Windows Weekly Episode 799 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 Thera Here. Mary Jo Foley's. Here. Microsoft's renaming Microsoft office to Microsoft 365. Not <laugh>. I guess we got it all wrong. We'll take a look at the latest update for Windows 1122 H two. Can you, can you tell the difference Paul and Mary Jo will explain, And a new Windows UI that they snuck into the Ignite keynote, Paul and Mary Jo. Explain what that's all about too. It's all coming up next with a lot more on Windows Weekly podcasts you love

TWiT Intro (00:00:36):
From people you trust. This is tweet.

Leo Laporte (00:00:46):
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley. Episode 799 Recorded Wednesday, October 19th, 2022. Would you like salsa with that? Windows Weekly is brought to you by draha. Security professionals are undergoing the tedious, arduous task of manually collecting evidence with Drta. Say goodbye to the days of manual evidence collection and hello to automation. All done at draha speed. Visit drta.com/TWiT to get a demo and 10% off implementation. And by Tanium Tanium Unites operations and security teams with a single platform that identifies where all your IT data is. Patches every device you own in seconds and implements critical security controls all from a single pane of glass. Are you ready to protect your organization from cyber threats? Learn more at tanium.com/TWiTt and by Lenovo, orchestrated by the experts at CDW to help transform your organization with Lenovo ThinkPads equipped with the Intel Evo platform for effortless connectivity and collaboration from anywhere. Learn more at cdw.com/lenovo client. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello dozers. Hello winners. It's time to talk with these cats. He's a dozer. His name is Paul Thurrott. Comes from Windows via Amiga. I had a guy call and say how much he missed. No. How much he loved his a Omega 1200 and he was still using

Paul Thurrott (00:02:27):
It's That's what I always wanted.

Leo Laporte (00:02:29):
Yeah, he was, He was

Paul Thurrott (00:02:30):
At a 500 and a 600.

Leo Laporte (00:02:32):
He was still making the demo music, the demo scene stuff.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:35):
I'll never forget, I went to the local commoner dealer when the three, the omega 3000 came out and the guy was showing it to a customer and he said, Well, how many megabytes that came with or whatever. He goes, You gotta get all the Megs

Leo Laporte (00:02:46):
<Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:48):
And I was just like, Yeah, that's

Leo Laporte (00:02:49):
Good advice. Get all the megs baby. And this

Paul Thurrott (00:02:52):
Gotta get all the megs.

Leo Laporte (00:02:53):
This over here is your winner, is Mary Jo Foley from all about, about microsoft.com. Paul is in Mexico today. Yep. And for the next two weeks. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, welcome. Welcome home.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:08):
Thank you. Thank you.

Leo Laporte (00:03:11):
Today we shall talk about Windows 11. What's the latest,

Paul Thurrott (00:03:21):
Latest silliness?

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:23):
Yeah. Well this is a total surprise because we heard this was going to happen in Week C as Microsoft calls it. So this week they've, Wait

Leo Laporte (00:03:34):
A minute. Wait, wait a minute. This is weeks

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:37):
A, B, and C and D. They, this is how they talk about what

Paul Thurrott (00:03:41):
Goes out. It's osa Can you C week? And

Leo Laporte (00:03:44):
That's the week

Paul Thurrott (00:03:46):
Optional update

Leo Laporte (00:03:46):
Week. What's wrong with 1, 2, 3, and four?

Paul Thurrott (00:03:51):
Oh, Leo, you obviously

Leo Laporte (00:03:52):
Dunno.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:53):
Computer science numbers.

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:54):
Why numbers? Let's,

Leo Laporte (00:03:56):
That's so strange. Okay, so we're in Sea week,

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:00):
Which is optional patch patches and cumulative updates. Mm-Hmm. So people can preview them before the next patch Tuesday. And so lo and behold, we get the set of missing Windows 11 features that they announced would be coming.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:15):
Oh, well, asterisks, asterisks, asterisks, by the way. True,

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:18):
True. I

Paul Thurrott (00:04:18):
Know. Cause we've only gotten one of that from what I can tell.

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:21):
Yeah. Yes. Yeah. So they said in a blog post yesterday, Hey, here it is. If you wanna download the optional updates this week for Windows 1122 H two, you're gonna get all these things we talked about, like tab file explorer, suggested actions, task bar overflow. And this was a surprising one to throw in there. And the, the thing we recently started talking about, right click on your task bar to jump immediately to, to a task manager.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:50):
So let me ask about that one because did they actually say that or did it just appear?

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:56):
It's in the blog post.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:58):
It

Leo Laporte (00:04:59):
Is. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:59):
It's in yesterday's blog post. It's mixed in with the task bar overflow item, but not a single person I have talked to or myself who actually went out and did the C week patches. None of us have it. Right. So I said to Microsoft, So is that there or is it not there? Like, it's weird. This showed up in the list of things I can actually, it's weird because it wasn't Yeah. Okay. So they, they haven't responded about if it's there or not there. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:05:30):
And this is in the optional

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:32):
Updates. Optional updates that came out yesterday. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:34):
Okay. It actually, so given how critical I could be about Windows update stuff in particular, or Windows 11 in general, I will say the one thing that they do do right is this optional update thing, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> you won't get it by mistake. You can't seek it and get it by mistake. You have to explicitly say, I want to get this thing. So I think that's smart. It does give people who want to give a chance to, you know, want a chance to take a a look at it to do so. Good. there's Mary Jo basically ran down the list of what should be in this update. Only one of those things is there. The other ones are all coming later. That one is going to the, the, the right click ta the task bar to get to the task manager option is going to roll out in the coming days. It's not there today. Now there are you gonna remember, or you should know, these things are actually all built into the system right now. They're, all those features are all there. They just have to,

Mary Jo Foley (00:06:27):
They're there, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:06:27):
Yeah, that's right. So if you Google this, you'll, you can find there's some things you can do to enable these features, including right click the task part to get task managers. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, if you want to do that, you can for me, you know, because I'm working on the book and this sort of has to be the baseline for it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I need this stuff, you know? Yeah. And this task bar thing, which I didn't think was gonna happen cuz they never mentioned it. Well, they mentioned they were working on it. It was in the dev, it was in the dev channel, but we were thinking next spring, you know, something like that. Yep. So I'm gonna have to go back and rewrite some of my more caustic commentary about that. But anyway, <laugh> it's coming. So it's kind of, it's to get slip back into my more normal mode. It's kind of strange how they're rolling this out. You know, they announced it was coming, you everyone went and downloaded it, Everyone got file tabs, which I think is what people were looking for. File Explorer tabs. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But that other stuff is not there. Suggested are not there. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:26):
If you look at the way this blog post is worded, it makes it seem that it is there, Right? Like, it doesn't say, and this will roll out in the coming days. It doesn't say that. It just says it's there. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:37):
<Laugh>. So my theory is some of the stuff might wait for November for the B week, you know, Patch Tuesday, normal update. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But they did say explicitly for the task manager option, which again said was coming until the blog post. That one will be coming in the coming days. Although I suppose November is the coming days. So, you know,

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:59):
<Laugh> right?

Paul Thurrott (00:07:59):
It is great. So it's December, so it's January.

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:02):
Yeah, exactly. No, you know what I don't like about this? I'm putting my Paul Thero hat on right now with this criticism. <Laugh>, I'm gonna say they cannot communicate. And I'm just like, here's why I'm mad about this. Because the, they spent a lot of time in this blog post yesterday saying, Okay, is this how we're gonna make this predictable for people so that it's not, it doesn't seem like we're just doing this woolly nilly. Right? They're like, we're gonna tell you it's coming in the optional update week. You're gonna be able to test it, look at it, check it out, and then it will roll out in the, in one of the subsequent patch Tuesdays. Okay. That sounds like great predictable, like very methodical. And then you get it to this week. And of the 6, 7, 8 features listed, one is there, there's none of the other ones are there. And there's no mention of this at all. Like, where are they?

Paul Thurrott (00:08:49):
You know what's interesting? I'm li I'm listening to explain this, and you're right, you're a hundred percent right. And normally this would outrage me and I feel like they might have just beaten me down at this point <laugh>, because I, I, I hear that this is the case, or I see this is the case and it is the case. You're absolutely a hundred percent right. And I'm like, I just don't, I I can't even summon the outrage anymore. It's just a, you know, Okay, minor. I'm really, Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (00:09:13):
It's kind of minor. But it also, it's like they wanna demonstrate, especially to enterprise and education customers, like this isn't just gonna magically show up and you're gonna be forced to use it, right? Like, there's gonna be controls, there's gonna be a preview period, there's gonna be all this stuff, and then they do this and they roll it out and there's, if they just put like a thing saying, okay, the one feature that's there right now is tab file Explorer and the other ones will be in the coming days. All they have to do is that right? That's

Paul Thurrott (00:09:39):
That, that, that, that's exactly the point. That's exactly right. Yeah. Wait, so the issue here is click

Mary Jo Foley (00:09:44):
And the right click thing, the right click thing on the task bar is that one sets off some red alarms for me, <laugh>, because I'm like, wait, so like you said, this was in preview in the dev channel and then it just seemed to skip outta the dev channel and go into the final build of, of this set of

Paul Thurrott (00:10:02):
Cumulative. Oh no, it didn't seem to, It literally did. That's exactly what happened.

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:06):
So that's pretty weird, right? Like shouldn't it go through release preview, blah, blah, blah. Right. It,

Paul Thurrott (00:10:11):
Look, I'll just say this the, the task bar, as I understand it, Windows 11 is built with saml, which is this descriptive XL type language. Adding a menu item to an existing menu is a trivial matter. Trivial, right? Okay. an event handler that will launch a single application. Not difficult. But yes, I mean they have in the past week alone release two release preview builds of Windows 1122 H two. Like, you know, if, if you've been following along, you'll see dev channel, beta channel release preview channel builds every week. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, there seems to be some, you know, it seems to be progressing as it would, you know, features move their way down the chain. But yeah, this one jumped to the head of line. It, it is a fairly trivial feature. And I think one of the,

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:00):
And something a lot of people wanted

Paul Thurrott (00:11:01):
Clients. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. So question like that they did it

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:06):
<Laugh> it makes the question though, like, why did you ever take it away if it was that trivial to put it back? Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:13):
Well, okay, so what are you doing to me? I'm gonna defend Microsoft. So here's

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:18):
The, what, what

Paul Thurrott (00:11:19):
This is. I know, I know. Maybe it's cuz I'm in Mexico and everything's

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:22):
Just, I think you're eating a certain food that's making you more agreeable. <Laugh>. Yeah. That thing is happening.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:27):
You p side of this conversation. No, it's,

(00:11:34):
It is hard to do what they're trying to do with, with the Windows 11 ui. And what I mean by that is they've decided they're gonna simplify it. There is no way to simplify the Windows UI without taking away features. Right? So you could either be serious about it or you can do what I think they're gonna do, which is dabble in it, and then then slowly over time give into all the criticism and bring everything back. I think that's how it's gonna go. I just don't think there's any other way. I give them a little credit for holding out. Right. I give them a little credit for saying, Hey look, there's no one using the task bar on the sides of the screen at the top of the screen. Statistically, I know there are people, but it's a tiny audience. It doesn't make sense to support that. You have to kind of make a stand, you know? Yeah. Or you don't, You either do it or you don't. So this one I think has some bar because so many people needed it. It was such an obvious thing. But like, Windows 11 is gonna be simpler. It's not. And if it's not, just give up. I mean, so they're, I don't know, they took a stand. So like that I, I don't like the way they're doing things, but I sort, I semi respect that because what they're trying to do is difficult.

(00:12:47):
And please don't make me do that again.

Mary Jo Foley (00:12:49):
<Laugh> as our French har elna notes, there is a footnote, a buried footnote at the end of the blog post yesterday. It says, timing of feature deliveries vary by device OEM region. Okay, Sure.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:03):
Wow. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (00:13:04):
There is, But you guys made this look like it was all there <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:09):
And that's, but that's also not true. That's literally not true. You could have ended that sentences, sentence after the word vary and it would've been true. And the reason is not devices or regions or anything else. It's because they have not shipped them or shipped the little code that flips the bit that gives you the thing, by the way, is already sitting there in your pc, These features are all there. They're all there, Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:13:30):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:31):
Anyway. Yeah. I, whatever I, we can complain that they didn't test the right click task bar thing and they flushed to the front, but it's, but it's not out yet. So maybe this is part of the time. I mean, you know.

Mary Jo Foley (00:13:46):
Yeah. So the right click task bar thing was in the release preview build that went out yesterday. I looked <laugh>. I'm like, Oh. So there it is,

Paul Thurrott (00:13:53):
But that just happened. Okay, there you go. Yeah. So maybe that's the testing period. We'll give it a week. Yeah. Two weeks, you know, whatever it is. And there you go. Broad audience. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:02):
Yeah. The thing I wanna remind enterprise and education users about this weird clause on these set of features is after this bunch of features, like in the next grouping of moments or the set of features, whatever, you'll be able to turn this off by default. If you're an enterprise, if you're running enterprise or education, Right. It'll be off by default. You

Paul Thurrott (00:14:25):
Mean new features off

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:27):
New features will be off coming, new features off. Not this group though, this group of features, the tabs tab pile explorers, suggested actions, all that, that is not off by default for some reason. Like, they're not considering that a moment or a separate grouping of features. It's like part two of Windows 1122 H two that didn't make it into part one. And those are not gonna be off, off by default. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:51):
Yeah. We've talked about this kind of thing a lot, and this is a kind of a new extension of this new way of doing things with Windows. But, you know, we, having been around for a long time and, and liking how things worked in the past, maybe sort of like things like release candidates and rtms and hard stops and blah, blah, blah. And, you know, Windows is this thing that never stops, right? It, it keeps getting updated and, and they've done it with an update now, a feature update. So 22 H two is something that never stops, you know? And so they, they began rolling it out earlier this month. They added some more features. They're gonna add some more features in the spring or whatever they do again, you know, and they may do it four or five times, we don't even know. But this is the, this is the world. There is no, you know, to say that this is the literal list of things that is 22 H two is kind of impossible to say because there'll be more in the future that we don't know about yet.

Mary Jo Foley (00:15:41):
Yeah. Right. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:15:42):
True. It's just a, it's a, it's an ongoing rolling release. It's just, it's weird. I I, I have a hard time with this, but,

Mary Jo Foley (00:15:49):
And then the, but everything after this group is off by default for enterprise and education. But this group is on by default for edge price and education, because no one knows why, because that's

Paul Thurrott (00:16:00):
It. So this is not in the notes, but actually I, I would like to address an issue, which I probably have raised in the past, but one of the side problems with the Windows Insider channels, not mapping to specific Windows releases, not all of them, is that, it's not clear how you can get out of that. Oh, of course. We talked about, Cause Leo's computers stuck. So there has to be this system where people can move between channels or get out of the system entirely. And I've never really addressed this explicitly. I, over the weekend, I think sometime before I left, I looked up their official description of each of the channels. And there seemed to be some, there was some language to the effect of that at some, sometimes the stars will align. They didn't use that wording, but it, they literally said something about build numbers aligning. And at that time you would be able to move between channels, which is something you can't do easily or all right now. Yeah. But the big issue is people who are in the system and want to get out, they want to get off the train when the release comes. There is no the release anymore. Like I said, it's this, this thing that keeps going and going. So Leo's computer's a great example of this. When do we get out, you know, how do we get out of this?

Mary Jo Foley (00:17:07):
If you don't, I'm just thinking of this now. Maybe what if you can't <laugh>? All right, here's the, the process without like, repaving your machine. Right? Without repaving.

