Windows Weekly Episode 767 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley are here minutes before the show began a new build for windows 11. We'll talk about Microsoft family and the new clip champ. It's the new windows movie maker plus IOP between Apple, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft and halo. Co-Op is delayed again. Paul explains co-op to Mary Jo and a lot more. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly.

... (00:00:31):
Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT.

Leo Laporte (00:00:40):
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley episode 767 recorded Wednesday, March 9th, 2022. Searching for Longhorn. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by new Relic. That next midnight call is just waiting to happen. Get new Relic before it does so you can get back to sleep. You can get access to the whole new Relic platform and 100 gigabytes of data free per month. Forever. No credit card required when you sign up at new relic.com/windows. It's time for Windows Weekly. The show we covered the latest news from Microsoft, with Mary Jo Foley from ZDNet. Hello dozers. We gotta learn the Spanish word for dozer. I think it's dozer actually. That's Paul Thra throt.com. Not in Mexico this year, this week. He's he's back home. Although you never know with Paul, he could be leaving cause it's snow. It's snowing outside right now. I wishing

Mary Jo Foley (00:01:44):
Snow snowing here too. Is it? Yeah, this

Leo Laporte (00:01:46):
Is is this considered a late no March comes in. I remember this from my years

Mary Jo Foley (00:01:51):
In, in like a lion

Leo Laporte (00:01:52):
Andout like a lamb, right? Yeah. So this is the lion. It's not, it's not, it's not gonna be much, but yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (00:01:59):
It was 72 days ago here. Weird. Literally it was 70. So

Leo Laporte (00:02:02):
Weird. Spring is always is always weird.

Mary Jo Foley (00:02:06):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:02:10):
All right. Well, it was good talking to you guys. I'm yeah, thanks. I'm off to Mexico. He

Mary Jo Foley (00:02:14):
Says he's off for map.

Leo Laporte (00:02:17):
Yep. Alright. What is going on in the world of I had a, I had a GERD, my loin. What is, what is going on in the world of windows 11? And what is clip champ? If I might ask,

Mary Jo Foley (00:02:32):
Do you remember? We couldn't pronounce that, oh, this,

Leo Laporte (00:02:35):
This ISS new Clippy clip. What? We're calling it. Chip clip,

Mary Jo Foley (00:02:41):
Chip

Leo Laporte (00:02:42):
Clip chip.

Mary Jo Foley (00:02:44):
So we just gotta build right before the show. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:02:46):
Nice. Oh good. Woohoo.

Mary Jo Foley (00:02:48):
Yep. Yep. And let's see, what's new they're, they're adding more inbox apps, which are like pre-loaded apps, including the family app, which is family safety, right. For, with the parental controls and the location tracking, if you wanna have that turned on and clip champ, which is the little video editing app that they bought last September. So it lets you do video creation, editing. It has a lot of different editing tools that are embedded in the app up. And that's gonna be an inbox app now. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:03:21):
Windows little. I'm gonna, I'm interested in that. You know, Microsoft of course used to have windows movie maker, which by the way, evolved into a great little app actually and eventually became windows live MovieMaker I think was part of ASCE.

Leo Laporte (00:03:34):
I don't, they couldn't have just kept, kept that going. Huh? They just built by, I don't know. Anyway, it looks okay. I, the weird little board they had about it here was that they called out the the timeline at the bottom of the app, which is where you, you know, position clips and so forth. And they sort of said something to the effect of, well, you know, this is usually really hard to use, but this app it's really easy. It's like, guys, you, you had something that was really easy to use like 10 years go, what are you talking? So, so this is windows, movie maker for a new, a new era. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of, it's an external company that they bought. So it's a, it's a completely separate product, but yeah, it's essentially the modern replacement for movie maker, which really hasn't been officially available.

Leo Laporte (00:04:16):
No, this is good years. Right. I get this call a lot on the radio show. How do I edit movies and windows? And I think cuz the expectations there cuz of movie maker and of course on that's right on Mac. Yeah, no, I, by the way, one of the things I was really looking forward to with this Android compatibility was looking at some of the Android video editors because there are some decent ones out in the world. Yeah. And of course it's Amazon. And so you get this, you know, we talked about this, how terrible the app selection is. So that made never happen. So hopefully this is good. I like something as well. And it is timeline editing, which is good. You, I don't think it's good to learn a different way of editing since any, any pro app is gonna work with a timeline. So, but as well learned that right.

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:56):
Looks pretty nice when they bought it. Yeah. When they bought it last year, they said, you know, we're gonna and integrated with office 365 for consumers and businesses. And they never said, and by the way, we're gonna make it a free inbox app with windows 11, you know? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:05:10):
That's right. No, I think this is a good move on Microsoft's part. I think we do lot of video editor.

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:15):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:05:17):
It comes with a lot of features. Lots of templates. There's a clip. It does

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:20):
Clip part

Leo Laporte (00:05:21):
Stock footage library and yep. Oh don't worry. Personally put windows won't have any of that. I'm looking at the clip champ site. Is this now? Yeah. Yeah. It's a Microsoft. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:31):
It's a Microsoft. Yeah, yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:05:33):
Yeah. No, if you go to the blog post, there's a picture of the editor of the sorry. The, the, I wanna call it a native app. I'm not even sure. Or it's a native app, whatever the app is. We'll have to. Right,

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:44):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:05:45):
We'll have

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:45):
To look, try it out. I'm

Leo Laporte (00:05:46):
Curious about it. Good. Yeah. That's a good reason. And that will be windows 11 only. Or do these toys go to windows 10

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:55):
Ever? That's a good question.

Leo Laporte (00:05:57):
It's a,

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:58):
We

Leo Laporte (00:05:59):
Don't know. It's good question right

Mary Jo Foley (00:06:00):
Now. I mean, what I'm guessing, I guess they won't bring it back to windows 10, but what they'll do is they'll make it part of like an office 365 subscription. Right. So if you have consumer or business, you're gonna get it that way.

Leo Laporte (00:06:12):
Well, I mean, if you go to the clip champ website today, is there a download for a window is app?

Mary Jo Foley (00:06:18):
I don't know. I haven't, I haven't tried downloading it. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:06:21):
I think so. I think so. So if there is, it's likely it's that app, you know, maybe not the version.

Mary Jo Foley (00:06:26):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:06:28):
Yep. Yeah. There's an app in the Microsoft store. Oh there.

Mary Jo Foley (00:06:32):
Yeah. We'll just say, does say work someone does 10.

Leo Laporte (00:06:37):
Well, let's see Wells,

Mary Jo Foley (00:06:42):
I guess it would because they announced this in September last year before they, no, that was after they announced one 11. So maybe not,

Leo Laporte (00:06:50):
This is June 23rd, 2021. So yes, the answer would be yes. Cuz there was no windows 11 at the time. Yeah. True. Unless they've changed that that's a good point unless they've changed that. Hmm huh.

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:06):
Yeah. You know, ever since they didn't get TikTok for better or for worse and didn't end up behind for better say for better, I think. Yeah. They've always been looking for like, okay, we still need something to kind of fill that space. They have Flipgrid in the education market. Right. And that's really big in the education market, but it hasn't translated over to the other markets like mainstream consumer. I don't think

Leo Laporte (00:07:30):
Hold on there. I don't know if Microsoft will stop this, but it works with a Chromebook. Hold on.

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:36):
They shouldn't. They should not, if they're smart.

Leo Laporte (00:07:39):
Yeah. Cause there's a browser plugin. Right. And there's a mobile app. Oh that's very interesting. Wow. Wow. There's an iOS app. That's fine. So Apple released something which they kind of, you know, like very aply way called clips and they kind of pay attention to it and then they forget about, and then they pay attention to it again. But it was also kind of their response to TikTok like, oh, don't edit in TikTok, which by the way, you know, the real talkers do, they just do it all in, in, in TikTok, but don't, they don't wanna edit in TikTok, edit in clips and then you can share it to all your social media. And I thought so that's I guess the same strategy in a, it is, but I bet clips is not available on the web and no, no, no, no. It's only iOS. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah. Interesting. Yeah. When you have the, a dominant mobile platform, you can pretty much just use, you know, focus on that. Yeah. You know? Yeah. When you don't you make things available everywhere. That's right, right. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:40):
Now there's one thing in today's build that is very distressing to me.

Leo Laporte (00:08:44):
Yes. I know what it is. They're taking out Nopa search. Oh there's the digitization of search. Is that what it, yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:52):
They're doing a bunch of tweaks to the search capability. That's gonna be in windows 11. So right now, if you click on search, you know, that's pin to your task bar or through the start menu, you come up with something in, has your recent apps as top apps, recent apps, quick searches, quick searches are things like movies, markets today, today in history. Right? So what they're gonna do is take all those things that are in quick searches that are kind of like low key kind of buried a little bit in the current search and they're gonna really make 'em front and center when you click on search. So it's gonna almost look like the Bing image of the day from the descriptions of this. It's gonna have like images word of the day holidays. And I'm like, no, no. And no, I don't want that. I don't want any of that in my search box.

Leo Laporte (00:09:40):
Yeah. It's just garbage that you're not looking for. It's

Mary Jo Foley (00:09:43):
Extra. No I, and so no. And you know what, I'll tell you. I don't know if you guys have this experience or if anybody listening to the show is having this search for me is barely working and windows 11 as it is now. Like when I click on that search bar, that search icon in my task bar, I'd say about eight times outta 10. It crashes when it doesn't crash, it takes forever to load. Like I I'm like waiting for it to load waiting, waiting, waiting. I'm like, what, what is going on with search? Right.

Leo Laporte (00:10:15):
You think I'm like about search in windows 11 is that I have spent the past two months writing about Longhorn again. And when I search for Longhorn, the thing that comes up first is Longhorn steakhouse, a casual dining restaurant chance. 

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:29):
So handy and useful, right?

Leo Laporte (00:10:31):
Yeah. You guys get me. I that's what I'm looking for.

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:34):
Yeah. I'm I, my, the first thing, when I saw all these search things was there's gonna be a way to turn it off. There has to be right. And there is, they give you instructions and there, there will be a way for individuals to turn this off. There will be a way for admins to turn it off globally for their users. There's gonna be ways, but I don't like that. They're doing this. It's like the Ms. Unification of everything. And we don't need that. We don't.

Leo Laporte (00:10:57):
I agree with you. I, so I, I had this weird thought today when I started reading the blog post describing these two, two new two new inbox apps as they call them in dash box, right? They're in the box, which there's no box, but whatever. Right? these new features to search and elsewhere. And I'm thinking to myself, you know, this is, there's a gr there's a group of people. They listen to the show, right? They may not be the normal people out in the world per se, like a average consumers or tech people, whatever that look at windows 11. And they say, you know, I like the way this thing looks, I, what I want them to do is update everything. Right? You've got these melon calendar apps we've been talking about that need this one. One outlook replacement modernize all the UIs, right?

