Windows Weekly Episode 801 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott is here. Lots to talk about. New versions of Windows. For those of you insiders, we'll also talk about Microsoft 365. Some new teams features that are pretty cool. Paul, talk about how to set up your edge and why you might wanna do it before you start using it. Earnings from other companies, including Intel and thoughts about Call of Duty, Modern warfare too. We got a lot to talk about. Coming up next on Windows News Weekly podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWIT Straight.

(00:00:45):
This is Windows Weekly episode 801. Recorded Wednesday, November 2nd, 2022. Whiskey and Egg Rice Windows Weekly is brought to you by Melissa. Over 10,000 clients worldwide in industries like retail education, healthcare, insurance, finance and government. Rely on Melissa for full spectrum data quality and ID verification software. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today with 1000 records cleaned free at melissa.com/TWIT and by thinks Canary detects attackers on your network while avoiding irritating false alarms. Get the alerts that matter for 10% off and a 60 day money back guarantee. Go to canary.tools/TWIT and don't forget to enter the code TWIT. And how did you hear about Us Box? It's time for Windows Weekly. The show we cover the ladies news from Microsoft. The new and improved Windows Weekly with just Paul. I guess it's not improved, is it? I'm trying. It's so very hard.

(00:01:52):
Paul <laugh>, Paul Thurrott is here from Thurrott.com if you're just joining us, Mary Jo Foley has gone off to greener pasture. She now works for an analyst firm. She's editor in chief of directions on microsoft.com and just left us in the dust, just left us and said, See a guy's bye. Line it's is like you have a favorite band and this new singer comes in and you don't like it, but then it goes on for a long time. They're like, Okay, I got used to this. And then the old guy comes back, you're like, Who is this guy? Who is this guy? She's the Bond's Scott of Windows Weekly. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, I'm gonna say this. Sammy Hagar, but yes. Sammy Hagar. Yeah, the Stephen Tyler, the who's the guy in journey that nobody remembers anymore? That guy. Oh, Arnell. David Lee Roth. He's the David Lee Roth of the <laugh>. Sure. No, now in fact she's assured us, she'll come back from time to time and we have a long list of people we would like to have join us from time to time, including I think starting next month, Rich Campbell's gonna pop in which is great from run as radio. So I think it'll be fun. But you know what, this is how it used to be just you and me Paul, talking about the winds. It's it's a great taste. Less filling is what somebody said in the chatroom. <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:15):
Okay,

Leo Laporte (00:03:16):
Speaking

Paul Thurrott (00:03:17):
Aish.

Leo Laporte (00:03:18):
New dev build's what get going. Windows 11 is out. Woohoo.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:24):
Yeah. So we had a new dev build today. I won't see if there's new beta builds. And then late last week after the show last week, there were new dev and beta builds. So this is something I have willfully not ignored, but didn't pay a lot of attention to over the past year. I think a lot of people, I get semi fed up with this system, I don't understand it. I don't quite know why they're doing it the way they're doing it, but obviously writing the book and everything, I need to know what's coming down the pike. So I'm starting to pay a little bit more attention to this. And I would say across the dev and beta builds, which in my understanding today, this shifts over time. But neither one of these relates to a very specific version of Windows. That's the new thing. Well, it's so new thing that's happening in the Windows Insider preview. So they're still testing features. We'll see if they appear in stable at some point in the future. So has two different things.

Leo Laporte (00:04:22):
I have to confess, I was a little concerned because I was looking at TWITtter and Windows 11 is trending and I thought, oh my God, it died.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:28):
Oh, they're getting rid of it.

Leo Laporte (00:04:29):
Yeah, they're getting rid of what happened. And I don't know why some reason is just trending.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:35):
It must be the Windows 11 field guide that's just pumping new life. That's

Leo Laporte (00:04:39):
It. That's exciting. Yeah, no, not I know. Anything particularly news and this, even these build is minor, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:04:50):
Yeah, they're all minor. So Windows 1122 H two came out in the beginning of October. The October slash November update came out in, I don't really call it preview today, but we'll call it preview form in week C back in October. So next week is patch Tuesday for November. And we should see the broad release of those new features. So this stuff that we're looking at here, I would call these potential future moments, if that makes sense. Because these are features that will probably appear in a future so-called moment update for Windows 1122 H two over the next year. So we'll see. So in today's dev build, just a couple things. One of, well, both pretty minor. One is a kind of UX change for the Windows store. This is just making it easier to find what I would call non-standard content like subscriptions, digital offers, redemption opportunities, that kind of stuff.

(00:05:46):
So that's whatever we'll see, I'm sure that will eventually make its way to the store. The other one is curious to me, this is basically, if you're familiar with how Windows 11 works, there are four icons that appear on the task bar that I often recommend removing, although some of 'em have little asterisks next to those widgets, search task view and chat. And my contention is for the most part, if you know how to use these features, you don't need the buttons on the task bar. They're just taking up space. The caveat there, the asterisks is for those things, is actually additional functionality if you leave them there. So for example, with the search feature, if you mouse over the search icon, you get little popup that gives you possible things you might wanna search for. If you use virtual desktops, you might actually wanna lose leave the task view icon on.

Leo Laporte (00:06:36):
See I use that cuz I have all these virtual desktops going.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:40):
So leave that there because when you mouse over that you get the Yeah, that's handy desktops management. It's nice. You don't have to go into the

Leo Laporte (00:06:46):
Environment. You even see these little thumbnail which is live cuz I have a little clock in one of them and it's ticking over, which is kind of cool. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:06:53):
Right. Yeah. Now if you don't use desktops, but you clearly actually use it pretty extensively, you

Leo Laporte (00:06:58):
Could see I do. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:59):
Yeah. You could get rid of that thing. No big deal.

Leo Laporte (00:07:01):
What? Right click, right. How do you get rid of it? Right click and then task force settings. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:08):
And then you'll bring up a settings window and you can see

Leo Laporte (00:07:10):
The, maybe wonder if I should add widgets and chat widgets is that thing that I turned off that kept popping up the weather and all that stuff. And then Chad, I know so I don't want, cause I don't,

Paul Thurrott (00:07:21):
You're never gonna wanna use, but every one of these things has a Windows T shortcut you can go too. So windows key plus S for search windows, key windows Q plus tab for task view windows Q plus W for widgets and windows key plus C for when it's really called teams chat.

Leo Laporte (00:07:37):
Oh that's handy. Handy. I took the widgets away cause I kept accidentally hitting the widgets by moving my cursor there. So it's Windows kw and then I would just can do that. Yeah, that's right. I remember you told me that and that's why I took it out.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:52):
I

Leo Laporte (00:07:53):
Remember that now.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:54):
So the interesting thing to me is, and I believe I got such a bad memory for this kind of thing, but what we think of as start search, which is technically just called search, but search from the start button or search from the start menu

Leo Laporte (00:08:07):
Because it used to say start, why we call it that? It used to say start.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:11):
Well it's really just system search. You happen because actually I will, well to make be fair, you don't have to go to start a search anymore. So that's kind of the trick. So Microsoft has been trying to make it really easy to get to search. So in Windows 10, remember there was a search bar in the task bar, right in Windows 11. They're actually test testing bringing that back. But there's a button and they're afraid that that thing is not obvious enough. So the new feature they're testing is a popup that appears over that icon say, Hey by the way, this is a faster way to get to search.

Leo Laporte (00:08:44):
All it says now is start. But

Paul Thurrott (00:08:48):
I mean the

Leo Laporte (00:08:49):
Search and the other things have stuff. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:54):
Anyway, we, we've spent more time talking about it than it will take to use it. But it's just a little pop up look, they rarely want people to use search. And why would they want you to use search? Because as we talked about maybe last week, but if not two weeks ago, Microsoft wants you to use, when I still think of start search and search the web because it brings up search highlights because web search results come up through Bing and those results will often show advertising based on Microsoft's ad network. So they're trying to get you into their environment here.

Leo Laporte (00:09:27):
I also think there's a secondary thing, which is a lot of stuff on Windows is not very discoverable. And so this gives them a chance to help you find things like every time I listen to this show, I learn a new thing that I could do that I didn't even know I could do. And so that's maybe another reason I don't know.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:46):
I feel like yes, but the thing that's interesting about search is it's available from so many different places. There are literally two different keyboard shortcuts at one search. You can get to it from the start menu, of course you can get to it from the search button on the task bar, which is enabled by default. You can mouse over it and click a little search box in the popup that appears when you mouse over it. They really want you to go down this path. And I think this is yet another, this is all part of that services push. We talked about their ad business and search business going bang busters relatively speaking in the financial results they just reported this is what they're trying to do. They're really trying to use drive usage of

Leo Laporte (00:10:25):
This stuff. So if you don't wanna belabor this, you tell me to move on <affirmative>, but I'm just, cuz now I'm curious. You're not talking about the magnifying glass, you're talking about the old the

Paul Thurrott (00:10:35):
Start. Now I am talking about the Oh you are

Leo Laporte (00:10:37):
Talking about,

Paul Thurrott (00:10:37):
Although in both places. So for example, you,

Leo Laporte (00:10:40):
It's different when I do this from when I do the,

Paul Thurrott (00:10:44):
So go back to that, just look at it for a second to remember what it looks like.

Leo Laporte (00:10:48):
Okay, I'm memorizing it. And

Paul Thurrott (00:10:50):
Then start typing something like type W YN or whatever and you'll see search results come up,

Leo Laporte (00:10:56):
Right? Same thing here. This research w i n you get the same results. Yeah. Although it has an auto complete because I usually type update. So it thinks when I type wn I n I'm going for Windows update, which

Paul Thurrott (00:11:07):
I that's and actually that's working correctly. But the thing that I think most people don't maybe notice is when you go to start and start typing the window subtly changes to become this thing, right? Yes. It's not actually part of start, it's a new watch. What happens to the window when you type? It does

Leo Laporte (00:11:28):
Even I just clicked in it. It changed it, right? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:31):
Because what you're really doing is closing start and opening search.

Leo Laporte (00:11:36):
And now I will grant you about the Bing thing cuz I noticed my Bing rewards number is a Microsoft Rewards is popping up immediately tempting me to click on that

Paul Thurrott (00:11:47):
<laugh>. Well you've turned off search highlights. So actually the limits and Bing whatever stuff that you would see is much less than normal, which is fine. Don't turn it back on. It's terrible

Leo Laporte (00:11:57):
<laugh>, but that's interesting. Okay. All

Paul Thurrott (00:12:02):
Right. Yeah, yeah. That's already smaller so that's kind of interesting. Yeah. Okay, so that's build. Last week they released builds for both dev and beta channels. The beta channel is, and I say channels for beta because there's two versions of it. Remember there's a build for people who are getting new features and a build for people who are not. And they're kind of doing this AB testing or whatever you want to call it in order to test the system they now have going out into the stable world, which is you get something like 22 H two, there are actually new features hidden in the OS and they're enabled by a future update that might ship 2, 3, 4, whatever number of weeks in the future. So everyone who's waiting on next week's release of whatever we're gonna call that the November update, those things, those new features are actually on your computer already.

(00:12:53):
There may be updates to them, but there are things you can do to enable them. Now Microsoft will enable them for you in the future. So I personally disagree with this system, but the fact remains that dev channel is what it is. You get dev channel builds is one type, this one build number and beta channel has two. So that's just the way it's on the dev channel side. The tablet optimized task bar we've been talking about literally for 18 months is now available to all insiders. So if you're in the dev channel, I'm sorry. Yeah, no that's right. Yeah. If you're in the dev channel, you will get that. There's also this new system tray overflow area. Last week I talked about how there are kind of two task bar based overflows. There's a major update to the main task bar overflow coming in this November update.

(00:13:41):
But there's also an update to the <laugh> to system tray slash notification area overflow. The icon icon where you can side icons, like the little icons you see in the corner. And they're updating that as well visually. And they're gonna let you move icons around. You can already, but in the new ui this is new. So that will be coming in the future. And then on the beta side again TA it optimized task bar. This is the feature they showed up last year, they tested, they pulled, they put back in, it's coming in. A future update is also available in beta. And then that thing that I think was in your computer, if I didn't, I think I saw it in your computer. If you right click the task bar, they've added the ability to go right to task manager back from that Right click on the task

Leo Laporte (00:14:27):
Bar. Yeah. Cause I'm on the Windows 11 beta that I can't get out of.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:31):
Yeah, yeah. Right. So the computer I'm on, oddly I'm not seeing it even though I'm somewhat positive, I enabled that. But I saw it on yours and

Leo Laporte (00:14:40):
Yeah, we talked about that last week cuz I still do control delete to get to the task manage. But I guess I'll get used to that

Paul Thurrott (00:14:46):
Really? Right click that thing every day. Yeah, it makes me insane. And next Tuesday that will be fixed for everybody. So if you've been waiting on that, that's actually happened pretty quick. I have to say. That's pretty good. And the other big thing is there was a phone link app update. So a phone link is the thing that used to be called your phone, which I always thought should have been called my phone, but whatever. It's this right? I mean it's like Windows is telling me it's your phone. It's your phone Paul. Yeah, I know. But I would call it my phone <laugh>. Anyway, the change name of the phone. Phone link. Microsoft and Samsung have a deep partnership where if you have a recent Samsung Galaxy device, you get additional features in this app and there's another one coming and this one's pretty cool.

(00:15:24):
So if you have mobile hotspot capabilities on your phone that you can go to the phone, find that interface in settings, turn it on, maybe you have that quick link thing in the shade. However you do it, you enable it. And then you can go to your pc, bring up quick settings, go to the wifi split button there, choose that network, it will connect to it. And then you're online. That's okay. That's how life works. If you have a recent Samsung device like a smartphone, you can now through this integration enable the hotspot directly from the computer. So instead of turning it on the phone first, going to the computer, connecting to it, you go to the computer, it still shows up on the list, you select it and it enables it on the phone. And then the PC connects to it. So this is something that I'm sure service well owners might be a little upset about, but this is the nature of that partnership and

Leo Laporte (00:16:17):
To really confuse things. <affirmative> the dialogue. Cuz I haven't installed the what's it called? It's no longer your phone. I haven't installed it yet. Phone,

Paul Thurrott (00:16:28):
Phone. No. It should be on your computer.

Leo Laporte (00:16:30):
It says on your Android phone. Go to aka.ms/your pc. So that's really, there's a confusing thing. And then the download is something called a link to Windows. But now I'm on a Google Pixel. Is that gonna, If you don't use Samsung, I remember it worked really well on my Samsung, but

Paul Thurrott (00:16:49):
It will work. Okay. You're not gonna get this new feature and

Leo Laporte (00:16:53):
It'll work. Okay. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:54):
So on a Samsung, recent Samsung Galaxy devices, this is built in. So you don't have to install an app actually built into the os. It's kind of neat on other Android phones you do what you're doing. That aka.ms is like their version of a quick link. Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. They didn't think to change the world, which is classic Microsoft unfortunately. So that's the old name, but whatever. It's

Leo Laporte (00:17:19):
The old name. It's so funny for Surface Duo, certain Samsung phones and honor phones, link to Windows is already installed. I will open from the link. That's right. But mine was not. That's right. Okay. So I'm install link to Windows now. And then once I have

Paul Thurrott (00:17:33):
That, then Samsung actually, what do you call, It's like a notification shade. And then you get something that I think of as quick setting icons on Samsung devices. That's one of the default set of icons you could add. It's built into the system. It's kind of a nice thing if you want this integration.

Leo Laporte (00:17:48):
So I'm gonna link my phone. Is the QR code ready on your pc? I should probably. Should I not show this QR code <laugh>? Well I wonder, but I mean I wonder. That's interesting. Okay. Pair with QR code. I won't do that. Oh, it's a little tiny little, Wait a minute. Oh here it is. Okay, here's the QR code. Gonna scan that. Pairing with pc Hold tight. Pairing is in process. And now just finishing things up on

Paul Thurrott (00:18:21):
My phone. How long is this podcast? I'm not, I wonder if we have enough time.