Paul Thurrott (00:17:16):
Okay. The two, two problems with that is that's beyond the capabilities of a lot of people. It well, it is. And or is something a lot of people wouldn't want to do because they're gonna lose things. Yeah. That might be OEM pre-install or configurations or whatever it is. They, they just want to go, don't want to go to the effort. You're on Windows, on Arm, you have a very different set of problems because you can't go to, you can't Google download Windows 11 and find an ISO easily, Right? I mean, technically they're out there, but they're not official. And do what you're describing and that that's a huge problem. Yeah. You know, when you PC reset, there should be an option. Do you want to go to the latest ver you know, stable version of Windows 11? Because if, because by default, what you're getting is what's on the pc. So if you do a reset, you'll go, you'll be right back in the whatever channel build stream you're in. Not that you're back in the insider program, but Yeah. You're still repay them. No,

Mary Jo Foley (00:18:08):
They, they call us. They, they're, they've given us a name, continuous innovation, I think is what they call it. These features, Lord. Right. I know. Used should

Paul Thurrott (00:18:18):
Call that water torture

Leo Laporte (00:18:19):
<Laugh>

Mary Jo Foley (00:18:19):
<Laugh>. What if continuous innovation means you can never get outta the insider program like Hotel California, You can't leave what

Paul Thurrott (00:18:26):
You're in. Yeah. It's, I call this the, the one way dead end street. I dunno how I got here, but now I can't leave. You know, the Stephen Ranker. Yeah. Yeah. It, I, They can't do that to people. There are millions of people in the insider program. Not all of them are super tactical, you know, <laugh>, that's a no. I mean, that's just not the right thing to do. There. There have been ways to get out. Well, there's a way in the ui Leo did it, you know, I know he can't, He's a, he can't get out.

Mary Jo Foley (00:18:51):
No. I've got other people that

Leo Laporte (00:18:52):
Can't. I'm feeling really

Paul Thurrott (00:18:53):
Bad. He's, he's the real victim here. I'm the real

Mary Jo Foley (00:18:55):
Victim. <Laugh>, I'm

Leo Laporte (00:18:56):
Feeling so bad. I don't, I haven't really paying that much attention to it. Honest.

Mary Jo Foley (00:19:00):
No, you're not Just the only one.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:01):
Play the victim card. We're gonna get, we're gonna get you some compensation. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (00:19:05):
No. Y no. Yesterday somebody tweeted to me and they said, I don't know why you're acting like tabbed File Explorer is something new. I've had it for a while. I'm like, Are you in release preview? And he comes back, Okay, face pump. Oops. Yes I am. Oops. Right. Yeah. And he saw, he's like, I didn't know I was, or I didn't think I was. Well,

Leo Laporte (00:19:21):
Remember last week we discovered I had tab file, explore, didn't even know it. Now I am right clicking on my task bar and all I get is taskforce and things.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:30):
Right. Right. That's what everyone's saying. Yeah. That's, that's the common experience. Okay. Yeah. None of those other new features are, to my knowledge, available anywhere on any pc. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:19:38):
I, I mean, big deal. Right? So you, I mean, everybody knows you can hit control, delete to get to the task manager. I don't,

Paul Thurrott (00:19:45):
Leo, I am gonna die on this hill. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:19:49):
I mean, I'm,

Paul Thurrott (00:19:50):
I don't have to look. They're bringing it back. Muscle. Muscle. The point is they are bringing, But listen, no one knows more. Well, that's not fair to say, but I know every single way there is to launch this

Leo Laporte (00:19:59):
Program. Of course. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:59):
But, but I only do it this one way. And I, and it is one year later and I still write, click the task book. Oh, okay. I see the one stupid option. And then move the mouse over to the, you know, I do this every day, but almost every day, you know?

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:13):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:14):
Anyway, it's coming back. So that's good.

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:16):
Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:17):
And once it does, I guarantee that 50% of the time I will select task bar options by mistake. Because those two things are really close to each other. Yeah. Alphabetically, you know, we'll see

Leo Laporte (00:20:28):
Alphabetically,

Paul Thurrott (00:20:29):
Well, task task manager,

Leo Laporte (00:20:32):
Task bar setting. We're C week alphabetically.

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:34):
Yes, that's

Paul Thurrott (00:20:36):
Right. Also phonetically.

Leo Laporte (00:20:37):
Yeah. See, see, I told you dev channel anything to report in the dev and beta channels. Anything else? I mean, we're,

Paul Thurrott (00:20:46):
We're talking about the release channel here, right? That's the difference.

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:49):
The mainstream,

Paul Thurrott (00:20:50):
Well, theres three, there's three cha. So actually I need to go look at this more closely, but there might have been some language in today's, or yesterday's, I guess it was release preview build, which we don't even have the notes. No, Related to the end of the, the room, whenever I'm, I hope to see this happen.

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:07):
Oh, the, the, the slamming

Paul Thurrott (00:21:10):
Of the window as we call

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:12):
It. Hearing, Yeah, the opening and closing of the magic window. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:21:14):
The magic window. Yeah. Because now that this is happening, maybe they could tie it to November since it's optional now, but Oh yeah, maybe that should be the window from now until November. Make it, make that the window anyway.

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:25):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:25):
Yeah. So we have gotten new Devon beta channel bills so good. You had, I I, I erased what Mary show I put in there, so I apologize because Lauren had written an article, but there was some it related stuff in the dev channel today

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:44):
Lost over yeah, there was Stack Orchestrator changes for people who manage Windows, manage up Windows updates. And then there were a bunch of smaller things like some tweaks to the clipboard and voice typing and a couple other things. So Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:01):
Yeah. There's a Microsoft store update that no one should care about. This little popup videos about things. Yeah. There's some widget UI changes coming. There's a start menu change coming that they described it did not show, but if you've

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:12):
Ever badging, what's that even mean in start menu?

Paul Thurrott (00:22:16):
So if you have a pending update and you bring up the start menu, that little power button in the bottom right will have symbols on the various choices. Right? Meaning it's timed update. I think what they mean is they'll have a badge on your user profile picture on the left side. And if you click on that, you get the various options. And maybe they'll, I don't know what it will say cuz they didn't show it, but something, you know, maybe every once in a while Windows, you get a message that says you need to reconnect to your Microsoft account for some reason. Yeah. Maybe it's related to that kind of thing. Mm. They never showed an image, so I don't know exactly. But that's, it's gonna be in there somewhere.

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:48):
Okay. Yep. Yeah, fairly small, like a lot of fixes, mostly in small tweaks. Nothing big in that.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:56):
Right, Right. And then the beta channel, which was last week, got some tweaks to the system tray, which there's, you know, there, there's screwing around with kind of the, this overflow change. Right. So if you click on the little carrot button that's next to the system tray in the task bar, you'll get like a little popup window and it looks a certain way. Right now it's probably looked this way since Windows eight, I'm guessing. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:23):
Mm-Hmm.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:24):
<Affirmative> it hasn't really changed, but it is changing with this new update we just got at some point, some, you know, in the coming days. So it's gonna look like more like a Windows 11 ui. And so I'm not actually a hundred percent sure, but I would imagine, Yeah, I think it's just, I think there's, that's going through the beta channel as we speak. So it's gonna probably, probably work its way down to the

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:46):
Mm-Hmm.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:47):
<Affirmative>, you know, release, preview and then eventually to everybody. Yeah. And they got that photos app that we talked about a few weeks ago that doesn't have the video editor in it anymore that nobody should have ever used.

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:59):
Although that's another one that's not there. Like if you read the blog post that says the photo app, which is coming at the end of October, so maybe next week will won't have the iCloud integration until November. So neither of the two things are there. The re review, the revised photo app or the iCloud integration, neither one's there, even though they're both in the block.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:19):
And I could imagine those pairing at different times, Right? Like the

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:23):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:24):
Next week or the week after mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know, they'll put it out in stable, but it won't have iCloud and then sometime in November it will have iCloud.

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:30):
Yep.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:31):
Something like

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:32):
That. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:33):
That's my guess. Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:35):
Me too. Same. You know what this is gonna make doing your book really hard going forward, because things aren't gonna be like in groups. They're gonna just come out all over the place. Like your book would be like a moment in time of when something is there, and then the next week it could be different.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:52):
<Laugh>. That's always kind of been the case. I mean the, obviously when you're doing two feature updates a year, that was kind of problematic. Apps could be updated at any time. That could be kind of a problem. But I literally redesigned the layer of the, the way the book is structured to kind of accommodate this. There were other reasons, but I wanted to make it much easier. Cause it's hard if you only have you know, 20 chapters or whatever and the really big chapters, it's hard to find all of the places where something might be. But if you have a lot, a very large number of small chapters, it's a little bit easier. So I, the Windows 11 and the way they're doing things has, you know, was part of the delay in the book. Cause I didn't really rethink how I presented this information. Okay. But I already have to make changes. I it's, Yeah. Book's not even out yet for most people. <Laugh> and I already have to make changes. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:46):
Service packs. You're gonna have service packs for your book.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:49):
That's, Well, that's the point of fi book, right? It can be up in at any

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:52):
Time. Yeah, it's true,

Paul Thurrott (00:25:53):
True. Apparently.

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:56):
Yeah. Yeah. That's good. <Laugh>. Oh yeah. I wanna talk about the next item though. Or I actually don't wanna talk about it.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:08):
I figured I was curious. She never addressed this anywhere.

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:12):
Yeah. So, so you just, at Ignite, at Ignite, somebody had on their pc, was it Stevie Batist? Somebody had

Paul Thurrott (00:26:23):
I'm surprised it wasn't Jerry Nixon

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:26):
<Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:29):
It was the guy that said that. Oh, Jerry Nixon last our fall guy. Yeah. Yeah. The bad man. Yeah. Hey Jerry, throw out the red shirt.

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:36):
Write

Paul Thurrott (00:26:36):
Another, Don't worry about the presentation with Yeah. We're gonna need you to write another blog post. <Laugh>, we, we, we put the images in for you. It's fine.

Leo Laporte (00:26:45):
Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:47):
No. Somebody had on their pc an image that looked like a whole different UI supposedly of Windows 11 right on, on their machine.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:58):
Yep.

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:59):
And everybody was talking

Paul Thurrott (00:27:00):
Now to the untrained eye, most people might not have, most people would never have notice.

Leo Laporte (00:27:04):
So here's the question. Did Mary Jo notice it?

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:06):
No. No. And somebody showed it to me. They're like, Look at this. It's so different. And I'm like, Okay, I'm not kidding. Like, what is different here,

Leo Laporte (00:27:13):
Wait a minute. Don't tell me, just tell me. Okay. I have no idea. A floating task. What's this thing at the top? Is that it?

Paul Thurrott (00:27:20):
Or four differences? There are four

Leo Laporte (00:27:22):
Differences. Okay. There's a floating test bar

Paul Thurrott (00:27:24):
At the top floating task bar. Now, floating task bar is this, this, what is it means it's not backed to the bottom of the screen. It's floating

Leo Laporte (00:27:31):
<Laugh>

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:32):
Woo woo.

Leo Laporte (00:27:34):
Well,

Paul Thurrott (00:27:35):
Hold on a second. Now why would you do that? Right? Why? Like what? Don't worry about the

Leo Laporte (00:27:40):
Copying

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:40):
Apple.

Leo Laporte (00:27:40):
What is in the test bar? Is it different? Is it d Not

Paul Thurrott (00:27:44):
You gotta go, you gotta go to the bottom. The

Leo Laporte (00:27:46):
Bottom, bottom. Oh, it is floating. I see what you're saying. There's something underneath it. Apple doesn't do. That's does it? Oh yeah, it does. Well, yeah, it does. It sort

Paul Thurrott (00:27:53):
Of does, right? Yeah. So the apple, the os the Macs doc, sorry,

Leo Laporte (00:27:57):
Floats

Paul Thurrott (00:27:58):
Re resizes to, to accommodate the number of icons that are there.

Leo Laporte (00:28:02):
That's

Paul Thurrott (00:28:02):
Right. And, and it floats. Yes. It also has animations, you know, mouse over the icons, they kind of resize and so forth. Yeah. I think it's pretty clear, and I don't think there's any reason to deny that Microsoft is very clearly eyeing the, the Apple aesthetic. They want something that Sure. There, you know, appeal to people because it's good. Okay. So, but you know, pragmatically, I will say not, not that this is a reason or a good reason to do something like this. The one of the major shifts that's taking over the PC industry this year, that we're moving finely belatedly from 16 by nine displays to 16 by 10. Right. And also three by two, in some cases, that means you have more room in the vertical. So if you're gonna lose a couple of pixels down there, because you'd try to be cute with the graphics, it doesn't hurt that much. It's

Leo Laporte (00:28:45):
Not functional though, Right? It's just, it's, it's not functional aesthetic. Okay. I don't like it. That's right. Put it back down there. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:52):
But here, but, okay, so the other, the other differences are at the top. So there are three things up there.

Leo Laporte (00:28:57):
There's this thing,

Paul Thurrott (00:28:57):
There's a, there's a floating thing in the middle. There is a, a thing over there in the left, which is the widgets interface, right? And then over on the right is the stuff that is the system tray today. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:29:08):
So the, Oh, Windows 11 just moved up here. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:12):
Yeah. So when Windows 11 originally shipped, there was no widgets, right? So you had the, the icons were centered in the middle of the task bar. Then you had those, the system tray stuff over on the right. And it kind of

Leo Laporte (00:29:25):
Took,

Paul Thurrott (00:29:26):
Put the whole

Leo Laporte (00:29:26):
Thing out of balance. This is Aply, right? This, this is this is so that Mac users can be right at home, I think. So when they switch to Windows 11.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:34):
So at some point they, I'm sorry, there were widgets, but they were just part of the normal for the mill. So eventually they moved the widgets out to the corner, and that kind of made the task bar a little more balanced looking. But now they're taking that stuff out of the task bar, which I think will eventually lead to them letting that thing resize with the number of icons you have. Which again, not functional, but an aesthetic thing. Yeah. So you get, you get that stuff out of the corners and it makes the task bar make a little more sense. I mean, at this point just guys, just call it a doc and let the icons resize on us over whatever. The thing that's really different between this ui, this is just a photo, but between the picture and what happens today on Mac Os and has always happens since Mac was 10, the original release is, and actually dating back to classic Mac.

(00:30:15):
Mac is Mac has a system menu that's always on screen. And if you have an app running that app's menu takes over that menu. So we don't do this in Windows. Menus are associated with the app window in Windows. Right. So they're not, they're, it's weird. They're kind of stealing space at the top and the bottom so that all the gains we just made from 16 by 10 will now go away. Yeah. Although there's different ways to do things, right? If you use a mobile, any mobile device, you know, you can maximize apps and the the status member, the tap goes away, or maybe an overlays on top of it or whatever. So we can work around that. The, the problem with the system tray being the upright for a maximized window today is that that's where the Windows buttons are in a Windows window, Right?

(00:30:57):
The minimize, maximize, restore and closed button are all up in that corner. So they can't really be under something, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And it's just a picture. We don't have any information about how this is actually gonna work. Also, this may not be the final design, but I think this is, here's, here's what I like Jesus, I'm doing this again. So here, here's, I have to give Microsoft a little credit here, because assuming this is true, and this is what it's gonna, this is how it's gonna evolve. When Microsoft went from Windows 10 to Windows 11, from a UI perspective, lots of complaints, right? It is prettier, but you're losing all this functionality, right? That's the thing I talked about earlier with the simplification. That's what they did. But I think the transition from Windows 11 to this is a, gonna be easier.