Leo Laporte (00:11:38):
I don't wanna see windows 95 UIs Vista, UIs windows seven, UIs, windows, eight UIs. I wanna see, I want everything to look the same. And I I've, I've sort of cautioned people like that in the past. Like that's never gonna happen, you know? But I think this kind of drives that home. Right. they're pushing forward with new stuff and I don't mean this in a cynical way. It's just the reality of the situation. It's fine. I mean, it's just what it is, but they're gonna provide new UIs for new things. There will be some major things like the one outlook app, you know, that will come. But I, I, you know, you, the search thing is interest because search again, not to go back to Longhorn, but that's when they were talking about search and database back file systems, yada yada Y and all this stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:12:20):
Yeah. Apple showed off instant search and tiger. This is like from 2005, maybe a long time ago that doesn't work today in windows. Like it just doesn't work. It's, it's almost 20 years later. We still don't the of stuff doesn't work, but they're not focused on that. They're focused on video editing and family safety through some, what used to be a windows live service. And I just making search forget instant search. Now it's gonna be cute. Mary Jo, you don't have to worry about search. Just look at all the fun stuff that's in search. You went to find something and we're gonna show you something. It may not be what you were looking for, but it will be very graphical,

Mary Jo Foley (00:12:57):
You know? Right. And you know, right now across the bar top bar, when you click on in the, on the search box it lets you search within apps within documents within the web, right? So at least you have this image in your head that you're kind of constraining your search. I don't even know if that even works. Cuz most of the time it doesn't for me. Yeah. But I, but now that's gone too. Right. So when you click on this, there's just a search box. So if I type something and I'm like, I wonder if it's gonna search my email. There's no way to even see that. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:13:27):
Yeah. Okay. So there is an email, right? A choice, but it's in a dropdown. So presumably that would appear in the results, although I,

Mary Jo Foley (00:13:37):
You know, but you don't know from their new design, all you see in the new design is recent along a left bar. You see a big picture and then their picture, it's got like a picture of earth day, right? Trending searches under that. I don't care about trending searches. I don't care about earth. I hate the earth. Okay. I hate it. I hate it. Like I just,

Leo Laporte (00:13:56):
Wow.

Mary Jo Foley (00:13:58):
I guys, you know what, when I click on search nine times outta 10, I'm trying to search something in my OneDrive or on my PC. I'm not trying to do. And this

Leo Laporte (00:14:06):
Is where actually see to me is when this falls apart and, and great. I look, I'm searching for files. Its every that's period. I mean, and that's me, but what that's fine, but right. That is where windows search falls apart file search. Yeah. And in, in the start sorry in windows 11, when you type a, I guess keep, I keep typing long on, for some reason I can't get this outta my head. It wants auto complete steakhouse. Now that's hilarious. Anyway. Yeah. You type Longhorn and it says steakhouse. Oh I get it. It actually to the end of the, yeah, the thing is, what I'm looking for is, is files like Mary Jo said, I can go to the documents tab. Yeah. And it shows me a couple things. But then at the bottom it, it's only a couple things and it's not the thing I'm looking for.

Leo Laporte (00:14:48):
It's not the thing I was look working on most recently, in fact, so one of the choices is search file, explore yeah. File Explorer. That takes a long time. It's searching your entire, it does hard drive or whatever you have. And my look that stuff I know, I know cuz on me, I mean, I know where it is roughly, but it, it, it takes it a long time. Yeah. And then there's no ordering, there's no way to say, well, okay sort this by most recently access or this by locations or this by dates, that's not there. It's very primitives. Despite the fact that again, Microsoft executive stood in stage 15 years ago at whatever many, almost 20 years ago and showed us how awesome this was gonna be, you know? Right. It is not there.

Mary Jo Foley (00:15:37):
Yeah. I just, I worry about this stuff. You know, I, I, Yeah, I know everybody's and Micah always says this jokingly. I hope that I hate consumers. I don't hate consumers. I, but you know what? I think

Leo Laporte (00:15:50):
I would never say that by the way, that's like

Mary Jo Foley (00:15:53):
Some consumer S hating consumers. 

Leo Laporte (00:15:56):
But it just means you love enterprise that's all right.

Mary Jo Foley (00:15:59):
Yeah. But it's this isn't even about that. Right? Like this is just about just make search work on my PC, whether yes, I'm a business or a normal user. I just want, like when I type in the search box, I want you to find the results that are on my PC. That's what I don't care about. The Bing results. I don't even care about that. Like I don't, I don't want you to gimme an image of the day. I don't want you to show

Leo Laporte (00:16:19):
Me the word of it this way. They DT know what it's, but they really, the first steak restaurant is up a percent. You're not even using Bing, but you're using Bing, right? Yeah. It, is there a way to turn that off? No,

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:32):
That's think there is right. Can you unhook Bing from this? I think there is.

Leo Laporte (00:16:36):
No, I don't think so. I thought, well, that's really

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:38):
Terrible. That was a big controversy. If that's true,

Leo Laporte (00:16:40):
That's terrible. Let's take a look.

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:43):
That really is

Leo Laporte (00:16:44):
Terrible. That's not good.

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:45):
I think there must be a way

Leo Laporte (00:16:46):
I don't want being in my search results. I mean, I might,

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:50):
Or you should be able to choose, right?

Leo Laporte (00:16:52):
Yeah. Be to turn it off. Let's that if I think I don't everybody, this is a very common thing. For some reason, operating systems think, oh, you're searching you search more than just your hard drive. Yes. You search the world and I see this. It, it sounds, it sounds like a good idea until you actually see search results and you realize, but people also want to have a tool that does what they expect it to do. They don't want additional right stuff cropping up. Yeah. Well right. Okay. You guys, you're asking for an impossibility. This thing should, well, it should work well from the get go, because most people aren't gonna screw around with it and, and configure things. Yeah. Right. But there should be an option for people who really care to say, look, I I'm only ever gonna want to search my hard drive or my documents folder, my one drive, whatever that should be available. And that does not exist because that's not within the business goal of this interface. Right? Yeah. There's a, so it's not just a, I'll tell you who hates consumers, Microsoft. I mean, that's, that's a little user hostile. I think that's saying your needs are trumped by our business interests.

Mary Jo Foley (00:18:03):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:18:04):
I don't think

Mary Jo Foley (00:18:05):
That's right.

Leo Laporte (00:18:06):
Well, most people don't think of this, but when Apple got up on stage yesterday or Microsoft gets up on stage on whatever time or Google or anybody, you know, they're presenting things that make sense to them as a business. And, but they're selling it in a way that makes sense to you. You, as the consumer, hear all the good stuff about you and when you hear you can search across your hard drive, you can search across the web. It sounds good. It, it makes for a good demo. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It, but really that's right. The point of this wasn't we want to help people that has to exist for anyone to even use it. But the point of this is how can we make this viable as a business for us.

Mary Jo Foley (00:18:41):
Right. And everything points back, right. Everything they're doing with edge with windows 11 points back to them trying to grow two things, it trying to grow Bing's market share. And they're trying to grow their ad, share through Bing, through MSN and other similar properties. That's what they're trying to do. Right. I get that's their goal. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, I think you're right. I think like when you're using search inside of windows, you have to use, I don't know if it's, is it B that you're

Leo Laporte (00:19:10):
Using? I just looked at, I don't see any, yeah, it is Bing. And because when you go to a web, yeah. It comes up on, on Bing.

Mary Jo Foley (00:19:17):
I know on the web you're using Bing, unless you switch out of it. But like,

Leo Laporte (00:19:21):
And the only reason they let you switch out of that in edge is because that's the expected behavior of every single person on earth uses web browser. If Microsoft made a web browser that only searched with bang, no one would use it. Right. That would literally be a non-starter for people. Right. That's true. So they can get away with it in the OS, just like Apple gets away with it in iOS and Google does in and Android because it's not really advertised. You're just searching you don't, you don't really that's true. Push the Bing notion of it. 

Mary Jo Foley (00:19:48):
Right. It doesn't tell you how's

Leo Laporte (00:19:50):
Searching the web. You're not searching Bing, but if you bring up, if you do look at one of those results, you'll see it comes it's Bing. It is Bing.

Mary Jo Foley (00:19:56):
Yeah. All the web results you get through search is, are definitely on Bing of

Leo Laporte (00:20:01):
Of course. Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:02):
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:20:02):
It's understandable. I mean, I just, yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:05):
I, yeah, that part doesn't really irk me as long as, as long as it works and as long as it isn't slow and those are the two things that are not true of search in windows 11 right now. Right?

Leo Laporte (00:20:18):
Yeah. It's not, yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:21):
I want them to fix search. Like this searching inside of an operating system is kind of one of the top things that people do or I would imagine that people would do. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:20:35):
I would've, I don't know. So the problem is, I think for again, I think this applies to a lot of people who listen to the show or watch it yeah. You, because you're technical and because you've seen limitations when you use standard UIs, you have, you develop your own way of doing things.

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:50):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:20:50):
Right. So, yeah. And I, I, I have things it's, it's an odd thing from when I am going back into my archives. Right. For these article series, I'm actually accessing those files from a NAS. But if I have to search for something, that's somewhere in those archives, I search the version up in one drive because for whatever reason, when I search from OneDrive, that is actually much faster. Yeah. From a web browser. So that happens to work really well

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:15):
For me. Yeah. It, it totally does that, that you're right. It, for me, it takes a while to like first index that, but once it does, then it does search much.

Leo Laporte (00:21:24):
I have, I mean, yeah. I, I have navigate issues with OneDrive on the web and that's whatever. But as far as like I lit, all I have to see is where it is. And then you can right. Click and show. I don't remember the exact phrasing, but it's basically show containing folder. I can find out where it is. And then I just go look at it on my nest. You know, it's just, I know it's a goofy workaround, but for me, that just works well because the default you UI and windows are just not of any interest to me, like the start searching, you're asking questions. I had to go look at it. I'm like, I don't even use this thing. I, and now I use it and I'm like, oh, that's why, cuz it's terrible. This thing I've been writing about for two months, doesn't even come up. You know, which I, I think is unbeliev. I just don't understand. I'm looking at, I just don't understand how they thought this is what I wanted.

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:08):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:22:11):
Okay. It's very strange. Well, it's not what you want. It's what you're gonna get. And that's all that matters. That's

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:17):
A good point. I wonder. Okay. I'm I'm super curious. What kind of feedback they get from the insiders on this? Like are they just gonna be like, yeah, that's beautiful. I love it. It's like the image of the day. It's a great thing. Or people gonna say guys, like, why are we cluttering the search box even more than it's already cluttered? Like can't

Leo Laporte (00:22:35):
Do they remember? There was a really good disc search tool called X one way back in the day. Oh boy. Yeah. Do you remember that? I wonder if there's still around because I mean, this is an opportunity for somebody to do a really, it was always faster than windows search. Exactly. There was a version of windows. It went in Invista, but it might have been post Vista where they would index the drive. Yeah. And so, because you have to right. That's how you instant windows. Now you have to yeah, you right. But in the, the way this used to work was literally the second you stopped interact with the computer, he would start indexing the drive and the little light would come on and you'd hear, you had hard drives back then. So you'd hear it. He'd go. And people would say, what the heck is this thing doing? I'm not even using, it's like freaking out. And Microsoft said, oh, it's okay. We're indexing the drive. It's like, no, I don't, I'm not using the computer. Don't do anything. Like what are you doing? And I, I don't know. I, I, honestly, these features probably are driven by feedback. I bet these pretty pictures you're worried about and start search are gonna drive usage. That's the point of it? People like, oh look a, a picture of a kitten, you know? Yeah. X

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:41):
A lot of

Leo Laporte (00:23:41):
People like

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:42):
The image of the

Leo Laporte (00:23:42):
Day X one.com is $79 a year though. Chat room saying there are two free things that do this, called everything, an ultra search. So you could just install a third party search and you wouldn't get the picture of the day and all that stuff. Okay. I liked X one, cause it was so fast. You'd type one letter. It would give you all the results. Yep. Then the set I letter would narrow it. Third letter would narrow it. So it was very, very fast. And it could search into emails and stuff like that. I don't, I don't actually care enough. I didn't, I should say I didn't care enough to look. But when I was writing about this stuff, like I said, Apple did this incredible demo for tiger whatever year. That was 2005 ish where they did instant search, same thing you just described the type of letter.

