you're probably gonna get a better result from Google as well. So preventing people from doing that is, you know, yeah. I guess there's some kind of, in certain cases you can make a case cuz they're gonna mix and match results that maybe includes your workplace stuff. You know, how they do that integrated window search on the web thing or whatever, with search results, which are gonna come from Bing or whatever. But I, I, most people, you open start, you type in what is the capital of Uruguay, whatever browser's gonna open a search, engine's gonna throw you a query or throw a query. You're gonna get the answer. If you chose Chrome, most people are gonna expect Chrome to open and they're gonna expect that thing to come via Google mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, and that's not what's gonna to happen whether this matters or not.
Paul Thurrott (00:24:08):
It's not a big deal. I, I, I guess in, in the scheme of things, but it's one of the many little things that's going on here. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and this is, you know, it's a play for for usage, which, you know, Microsoft it's just like anything else they'll, they're gonna push it as far as they can because they have business interest in the outcome. Right. I mean, you know, so, you know, we can say, I can, I can freak out because you know, all I care about are the people that use it. And there are other interests that work here,
Leo Laporte (00:24:39):
I guess that's fair. I mean it's not illegal. Well,
Paul Thurrott (00:24:44):
Well that's
Leo Laporte (00:24:46):
Mean the courts that's might have to take that one on. Yeah, I see. It's not nefarious
Paul Thurrott (00:24:54):
It's it is, it is underhanded. Right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> and, and the reason I say that is because of those instances where it's reasonable to assume the browser and thus the search engine, you, you chose explicitly, doesn't do what you back. He doesn't do what you expect. Yeah. And so anytime that happens, you're either gonna be just, you know, mayor Jo wondered, would people even notice. And I, I do believe there are a certain percentage of people, whatever it is that would not notice <laugh> and would not
Leo Laporte (00:25:18):
Care, is it the case that a company, you know, a lot of lately Facebook and a lot of other companies have been accused of putting profits over of people. And of course it's their job as a company to put profits over mm-hmm people, but everything else, there's a point. Yeah. But there's a point where it's not actually the law into play. Yeah. There's the first thing is, you know, the right thing to do, but let's put that aside because your stakeholders say the right thing to do is make us more money. The, the next most important thing is
Paul Thurrott (00:25:51):
Long term and short term, but, well,
Leo Laporte (00:25:53):
That's okay. That's where I'm going, which is in the short term, this might be good. But if maybe really aren't putting profits over people, if people go, this sucks.
Paul Thurrott (00:26:03):
If you only are thinking about this quarter, your head is not in the right place. And a, I would make the argument that any, anyone who is in like a CFO or a financial type position that is only looking at ones, well, I'm looking at <laugh> all of the numbers actually, but you're only looking at, you know, how many, you know, whatever the X profit or, you know, whatever it is you have to take into account this kind of long term implication. And that's what I think the argument I made, I think last week was it doesn't show up in telemetry very easily. The impact that not seeing what you expected after you went to the trouble to make this choice, is it undermines your trust in the company, in the product, in the services. And you might go in a different direction next time when it comes to buying a new computer or a device or whatever it is.
Paul Thurrott (00:26:49):
And that's really hard to calculate. Yeah. It's really easy for you to tell me what your profits and revenues were this quarter, but what's the impact that, that all those profits and revenues have on your long term trajectory with regards to kind of thing, is very hard to calculate. Maybe it's impossible. I don't know. Yeah. So, so, you know, but that's, that's the kind of thing you sit in the boardroom and you, you chew over and you go back and forth and say, well, how far can we push this? We really want your mono in. And you laugh like a bat man, fall back on your pile of money. <Laugh> yeah. Well, that's always the risk is if people see you doing that, then that doesn't look, that's not a good look. And, and you know, I mean, no, no corporation wants to be evil Corp.
Paul Thurrott (00:27:36):
Sure. It's on Facebook. This, this is an E, but that, I guess that's the other point. It's not evil. Exactly. It's not wrong. It's just, it's defying user expectation. And this is the new England Patriot style of business. It's like, we're gonna do everything it takes to win, slate the football. If, if you get away with it good. And if you don't, you pay a fine, you say, oh, we're so sorry, but you can't have the trophy band and, and right. And there'll always be those people that say everyone else is doing it. <Laugh> which was the case of football and is the case here. I mean, apple does this in some places in their platforms, Google does this in their platforms. You know, it's not like you can go into a Chromebook and switch to Bing if you wanted to or whatever, or switch to edge.
Paul Thurrott (00:28:18):
And does that deflate the argument against Microsoft doing this in windows 11 or whatever? Not exactly, but but that's part that has to be part of the conversation too, you know, they're, they are competing against companies that are not particularly scrupulous themselves. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> right. And are also betting the rules so to speak. Yeah. And seeing what they can get away with you know, Google and well, Google, especially, I'm not sure about apple, but this kind of thing, but Google for, for sure has come under antitrust scrutiny for this type of behavior in its platforms. And in fact has had to change Android in Europe so that you can choose your search engine and browser before you even use the platform. Yeah. Interesting. So, yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's a natural tension and I think it's your job, our, our job to point out what users would like and expect mm-hmm <affirmative> because you know, that's, and, and
Mary Jo Foley (00:29:12):
That, you know, why that's hard because like, listen, listeners of this show are savvy enough to expect one thing. Right. And normal people don't even know if they're using or whatever. Right. Like they don't know.
Paul Thurrott (00:29:25):
I guess I could make the argument. It's not our job to represent normal people. Yeah. We represent our, our, our listeners. I mean, but I do feel like, I, I think it's important to defend those who can't defend themselves as well. Yes, I agree. But I mean, but that's, you know, in this case it means the people who don't understand the, the, the forces that are work to usurp their experience, they, they, in some cases like Mary Jo says that they wouldn't notice and don't maybe they don't even care. But you still wanna look out on the better interests of people.
Leo Laporte (00:29:55):
Well, and I think even if that's what Microsoft's gonna say is we think this is a better user experience. Exactly. That is what they have said.
Paul Thurrott (00:30:06):
Yeah. Like verbatim, and by the way, a better user experience in Microsoft's opinion, that also happens to benefit Microsoft. However you want to term that financially. Otherwise there's nothing wrong with that.
Leo Laporte (00:30:17):
This is exactly what apple does too, by the way, we're just doing and the right thing for users, so,
Paul Thurrott (00:30:23):
Yep. Yeah. And just like with features in Apple's case, the users don't know what's best for them, so we'll just do it for 'em. Don't worry about it. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>
Leo Laporte (00:30:30):
<Laugh> I
Paul Thurrott (00:30:31):
Guess. I, okay. I don't know. Anyway, look, we're hopefully intelligent enough to have a conversation about this on some level, and we can and disagree or agree or whatever, and we can all walk away with our own opinions about it. I, I, I'm not happy with this personally, but I also know that I know I, because I, you know, you hear from people like this too, some people just don't care <laugh> they don't understand what the big deal is. Well,
Leo Laporte (00:30:59):
And that is probably the case for most people. Right. Most whatever. I, you know, what are you talking about? Probably. Yeah, it looks good to me.
Paul Thurrott (00:31:08):
<Laugh> okay. Yeah. Okay.
Leo Laporte (00:31:10):
Okay. If, if that's how you feel. Okay.
Paul Thurrott (00:31:14):
I mean, if you're that dumb, I can't know. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:31:16):
I just can't help you if you don't know any better.
Paul Thurrott (00:31:20):
I mean, I can't even talk to you if you don't understand the language. No, it, yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:31:23):
It's it's okay. Yeah. I mean, I think the real question we should ask is, is it better for users or is that just a rationalization for making more money? Is it actually better for users?
Paul Thurrott (00:31:33):
It'd be great. If you could do both, right. If you could
Leo Laporte (00:31:36):
Do both, if you, you should do both, that's the job, right. Do both. Yeah. You should hopefully cause the ones, the other,
Paul Thurrott (00:31:44):
Yeah. Right. Do the right thing and the money will come. Yeah. <laugh>, you know, in a way, right. I mean, I it's a little naive, but yeah. Well, that's why, by the way, and I want to, I wanna keep, I have to keep going back to this. It's so important when Microsoft first switched edge to chromium the, the, the, the promise of this product was everything that it was right about Chrome with all the Google stuff you don't want removed, especially the tracking and all that. That sounds awesome. That sounds awesome. I was so happy about this. It was so good that I, I think it, it overcame the argument about that monoculture thing where we only have this one rendering engine that's chromium, or whatever the underlying re what's it called whatever it's called. And you know, people say, oh, no, we need to, we need competition.
Paul Thurrott (00:32:29):
You know, you need, you know, Mozilla should have its own thing. Safari should have its own thing and IE or ed should have its own thing. And that keeps everything on an even playing field. And it's like, well, I mean, honestly, it's better for the web development world, if there's only one thing to write to, but we can talk about the security and the privacy and all that kind of, and the feature set and that's where maybe browser makers should compete. And so you can have that kind of argument as well. But I just feel like edge has evolved so far past this. Now it's not even the same product that they promised, you know,
Leo Laporte (00:32:58):
I, why is, would Vivaldi be mad? Oh, cuz they want you to be able to use them as a default browser. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> how come Firefox isn't complaining or are they also,
Paul Thurrott (00:33:06):
They've also complained. Okay. In fact, Firefox was one of the couple of companies that they did their work work around in their own product. Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:33:13):
Which, which browser,
Mary Jo Foley (00:33:14):
By the way, put theirs, which browser vendors said they were gonna put their browser in the store. It wasn't for vaulting Mozilla, right?
Paul Thurrott (00:33:21):
No, it's the Firefox. It is. It is in the star. It, it it's been there for the past, I dunno, three weeks or so.
Mary Jo Foley (00:33:28):
Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, that they, they know that they're breaking the ability to have the work around, but they still did it anyway. They
Paul Thurrott (00:33:37):
Still, yeah. So the, the look, this is the, the weird dual nature of this whole thing. Mozilla is the first browser in a Microsoft store that doesn't use the edge rendering engine, which was a requirement up until windows 11 Shipp mm-hmm <affirmative>. Oh, so that's a big deal. And that's kind of a neat pro. Yeah. But the, the, the, the kind of dark side of that, isn't, isn't just this stuff. It's that and I'd have to, I maybe someone will remember this, what it, what it is, the, the store version of Mozilla. Oh, no, it is this thing. The store version of Mozilla Firefox doesn't have that button where you click here to make it the default and it actually works, which is now broken mm-hmm <affirmative> and I'm sure that's why Microsoft was like, yeah, actually we're gonna, we're gonna prevent that from working. So may don't put that in the product <laugh> yeah, yeah. Right. So, you know what I would've said, what I probably did say three weeks ago is, Hey, congratulations. Misso is in the store, but you should get Firefox in the web cuz you want that, that feature, which now does not work. Yeah. Yep.
Paul Thurrott (00:34:38):
It's really interesting. It's the yin and the yang. It's
Leo Laporte (00:34:42):
Fascinating actually conversation. And I'm sure that this is kind of, every company says we gotta maximize profits. We wanna make it. I think even when Amazon says customer experience comes first, it's a little bit of a lie. I mean, totally. It would be interesting to see, you know, if all you cared about was the best customer experience, would you do better as a company? Would you be more profitable? Would you
Paul Thurrott (00:35:06):
Succeed best customer experience? Let me tell you what Amazon has done has, has piled a truck upon truck on the highway that goes by my house, that you can't get anywhere anymore because everyone has to get their thing tomorrow or even today in some cases. And it's just full of trucks. You know, the whole world is just Amazon trucks. Now you could walk across them and get there faster.
Leo Laporte (00:35:27):
We can't be held responsible for unintended consequences. We are given the customer what
Paul Thurrott (00:35:32):
They want, but this is, but this is a good example of short versus long term. I mean, I, I, it, this, in this case, it would be a hard thing to explain to people, Hey, listen, I know you need this little dude, dad like tomorrow, but, but if you got it in two days, just, just give it a second. Hold on. There'll be less pollution. There'll be less traffic. <Laugh> right. You, you won't be screaming at the cars in front of you that aren't going where, because it's all the big smile thing on the truck and we're hiring. You get
Leo Laporte (00:35:56):
To deliver sponsor, but youve got paying customers. You wanna make them happy. Those aren't necessarily paying customers. There're just some people in the vicinity of the paying customers. No let's
Paul Thurrott (00:36:05):
Well, okay. But let's, but let's say they are the paying, but even
Leo Laporte (00:36:09):
That's the problem, Amazon doesn't know the data points are the paying customers like one day delivery. That's
Paul Thurrott (00:36:14):
The data. So you're like, you're driving home from work and you're thinking, God, I, I, it takes me 45 more minutes to get home, but at least wanna get this that's my stupid print I bought on Amazon is there <laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:36:22):
Well, and that's why we have, by the way, that's why we have government to impose society's interests on companies that are only looking out for their own interests. That's the natural tension. That's why we have antitrust regulation. Iridescent S in our dis cord, I think says a really interesting thing. I'd love to know what you think. Once upon a time Microsoft built a platform, opened it up to third party developers. That was good for users. That was good for the ecosystem today. They're ruining both by trying to wall it off for themselves.