Leo Laporte (00:18:24):
<laugh>. Well I've worked, So you know what? It worked so well on my S 23. And now I'm just curious.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:31):
I gotta say if you ever use a Chrome, a Chromebook has a similar feature, which works great obviously for Ann Apple ecosystem.

Leo Laporte (00:18:38):
All, you don't have to do anything cuz you're, that's all to keep you in the warm confines of the app. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:18:43):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:18:44):
Ecosystem.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:47):
Yeah. But mean Microsoft understandably wants to do as much as they can to bring this to Windows. I'd love to see something, anything on the iPhone side as well.

Leo Laporte (00:18:57):
So it went back, now it says review mobile permissions. But on my phone I didn't get that, so I have to do this over again. Oh, alright. You're right. The podcast is not, it's not

Paul Thurrott (00:19:09):
Great. Yeah, no, it's not a great experience. It's hard because

Leo Laporte (00:19:12):
It was so good with,

Paul Thurrott (00:19:13):
There was kinda a multistep thing. You have Yeah, you to do it on both sides and you have to give it okay to access your camera,

Leo Laporte (00:19:19):
Roll your text list

Paul Thurrott (00:19:21):
Of text message, text messages, phone

Leo Laporte (00:19:23):
Calls. Now I'm getting that. Okay. I had to Oops. Wow. Send notification. Yeah, so you get some permissions. Allow. I guess

Paul Thurrott (00:19:39):
Fortunately the way Android works now is you can't bring up a single dialogue

Leo Laporte (00:19:43):
Is always Yeah, there's a lot of allowances. Okay. And then you, so you'll see these permissions. Got it. These are all the permissions in there that you have to give it quite a few, but Well,

Paul Thurrott (00:19:55):
But think about what it's doing. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:19:57):
They're all really, Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:19:59):
Yeah. They're all, all.

Leo Laporte (00:20:00):
Oh and now it's working. Woohoo. There you go. Woohoo. You could see my spam messages and everything. <affirmative>. <affirmative>. Okay, cool. I

Paul Thurrott (00:20:09):
Got some good Mexican spam messages going these days, by the way. It's good stuff. If you thought spam was annoying in your own language.

Leo Laporte (00:20:17):
Oh really? You're getting spam? Yeah. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:20:19):
I'm getting a lot of spam from something called uno tv.com.

Leo Laporte (00:20:23):
There's only one. Thank goodness.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:26):
That's

Leo Laporte (00:20:27):
Not good. Not good. That's cool. All right. Yeah. So I'll give you some feedback on this. But do you use it with a Pixel phone or a Samsung phone?

Paul Thurrott (00:20:38):
I use it with a Pixel phone these days. Although for the book, I'm gonna borrow my wife's phone because she has a Samsung. Samsung. It

Leo Laporte (00:20:44):
Seems to work. It seems to work better, frankly.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:47):
It works best for the Samsung

Leo Laporte (00:20:49):
For sure. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and then they give me a long list of things I can install. Of course. Sure. From Microsoft. Why? But you don't have Outlook. Swift, Key, Launcher, Edge, LinkedIn, Microsoft Word or PowerPoint or spreadsheets or you don't have any of that installed. Leo, what kind of might user are

Paul Thurrott (00:21:07):
You?

Leo Laporte (00:21:10):
I have a couple on here. The last three?

Paul Thurrott (00:21:13):
Yeah, that's it. Huh? What do you, What's at the top? Wait, go back to the

Leo Laporte (00:21:17):
Top. Thery Top, Sorry.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:19):
Outlook. Yeah, what's the, Oh, I'll look.

Leo Laporte (00:21:20):
Swift Key Launcher, Edge, LinkedIn. Word. PowerPoint. Excel, OneNote to do teams. Xbox. Xbox. Game pass, Bing, Microsoft start.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:35):
So what's weird about this, you don't see the Microsoft Office app as one of the options?

Leo Laporte (00:21:40):
No. They have the individual offices apps not, Huh. That is interesting. Yeah. Huh.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:49):
Curious. I

Leo Laporte (00:21:50):
Curious. Yeah. And it's not like I have it installed anyway. You

Paul Thurrott (00:21:53):
Don't have the Power BI business data analytics on your phone?

Leo Laporte (00:21:56):
No. And I don't know why not. I really need that Power bi baby Power.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:02):
I couldn't explain what that was. If

Leo Laporte (00:22:05):
That's, That's a Mary Jo I think. Yeah, <affirmative>. Okay. This is cool. This is cool. And it's now giving me my photos, which is nice, right? Yeah. So you get access to photos, calls and messages and it seems to work fine. I think that's good. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:28):
I wish it worked on an iPhone. Well I think you get photos I think with the iPhone. I haven't looked at,

Leo Laporte (00:22:32):
Oh I haven't tried it with the iPhone. Oh yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:34):
I think that might be the extent of it. <laugh>,

(00:22:39):
This is completely off topic this, it's a topic I brought up many months ago, but I felt the real need for it over the weekend, which was, I have photos that are in Google Photos. In my case, it doesn't matter where they are, they could be in one drive, it could be up on Amazon, wherever in the clouds somewhere. It's weird to me that I can, and this is I think specifically an limitation of Instagram, but also I feel like this needs to be more of a formal mobile platform feature. So I go into Instagram and I say, I wanna post some photos, but they're not photos that are my phone cuz they're photos from some time ago.

Leo Laporte (00:23:14):
<affirmative>,

Paul Thurrott (00:23:14):
I don't understand why I can't select photos from these sources. So you think, well, okay, you can

Leo Laporte (00:23:19):
Only do apple's photos, that's

Paul Thurrott (00:23:22):
It. So I'm like, okay, no problem. C I will down. I do. And I did them in every way. You can do them. I downloaded them to photos, I downloaded them to files and in no case could I see those photos from Instagram. There's no way to bridge that

Leo Laporte (00:23:36):
Gap. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:23:37):
That's that I found.

Leo Laporte (00:23:38):
And yeah, that's an Apple thing. I'm sure it's to protect

Paul Thurrott (00:23:42):
Super frustrating. And to me it just seems like such an obvious, what you need is a file picker. Yes. It's extensible. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:23:53):
But they don't know. No.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:54):
Right. Nobody does

Leo Laporte (00:23:56):
This. So what you have to do is export them into apple's photos,

Paul Thurrott (00:24:00):
Which I did, but they should show so well the problem in this case is Instagram. So in that, depending on what I was trying to do, that should have worked. You're right. Yeah. In Instagram, if you look at where it can find photos from on iOS is like two places and it's, it will is not gonna happen. It didn't in my case anyway. I couldn't find 'em.

Leo Laporte (00:24:22):
You have to allow access to all photos and then it shows the Apple photos. But you're saying that isn't a file picker, is it? It's just the Apple photos is all you see. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:24:34):
I spent a lot of time on this over the weekend and I eventually just said, you know what, I'm gonna do this for my computer. Actually it worse than that. I'm just gonna do this on my computer to Facebook. Because the thing I wanted to post <laugh>, I wanted this to be done sometime this century. I wasn't trying to,

Leo Laporte (00:24:51):
Hey, you know what, if it gets into meta, it's all the same.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:55):
You think, Well you think so, but you can post from Instagram to Facebook. You can't post from Facebook to Instagram. Yeah. A little frustrating. You

Leo Laporte (00:25:06):
Treat Instagram as your photo, your personal photo album.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:09):
<laugh>, which is ludicrous because it's a terrible place to share

Leo Laporte (00:25:12):
Photos. I know. I was just gonna say

Paul Thurrott (00:25:14):
<laugh>, I did imagine you go out to dinner and look, you want whatever you feel about people posting pictures at dinner. You have 13 photos of dinner that you wanna put up there. You can only put 10. So you could have two posts, one with 10, one with three, you know, could do it. The one thing you can't do is have 13 posts, but if you go over to Facebook, you can post 285 photos to Facebook. They

Leo Laporte (00:25:37):
Don't care. So dwindle And our chat room is saying that you have to conceptually change your point of view. If you wanna share something from Google Photos to Insta, you start in Google photos and use

Paul Thurrott (00:25:52):
The share. Oh, I did that. Yeah, Yeah. It didn't come up. Oh, it doesn't come up. So I did try that. No, it's not a share target I guess we'll call it.

Leo Laporte (00:26:00):
Oh, you might have to dig through that long list.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:03):
Oh no, I did. I listen. Oh, I trust you.

Leo Laporte (00:26:06):
If you tried it. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:26:09):
You can do. Yeah, it just doesn't.

Leo Laporte (00:26:11):
Well that's weird. Why wouldn't it show up? As in, why wouldn't Insta show

Paul Thurrott (00:26:14):
Up? Actually, it literally did just show up. Okay, now I'm wondering. No, but now I'm wondering. So I literally did 10 on purpose. I'm wondering if it has something to do with the number. Cuz I was trying to meet Instagram stupid needs anyway. Okay, that's interesting. Now I listen, my wife and I sat there together and went, We did whatever you think of me. My wife is an intelligent

Leo Laporte (00:26:34):
Person. I see Instagram and then I can post, I shared as a post a

Paul Thurrott (00:26:38):
Story, a real or a story. Yeah, yeah, I saw that. I just saw that too. Yep. Yeah. So all I can tell you is I absolutely went and tried for that. I didn't say, I don't know what to tell you anymore.

Leo Laporte (00:26:49):
Very upset. This is, and this is an Apple problem. And so shouldn't be even mentioned on this show, but it is the case that Apple's share sheet is completely borked and weird.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:59):
Oh it's

Leo Laporte (00:27:00):
Horrible because frequently the thing you want doesn't show up in the obvious row. So then you have to do more and then go through the suggestions and even then, Got it. Things won't show up. And you, you'd think that if you always share to the same thing, that thing would get entered into this top line, but it doesn't. And there seems to be no way to, I mean maybe there is, I don't think there's any way. So I always, Yeah, that's just a

Paul Thurrott (00:27:27):
Weird, because this was making me insane. I just did this again, so I just did what you did. I selected one photo and I saw you saw Instagram came up and I'm thinking, what am I seeing things. No. So I just went and selected 10 photos. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:27:40):
It's cuz you did multiple. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:42):
It won't do it. A Instagram is not a choice. So for my own edification, I don't care if people think I'm ridiculous, but this was actually important to me that I post this and I couldn't do it. And this is the digital divide is not people who grew up on analog TV and phones from at and t and don't know how to use computers. It's this kind of thing. Yeah. Where, yeah, I feel like I know what I'm doing and it makes me feel stupid. And it just has nothing to do with piece your phone link or what it's called. But it's just reminded me of this how insane stuff it can be. It's too bad. It needs to be a better way to go back and forth between services

Leo Laporte (00:28:24):
And it doesn't seem like that's that hard to do. But yeah, for some reason

Paul Thurrott (00:28:28):
I just agree on a sta. I mean I don't, Yeah, yeah. Look, if Apple built the extensibility model into iOS, everyone would use it.

Leo Laporte (00:28:37):
You think so? You think that's the one thing missing? Well,

Paul Thurrott (00:28:41):
Everything. The one thing missing. No, no, I don't mean it like that. I just mean if they did do this, people

Leo Laporte (00:28:45):
Oh, people would do it. No,

Paul Thurrott (00:28:46):
No it It's not the one thing missing.

Leo Laporte (00:28:48):
Okay. <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:50):
I think in this case Apple did build something in, so there's a share too and Instagram, which is terrible. I, I'd have to look and figure out what they support exactly. But like you with one photo selected pre choices,

Leo Laporte (00:29:03):
It's

Paul Thurrott (00:29:04):
Just the multiple 10 photos selected with 10, nothing. Zero. It's not even there. It's like it's not even installed.

Leo Laporte (00:29:09):
That is a, That's gotta be a bug. That's just a weird,

Paul Thurrott (00:29:13):
I think it's an in. That's why I said I believe it's Instagram. I think it was Instagram's fault.

Leo Laporte (00:29:16):
Oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:29:18):
It's an incredibly unsophisticated application.

Leo Laporte (00:29:20):
I'm gonna select four or five <affirmative> share two.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:24):
I do. We're we are gonna find the number.

Leo Laporte (00:29:27):
Insta has seems to have disappeared. You right? Disappeared. Yep. Think no longer. And it's no longer in the extended suggestions. It's just gone. Gone.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:38):
I know what I saw. I know what I saw. Well, as you showed it, I was like, that's interesting. It never occurred to me

Leo Laporte (00:29:45):
For single photo. It does it for multiple photos. It does not. But who's to say <laugh> to? Why? Let me try it now. I want to, now I wanna see if I can do multiple photos from Apple's photos to Insta.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:02):
Oh yeah. Geez. That would be something. <laugh>. And then also if you could do this on an Android phone, right? Or

Leo Laporte (00:30:10):
Is that what you No, you're right. Insta goes away. So they must be saying, Oh no, no, no. Oh no. We don't want you to do that for some unknown reason.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:17):
But explain to me, I'm sorry. You have one photo you wanna share and they give you options for post story and what was the other one? Message

Leo Laporte (00:30:26):
Probably. Yeah, something. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:27):
So you can share a photo to Instagram. A photo. That's what this is what I'm talking about. This is how stupid this thing is <laugh> like it is literally define Instagram in one sentence. A photo sharing service. It is the worst way to share photos online that could ever be imagined.

Leo Laporte (00:30:44):
Well here's an opportunity <affirmative> for somebody to step up and make a better one. Please.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:51):
Well, I'll just put the breaks on that right now because if we need a better anything, it's TWITtter and that

Leo Laporte (00:30:56):
Ain't happen.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:57):
I would fix that first.

Leo Laporte (00:30:58):
That ain't gonna happen. <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:01):
I know.

Leo Laporte (00:31:02):
What are you crazy? What? Are you nuts? I know, I know. I don't know. Elon might Elon might. You might. I I'm, I'm rooting for him. I ain't paying him

Paul Thurrott (00:31:11):
$8. Don't

Leo Laporte (00:31:11):
Say I ain't paying him $8 for a blue check anymore. I got verified. I guess if in three months you see my check goes away. There you go. Here,

Paul Thurrott (00:31:20):
Here's what I'm waiting for someone to say about Elon Musk. Don't worry. He's gonna surround himself by a bunch of smart people and we'll be fine.

Leo Laporte (00:31:26):
He did that at SpaceX. He might have done that at Tesla. Could be Who's in the room? Who's according to Wall Street Journal assisting him in making these smart decisions. Jason Gall Anis.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:39):
Oh yeah, that's right.

Leo Laporte (00:31:42):
He also brought in one of a former director of product.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:48):
He bringing Kanye's got nothing going on. Kae

Leo Laporte (00:31:50):
Bringing

Paul Thurrott (00:31:51):
In, Yeah the whole thing off.

Leo Laporte (00:31:54):
There you go.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:55):
Oh boy. One away.

Leo Laporte (00:31:57):
Oh, where were we? You did the dev. Did you do the beta?

Paul Thurrott (00:32:01):
I did. I

Leo Laporte (00:32:02):
Did. Did you do? Oh yeah. And you did the big phone link app update,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:07):
Which got me off of my Instagram, meaning

Leo Laporte (00:32:10):
Ran and we got the Instagram tirade in. Excellent. I'm hoping Mary Jo has packed up the gong and mailed it to me. I'm just saying, which she doesn't need anymore.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:19):
He told me she's just gonna use it. She's some kind group. I think there's gonna be some people she works with who have a silent reevaluation of her hiring the first time she brings out the go group meeting. Bring

Leo Laporte (00:32:33):
Out the go <laugh>. That will be, Now I wanna be a fly on wall for that. I

Paul Thurrott (00:32:40):
Really do. I have. I'm a rude enough person that I have said, I've said this multiple times to someone that we'll be in a group of friends, guys I've known since high school and they're like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. One of our friends was going on and he's like, I got this pool and the guy won't cut the lawn right around the pool and know I had a firearm and then a new guy did this. And I'm like, I'm gonna give you 60 more seconds on this topic. And then we are just moving along. <laugh>. This is a waste of my Brian sells. I don't care about your pool or your one or No, no, no offense, but we're moving on from this.

