Windows Weekly Episode 772 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 and Mary Jo are here and it's dejavu all over again. The EU looking at Microsoft's licensing agreements saying they're anticompetitive, a tiny little windows on R PC. Paul says you should not buy. And an upcoming windows, 11 security feature that requires a PC reset. It's all coming up next on windows, weekly Podcasts you love
TWIT intro (00:00:27):
From people you trust. This is TWiT.
Leo Laporte (00:00:35):
This is windows weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley episode 772 recorded Wednesday, April 13th, 2022. Exploit Wednesday. This episode of windows weekly is brought to you by Arons. Keep your digital world safe from all threats. With the only cyber protection solution that delivers a unique integration of data protection and cyber security in one, a Cronus cyber protect home office. Formally a Acronis true image. Go to go.aros.com/ww and by Intel orchestrated by the experts at CDW to deliver increased performance with a built for business 11th gen Intel core vPro processor. Learn more at cdw.com/intel client. And by collide get endpoint management that puts the user first. Visit collide.com/ww. To learn more and activate a free 14 day trial today. No credit card required. It's time for windows weekly. The show we cover the latest news from windows U dozers. Let's get ready to rumble, Mr. Oh, I can't say that's cat copyright. Let's get ready to rock and roll. Mr. Paul thro Mr. Thra comes from Thurrott.com by way of lean pub.com and joins us of course, every week for last God knows how many years it's been more than a decade since Vista. Yep. So is before this should
Paul Thurrott (00:02:04):
Know this off the top of my head, it was September, October, 2006.
Leo Laporte (00:02:08):
Sounds like a kind of a John Cougar song. It was September in 2006, right? That's Mary Jo. Name of the
Paul Thurrott (00:02:17):
Song. September-Ish
Leo Laporte (00:02:19):
September-Ish two. All I have to do is trip that TV slash WW one. Yeah, somebody said mean Mary Jo hasn't been on forever. Mary Jo. Foley's also here from all about microsoft.com. Her eating net blog. I'm sure it's it feels like forever. It's been a long time. Yeah. More than 10 years. Yeah. September 28th, 2006
Paul Thurrott (00:02:41):
Tooth extraction was
Leo Laporte (00:02:42):
Taking. So was, so this show is now officially 15 years old going on 16. Wow. You are 15 going on 16 Leo. What was the date? That was September 28th. So make a note of that. So we can have a part T reason I'm thinking along these nostalgic lines is Sunday is the 17th anniversary of TWiT.
Mary Jo Foley (00:03:06):
Oh, wow. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:03:09):
So time flies when you're talking. Windows does. Yes, it does.
Paul Thurrott (00:03:16):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:03:18):
So let's talk windows. Yeah. What do you, what? What's go what's new Microsoft once again in the spotlight.
Paul Thurrott (00:03:27):
Leo. Yes. It's like riding a bike baby. Yeah. Yeah. We're back. We're back in antitrust.
Mary Jo Foley (00:03:32):
Not a good way. Yeah. Not a good way,
Leo Laporte (00:03:35):
But who's saying that, is it a government government or just competitors?
Mary Jo Foley (00:03:39):
So it's the EU doing some investigation around complaints from competitors and now customers weighing in now
Paul Thurrott (00:03:49):
Customers too, right?
Mary Jo Foley (00:03:50):
That's right. Yeah. Right. So this, you know, what's funny this all dates back to something that happened in 2019 Microsoft change some licensing terms around what it means to bring your own license of software, like windows server, SQL server, windows, client and office client to other clouds. So, you know, we, we know you can run all those things on Azure and they cut you deals through their Azure hybrid benefit. Like you get a good deal. If you run S soft software on their cloud, that makes sense. But what they did in 2019 was make it a lot more expensive in many cases, to run it on competitors clouds. And at the time they're like, you know what, if they wanna do that too, they can do that. If Google wants to, you know, make it so you can only run Google software on their cloud, we don't really care.
Mary Jo Foley (00:04:39):
And at the time people were of trying to figure out, like, what are the repercussions of this? And now three years later, we're starting to see people whose contracts are coming up for renewal. Mm. Figuring out what happened. They're like, wait a minute. I didn't notice this in 2019, cuz my contract wasn't up. But now my contract's up and I can't even run office in Aw, us in some cases, or I can't even get windows to work right. In Google cloud. And I wanna be able to do that virtually and not be prohibited. So the way that people are going about this is AWS, Google, their partners, and now their customers are complaining publicly to the regular nurse.
Paul Thurrott (00:05:19):
Yeah. According to Bloomberg Amazon and Google both went to Microsoft first and said, Hey, you need to change this.
Mary Jo Foley (00:05:27):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:05:28):
They
Mary Jo Foley (00:05:29):
Public. I remember. Yeah. Yeah. In 2019 they were publicly complaining like saying, Hey, this isn't cool. Like, we feel like Microsoft's doing something illegal here. And Microsoft's like, ha ha who cares? Goodbye? You know? Yep. It wasn't like it wasn't even and entertained as like a possible violation. Right. Here's the most interesting thing. So Bloomberg got Brad Smith. Who's the head council at Microsoft. Yep. And they, they called him and they said, Hey, like this is going on. So here's what Brad Smith's can't quote is to all of us. We're committed to listening to our customers and meeting the needs of European cloud providers while not all of these claims are valid. Some of them are, and we will absolutely make changes soon to address them.
Paul Thurrott (00:06:13):
Wow. Yeah. I think the changes are gonna be like, oh, I'm sorry. We meant this to be more expensive and or impossible in all cases, not just in some, our mistake.
Mary Jo Foley (00:06:24):
I'm curious how they're gonna do what they're gonna do here. And how they're gonna do it, but we'll see, I guess.
Paul Thurrott (00:06:31):
Very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.
Mary Jo Foley (00:06:34):
Yeah. So if you're one of the customer out, there are a partner who's been having problems because of these changes in licensing, you may get some relief. It's, it's still up in the air, what that'll look like and if it'll be retroactive or how it'll look, but I'm gonna be super curious to see what they actually do to try to head off an EU
Paul Thurrott (00:06:55):
Complain. Well, we're not gonna see the belligerent Microsoft of the early two thousands, for
Mary Jo Foley (00:06:58):
Sure. Definitely not. No, we are not.
Paul Thurrott (00:07:02):
And you know, EU moves slowly for sure. But they do. I expect, I expect them to just the fact that he made that comment is amazing. I, yeah, they'll, they'll probably, yeah. Try to get ahead of this.
Mary Jo Foley (00:07:14):
I would think. Right. So the old, the old Microsoft back in original antitrusts was like, we don't care, you know, too bad. We're doing what we wanna do that Brad Smith lived through that. Right. Brad Smith was part of the antitrust trial. He knows like that doesn't really work so well, especially in the EU. And I'm sure he's gonna try to be more, much more conciliatory and say, okay, sorry, partners. We didn't mean to hurt. Like we're trying to fix it, blah. Right. Actually,
Paul Thurrott (00:07:42):
You know, maybe this was surprised. There was a period of time. Microsoft had been really belligerent with the us DOJ and that had gone very poorly. They did the same thing with the Ewood first. They got the, at the time record fines later broken by Intel, but actually since reinstated because Intel got their money back and had to make these product changes, et cetera, et cetera. But there was a right at the end of all, this Microsoft basically capitulated unexpectedly, I think it was the year window seven was coming out and they, they said, all right, fine, fine. We'll just, we will separate internet Explorer from the operating system. This thing we had 10 years ago, we said was impossible.
Mary Jo Foley (00:08:16):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:08:17):
We will let people remove it. We'll let PC acres replace it with the browser of their choice. We will, you know, and they, I, I wonder if Brad Smith, I wonder if that wasn't the beginning of the Brad Smith era in the sense that he was running the show legally. Right? Cause was, it was a bill Newcomb was the Microsoft.
Mary Jo Foley (00:08:33):
It was
Paul Thurrott (00:08:34):
Yeah. Bill cons. Yeah. It was for the antitrust stuff. Yeah. So I wonder if that was the end of bill Newcomb in the beginning of Brad Smith. I wonder, I'd have to look,
Mary Jo Foley (00:08:40):
Could have been, that could have been yeah. Yeah. It was definitely a, a difference in tone and approach and
Paul Thurrott (00:08:47):
Oh
Mary Jo Foley (00:08:47):
Yeah. So yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:08:49):
Yeah.
Mary Jo Foley (00:08:51):
I'm like, yeah. Brad Smith. I, I figured this guy's gearing up to run for a public office at some point. Right. Because of the way, the kinds of causes he Espes the way he conducts himself, how he's, what, what kind of things he's chosen to focus on? I'm like, at some point you're gonna hear Brad Smiths running for Congress, right? Like that that's not gonna be a surprise.
Leo Laporte (00:09:11):
Oh, interesting. I don't think it will.
Mary Jo Foley (00:09:12):
Sure.
Leo Laporte (00:09:12):
I don't it's boy. That's interesting.
Paul Thurrott (00:09:15):
And he's also just kind of risen through the ranks at Microsoft as a, I don't know what he is now, a president or a, probably a he's senior. He's
Leo Laporte (00:09:23):
A
Paul Thurrott (00:09:24):
Guy he's risen up the ranks. Like he's not usually with the legal guys. You don't hear about them unless there's a problem, you know? Yeah. But this guy, he's
Leo Laporte (00:09:31):
A public face. He's intentional and
Paul Thurrott (00:09:33):
He's, he is, he's become a big public space face of Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah.
Mary Jo Foley (00:09:37):
He has. Yep.
Leo Laporte (00:09:38):
Very interesting.
Paul Thurrott (00:09:41):
Yeah. Interesting. It is
Mary Jo Foley (00:09:42):
Interesting. It'll be interesting. I know, I I'm, I'm gonna be very curious to see how they try to quote, fix the licensing thing because a lot of the things they did were to try to not only drive growth of Azure, but also growth of Azure, virtual desktop and windows 365. Like they wanted that to be the way that people ran their software on clouds. Right. Like they're like, yeah. That's, that's how we're trying to guide people. Get 'em to go that way. Right. right. So yeah. We're, we'll see.
Leo Laporte (00:10:13):
Very interesting. Very interesting. Nothing more to say about that. We'll just watch sure. And wait, wait,
Mary Jo Foley (00:10:23):
Watch, wait and see. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:10:25):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're just gonna go do a little pop, I guess, of windows 11 things and so forth. Microsoft has no plans says Paul Thurrott no plans.
Paul Thurrott (00:10:40):
Well, no plan says Microsoft. I I, yeah. So they talking about
Leo Laporte (00:10:46):
Task bar, right?
Paul Thurrott (00:10:47):
Yeah. Yeah. So the
Leo Laporte (00:10:48):
Microsoft has plans, just not about moving. That was not 11 task bar. Yes.
Mary Jo Foley (00:10:53):
Different plans. Different.
Paul Thurrott (00:10:57):
Yeah. So there was a, an event last week, as you know, and we talked about that and, and Microsoft talked about things they're gonna add to windows 11 and it was kind of light on the type of information that most enthusiasts were looking for. And anyone who cares about the product in general, I guess, are enthusiasts who would like there to be things that used to be in windows 10 that are, or not in windows 11. And there's a whole list of those things, but one of them is the ability to move the task bar location, which we know from actually, I think windows seven days, cuz OVS used to talk about this kind of data point all the time. Almost nobody does this. This is not a common activity. But the windows 11 task bar is completely re and based on discussion with Brad who works at star, who was implementing their own task bar with star 11, talking to Rafael, talking to anyone who knows anything about the innards of this thing, the feeling is that they had to redo the task bar from scratch in order to center the icons.
Paul Thurrott (00:11:57):
This thing is like this giant spaghetti code thing that's grown and grown and grown over time. They've had features come and go over the years. It's just this big thing. And they're like, we start from scratch. We'll make it look like the way we wanna look. And then, you know, we'll try to implement the most important features that people want and they implemented like two of them. So one of the big issues with windows 11 of course, is that this, all these task bar features and other features that are not present. So when that event kind of came and went and they never addressed any of that stuff, meaning the, you know, bringing back features the regressions from the past, there was an AMA with a lot of the people who appeared in that event and they knew these questions were gonna commit. And of course the very first question was when are you gonna list change the task bar? And I don't wanna make fun of an individual. I don't mean it like this, but I, I do. I don't like the, what I'll call fake compassion thing where it's like, you know, we know that people care so much
Paul Thurrott (00:12:52):
About this stuff and we're not doing it. You know, it was basically the way it came out. The excuse was that there were challenges in bringing the task bar to different sides of the screen. There's a reflow of work and then apps have to do something to understand the environment. And it's just a big problem. That's, that's absolutely not true. Apps don't have to do anything. The, the system has to do it. This comes from the operating system apps don't need to adapt to this apps, just work. That's the, that's how this works. But the, the long and the short of it is this individual said that when they look at the data, what they see is that nobody uses this and, and it was said slightly contorted. It's like, when you look the data, we know there's a lot of a set of people that love it, the way that we could move it. It's like, that's not what the data shows, but at the moment they're gonna focus on the things that they hear more pain about. So my recap of that is Microsoft broke the task part and then people complained and they looked at all the complaints and they said, well, we'll do the first couple. And because the TAs bar location complaint is not near the top of the list. They're not even thinking about that. So I, I don't know. I have,
Mary Jo Foley (00:14:03):
I have questions for you on this. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:14:06):
Yeah.
Mary Jo Foley (00:14:06):
Okay. So one is do they also not commit to doing anything else on the task bar? Like what about the right click thing in the task that
Paul Thurrott (00:14:18):
Is that gonna come back, come specifically? You know what this is, this is like levels of outrage, right. So, okay. Remember when windows 11 was coming out before in the, in the 10 seconds before we knew that the big issue was gonna be hardware requirements. Yeah. I had had this conversation with you where people gonna freak when they found, find out that in windows 11 home they're to sign with a Microsoft account. And, you know, we can debate whether or not that would ever have been the case, but that was completely overshadowed by this right miscommunication on the hardware requirements. Right. I think this task moving the task bar thing is that very vocal, very minor part of the user community that wants it. So they're, they're small, but they're loud and they're loud because they're enthusiasts and there are people kind of championing the platform and it, it, you can't equate, you know, if you can't equate a score to that one person, the same a, you would equate to a, my mother or a normal person off the street or somebody cuz those people just don't care about anything. And, but that's what Microsoft is doing. They're looking at that's what telemetry data is. I mean, they just look at the data they're like, yeah, who cares? And I, I think that's a, you know, we talk about this kind of thing a lot now because that's the way windows has evolved. Unfortunately. I think it's a mistake to ignore that part of the community.
Mary Jo Foley (00:15:32):
So my other question is, and maybe I'm MIS remembering this, but I thought they had said publicly, they were gonna add this feature back in to windows 11.