Paul Thurrott (00:36:55):
Yeah, of course. But you know, and, but in the years, since Microsoft was personal competing it where it was just windows in office, and that was everything that was the whole world. What has happened. Video game consoles have taken off in a serious way. Mobile has taken off in a serious way and Google has taken it off in a serious way. And then is competing in these other markets as well. And every single one of these things, what's the thing they all have in common. They're all walled gardens. Yeah. Right.
Leo Laporte (00:37:23):
Because there's more Microsoft being a walled garden than being an open platform. Right. So really this is the argument for Lennox. I'm not gonna bring that up though. Cuz I know you would throw things at me. <Laugh>
Paul Thurrott (00:37:35):
Well, no, actually, I mean on the, because on, in, well that's Microsoft argument. We, we see what hap what Sony and Nintendo have done in video games. We see what apple and Google have done in mobile platforms and computing platforms. Yeah. They're on one of the of the spectrum. And then on the other end is Linux. Gee, I wonder which one we wanna be like <laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:37:54):
Who makes, makes the most, you know, it comes back actually to the earliest days of gaming Atari, let a, anybody make a game for their Atari gaming consoles, the VCs. And as a result, there are many, many crappy games and it was Nintendo that said, no, no, no, no. We are gonna tightly control the games, improve the experience and put Atari out of business, by the way, Nintendo stills going strong. Here's a
Paul Thurrott (00:38:17):
Thesis for a book that someone should write. All of his is seriously just things happening. And then things overreacting to that thing that happened. Yeah. The pendulum. And then you just keep you just go back and forth ping pong between those two things. So Nintendo was an overreaction to what happened with Atari.
Leo Laporte (00:38:32):
Yeah. Overreaction, you say. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. But who's in business still. <Laugh> right. Let's take a no you're right. Yeah. Yeah. Let's take a little break again. Chris. Capella is coming up, but there's lots more to talk about our show today brought to you by PO this is the, I'll tell you what if you are customer-centric you wanna communicate with customers in a way the customer wants you to communicate in the old days, maybe a phone call, maybe the web email was big for a while. Who, who reads email anymore today? It's text messaging. The open and rate on text messaging is almost a hundred percent customers like it, cuz it's a friction free experience. We've all gotten used to it during pandemic because you know, you're, you know, when you order food, your orders on the way you get the text message when you're gonna ha go to the grocery store, you send the text message I'm out front.
Leo Laporte (00:39:25):
It's just, this is how we communicate nowadays. If you own a business, there's just not enough time in the day to play phone tag, the list of customers you want to reach, doesn't get any shorter, especially if businesses go good and I hope it's good for you right now. That's why local businesses everywhere are turning to podium. Podium makes every interaction as easy as setting a text, easy for your customers. But I should point out also easy for you. Your employees will like it cuz instead of responding to F 15 different, you know, things, there's one inbox they can quickly handle every request, everything that makes your business great can get done faster. Couple of examples with podium. I, it's not just about communications. It's about getting things done. You can gather reviews. Somebody leaves your business. They get a text saying, how is your experience?
Leo Laporte (00:40:14):
Leave us a review on Yelp or Google. And there's a link and they click it. And you know what? The proofs in the pudding, the, the, this is the response rate and this is so much higher, so much higher collecting payments. People, people, you know, nowadays the infrastructure exists to respond to a text with payments. People like that. It's easy. It's fast. It just makes it a big difference in your ability to collect marketing your customers. Sure. I get a, that makes me crazy, but it works. The local ice cream store sends me a text message every few weeks. We haven't seen you in a while. Here's the 30% off coupon. Oh, got me again, podium. It all. It's great. I mean, you know, you leave the, this office and they say your appointment is, you know, I just love that. And, and because like on most modern platforms, you can click the, a, the date in that text, add the appointment to your calendar.
Leo Laporte (00:41:09):
It's just, this is what your customers want. And you, won't just free up more time for yourself. You're gonna grow your business. You're gonna get more done. You're gonna close more deals customers. These days also take, you know, say, I want, I need somebody. I did the the other day I needed a, a window fixed and I, I contacted glaciers. And the first one to respond via text was the first one to get the, the business join more than a hundred thousand businesses that already use podium to streamline their customer interactions. Get started free podium.com/dub, dub, or sign up for a paid podium account and get a free credit card reader. Restrictions apply P O D I U M podium.com/w you w we thank them so much for their support of windows weekly. And we thank you for supporting windows weekly by using that address, podium.com/dub dub. All right. Didn't mean to interfere with your flow. <Laugh>, it's your flow. It's a patch. Tuesday, it was a patch. I didn't even notice. Do we seek patches or do they just happen?
Paul Thurrott (00:42:20):
I mean, I, it
Leo Laporte (00:42:21):
Depends. <Laugh> it depends. I see. Trying not to seek. I know. I know, but I'm trying not to be a seeker,
Paul Thurrott (00:42:27):
Right? It will, it will happen automatically if you don't see, just
Leo Laporte (00:42:30):
Not as fast. Yeah. Yeah. Now with things like for J I feel like maybe
Paul Thurrott (00:42:36):
Honestly that's yeah. That's a good example of why I think you just installed this stuff. Yeah. Plus, you know, you get to eliminate your choice of browser. So you do that too. <Laugh> <laugh> so if you seek it's like you chose it. Yeah, yeah. Or it would've been, if you knew that was happening cuz they didn't document that it was happening, but you know it's okay. Yeah. It's okay.
Leo Laporte (00:42:55):
Over that <laugh> oh yes. Sorry. Yeah. Patch Tuesday. Anything has to say about it? No, no. Except for that browser redirection blocker. That it's yeah. That was about it. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:43:11):
I don't know. It was interesting to me that they proactively applied this fix <laugh> I hate to use that term to windows 10. What were people doing in windows 10? <Laugh> with the bypassing. So I don't know. I don't know. I dunno, maybe edge deflector worked in windows 10 too or something. Yeah. Must be nice guy. Feel like this guy. He's just a guy, you know, Microsoft worth like a trillion, something dollars. He's a guy
Leo Laporte (00:43:37):
<Laugh> what do do at Microsoft will keep
Paul Thurrott (00:43:40):
People, I'll tell you what to do. We train the guns in this guy. <Laugh> you know, remember when the death star blew up a planet, we're blowing up a person. That's that's the level of precision we got from this thing now that's so good.
Leo Laporte (00:43:52):
So you'd think it'd be Mary Jo that would go hand on with the new notepad, but it's <laugh> it's Paul getting
Paul Thurrott (00:43:58):
All handsy. Well, okay. But here's why you can only get it in the dev channel of the windows insider program. And I'm gonna guess that Mary, Jo's not
Leo Laporte (00:44:06):
Involved with that right now. No, I am no longer in the dove channel
Paul Thurrott (00:44:08):
Because it's one way dead and street. Right. It's not a, it's not associated with any version of windows. It may, there may never be an out breaks. You know,
Leo Laporte (00:44:16):
It breaks things happen. Nah, I don't want
Paul Thurrott (00:44:19):
It <laugh> so I, yeah. So here's the good news for Mary Jo and for anyone who cares about no pet, it, it does not expand change the experience in the slightest, the actual part of the editor that is the editor where you see text is the same. It is the same. You know, the selection of font is a little more modern. They've moved two menu items around not a big deal. So every single feature literally that was in notepad before is still there. And great. Let me think about this before I say it. There's no real new feature. I mean, mean there's a, a very basic settings interface, which is just for fonts. And I don't remember what the other one is. Some other feature, some other setting, but it's really basic. And yeah, I'm glad because you know, I, I don't wanna spend too much time on this, but I mean, they, they, they almost ruin paint when they updated it.
Paul Thurrott (00:45:08):
I'm, I'm hoping they will get to fixing the at over time. There, I know just looking at it, there are gonna be certain things they never do fix, but I'm glad that they, this to me is when we, when we think of a, a legacy app and you kind of apply what I think of, even if this isn't what it is like a, w I three code of paint to it, you know, give it support for a dark mode, which I think is great. You don't ruin the essence of what it is, hopefully. Yeah. And that's what they've done here. So that's, it's just good news is,
Mary Jo Foley (00:45:38):
Is the dark mode, truly dark mode, you know how they've had trouble making some things, truly dark mode.
Paul Thurrott (00:45:44):
<Laugh> in that, in that, is it all dark kind of, you mean like there is there some hit? No, it appears to be all dark mode. And I think that was part of the, you remember I said, when I did my version of notepad a couple years ago, one of the problems I ran into was I can't, I, I, I apologize. I can't remember the, the window type, but there was a specific window type they used for find and find and replace. And it, the support for that in modern frameworks is lost it's over. They they've just, they don't offer for it anymore. That thing, because it was written 20 years ago will never support dark mode. Right. And I think that's part of the reason, probably the reason they created an U UI for that cuz they had to. So no, there were no, you know, the same thing, the font dialogue that would come up was an old, that thing probably dated back to the nineties. You know, if you, if you look at your font and notepad today, what you're gonna see is they might have restyled it a little bit, but it's this, that thing's gotta be 30 years old. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so those interfaces are now new because they have to be part of that dark mode support. I think that's the rationale for all that. So it looks good.
Leo Laporte (00:46:49):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, it's, it's gotta be, you know, when you're a coder, you write, you wanna write code that does stuff instead of writing code that works around bad stuff, operating system insists upon.
Paul Thurrott (00:47:04):
Right. I mean, I, I, I spent
Leo Laporte (00:47:07):
Get some of four days writing a dark mode picker because the default one was wouldn't do it
Paul Thurrott (00:47:14):
Well. Yeah. But those are the UIs that when you think it's a legacy app, you know, that's just, so if you're gonna support this new thing either do or you don't, you know, if you even the new file exploring windows 11, like if you go to that menu thing and go to options, folder options pops up. That's a legacy control panel. Same thing with probably the property, not properties goes to a new interface actually. So, but there is still it's the wide
Leo Laporte (00:47:40):
About target mode is yeah, you gotta fix all of this old stuff. Yeah. To subpoena.
Paul Thurrott (00:47:45):
You never will. It's like the one dialogue is still old. Even
Leo Laporte (00:47:48):
Know about dark mode. They just liked everything in one color.
Paul Thurrott (00:47:52):
No. And that's part of the complexity of windows is there's so much UI in there that dates, some of it dates back 30 years. So in, in you have a dark mode, it's dark, it's pleasant for your eyes. And then it's like a spotlight pops up in the middle of the screen. That can be a little tough anyway, they did to write with notepad. So
Leo Laporte (00:48:10):
Kevin, Kevin Brewer has sent us a video of his experience when, when it, when you know, he starts in dark mode and the suddenly, ah, <laugh> exactly Kevin <laugh>
Paul Thurrott (00:48:25):
You like laying in bed at night. It's like three o'clock in the morning and you just, and then you comes, come on, you'll be seeing like light reflections for like the next 15 minutes. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:48:35):
Yeah,
Mary Jo Foley (00:48:37):
But there is no auto save. We've had we Paul and I both been asked this that's not
Leo Laporte (00:48:41):
There.
Paul Thurrott (00:48:42):
No, no, they haven't added any features. There's there are no new features now right now that they've done this though, does that mean they're they could be set up to of course. And I have a very basic auto say feature in my version in oped. It's very easy to add. Cuz you can tell because I did it I suspect that Microsoft, whether it's infinite resources could probably figure out something a little more sophisticated. Maybe I would welcome that kind of a change, you know? That's fine. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:49:08):
Yeah. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> yeah, yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:49:16):
Then I'll Sue an antitrust card for trying to put my little product outta business, but you know what? We'll get to that. <Laugh> don't worry
Leo Laporte (00:49:21):
About that. <Laugh> you've been Sherlock <laugh> exactly the so this, I think I agree with a hundred percent, Microsoft's gonna take this really nice new to terminal that they've written and make it the command line from now. I thought they'd already done that this doesn't even happen until next year.
