Windows Weekly Episode 761 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott here. Mary Jo Foley's here. There is as always a lot to talk about some new features coming to windows next month. Is this a big feature release for windows 11? We'll find out Microsoft's earnings report. It was a pretty good quarter. In fact, one number really stands out. 1.4 billion active windows, 10 11 users, plus some good news for Xbox fans. It's all coming up next on windows, weekly podcasts you love from people you trust. This is, this is Windows Weekly with Paul throt and Mary Jo Foley episode 761 recorded Wednesday, January 26th, 2022, 1.4 billion served Windows Weekly is brought to you by it. Pro TV. Are you looking to break into the world of it? Get the introduction you need with it. Pro TV, visit it pro.tv/windows for an additional 30% off all consumer subscriptions for the lifetime of your active subscription. When you use the code WW 30 at checkout and by progress progress has the technology you need to secure, analyze, and integrate your or applications, network and processes. Find out more and download a free trial at progress.com/twi it's time for Windows Weekly. The show we get together and to chat about Microsoft. There's lots to talk about this week. Mary Jo Foley is here allaboutmicrosoft.com. Our ZDNet blogger, Mary Jo.

Mary Jo Foley (00:01:44):
Hello, Leo.

 Leo Laporte (00:01:45):
That sounds like a Rick Nelson song.

Paul Thurrott (00:01:46):
I know goodbye, heart, goodbye, heart <laugh> that's BA every, every

Paul Thurrott (00:01:51):
Every time, every week you say it and it goes

Leo Laporte (00:01:52):
Hello Mary Jo Baso profundo man on the left, Mr. Paul Thurrott from Thurrott.com and his books are at lean pub dot. And he is in Mexico city of this day, enjoying a beautiful Wednesday. It looks like. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:02:12):
Yeah. Not a cloud. The sky,

Leo Laporte (00:02:14):
Not a cloud in the sky and sunny

Mary Jo Foley (00:02:16):
Here too. It's just 22 or six <laugh> it's

Leo Laporte (00:02:20):
Sunny. 22. You greet that's

Paul Thurrott (00:02:24):
Too height, too. Few numbers. Yeah. That's 73 ish. Few

Leo Laporte (00:02:30):
Numbers. Yes, that's too few numbers. We need more numbers. We do. Earnings earnings are in mm-hmm <affirmative> you wanna talk about that first?

Paul Thurrott (00:02:42):
No, I did. But Mary Jo Barry, the lead. How come?

Leo Laporte (00:02:45):
Buried the lead Mary Jo.

Mary Jo Foley (00:02:46):
No, this is a bigger story you guys.

Leo Laporte (00:02:48):
Really?

Paul Thurrott (00:02:49):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:02:49):
Windows 11 new features coming next month, but like what? <Laugh> oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:02:56):
This like very few of them

Mary Jo Foley (00:02:58):
Android. No. Okay. Android

Paul Thurrott (00:03:00):
Came out today. I did see that. Yes.

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:02):
Yeah. Android apps on windows. Yes, but here's, here's why this is interesting. Paul has been talking about this and I've chimed in over the various shows saying at some point Microsoft's gonna roll out new features for windows 11 before the feature update comes at the end of the year. Right? They're they're like queuing it up. And then today, suddenly there's a blog post this morning, really early that says, Hey, next month, here's a bunch of features. We're gonna roll out to the mainstream, not to

Paul Thurrott (00:03:28):
Insiders. Hey, like, I know this is not like me, but could I throw some cold water on this one? Yeah. <laugh> go ahead. Yeah, they, I, they did right. They did make announcement. The thing is, what we're looking for is clarity. Right? What we're looking for is some kind of definitive statement about what's

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:45):
Gonna happen. Why do you think, why do you think miracles are gonna happen this year? What, why do you think something

Paul Thurrott (00:03:50):
New is gonna happen? Okay. But see what we got was the promise of a public preview of a very limited number of features in February. End of sentence. There there is. There's no continuation to this. There's no. After a short period of testing with the public, we're going to release this to everyone. Who's running windows 11. It's still possible that this, these features won't hit windows 11 for most users, until that feature update arrives in say October or whatever it is in the later

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:19):
Party. Really. Why do you think that that's the opposite of what this says?

Paul Thurrott (00:04:23):
No, it's okay. Well please. Well, no, please do contradict me because okay. The thing that's happening in February is just a public preview.

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:30):
No, so you've gotta look. They, they worded this so confusingly, so confusing,

Paul Thurrott (00:04:35):
Please, please, please preview one,

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:38):
A public preview of how you can use Android apps on windows 11 is coming to the mainstream. But the other things, they list task bar improvements with the call, mute, unmute the weather on the task bar and the new notepad, the new media player, those aren't in preview. Those are the actual

Paul Thurrott (00:04:55):
Final. Those are happening. Okay. So maybe we should step through this real quick because obviously Android up app support is huge. This was one of, well, this was arguably the biggest thing they announced last June, or whenever it was when they first announced when was 11. Yeah. Didn't make it into the product. <Laugh> right, right. We've been testing it in the windows insider program, a very limited selection of apps by the way, but whatever it's there it's so now it's gonna be in preview in February. Okay. So maybe it doesn't hit until next October in some ways, you know, whatever. But if you look at the list of other things I know off the top of my head, it's three features, small. Yeah. And two apps <laugh>, which are just updated through the store. Anyway, you know, windows 11 shipped in October in what I would call a horribly incomplete state should have launched with an entire new swath of apps, all updated new UIs, you know, new features, whatever didn't and we're getting a new notepad. And what was the other one? <Laugh> 

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:54):
What media player?

Paul Thurrott (00:05:55):
The media player. Oh, the, the thing no one ever uses anyway. Yeah. That's great. So <laugh> the, the new generation groove app. I mean, this is, look, I'm excited that they're doing something, like you said, I've been talking about this, thinking about this, writing about this from day one. In fact, one of the earliest articles I wrote about windows 11 was the disappointment of us. Not all those things they promised back in June. Right, right. But this is a very small selection of things.

Mary Jo Foley (00:06:22):
It is don't you think? And yeah, I do. And I think the most confusing part of this whole thing is they don't say how you're gonna get them. Right. Like, like people are saying, oh, so we're gonna get one big, giant cumulative update. That's basically like a feature update on in February and it's gonna have all this. I'm like, Nope. I, I don't think that's how it's gonna go. I think some will be like, you're saying the store for the two apps, right? No P media player, but then the, what the Android apps for windows 11, are you gonna get like a launcher from the store? And then are you gonna get the windows subsystem for Android, like built in somehow through a cumulative update? Or is it gonna be a feature experience pick, like I ask them today for clarification on this and I've heard right. Zero, right.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:06):
So weird. They're usually so good about that. I

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:08):
Know. Right. <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:07:11):
Okay. I mean, look, one of the other things we've been talking a lot about, about a lot over the past year or two is Microsoft's many avenues for a updating the operating system. Right. They've really significantly expanded it. I, I suppose in some ways it doesn't really matter. I guess how we get these things. I it's almost certainly the non-op things are almost certainly gonna come through windows update and be some form of cumulative update. Right, right. Or set up, you would assume updates. I would, yes. I would assume. But I, you know, I don't know, but that's how I assume. So what we see in the windows insider program, I think you're right about the Android app subsystem as well. It's basically gonna be a store deliverable. You'll see a, an advertisement will, you know, highlight that it's in preview or public preview or whatever the language is. And that's fine. I mean, it's fine. Right. It's it's gonna be limited probably hopefully more apps. And we see a, but available to people on the, what we'll call the stable channel. Right.

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:03):
Right. So that, of all the features they listed the very few, like you said this is the one to me that's very worrisome the Android Android apps for windows 11. Right. Because, because like you're saying right now, it's a very, very limited set of apps, mostly games, right. That's available this way. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> if you wanna read a really good story about what is there and what isn't our friend rich woods wrote something on XCA developers. Right. And he said, when they first announced us, there were 50 apps that were available through the, through Amazon and Microsoft's partnership for this. Now there's fewer than that. There's 40 something at apps. Right. Interesting. And they're us only, it's only for us users again, here we go again with not supporting globally. Right. For some reason. And how would you explain this to mainstream users who hear oh, Android apps on windows? So I can just get any Android app on windows. Right. But that's not how it's gonna work. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:00):
<Laugh> well, okay. But here's, here's the good news. And, and, you know, like I said, I I'm, I'm not super impressed with the volume of things they're delivering, you know, in, in the near future to the public that said a public preview version of the Android sub a Linux or whatever. Yeah. I'm sorry. The Androids, the windows, subsystem,

Mary Jo Foley (00:09:18):
Android, or subsystem for Android. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:20):
<Laugh> right. And, and is, they're gonna do that in the right way, because based, based on what we've seen in this store based what, what we've seen in the insider program, in other words, it's a, an advertisement in the store, which most people aren't gonna see anyway, you have to opt into it, you look at it, you do determine if you want it and then you get it or you don't. Right. And most people won't. And so that's fine. Like I'd rather have them do it that way than just throw it into the operating system. Right. Right.

Mary Jo Foley (00:09:44):
And make, and just show up for everybody. Yeah. Right. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yeah. And have like this ad saying, Hey, get window, get hand apps on windows 11, which I hope they're not gonna do, but I I'm not ruling anything thing out <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:57):
Yeah. Okay. Actually, that sounds very plausible.

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:00):
Right. Right. So I, I just feel like this is something that people who hear about it assume it means any Android app you want on windows. And that is so not what this is. Right. And I feel like it's, it's kind of almost like windows 10 and S mode over again, like people ha are gonna have an assumption, oh, Android apps on windows. I can run every single Android app on windows. And then you go and it's like, no, actually not you can't. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:26):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:10:26):
That's right. As dwindle said, so the good news is you'll be able to get candy crushed finally on windows. <Laugh> thank

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:33):
Goodness. Right?

Leo Laporte (00:10:33):
It's about time. Everyone's waiting. So I've been telling people on the radio show, correct me if I'm wrong, that they probably don't want to worry about windows 11. They just stick with windows 10. Cause they got to

Paul Thurrott (00:10:47):
20, 20. Oh you mean customer people, calling

Leo Laporte (00:10:49):
Customers. My customers, when they call little doorbell rings, they go, hello

Paul Thurrott (00:10:52):
People with a capital P should I upgrade

Leo Laporte (00:10:54):
To windows 11? And I say, well, it's nice, but I don't see any

Paul Thurrott (00:10:58):
Need to, well actually, so maybe we could use some anecdotal data to prove a point <laugh> right. Like the whole world does. Which is, you know, my, I think Mary, Jo's a story to this effect I do as well. You know, Mary Jo, actually, my brother-in-law as well, kind of called me or texted me or my wife, excuse, just ask me Hey, I just got the windows 11 advertisement and windows 10. Should I upgrade? And then, you know, that's a real moment of truth for me because these are normal people that

Leo Laporte (00:11:23):
Was exactly through the call. That was exactly the call.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:26):
Yeah. And it's like, well, I thought about it. And in both cases, I said, you know, honestly, I think for your use cases, you will either not notice anything or you'll think it might look slightly pretier and I don't think there's any harm to it. And in both cases, it

Leo Laporte (00:11:42):
Is pretty, I agree. I like how the only harm is

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:45):
Grown on it. The only harm is not being able to easily choose your browser still. Right. That's the edge thing. One area. Yeah. People need to be aware of, right?

Leo Laporte (00:11:53):
Yeah. Yeah. That's true.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:54):
That's true. So maybe that's

Leo Laporte (00:11:55):
The decision tree. Do you, do you like edge then? Fine. If you using something else, maybe not.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:01):
There are reasonably simple instructions on the little settings change you have to make to choose your other browser. Right? I, I it's, it's not super difficult. It, I mean, look dumb. I, I <laugh>, I don't want, I don't want to, it is dumb what Microsoft has done and it's user unfriendly for sure. But if you go into that, if you find your browser in that list of apps that are installed and you could, you make what you basically make or two file or document type associations and two protocols. And one of them's automatic, if you choose HTTP, HTS goes,

Leo Laporte (00:12:33):
Stop right there. I'm not, so I'm not gonna say

Mary Jo Foley (00:12:34):
That in a yeah. Normal people will never understand

Leo Laporte (00:12:36):
Protocol what, but isn't there a button at least you can push that will just make it kind of like it's the default browser now. Like

Mary Jo Foley (00:12:43):
There wasn't windows 10.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:44):
Yeah. Oh no. Like there will be in windows 11. So they're testing that now in the insider that's that's not in the version that ships to consumers. Right? I don't, you know, my, honestly, I, so I just, coincidentally, I sometime in the past week or 10 days or whatever it was, I literally just thought of it in passing. I think I walked by her computer or something and I said, Hey what do you think? Like, how do you, did you, or any issues? And she says, I haven't even noticed a single thing. She doesn't even notice it. Yeah. I think I married most, I don't know what happened. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:13:16):
But that's a lot

Mary Jo Foley (00:13:17):
On here. Yes. Most people won't, most people won't understand. Won't even notice anything. They might be like, oh my task bar's in the middle mouth. The central

Leo Laporte (00:13:24):
Start menu is a big change. Isn't it? I maybe she didn't notice that. No,