Paul Thurrott (00:15:41):
I don't remember. So here's what I do now. I
Mary Jo Foley (00:15:43):
Know
Paul Thurrott (00:15:44):
It is, it is possible today in windows 11 with a registry key edition to put their task bar at the top of the screen. Okay. So that suggests that they could add that feature in the UI pretty easily, but they don't want nobody to do it. They don't want anyone to do it, but they could add it. You know, it could be a power toy. It could be a third party utility, whatever what's completely missing is the ability to put the task bar either side of the screen. And then this is that whole, like you mentioned, like, is this bigger? Or had they mentioned, we're not gonna do anything else. We know. I think we know in the dev channel that they're looking at the ability to change the size of the task bar, another feature that was missing. Yeah. They've never publicly addressed to my knowledge, the right click thing.
Mary Jo Foley (00:16:26):
Right. They say, all you have to do is right. Click on the start button. Right. And you'll get a similar yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:16:31):
But you did sort of exactly.
Mary Jo Foley (00:16:33):
It's not the same. I
Paul Thurrott (00:16:34):
Know, honestly, the, the, the right click thing is a lot like the default app situation, although that's being fixed, which is they, that stuff is a lot of, it's still there. It's just harder to get to. And, you know, I don't know. I, I, I think the direct interaction model, which works everywhere else makes sense. We, you right. Click on a thing and you say, I don't want this thing here. Get rid of it. Whatever the command is, they got rid of that for some of the built in buttons or icons or whatever, you have to go to task bar settings inside of the settings app. I don't know this, this came up and I, I don't know the rest of it. I don't, you know, I don't know. I mean, yeah.
Mary Jo Foley (00:17:11):
Well, the good news is, I think, as you mentioned, when you started talking about this star has a program for like $6 that lets you move the task bar. Right. So if you're one of these people who really wants to use it, right. If you really wanna move this task bar, give them $6. Right.
Paul Thurrott (00:17:28):
Right. So there's a whole, like I said, I don't off the top of my head. I'm not gonna be able to blur out every single feature, this missing in the windows 11 task bar. Yeah, yeah. Windows the windows task bar in previous version supported the notion of ungrouping icons, for example. So if you had right. Two word icons, instead of there being one icon, they would be two, you know, and they would, they would spread out and give you room. So you could see the name of the document and everything. Yeah. Start 11 has added that feature back in certain situations. They, they have actually decided that they need to rip reimplement the task bar themselves to do this stuff as well because the windows 11 task bar is so constrained functionally that it's not even worth working off of. So they're actually doing it themselves just like Microsoft is right. So it's possible, it's, it's kind of a weird situation, but it's true today and possible for the foreseeable future that theirs will have more of that functionality that you expect from windows seven, windows, 10, whatever than will windows 11 natively. Right. And that's what, that's certainly the, the case today.
Mary Jo Foley (00:18:32):
Yeah. You know, I remember you and Leo used to say to me, Android and windows are a lot alike in terms of they're for people who like to configure things the way they want
Leo Laporte (00:18:43):
Customizability. Yeah. Right.
Mary Jo Foley (00:18:45):
And now it feels like windows is going away from that. And I wonder if it isn't because Panos so much wants to emulate what Apple's doing with windows. That's the surface.
Paul Thurrott (00:18:55):
That's exactly right.
Mary Jo Foley (00:18:57):
Yep. Right. They're just like, let's see how apple does it. Okay. Let's do that. Right. It feels like that surface.
Paul Thurrott (00:19:01):
Anyway, the surface business was built out of a desire to emulate the hardware and software integration thing that apple was doing with the, and of course with the mobile devices as well. And I think what they realized over time was, you know, now if we have the same team running this, we can further that to the software. Yeah. I, I mean, I get it, but I, I, yeah, I, I think the, the success of windows well is multifold, but one of the main, one of the, not maybe one of the main reasons, but one of the reasons I think is this customizability, this, they used to always talk about how diverse their audience was. Right. We were building a product that has to work for all these different people. And they, I think what they found is that, or what they think is apple is a billion users too. And no, one's really worried about stuff, not working over there. So right. Our audience will do that too. But I, you know, I think their audience is
Mary Jo Foley (00:19:57):
Yeah,
Paul Thurrott (00:19:58):
Not older is not the right term, but they've been around, they've been using it longer and they have expectations from the past. And I think a lot of the things that people do with PCs are what we would call like legacy workloads or whatever, their productivity focus tasks. And you can't just take stuff away. That's not,
Mary Jo Foley (00:20:15):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:20:16):
I don't know. It just seems insane to me.
Mary Jo Foley (00:20:19):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:20:20):
What about somebody Doug Mond the chap room on the IRC saying maybe put it in power toys or something like,
Paul Thurrott (00:20:27):
Yeah. Make
Leo Laporte (00:20:27):
It more accessible. I guess. You know,
Mary Jo Foley (00:20:32):
Always felt like, I always feel like they should have a like window windows for normal people and windows for enthusiasts. It feels like right. There's two different things that people want and need. And it's like a, I know they're trying not to do that, but I, I really feel like there's different expectations there. Right? Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:20:50):
There's a I, I suppose if you, if you take a product and you take features away from it, like they're doing new windows 11. Yeah. And then you've created this kind of servicing baseline, you know, but if you do have some way, some windows live essentials type thing, or power toys, like Leo it, or whatever it is yeah. To bring back those features for the people that want it. That's something that the people, if they want it, they can seek it out and get it. It's not part of windows. So it's not supported as windows, which won't matter to these people. That's, it's okay. That's an okay model, you know, but that's not what they, that's not really what's happening. Right. Like they, no, I think the, this is very reminiscent of windows eight, you know, we're gonna just plow ahead, get rid of stuff that you expect and use every day and want and do so with no explanation whatsoever brag about how well received it was, what the comes high, the customer satisfaction scores are, and then bring in a bunch of emojis and other nonsense features which are, are the, is that based on some Ture data?
Paul Thurrott (00:21:48):
Like one of the things they were talking about in this AMA was like, Hey, we have this feature. Now, when you pull the keyboard off of a tablet, the task process squishes down, like that's brand new, like the old task bar didn't do that. It's like, oh, so you can add features that aren't based on what anyone has ever asked you for. So what do you, what do you like, how do you make judgments on, on this stuff? Like, why is that more important than the feature that people already use? The product rely on? I don't know. I don't know that this,
Mary Jo Foley (00:22:16):
Because they develop surface and windows together and they've got some group of surface
Paul Thurrott (00:22:22):
Users who can surface has the keyword that goes, click. Remember,
Mary Jo Foley (00:22:26):
Like,
Paul Thurrott (00:22:27):
That really was perfect. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:22:28):
It is the case though, that it is the, it is a 1% of users that want to do all this customization. I mean, that's why we talk about the,
Paul Thurrott (00:22:40):
Of the default. It's, it's a small,
Leo Laporte (00:22:42):
Number's a small number. It's a small number, so
Mary Jo Foley (00:22:43):
Small but loud.
Leo Laporte (00:22:45):
But when you add configuration choices at that's to complexity.
Mary Jo Foley (00:22:51):
Yeah, it does.
Leo Laporte (00:22:52):
So I can understand, I'm just trying to channel Panos here that what you might wanna do is be opinionated. Yeah. And, and say, this is you know, it's an opinionated operating system and this is our opinion of what it should look like. And most people will then say, okay. I mean, that's the apple way, right?
Paul Thurrott (00:23:13):
Yeah. It's worked for apple. I, I I've Al I mean, not that people don't complain on the apple side and not that there isn't a rich ecosystem of third party apps that add features and do things that aren't in the operating system. I'm sure there is. That's fine. It's just, we, we, we've never done it that way in windows. Well, we've done it that way once in windows and it backfired completely, almost destroyed the platform and they apologized and then added all the features back and released windows eight one and 8 1 1 and windows 10, because that was such a disaster.
Leo Laporte (00:23:43):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:23:44):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:23:45):
Windows has always been the, you know, you can configure it, you can make it the way you want it to be, but I bet you there, telemetry also tells 'em nobody does that.
Paul Thurrott (00:23:56):
And my point is telemetry doesn't is not enough information that you don't, you cannot base a DEC any decision on just telemetry, but that's is literally what they do. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:24:05):
And then, I mean, and then of course the 1% of the loudest users and they're yeah. Let's, let's say they're also probably fairly important cuz they're the ones that people ask, well, what should I do? Or what should I buy? Or so they're, they're the influencers.
Paul Thurrott (00:24:20):
That's what I mean, like you can't rate that person on the same level as the normal user who doesn't care about this stuff.
Leo Laporte (00:24:25):
Right.
Paul Thurrott (00:24:26):
Because they're not those people are not influencing anyone else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I think, I feel like we've lost track of that part of the equation too. I mean, there was a, I had forgotten about this, but I had gotten some very early windows, eight plot product planning documentation, and it specifically called out the important role that enthusiasts played, even though they were the minority. And even that team, which I didn't think did a bang up job. Exactly. You know recognize that at least internally, you know?
Mary Jo Foley (00:24:56):
Yeah. Although then they made a bunch of choices around windows eight that they knew people were gonna scream about. Right. Like not making right. Keep board friendly first, even though that's the way most people use the operating system, they're just like, eh, too bad for them. We're everybody's gonna touch. Right. So, oh that, oh, well right. And I'm like, wait, you knew everybody's gonna scream.
Paul Thurrott (00:25:19):
It's hard to remember or understand the deep inbred, apple envy that existed at Microsoft at that time. That's true that they that's true. Apple was the company, had it and came up with the iPod and the iTune store and destroyed all of their partners, focused strategies and everything. They destroyed the zoom. They came up with all those anti Vista ads that they did around when they were advancing the Mac very rapidly. And they talked about it incessantly and all their trade shows. Microsoft took years to come to with finally came up with the Mohave project and I'm a PC and all that. And then you know, the iPhone came and completely recast personal computing. And then they announced the IPO, the iPad, and they had been pushing apple PCs to a completely dis disinterested audience for 10 years, by that point almost. And they sold 15 copies the first year as Steve jobs said in 2011, more than every tablet PC combined that year. Wow.
Leo Laporte (00:26:14):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:26:15):
Wow. Yeah. So by the time windows a came, no, no one was listening to logic. Yeah. We have to, we have to meet them where they are full screen touch interfaces. We're gonna have our own PCs, screw the partners. It was the stupidest insanity, but I mean, they were just like, I mean, it was like get punched again and again in the face, you know,
Leo Laporte (00:26:33):
There's also a damaging side effect to this. As you switch, you know, you swerve back and forth that really, I think cause causes loss of confidence in the, in your customers. That's right. They don't know to expect. And I don't think, would it be every other one that's a, we all touch one now. And that's a, the number one don't oh yeah. Be only the, you know why, because it's not just uncertainty. It proves that you're not leading anything you just re responding. Yeah. You know, and unfortunately that's what they were doing. They were just reacting to everything apple was doing. And I think we need to look whenever anyone thinks of apple, just at least agree that they're unique. You know, that you can't, they're opinionated. You can't look at what they're doing and say, do that. We'll be successful. It doesn't work for anyone. I mean, Apple's backtracked on some things, but it's rare. Oh, much rare for sure. Yeah. I have to play because of course, Gilbert Godfrey passed away yesterday and I have to play a a video from another time, Microsoft backtrack. Do you know what this is gonna be? It's gonna be a Clippy. It's gonna be the farewell to Clippy, which you can't play anymore. Unless you have the Clippy, the lash player for the Clippy website, but I'll play it for you from YouTube. That's that's Clippy blinking at you.
Clippy (00:27:50):
Why? Hello there I'm leveraging real time. Legacy compliant, collaborative, micro branding to complete the most important project in my company's history. As soon as I finish this proposal, I, it looks like you're lighting a letter. You like help you. You little metallic.
Leo Laporte (00:28:08):
You, this is from Microsoft,
Clippy (00:28:11):
Right? Try rephrasing your query. For example, print multiple copies of a file will lead to stop. Listen next to Microsoft. Bob, you are the most annoying thing in computer history. You'll know Bob he's a friend of mine get lost. Didn't you hear office XP has put your skinny metal butt in the digital dust bin. Just look,
Leo Laporte (00:28:35):
And then of course a tour of features, but the take
Clippy (00:28:38):
That
Leo Laporte (00:28:39):
Thing anymore. But the best part is at the end. I'm gonna need
Clippy (00:28:42):
You
Leo Laporte (00:28:42):
Gilbert back
Clippy (00:28:44):
Out of the
Leo Laporte (00:28:44):
Cubicle. Yeah. Oh really? But listen,
Clippy (00:28:46):
Office P well, we'll just see about this. Hey, you, it looks like you're writing a letter. Would you like beat it?
Leo Laporte (00:28:56):
The best part? Hey,
Clippy (00:28:58):
You
Leo Laporte (00:29:01):
Was at the event where they, they put him on the pasture. Yeah, actually I was sitting next to Jeff Bezos. There's really? Wow. Yeah. Really? The office XPLAN yeah. Boy, now, now I've got a lot of questions, but just to finish this thought. Yeah. we will of course miss the gravelly voice, Gilbert Gottfried, and nobody better to voice Clippy than Godfrey. And by the way, who is responsible for clip? Oh, our friends. Steven Sina. Oh yeah. Yep. That's partly the swerves in the road come from changes in leadership. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. That's really the real place they come from. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I just thought I'd play that in honor of dear old Dold Gilbert. Oh,
Paul Thurrott (00:29:45):
They lo yeah. They lost their mind so many times they put that stupid dog thing in windows XP.
Leo Laporte (00:29:50):
Remember the search part? Bye. Bye. Doggy. Yeah. Rover Rover. Hey, I want to pause for a moment for a message. A station identification, as they say, as they used to say, this is actually a product you guys are I'm sure. Well aware of a Cronus, it's a kind of legendary name in the windows space and you all know Acronis true image, which is, you know, after, after Norton went away and ghost went away, this was the became the, the, the, these, the premier imaging product. Well, Arons has now branched out expanded Arons, true image into something. They call a Arons cyber protect home office that is designed to protect you from all the bad things. Hard disk failure. Yes. Coffee spills shore. We've had a few of those in here. I might add cyber threats. Yes. Even cyber threats with a Kros cyber protect home office.
Leo Laporte (00:30:49):
Everything you need to safeguard your device, data protection integrated with cyber security, windows, Mac, Android, and iOS, by the way, which is nice. You get quick backup in recovery. Of course that's what a krons is famous for. Never lose precious files or expensive applications. And when you need to, you'll be able to restore system to either the, you know, the full system or individual files. It's what we would use in the day, back in the day on tech TV and elsewhere. When cuz we knew if the computer died in the, we had to be able to get it back up and running within a commercial break and a Acronis true image, push the button and you've got the whole thing back or you can just do individual files. So it's great for backup and recovery. You back up what you want, where you want.