(00:31:39):
It's a more seamless transition. Like this is more like Windows 11, and thus I don't think will be a big deal for most people. But also it show, I kind of hate myself for saying this <laugh>. It shows that there's some actual forethought happening somewhere at Microsoft about the future and about where this UI is heading. And I did not get that feeling with Windows 11 at all, because with Windows 11, I felt like they just threw up the baby with the bath water or whatever, you know, when they oversimplified the ui, it was like they forgot that there were all these people using Windows and that they all did things in a certain way. And I, that really rubbed me the wrong way. We talked about that start menu video. Remember that it was the horrible people and it clearly had never used Windows designing the Windows Star menu. But when I look at this, I see something a little different because now we have to just accept that Windows 11 is a thing, right? So Windows 11 is here, and if we're gonna go from Windows 11 to that thing, I think that, I think it's fine. I I, I mean, we'll see, right? We don't, no one's using it yet. We don't know what it's like, but I think

Mary Jo Foley (00:32:43):
It looks good. And it may be, that might be Windows 12, right? That might be,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:46):
That's right. I, yeah, I think that might be how they, how they handle that. Yeah. It might be

Mary Jo Foley (00:32:50):
Windows 12. I, I have to tell you, I'm not exaggerating or pretending here. I did not see what was that different. I,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:57):
And I am not exaggerating when I say the second I saw this, I thought Mary Jo was not gonna see any difference in this photo. But not to sing single you out. I don't think most people would have noticed a difference. Now

Leo Laporte (00:33:09):
You will, when you use it, I think you would notice it when you use it. These are the moving, just moving the task part of the upper right hand corner is a significant,

Paul Thurrott (00:33:17):
No, it's not the task part I system. So think about it, think about it from this perspective. Like, what do, what do most people do? You even look at that stuff. The big thing is maybe the date and time is gonna be a

Mary Jo Foley (00:33:28):
Different place. That's, that's the only thing I look at is the date.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:31):
I think for most people, that's it. And I, I'll just say I, I use the Mac. I mean, not every day, not every week even, but I do use the Mac frequently, and the Mac has, you know, like I said, that top level menu, that's what the time is up and the right et cetera. And I don't find that transition to be particularly difficult. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And, and the future, I'm gonna find it to be really easy because they're gonna be identical. Yeah. And I, I do think this is them moving toward e moving even more toward a Mac like aesthetic. Hmm.

Leo Laporte (00:34:00):
Huh.

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:01):
Why not force Apple users to move to a Windows aesthetic?

Leo Laporte (00:34:04):
Yeah. Really?

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:05):
We're the majority.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:07):
Wow. So I, I mean, I, I think that that is what we have been doing for many years, actually, right? I mean, yes, but, and let's keep going. It's a good strategy. Okay. Well, except that Mac has had a lot of good things happening lately with the Apple silicon chip. That's they're not, most of the max that most people we buy are not unreasonably expensive. I think they're, I think this battle is getting a little more heated than it's been, you know, for maybe ever <laugh>, I dunno, for some long period of time. But I don't know the most, I'd have to look this up, but I mean, the Mac market share, the most recent quarter was somewhere 11%. It's double digits. So, you know, they were stuck in three to 5% for like, many, many years when Steve Jobs was around. But that's not really the case anymore. So maybe they're feeling a little pressure to step it up and give people less reason to walk away from Windows, you know, than they might have before.

Leo Laporte (00:35:11):
Or if you're switching to Windows, you'll feel more at home, or Right. They just think it's prettier.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:17):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'd like, like I said, I'd like to think there was some forethought going on here. But yeah, maybe this

Leo Laporte (00:35:23):
Is pretty, Well, we don't know that this is anything, but just somebody, we don't, this guy could be running star or something. Right.

Mary Jo Foley (00:35:30):
<Laugh>. Right. We don't know if it's a real thing or like when it's coming or if it's just a

Paul Thurrott (00:35:36):
Mockup or guys listen, we don't, we don't know. One of the theories here was like, this was a mistake. They didn't mean to show it. I absolutely not as, as guy as I think as Microsoft can be in some cases. Yeah. This was done on purpose. I think this was done. Some enthusiasts will see it and, and have a, We could see the conversation that we're having like today and other people are having on, on,

Leo Laporte (00:35:55):
You think they're pretty cagey, huh?

Paul Thurrott (00:35:57):
Not usually, but I, I, in this case, I really do think this was done on purpose and that the idea was to get it, get it out, and see how people react. And I think most of the reaction has been,

Leo Laporte (00:36:07):
Was this at a session or a keynote? Was this like, how public was this?

Mary Jo Foley (00:36:11):
It was a surface event, wasn't it?

Leo Laporte (00:36:13):
Was this at the surface event?

Paul Thurrott (00:36:15):
I think it was part of the surface event, which was tacked onto the first day of Ignite. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:36:20):
So the, the, the thing that happened with Panas Benet at seven in the morning my time. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:24):
Yeah. So who, who's

Leo Laporte (00:36:25):
Gonna watch? So I didn't notice it either. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:27):
No, but I, like I said, most people won't, It's, you know, from a long distance, especially if it's just kind of in the background of whatever. It's quick. Yeah. Or it flashes, it's quick. You wouldn't, it, it basics are all the same, you know? Yeah. but people like me, people like Tom Warren or people from Windows Central, whatever, they're gonna see this for one second and be like, Oh my God, that's

Leo Laporte (00:36:44):
Different. This was in the, that looks like in the demonstration of Microsoft Designer, which is in beta. Okay. I mean, Right. Isn't that what we're looking at? There is

Paul Thurrott (00:36:52):
Design. Yeah. So here's something that's coming in the future, running on something that's coming in the future. Right? Right.

Leo Laporte (00:36:57):
But with the same folded paper wallpaper,

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:00):
<Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:37:01):
Well, yes. Yes. So we haven't designed the Windows 12 wallpaper yet, I guess, but

Leo Laporte (00:37:06):
Yeah. You think this is Windows 12? Is that what you think it

Paul Thurrott (00:37:09):
Is? Yeah. I do. I think that's how this is gonna fall out. Yep.

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:11):
Yeah. Or maybe a concept one of many.

Leo Laporte (00:37:14):
Well, you have to do something. You just have, I mean, even

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:19):
If it's, it has to look different. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:37:20):
Even if does it's pointless. You have to do something so that you can distinguish it.

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:24):
Right. You okay? If you're gonna pretend Windows 12 is a big departure for Windows 11. Exactly. Which is what they will pretend. Yes. Right. Has to look different, right?

Leo Laporte (00:37:33):
Yes, that's exactly right. <Laugh>. So there,

Paul Thurrott (00:37:35):
If Windows 12 really is different Ooh, looking different is a big

Leo Laporte (00:37:40):
Part of it. Ooh, true. Look at you being, if

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:43):
A floating task bar is the differentiator, we've got a problem here.

Paul Thurrott (00:37:49):
<Laugh>. It's the fresh maker. Mary Jo. I'm ready.

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:52):
All

Paul Thurrott (00:37:52):
Right. The Windows 11 UI is already getting tired. Time to move on.

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:55):
Windows 12 field guide time for the Windows 12 field

Paul Thurrott (00:37:58):
<Laugh>. That's right, That's right.

Leo Laporte (00:38:00):
Let me take a little time out here and talk about our sponsor while Paul and Mary Jo switch heads again. Cuz I don't know what happened there. <Laugh>. Hey, Don, you Yeah, they're just they're just two they're two different for this episode.

Paul Thurrott (00:38:15):
I'm not comfortable with it, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:38:18):
In a contemplate. Paul's happy and Mary Jo's ranting. I don't get it.

Paul Thurrott (00:38:22):
I feel it's like itchy. I don't, What is this feeling?

Leo Laporte (00:38:25):
<Laugh>. Oh, I'm so jealous of your breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's all I can say. I'm just so jealous. Mary Jo, do you feel the same way when you look at the foodies eating? You go. Looks good. Yeah, it looks really good. It does look good. Yeah. Lot of vegetarian options in Mexico. Yes.

Mary Jo Foley (00:38:40):
Which looks very nice. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I'm always like, Oh look, I could eat something

Leo Laporte (00:38:43):
More <laugh>. Oh, everything. Everything.

Paul Thurrott (00:38:45):
This neighborhood is full of vegan and vegetarian restaurants.

Leo Laporte (00:38:48):
It's great. You know, it's a poor country. So meat is not like in America. Like every meal. I got a big bunch of meat in it. In fact, I would chew the meat often <laugh> in Mexico. Right. They have a

Paul Thurrott (00:39:00):
Also of those taco pitches were vegetarian. I dunno if

Leo Laporte (00:39:02):
You caught that, but Nice. They have a, a thing they do, which is like flattened out beef or something. Mm-Hmm. And it's really, it's,

Paul Thurrott (00:39:10):
It's, it's a I it's, it's a terra. It's skirt steak.

Leo Laporte (00:39:13):
Yeah. It's dry and terrible. And, and there's no reason to eat it. No. It's wonderful. I love it. <Laugh> <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:20):
Well, I eat it every chance I

Leo Laporte (00:39:22):
Get later. Do you really? Yeah. Yeah. I was, I was, I'm not, I it's like I'm a kind, I'm not. Yeah, okay. It's cuz it's not laden with fat. They probably don't go to a corn lot.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:33):
It's cooked per No, that's true. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. It's it's not, it's perfect. It's really, it's

Leo Laporte (00:39:38):
Really good. Yeah. It's how cows used to taste. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. It's what's for dinner anyway. I would, I would go all vegetarian happily there cuz there's, there's such variety in the cooking, the molas and everything. I mean, just amazing. Just amazing. I'm so jealous. And, and you're in Mexico City, so you don't get a day of the dead particularly, or No, you said that they're Oh, touristy now.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:02):
They they do it now. Yeah. And it's revving up every, there's like little skull things all over the place,

Leo Laporte (00:40:06):
Like sugar skulls love this things. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:08):
Yeah. So the combination of Halloween and Day of the Dead is, might be the biggest, the big one, I mean, might be bigger than Independence Day. It's crazy here.

Leo Laporte (00:40:17):
Well, we're gonna go down to the Zuka in just a bit and do some more for Windows Weekly. But first a word from our fine sponsor, drta. You've heard me talk about Drta before. This is all about compliance, right? If your organization is having a tough time achieving continuous compliance as it quickly grows and scales, I got a solution for you. If manual evidence collecting is slowing your team down, I got an answer as G two's highest rated Cloud compliance software. Drta, D R A T A. It's like data with an R in there. Drta streamlines your SOC two your ISO 27,001, your PCI dss, your gdpr, your hipaa, your other compliance frameworks and provides 24 hour continuous control monitoring. So you could focus on scaling securely. See, I didn't realize you have to do continuous compliance. I could see how that would be difficult.

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Paul Thurrott (00:44:10):
Let sell you guys on Microsoft Edge. Let me

Leo Laporte (00:44:12):
Tell you, it's the best browser there is. You love it. Oh, Marty Lord who are you, what do, where did you do with Paul? Is this guy I know you're using Edge really, Paul Really well.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:28):
I have, I have to. Right. So Edge is a part of Whens Love and it's in, I have to write a about for the book and unfortunately trying to ignore Edge for years, <laugh> since he start get No, I mean, it's been getting terrible, right? So, okay, I gotta dive into this. And here is You don't like it? Do you like it? No, you know what? Honestly, it's, it's, it's okay. Like once you get, you disable some stuff, it's good. It, it's, it's a little busy. Yeah. it's, it's very Microsoft centric. Obviously you disable things like the coupons and the sidebar, the shopping nonsense. Yeah. Yeah. There's all this stuff, you know, like, it, it is not unique to Edge, but Windows does this now, Office does this, frankly, you know, a problem that I've had for a long time, people who move to different computers a lot is you have to constantly reconfigure things when you go to a new computer.

(00:45:22):
It doesn't have any sense of remembering whatever settings you have. And that's kind of a problem. So of course for the book, I'm using multiple, just in the process of this little experiment, I've been, you know, having to redo the same configuration changes over and over again. I mean, even back when Edge was okay, you know, when it first came out, the chromium version I, I ch I challenge any normal person to find the location of where you set the default search engine, for example. I mean, it's like crazy how that works. There's no real sense of tracking in this browser despite the anti tracking, despite the fact that there's a lot of language about it in settings. So you're gonna need extensions for that kind of stuff. Which is true of most browsers, you know, if you're coming from Chrome, that's nothing new.

(00:46:09):
 But it's a busy, busy browser. And I don't understand. So I really, I mean we've talked about this a lot, you know, not using it and looking at the pictures of it, I've been like, I don't understand what they're doing using it. I'm like, I, I don't understand what, I don't understand what they're doing. So I, you know, there's this market of people who are Microsoft people, right? And they, they use Office, they use Edge, they or they pay for Microsoft 365, you know, maybe they buy surface computers. Probably were Windows phone fans back in the day. And I'm sure they're all loyal using Microsoft Edge and they're doing fine, you know, they're fine. But coming from Brave where security and privacy was automatic and the thing was really lightweight and the UI got out of the way and it's been a little bit of a, a little bit of a transition.

(00:46:58):
It's kinda, it's interesting also just for the purposes of writing about this for the book, I can tell you that there is no such thing as an Edge chapter, Edges a section. This could be a small book by itself. It's kind of insane how many topics there are just related to Edge, you know tabs, collections, security, privacy, media extensions, web apps, on and on, you know, shopping, like, you know, can't stand, but you know, whatever. So Microsoft has their own own, I feel like Microsoft is try kind of, in the nineties we would've looked at this as very predatory. Of course, now they're not in a lead, so it doesn't matter as much, but it is like they're trying to replace everything, you know, that's out there with their own stuff and Yeah. Cuz that's what they got hard trouble for in the nineties is having browser. Yeah. Honestly, Yeah. If you brought someone to the, you know, to the future from 1998 and said, Hey look, this is what Microsoft's doing now. They would've been like, Yeah, of course they are. They're terrible. You know? Right. <laugh>. I don't think, I don't think many people here, because I think the lens is focused elsewhere right now on Apple and Amazon and Google and Meta, you know? Yeah. So I I I, I don't, I don't like it, but it's okay. It's okay. It's working.

Mary Jo Foley (00:48:15):
I think a lot of what's going on, like we keep, we keep talking about this has to do with the way Microsoft's organized, right? Like organizationally, Bing Edge and advertising and MSN all sit together. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> like this is a one's

Paul Thurrott (00:48:29):
Group's, right? That's exactly right.

Mary Jo Foley (00:48:30):
So this is why this is happening. It's kind of it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy, but also once side reinforcing the other. Like you could see, you could just imagine this like, hey, where the WebEx key team and the WebEx key team says, you know, how can we get more people to use Microsoft News? Oh, let's build this into the operating system. Let's build into the browser, let's build this in. You know, it just, I'm sure this is what's happening. I can't say I'm sure, but

Paul Thurrott (00:48:58):
It would be No, no, you're right. I no, you are a hundred percent right. I, I do know explicitly that one of the things that Terry Meers had to deal with when he ran Windows, when they were making Windows 10 was you need to make this product make sense within the, this company, which is now cloud focused. And that's why we see things like Windows as a service where Windows is, is serviced as if it were a cloud service, when in fact it is anything. But, and I, and moving that forward to edge and the, the MSN being et cetera, advertising, of course it's, this was inevitable. I have also been trying to use Edge on my phone and on my iPad, and that has been interesting as well. I, I, one of the things you can do on Edge on the desktop is, well I use a, actually I use a third party, but for the third party new tab screen, but for the book, of course I'm not doing that.