Mary Jo Foley (00:13:28):
Really. So she, you even notice that no one notices,

Paul Thurrott (00:13:31):
Well, I, so I don't, I don't look over her shoulder and see how who works, but a lot of people and myself included certainly launch applications from the Tasker. I know she does that. Yeah. And I think of the start menu as being kind of a secondary interface. So in the windows 10 days, when you had an all apps list, constantly displayed on the left and the tiles area on the right. In the early days, like a lot of people I would spend, I'm kind of configuring those tiles the way I wanted them and position them and size them and do all this stuff. But what I found over time is I never really used it. So who cares? I used it as a secondary interface. I, I, I bring it up, I start typing the thing I want. It comes up and start searching off. I go. And I would imagine my wife, other people probably do the same thing. And so yeah, the new start menu is different looking it's centered. Yeah. It has less stuff going on for sure. It's not particularly configurable now, although they're apparently working on that. And for me it doesn't matter. And so when I complain about the regressions and the start menu, I'm kind of doing that on behalf of normal people. In my case, it doesn't actually packing cause I never use it anyway. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>,

Leo Laporte (00:14:37):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> has the okay, so I do the same thing. I hit windows key, start typing. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I type, update for instance. Yeah. That's changed though. Now update, instead of pulling up the program, windows update pulls up some weird shortcut. I

Paul Thurrott (00:14:53):
Mean, it hasn't well, okay. No, no star search itself hasn't changed. Like if you type in something like same thing, control panel, you still get, okay, that's you get a list of things. I mean, in my case, I typed all of that. I actually, I just type control. So control panel is the best match. If you select that one time, it will always be the best. Not sure if, if it's a common word or whatever you know, it remembers that

Leo Laporte (00:15:16):
I don't know. I that's, the only thing I ever do in windows is update. So, you know what I, so it's

Paul Thurrott (00:15:21):
Experience, this is, this is a classic kind of Mary Jo Paul thing, right? Mary Jo, as the normal person, me as the person who overthinks things and there's something wrong in my brain. And a, and I, I obsess over these things and I worry about them. And I try to think about how other people are gonna be impacted by them. And then Mary Jo's like, I don't even notice. And I don't, I maybe more people are like, I hope more people are like Mary Jo. I mean, honestly my wife certainly is, and maybe it's okay, you know, check the people or whatever you wanna call us, us, us broken few, you know, <laugh> are worry about these things that talk about 'em debate. 'em Call Microsoft that task on them. You know, meanwhile 99% of the world doesn't care.

Leo Laporte (00:16:06):
Oh. And I'll tell you the reg reason to do it is that annoying windows upgrade popup. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:11):
And just to get rid, you get rid of that stop bugging me well, okay. So actually I don't know if you can do it with that particular one, but any popup like that, like a suggested thing or whatever, this is a.dot, dot thing you collect that it says stop showing me these things. Okay. Now, in the case, a case of yeah. In case, well, I'd have to see it to make sure it has it on that particular one, but in the case of windows, the windows 11 grade eventually, well, no, that maybe that's not true.

Leo Laporte (00:16:37):
Not for the next gonna years. I hope we don't know. That's what

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:41):
I was. I asked them today. I said, when are you guys gonna stop showing that popup? Or are you never going to stop showing it? And I didn't get an answer. So, right.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:48):
The answer is, when are you gonna just upgrade Mary Jo?

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:52):
I upgraded both my PCs right away, because I figured it wasn't gonna be a big change. And I was correct.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:58):
Yeah. There you go.

Leo Laporte (00:17:00):
Yeah. My window's 11 machine. I'm, it's pretty, it's, I'm happy. You're right. It's just, and I guess that's what I'm telling them is it's just cosmetic. If you don't want to, you don't have to. Right. And

Mary Jo Foley (00:17:10):
There's no one compelling thing that you would say, you really want this, you have to

Leo Laporte (00:17:15):
Upgrade, but now maybe that'll be different if you want what

Paul Thurrott (00:17:17):
I'm looking at right now. I mean, think about just, just the basics here. I, I, I, I have a zoom window that is windowed behind it. I can see a browser window that is maximized. So the only two applications I can see and there's a task bar at the bottom. So fundamentally speaking, the only difference between this and windows 10 is a task bar is centered. <Laugh> right. I mean, let's, you know, a couple of the icons, a little different and obviously click on that stuff over in the corner. It's a little different, but I mean, fundamentally, oh, in the windows, the window corners on the zoom thing are curve, which you can barely see. So yeah. Yeah, maybe that's not a

Leo Laporte (00:17:51):
<Laugh>, but that's why I say don't because it's just cosmetic and you're, and it's not a big deal. Yeah. Right. On the other hand, Microsoft's gonna bug you every minute to do it, do it, I guess. 

Paul Thurrott (00:18:01):
Well Microsoft would list a laundry list of things that would make you want to upgrade all the little performance improvements, all the little changes,

Leo Laporte (00:18:09):
Whatever. But, so I'm gonna change my advice. I'm gonna say, go ahead and do it. It's not a big difference. I mean, installing a new version of windows for people is a fraught with peril.

Mary Jo Foley (00:18:19):
It is, you usually think like, look at all the things that are broken or could go wrong and has it really ready?

Paul Thurrott (00:18:24):
Right. That's based on not date information. Right. So windows has gotten much better at updating itself was back in the nine X, 2000 XP days, whatever. Yeah. Windows 11, despite the name is really just a cumulative update for windows 10. It's just another version of windows 10. So it's a small thing. Agree. There are things missing in windows 11 that might be problematic for some users, but mm-hmm <affirmative> when you do an upgrade from windows 10, they come along with it. Right? So things like Skype that are no longer included 3d stuff, like pain, 3d, whatever. Those are not in windows 11. But if you upgrade from windows 10 you'll, those will come forward with you. So those are another things. So it it's, you know, they did that the right way. I think it's that's friendly. You don't want to take stuff away. Remember? I don't remember what version the windows, but in the past you would get a little text file on the desktop and say, Hey, here's all the stuff we took away from. You have fun, you know?

Leo Laporte (00:19:16):
So yeah. I mean, it really, in other words, it doesn't really, it's a flip of the coin. Doesn't

Paul Thurrott (00:19:21):
Really matter what way or the other, well, you could tell people, look, you can upgrade. If you want, just don't call me back. <Laugh> that's the reason,

Mary Jo Foley (00:19:28):
You know, where they're going. I told everybody, no, I, everybody in my family who's asked me, who's gotten it, offered to them. I'm like, yeah, I think it wouldn't be a problem. And nobody has called me and said like, why did you say that? Like everybody's like, oh yeah, yeah. It seems fine. Like I like the wallpaper. It's cool. But the ribbon thing, it's nice. I'm like, yep. There you go. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:19:45):
It ribbon thing. Yeah. Yep. They toilet the toilet paper thing.

Mary Jo Foley (00:19:52):
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Like I, like, nobody has said to me, oh, I can't figure out the start menu. Like when I like, I'm like, did anybody in my family even use the start menu for anything? Like, did they notice like live on,

Leo Laporte (00:20:04):
I would think the less sophisticated users are more likely to use the start menu, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't know.

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:10):
That's what I feel like everyone there ways. Right? Like, well,

Paul Thurrott (00:20:14):
Yeah, that's right. I,

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:15):
Yeah. I use the start menu for two things. Like when I, when I don't have a program pin to my task bar and I'm like, where is that? I click on the start menu and do a search and the start menu, which I don't need to do, but it's like a habit. It's the

Leo Laporte (00:20:28):
Slowest possible way to find a program is

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:30):
Start menu. It totally is. I know, but it's just like a memory thing. Like that's how I do it. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. And then the other reason is if I've opened a document recently, and I can't remember where it is, like I opened the start menu and they're all my recent documents pinned right there. I'm like, okay, there it is. Right. That's it. Yeah. That's how I use it. I use windows in the most unsophisticated way. For me, it's a tool to do my job. And it's nothing, even though I write about Microsoft, I just use it in the most simple way. Right? Like UN

Paul Thurrott (00:20:58):
Unsophisticated is a tough way because that's the right way to approach this. It really is a launcher for the things you're there for. Right. That's what I feel. Those things are not there in windows other than basic file management, you know, whatever. But you're there to run applications. That's what matters. That's what

Leo Laporte (00:21:14):
Evil John says in the disc court. He says, all I know is I run steam and I'm done. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:19):
<Laugh> right. And it works. So. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:21:24):
Right. Okay. So anyway some, I'm also confused about what you just agreed upon. Okay. Cause some new features next month. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:37):
Okay. Not just a, a preview. So Mary Jo can apparently has a much better handle <laugh> so why don't you, why don't you reiterate what you just told me? Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:46):
Right. So the only one of the new features they listed in the blog post today, that's still gonna be considered preview is Android apps on windows 11th. That's considered a preview, the other ones, the call mute and unmute from the task bar, easier windows sharing weather on the task bar and the two apps. Those aren't gonna be previews. Those are just gonna

Paul Thurrott (00:22:05):
Be, those are just happening. Yeah. Yeah. I get gotta tell you whether on the task bar, not being there was probably holding back hundreds of millions of users. Definitely. This will be the floodgate that Microsoft needs.

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:17):
Yeah. No. The reason they're putting, right? No. They're putting weather on the task bar to try to get people, to figure out how to, how to open widgets and to use widgets. Like they want people to yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:27):
By the way, because people, what they will, what a betrayal, what a betrayal is it? When you click on weather expecting to see weather and you find out about what Kim Kardashian's doing, right? Like <laugh>, I don't understand this interface. It launches news. Is that what happens? It launches the witches interface. Right? So it, by the way, weather is part of it. I'm I'm being sarcastic, but other stuff is it other stuff is too including, you know, lots of, I don't even wanna read what's in here today, including lots of the terrible

Leo Laporte (00:22:57):
Content. Yeah. Yes,

Paul Thurrott (00:22:59):
Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. People magazine centric content.

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:05):
Yeah. No, I I'm telling you. That's why they put the weather thing on the task bar. Cause they're like, you know what, not an know people are trying widgets. They may not know that they're there and we get a signal somehow for people to open it. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:15):
To be fair. I will say that that information not being in the task bar is a regression in windows 11 because in windows 10, the analog of this thing, the news and information thing, whatever it was called news, I think it was just called news and information did have an optional weather display and the task bar that was on by default. And when they switched to widgets and windows 11 that went away, widgets became just an icon. And so yeah, I I'm okay with that. I know some people want that. That's, there's nothing wrong with that. No, it's not a major new functional addition. It doesn't turn this thing into windows 11 version two or whatever. No. what they should do, just put a little Clipy in there bouncing up and down saying, click me, click me,

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:54):
Click me,

Paul Thurrott (00:23:55):
Click me,

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:56):
Click me.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:57):
Yep. Pretty much. That's really what Lay's needs. I think. Yeah, actually that's what the notification windows of four Leo. But yes it does. It does at that.

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:05):
Yeah. No. The only reason I thought this was interesting today and kind of a big deal was we had been wondering if, and when they would launch new features independently of the thing, they call the feature update. That's coming around October. And finally like today it just came outta nowhere. Like, boom. Yeah. Hey, we're doing it next month. It's coming. That's it?

Paul Thurrott (00:24:25):
It did literally come outta nowhere. That's true.

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:27):
It did. It did. Yeah. They, they attached it to a Panos Panay blog, which was meant to kind of build on some of the things they said during earnings, right. About acceptance of windows, which we're gonna talk about in a minute and, and kind of how that's growing are not growing.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:43):
There's actually all kinds of things to talk about. That post is a mess of data. It is, it is all over the map,

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:50):
But a lot of the data, or is just like earnings it's percentages of growth based on a number they don't give you. So you really don't know what it means, right? That's right. That's right. Like something grew six times, six times from what? Oh, don't know. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:06):
It's true. What gross.

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:08):
It's true. Yeah. Like what they said on the earnings call yesterday, like yeah. Windows is taking market share. I'm like from who?

Paul Thurrott (00:25:15):
From what exactly this exactly. From what? From unsupported version to windows, what are you talking about? Chromebook from ourselves is what we

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:26):
Is that place. I maybe that's what they meant like from windows seven and when no,

Paul Thurrott (00:25:30):
They have to have meant the max. I, I will say so. Here's, here's the one data point that came out of canals, IDC and Gardner apples sold as many max in the last quarter as they did the year before, within one percentage point. So they barely grew, but the industry grew almost double digits. So that means windows didn't for, at gain on the Mac, apple sold more max. They still grew, but from a share percentage, yeah. PC makers now have more of the market than they did a year ago. So, but

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:57):
Why didn't they say that? Right. Like we grew in share compared to the

Paul Thurrott (00:26:01):
Mary Jo. What I just said is clear in what they said. Can't be clear. That's how they communicate.

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:08):
No, that was me on the earnings call. Like when they said we took share with windows and me yelling at the screen from,

Paul Thurrott (00:26:14):
Oh, it's in the transcript. It literally says, parenthetically, Mary Jo Foley screams.

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:19):
I was screaming a lot during the earnings call for many reasons. But that was, that was one.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:24):
We, we took a windows gain share or whatever the phrase was. Yeah. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:28):
Windows gain share. I'm like from

Paul Thurrott (00:26:33):
<Laugh> look, I, I, should I look this still? It always bothers me. This is the type of thing my wife does not appreciate. I just complain about the same thing over and over again. She's like, you know, if you're, you're expecting clarity where there's never been clarity, what is, why you what's what's with

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:46):
This Nu nuts, not the expect. I think he thinks it's a new year, so there's gonna be new clarity or something. Well, I,

Paul Thurrott (00:26:53):
They look, this post answered part of the question, right? 