Leo Laporte (00:24:26):
Yeah. It comes up. I wonder if Apple has kind of toned that stuff down over the years, just because it's like windows, Microsoft has, cause people probably just don't use it that much, you know? Maybe that's it. So yeah, it doesn't do that narrow down thing anymore. I think that's probably because we have millions of files now in our hard drives and the indexing takes so long and to keep it up to date that is using a lot of CPU or a lot of people probably just use files up in the cloud. I don't know. Can you not still though hit windows key and start typing and yes you can. So that's the search I always use. Yes. Yes. That's that's what she's describing that doesn't pull up being pictures when I do it. No, it does. So yeah. So, or will, this is what we're talking about.

Leo Laporte (00:25:10):
So, oh, now the way it works in windows 11 today is you get the default view is called all and it's a combination of apps. I don't know why apps would be, well, I guess I do know why apps documents web, and then there's a more dropdown, you get email and other things. And the, the, you know, the first column, this best match, this is where I see that Longhorn steakhouse thing. I, I it's the best match despite the fact that I've never selected it and have tried repeatedly to ignore it. It keeps showing me Longhorn steakhouse and actually on the right side it says open results in browser, under a picture of a map where I can see the Longhorn steakhouse in my area. It's a little big symbol right next to it to let you know, that's how it's gonna work, you know? Yep. Now you could go over to apps and just see the Longhorn related apps on my computer of which there are none and then documents and that it still amazes me this three documents in the list. And I, I have possibly actually thousand documents just with the name Longhorn in there. Same. Yeah. It's unbelievable how worthless this is.

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:15):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:26:17):
But there you go

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:17):
Use work for sure. I mean, I'm not saying, I don't think they could make the search box better and the search experience better. I'm not sure by making it pretier in, does anything to make it better?

Leo Laporte (00:26:29):
I will say this just in their defense. I don't use this anyway, so I don't really care. So right. It's kind of an interesting intellectual exercise to look at it and say, yeah, it's still lousy. Good. Yeah. But the truth is I don't because this has never worked well for me. I don't even think of this. And so when I go to find things, I have just have a different approach.

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:47):
You just start typing. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:26:49):
And well, I do no. I go to specific places in the file system and search from there. Okay. You know, that kind of thing. Yeah. But right. I think what they're trying to do, Microsoft is create an interface of people will use. And like I said, with the business of driving people, to being in EMN services and some capacity, and I'm sure with the positive message of we've delivered some value because you know, you try to find a cute kitten video on the internet and you found it.

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:16):
Yeah. Or

Leo Laporte (00:27:17):
Whatever it is you're looking for you, normal person. You.

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:21):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:27:23):
That's

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:23):
My guess. I don't know. It made me sad.

Leo Laporte (00:27:27):
This is the blog post. You mean the, the where they describe

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:31):
The new focus highlights. Yeah. I Al every time I feel like I keep coming, no, I keep coming back to, okay. So nobody must be using widgets. So they keep thinking, okay, no one's using is how can we get the MSN content in front of them somehow, right? Yeah. Like if they won't click on the widget, even if we put the cute weather button over there and they accidentally click on it, sometimes what's another way we can get that content in their face. What if we throw it into the search box? Right. And then they'll see it. Yeah. You can definitely, as ke is saying, you can go and configure all these things. Right. You can configure a search right now. You can make it. So you don't, you never see web results if you want it. Right. But is that true? Yeah, you can. Oh yeah. You can shut off web results. Yep. You can. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:28:20):
Okay. 

Mary Jo Foley (00:28:22):
There's a way you go privacy and you go settings, privacy and security search inside of windows. And then you can, I think there's an option that just says, don't show me search. I find it search results. That

Leo Laporte (00:28:36):
There's a, a link from start search that goes to someplace else by the way.

Leo Laporte (00:28:41):
But okay. Search privacy and security where searching windows. Yeah. Yeah. Is that what you said?

Mary Jo Foley (00:28:48):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:28:48):
Yep. That's not what happens

Mary Jo Foley (00:28:51):
You?

Leo Laporte (00:28:52):
That's funny. Okay. Okay. I see. Yep. You could do this and this is what normal people do. They'll configure the, the locations on their hard drive that they want search to look at. They'll exclude folders nobody's ever gonna do

Mary Jo Foley (00:29:04):
This. No, exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:29:05):
I mean the people listening to the show. Absolutely. 

Mary Jo Foley (00:29:07):
Yeah. Yep,

Leo Laporte (00:29:08):
Absolutely.

Mary Jo Foley (00:29:10):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:29:11):
And my God, if there isn't an indexing options control panel that literally dates back to windows Vista, but here it's. Yep. Fantastic.

Mary Jo Foley (00:29:21):
Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, that was the thing. Oh, one other thing we didn't mention, we had talked about this on the show back in early February, but the new defender preview. Oh yeah. Which is the one that kind of changes defender so that it lets you manage your phones also in addition to your PC that is now available. Like Microsoft's now saying, oh, it's available. It's been available for a while. If you knew to look for it, but it's available to insiders and the us and English only right now for them to try as well. They kinda gave a throwaway line on that today. So

Leo Laporte (00:30:02):
Yeah, this blog post is like an example of PTSD. It's it's literally here, here are two icons in the entire system that we have updated to the new style. Two icons are in this bill, right? Like this is, this is what I was talking about earlier there. They're absolutely gonna add all kinds of, of new stuff to windows 11 and it's gonna give it that kind of surface level sheen of being something new. But for those of you or us out there who use very specific interfaces yeah. We'll see. I don't think it's all gonna get updated. I just, I really don't.

Mary Jo Foley (00:30:38):
No, I don't either. Definitely not. And not this year, at least. Right. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:30:45):
I'd love to be proven wrong. I really

Mary Jo Foley (00:30:47):
Would. I bet you're not wrong.

Leo Laporte (00:30:49):
So yeah. It's okay. I like windows 11. Yeah. I never search.

Mary Jo Foley (00:30:53):
I keep telling us that be

Leo Laporte (00:30:54):
Confronted. I ignore things that offend me. Yes. I like it.

Mary Jo Foley (00:31:00):
I like it. Mostly. I just am like, oh, okay guys, like, you know, keep going on the right path with it. And don't clutter it up with a lot of junk. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:31:11):
Junk, junk.

Mary Jo Foley (00:31:12):
Just like I E right. I mean, sorry. I E I just called it, I E edge edge,

Leo Laporte (00:31:17):
Which is absolutely cluttered with junk edge,

Mary Jo Foley (00:31:20):
Started out like really clean. Right. And really awesome. And everybody's like, yeah, we should all try using edge. And then suddenly they started letting all these like weird features creep in that were mostly meant to help monetize it. Right. So you're

Leo Laporte (00:31:33):
What you're describing of edge is what is actually essentially what I'm saying about windows, which is what I would say about modern music or whatever. It's not for me anymore. Right? Like these things they're adding for features to attract people to use this product. And for people like us that actually just wanna get stuff done. What we're really asking for is like this strip down really minimalist system. And I could just add the stuff that I want and I, and just get out of my way and let me go, you know, Microsoft used to use this language, like we're, we're not, we're not, we're gonna focus on the Chrome of the application. We're gonna let the content come to the middle. You know, that was the whole thing. But I think now they're just looking for eyeballs, you know? Yeah. And they're not gonna find them here. Right. You know, I just don't, I just don't care about this new stuff. Yep. I don't, I'm not gonna open search so I can see pretty pictures of earth, day, or ever they're celebrating today. I, you know, I just make it my wallpaper. I like the Bing wallpaper and I just make it my wall. Yeah. I like that. Right. To see it, you know, it's different. My wife turned on her laptop on the plane and this gorgeous photo yeah. Came up on her lock screen. It was Beau. It just beautiful. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:32:38):
Image

Leo Laporte (00:32:39):
That window spotlight. Yeah. That stuff is, I like that kind of stuff. But there you go. I mean, I don't know why there's a line with me. I mean, I, once I get into the system, I guess I just wanna get work done. And it's like, look there little fireworks here in the corner. It's like, no, I don't care about the fireworks. I'm trying to, trying to write a document, you know? I dunno.

Mary Jo Foley (00:32:57):
Yeah. Anyway, Ava, that was today's build. That was today's build. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:33:05):
How's the subsystem for Android holding up.

Leo Laporte (00:33:10):
It's holding up fine. You know, the problem like we've been saying is there's not a great selection of apps and games. There's a release today that was a release today or you yesterday, but I think in the last 24 hours for the dev channel. So if you're on the dev channel, there's an update to the Android subsystem improves performance, especially for, for games, which is really interesting. Because those games are all kind of garbage, but anyway, they're, they're doing deeper integration between that subsystem and windows, which makes sense. We've seen that on the Linux side as well, the subsystem for Linux. So yeah, they're just trying to improve that. I mean, but from a fundamental standpoint, the issue with this isn't this kind of stuff, per se, although this will help, it's the just the quality of the selection of the apps and so forth. Yeah. But I, I, I suspect like everything Nelson in windows 11, the situation with this particular feature a year from now will be, you know, different from what was when we, we got the first preview back and whatever that was February, whatever. Yeah. It'll just improve over time.

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:15):
Yeah. Hopefully

Leo Laporte (00:34:18):
Also us only, yes. To D was patch twos D

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:23):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:34:24):
He we don't usually cover this, but this one was actually kind of an important, Steve had nothing to say, well, he, he may next week. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:32):
There, there was one thing they fixed that windows users will care about. Oh, remember that, remember that bug that we talked about a week or two ago when you were resetting a windows 10 or 11 PC, some user data may have stayed on there in the windows dot old folder and an MVP discovered this and Microsoft's like, oh yeah, you're right. So they, you, we had a work, they had a workaround, which was, make sure you disconnect one drive before you reset your PC C, which probably most people don't do. But yesterday as part of patch Tuesday, right. They, they said, okay, we fixed it. So if you apply the patches from patch Tuesday on windows 10 and 11, it'll get rid of that bug that let user data remain. When you reset,

Leo Laporte (00:35:19):
Did they ever say how far back this went?

Mary Jo Foley (00:35:23):
They said it, it applies to windows 10 21 H 2 21 H one and 20 H two. So windows 10, 20 H two is the first build where that seems to have

Leo Laporte (00:35:36):
Been applied. Well, if you're a PC maker that has taken one of my dozens of returns to your factors,

Mary Jo Foley (00:35:42):
Please. My personal view. Same. Yep. Same here. Yeah. And so I, I was like panicking because I remember when I had, I I'm glad I didn't apply to windows seven because I had that window seven desktop I had had for 12 years or whatever. And, and I gave it right. But I even tell you guys what I did with that. I started to bring it to a place to donate it for education. And so I got in a cab lugging this giant windows, windows seven desktop. And it was like a Dell Plex. I, I got, I hail a cab. I get in the cab and the guy goes to me, where are you going? And I'm like, I'm gonna, anate this PC. He's like, I'll, I

Leo Laporte (00:36:18):
Can go to the river.

Mary Jo Foley (00:36:19):
What? No, he's like, I'll take it. He's like, I'll take it. My daughter needs a PC and I'm oh, no. He's like, what's on it. And I said, I reset it from windows seven to 10, but yeah. It's like legitimate copy and everything. He goes, okay, I'll let you off right here. And I'm taking it. I'm like, go ahead.

Leo Laporte (00:36:35):
Wow. That's great. I have an old trader barbecue. I could give him. Yeah, we see him again.