Leo Laporte (00:31:37):
You can back it up locally. What we didn't have the advantage of then. And I'm glad we have it now is the Arons cloud, which may means you can weather the worst storms. Even if the whole place burns down. You've got an image of that hard drive, an image of that system, safe in the cloud. You can restore your entire system, the same hardware or new hardware. It's the best way to set up a new computer, create direct cloud to cloud. This is you like cloud to cloud back of. So Microsoft 365 accounts. So instead of downloading it and then uploading it, boom right across, including by the way, your entire outlook.com mailbox, your OneDrive data can all be imaged backed up by a Acronis cyber protect home office. And you still get that cybersecurity component, which stops any cyber attack from damaging your data, your applications, your systems, block attacks in real time before malware ransomware or crypto jackers can cause damage.
Leo Laporte (00:32:33):
And you know, sometimes people say, well, I'm worried about imaging my system, cause I don't want to image any malware on it. Well, that's another reason you wanna combine these together because it will also with this flexible antivirus scan, scan the image and protect you and having it all in one place makes management easy. Reduce the cost, the complexity, the risk of using a variety of incompatible solutions. You can simplify your protection by managing everything through a simple, single, intuitive interface. You'll spend less time on the computer with a krons two click setup and the set and forget options. That's actually pretty important because you know, people forget to back up to protect. This is automatic rest assured your entire digital world is protected with Aron cyber protect home offices, integrated protection, more than just a backup, more than just an antivirus peace of mind, knowing your devices and backups are protected.
Leo Laporte (00:33:27):
Your data is safe, accessible, private, authentic, and secure. So keep your digital world safe from all threats with the only cyber protection solution that delivers a unique integration of data protection, cyber security in one package, Arons, cyber protect home office. You may have known it formally known as Arons, true image. We we know the name so well, right? And this is one of the best products out there. The best I'll have to say it. The best. Go to go.arons.com/w U w for more information, visit go Arons ACR, O N I s.com/ww. Somebody said, I'm glad you're doing ads for Arons. Cause now I know how to pronounce it. I asked him, I've always said Arons, but I'm glad to know. I was read, go.aros.com/w be thank you a Acronis for supporting windows weekly and all of us windows users for all these years, Mac and Andrew now, us now, too, which is great. Windows updates. Anything new yesterday was patch Tuesday, but we also have a new build, right?
Mary Jo Foley (00:34:41):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:34:41):
Yes. Today we got a new dev channel build it's
Mary Jo Foley (00:34:45):
You know, Dan beta dev and beta
Paul Thurrott (00:34:47):
Beta. Oh, Devin beta. I'm sorry. Yep. You're right. Yep.
Leo Laporte (00:34:50):
Devin beta
Mary Jo Foley (00:34:52):
Devin beta. Not much new though, right? Yeah. Like they're trying out some new stuff with making windows spotlight on by default. I think that's the image, right? Image. Excuse
Paul Thurrott (00:35:05):
Me. That's the image you
Mary Jo Foley (00:35:08):
Background
Paul Thurrott (00:35:08):
The content the back of the screen. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're bringing that to the desktop, which by the way, obviously, right? Like those images are often Beau gorgeous.
Mary Jo Foley (00:35:17):
Like they are. They're really nice. Yep.
Leo Laporte (00:35:19):
By the way, if yesterday was patch Tuesday, you know what we call today?
Mary Jo Foley (00:35:23):
Weeping Wednesday, Wednesday,
Leo Laporte (00:35:27):
Actually Steve Gibson had a t-shirt yesterday on the show exploit Wednesday.
Mary Jo Foley (00:35:32):
Yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:35:32):
There you go. But that's not a negative. That means that when that's why you wanna do those patches, you know? Yeah. That's right. The bad guys start analyzing those patches immediately and see if they can come up for the next Patrick, Patrick, Patrick, Patrick. Alright. Anything,
Mary Jo Foley (00:35:47):
Anything else in the build in the build? Yeah. Like a lot of fixes,
Paul Thurrott (00:35:51):
Nothing, nothing notable,
Mary Jo Foley (00:35:54):
No, nothing.
Paul Thurrott (00:35:55):
But remember, I mean, to be down on that, it's fine. Honestly the last few builds have been kind of interesting. Right. So, yeah. Right. Doesn't make sense that they're gonna, you know, explode with new features every week, but
Leo Laporte (00:36:05):
Right.
Paul Thurrott (00:36:06):
Yeah. This is not one of the bigger ones for sure. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:36:09):
Yeah.
Mary Jo Foley (00:36:09):
At the end of the post, they just say media player, we've improved the library experience and new video playbacks. So if you use that, they're also a
Leo Laporte (00:36:17):
God
Paul Thurrott (00:36:17):
Help if you use this program, this that's another example of, well, no, I mean we've
Leo Laporte (00:36:22):
Incorporated win visualizations in media.
Paul Thurrott (00:36:26):
Oh right. Exactly. This is, this is very much the windows 11 thing, RI large, which is take away everything. And then drip back features from the past and it's like, Hey, re you know, remember when you could do this before you could do it again, baby. And it's like, great.
Leo Laporte (00:36:42):
You know,
Paul Thurrott (00:36:42):
Like I, I just, I, I can't, there's almost no purpose to this app that I can think of. It's crazy.
Mary Jo Foley (00:36:49):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:36:50):
Crazy. Okay. What do you use media actually, I'm curious. What do you use? Cause people I call and ask me this a little lot.
Paul Thurrott (00:36:58):
Yeah. I use VLC mostly
Leo Laporte (00:37:00):
VLC. Oh wow. That's a power tool. But the nice thing is that plays back everything, including streams.
Paul Thurrott (00:37:05):
Exactly. That that's why, because what will happen is the built in there's also movies and TV. Right. So that, before this thing that would typically load for video. So I'm going back to a lot of old files, right. The lot archives and, and so older versions of WM V Avi flash files like FF, I think they're called or whatever. Yeah. Those, it plays everything. Right. So with the, with the modern apps, you just doesn't work at all or won't have sound, or it will tell you, you need a plugin which doesn't exist. And it's like, you know, what, how about you just use something that works every time.
Leo Laporte (00:37:39):
Not the best UI.
Mary Jo Foley (00:37:41):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:37:42):
I it's fine for what I want. It's
Leo Laporte (00:37:44):
Yeah. I, it's not the most attractive UI.
Paul Thurrott (00:37:46):
I don't like
Mary Jo Foley (00:37:47):
Icon kinda like teams.
Leo Laporte (00:37:49):
It's kinda like, what do you use Mary Jo to play?
Mary Jo Foley (00:37:52):
I don't really play back media on my PC. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:37:56):
Not even music
Mary Jo Foley (00:37:57):
Let's to think.
Leo Laporte (00:37:57):
Do I ever, do you play music? Not really.
Mary Jo Foley (00:37:59):
No, no, no. Okay. I don't, I'm one of those people who doesn't like to work with music. I find it super distracting. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:38:07):
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So nevermind, sorry. I asked
Mary Jo Foley (00:38:11):
Never mind,
Leo Laporte (00:38:13):
Never mind. I don't have the luxury when somebody calls on the radio show saying, what should I use for media playback? I know.
Mary Jo Foley (00:38:18):
Right.
Paul Thurrott (00:38:19):
I don't, what would you wanna ever wanna do that? I dunno. You know what computers for work, right?
Mary Jo Foley (00:38:24):
Windows, media players still in there though. Cause I see it pop up right's sometimes.
Paul Thurrott (00:38:28):
Well that's yeah. And if you, if you wanna burn a CD or something or rip a CD yeah.
Mary Jo Foley (00:38:33):
Right.
Paul Thurrott (00:38:33):
You can use windows, media player. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:38:35):
That's true. Works. Yep. That's true. And it's there and that's the thing. I mean, if you've got an MP3 on your disc yeah. And you double click it, it's gonna launch media player unless you've installed something else. So, you know, I guess that's probably what everybody uses, but, but given the frequency of this question, I think it's probably something people aren't that
Paul Thurrott (00:38:54):
Before windows media player became that all in one player, starting with windows, media player seven, I think it was. And, and they came out, windows, me, they had there's something called windows media player, which was a little, just a little window thing. Yeah. And that's what this new media player is like. They, that's where they are. They're back in the year 2, 19 99. So yeah, I guess if you wait a couple years, this thing will catch up and we'll all be playing music from holograms and won't care anymore. I don't know. It's just, I don't understand what, why they're even making this app. It's crazy.
Leo Laporte (00:39:24):
Right. Win a is still around. So I guess, you know,
Paul Thurrott (00:39:26):
Yeah. Winn a, yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:39:28):
It came back, I guess it was not around. Sure. And I think nowadays, honestly, most people don't play MP3s on there. Hard drives. They, they stream it for Spotify or somebody like that's. So maybe
Paul Thurrott (00:39:40):
This I'm sure that telemetry data would show them the only 2% of people ever used the
Leo Laporte (00:39:44):
Exactly.
Paul Thurrott (00:39:45):
So why the heck are they building it in
Leo Laporte (00:39:47):
The window? Yeah. Why bother? It's crazy. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:39:50):
It's like, you know, you could make playlists of the why, who, what, like you care enough about music that you own it, you ripped it from CD, you copied it to your hard drive and then you wanna use this piece of crap application. No people like that have very specific needs.
Leo Laporte (00:40:04):
That's true.
Paul Thurrott (00:40:05):
I don't even, I don't understand what this is
Leo Laporte (00:40:07):
For. That's true. I generally recommend something like media monkey, which will look up album and other media data data. I don't know if you're familiar with that. That's kind of my go to lately media bar 2000 is also very,
Paul Thurrott (00:40:19):
I hope to never, ever, ever mess with MP3 or whatever. I
Leo Laporte (00:40:23):
Know it's
Paul Thurrott (00:40:25):
Ever again
Leo Laporte (00:40:25):
Ever. It's very two thousands. It's like, yeah. Pretty old school. Isn't that
Paul Thurrott (00:40:30):
Funny? What are you doing? I'm I'm not getting work done. That's what I'm doing. I, my album art is perfect on this one.
Leo Laporte (00:40:35):
Somebody sent me and I, and I still owe him a thank you note. But it was the cutest thing. He bought one of those really cheap MP3 players. You know, they're like $10 on, you know, on Ali Baba express. And he put every top 100 song from 1955, every billboard, top 100 song MP3 from 1955 to like 2004. I know I stopped at 2004,
Paul Thurrott (00:41:05):
Ran
Leo Laporte (00:41:05):
That storage. Maybe you ran outta storage, but there was a little micro little SD mini SD in there. Yeah. But I mean, it was very nice and I I'm thrilled now. I have thousands of songs that like Bobby Riddell songs I don't really want to ever listen to, but it's, you know, it's
Paul Thurrott (00:41:23):
I still have my collection. I just want to touch it.
Leo Laporte (00:41:25):
That's the thing I have my collection. I have 60,000 songs or something I downloaded from Napster back in the day. But
Paul Thurrott (00:41:35):
Yeah. So of course,
Leo Laporte (00:41:35):
I mean, you're gonna stream
Paul Thurrott (00:41:36):
It. I've ripped my collection several times. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:41:39):
Ripped many CD collection. Yep. Yeah. And when, in fact, when I look at them, I go, oh wow. That I haven't listened to that in a long Bob Dylan's Biograph wow. I haven't listened to that in long
Paul Thurrott (00:41:47):
Time. A lot of people listen to show are gonna have like CD collections. They ripped in like WM V nine, whatever year that
Leo Laporte (00:41:54):
Was. And you need windows, media player.
Paul Thurrott (00:41:56):
I know. What are you gonna play? What are you doing
Leo Laporte (00:41:58):
With that? You do now. You need it. I bet VLC would play that
Paul Thurrott (00:42:01):
Probably. Oh yeah. Easily.
Leo Laporte (00:42:03):
Yeah. All right. Sorry. Sorry for this trip down memory lane. No, it's
Paul Thurrott (00:42:06):
Fine. That's
Leo Laporte (00:42:09):
You can now buy says Paul, Thurrott an entry level. Whoa, congratulations.
Paul Thurrott (00:42:15):
I, whoa. Did I write woah
Leo Laporte (00:42:18):
W a windows on arm? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:42:20):
Okay. Yeah. So remember, sometime months ago Qualcomm released a kind of reference machine for people to use as developers that they wanted to target windows apps for an arm using physical hardware. And I bought this thing. It's terrible. It's
Leo Laporte (00:42:36):
Junk. Oh, but it's so cute.
Paul Thurrott (00:42:38):
Oh no, this is new. So this is now this is, this is the second one. And it's, you know, it's, it's the same platform. So the problem is the price is right. If you don't like anything it's a Qualcomm Snapchat, seven C based system. So it's super low end four gigs of Ram 64 gigs of EMC storage weight for it. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:42:59):
But this is the kind of thing you'd Velcro to the back of a mirror or something like, it's like almost, it's a step above raspberry pie, but below an Intel nook,
Paul Thurrott (00:43:09):
Honestly, from a performance perspective, I bet it's a step down from raspberry pie. Oh
Paul Thurrott (00:43:12):
That's not true because it's running windows. It's it's and I don't mean that. I mean, it's
Leo Laporte (00:43:17):
Not designed for this.
Paul Thurrott (00:43:19):
It's a big system. That's all, you know, compared to what this thing can do. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:43:23):
Got SIM slot, which is interesting.
Paul Thurrott (00:43:27):
Yeah. Right.
Leo Laporte (00:43:29):
So you
Paul Thurrott (00:43:29):
Can have, yeah, no, it has the port, the port situation's pretty good, honestly. I mean, for what it is
Leo Laporte (00:43:34):
How
Paul Thurrott (00:43:34):
Much yeah. I, how much? 2 29. Oh sorry. Yeah. 2 29.
Leo Laporte (00:43:39):
So who cares if it doesn't run well at all?
Paul Thurrott (00:43:43):
It's still, it's still,
Leo Laporte (00:43:44):
I, the.one better
Paul Thurrott (00:43:46):
Performance running a virtual machine on a normal computer than,
Leo Laporte (00:43:50):
Yeah. Is the seven C designed for windows or is it,
Paul Thurrott (00:43:55):
Yeah, so there's two, there's two levels now of Qualcomm staff, dragon chips for windows on arm. And this is the low
Leo Laporte (00:44:01):
End goodbye fan noise because your machine can't do anything.
Paul Thurrott (00:44:05):
I mean, if you really listen close, you'll hear the geal running on the wheel, but it's
Leo Laporte (00:44:09):
It's,
Paul Thurrott (00:44:09):
There's no fan.
Leo Laporte (00:44:11):
I did not for that.