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:59):
The updates gonna come, some updates are coming independently.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:02):
Like you said, we don't know how we don't know if this is it. So it's February I, I was of the opinion that very strongly that they would out of band, so to speak or out midstream, whatever you wanna call it. Yes. Update when 11, I am also still of the opinion, they will do it multiple times. And I was of the opinion that the first thing we would see the first or only ever would happen very early in the year. In fact, it being it's being right. Well, no, no. It's the 26th. Honestly. I thought it would be much closer to the beginning of the month. Oh, oh really? Whatever that's worth. But that was my, that, that, that was my opinion. Belief, whatever. Yeah. You know, we'll see. I, geez. I don't know. <Laugh> yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:43):
So, okay, February, this is also, this is kind of insider baseball, but I think it might help some people who are, who I've had people ask me today. So does this constitute a feature update, even though they said there'd only be one feature update. No. And the reason it doesn't is very kind of esoteric, but the, when Microsoft calls something, a feature update, it that's the support clock that's right, right. And so if, if they don't call something a feature update, you're still within the support window that they already outlined for the last feature update. You know,

Paul Thurrott (00:28:14):
I know you're right. You're a hundred percent, right. I, if this is really semantics is what it is. It is, and is I guess, legal semantics in some ways. But you know, Microsoft has confused language around what things are, you know, this is a version upgrade, which I think a feature update I should say is a version upgrade. It does, like you said, reset the clock on support. It is something that's different from an update. And by the way, it doesn't just mean a couple of new features or X number of new features. It's, it's a cumulative thing. It's that it it's the next milestone. So if it's a month later and you buy a new PC, when you upgrade, that's what you get. That's the thing that you get. Yeah. You know, a feature update, lower case could mean anything. It, us getting mute, unmute in the task bar, isolated as its own little thing is in plain English, a feature update <laugh> we have gotten feature right. Or an updated feature or whatever, but yes, because they use this very general term to describe something that is actually an important thing in the world of windows. We have to dance around language all the time. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:29:20):
Right. Upgrade versus update versus cumulative update versus feature. Yeah. So many things it could be,

Paul Thurrott (00:29:29):
You know, by the way, it occurs to me now that you've told me that this, these updates, these three things are coming in February, not in preview. Yep. That suggests that will happen on the second Tuesday in February, whatever that date is. Right. That's

Mary Jo Foley (00:29:43):
What I wonder too. Patch Tuesday. Yeah. I would think so. Right. That would be my guess. That would be my guess. But again, it doesn't say that in the block. No. No. Why would it don't say one. That would be no, <laugh> doesn't say when in would be too clear or which vehicles or anything. Yeah. It doesn't say okay. No.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:00):
All right. Right. We'll see. Right.

Mary Jo Foley (00:30:02):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:03):
It's the other thing it's amazing. I'm not in an institution by this part in my life. It is kind of,

Mary Jo Foley (00:30:07):
This is why it's figured in Mexico thinking about

Paul Thurrott (00:30:10):
Fatty, tuna, getting some sun and eating. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:30:14):
That's true. Yeah. Do you wanna talk more about the rest of that blog post though? Because like you said,

Paul Thurrott (00:30:19):
A lot of things there's many, I, I, oh, three posts about it eventually. Okay. Because the more you go through it, the more there is.

Mary Jo Foley (00:30:26):
Right. So something else that struck me in this blog post is like we said, there's a lot of metrics in here that, right. You don't really know what it, what they mean. Like windows 11 is helping drive three times more traffic to the new Microsoft store three times, what number we don't know. Right. Engagement with people spending 40%, 40% more time on their PC. Like there's lots of numbers like that. Right. But Hey, by the way,

Paul Thurrott (00:30:52):
Just sorry to interrupt, but could some, could the pandemic have anything to do with that? I mean, is it <laugh>, is it literally windows, windows? There's nothing inherent in windows 11 that makes the store more attractive to a normal person. Right. It, it's not more in your face. It's, it's not a better app. It's, you know, slightly restyled or whatever. But I just, I, I mean, are we just stuck at home now when it's been so long, we're starting to fiddle around with our computers a little bit. Cause we're bored. I mean, I, that's probably true, right?

Mary Jo Foley (00:31:19):
It is true.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:20):
I'm just wondering, I mean,

Mary Jo Foley (00:31:23):
Yeah, no, there's another line in there though that I have asked for clarity on and I have heard nothing at all. So they said <laugh> windows 11 is beginning to enter its final phase of availability, putting Microsoft ahead of its initial plan of mid 20, 22. So I said, so what does that sentence mean? Like what do you mean by that? Do you mean you're not gonna do any more prompts for people? Like you've decided every machine that is gonna have a good upgrade experience has got it now or is about to have it or does this mean something else? And I don't think communications team knows because I've bugged them twice. I'm like, what's does that line mean? And they're like,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:04):
I don't think they wanna talk about this. Right. I, I, because obviously, well, because like John cable would be the guy who explains this kind of thing, but what he will say is we have a very staged approach to delivering windows 11 as an upgrade to existing users. Yeah. You examine all these metrics. We look at different things, you know what your configuration is, what applications you run, et etcetera. Right. We use, you know, there's a lot of math and Microsoft internally will always have a schedule for whatever the upgrade is. In this case, the upgrade from windows 10 to windows 11, which is a free upgrade, something they offer electronically, they advertise, et cetera. Cetera. What they're admitting now is that we originally thought we would be done by with this process by mid 20, 22, if mid 20, 22 had come and Microsoft had not met this internal goal, we would never have heard about it.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:51):
<Laugh> right. You know, they would've met it in the third quarter this year or the fourth quarter. And we would heard about, you know, the, the upgrade complete we're done. But now what they're saying is they will complete it. Not that they have completed it right. That they will that this thing has gone faster than anticipated. Now that sounds, by the way, this kind of, thing's gonna come up again on this podcast. That sounds like an amazing positive piece of news, but the reality is windows, not that impressive of an upgrade, technically speaking, like I said, it's just a cumulative update. This is something they could have released at any. I mean, almost at any time and just any month, whatever, I mean, yes, it upgrades the UI and all this stuff. So there's that kind of confusion or that addition, but this is, this is not a big deal.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:36):
This is, I mean, from a, an upgrading perspective. So what they're celebrating is we spent five, six years getting windows to update properly. And now it's working on a very minor update. <Laugh>, you know, it's kind of like when they would celebrate the deployment of windows 10 version 2004 or 21 H one or whatever, it's like, yeah, great. You'd got that thing out really quick. Yeah. Cool. She did. There's nothing to it. It's not like those creator update things we used to get back in the day 20 16, 20 17, whatever. It's a much smaller upgrade than those things. So yeah, of course it went better, you know, it, it should, it, you know, whatever. Anyway, so it, I just

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:16):
Wanna know what that means though. Like, like you're in the final phase. What? So if people don't have it, what's gonna happen, right. Like you don't, you're not obligated to get off of windows 10 and go to 11, but they're calling this the final phase of their push. Right. And I'm like, so what does

Paul Thurrott (00:34:32):
That mean? It's not probably not literal upgrades, but rather it, it, it will, at some time in their future be offered to basically the entire user base because we now know that the will work well for everybody. I think that's what it is. Not that the entire user base is going to windows 11. Cuz of course they're not, by the way, the one little figure we never got <laugh> all these numbers and there were mil, well, dozens of them, how many people are running windows 11, right? For PCs. Never mention that. No. The one thing they did mention with regards to a number 1.4 billion people are now running windows 10 and, and 11 now combined. That's another one. Sounds pretty good. Sounds good. Yeah. However, <laugh> I just wanna give you some numbers. The last time we got a number for a total windows user base for Microsoft was October, 2018. Right? So over three years ago, that number was 1.5 billion. It's a bigger number. Now we're comparing two slightly different things. That's the entire windows user base. This is just windows 10 and 11. But how many versions of windows are actually supported right now? Three <laugh> well and a little windows seven

Mary Jo Foley (00:35:42):
Also they changed the metric too, right? Like you're talking there the 1.5 billion wasn't that PCs and this, the new numbers they talk about are monthly active, monthly active

Paul Thurrott (00:35:51):
Users. No it's devices. It's devices. Is it devices? Yeah. Which is PCs, right? Yeah. So, okay. So here's the thing. It's very clear that there are some number of millions of PCs out in the world, running unsupported versions of windows and or windows seven PCs and enterprises that are paying for that extra support. Okay. Yep. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so that probably makes up the difference. It's unlikely, given the PC buying boom of the past two years, that there were fewer people, fewer PCs running windows today than there were three and you know, three years ago we'll call it. Right? Yeah. I mean, it just doesn't make any sense. However, because this was a news item of that day. It seems odd to me that they didn't put that in perspective. So whatever was the number before 1.5 billion. Oh,

Mary Jo Foley (00:36:36):
Well the actual, the, the closer number to compare it to is last April windows 10 was 1.3 billion, monthly active devices. Right. That's right. So yesterday's number was 1.4 billion, monthly active devices, but that's windows 10 and 11. That's it that's all that

Paul Thurrott (00:36:53):
They're measuring. So that's fine because those things are the same thing. Right? So they are, this suggests that they're, well, this tells us, I mean, we know this, I mean, windows sales, windows, PC sales, I'm sorry are up <laugh> right. They, they have they've risen now for a coup you know, a year and a half or whatever. So yep. That a hundred million new computers came online, some running, well, most of them running windows 10, some of them running wins 11. And so that actually does explain that that's fine. Like that's, that's really good growth. Because I know people will wonder about this. I feel obligated to say there the last number we got from Google with Android was 2.5 billion active Android users worldwide in August, 2021. So we'll probably get a new number at Google AO in may. And the latest numbers from apple <affirmative>, which are literally from one year ago now, because apple next week will announce their earnings and we'll probably get new numbers. So these numbers are gonna be higher. 1 billion iPhone users and 1.6, 5 billion, total devices running apple platforms. Right? So that's, that's where windows 10 and 11 compare to the two biggest, I dunno, I'll call computing platforms that are available today. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, it's it's in the, it's in the ballpark, right? It's in the running. Yeah. Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (00:38:06):
Yeah. But there's no way to tell from the way they talked about the number, how many of those 1.4 billion devices are on windows 11 and they don't wanna, no, they

Paul Thurrott (00:38:16):
Don't want you to, because that number's probably pretty low. Really? What would low be? Well, think so windows 11 came out in October, it shipped on a, a fairly limited number of PCs by the way. Right? Right. So I, it, it's reasonable to expect that most of the computers bought over the holiday selling period. We're probably running windows 10, by the way. It's also reasonable to say most of those probably qualify for the windows 11 upgrade by now. We don't know how many people have upgraded. There is a vague, I can't, I'm not be able to find this off the top of my head there. One of the other little vague statistics in here is that people are upgrading to windows 11 faster than they did to windows 11. <Laugh> right. But they didn't say what the timeframe was and they didn't give a percentage. I don't think they give a percentage. There's too many of these star. I don't know. There's too many. You

Mary Jo Foley (00:39:00):
Mean faster points they did to windows 10. Right? Is what you

Paul Thurrott (00:39:03):
Mean? Mm-Hmm <affirmative> yeah, that's right. Okay. Windows. Yeah. No, it says windows. Customers are accepting the windows 11 upgrade offer in windows update. Presumably at twice the rate we M off software windows 10. Okay. <laugh> okay. I mean, I don't know,

Mary Jo Foley (00:39:20):
But not all devices qualify. Right? So that's

Paul Thurrott (00:39:22):
Numbers. What are we talking about? You mean in windows 10 during its first three to four months in the market or in what are we talking about here? It doesn't give you any like, you know, like we keep saying this, the data is very partial

Mary Jo Foley (00:39:36):
Big

Paul Thurrott (00:39:37):
<Laugh>. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this there's all kinds of stupid numbers, a 50% growth in people who plan to use PCs for creativity, gaming or work. What other use cases are there for PC and okay. What I got, I know there are rather, but I mean, I that's isn't that most of it, what are we talking about here? It's really strange. How they, it is continue to wording is odd. Communicate. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>

Mary Jo Foley (00:40:05):
No. And they just, they snuck that 1.4 billion number into the earnings. Yes. Right. Kind of like towards the end, like really downplay it there. Like, oh yeah, we got 1.4 billion. No, I know why,

Paul Thurrott (00:40:15):
Why wouldn't you write a post called 1.4 billion. It's a big number.