Mary Jo Foley (00:36:41):
But it pan for a minute, I panicked and I'm like, oh man, what if like that PC? I just gave to this random taxi driver out on it. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:36:50):
That's really a sweet story, man. And they say new Yorkers are cold and heartless. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:36:57):
It's like I

Leo Laporte (00:36:58):
A gun on you. I'll take it. I'll take it. I

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:01):
Don't care. No, cuz I had, I had it in the backseat. I'm like holding it this giant, like Dell optic. Why were

Leo Laporte (00:37:06):
You? You carrying it around?

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:08):
I was trying to bring it to cuz the donation center wouldn't come pick it up.

Leo Laporte (00:37:11):
He, you

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:12):
Were trying to it to us. I get, so I brought it out to get in a cab to go to the donation center and this guy's like

Leo Laporte (00:37:18):
Donation center. You real, you got a real deal there.

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:21):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:37:21):
You, you did get the ride for free. I hope

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:24):
I did.

Leo Laporte (00:37:25):
Yeah, I did that worked out great.

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:27):
It did.

Leo Laporte (00:37:29):
I love New York. That's hysterical. What a good story. That's fantastic. You should just get in random cabs with laptops all the time.

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:38):
I Hey, how far can I go for a ride? If I give you this

Leo Laporte (00:37:43):
Now on instead of having leaders for Rodale in the conference room, I'm just onesy. Tosing everything. Oh, we don't have cabs here. Never mind.

Leo Laporte (00:37:52):
Nevermind. let's take a little actually. I don't. I don't. Yeah. I'm gonna take a little break cuz you guys you've been working hard. You've been sling over a hot podcast all morning. So I'm gonna give you a little break and we'll come back and we'll talk about more stuff, including an Xbox semen. Our show today though, brought to you by. I wanna mention it because I love these guys, new Relic and you, if you don't know about new Relic, we'll love these guys too. If you're an it or CIS admitter you run a network. You know the thing you dread is the 3:00 AM phone call.

Leo Laporte (00:38:32):
Remember in the couple of presidential election and go, that was the, the campaign thing was will he be ready for the 3:00 AM phone call? Well, it's, it's not it's not pre president. Gocha calling the 3:00 AM phone call from an it point of view. Is that one where the server's down, the app's not working. I don't know what's going on with the cloud or maybe he's just a, you know, a beeper message saying, and it's in the middle of the night, you you're in the you're cozy, dreaming your sweet dreams and you gotta jump up and figure out what went wrong. And you know, this runs through your mind. It could be all sorts of things could be that deploy. You just pushed. That would be bad. Right? And you gotta rewrite that code. Or maybe it's not your fault. Maybe it's the, the backend or maybe it's the server or maybe it's the cloud provider or maybe your database is just, you know, full.

Leo Laporte (00:39:26):
And, and then, you know, if you're lucky you got a team, but then now they're woken up in the middle of the night. They're scrambling around and nobody knows what's going on. You're running a bunch of different tools trying to diagnose. I said the problem right here, my friend, I can tell you right now, you know what? The problem is. Lack of observability. That's the term I guess, of art for this new Relic did a study. They found that only half of all organizations implement observability for the networks and systems. That means there's where you're getting the 3:00 AM phone call. Not if you got new Relic because new Relic is all. You need to know exactly what's going on at any given time. So when you get that call, look, nobody's gonna stop that call things go wrong. But when you get that call, you could jump up, fire up new Relic, go, I see what's wrong, fix it.

Leo Laporte (00:40:16):
You. And even if it's in your code, you new Relic has application monitoring and APM. You can even go down to the line of code where the issue is say, oh, that should have been. That should have been negative one, fix it. And you're back to bed before you're even before you're even fully awake, 16 different monitoring products. You'd normally buy the lead engineering teams, see across the entire software stack in one place. You get a, as I mentioned, application monitoring a unified set of monitoring for your apps and microservices. You get Kubernetes pixie, you know about, if you use Kubernetes, you really need pixie. It, it gives you observability across all, all your installations. You got distributed tracing. So you can see all your traces without management headaches to fine and fix issues fast. You know exactly where that data stopped. Network performance monitoring that eliminates the siloed tools for a system-wide correlated view.

Leo Laporte (00:41:15):
More than 14,000 companies rely on depend on require new Relic to debug and improve their software door. Dash uses a GitHub uses it. I think that's a Microsoft company. Epic games uses it. Whether you run a cloud native startup or a fortune 500 company, it just takes five minutes to set up new Relic in your environment. And I have the best news for you. It's free. You get access to the whole new Relic platform and a hundred gigabytes of data free per month forever. You don't even need to give 'em a credit card to do that. So there's no reason why you can at right this minute install, new Relic. You don't have to get anybody's approval. You don't have to get a credit card, nothing. Just put it on there that way. Cuz you know, there's gonna be a midnight call sometime in the next week, month days, and you'll want to have new Relic ready, sign up at new relic.com/windows.

Leo Laporte (00:42:14):
That next midnight call is just waiting to happen. Get new Relic before it does new Relic, N E w R E L I C. New relic.com/windows and that, and then when that phone rings in the middle of the night, you can answer it and fix it and get back to bed. New relic.com/windows back. We go to Paul and Mary Jo who probably does get 3:00 AM. Wake up from her cat. I do. I'm guessing Rachi we had, you know, last night, you know, I, I look over Lisa's head. She's fast asleep and there's Paris sitting bold, upright staring at me. Yep. You know, they used to say that you don't let cats near babies cuz they'll steal their breath. Right. I think she was planning. She was plotting. She how I steal this guy's breath. I know I can. All right. Microsoft teams, we haven't talked about them in a few minutes.

Leo Laporte (00:43:19):
What's the latest, do you see where I am on the rundown? You yeah, it's not, it's not Microsoft teams. It's Microsoft partners with. Oh, you see, when you use the words, Microsoft and teams, I saw, I saw your confusion. Yeah. I'm like Microsoft teams, Microsoft lowercase teams. We it Apple. Yes, yes, yes. Okay. Yeah. So last year Microsoft and Google joined a group of other web browser makers and people with interest in the web market to improve the compatibility and interoperability of certain HTML standards or how their browsers rendered those things. This year they're added again, Apple are involved as well. They've renamed it for some reason. This is an initiative. It's not really an official thing, but it's called compat 2021 this year. Last year it was interrupt. I'm sorry. It's this year it's called interrupt. 20, 22. Last year, it was called compat 2021, but they have a specific list of areas of interoperability.

Leo Laporte (00:44:14):
They're looking at, you know, related skating style sheets and different things like that. Microsoft is primarily focused on a very specific thing. The CSS subgrid which is apparently I assume is one of the 10 top areas for this year. They never called that out. But anyway, they're all working on this stuff together, which I think is great. So web standards exist for a reason. I don't know why this is even necessary, but apparently there's still issues using different web browsers. Maybe we need little buttons on sites that say, you know, this site is best viewed. I dunno. It's just an idea. Something that would probably work too.

Mary Jo Foley (00:44:49):
I think someone tried that haven't they?

Leo Laporte (00:44:52):
Yeah. Does that sound familiar?

Mary Jo Foley (00:44:56):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:44:58):
Yeah. Okay. That's that? Huh? All right. Yeah. There's not much time. That was exciting.

Mary Jo Foley (00:45:02):
No.

Leo Laporte (00:45:03):
But we do need to do that. I mean, I, I think they need to do that in fact.

Mary Jo Foley (00:45:06):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:45:07):
Didn't they I don't remember if Microsoft was part of the matter coalition where all these oh IOT folks finally said, you know, yeah, we gotta have interoperability between these. I don't think they have enough stake in, they probably not end user part of that market, but, but Google and Apple, obviously. Yeah. People that would be part of the matter initiative would build, might know based on Microsoft IOT technology. In fact, there's a bill. We were talking on Sunday, Cory doctoral was on and he's very up on legislation. He's a big fan of the access bill. There's both house and Senate versions of that, where it requires interoperability. Yeah. I think that's, you know, that's what it used to be right in the old days when it was a bunch of equals. But now when you have giant, there's no incentive to say, oh no, no, we want deal it data side.

Leo Laporte (00:45:55):
I mean, it's not that I necessarily think this future should have happened. But if there was that requirement today, you might make the argument that Cortana might still be a thing because that compatibility would've been just been automatic. Right? Yeah. Yeah. And you could, you know, Facebook would not be so giant because you could port your data out into something else. Can you imagine if you could get your Facebook data and put it somewhere else? Yeah. Easily like that. Standard's the primary goal of that bill I'm sure. Yeah. The Ukraine war drags on what a nightmare, a hellscape Russia is suffering, you know, what's sad is that there's plenty of innocent civilians in Russia who have to suffer because this just as there are innocent civilians in Ukraine really well. Yeah. We can only get that. You gotta remember this as an authoritative authoritarian government that is lying to their people. If you were to pull someone on the streets of Russia, I think a lot of those people would think that what they were doing was great. Yeah. Or Dean that was the right thing to do. Yeah. Yeah. So obviously we don't want to get in a shooting war with Russia. But we have these economic sanctions, they seem to be taking hold and Microsoft is participating. Yes.

Mary Jo Foley (00:47:09):
Kind of, yeah. Kind of

Leo Laporte (00:47:11):
Not wholeheartedly. What is Microsoft?

Mary Jo Foley (00:47:15):
Yeah. So Friday they announced they were SU they were suspending all new sales of products and services in Russia. Yeah. So that does not mean existing contracts or sales. Right. the trick here is there are sanctions imposed by the us, the UK and the European union that may cover some of those existing contracts. So there may be some cases where existing contracts and, and products and services are halted in Russia, but by Microsoft only committed publicly to halting new sales. So yeah, it's, you know, it's something, some people were disappointed in, in what they said. They're like, yes, it doesn't go far enough. But you know, there are a lot of things to think about on this. Like some people brought up, well, there are also agencies in Russia that may be helping people or, you know, not everybody is doing what Putin wants, you know, so you can't just, you know, say, okay, cut off Russia, even though that's what we're basically doing here in the us now. But you know, I, I, I understand the, that it's a nuanced thing, but I also think some people are like, okay, Microsoft really, you know, of put some pressure on them and, and you can decide if you think that was enough or not enough.

Leo Laporte (00:48:36):
Geez.

Mary Jo Foley (00:48:36):
They also, you know what, they didn't talk about their Russian office. Either Microsoft, I believe has a fairly large office in Russia, at least one office. And I a, I asked them about that and they said, we have nothing to say about that office. So I'm like, okay. So yeah, I,

Leo Laporte (00:48:52):
I think Russia, you know, back when windows XP started edition was the thing, the Russian market was one of the first markets for that project. I remember that. And Russia at the time was probably a big source of pirated software. So I think that, I don't remember what the program was called, but after their antitrust stuff, they opened up lab so that governments could look at the source code for windows and there other products to prove that there weren't back doors. Right. And I think Russia was part of that process as well on the governmental level.