Paul Thurrott (00:49:38):
Yeah. Wow. And it's by the way. And it's, it's unclear because I think this falls into that. When does windows 11 get updated thing we've been talking about? They don't know and don't wanna say, or maybe, or, or don't wanna say I will tell you this little bit, just a little bit of trivia. You know, you can change your default command line in windows 11 with one click <laugh>. You don't have to go through a bunch of protocols and file types. It just works. You know, okay, that's fine. So I don't know that there are, you know, remember back in the windows 95 timeframe, we used to have all these terminal, emulators, tele nut applications and things. I don't, I mean, there are actually some command line environments out there, but it's really not that big of a deal. And I think as with visual studio code, whatever you think of Microsoft, I think a lot of even open source type developers have embraced windows terminal. It's great.
Leo Laporte (00:50:30):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, it's really pretty. They, and they did just did a nice job and I can't believe we used that old command line terminal for as long as we did <laugh> oh my that's
Paul Thurrott (00:50:39):
Incredible. I know. Well command com I mean, or whatever they call it command prompt. I mean, it it's basically like
Leo Laporte (00:50:45):
CMDC right. That's that's it right? It's
Paul Thurrott (00:50:47):
Yeah, it is. It's not a, and it is no, but it is a it's it's almost an MSDOS 1.0 emulator when you think about it. Yeah. You know, that's been updated over the
Leo Laporte (00:50:56):
Years. That's basically what it is. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, welcome to the the fold modern terminals. Wow. Mm-hmm <affirmative> wow. So nice.
Paul Thurrott (00:51:07):
It's
Leo Laporte (00:51:08):
Funny. Well, I just, I hear a little little something on the roof. I think we're just about half an hour away. The reindeer have arrived. Chris Capella will be coming down the chimney and joining us as we continue, I just wanted to pass along the mm-hmm <affirmative> the, you're gonna get this in the mail, you guys, but the I, the TWI Christmas card has come out oh, no meta twit, miss. Oh boy. <Laugh> that's awesome. Isn't that funny? It seemed like a good idea at the time. Now I'm thinking, well, it's not very festive, but we're all virtual characters you are. And it was easier than getting everybody in the same room anyway. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>
Paul Thurrott (00:51:47):
Yeah, it was that mask wearing fellow on the bottom right there.
Leo Laporte (00:51:50):
I think that's Kevin wearing a sharks mask, cuz he's a, yeah, he's a shark fan. He likes shark week. Yeah. That's kind of an in joke and then you can figure it out cuz everybody's signature is there. Oh nice. Nice. Yeah. So kind of cool. Very cool. Happy
Paul Thurrott (00:52:07):
Holidays by the we get Christmas cards, you know, last week I, I ranted a little bit about people who send me pictures of the kids that don't even know. Yeah. I don't know what your situation is with Christmas cards. We, we, my wife puts Christmas cards that we receive on the door and they kind of kind of cascade down the door until the door is filled and then they go onto the wall. Yeah. This year we have four cards. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:52:28):
It's a little, you know, I think it's a tradition that maybe has run its course. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:52:34):
A lot of people, I like Christmas
Leo Laporte (00:52:36):
Cards. I'll send you Christmas facts. <Laugh> Christmas
Paul Thurrott (00:52:40):
Facts. Man.
Leo Laporte (00:52:42):
Well you're gonna get, but no, I know what you mean. I very used to have piles of them. We would hang them in the studio. Like you know, like
Paul Thurrott (00:52:51):
Our door could not contain them. We had to use the wall next to the
Mary Jo Foley (00:52:54):
Door. If you have to go to the post office, you understand why people are not mailing
Leo Laporte (00:52:59):
Christmas cards.
Paul Thurrott (00:53:00):
That's why you should, well, you just leave 'em in a mailbox. I mean, yeah, yeah,
Mary Jo Foley (00:53:03):
No. So I went to the post office yesterday because we don't have a mailbox, you know? It's
Leo Laporte (00:53:07):
They took 'em all out. Yeah. The same. Even in Petaluma, they took the mailboxes out
Mary Jo Foley (00:53:13):
There aren't many, there aren't many. And
Paul Thurrott (00:53:16):
I went to the post office pay
Mary Jo Foley (00:53:18):
Exactly. <Laugh> no it's and the line is out the door. People are fighting and like fighting with the guys behind the counter, fighting with each other, yelling the machines cause that do stamps are broken. People are screaming, giant packages. So I'm like, yeah, this is why people don't send cards.
Paul Thurrott (00:53:34):
So I'm gonna let me compare and contrast the experience of going to the post office in New York city with that, of going here in, you know, rural Pennsylvania. Yeah. First of all, it's often closed because they go to lunch or something. I guess the federal office just closes during, in the middle of the day. The only time they're open, but you know, they're, they're closed for like two hours <laugh> but then you, you stand in a very short line. Everyone is incredibly pleasant. In fact, they're too pleasant. That's why there's a line. The person at the front is concluded his business. They're just chitchatting about kids and Mo blah, blah, blah. And this, and it's like, guys, I just gotta return a phone here or whatever I'm doing, you know, whatever awful reason I'm here and I need a receipt, you know? So like it's still miserable for me, but it is in the most pleasant of environments, assuming they're open <laugh>, which is, they often are not. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:54:22):
Now people don't send digital cards either. I hope that's gone. Remember that for a while. You'd have little animated things in your email, Chris digital. Oh, I hated that.
Paul Thurrott (00:54:34):
You know, I, we have the family from France that we did our first home swap with was sending digital cards for a few years there. I wonder, I think they might. And they sent, and the French sent these cards after the holiday days they send them in January. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, it's kind of like a new year's year type
Leo Laporte (00:54:50):
Of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Well it's also understandable. I mean, they don't wanna send, you know, they send it air mail from France. It might not get here <laugh> just
Paul Thurrott (00:54:58):
Year. Right,
Leo Laporte (00:54:59):
Right. Yeah. So yeah, I guess it's a digital card from overseas seems makes sense. But I just, I think, I think cards, Christmas cards, all of this has gone by the wayside cuz we all do everything kind of face, face to face on zoom or
Paul Thurrott (00:55:14):
Something. This is a mistake. I think this is a nice tradition. I'm gonna go out and crank that little thing over there and make my own butter. But, but you know,
Leo Laporte (00:55:25):
<Laugh>,
Paul Thurrott (00:55:26):
It's all
Leo Laporte (00:55:26):
Good. A churn churn,
Mary Jo Foley (00:55:28):
Put a turn don't I sent you guys cards. They're in the mail. That's why I had to go to the police
Leo Laporte (00:55:32):
Office and Luka did, did Paul. I, he was listening obviously. Yep. He sent a lovely card host on TWI with his family. In fact there's several pictures and him and his wife. And I think that was exactly what I was need
Paul Thurrott (00:55:47):
The context, you know? Yeah. Sometimes the people look vaguely familiar whose children are,
Leo Laporte (00:55:52):
I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. Well, <laugh> get ready cuz this is coming right.
Paul Thurrott (00:55:59):
Those look vaguely like people, I know <laugh>
Leo Laporte (00:56:02):
This is our way of saying it's all meta and now from now on that's it? Yeah. All right. All right. Let's take a little break again. Chris Capella, just around the corner. It's getting in smell a lot like Christmas
Paul Thurrott (00:56:16):
Smelling, like ugly Microsoft sweater in here. I,
Leo Laporte (00:56:19):
I hope he is got that mind sweeper sweater. That would be so cool. Can't wait to see our show today brought to you by Anela. I love ELAs motto. Brilliance is evenly distributed all over the world, but opportunity is not, there are talented, brilliant, a grade programmers and other technical talent out there. But they live in, you know, Africa and they can't. And you know, there are no jobs for them. Andela is a global talent network with a mission to connect all that brilliance with the opportunity we have here in the states, an opportunity you might have your company's expected to move faster than ever of stay ahead of the competition. These days, you've got a lot of priorities to manage the, you know, it's hard to find the time to build an onboard, an amazing engineering team hard to find them.
Leo Laporte (00:57:12):
And this is part of the problem is you're limiting your search to the people. Next door Andela can help. It's the world's first talent network, connecting innovative companies like yours with top tier vet engineers. They've got a process. So these engineers are really good. They're really good. You can focus on your core business and you've got an engineering team. That's great. A first class Andela is committed to your success that with, with their combination of expert technical recruiters, proprietary matching algorithms, they've really built a business around this whole idea of finding great developers all around the world and then ma the best in the business. But, but then matching 'em to your business, letting you accelerate productivity drive revenue, the, the vetting process is rigorous. They maintain the highest quality of mission standards to ensure they can play lace you with top quality engineers at scale, but they can move fast. In fact, you know, you can call Adela today and be ready next week to get going in today's hypercompetitive environment, companies that limit themselves, the local hires are at a big disadvantage. You probably are already experiencing that with ELA. You could tap into their pool of highly qualified talent from around the world. Cut your hiring timelines down from months to days.
Leo Laporte (00:58:31):
When you hire ELA engineers, you can expect they'll be efficiently onboarded, ready to work. And, and I love it because th this is not like a remote team. This is, they are fully embedded within your organization and they guarantee at least five hours of overlapping working hours rest of your team. So it's not that thing where well, we'll have to call him in the, in, you know, in the middle of the night, cuz he's not working now. No they're overlapping, which is great. Lots of great testimonials on the website. Here's one mind share partnered with Adela. They had they needed desperately needed 10 new digital experts, data scientist, machine learning specialists, analysts. I mean, I mean, these are, these are the top people, software developers and it worked Mindshare's executive director and head of business. Intelligence says as we continue to enhance the synapse platform, time to value is very important. Andela is a good partner in helping us identify the right talent fit for different purposes. It's time to tap into a wider talent pool to stop competing with the big tech companies and spend less time interviewing brilliance is evenly distributed opportunity is not visit anela.com/four companies to schedule a complimentary consultation. You can even get a two week no risk trial with their vetted technical talent. Try 'em out. Anela a N D E L a andela.com/four-companies, four dash companies, a N D E L a.com/four-companies. Thank you, Adela for supporting windows weekly.
Leo Laporte (01:00:09):
Moving them right along. We gotta get ready for Chris Capella teams. We haven't talked about teams in half an hour. What's new with teams.
Mary Jo Foley (01:00:20):
<Laugh> teams is getting end to end encryption for one to one teams
Leo Laporte (01:00:27):
Calls. Oh, that's actually a big deal. It
Mary Jo Foley (01:00:29):
Is. So this is only for voice and video, not for chat or file sharing, but they're starting to roll this out now to tenants. And there's a couple interesting things. One is it's not on by default. So once it configures it and says, here are the users who we want to have. This users still need to turn on this feature. And then there, once it's on, there are a bunch of things that it conflicts with and won't work. So things like recording, live captions transcription, adding participants to a call. If it's a group call, none of those will work if you have end-to-end encryption on. So your only option is to go and shut off end-to-end encryption. If you want any of that, which is kind of ironic, but at least they're getting it.
Leo Laporte (01:01:15):
I think they can't, you can't, it's harder to do. You can't have all those things,
Mary Jo Foley (01:01:18):
Right? Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:01:20):
And encryption kind of makes it impossible to do that.
Mary Jo Foley (01:01:23):
Yeah. Right. If you're gonna add somebody to the call and it's a one on one encrypted call, how does that work? Right. So <laugh>. Yeah. but it's still great. Good to see. They promised this was coming and it actually is starting to roll that now. So that's great. I don't know, Paul, do you know if it's us only that's somebody asked me that and I'm like I
Paul Thurrott (01:01:42):
Don't believe that it, it is based on the language of the post. But let me
Mary Jo Foley (01:01:47):
Good. You'll look it up. Yeah. Some of the things that we see like in there's an asterisks hidden somewhere and it says us only, or us Canada and the UK only. And yeah, I didn't see that here, but it's one of those things you're like, yeah, it could be maybe I don't, I didn't see any exceptions, but
Paul Thurrott (01:02:08):
Yeah. I mean, it has been, it was tested across multiple enterprise customers in the us and Europe is the first line of that post mm-hmm <affirmative>. I, it doesn't, it seems like they would've been very, doesn't say
Mary Jo Foley (01:02:22):
It it's limited. Right? I think so, too,
Paul Thurrott (01:02:24):
Right? Yeah. Yeah. That was my take. But I'm trying to look fair.
Mary Jo Foley (01:02:28):
What I thought that anyway, it's good. It's starting to rule out when across 10, when
Leo Laporte (01:02:33):
Was illegal to exploit export encryption is I guess that's gone by the wayside.