Mary Jo Foley (00:40:20):
And they just kinda like mumbled it out and I'm like, wait, did they just say how many windows users there <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:26):
Yep. Crazy. And by the way, if you're not tired of the numbers nonsense yet, we're still haven't even gotten to

Mary Jo Foley (00:40:32):
Earnings. We get lots more numbers. There's

Paul Thurrott (00:40:34):
A lot of numbers. A lot of for numbers let's talk Platon. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So a CES <laugh> sometime over a year ago, Microsoft announced the Microsoft Platon security chip set, which we discussed and displayed her ignorance about a couple weeks ago. Yes. What we do know about it is that it, it, it is or will be built into microprocessor architectures from Intel AMD and Qualcomm. Although by the way, <laugh> Intel has a statement very recently saying, I don't think we need to do this. We already have a thing that is this in our own team chips that we made. Right. Well, no, not TBM, but they have a, they have a name for it's like the Intel. Oh, okay. Security sum something. It's it's, you know, again, the primary difference and Platon or this Intel thing and TPM is that it's built into the chip set.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:21):
There isn't a communications channel between it and a separate chip set. So that is more secure, apparently, whatever the other big difference is, Microsoft makes it right. Right. So they have to get buyin from the chip makers from the do it, it apparently did. Although, like I said, as of this past week, who can say, well, I guess we'll see what happens. And because it's Microsoft, I think we have to bring up the open source thing where now we ha we're seeing the same fears in the Linux slash open source community that we saw in 2002, 2003, when Microsoft started talking about things like palladium and then TPM where they said, you're just, you're doing this for security. Yeah, sure. But you're really doing it to keep Linux off of PCs. So here's what we just found out. Two things. One Platon can be disabled.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:06):
So if you buy a PC with Platon built into the chip set, you can disable it. Linux is not Platon compatible. Soft has shown no interest in making it Lennox compatible and has said that by the way. But you can turn it off. So we don't have this actually the same real world fear that we had back say 20 years ago almost is not there today. Although people are still complaining about it to, and perhaps more interesting, Lenovo, the company who ad ties itself as being the first company, PC maker to ship Platon compatible computers has said it will ship those computers with Platon disabled by default that's

Mary Jo Foley (00:42:42):
Hysterical. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:42:44):
It is now you gotta wonder. And why would no,

Mary Jo Foley (00:42:46):
Wait, do you remember when Microsoft put the blog post about this? They said there are three ways you can use Platon. And the third was OEMs. Can I up to ship with the chip turned off? And I'm like, that's weird. They put that in the blog post and now we know why they did, right? Yeah. <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:43:01):
Yep. So, but I, I, well, we know why they did because Lenovo, maybe other PC makers are gonna ship those PCs with it disabled, but then the question becomes, well, why, why is it disabled? You know, mm-hmm <affirmative> do they know, know something we don't know? Is there some incompatibility there with existing software probably. You know, I don't know. So it, it, you know, this is a really weird way to undermine an announcement. The, the Lenovo PCs in question, notably are all AMD based. Like I said, Intel just kind of came out and said, you know, this my may not be necessary for our computers. We already have our own thing in here. That does the same thing. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so hopefully Microsoft and Intel are working on some standard that these things are compatible and basically do the same thing or whatever, because, you know, TPM was made by a third, you know, an outside third party consortium. It's an industry standard essentially. It wasn't designed in by Microsoft, but Microsoft did back it and talked about making it a requirement for Longhorn. And, you know, we went into windows, Vista, whatever, but yeah, this is <laugh>. This is this just, it's not like it's six months later. CES was like two weeks ago, I guess, maybe three weeks ago. Exactly. this just happened. It was a major announcement. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so now it's not, yeah. It's not gonna be by default. Interesting on

Mary Jo Foley (00:44:21):
If you want it. Who turns it on admins? Like who, who actually is responsible for turning

Paul Thurrott (00:44:26):
It on it's in the bios as we still call it for some reason, even though we haven't had a bios in a computer in probably 20 years, but it in the firmware, whatever you wanna call it. So it's an option in the firmware. You know, Intel obviously has their management software and Microsoft has management control software on the other end. So yes. I assume that's a feature you could configure as an admin for the PCs that go to your workforce. Yes. Yeah. But we're getting ahead of ourselves here because not one of these things that ship yet, and so far nobody's seems to be having much interest in it. Don't until may, right. You the Lenova ones wasn't it may. Yeah. I think it is may. Yeah. Crazy. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:45:02):
Let's take a break. And cuz I know you wanna, all, you want to talk numbers, you want talk numbers, fiscal year 22, making the numbers fun, Q2 making them

Paul Thurrott (00:45:14):
We're gonna invent businesses that don't exist. We're gonna compare things to things that we don't know what they are. It's fun. Yeah. It's

Leo Laporte (00:45:21):
Awesome. Watch Paul and Mary Jo try to make sense. Oh, juggle of all of that stuff. Just a moment first. However, a word, if don't mind from it pro TV, I know a lot of you tuning into our show are interested in it as a career. But you maybe don't know exactly how or where to get started. I am here to tell you there's one place in one place only you should go straight to it. Pro TV. It pro TV has engaging fun, complete up to date streaming video that you can watch anywhere on your computer, your phone on your TV, via Roku or apple TV. It's just great. Their entertainers are experts in the field, but they're there because of their enthusiasm, their passion and their ability to kind of entertain while they inform. And that's what you want. If you need those certificates to get that first gig, this is the place to go.

Leo Laporte (00:46:17):
If you're already in it and you wanna re-certify or stay up to date, this is the place to go. It's a good month too. If you're interested in it to go to it. Pro TV, cuz January is all about getting started in it month. So you'll have a great start to the new year. If you wanna gonna dip your toes into it, check out the following courses you can get started with compt is ITF plus and a plus search. I should mention parenthetically it pro TV is the official video training partner for compt. So these are kind of the official courses, Linux essentials, Microsoft 365. This is Ms. Dash 900 the, from the bench series this month, hands on PC build, that's kind of fun. Sy that's that's more for your like enjoyment, right? Cisco CCT, routing and switching. That's more for your cert 100 dash four 90.

Leo Laporte (00:47:06):
Although I don't know, maybe you love this stuff. If you're an apple person, apple certified support, professional ACS P that's another assert macOS 11 focused. If you're worried that learning, it could be boring, do not worry it pro TV specializes, specializes in making it learning fun, entertaining, but, and, and of course informative educational. All the courses are in 20 to 30 minute increments means you can watch it during lunch whenever it's convenient, just the right length for, for my short attention span, seven studios, five days a week. It's Monday through Friday, you can watch 'em film live. You can chat with 'em live just like we do. They have the content that they make goes from studio to library in 24 hours. That's how they keep their content library, absolutely fresh. Cause you know what? The, the test change, the, the software versions change.

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There's new software, there's new certs. So they, they, you know, they work hard to make sure it's exactly what you need up to date. You can also prepare for your exams. They have virtual labs, they practice tests. They have monthly webinars that are free to catch up, get more insight into the world of it. It kind of is a way to kind of get to know the culture, the, the ideas, the things people are talking about in it. It's really great. If you are looking to break into the world of it, get the introduction you need with it. Prot website it pro.tv/windows. Please use that slash windows. So they know you saw it on windows, weekly, it pro.tv/windows. And if you want an additional 30% off, any consumer subscription, as long as you stay active forever, right? If you want use the code WW 30 WW, 30, the additional 30% off the lifetime of your active subscription, it pro TV. This is such a great place to go check it out it pro TV builder, expand your it career and enjoy the journey along the way it pro.tv/windows. And don't forget that. Offer code WW three, zero. All right. Earnings where they, yes. Was it yesterday? That was earnings day mm-hmm <affirmative>. Was it good? It was good. As I remember the, you know, top line, the earnings were good. Be good. Wasn't bad. Wasn't bad.

Mary Jo Foley (00:49:19):
Good money. Not so bad. Yeah. Yep. It was the first time Microsoft surpassed $50 billion in a quarter.

Leo Laporte (00:49:27):
They're gonna need it because they they got, you know, save up to the by division. They do.

Mary Jo Foley (00:49:32):
Yeah, they do. Yeah, 51.7 billion in revenues. This is their Q2 for fiscal 2022, our favorite metric, the Microsoft cloud, formally known as the commercial cloud. You know, that weird bucket of services that they put together. Azure office 365, M soft 365 dynamics, 365 power. Some of the power platform, some LinkedIn that number was up to 22.1 billion, right? So 22 billion is how much of that 51 billion they say is from business cloud services.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:10):
Yeah. Two things to that. So this, this bull base <laugh> Microsoft cloud businesses is almost half of their revenues. Yeah. Right. Which I think is what is the point? Right. They want to drive that home. See, we said we were a cloud business. We're a cloud business also up 32% year 30, 2%. This is a random fact, not a factoid. This is a fact Microsoft has a lot of growth numbers all of their businesses, their major three business units experience growth, all of their major product lines, experience growth, all of them. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> all of them, but one experienced double digit growth in this quarter. How is this possible for a company <laugh> that has been around since what, 1976, right. Is in many ways, you know, look, I mean, they're not IBM, I get it. But I mean, you know, they're not, they're also not apple or Google, right. They're not new and exciting. And I know Apple's not really that new either, but you know, it's a, this is amazing, you know, this, yeah. I keep saying this and I, I do mean this sarcastically. I'm not, I'm not trying to say this is a serious thing, but the pandemic is the best thing that ever happened to this country. That company pretty much

Mary Jo Foley (00:51:22):
Right. Pretty much right. Work from home. It's

Paul Thurrott (00:51:25):
Crazy, crazy growth, crazy growth. It

Mary Jo Foley (00:51:29):
Is. Although if you're watching the earnings call yesterday, which happens at five 30 Eastern, as soon as the Microsoft numbers came out, their stock tanked, not tanked, but like really dropped. Right. And everybody's like, wait a minute. This is an amazing earnings report. What happened? So there's a, there was a chart in their earnings deck that showed a, a category, another made up category that we don't really know what's in Azure and other cloud services. Right. So we don't, yes. It's not office 365 in there, but there's some other Azure services', but not all of them mixed in that number was 46% growth. And the last few quarters, it spent 50.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:08):
So, oh, how? Yeah. I microphone <laugh> you gotta remember it for, for several quarters in a row. This is years ago. Azure grew 70%. Pretty routinely. Yeah. Right. And as that never started the fall as it must for a mature business, right? Yeah. People are freaking out. I just wanna remind 46% growth. Now they might be patting the numbers a little bit there cuz you, you actually made a really good point there. They typically have put other cloud services in with server. And I think they've done that to bolster server a little bit, frankly. But if you look at the way they describe it, this quarter it's server and cloud services and Azure and other cloud services. So once again, we have no idea what this weird mix is, why something might be here or there, we don't even know what the makeup is, but yeah. I feel like they've bolstered. I think that, you know, like I said, we, we push cloud cuz that drives the stock up. Yeah. Analysts keep freaking out because Azure growth is slowing, slowing to mid, double ditches by the way, whatever. Okay. Right. All their, and, and maybe to, to prevent this impact from being worse, they've started bundling other technically non-ag services into the Azure number to make that slow down, to make the slow, slow. It's a slowing slow. If that makes sense. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:28):
Yeah. No, we don't know what's in that other cloud services. Like we know it's not office 365 and it's not dynamics. It's not those it's services, obviously that run on Azure. But those other services, I just mentioned run on Azure. So I'm like, yeah. How are they picking and choosing which things are in this bucket? I don't know. I, and they won't say what's in this bucket.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:46):
Yeah. I mean, you, you kind of said it. I mean there are, there are three business units at Microsoft. Two of them are primarily cloud based office 365, Microsoft 365 or in the other one. <Laugh> right. So that, that can't be part of what's bolster Azure. So I think with commercial cloud, Microsoft cloud, they're doing a little bit of juggling here. Yeah. To balance things out, frankly. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> but we don't know because how could we know? They don't tell us what we need to know. So

Mary Jo Foley (00:54:15):
Yeah. We can only guess my favorite, my favorite metric of the entire call and only enterprise people will care or understand why I think this is interesting. <Laugh> okay. Azure arc tripled their customer base tripled year over year. So the reason this is interesting is Azure arc is the way Microsoft talks about multi-cloud and how you can manage their services running on other clouds like Google and Amazon. Right. But they've never given any indication of how big is the market for that or how many customers have used it. And now we, we say, okay, the base has tripled. We don't know what the base is. I

Paul Thurrott (00:54:52):
Was gonna say, right. They still have it. <Laugh>

Mary Jo Foley (00:54:55):
No, but they did say thousands, plural of customers are using it. I'm like, okay, this is the first time I've ever seen any number because I always ask analysts like, do you know any customers using an Azure? A not like I know every enterprise customer Microsoft has and could call 'em up and be like, Hey, using Azure arc. Right. but I, but I was always curious because this is something they push super hard and it was a big introduction for them. Maybe like two ignites ago. And I'm like, is anyone using this thing? The answer is thousands plural. Okay. Now we, we something to go on <laugh> So yeah. I'm like, oh, Azure, Eric mentioned in the call. Nice. <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:55:36):
There were a lot of weird mentions in the call, by the way, there were I'll get to later, but yeah. Broads strokes, right. Microsoft has the three business units, intelligent cloud, more personal competing and productivity processes. Intelligent cloud is the part of the business that includes Azure. It's the biggest part. Yes. 18.3 billion in revenues, 26% growth. More personal computing which is windows surface. And Xbox came in second, if you will 17.5 billion. Yes.