Mary Jo Foley (00:44:11):
Just don't understand why anybody runs windows on arm still. I Don stand it. Yeah. I
Leo Laporte (00:44:17):
Don't. Well, this is like a project PC, so I guess that's all. Yeah. Yeah. But
Mary Jo Foley (00:44:23):
We're not ready. It's not ready. The Harbor's not ready, you
Paul Thurrott (00:44:26):
Know, for the, it's like the enthusiast that wants nothing to work and for nothing to be fast, it's like, I'm really into cars, but I bought a bicycle.
Leo Laporte (00:44:33):
Right. Yep.
Paul Thurrott (00:44:34):
Kind of thing. I dunno.
Leo Laporte (00:44:36):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And
Paul Thurrott (00:44:40):
By the way, a version of this running modern hardware or better hardware would be of interest. It'd be cool.
Leo Laporte (00:44:45):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:44:46):
Prices, they, yeah. Their chips, it is very expensive, a
Leo Laporte (00:44:49):
Lot more expensive. And you might, you know, you partly because you wouldn't have the builtin LTE and, and, and all that, the radios and everything. So Qualcomm has a SOC, that's why it's got SIM slide and antennas and all that. Right. So, I mean, it's a specific it's built for a specific market, obviously.
Paul Thurrott (00:45:09):
Let's just let's all admit we're in a holding pattern here waiting for those. Yeah. We are next generation,
Leo Laporte (00:45:14):
You know what that's, this is for like, okay. A restaurant that has menus on a screen instead of on the wall and Velcro behind it. I'm sorry. Hook and looped behind it is this little, $229 box. It has to run windows cuz they're using PowerPoint for the menus or something. Right, right, right, right. Right. And, and you know, it costs less than the monitor, but there, but your menus are changeable.
Paul Thurrott (00:45:41):
Okay. I, I, I feel like there's gotta be a kit PC with an Adam chip in it. That would do the same thing.
Leo Laporte (00:45:47):
Probably you're right. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:45:49):
That'd be more
Leo Laporte (00:45:49):
Compatible. My trainer uses a, a system called my eye zone. That runs on a it's. I think it's on those one of those Intel, remember Intel made like a little stick computer.
Paul Thurrott (00:45:59):
Yeah. The compute
Leo Laporte (00:46:01):
Stick. I think it was comput stick. Yeah. And it, so that runs windows also. And it runs on that and it has,
Paul Thurrott (00:46:05):
He actually uses that.
Leo Laporte (00:46:06):
Well, he that's no, when you buy, you know, you buy a system, it's got a screen and plug that in. And
Paul Thurrott (00:46:11):
I don't think they made those in years now.
Leo Laporte (00:46:13):
Well, I don't, that's what it looked like. It might
Paul Thurrott (00:46:15):
Be, you get 'em like on eBay or something.
Leo Laporte (00:46:18):
All I know is, yeah, we'll be working out. So you wear these straps and then everybody sees their, their stats on the wall. That's what this thing does. It's gotta attached Bluetooth thing that everybody pairs with. So when you come in, it says, hi, Leon. You know, but all know every once in a while, and they're in the middle of the workout I need to update windows right now. So I know it's a windows machine. Yeah. Boy,
Paul Thurrott (00:46:44):
He's played the scene right from what's that Steve car show that's the space, the space
Leo Laporte (00:46:50):
Force. Yes. Oh, that scene is hysterical. Play it, but they take us down immediately.
Paul Thurrott (00:46:55):
Yeah. They're trying to correct the you know, fix the satellite or whatever the Rover, whatever it is. And they, they have to wait for windows to tend to update.
Leo Laporte (00:47:04):
They're all freaking so good. Such a fun scene. All right. Let's talk about sleeping tabs.
Paul Thurrott (00:47:12):
Yeah. For about 10 seconds. So Microsoft edge has a feature called sleeping tabs. Actually. I think Chrome probably does as well.
Leo Laporte (00:47:21):
Firefox does this too. A lot of, I think all browsers. Yeah. Because you have tabs that get very busy in the background and you don't want
Paul Thurrott (00:47:26):
Yeah. And they're trying to keep right. You're trying to improve battery life and performance, et cetera. So they have, and they, you there's, it's configurable and all that kind of stuff. So starting with a Microsoft edge version, 100 Microsoft basically enhance this feature and I can't believe what I'm talking about. This 8% more tabs on average will now sleep, saving you even more resources more now with more sleep, 8%, God, that's a good number. Each sleeping tab saves 85% of memory and 99% of CPU from Microsoft edge. I dunno. Now I think you buried the lead on this story. This to me, this next story is a hair on fire moment. Speak of updating in the middle of workout. Oh no, this isn't as bad as it sounds. It sounds bad last week. No, it's not as bad as it sounds. Okay. So last, last week Microsoft had that event we've been alluding to and there were, there were three core areas that they talked about of updates coming to windows 11 productivity management and security.
Paul Thurrott (00:48:28):
And I've now rewatched, or I've watched all, all of those things. They had the main event. They had the three breakout sessions. I since have rewatched, all of them, it's brutal. Don't recommend people do this. Wow. but there's a, one of the security features that's coming in. Some indeterminate time to windows 11 will ship on new computers of course, and will be enabled on those computers. It's called smart app control. But if you have an existing computer and you upgrade to whatever version of windows, this appears in this thing will not be enabled by default. And in order to get it enabled, you actually have to do a PC reset and install it from scratch and enabled the whole windows kitten. Oo. Yeah. So basically, you know, Microsoft has had a lot of, we don't really, we don't use the terms whitelisting and blacklist anymore, but they basically have had technology for usually for it pros, right.
Paul Thurrott (00:49:23):
Not individuals, but, but individuals too to okay. Or not okay. Applications that can run or, you know, have, oh yeah. We use that trusting or not trusting applications is there. Yeah. Yeah. We use, so this is, yeah, this is just an advance on that. It's in there already have features and windows that do this, but this uses AI and code signing. And it literally predicts whether a process could be malicious or safe based on a variety of signals it's getting. And if it's thought to be probably unsafe, it will block it by default. But for that feature to work, it has to be integrated into the operating system at some kind of a deep level. And we're talking about science fiction anyway, cuz this feature doesn't exist today. And we have idea when it's coming. So,
Mary Jo Foley (00:50:06):
You know, what's funny this, so this was in a dev channel test build in early March. I'm looking at when I wrote about it. And I said, and by the way it'll only work on devices that apply this builder higher, via a clean install. So we already knew this was gonna be that issue. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:50:26):
I just thought it was kind of interesting that, you
Mary Jo Foley (00:50:27):
Know, I know it is a little, it it's a little strange, right? Because they're so adamant about everybody doing everything they can to secure their PCs. And it's like, this is if you want this, you have to clean install.
Leo Laporte (00:50:38):
Well, it's probably a kernel mod, you know? I mean, it's probably so deep in, within the system that you can't patch a built
Paul Thurrott (00:50:47):
Microsoft has made the claim that windows 11 is more secure than windows 10. And I would say as of today yep. That claim is pretty much unsupported, but I think it's also fair to say that in a kind of a thorough enough fake it until you make it sense. It eventually will be true because they're adding these other features to windows 11 over time that ultimately will make it more or secure
Mary Jo Foley (00:51:08):
One day in combination,
Leo Laporte (00:51:09):
Likening it to Theranos is not the most inspiring.
Paul Thurrott (00:51:14):
I, I think if they, if Theranos could have kept it going, maybe they would've solved
Leo Laporte (00:51:18):
Those problems. No, they estimated about in 10 years. Yeah. 10 years.
Paul Thurrott (00:51:21):
Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:51:22):
So, but they also said they'd have it Walgreens by December. So you know, but at
Paul Thurrott (00:51:26):
Least they didn't test it on real people
Leo Laporte (00:51:27):
At least what have you watched the dropout yet? It's so, oh yeah. Oh, so good. Incredible. So good. Oh, I don't know how true it's
Paul Thurrott (00:51:37):
I almost feel like I know too much about this woman. Now I read the book.
Leo Laporte (00:51:40):
Yeah. I've read the book podcast and I watched saw the document. My
Paul Thurrott (00:51:44):
Wife's asking me questions and I'm answering. 'em All. She's like, how do you know all this? I'm like, I don't know. I live in her now. I,
Leo Laporte (00:51:48):
I expert on Elizabeth Holmes. I know
Mary Jo Foley (00:51:51):
She's in jail. Right? Is
Leo Laporte (00:51:52):
She not yet? She's awaiting sentencing. No, not yet. She's and could get up to 20 years son. Bawan her boyfriend at the time. And COO at Theranos is on trialer right now,
Paul Thurrott (00:52:05):
By the way, much bigger jerk in real life than he was portrayed in the show. Even though the I didn't come off too. Well,
Leo Laporte (00:52:10):
He was worse than in the show. Cuz he was oh way. He was pretty bad in the show show.
Paul Thurrott (00:52:15):
Yeah. He was actually way worse than
Leo Laporte (00:52:16):
That. Oh interesting.
Paul Thurrott (00:52:18):
They didn't help. They had that guy from lost plan. He's like a good looking guy. He much better looking guy than the guy in real life. It's like what? You, you kind of underplayed what a monster this man was. But,
Leo Laporte (00:52:28):
But the guy, the dad from the seventies show playing David boys, which I thought was yeah. Which
Paul Thurrott (00:52:32):
Is perfect.
Leo Laporte (00:52:33):
Just exactly right. He's great. He's great. I think we talked about that last time. Yeah. He's great. He did. Yeah. Really enjoy that. You haven't watched it yet. I take it.
Mary Jo Foley (00:52:40):
No I have not. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:52:42):
Well you will. You should. You should. I will. It's really good. I think I will. Yeah. It's really yeah,
Mary Jo Foley (00:52:48):
I needed a break after Anna. I need to
Leo Laporte (00:52:50):
It's very much like that. So I understand why it's kind of the same genre.
Paul Thurrott (00:52:55):
You can't believe they got away with what they got away with for so long.
Leo Laporte (00:52:58):
Right?
Paul Thurrott (00:52:59):
It's crazy.
Leo Laporte (00:53:00):
Unbelievable.
Mary Jo Foley (00:53:00):
I'm like, I can't watch these back to back. I need a little break.
Leo Laporte (00:53:02):
Yeah. Yeah. You're you're smart. Yeah. So go watch the WeWork story or no, maybe the
Mary Jo Foley (00:53:07):
Horrible,
Leo Laporte (00:53:08):
Maybe the Uber story. Some for some reason
Paul Thurrott (00:53:10):
We here's, what we work is WeWork is worth a two hour documentary. This thing is,
Leo Laporte (00:53:14):
You know, I couldn't
Paul Thurrott (00:53:15):
Five hour episodes or something.
Leo Laporte (00:53:17):
I, but I couldn't. No. And Jerry
Paul Thurrott (00:53:19):
Did too, but gimme a break. Like I that's, that story is not that big. Like I just don't, I just don't care that much
Leo Laporte (00:53:25):
About that. Frankly. I lost steam on the Uber one as well. Yeah, just cause it's like, okay, I get it. Those
Paul Thurrott (00:53:31):
Are that's good for a podcast or a book. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a whole like multi episode series. I just, nah,
Leo Laporte (00:53:39):
Yeah. Not too
Paul Thurrott (00:53:39):
Much.
Leo Laporte (00:53:40):
Yeah. Let me see here. I wouldn't mind taking a little right now. I'm trying to do some time management so that we can get to the Xbox and have a lot of time there for the Xbox segment.
Paul Thurrott (00:53:54):
Actually, that's funny because we don't actually have,
Leo Laporte (00:53:57):
I'm just teasing Joe. I'm just giving it our show today brought to you by Intel. You heard of them orchestrated by the experts at C D w C DW understands to keep up with changing business needs. Organizations of all sizes need to stay secure. It's kind of a drumbeat. These days stay connected, stay protected, and that takes powerful processors built for today and tomorrow, like Intel's built for business gen Intel core vPro processors, the 11th gen Intel core vPro processors provide you with a performance security and remote manageability needed to continually move forward and stay productive even while on the go. And of course, CDW works with Intel to provide the right technology to fuel productivity and, and innovation CDW can assess your distributed workforce and their needs and implement the Intel vPro platform. They can configure devices powered by 11th gen Intel core vPro processors.
Leo Laporte (00:54:58):
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Paul Thurrott (00:56:22):
Supposedly the original surface laptop go shipped about, I don't know, 18 months ago, ish. So cute backbone. Yeah. Over at windows central says that the next version is coming soon. Same form factor. So same screen, same port, same thickness, chassis materials, et cetera. This is gonna be a new Sage finish in ice boil Chan down green.
Mary Jo Foley (00:56:46):
Don't tell my I never
Paul Thurrott (00:56:48):
Low screen it's green. I do too. I never tested this product. I think it doesn't even have LA or keyboard back lighting though. It's it's, you know, it's a low end kind of computer, but the new version will go from 10th gen I five CPUs to the 11th gen. So it's, you know, behind four gigs of Ram 64 gigs, OFC storage. But also starts at five 50, which you know, this is kind of a, kind of a netbook ish kind of computer. What's the performance on the go. Is it decent? I think it's so cute. Should I use it? Yeah, it is cute. It's probably much better on the more expensive. Yeah. Oh yeah. It's soft. Not this wasn't I don't think this was even designed by the service team. Right? Wasn't this an outsourcing thing. Oh, that's interesting. Oh, maybe I'm thinking of surface go. Well, that's what we're talking about. Surface go. Well surface. This is
Mary Jo Foley (00:57:40):
Laptop. Go laptop.
Paul Thurrott (00:57:41):
Oh, I'm confused. Yeah. Oh, the laptop. Yeah. Cuz I thought we surface go too, but this is surface laptop. Go laptop. Go long. We had surface go three. I think so. No one I'm confused. So the surface go is the tablet sort of the mini version of the search pro. Okay. Surface, laptop go. I didn't even know. There was surface laptop, not to confused with surface laptop. SC. Let me know if I'm losing anyone's attention now. You know why I'm confused. Yeah.
Mary Jo Foley (00:58:11):
So this is not a surface
Paul Thurrott (00:58:12):
Laptop. It's well, it's a, it's a mini surface.
Mary Jo Foley (00:58:16):
It's just a small laptop's it's small surfaces size laptop.
Paul Thurrott (00:58:21):
Yeah. So it's a 12.4 inch display display 0.4. Oh, that's a good size, actually. A nice, I mean it's not big. It's okay. If you're running notepad, it's plenty of it's 80
Mary Jo Foley (00:58:32):
Characters. No, you would think you would think. But the key keyboard is a little too tight
Paul Thurrott (00:58:37):
To little cramp. Oh, oh. That's what for kids, you know, students you buy it for kid in elementary. So it's not that like could go, it's not detachable left. No, just a laptop. So that's why it's called a laptop go. Okay. Yep. That's right, boy. I'm sorry. I did not understand this
Mary Jo Foley (00:58:51):
Product. No, they have another at all. They have surface laptop se, which is another small laptop. Right. Which
Paul Thurrott (00:58:58):
Yeah. Well that one, I think you can only buy through education Chrome. Yeah. Yeah. You can't get that as a individual, right?