Mary Jo Foley (01:02:41):
Yeah, I
Leo Laporte (01:02:41):
Guess so is Microsoft, let me ask you a question. Is Microsoft doing anything to make teams search more functional? They
Paul Thurrott (01:02:49):
Are <laugh> that came outta the blue. I'm just reading the notes here, Leo. Well, you psych. Yeah.
Mary Jo Foley (01:02:57):
How did you know? Yes. They're rolling out a new search in teams and you know, when you first hear about this, you're kinda like, yeah, sure. I'm sure it's gonna be great, but I've had people who have already gotten this feature say, oh no, this fixes search in teams. So what they're doing is they've redesigned the UI. So there's four search pages there's messages, people files and all, and this really, I guess lets you get much more granular and better quality searches when you're searching for something in teams. So yeah, that also is rolling out now. Have you tried it? I,
Paul Thurrott (01:03:35):
No, because I've been burned by this. So every week I write this premium newsletter at it tutorial and I try to use like a one word title when I can. So I'll just make something up like per say, I, I wanna use the title magic, you know? And I'm like, I, I feel like I used this title sometime in the past two and a half years I should search. So I search for magic. It doesn't come up with anything like, all right, fine magic. Magic's good. So I upload the file and it goes, Hey, this is already a file call magic. Did you want to override it? Come on. I just, I literally looked for this and yeah. So that's happened to me multiple times. That's
Mary Jo Foley (01:04:07):
Not good. I think that the search that works the worst for me in any Microsoft app is in the outlook outlook search, I think is just awful. Right. And sure. I'm really hoping when they come out with outlook Monarch, you know, that, that version that we keep hearing about that has still not materialized that maybe they'll fix search and outlook. I hope so. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:04:31):
Oh, I am happy about this. I fix it is a long time sponsor on our shows. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> we love Kyle. We he's big on the right to repair. They've been really pushing that forward. I, I guess they're doing a deal with Microsoft.
Paul Thurrott (01:04:44):
Yeah, yeah. In that he, he was the one that wrote their blog post about it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, Microsoft and apple, I think were both the target of like shareholder <laugh>, you know shareholders who kind of went after 'em for this. So they're, they're embracing right to repair, but it's good for customers. So obviously it's, you know, it's good. So yeah, this, now this is aimed at what they, if I list is where is it? I Fixit pro independent repairs, Microsoft authorized service providers, Microsoft experience centers and Microsoft commercial customers. And as far as the I Fixit pro independent repairer job goes, I believe it's free to get this title. You have to apply, but you can, I think an indivi, any individual could do this. It's obviously not aimed at end users per se. They're not, you're not gonna find a, a surface go, you know, display bond frame.
Paul Thurrott (01:05:35):
Yeah. In best buy, you know, but they do have, I think it's four, is it four? I think it's three or four new tools, three tools, sorry. A surface display bonding frame which applies to surface pro seven plus an eight, a surface battery cover for surface laptop three plus surface laptop go laptop se laptop studio and the surface display, deep bonding tool for service pro plus a seven plus pro eight and pro X. And then they, all, some of them will include various weights and accessories, you know, for these, for whatever these things are, this is not something, a normal person, whatever should ever or whatever be doing. But any move to right to repair is good. And kind of a related note. I, I didn't put this in the notes, but do you see Dell put up a prototype of a, a fully repairable laptop where every single component could be replaced and you could essentially over time build a brand new laptop by replacing individual components and they've even come up with a or they, this is again a prototype, but a they've come up with like a, like a webcam that connects to this, this display of an, any laptop we're using a magnet.
Paul Thurrott (01:06:40):
And it, then you can just replace that, you know, with a better camera as they come out. It's kind of interesting. So, oh, I think that's a great idea. I like that. Yeah. This is a good, this whole thing is just, it's just good in general for everybody. So whether you talk about you have an iPhone and you need to screen repaired or whatever it is, you have a laptop and you know, you, something is broken it's, it's such a good thing. So because we were really treading in the wrong direction and these things were like sealed boxes couldn't even get into with tools. So that we're finally, have you taken any of these apart? I mean, no, no. I would never do that.
Mary Jo Foley (01:07:13):
I right. And it's not even, it's definitely not for people like me. Right? Like, like I would never even thank do this.
Paul Thurrott (01:07:21):
Right. So over the summer I had, I brought two laptops to Mexico in August and one of them suffer, well, they both got water on them and one of them wouldn't start. That was a dragon fly. And the dragon fly is user serviceable. You need like a torque particular torque to open it up. I tried to actually try to find one in Mexico city. I, I find the exact one. And I I dunno if someone from HP heard me talking about it or if I contacted them, but they basically, what came down was like, Hey, look, you really shouldn't do this. If you're not educated about how it works, you could ate yourself. And it's really not designed for individuals. Like we we're, you know it would be better if you that destroyed it or recycled it, or you could send it back to us. And I said, if I sent it back to you, are you gonna open up and find out what was wrong with it? And it's like, no, we know exactly what's wrong with it. <Laugh> we just don't think you should open it up. And I was like, okay. So I ended up sending it back, but they just, I think they destroyed it. So <laugh> well, cuz it's Rex. I mean at that point, right?
Leo Laporte (01:08:21):
Can yeah. Yeah. You gotta be careful. Yeah. That's the, and I think that's probably the argument. A lot of companies use for keeping repairs to themselves is, you know, this is not, you could puncture the battery and all sorts of risks involved.
Paul Thurrott (01:08:33):
Well, but you know, laptops used to be made of components. You could replace, not all you couldn't replace the screen typically. Right. But you would have like a bay that could be a, a, an extra battery or a hard drive or an optical drive. And they, you know, they've, they've gotten less and less for parable they're made with really awful glue and materials that can remember the AERA. Yeah. On surface laptop, couldn't be ripped off without destroying the cake. And you know, I, I right to repair means a lot of things, but it, it, I think the big thing is just easier and more accessible repair and thus probably lower cost repair as well. Some machines literally can't even be repaired. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:09:10):
Like that's, that's why we, we love the, the framework. Right. Because you can open it up it's you can buy third party parts, put 'em in there. You can buy parts from framework. Right. Right. It's really nice that Dell's now announced they're gonna do something very, very surprisingly similar <laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> that's but I, I think that's good. I think every company should, and I think this is one step toward, in that direction anyway. Yep. Make it, make it a little easier to repair. We don't shame that these things or even upgrade because as like that camera cuz these things don't they don't belong in the landfill. That's not mm that's not the future we want exactly. Right. Our little babies. It's
Paul Thurrott (01:09:48):
More, it's good for the environment. Right? These things you stay out in the world longer, you can pass 'em on to other people. They can keep being used. Exactly.
Leo Laporte (01:09:54):
Exactly. let's see. About 10 minutes from the big C it's the CBA very excited about about all of this. Should we delve into the Xbox? How long is that gonna take? We do we, do you have time to a few minutes. All right.
Paul Thurrott (01:10:09):
Yeah. And then just do the Xbox and then you can probably do the, then
Leo Laporte (01:10:11):
We'll get, then we'll get ready for Mr. C. Okay.
Paul Thurrott (01:10:15):
So there was no formal announcement of this, but during an event that happened last week in the gaming world, Microsoft revealed that is rebranding, rebranding, sorry. Xbox game pass for PC. Jeez. I can't speak and you're not gonna believe what happens next. <Laugh> no. So well, so my, the branding on this has been kind of confusing. So there's been an Xbox game pass, which is the overall of us, which has various tier one of which has been called Xbox game pass for console sometimes just Xbox game pass, which kind of mixes things up Xbox game pass for PC obviously. And then Xbox game pass ultimate. So the console tier will now just go by the name Xbox game pass. And the PC tier will be called PC game pass. So they're getting rid of the Xbox name, although there'll be an Xbox logo as part of the, the brand obviously, and then Xbox game pass. Ultimate is not changing. So
Leo Laporte (01:11:08):
I wonder how we should ask Chris this, but I wonder how well this is doing this is I think was such a great
Paul Thurrott (01:11:13):
Thing. We've only gotten one figure. And I don't remember off the top of my head of what, what it was, but it was double digit millions of subscribers. Good.
Leo Laporte (01:11:22):
Wow. That's great. They deserves that. It's a great way to play. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:11:28):
Every month, twice, typically Microsoft announced is game pass titles across those platforms, console PC and cloud and cloud cloud is the Xbox cloud gaming feature of Xbox game pass ultimate. Right. Which is X cloud. And they typically do one right at the beginning of the month and then one in the middle of the month. So it is the middle of the month and they have a announced more titles, but the titles are all coming out today and tomorrow they're not coming out. You know, there's nothing coming out in the 27th or whatever. So they didn't say this, I take that to me. And that's probably it for December. Right. You know, typically things slow down around the holidays, but you never know. I suppose there could be a third announcement, I guess. We'll see. There's some pretty big titles in there.
Paul Thurrott (01:12:10):
I wanna hold off on what those are because one of them is my pick my software pick this week, if we get to that forget you saw that. Yeah. <laugh>, don't look at it. Look at it later. Yeah. and then two related news items that are not Xbox specific Sony, of course <laugh> having spent the last year's suing every company that tried to make a color cover of any kind for the PS five as announced, they're gonna release call covers of their own and they're coming out after the holidays, unfortunately, but starting in January, you will be able to buy pink, blue and purple covers. So you can replace the, I think it's like black and white color scheme of the default PS five with something it's cool. It's nice. It's got a, they've offered a couple of different colors in the controllers.
Paul Thurrott (01:12:53):
Microsoft of course has arts game labs for the controllers, which is incredible. You can really have an incredible amount of customization there. So it's kind of nice to see. I wish I I'd like to see stuff like that for Xbox and Google in a bizarre announcement, really bizarre. They actually contacted me the night of the announcement before it came and gave me a really vague quote about what they were doing. And then they announced it. And there's really not that many more details, but what it boils down to is Google is bringing Android games from the play store to windows in 2022, they're not gonna be streaming. They're gonna be locally installed. They, it, it's gonna offer that kind of, of Xbox play, anywhere type functionality where you can start a game on your phone, pick it up and continue on your PC and then go back to your phone or tablet or whatever and play it from there again.
Paul Thurrott (01:13:43):
And so you you'll have that kind of sign in experience, but they very explicitly pointed this out multiple times, not working with Microsoft on this. Microsoft played no role in this. This has nothing to do with any feature of windows 11. This is, we are doing this by ourselves. It's our store. We're not, you're not gonna get the stuff from some other store, which kind of throws a little bit of cold water on the notion that maybe someday the Google play store will come to the window store or the Microsoft store like the Amazon app store has, or, or will come, I guess. So it's a little weird, but I, I, so why would they do this? Right? I think that this is, Google's a part of Google's answer to what Apple's doing with iOS slash iPad OS slash Mac OS, where you can buy a game through their app store or subscribe to, you know, they have the the game, what, what's the game. They have a game service. Whose name is what? It's not apple, apple play, apple play. What's it called apple games, plus I don't know, whatever arcade, arcade. Thank you. I knew it was something unusual anyway. And you can run it's iOS
Leo Laporte (01:14:45):
Only. It's just, you know, it's not well,
Paul Thurrott (01:14:47):
Except that you can play iOS games. You can play it on technically right on an and on
Leo Laporte (01:14:52):
TV, apple TV. Yeah. I guess you can. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:14:53):
Yeah. So, so what does Google have for this? Right? So they have, you could play an, an Android game on a tablet, but nobody has an Android tablet. You could play it on a Chromebook, but very few people have Chromebooks. What else is out in the world? Well, windows PCs, right? And so most Android users probably use a windows PC. And I guess this, this is my guess, like, cuz they never said any of this, but I, my guess is this is their attempt to try to duplicate what apple is doing across platforms with their own game stuff. So interesting and mysterious.
Mary Jo Foley (01:15:23):
<Laugh> kind of like, yeah, I have people ask me, does that, do you think this means that Google is gonna bring their, either their store or more like business apps to the, my Microsoft store? And I'm like,
Paul Thurrott (01:15:34):
No, they, they explicitly said they hate each pretty much hate. They're not doing anything with the Microsoft store. No, that doesn't mean, I mean, I, it, it suggests that the play store will be made available on windows or at least part of it. Right.
Leo Laporte (01:15:46):
Weird. Cause didn't they knew Microsoft stores say other stores can be in here. Why wouldn't they? They did.
Mary Jo Foley (01:15:51):
Yeah. They did say
Leo Laporte (01:15:51):
That. Right.