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:05):
May I add something there? Yeah, of course. During the last call they had Amy Hood really was putting cold water on the likelihood that surface was gonna even be out of the red. Like she was like, yeah, it's gonna be a terrible quarter for surface, like really bad. And the windows. Yeah. It's gonna be okay. Right. And then suddenly, boom <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:56:24):
Well, I want, okay. That's the, that's what I wanna talk about. So that's one of the things I do definitely wanna dive into it just real quick though. Productivity and business processes 15.9 billion, 19% growth. So yeah. You mentioned Azure arc. The thing that stuck out for me, surface laptop. Gotta mention in there. Yeah. So this, this is what's weird. Yeah. Year ago that this quarter, one year ago, Microsoft's surface business hit 2 billion in revenues for the first time ever became a $2 billion business. This past year I don't remember the exact timing, but we'll call it right before this quarter or right in the beginning of this quarter, mm-hmm <affirmative> Microsoft had its biggest surface product launch of all time. They update or introduced new PCs across the board and updated every mainstream device they make, except for one surface laptop surface laptop is the only primary product they have that didn't get updated.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:16):
This is a weird product because surface laptop three N four, which is the most recent version, still are the ones that have come with AMD processors. And most notably, those processors have always been a generation behind. For some reason, this was a big problem for surface laptop. Three it's much less of a problem for surface laptop four because the chip set that's in there is actually is fine. It's it's a good chip set. Yeah. They called out surface laptop. Despite the fact that they announced several other surface computers. Yep. The one that did this, it was surface laptop. The thing that hadn't been updated since the spring almost a year ago now, but surface is also unique because I mentioned earlier, remember that every business in Microsoft grew double digits except one mm-hmm <affirmative> that one is surface surface only grew 8% by revenue. Yeah. That means by the way, it's still $2 billion business, because if it grew percent from 2 billion last year, it's 2 billion plus eight to 8% of 2 billion, whatever that is. Yeah. Right. So that's good. I mean, it's good, but not the growth I saw. I don't remember the growth figure from last year, but I think it was 30%. It was, it was pretty high, whatever it was. Yeah. So yeah, that was, that was the thing that stuck, all the stuff they talked about. I was like, wait, surface, laptop, are you kidding me?

Mary Jo Foley (00:58:24):
Yeah. They called it out in the deck. They called it out. Like when I said to them, why, so you guys said surface was gonna have a bad quarter. What happened? Like you had actually had a good quarter and they said, surface laptop. Right. That sold way better. And we got our hands on more product to sell. So, you know, they were predicting chip shortages and this and that and component shortage is right. And so somehow they managed to get their hands on enough to make more product and fill demand. Okay. So that might be why surface, laptop kinda lagged and then caught up. And the quarter was, I see they had a lot, maybe they had a lot of orders for it, right.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:01):
Since we're discussing this, I'll just also point out that the other weird thing about surface over time has been, you know, surface is meant to be innovative and new form factors and all this kind of stuff. And then over time, of course they released a laptop and it's like, oh look, you know, 30 years after the first laptop, Microsoft's invented a laptop, you know, but the reality is they need a laptop, right? This is the mainstream device. It's the one everyone buys. It's the MacBook error of windows. I mean, of course they have to make this thing, but you know, all the numbers we've ever gotten, not from Microsoft. Right. Cuz they never released anything like this. But from third parties, ad duplex, for example, it looks at usage of different surface devices. Hasn't done it in a while, but in the past have surface, laptop is not one of the best selling surface devices or had it wasn't historically the tablet form factor surface pro surface go surface lab, you know, surface three back in the day or whatever. Those are the best selling devices by far. Everything else is way off at the end of the chart. So surface laptop has done better than like, you know, surface book or whatever surface studio of course, but it was never the volume leader. And I I've never understood that surface laptop is a beautiful device. It's a great, it's just a it's, you know, it's almost perfect as a laptop that got the right sizes. There's

Leo Laporte (01:00:16):
More competition in that arena. There is. And there is in the two and

Mary Jo Foley (01:00:20):
Sure. And also so a duplex, a duplex measures things in a kind of an odd way, right? Like they don't measure like all sales of all PCs.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:29):
No, no, of course, no they're looking at app usage and they can see what's running them and so forth. No, but I that's, but that's the best we have. I mean, that's, that's what we have.

Mary Jo Foley (01:00:36):
I know we don't have anything else. Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:38):
So, you know, just in the, just in that context. So I was fascinated, a service laptop called out a device that hasn't been updated in almost a year, unlike everything else they sell. And this is one that hasn't historically been near the top of the sales charts. And yet that was the one they called out. I love it. I, I that's in many ways my favorite surface, it's the one I think people should buy. Yep. You know, if they're gonna,

Mary Jo Foley (01:01:01):
I'll just say, I will just say laptops, work on laps and just leave them <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:01:07):
So the name isn't just cute. It's it isn't just it's

Leo Laporte (01:01:11):
Practical. Yeah. Right. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (01:01:14):
Maybe people have finally come to realize lap ability matters. It ain't a laptop

Leo Laporte (01:01:19):
If you can't keep it in your laptop. That's right. That's right. That's right.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:23):
They should put the ACON tear on the bottom. So it doesn't just slide off your legs. Hmm. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:01:27):
Google kind of did

Paul Thurrott (01:01:28):
That with their oh, the little ribbed bottom on the oh yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:01:32):
NUS in the bottom. That's not a bad idea. That's fine. Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:40):
Anything else? So else what else? Yeah. Real quick. I cuz cuz it's in the notes, we just, just some data points. Right? So Microsoft talk halo, infinite which we'll talk up a little bit later. 20 million active users or users fours of horizon five, by the way. Not far behind 18 million. They reiterated the game past number, which we had heard last week, 25 million 56.4 million Microsoft 360 of consumer users that still doesn't seem super high to me. But by the way up 19%, year of year, that's actually really big 209 million seats of enterprise mobility and security, which is basically what we'll call in tune up 28%. And then the biggest one of across Mary Jo, the most important one I do.

Leo Laporte (01:02:22):
Oh how's he? How's

Paul Thurrott (01:02:26):
A it didn't make the ruins

Mary Jo Foley (01:02:29):
Seriously. Right? No. And you know why, right. You understand why they didn't bring up act vision. Like it's, there's nothing

Paul Thurrott (01:02:36):
They can say. No, no, no.

Leo Laporte (01:02:36):
He was talking about it. I was talking about, but yeah, I understand why they

Mary Jo Foley (01:02:39):
Oh, had duke. Sorry. <laugh> I actually the, the notes we have activism. Okay. So activism. Yeah. The deal is probably not gonna close till 20, 23. Right? So what can you ask

Paul Thurrott (01:02:52):
Right now? Well, could you ask, well, I don't know. It was the big blockbuster announcement of the century. I mean it feels like someone would've how, how will this impact your guidance of blah, blah, blah, whatever. Yeah, there you go. You know,

Mary Jo Foley (01:03:02):
You can't so here's, it's not approved. So they can't even talk about,

Paul Thurrott (01:03:06):
I was gonna say, okay, I was literally gonna say, I'm surprised no one asked, but you're right. The reality is Microsoft. Can't talk about this.

Leo Laporte (01:03:12):
They could have asked about, when is Leo gonna get an Xbox series X you could asked the Matt that did they ask about this chip shortage or hardware issues?

Paul Thurrott (01:03:21):
Well, you were reading the ad. I saw a thing that Xbox series X bundles were available at some retailer, but they were

Leo Laporte (01:03:26):
Already sold. It's already gone. That's what happens? 60 seconds later. Boom. It's they're

Paul Thurrott (01:03:31):
Gone. That's all right. When you do ads, I research Xbox series Leo to see what what's going on. Well, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:03:38):
Someday, someday, but I am curious. So nobody asked about chip shortages cuz you know, people are now saying, I just saw a study report that said we only have five days of chips ahead. Yeah. You know, and that I mean that's not just for computers, that's for cars and everything else, but yeah. And that it may not be solved for years. So I'm surprised nobody asked them about that. It's

Mary Jo Foley (01:04:01):
Somebody asked, they gave just some usual there's they could say

Leo Laporte (01:04:04):
About that either. Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:04:05):
Microsoft primarily is not a,

Leo Laporte (01:04:07):
But they make service. They make Xbox. They do. Yeah. But

Paul Thurrott (01:04:10):
Those are so small by volume. I mean, those are very small parts of the

Leo Laporte (01:04:13):
Business. Right. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (01:04:13):
Yeah. But it could, at one point the, the shortage was affecting their servers and their own data centers. Right. They couldn't get servers. Right. And they couldn't get parts for

Leo Laporte (01:04:22):
Service they're customers as well as sellers. Yeah. Yeah. They are.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:25):
They are. But we should talk about teams. We should.

Leo Laporte (01:04:28):
Yes. Cuz teams of course is all that really matters to

Paul Thurrott (01:04:31):
Microsoft. These well, not anymore Leo that, as it turns out that is slow dramatically. So now we're gonna move on to something else. <Laugh>

Mary Jo Foley (01:04:38):
What that, so I was very surprised they, yeah. Publicly talked about this number. So yesterday they said we've surpassed 270 million monthly active teams users. Okay. So that sounds huge. Right. But the, the last number we had was 250 monthly active users. Which was July of last year. So from July, till December, they added 20 million. Right, right. 20 million active users, which given how fast teams was growing at the start of the pandemic, that is a, a radical that's

Paul Thurrott (01:05:10):
Right. Slowing. I did not do this. I I'm lazy, but someone should make a graph that shows the, the growth rate. And what you'll see is that it has yeah. But it's still growing, but it's slow

Leo Laporte (01:05:19):
Dramatically when you get to those kind of numbers. There's only, I mean the

Mary Jo Foley (01:05:27):
Other number to no, the other number to look at is office 365 commercial users. And that we don't have a recent number for that, but all I members up until like a certain point the percentage of those users who had teams for free weren't using it's right. Like there was, it was like surprising how few of them were using teams, even though it was built into their description. We're

Leo Laporte (01:05:50):
Probably one of those. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Because they're using slack something else.

Mary Jo Foley (01:05:56):
Right. Or just are like, ah, you know what? We don't need it. I know I'm supposed to be using it, but blah. Right. And so I, I just was very surprised. They went public with this number last, the last in July, they switched how they looked at the number. They used to call out daily active users. And then they switched it to monthly active users, which is a sign already. Like they're trying to hide something. Right. Like they're change the metric. And then if you looked at their executive compensation numbers, which were in like a 10 K a 10 K form last year, you could see teams were starting to slow down. And their executives were being, you know, docked basically for the slow down because they had a predicted number and then they had the number they were making and it wasn't the same. So I'm like, yeah, it can't grow forever. But it's, it is kind of surprising to me. It's not growing faster. It

Paul Thurrott (01:06:43):
Is. Well, I mean, I'm like, we used to talk about Microsoft's revenues in very rough terms and say you it's a long time ago. This is outta date. 60% of the revenues came from business customers, 40% from consumers. It's probably skewed more toward businesses now. Yeah. That user base has to be much higher than 270 million. It has to be. Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (01:07:01):
It is. It's I forget what the last number is. I'll try to find it because it was, it has to

Paul Thurrott (01:07:06):
Be now I own the world. It's fair to say. A lot of people, a lot of companies are using slack. They're using other things. I mean, that's of course, you know, the competition is occurring. Yeah. So that's part of it. And Microsoft, hasn't talked about the office 365 commercial seat number in, if not Mon you know, quarters, years, it's been a long time, like she said so we don't know where that's at, but

Mary Jo Foley (01:07:29):
Okay, well maybe I'm wrong here. <Laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> I'm looking at, so yeah, office office 365, it pros, they said mm-hmm <affirmative> office 365 commercial. The number of users is likely 280 million. Okay. So, oh boy, it isn't radically different. I'm wrong. That's

Paul Thurrott (01:07:51):
Why they're putting it in windows 11. You know, you have to grow somewhere in a, I guess if it's not gonna happen in business. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:07:57):
Right. Yeah. They that's their estimate that it was a, in July last year, it was like 280 million users. So 250,000,002 80 million that wasn't bad. Like okay. I'm, I'm very wrong. Okay. About

Paul Thurrott (01:08:08):
That. So re Microsoft commercial revenue off the top, my head, I think was up 19%. There's the thing going on in the office, part of Microsoft's business, where as the user base shifts to subscriptions away from mm-hmm <affirmative> on-prem software or whatever their revenues actually kind of go down there short term, but the goal obviously is over time to make it up in volume. I don't understand money, but it, it there's a, there is a financial thing going on there. So that's interesting. It would be, I mean, we don't know how many, we don't know what the number is. Now we can assume its' haven't given us something, you know, it's not, it's not two 80 today

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:44):
Number. No. Right. It should be higher. Right. Yeah. So, okay. Yeah. I thought that was a big discrepancy, but no, I guess

Paul Thurrott (01:08:53):
There was also the big announcement about them making a free tear of Microsoft teams available in the most recent quarter. I don't think that was done altruistically. It might have had something to do with, you know, this, this slowing down. Right. And, and I made the point at the time, you're better off spending the $5 a month on the basic version of Microsoft 365, because you get all this other stuff including some things that would impact team, but Microsoft does in fact make a free version of teams now. And I, this has to be why, oh,

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:22):
Actually it's not free. The one you're talking

Paul Thurrott (01:09:23):
About, oh, low cost, I'm sorry. Low cost. I'm

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:25):
Sorry. Low cost. Right. For SMBs. Right. And yeah, I agree with you. That was because of lawsuits probably as much as anything.

Paul Thurrott (01:09:32):
Oh, that too. I'm sorry that too. Of course, of course. Yeah. But you know, the slow, you know, the timing is interesting because it happened within the quarter where yeah. They finally announced a new team's number and it wasn't maybe as high as we thought it was gonna be.

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:44):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway I thought the teams, the teams numbers were very interesting and, and the fact that it is slowing. Yeah. You know, like we say, part of it, part of it's because it's getting to be a bigger and bigger base, but there's more going on there. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I think, I think we keep talking about this teams shoot, oh, overhaul that they keep promising or that we're hearing about. Right. But we haven't seen it and I'm like, yeah. You know, what if teams was easier to use? I think a lot more people would just spin up a teams meeting instead of going to Rome. I think I just

Paul Thurrott (01:10:17):
Have the it's just hard to use it is if teams was more easy to use, it'd be called slack. Mary Jo. No, I'm sorry. I'm <laugh> yeah, exactly. Or zoom, right? Yeah. Or zoom. Yeah, sure. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:10:27):
Yeah. True.