Mary Jo Foley (00:59:06):
Yep.
Paul Thurrott (00:59:07):
Okay. I'm so confused. I'm sorry. It's okay. So it is confusing. It's confusing and stupid, but anyway, that's what we deal with. And speaking of confusing and stupid sorry. Two surface du duo stories. So service duo is the folding phone thing that Microsoft makes based on Android. There's been two versions so far both have received the April, 2022 Android update that went out really early this week. This month, by the way, I don't know if anyone noticed this, but if you had a, a Google or a Samsung phone, it was like April 1st or April 2nd. Like the, the updates, there must be something going on security wise, but the, the April update has gone out very quickly. So Microsoft's devices have gotten that basically fixes a bunch of issues, obviously the security and other updates. And then if you have been considering this newest version of surface 2 0 2 for summer reason but we're put off by its very high price. You know, remember it starts at 1499 I think, right? Yeah. 1500. Yeah. Yeah. So it's on sale now for 9 99 at the Microsoft store and best buy. And I, you know, I don't have anything. I,
Mary Jo Foley (01:00:17):
You still shouldn't buy it still should not
Paul Thurrott (01:00:19):
Buy it. There you go. I wasn't, I did. Didn't feel qualified to say that, but you know, once it gets down $500 a thousand
Mary Jo Foley (01:00:27):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:00:28):
500 I'd buy a thousand bucks. Yeah. Yeah. A thousand thousand bucks is the price of a new iPhone guys. Like, you know, I don't, I, you know, I don't know. You have to be kind, you have to consider yourself kind of, it's like a Kickstarter almost like you want to support the idea.
Mary Jo Foley (01:00:41):
Yep.
Paul Thurrott (01:00:42):
You really, really love surface. And here you go.
Mary Jo Foley (01:00:47):
Even if you do, even
Paul Thurrott (01:00:48):
If you're gonna surface
Mary Jo Foley (01:00:50):
It's it's Android because it runs the Android. Right.
Paul Thurrott (01:00:52):
Well, but I mean, if surface is more of, I think of it more as like a hardware brand. I mean, it's, it has the surface look and feel. I, I, I, the one thing I've heard about it, that seems or universal is it's it feels the
Mary Jo Foley (01:01:06):
Much high quality. Yeah. So nice. Like when you put this thing in your hand, you're, it's beautiful. This is a beautiful device. It's beautiful. Then you open it and you try to use it. And you're like, and no, it's not ready.
Paul Thurrott (01:01:17):
It's the supermodel of phones.
Mary Jo Foley (01:01:19):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:01:20):
It looks good. And you're like, oh, that's too bad. She talked, IM
Mary Jo Foley (01:01:23):
Know, there are people who love it. There are people who love it and who have made it their device, but I just still find it confusing. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe that says more about me than that. The device that
Paul Thurrott (01:01:33):
I, and I bet those people would love to put the task bar on the side of the screen. You know what I'm saying?
Mary Jo Foley (01:01:37):
They would it's that same group. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:01:42):
That same group, those
Mary Jo Foley (01:01:43):
People,
Paul Thurrott (01:01:45):
Those thinking differently people. All right. Mary Jo Foley. Don't tell Sorachi, but Paul's gonna take over now for about half an hour. I could do this one in half a minute. No, please. So halo, infinite finally. Okay. Halo, infinite finally launched late last year, November, I guess. And one of the things they're doing is like they do with other big games like this that are competitive online is they're gonna have this notion of seasons. And so every season is gonna add features to the game. It will add maps. It will add, you know different play modes, weapons, et cetera, et cetera. So the plan from day one was we're gonna do we meeting Microsoft to 3 43 is going to do a new season every three months. But because this thing came in really hot and by the way will be coming in really hot for the next year.
Paul Thurrott (01:02:35):
The first season was gonna be delayed three months. So the first, this I'm second season round. So the second season of halo infinite was not gonna start until six months after launch, which is may and Microsoft revealed this past week that that is happening. It's gonna deliver that thing on May 3rd. It's not gonna have all of the things they promised originally, which you know, of course cuz halo, infinite. And then there are these further out bit. It will be coming at some point in the next year, you know, campaign co-op, which is probably one of the big ones actually forge is huge. Forge is the map editor. And then of course, season three, which will be coming three months later. So whatever that is August halo, infinite season two is called lone wolves. New playlists balance changes, new playbook modes, including last Spartan standing, which is a free for elimination mode, land grab, and an update updated version of king of the hill, which is like a long time halo, favorite new maps catalysts and breaker, and we'll know more soon, but May 3rd is the date.
Paul Thurrott (01:03:36):
So if you are a halo, infinite fan state to this is, this is coming. I, I would've done this one as a tip, but I had two app picks. So I decided to divide this up a little differently, but Microsoft kicked off its Xbox spring sale. The other day, this is one of several sales they have over the course of the year, but this is a big one because some of these games are actually up to 80% off. Most of 'em are not. And of course, but you know cyberpunk 20, 77 is 50% off call duty Vanguard, which the latest version, 35% off destiny, two, which hunt, which Queens, sorry, 20% off FIFA, 22, 60% off, et cetera. So head over to the xbox.com and check this out. If you're in the mark it for a new game, because you might find that is significantly cheaper now than it had been just a few days ago. So there you go. I'm sorry. I don't have more Mary.
Leo Laporte (01:04:31):
Oh yeah. I was hoping for more.
Mary Jo Foley (01:04:33):
Yeah. It's been a quiet couple weeks. Yeah. Besides it really has one windows event.
Leo Laporte (01:04:42):
You say here, and I don't know if it's aspirational or let's take some questions from our live listeners. Right? We could, we could
Paul Thurrott (01:04:54):
Leo, I learned something. I, something about TWiT when I did the AMA last week or the week before. Yeah. Which is that you can take live questions from people listening. Yeah. I don't know if like everyone who works for you ever told you this, but This is apparently a feature.
Leo Laporte (01:05:11):
Oh, did you, do you actually take live questions from?
Paul Thurrott (01:05:14):
I did. Oh my
Leo Laporte (01:05:15):
Gosh.
Paul Thurrott (01:05:16):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:05:17):
So
Paul Thurrott (01:05:18):
It was like being grilled in one of those 1950s mobster movies, but
Leo Laporte (01:05:22):
It was good. I don't know how we should do this to be honest with you.
Paul Thurrott (01:05:26):
Or we could just do it through
Leo Laporte (01:05:27):
Discord.
Mary Jo Foley (01:05:27):
I mean, we've done it in discord,
Leo Laporte (01:05:28):
You know, we're in discord right now. Yeah. And I, if anybody in this good looking bunch of people ask anything they wanna ask. I don't know how, how do we do this? Anthony, do we do they raise their hands? It's been so long since
Mary Jo Foley (01:05:45):
Said open mic. He says open
Leo Laporte (01:05:47):
Mic, open mic.
Paul Thurrott (01:05:49):
It's no, I don't think open mic night is exactly what we're looking
Leo Laporte (01:05:52):
For, but I have a comedy routine on like to do. What about
Paul Thurrott (01:05:57):
IM trying this outta my family?
Leo Laporte (01:05:59):
Open mic stage. What does he mean by open mic? What does he mean? What does he mean? Why do I, why didn't we've done this before? I don't know why I'm having a hard time remembering because we've changed how we do it.
Mary Jo Foley (01:06:12):
John needs to add the open mic channel or,
Leo Laporte (01:06:15):
Oh, I can do that. I have it here. It okay. I got the mic open. Now what? Anybody wants to say something? Disco fuzz. Doug M echo relay em, Freddy, go on. Say something. Mash potato fresh Pete hop knife. General G Jeff call. Ay,
Paul Thurrott (01:06:37):
We what?
Leo Laporte (01:06:40):
It's Skype four now. No, it says discord. PC is, should I do discord, PC or Skype? Four wo Jo Savage. Jeff. None of 'em are saying anything anyway. It doesn't really matter, John. Let me think of, have a question. They're all shy. They're all very shy. Nobody's nobody's unmuted their microphones. We could take 'em we don't have to take live questions. I mean, they to be live, but they could be text textual.
Paul Thurrott (01:07:13):
Of course. Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Leo Laporte (01:07:14):
Yeah. Okay. I C can ask too, you know, just just robot says, I can't remember what my question could be nice. Very nice. Yep.
Mary Jo Foley (01:07:30):
Well, we can't help either with that,
Leo Laporte (01:07:31):
Unfortunately. Will Microsoft ever get their acts together? Asks dwindle? I don't know what even means by that. The answer is
Paul Thurrott (01:07:41):
No, we were trying to fill some time, not infinite time.
Mary Jo Foley (01:07:47):
And if they did, we wouldn't have a job anymore, so it's good to,
Paul Thurrott (01:07:50):
Well, okay. To be fair, Microsoft probably has its act better now together now than at any time. It's
Leo Laporte (01:07:56):
Just that I think so.
Paul Thurrott (01:07:56):
Yes. It doesn't involve us.
Leo Laporte (01:07:58):
Yes. You know? Yeah. I honestly do think Microsoft has their act together. Yeah. As a company, for sure. It's a very
Mary Jo Foley (01:08:06):
Different company. I do. Sometimes I do sometimes. And then something happens that makes me say, oh no, actually, no, well
Leo Laporte (01:08:13):
They're different departments. Some departments have their act more together than others.
Mary Jo Foley (01:08:17):
That is true. That is true.
Leo Laporte (01:08:19):
And you deal with the communications aspect of it. And I have to say Microsoft's communications. Oof is brutal. Yeah. I mean, and I don't know that cuz they don't talk to me, but just judging from what you, you all it's true say, but I would say, you know, I mean you know, where they're really, their act is together is, is Azure in the cloud.
Mary Jo Foley (01:08:41):
Yeah. More together
Paul Thurrott (01:08:42):
And that's, that's a fake until you make it situation right there. Right. They've been talking up cloud computing forever and now they are. I mean, they're not number one really anywhere, but they're solid. Number two, a distant number two. I mean they're, they're a solid number two and that business is humongous and it touches almost everything Microsoft does except for the part I care about.
Leo Laporte (01:09:04):
So,
Paul Thurrott (01:09:05):
You know, although I guess windows 2 65 gets
Mary Jo Foley (01:09:07):
A window. Right. I was gonna just say that I'm like, except for virtualization, which you care about. Right, right.
Paul Thurrott (01:09:12):
Yep. Yep.
Leo Laporte (01:09:13):
Here's a good one. From our disor dwindle was in the IRC. This is from the discord king wing 27 will Microsoft ever release the Neo. I saw an interesting article. I can't remember. Was it ours somewhere saying, oh, they should just put Android in the Neo and put it out instead of, yeah, I don't know. Well,
Paul Thurrott (01:09:31):
I mean the contrary argument would be, they should just put windows 11 on it and put it out and you know, what does that look like? You know, they're adding a lot of tablet features to windows 11. Is that what they're working toward?
Leo Laporte (01:09:43):
Mm, well I guess the premise was, it was intended for X, right? That's
Paul Thurrott (01:09:47):
Right. 10 X.
Leo Laporte (01:09:48):
Yeah. And without X,
Mary Jo Foley (01:09:51):
With
Leo Laporte (01:09:51):
Neo
Mary Jo Foley (01:09:52):
Who forgot Neo, so dual screen windows device. So we actually a prototype of back in 2019. Right.
Paul Thurrott (01:10:01):
Cause that would
Mary Jo Foley (01:10:02):
I think the problem now is yeah. The component shortage, right? Like if you were gonna make Neo, now you'd need to have two custom pieces of glass unless they change what that device looks like. There's, there's also been speculation that they might just jump to a foldable, skip the dual screen. But I feel like that's kind of out of character for the surface team because they love hinges so much.
Paul Thurrott (01:10:26):
Right, right, right. You know, we've seen a couple of interesting PC designs with foldable displays that could show what, and, and actually Neo had something very much like the ThinkPad fold where, you know, it's, you know, it's what do you call it? A hinge device? Not two screens, like you said, but you could put a physical keyboard over one of the screens and use it like a small clam shop tablet.
Paul Thurrott (01:10:52):
Yeah. Yeah. And you could use like, so I mean these things, I mean maybe I, I will a for whatever it's worth, I, I don't think the do makes a, a ton of sense, but when I think about dual screen devices or folding devices, the smartphone form factor makes more sense to me than a PC form factor. You know, just from a size perspective. Yeah. Because at least that thing you could put, put, you know, put it in your pocket and you take it out and you have a bigger screen. It's kind of an interesting idea, you know, a two screen device where you're covering one of the screens to use as a keyboard. Yeah. You know, we just talked about a 12.4 inch display. This thing that orientation must be what nine inches or 10, or is some tiny it's. It would be really hard to type on a keyword like that.
Leo Laporte (01:11:37):
It
Mary Jo Foley (01:11:37):
Would be, it would be, yeah. I don't know. Like I, I keep going back and forth. Are they going to do more Android devices? And I think sometimes yes is the answer because they just move that whole Android team under Panos. That's dealing with Android hardware. Right. Type things, which makes me think it can't just be the duo. It can't, that can't be the only thing they're working on. Right. What if Microsoft did make a surface Android tablet? They could, I guess
Paul Thurrott (01:12:05):
They sure they could make a surface pro type device. Yeah. Those things exist in the Android slash Chromebook world. I mean windows 10 or 11, sorry, windows 11 se points to a, a sort of 10 X type system that might make sense on something like that. Although that's specifically designed for education, obviously. I don't know. I don't know.
Leo Laporte (01:12:29):
Yeah. I wanna give credit where credits due it's actually was Daniel or Bernardino's article in I windows central. He was on TWiT on Sunday, should have asked me about this. He says, windows 11, this is the issue is not great as a tablet OS. Right. And of course, as of right now, there are no features in windows 11 that leverage dual or foldable displays. Right. So he says in short, while I find foldable PCs, Q my X one fold experience has left me skeptical of its usefulness as a laptop replacement. Yeah, me too. That's why I was thinking Neo should be forget desktop. It should be. And Android, it should be mobile.
Paul Thurrott (01:13:07):
Yep. But then you run into, so there's weirdness there, right? So at a certain screen size, you have to pay for Microsoft 65 to use the Microsoft Android apps you know, full featured. I don't know, you know, it, it it's, it gets into a weird area. I'm not against Microsoft doing more Android devices by the way. It it's not that I in some ways Android does make more sense on a tablet, even though Android doesn't make a lot of sense for tablets compared to iPad. But I mean, compared to windows, I mean, yeah. You know, I guess it's, it's definitely a, a step up in some ways
Leo Laporte (01:13:45):
There's also this message from they might not air force base in the 91st missile security forces squad way. I'm not sure what he's trying to tell us here. But specialist KC, thank you for your service. And I hope you survive the whatever they're in charge of the minute, man missiles. So yeah,
Paul Thurrott (01:14:10):
I hope that's one way to fall asleep.