Paul Thurrott (01:15:52):
They hate each other.
Mary Jo Foley (01:15:54):
Right. I think they had this agreement. Right. Google and Microsoft where they were kind of like in the de deun and then that fell apart this year. Right. I think it expireds ever. Yeah. Ever since then, it's just been like, yeah, we're back to being enemies again. It's all good. Right.
Paul Thurrott (01:16:08):
These companies have like, I almost identical robots running them. You think these guys would get together and the end of the earth or something, but they, they, these companies like hate each other so
Leo Laporte (01:16:16):
Strange.
Paul Thurrott (01:16:17):
Yeah. It's very strange.
Mary Jo Foley (01:16:19):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:16:20):
All right. Let's take a break. And when we come back, mm-hmm <affirmative> through the magic of video, Chris Capella will join us and we can this breaks maybe next
Paul Thurrott (01:16:31):
Year you can join us from the metaverse in teams. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (01:16:33):
Yeah, yeah. That's actually, don't don't laugh. I could see that don't laugh cuz it could happen. It's great. Don't see it happen. Yeah. Meanwhile, let me talk a little bit about our sponsor for this segment. Our show today brought to you by user way because podcaster audio and my radio show is audio. We have a lot of blind listeners and I hear from them all the time. Number one, complaint, accessibility. And you know, there, there is the irony of this is there is a law. There is the Americans with disability act the ADA. And it's a requirement that any public entity, including websites be fully accessible. It's just, it's just how it should be. Now I know as a, you know, on the one hand, I think I'm absolutely like this is absolutely has to happen. Should happen, must happen. Legally required.
Leo Laporte (01:17:26):
Cetera. On the other hand, as an oh owner of a business and, and many websites, I also think that's gonna be a pain. <Laugh> that's gonna be work and money. That's when user way stop by. And man, this is a mind boggling, big win for everyone. User way.org. Every website has to be accessible user way has an and credible AI powered solution that does it. One line of JavaScript. And suddenly you are completely compliant with the web content access guidelines with one line of JavaScript user way can achieve more than entire team of developers. It is hard. It's, it's overwhelming to make your website accessible, but you need to, you just need to fortunately user way's here to make it easy. And, and by the way, very cost effective first step probably go to user way.org/twi run the scanning tool to see if your site is ADA compliant.
Leo Laporte (01:18:22):
You'll be very glad to know that user way costs hardly anything. I mean, it's less than the, what we pay for the fonts on our website monthly. And it is also a very trusted solution. Over a million websites used user way. Coca-Cola Disney, eBay, FedEx, Walmart, UNICEF. They all use it to make their sites more accessible. But now these best in class enterprise tools are available as small and medium size businesses at prices we can afford. It's it's just good business sense too, because millions of users need user way just to purchase your products. And when you scale, don't worry. If it can handle, you know, Disney, it can handle your site user way. AI automatically fixes violations at the code level, adding to the accessibility layer in the browser so that when people come there, <affirmative> the accessibility layer makes it easy for them to navigate your site, to fill out forms, to use your shopping cart.
Leo Laporte (01:19:18):
All the images have Al tagged so they can, they can hear what you are seeing. It, it makes the website true to colors accessible without changing your brand. It doesn't change the, the hue. It just changes the saturation and luminance. And you'll get a detailed report of all the violations that were fixed. Plus it's easy to work with the user way software so you can enhance it. You can add to it. You can make those Al tags even more descriptive, completely platform agnostic. It works anywhere. Wordpress, Shopify w AEM site core SharePoint completely compatible. Even with a hand coded site. If you could put a line of JavaScript in you're good let your business meet its compliance goals. Improve the experience for your users. Open your users to a brand new world. Your world of accessibility, just ask Susan Bennett, the voice of Siri, what she thinks of user way. Hi, I'm
Speaker 5 (01:20:15):
Susan Bennett. The original voice of Siri. You won't hear me say something like this too often. I'm sorry. I don't understand what you're looking for, but every day that's what the internet is like for millions of people with disabilities user way fixes all of that with just one line
Leo Laporte (01:20:34):
Of code user way can make any website fully accessible, fully ADA compliant with a, a user way. Everyone who visits your site and brows seamlessly customize it to fit their needs as a great way to show your commit commitment to millions of people with disabilities and to avoid lawsuits too, go to user way.org/twi. You'll get 30% off right now. User way's AI powered accessibility solution, user way, making the internet accessible for everyone. That's something we can really get behind user way.org/twi. Go on there. Now let me see here. I think I heard a little commotion on the roof. I think somebody came down our chimney me see, is the plate just crumbs? <Laugh> the carrot is gone. The plate is crumbs. I think if I press the right button Mr. Chris Capossela should emerge.
Chris Capossela (01:21:27):
Yes.
Leo Laporte (01:21:28):
Wait a minute. I gotta move.
Chris Capossela (01:21:29):
Hi Leo
Leo Laporte (01:21:29):
Hi Chris!
Chris Capossela (01:21:31):
How are you?
Leo Laporte (01:21:31):
Oh, and you are wearing the the mind sweeper sweater we were hoping you would.
Chris Capossela (01:21:35):
Yep. Had to do it. The Windows team insisted that I wear it. It's very hot in here right now.
Leo Laporte (01:21:42):
<Laugh> thank you for matching the background wall wall color that we all have. Appreciate that.
Chris Capossela (01:21:48):
Yeah, that's pretty good. Right.
Leo Laporte (01:21:51):
Chris joins us. We, we calculated it. Chris, this is your seventh appearance, seven years in a row. Our holidays special with the chief marketing officer at Microsoft and before Paul and Mary Jo beat you up. I just wanna say <laugh> thank you for coming. You're very brave. Now I'm gonna get outta here and it's it's time for the the Chris cap show and I love it. Paul and Mary Jo takeover. Well,
Chris Capossela (01:22:16):
Great. Well thank you for having me.
Mary Jo Foley (01:22:17):
We're not gonna beat him up.
Leo Laporte (01:22:19):
No teasing. I'm teasing
Chris Capossela (01:22:22):
And thank you for spelling my name, right? It's a tough, tough, last name to spell spell.
Leo Laporte (01:22:25):
We spent literally half an hour trying to figure it out. Yep.
Chris Capossela (01:22:30):
You've done a very good job over the years of getting it right. But I've had lots of, lots of people spell it wrong over
Leo Laporte (01:22:35):
The years. So it's one P two S is one L
Chris Capossela (01:22:38):
Yeah. Everyone wants to double the Ps and double the Ls and give me a single S.
Leo Laporte (01:22:42):
It's Italian, right? Caposella.
Chris Capossela (01:22:44):
Yeah, exactly. You got it.
Leo Laporte (01:22:45):
Means the, the head of the salt. No. What does it mean? <Laugh> I don't know. Couple percent anyway. Welcome. It's great. It's really great to have you.
Chris Capossela (01:22:57):
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Obviously. It's been we got a lot to dig into. This has been a big, a big year, needless to say, as I guess every year is, but I'm really happy to have the chance to be here. So thanks for sneaking me in for a little bit today. Yeah, you bet.
Mary Jo Foley (01:23:11):
Great. Now we wanted you to start, like you always do lately and talk about what you call hidden gems. Cuz we always, we always get a few of these where you're like, these are things that didn't get a as much press or a notice maybe, but we think they were a big deal.
Chris Capossela (01:23:26):
Yeah. Great. I'd love to do the hidden gems and I'm gonna try to keep it as tight as I can. <Laugh> I I'm gonna do four hidden gems and I'm gonna time myself and try to do them in six minutes. Ooh. And they're I picked them. I picked them very carefully because I thought they would give you things to think about and, and perhaps talk about, so hopefully you'll, you'll enjoy them. And of course, hopefully your listeners will, will enjoy them. The fir the first one is something we've been working on for three years and finally reached the world. And it's not a product, but on Monday of this week my first hidden gem is we is this Xbox power on the story of Xbox sort of docu series.
Paul Thurrott (01:24:08):
Oh, you ruined my tip. <Laugh>.
New Speaker (01:24:10):
Oh my, oh, I did. Oh, I'm sorry, Paul.
Paul Thurrott (01:24:11):
No, it's alright. No, it's no. It's okay.
Chris Capossela (01:24:14):
Well, we've been fun. We've been funding this work for three years. Tina Summerford has done just a stunning job. This is like a five hour, four and a half hour series. You can get it on YouTube or IMDB-tv, Roku, Microsoft
Paul Thurrott (01:24:27):
Movie. It is fantastic by the way it,
Chris Capossela (01:24:29):
Oh my gosh. She did just, I mean the whole team did a stunning job and the reason I pick it is because I think a gamers will love it. But even if you don't love gaming, I did like how the team told a lot of the Microsoft mistakes. I mean,
Paul Thurrott (01:24:42):
It, it does does no, I'm actually, I'm really glad you said this. Cuz I, my, what I was gonna use this as my tip and what I was gonna say was Mary Jo I know you're not into gaming, but given your knowledge of the history of Microsoft, you have to watch this documentary. It's fantastic.
Mary Jo Foley (01:24:54):
Yeah. Cool. Okay.
Chris Capossela (01:24:55):
And just watch the first episode and if you don't say, oh my gosh, I wanna watch the rest of it, you know? Yeah. Would be, you will. Yeah. And the team was very clear. Hey, if we make this, we're gonna tell the, the whole story and we're gonna, you know, gonna be some worth that the world sees. And yeah. So I picked that one as that's hidden gem Nu number one. Okay. Should we that's great. Move on to number two. Yeah. Okay. Nu number two, hidden gem number two. And you're gonna, you're gonna think I'm crazy for picking this one because it's not particularly <laugh>, it's not particularly, but it goes nicely with the Xbox one. It's not that sort of glamorous,
Paul Thurrott (01:25:27):
If you want, if you wanna keep 'em all Xbox focused, that'd be great. <Laugh> there's
Chris Capossela (01:25:30):
I got a couple, I got a couple of notes. I got the, the second one, which is a little bit more on a serious note is the the actual, the Microsoft store policy changes we made happened a bunch of them that happened this year. And before the policy changes, we published a bunch of app store principles back in October, 2020, and we invited Android and sort of iOS to embrace them. And we said, windows of course needs to embracing. These are the three big ecosystem app store ecosystems. And we basically punched, published a bunch of principles around fairness and innovation and greater opportunity. Economic opportunity for developers. Satya is really on a mission around economic opportunity for creators and developers. And then we updated a bunch of the way that the Microsoft store on windows works and the four I'll just call out, you know, developers can finally bring basically any apps to, or they want to the store.
Chris Capossela (01:26:23):
It can be a win 32 app, a PWA, a UWP, whatever framework they wanna use. They can bring it to the store app. Developers can bring their own commerce into our store. And if they bring their own commerce where they're doing the commerce through their backend, through their app, then they keep a hundred percent of the revenue and we don't take any of that. Revenue. Developers can bring their own browser engines to the store. Historically stores have locked down to the engine that that ecosystem wanted and we've opened that up. And since then, opera Yandex, Mozilla, they've all come to the Microsoft store and windows. And then finally, and probably most importantly, the third party storefront apps, you know, are now can be discoverable from within the Microsoft store. And of course we announced that Amazon is bringing their Android app store to, to windows 11.
Chris Capossela (01:27:07):
We're very into windows 10. We're very excited about that. And epic of course has brought their app store to ours as well. So you can search deep link into their stores, go in their stores, et cetera. And I think, I think foreshadowing <laugh> publishing principles for the industry and then us walking the talk with our own implementation to those principles. I do think that's a very powerful blueprint for us to use. We did it with stores. I think it's an important, powerful blueprint for us to use in other places. And maybe we'll see more of that in the years ahead. So hidden gem number two. I know it's not sexy. People might be great. That was very sexy. OK,
Mary Jo Foley (01:27:47):
Great. Can we ask you a question about, about the gems? Yeah, yeah, of course. What about Google? What about Google? Yeah. So they, them coming to the store, is it like off the table or no? Oh
Chris Capossela (01:27:58):
No, no, no, no. Maybe. Well obviously if we say third party store fronts can be discoverable through you through the win the Microsoft store then great. Let's talk to any storefront that wants to come. I happened to notice news, like what was it two days ago, Mary Jo some recently this week, I think they said, yeah, Hey, we're bringing an app that is gonna bring games to windows. And we were like, oh, okay. And obviously now we're gonna, we're gonna see what that looks like over, but literally anybody who, you know, has that, that storefront, we want to talk to them about their willingness to bring it. And you know, there'll be multiple levels of what it means to bring the store. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> with Amazon, we're doing deep work. So, you know, you'll be able to search in our store and find things in their store.