Mary Jo Foley (00:49:27):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:49:27):
But yeah, I don't know. I mean, we do business with ch you know, people are know if you hate the EU antitrust laws. Why don't you just not sell products in the EU? Or if you hate China so much, because they're a humanitarian disaster just don't do business with Russia or with China, you know? And like, that's a cute thing to say when you're an individual, you know, it's a little, yeah. It's a little harder for companies to it is to take those steps. So

Mary Jo Foley (00:49:50):
It is, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's something right. I, I think I had heard somewhere that it affects like 1% or less than 1% of Microsoft's business, what they did. Yeah. You know, but, but it's, it's also ceremonial important for image. Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:50:10):
Yeah. And I mean, and this is not what we would about, but there's calls on restaurant chains and food stores and things to not do business with Russia. And it's like, well, yeah. Donald's is closed. Yeah. Yeah. I hear you. But there's also an issue there where the, like Leo said, the people there are victims in their own way as well. Oh God. Yeah. So you're not gonna sell food now to the people of this country. Well, they can't get money out the ATM, they can't, I mean, this is getting to be rubs worth pennies no less than a penny. This is really getting dire for the people. You could be sure Putin's got all the steak and lobster he wants. I bet his Longhorns steak is open for his Longhorn is why he's got his own Longhorn in Natasha as well as the McDonald's. But yeah. So that's the problem. And I don't, I don't know, boy, I don't know what the long run solution is gonna be. This is just awful. Just,

Mary Jo Foley (00:51:01):
It is, it really is

Leo Laporte (00:51:03):
So sad. So yeah, it's hard when a company to decide on sanctions, there's, there's the kind of the greenwash style sanctions, which make you look good, but don't, don't maybe really, maybe even do worse harm. And then there's the, well, I look, you can't, you could, I guess they're probably examples of this, but I think most companies can't just ignore this. No, you can't, we're not gonna rise above this. You have, did you, so you, you pay lip service to it. You're at least showing your support. You know, Tim cook wore ukranian colors yesterday, by the way. Yeah. Wasn't that interesting? They didn't say anything. No, but he wore a blue shirt and a very bright yellow watch band. And so you kind of do those little things you can do. Yeah, that's very little that about as little as you can.

Leo Laporte (00:51:50):
Oh, you know? Okay. I'll wear a yellow tshirt. Well, it's not the only thing. No, it's not the only thing Apple did, but no, in fact, they, they did more and, and again, that's a perfect example because they shut down the app store as to Google and then some people I've talked to, some people say, you know there's somebody in the discourse system. I have a friend who's trying to get outta Russia. And if you don't have signal and you can't get signal in the app store, that's not good. So, you know, it's it's a mixed bag. And so it's very hard to know what, what you're, what, what you're doing, what the impact will be. I think you had to, you know, Apple had to do it, Google had to do it, but there might be side, you know, unintended side effects on the, on the people of Russia. And I, I mean, what are we trying to do? Get them to rise up against Putin? I don't know. I think I'm gonna see that happening. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not that there is not a history of that in Russia, but that's true. Ah, let's see. Okay. Let's talk about a funny place like China. Oh my. And this is, but see, this is another example of you also have to do things because the country insists on it, right?

Mary Jo Foley (00:52:59):
Yeah. Right. So the timing of this was really interesting. So the same day that Microsoft announced they were imposing the sanctions on new contracts in Russia. They also quietly posted a blog post about China and they didn't bring it to anyone's attention, but they, the news in China is they're opening their fifth Azure cloud region in China. It's open now. And they work with a company there called 21 via to run it because there are rules in China that, that Chinese businesses have to run these kinds of things. So this is, this is huge, right? Because Microsoft said, as of this opening, I don't know how you pronounce the city or the region, H E B E IBA. As of this opening this week, it doubles Microsoft's cloud capacity in China. That's how big that data region is.

Leo Laporte (00:53:57):
Is it Kube or

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:59):
Hub? I don't H

Leo Laporte (00:54:00):
U H

Mary Jo Foley (00:54:01):
E H E. Yeah. It's in north China. Yeah. it's their fifth region. It has all the usual services available there. Azure dynamics, power platform, office 365. And you know, people say, oh, why are they doing that? Because China is the fastest growing public club market in the world. It's growing. It grew last year at 50%. Yeah. So that's why they're doing it. I mean, it's crazy, but it's, it's just a huge market for them and they're not stopping business there. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:54:35):
Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:54:36):
They also announced them this week that they're gonna be opening their biggest data center in India. They didn't give a date on this in, in high. How do you pronounce this? Hiba.

Leo Laporte (00:54:49):
Hiba.

Mary Jo Foley (00:54:49):
Yeah. Hiba. Yeah. They, I think it'll probably be in a couple of years, but that's gonna be their biggest data center in India. So now

Leo Laporte (00:54:57):
Is that legal requirement as well? Or is that just because they should

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:00):
Have, they can run it themselves. Yeah, they can. They, they just have a lot of business and a lot of their offices in India also. I think that's

Leo Laporte (00:55:07):
The tech center for that country. Isn't dBot is. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:10):
Yeah. So that's gonna be really huge. I think that that may be also their fifth one in India. And last year Microsoft said they were on pace to open between 50 and a hundred data centers a year. That's how fast the cloud is, grow for Microsoft.

Leo Laporte (00:55:28):
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. This is it's big. It's we're in a global, it's a global business.

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:38):
It is

Leo Laporte (00:55:39):
It's global business. Yep. Finally Microsoft revamps its program for startups.

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:47):
Yeah. This is, this is kind of interesting too. If you're a startup before a lot of, a lot of cloud companies, not just Microsoft, they would have a lot of different requirements. If a startup wanted to get in their like startup program Microsoft's is called the Microsoft for startups, founders, hub. It's kind of an unwieldy name, but you, in, in the older days, you'd have to have like venture capital behind you, or you'd have to have an affiliation with an incubator. Like there are all these ways that kind of prevented true startups from getting in and getting things like Azure credits and credits for GitHub and office 365. But yesterday Microsoft announced this new, this new program, startup founders hub there's basically no wall to get in. You can just be somebody with an idea and come to Microsoft and, and apply and say, I want, I, I have this idea and I want some Azure credits.

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:41):
I wanna play with the cloud and you can get in at a pretty easy level. It sounds like you start out with a thousand dollars of credits per year, if you just have an idea. And then if you get all the way up to actually starting your business and trying to scale it out $120,000 worth of credits, right? So it's, it's big, it's a big program. And, you know, Microsoft is very interested in trying to get startups in its camp especially in the cloud side, because that's where Amazon has a lot of success in Google has a lot of success. They're, they're very well connected to the whole startup world and startup community. So Microsoft's like, okay, let's just drop the barriers, make it super easy to get in and hopefully, and hook some of these businesses at a very early stage and get them on Azure and on our products too. So yeah. Pretty, pretty interesting what they're doing there to try to grow that part of the business.

Leo Laporte (00:57:36):
Yeah. Okay. Mary Jo go make a sandwich that time time to pat the pat, the cat coming up it's Xbox time. Geez.

Speaker 4 (00:57:53):
When the first ever 24 7 sports network debuted in 1979, fanatics thought they died and gone to sports heaven. ESPN forever changed the TV land, but Fox sports saw an opportunity to make the games more entertaining and through big money into stealing ESPNs thunder. Hi, I'm David Brown, the host of Wondery show business wars and in our latest series, media mobile Rupert Murdoch wants to own the lucrative sports TV market. But to do that, he'll have to launch a full court press, listen to ESPN versus Fox sports on business wars on Apple podcasts, Amazon music, or the Wondery app join Wondery plus in the Wondery app to listen one week early and ad free.

Leo Laporte (00:58:40):
Well, Paul Paul Thra, Paul Thra is our Xbox guru. As I mentioned, Paul, I put Eldon ring on the one I presume you're not playing that silly game. I am not, I'm not, it's a very difficult, I feel like Mary Jo is not playing halo infinite on Xbox because they have not enabled co-op yet. Oh, she's waiting for waiting for it. Yeah. She likes PV. What

Mary Jo Foley (00:59:02):
Is co-op

Leo Laporte (00:59:06):
Well, even Cooper. In other words, the cake is a lie. That's all I can say. Yeah. Think that's all I

Mary Jo Foley (00:59:11):
Need to

Leo Laporte (00:59:11):
Know. Think started. I think it was halo three. I could be completely wrong on that, but at some point they added a co-op mode to the single player campaigns in halo and, and other games have this as well, but it's a big thing in halo. And this states back to the times when you would sit in front of a TV with one screen and one console, and you could split the screen. So you could have like two people side by side, you could have four people in a grid and you could all play together. You could play multiplayer that way, which was tough. Cuz people would cheat. Look at your screen. I sometimes I call it sofa mode, sofa so that you and others are on a sofa together. We're looking at the same screen playing at the game together. Got it. Yeah. So one of the big controversies with halo infinite is that they delayed it a year and that, you know, the first the thing they were gonna release looked horrible.

Leo Laporte (00:59:58):
And then they delayed it a year and yet they still didn't have to go up ready a year later, which everyone's like, oh, okay. That's kind of weird. And he said, it's all right, we're gonna, or we'll add it in the spring. They delayed the first, I guess we'll call it the second season tech, the next season, whatever season it is the next or first season of halo, infinite until may I think was the date. Presumably, so they could get co-op working before that and that's not gonna happen now. So it's been delayed again or as I call it and this keeps coming up for some reason today. They Longhorned it. See what I did there. Anyway, it is coming eventually, but it's gonna be later than we expected. In the good news department, we do have a new monthly Xbox system update that arrive today.

Leo Laporte (01:00:43):
So if you have an Xbox one series X RS you can download that. Now there's nothing I wouldn't call any of this major. The big thing is this ability to pin games to quick resume. And what that means is that you now have a group called a group in your games. So it's called quick resume. These are games that you want to quickly resume, right? Using the quick resume features. So you can have the games used most often be there. And those things will start up quickly. You'll have a, a quick place to, to go to those. But couple of other small features, but not, not a big, big deal, but that is out today. And then they didn't release this entire list, but Microsoft announced today that they have over 40 new games coming to the Xbox platform over the next.

Leo Laporte (01:01:29):
I'm not sure I can say five weeks, I guess. And yeah, between March 8th and April 11th. And so they've released a list of the first batch. They're gonna release them in weekly allotments. These are just, these are not all Microsoft games, I mean, should say across the platform. So MLB, the show is coming a this week, which is nice, cuz that will be the real life thing is not coming this week. So that'll be fun. And that's, that's the big one that I saw on that list. So I wish I had brought an Xbox to Mexico with me. Cause I gotta tell you, I could have used that release of frustration or stress or whatever when I was away. But instead I sat in a dark room instead wife, he did that instead of that was fun too. That's the other kind of couch mode.

Leo Laporte (01:02:10):
Exactly. Much less fun. It's like, do you wanna do something? No. No. Are you hungry? Not really. I see. But they don't have a TV in this new apartment. No, they do. They it's on Spanish. Is that the problem? No, I, the last place we stayed was fantastic and they had, the only downside was the, the, the Apple TV was so slow. You couldn't even use it. Oh. And they actually updated it apparently since I mentioned that, but this new place had two TVs and it was fine, but I just, I, I think we were, I just kind of click, like, I don't know. I just, you were in shock. Yeah. You were. You were saying to yourself, what have we done? Yeah, not, well it's just nothing, nothing. I don't know what to say. I don't know nothing. It's just, it's not SIM it's not easy.

Leo Laporte (01:02:57):
I guess it's not easy. It's not easy. It's not easy. I understand. It's not simple. I completely understand. I am. There was a moment we were signing papers literally and the guy representing us and the one of the developers realized they had gone to the same school and they were like busily chatting, like little girls. And I was like, Hey guys, try to make a real estate transit. Can we focus for a second? You're gonna have to get, they're like high five at each other. And Hey guys, Mexico, nobody's in a hurry in Mexico. It's that's one of the, listen, I just need to focus on this for like five minutes here. It's very relaxed society. Rain, ITIN. Very relaxed. I dunno is, but the food's good. The coffee's good, right? Yeah. The chocolate is, is there lots of music you can go see?