Leo Laporte (00:33:13):
Forget the fart app. There should be a Gong app on every phone.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:18):
Yep. It's the time. It just like a buzzer goes off. What's that? It's like, oh, that's the alarm on the end of this conversation. <laugh>. Yeah, we're done. That's enough of that.

Leo Laporte (00:33:27):
There's a nice passive aggressive way

Paul Thurrott (00:33:30):
To get out this. Oh yeah. No, it's not me in my phone. I would've kept going but it's telling me we need to move on. I can't help

Leo Laporte (00:33:37):
It.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:37):
Yeah, Apple, I mean they know it's good.

Leo Laporte (00:33:39):
The Apple knows our show. Let's take a little break. Our show today brought to you by the great folks at Melissa. If you're in business, your address list, we're just getting our Christmas card list together. Of course. What are we gonna do? We're gonna put it on, send it up to the Melissa secure FTP server and have it updated. Wait a minute, you'll say they don't know who's on your Christmas card list. No, but they will know if there's a bad email address, if an address is changed, if a phone number is changed and they'll send it back to us. Clean and sparkling and fresh and baa bing, baa boom, we're ready to go. Same thing with your suppliers, your customers everything that you keep track of these days. And the thing is, you gotta understand all of those address lists are decaying. They're decaying as we speak.

(00:34:30):
In fact, bad data could cost organizations on average 15 million a year. And the longer poor quality data stays in your system, the more the loss will accumulate. If your business is gonna be successful, your customer information has to be accurate. Well, there's another bad thing that can happen. I mean, big deal. We sent a Christmas card to the wrong person. That's not the end of the world. I used to do use bill photo card app for that. And he would by hand, he would do this pills amazing fella. He would go and he would correct the addresses for us and then he'd send me a little snarky note saying, you know, gotta fix these addresses, Leon, this fly for wrong. But he fixed them. So I got lazy. Melissa's a solution. And the other side, which we big deal Christmas card goes asray, not the end of the world.

(00:35:20):
But what if you're doing customer service? Some customer calls up and you say, Hi, Yeah, this is Leo LaPorte and I'm really unhappy. I haven't gotten my package yet. And you're saying, Well, Mrs. LaPorte, is it Helen? I'm talking to, we sent your package to Delaware. No, that's not me. You see now a already 10 situation has just gone to hell. Melissa can fix it. What about sending email? And then it gets because of course nowadays with email authentication and due to increased spam and fraud it's harder to get your emails through because of a misconfiguration on the senders side. Right. Melissa can solve this too. Melissa's global email can identify which authentications are in place. Wow, this is something new I hadn't heard about. This is so cool. They can check for the MX server of the email that you're sending out during validation and tell you it's not gonna get through because you're not doing DM or whatever.

(00:36:27):
And you can fix your settings and prove deliverability before the email gets bounced before to even send it. Melissa, I love you. That is brilliant. Melissa's global email identifies potential business impeding authentication systems like SPF D c dmar. It will help you follow best practices for all three. When you set it upright, you maximize your email deliverability, You improve ROI on leads, you reduce costly IP reputation damage because you know when you send out a lot of emails improperly authenticated, at some point the receiving servers are gonna start blocking your whole IP address and now you got trouble. You may even be designated as spam and that's the worst thing you really, that'll kill you. Melissa, Global email verification service helping you increase deliverability, avoid high bounce rates, avoid black listing, Protect your valuable sender reputation so you don't look like a n nick sending out mail to Leo.

(00:37:30):
This ain't no address. <laugh> and their solution verifies emails in real time, pinging each email to ensure the address you're sending it to, that it's active, able to receive mail. And in that process it also says what authentications are needed. It'll correct typos, illegal characters, text mobile email addresses that should not receive commercial email messages. Oh man, no, I shouldn't be surprised. Melissa is the best. They've been doing this for 37 years. They're independent, they're experienced. They take good care of all your data. So you never have to worry about breaches or privacy. They are HIPAA compliant, GDPR compliant, SOC two compliant. These people are great. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. There's so many things Melissa can do for you. You can get started today. Maybe do your Christmas card list, right? 1000 records clean for free. Just go to melissa.com/TWIT. M E L I S S a.com/TWIT. We thank Melissa so much for supporting Windows Weekly. They are asking in the chat, where's Mary Jo? She as I mentioned at the beginning of show, yes, she's got a job directions on microsoft.com, She's editor in chief over there. She said, I'm just gonna be too busy, but I'll come back from time to time and we will count on that. We'll have her on the big show from time to time as well. So she's not as, I

Paul Thurrott (00:38:54):
Would be in the disc card today, but I'm using a computer install on,

Leo Laporte (00:38:58):
I'm sorry. Oh, I know. And disc. But you know what, there's a nice feature to discard.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:02):
I use the Yeah, that's true. There's

Leo Laporte (00:39:03):
A web client. There's a web client, which I use. There's also, when you do it on the desktop and you have Discord on your phone, you can do, don't have to log in. You can have put up a QR code, you register with your phone, which is already logged in and it's boom and it's easy. And we should mention that is a feature of our club TWITt that I think has turned out to be, we thought it'd be the ad-free versions of the shows. We thought maybe it'd be access to special shows like Paul's hands on windows and sure that's good. But the Discord is so much fun that I think a lot of people consider that the real benefit. Every show has a discord chat going on in the background, but also there's chat going on all the time about all the things geeks are interested in, including beer. Yes, you can get your beer, wine, and cocktail hit. There's a book club, we talk about coat, there's a tick corner, science, travel, everything. So we are really thrilled to offer that as well as the ad free versions of the shows as well as the special shows and the trip plus feed for less than it cost to be a TWITtter blue subscriber. How about that? How about that?

Paul Thurrott (00:40:12):
I mean that's kind of a low bar

Leo Laporte (00:40:14):
<laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:40:16):
Honestly,

Leo Laporte (00:40:16):
Seven bucks a month and you're

Paul Thurrott (00:40:18):
Verified payment is less.

Leo Laporte (00:40:20):
Maybe we'll give you a blue check. You want a blue check? I got you. Blue check. Seven bucks a month is really the most important thing. I'm being silly, is it really supports us. That eight bucks to TWITtter, somebody did the calculations. If every blue Check 443,000 of them paid for it, it would give Elon a few million dollars. He needs a billion. He's got a billion dollars a year in interest alone. He needs a lot more than that. Blue check's gonna get ya. But for us that seven bucks a month, we're small. That makes a huge difference.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:53):
<laugh>, I also feel like you guys made a rational decision after lots of contemplating and <laugh>. I feel like this kind of a seat of the pants aspect

Leo Laporte (00:41:05):
Of this story. Oh, it took us months and Lisa went out and talked to everybody and talked to different provider. I mean, oh no, she did the due diligence. She did a beautiful job there and it paid off cuz it works really nicely. Yeah, Elon's just throwing spaghetti against the wall which is hysterical. I mean there's different ways of doing business. That's another one.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:26):
I like that Irre respectful of it. And

Leo Laporte (00:41:28):
That's another one. Silly <laugh>. All right <laugh>. Yes. Let's see. We've paused enough. I should tell you, Steve, who also does a show all by himself no one would work with him. No, that's not true. I don't think he would, wouldn't want anybody. He doesn't even want me to interrupt. He's like, he gets on a roll and I should tell you, because he's talking a lot from time to time, we'll say, Leo, I need a drink. Do an ad.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:00):
That's amazing. That's amazing.

Leo Laporte (00:42:02):
And I will give you that authority to say, Leo, I need drink.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:07):
I have a drink at the hand. I can take a, I need

Leo Laporte (00:42:10):
A p i.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:12):
Well <laugh>, I occasionally need to be interrupted <laugh>. So I recognize that. No, I will not ask you

Leo Laporte (00:42:21):
For, but you could. No, I'm just saying you can. It's okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:23):
I usually, I get my Apple watch bugging me to stand. I got to stand during that Ed, by the way. There you go. Spiff. Wasn't that an audio standard? Spit

Leo Laporte (00:42:31):
If is the optical audience. Everybody stand up now. Paul got to stand. You can stand up here.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:38):
I was really hoping you were. Weren't gonna see it and just flip the camera

Leo Laporte (00:42:40):
On me. <laugh>. No I don't.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:42):
You know, here's Midsection for some reason. Here's

Leo Laporte (00:42:45):
A little tip. I can see you during the breaks. No,

Paul Thurrott (00:42:49):
I know I that

Leo Laporte (00:42:50):
And I'm aware of what's going on. <laugh> behind the scenes and

Paul Thurrott (00:42:55):
I'll,

Leo Laporte (00:42:55):
Okay. And I try to protect my hosts at all times. Your privacy and security come first here at

Paul Thurrott (00:43:03):
It's really digging in there. What does he think he's gonna find

Leo Laporte (00:43:06):
<laugh>? We're gonna call you Sweet Willie Thurrott. Do <laugh>, Microsoft 3 6, 5. What's up with that?

Paul Thurrott (00:43:19):
So one of the harder things about covering Microsoft these days is keeping track of all of the features that it adds to Microsoft 365 every month. And then more specifically teams. And I actually had the chance to talk to the guy who writes these films one time, this is a couple years ago, but he admitted to me that incredibly, incredibly difficult to keep track of this stuff because a lot of this stuff is, and I'm just gonna look at Teams today maybe next week there'll be a Microsoft 365 all version. But they just published a post, here's they call it, Here's what we released. This is one of the tricks to it. This is really what we announced. And some of this stuff is out now, some of it's not. There's a team's premium feature that can't possibly be up because Team's Premium is coming in preview form in December, or they announced it as a feature they released in October.

(00:44:08):
So this is kind of a list of features that Microsoft added or plans to add or planned to add I guess in October. It's an interesting list. I'm not gonna list the whole thing obviously, but I kind of cherry picked the things that I thought were biggest deals. So if you're familiar with Together mode that's the image I used on my article. It's the one where you have maybe seats in a movie theater and you can kind of put people in there and people join the meeting. The idea behind together mode is we want meetings to appear to be more natural, more like a real life meeting. And that by doing that, maybe it sort of lessens the anxiety or whatever increasing the anxiety. Microsoft is decided that they're gonna allow it and meeting organizers and presenters to assign seats in together mode. So it's one of those things, you go to a wedding or actually a work meeting and they're like, Well you're gonna be sitting with Bob and you're gonna be sitting with Mary. They're gonna force that kind of thing. That's something people have done to Brad and I a lot. It's like you guys always screw around in the corner. So Brad, you're gonna go over here with him and Paul, you're gonna go over here with this other guy <laugh>. So <laugh> doing that. I

Leo Laporte (00:45:12):
Remember that Ignite where you guys made a pillow fort during the, That's

Paul Thurrott (00:45:15):
Right. <laugh>, you can't let you we're children, so this is okay, whatever. So it's a nice expansion together mode. Actually I think that's fine if you're familiar with teams, you know can pop certain things out into a new window. So if you're in the middle of a meeting and you're like, I wanna share my screen, or I wanna share a PowerPoint presentation or whatever it might be you can pop out a chat meeting and calling experiences. Now you can pull out shared content. So it's like a PDF file or whatever it is. You can do it side by side thing where you have the participants in one window and the content and the other. And so instead of everyone just looking at that thing, you can be looking at each other end at that thing at the same time. The biggest one is unfortunately Team's premium feature.

(00:45:57):
I'm kind of curious how that's gonna follow up because I think the preview pricing they talked about was $10 per user per month. We'll see if that sticks, but Ouch. Yeah, no not surprisingly. If you look at the list of hot new features coming to Teams over the next year that they announce Ignite, all the best ones are coming to Teams Premium. So this is actually a great example of it. Teams already supports live captioning. So as you're speaking, it's captioning what you're saying. Live teams premium will soon have the capability to translate those captions live into 40 spoken languages during meetings. So you have a group of people from around the world, maybe some of 'em speak different languages natively. They can choose to have what's being spoken, translated into their meeting, into their language, Sorry, during the meeting in real time. It's incredible. That's a neat thing I think for everybody. It's just incredible. But you

Leo Laporte (00:46:49):
Have 10 bucks a month for that

Paul Thurrott (00:46:52):
And it's not there yet. <laugh>. So I

Leo Laporte (00:46:54):
Could see the paying if that was a need. You had to have

Paul Thurrott (00:46:57):
<affirmative>

Leo Laporte (00:46:58):
International calls or whatever. I could see paying for that. I understand that

Paul Thurrott (00:47:01):
A lot of multinational companies, my friend works in the financial services industry and 50% of the workforce is in Singapore. That's worth it. And they do, they speak English, but their primary language is not English. I think it might be Chinese actually, but

Leo Laporte (00:47:16):
It depends. It's a Malaysian nation. But

Paul Thurrott (00:47:19):
I could

Leo Laporte (00:47:20):
Be wrong Chinese there and all different nationalities, but English is the default language in Singapore. But yeah, Okay. It's true though. You could imagine lots places. Yeah, that would be useful. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:47:32):
So that's kind of neat. There's some new certified devices. Some of these are actually kind of cool. So these are third party devices that are certified to work with teams. Sony Sony yy, 29 69, earbuds, whatever. It's something called a Neat Frame, which is basically an external USBC display, but it's portrait mode display. So you, it's meant to be used with your laptop. And I think the idea here is when you're having a teams meeting or using teams, teams occurs just on that display and especially organized for that kind of thing. And then you use your laptop as you would normally. So that's, see in this, every office communication, whatever product that's ever existed has had some family of third and first party devices. So obviously teams being so successful that we're seeing that explode. So that's kind of interesting. A new PDF experience. You can now, if you have Adobe Acrobat, you can use it as your default app for viewing and editing PDFs in teams.

(00:48:29):
Suggested replies, which is something we see in every single messaging app on mobile. Basically uses machine learning to look at what someone just said to you and then pops up two or three possible replies, which usually will probably take the form of an emoji, like thumbs up kind of a thing or whatever that but useful, I think useful certainly on the phone is useful because you're often doing something else and you want to get that done as quickly as possible where you crash the cart and <laugh> some kind of a file management interface. So this is something I run into actually in my own work because every Monday I send in an editorial, which is a Word document. We send it into teams, it goes into storage up in the cloud. The person I work with who edits that, reads it, edits it, the original's still there, I can look at it.

(00:49:13):
We kind of go over it and then it goes out into a newsletter. The problem is this is one giant bucket of storage. It's not like folders with dates and things like that. At least not yet. I'm thinking it will be. So I of course used these simple file names and then I've used try to use the same file name multiple times. I can rename the file before I upload it. But what I can't do today is go in and edit that thing, rename it, that kinda stuff. So that is being added. Now you can delete and rename files in a channel using that more dot, dot, dot. So there's a lot more that those are the ones I just kind of picked up. But there's a ton of other stuff. Microsoft has a post up on the Microsoft 365 block today. You can check it if you wanna see full

Leo Laporte (00:49:59):
List. I wonder how they get the idea for what features people want. They must test, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:50:06):
So they definitely use some of it's feedback. So much as we sort of joke about Microsoft, that's not really a joke. But as much as we joke about Microsoft ignoring feedback, well there are many Microsofts, right? So I deal a lot with the Windows side of the house and to me that's the important bit. But broader Microsoft 365, honestly that's a different org. Well they're part of the same org, but it really is a different business and they handle things differently. They do things differently. They do a much better job of documenting what they're doing and they absolutely do a much better job of responding to feedback. So where they drop the ball a little bit is they have so much going on, so many balls in the air that they'll announce something in April. It could be the most random little feature, but are gonna, there's gonna be some group of people, cuz billions of people use this thing, want that feature.