Leo Laporte (01:10:30):
<Laugh> okay. That's it right. That's the earnings in a nutshell, I say,

Mary Jo Foley (01:10:35):
So I say we made it fun, fun, and painless. My

Paul Thurrott (01:10:37):
It fun, fun, and painless. Paul and Mary Joe

Leo Laporte (01:10:40):
Maker. Earnings fun. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:10:42):
Take your medicine with a little bit of sugar. You'll be fine. You'll

Leo Laporte (01:10:45):
Love it. All right. Quick break. More to come just a little bit, including I think we've got a little Xbox news, some surface duo news are you show today sort of news brought to you by progress. Hey, who isn't for progress? Right. But when I'm talking progress, I'm talking a suite of apps that everybody needs for their growing enterprise. There are, you know, there are pain points. These days in in business progress has been enabling enterprise experiences for decades. They, they know what business needs to thrive. Most companies don't have the resources to invest in technology. They don't build it themselves, right? They don't have giant it teams, but you still need to use technology, especially to create differentiation. You just have to do it with a smaller budget. That's why progress is a great place to turn with progress. Any organization can achieve the level of differentiation that's critical in today's business environment, whether you're an it professional concerned about networking, infrastructure, security and compliance progress has a solution for you.

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Mary Jo Foley (01:13:56):
I, I brought this up in a, I think in the pick of the week, a couple weeks ago. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> but now I have a little more information about this. So Monarch, the thing that also is known as one outlook, Microsoft's attempt to bring all its various outlook desktop clients together and create them. So that they're all based on the same code base. That effort is moving forward. Last week we had about that was from windows central last year saying it was gonna happen last year, but you know, there's a pandemic and you know, stuff gets delayed. So yeah, it, it seems like it's about to happen this year instead. And I'm hearing that we might hear a big announcement from Microsoft about this in March late March, early April timeframe that they may go public with it and say, Hey, we've got this thing.

Mary Jo Foley (01:14:47):
We've been working on called one outlook and we're trying to bring together all our different clients. It's gonna look a lot like outlook for the web looks like right now, but this will be the client for the web Mac. 1 32 it'll work on Intel arm. It's gonna be a single code base. That'll work everywhere and be basically the same outlook in one place. It won't be the same outlook as on mobile, you know? So the there's also products on mobile called outlook that aren't really outlook they're Comly technology that Microsoft bought, but they rebranded everything outlook just so it looked like there was one outlook, even though there were many outlooks <laugh> but yeah, that's, that's kinda where we're at with this. I'm hearing that it could go to insiders late March, early April by O July or August that it could go to insiders in the slow channel.

Mary Jo Foley (01:15:43):
And then the idea is when, when the next version, the next feature updated windows 11 and windows 10 come out in around October or at least the fall of this year, that there'll be the, the new outlook pinned to that product. So that you'll have the option to use it in place of the mail and calendar apps that are built in to outlook. Sorry, built into windows. Now they're not gonna force you and say, you have to use this outlook in place, place of the built in mailing calendar, at least not yet. But I think that the idea will be let's get people to try it. Let's get people excited about it. Let's pin it there and let people say, oh look, there's outlook here. Let's let me try it out and see how it is. <Laugh> yeah. I, I like that. They're not gonna try to force it on people immediately because especially for outlook windows users, they're very attached to their outlook. And there are a lot of features in there that are not gonna be in the outlook web client. And I think being using a carrot versus a stick approach and doing a gradual migration is a good idea. This guys they're

Paul Thurrott (01:16:50):
Gonna need therapy when this change happens. They

Mary Jo Foley (01:16:52):
Are, they are. Yeah. Yep.

Speaker 4 (01:16:54):
So what gonna hear powers of pain?

Mary Jo Foley (01:16:58):
I think so. I I'm excited though, because I think the mail and calendar app, so there are some people who love the mail and calendar app that's built into windows. I find it very frustrating and limiting. Yeah, no theres no. And I love to, I would love to see outlook replace that. Like if it was real.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:13):
Oh yeah. Like today. Yep. Right? Yep. Yeah. A P PWA version of outlook.com would be better.

Mary Jo Foley (01:17:19):
Yeah. Yeah. Yep. But anyway, that's, that's what I'm hearing from my content.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:25):
I'm excited that you wrote about this. I get questions about this all the time. There's not a lot of info out there. No, I'm glad to see. There are plans to put it in windows 11, et cetera, et cetera. So the funny

Mary Jo Foley (01:17:34):
Part is a lot of people inside Microsoft are using Monarch one outlook. Yeah. Like they, oh, interesting. That's where they've been testing it. They've been testing it inside. Right. So I, I periodically ping the administrator of the outlook at Microsoft. I'm like, Hey, I get in on this and they send back. No, no, no, no <laugh> but I'm like, ah, you can't blame me for trying. I'm gonna keep paying them. They send me a nice little polite note. You, you are not granted access to this. No, no. And I send back a little appeal and nothing ever comes back. It just goes into the Abys

Paul Thurrott (01:18:09):
<Affirmative>

Mary Jo Foley (01:18:10):
Yeah. <Laugh> yeah. Surface

Leo Laporte (01:18:15):
Duo.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:17):
Ooh. Yeah. So

Mary Jo Foley (01:18:19):
I can't believe you put this in the notes. I thought you hate this product.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:22):
<Laugh> it's still news. I mean, it's still a Microsoft product. I mean it is year and a half ago, ish. Microsoft released the original version of based on Android 10, but a month after Android, 11 had come out. And so they promised they would provide an Android 11 upgrade by the sometime in 2021 and 2021 came and went and that never happened. And they made it available two days ago. I think yesterday, the day before you have to have it unlocked device, it has to be in the United or north America or Europe, I think. And this remind people, Android 12 came out six months ago. <Laugh> I dunno. So, you know, the lack of support on the software side for the duo is one of its Achilles heels. Cynically, a lot of people and myself included aren't really expecting much more in the way of updates know Android 12 ever. It maybe never happens. I don't know.

Mary Jo Foley (01:19:14):
I feel like it's about 12 L right? Wasn't that supposed to be? The one everybody thought was going to yeah, because that's more for

Leo Laporte (01:19:20):
Those bigger screens. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I just feel like duo is so different from your regular run of the mill of Android phone. That it's just hard for them to keep up with Android.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:29):
I mean they only make one phone. So I, well, I just regarding 12 L I, I think it's reasonable for the surface du oh two to get that sometime this year, for sure. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and, and be included in the beta as well. Right. Because that's one of the things they're running through right now that would be appropriate and I hope that happens the original version. I hope so, but I, I, you know, I, I, I would just prep yourself for yeah. Just prep yourself for disappointment there. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:20:00):
Prepare and you also see, wait, there's one more duo thing I just saw mm-hmm <affirmative> okay. Duo two, I believe got an update to the, your phone app that lets it actually manage apps. Remember that was just a feature that was supported on Samsung phones. That's right. And it wasn't even supported on the duo the, your app yeah, man, managing of your apps and manipulating of your apps. Right. And now I think it's just the duo

Paul Thurrott (01:20:27):
That, that got just so people understand that, you know, it's controversial because Microsoft makes their own hardware. Why wouldn't it get the stuff first? They have a, a, a partnership with Samsung that predates the duo and you know, we don't know how long that's gonna last but surface. I'm sorry. Your phone features often come first to Samsung. That's been the, the way it's been for the past couple years actually. So yeah. Anyway, it's good that it's expanding to do it too. Not

Mary Jo Foley (01:20:52):
Just first, just like they worked

Paul Thurrott (01:20:54):
Way better on Samsung and, and sometimes only sometimes it's only on Samsung now. That's true. Yeah. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:21:03):
You already talked about surface laptop. Yeah. That came up earlier. Yeah. Invidia is it seems like preparing to walk away from the arm acquisition, which is, makes sense, right? Yeah. I'm a little disappointed. Every company

Paul Thurrott (01:21:17):
That licenses are no one. So they're gonna IPO, that's the plan now? So, and this is just, this is a Bloomberg report. It's not confirmed by any company, but you know, Mike, Microsoft, Google, apple whoever Qualcomm, everyone complained regulatory bodies from around the world, the UK, the United States, the FTC just got involved fairly recently trying to block this the UK did it is looking at it for national security reasons, which is kind of interesting. And so the question has always been, you know, Nvidia to me, I seem like an okay company for this to, you know, for them to have this, but if not Invidia then who or what I guess. And you know, maybe the answer is arm remains its own company. And so supposedly according to Bloomberg, the plan now is for them to spin it off in an IPO. And then they can be a standalone company if anyone could buy because the left share. So maybe there could be a hostile takeover. And one of those terrible companies like Google or somebody can take it. I Don know. So that would be good. Right. But you know, that's

Leo Laporte (01:22:18):
Oh, well, okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:20):
See what you

Leo Laporte (01:22:21):
Get. This is all cuz SoftBank, which owns arm right now really wants to get it out of their

Mary Jo Foley (01:22:26):
Portfolio. I always forget SoftBank owns. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:30):
I mean, which doesn't yeah. It doesn't make a lot of sense.

Leo Laporte (01:22:32):
Just, you know, it's like just another

Paul Thurrott (01:22:34):
Project. I just point out, you know, SoftBank is a Japanese, right. We don't know a lot about this company per se, as, as, as far as, you know, the parent company of arm. But I, I don't think there are any negative reports out there about them doing terrible things and harming arm

Leo Laporte (01:22:47):
In any way. They haven't been selling it off and pieces and stuff like that. So yeah. I guess it's fun. Eat Intel, eat Intel's EU antitrust conviction. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:23:00):
This is crazy. So just to give you like a little insight into how my brain works, I, I see a headline like the European, I think it was general court. Let me just find the actual story and I can tell you exactly what it is. <Laugh> European general court overturns an anti anti I'm sorry. An antitrust decision against Intel reversing. What was a record 1 billion Euro in the process. I see that. And I think I remember this, right? So I'm gonna search through my, the stuff I've written on Thurrott com. You've very good memory. <Laugh> well, no, this is a big, this is a big story. I mean, so the thing is, this happened in 2009, this is a long, this is not, this is not from five, I've only been at this site for six years. It's not on Thurrott.com. And it was like, oh, that's right.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:46):
Because when this happened this was in the wake of Microsoft's antitrust stuff in the EU and your Intel took a different tact, right? They learning from Microsoft, they just kind of went with it and everything. But the interesting thing is they've been fighting it ever since. And basically they have kind of one again and again and again, and it's, it's, it's a very complex, but the ruling is incredibly complex. Of course it is it's the EU. But basically <laugh> the they have argued to the European commission, the EU court of justice, and now the EU general court that evidence was ignored all along the way. And that this, that the proof that the rebates that Intel offered to PC makers 20 years ago, by the way, 20 years ago that were originally deemed abusive and capable of that foreclosure effect, which is a term we, I learned about cuz of Microsoft to, in this case to AMD not true.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:47):
Mm. So they're reversing this decision. This is like 20 years old. So here's the thing. This is, what's beautiful about this. This is what I love about Europe. The most, this can still be appealed. Oh no, this is, is not over this isn't necessarily. This could go on another eight years. Oh God. We won't even be using my we'll be using light <laugh>, you know, as a, as a computing power source, by the time this thing concludes it won't even matter anymore. Crazy. That's crazy. Yeah. This is the problem with court actions. They just take forever crazy, but that's an unusually a long time. Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. No, just one more Intel thing. So I mentioned the the Intel, we might not need Pluto on thing, which I think should be more of a story by the way, but whatever that's one thing Intel, since pat Gelsinger took over has been announcing an expansion of their manufacturing capabilities at a time when no one is really doing this right.