Leo Laporte (01:14:12):
He maybe he trying to stay awake, maybe that's maybe that's what's going on there. There are a lot of questions of the ilk of what's up with this, you know, what's going on with Xbox or games or how about hollowlens we were talking little bit about that on Sunday on TWiTtter as well, web 97 0 8. I, I thesis holo ends three, still dead.
Paul Thurrott (01:14:40):
I feel HoloLens. I feel like has evolved for lack of a better term into a different kind of a product where they've seen some success with vertical markets.
Leo Laporte (01:14:48):
Daniel was saying that the army deal might be a little sketch right now that it, they may is.
Paul Thurrott (01:14:54):
Yeah. And one of the, well, one of the big, maybe the biggest vertical market is the military right. In the Pentagon and whatever. And that's not been going great. And we know there are stories about half the team leaving and some really high profile talent, like Don box have left the building. So yeah, it's a good question.
Mary Jo Foley (01:15:13):
Rumors. Yeah. The rumors are that they are working on a consumer version, but with Samsung as the hardware maker, not themselves. Right. So I guess, you know, they, they definitely wanna stay in the air XR, you know, mixed reality space. If you, if you look at job site, there's lots of jobs open that talk about mixed reality. You're starting to see things like metaverse and NFT references creep into those job postings, which is a little worrisome to me, but I, you know, they're just, they have to do what everybody else is doing. Like, you know, metas coming out with glasses for that. So Microsoft's gonna do something. I think HoloLens is just gonna become a work focused product only. And like, they're just gonna abandon the idea of making it a consumer product and try something different maybe with Samsung, maybe without them in the consumer space.
Paul Thurrott (01:16:09):
Well Samsung was one of the few partners that had followed them down that windows mixed reality path. Right. HP was maybe the other big one actually Acer made a headset. Yeah. But I bet those things have dropped off, obviously windows mixed reality didn't go anywhere. No. so maybe there's a future version of that, that mixes in more of the AR stuff, more of the Hollands tech. Yep. And Samsung, I don't know why Samsung would want to take a chance on that, but yeah. Yeah. They make it a pretty big PC push though. These days, this year, last year seen a lot of Samsung movements in the PC space. And they make, you know, George's hardware and then lots of crap wear, but you know, Samsung, whatever. But I don't know.
Mary Jo Foley (01:16:57):
I know
Paul Thurrott (01:17:01):
Mary Jo, what S floor are you on? What floor is your apartment on? How did we hear traffic?
Mary Jo Foley (01:17:09):
Like you can always hear traffic in my apartment. Yeah, no, that's now there's some good questions in the discord that I like.
Leo Laporte (01:17:15):
Okay. Take some, take
Mary Jo Foley (01:17:16):
Some. Okay. John Gerard, is Microsoft ever going to do an IOT or light version of windows? He has 2 30, 2 gig tablets. He'd like to use them, but he can't even update the full windows on them because windows won't update via an SD card. So there, you know what, there used to be embedded versions of windows, but those have kind of gone away. Like there's still something called windows 11, but
Leo Laporte (01:17:43):
They still running in every ATM in the nation. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:17:46):
Yeah. But it's the old running S too. It's the
Mary Jo Foley (01:17:48):
Old, yeah. Yeah. Like the, the thing that's called windows 11 IOT enterprise. That's not even really a light version of windows. It's just a version of windows used to be it's. Yeah. It used to be, but it's more like customized for very specific use cases. And that, that can, you're talking about,
Paul Thurrott (01:18:05):
I think the arm stuff might be
Mary Jo Foley (01:18:07):
The closest
Paul Thurrott (01:18:08):
Taking over for that. Yeah. Because me too, in the windows seven timeframe, windows seven was obviously just X 86 X 64. Yeah. but they had armed versions of windows embedded, whatever the names were, I think embedded was in the names. And then of course with windows eight, they started talking about windows on arm, the first, you know, gen right with windows R T. But now they one of the goals with windows 10 and I would imagine windows 11 is to have this new version of windows on arm run and as many chip sets as possible. And in fact, last week we learned about a windows server implementation and the data center that's running on a different flavor of arm. So maybe, you know, there's a, well, there's a, there's a windows, there was a windows 10 embedded variant that ran on the raspberry pie, right.
Paul Thurrott (01:18:56):
This was for single tasking. It was no UI. It was not like the, you didn't get a desktop or anything. But I mean, this, this stuff, I just feel, I, this might be a little bit like the the voice assistant stuff, you know, is the smart home market move, destroy this matter thing and the standards, and it's gonna work across Amazon, Alexa, it's gonna work with apple, Siri. It's gonna work with Samsung smart things. And that's the end of that sentence. Right. So Corton is it's over that, that dream, that, that thing is kind of sailed. I sort of feel like the I T hardware market has likewise gone in that direction where it's kind of non-Microsoft, what was that? Remember? The Microsoft came up with a Linux based we haven't heard about this in forever Linux based microkernel operating system for smart switches. Does that sound familiar? Remember this, this is from build three, four years ago.
Mary Jo Foley (01:19:51):
Yeah. It's funny. You're, you're anticipating a question here from petant Deere. What do you think the chance is that Microsoft moves to a Microsoft Linux, distribution and Android as a thin client platform for Azure driven services and a move to cut costs and focus on services while dropping the heat, the platforms are gonna get from regulators. So there is a Microsoft Linux distro it's called CBL Mariner CBL.
Paul Thurrott (01:20:18):
Yeah, but that's not what I was thinking of.
Mary Jo Foley (01:20:20):
Okay. Right. So that one is just for Microsoft internal use. They've said they're, they have no intentions of making that a publicly available distro. It's just things they build products around themselves and use inside their own products. Yeah. Will there ever be a Microsoft Linux like for customers?
Paul Thurrott (01:20:41):
No, no, there won't. And, and the reason is and you can say this definitively because M well, Microsoft probably would love Google, but Google hates Microsoft. And when you look at the, the kind of Android integration stuff, that's going on in the desktop, Microsoft and Google do not work together on any of that. Yeah. And Microsoft cannot risk running its platform based on Android. Right. It's main platform, you know, it just can't, and, and the whole, you know, like for all the stupid things that are going on with windows 11, windows, 11 runs windows apps, you know, that's job one. And that situation is dicey on Linux today. And would require Microsoft to create some kind of a software layer that not just run, win 32 apps, but all of frameworks and do net and everything else that goes on top of it. I it's just too, it would have to be a, a fresh from scratch kind of a thing. I don't
Leo Laporte (01:21:36):
Know. The market would be, I mean, WSL is for one of a, you know, better term windows. Linux.
Paul Thurrott (01:21:45):
Yep. Yeah, yeah. Right. But that's on windows. In other words, he said.
Leo Laporte (01:21:50):
Yeah. But yeah, but I don't think that it's, well, I don't know, is it Microsoft's interest to say, oh yeah, your next PCBC should not run windows.
Mary Jo Foley (01:21:59):
Well, it
Leo Laporte (01:21:59):
Would be for the server.
Paul Thurrott (01:22:00):
I think it's just too complex of, I just don't, I just don't think there's any way out of it. You could look at like, could there be, they had hyper or VR,
Leo Laporte (01:22:07):
They had a, had a Unix.
Mary Jo Foley (01:22:09):
They had Meor too. Remember that wasn't based on one dose, but what
Paul Thurrott (01:22:12):
Was the thing? It was it Azure Azure sphere
Mary Jo Foley (01:22:16):
Was that thing. It runs on Lennox. It's
Paul Thurrott (01:22:18):
Linux. Right. But it's like a microkernel thing for IOT.
Mary Jo Foley (01:22:22):
I think it's Mariner. Isn't it? Mariner CBL. Isn't it there isn't, that's the same thing distribution. I, I thought so.
Paul Thurrott (01:22:29):
Oh, I don't, I'm not a hundred percent sure. I don't remember. I just don't, I don't see it replacing windows at Microsoft, I guess, is
Mary Jo Foley (01:22:35):
The short version, you know, they, they run, they let you run Linux on Azure. In fact, more than 50% of the workloads on Azure are Linux. Right.
Leo Laporte (01:22:44):
Right. And they had Xenex for a long time. Yeah,
Mary Jo Foley (01:22:48):
They did. Yeah.
Mary Jo Foley (01:22:49):
I, I haven't heard that
Leo Laporte (01:22:51):
Terminal. Remember that. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. For sure. That was a really
Paul Thurrott (01:22:54):
Was Unix. That was, that was Unix. That was, that was Unix. Yeah. Back when Unix really mattered
Leo Laporte (01:23:01):
Back in the day.
Paul Thurrott (01:23:03):
Well, I mean, now it's, it's Linux now. I mean, right. It's not, it's not Unix. You don't see, you know, a lot of aux out in the world.
Leo Laporte (01:23:11):
Did they learn a lesson from Xenex? I mean like, oh, we'll never do that again, or
Paul Thurrott (01:23:17):
No, that was just so long ago. I don't think that impacts anybody today. I just don't see. I, I, I mean, look, one of the points of micro of windows 365 is that you have that accessibility through the cloud to not just a windows environment, it's a very specific apps that you might need, and that those things will run on whatever hardware or whatever you have. So there's no reason that can't work into it does work on Linux to a web browser. That kind of thing. I mean but that's not, I mean, how does that,
Mary Jo Foley (01:23:49):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:23:49):
I don't know that just doesn't address normal people. Right. Not yet. Yeah. And
Mary Jo Foley (01:23:53):
Yeah. So Azure sphere OS is its own variant of Linux. That runs, that's
Paul Thurrott (01:24:00):
What I was thinking about, right? Yeah. Micro controller. Okay. Yeah. That's what I thought. Okay.
Mary Jo Foley (01:24:04):
Yeah. Yeah. So they've done a lot of things dabbling around the edges of Lennox, especially now that they're no longer, you know, considering Lennox as a hostile thing. And they, and they've got developers in, in the company contributing to open source and such. Oh, but yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:24:20):
Think, think about like a windows 10 X, right. Windows 10 X could have made sense. This was a container based architecture where they were gonna have a 1 32 container. So when you did need backwards compatibility, which most people would on a real computer, especially this thing would fire up and it would be even better than normal. Assuming it worked because these things would be isolated. This is like an architecture that made some sense. They couldn't get it together. And I don't think they're gonna even try anymore. They tried. And it made sense theoretically. Now think about, you're gonna start over again with Linux now. And it's like, well, hold on a second. Like what, like what, I mean, I suppose there's a container, like I said earlier, hyper V based solution where the main OS is Linux, and then you can do backward compatibility. We'll just call it through a one thirty two container for lack of a better term. But, but I it's just why though, like why?
Mary Jo Foley (01:25:10):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:25:12):
I, it just seems like a lot of work for very little gain and I, I don't, I just don't see it happening, I guess. I dunno.
Leo Laporte (01:25:21):
We tried. We tried. Yeah. Yeah.
Mary Jo Foley (01:25:23):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:25:25):
Any other questions you want to do Mary Jo?
Mary Jo Foley (01:25:28):
I kind of like this one too. Okay. Although it's something that takes a little thought. What's the this is Rob, Rob J B L or one. What's a single biggest mistake Microsoft has made in the past 20 years.
Paul Thurrott (01:25:45):
Oh, what do you
Mary Jo Foley (01:25:46):
Think so many?
Paul Thurrott (01:25:47):
I know, how do you even choose it's like choosing your favorite child?
Mary Jo Foley (01:25:50):
It is, besides
Leo Laporte (01:25:52):
Aside from the kin phone.
Mary Jo Foley (01:25:54):
No,
Paul Thurrott (01:25:55):
By the way, the kin phone was not a,
Leo Laporte (01:25:57):
The mistake was
Paul Thurrott (01:25:58):
Screw that up.
Mary Jo Foley (01:26:00):
The mistake was how they worked with Verizon and Verizon lake. Right.
Paul Thurrott (01:26:03):
Verizon priced it with a full data plan. It just didn't make any sense.
Mary Jo Foley (01:26:07):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:26:08):
That
Mary Jo Foley (01:26:08):
Was a great little phone, I would say. Yeah, I would say. And maybe it's just cause it's still a fresh wound. What they did with windows eight, almost completely derailed the company.
Paul Thurrott (01:26:20):
I am gonna read something to you. I can't believe you this.
Mary Jo Foley (01:26:24):
I feel like, I feel like if, if somehow that had gone unchecked, Microsoft may not have survived because it, it was like one mistake after another, after another. And they just kept trying to back the play. And finally they realized like we're gonna lose our entire customer base and many of our good employees who can't stand working with the current windows team. And I think, I think that was a huge mistake to just let that run unchecked.
Paul Thurrott (01:26:51):
So I thought I hadn't published this yet, but actually I put this up today, but this is the line I wrote to that. Yeah, that windows eight was a cataclysmic failure. Wily regarded by many inside and outside of Microsoft as the single worst thing that has ever happened to windows that it came from within and was easily. Avoidable is incredible. And, and I, yeah, I mean, I just keeping it into like our world with windows. I, I, this came up earlier in the show, like Microsoft's overreaction to the success that apple had and it's growing apple envy through the iPod and Aune star, like I said, and through this windows, media player stuff and zoom, and the Vista ads that, you know, apple was making fun of and all that stuff, you know, the iPhone happened and then the iPad happened and I think they just went insane.
Paul Thurrott (01:27:40):
I think they lost it. And there's a, a story that I don't think I actually happened, but Steven Sinofsky went to CS that one year and he called his team. He says, you gonna come out here, everyone's touching the screens. And he's like, you know, the screen's all over CS. And he can see fingerprints in all of them. He's like, everyone expects to touch screens. We gotta do this to windows, you know? Yeah. And I just don't, I don't agree with what apple is done by segregating non-touch and touch. You know, you can have a Mac if you want a computer, but you can't touch it, but you can have an iPad and you can have some computer stuff, but you can touch that one. You know? Like, I, I, I think there's some logical, like, multitouch like the pen smart pen, handwriting recognition stuff is like additive. And it, it makes some sense, but they went insane in windows eight and they did it at the worst possible time. Yeah. And all the PC maker part, literally every single PC make partner on earth adopted Chromos in that time period. Some of them had already done it, but
Mary Jo Foley (01:28:40):
I feel like, right. I feel like they had so many people on every side telling them, not do windows eight, the way they had envisioned it. Yep. Like the press partners, customers, every focus group, like people inside the company saying we're going off the rails and they still did it. I feel like, how
Paul Thurrott (01:28:58):
Did you guys, if you look
Mary Jo Foley (01:28:59):
At that happen,
Paul Thurrott (01:29:00):
If you, if you, you know everything about windows eight, other than the fact that it was gonna be full screen place, school style UIs on top of this powerful desktop system, you could not get rid of, if you looked at everything else they do, when windows eight, you would've said, oh my God. Yeah, that sounds awesome. And that's what they showed partners. They didn't show the insane stuff. By the time it came out, everyone was like, wait, what are you doing? Like, what is this thing? Yeah. And I, it just, and by the way, there's so much MIS there's so many mistakes there. They had windows phone already. How do you not base the app? PLA how do you not make it the same app platform? You made something that looked sort of like it, but wasn't the same. Are you insane? Like, it was just so stupid. And by the way, this was the time they were like, Hey, here's another idea. Remember how windows got really successful? Cuz we had all these partners and everything. Let's compete with them and we'll make our own hardware now too
Mary Jo Foley (01:29:51):
Nuts.