(00:50:55):
And so June comes July, September and people like me will start getting emails, Hey, remember Microsoft announce this feature, When's this, What's going on with that? And I don't remember that so I have to go look it up. And then what you discover is they just never released it. They'll announce that it's possible. I'm not accusing of this, but it's possible there's a feature or two on this list that they've announced that, Well that's not really possible. I think teams are gonna follow through. But broader, Microsoft 365, think about the many permutations like oh God, yeah, we're gonna add the ability to use arbitrary object types in Excel on iOS. And this is something that may or may not be on Android, Windows, Mac Web, whatever the different clients are. Is it ever gonna come to iOS? I dunno. So it gets tricky cuz there's so much going on with Microsoft. I'm

Leo Laporte (00:51:42):
Sure we've talked about this before, that they have a very evolved process. There's probably documented in a big thick binder somewhere.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:51):
I was gonna say there's a Hobbit somewhere with a giant, I think you're describing it like this Evolv process. What's been going on with this feature? I don't know. Bob's been out sick for three weeks though. See I don't think it's that. I really

Leo Laporte (00:52:02):
Don't, I don't think it's offhand, I think, yeah, it's probably extraordinarily bureaucratic to add a new feature, especially to the broader Microsoft 365. I'm sure there's meetings, you have to justify it. You have to write it up

Paul Thurrott (00:52:17):
Here. Here's the problem. So one of the things I glossed over in that list of new features was there's a new companion mode feature for the Android client of teams. So the idea is you're sitting in front of your computer, but you also have your phone. And these things can interact in some fun ways and you can do something on the phone, something on the computer doesn't really matter what it is, but it, it's impossible to mention that without someone raising their hand and saying, That's cute. When's the iOS version coming? They didn't say anything about that. I have no idea. And I kind of wish when it was not non-critical that they could align these releases, these feature releases a little bit better. We talked about dark mode. I think it was for word on the web that was an announcement. The right reaction to that was, wait, this didn't exist before. Is this really a thing? And the answer is, yeah, I mean, Dark Mode has been on the desktop client for several years. I would imagine by this point it has never been on the web before until this past one. That's

Leo Laporte (00:53:15):
Another thing Microsoft does, which is sometimes they have separate teams for each platform and then sometimes they have a unified code base. And I mean in the early days of Word on the Mac wasn't the same program as Word on Windows.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:33):
Exactly. Today it is by the way, in some of the really ugly days past were at six that timeframe Office pre Office 95, there was the same code in both, but it was horrible cause it was P Code and it ran was terrible on the Mac. On the Mac, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:53:50):
It was terrible. That's right. Plus it didn't use Apple's official memory management, they had their custom. It was a, Yeah. So it's tricky. I mean now it's not just Apple, it's not just Mac Os and Windows. You got Android and iOS as well. It's, it's challenging. I don't know how they do that.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:06):
I think this is where web technologies make things a little easier. Absolutely. I just feel like a company of Microsoft Size and sophistication can come up with a spreadsheet that says, Look, we're gonna ship this feature. I'll just make arbitrary feature in Excel. We need to know that within one or two months of each other, this is gonna come out on desktop, Mac, np, on the web, on Android, on I, and possibly in that office mobile app as well, which has a subset of Excel functionality. And wherever it's not gonna appear, we need to say right on day one it's not gonna be there. And here's, here's why they don't do that. And the reason they don't do that is, I described a non feature, I didn't even say what the feature was, but they released like 150 new features every month. I don't know how you could possibly keep track of all this stuff cuz 150 is not 150, Sometimes it's 150 times four or five if you count all of the clients. It's just a big management hurdle. So I'm not giving, I don't mean to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I really wish they were a little more organized with new features. Especially to products that I feel are pretty mature and maybe be scheduled better.

Leo Laporte (00:55:16):
<affirmative>. Right. Though the long term solution is web,

Paul Thurrott (00:55:21):
Web, web, all

Leo Laporte (00:55:23):
Web. But do you think ever there will not be an on-prem disc version, Perpetual license of office?

Paul Thurrott (00:55:33):
I think there's always gonna be, I mean never say number. I don't know honestly. I feel like there is no reason why they couldn't get rid of the native clients or build the native clients in such a way that they take advantage of the same well underpinning that they

Leo Laporte (00:55:48):
Like an electronic app.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:51):
Right. The problem is office apps are huge. So these legacy humongous. Yeah. And so what maybe makes more sense is to do what they are doing, which is slowly try to replace most of that with new apps like Loop Right. And Teams.

Leo Laporte (00:56:07):
<affirmative>, <affirmative>

Paul Thurrott (00:56:07):
That are more modern. Our web focused, web based <affirmative> web first or whatever you wanna call it. And then those things will always kind of be there, but maybe they become less important over time and it doesn't matter at some point. I don't know. I dunno they're, they're too complicated. They've tried by the way, So Web was gonna be the focus for a while. There were those new mobile clients when Windows ten first came out, maybe even Windows eight something. Those are gonna be the future. But they run into Roblox. They're, it's too hard to duplicate all the functional from the classic clients And there's too many people who use them to accept something that doesn't do as much stuff. Cause they always need that one feature that's not there.

Leo Laporte (00:56:54):
That's fascinating. Fascinating. Yeah. I wonder if Edge at some point that the back in their back of their minds, I mean that's what they did. They replaced Internet Explorer with Edge. They were able to do that. I wonder if there's Technologies in Edge designed to foster future web-based versions of their productivity apps. Oh

Paul Thurrott (00:57:15):
Okay. It's funny you say that but that's in the notes. I

Leo Laporte (00:57:19):
Just guessed I read your mind. No,

Paul Thurrott (00:57:21):
No. That's really interesting that you say that because So there's a new version of Edge Out. Just get that outta the way real quick. There's really nothing new there. Microsoft is promoting things like the sidebar, but sidebar was in 1 0 6, the previous version. So I'm not really sure what they're talking about. A couple of new enterprise policies that are available around workspaces which is interesting and you can enable, that's a flag. So it's not a stable feature quite yet, but if you have an urd account or in an org that you can size your ad, he can enable that for the group and you can experiment with it. But by and large Edge is on a four week schedule. Nothing major going on in this release. That's fine. I've mentioned a couple times now that I've been, I use, first of all, I use Brave and I recommend Brave. I really like Brave, I like everything about it. But also

Leo Laporte (00:58:12):
Chromium

Paul Thurrott (00:58:13):
Like Edge. That's right. So you get the same edge and this is if you want to just waste your life, go on TWITtter and mention to people that Mozilla shouldn't exist anymore. Cause they

Leo Laporte (00:58:23):
Don't use, Oh don't say that that baby. I'll be the one in your at replace. I will <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:58:29):
Just pile on end your weekend early.

Leo Laporte (00:58:33):
Have

Paul Thurrott (00:58:34):
That conversation. People are really, they're really open to it. But I do, I don't trust Googling but I feel like standardizing on the web rendering engine might be the right choice for that industry for so many reasons. We don't, I think everyone understands why, whether or not you agree with it. I want Misso to survive. I want them around. I think they make the web better, but I will say it's a competitive disadvantage now for them unfortunately cuz they have to keep up with everyone else. A lot of the major browser vendors aren't doing the hard work with maintaining a rendering engine. They're making contributions to an existing rendering engine and it's kind of a consortium or, well not really, but let's call it a consortium that kind of works in that together. I think that's a good approach for the web. Okay, so go Microsoft did that.

(00:59:23):
I like the idea of Edge, generally speaking. Strip all the Google nonsense out of it. Add bunch, a bunch of add back, a bunch of Microsoft nonsense frankly, which is what they did. And here's our browser. So I think for Microsoft, this was the right choice. They did the right thing. But going back and use, I think I've been using it now for maybe three weeks and writing about it for the book. And I have to keep reorganizing the content because unfortunately I keep coming up with the stuff that falls into the category of if you're gonna use this browser, you really need to make these changes. And it's a really big list. If you're not gonna use this browser, but you are gonna use Windows 10 or now 11, you're still gonna want to go in and configure this thing because why? Whether you like it or not.

(01:00:09):
Oh, Edge is gonna pop up <affirmative> sometimes. Mm-hmm. Right. And you want to be protected if it does. So if you, everyone uses a smartphone so you know that if you're on Android and Chrome is running in the background, even if you're using Brave or Firefox, cuz that's what happens depending on what app you use, it's the backend renderer. And on iOS it's the Safari engine. So this is a fact of life in these worlds and it's a fact of life on Windows 11. Now it's not something I like, but it's a fact. So we can step through all the different times where Edge comes up, but it doesn't really matter. The fact is, even if you use Firefox or Grain or whatever your browser choice is Edge, sorry, is going to run. And so this has also informed what I'm writing about this product.

(01:00:56):
I will say in the world of web browsers, honestly, once you configure it the way you want it, there's nothing really wrong with Edge. It's, it's better than Chrome. Not as good as Firefox, not as good as brave. Certainly at doing things like protecting your privacy and preventing tracking. But you can solve that problem with extensions. I think that makes it mostly acceptable. The trickier stuff is same thing that makes Edge good for a lot of people, which is the OS integration. If you're a heavy office user, if you're just a Microsoft guy, for lack of a better term, I kind of understand why you might want to use Edge. You can enable three different sidebar in edge at once, which is the craziest thing I've ever seen in my life. If you want to, you can do that.

(01:01:47):
I turn everything off. Well not everything, but I turn most things off. There's a lot of deep integration with the os. But some of it will rob you of resources even if you don't use Edge. So for example, there's a, lemme look actually just look at, it'd be cool if it's you would just write an article on setting up Edge correctly and push the RO com. Yes. Yeah, yeah, that's a good idea. I will do that actually. So the joke is that article is about to be updated and the reason is because I've had to pull another thing into it. So if you go into Edge settings, if you have Edge on your computer, you might be able to do this. Okay. Yes I do. So the thing I'm about to talk, the thing I'm about to talk about is not in the book yet. So it's not in that article, but it will be eventually. So you go up to that little Yeah, there's another little

Leo Laporte (01:02:37):
Thing. Oh boy it didn't take us. Take any time as soon as I loaded Edge to say so. So first of all, don't

Paul Thurrott (01:02:44):
Part of the behavior. I'm not exactly. Don't ever say yes to

Leo Laporte (01:02:47):
That. Don't update my browser settings. Now I'm gonna go over settings, which this does look so much like Chrome's menu. Okay, so

Paul Thurrott (01:02:54):
On the left, about two-thirds, three quarters of the way down you'll see system and performance. There are two main parts to it. The top is system and the bottom is

Leo Laporte (01:03:04):
Optimized. Startup Boost.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:05):
Startup Boost is Edge actually starts running in the background when you boot up your computer. Now if you're not using Edge, Oh

Leo Laporte (01:03:13):
That's

Paul Thurrott (01:03:14):
Interesting. Should turn this off. Yeah, you run it once and turn it off, right? Yeah. Turned that off. Running around extensions and apps, you can turn that off. It's not gonna matter if you're not using it but obviously do you have the behind that?

Leo Laporte (01:03:24):
Do you have the buttons that I have that, Let me vote. Are you satisfied with

Paul Thurrott (01:03:28):
Star Boost? Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:03:28):
I know, I know. Do you get those or is it just me?

Paul Thurrott (01:03:31):
No, it's everybody. <laugh>. It's not just, It's not. No, it's meaning it's not because you're in the beta channel. It's

Leo Laporte (01:03:36):
It is. Cuz I'm, I'm getting pulled.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:38):
It's unstable.

Leo Laporte (01:03:39):
So you suggest turning that off if you don't run Edge you all the time. I use it. So I'm not gonna turn it off. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:03:45):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:03:46):
I only use it, I don't use it as my main browser, I just use it as a PDF reader. So maybe the smart thing to do would be to get a make, Firefox will read PDFs, have Firefox be my default pdf. That's right Reader. Cause I'm any

Paul Thurrott (01:03:59):
Default use can do PDFs. That's right. The bottom section though is a little trickier or the optimized performance section because Efficiency Mode is a new, I'm gonna call it power management feature. It's not really, but a feature Windows 11. And so the idea there is that you might have a process or an application that's hammering the micro processor. You can through Task Manager and Windows 11 try to prevent it from doing that by turning on efficiency mode. And the reason you do that is cuz that might solve the problem. Now if it doesn't, you can still kill the app from task managers. But that's one strategy. Now when Windows 11 is new, so this feature is built into Windows, I'm sorry, into Edge as well. So Edge is one of the apps that will show up in task manager with efficiency mode enabled as it is by default. It's only supposed to run when you're unplugged or low on battery, that kind of thing. It will turn on efficiency mode if you gaming. So if you're running a PC game thing will mm-hmm <affirmative> brittle back, which I think is good

Leo Laporte (01:05:01):
To hear. Is this efficiency mode globally or just an edge? When it's an edge setting, it's

Paul Thurrott (01:05:06):
Available globally to understand that. And it is available in edge, which is technically kind of a hybrid app kinda.

Leo Laporte (01:05:13):
But is this setting, when I set it here, does this set it globally or just for Edge use?

Paul Thurrott (01:05:19):
Just for Edge.

Leo Laporte (01:05:20):
I'm sorry. Good. That's what I want. Yeah, that's sensible.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:22):
You could go into this and say I don't want this, whatever. You could try to outthink it and turn it off if you want. The more, to me efficiency mode is fine. I wouldn't actually touch that. But

Leo Laporte (01:05:33):
There is a lot of stuff that is edge specific, like save resources with sleeping tabs, face shipping tabs,

Paul Thurrott (01:05:40):
That stuff I don't like, This is a weird one. I think this is a technical heron thing. I think for average users, the idea here is a lot of people just open tabs like tap, tap, tap, 20 tabs,

Leo Laporte (01:05:50):
40. I only have a couple of tabs even on Firefox, which is my main browser. I only have three, but I do have pin tabs, so maybe that's a little different. I have quite a few pin

Paul Thurrott (01:06:00):
Tabs. Yeah, right. So what's interesting is, yeah, so I, I've been obsessed over this so I don't usually have more than 10 or 12 tabs open at a time. Yeah, obviously they're exceptions. So I feel like in my case, I don't really need sleeping tabs. So course I think that cuz I'm like I know better than Microsoft. So on my own computer I typically turn this off. I've been leaving this on just to kind of deal with it. Honestly it's not as aggressive as it was when they first announced the feature. I believe the default, let's see if your computer says the same thing, but I think the default time of inactivity before they go to sleep is one hour. It's one hour. Which is not, it's not very aggressive. The other thing that I notice, you won't see this in yours cuz you're not using it, but I pin tabs for Gmail, Google Calendar and TWITtter the window. I keep those always on. And then I have my own Windows, like I use through.com, Google News the old reader, which is kind of

Leo Laporte (01:06:55):
A Google. Yeah, I would do that if that's through my primary browser for sure. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:58):
Well what I noticed was it on its own put every single one of those in a list of don't turn on sleeping tags for these things.

Leo Laporte (01:07:06):
Oh,

Paul Thurrott (01:07:06):
Kept them awake with one. It keeps 'em all away except for Thurrott. So if I go into this thing, I can say, well I'd

Leo Laporte (01:07:12):
Be heard if I were you.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:13):
Well, I don't know. I don't know. Well mean my site is not constantly updating with new content.