(00:49:47):
I'm using what's built into Edge and you can make that a minimalist experience. Like you can actually turn off the news and stuff like that, which I like mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I don't think you can do that on mobile unless I'm missing something. Which is, you know, and you know, if I'm right, I mean, if someone can, you know, I'm sure everyone will let me know if I'm wrong. I you're, you're never shy about that. But if if, if, if I'm right and you can't turn off that newsfeed thing in the news, in the new tab screen on Edge Mobile, then you know, there's another little example of, you know, just a little subtle kind of passive aggressive. We're gonna put you in front of our stuff.

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:19):
Huh. So I'm looking, I use Edge, I use Edge on my phone, surprisingly. Okay. And I don't see any new stuff.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:28):
No. Oh, good. That maybe I am missing something. I

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:31):
Hope I am. I don't know

Paul Thurrott (00:50:31):
If it feels I'm on a iPhone and iPad. I don't know,

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:35):
<Laugh>. I'm like, what

Paul Thurrott (00:50:37):
Have we done? Okay, well that's good. That's fine. Well,

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:39):
If you click the three buttons in the middle, a bunch of things pop up that you can do. But I don't see news there either. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:50:45):
What, that's what I mean. Like I don't, I don't see a way to, No, I don't see it. I've looked, I've looked, I have looked.

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:51):
I wonder how come I don't see it. That's weird. Okay. Anyway, I must have done something collections. I see history downloads and favorites. That's all I see.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:58):
Well, okay. I'm sorry. What I mean is if, so, if you start, if you open a new blog, a new new blog. Yeah. If you open a new tab.

Mary Jo Foley (00:51:04):
Tab mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:06):
<Affirmative>, Right? You get this, you know, nice pitch, you get some icons, and then you scroll up from the bottom and you get feed. And I know maybe there's a, maybe I can just turn it off. I don't know. I've never, I've not found the way. It's not super important that, Yeah. It's just a, this is something, this is not gonna be a big focus for the book, but I'm, I am, you know, I'm trying to use Edge everywhere. I'm trying to do the thing where you mm-hmm. <Affirmative> hating it. It's okay. I just, I'd rather not even look at it

Mary Jo Foley (00:51:36):
<Laugh> a

Paul Thurrott (00:51:37):
Little, you know, cuz you can use Edge for passwords and blah, blah, blah. I,

Mary Jo Foley (00:51:40):
Yeah. It's, I feel like I've locked how, what my edge browser looks like down so much on the desktop that it doesn't look all that different. Like I just, I shut everything off pretty much.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:51):
That's right. And you can do, Yeah. And actually it's, it's, I I like that they let you do that. That's smart. Yeah. Like I said, I don't, For me, it would've been huge if they could have somehow saved this setting and synced it. Yeah. But you know, they do have cross pc, cross device sync. That's the first option you encounter when you run it the first time. And none of the things I wanna turn off in that list of things you can configure, so.

Mary Jo Foley (00:52:17):
Okay. <laugh> Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:52:19):
I do. That's a key thing for me is the sinking in any professor that I use. But they all do it sync.

Mary Jo Foley (00:52:25):
I don't sink mine.

Leo Laporte (00:52:27):
I, I

Paul Thurrott (00:52:28):
Want book. I mean, I use so many, I use so many devices. I have to, And

Leo Laporte (00:52:32):
So here's a tip from PC guy 80 88 who's pretty good. Turn off Startup Boost in Ms. Edge, otherwise Windows, Preloads, a bunch of extensions. That's right. Startup Boost will speed up your startup if you want those extensions. But we'll also load stuff you don't want.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:49):
Actually, one of the things I don't like about Edge is sort of the opposite of this tip, which is, it has things that are designed to save energy and also save system resources. And I would like to turn all of those things off. Yeah. So one of the things I turn off is like sleeping tabs. I mean, I get it, but I want to go to a tab and have it actually display, not have it be dimmed out and then reload from scratch every time I mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know, I, that's not how I work. So.

Leo Laporte (00:53:12):
Yeah. So are you using Brave Now is your primary?

Paul Thurrott (00:53:16):
Yes. Yep. Everywhere.

Leo Laporte (00:53:17):
Brave just announced, which is great. That they automatically block cookie banners, which is great. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. That's good. 

Paul Thurrott (00:53:25):
There's a I didn't put this in the notes cuz it's a Mac topic, but Duck Do Go has their own browser now and or in beta and it's on the Mac. It's coming to Windows this year later in at least the limited beta. One of the things they do in addition to blocking ads is they actually one of the, like I use that next DNS thing to block ads, but there's still like a blank space where the ad was. So this browser will remove the ads and then Oh, nice. Make the blank space too, which is nice. Oh, cool. Yeah. So, yeah, that's kind of neat. But anyway, we'll talk about that when it comes to Windows, but so I miss Brave already.

Leo Laporte (00:54:01):
I miss a brave already. I

Paul Thurrott (00:54:03):
Like the way it sinks. I like, it's, it's such a different way of doing things. Like I, I really,

Leo Laporte (00:54:07):
I should give it another try. You know, I use Firefox with U Block origin. Yeah. And it does all that. And it has, but I have a feeling brave is also you know, kinda out of the box doing all that stuff. So that's kind of cool. I just, I'm not crazy about the idea of these bat tokens or are you able to kind of eliminate all that crypto stuff that they

Paul Thurrott (00:54:28):
Yep. Yeah. Yeah. You can turn it all off. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Leo, I gotta tell you, there are people looking at the penthouse right now.

Leo Laporte (00:54:33):
Stop it. Go away. <Laugh>. Do not look at my house.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:37):
I've never seen a human in there before.

Leo Laporte (00:54:39):
That's mine. And this is your across the street neighbors? Yeah. Okay. Damm it

Paul Thurrott (00:54:45):
You the

Leo Laporte (00:54:46):
Other, Maybe I should come down and make an all cash offer right now.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:49):
<Laugh>. They would, they would take it like,

Leo Laporte (00:54:51):
Yeah, it's been, it sounds like it's been on the market for six months. Yeah. Yeah. Is it too

Paul Thurrott (00:54:56):
Expensive? That one's expensive. Yeah. It's too expensive for here. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:54:58):
Okay. Well, tell me, do those people look fancy <laugh>? No.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:06):
There's a, there's a two-tier floating staircase that goes up to the rooftop deck.

Leo Laporte (00:55:11):
Must have, must have.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:13):
I I I, I've often, every time I look at, I, I think this is how I would drunkenly die if I lived there. Uhhuh.

Leo Laporte (00:55:19):
Yeah. Well that's good to know. I'm just trying to navigate this. You you got an exit <laugh> exit strategy. Yeah, Yeah. If we buy it, then you can come over and jump off <laugh>. So then you get the best of both worlds. Yeah. Yikes. Yeah. no, I wouldn't let you do that. I would I would glass it in or something. You have the think Padd X 13 s s means super

Paul Thurrott (00:55:45):
Snap, a dragon

Leo Laporte (00:55:47):
Snapping dragon, so you get windows

Paul Thurrott (00:55:50):
On the latest. Yeah. You know, I, I this has been a really weird year for laptop reviews and I've had so many devices in my house and it's, it's really just bogged me down a bunch. But one of the things I do is I move back and forth between different machines at the same time. Not all 12 of them or whatever, but, you know, the newest two or three or whatever. And this one I was particularly interested in because of all the obvious reasons, right? We think this might be the future. What does this thing look like? And I'll, I'll just say, just hitting on the positives,

Leo Laporte (00:56:19):
It's a think pad

Paul Thurrott (00:56:21):
<Laugh> well just, I mean, of the platform, platform itself. Yeah. it is by the way, the first Windows on Arm ThinkPad the software platform that Microsoft creates, right? Windows Onar, Windows 11 on Arm has gotten better, right? X 64 emulation. Now there's also a technology that will allow developers to mix and match arm and actually 86 code in the same project. The idea there is that they don't have to do a total rewrite of an app, right? They can start putting arm bits into it. Smart. I have no idea if anyone is even using it. I've never seen one report of anyone using that technology, but they've done what they can do, I think, on the software end, right? To make this better. Qualcomm likewise has done a, a reasonable job, although we're hoping for a much bigger advance soon with the new via base stuff of improving the hardware.

(00:57:07):
Although, as I've seen and as I've often predicted if you bulk this thing up enough so that it's powerful enough to run like a core I five, you're gonna give up battery life. And boy do they give up battery life. Like, so they've, the basics are okay. And if, and I actually, I just mentioned this, this mythical Microsoft person, if you're that person and you run Microsoft Edge, which is native on this platform, if you just use office, which is, you know, half native, half emulated, I would imagine probably not even half half, but some combination and that's kind of what you do. And you don't run a lot of browser tabs, It's okay. It's okay. It's in that situation, it's probably like having a, a kind of a basic core. I five this particular PC has 16 to 32 gigs of ram, which I think is telling cuz it's unnecessary.

(00:57:54):
But on this platform, you kind of really need it. Cuz you gotta be running a lot of mb emulated apps the live storage, but it just falls apart in everyday use. And w with the stuff I do, so I, I don't know if I'm, you know, different from the norm or whatever, but I run things like Photoshop Elements, which is not native on Arm by the way. There is a Photoshop that is, if you pay for Creative Cloud, you know, I use Affinity Designer, I use Notion, I use Rock Down pad. I use Brave, you know, and they try to do as good as they can. If you do, if it presents itself as a 32 bit operating system. So if there's a 32 bit version of an app you're trying to download, like Brave or Chrome, I think as well it will give you that version because that version runs better.

(00:58:40):
And X 64 compatibility is slower than X 86, but at least it runs, you know, we always talk about that with arm. Like at least it runs or running slow is better than not running. The problem is lot of tabs, lot of apps open, lot of performance problems. Like, it just, it really, really bogs down. And this machine is expensive. These things always are expensive. I could be wrong, but I think the lowest non-sale price for a base unit of this thing, which doesn't have enough ram, it's $1,400. You know, 150 bucks more to get 16 gigs of ram, I think would do it. It's a lot of money. And when you're talking a thousand to $1,500, you have an incredible range of computers that all will perform better, will be more compatible, we'll run whatever special utilities for you know, printers and scanners and things like that that you can't get on arm. Will

Leo Laporte (00:59:33):
It get better once there's less simulation and more native code? I mean, that's certainly happen. I

Paul Thurrott (00:59:39):
Would say I would've awarded that if we get more native.

Leo Laporte (00:59:42):
Oh, you don't think that'll happen?

Paul Thurrott (00:59:44):
Microsoft has done a decent job of taking what's in Windows and making more and more of it native to arm. Right? So we've seen that over time App, like one note comes up one day and it's an available at arm. By the way, when I was reviewing this laptop, it was no Xbox app on arm. You could even get it. And that's how you access things like Xbox, Cloud gaming and ex Xbox PC Game Pass. So that actually just came out recently. So that's available. I think Microsoft might have made a special version only for the surface prox or whatever. But now it's, it is broadly available. So actually you can use that at least. But I think these compatibility things bad

Leo Laporte (01:00:23):
Was six really disappointing. I wanna know.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:25):
Yeah. Well, six-ish hours. I think it was off the top of my head. I think it was six, six and a half somewhere there.

Leo Laporte (01:00:29):
Yep.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:30):
You, but you have to, if you go to their website, they're talking about 28 hours of battery life. Right? Of course

Leo Laporte (01:00:34):
They all do. They have to Yeah. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:36):
Yeah. Right. So that's obviously like a video loop, kind of a test local video, you know, screen set on 50% kind of deal. So that's cute, but I'd actually just use the computer and I, this is the kind of battery life I already get from Intel and AMD computers and sometimes better than that. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, so, you know, this thing is killing itself, emulating, Right? So the point is this, maybe this still, maybe this is the future, right? There, there are no fans in this computer. You, I saw the same issue you see with like the recent MacBook Air, that's fan list where, you know, if you have a lot of stuff going on, a thing heats up, you can feel it and it Thurrotttles

Leo Laporte (01:01:14):
Heats up and slow down. So performance, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:01:16):
Yeah. Which already wasn't great, is now slower. Right?

Leo Laporte (01:01:19):
Wow. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:20):
So it's, you know, it's, it's better than it's ever been. There's no doubt about it. No, I mean, that's true. And then if that was the end of the sentence, that'd be a nice story, but unfortunately mm-hmm. <Affirmative>

Leo Laporte (01:01:31):
Still not good performance, isn't it? Yeah. Still not good enough. It's not great enough. Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna stick with my m M one and M two max, I think. Yeah. for the time being. And

Paul Thurrott (01:01:41):
That's actually, I should have mentioned that the final irony, the final kick in the butt here is if you do run Windows on Arm on a Mac, an M one or M two Mac, it runs better than it does on a real Yeah. Windows piece.

Leo Laporte (01:01:53):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. If you use the emulators like virtual box or parallels. Yeah. Yep. That's tough. In fact, people are saying it runs quite well, <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:05):
No, it runs great. It runs great.

Leo Laporte (01:02:08):
Yep. Wow.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:08):
And the, the reason that's important is because most people aren't doing that to run a Windows machine. They don't need to run an app, sworn

Leo Laporte (01:02:14):
App, you know? Yeah. Just that app that I need.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:16):
Yeah. If that gets it done, great. You

Leo Laporte (01:02:18):
Know, I have to say, the impetus for me to use Windows has really diminished because of the really high compatibility of games on Linux. I'm able to run all these windows Yeah. On so-called Windows only games run very well on Linux and emulation. And there's,

Paul Thurrott (01:02:36):
You know, there's another So that you're, I'm not sure that's a mainstream, Well, no, I guess it is. I mean, well

Leo Laporte (01:02:42):
That's one of the main things people get Windows for is gaming, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:02:45):
Yeah. No, you're right. That's, Yeah. So the other thing that's changed that I think will impact a lot of people is just the availability of, you know, web apps that solve problems that you can run on any platform. Right. You know, the big issue with the Mac, you know, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, was the, there, the apps weren't there enough of the apps or whatever. And I don't feel like that's as much of a problem anymore, that there are like really key windows only apps out in the world. I don't think that's

Leo Laporte (01:03:09):
The case. No,

Paul Thurrott (01:03:10):
I mean, sure. I mean, obviously could be the case in certain, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:03:12):
It's much less than it was used to be. You know, especially line of business software used to be a big issue.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:18):
Right. But if you're writing line of business software today, you write it for the web and then it works everywhere. Cuz everyone has iPhones and iPads and Android devices and whatever. You want it to work everywhere. That's the goal. And it makes Windows less necessary, you know, in those situations.

Leo Laporte (01:03:32):
Yeah. okay. It's interesting. It's interesting. On the other hand, step forward, Intel has made great progress. And so it may be that you don't Well, I feel like they

Paul Thurrott (01:03:46):
Have, they have, They, I don't know. No, I mean, I, I mean, and I say this having, like I said, I've got, I think

Leo Laporte (01:03:52):
Yes, I'm gonna say

Paul Thurrott (01:03:53):
Laptops prove you.