Leo Laporte (01:03:46):
Yeah. I mean yeah, Mexico's gonna be a major destination for concerts, for sure. Yeah. So sports too, by the way, you know, sports, you're gonna have to learn the rules of soccer. I think I game am gonna arrive just in time for, for bull fighting to no longer be a thing in Mexico city. Oh gosh. It still is. That's kind of a shock, right? I believe so. Yeah. Yeah. When we were in Spain, a few places, you know, every city had a bowl ring it was kind surprising. They still, I think you know, Barcelona had got rid of it a long time ago, but Madrid had still had it when we were there, but they, they weren't doing it at the time. Good, good, good. Yeah. Yeah. Port bowl portable the March, 2022 Xbox update is here. This is good to know.

Leo Laporte (01:04:34):
I like to know these ahead of time so that I know when I get home, I can't play my game. I have to wait right. By the way. If red sent me this, but we, we had watched this series, so there's a a series on Apple TV. Oh God, what second? The it, oh, jeez. It's the comedy series with Steve Carrell or maybe it's not on the office. No, no. It's the, the new comedy series, the oh space. It's like space force, right force. So there's a, there's a great scene in this thing where they're trying to fix, they try to do something remotely so they can fix the satellite and get every, you know, the astronauts back and windows 10 doesn't update.

Leo Laporte (01:05:11):
And there's a great, there's this a great moment where everyone rants about windows and Microsoft, you know, your mainstream when you know, a sitcom that's one of the sits, right? Maybe it's not on, maybe it's on Hulu or Amazon or something. Space force is a HBO, I think HBO. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I actually had looking spreadsheet because I couldn't keep track where all the shows are. Oh no, we do this. We don't have a, we make a list because we keep forgetting. We we'll finish it. What are we watching? Yeah. And I'll we'll, this is my wife. And I don't really argue a lot about things. I mean, obviously the money stuff now with this is stressful, whatever. But but honestly, the thing we argue about the most is probably TV, what to watch because we'll sit there for 40 minutes and not find anything.

Leo Laporte (01:05:59):
And I'll be like, I thought you said you made a list and she's like, I can't find it. And I said, and she's like, well, you know, you do all the TV style. I'm like, I don't know what, I don't know what things are. Paul, just a hint. We from a man has been married many times. Yeah. Right. Let her decide. Right. And and basically never, you know, don't take the remote away. It's well actually, so what she wants me to do is say, I know she wants you to do here's the series we're gonna, I think we're gonna watch next. Cause I know you'll like it. That's what she wants me to say. Okay, good, good. And I don't, I just don't ever remember. I'm like, I remember we mentioned something. I have an obsidian is my note keeping app, like I'm opening it right now.

Leo Laporte (01:06:38):
My OB I have an obsidian page that has wanna watch our watching. Yeah. That's good. And, and have watched and then in, and then in each one of course has to have the most important part where to watch, right? Yeah. That's a huge problem today. Like it's it on? Oh gosh. It's all over the, there are shows coming down the pike. I know I'm gonna have to get like peacock network or yeah. One of these other things, like I te plus peacock, fortunately, a lot of what we wanna watch these days is on Hulu. Right, right. That's the next thing we're actually, I do know, by the way, figured that out lunch today, I have the next series, so we're good. Oh, what is it? Tell me. I need to Elizabeth. I believe it's called dropout. The dropout. It's the, the phone Mary Jo picked it.

Leo Laporte (01:07:27):
Lisa and I are two, two episodes in and enjoy it. Is it good? Yeah. It's good. Okay. I'm on inventing Anna now. Thanks love that. This is right, which is fantastic. Yep. So we just watched by, so since we're on this topic, not to a different show, there's something called the Tinder swindler. Yes. Which is not serious and should be. Yeah. Right. Its wanna warn everybody about this? It's a movie. It's a documentary movie guess. Yeah. Yeah. This one does not end in on a positive note in any way, shape or form. So if you're looking for like a, a story like this inventing Anna thing and, and you want it to end well a I'll watch this worse. It is. He's out. It's about swindling. Yeah. He's like, it's unbelievable. Yeah. And everyone who worked with him on all of the stuff he did. Yeah. Never been charged with anything. No punishment. Yeah. Oh wow. It's awful. It's like it's awful. Well, okay. As long as we're talking about depressing endings, I know you need more depression in your life. Paul, have you, so did you ever watch Yellowstone? No. Oh, okay. You put that on the, I

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:27):
Heard it's great. Right?

Leo Laporte (01:08:28):
It's the Sopranos before starts. Great. It gets nuts. It goes up and down. It's four seasons. It goes up and down there. So, you know, halfway through some season, the

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:35):
Power of the dog also speaking of westerns was very,

Leo Laporte (01:08:38):
Did you like it? I

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:39):
Did not. I

Leo Laporte (01:08:40):
Liked it. It's gonna win an Oscar. It's gonna be best picture. It was good. Not a fan.

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:44):
The scenery alone. It's

Leo Laporte (01:08:46):
Beautiful. Pretty it's beautiful. Benedict cucumber batch is a cowboy. A little bit of a stretch.

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:51):
A little hard to understand. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:08:52):
He's not, he's not, he didn't. He did nail it.

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:55):
It didn't work. No.

Leo Laporte (01:08:56):
Yeah. Huh. everybody else is great. And it, Kristen DUNS. Yeah. Is fantastic. Her husband's.

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:01):
She was.

Leo Laporte (01:09:02):
Yep. So the Yellowstone must watch Sopranos meets it's Sopranos with horses. Yeah. and Kevin cost ons, but then it's so successful. It's actually saved paramount plus. Wow. Wow. So they've got the guy who created it, Taylor, she and who is actually in it, not a good actor. So, you know, immediately that that guy is not an actor, but he can ride a horse, like no one's business. Anyway, he's been commissioned to like write 20 more series for paramount plus. So the first one was the prequel 1883, which is the about at the, the Oregon trail and the pioneers getting to Montana. So they can start the ranch that Yellowstone will cover seven generations later. And then he is gonna do that generation after generation. So anyway, 1883, but a warning with 1883, the ending is to pressing as hell. Okay. That's all I'm gonna say. Still worth watching cuz it's the most. And I, this is why it's suppressing realistic depiction of what it must have been to be a pioneer on the organ trail. And it goes Sam Elliot and who doesn't love Sam Elliot. So, okay. We have really, we have really gone off the rails as frosty Winnipeg says worst road trip ever.

Leo Laporte (01:10:24):
Well, I don't know that the Donner pass was pretty bad. Well, they didn't even get that's the sad thing. They didn't even get to the Donner pass. They were gonna get it. But the, well anyway, you'll I don't wanna spoil it. Okay. Did we cover everything in the Xbox section? Yeah. Yeah. Did you wanna do the 40 new games coming this spring? No, it's so Def well now know Paul out. We only know a few of them. Now you really know Paul when Paul says yeah. Okay. I don't care. That's bad. Is it, is it is it morning after regret or you just, no, I don't. I don't regret it. I just want it to be over with yeah, yeah. It's pain. I wanna move on. Yeah. You know, do you buy a right? Or you only get a 99 year lease.

Leo Laporte (01:11:11):
It used to be, you'd only get a 99 year lease. No, no, it's it's alright. That's the thing you're referring to, so there is a, if you move within some distance of the coast of the borders of the country. Yeah, yeah. You have to, you get what is essentially a trust and it's a 99 year something and we actually don't know what's gonna happen after that. But I mean, they probably just move another 99 years or something. You're not gonna be alive for 99 years. Well that's why no one cares. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. No, but in, in the interior of the country, the 99% of it doesn't matter. You can just own it. Right. Nice. Yeah. Lovely. Yes. Lovely. All right. Well I'm just I'm stalling cuz we have to separate the ads by a certain amount of content. We can't just, we can't just pile 'em all on. Any other shows you wanna talk? Oh there's SRA. SRA can do a little dance for us. Something like that. He

Mary Jo Foley (01:11:59):
Could, he could

Leo Laporte (01:12:03):
Have you seen what we do in the shadows? That's pretty good. That's on Hulu Uhuh. No. Yeah. I like that.

Mary Jo Foley (01:12:08):
I'm waiting for the handmaid tale to come back. I want it

Leo Laporte (01:12:10):
To come back. Talk about grim.

Mary Jo Foley (01:12:12):
Oh the ending of that thing. Holy you know what, remember

Leo Laporte (01:12:17):
It? Yeah. You think that it can't get any darker or more awful?

Mary Jo Foley (01:12:21):
Oh, I know. Well, that's good to know. I actually was screaming in my living room on the ending of the last one.

Leo Laporte (01:12:27):
I couldn't even get through the first few episodes, so it's good to know. I, it was so grim. It's just,

Mary Jo Foley (01:12:34):
It's really well done though. You have to admit

Leo Laporte (01:12:36):
Well, and I was

Mary Jo Foley (01:12:37):
Sadly too believable.

Leo Laporte (01:12:38):
That's the problem. I was watching it right during the Trump era. So it, it was like, well that's right. This, this thing is like a prediction. Exactly. This is not fiction. Yeah. Right. And of course let's see, what else? There's some good food shows somebody feed Phil is I'm told very good. Yeah. I like that guy. Yeah. the one with the guy he goes to Mexico city. There's a good episode there. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you've seen it up with the owner of pool hole and oh, nice. Get that mole. Get that mole. Didn't get, I didn't have a single bit of mole on this trip. Well, that's

Mary Jo Foley (01:13:16):
See. That's why you're

Leo Laporte (01:13:17):
The whole thing went. The whole thing went south. It just, it just didn't Paul.

Mary Jo Foley (01:13:20):
No pun intended. I'm sorry. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:13:22):
Watch the dropout. Watch the dropout. I'll cheer you. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I'm very, I'm quite familiar with the story. I mean there's a to an audio, so it's based on the podcast. Yeah. Yeah. And I read the John car you, which is only starts like later this starts like when she's a kid. And so it gives you a little more and I hope it's accurate. I think it is more understanding of how, cause you know, that's the question everybody asks is like, well, how did this happen? Did she plan this from the beginning to be a big con or or no, I think this a bigly make it thing in the Silicon valley, especially. But, well we mentioned those two stories about the Tinder swindler and the inventing, anything these people have that, you know, you get spam calls that try to get money from you.

Leo Laporte (01:14:12):
But these are from people in a distant country that don't know. You'll never see you. Right. But, but how much crazier it is to, for a scam to work, these people have to interact with you on a daily basis, fall in love with you or pretend they're falling along with you. Yeah. I like those people are pathological. Yeah. And at some point Elizabeth Holmes had to have turned into that. She had to have just decided we're going for this. I'm gonna swindle people to their face. You know? I mean, that's, that takes a, that's a we'll watch it cuz there a form of insanity. And again, I don't know how accurate this is and how much insight editor are thinking, but what this show sets it up very nicely as you see how she gets drawn into it initially with good intentions, but right, right. Kind of naive and somewhat ignorant gets drawn into it.

Leo Laporte (01:14:58):
And at some point can't, you know, you can't get out. And I think that that's I think that's probably accurate, you know? Good. All right. I think we've found some good shows to watch. So now I'll just tie it back to the last thing we talked about. Don't watch 'em on an Xbox. That's a really inefficient way to watch those. You go perfectly done. Very nice. Nice. it is time for the back of, well, it will be in a moment time for the back of the book. And now that moment has passed and the back of the book time has come. It's a understand time. Leo. I know. Believe me. I, so it's, it's complicated. It's complicated. Paul arrived your tip. Yeah. Last week for whatever reason, I had two tips this week. I have two app picks just to kind of make up for that.