Leo Laporte (01:07:21):
It's sensing what the site's updating. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:07:24):
Yeah. Because it is, it's using heuristics. There's, there are sites that have certain behaviors that are not compatible with sleeping tabs. And I think things like email calendar, think about this TWITtter, right? A feed reader, a news reader, which is every one of these things is updating, updating, updating, update. They can't go to sleep. It would hurt or literally turn off the functionality of the site. So it puts them into this list. All it like an allow list, right? Or a, I guess block. Block it from using sleeping tabs. And honestly it's pretty smart. So I think me as a technical user, I would overthink this and say I don't need this stupid feature for normal people or something. But honestly it's not horrible. What I don't like about it is when a tap goes to sleep, it's faded and then you click on it and it loads as if it wasn't there. There already. But of course, so

Leo Laporte (01:08:17):
There's no point in pinning it because,

Paul Thurrott (01:08:19):
Well it might just be an open, I can go to a quick, it might just be an open tab. It's something you forgot you were, It's one of the many things you have on your list. So I guess what I'm trying to say is if you're gonna use this browser, you gotta make a career outta configuring it. You really

Leo Laporte (01:08:34):
Gotta think about it.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:35):
No, you really have to think about this stuff. I appreciate what they're trying to do. Every, It is a fact that people use browsers on Windows more than every other app combined. On average it's the app. We're all in all day every day. These apps are big and you load tabs, they take up memory, they use the microprocessor. Doing anything you can do to make it more efficient within the context of what it is is difficult because you harm functionality. And I guess I appreciate this. I think this stuff, this system and performance stuff, this is the content I've been working on. I'm gonna move it to that chapter you were just referencing. I think this is something, if you're gonna use Edge or if you're not gonna use Edge, you need to think about this stuff just for a second. Turn off Startup Boost if you're not gonna use Edge, but let this thing run in the background when you're not using it. That's stupid. If you don't ever use it, if you look, I'm gonna use Chrome, that's what I'm using. Run this thing once, turn off all the nonsense, just whatever. Cause then it's gonna run sometimes, right? Cause it still runs from search highlights, It runs from widgets.

Leo Laporte (01:09:42):
Yeah. It's

Paul Thurrott (01:09:44):
Whatever it's, It's still gonna run. Yeah, but don't give it your system resources, right? Just don't bother. Who cares?

Leo Laporte (01:09:50):
I, it's smart enough to say, Oh you have a pined, so I don't want it to sleep. Or Oh, you have notifications turned on for that site. So I don't want it to sleep. I wonder if how smart

Paul Thurrott (01:10:02):
It's, you know what, that's right. Okay, I'll test, test that. Actually I, like I said, I think it's interesting the types of sites, it's email calendar, TWITtter news and a news, a feed reader. These are all things, like I said, they're constantly polling and potentially updating. You really wouldn't want those to sleep. You don't want your email to go to sleep. I have push Gmail email, I don't wanna think, I want to go to the site and have it then check for email. I want that to run in the background. I hope it's that smart. I'm giving it maybe a little more credit than I should, but I believe, I think it is that smart. I think that's,

Leo Laporte (01:10:40):
See I

Paul Thurrott (01:10:44):
Don't like myself,

Leo Laporte (01:10:44):
As I said, I don't want my email program to be of any kind browser or STA to be checking all the time. If I'm not gonna visit it all, it's time. I want it to check when I visited,

Paul Thurrott (01:10:56):
I don't think it's actually checking. I think this is push email. So I think what's really happening is

Leo Laporte (01:11:00):
There's listening

Paul Thurrott (01:11:02):
Is a heartbeat. And when there's mail, that thing receives a message. If that up on the cloud, it's gonna happen without our involvement. What I mean is in the browser, you may not find out about it right away in which you let that thing not go to sleep. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:11:19):
Out sync has a very good point in our IRC says browsers are the new operating systems. Why wouldn't they require OS level configuration? Actually I like it. The Microsoft to put that in a lot of browsers, they, you put it in the about config, this kind of hidden area,

Paul Thurrott (01:11:36):
Right? That's right. No, they do. Look, let's not give to Microsoft too much credit. If where Microsoft puts the option for changing the search engine, it's the most Allison Wonderland furthest hole A down imaginable. It's crazy where this thing is, this is not what, other than the fact that the main heading is privacy search and services it, I'll just ruin surprise. It's the last option. And it's like you could spend so much time looking for this. I mean you could just use search inside of the,

Leo Laporte (01:12:09):
But this is the modern world. There's so many settings and everything. The mod, sometimes I'll tell somebody, you get a new phone, the first thing you should just do is go through every single setting one

Paul Thurrott (01:12:20):
By one. Oh, I lay on the bed and spend two hours just going through. It takes. That's a modern long time.

Leo Laporte (01:12:26):
And it also gives you an opportunity, people like you, an opportunity to write articles like this, which is great because if you're a very serious user, you want this. If you're not, you don't. And so this is a kind of an advanced, this is a black

Paul Thurrott (01:12:42):
Diamond. That thing that you're showing a picture of, which is the kind of out inbox experience is one of the most insidious, it's of UI I've ever seen. Not that particular screen, but the 34th screen in where it says, browse the web the way you want. Something like that. Yeah, no, it's browse the web. The way Microsoft wants you to browse the web is what it really is. You're literally agreeing to give up your privacy so that it can track you all around the web and then serve you ads that are tailored for your interests. That's what you're agreeing to and that's not what it looks like you're agreeing to. And I have a problem with that. Then I look at features like tab sleeping and efficiency mode and everything. I think, well, okay, there's a part of this group that just has their heart in the right place. They're trying to do the right thing, but then the front end to it is like, man is a lot of stuff you're gonna want to turn off. It's

Leo Laporte (01:13:28):
A different group, isn't it?

Paul Thurrott (01:13:29):
<laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:13:30):
It two

Paul Thurrott (01:13:30):
Different groups. You got your marketing

Leo Laporte (01:13:32):
And you get engineers.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:34):
It is as complex as an os. And when I prepped this section of the book, when I came up with the lists of preliminary list of comics, which have expanded, my first reaction was this film book. This is not that anyone would ever wanna buy a book about Edge, but I mean it's so much to it and it's crazy. It's crazy how much stuff there is in this product. Anyway,

Leo Laporte (01:14:00):
It's

Paul Thurrott (01:14:01):
Good for you. I get it. Good

Leo Laporte (01:14:02):
For Microsoft. How many pages are in the book now?

Paul Thurrott (01:14:06):
Oh, it's over. The version I have that's not public yet is about four hundred and five, four seven, something

Leo Laporte (01:14:12):
Like that. That actually sounds small.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:14):
<laugh>. Well, it's only about a third of them. It's only, it's not quite It's

Leo Laporte (01:14:18):
Sounds Scant. <laugh> scans.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:21):
It's a pamphlet. It's

Leo Laporte (01:14:24):
A 400 page pamphlet. Yeah, well, I mean you've written books that are more than a thousand pages, I bet. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:14:30):
That's right. Yeah. If this thing falls through the way, I think it's going to, It's be that size. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:14:35):
Yeah. Isn't that interesting? It's depressing. And most, well no, it's not doing a big great service and most people won't want it. But if you are a power user, if you're an enthusiast, if this is your thing, then you do want it because you want to get it just so

Paul Thurrott (01:14:51):
I also, I just wanted to tackle some of the power user stuff I never wrote about in Power, Automate powered Shell terminal, the virtualization features like HyperV and Sandbox the Windows sub system for Linux. There's a lot of these kind of features that you never quite get to. And I wanna make sure this book is everything so

Leo Laporte (01:15:14):
Well, and maybe it's just you and me, but there's a real joy in my opinion and in studying it and become adept at it and spending the time and reading a thousand page book and going through every setting and really knowing and getting it just the way you want it. That's not for everybody, but for a certain group, probably most of the dozers and winners listen to this show. Actually, maybe that's the difference in a winner and a dozer.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:41):
If you write a

Leo Laporte (01:15:42):
Book about it, a winner cares. A winner reads the book dozers. It's like whatever. I'll just take it as it is.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:47):
Back in the late eighties, early nineties, when I would read these books like Programming Windows by Charles Petzel, I read a Woody Leonard book about which word, Windows 2.0, which had a programming model based of Visual Basic. I used to think, man, these guys are geniuses. They just know everything. And this kind of uttered it out into the world. And then I Now you are writing books and I <laugh> No, I realized they don't know everything. They learned everything when they wrote the book. It's

Leo Laporte (01:16:19):
A lot of work, it's a

Paul Thurrott (01:16:21):
Lot of research. It's one way to force yourself to figure things out.

Leo Laporte (01:16:24):
It's a huge amount of research.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:27):
It's better now too, because you can get feedback from people who are subject experts on particular things. Like someone just piped in the discord there or whatever. And that helps too because there's a feedback loop that can occur now that couldn't occur with an author in the late eighties, early nineties.

Leo Laporte (01:16:45):
Yeah's, nice. Thanks. That is nice. Yeah I'm not sure I'd take advice from somebody named Death Zero, but okay, if that's, That's where you want to go with that.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:56):
I'm good with it.

Leo Laporte (01:16:58):
<laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (01:17:00):
You have to have a certain level of confidence. There's the As and confidence. Confidence.

Leo Laporte (01:17:05):
Exactly. Yeah, no, I'm just teasing you. Death at Zero please.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:12):
Outlook.

Leo Laporte (01:17:13):
I didn't even know there's a unified, I'm sorry, OneNote, I didn't even know there's a unified OneNote app.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:18):
Well that's a joke, Leo there. Okay, so it's coming. So Microsoft, this is another great example back and forth. I talked about the future of Office remembers gonna be the web and then it was gonna be those new style mobile abstinence. It's like, well, so OneNote has followed a similar trajectory. And this is an interesting case because I felt like the, call it the UWP version, modern app version of OneNote, which was called OneNote for Windows 10, I thought was the best version of the app. There was a time where Microsoft had brought out Office 2016, which included OneNote 2016. That was the end of the line. They were retiring that thing, they would keep it around because they added add the new features to the uwp app. And a few years went by and I think they realized what other groups at Microsoft realized about that platform and about the web, which was they could not duplicate everything from the desktop 1 32 version.

(01:18:13):
And so they announced they were bringing back classic OneNote. So OneNote 2019 appeared OneNote 2019 was just 2016 with a new name. This was gonna be the base client going forward. They were gonna get rid of the uwp version over time and they were gonna bring in features from the UWP version because that was the only one that had been updated for two or three of the years there. And also some UI stuff, cuz there was some nice simplified UI there. So flash forward to 2022 that app is not available yet. However, the cla, what I'm gonna call the classic desktop version of OneNote, which is now just called OneNote, right? No number on the end of it is now available from the Microsoft store. So you can download it just like you used to be able to, well you still can download OneNote for Windows 10.

(01:18:58):
So of course hearing this last week, a lot of people like me said Neat, I've been dying to check out this simplified UI and then you download it and you got on OneNote 2016. It's just the same stupid app. So it's not there yet but this one will be, vers will be updated over time to that new consolidated client. So this is the base of it. Last week I talked about bringing the simplified ribbon to word, at least, I think it's word Excel, and probably the other main three or four apps. If you join the Office Insider program on your Windows desktop PC and are running the desktop version of office, you may or may not over the intervening days or weeks be offered this update to this new simp. It's not really a simplified ribbon, but that's what they were calling it originally. It's really just a toolbar.

(01:19:47):
It is humor to me that OneNote still refers to it as Simplified Ribbon. This is another example of different groups at Microsoft not being on a hundred percent on the same page, but the idea is that the desktop version of the app will carry forward, maybe this is, if you're familiar with Microsoft programming stuff, maybe this is a Windows app STK thing where they're throwing a W UI three front end on top of it. Modern ui, we have the legacy app on the back end you're gonna get that toolbar slash simplified ribbon that we've been talking about that you can see in the web apps that you sort of saw an older version of an OneNote for Windows 10. So it looks like it's, it's gonna look nice based on the pictures they show. But man, if you download that thing now prepare for disappointment because it's the, It's that things like six, what is it, six years old now? Older. I mean it's just the old version of the app. So it's coming. I just the way to

Leo Laporte (01:20:46):
S today. Did they say that it's the unified one though? Na

Paul Thurrott (01:20:50):
I That was the announcement. I thought that's why I thought I was getting it and then it's not here.

Leo Laporte (01:20:57):
Not here. It's not. Stay tuned.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:00):
Yeah

Leo Laporte (01:21:02):
Let's take a little time out. You can stand up and stretch and I can tell <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:21:10):
I'm not gonna stand up.

Leo Laporte (01:21:10):
He only does it when his watch tells him <laugh>, I could tell people about this little doh hickey. This thing is so cool. What do you think that it looks like an external hard drive.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:20):
It's gotta be a

Leo Laporte (01:21:22):
What do you think

Paul Thurrott (01:21:22):
That a network protection device like a

Leo Laporte (01:21:25):
Oh you are so good Paul. It is the thinks canary. It is in fact a honey pot from our sponsor thinks a honey pot in a device this size, it's kind of unobtrusive, can sit on your desk or in a corner in a closet. Most companies would have a few of these because what you do, this is the canary in your coal mine. What you do is you scatter these around and the beauty of a canary, you can make it look like anything. This one looks like a S Mass. It could be a Windows server, it could be a Linux server, it could be a SCADA device, it could be almost anything. It can have just one or two services turned on kind of stealth mode. Or you can light it up like your Christmas tree. You control it and it's easy to change at any time.

(01:22:21):
Just go right into the console and configure it. But here's the deal. It doesn't look like some security device to the bad guys. It looks like something valuable that they're gonna want to investigate. So here's the problem, unfortunately companies find out way too late that somebody is in their system, they spend millions on perimeter security and they just figure, well, nobody's gonna get in. But attackers are stinky. In fact, they don't necessarily trigger their presence immediately very often. In fact, on average it will take 191 days for a company to learn they've been breached. That's on average. And I could think of cases Marriott, where the attackers were in there for years and they had no idea. This should make you nervous. If you're responsible for keeping the company secure that you don't know if there's somebody in there, this will tell you because they don't look vulnerable on your network.

(01:23:24):
They look valuable. They're sitting there just humming along. You don't get deluged with alerts. Doesn't ping you every once in a while. Say I'm here, it's just silent. In fact, I haven't heard from my canary in a while because I haven't been attacked in a while. But the minute somebody tries to log onto this sonology, I will get an alert and I will know something's up, right? Cause under normal course events, nobody would be attacking this attacking. It's not even an attack. No one would try to log in cuz it's not a real server, it's a honey pop. They also can create, every secondary can create what they call coronary tokens. These are files that act like trip wires throughout your network. They can look like spreadsheets or PDFs or word dog, anything you want. They look like files. I might, I'm not saying I do.

(01:24:12):
I might have a file on a share in the company titled payroll dot xls. I might. Now, if you're a bad guy and you're there and you're prowling the system, don't you think you're gonna say, Ooh, ooh, that's good. And you're gonna try to download it or open it. You're gonna try to look at it except the minute you touch it. But you get alerted. You get alerted. You can enroll your canary active directory. So it's easier to find when attackers investigate, they'll give themselves away. You're instantly notified. And I love it because you only get the alerts that really matter. No false alerts, no just hellos. Just an alert when something's bad and you can get it any way you want. Email, text, message with a canary, you get a console, of course it'll log it there. You can have it slack you, it supports webhooks. So it could go in a lot of places cuz of that. They support Syslog. I know a lot of cis admins like Syslog, they even have an api if you want write a little custom thing that pops up, maybe all the lights in your house go red. If there's somebody <laugh> attacking your canary, you can do it.

(01:25:25):
Canary was created by this company thinks that is founded and run by people who have trained companies, militaries and governments, how to break into networks. I mean these are accomplished hackers and what they took, what they know about hackers and breaking into networks and they built it into the canary to make the most attractive, easiest to configure, least expensive. Honey pot anywhere you'll find canaries all over the world. They're one of the best tools, a big part of your security strategy to have these on your network. And if nothing else, it gives you peace of mind. Cuz if somebody were in there, you'd hear about it. Visit canary.tools/TWITt. Okay, that's the website. I'll give you an example. You can get as many canaries as you need. But let's, I think a reasonable number for medium sized business or small business like ours, say about five, right?