Leo Laporte (01:03:54):
I'm not sure Yes. Was 13th gen, you know, you're gonna see some real batteries, life improvements.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:59):
Yeah. That, no, that's a good asterisk to that one because I feel like the transition to this hybrid core architecture is gonna take a couple generations. Gen

Leo Laporte (01:04:07):
Had issues,

Paul Thurrott (01:04:08):
12Th gen definitely has issues. And I, I, I'm shocked I don't see more people talking about that, but I, it's like Microsoft with Windows 11, arguably they're doing the right thing in the sense that they know they have to make this change. It's gonna be hard for a little while and not ideal for some customers for a little while, but it's, they have to get through it, you know? And I think they'll end up in a good place. But, you know, we'll see, We'll see what market show looks like in a couple of years. I don't know.

Leo Laporte (01:04:36):
I think also Qualcomm's exclusive deals and their kind of dominance Yeah. Is bad for arm architectures on the PC side because I don't think Qualcomm does very good chips.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:51):
Yeah, no, that right?

Leo Laporte (01:04:54):
I mean, it seems not

Paul Thurrott (01:04:55):
<Laugh> not that, not to add to that. I mean, I, I think a lot of people would, would say the same thing and there's evidence to support

Leo Laporte (01:05:00):
It. Yeah. So if you had, I'm somebody doing some great, maybe next it'd be possible

Mary Jo Foley (01:05:05):
Next week, Arm dev, dev summit, maybe we'll see some

Leo Laporte (01:05:09):
News.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:09):
Oh, okay. Some new view maybe. We'll see. I mean, I look a generation over a generation, this gen I think it's like the H CX Gen three, whatever that's in this computer is actually significantly better. And, you know, with X 64 emulation and whatever else it, you know, it is better. It's, you know, in the past some of these upgrades, I'm like, I don't really seeing anything here. Like, this is better. So if they're able to do this with what used to be a phone architecture, you know, seven years later or whatever it's been Right. They're making, you know, they're making progress. It's gonna be interesting to see if there's a, a much bigger leap, you know, with the nuvia based stuff mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So we'll see.

Mary Jo Foley (01:05:49):
Yeah. If there isn't, there's no future for this platform.

Leo Laporte (01:05:52):
Right. It's kind of a race now. Right. Between Intel and, and and our architectures. Like Intel's getting better and they're getting more efficient

Paul Thurrott (01:06:01):
And Yeah. But they're all, they're, they're not gonna be in the places where Arm dominates. They're not gonna be Im mobile and it in the, you know, one has to wonder if it matters in a anymore, whether Intel does anything. If, if they're only claim to fame as we can run legacy Windows app, you know, Windows stuff on PCs you've just inherited the smallest, you know, market there is for these types of devices for, you know, for personal computing devices.

Leo Laporte (01:06:28):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> mm-hmm.

Mary Jo Foley (01:06:29):
<Affirmative>. I don't care who solves it, but whoever solves battery life, I'm, I'm they're called. Nope. I know. Other than Apple. Somebody other than Apple. Apple needs to step up to the plate. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:06:43):
I

Paul Thurrott (01:06:43):
I, I hate to say this, I think you would really enjoy an I a

Leo Laporte (01:06:48):
Macbook Air that new MacBook Air Mm.

Mary Jo Foley (01:06:51):
Hate

Leo Laporte (01:06:52):
In midnight Blue Baby. Mm. Hate about 18 hours of battery life,

Mary Jo Foley (01:06:57):
Guys. I mean, never can use a Mac. I've tried.

Leo Laporte (01:07:00):
I don't understand why you're just use a notepad. There's plenty of great notepad like apps on,

Mary Jo Foley (01:07:05):
Everything's opposite from what I'm used to and it's just, it's just not good. Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:10):
It's just, you know what, actually I think I know what it is. You often talk about how you don't notice new UIs. And I think when you go to the Mac, you do notice all the things that are different.

Mary Jo Foley (01:07:18):
I do. Yeah. That's

Paul Thurrott (01:07:20):
Up right now. Maybe that's what

Mary Jo Foley (01:07:20):
It's Yeah. You know, I'm like, what am I running? What are all these weird things like getting bigger and smaller and No, absolutely.

Leo Laporte (01:07:27):
You could turn all that stuff off that I don't

Mary Jo Foley (01:07:29):
Like that. I don't want any of that crap. No, no, no. Guys. <laugh> plus it's Apple. So, Sorry.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:38):
I, I do understand. I understand. I don't like the Mac either. I, I can't use the Mac. I mean, I, I I'm not gonna switch to the Mac. Like that's not gonna happen.

Mary Jo Foley (01:07:45):
Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>

Paul Thurrott (01:07:46):
Never. I like the iPhone, you know, and the plus and minuses, obviously iPad. Great. Matt,

Leo Laporte (01:07:54):
Let us take a little tiny Oh, wait a minute. Before we do, I'm so excited to hear about Windows News 22 H two Windows 10.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:03):
I like that you intuitively understood. This was gonna take about 10 seconds

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:06):
<Laugh>. Yeah. So first may I just say, I called this last week, I said, I said Tuesday would be the day that Microsoft rolled this out and I was correct.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:17):
Yep.

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:19):
Yeah, so it's like, ta-da. Windows 10 22 H two is here for the mainstream and you can get it now. So what do we most wanna know? What's in it?

Paul Thurrott (01:08:29):
Yep.

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:29):
What's the feature list? What's in this thing? What is it? Windows 20, Windows ten twenty two. Sorry. They call it a weird thing. Windows ten twenty twenty two update. They don't call it 22 H two delivers a scope set of improvements in the areas of productivity and management. That is all they will say. They won't give us a feature list probably because there's almost nothing in it. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:08:53):
What are they hiding?

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:55):
It's so little

Paul Thurrott (01:08:56):
They don't, It sounds like you're getting a colonoscopy or something, doesn't it? <Laugh>, you're gonna get so

Leo Laporte (01:08:59):
Scoped. What does that mean in that context?

Paul Thurrott (01:09:01):
You're gonna be

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:02):
Stok. It means, it means that you're gonna get this via an enablement package. If you are running the latest version of Windows 10, like, you know, that means it comes like a cumulative update. Really fast update automatic, like super easy to do. The update. All this is doing is changing the support window, right? Like the new supports clock starts ticking as of yesterday for people who download this update. But in terms of new features, Microsoft won't tell us what's in it. I saw somebody in the, in the Discord point, It's a bleeping computer. They've figured out a couple of the features. Foc you can get not important notifications when Focus Assist is on restoring functionality to Windows autopilot deployment scenarios affected by security mitigation for hardware. We use like really small esoteric things, but Microsoft so far is not giving us a list of features, which I think so weird is bad. It's, it's really bad. People wanna know what's in this thing before they download it,

Paul Thurrott (01:10:01):
Right? So I, I believe there were at least two builds that went out in the inside of preview program and that's where they might have found out about the new features. That notification thing with Focus of Snow. Okay. the notification

Mary Jo Foley (01:10:15):
Didn't help people. What was in it? <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:18):
Yeah. So Windows 1122 HQ changed focus, assist to focus and, or I forget that. I can't remember that. It's do not disturb in focus now. Yeah. Similar feature where you can break through with important notifications. I'm sure they're based on the same. I'm sure that's what that is. Yeah. Just a, it's like a, a small Windows 11 feature that's, you know, Yeah. In Windows. Does

Leo Laporte (01:10:41):
22 H two on 10 have any of the same blocker issues that it does in 11? Or is it a different beast entirely?

Mary Jo Foley (01:10:49):
I looked at the list yesterday. There was only one thing there listed. 

Paul Thurrott (01:10:53):
Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (01:10:54):
Some esoteric error message, error message thing. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:59):
Yeah. I mean it's depending on the feature update you're talking about with Windows 10, there have been smaller long lists of blockers. Yeah. Obviously I think those lists are gonna get smaller and smaller because this one, the last few have been very small updates, so mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, <affirmative> not a lot's changing. It's not a lot. You are gonna get, have problems with the compatibility or whatever. So.

Mary Jo Foley (01:11:18):
Right. The thing they're trying to do is they're trying to make Windows 10 look unattractive. So people will say, you know what, all the cool stuff's happening in Windows 11, so I shouldn't move to Windows 11. I'm not gonna tell you what's in Windows 10 updates. I'm not gonna make it look fun. They like hit the fact that this came out yesterday. Right. Like, they

Paul Thurrott (01:11:35):
Just are down playing

Leo Laporte (01:11:36):
It as they don't want people to say, Oh, it's getting updated. Yeah, yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:11:40):
Yeah. Except for one thing. Except for one thing. Who loves what you just said? Who loves that happening?

Mary Jo Foley (01:11:45):
It pros. They love

Paul Thurrott (01:11:46):
This. Microsoft's biggest customer base is like, Yeah, baby, you're not adding anything to Windows 10. That's exactly what we've been

Leo Laporte (01:11:52):
Asking for.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:53):
We're gonna stick on that. See, that's gonna, that's not, that might not happen.

Mary Jo Foley (01:11:57):
Yeah. It's gonna backfire maybe, right? Yeah. Right. Cause you can keep running Windows 10 supported by Microsoft till October 14th, 2025. You still have a lot of life left in this thing. Right?

Paul Thurrott (01:12:07):
So, Yeah. Yep. That's fine. You know what, interesting rides out and doesn't have any major changes that, that audience's would be ecstatic and there's nothing like they will that Yep. Yep,

Mary Jo Foley (01:12:17):
Yep. I know. They should just own it and be like, Guess what guys? No new features. And people will like, Yes.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:23):
<Laugh>, embrace your inner ludite <laugh>. That should be the marketing <laugh>, you know?

Leo Laporte (01:12:28):
Good. Yes. Yep. None of what I didn't want.

Mary Jo Foley (01:12:31):
Right,

Paul Thurrott (01:12:32):
Exactly. And everything I did.

Leo Laporte (01:12:34):
Yeah. Which is nothing. Why

Paul Thurrott (01:12:36):
Not? Yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:12:38):
Okay. That actually, that all makes good sense. You could see,

Paul Thurrott (01:12:43):
You know, the whole communication thing. You can't, you can't take a paragraph and a blog post just to give us the three pieces you added.

Mary Jo Foley (01:12:49):
I know,

Paul Thurrott (01:12:50):
It's crazy. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:12:52):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:12:52):
We don't get, Want you to get all excited <laugh>. Don't, don't get excited. Take a break. Come back lots more. Mary Jo, interviewed Scott, Go.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:06):
Mm-Hmm.

Leo Laporte (01:13:06):
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(01:15:13):
Just ask Kevin Bush, VP of IT at Ring Power Corp, here's his quote. He says, Quotatium brings visibility to one screen for our whole team. If you don't have that kind of visibility, you're not gonna be able to sleep at night. <Laugh> sounds like he knows what he's talking about. I hope you, I think he's sleeping better with Tanium. Thank you, Kevin. With realtime data comes realtime impact. If you're ready to unite operations and security teams with a single source of truth and confidently protect your organization from cyber threats, it's time. Yame Tanium, T a n i u m to learn more. Tanium.Com/Twit. Please go there. I know you can just go to the front page, but it's how they keep track of whether we're sending people to the site. So if you're gonna visit it, please go to tanium.com/TWiTt and I think you want to, I think you do find out more. Tanium.Com/Twitt. We thank 'em so much for supporting Windows Weekly. Paul and Mary Jo, do it. Are you getting used to calling Office? Microsoft 365? You getting used to that? Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:16:20):
Don't

Leo Laporte (01:16:21):
<Laugh> <laugh>. What?

Paul Thurrott (01:16:25):
This is actually a classic example of Microsoft communication problems, Right?

Leo Laporte (01:16:29):
Wait a minute. So the last thing we heard at Ignite was not Microsoft Office anymore. It's Microsoft 365,

Paul Thurrott (01:16:36):
Right? Not

Leo Laporte (01:16:37):
True's

Paul Thurrott (01:16:37):
The thing Leo,

Leo Laporte (01:16:37):
Here's not really Not exactly right. Oh, man,

Paul Thurrott (01:16:40):
The, you gotta, Well, first of all, Office is Microsoft's most memorable brand. Really, Right? I mean mm-hmm. <Affirmative> office, I mean Office and Windows maybe arrived around the same time, but Windows was not popular to leave.

Leo Laporte (01:16:52):
I think Word was first actually, wasn't it? Word?

Paul Thurrott (01:16:55):
I think it was Excel came for the first for the Mac.

Leo Laporte (01:16:57):
Yeah. Word and Excel for the Mac. It was the first mouse many of us used. Yeah. Came with Word

Paul Thurrott (01:17:03):
In the box. Like a bundled the mouse with word for Windows. Yeah, that's right. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So look, I, the short version of this is nothing really has changed. Microsoft has been trans or transitioning toward mi you know, Uber brands, Microsoft Brands, Microsoft 365 in this case. But that doesn't mean those sub brands are going away. And I think the simplest way to think of this is Office is a brand. Everyone knows they could rename it if they wanted to, but everyone would still call it Office. And it's gonna be the legacy stuff. You know, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, it's it's office. You know, they're still gonna sell an office standalone version a a perpetual version of office. Right. that doesn't stop. There's still Office 365 excuse that doesn't stop. But I mean, I think that most important quote is in a fact Microsoft's website where the question is, is Office going away? And the answer is no, as part of blah blah, blah. Everything. I, you know, so it it's like they announce this thing and it sounds like, Oh my God, they're changing everything. It's like they've been kind of doing this, you know? Yeah. When Office Lens became Microsoft Lens, you know, when Microsoft Editor came out after that transition, it wasn't office editor, it's Microsoft editor. I mean, it's just the new stuff is Microsoft.

Mary Jo Foley (01:18:22):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:23):
But it's all co-mingled, you know? Yeah. In something that I will always call office.

Mary Jo Foley (01:18:28):
Yeah. You know what made that this story get very confused. So at, at at Ignite they said we're rebranding the Unified Office app to Microsoft 365, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:18:39):
Yep.

Mary Jo Foley (01:18:40):
That's right. When you go to office.com, when you go to that URL at the top it says, Hey, office is becoming Microsoft 365. No. The all they mean is that one app. They don't mean the whole branding, but the way they worded it and the picture that goes with it, I'm like, Yeah, this is why everybody got confused. Right? They, Microsoft was just kind of glossing over it and saying they meant that app. They didn't mean all of it. So,

Paul Thurrott (01:19:04):
You know what's interesting about what you, what what you just said is that Microsoft is co-mingling office.com, the office app for Windows and the Office mobile app as being the same thing. Right? And by the way, maybe they are, maybe these things are all a web app and they're just created the same way mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And so to make branding simpler, cuz it seems like office.com, you wanna leave this as office probably they, they'll have a a logo that's the same across everywhere. They'll have the same branding across everywhere. Yep. But that's just an app, you know, and it's like I just said, it's a new app, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> it's not Word PowerPoint, you know, it's a new app, Right? And the way,

Mary Jo Foley (01:19:44):
So it's gonna have

Paul Thurrott (01:19:45):
Microsoft 365 brand.

Mary Jo Foley (01:19:46):
I usually to get to the Microsoft app, I have it on my desktop, but I almost never go through the app I type office.com into a browser. Right. And I asked Jared Spataro, who is the head of this part of Microsoft, the modern work part, and I said, So are you gonna take away this URL that I use? Cause I have this committed to memory i type office.com to go go to this office app. And he goes, No, that's gonna stick around. Okay. So that's sticking around, right? What

Paul Thurrott (01:20:11):
We talking about

Mary Jo Foley (01:20:12):
<Laugh>, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:20:13):
Right.

Mary Jo Foley (01:20:14):
Yeah. People don

Paul Thurrott (01:20:15):
Just office and

Mary Jo Foley (01:20:17):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:19):
It's just too good of a brand and it's too obvious of a brand and it's too embedded in everyone's.