Leo Laporte (01:15:45):
Nice. Both of these are just ideas for alternatives. Just based on recent events. The first is brave. This has come up. I, like I said, I still feel this way. I feel like I'm tunneling toward brave. Like I'm gonna end up at brave someday the web browser. This is the, the, well, the very anti tracking privacy folks, et cetera, a third party chromium based browser. They have, they are soon picking up a new feature called UN linkable bouncing, which is yet another anti tracking feature. This is actually really interesting to me. And the way this works is every time you visit a site that is thought to be, or could be suspicious for some reason in that it will not, they suspect that it will try to track your your personal data. They will generate a unique first time you know, digital profile for you and then erase it when you leave.

Leo Laporte (01:16:38):
And so it's kind of like when you use a credit card and they, they give you a fake number to make a purchase and it only works for that one time. It basically stops sites from tying your footprint to previous visits. You always look like a first time visitor. So if you're, if you're in brave night, just like their you know, obviously a pre-release version nightly build, you can get that now, but it's gonna come to stable very soon in version 1.37. And I guess this is a part of a suite of features that are coming, which they call first party ephemeral storage which they describe as being similar to, but more powerful and friendly than clearing your browser storage every single time you leave a site. Right. I think you're super worried about the web tracking you around that's I guess that's one of the strategies you can sit there and keep clearing your cash, whatever, but they're gonna build that right into the browser.

Leo Laporte (01:17:27):
So I think that's smart. That's cool. And then Corll draw a, I should say Corll draw usually every year releases a new version of the Carr draw graphic suite, right? So there's I know there was one in 2020, there was one in 2021 that usually happens around this time. There's not one yet for, or at least for at least yet for 2022. But the thing that has switched over there over the years like it has elsewhere is there are standalone versions of the product that you buy. So you buy, you know, that 20, 21 version, that's your yours forever, or you subscribe. And in this case it's an annual subscription. And when you subscribe, they give you roughly quarterly updates. I know there was one in October, this one now in March. And you just get that as part of your annual subscription, kinda like Microsoft 365 or the Adobe stuff, except for the UHR draw suite.

Leo Laporte (01:18:15):
So there's only a few updates here. I'm not a user per se. I'm not actually an Adobe user either. So, but if you're looking for an alternative to the Adobe creative suite stuff, because it's expensive or whatever this might be something you want to look at cuz it will be the less expensive. The annual subscription for this for example is $269 a year or you can just buy it out, right. You know, for 550. So if you're interested, you should check it out and also check out what they add to it over time. Because I think that's where it gets interesting in the same way that Microsoft 365 gets interesting over time because they keep, you know, adding to it. So there you go. They keep adding to it kinda like the the search stuff they're adding to windows 11. It's just like dad had kittens to it and stuff. It's fine. Enterprise pick of the week. Boy, this took a long time to close. Holy cow.

Mary Jo Foley (01:19:10):
Yeah did. Yeah. Yeah. So Friday, Friday was a very big day for Microsoft last week. They announced the sanctions with Russia, the Azure data center in China. And they also announced that they completed the nuance acquisition. That was like almost a year from when they announced that they were planning to buy them. The reason it took so long was there was more probably I can't say for sure because they were very secretive about it, but there's normally regulatory scrutiny of these kinds of deals. And now with the climate against big tech, there was probably even more regulatory scrutiny than before on this deal. So this is Microsoft's second largest acquisition currently LinkedIn 26.2 billion nuance, 19.7. If activism goes through, that'll obviously the big be the biggest at 69 billion. But what's very interesting to me about nuance is a lot of people just think of them as a healthcare voice recognition company.

Mary Jo Foley (01:20:14):
They're they popularize the dragon voice system and it's mostly used currently in healthcare, but they also have pretty big businesses in finance, retail, and telecommunication, all areas where Microsoft also has very big vertical market presence and they have already started working. This is really interesting. They've already started working with the dynamics team to take the dynamics, customer service product, combine it with nuanced technology and create a contact center solution that they're going to sell using nuance, AI technology, combined with dynamics. So you can see that they're gonna, Microsoft's gonna take this nuance AI technology, and it's gonna show up in a lot more places than just healthcare. So I'm yeah, I'm very interested to see how this plays out in what kinds of new services they come up with for various vertical markets.

Leo Laporte (01:21:11):
Was it, was it a year how long? It was, seemed like a long

Mary Jo Foley (01:21:14):
Time ago. Yeah. 11 months. Wow. 11 months. Yep. Wow.

Leo Laporte (01:21:18):
I'm sure avision blizzard will be like two, three months. It'll be fine. Right. You know, we, we always do the news of the acquisition, but we, you know,

Mary Jo Foley (01:21:26):
Right. You don't always start about the clothes.

Leo Laporte (01:21:29):
We did regulatory process, the ongoing yeah. The EU has said today that they will approve the purchase of blah, blah, blah, whatever it is without restriction, you know, that takes place. That stuff takes a long time, long time. It does. And I think it's gonna take longer. I mean, we now have and Le con at the FTC a very much, well, we Don need people paying attention to yeah. You know? Yeah. Right. So I don't think any acquisition anymore is a cake walk. Yeah. It really is. Agree.

Mary Jo Foley (01:21:55):
Yeah. Agree

Leo Laporte (01:21:56):
Code name pick of the week.

Mary Jo Foley (01:22:00):
Okay. This is one I'm doing with Paul because

Leo Laporte (01:22:04):
This is how we get into the book. This is the first step. Everybody Collaborating on a tip needs

Mary Jo Foley (01:22:11):
Authoring. No. So I had said to Paul recently, I forgot that the code name of windows seven was just window seven. That's what Raymond Chen said in his blog, the old new thing. And then Paul said, well, technically it was actually Vienna before it was

Leo Laporte (01:22:28):
Vienna seven. I remember that. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:22:30):
I

Leo Laporte (01:22:30):
Didn't remember that. Raymond Chan is a dirty little liar. No, Raymond Chan is.

Mary Jo Foley (01:22:35):
You're gonna tell the Mozart, the Mozart came.

Leo Laporte (01:22:37):
I will. Yeah, this is, well, this is, this was a fever dream I had. I, and I mean that literally. So I just, I, I, I, I don't mean to keep bringing it back to this, but I've been, you know, I've been writing this series on this site out the history of windows I got through the Longhorn stuff, which I have often described as the, the NA deer that they, you know, that, that I figured if I got through that, the rest of it would be easy. And I forgot because what happens after what windows Vista and Longhorn is Steven snaky. I forgot. So on this trip among I forgot. And I have a couple of little articles I wanna do before I get full blown into the windows seven stuff. The Longhorn server was one. And some other, it doesn't matter, but, but I've been researching.

Leo Laporte (01:23:22):
I've been watching videos. I've been going through my archives. I've been reading emails and oh my God, I've said this to Mary Jo probably multiple times. I don't know if I can get through it. I, I, I literally have PTSD about this era. It it's, I forgot. I, I blocked it out. Yeah. And I'll just give you two things just off the top of my head. You, you know windows seven was the code name for windows seven. You know what I else they said about windows seven, that it was the seventh version of windows. Remember that? Yeah. That was the claim. It was Mike Nash who they made say that, by the way, Mike Nash is a friend. He's a good guy. That's nonsense. He also also the other Stephen Sinofsky history rewriting is that windows versions were like star Trek movies. Every other one was great.

Leo Laporte (01:24:05):
And know the one was terrible that also doesn't hold up to any amount of scrutiny whatsoever. You have to completely change. What is a windows version to make that make any sense? You have to lie. Basically everything they did was a lie. So here's, here's the, well, I can't say the truth. I mean, here's my, here's my interpretation of the, the code name thing. We, we just talked about this, I think last week or the week before windows regimes, when you go from Jim Alton to Sinofsky to Myerson and now to pane are reactions to the group that came before. Yeah. It's a pendulum Jim Alton forth. Yeah. Transparent and failed. Publicly Steven OVS was a reaction to that. He was private and secretive and undermining and I I'll just stop there. And he was not gonna be like Jim Chen.

Leo Laporte (01:24:58):
Right? Yeah. But he was brought on to, to run, to, to build the next versions of windows before Jim AlTiN was done. It was a very little thing and a, an, an announcement that had other reorg implications. He was working on two projects that were named before he got there. Fiji and Vienna and Fiji was technically windows Vista service pack one, but they actually later reused that name for a version of media center, I think. And I think they did that to obscure that. And I think they did windows seven because they didn't want to use the name from before. That was Vienna. However, when they, before they even talked about the product, they started up a blog called engineering seven. And it was about how they were building windows seven. It was a million words over two and a half years, zero content whatsoever, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Leo Laporte (01:25:54):
It was our first introduction to how he goes on and on and on and on and on. And I swear to God, this came, I, I'm not kidding you. I, I had, I slept so poorly the week we were in Mexico, but in the middle of the night, I was awake. It was three 30 in the morning or four o'clock in the morning, something like that. I'm laying in bed. And this is what is what went through in my head. There's a blog post. He wrote very early on to be I'll, I'll be quoting it soon where he explained, he talked about Mozart and someone had said, is the windows group getting too big? Is there too many things? Are there too many people? And he says, this is like Mozart. And people complaining too many notes, too many notes, too many notes. And he, and, and he went, you know, in his own way, he went on and on and on and on.

Leo Laporte (01:26:35):
But if you, if you break down like, you know, word has like this feature that can break down things and give you the summary. Yeah. The summary was Steven Sinofsky thinks he's Mo and this thing was called Vienna. Cause at that time, I think they had just changed the name. Do you think they changed? He wanted to go? No. No. He, he wanted to go. He wanted, listen. He was the, he was the epitome of not invented here. You gotta remember this guy. I changed everything because he didn't want anything from the past. He was gonna change the file system in windows, which had been windows, NTFS or NTFS, sorry. Since the beginning of the windows NT in 1993, because it wasn't invented by his team. Like this was this technology here. That's really,

Mary Jo Foley (01:27:23):
I don't know if remember this. Do you remember he, he wanted to do away with code names. Like they tried to stamp out code names of of course during his regime. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:27:32):
I don't think

Mary Jo Foley (01:27:33):
He, that makes sense

Leo Laporte (01:27:34):
Stuck with a label. Yeah. So windows seven was the next version they came, they chunked up this crazy rationale for it was the seventh version. Yeah. And then, and it was course windows, probably it to 6.2 or something under the covers. Yeah. It was a whole thing about whether it was a minor release or a major release and all the rash, but on and on, on, and on and on. And if you added it all up, you, you are like, oh, you just proved, you proved in your own words, it's a minor release. No, it's a major release windows seven was windows Vista, service pack three

Leo Laporte (01:28:02):
Period. Like I, I he way too much, you gotta, and the other thing I, I, I can go, I'm gonna go on and on he, he, God, he had such a great public respect because of what they did with office. What did they do with office? There were no major new features of office, like ever. It was just iterate, iterate, iterate, iterate. And the reason they did the ribbon not was, you know, remember the too many commands. We can't blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Okay. That was something to that for sure. But it was because of all, because no one was upgrading anymore. They used to arbitrarily change the UI of office. So you could tell which version of it. It was right. Yeah. But there was no one would upgrade because it look at office and say, it looks the same. I don't need, I Don. Why, why, why would I upgrade? The 50% of the reason they went to the ribbon was to get people to upgrade. Cuz it looked like it was something new.