(01:26:21):
A handful. Those would cost $7,500 a year. You get your own hosted console, as I mentioned. You get all the upgrades, all the support for the year maintenance. And if you use the code TWIT and how did you hear about a box, you get 10% off for life forever. So please do that. Please put TWIT in the how did you hear about a box? I know you're gonna love this thing and you're gonna be really happy you have 'em on your network. But if for any reason you're not happy, you can always return your Canaries. They have a two month money back guarantee for a full refund. canary.tools/TWIT. This thing is brilliant. I just love this and I love it that I, It's silent cuz that means we're okay. The canary in the coal mine get it. canary.tools/TWIT. Only difference is when this Canary sings, you know, got a problem and of the code TWIT and how'd you hear Best bucks?

(01:27:13):
That'll save you 10%. Don't forget, that's a two month money back guarantee. So you certainly, you could try this and I would suggest if you're at all skeptical, try it. It's really remarkable. They've done such a good job. canary.tools/TWIT, when you're at canary.tools, if you go to canary.tools/love, you'll see a bunch of tweets from CISO's, big names in the business who use these. If you need that for reassurance, canary.tools/TWITt back to Mr. T. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, I'm gonna call you Mr. T from now on. You're gonna have to get a Mohawk the fool. Pity the fool who doesn't know how to turn off something in edge.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:56):
You keep a file club payroll <laugh>. I know. Crazy. I know, I know. Are you crazy? It's

Leo Laporte (01:28:01):
Like, I didn't say I do, I just might. I might. I'm not. You know, it's like you got wanna name it, right? You don't want to be like, Oh yeah, Social security numbers dot text. Yeah. Yeah. You wanna payroll's a good one. I'm just saying. Alright, continuing on. We did our 365, Oh I saw, I should mention this. Joe B's retiring.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:25):
Yeah, what a surprise. I go way back with Joe B. So we'd love, I think people forget how long he's been at Microsoft and what he's done. So a lot of people are familiar with the media center stuff, which was an home thing that got in a bunch of trouble with big windows for doing their stuff and went on Zoom and of course Windows phone. It was part of the team that did a lot of the metro UI kind of stuff, which is what all that was. It's not like he sat down with a pad of paper and invented the UI or anything. He was on the team. But the thing about Joe was he was just kind of a bright and enthusiastic, outspoken kind of good front end for this stuff. The first time I saw him was, this is what virtual events were in the 1990s kids was I went to a movie theater in Phoenix and Microsoft broadcast a show over satellite, which was how you had to do stuff back then and you would go to a movie theater, remember it if you couldn't be it.

(01:29:17):
Yeah. So at the, I'm gonna guess of the year was 96 or maybe 97th latest, probably 96 Windows 95 had come out. Joe was on the team that did Windows 95 and a lot of the new UI stuff there, ie stuff as well. And they were talking about the next two versions of IE. And over IE. 2.0 and 3.0. They were gonna implement things like frames and they were gonna do their own kind of unique take on that. They were gonna do things like site map, which never ended up coming out where you could see a file manager style view of what a website looked like, which in retrospect makes no sense. There was gonna be an integrated sidebar FTP client all that kind of stuff. And I saw him on stage and I thought virtually, right? Cuz I was in a different state, but I thought, wow, this guy is really interesting.

(01:30:04):
He's really peppy and exciting and whatever. And I eventually got to meet him. Of course I've seen him at a hundred events over the years, but he was part of a lot of stuff. And at Microsoft, the stuff I care about quite a bit actually. And he took a sabbatical I think in 2015, right around the time Windows 10 came out. I dunno this for a fact, but I think him and Terry didn't quite get along. I think there was a little clash of ego there. When he came back, he went onto a, I believe it was called the Windows Experience Team. So they were doing some of, not the core Windows engineering work, but some of the UX stuff around new apps like the photos experience with the fireball special effects and all that stuff. And then he eventually went to actually the office team.

(01:30:46):
I think one thing people don't really realize cuz it, and not so much public facing stuff anymore, but he was working on some office slash Microsoft 365 end user experiences probably for the past two years. And he's a guy like Jeffrey Snow this happened with as well. When that guy kind of moved on from his core Windows server power shell stuff and went to the Microsoft graph in that case, or with Joe be Fiori, certainly I thought this might be the end <laugh>, not because it's not good work or because it's not interesting, but it's just not what he had been doing for most of his career and it's not really public facing. I think Joe's good strength. Yeah, he was communicating. Yeah. Yeah, he so he was a bright spark. I like Joe a lot. It is an unfortunate sidebar of history that he was on stage and said certain things that never happened and then people wrote about it and then he denied that he ever said that. And it was like, Joe, there's a transcript and a video of you saying this. And he got caught up in the Microsoft nonsense, which is too bad. But he's a great guy and I feel like obituary, should

Leo Laporte (01:31:58):
I light a candle? Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:00):
No. Do you find it suspicious that him and Mary Jo both moved on in the same week? I do not.

Leo Laporte (01:32:06):
<laugh>, do you think he's just gonna spend more time with his money or do you think he's gonna do something else? He's pretty young still, right? He's

Paul Thurrott (01:32:13):
Too young not to do something else. But I think for the next few years he's gonna try to make go of it. Just hanging out at homes and whatever.

Leo Laporte (01:32:20):
Sometimes you's got enough money in your life and you wanna spend time with your family.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:26):
I understand that. Well Terry Myerson, same thing. He didn't move on. He's not the CEO of some company, but he keeps busy. He is charitable work and he's part of business group. So I think he was part of group that bought the, what's it called? The Sooners or whatever the soccer team is. Oh yeah, yeah. I don't think he's part of that.

Leo Laporte (01:32:44):
I think so just a little inside baseball, we only have one photo frame. So yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:32:50):
It's

Leo Laporte (01:32:51):
Talking about Joe. I just fold Mary Joe back and then it's Joe

Paul Thurrott (01:32:55):
Actually it, it's a lot like that in The Exorcist where what they call that, where they flash a scene really quick. Yeah, I think he saw something

Leo Laporte (01:33:01):
Subliminal.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:02):
Yeah. Yeah. Subliminal,

Leo Laporte (01:33:03):
Subm Joe be

Paul Thurrott (01:33:04):
Fur. Yeah. Every time I look at Joe B I see Mary Jo for some

Leo Laporte (01:33:07):
Reason it's the hair. I think <laugh> the hair <laugh>. Anyway, yes. He's gonna be there for a little longer. Yes. Or is he already out the door?

Paul Thurrott (01:33:17):
Yeah, no, he's sticking. I don't remember what the timeframe was, but yeah, he's gonna stick around for a little while. But yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:33:23):
He's on the way. Mary Joe, be Fiori, <affirmative> they're all retiring. So Microsoft had a very good quarter last quarter. We talked about that in our last episode. Now we've got Intel, we've got Apple, we've got Samsung, we've got Amazon. This has been the big week for tech results. Any thoughts on that?

Paul Thurrott (01:33:43):
So yeah, so many nights the past week I've been like, all right, I'm done for the day, let's lay down and oh God, <laugh> like Amazon, Apple,

Leo Laporte (01:33:53):
Maybe Mary Jo enjoyed reading earning's reports, but I don't think anybody else does. It's not fun.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:59):
I have to, it's my job. I gotta write this up. So look, Intel's interesting because they're a bellwether for the PSC industry, right? Over what's their, it's over over half the revenues come from their client group, which is PCs. That business was down 17% year over year in the most recent quarter data center, which should be their up and coming business. But frankly I think that's really gonna hurt him with ARM and whatnot down 27% year over year. So not helping matters. This company is in the middle of making tens of billions of dollars in investments in fab facilities around the world, United States, Europe and elsewhere to become the next I always get this wrong, but Tmsc, I think TSM Z because yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:34:48):
This is their market leader. This is their new plan. <affirmative> under their new CEO is to be a fab and a foundry. I mean that's right. Yeah. Designer and a manufacturer. That's right. Two different business.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:00):
Well back in the day, this was Intel's big strength. Look back in the day, this was Commodos big strength with MO technology. I mean people don't really really remember that, but there aren't many companies that do this. So all these companies we associate with Chips Snap, your Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung, they don't have their own a building that builds chips. They outsource that to someone tsmc. And so Intel wants to be one of those companies not just designing and building their own chips, but also doing it for third parties. So it's expensive and

Leo Laporte (01:35:35):
Yeah, they're in this transitional state now where their old business isn't doing all that well. Their new business hasn't kicked in yet. It takes years to build these fat <affirmative>.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:45):
The economy right now is bad for everybody, but it's particularly bad for Intel. This is just

Leo Laporte (01:35:49):
Not, I wonder if there's thinking that, oh this was bad timing. Cause I think a lot of companies that we're gonna come out of the pandemic with a bang and we're gonna be go, go, go. And it hasn't happened.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:02):
I think a lot of comp, Well I will say this because this is the way unfortunately the finances work for companies like this is, I think one of the struggles big tech had coming outta the pandemic was we're never gonna be able to match the growth that we just saw. We'd somehow have to do something that makes it look like it's okay.

Leo Laporte (01:36:18):
I think that's right. And the

Paul Thurrott (01:36:20):
Economy fell through the floor and now they can say, well it's not our fault. I mean now this is happening. I think this is gonna give them a good out until doesn't, like they're kinda screwed here. I don't know what I think they'll be okay don't get me wrong. But they have nothing to fall back on and they are spending all the money and more than they have to get into this next act. And so we'll see how it goes.

Leo Laporte (01:36:45):
But

Paul Thurrott (01:36:46):
Who knows, maybe the US government will bail them out. Well

Leo Laporte (01:36:50):
They already fact that they didn't build the fab in Phoenix that they were planning until they knew they were gonna get money from the CHIPS Act. And then once that happened, that's right, then they broke ground. So they are counting on that. They

Paul Thurrott (01:37:02):
Needed that. That's exactly right. And that's like tens of billions of dollars.

Leo Laporte (01:37:04):
Yeah, there's 20 B. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:07):
Yep. It says big, right? So that's Intel. I mean, we'll see Apple had a great quarter, although I read something really nuanced about this in Mac world of all places, which I'll get to in a moment. But the results, with the exception of iPad, all of the businesses were up. Now, the one negative I pulled out of this was services is Apple's second biggest business. It's been their fastest growing business for a long time. It's no longer it's fastest growing business. In fact it's revenues only went at 5%. Now I'm not saying that's ex exactly that. That's why they just raised prices on their services. In fact, Apple ceo Tim Cook denied that explicitly. But that might be why <laugh>. So that's kind of interesting. This is where me not knowing enough about Apple contributes to a little bit of a like hu, we have a show you could listen to if you really, eh, it's okay.

(01:37:58):
So <laugh> the Mac Yeah. Experienced a 25% increase in revenues. That's incredible. This business has been around since 1983. Yeah, that doesn't make any sense. Silicon. Well the reason was they couldn't make enough of them in the last quarter. So this was actually the best quarter ever for Apple. But it was with an asterisks because last quarter was a disaster cuz they couldn't make enough of them right this quarter they made up from last quarter a kinda artificial. Yeah, yeah. So that was that. But anyway Apple, like everyone else is gonna have some issues in the quarters had yada, yada yada. But I mean iPad, I mean iPhone, sorry, 40, almost 43 billion in revenues up almost 10% year over year. Are you kidding me? Wow. Services didn't grow that much, but still almost 20 billion in revenues. Mac 11.5 billion. The only down one was the iPad, but they just released new iPads right after the quarter ended.

(01:38:52):
So I think iPad's gonna be okay guys. That's what I'm trying to say. They did caution though. The next quarter is be tough. Yeah, partly. And this is actually, they aren't gonna ship New Mac this year. That's the other thing they said. Right? So it's weird because this quarter gets the boost because it's the holiday quarter, right? So a company like Apple should do okay. Yeah, I agree. They would've done better if they could've had more consumer products. But I feel like they launched a bunch of stuff in September. They launched the new iPads in October. I don't think we have to worry too much about Apple, I guess is what I'm trying to say there. And then I'll go through Samsung. We don't care about too much, but just as the primary competitor in Apple in the phone business blah blah blah, 54 billion in total revenues up 4%.

(01:39:37):
Which is a record by the way. Operating profits for Don, I don't really care too much about profits but the mobile division 22.7 billion. So roughly half the company up 13% year over year. And they cited sales of their most recent devices I would expect. So their outlook for the rest of the year, honestly, they're like, Yeah, we're gonna be fine. We think smartphones and wearables are gonna grow despite the continued instability. Low end, mid-end tablets can crack slightly premium tablets, it's gonna be fine. And they feel like they're gonna continue to grow. So they're the one company I think in tech that was intact that I've saw. It was like, it will be fine. So I thought that was kind of interesting just for that reason. Samsung did, I'm sorry Amazon did great as well. 127 billion. AWS searched 27% to 50 billion in revenues. Microsoft of course has their, I think it's just called the Microsoft Cloud now.

(01:40:36):
It used to be Mary Jo would know, used to be whatever the name of that fake business was. That business is bigger than aws, but that business was cherry picked from the best of Microsoft. So we're not really possible to compare these things head to head. Let's suffice to say that AWS is bigger than Azure, probably by a factor of two or three today. So that thing's going gangbusters. But Amazon's results were boosted by having two prime day sales events in a quarter, first time they've ever done that. And they looked at the current quarter and said we might not even be profitable in this quarter in the holiday quarter. Which is crazy. And they're gonna have revenues in the 140 billions wherever that falls. My watch is very excited about something. I'll leave that for,

Leo Laporte (01:41:20):
Probably wants you to stand

Paul Thurrott (01:41:21):
Up a little like a Samsung washing machine there.

Leo Laporte (01:41:25):
Little songs. <laugh> nice. For some reason Japanese hardware appliances tend to play TWITnkle TWITnk little star. I don't know,

Paul Thurrott (01:41:33):
I gotta get a toilet just to get the, Is that Doby? That's

Leo Laporte (01:41:39):
Incredible. <laugh>. It's really strange. We have appliances throughout the house that sing to us. Yeah, yeah. We, it's a very Ray Bradbury.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:49):
We coincidentally, not for any design, but we have a Samsung washer dry hair and we got a Samsung washer in Mexico and that one, I swear to God, plays a three minute pop song. Oh yeah. It doesn't stop. It just goes to town. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:42:02):
Yeah. Ours.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:03):
It's funny. Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:42:05):
<laugh>, I don't, Funny is one way to I d know why. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:42:08):
Yeah. I find it humorous. I

Leo Laporte (01:42:11):
Used to have a water purifier, Japanese water purifier that play long. Sure. Long sonatas after the water was, Yeah. I don't know. It's very, it's exciting. It's, it's very happy.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:20):
It's very happy. I get the feeling of accomplishment.

Leo Laporte (01:42:23):
It's nice. My rice cooker plays TWITnkle TWITn a little star when I start. Nice. And then, I don't know, it's, it's less excited. What's

Paul Thurrott (01:42:31):
The brand on that, do you know?

Leo Laporte (01:42:32):
Oh, Zo Ruhi the best. Oh, you need a rice cooker.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:37):
Oji. We have the most basic rice cooker. It's just, it makes a chop sound when it's done. It's just a single switch.

Leo Laporte (01:42:46):
I got what doc Rock, who's Hawaiian and lived in Japan for a long time, recommended. And he then told me which Japanese rice to get from Japan and I got a 20 pound sack. So if you ever want some rice, I got some. Yep. And is every time it's a size of a pillow. It's so good. It is. It's literally the size. Exactly. I could actually, I didn't think of that. I could sleep on it but the oh man. Oh I love the rice and it's so easy. I said it. I'll be home at five, make sure there's some rice for me when I get home and it's wonderful.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:23):
I went through about a six month egg rice phase this year where somehow in my YouTube feed, it was a guy from I think Korea making rice.