Paul Thurrott (01:25:46):
They really see this as an advantage. They're gonna temporarily use third party fabs if they, when they have to, but the goal is they want to have all this advanced manufacturing capability for themselves and they wanna sell it to other people too. And we know they're doing stuff they're expanding their existing facilities in New Mexico. I think there was a thing in Arizona as well, 80 billion investment in Europe for two different facilities. And now they've announced they're gonna invest at least 20 billion in Ohio, and that could actually grow significantly depending on how it grows. Lots of jobs involved, obviously not just temporary construction jobs, but actual jobs, you know, at the fab that they're building there. And this let's see if I can find the numbers here. A thousand acres in licking county outside of Columbus could support up to eight chip factories. Intel says, so they're building one, they're promising that, but this investment could grow to over a hundred billion dollars over the next decade. This is

Leo Laporte (01:26:43):
Successful. This is pat gel. Singer's big gamble is what this is. It really is because, and Ben Thompson writes a lot about this in Strat Intel, which kind of, I think stumbled by being an integrated company, doing both design and fab for their chips for years, while other companies like arm and Envidia apple would design it, but then have TSMC or other companies build it. That's right. And Intel Gelsinger announced this remember a couple months ago is gonna try to kind it's I kind of split the baby, do both that's. So they're building factories to be a fab for companies like apple and, and arm. And that's what this Ohio factory is, but they're also going to, they're still contracting capacity from TSMC to make chips for the design arm. So it's almost as if Intel's splitting into two different companies. It's a very, it's a big gamble, actually. It's a very interesting gamble. It makes some

Paul Thurrott (01:27:40):
Sense to me. I, I just two things that are kind of Microsoft related to this we know Qualcomm by the way, has already said yes to this, they're gonna probably sign on to Intel's manufacturing capabilities. It makes sense for a company like Qualcomm to have multiple sources for this, especially

Leo Laporte (01:27:56):
The sources in the us. Yeah. And that's what Intel's gambling on. Of

Paul Thurrott (01:27:59):
Course. So that's smart. I mean, I would say manufacturing anything in the United States probably expensive, but then again, they're doing chips are expensive, no matter

Leo Laporte (01:28:06):
What, I don't think there's a cheap way to make chips. Yeah. The weird thing as, as Ben points out is that by, by using TSMC to make their own chips Intels in a way funding a competitor, they're helping a TSMC build their capacity.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:20):
That's right. But the, you know, what the, I, I, I don't know. I, I think more of the look we, we were we're in the middle of a, a, a, an era where we can't get chips, right. I mean, it's, that's the bet. This is, this is smart. The other thing just to, for Microsoft guys to kind of put this in perspective, this thing Intel is doing right now, Intel's historic strength. If you will, is what sunk Nokia. Right. So Nokia alone, among phone makers, by the end of the run had facilities all over the world for manufacturing, their phones, not the chip sets, but their phones. And they had, and what that is, is a tons and tons of employees, all of which have high salaries, health benefits, legacy you know, retirement plans and things like that. Like, like this was, this is why the NOIA we know and love sort of, and was bought by Microsoft and now is gone. I know there's a new NOIA doesn't exist anymore because of this. So that's, and I think that's the bet that Leo is yeah, it's interesting referring to in away because this could go either way for Intel. Yeah, for sure.

Leo Laporte (01:29:22):
But it's not going well without a big change anyway. So it's, you know, they needed to do something. Gelsinger is a chip designer. That's the other thing that's interesting. He did the 4 86. So he came back to Intel and I think he's, he wants them to be a great chip design firm once again, and then kind of

Paul Thurrott (01:29:41):
There, this might be like jobs returning to apple. You, you know, it might be the best thing that ever happened could be,

Leo Laporte (01:29:46):
And, you know, I think it's gutsy and I think it's probably had to be done. So it'll be good to watch, but that, you know, that's the problem with building these factories 20 billion they're expensive. Yeah. Very expensive. Alright. Little break. And then I would love if you would talk about Xbox Paul you know, as long as possible,

Paul Thurrott (01:30:06):
<Laugh> I do have some stuff

Leo Laporte (01:30:08):
You do Xbox coming up.

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Leo Laporte (01:30:46):
Let's start with halo infinite, because I think it's a success story.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:50):
Yes, it is a success. So Microsoft separate from the 20 million announcement we mentioned earlier had tweeted out, Hey, by the way, this is the biggest Xbox launch in, in history, you know sorry, biggest halo launch in history and without even know what the number is because there's no numbers for any of these other things anyway, who cares? Of course it is, right. So there are two big differences between halo, infinite and every other version of halo that's ever come up before it, the first one is it's available for free. <Laugh> like halo, multiplayers free for everybody all the time. So you, a lot of these people aren't even paying for halo. So that alone, I think makes, you know, it, it obvious that this always will have been the biggest launch, assuming a certain level of quality and all that stuff.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:34):
The other thing is this is the first version of halo, not to be tied to a specific console version it's available across all two console generations on Xbox it's available on piece C it's available through game pass, which it gives it makes it available to people don't wanna pay for the, the game outright it's available in Xbox cloud gaming with a streaming service, which means you could be playing halo right now on an iPhone, an iPad, an Android handset, a anything that runs a web browser, including a smart TV, probably a PC and a, a console as well. Right. You could stream on those things as well. So, I mean, yeah, a little asterisks on that one. I mean, of course, you know, you, you kind of stack the deck here, right? <Laugh> I mean, like obviously this thing's gonna be the biggest launch it's, you know, it's just, the avail is so much broader.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:20):
I will say the little negative part to this statistic is I mentioned earlier 18 million players on for fors horizon, five fours, a horizon five does benefit from game pass. So it is there in game streaming, but there's no free component to it. So it is interesting that fors a, a game that is, it's a great game. But halo is iconic. I mean, that, those two things are that close, I think speaks really well to fors that franchise. And I think it was part of them to, you know, place it in Mexico, frankly. That's a great location. Just, you know, is it in Mexico city? Yeah, it does take place around the Zuck. <Laugh> I don't know if it's Mexico city, but the locations are on my, yeah. So the, this one is probably the, the bigger news in a way is obviously with the avision stuff.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:06):
Right. There's a lot of questions swirling around, you know, Sony was like, Hey you know, we have certain agreements with avision, you're not gonna put a stop to that obviously. And it's like, well, obviously that's legal agreement, you know? So there's not much that Microsoft or Phil Spencer or anybody can really about this thing ahead of the actual clearing of the deal. But Phil Spencer has been saying a lot. So <laugh> he does say he look, he's like, I talked to Sony, we're keeping call duty on PlayStation. There's still a gray area. There there's been more recent reports where maybe the next three versions of call duty will be on PlayStation. And then we'll see, I don't know, but I Don don't think it makes any sense not to put it on PlayStation. I, I might talk about that a little bit more in a second, but there was also a deal where activism C orig CEO Bobby Kotick, that great human being who will have a statue someday had a fireside chat with his employees.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:58):
There's been a lot of sexual harassment stuff going on, replace violations, et cetera. As we know at avision this guy showed up seven minutes late for a 30 minute meeting and only spoke for 16 minutes, but he did say the transition's gonna be smooth because Microsoft is committed to keeping as many of division people as possible. That's a concern too, right. Are they gonna lay off like half the staff or whatever, and supposedly not. And we'll see, I think the, I don't know if that even remembers the employee figure over there. I think it's in the 10,000 range, they have a lot of S 10,000, 10,000. Yeah. and then he has dealt with his <laugh> legacy, sort of like he's gonna stick around for the transition. I'd be happy to stay along after that. I think we all know that's suck, so that's whatever that's cute, but he's gonna be gone.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:46):
And I just, you know, just regarding this platform, exclusive thing, or, you know, the, the specific issue of call of duty, which will eventually, if the deal goes through, become a Microsoft title, should Microsoft, or will Microsoft make that available on rival platforms? Right. If you look at the video game industry, going back to actually the beginning of the video game industry, things like Atari in the beginning, they had games like PAC band and asteroids and missile command that were huge. And over time they would make those games available in other platforms. But, you know, you sort of thought of those as Atari 10 did this with the NES in the beginning, they had very specific games, only on that platform, super Mario brothers, right? Never came on Sega. It was never on anything else. They kept it to themselves. It's always been a strategy.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:29):
So Sony has done this, and Sony has wielded exclusive games as a weapon against other, you know, against Nintendo and Microsoft, frankly. So, and they've been very successful. They won, they have won. Let me think about this. Well, actually Nintendo technically won the the we generation there with the PS three and the Xbox 360, but they won the previous generation handling. And part of that has to do with Microsoft and NIST. But part of it has to do with the, this exclusive strategy, but as games move to cloud gaming, I think this becomes less of a problem, right? Because a games run everywhere. I just mentioned you can play halo on a phone. <Laugh> right. So yeah, it's exclusive to Xbox, but as long as gamers can get it anywhere, I think that matters less. And if Sony offers a similar subscription service, which expected to this is gonna, they're gonna update their PS now stuff you'll be able to play Sony exclusives on any device as well. And so I think the era of platform exclusives doesn't go away, but I think it's gonna change dramatically and become more game centric. And I think that's good for everybody. So I know everyone's worried about call duty on PlayStation. I don't, I think PlayStation's too big to ignore and PlayStation is, so today is so firmly associated with call duty to my chagrin that I don't, I just don't see that

Leo Laporte (01:36:50):
Going away. It's almost a math problem. Does Microsoft make more money by making C O D exclusive and thereby selling more Xboxs or do they make more, more money by continue to sell call duty that platform, that math, so that math, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:37:03):
That math is very easy today. You make it available everywhere because you don't make money on. That's how you make the most money. You'd be better off selling it on PlayStation, cuz Sony can lose money in the consoles, however, with them, yeah. As you move to cloud, you kind of don't care anymore. So if you, if you're gonna say, well, call duty is gonna be exclusive to Xbox. Now that state mean something very different five years from now than it did five years ago. True. Right. So,

Leo Laporte (01:37:24):
You know, we'll maybe, I don't know. Maybe if you say you have to have a game pass to play call of duty, maybe that does make 'em enough money to make up for the, you know, losses PlayStation. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:36):
We live in a world where Sony and Nintendo will not allow Microsoft to bring Xbox game pass to their consoles. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:37:42):
This is, well, that would be one way to leverage that. Wouldn't it

Paul Thurrott (01:37:45):
That's right. And then by the way, that might have had something to do with this purchase. Right. make those games as broadly available as possible.

Leo Laporte (01:37:52):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> we'll see, you know, you wanna make game pass the dominant platform. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> you do make 'em exclusive. You say, look, yep. You wanna play these great games that's game pass is the best deal,

Paul Thurrott (01:38:04):
But you know what? This is the, the fighting is occurring at the right level at the corporate level. So in the end gamers benefit, if, if I wanna play college duty, whatever 2023 or whatever it is and on the PlayStation and I can get Xbox game pass on there and get it that way. That's fine. I don't think I, I don't think I care. Yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:38:20):
So I think that's, that's the bottom line from a point of view of you, it's gonna be everywhere one way or the other is gonna be everywhere. You might have to get a game pass subscription.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:30):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> yeah. So I think things are changing in the gaming world. So we'll see

Leo Laporte (01:38:34):
How that play. But none, none of this means anything until the deal closes you guys that's right. You still bullish on that deal. Closing. Yep.

Mary Jo Foley (01:38:42):
Yeah. I am

Leo Laporte (01:38:43):
You,

Paul Thurrott (01:38:43):
You're both pretty clear. I'm gonna hold the boom box over my head playing. We are the champions when it happens. <Laugh> <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:38:54):
And finally, yes, Google, Google would play games on windows, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:38:59):
So some number of months ago go Google announced in a very strange way, very mysterious way that they were bringing game past games, Android games to windows. They didn't really say how there was a suggestion. There would be an app. They were very specific not working with Microsoft that says nothing to do with Microsofts in Android, subsystem that they've been talking, we're not, this is us, we're doing this. And this past week they did release a very early preview version of it in three places. I think it was Hong Kong, Taiwan and somewhere else in that area. So I can't, <laugh> see what it's like, but apparently it's, it is what it sounds like. It's an app, you down load over the web for windows and that app hosts the games that you can download and play. They are and Android games. They're not streaming.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:45):
I, so there has to be some emulator subsystem side I've no, I, I just don't know how it works, but it is available now in an early previous. So that suggests, or I would hope it is coming to other countries more broadly in the near future. So interesting. It's an interesting little kind of thing in there. And by the way you know, Google of course makes stadia, stadia. Hasn't been doing too well, a lot of questions there about whether they transition to being like the backend service for other game studios or something. And they get rid of the direct, everything gaming on Android is huge. So bringing Android gaming to windows and I think to the Mac eventually, I think that makes tons of sense. So we'll see what it looks like, but interesting.

Leo Laporte (01:40:30):
We survived Mary Jo,

Mary Jo Foley (01:40:32):
We did who Sorachi joined me. He knew, he knew

Paul Thurrott (01:40:36):
I was in pain. You know, the, the cat can tell when you need comfort. He did you see, you seem to have a heightened level of stress.

Mary Jo Foley (01:40:44):
He's like, oh, I gotta come help.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:46):
<Laugh> yeah. Like a service animal. What do you call this? Like a a comfort animal comfort. He's

Leo Laporte (01:40:51):
My, yeah. Well, you can get some more comfort while we start the back of the book segment, ladies and gentlemen with Paul Theros app pick of the week. And it's fair enough. You can pick your own apps. It's okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:03):
It's not every day I get to pick my own app. Yeah. So last week I, I hope to deliver this by next Wednesday. And I, I, I, I, I felt just missed it, but I gotta tell you the ordeal I've had since then getting this thing up and running suggests I was maybe being a little overly optimistic. I required a lot of help from Rafael in a lot of things but this is the ver this is the, the first, well, technically the second and most basic of my note had alternatives. This one was written in C using windows forums and the do net framework 4.72, I think it is a C sharp conversion of the original visual basic version of the app. I wrote about a year and a half ago. I've always intended to make it available publicly on GitHub.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:51):
So I've now done that. So if you're a opera, you can go to visual studio, you can clone the repository, you can bring it down a local copy, you can run it, you can install it, you can publish it, you can modify it. You can make push re pull requests, I guess they're called. You can do whatever you want with it. I am in the next month going to update it myself and I will document that process on my site. I'm just gonna do a couple of minor well bug fixes. I get some, I have a list of things I wanna fix. I have some modernization ideas, frankly. You gotta remember windows forms is 20 years old, plus it is the oldest of the technology I've used for this app. It is a very reasonable alternative notepad. It does everything notepad does, except for two major things.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:33):
It doesn't support a lot out of the weird text and coding formats that Microsoft's app supports in part cuz Microsoft doesn't document that very well. And it doesn't support other languages than English, us English, and that's just me being an INEP programmer. So that's one of the things I'm actually looking at is giving it local support. So maybe that's actually a big thing to change by the way, but we'll see. It does have things notepad doesn't have, it has word count built in, it has an auto save capability that you can enable it supports themes and you can arbitrarily change the color of the background and the text of the font, you know, the font text of the text font, text font. So you can do all that stuff. So it is available. It's on GitHub. If you go to github.com/threat, you should see it.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:17):
And in the coming months I will make the other versions available as well. So I made the visual basic version. Like I said, I made a version in windows presentation foundation, which I think is the best version by the way. So that will be the cool one. And I think that's the one we can really modernize because it supports all the new w UI three stuff and there's some cool stuff going on with WPF. So that will be neat. And then I also made a version with universal windows platform, which frankly is not a, a great software platform for productivity apps, but it's, it's got some unique aspects to it. It's it's kind of interesting. I, I'm not sure I'm gonna update that one, frankly, but I will at least make the source code available so you can play with that too.