Mary Jo Foley (01:20:26):
It is. And I think a lot of people who wrote the stories about this, so you saw this everywhere. Like Microsoft's going away from the office brand, they don't even know there is an office app. They don't know this thing exists, right? So they don't know what they were talking about when Microsoft said this is being replaced by this. Right. That they

Paul Thurrott (01:20:42):
Don't. I once again in the alternate reality, Paul, that I've become, I am not blaming those people because Microsoft messaging was so confusing. It was you'd really have to dig deep to see the reality of it. And you do really have to have an understanding of what they've been doing for several years. Now. You do. Yes. And so I I don't blame those folks. I, I, no, In fact, I wrote that in my article. It's not their fault. This is Microsoft Mis Commuting. Kidding something.

Mary Jo Foley (01:21:07):
Yeah. Surprise

Paul Thurrott (01:21:09):
<Laugh>. Yep.

Mary Jo Foley (01:21:11):
What they were trying to communicate, They were, it was a very complicated story I feel like that they were trying to communicate, which was, we're at an inflection point where what people thought of as office is different now. Like you've got all these new features and functionality, Editor Loop, all the stuff that didn't exist in the original office. So they were trying to make a point like, this is a new thing, even though it's your familiar set of apps, it's got a whole bunch of new capabilities that you might not even know exist if you just use Excel, PowerPoint, Word. But that's a complicated story and a complicated idea. So I don't think a lot of people grasped that that's what they were trying to say. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:48):
Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:21:49):
Anyway. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:52):
Well thank God we have careers.

Mary Jo Foley (01:21:55):
Yeah, exactly. And one more thing on Microsoft 365, I wanted to point this out because Zion and Club TWiT reminded me of this today. So on Windows Server 2022, Microsoft kind of drew a line in the sand and said, okay, no more running Microsoft 365 apps on Windows servers starting with Windows Server 2022. And customers flipped out. Like they were like, Wait a minute, I wanna do that. I don't want you to stop me from doing that. Especially in my on-premises operation. And Microsoft's answer originally was, Why don't you just use Azure Virtual Desktop or Windows 365? And customers said, you know, I'm gonna use Google. I don't want that. I don't want that Microsoft <laugh>. Oh. So they went back and they reconsidered and this week they said publicly, Yes, we've changed our mind and we're gonna let you run Windows of Microsoft 365 apps on Windows Server started.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:50):
I'm already using Google. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah, exactly. What, what, what are they concerned about? There is the people you using servers like a workstation or something.

Mary Jo Foley (01:23:00):
Yeah, they, I don't know why Mic, Well I think Microsoft was trying to cut this off because they're trying to force people to think about apps as cloud apps, Right? Like they're like, if you've got Windows server, like why don't you run this virtually? Like why don't you run these apps virtually using our cloud services instead of trying to run them locally

Leo Laporte (01:23:17):
On

Paul Thurrott (01:23:17):
Premises. If if I wanted to run this in the cloud, I would be running this in the cloud. Yeah. I obviously wanted OnPrem something, so.

Mary Jo Foley (01:23:23):
Exactly. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:23:24):
Yeah. They just don't want you hostile your PowerShell scripts with Word.

Mary Jo Foley (01:23:29):
Exactly. Yeah. Well now, you know, people get used to it cuz they could run Microsoft 365 apps on, on server 2016, on server 2019 and then Microsoft's like, Yeah, we don't really want you to do that anymore. Customers like, Well, too bad. I want to do that. And if you won't let me, I'll go elsewhere. Okay. <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:23:47):
If you want on prem, just use

Mary Jo Foley (01:23:50):
Emax. Let 'em do it. Let them do it. Microsoft

Leo Laporte (01:23:53):
<Laugh>. Yeah, well they are right. Just use emax. Just use EMAX

Paul Thurrott (01:23:57):
Would be a great title

Leo Laporte (01:23:58):
For an article. The answer for everything. You, there's nothing you can can't do. It's, it says they say an operating system with kind of a mediocre text editor built in.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:09):
I used to say this in the Syop era, you know, always be like, why are they doing this? And I'd be like, F you. That's why you have

Leo Laporte (01:24:15):
Another question.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:15):
Like, Yeah, how come the star button's gone f you? That's why you got

Leo Laporte (01:24:18):
Another question.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:20):
Like, that was always the, you know, that was just the whole conversation.

Leo Laporte (01:24:24):
Is that what Yeah. Is that, what is that how Scott go treated you? Mary Jo

Mary Jo Foley (01:24:28):
Foley <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:24:30):
We now go to executive contributing editor, senior contributing editor at Zed, at Mary Jo Foley for her interview with Scott. Go.

Mary Jo Foley (01:24:39):
Okay, I've gotta give you the backstory cuz it's kind of hilarious here of how this happened. Yeah. So it's the last day of Ignite and Microsoft Pierre calls me up and they're like, Hey, wanna interview Scott? Go. And I'm like, Oh yeah, I've been asking you for an interview with him for years, but sure, I would

Leo Laporte (01:24:54):
Love to. Oh yeah, we saw your name on a list. Somebody threw away <laugh>. <Laugh>,

Mary Jo Foley (01:24:57):
Right? And so I'm like, when, like, how, how long do I have to wait? They're like, how about in 10 minutes? I'm like, today, like now <laugh>. And they're like, Yeah, like it's gonna be a virtual interview and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, Okay, let me hang up with you and write a few questions down so I could like, have something prepared. And so they called me on teams, we did an interview. I was very disoriented because he was wearing a white button down dress shirt when he came on the call. And I was like, Wait a minute, is this even Scott Go, Where's the red shirt? I don't know. Like, I'm not not able to do this really. But he said he was going

Paul Thurrott (01:25:32):
Custom's, they're not on stage

Mary Jo Foley (01:25:34):
<Laugh>. No. He said, I'm going to a custom meeting right after you. That's why I'm wearing this. I'm so sorry. You know, <laugh>, he's such a great guy. I love DA to him, he's just like a real nice human being. But yeah, so we, we talked about like what he thought were some of the highlights from Ignite, so that was good. It's always interesting to hear what the executives think of the highlights versus what we end up rating. You know, <laugh> and he talked a lot about some things predictable. Like he, he oversees all of data at Microsoft ai, like a lot of different teams power. He oversees oversees the power platform team now and Dynamics even. So he has a big purview. Like he has a lot of things going on. So I asked him about a little bit about Cosmos db, getting post se Postgres sequel.

(01:26:17):
He was very excited about that. He talked a lot about power platform. He talked a lot about Dynamics and how Dynamics and Azure are kind of both sharing a lot of common technologies and are more tightly integrated down the stack now. So that was kind of interesting. We, what else did we talk about? We talked about GitHub a little bit. And he was very up on like the Microsoft partnership with Open ai, which I think came out a lot at Ignite. He was just like, we are really tightly, tightly partnering with them. We have an open AI service now and that's drawing on models that we're building with them. We're building super computers for them to run their models on. So it was really good to hear all his thoughts about working closely with open ai. Yeah, so it, it was very interesting.

(01:27:06):
I had 20 minutes. I was just like packing questions in there. But he, he was great. And if you care about data and dynamics and para platform and databases you probably wanna go read. It's a fairly short interview I did with them. Just about what is top of mind for him. I tried to get him to talk about SQL Server 2022 because I think that's coming out in November and he gave me a little on it, but he was like kind of holding back so that he can have a big announcement. I'm sure about

Leo Laporte (01:27:33):
That. And not once did he say f you? That's why he didn't know. That's exactly right. <Laugh>. He's

Mary Jo Foley (01:27:39):
A great guy. That's not a Scott Gu guy. No. Yeah, that's not his way.

Leo Laporte (01:27:42):
That's much more synsky. Yeah, yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:27:45):
Yeah. He he's a really, Yeah, very. It was great to get him. I was like, Yeah, I've been dying to talk to him. And it was like, it's

Leo Laporte (01:27:51):
A good interview and, and you got a lot. You gotta

Mary Jo Foley (01:27:53):
Do this quick.

Leo Laporte (01:27:54):
<Laugh>, you got a lot of time with him. I mean, relatively, I

Mary Jo Foley (01:27:56):
Guess. Yeah. 20 minutes is, Yeah, that is a lot of time actually. Yeah. so I was really happy they gave me access to him and it, I just was like, wait, we're doing this in 10 minutes. Okay, let me hang up. I gotta go write some

Leo Laporte (01:28:05):
Questions. <Laugh>, did he offer you some Oreo thin cookies?

Mary Jo Foley (01:28:09):
He did not.

Leo Laporte (01:28:10):
Oh,

Paul Thurrott (01:28:10):
I love, and I, I might, am my understanding why you just asked that question. Is this the, the Microsoft partnership with Oreo? Yes.

Mary Jo Foley (01:28:18):
Yes. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:28:19):
I,

Mary Jo Foley (01:28:20):
It did not surprisingly, it did not come up

Leo Laporte (01:28:23):
<Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:23):
See, I was offered that interview and I declined

Leo Laporte (01:28:26):
It.

Mary Jo Foley (01:28:26):
<Laugh>? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:28:26):
Okay. With the Brown Eminem. Is that who you were gonna talk to? Yeah, exactly.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:30):
Uhhuh. Yeah. With the the thin Oreo,

Leo Laporte (01:28:32):
It has to do with the weight interest. Right. And

Mary Jo Foley (01:28:35):
Yeah, it's a isn't it emoji in teams or something? <Laugh>?

Paul Thurrott (01:28:39):
I I didn't look at it too closely. I gotta be honest. 

Leo Laporte (01:28:42):
Well, I did the work, why Microsoft 365 is teaming up with Oreo thins to give you a break.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:51):
They literally reached out to me and I was Did they really? Very

Leo Laporte (01:28:54):
Interesting.

Mary Jo Foley (01:28:55):
No, did

Leo Laporte (01:28:55):
They Thank you. That's enter the Thin invite, a 15 minute snack,

Paul Thurrott (01:29:02):
National cooking month or something like that. And

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:05):
Ah, is that why

Paul Thurrott (01:29:06):
I really, I tried not to look too much at

Leo Laporte (01:29:07):
This. So during National send

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:09):
You that emoticon,

Leo Laporte (01:29:11):
Microsoft 365 and Oreo thins are teaming up to create the thin bite, a 15 minute snack break delivered straight to your calendar and to your door. Oh, yum.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:24):
What is an Oreo? What is an Oreo is like two pieces of cardboard with

Leo Laporte (01:29:28):
Some large <laugh>. With lard in between. Exactly. That's it. So if you type Oreo or Oreo Yum. In your team's chat emoji search box you'll find will not Come on. Come on Paul. You'll find these lovely Oreos in there. These emojis.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:48):
I will not eat it on a train. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:29:50):
I will not

Paul Thurrott (01:29:51):
It on a plane.

Leo Laporte (01:29:52):
Oh, let's go to

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:53):
The, Doesn't this make you wonder though? Like, are we gonna see like brand, you know, corporate branded emojis showing up everywhere? Now, I,

Paul Thurrott (01:29:59):
I will say this does make me wonder,

Leo Laporte (01:30:01):
Is this a profit deal? What is, what's the story

Mary Jo Foley (01:30:04):
I would guess? Right? Or, or, or The Nabisco is a par partner of Microsoft, which I think they are

Paul Thurrott (01:30:10):
Orio thins the ultimate cookie for adults. And Microsoft 365 a leader in modern work have obviously teamed up because,

Leo Laporte (01:30:17):
So November 1st, second and third, they'll, you could put a 15 minute hold on your calendar from two to 2:15 PM Eastern, and I guess snacks will arrive at your door. Oh, they're sold out. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (01:30:37):
Well I can tell you this, You don't have to walk about 12 feet before I can find a guy selling cookies on the street here. So that won't be a,

Leo Laporte (01:30:43):
And they're probably good cookies, right? They're homemade delicious,

Paul Thurrott (01:30:46):
Crazy. The snack stuff they have here,

Leo Laporte (01:30:48):
They have cookies. Really? Street vendors selling cookies.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:50):
Oh my God. Yes. You They sell cheese balls, they sell popcorn and they sell candy of every stripe. They, and then the question at the end is always, Would you like salsa on that? And the answer is always

Mary Jo Foley (01:31:02):
What's, Of course I would <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:31:06):
So I I could run out the door and get some cheese balls. Yeah. With salsa. With

Paul Thurrott (01:31:11):
Salsa on it. Yes. Wow. That's true. This is not something I'm making up. This is true.

Leo Laporte (01:31:16):
Wow. That's, that's that's another reason to move there. Are the people still in the penthouse across the

Paul Thurrott (01:31:23):
Street? Nope. They they checked out the roof deck and then they went down.

Leo Laporte (01:31:26):
Oh man. I want, I want you said 400,000,

Paul Thurrott (01:31:33):
Four 80. I,

Leo Laporte (01:31:34):
I can't get a shed here for that price.

Mary Jo Foley (01:31:36):
No, you can't.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:36):
I know, I know.

Leo Laporte (01:31:40):
So don't tell

Paul Thurrott (01:31:41):
It is on the sun side of the building. I mean, I

Leo Laporte (01:31:43):
Well, that's fine. What's wrong with that?

Mary Jo Foley (01:31:46):
Get automated shades.

Leo Laporte (01:31:47):
You're on the shade side of your building, I take it. Yeah. Did you want that?

Paul Thurrott (01:31:55):
Well actually, honestly, when we, we had no conception of what the size were when we did, did this,

Leo Laporte (01:31:59):
But, but I guess the sun beats in that windows in the

Paul Thurrott (01:32:02):
I wouldn't prefer to be, Yeah, I'd prefer to be on this side. Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:32:05):
We were on the sun side at the brick house and on the afternoon sun came so strongly into the studio. We actually basically

Paul Thurrott (01:32:12):
Big windows and it's

Leo Laporte (01:32:13):
Yeah. Yeah. We had to yeah, create three layer

Paul Thurrott (01:32:15):
Water mine chair with job one. The, the sun is it's bright hair. It's

Leo Laporte (01:32:20):
We're closer to it. You're mostly yeah. You're practically on the equator or something.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:25):
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:32:27):
Dark mode finally comes to word for the web and senior contributing editor, Mary Jo Foley has the story. No, that

Mary Jo Foley (01:32:36):
Is not me. Actually. I'd rather do the,

Paul Thurrott (01:32:40):
This story is barely, Yeah, this is barely worth mentioning. I, the only reason I'm mentioning this is because this is a feature that's been in the desktop versions of Office for years and years and they improved it last year or something. I don't understand why something like this took so long. I don't understand why they released Fe the same feature for the same app on different platforms at different times. I don't get that. But if you look at the screenshot I have of the dark mode thing for word for the Web, what you'll see is what I want in word for Windows, which is that simplified ribbon thing that they promised years ago they were bringing to the desktop. And as of today, there's only one desktop office app that has this interface and that is Outlook, which is the one office app. I refuse to use <laugh>, but I use Word every single day. I'd love to have this ui.

Mary Jo Foley (01:33:25):
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:33:26):
I'd love to have it. And we

Mary Jo Foley (01:33:28):
It home soon, right? Isn't it? I feel like it's part of, isn't it part of Monarch the redesign of

Paul Thurrott (01:33:34):
Office? Everyone. Well, no. Well, Monarch this is, I

Mary Jo Foley (01:33:37):
Mean, Mon Monarch is, Sorry. Yeah. Sorry. Yeah, you're right. No, it's okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:41):
Yeah, I'd give anything to, I want, I want dark, I want this a ui. I have Dark, but I want, I want this ui.