Chris Capossela (01:28:42):
And there's, you know, we're doing a lot of work on the flow, so you only have to enter your Amazon credentials once and all, all that stuff. So I don't think everyone will wanna do the same amount of work, but yeah, we're not, it's not restricted to a particular storefront. And I think it's the only way for, you know, these ecosystems to move forward in a healthy way. And as I said, you know, Satia is just like creator economic opportunity for creators on windows, economic opportunity for developers on windows it's and you've heard him talk a little bit about it. So that, that was my number two. Okay. Should I go to three? Yeah, sure. Okay. I think you might have hurt me a little bit on time, but I think though within it with, well, we
Paul Thurrott (01:29:22):
That's, that's not your fault. We, we interrupt. We'll deduct that. We'll deduct that from the thank you. I appreciate it. Reset the clock to two minutes. <Laugh> add 13 seconds and to the clock starting now,
Chris Capossela (01:29:34):
HJA number three is accessibility with surface and accessibility with gaming. You know, we dedicated like 15 minute its of our surface launch to the, to the surface adaptive kit. And we created this with this inclusive tech lab. We did it in partnership with people with disabilities. And as you guys know, you know, there's these sort of key cap labels and bump labels and port indicators and even this sort of device opener that we launched <affirmative> and I didn't know how big a deal it would be. And our team said, you know, this is gonna be a bigger deal than you think. And I said yep. I'm not sure it's like $15 of key cap labels. And of course they were right. And I, my doubt, my, my, my lack of clarity was wrong and it, it, you know, it's become a big thing and an important thing.
Chris Capossela (01:30:20):
And more importantly, be even in the surface adaptive kit is this thing we introduce that most people actually have no idea about. We launched this thing called the Xbox accessibility testing service, which is a service we provide to game developers to then partner with members of the disability community as they're building their game so that they can build a game that is more accessible out of the shoot. And so for me, hidden gem number three is just this sort of accessibility in hardware, accessibility services for developers who wanna build more accessible things. And I think that was a pleasant surprise for me. And then very few people have talked about the testing service that I think will be quite helpful for dev game devs. Yeah. And so I wanted to make that hidden gem number three.
Paul Thurrott (01:31:02):
Yeah. We'd definitely talked about the surface and the adaptive kit and the Xbox adaptive controller. Yeah. That, but not the surface. Yeah. That, that's true. Mm-Hmm
Chris Capossela (01:31:12):
<Affirmative> last one. Mary Jo, this is actually for all of you, but it's a special Mary Jo Mary Jo focused one. Nice. And this is you again, you're gonna, like, people are gonna laugh out loud and, but you gotta give me a minute hidden on number three, hidden on number three is Azure digital twins, and you're gonna sing, what are you talking about? I don't even know what you're talking about. No, I know why I know exactly why exactly. Of course you do. Of course, which I said it would it's and there's a couple reasons why, first of all, if you don't know what the heck this is, this is a set of services that we provide in our Azure cloud that enables, you know, regular people to create digital models of basically anything physical. It could be a digital model of something simple, like a coffee cup, but it could be a digital model of something super complex, like an entire energy grid or a warehouse or a factory.
Chris Capossela (01:32:02):
And one of the reasons I chose it in addition to the obvious foreshadowing to the metaverse is the fact that one of the best customers we have that's using this is Anheiser Bush in Bev. And since you guys always talk about beer, I said, I'm going to bring this to the show, right? Because, and Heiser has what these folks have done is they've literally taken 200 breweries and they've created digital twins for every one of those breweries. And now their digital twins are, are literally a, a model of each of these breweries and the supply chain that feeds the brewery and their twins are synchronized with the physical brewery. So the digital model is all, always live and up to date with what's happening in the physical in the physical brewery itself. And then their brew masters who you guys talk about sometimes can adjust things based on these active conditions that they're seeing in the digital twin. So, you know, I think there's a lot of discussion on the metaverse on the consumer side, which is awesome and excited to talk about that. But actually there's a lot of companies who are sort of already creating their own, you know, version of this using Azure digital twins. And I thought that was kind of a nice blend of consumer commercial. And so number four is the very commercial, but beer oriented, Azure D <laugh> nice.
Leo Laporte (01:33:13):
Hey, Katie, like very, very commercial, but beer. Yeah, yeah,
Chris Capossela (01:33:18):
Exactly.
Leo Laporte (01:33:19):
Like off brew, cuz that would be really a good name, but yeah, no, I think the chat room saying you in your very first gem, you neglected to mention the name of the story of Xbox power on the story of Xbox. I thought, I thought it did maybe. Okay. Maybe the chat room just missed it.
Chris Capossela (01:33:37):
It called power on the story of Xbox. Exactly. Want to give that
Leo Laporte (01:33:39):
Credit? You can, can find it everywhere. Youtube, Microsoft movies everywhere. Yeah. And it really looks good. It's for, I, yeah, I can't wait to see. And it's,
Chris Capossela (01:33:47):
You know, like three years we had to find budget for this thing. Like it, you, I dunno if you know, you know, corporate America, it's hard to budget over multiple years for something <laugh> and oh gosh. I'm just so glad.
Mary Jo Foley (01:33:56):
Especially during the pandemic. Right. <laugh>
Chris Capossela (01:33:59):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So anyways, there you go. Those are my three hidden dreams.
Mary Jo Foley (01:34:03):
Those are good. That's great.
Chris Capossela (01:34:04):
Awesome. Okay. Over, I'm done over to you guys. Woo. All right. See you next
Leo Laporte (01:34:08):
Year. Oh wait. Oh, wait. You have questions. <Laugh>
Mary Jo Foley (01:34:10):
We have a few questions. We have some kind of open ended questions and some pointed questions, but go for it. I wanna kick it off with one about windows 11, because I'm, I'm curious what you think about the reception and the pace of upgrading to windows 11 is, and when I say you, I mean Microsoft, but you can say it from your own perspective because we have our own take of how we think it's going and how, how the launch went and how subsequently people have felt about it. But I wanna hear what you think like you're yeah. Great. Your analysis
Chris Capossela (01:34:42):
Of that. Yeah. I mean, I'll leave it to Amy Hood, our chief financial officer to, you know, wait for, wait for the time to share, you know, actual numbers about momentum. But what I can say is a couple things first, you might have noticed we we're speeding up the rollout. And that was based on like in terms of how many PCs we say, Hey, you can upgrade to windows 11. And so that's obviously a good piece of news in the sense that we think the technical rollout is, is going well. And so we sort of opened up the gates faster than we expected to. And I certainly like that. So that's one measure we're excited about. I would say that the retail and OEM reception has been quite good, which is something I care a lot about today at holiday, about 97% of PCs on retail shelves either have windows 11 or are capable to upgrade to windows 11 with the specs that are on shelves.
Chris Capossela (01:35:33):
And most big retailers are telling me, you know, very early in 2022, despite all the supply chain issues, every machine they sell will be a, will be a windows 11 machine. So like the ecosystem has moved to 11 despite very difficult circumstances. And we're really pleased with that, I would say on the user front there's two things I would say. One is we're seeing more interest from commercial customers than perhaps we had predicted which is great. It doesn't actually mean sales change cuz a commercial customer can buy windows 10 PC or windows 11 PC. It's not a sales thing, but it is a people seem to like the design. They seem to like the simplicity, I would say hardcore windows, fans, it's more of an update for, it's more of an adjustment for them. You know, they're missing their clock across multiple monitor.
Chris Capossela (01:36:18):
They're telling us they wanna move the task bar to the left of the screen or to the top of the screen. Like some of the simplicity choices that we made and you know, upon is very good at this. I think of course we're hearing lots of feedback from what I'll call the power user of windows 10, that they're missing some of those things and they're telling us, Hey, can you still bring some of those back? Even you wanna keep things simple and clean. And so we're listening to that feedback. And then I would say people who are more casual windows users have had a much more, you know, universally positive response on, wow, the design is beautiful and modern and you know, I like the simplicity and, and that sort of thing. So that gives you a little bit of texture. I would say as a company we're thrilled, but we know we have work to do.
Chris Capossela (01:37:01):
And I would say I'm really glad PNO is leading the charge. I spent a lot of time with him. We talk about all these things on a regular basis and he's a very thoughtful person who he's not a big bang type person. He's not like the day we launch windows 11 is like, we're done for him. That's like day one. And he would say, we're in the first inning of the windows 11, you know, American baseball game, which has nine innings. And so I know he's very excited about 20, 22 and he has a lot of plans to make it better for all users. And so, you know, I would say the leadership team we're super, we're super are pumped, but we're also humble that we know not every power user loves all the decisions we made.
Paul Thurrott (01:37:46):
Yeah. So we gotta, I assume you've heard some of the conversations we've had and others have had around Microsoft edge and what's happening with default browsers and windows 11 and so forth. I mean, how do you, I mean, how do you look at the edge browser? Is there a, you know, what's the value proposition there you know, for users I guess for customers and, and I mean, how do you, what's your take on the controversies, the issues that, you know, we and others have raised around edge.
Chris Capossela (01:38:13):
Yeah, totally. It's a, it's a great topic and I'm glad to get the chance to talk about it. First of all, I guess I'm a glass half full person. <Laugh> and by that, I mean, boy, is it nice to have fans that like the browser and don't want us to screw it up and by that I'm, you know, like if you back, if you went back three years, right, right. You know, we were not in a position where people were saying, I, I like what you've done. Thank you. Don't make it big. Don't make it gloat wear. Right. You know, don't add features. I don't want like, don't you get, you have a good browser. Like, so at the first thing I look at is wow. People actually care and I'll take that. That's actually a dramatic change in position for the company from just three years ago. Or maybe it's four years ago. You, you can tell me the exact date, but it's
Paul Thurrott (01:39:07):
Somewhere in there. Three is about right. Yeah.
Chris Capossela (01:39:09):
Yeah. I mean, I remember the meeting where we said, we're gonna write a new browser based on chromium. And you know, we had to make that decision and here we are and people are saying, you've got a good browser based on chromium. Don't screw it up. So I, I actually start with there. I love hearing that people love vertical tabs. I love hearing that people who shop a lot, actually like the coupon work we've done and I know not, and everyone shops a lot. And so they don't like the coupon work we've done. You know, I like the security. I like, like, I think we've built a compelling browser that not everybody, but a bunch of people are saying, I actually like this and I use it all the time. And so I, I start there, you know, there's no doubt that we heard the feedback loud and clear that you've gotta make it simpler for someone to just flip their default browser.
Chris Capossela (01:39:51):
And don't give me the super granular control on all these tiny little file extension and come on, just make it simpler. So windows 11 inside preview preview build, you guys know it 2, 2, 5 0 9, which is now released to the dev channel. It's super simple to just flip that browser to, to what you want. And so I'm glad we're listening to that feedback. And again, that's when PNO and I talk about very frequently. Another reason I'm a glass half full person is cause I know Satya and I know upon us and I know the leadership team and I know, you know we wanna listen to the feedback and make sure we're building on something that is strong. I think there's also been a bunch of feedback around what some people call ads. What I actually don't call ads because for me, an ad is something somebody gives you money for, and it's a market place and you bid on the ads and whoever bids highest gets the ad spot and in the ad goes.
Chris Capossela (01:40:43):
But I think you, what you often call ads. I refer to as essentially in product promotion in product notification. And I don't mean to be pedantic, but I do wanna make sure that someone who listens, we don't sell ads. There's no ad marketplace to get a spot on the windows lock screen that windows lock screen is sacred to us. We test the heck out of the image that we put on that lock screen. We, we flight tons different images to tons of different cohorts. If you're a gamer, we're gonna do something different with the start menu than if you're not a gamer. And so we're trying to figure out ways to make the windows experience highly, highly engaging. And I know not everybody loves in product notifications that suggest that you use this Adobe product that's cuz we think you're a photography lover or you use clip champ because we think you're a video.