Leo Laporte (01:43:55):
So, and I know you're doing this cuz it's a learning project and it's part of your job, but I also feel is this kind, you kind of enjoy it. Do you like look forward to the time you're gonna get to sit down and work on this or yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:07):
Yes, I it's fun. Isn't it? Yeah. It's it's almost obsessive. Yeah. In

Leo Laporte (01:44:13):
A way. It's okay to admit that Paul it's okay. And I

Paul Thurrott (01:44:15):
Like to, yeah, there's a troubleshooting aspect to it. Yeah. I get frustrated when I can't figure out something I'm fortunate in that I have a friend Rafael who was an expert in all of these things. So he's been very helpful.

Leo Laporte (01:44:27):
It's frustrating, but then when you do solve it, oh boy, he boy, what an endorphin rush, right? It's

Paul Thurrott (01:44:33):
Really? Yep. Oh yeah, no. I had like a high DPI issue that I solved and it was like it was just, it feels good. It was, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:44:39):
It's good. Coding's fun. Yeah. Coding's fun. Now since you, I mean, okay. You know, I know you enjoy plugging your own stuff, but you, maybe you have another app pick. I do. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:53):
So, so this is interesting because both these app picks are available on GitHub. So a couple years ago, Microsoft engineer in the Azure group decided to take the source code release of file manager, the original like windows 3.1, NT 3.1 file. You know, the old version of windows Explorer and make it available, you know, update it and get it running and everything. And it works. And so you can actually download this from the store. I guess it's finished now is the point is the reason that this comes up now if you go to the store and search for windows file manager, you will find it. You'll find that cute old, you know, the room with the file, the file. What do you call it? Say like file draw the physical file. Drawing the cabinet. Yeah. Cabinet file cabinet. Yeah. yellow icon.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:38):
And then it runs and it's just like a, it's like a blast from the past. You, if you've been using windows for any amount of time, you'll totally remember this thing. When Microsoft moved to windows, 95 file manager was still included in the box, but they moved to what we now call file Explorer. I think it was called windows Explorer probably back in the day. And it was considered inferior because you couldn't have it. Wasn't an MDI application. You couldn't have sub windows. So you would have to open. And by the way, still today, this is the way we've doing it for now for 25 years, you open multiple instances of the window and then you can copy things back and forth and file. May you can do that inside the application. And some people really like that. So I technically it's on GitHub, but you could download this. You could fork it. You could do what, you know, what people might do to my notepad app. I had, I gotta tell you running it the first time I immediately thought I have solved high DPI. This thing has high DPI issues. I wonder, I wonder anyway, it's it's

Leo Laporte (01:46:40):
A cool send them, send them a poll request. Send 'em a little that's exactly right. Yeah, yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:46:44):
Yeah. I have some ideas. Yeah. <laugh> well maybe I'll do a windows form version of

Leo Laporte (01:46:48):
It. You're you're in with the open source community. You's part of it. That's exciting.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:54):
That was one of the big questions I had. I was like, so I make this thing available. Like,

Leo Laporte (01:46:58):
Can people modify it

Paul Thurrott (01:47:00):
Well, can people like sell it? And they're like, he's like, yeah, basically. I mean, they have all, they interested in T MIT license. So he is like, yeah, they, they can right. As long as keep your copyright in there. <Laugh> I was like, that's

Leo Laporte (01:47:10):
Okay. That's okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:12):
It's just, it's a moment. It's a little gut check moment, you know, but then I realized this thing is so crappy. No one's gonna, that one's gonna sell it.

Leo Laporte (01:47:17):
<Laugh> nobody's gonna take it. They'll improve it if they sell it. Yeah. Enterprise pig of the week, time with marriage O foun.

Mary Jo Foley (01:47:27):
Right? So we were talking earlier about how the windows insider team doesn't always give us the most direction when we need it to put it euphemistically. Well, the dynamics team kind of does the opposite, right? Every twice a year, they publish roadmaps for features that they're gonna be rolling out and what they call wave one and wave two of their next versions of their products. So yesterday they published wave 1 20, 22 of dynamics, power platform and the industry clouds, which are those vertical clouds they sell for retail, healthcare manufacturing as such. These roadmaps are not for the faint of heart. The dynamics one is 400 page is the power platform. One is about 150 pages. I'm not kidding. <Laugh> there are PDFs that you can download. And this is only some of the hundreds of features. They're going to be adding to the products between April this year and September of this year.

Mary Jo Foley (01:48:28):
So yeah, a lot of these features are very increment of course, but it's pretty amazing. They even do this. And this is, this is designed more for like admins, implementers, people who are really into the granular aspects of E R P and CRM products. So if you are that person or you know, that person, you probably wanna download these they're free. They're a Microsoft's website. They just, as a caveat, they don't include every feature. And as one of my dynamics, friends said today, not only do they not include every feature, they also have features in there. That're gonna get pushed to the next wave. So if you're counting on something, that's in the roadmap showing up before September, don't think it necessarily will. It may be pushed to the wave two set of features, which is like October until early next year. But anyway, if you care about dynamics, if you care about all the different parts of that suite, if you wanna know what's coming and power platform, so that's like power BI power apps. And what else is in there? Like the AI and bot stuff that they're adding to the power platform. You probably wanna go check these out. They're they're very well done. They have, you can click on the table of contents and skip just to the parts you want. I was trying to summarize it, but I gave up because who can summarize 400 pages in one blog post <laugh>? I just said, if you care about this, read, read the rest

Leo Laporte (01:49:56):
Here and it just links the website smart very wise. Yes. Enterprise pick number two.

Mary Jo Foley (01:50:04):
Yes. So we were just talking about open source and Microsoft is holding a virtual event on February 15th that they call Azure open source day. Oh, it's free. They're gonna be talking about a lot of interesting topics, even though this is like a marketing type thing, they said, they're gonna be talking about CBL Mariner, which is their own version of Lennox that they been able to host projects of their own inside Microsoft. They're gonna talk about like Azure hybrid benefit, which is the way you can run your on-premises licenses in the cloud. They're gonna talk about running, obviously running Linux on Azure and they say there's gonna be a special announcement from Satya as part of this. Hmm. I have no idea what that's gonna be if it's gonna be something real. Or if it's just gonna be like, yeah, we love you open source guys. You're great.

Leo Laporte (01:50:53):
And do you know what those those cows anyway? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. I don't know. I dunno. Do, do you know what those cows are on the, on the logo there? I do not. That is a command line program called cows say, which gives you a fortune on the cow. Assess it.

Mary Jo Foley (01:51:09):
I was wondering why they were cows.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:11):
Yeah, you don't. I didn't like so open source until right now

Leo Laporte (01:51:14):
Tell no, this is why we love open source little things like that.

Mary Jo Foley (01:51:19):
Right. So if you, if you're interested in this, just Google or Bing using your favorite search engine, Azure opensource day, and you'll get a link and you can just for free and check it out on the 15th. Nice.

Leo Laporte (01:51:32):
Very nice. Okay. You have been very patient, my friends <laugh> and it's time to eat your vegetables. No. It's time for the beer pick of the week.

Mary Jo Foley (01:51:43):
All right. So I, Paul thinks I do a lot of IPA picks for my beers. I actually don't try to mix it up quite a bit, but today this is, this is just all me being all. She

Paul Thurrott (01:51:54):
Says, announcing an

Leo Laporte (01:51:55):
IPA. The one thing better than IPA

Paul Thurrott (01:51:58):
Is another IPA

Mary Jo Foley (01:52:00):
Ipas. Okay. And one of my favorite IPA brewery, <laugh> one of my favorite IPA breweries in the world happens to be in New York and their name is other hat. So other half makes like when you go to their breweries, they have a big board inside the brewery. And like of the 20 beers on tap, probably 18 are IPAs, all different IPAs. Wow. Right. So they have one, they have a lot of them that they have named after things that are green in honor hops. So they got like cheddar, they've got cabbage cheddar, meaning money cheddar. Oh, I was gonna

Leo Laporte (01:52:35):
Say cheddar

Paul Thurrott (01:52:36):
Is literally like, if it's don't eat it, do not eat the green cheddar. Explain

Mary Jo Foley (01:52:42):
That. And then they have broccoli leaves. So they make a lot of beers with the name broccoli. I can tell you there's no broccoli in these beers. No, there is not <laugh>. That is a relief. Yeah. Although the one I've made for, I pick today, other half broccoli world, special reserve brewed on the occasion of the eighth anniversary of the brewery, which is this year. I have to say when I had a sip of it, I thought I tasted broccoli. You did

Leo Laporte (01:53:08):
It's all psychosomatic affection. Exactly.

Mary Jo Foley (01:53:11):
It is para of suggestion. Right? yeah, but if you like double IPAs <laugh> if you like double IPAs you should definitely try other half. If you can get it near you or when you come to visit New York someday in the near term or long term future, and here's the best part. If you're in Rockefeller center, they just opened a tap room in the middle of Rockefeller center. So you can go and don't, you don't have to venture out into the wilds of Brooklyn way, way out. You can just go to Rockfell center and drink your IPAs, right. At a civilized counter with beautiful lighting and yay.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:48):
We understand your version of Brooklyn, please come here instead.

Mary Jo Foley (01:53:51):
<Laugh> I, I go to their tap rooms in Brooklyn all the time. They all know me when I come in, they're like, Hey, I'm like, Hey, <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:53:58):
Do you walk over? How do you get there?

Mary Jo Foley (01:54:01):
So when I go to Brooklyn, I, the subway.

Leo Laporte (01:54:04):
Oh, you subway. Ah, nice. Yep. That's

Mary Jo Foley (01:54:06):
A tough walk. Yeah. It is a tough, that would be a long walk. It's pretty the tap room. The new tap room is a 15 minute walk from my house, which is very dangerous. Nice.

Leo Laporte (01:54:17):
Yeah. Uhhuh

Mary Jo Foley (01:54:18):
Near the Microsoft store in New York, which is still there. Yeah, it's right in the middle of everything. Nice.

Leo Laporte (01:54:26):
<Affirmative> well, you've done it again. My friends managed to condense a huge amount of information to a mere couple of hours of goodness. <Laugh> thank you so much. Paul Thurrott is@throt.com. The field guide to windows 10 is available@leanpub.com. He's working on field guide to windows. 11 says Microsoft finishes the guy, my target date. What's your, what's your target date? Why they might be this

Paul Thurrott (01:54:49):
February update? Ah, Oh, what's the second Feb weekend. February look like

Leo Laporte (01:54:56):
Maybe interesting for Valentine's day, because exactly

Paul Thurrott (01:55:01):
For Valentine's nothing says, I love you like a windows.

Leo Laporte (01:55:06):
<Laugh> that's that's a good, I gotta say. Yeah. Mary Jo Foley writes about microsoft@herzdnetblogallaboutmicrosoft.com together. They unite to create this synergistic hole. We call Windows Weekly every

Paul Thurrott (01:55:21):
Wednesday. That's hold with a a w by the way, whole hole with a w oh

Leo Laporte (01:55:26):
Cool. You can join us. Watch us do it live at twi.tv, actually live Dutch twi.tv every Wednesday at 11:00 AM. Pacific 2:00 PM. Eastern 1900 UTC. Look for the hole in the synergistic mud. You can also get on demand versions of the show at twi.tv/dub dub. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. Of course there is. And probably the easiest thing is subscribe in your favorite podcast app. That way you'll get it automatically listen to it at your leisure. People who are listening at their leisure can still interact with us. You know, don't have to go to irc.twi.tv or the club TWI discord. You can actually do it in our forums, right? We have discourse forums@twi.community. There's also a mast on instance@twi.social and both are free and available to you. And I hope you will take advantage of that.

Leo Laporte (01:56:19):
Let's see, what else, what else? I think that's about it. You're not a member of club TWI. We really appreciate that support seven bucks a month, add free versions of the show. You won't even hear this plug for club TWI, cause you'll already be a member. You also get the twit plus feed and there's some good stuff coming up. We've got a Georgia Dow fireside chat Stacy's book club is gonna be fun. We've got the untitled Linox show the GIZ, all of that on the TWI plus fees. Actually the untitled Linux show has earned its own feed in the TWI club. So if you're a Linux fan, you'll love that. And we have another show coming up. We'll tell you about that in the future. Lots of events as well. The discord is also a great place to hang while you're listening to any of shows. Please do that by going to twit TV slash club TWI I guess that's it. Thank you everybody. Have a great week. We'll see you next time on windows, weekly patch, Tuesday edition.

Speaker 5 (01:57:21):
Hey, you don't have to wait till the weekend to get the tech news need. Join Jason Howell and myself, Micah Sergeant for tech news weekly, where we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news.