Leo Laporte (01:43:32):
You put an egg in it.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:33):
Yeah, put an egg on it so you like poach eggs and put it on top with some sesame oil and dry sauce and you know, can cut vegetables and stuff too. But that's incredible. Yeah, it's probably super unhealthy, but Oh yeah, just, I went to town on this for months.

Leo Laporte (01:43:49):
It's okay. In Japan, China, Korea, because they eat this much. They eat the tiny. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:56):
See

Leo Laporte (01:43:56):
You and I we can make a bowl of this stuff.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:58):
Yeah, exactly. It's a salad bowl. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:44:00):
Yeah. Gimme more.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:02):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:44:03):
Duck rock told me the best thing you have leftover Kentucky Fried chicken is you put it on top of the rice and the rice cooker. You cook it when it's done,

Paul Thurrott (01:44:10):
Which is so right since you mentioned it, our sushi place in Mexico City, which is called G chan made they do ramen on Thursday nights. It's like first come first serve, they run out and it's over. So we went and did it because they did, they called it Jfc Chicken

Leo Laporte (01:44:25):
Jfc of course

Paul Thurrott (01:44:26):
For G Chan. They had a funny little logo for it, but cute. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it was literally Kentucky fried chicken style chicken on top of ramen.

Leo Laporte (01:44:35):
And

Paul Thurrott (01:44:36):
They said, We've never done this before. And I said, well do it. Make sure you do it every week cause we're,

Leo Laporte (01:44:40):
We'll be back. Cause

Paul Thurrott (01:44:41):
It was so good, so good.

Leo Laporte (01:44:44):
I love it that you go to Mexico City to get great Japanese food. I just cracks man.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:48):
I know, I love that. I had excellent fried chicken on that trip. TWITce. TWITce. And we met one of our, well we knew her virtually, but we went,

Leo Laporte (01:44:59):
I saw the picture pictures of the dinner. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:02):
So she said, Look, I'm gonna take you this place and I don't know if you're okay with this, but honestly we should just get one of the appetizers that kind of small. But she says they make the greatest fried chicken in the world. This is and ISS hyster, they had never made it, but the pandemic happened. So the guy who did that started working on recipes and everyone in the place loved. So now it's at different restaurants everywhere. But fried chicken was not a thing in Mexico City. But now it kind of is because of the pandemic.

Leo Laporte (01:45:27):
It what? So it's like, why

Paul Thurrott (01:45:28):
I, Cause it's super easy to make and then they could give it to people to go if no one was going in restaurants. So they could make a bunch of it at once. They would just ship it out the door to

Leo Laporte (01:45:38):
Go

Paul Thurrott (01:45:38):
And everyone would take it home. And then everyone kept saying, Yeah, great. I want this exact same thing next week. And they kept so now it's a permanent thing on the menu. So yeah, I too, it's like I don't have fried chicken that much at home and I had it TWITce in a week. It was the weirdest in Mexico, <laugh>, it just doesn't make sense. But

Leo Laporte (01:45:59):
What a world without Mary Jo Foley to stop us. I think there is nothing in the way of doing

Paul Thurrott (01:46:09):
No one will believe me when I say this, but Mary Jo left last week and this is probably the biggest box section I've had in 10 years. I don't know why. I just, Sure. It's a weird coincidence is all I'm saying. <laugh> a lot to

Leo Laporte (01:46:25):
Get to. Have you been playing the modern warfare too?

Paul Thurrott (01:46:29):
Yes, I have. And I am so happy to report. So the first time in, it's only five years, but this game is fantastic and I will be playing it going forward and I'm so happy. <laugh>. I have been playing an older version of Call of Duty, cuz every game that's out over the past few years has been terrible. And this one's great. I think that it's too bad. It's not very big deal. But remember they shipped the campaign a week early if you pre-ordered it on digital. Yeah, I was in Mexico for that <laugh> and then the game came out on Friday and I was in Mexico for that. Well

Leo Laporte (01:47:03):
Don't you have an Xbox down there?

Paul Thurrott (01:47:06):
No, no, Paul. I don't Paul. So I had to wait till I got home. But I did play the beta, so I kind of had an idea what I was getting into and all the lag and latency problems I had with the past two. Well, Monte wear for remake and then Color Duty, Cold War Black, Cold War, Gone All great. The graphics a fantastic way better than Vanguard. They did little bit of a Halo infinity type problem. I play hardcore games. Those are not available yet. They're coming out in the 16th, so I have to play the normal version of the game. Okay. But map's a great, I know. Anyway, it's great. So we'll see. I suspect this is gonna be a record money maker for these guys, which is great. Cause they

Leo Laporte (01:47:51):
Have ups and downs, right? I mean they've had

Paul Thurrott (01:47:52):
Some

Leo Laporte (01:47:53):
Bad updates. They do one every year and sometimes they're better than others I

Paul Thurrott (01:47:57):
Guess. So that's about to change, by the way. So next year will be the first time since, I don't know, the year 2005 or something that they don't have a new Call of duty, but I couldn't be happier cuz they're gonna take this game, continue it forward for another year, and they're gonna put out the legacy classic map pack that I've always wanted, which is X number, I dunno how many 20, we'll call it. 20 levels of all the best levels of all time from all the different versions of Call of Duty. I you next year's gonna be even better. I cannot wait. So anyway, they're doing a good thing. So Call of Duty is back on track. Thank God's, It's a big thing for me cuz this is what I play it good and less good news I guess. Although this is exactly what I thought. This is exactly what I've always said. The Xbox consoles have never been profitable, ever. And I've always said this and people always say, Well how do you know that? And I say, Cuz they never talk about it being profit. If this thing made money, they would've talked about it. They, it's never made money. So people, it's sort of like the razor razor blade scheme, although I don't think that holds up. But the idea is they lose money on each console. They make it up on game sales, peripherals and all this stuff. But

Leo Laporte (01:49:06):
It's a breathtaking amount of money.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:09):
It is on this generation one to $200 per consult. So this is the difference between Microsoft and Sony and Nintendo, actually, I should say. When Nintendo enters a market with a new device, their goal is we are gonna make money selling this thing. And you, Nintendo is unique enough of a business that by and large they are able to do that. Obviously if something is in market long enough, they may cost reduce it or come up with new versions and that kind of helps 'em become profitable. But they don't have to sell the software to become profitable. That's another profit center. But that's the way they are. The way Sony does business is they typically, although this generation I think is gonna be very different in the past, they've always come up with a new console generation and said, Look, we're gonna lose money on this thing in the beginning.

(01:49:51):
We're gonna build up the base, we're make it back on software and peripheral sales of course. But over time we are gonna make money on the console because we're gonna cost reduce that thing and eventually we're gonna make money selling that as well. Microsoft has cost reduced their console. So especially the 360 and actually the Xbox One, remember there were two other versions, the Xbox One those things never made money. So they lost less money over time. That was, that's the Microsoft model. But they make it all up in software and peripheral. So how does that work? Because you can't, as an independent developer say, I wanna release a game on the Xbox and just put it out in the world. You have to go through Microsoft. Microsoft. It's a cut of every deal. Everything that goes on at the console, the market, that's when Apple kinda lashed out at Microsoft. Cuz Microsoft was complaining about the App store saying you do the same thing. But these are two different markets. Apple makes money when they sell an iPhone. Microsoft doesn't make money when they sell an Xbox. That's the plan. That's how it works. And it's two different types of markets. So yeah, we finally found out a number. I was, Philip Spencer's been very vocal lately. We're gonna get to him a couple more times. This

Leo Laporte (01:51:02):
Came

Paul Thurrott (01:51:02):
From, he said that, Yeah, a hundred to $200 per console. I would imagine there's a hundred for the S and 200 for the X.

Leo Laporte (01:51:08):
No, it's the other way around. They lose more

Paul Thurrott (01:51:10):
Money. Oh, it's the other way around. Fascinating.

Leo Laporte (01:51:12):
They lose more money on the cheap one, which it makes sense. It just means that the S probably costs close to the same to make as

Paul Thurrott (01:51:19):
The X. I bet it does. Yeah, of course. By the way, I've been playing on the S for the past year now. Oh, you have playing? Yeah, I play Call of Duty on this thing. It's fantastic. Oh, you don't,

Leo Laporte (01:51:29):
Okay. But

Paul Thurrott (01:51:30):
They could have come to market with this Interesting. Come up with the X. Yeah, I don't, It's

Leo Laporte (01:51:35):
Slower though, right? It's not,

Paul Thurrott (01:51:37):
Is it? Isn't it? I mean, honestly.

Leo Laporte (01:51:39):
Oh, maybe not.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:41):
I think it works great. So there's that. Phil Spencer also came out, he was on a podcast and they asked him, of course about Sony and all the complaints and blah, blah, blah. And he said, Look, we're not, he said, But of course he said, we're taking the, I mean, I'm sorry, Call of Duty off of PlayStation. And he was more explicit about it maybe than he'd ever been. He basically said, Look, as long as there's a PlayStation, all of duty will be on the PlayStation. But better still, the goal with Call of Duty and other games that'll require with activation Beliard, is to do what they did with Minecraft, which is to make it in Java. No. Is to make it available everywhere. He wants to bring Call of Duty to the Switch. He wants to bring it to mobile in more ways than it is now.

(01:52:33):
He obviously wants to bring it to game paths and do all that stuff. But his goal is not to limit where you get Call of Duty, it's to expand it. And sounds obvious, I mean, obviously we talked about how insane it would be for them to take call duty off of the PlayStation, but I think now they're filling the heat a little bit and they want to be a little more explicit. So anyway, he has said that. The other thing he said this week, which I thought was so beautiful, he was, I think it was a Wall Street Journal tech conference and speaking on stage, and they asked him and a bunch of other guys, I think What do you think about this metaverse thing that me is doing? And his response to this question is why I love this man. And I don't know if anyone knows anything about him.

(01:53:18):
He's obviously an industry insider, but he's also, he's unlike every other executive I've ever seen at Microsoft or any other big tech company. He doesn't speak in platitudes and doesn't have lofty speech and does, He's just a plain spoken kind of normal guy. And the way he answered this question is, he said, I'm gonna get in trouble for this, but he said I think in the video game world, we've been putting the people in 3D spaces for years, <affirmative> saving the world, conquering blah, blah, blah. But he says, Building a metaverse like a meeting room is not how I wanna spend my time. Thank you. That's a poorly built video game. Thank you. Poorly built. I was like, Bam. Exactly right. He is voiced. Exactly. Exactly. Yes. It meetings are already terrible. Now you want me to be at a virtual, so I'm not gonna be shooting aliens, but I'm gonna be looking at Bob from the office. I Yes, thank you. And I

Leo Laporte (01:54:14):
Don't know anybody who disagrees with him.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:17):
That's option. No one will say it. No one will say, Microsoft gets his boss got on stage and promoted teams at the Meta Joe. It's like, ugh. You're right. Exactly. So I love him and I love that. I love how plainspoken he is. And so every time he utters anything about, by the way, think about all the stuff we just got, how much they lose in every console. We're not taking Ball of Duty, PlayStation. Think about meta. I know he gave us a quote about price increases. Like, hey, everyone's increasing prices around the every on everything. Are you guys gonna increase prices? He's like, Yeah, probably. But we're not gonna do it before the holidays. Let's get through this. It's a terrible year financially. Let's just, let's get through this. We'll see. We'll look at this stuff again next year. I mean, we're looking at it. But again, just, I love the way he speaks. We need more of this. This is the clarity I don't get from elsewhere at Microsoft. I love it.

Leo Laporte (01:55:18):
I'm sure there's a good reason why executives aren't forthright and honest. Yeah. But it is nice when one is I feel like, mm-hmm. <affirmative>, there's gotta be a reason They're not like they're carefully cultivated not to say anything.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:37):
Oh my God. You wanna hear, Did you read the, You probably don't read stuff like this. You should go look at the Tim quote, the Apple press release about the quarterly results. I'll read it for you if you want to hear it. Yeah, yeah. It is the most garbled nonsense. That means nothing I've ever read my entire life. This quarter results reflect Apple's commitment to our customers, the pursuit of innovation, and to leaving the world better than when we found it. He said, as we head into the holiday season with our most powerful lineup ever, we're leading with our values in every action we take, in every decision we make. Oh God. In every breath we take,

Leo Laporte (01:56:11):
I'll be watching you

Paul Thurrott (01:56:12):
<laugh>. Exactly. We are deeply committed to protecting the environment and securing use of privacy to strengthening accessibility, and to creating products and services that can unlock humanity's full of creative potential.

Leo Laporte (01:56:24):
What if Steve Jobs had said that? Everybody would've just laughed. But Tim is so sincere. Oh

Paul Thurrott (01:56:32):
My God, out of his mind.

Leo Laporte (01:56:33):
And sweet. You kind of almost give him credit for,

Paul Thurrott (01:56:35):
If someone had said that in front of Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs would've said, You're fired.

Leo Laporte (01:56:40):
Yeah, you're right.

Paul Thurrott (01:56:41):
What you just said is ludicrous.

Leo Laporte (01:56:43):
No, you're

Paul Thurrott (01:56:43):
Right. You didn't say anything. I passed it through the word filter. It said zero words. There's nothing there.

Leo Laporte (01:56:48):
This is why I don't crazy. I don't really attempt. People say, Why don't you get Tim Cook on? Or, I don't ever attempt to interview CEOs or athletes or musicians. They're all good at not saying <laugh> <laugh> in

Paul Thurrott (01:57:04):
Interviews. Oh my God. But this guy's a genius. Yeah. Are you kidding me? Skilled,

Leo Laporte (01:57:10):
Especially,

Paul Thurrott (01:57:11):
Oh

Leo Laporte (01:57:11):
My God. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:57:14):
Okay, moving on. Sorry, <laugh>, that freaked me out. I have never seen that much gobbly book in one paragraph. It was unprecedented. Yeah. Even for him. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:57:25):
He didn't, I'm sure he didn't write it. I'm sure somebody in, Oh geez,

Paul Thurrott (01:57:28):
Marketing wrote it. Okay. Yeah. I don't, Yeah, okay. Okay. I'm just saying it's

Leo Laporte (01:57:33):
Contracts that to Phil Spencer, you know?

Paul Thurrott (01:57:35):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:57:36):
But honestly such in ELA says stuff like that all the time. I mean,

Paul Thurrott (01:57:41):
I tell the story a lot. It was Greg Sullivan. I was at this there was an event at xp, was in market for a long time. Longhorn was delayed and delayed. So they did this interim update. They were gonna release it as new version of Windows, but they realized they couldn't charge people for it. So they said, Look, we'll just refresh Windows for free. And it was like new digital media stuff, new net home networking, all this stuff. And the code name for this was XP Reloaded, which I knew I was writing about it a lot. And so I went to the launch event for this thing. And I guess they don't call it XP reloaded out in the world. They had some nonsense marketing thing. So I was talking to one of the PR people and I said, So I, this is XP Reloaded. And the guy said, Paul, Microsoft is constantly reevaluating how we deliver software and solutions to our customers. And just as he was talking, Greg Sullivan walks by, I'm like, Greg, this is XRP Reloaded, right? And he was holding a glass of red wine. He held up the wine, he goes, <laugh>.

(01:58:37):
And then he keeps going. And I looked at him, I looked at the PR guy, and I said, That's how you answer question <laugh>. I was like, What's wrong with you? Just unbelievable. You can just speak clearly. Why can't you just speak clearly? I'm sorry. I'm always looking for this clarity, but that's why I love Greg anyway. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:58:56):
It's also tells you something about somebody's seniority that they

Paul Thurrott (01:58:59):
Can do that and get away with it. Absolutely. By the way, he's still kicking around today. So good for him. Yep. All right. It's a new month, as you know November. So we have got games with gold and Xbox Game Pass. The games with gold is looking pretty sad. So I don't wanna go into that too far. Remember they used to do Xbox 360, sometimes OG Xbox and also Xbox One games Recently they ran outta titles they could bring forward. So they stopped doing the older games. Now all we get is Xbox One or newer. And so I thought, that's great. We're gonna get four new games every month. Now we're just getting two. So it used to be too old, too new. Now it's just too new. So I don't recognize either one of these games. The S hd, Remaster and data and Job, those are, This is games with Gold.