Chris Capossela (01:41:38):
You know, you want to edit video. But it is important for us to drive engagement. We do think engagement drives long term satisfaction with windows and that's important. We're not gonna get it right. Every time we're hearing the feedback. Believe me you know, when people say, should I hate the way you've done this, or I hate the way you've done that. Sometimes it's around in product notification. Sometimes it's around a feature that we've added that they think should be an extension and not a feature. And those aren't the same thing. Those are two different types of feedback to us. But we're listening. We're trying to be incredibly data driven. You can see changes in insider per review builds. We're not gonna do everything everybody asks says, when you make a pizza for a billion people, you can't make everybody happy. Which is sort of what we try to do with windows and hopefully with edge. So that's a lot, I'll throw out you, let me pause and see if you have any reactions to, to those, those
Paul Thurrott (01:42:28):
Thoughts. Well, I, I understand. I mean, I, I, it's all understandable and I get it. I mean, I, I, I don't wanna get it too deep into the weeds around very specific behaviors, but even in the insider program, when you switch you to default browser, we, you know, you're still pushing edge in certain circumstances. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris Capossela (01:42:45):
I could talk if
Paul Thurrott (01:42:46):
You want. Yeah. And I, right. I don't mean to push something super specific cause I know, you know, the product eye or whatever, but I mean, what's the justification from, I dunno if it's from a business standpoint or just a, a marketing, you know, or, I mean, how do you, how do you handle the fact that people have made a specific browser choice, but you're circumventing that in some cases.
Chris Capossela (01:43:07):
Yeah, no, I know exactly what you mean and this it's always interesting for me to hear who, who, how marketing, you know, how powerful people think marketing is. It's awesome. Make
Paul Thurrott (01:43:15):
Positive, Chris. That's what I'm looking for. I just
Chris Capossela (01:43:18):
Good. I didn't, I didn't know. I wielded, I didn't know the small number of marketers wielded so much power at this company in general. I mean, just to give you an inside scoop in general, if it's a in product decision, you know, that's usually being made by an engineering leader. Like someone like, like Aons or, you know, a Scott Guthrie or you an engineering leader. If it's something like the notifications of you know, the lock screen and windows or something like that, the, that in product surface area programming, you know, that's typically something that is driven by marketing just in case you care. The ones you're talking about are definitely ones that the product team we've essentially said, look, when somebody has a particular experience in windows, we want to know that that windows experience is windows soup to nuts, start to finish so we can have control over what that consumer experience is.
Chris Capossela (01:44:10):
That's not a marketing statement of, Hey, we're gonna drive more revenue. If someone views a help topic in edge, instead of what they've chosen as their default browser or the widgets that are built into windows. If you click on those, that's literally us saying, we think the curated experience is gonna be better soup to nuts for things that are built into windows, like the widgets or the news feed compared to somebody who wants to pin the Chrome browser or the Firefox browser to the task bar and browse the internet with that browser. And we want the user to be in control of, of that. Now what's the edge and sorry, bad pun. What's the right line. What's the right line. That is a totally good debatable topic for when is it something that we should curate soup to nuts? And when should it be something that no, no, no. When somebody selected this video editor, anytime they do these 17 things, that should just be the default video editor they selected. And we, we won't get that right for everybody, but it is an area where we'll listen and keep, keep updating and keep modifying. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, that's the specifics of, of edge of the edge soup to nuts. One. That's
Mary Jo Foley (01:45:21):
Good. I have a question about your comment and the pizza, making the pizza for a billion people or whatever <laugh> so what if, instead of thinking that way, you said, Hey, like what happened with the Kindle? If you're willing to pay, not to see ads or house or notifications, whatever, right? You, you could actually pay us X amount of money and we'll take those away. Do you ever consider that? Or yeah, we do about
Chris Capossela (01:45:48):
That. In fact, I, I don't even know that paying is the, you know, we've tried to actually make those notification things that you can control and you know, but yeah, of course, you know, the, the free to play gaming model essentially says, here's a game you play. And every five minutes, we're gonna put an ad in it. And if you wanna pay us five bucks, you, you know, we will get rid of the ads and a lot of game developers do that. You know, do I love that notion in, for an operating system? I don't love that notion for operating system. <Laugh>, I'd prefer the notion of us getting it right of you don't even notice. You know, when I go to netflix.com, I know they're programming the heck out of that homepage. When I go to the Xbox dash, we all know we're programming the heck out of that dashboard. And you know, we want to get the experience to feel like that where you don't say, Hey, there's some notification to watch the Netflix movie that Netflix obviously wants me to watch. And it doesn't bother me because I love action movies. And there's the rock. And yet another action movie right there on the
Paul Thurrott (01:46:48):
Hometown. I knew exactly what movie you meant. <Laugh> right. When you, when you first brought them. No, no,
Chris Capossela (01:46:52):
One's confused. That's not gonna win an Oscar, but they put it there and they built it and they're gonna promote what they think is gonna, let me keep coming back to Netflix. And so yet, Barry, Jo, we could technically do it, but I think we kind of feel like him, maybe that's not the design we're going for where someone has to pay us more money instead, you know, let's give them control over the notifications and let's make the lock screen delightful. And something that people actually love to use, but you're right. It's technically totally possible. Do we speak about it? Honestly, not much. There isn't like a movement inside the company to say, Hey, let's charge people to turn offs, annoying stuff. It's more, how do we get rid of the annoying stuff? Mm-Hmm <affirmative> mm-hmm <affirmative> yeah, Kindle's done a nice job. I think, I don't know if you've used a Kindle recently, but they haven't a funded, they have sort of an ad funded skew, but they're not, you know, it's, it's reasonable, you know, you unlock it and there's an ad. Okay. Mm-hmm <affirmative> then you go, but they're not putting an ad in front of me, every five pages that I turn the book. Right, right, right. And those are ads, by the way, those, you know, those are pay for ads. You, you can buy those. I can, I can buy that slot if I want to. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> what else? What else? Keep coming. We're running that.
Paul Thurrott (01:48:03):
Let's go back to Xbox. Okay. What about the console shortage? Is there any light, the <laugh> end of the tunnel or whatever. I mean, God, it's dark. It's a, it's literally a year later
Chris Capossela (01:48:16):
It's darkest inside the company. Just so you know, I
Paul Thurrott (01:48:19):
Think, why do you hate Xbox fans, Chris? <Laugh> no, it's <laugh>.
Chris Capossela (01:48:24):
I think one of these shows Mary Jo might have asked me, like, is this a marketing tactic of keeping supply this year? I wondered that I did. It's like, God, it really, you
Paul Thurrott (01:48:34):
Gotta think a year later, it's like, no, they just can't sell it. They can't get
Chris Capossela (01:48:37):
This. It really isn't. It really isn't here. Here's what I would say. For people who are just infuriated with us, we're infuriated too. If it was only a single pinch point, if it was only the AMD chip, you know, that would make life easier. There are multiple component shortages, which makes things complicated and then believe it or not. There's a bunch of ships sitting in cargo bay, you know, in cargo bay, sitting in ports that are just stuck. And so, you know, you can imagine how infuriating it is. We're paying for things to be moved around the planet, flown shipped. There are some, and they're like, they're right over there on the water. And we can't even get 'em in the port to get them. So it's frustrating. I will say that throughout the holiday period, there have been little bursts of S and X.
Chris Capossela (01:49:26):
We're seeing a little more S than we are X, which is helpful. Retailers are trying to meter the ease out at different buying windows. So if you haven't gotten one for Christmas or for holiday, it's actually, you will see some retailers that are just waiting and they're gonna, you know, open up the doors and there's still be some that will be purchased. But if you ask me, Hey, when will this get better? I wish it would be soon. And we don't think it's gonna be terribly soon. And that's frustrating because there are all these different choke points. Don't blame AMD. Don't like, there's not one thing to blame. There's multiple choke points with the supply chain challenges that the world is having. So we're just trying to gut it out, do everything we can, you know, I would say, I mean, just I'm a marketer game pass, lets you stream to any device that you might already own. So if you can't get a console, but you already have a PC or an iPad or you know, you can give someone Xbox game pass and they can stream hundreds of games to a device they might already own it's same. I get it. You know, UN unwrapping a little card. Isn't as fun as unwrapping, like a console I
Paul Thurrott (01:50:33):
Get. Yeah. But if you want to just play halo, right. I mean, that's something I, we haven't talked about, but I did play that over Xbox, you know, cloud gaming. Yeah. It was a
Chris Capossela (01:50:43):
Really tweet. There's a really cool tweet for someone who's not like a Microsoft fan and they were using a random Xbox con, a random controller. That's not an Xbox controller. And I think maybe a second tier or third tier Android phone. And they had a, you know, they had a you know, a controller connected to it and they were streaming halo, infinite and forts a horizon five to this thing. And they were like, this actually works. And so you're right. I mean, there is another way to give gaming gifts that aren't consoles, but we're super frustrated. We hate that our fans can't buy them. And yeah, we share the frustration,
Paul Thurrott (01:51:25):
Chris. I know you have
Chris Capossela (01:51:25):
A hard, very depressing. That's a very depressing answer for give
Paul Thurrott (01:51:29):
It's up to Chris. It's
Chris Capossela (01:51:30):
Up to Chris. Yeah. For go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Go, go.
Mary Jo Foley (01:51:35):
I think it was one of the very first times you were on windows weekly, you talked about, you really wanted to turn more users into fans. Yeah. Great. Right. And so that means to me, winning over, not just business users who you already have pretty much kinda locked in, but we have a
Chris Capossela (01:51:53):
Strength, consumers. We have
Mary Jo Foley (01:51:54):
A strength. You have a very, yeah. Okay. Not lock in is a tough word, but <laugh> but what about consumers? Right. So I, my question is if you were going to give yourself a report card this year and say, how have we done in turning consumers? What grade would you give yourself? Mm
Chris Capossela (01:52:11):
That's such a good question. I think let's see. An overall grade would probably I'll give us a, a, mm I'll be a tougher grader. I'll give us a, B minus overall as a company C plus B minus. Now why do I say that it's important to have a high bar? I think in the gaming world, I I'd honestly give us an a minus because I can't be, I can't be so arrogant to give us an a, but I think when you look at what we've done with gaming, wow. It's, it's just been a blockbuster year. Our first party games, I think have exceeded expectations age of empires, YouTube just announced today that Minecraft has been viewed a trillion times. We've crossed the trillion barrier on YouTube, but Minecraft content has now been viewed on YouTube more than any other IP on YouTube, including, you know, Justin Bieber and Katie Perry and like everything you could possibly imagine.
Chris Capossela (01:53:08):
<Laugh>, and it's, that's, you know, it's mind blowing. So like gaming, I really would say the companies just had a phenomenal year, but I think windows 11 is an important step, but it's not everything we're not done. You know, the teams consumer experience we shipped, I want more, I want better. So it's a, it's an important step. We bought a company called clip champ. I'm really excited to have video editing, be something on windows that's delightful, but buying the company doesn't change. You know, it doesn't like make it into 5, 10, 20, 50 million people using it. So, you know, I I'd give us a, I'd give us a mixed rating, but I think we've laid the foundation for a lot of good things to come. And yeah, if at the end of the day, you had to average up your a minus in gaming with lower scores in other places, I would say, you know, let's average it out to whatever a, B, B minus C plus, but you know, I step back and I say, look, who can do a better job?
Chris Capossela (01:54:04):
Keeping consumer entertained on a console on a PC, on a phone, then Microsoft, we should do the best job who could help consumers thrive in their education, literally their education, like going to school, we should be doing a fantastic job with windows and Microsoft 365 and surface who should do a better job at connecting with their friends and family. Apple does a wonderful job as long as it's all within apple, but who can do it across apple and Android and windows and Mac cush. That should be us who should make shopping a safe, delightful experience on the internet. That should be us, you know, who like we have, we have the ability to execute. I think we can do more for consumer creators than we've done. And that's why I'm so excited about clip champ. We help people build new worlds with Minecraft. Like we have a lot of the pieces and I remain very bullish that gaming won't be the only place where we can do, you know, true a level work. And I hope that 21 lays the foundation for, you know, 22, 23 to have that B minus C plus, you know, move up quarter over quarter over quarter.
Leo Laporte (01:55:17):
Chris, it's been a yeah. Short, but very pleasurable experience having you
Chris Capossela (01:55:23):
Well, thank you so much for having me. Yeah. I really appreciate it for,
Leo Laporte (01:55:26):
Yeah. I don't wanna throw you out, but I know you, you know, you had to make time for us and you don't have to go home. Grace, you just can't stay here. <Laugh> exactly. But it's closing time and exactly Chris cap. Well, thanks for chief. Thank you for having me. It's so great. Chief marketing officer at Microsoft. Thank you, sir. I'm gonna press the button. You're going to disappear back up the chimney, the plate where you to the metaverse make sure you keep metaverse. Thanks, Chris. Take care. Thank you, byebye. Thank you. Bye bye. Thanks. Well, look at that. He's disappeared. It's an amazing thing. That's
Paul Thurrott (01:55:54):
A nice little swipe to get that. That's pretty cool.