Paul Thurrott (01:29:52):
Like just nuts. Right. And look, I know a lot of people, as things love surface, like I actually like surface too, but you know what? Sorry, strategically. Yeah. That was a stupid, they really alienated a lot of important yeah. Partners at that time. Really big mistake.
Mary Jo Foley (01:30:08):
But you know what? I feel like the partners now, like a lot of OEMs are sounding the alarm when Microsoft first said they were gonna make their own hardware and you don't really hear those concerns anymore. I think cuz they saw like, yeah, they're making hardware, but it's kind of a niche. And like I wanna,
Paul Thurrott (01:30:22):
You had so many problems every time there's a reliability problem of surface. You know, those guys are just laughing and laughing. Yeah. You know like, like yeah, we've been telling you this for years. You don't listen. You know, that was one of the things like Sinofsky invent or invented, Sinofsky hired AC to build like a little tablet, PC thing. They gave away, remember it one build, they worked with Samsung to build a tablet PC so people could test windows eight and they were like, surprise, you probably didn't figure it out, but we're making our own hardware. And you're like, why? Like what is this thing? But yeah. And there we are. I mean,
Mary Jo Foley (01:30:58):
Here's, I'm, I'm kind of not really answering a question somebody asked, but this got, got me thinking about this. If Microsoft had ended up buying Yahoo, which I almost did more than 10 years ago, I would say that would've been their biggest mistake. Oh yeah. Of
Paul Thurrott (01:31:11):
All mistakes. How much was that? Like, it was like 50 billion, right?
Mary Jo Foley (01:31:13):
50 billion. Right. or so something
Paul Thurrott (01:31:17):
Like that
Mary Jo Foley (01:31:18):
Horrific. Yes. So at the last minute that deal didn't happen for a variety of reasons. But I would, that could have been their worst mistake.
Paul Thurrott (01:31:26):
I may still write about the Yahoo thing. I, I save as I went through their press because I'm, you know, mental, I have go, I've been going through every one of their press releases over every year. They've been in existence and you get to the Yahoo stuff. It's really interesting. They, they issued announcements about it every few weeks. Like it went on for months and months. And then, then for the next two years it still happened every four, maybe six months they'd come out and say something about Yahoo. And do you know what that always ended up with? Do you remember this? They actually had a search deal with Yahoo. That was the culmination after two plus years a promised 50, 50 billion,
Mary Jo Foley (01:32:02):
Whatever Carol Barts. Right? Wasn't
Leo Laporte (01:32:03):
It?
Paul Thurrott (01:32:03):
Yeah. Carol caraway. Carbo. Carol. Was it Carol Bartz
Mary Jo Foley (01:32:07):
Barts I think. Was she running
Paul Thurrott (01:32:09):
Out? Yeah. I don't remember that. I thought,
Mary Jo Foley (01:32:10):
I
Leo Laporte (01:32:11):
Thought briefly. She did. I think you're right. Yeah. Yeah. I think she did before Marissa Meyer.
Paul Thurrott (01:32:16):
I be sure who was running out. Who, when this was,
Mary Jo Foley (01:32:18):
I think she was the one who baller was dealing with around Yahoo. Cause
Leo Laporte (01:32:23):
I used to be Adobe and I think you're right. I think she
Paul Thurrott (01:32:25):
Was running. She went to eBay. Wasn't she? Ebay.
Leo Laporte (01:32:27):
Oh, eBay. That's right. And she was president CEO of Yahoo. Let me see. Let me see if I can find
Paul Thurrott (01:32:36):
Jerry Yang was one of
Leo Laporte (01:32:38):
Thousand nine or 2011
Mary Jo Foley (01:32:40):
Still. Yep. That was, that was the timing I think. Yeah,
Paul Thurrott (01:32:42):
That was okay. He was still, he was still involved and he was really against us was, I
Leo Laporte (01:32:46):
Don't remember AutoD she was at Autodesk that's right then Yahoo. Right
Paul Thurrott (01:32:51):
Anyway, after all this work millions and billions of dollars they, they eventually did a search deal with Yahoo where Yahoo being integrated their search results on yahoo.com. And then I think Yahoo might have provided some backend search stuff for Bing on bing.com. If I'm not mistake, I, I haven't really looked that deeply into it, but it's like all that tough. And it's like, nothing came out of that. Thank God Yahoo. That would've been, I, that would've been right. Terrific disaster that, yeah. Terrible.
Mary Jo Foley (01:33:21):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:33:21):
Terrible. But you know, that's what happens though? Microsoft is this constant series of reactions to things. Yeah. And only Microsoft, like at a time when Yahoo was circling, the drain would be like, we need online services. They have online services, you know, it's like, let's buy a music service, which MySpace doing these days, you know? Yeah. Crazy. It was crazy back when they wanted to do this. It was crazy. Yeah. This was not like Yahoo was not riding a wave at the time guys. Like this was Yahoo was over. Yeah. Insane. I wish I could
Leo Laporte (01:33:54):
Remember. I want to try this. I have a feeling that's be massive feedback, but em wants to ask a question in there's a room called open mic. So I'm gonna open the open mic and eat. I got it. I got it, John. I know. Oh, go ahead. Em, say something. I do have Skype there. It is. Say, say, say John, didn't think I knew what I was doing. I, em,
Discord! (01:34:22):
Hey, how you doing? I, I just kind of going back to Paul was talking a, a, a while back about that low powered arm PC. And I know this is not raspberry pie weekly, but you know, I, I messed around with these devices.
Leo Laporte (01:34:38):
That's a good idea for a show though. I have to say it.
Discord! (01:34:42):
And you know, given that those arm devices are pretty low powered and they're, it's probably not a great windows PC as you've suggested. Do you think that this could be something that could run more open source software, like raspberry pie or something like that where you can do more?
Paul Thurrott (01:35:03):
Yeah. Home smart home stuff.
Leo Laporte (01:35:05):
Before we answer that though. Are you wearing surface headphones? IAM?
Discord! (01:35:10):
No. No, these are bow.
Leo Laporte (01:35:11):
Oh, okay. Nevermind.
Discord! (01:35:13):
No,
Paul Thurrott (01:35:13):
Those are inability. I
Discord! (01:35:17):
Mean, look, grab my service ones. No,
Leo Laporte (01:35:19):
No, that's okay. That's okay.
Paul Thurrott (01:35:20):
You can't, you can't even buy raspberry PI devices now because of the component. Yeah, that's
Leo Laporte (01:35:24):
Right stuff.
Paul Thurrott (01:35:24):
That's right. But the, you know, the highest end, most recent rat was raspberry probably for, probably with eight gigs Ram, probably a decent desktop experience. Right. Running whatever Linux, raspberry pie, whatever it is. But yeah. I think something like that would make a lot more sense than a windows sonar, seven C based thing today. Yeah, absolutely. That might change.
Leo Laporte (01:35:45):
If you could get one, could get one. That's the real issue. I agree. Yeah. There's
Paul Thurrott (01:35:49):
A problem. Yep.
Leo Laporte (01:35:51):
Hey em, thank you for letting us letting me, cause I've never used the open mic. We've used it. In fact, we used it with Paul I'm. Sure. But it does a weird thing on the video. You see, this is switches to whoever's talking, so
Discord! (01:36:04):
Yeah, it's it's it's it's interesting. I tried turning going in here and I was like, I can't hear any sound.
Leo Laporte (01:36:10):
Yeah. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:36:12):
What's funny.
Leo Laporte (01:36:14):
Yeah. I don't know. Can I write click and pin? I don't know. No it's interesting. It's just, it's just the open mic windows reflecting. Who's talking,
Paul Thurrott (01:36:24):
Right. That's funny.
Leo Laporte (01:36:25):
And when em talks,
Paul Thurrott (01:36:26):
I, I actually didn't do anything like this. I, I aunt was reading the questions, but it was like a live interaction. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:36:32):
Anyway, thank you em, for joining us. Yeah.
Discord! (01:36:35):
Thanks a lot. Yes.
Leo Laporte (01:36:37):
Thank you. Appreciate it. Next time please wear your surface headphones.
Paul Thurrott (01:36:42):
That's all I know. Or, you know, maybe just wear the ones that work the best.
Paul Thurrott (01:36:49):
Actually I think is what he was doing.
Leo Laporte (01:36:52):
Probably I'm thinking probably, Hey, let's take a little break back of the book coming up next as we can continue. I, I love doing audience questions and if we can get people to do live like em did that's even better. That's taking calls. I mean, I love that. Em had a good setup. He had a mic. We could hear what he was saying and all that stuff, but I would love to do do more of that. Em is a member of club TWiT of course. But we take questions for, from the IRC as well, which is open to all, but club TWiT because we're using discord does let us do the audio, which is, I think great. If you are not yet a club TWiT member, there are going to be more reasons to join club TWiT.
Leo Laporte (01:37:33):
I can't tell you exactly, but there's some exciting stuff coming along the way already. It's pretty amazing. Seven bucks a month, a free versions of all of our shows. You know, that's what we thought would be the thing turns out the discord is so much fun and it lets us do so many interesting things. Not only is it a chat for each show, but just like the IRC, but we can do other shows inside the discord. So Paul's asked me anything that he did last week. Jeff Jarvis is coming up later this week. I think it's tomorrow, actually on Thursday Stacy's book clubs in there, the untitled Lennox show every Saturday, the GIZ fizz before that this week in space because of members like you, thank you club TWiT members. We were able to do a show, launch it inside club TWiT, get it to a certain level of audience and then put it out in public.
Leo Laporte (01:38:24):
I think we're gonna do more stuff in club TWiT only if you're not a member, this is a great time to join seven bucks a month it's month to month. You can castle any time TWiT.tv/club TWiT Paul. I also to wanna plug our crew as long as we're doing the plug Fest, because a number of people I think probably because maybe of COVID or whatever, I think we have more spaces, a number of people canceled. So we have a hundred people going on this TWiT cruise to Alaska, along with me and Paul. And then you said Rob Campbell, Rafael
Leo Laporte (01:38:58):
Rafael's coming, Richard Campbell, Richard Campbell Rob's in our discord. He might be coming if I can talk him into it, but that's really cool. And there are some openings I'm told due to a few cancellations. So last chance maybe, but please go to cruise.Twit.tv we're doing in July. The details are on the website. And Lisa says, she's getting emails from people saying, what excursions are you gonna take? So we are gonna Lisa and I have to sit down this today and do that. Yep. And then we will post that as well. So we can, I think one of the things Lisa wants to do is some photo walks.
Paul Thurrott (01:39:34):
I can tell you what I don't want to do is anything that involves ropes and climbing up the side of a
Leo Laporte (01:39:39):
Glacier. She said, no helicopters, cuz I,
Paul Thurrott (01:39:42):
I do. I really want to do a helicopter.
Leo Laporte (01:39:44):
I know. And there's one where you helicopter out to a glacier and then you that's exactly the mush Huskies. Oh no, not that one. Oh, okay. Well anyway,
Paul Thurrott (01:39:52):
I, I do want to go to a glacier, you know, while there are still
Leo Laporte (01:39:54):
Glaciers while there's a glacier, this is your last chance. Not only to book the cruise, but to see a glacier, July 16th of the 23rd, if you're interested, cruise.Twit.tv and there, I don't know which rooms are still available, but there are a variety of prices. There's some very affordable rooms. It's gonna be a, we, we start in Seattle, we go up to Alaska, we come back down. It's gonna be a, I think it's gonna be a lot of fun. And I have, have put together an audio recording kit to bring with me. So we might do some, some special podcasts on the boat as well. So cool. That's a couple of plugs there. Now I'll mention of our sponsor collide, which is a great service. This to me, this is the future of it. You know, I mean a lot of it, people have already tried this idea where lock, we're gonna lock down everything.
Leo Laporte (01:40:42):
We do MDM, you know, yes, it's bringing your own device, but if you've got an endpoint on our network, we're gonna lock it down and we're gonna put glue in the USB ports. And you know, and I think a lot of it people have learned professionals have learned that if you don't get your users involved, if you don't get their buy-in, you're fighting an uphill battle. I mean the worst case scenario, you lock down their laptop too much and then just use their laptop, get it infected, bring it in. You know, you've lost completely lost control. Collide is a new take on endpoint management. That's all about getting end users more involved. It's built by security practitioners who in the past saw exactly how much MDM was disrupt, disrupting end users. And, and, and you know, the, of them just throwing up their hands and, you know, using their own personal laptop and not telling anyone, which is, you know, I think you could agree probably the worst case scenario.
Leo Laporte (01:41:41):
Kaine's different. K O L I D E. If you use slack as we do in our enterprise, it's so cool. It's a user focused approach that communicates security recommendations to your employees through the, their slack. So in fact, you, they even are enrolled in the process from the very beginning because they install, collide themselves. You know, they install the the endpoint agent on their own. That's how it starts. And then if they do things like, you know, they they turn on you know, screen, but they don't have a password on it. Collide will say in a slack message. I should show you cuz it's really cool. They'll say in a slack message, Hey, I see you turned on it's a screen lock, but you know somebody could still use your computer. You've gotta set a password. That kind of thing.
Leo Laporte (01:42:28):
I think it's really a very interesting take on endpoint management. Here's a collide slack. It looks like you have two Salesforce, customer data exports that have been sitting in your download folder for more than 14 days. Here's those files and here's what to do. And then there's a button. I fixed it. Check again. It's little things like that. I think it's just really fascinating and it makes a lot of sense to me. So from there, once you've got client installed, it regularly sends employees recommendations where when the device is insecure, here's one windows firewall disabled. Why is this a problem? They explain it, tell you how to fix it. Find my Mac disabled. Why is this a problem? They come right in the slack. So it's talking directly to employees educating them about the company's policies and, and how to keep their devices secure.
Leo Laporte (01:43:21):
Using real examples, not theoretical scenarios. It's a really brilliant idea. Cross platform, endpoint management windows, of course, but also Mac and Linux puts the end users first. And I know sometimes it people say, well, I don't like at the end users first, but I think by now we all understand why end users have to participate in this process or it's a win. It's a no win for anybody get endpoint management that puts the user first, K O L I D E collide.com/ww. You can learn more activate a free 14 day trial, no credit card required collide.com/ww. You can also right now get a goody bag of collide swag after signing up for that trial is a way of saying thank you, honestly, this seems so right to me, collide. K O L I D e.com/ww with thank them so much for their supportive windows weekly. All right. Enough plugin. Let's get back to the back of the book and Paul Thurrott with an app pick to start us off this week.