Mary Jo Foley (01:28:55):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:28:57):
So that's what windows seven was, windows seven was take the office model iterate and apply it to windows. And then I think there was a lot of ego involved and they were like, we gotta make a big bang now and we're gonna do windows eight. And that was

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:10):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:29:11):
You know, that worked out great

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:12):
CATA. Yeah. Should

Leo Laporte (01:29:14):
Have kept that way. That's that's my theory. I, because I had heard about Vienna multiple times. I have slot, I have Microsoft internal slide decks that use this term. Yeah. This was the next version of windows.

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:25):
No, I love, I love the Mozart and Vienna connection. Yeah. Right. Like, cuz I right. Like I'm like, oh yeah. Okay. That's all like falls into place now. Right. Paul, you really enjoy being a,

Leo Laporte (01:29:36):
A

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:36):
Windows or a Microsoft historian. I think he does this either should to your next book or better. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:29:42):
Microsoft should just

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:43):
Hire you to do this.

Leo Laporte (01:29:46):
I mean, well, here's the problem. So I'm an outsider, right? One

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:49):
Of the, they wanna sanitize. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:29:51):
Yeah, yeah. This is yeah, you gotta, and also Sinofsky right now is writing his own little, little, he doesn't write anything little. Right. He's writing his own version of this. Now he was on the, he was, he led the team. I mean he could easily refute anything. I just said by saying he wasn't there. I was there and here's the truth. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The problem is we have a rich history of that guy lying again and again and again, I prefer

Mary Jo Foley (01:30:13):
The outsider. 

Leo Laporte (01:30:15):
So inside I have no, I don't have an agenda. In fact, like I said, ID kind of blocked this out. I I'm going through my a, so I'm thinking I'm like, oh my God, I completely forgot. Here's another, I'll just give you one with, this is, this is the first time I met this guy was at, I told this story. It was at the office reviewers workshop, which was for office 2007, I think. And I had leaked all this stuff about this product ahead of time. He had emailed me, told me to, he was, they would send me a cease disorder. I didn't take it down. And so I took, I met him. This is a year later I meet, I met him in person. I walked up, he's talking to other people. I didn't wanna interrupt. I just wanted to say hi. He looked at my name badge. I saw who I was, did the up and down scan. And then just went back to talk to the people, ignored me completely. Now the next time I contact the next time I heard from him, this is the email I stopped the time my head was what he wrote. I remember this exactly. He said, howdy. I know it's been a while since you and I have interacted, I wanted to let you know the last time you, we interacted, you sent me a cease desist order.

Mary Jo Foley (01:31:15):
What are you talking about?

Leo Laporte (01:31:17):
Like, like

Mary Jo Foley (01:31:18):
That was

Leo Laporte (01:31:18):
The email I got. That was the next one. So yeah, I have a yeah, maybe I have a little bit of a, an issue to deal with your

Mary Jo Foley (01:31:28):
Oh, chip shoulder there.

Leo Laporte (01:31:29):
I forgot this, this stuff. Like I'm going through it. I'm like, oh my God. Right. This

Mary Jo Foley (01:31:32):
Guy. So this, they didn't name it after Vienna beef. This was a different kind of the city. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:31:38):
City, the city the city home. Remember in the nineties, they did city names, Chicago Daytona. Detroit was one, right? Boston was the co name for the first version of visual studio. This is many years later chip will. Okay. But yeah, I don't really wanted to tighten the Mozart connection. They should have named it. Saltsburg but I guess Vienna's close enough. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:32:03):
Well the other thing, like, you know the windows code names at the end, there were long, well, I'm sorry. Were Whistler and black home. Yeah. Yeah. They were after those were mountains. This is like the aggressive testosterone guy thing. Like, you know, whatever. And is the bar in the middle? Cuz they, there was no other place in the middle is the Longhorn. Was it was that. And it's like, from there, it's like, well where do we go from there? It's like, you know, international destinations, you know? Yeah. Little pretier kind of places cosmopolitan, perhaps. And it makes it's just for, they do it for Mary Jo's benefit. That's the real

Mary Jo Foley (01:32:38):
They do. Just to keep me happy, keep interested, Check out all the code names and

Leo Laporte (01:32:43):
I should correct myself. Space forces on Netflix, not HBO. Netflix. I'm sorry. I can't remember this chord reminded me. No, no, it's a, it's a it, by the way, it's an easy to digest show. Like 30 minute episodes is there's not many of them. I like the first season I started the second season and I'm I think I, I get through it's worth it's it's good. Yeah. We like it. It's a little slapstick, but it's fun. Yeah. No, it's good. I love Steve crew. You watch it just for the windows 10 update thing. It's I will. I know now I will. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody HD editor suggesting maybe for the cruise, you could do a, a talk on the history of windows. We'll say I'm gonna be in a convalescence home by that point. If I, I don't, you know, I've already started the couple. You'll see it's you'll say it it's it's it's it gets interesting. I can't wait. Maybe you and I and Mary Jo should share a beer right now. Time for our beer pick of the week.

Mary Jo Foley (01:33:38):
Paul might even like this beer.

Leo Laporte (01:33:40):
I know I will.

Mary Jo Foley (01:33:43):
So I haven't done a lot of the old classic very famous beers as my beer picked. But this past week I got to have this beer that I've had before in the past. And I remember how fantastic Belgian beers are. Yes. Brassie, Canion one of the most famous brewers in Brussels. They make beers called lambs. So lambics are a very famous style where usually they blend multiple kinds of different beers together. Usually they're not fully fermented. So they undergo various fermentation. Sometimes they're fermented by leaving 'em open so that the yeast in the air can just naturally ferment it. Yeah. Right. Sometimes it's they ferment it in a bottle and they that's. When you have bottle fermented, these beers, they they're so classic and so well made that they last for 20 years. Like when you, when you get one of these beers, you could hold it for 20 years and it would still be fantastic when you drink it.

Mary Jo Foley (01:34:44):
So this one I had is one of their most famous ones. It's called the classic goose. And I just can't even explain how delicious this beer is. It's you take a sip and it's just so refreshing and light. It's like 5% delightful. It would pair with any food, very fresh a little bit floral tasting. And I, it just makes me remember, like, yeah, we have all these cool, fun beers that I always make picks, you know, add chocolate, add Graham crackers, add this, add that, you know, sometimes just a simple from simply fermented beer from a brewery dating back to 1900 is what you want. And if it is look for brassy Canion, if you can find their beers, they're hard to find in the us. They're a little easier to find in Europe.

Leo Laporte (01:35:31):
I lo if I just had to drink Belgian beer forever, I'd probably be happy. Although it's have, yeah, by the way, this guy, Devon looks like he drinks. Let's see if I get that close up of his profile, looks like he drinks that beer. For sure. Look at that. I can see, I think I saw him when I was there. Yeah, for sure.

Mary Jo Foley (01:35:50):
Yeah. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:35:51):
Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:35:51):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:35:53):
It's one of his ring to rule them all. Yeah, exactly. It's a Gandolph beer brassy classic. And you say Guz,

Mary Jo Foley (01:36:03):
Guz. I think you say it.

Leo Laporte (01:36:05):
It's like Goza yeah. Goza yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:36:07):
I used to say Guz. I don't know if that's wrong. Right? Who knows,

Leo Laporte (01:36:10):
But who knows? Yeah. It's probably Flemish. Ladies, a gentleman. You've done it all. You've seen it all. You've you've heard it all. And now it's time to go home. All you don't have to go home. You just can't stay here. Exactly. No, you can't stay here cuz twigs coming up. But Mary Jo Foley is of course her home is@allaboutmicrosoft.com on ZD net. And that's where talks about all of this stuff all the time, all day long, constantly filing

Mary Jo Foley (01:36:43):
Pretty much

Leo Laporte (01:36:44):
All rot typing as well@therotdotcomthurrott.com go there. And you know what? Cheer him up. Sign up for a premium subscription. It'll make him happy. Maybe not, but it you'll be happy cause you'll get, you'll get all his extra stuff. He also has a very good book. The field guided windows ten@leanpub.com highly recommended both Paul and Mary Jo will show up here next week. And I hope you will too. We do the show's Wednesday 11:00 AM Pacific 2:00 PM. Eastern time, 9,000 UTC, the livestream live do twi.tv. If you're watching live, you could chat live@irc.tv or in our club, TWI discord channel for Windows Weekly. That's open all the time, but people, you know, flock in there during the show, of course. But you don't have to watch live. That's the whole idea of a podcast. You can watch it at your convenience on demand versions of everything we do, including the audio and the video available at twit TV slash WW.

Leo Laporte (01:37:52):
There's also a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. And you can subscribe in your favorite podcast player. Doesn't have to be Spotify. You can listen to it in anything you want. If you do subscribe, you'll get it automatically. And please leave us a five star review. So everybody knows about Paul Thurrottand Mary Jo Foley in the fabulous Windows Weekly. Thank you too. Cheer up, Paul, you I'm jealous. You're gonna be, you're gonna be so happy and we might be your neighbors. You're upstairs neighbors, things like that. I was telling about, yeah, you get ready for the six o'clock in the morning knocking the door, cuz I need sugar or you know, whatever that is. Hey, I'd like to I'd like to bring a cocktail up. Can we enjoy your roof? We understand you have a view. We have drinks.

Leo Laporte (01:38:44):
I'm so tempted. I am so tempted. That sounds heaven. You should just, you guys should go down and just visit the area. We should. You like the neighborhood Roos. Great. Yeah. We fall in love with the you earthquakes are concern, but that's a modern building, so oh, by the way. Oh, that was the other thing I, I knew I forgot to start. So we experienced an earthquake when we were there. Yeah. Oh wow. Didn't even feel didn't even know what, so this is what we were we're in the cab and heading to the first meeting with those guys and heading to Polanco actually. And we're going by the, the giant park and the one of the big museums there and there's the siren is going off. And I said, I said to my wife, that's like the siren at the beginning of a science fiction movie.

Leo Laporte (01:39:28):
Yeah. And then at the, in five minutes, everyone else is dead. Yeah. Like it's the end of the world siren. Yeah. And we're like, okay, whatever. And then we went and we had the meeting and we go to the place at the it's a lawyer at notary's office. And there's a news story about an earthquake. And I'm thinking, and I'm looking at the pictures and I said where, where is that? And I said, that's here. Like what you didn't even feel. And it was, it was a 5.9, 5.7, something like that. That's fairly strong. And we didn't. Yeah. They've had some bad ones in Mexico city, but I'm sure modern construction is it's designed specifically for that purpose. Oh man. I am. I maybe I just buy it myself. Just buy it myself. Sure. How's the internet. I don't know exactly, but right up the street, that's the first thing I'd find out.

Rod Pyle (01:40:21):
Well, because it's, it's actually, I'm told it's hard to know exactly, but the place we were two doors down in air Airbnb, it was one 60. Oh fine. I could do this. They do a fiber. They have fiber, they have fiber and they have tequila. That's a Paul Thra, Mary Jo Foley have a wonderful week. See ya next time on Windows Weekly. Bye-Bye Hey, I'm rod pile, editor of ad Astra magazine. And each week I'm joined by TARC. Mallek the editor inchi over@space.com in our new this weekend space podcast, every Friday Tark. And I take a deep dive into the stories that define the new space age what's NASA up to when will Americans, once again set foot on the moon. And how about those samples from the perseverance Rover? When are those coming home? What the heck is Elon must done now, in addition to all the latest and greatest and space explor will take an occasional look at bits of space flight history that you probably never heard of and all with an eye towards having a good time along the way. Check us out on your favorite podcast. Catcher.