Leo Laporte (01:55:56):
Swipe. Apparently got trained professionals here who knew, so yeah,
Paul Thurrott (01:56:03):
So he's always great. And by the way, I believe if you go to YouTube today, their logo is that 1 trillion number. And I think that's for mine. That's amazing. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:56:10):
That's, that's all the Minecraft videos together. I'm sure. But still, that's an amazing number and YouTube certainly made a lot of money on Minecraft. Yeah. I'm sure that remember when they bought it, everybody was like, why are they buying Minecraft? Oh, Microsoft did the right thing. Totally. I'm talking about YouTube. I mean, that's the funny thing about the YouTube business is, you know, they can make money off of creators making Minecraft videos. Yeah. Yeah. And, and a trillion is a lot. It is. I also am always impressed. And I think this must be Chris's super power cuz he could take anything negative and make it sound like sure. You know, he can turn it, you know, it's
Paul Thurrott (01:56:52):
Yeah. We, we couldn't have D more different outlooks on life. The two of us than,
Leo Laporte (01:56:56):
You know, he's, he's the anti Paul
Paul Thurrott (01:56:59):
Throt. He really is. He's you know, and I say that with great respects. You don't wanna be like me. <Laugh>,
Leo Laporte (01:57:05):
That's good. It's, it's a, you know, it's really it's interesting. And he does a very good job of he's very persuasive, very good job of
Paul Thurrott (01:57:14):
Condensing. Yeah. He's always, he's always fantastic.
Leo Laporte (01:57:16):
It also reminds me that there's a very different narrative about what we observe going on from the outside than what he there's observe going on from the inside, that what we at, you know, what we might attribute to malice or greed that's true is completely unrelated to what's going on inside. And you know, we both have our points of view from where we stand, but
Paul Thurrott (01:57:39):
That's right. And I, I, I should just, just so people understand too, cause I know there are gonna be people who say didn't push him hard enough on something or he didn't, you know you gotta understand Microsoft's a humongous company and he doesn't singlehandedly walk around the product groups and tell 'em what to do. It's not his fault,
Leo Laporte (01:57:54):
Man. He
Paul Thurrott (01:57:55):
Didn't, he made that point, the idea he did, you know? Yeah. He made that
Leo Laporte (01:57:58):
Point. I thought that was
Paul Thurrott (01:57:59):
Quite good, but this, you know, but there's always gonna be that kind of thing, you know? Well they implemented that UI in his place kind of thing. Yeah, they did. They did. He didn't <laugh>, you know, I mean, I, I don't know that we'll be able to get to the person or people that came up with this and really ever figure out the why of it or whatever, but yeah, it's important. I think the thing he brings, which is so important is just the kind of high level strategic way that Microsoft looks at windows and edge in that case. And, and, and I think it's, it's helpful to hear that because I think a lot of like you brought up the subscription, the notion of I'll pay you to mm-hmm <affirmative> get rid of this stuff. And he's like, you know, we don't, we just would rather not make, make it not terrible. <Laugh>, you know, like make it less annoying and that would be better. Wouldn't it? And that's, that's kind of what you want to hear. Not that oh good. There's another revenue source. We'll make windows so terrible. People will pay us.
Leo Laporte (01:58:50):
Yeah. <laugh> yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:58:52):
You know?
Leo Laporte (01:58:56):
Well I think that's you want, we could do the book back in the book. I think we should save it for next. Yeah, we can save it. We're gonna be beret, probably of stories. We won't have Microsoft executives to
Paul Thurrott (01:59:06):
Filter. Just bring up. Let's gotta bring up one thing real quick. I did, like I said, when Chris was on, I did want, oh, okay. I'm sorry. Do it. Oh I, I, I, I do think anyone who's not interested in gaming, but cares about Microsoft. She still power. I think it's, it's very, very good, but we didn't bring up one story. There was a big issue with Android and teams where if you had teams involved in a certain situation, you couldn't dial 9 1 1. So right. This, the app has been updated to fix that problem. But the work around to this is to make sure you're signed into teams because apparently mm-hmm <affirmative> this only happened when you had teams installed that weren't wow. Signed in. But the other, the fix of course is just to update the app. So if you go to, you know, long press on the play store, go to all apps, update your apps. You'll get that update it's out. So that's been fixed, but that was, and Burke brought this at yes,
Mary Jo Foley (01:59:57):
But now once they fixed it, you can't sign out of teams on Android.
Paul Thurrott (02:00:03):
It's right. You're fixed. So goodnight, everybody. Right. So I
Mary Jo Foley (02:00:06):
Deleted it immediately. I deleted teams <laugh>
Paul Thurrott (02:00:09):
Oh, you could. Because
Mary Jo Foley (02:00:10):
Of that.
Leo Laporte (02:00:11):
Yeah. I deleted, yeah. You wanna be able to dial nine one, one with your phone kind of important, but
Paul Thurrott (02:00:16):
You also, what your workplace will to reach you 24 hours a day.
Mary Jo Foley (02:00:20):
Yeah. Right. You have to have teams on all the time and I'm like, so that's a terrible fix. Right?
Paul Thurrott (02:00:26):
Unless you need teams.
Mary Jo Foley (02:00:28):
I don't need teams as much as I need.
Paul Thurrott (02:00:31):
Not, to be honest, there was an awesome moment of silence while you contemplated this
Leo Laporte (02:00:34):
Terrible. This has been fixed now though, right? I mean, this is fixed now or no, it's not. It's fixed.
Paul Thurrott (02:00:38):
But, but I, the fix is you. Yeah. You have to remain silent. That's a work.
Leo Laporte (02:00:43):
That's not a fix all the time. That's not a, that's not a fix. That's a workaround. So it's it's well, well, okay. It's yeah. I
Mary Jo Foley (02:00:51):
Don't, I can't if, if you don't mind teams being on all the time. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:00:55):
So just,
Paul Thurrott (02:00:56):
It's not, it's not on all the it's. It's a, they have a background service that because it's check polling teams
Leo Laporte (02:01:02):
For activity. What you're telling me is if you want to dial nine one, one <laugh> on your Android phone, you need teams running.
Paul Thurrott (02:01:10):
I'm telling you that teams just delete teams
Leo Laporte (02:01:12):
Or no teams at all.
Paul Thurrott (02:01:14):
But teams is endangering your life is what I,
Leo Laporte (02:01:16):
But if I download, I'm not gonna try it. But if I download teams, but don't log into it. If I download on my Android phone, I will no longer be able to use
Paul Thurrott (02:01:24):
Emergency. It's not a hundred percent of the time. I don't understand the combination of, well,
Leo Laporte (02:01:27):
As long as it's not a hundred percent of the time, just once in a while, just when you,
Paul Thurrott (02:01:30):
If you're having an emergency, here's what to do. Here's what to do. If you're having an emergency and nine one, one's not working, then delete teams. <Laugh>. But until then having a heart
Leo Laporte (02:01:39):
Attack, I dialed 9 1, 1 I can't get through. What, what is he saying? You said uninstall teams. What's he talking about needs. Okay. Guess I'm not gonna put teams on my Android phone. I
Mary Jo Foley (02:01:50):
Think I had teams on there and I'm like, are you kidding me? I can't unins teams.
Leo Laporte (02:01:54):
So that's, so there isn't a fix. In other words, there should be a version of teams. I'm sorry that I believe there and doesn't do anything, but okay. No, I thought it was fixed. My understanding is it was fixed. That sounds
Mary Jo Foley (02:02:05):
Like a work. Yeah. I think the fix, I think the fix is you can never log out of teams. I think that's what they consider the fix to be.
Leo Laporte (02:02:14):
Well, they're gonna have problems because you know, people are gonna die. And then it's on you team teams. I don't that, that you gotta fix that. That's not, that's not
Mary Jo Foley (02:02:23):
Optional to fix. Maybe I'm wrong. But I, I, the other day I took the update to teams on Android. Then I'm like, okay, how do I log out? I can't, I literally cannot log out. <Laugh>
Leo Laporte (02:02:38):
Okay. You shouldn't be able to do anything to your phone. That makes nine one one not work, right?
Mary Jo Foley (02:02:45):
Yeah. Agree. Right.
Leo Laporte (02:02:47):
That should be a principal. In fact, you don't have to be logged into your phone. You don't even have to have a SIM 9 1, 1 by federal law works.
Mary Jo Foley (02:02:54):
Right. It comes up automatically. Right?
Leo Laporte (02:02:57):
Right. Unless you have teams <laugh>
Mary Jo Foley (02:03:01):
I don't know. I may be wrong about this, but I could not find a way to look oh, UNG
Leo Laporte (02:03:05):
Up on us now. I don't.
Mary Jo Foley (02:03:06):
He left. He's like, I don't know. I don't
Leo Laporte (02:03:08):
Wanna talk about it. I don't care. <Laugh> right.
Mary Jo Foley (02:03:11):
I brought it up and I wish I had not brought it up.
Leo Laporte (02:03:13):
<Laugh> wow. I we'll have to do some research on that one. I know
Mary Jo Foley (02:03:18):
I, cause Jarno is saying in and discord that no, they fixed the, the bug and Android is fixed. Okay. If that's true, that's good. But I still am curious if you can log out of teams in Android
Leo Laporte (02:03:31):
<Laugh> it was an, it was an Android bug. Not a Microsoft bug. I don't see how that could be either because
Mary Jo Foley (02:03:41):
I don't either.
Leo Laporte (02:03:42):
It seems like teams. Cause
Mary Jo Foley (02:03:43):
It's the only app where it does it. Right. I know it's the only app that seems in combination with 9 1, 1 that makes that happen. So yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:03:50):
<Laugh>, you know what they say, the difference between being involved and being committed in, at breakfast, the chicken is involved. The, the pig is committed. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> anyway. Yeah. We haven't, I think Paul's having some technical difficulties, cause he's apparently still logged into zoom either that or he, he threw his headset down and stormed out. I don't know, but you know what? This would be a good time to wrap the show up. Anyway.
Mary Jo Foley (02:04:16):
He said his internet service just went down
Leo Laporte (02:04:18):
Completely <laugh> yeah. Something bad happened. Sorry about that. Next week is the 22nd. We will be doing a show, be the last show of the year, the following week. It's a best of windows weekly. We've collated some of the best bits from the year we might even have to throw in a Chris Capella. I am having a feeling. But we will see you next week. Mary Joe Foley all about Microsoft dot coms, eating that blog. If Paul's the editor ever comes back, you'll find him at thurrott.com. And of course the field guide to Windows 10 at at leanpub.com. And we, this show every Wednesday, it's a little disorienting because I'm seeing myself maybe if I press the cue button. Yeah. The other window <laugh> no, that really makes it bad. Okay. Let's oh, that's bad.
Speaker 7 (02:05:07):
Yeah. I'm seeing it's just many. I see. Three Leos. Yeah. There's
Leo Laporte (02:05:14):
We windows weekly. Every, we say 11 Pacific 2:00 PM. Eastern time, 1900 UTC. If you wanna watch us do it live. So you get to see all the stuff that we, you know, like that you can <laugh>, you can tune in on the internet at live.twi.tv. There's live audio and video streams there. People who watch live often chat live@ircdottwi.tv. That's our free chat room club. TWI members can chat in the discord that goes on year round. In fact, Mary Jo Foleys ask me anything is is in our TWI plus feed over there. You also get ad free versions of all the shows by the way. And you could find more information about that, including corporate memberships. This is the time of year to do that. We have a, at least one company now whose it team gets all of our shows add free.
Leo Laporte (02:06:02):
Thanks to that. Just go to twit.tv/clubtwit on demand versions of all of our shows are at the website, twit.tv. In the case of windows weekly, twit.tv/ww. There's a Windows Weekly YouTube channel. All of our shows have their very own channel. Of course the main TWiT channel is youtube.com/twit there's links there as well. And the best thing to do, probably subscribe that way. You'll get it every Wednesday afternoon after we're done automatically, just go to your favorite podcast plan, press the subscribe button. And if it allows you to leave reviews, do us a favorite, leave us a five star review, tell the world how great Paul and Mary Jo are. Thanks for being here. We'll see you next time on windows weekly, bye-bye
Jason Howell (02:06:47):
Android is constantly evolving, and if you are part of the Android faithful, then you'll be just as excited about it. As I am. I'm Jason Howell host of All About Android, along with my co-hosts Florence Ion and Ron Richard, where every week we cover the news, we cover the hardware and we cover the apps that are driving the Android ecosystem. Plus, we invite people who are writing about Android, talking about Android and making Android onto the show every Tuesday at twit.tv. Look for All About Android.