Leo Laporte (01:33:48):
It looks good. Really? But this is web only right now. Yeah, yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:33:51):
Yeah. Web only.

Mary Jo Foley (01:33:52):
But you know what's also weird about this story? We usually Office on the web gets a feature before the desktop. That's right. Like,

Paul Thurrott (01:33:59):
That's exactly right.

Mary Jo Foley (01:34:00):
That's what, why is it coming after? And

Leo Laporte (01:34:02):
Because it's easy to do it in a browser.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:04):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:34:04):
There's all sorts of affordances for making that happen. Trivial.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:10):
I don't know what

Leo Laporte (01:34:10):
They're doing. It's trivial, man. It's easy. <Laugh>, By the way, is Contoso the the equivalent of Vandalay Industries for Microsoft? Is that their like, Yes. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:19):
Yeah. It's their, they're go-to fake brands.

Leo Laporte (01:34:21):
They company brands, fake company, Contoso new products, go to market strategy. I

Paul Thurrott (01:34:27):
Mean, like, I miss, you know, Volcano Coffee. Really? That was another good one from the past. But Contoso Long lived.

Leo Laporte (01:34:35):
Somebody should do a Instagram popup of fake corporate. That would fun. Fun.

Mary Jo Foley (01:34:42):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:34:42):
You can visit.

Mary Jo Foley (01:34:44):
I've got a cont a t-shirt from Do you show a few years ago?

Paul Thurrott (01:34:48):
What's the company in Resident Evil? That's the one. They I wanna work for that company. What's, what do they call Bio? No they have an awesome kind of

Leo Laporte (01:34:56):
Nuclear logo with the red colors. I'm, I'm an Aperture science fan myself. There you go. That's yeah, that's, that's even better actually. Yeah. Aperture Science

Mary Jo Foley (01:35:06):
Umbrella Corp. Anthony says

Leo Laporte (01:35:08):
Umbrella Corp. Thank you. Yes. Umbrella Corp. Anthony knows all he is so on top of culture, modern culture, nice. Umbrella Corp. Is Microsoft 365, right. <Laugh>.

Mary Jo Foley (01:35:21):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:35:22):
Explain that. Branding. so I guess it's time to mention the the elephant in the room. Yeah. Dark mode for Word in the web. Talk about Microsoft is laying actually every company now laying off people. Yeah. you know, last month it was all the CEOs saying, Hey, tough times are coming time to tighten your build. And it's, you know what, now we know when they start saying that, start working on your resume. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, I say Alex, who we know Yeah, yeah. Texted me yesterday, I think it was to say, Oh my God, they got Alex Kipman. And I'm like, What are you talking about? And they did not lay off Kipman. He left on his own months, months ago. Months. He was helped

Mary Jo Foley (01:36:17):
Out the door. We believe

Leo Laporte (01:36:19):
<Laugh> helped out the door. Yeah. He was showing the door. Mr. Kipman, please cut mini hoop down to,

Mary Jo Foley (01:36:25):
But this, this group of layoffs under a thousand. So, you know, Microsoft has close to 200,000 people now. So

Leo Laporte (01:36:32):
Plus half of one percents. Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (01:36:34):
Yeah, yeah. The one team that I saw that get cut, this is kind of interesting to me because I wrote about this a while ago. It was something called Studio Alpha at Microsoft, which is the war game simulation team at Microsoft. They, I don't know where they sat in the organization, but it was about simulation and modeling for gaming, mostly for defense, I

Leo Laporte (01:37:02):
Believe. Real war. Not to, not to shall we play game. Right, Right. Real. This is Waffer. Yeah. Right.

Mary Jo Foley (01:37:07):
War gaming simulations. Military and commercial. Right. Like but I wonder if it had anything to do with the problems they've been having with HoloLens in the army of like, maybe they're just like, You know what? We're having trouble over here. Maybe we should take a pause. I don't know. Like <laugh>. Yeah. So

Leo Laporte (01:37:25):
Because of the Army's, what they said, 80% of the soldiers who wore HoloLens in their tests were getting sick.

Mary Jo Foley (01:37:30):
Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. but yeah, I I, it felt like a lot of the other layoffs of people I saw, like talking on TWiTtter or LinkedIn, they were kind of random. Like different departments, different groups. Right. Different parts of the company. It wasn't like before where they said, you know Windows and Office are gonna have some cuts because it's time to do some bell tightening here. Also next week is earnings report for Microsoft q2, fiscal 23. So, you know, when you wanna show your investors and shareholders that you're being serious about doing more with less, you say, Hey, look, we're even tightening our belt, not just you guys. Right?

Leo Laporte (01:38:09):
Yeah. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:38:10):
So yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:38:12):
We're all doing it.

Mary Jo Foley (01:38:14):
We're all doing it. And you're doing it. We're doing it. Everybody's doing it. It's a thing.

Leo Laporte (01:38:17):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. You, I mean, it's just been a steady stream of layoff announcements Yeah. From companies.

Mary Jo Foley (01:38:23):
Yeah. I hope people who got cut can find places in the company. Although I've seen people say it's hard right now because, you know, things are tight, tighter than they've been, so Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:38:36):
It's the pressing

Mary Jo Foley (01:38:38):
It is. It's not fun to talk about layoffs or report about

Leo Laporte (01:38:40):
Layoffs.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:41):
It's the year we're in, unfortunately. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:38:43):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. this is the year we're gonna be in. This is just the beginning, the tail end of 2022, if three session really hits. Yep. 2023 is gonna be not so good. It's funny because in Covid, the tech companies all soared, They were hugely profitable. They made a lot of money. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I don't know if this is the chickens coming home to roost or if it's a separate, unrelated issue, but this is one contraction where the tech companies are not gonna benefit.

Mary Jo Foley (01:39:16):
Yeah, that's right.

Leo Laporte (01:39:20):
So you will have, so next week we'll have the earnings, We'll have our earnings, earnings episode. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:39:26):
Yep, that's right. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:39:28):
Day after the dust clears. Do you have any thoughts about what we should be looking for in the earnings call

Mary Jo Foley (01:39:37):
Commercial cloud? I bet Microsoft Cloud's gonna be a killer. They're gonna still do great. Yeah. Although maybe not as well, right? Yeah. Like, I think they're kind of cautioning It could be down a bit. Yeah. PC Mark P sales, PC sales have been down. That's not usually good for Windows. Right. For a quarter. 

Leo Laporte (01:39:54):
Yep. We'll

Paul Thurrott (01:39:55):
See. Yeah. I think this could be negative, you know, we'll see

Mary Jo Foley (01:40:03):
Actually should be a tough quarter.

Leo Laporte (01:40:04):
We just saw a report that there is massive churn at Amazon <laugh>. Like people don't stay more than a few months. It's costing Amazon 8 billion a year. So maybe you Microsoft folks wanna go across the street and just

Paul Thurrott (01:40:18):
Oh, by the way, they often do and yeah, that's where they go. I mean, Right. Amazon is like the halfway house between a Microsoft employer and their future career

Leo Laporte (01:40:27):
<Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:27):
No, that's been a, that's been true for a long

Leo Laporte (01:40:29):
Time. Yeah. Yeah. Well,

Mary Jo Foley (01:40:31):
A lot of people have been going to meta too, but Meta's having layoffs,

Leo Laporte (01:40:33):
I wouldn't go to Meta right now. Mm-Hmm.

Mary Jo Foley (01:40:35):
Yeah. Mm-Hmm.

Leo Laporte (01:40:36):
Yeah. Not in a growth growth cycle here. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Cheer us up. Paul Thurrott. Mr. Happy go lucky Paul Thurrott with our Xbox segment.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:47):
Yeah. A couple of Xbox News bits. First is that it's, you know, we're moving, we are literally in the second half of October, so we have the next set of games coming to Xbox Game Pass. The biggest one is the eight, I'm sorry, is a Plague Tale Requiem. Right. which is kind of a great game. And then a bunch of not, I've never heard of, frankly. Amnesia, Collection, Amnesia, Rebirth Phantom Abyss Soma, tell me if you've heard of any of these. So Frog Detective geez. So whatever, but that's what the rest of the month, That's

Leo Laporte (01:41:20):
The game I wanna play. Frog Detective.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:23):
Yeah. Who, But in bigger news we're getting an Xbox system update today. And this one's actually kind of a big deal. There's some stuff we'd heard about in the past and then some stuff we hadn't. So, for example, if you're familiar with the CEC controls over hdmi you can finally control your TV volume through your Xbox. Now which is a feature that's in every cons, consumer electronics device on Earth. But anyway, that's in there. You, you start up audio, that was something we talked about a couple weeks ago. They were testing that in the insider program. And that way when you reboot your computer, turn it on from scratch. It doesn't do the, you know, that kind of swirling triumph and movie style intro that normally happens. They're changing the names of the power modes.

(01:42:06):
This has actually kind of a big deal because there's always been this kind of confusion over like, I think it was called Energy Saver. And the other one was Standby <laugh>. Oh no, I'm sorry. Na. Yeah, so I'm sorry. It was Sleep and Energy Saver. So now they're calling them standby and shut down energy saving, which to make it a little more obvious, cause I think a lot of people didn't quite understand how those things work. And then it's a bunch of smaller things for firm. Were update for your controller and the mobile Xbox app is getting updated with better video editing controls, et cetera, et cetera. So this is kind of a big one though, I would say for this year as far as number of features for the console. So that's something you will it'll be prompted or you'll just get when you reboot. But it's out today. That's it.

Leo Laporte (01:42:55):
That's it? That's it.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:57):
I was promised it's gonna be short, although I cheated because my tips and picks are all Xbox.

Leo Laporte (01:43:02):
Oh, okay. <Laugh>. Well, that's something to stay tuned for the back of the book coming up just around the corner. First a word from our sponsor, Lenovo, orchestrated by the experts at C D w. Now, helpful people at CDW understand that as the world changes, your organization needs to adapt quickly to be successful. So how can CDW keep your business ahead of the curve with those beautiful Lenovo think pads? That's how these powerful devices deliver the business class performance. You're looking for thanks to Windows 10 and the Intel Evo platform. With your remote teams working across the country and around the world, collaboration just isn't a problem anymore. Cuz Lenovo think peds keep your organization productive and connected from anywhere, anywhere. Plus CDW knows your workforce has different work styles needs flexibility, right? That's why Lenovo ThinkPads are equipped with responsive tools and built in features that let your team work seamlessly across their favorite tools. Now think about that for a second. Well, and let's not forget about security. While you thinking these high performance machines protect at the highest level with built-in hardware to guard against modern threats without slowing your team down. When you need to get more out of your technology, Lenovo makes seamless productivity possible. CDW makes it powerful. Learn more at C d w.com/lenovo client. That's cdw.com/lenovo client. We thank CDW and Lenovo for supporting Windows Weekly now with Mr. Paul Thurrott and his tip of the week.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:45):
A month or two ago, I don't remember. There were these rumors of a white elite controller, which I thought looked terrible. I still think looks terrible, <laugh>. And then it materialized as something called the Elite Series two Controller. So this is slightly less customizable but it gives you some of the best features of the high end Elite controller. Now you can customize this controller in the Microsoft what's it called? Geez, I lost the Xbox Design Lab. So this is something that's been around for five or six years, I think it is. To date has allowed you to, to customize a normal control like a typical Xbox wireless controller. But now you can customize an elite series two controller, which is why that white thing sort, sort of starts to make sense because now you can have that body part of it be whatever you color you want, you can customize, you know, the bumpers, the thumb sticks, everything else as well.

(01:45:34):
So you get, like I said, a bunch of the benefits of the high end Elite controller, but, and I customize the colors and stuff. So $150 which is, you know, for that controller too horrible. And then the app at Pick of the week is I'm not sure if it's the Xbox app or the PC Game Pass service, but I am, like I said earlier, in the middle of reviewing a ton of laptops this year. One of them is an HP NV 16 that I've actually written most of the reviewer already. I'm gonna hold onto that for a couple of days just so it's not too close to another review I wrote. But one of the things I was doing while testing it was this thing comes with a kind of a, what I would call a mid-level NVIDIA graphics card.

(01:46:18):
And it's not sold as a gaming pc, but it does actually come with like omen gaming utilities in it. And I was thinking, you know, maybe this, maybe this is a decent, you know, gaming computer for like a ca you know, casual, more casual games. But I loaded this thing up with Asphalt nine with Flight Simulator and with Halo Infinite. And this thing is an awesome gaming pc. So those game I I have access to all those games through PC game pa Well, I have actually game past Ultimate, which is console plus pc. But if you pay nine 90 a month, nine hello, 9 99 a month for the PC game, past subscription, and you have an Xbox controller and you have a decent computer, this is actually kind of a, this is an interesting thing. I mean, I, I've been an Xbox gamer since the 360 full time, so since 2005. And honestly, the graphics that are, that are available on this particular computer are better than what I see on my Xbox console at home. Really? Like it is

Leo Laporte (01:47:17):
That of the Invidia card or,

Paul Thurrott (01:47:19):
Yeah, and it, well, it's in, it's, you know, 4K display. I mean, honestly, part of it might be it's a 16 inch screen, so Oh yeah, 4K display at 60 cut of helps too. But it is, it's gorgeous. And in flight simulator bump bumped everything up to high. It's 4k hdr, all that stuff. It, it is, it's gorgeous. Like these games are gorgeous and they run great.

Leo Laporte (01:47:39):
How much bandwidths do you think

Paul Thurrott (01:47:42):
Is like the Well, they're lo so I'm doing, this is local game, right? So this is, I'm not playing Oh, it's local.

Leo Laporte (01:47:46):
Oh, you're playing? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:48):
Wait

Leo Laporte (01:47:48):
A minute. He's playing it on the Elite.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:51):
I'm playing them on the pc. Like I do, You download the games to the pc. So in other words, you subscribe the PC game pass.

Leo Laporte (01:47:57):
Oh. Oh, that's

Paul Thurrott (01:47:58):
Incredible. You, you download the games.

Leo Laporte (01:48:00):
So this is a laptop that can play Flight sim at max in 4k. Yep. What else?

Paul Thurrott (01:48:06):
Gorgeous. you'll see it in the shots when I finally put this up. But I, I tested flying over Cairo where you go over the pyramid and the that area, and then you fly up at Ben Nile River, which is incredible. And you go past the tower in Cairo and it's just, it's gorgeous. Like it's gorgeous and especially, you know, HDR display fork, you know, powerful enough. But this is a core, this particular machine is a Qury nine as well. Which is kind of interesting, I think. Does

Leo Laporte (01:48:31):
It get pretty hot when you're playing? Yeah, sure it does. Okay. <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:35):
But

Leo Laporte (01:48:35):
It's not a miracle. Okay, I got it.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:37):
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, physics still exists. But yeah, I know, and a fan cranks a little bit,

Leo Laporte (01:48:43):
But the, but the these HP are so thin inspectors are really thin in light. This is an ultra book. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:51):
It's kinda, Yeah. The, the fans are getting more thinner blades there's way more airflow going on. And but the point of this is, you know, with a controller and the Xbox app, this is doing a really good job of emulating the Xbox Console experience. And I, I, you know, I could have went in, I, I'm like, I'm not sweeping platforms or anything, but I, I went into this thinking like I'll just, I'll do this for the review, you know, whatever. But honestly, this is kind of neat because I don't travel with an Xbox console, you know, <laugh>. But I, I do travel with this thing and this is like, I've come on a tweak trip like I am now in Mexico and never, you know, look at a video game, but it's like, no, if I have some downtime, it's like, hmm, this is this is a

Leo Laporte (01:49:36):
Possible Well, and you could play on the airplane too. Cause we're not streaming here. This is

Paul Thurrott (01:49:40):
Yeah, I, yeah, that would be an interesting, I should try that on the way home actually. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe I will.