Leo Laporte (01:59:44):
Okay, Why would you wanna play a game called Dead End Job? We already have. We already, That's not a game.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:50):
It's life. I know. Well, it's a career now. So however the first half of the month is looking really good for Xbox Game Pass. So if you have Xbox Game Pass console, heats, See, Well, Ultimate, which is cloud. Bunch of new stuff. Bunch of good stuff coming. The biggest one though, Return to Monkey

Leo Laporte (02:00:09):
Return your Monkey. Yeah. People are so excited about this. I know.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:12):
Yeah. There's a game called Ments, which actually gonna be testing pretty soon which I know nothing about, but that is coming soon. And then Two Walking Dead Games, which these are the old what was it called? Tell Tale, Is that the end of the games too? Tell Tale. I think I played through at least two, if not three of these. In fact, the One New Frontier one, I think I did play that game through. These are great games. And then this one called The Walking Dead Shown, which is based on that character, which you might know from the comic book or the TV show. So really, really good. So this is a good month for Xbox Game Pass. And what else do we get? Oh, TWIT, this is a little convoluted, but TWITtch, which is a Amazon service, right? Yes. As a partnership with Microsoft that's starting tomorrow and runs through the 11th.

(02:01:04):
And the idea is that you can get three months of PC Game Pass if you purchase or gift two new subs subscriptions on TWITtch between those days. So in other words, maybe you're giving this as a gift and then you get a gift back for yourself in the form of three months of PC Game Pass, right? So TWITtch is a service, well, it's actually, it's on the console as well, but it's primarily for pc where you can live stream and so watch other people play game. So that's kind of a cool cross platform kind of a thing. And then the last three items I have here are kind of industry news type things. So Sony reported their earnings every other company on Earth, cuz I had to write about them all. Some interesting news, PlayStation, not much of it. Very good. Sony has plans to sell 18 million PS five s in this fiscal year, which ends at the end of March in 2023.

(02:01:59):
As of this quarter quarterly result, they're halfway through that year. They've only sold what is it? Five, I think it's 5.7 million units. So they sold 3.3 this quarter. They must have sold 2.4 the previous quarter, and now they have to make up the other 12.3 million somehow in the next two quarters. Sony says they're gonna do it. So apparently a lot of the constraints have dried up and maybe things are gonna be okay. I have a hard time imagining that. But they have other issues too. So PlayStation Network is 102 million monthly active users in the quarter. Now from 104 a year ago, lowest, never that Sony's ever reported. Not that they've been reporting it the entire time, but for the past couple years anyway. And then PlayStation Plus, which was just redone to be a little bit more like Xbox Game Pass, remember multiple tiers, et cetera.

(02:02:51):
54.4 million subscribers, which is down from 47.3 a year ago. So those, there's a lot of stuff that's not quite where it needs to be but Sony seems to think this current quarter is gonna be great and we don't see, But what did they say? This is, I love, this is probably a English is a second language type thing, but the CFO of Sony pronounced about these declines said it was due to more people going outside, which is kind a nod to, people were playing games a lot before when they were stuck inside. More people are outside. Yeah, that's good. But Call, Call of Duty came out with a new version that's gonna go big for them. So I think they're gonna be okay. Sony also announced their new, Well actually what they did announce was a bunch of new games coming to this thing that's not out yet called the PlayStation VR two, which is the new VR headset and the controllers for PS five.

(02:03:41):
But they also said, Oh by the way, it's coming in February. It's coming February 22nd next year. So now we have a date. So obviously we already knew it was missing the holidays. They're gonna release it on February 22nd, it's gonna cost 550 bucks. Yikes. I don't remember what the PS4 version costs, but I'm gonna guess it was like 3 99 at most. Something like that. This seems really expensive. You get those little controllers with knobs on the end Headsets. Yeah, the dog will, No one of those things you'll use one prop Door Open. I don't know. I don't, I don't know. <laugh>. And then the final little bit of gaming related news is some number of months back Google and House that they were bringing something called Play games for PC to dc. Obviously a way to play Android based games, not streaming and not using Microsoft's Android subsystem, but play them live on your computer using some form of an ambulator, essentially, I would imagine.

(02:04:39):
Or a virtual machine. It kicked off with a very limited beta in some strange company I country, sorry, I think it was like Malaysia, Singapore, and one other place, I don't remember. But as of today, the service has expanded to the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and then Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore. So it is actually finally available in more places. It's still a beta. This just happened right before we started the show. So I haven't been able to check this thing out. But they noted some games. 1945, Air Force Idol, Hookie, Run Kingdom, I don't know any of these games. Ebony, the Kings return. I don't know. So I, I have been curious about this since day one. I wish to God Microsoft and this company could get it together and work together, but Google is going the wrong way. So really care by next week, I'll check this out. I'll see if there's anything to say about that. But that's kind of cool. And that's it actually. That's it.

Leo Laporte (02:05:35):
Well, normally at this time we would stop and wake up Mary Jo and tell her to stop Be the cat. We don't have to do that anymore. We're just two bachelors living on our own, eating leftover.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:50):
We'd be in the best US that we can be. Best we can be eating egg rice and drinking whiskey basically. By the way, I Whiskey and egg rice would probably be a fantastic combination.

Leo Laporte (02:06:00):
Oh yeah, we gotta try that.

Paul Thurrott (02:06:02):
<laugh> <affirmative>,

Leo Laporte (02:06:04):
Isn't it great being bachelor's? All right, we are <laugh> one thing. Don't like a great idea. We haven't figured out what we're gonna do. We're placing the beer pick. I mean, Stephanie's always welcome to come up with a cocktail pick and I'm sure she will. We have, I guess today we've come up with some rice cooker tips, which is new for us.

Paul Thurrott (02:06:22):
So I ended up just having a bunch of tips. So I have three tips today. One we actually went through a little bit, so I kind of preempted one of these. But Tip, I think I mentioned, yeah, I mentioned last week that the Windows 11, Field nine ebook, this is the version you can buy in Lean Pub, would be available imminently. That took an extra day, more than I thought. But it is now available. So if you go to lean pub.com/windows 11 field guide, all one word you can order the book if you want it. It's 9 99 or more. You can way more if you'd like. I'm not gonna stop you from doing that. But that will give you the pdf, eub and Moby versions of the book. It's aligned with the version on the web that's on throughout.com if you're a premium member. And it will be going forward.

(02:07:06):
Right now, I think the version that's live is somewhere between 375 and 400 pages. I've got all chapters I'm working on. So every week it will be updated. So I haven't sent out update emails yet. I don't wanna overwhelm anybody, but probably in the beginning I'll, I'm gonna try to keep it to once every two weeks or once every month. But we'll keep a list of everything I've updated. So you can keep up to date there. So anyway, that's available if you'd like to buy the book. If you don't, I, That's cool. Cool. And then I mentioned, we talked about this earlier, but if you are gonna use Edge, and I would say actually since I wrote this, even if you're not it's important to configure it correctly. So there is a chapter in the book actually, which will be updated yet again about this topic.

(02:07:45):
There's an article on my site, but the first time you step through that outbox experience is very specific steps you need to take. The thing I have in the article is most people have already stepped through it and didn't think about it. You can go back and fix your choices and you should, frankly, cuz there's some freaky stuff in there. But there's also some things you need to do if you're gonna use Edge, by the way, I could just give you one bit of advice. Install one or more anti tracker and kind of extensions. You block, Origin Ghostery, whatever. I mean, be sure to do that because Edge is, it's good in many ways, but it's not gonna stop bad blockers. I'm sorry, Trackers at all. It just isn't. And then the third tip is about the Windows dev kit, which by the way, I've almost pulled a trigger on five times.

(02:08:33):
I really want this thing. This is a Mac mini looking Windows on arm device. It's got the latest processor, 32 gigs of ram, I think it's 512 gigs of storage, if I'm not mistaken. It's a 600 bucks in the us. It's aimed at developers. I've been talking to, Well I actually, I will say, I said this last week and I've since talked to Rap Allen and he confirmed for me, I didn't ask him to say it, he actually just said this himself, exactly what I said, which was, I don't quite understand this notion of you're gonna sit down at a computer and use it cuz this is not a computer. Any developer would ever sit down and use this. It just isn't. So a developer is gonna wanna remote into this thing so they can deploy their app to it from Visual Studio on a real computer.

(02:09:18):
I think how most people who are developers would work. However, it's still a good deal. It's still an interesting thing. I think it's gonna find a home in a lot of enthusiasts and all that kinda stuff. But here's the thing, this is the asterisk, and this is super important. Last year I, I wanna say it was two or $300 dev box for Windows and Arm from Qualcomm, which you may remember. <affirmative> had the same problem as this, which is this. If you buy that thing, if you buy this thing, you can't return it. This is a one way street. There are no returns. So you need to be a hundred percent positive that this thing is worth $600 to you. You're actually gonna use it as a developer or I guess because you cannot return it, they will not accept returns. That's weird. I know, I know.

(02:10:07):
And I only learned about that after the fact from two different people who had gone through the process and they were like, Did you know that when you go to buy this thing, you agree you can't return it? And I was like, Really? Cause I experienced that a year ago and I don't remember the exact price of the Qualcomm one. I wanna say it was 300 or less. But I remember at the time I sort of thought, well it's okay because I know I'll be able to sell it for half price to someone. It'll be worth, I just wanna evaluate it and see what it was like. And that thing was a piece of junk because it was like a 700, the Qualcom processor, which is mid to low level this one's gonna be a little bit better. This will be very similar to that Lenova laptop I just reviewed, High end chip set, even more Ram and store and a good amount of stories. So it should be okay, but you need to know what you're getting into especially, and now that you can't return it, you kind of really, really need to know what you're getting

Leo Laporte (02:10:56):
Into. Yeah, I know it's tough. Yeah, that's weird that they won't take it back.

Paul Thurrott (02:11:02):
It makes me wonder what it is. <laugh>. Is this leftover parts from a wax or something or You know what? I don't don't know. I don't

Leo Laporte (02:11:11):
Know. This is the plan to make that money back.

Paul Thurrott (02:11:14):
Yeah, right, right. Well we did that part of Microsoft didn't do so well last quarter. So we've gotta bump up. We gotta bump at the hardware. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:11:22):
Paul Thurrott field guide to Windows 11 is available@leanpub.com. You choose the price. Now, if I turn all the way down to 9 99, what do you earn? Oh, you still get 7 99. This is a good deal for the author, and if I decide to pay 60 bucks, you get 48 bucks. So much better than publishing with a publisher.

Paul Thurrott (02:11:45):
I get random emails from Lean Pub that tell me that people bought this. They don't actually send me every purchase. It's kind of random, but I would say two or three, four, whatever. Some number of them people have actually paid more the 1999 or 24 99, whatever it is. And that's super nice. That's really, really,

Leo Laporte (02:12:04):
I would for

Paul Thurrott (02:12:06):
Really, really nice. It's certainly appreciated.

Leo Laporte (02:12:08):
So this is definitely an ongoing project, right? Oh yeah. So you will continue to get updates.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:16):
Yep. Yeah, every week.

Leo Laporte (02:12:17):
Nice. And it comes with, I think this is awesome, a free copy of the Windows 10 field guide.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:24):
Yeah. The idea there is, I wanted to cover the stuff that was really different and Windows 11 right up front, but a lot of the other stuff, PC Reset or

Leo Laporte (02:12:32):
You already know about.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:33):
Yeah, it's changed much in many cases, so at least you have that to kind of fall back on until the contents and the,

Leo Laporte (02:12:42):
So that's fantastic. Congratulations. It's now available. Lean pub.com/windows 11 Field guide is the full url. But you go to lean pub.com and find it. And of course is it better? No, that's the beauty of this setup. You don't have to get people to buy it through your website. It doesn't get you any more money. But if you are not yet a member of Thurrott.com,

Paul Thurrott (02:13:03):
It's better for me. If you buy the book on the street, if you buy the book paid directly, if you buy the book, I get make money so I don't make money. If you read the website or

Leo Laporte (02:13:12):
Oh yeah, but it was saying that Yeah, yeah, yeah. <laugh>. Yeah, no, no, definitely do both, right? I subscribe to the premium version of throughout.com. It's well worth it. There's a lot more than just the book A lot of history of Windows programming and stuff. That's great. It's great. Paul is t u r ot.com and boy, this really simplifies the end of the show. It's like, I know. Okay, we're done, <laugh>. I don't have to, This

Paul Thurrott (02:13:42):
Is the weird hole at the end of the show. It's the weird

Leo Laporte (02:13:44):
Hole where we would normally drink beer. We'll find, I swear we'll find We're gonna work on this. Yeah, we'll find something. I think so. Fill in there. Maybe your favorite peanut butter whiskey. I don't know. Something <laugh>, something interesting. We are, and we should tell you, we haven't decided whether we should replace Mary Jo or just have a rotating panel of experts. I think. I mean, Paul is plenty Claire

Paul Thurrott (02:14:08):
Replacing How's Impossible. It will. Yeah. We'll look, we'll,

Leo Laporte (02:14:15):
It'll be a work in progress. It's an evolving thing, and we appreciate your support, your patience. I tell you, it's still a great show

Paul Thurrott (02:14:26):
Standing there this time

Leo Laporte (02:14:27):
Doing this difficult, difficult time which <laugh>, <laugh>, Paul and I join together every Wednesday, 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern. By the way, starting Sunday we're going to a daylight. We're ending daylight saving time. We're going to stair time. So we'll now be at a 1900 utc. I hope it didn't confuse you. There are people in Europe, for instance, who are already on Mexico

Paul Thurrott (02:14:55):
Too, by the way. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:14:56):
Yeah, that's right. So might have confused some people. Paul, you figured it out. So good on

Paul Thurrott (02:15:01):
I We're on the

Leo Laporte (02:15:03):
Same. You did the math planet, so we're okay. We're on the same Planet Planets. Yeah, that's a good thing. For those of you on other planets do your own calculations. That's all. That's all. That's right. You can use your own number system. Use your own number system. You can listen live while we're doing it at live, do TWIT tv. There's audio and video there. You can chat live at irc dot TWIT tv. Of course, club members can chat with us in the Discord as well after the fact on demand versions of the show at the website, TWIT.tv/ww. Paul also posted on a thro.com. You can get it there. There's a

Paul Thurrott (02:15:34):
YouTube. I will be in Discord next week, by the way. I'm gonna, I meant

Leo Laporte (02:15:36):
Oh, that's fine. Don't worry about it.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:38):
I'll

Leo Laporte (02:15:38):
Do that. Don't worry about it. Yeah, we love having you in there, but it was a good conversation going on in the background with Death Zero and others. <laugh> Newman is suggesting Paul's Call of Duty kill of the week. That might be fun.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:53):
Oh, I like it. <laugh>. I've been making some. I have. I've already been making some

Leo Laporte (02:15:57):
Recordings. Oh, that's interest. We'd have to put a advisory, parental advisory up, but that'd be kind of cool. That'd be cool. Paul's

Paul Thurrott (02:16:07):
Desecrating of a Corpse

Leo Laporte (02:16:08):
Of the Week. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. Paul's headshot. Wow. <laugh> on that could be a thing on youtube.com. You can watch it and of course you can subscribe and that's probably the best thing to do with your favorite podcast application. Thank you. <laugh>. A wizard Links suggestion for maybe a bumper, an intro to Paul's kill of the week. No, maybe not. No, maybe not. <laugh>. Thank you everybody. Make that guy and make it look like he was talking. And yeah, Arm, Paul Rock, <laugh> arm, her Toto. Thank you Paul, and have a wonderful week. We'll see you next time. Everybody on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.