Paul Thurrott (01:44:26):
Now I'll do some plugin of my own. Do your
Leo Laporte (01:44:28):
Own
Paul Thurrott (01:44:29):
This one until everyone has a, it start 11. You know, we keep, we keep talking about it, but
Leo Laporte (01:44:36):
Version, did Brad, Sam pay you to say this?
Paul Thurrott (01:44:38):
No, in fact, he forgot to even tell me this one was released. Just so you know, this is coming
Leo Laporte (01:44:43):
From good, good,
Paul Thurrott (01:44:43):
Good. This version adds the ability to resize the task bar, a feature that's not available in what is 11 advanced multi modern is support. So you can define windows grouping, which is another feature. It has that windows 11 doesn't have cross primary and secondary displays. And you can ungroup items on the task bar and centered or left aligned modes. It's just, it's not perfect. It's in, you know, they're improving it as well as you know, alongside windows 11, but it is such a dramatic and improvement over what's available in windows 11. I think for a lot of people coming from windows 10, it's just, you, you just gotta do this. It, it, I, someone had asked us about this, I think earlier I do we ever think they're gonna get their act together with regards to this? No, I don't think they are Microsoft, but I think star, you know, startup is, and so this will preserve some sanity. It'll be the best $6 you ever spend.
Leo Laporte (01:45:37):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:45:37):
Even
Leo Laporte (01:45:37):
Though I don't get pick, they do, they do a great job. Honestly. I agree. They really do. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:45:42):
This second pick I have second a pick is, is gonna seem like a, a strange one at first, because it's about a new web browser on the Mac, but this is duck dot go. And so the duck go mobile app on Android and iOS and Android, or I'm sorry on iPad, I suppose is the privacy protection, all that stuff you want. And now they're bringing it to desktop as well, starting with the Mac. So the, the windows version is coming soon. The Mac version is now in beta. It's a wait list. So you actually have to, you know, sign into a list and hope that you get it. But, and it's the not perfect. It doesn't have a hundred percent of everything you want in a web browser. Doesn't have extensions for example, but if you're familiar with this product on mobile. This is the type of thing you might actually kind of want to check out. Privacy based search engine, tracker blocker, cookie popup, popup protection. It's got that awesome fire button thing, right? For instance, cleaning of all your data email protection. It, so I, this is I, I, you know, right away, it's not gonna be perfect.
Leo Laporte (01:46:42):
Well, here's, I'll tell you, so they're gonna do a windows version by the way. Yep. This version is built on web kit because it's on Mac
Paul Thurrott (01:46:51):
Because
Leo Laporte (01:46:52):
That's right. And that's why you don't have extensions cuz apple doesn't allow, they have a weird platform, but you would get all of the capabilities of safari without any of the, with, with tracking. It
Paul Thurrott (01:47:04):
Does the basics too. Yeah. This is, you know, password management tab management of bookmarks
Leo Laporte (01:47:09):
All. So I don't know. I don't know if the windows a version will be web kit. It could be, might be chromium. I don't
Paul Thurrott (01:47:15):
Know. Or chromium my be. Yeah. So they say they're working on a system to provide, provide extensions in the future. But for now it does not have extensions. So web kits they're definitely extensions I would want to use, but I would say the most of important extensions that I do use are in fact based around tracking protection, you know, the stuff that's kind of just built into this. So just something to keep your eye on. If you do have a Mac as well, definitely. Get on the list and try to check this out. I'm very, very interested. I, I feel like something like this is necessary on desktop and is something frankly, Microsoft and apple should be building themselves.
Leo Laporte (01:47:53):
It's what edge could have been.
Paul Thurrott (01:47:56):
Yeah, exactly.
Leo Laporte (01:47:57):
Could have been.
Paul Thurrott (01:47:59):
Yeah, they have other they have other concerns Leo and
Leo Laporte (01:48:01):
They have other priorities
Paul Thurrott (01:48:03):
Involve your
Leo Laporte (01:48:03):
Privacy. Yeah. Enterprise time, Mary Jo Foley has our pick of the week.
Mary Jo Foley (01:48:09):
Right? So I mentioned this in passing last week when we were talking about the windows powers, the hybrid future event there's a thing out called windows auto patch. And we didn't have a lot of details about it when the event happened. But since that time, Microsoft published on their tech community site, which is tech community.microsoft.com a windows auto patch FAQ. So if you go to tech community tech, community dot, microsoft.com and search for the windows auto patch FAQ, you too can find this and everything you wanna know is right here. All the things that we wish we would have known before the event. So this is gonna be released in July, 2022. If you know what windows update for businesses, this is pretty much like the next version of that. You need, it's got the prerequisites here. So you obviously need Azure active directory.
Mary Jo Foley (01:49:10):
You need in tune, you need windows 10, 11 you need config manager version 2010 or later. There's a lot of prerequisites. But the idea is if you use this service, it'll automatically apply patches for your customer, for your users. If you're an it pro there's a whole set of rings that it, it deals with so that it rolls out the patches to a small subset of users that you designate first to make sure that they're gonna work in your organization then larger than larger. And there's a whole thing. Like what happens if there's a problem with the update? How does it work? So if you're, if you're somebody who is intrigued by the idea of automa, automatic, patching and windows, you should go find this FAQ and study it because your answers will be there.
Leo Laporte (01:49:57):
And good news reset. Not required.
Mary Jo Foley (01:50:00):
Yes. How about that? Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:50:02):
Wow.
Paul Thurrott (01:50:03):
Well, it doesn't sound very powerful then.
Leo Laporte (01:50:05):
Like how, how powerful good does
Mary Jo Foley (01:50:06):
This nothing then, right.
Leo Laporte (01:50:08):
Steve Gibson was having so much fun with all the rings, whether there's like, there's like six rings. Now there's a huge number of rings.
Mary Jo Foley (01:50:14):
There are. Yep. Yep.
Leo Laporte (01:50:19):
All right. And moving along our code name pick of the week.
Mary Jo Foley (01:50:24):
So this is funny that this came in as a so somebody sent me this this week a tipster who's who goes by the name awkward swine, because of course he does.
Leo Laporte (01:50:37):
It's a bit of a pig, but okay.
Mary Jo Foley (01:50:39):
Yes, exactly. So the thing we were mentioning earlier in the show that requires the reset, this feature called smart app control, awkward swine says this co the code name of this feature is Knight's watch. And I, oh, I love it. Th an I G H T apostrophe watch. This is funny because I heard this code name years ago. I feel like I, I was always trying to figure out what this was. And he said, yes, indeed. The code him has been around even before this feature was released well before. And he here's how he described it. The code name is a reference to the vigilant Watchers on the wall. Guarding guarding west. Is that how you say it?
Paul Thurrott (01:51:20):
Yep. Yep.
Mary Jo Foley (01:51:22):
From the undead white walkers from the north? Yes. War clever. So wait, wait. This guy's malware windows users knowing,
Paul Thurrott (01:51:30):
Do you know what that's from though? Mary Jo.
Mary Jo Foley (01:51:32):
I had to look it up.
Leo Laporte (01:51:33):
I
Mary Jo Foley (01:51:34):
Looked it up. I had no idea where that was from.
Leo Laporte (01:51:36):
Are you gonna take the black Mary Jo? You have, yes. He's gonna join the night's watch. I'm looking
Paul Thurrott (01:51:42):
For it. I don't mind the night watch thing, but I would like it to be in a warmer place. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:51:46):
Yeah. The wall's a little chilly. It gold.
Mary Jo Foley (01:51:50):
You know, what's funny. Let's let's bash the windows eight time thing. One more time. Remember they wanted to do away with cool code names. Look at this code name. It's so cool. Like why
Leo Laporte (01:51:59):
That's
Mary Jo Foley (01:51:59):
Code's cold code name? Yeah,
Leo Laporte (01:52:00):
It's good. Perfect cold name. All right. We're gonna we're gonna give you a week off for the beer pick of the week, Mary Jo, because I think Stephanie's been at work again. She has, well,
Paul Thurrott (01:52:13):
Mary Jo requested it. I, I I'm gonna guess you asked about this. Not because it is the beginning of spring, but because today feels like the beginning of spring.
Mary Jo Foley (01:52:21):
Yeah. Well, tomorrow here in New York is gonna be 80.
Paul Thurrott (01:52:24):
Yeah. So it's 80. It's 80 here today. And it's gonna be 80 again tomorrow. Don't worry. It's gonna go back down, but
Mary Jo Foley (01:52:29):
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:52:30):
Yeah. So this is called maple splash and she says the new crop of maple syrup should be available now in farmer's markets. It's funny. That's correct. Obviously I think of maple syrup as being like, related to the winter for some reason.
Leo Laporte (01:52:46):
Yeah. Cuz well, it's when it's harvested when the S SAP starts running in the spring, I guess it's a spring thing actually. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:52:53):
Right? Exactly. I, it it's no doubt correct.
Leo Laporte (01:52:55):
You're right. I think it was winter too.
Paul Thurrott (01:52:57):
Definitely. Don't use supermarket pancakes, syrup, especially syrup. That's not released God, you know? But syrup is the like butter, you know, we grew up eating this stuff. That wasn't the real thing. And then one day you have the real thing and you're like, my God, why did nobody tell me this
Leo Laporte (01:53:11):
Exist grade a maple syrup from Vermont. Yeah. Or Canada.
Paul Thurrott (01:53:16):
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Right. So anyway, the recipe is seven parts, white rum four parts, maple simple, which is 50 50 split maple syrup, water generous, squeeze of generous squeeze. Oh my of lime juice. And ginger bitters, you combine it in a shaker, shake it up. She says, serve it in a smaller glass and hide alcohol. That's absolutely not what we do, but also with the
Leo Laporte (01:53:37):
Lime for you as small glasses, a tanker,
Paul Thurrott (01:53:40):
She's being responsible for the audience.
Leo Laporte (01:53:43):
Oh, this sounds good.
Paul Thurrott (01:53:44):
Drink this at home. You know, don't go
Leo Laporte (01:53:46):
Anywhere. Sounds very, very good. It does. Wow. I'd say a great a Amber probably on this one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mm, yep. Wow. Simple syrup with maple. Brilliant idea. Sounds good. Yeah. In fact, throw the water out.
Paul Thurrott (01:54:05):
Right. If you want something, your spoon will stand up and just
Leo Laporte (01:54:09):
Straight maple syrup, seven parts, Ru four parts, maple, simple syrup, lime juice and ginger bitters. Okay. She better make this on the cruise. That's all I'm saying. I'm
Paul Thurrott (01:54:20):
Ready. Well, it is gonna be in Canada. So it sounds exactly.
Leo Laporte (01:54:24):
I think it's perfect. I thought she was doing for the our place Canadian flag. Those guys. Did you see the animation of the Canadian flag in Reddit slash R slash place was a very clever Reddit game where you got everybody got to place one pixel, but only, only every five minutes and, and on a blank canvas. And it was incredible. And then let me see if I can find the Canadian flag animation because well, it was kind of a battle, I think. Yeah. here's the full, full Canadian flag video on our place. Remember there, people are placing these pixels every five minutes. So there's the flag. The maple leaf is going a little crazy. Cause, and then at one point, for some reason it turned into a banana.
Paul Thurrott (01:55:23):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:55:23):
Instead of Canada. And but there, boy, it's a battle going on, right. Are between the they,
Paul Thurrott (01:55:29):
I like the eight bit of this.
Leo Laporte (01:55:31):
Yeah. Isn't it fun? Yeah. Cause it's just dots, right? Yeah. And eventually I think they finally did get a fairly decent maple leaf in there. The banana folks briefly took over. I gave up
Paul Thurrott (01:55:44):
Well,
Leo Laporte (01:55:45):
So I thought maybe this happened. Stephanie was celebrating the the Canadian flag on our,
Paul Thurrott (01:55:52):
I suspect she's not aware of this. Yeah. But maybe, maybe
Leo Laporte (01:55:55):
Look at that. Oh, the banana. Okay. It's there's a pick. Wait, so turned into a pickle. Oh, it's a pickle sighting. And now all the flags of all the nations and then it's over. It's over. That's funny. So lot of fun. Thank you, Paul Thra. Thank you, Mary Joe Foley. What a great show. We got some comments from listeners. We got a caller in. I love that. This is, this is where all the dozers and all the world should gather every Wednesday, 11:00 AM Pacific
Paul Thurrott (01:56:29):
Someday. Archeologists archeologists are gonna find this, these episodes and have no idea why you keep mentioning doers.
Leo Laporte (01:56:38):
I
Paul Thurrott (01:56:38):
Don't know what it means. We can
Leo Laporte (01:56:39):
CF call her daddy. Okay. And mark Marin WTF. Just that's all I'm saying. We do the show. 11:00 AM Pacific 2:00 PM. Eastern time, 1800 UTC of a Wednesday morning or afternoon or evening, depending on your time zone. I say that so you can watch live if you want it live.Twit.tv. If you're watching live, join the community run IR heat channel irc.Twit.tv will take you there. You can do it in a web browser or an IRC client. If you're a discord lover, well join club TWiT, you can do the discord thing as well. And after the fact you can get downloadable versions of everything we do@TWiT.tv. In the case of this show, TWiT.tv/w w audio and video is available about four or five hours after the show. You can also watch us on YouTube again, a few hours after the show or not worry about what time it is.
Leo Laporte (01:57:34):
Does anybody really know what time it is? Does anybody really care? Just get a podcast, client and subscribe, and then just magically it'll appear on your device and you can listen. That's your leisure or watch it, your leisure. You could subscribe to the audio or the video. Thank you all for being here. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Most importantly, to Mary Jo Foley, all about microsoft.com. Paul Thurrott thra.com. Paul's book, the field guided windows 10 is@leanpub.com and have a great week. Enjoy the, are you gonna go out out Mary Jo and find a beer garden somewhere and enjoy the 80 degree weather? Definitely. Yeah, for sure. Sounds nice. Do you let SRA out? I guess not, no, no, too dangerous. He can't go anywhere. He just look out the window and dream he does. Yeah. Paul, you gonna get warm weather too and lower Macungie that was
Paul Thurrott (01:58:25):
Eating today. Oh, nice. We're gonna be outside tonight. Take
Leo Laporte (01:58:27):
A walk of us. Open the windows wide for music night.
Paul Thurrott (01:58:31):
We're usually not ahead of New York in any way, shape or form, but in one area apparently.
Leo Laporte (01:58:36):
Thank you. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Mary Jo. Thank you all for joining us. We'll see you next time on windows weekly.