Leo Laporte (01:49:45):
So that's, you know, that's, that's a good deal. I really thought you were talking about streaming. 

Paul Thurrott (01:49:49):
Yeah. No, no, no, no. This is, I did streaming with that little Snapdragon thing.

Leo Laporte (01:49:53):
Yeah, I did see that. And that's why I was confused. I saw Call of Duty and that's

Paul Thurrott (01:49:57):
In your garbage. And that's garbage. Partially because my connection here is garbage. But, and by the way, for whatever it's worth to get that service, you have to pay 14, 9, 9 a month for the ultimate function. Right, Right. This is just, you know, if you're just on PC and this is what you want, you should look at the collection of games you get with the cost, and it's not as big as what you get on the console For sure. But a lot of, especially the Microsoft First Party titles which used to be console exclusives, you know, Flight Simulator, the G War, Well, G War was on PC actually. The you know, Halo, the newest Halo the asphalt game, et cetera. Like these are, these are really good games and they look fantastic.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:35):
It's a good deal. It's, it's an interesting alternative to consider instead of, you know, buying some gigantic honking gaming PC and then you know, paying for the game.

Leo Laporte (01:50:46):
So this is the $10 a month plan, right? This is not

Paul Thurrott (01:50:49):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. Yeah, that's right. Yep,

Leo Laporte (01:50:50):
That's right. That's great.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:51):
Something to consider something.

Leo Laporte (01:50:53):
Yeah. And you have to have an, it's best with an Xbox controller. I mean, you don't have to

Paul Thurrott (01:50:58):
Have one. Well, the truth is, some games probably require it. A lot of games you can use the keyboard and I, Oh, I could be wrong about that. Cuz actually, actually the three games I played, I think you can play. I didn't, but I think you could play with the keyboard the, yeah, the keyboard the most if you wanted to. And a lot of PC guys would want that. But I'm looking for something to kind of emulate the console experience. And it's surprisingly good

Leo Laporte (01:51:21):
When they announced that there were, what, a hundred games? There's more than a hundred on it now, right? There's,

Paul Thurrott (01:51:25):
Well, it's not, See that's a hundred on the console side, that's the

Leo Laporte (01:51:28):
Case on

Paul Thurrott (01:51:29):
PC side. Yeah, it's not that many, I'm not actually sure what the total numbers in the pc. It's probably closer to, you know, the 50 range, something like that. Okay. but it's not like the Amazon app store for Android, which a bunch of garbage, Like the games are really good. Like, it's, it's a, it's a high quality collection of games.

Leo Laporte (01:51:42):
And how big is it? There must, there's still giant downloads, right? I mean,

Paul Thurrott (01:51:46):
Yeah, I should actually, let me see if I can bring it. Oh, I, yeah, they are big, but you know what, I downloaded them on the connection here and it's only a hundred megabits here and I guess I can't really see how big they're

Leo Laporte (01:51:58):
So this is like steam basically, except you get unlimited play on a certain set of games. You don't have to buy the games for $10 a

Paul Thurrott (01:52:06):
Month. It's, you know, Steam, you buy the games, right?

Leo Laporte (01:52:08):
Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:09):
On this, you're, you're paying a subscription and getting access to the names. Right? Right. So, lemme see, I can't find that. I'm trying to find the size. Yeah, Halo Infinite is 67 gigabytes flight. SIM's probably gonna be the big one. Fyim could get a much, much bigger than what it is now. Cause I haven't downloaded a bunch of the extra stuff, but it's 123 gigabytes,

Leo Laporte (01:52:28):
So, Okay. <Laugh>. So you make sure you get a big

Paul Thurrott (01:52:31):
Back. You're not gonna, you're, if you have a 128 gig ssd,

Leo Laporte (01:52:35):
This is, you're gonna, you're gonna be doing that no <laugh>. Yeah. and, and what they say you need at least an Nvidia GTX 10 50 or a radi on or RX five 60. Yeah, but what do you got? What do you have in there? Do you know?

Paul Thurrott (01:52:47):
Yeah. What do I have right now? I should know that off the top of my hand. Let me look. It is,

Leo Laporte (01:52:52):
It's impressive to be able to play Flight Summit full quality 4K on a laptop.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:57):
Impressive. If I could find this <laugh> the thing that you asked before. Let me just look at my review. I'm sorry. Please hold.

Leo Laporte (01:53:07):
And how much was the o Well, I'm asking all the questions.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:09):
It's like not that expensive, so Yeah. No, this is in the low thousand, so it's 12 to 1400 probably.

Leo Laporte (01:53:14):
Mm-Hmm.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:14):
Wow. Range. Let me just, sorry.

Leo Laporte (01:53:16):
So we've got a new champion for our land party.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:20):
No, it's just, you know, it's a thought. It is an Nvidia RTX 3 30 60.

Leo Laporte (01:53:26):
30 60 is pretty good. Huh? Okay. That's decent.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:28):
Six gigs a rim.

Leo Laporte (01:53:30):
Yeah. That's nice.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:31):
Yeah. Dedicated to graphics.

Leo Laporte (01:53:33):
Well, we'll look for your view. You'll put it out next week, you think?

Paul Thurrott (01:53:36):
Yeah, either late this week or next week. It's Is

Leo Laporte (01:53:38):
This, this isn't the Dragon fly?

Paul Thurrott (01:53:41):
No, this is an Envy.

Leo Laporte (01:53:42):
Envy, Okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:44):
Actually, the version I have is 1700, Sorry, the with the OED display and HDR

Leo Laporte (01:53:49):
And all that stuff, but it is an X 360. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Those are so pretty.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:55):
RTX 360. Yeah. 30 60.

Leo Laporte (01:53:58):
Yeah. They're very pretty. No, no, I was talking about the NV itself. It's the,

Paul Thurrott (01:54:02):
I'm sorry,

Leo Laporte (01:54:03):
Sorry, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Good. We got the whole review out of them <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:09):
Well, you got the whole, that part of the review anyway,

Leo Laporte (01:54:12):
The game part. Yeah, I was, I was

Paul Thurrott (01:54:14):
Just surprised by how good

Leo Laporte (01:54:15):
It is. That's, that's really interesting. It's good to know. There's so much focus on stream gaming, you know, now. And I never think of a laptop as a decent gaming platform, so it's good to know. Yeah. Enterprise Pick of the Week time with Mary Jo Foley.

Mary Jo Foley (01:54:30):
Yep. I got two enterprise picks this week, and they're both things from Ignite that were kinda left over that I should have written more about but didn't get to. So the first one is Microsoft announced something they're calling the Windows 365 app. There's a preview of this app available right now if you're a Windows 11 user in the Microsoft store. This is one of the things that Microsoft announced would be coming back in April. I don't know if you all remember, there was a Panos Panay event where they talked about coming integrations between Windows 11 and the cloud PC stuff. Windows 365. And so this is the first deliverable of the four things that he said would be coming. So there's this app it's an app, you can pin it to your task bar or you can put it in your start menu or both. And it just makes accessing your Windows 365 instance much more seamless. And it feels like it's just another PC that you own. You can go inside the app and do things like restart, reset your pc and Microsoft says at some point soon, this app will ship as part of Windows 11. So it'll, you won't even have to download it once it goes a little further along the development.

Leo Laporte (01:55:51):
Add to the book am

Mary Jo Foley (01:55:52):
Yeah. Another thing you,

Leo Laporte (01:55:54):
This is just for enterprises, is consumers

Mary Jo Foley (01:55:57):
Might use this. Well, this is for Enterprises. It is for now. This is really for enterprises. So far, so far, Windows 365 is really for business customers, not for consumers. But

Leo Laporte (01:56:06):
You, so you can leave it outta the book policy. Yes.

Mary Jo Foley (01:56:08):
You can guess at some point it will become more available to consumers as well, but we don't know when that will happen. But right now, if you're a business user and you, you have Cloud PC or you're interested in trying it out, you might wanna try this app out. It's in preview, like I said, but makes the, makes the whole integration experience much more seamless and easy for

Leo Laporte (01:56:27):
People. Cool.

Mary Jo Foley (01:56:29):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:56:29):
That'd be nice. And your, that was your enterprise pick of the week. How about number two, Enterprise pick of the week? Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (01:56:39):
So I was gonna make this one of the picks last week, but this is so complicated. I couldn't understand it enough to explain it, and I still barely can. So I started out by saying, if you thought the Microsoft 365 Office thing was confusing, the Intune team says, Hold my beer <laugh>, because watch this even more confusing, right? So it sounds simple. They said, We're gonna replace the Microsoft Endpoint manager name with Intune. Okay. That seems straightforward enough, right? For a while you had Intune, then they started using Microsoft Endpoint Manager. Now we're going back to only using Intune. Except if you're talking about Configuration Manager that's gonna stay Configuration Manager. And that's gonna be the on premises PC management and mobile management brand. So it's, they're not really taking away all of the things that were under the MEM brand and putting them under Intune.

(01:57:32):
There's still gonna be some things that are not branded in Tune. They also announced it Ignite that there's gonna be some premium add-ons coming for Intune. And there's gonna be a whole new plan coming in March, 2023 that pulls together a bunch of different services that you can use within Tune. So there's gonna be a remote help Tunnel for mobile app management, endpoint privilege management, advanced endpoint analytics and more. They didn't give any information about like how much this is gonna cost or how it's going to be accessible to people who already have in tune. They just say, if you have a three or e five plans, that it should somehow, at least some of these features should somehow be available to you. So I think you gotta wait for March, 2023 to figure this whole picture out. But yeah, the, the all up thing to know is in Tune is becoming more of an Uber brand at Microsoft and configuration manager's still not going away. If you're somebody who uses that on-prem, that's my best attempt at explaining this <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:58:37):
Well, if you're gonna hold my beer, you might as well hold a delicious Mary Jo Foley beer pick of the week.

Mary Jo Foley (01:58:44):
Yes, you should. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Maine Main Beer. They're very well known for two beers. Lunch and dinner, both IPAs,

Leo Laporte (01:58:53):
<Laugh>. They don't, they don't go for long elaborate names. No,

Mary Jo Foley (01:58:56):
They like short names. Yeah. And the new beer they've got out is called Fall <laugh> name Beer Fall.

Leo Laporte (01:59:01):
Cause you will after you drink it.

Mary Jo Foley (01:59:03):
Yes. No, actually it's, it's, I had this last night and I was a little afraid of it. Very dark in color. I was like, Oh boy, this is gonna be a big one. Cuz a lot of their beers are very big high alcohol, but this is only 5.6. Okay. It's kind of like a Guinness, right? It's like a dark beer, but very light, easy to drink. They make it with Ethiopian cold Brew coffee. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So if you like a coffee stout you'll like the spear a lot. It has all the chocolatey notes, but also some fruity notes too. I was surprised how light it was in terms of just easy to drink, easy to digest, going down easy. Don't be afraid of the dark colored beers. They're usually, they're usually lighter and easier on you than the IPAs for sure.

Leo Laporte (01:59:45):
<Laugh>. Isn't that funny? You would, you wouldn't think so, but yeah. Yeah. It's got nice head too. Nice with

Paul Thurrott (01:59:51):
Guinness, Right? Remember, everyone thinks Guinness was like heavy and calorie forward. Actually, it's kind of a light beer.

Mary Jo Foley (01:59:58):
It's this beer is very similar. Yeah. If you see it, Main beer fall. Very nice, nice easy drinker.

Leo Laporte (02:00:03):
Have a pint. Fall is coming. I bet it's almost there where you guys are. It is here. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. wow. What a great show. Episode 7 99 is in the books. Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley. You rock Paul still doing our Hands on Windows show. You've been doing some really good ones of late. You may be saying, Well, wait a minute. Where is hands on Windows? Well, let me tell you, it's hidden away. It's a secret for available only for club members. Just like the Discord ad-free versions of all of our shows. There's Hands on Macintosh with Micah, Sergeant Paul does Hands on Windows, The Untitled Linux Show with Jonathan Bennett, The Gaze Fizz with Dick de Bartolo Stacy's book club. We use the club to finance the portion of our operations that advertisers don't cover, which is increasing <laugh> all the time.

(02:01:00):
 But also because we have that revenue coming from the club, we can do stuff in the club. It's a great way to launch new shows like Hands on Windows. So if you're not a club member, go to TWiTt.tv/club. We welcome individual members for $7 a month. There's a yearly plan. I think it's what is 12 times? It's the same. It's $84 a year, but you only get one charge in your card. And there's also an enterprise plan. We've just got a new enterprise subscriber, so thank you for that. Thank all of you in our club TWiTT tv slash club. Now for those of you who listen to the show with ads in it, it, there are a lot of ways you can do that. You of course can watch anybody can watch the live stream, which is every Wednesday, 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern Time, 1800 UTC live.

(02:01:48):
Do TWiT tv if you're watching live chat, live in the IRC or in the club. Twit Discord. Of course, Discord is always fun. Lots of animated js and things after the fact, add supportive versions on the website, TWiTt tv slash ww. There is a YouTube channel with even more ads. Thanks to you, thanks to YouTube. Unless you're a premium member, then there's just our ads and probably the best way to get it, really subscribe. Now, club members have a special feed they can subscribe to. The rest of you can just go to TWiT.tv/ww. You'll see the RSS feed there, or search for Windows Weekly in your podcast client's directory and subscribe. That way you'll get it automatically the minute we are done putting it all together, putting in the beginning and the end and all of that stuff. And if you're a podcast app asks for reviews, please leave us a five star review.

(02:02:40):
Let the world know about these two fabulous hosts, Paul Thurrott Thurrott.com, field guide to Windows 11 coming soon@leanpub.com. Field guide to Windows 10 there. Right now, Mary Jo Foley at ziti net. Her blog is all about Microsoft dot Come. Thank you Paul. Thank you Mary Jo. Go out and enjoy the beautiful fall foliage and a little fall beer from the main beer company. And then Tuesday you're gonna be typing, typing, typing, because the earnings call on Wednesday <laugh>, we'll have our annual ear quarterly, I should say earnings learnings episode. Thank you guys. Have a great week. Enjoy Mexico City. Paul,

Paul Thurrott (02:03:22):
You sir.

Leo Laporte (02:03:22):
Very jealous.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:24):
I know

Leo Laporte (02:03:24):
I will. It's you're going, going out to dinner next, right?

Paul Thurrott (02:03:28):
<Laugh>? Yeah. We're gonna head down to the central area so our friends can see the, you know, Wallace art

Leo Laporte (02:03:34):
And, and then Serra's there looking for her. Canona. Do you cook at all while you're there? Paul seems like you eat every meal out.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:42):
There's no reason to. Yeah, it's so cheap.

Leo Laporte (02:03:44):
Yeah. Might as well SRAs given you a quite coin giving you this stink. It's like it's dinner time right now.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:52):
You're done.

Leo Laporte (02:03:52):
You're done. Show us

Paul Thurrott (02:03:54):
You're done. Where's my dinner? It's amazing. Yank the, the router. Don't, don't, don't

Leo Laporte (02:03:59):
Make force C issue. Don't make me yank this router. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Thank you Paul. Thank you Mary Jo. Thank you everybody. Have a great week. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly.