Windows Weekly Episode 810 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. Richard Campbell from Runners Radio and.net Rocks joins us as well. Uh, we're gonna talk of course about Windows. There's a lot to say about Windows 11 and why different people get different versions of Windows. Uh, Bing is apparently gonna include chat G P T in its search. That'll be interesting. We'll have a report on products from ces. Some of them are great, some of them a little weird. And, uh, we're gonna take a look at Microsoft's response to the FTC complaint over Activision and Blizzard. There's some interesting stats in there, plus a look at the, uh, final results from the Stack Overflow survey that and a whole lot more. And, and including how Bourbon works. <laugh>, yes. All that and more. Coming up next. I'm Windows Weekly podcasts you love

TWiT Intro (00:00:52):
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Leo Laporte (00:01:03):
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrottt. Episode 810 for Wednesday, January 4th, 2023. Call of Duty Free 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 for free at melissa.com/twit. Thanks for listening to this show. As an ad supported network, we are always looking for new partners with products and services that will benefit our qualified audience. Are you ready to grow your business? Reach out to advertise@twit.tv and launch your campaign. Now it's time for Windows Weekly, the first show of 2023. Now, I had to check my checkbook to make sure I had that written down right. Yes, sure. And, uh, with us once again, the lovely and talented curmudgeon, uh, Paul Thurrottt from the great white north of Pennsylvania, Laura Mcce Township. And on his left, a surprise visit from Richard Campbell of Runners Radio and.net, uh, rocks. And, uh, he is from beautiful Vancouver, what it

Paul Thurrott (00:02:33):
Is, 60, 61 degrees today in the great white north of Pennsylvania.

Leo Laporte (00:02:37):
It's 41 degrees here. It's freezing. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:40):
Don't worry. It's gonna get terrible in a few days. But,

Leo Laporte (00:02:44):
So I saw that, uh, Andy was talking about this, my mom, that it was raining back east and it's cuz it'd have a heat

Paul Thurrott (00:02:50):
Wave. We've had, we had a day where, you know, it gets foggy and then it burns off. We had a day that it was foggy and it was foggy all day, and then it was night and it was foggy. And it was foggy the next morning too. Like, it just, Ooh. It's just the, the weirdness of the temperatures. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:03:02):
How about you Richard? What's Vancouver like?

Rich Campbell (00:03:06):
You know, 10 degrees in the free in freedom units of course. And raining

Leo Laporte (00:03:10):
<laugh>. Oh,

Rich Campbell (00:03:11):
Yep. So

Leo Laporte (00:03:12):
I used to go down to the gas light district. I love that. With the old brick sidewalks in the warehouse.

Rich Campbell (00:03:16):
Gas

Leo Laporte (00:03:16):
Town. Yeah. Gas town.

Rich Campbell (00:03:18):
It's still down there. And, you know, bricks by walks and la and rain are really exciting.

Leo Laporte (00:03:22):
Oh, slippery as hell.

Rich Campbell (00:03:24):
Oh yeah. I used to drive drift my motorcycle out of there.

Leo Laporte (00:03:27):
<laugh>. Not intentionally the wheel

Rich Campbell (00:03:29):
Kick out, but hooked up and just get

Leo Laporte (00:03:30):
On out of unintentional.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:32):
I believe that my, my, the, the tile we use that someone put in in, uh, in our kitchen is the materially used for sleepy slides. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And, uh, it God help you if it gets wet, which it will. Cuz it's a kitchen

Leo Laporte (00:03:42):
<laugh>. I am lucky I don't have a broken ankle or femur or something because, uh, we, we were on vacation in Mexico and the floors were marble everywhere. Yeah. Oh man, that's whew,

Paul Thurrott (00:03:53):
That's like a bar of

Leo Laporte (00:03:54):
Soap. Yeah. I brought in sand and just spread it around. I took it Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:58):
Kick Sander. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:03:59):
Spread around <laugh>. Yeah. The Olds shoe. So I though

Paul Thurrott (00:04:04):
You could do a split Leo. That was pretty good.

Leo Laporte (00:04:06):
<laugh>. I did a couple of, uh, inadvertent splits and, uh, yeah. I felt like, ooh, I dodged a bullet there. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, because, uh, there's nothing worse than Christmas than a groin pole injury. <laugh>. Um, um, so, uh, last week we did their best, of which I'm, I, I, uh, here was well received by All and Sundry. Oh, good. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> because it was the best. And it had a lot of Mary Jo Foley. Mary Jo, as you, uh, all know by now, has got a better job. She's a directing directions than microsoft.com.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:37):
Mary Jo, you speak, who is,

Leo Laporte (00:04:38):
She's, we've forgotten her. Familiar. We've forgotten here. But I'm glad Richard's here. And I, I hope you can make this a, uh, a more regular, uh, appearance. We love having you on the show.

Rich Campbell (00:04:48):
We'll, we'll try. I think it'd be fun. Yeah. We'll, we'll figure it

Leo Laporte (00:04:50):
Out. Um, uh, well, I guess we should talk about, uh, windows. I mean Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:58):
I mean, I wish we had something to talk about. <laugh>. Um, so the, the issue of chorus is that for those who don't know or don't remember, uh, second half of December, pretty much Microsoft shuts down, right? Yeah. So it's slow. We got some insider builds right toward the middle of the month. And, uh, then that was kind of it. But this a couple little things. Um, I wouldn't call this hard news <laugh>, but, um, we know that Microsoft intends to update Windows 11 with what they call internally moments. You know, these, these updates. Um,

Leo Laporte (00:05:28):
You mean like Kodak moments? Like these are the moments of your life. You mean that kind of moments?

Paul Thurrott (00:05:34):
It's literally kind of slice and time stuff. It's like, Hey, it's been a few months. What can we Thurrottw in, you know? Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:05:39):
Um, it feels to me like it's the moment you can't find what you were looking for

Leo Laporte (00:05:42):
<laugh>. Yeah. The moment you walked Thurrottugh the door and said, what am I, uh, what am I doing here? What is,

Paul Thurrott (00:05:47):
What's happening? It's like when you're writing a book and like every computer you have is different stuff on it. That's the moment. That's why I have that moment.

Leo Laporte (00:05:53):
<laugh> all the time. So is this in the start menu? Where does this show up?

Paul Thurrott (00:05:57):
No, it doesn't show up. That's one of the tricks. It doesn't really show up anywhere. It's kind of a problem. So, thank you <laugh>. Thank you, Mike. Well, no, so I was actually, alright, so you just, you, you would just, before the show started, we're talking about Wever, right? So yeah. Win ver doesn't have any information about other stuff going on. And we talked about, um, that system about thing where you can scroll down and it says, Hey, you're on Windows feature experience pack. Right? Whatever the version number is. Right. And that's kind of interesting because you could be on Windows 10 or Windows 11 and still be on the same feature experience pack version number, which is whatever. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, there's no notation in here about like what moment you're on <laugh>. So this is not a, which is part of the trickiness, you know, that you, it's kind of hard to know.

(00:06:41):
We, um, you can find the exact build number. Right? Wever has that, you were saying you were on 22, 6 21. Yeah. 63, which is the latest stable build. Right. But that too is no indication necessarily of what features you may or may not have in the o s. It's tricky. Um, so I will say that based on how they've done it so far, and they've, they've had a few moment updates already. Um, that lower part of the bill number will increment. I mean, that will be a little bit of an indication I guess. But, um, you just have to kind of look for this stuff. It depends on what we're talking about. So, for example, uh, according to a report in Windows Central, the first of several moment updates could arrive as soon as February. And it will include some of the things they've been testing in the Windows Insider program.

(00:07:27):
Right? So, uh, that redesigned search button, which is out in stable, which is crazy. Um, the studio effects thing, which we're actually gonna talk a little bit later in an unexpected place. But this is, um, this is a thing that uses like a neural processor that might be built into your computer, which isn't, cuz no one has this yet, but they will soon. Um, that, uh, allows you to off, um, offload AI tasks from the CPU and gpu right. To save those, uh, resources. Um, some changes to system tray overflow, uh, tablet optimized task bar, which actually is already out in the world, frankly, but whatever. So there's this little changes, right? And so I think this is, this is how we're gonna be getting Windows updates now. They're just gonna dribble these things out. Um, and then they'll have a, a once a year update where everything that came out in the past year arrives, you know, for those corporations that decided to skip the moments.

Rich Campbell (00:08:18):
Um, well, I think every corporation will skip the moments. Like, come on, if you're, if you, the it, it guy in me immediately freaks out, right? It's like, right. Because my, now I don't know what tech support I'm gonna support. Right? Everybody's got a different search bubble. Like it's

Paul Thurrott (00:08:32):
Terrify. It's a nightmare. It's a nightmare. Now,

Rich Campbell (00:08:34):
On the other side, if I, if I have control over that, and you're gonna test all this on consumers, I'm a fan, you know, as the,

Paul Thurrott (00:08:41):
It adminis. Well, and you're gonna love the system, Richard, because that is what they're doing.

Rich Campbell (00:08:44):
Yeah. Well, not not gonna do it to me <laugh>. This is, this is, this is the standard IT mantra. This is, change is good. You go first. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:53):
Change is good for you, <laugh>. I wouldn't eat that. But honestly, you'll probably

Leo Laporte (00:08:57):
Love it. <laugh>. <laugh>.

Rich Campbell (00:08:59):
At least we're gonna know for sure what it'll do to you.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:01):
Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So now that, uh, people are starting to find their way back to work, I mean, I assume we're gonna start getting insider builds, um, possibly as soon as this week, honestly, I guess we'll see. But,

Leo Laporte (00:09:15):
And by people you mean Microsoft people? Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:17):
Yeah, sorry. That's right. Yeah. But

Leo Laporte (00:09:19):
It takes a while. I mean, uh, you don't code up moments just, uh, on a weekend.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:24):
I don't know, have you seen the quality? This?

Leo Laporte (00:09:25):
I think you do.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:26):
<laugh>. So the, the search pill that you were just talking about, as we keep saying, has lost its most over capability, right? It used to do like a little, or I guess it was Yeah, like a mouse. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:09:36):
Which was very handy. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:38):
It's

Leo Laporte (00:09:38):
Nice. Doesn't do it anymore.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:39):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:09:40):
It's like, uh, but it's software designed by a committee, right? They, they're, they're testing

Paul Thurrott (00:09:44):
It. Oh, I wish there weren't that many people involved. I think yeah, it has the feel of, um, not a lot of oversight. You know, that's, that's what it feels like to me. But, well, you know, we'll see. Like I, I, windows 11 has certainly gotten better. Um, the search pill thing is not great. Uh, that's, uh, to me, that's just a, a really bad indica or a really good indication of how bad things have gotten. Where this thing, they're still testing in the insider program. They're not sure what design they want has already been deployed out in the world to millions and millions of people, um, who are not an insider. I, that's crazy to me. That's too bad.

Rich Campbell (00:10:20):
I'm, I'm hoping this is actually an AB testing strategy, right? That they, there is, they're not just Thurrottwing stuff out there that they have a few different versions and they're, you know, uh, putting it upon people somewhat unwillingly and in instrumenting it, they come to see what's happening. Uh, so I do think it's to do that.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:37):
We'll

Rich Campbell (00:10:38):
Say up.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:40):
I'm just, I, I, I don't like the notion that Microsoft would do that without asking permission and would do it to normal people who don't know any better. Um, that's a little, that's iffy to me. I hope. I mean, but on the other hand, that's better than, oops. You know, like <laugh>, if, if there was a strategy, at least you could say, look, it's evil and it's bad, but at least you knew what you were doing.

Leo Laporte (00:11:02):
It was planned evil. Yeah. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:11:04):
Yes. Right? I mean, the, the scarier part is no plan. Yeah. Evil plan is better than no plan.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:09):
That's exactly

Leo Laporte (00:11:10):
Right. That's interesting. Is it?

Paul Thurrott (00:11:13):
We don't know. They've never said anything about it. <laugh>. They literally have never addressed the fact that this start pill thing that they are literally still testing is out in the world. Uh, no one's to my knowledge. They

Leo Laporte (00:11:25):
Have never said, I mean,

Paul Thurrott (00:11:27):
Never said a

Leo Laporte (00:11:27):
Thing. It seems like everybody now has it though, right? Or no, not everybody. Uh, not

Paul Thurrott (00:11:33):
Everybody not, no. But most people probably do. Most individuals probably do, I would say on unmanaged PCs. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:11:40):
Unmanaged PCs and everybody else. Richard's keeping it safe.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:44):
Yeah, I would think so. They probably still have the magnifying glass icon

Leo Laporte (00:11:47):
<laugh>. Yeah. Um, yeah. What would you block to keep from getting that? Just out of curiosity, how would you as a, as a IT guy, Richard, say, oh, we're gonna keep that thing off our computers.

Rich Campbell (00:12:00):
Yeah. We, we control update, right? I mean, that's the main thing is

Leo Laporte (00:12:03):
That, but if they ever said where that update was, they never said how it

Paul Thurrott (00:12:07):
Happened. No, they don't. So that's, that's the problem. But we do know where it came from, right? So we, we, we know what arrived in, I don't know off the top of my head, a kb Was

Leo Laporte (00:12:15):
It in a hot fix or a kb

Paul Thurrott (00:12:16):
It was a cumulative update that shipped in November. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:12:18):
Okay. Yeah. But then you blocking a cumulative update that may have important things to not get a search pill.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:26):
It's like a Congress spending bill, Leo. Sometimes it's pork. We

Leo Laporte (00:12:30):
Need, we need, there's earmarks. We need a wine item veto for it. Actually, that's not a new idea. Right. Has hasn't that been pitched before?

Rich Campbell (00:12:39):
Well, it has always been this pitch of give me a security patch stream and give me an everything else. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:12:44):
Right. That's right.

Leo Laporte (00:12:45):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:12:45):
There you go. I want security patch for sure. But then, you know, then a PM is like, no, no, no. My thing is really important.

Leo Laporte (00:12:52):
Why don't they do that? That's, that seems like obvious, but I, I'd actually no manufacturer does that. They always mix 'em in with everything else.

Rich Campbell (00:13:01):
Yeah. Well, and the other side of this is confusion. What have you applied? Right? Like the first thing's gonna happen if you call PSS about a PC with problems is, so what version are you on? Yeah. You know, they, they're trying to, well, by the way, figure it out too. So

Paul Thurrott (00:13:14):
This is where the week

Leo Laporte (00:13:15):
C gets

Paul Thurrott (00:13:16):
Yeah. Sorry Richard. This is where the Ricks, the week C week C thing comes in, right? So if you're testing patches as an administrator or whatever it pro, you could look at what they did in a preview version of a patch in week three and say, uh, this one's changing the start. Or the, uh, the search button. Let's not implement that. You know, let's, let's block this one when it comes out in November or the next month, or whatever. So there's that. But you know, this is, this puts the onus on it to do this. Like, they're not overworked enough, you know? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it's not like Microsoft telegraphs this thing, cuz they, they'll describe the update, but like I said, they never said anything about the search button change, uh, changing that just happened. Um, we're not, you know, it's not like a, like a little prize in a cracker jackbox. I, I wanna know what's happening here. You know, I don't want <laugh>. I don't want to guess what could be the thing, you know? Well, and this

Rich Campbell (00:14:07):
Is issue with us, the UX piece, right? I mean, that's, yeah. Everybody uses that and you change the, it's right

Paul Thurrott (00:14:12):
There. I know. It's crazy. Yeah. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:14:14):
Hmm.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:16):
So, yep. New Year's. Same complaints. But

Leo Laporte (00:14:19):
That's <laugh>. Well, it wouldn't be, or Windows Weekly if we didn't.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:25):
Well, you know, look, I am a, a product of my upbringing. It's not my fault. I'm just saying, you know, this is, this is happening to me. It's not, I'm, I'm just reacting to it. I, I, I want this to be better than it is. You know? Um, I, windows 11 got off to a rocky start, and I, it's not dramatically better than it was at the beginning, but it is better. And I'm hoping that trend continues. I, I would like this kind of thing of thing to stop. I I, there was a show not too long ago, one of the last couple shows where I documented I think three or four of these types of things at Windows 11, where it's like, guys, you gotta present a consistent face to the world and explain what you're doing. Just come out and say something. You know, but it's not, it's not how they work. They like to surprise people.

Rich Campbell (00:15:13):
Well, how, ask the question, do you know, like, is there a pipeline here? Is there actually oversight on here? Are all the modifications coming in? Like, no. When I did that job, like, we were pretty careful about what's in the bundle.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:27):
Yeah. It right. And, and I gu I guess, look, the only insight I have into this, or we have from the outside, is that we can see how they test things in the insider program, or don't. And we, I think anyone should feel, and it should be the case, that there is a logical series of steps that occurs before software Code makes it from the insider program into stable. It should show up in the dev program first. It should go from there to the, the beta. And it should go from there to release preview indicating it's about to come out. It should then go into a preview update, and then it should go into a, a stable cumulative update. That it's a very logical series of steps that would solve a lot of problems. Um, and it's the way things had been done. It just seems like, for some reason, since 22 H two, I think, I'm just trying to think if this happened earlier too. Well, let's just say since last year, um, they just seem to be, uh, it's almost like just Thurrottw it out there and see where it lands. Look, I guess we're gonna go beta first and then, uh, Thurrottw it in a stable, you know, I, it's just, it's just different every time. I f

Leo Laporte (00:16:28):
I can't believe that that's actually how it

Paul Thurrott (00:16:31):
Works, except that that is how it's worked. <laugh>. That's what it looks like. I know, I know. It sounds, as I'm saying it, I'm like, this doesn't sound like a

Leo Laporte (00:16:38):
Responsible, I'm a responsible adult company would be. It's not

Paul Thurrott (00:16:41):
<laugh>. I know

Rich Campbell (00:16:42):
For a flagship product,

Leo Laporte (00:16:43):
For a flagship product we did earlier today, I was on a round

Paul Thurrott (00:16:47):
May email me today and say, Hey, look, Paul, you're an idiot. He's where Microsoft documented a search bill. I would love to be proven wrong that way, but I'm telling you to Please beg of you. It's months later. I, yeah. I want to think there's a

Leo Laporte (00:16:57):
Nobody's

Paul Thurrott (00:16:58):
Something APL strategy out there, right? I, yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:17:02):
We were, uh, I, earlier we was on a round table with the open source, uh, show Floss Weekly and, uh mm-hmm. <affirmative>, one of the things i I I, we, we kind of talked about, uh, is how devoted Microsoft is to Windows. Clearly it's a, it's a big part of their revenue, but in the long run, all of this stuff is just annoying to them as well as us. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:17:27):
At which point does this become a burden? More of

Leo Laporte (00:17:30):
A Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:17:31):
A burden. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, you

Leo Laporte (00:17:34):
Have to have something to move people to. Clearly they don't really care if you use Windows these days. Well, maybe they do. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott (00:17:40):
Well, no. Well, uh, you know, Sacha Nadella made that point. You know, we're gonna meet you where you are. That was his whole thing coming out with, uh, office on the iPhone in the beginning. Right. You know, we recognize that people use different devices and everything. Um, I still look, they used to call this kind of a window. Well, first it was Windows only then it was Windows first. I mean, it's not, I I, I know there are people who are enthusiasts that would prefer to see a Windows first, or a Windows best kind of strategy, that kind of thing. And they will talk about that. You know, you'll have a better experience using Microsoft Office on Windows than you will on a mobile device. Obviously.

Leo Laporte (00:18:13):
It's not true anymore though.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:15):
Well, is it It is, it is in some ways, right? I mean the but, but the

Leo Laporte (00:18:18):
Touch first version of offices you say came out for, uh, iOS

Paul Thurrott (00:18:22):
First. Right. But it's not as full featured. It's not, uh, as com you know, it doesn't have all this features.

Leo Laporte (00:18:26):
At the time we thought the Touch was there was where

Paul Thurrott (00:18:29):
They were. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> going mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it was, we, rich and I were just talking about this, the, uh, this continuum thing they had done for Windows phone. The idea was you would plug it into a dock and you would get a desktop environment. And the same office app, like the word Excel, PowerPoint that ran on the phone would run now in a, as a bigger Windows looking app. And there was a, I don't, you know, no one will know how long it lasted. Exactly. Cuz it's not like they announced these things. But that was the primary version of Office for at least a year or two until they realized the limitations of the platform were such that they couldn't move forward with that. Well, not to. And then phone failed too. They, that didn't help. Um, you already, you already have these full featured desktop applications. Like we're never gonna duplicate that in uwp. So it, it's just, you know, and phone,

Rich Campbell (00:19:14):
It's also the foolishness of thinking there'll be one device to rule them all. Right. It's like real life is multiple devices. And if you really want to service, well make sure the same infos available across all of them.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:24):
Yeah. It's, it's <laugh>, I've talked to you about this today. I talked to Brad about this day. It, it's, there is this dream that we will find, uh, in this case a hardware device that will replace two hardware devices. Or we were talking about Loop the, this software that will replace two pieces of software. Like I can remove two things and use this one thing and it will in life will be better. And I look, this is the, uh, you know, right. Once run everywhere, uh, mantra. It's the, this is the, been the dream of our industry. I think since it's been an industry. And unfortunately, again, and again and again, what you find is that what I call the right tool for the job, you know, that, um, some devices are just, well, no devices are literally just optimized for certain use cases. They work better for this, and this thing works better for this. And,

Leo Laporte (00:20:11):
But these are general purpose devices. That's,

Paul Thurrott (00:20:14):
Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, a way we use a desk call. We have a pc, which is a personal computer, but the most personal device that we carry today is not a computer. It's a phone. It's a phone. Yeah. Right. I mean, so it's a name. And

Rich Campbell (00:20:28):
We keep coming up with ways to make the phone screen bigger to try and make it into kind of a tablet computer.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:33):
Yeah. Well, yeah, of course. And, and they'll, and they're, Samsung has an environment like this called decks for their phones, where you can, same thing, plug it into a deck screen, whatever. It's sort of a computer. You know, it's a dream. It's just, it's just hasn't really been realized, realized. Um,

Rich Campbell (00:20:47):
I just don't know that it's a good dream.

Leo Laporte (00:20:49):
Yeah. Is it a, is it something people want? I I think a lot of younger people are very happy to use their phone as their primary. And that's that they

Paul Thurrott (00:20:57):
Do, Joe. That's right. But

Rich Campbell (00:20:58):
That's right. But more saliently. It's just like, I want to use whatever device I want to use. Right. And my stuff should be there.

Leo Laporte (00:21:02):
That's a good point. That, that's Microsoft is trying to do with that moments to

Paul Thurrott (00:21:06):
That point, <laugh>. That, that is what Sacha Nadel, that's his whole his deal. We're gonna meet you where you are. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:21:11):
And that's good. Cause that's the cloud, that's Azure, the way it's Yeah. Yeah. That's, that's good business. Good for Microsoft's business. You store everything in the cloud.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:19):
Yeah. Now that said, they, they still make whatever billions they make every quarter, every year on Windows licenses, which are largely for, um, new PCs, which is going down, right. Because of the post pandemic.

Rich Campbell (00:21:30):
I, I looked it up. It's 12% of their revenue is Windows

Paul Thurrott (00:21:32):
12%. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:21:33):
That's significant billion. Yeah. A billion, billions real money, right? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:38):
As, yeah. As a percentage of their revenues. That's a much smaller number than it had been historically. <affirmative>, it's probably a bigger dollar value than it was, you know, because the company has grown, et cetera. So it's kind of a tough thing. Like, that was one of the early discussions. I don't remember if it was Terry, I think it was Terry Morrison had about, you know, windows. And he was talking about how, look, we need to get this, we want to get into a billion users. That was the big goal at the time. And, uh, you know, there are only a couple markets out there that have a billion users. Right? Uh, apple had a billion users across all the devices at the time. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, it's probably just iPhone does now. Uh, Android was well above, you know, was a billion, some billions, I don't remember. Um, and they're like, look, you know, we, if we get it there, I mean, we're, we're in that group. But you have to, when you look at all of the devices out in the world, I mean, the number of smartphones dwarfs the number of PCs by an order. Well, not well by wide margin. Right.

Rich Campbell (00:22:30):
And, but you're right, it's an order of magnitude. It's Yeah. 4 billion versus 250 million, right? Like

Paul Thurrott (00:22:36):
It's Yeah. Whatever the, yeah. So it's a different number. And, um, yeah, you can't, that's, that's the way the world's gone. You just have to recognize that. So.

Rich Campbell (00:22:45):
Well, and I think what Terry was talking about was trying to get win 10 to a billion users. That's right. Because there's mult, there's two more than 2 billion Windows users. How many willingly is a separate question. Yeah. Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:59):
Yeah. I don't know. <laugh>, I'm not gonna go there. But, um, yeah. And unfortunately, um, they use some deceptive, uh, counting practices to get to that number. But it's okay. <laugh>, today, it's fair to say Windows 10, uh, did hit that billion mark, of course. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> and, uh, windows 11 is struggling. But it will, it will get there eventually. Um, potentially artificially, because <laugh> Windows 10 will be put out to, you know, mark, uh, pasture,

Rich Campbell (00:23:23):
Whatever, not, not for another couple of years. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:25):
Right. Yeah. So we'll get

Rich Campbell (00:23:26):
For, for, for an IT guy's timeline, they're talking about 2025. And honestly, I don't believe 2025, either in the same way that XP is still supported, right. Because the US Navy

Paul Thurrott (00:23:36):
Seven Yeah. 10 will be X. Yep. Absolutely.

Rich Campbell (00:23:39):
10 will get an extension. Inevitably,

Leo Laporte (00:23:41):
You can't run Xbox in a submarine, but you can run XP

Paul Thurrott (00:23:45):
<laugh>. Yes. So actually, what's interesting, if it's, if you go, if you think about this XP seven 10, right? Um, each one of those was a milestone of sale of, you know, sheer, uh, usage size or whatever. Each one bigger than the last. But Windows XP as the smallest of the three lasted the longest by far. And that will probably always be the case. And it's the one everyone kind of remembers, right? It's like, oh, xp. Those are the good old days. You know, XP at the time when in 2001, windows was still, this was six years before the iPhone. Mm-hmm. You know, windows was still the center of personal computing. Uh, windows seven arrived in 2009 right after the iPhone. And that was the beginning of the shift. But that thing, people like, well, no one's, nothing's ever gonna outsell this thing. Like, this is gotta be the biggest one ever. But actually 10 ended up being bigger than seven. Yeah. Because the mar you know, the market's just bigger. It's just bigger. I

Rich Campbell (00:24:34):
Also argued XP didn't get a replacement for five years.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:37):
Yeah. Oh, for

Rich Campbell (00:24:38):
Sure. After there were versions every year before that, right? There was That's right. You know, 98 5, 98, 98, se you know, 2000.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:46):
Well, there were versions of X P V, year two <laugh>. Yeah. What do you think about it? Um, had some issues there, but, uh, yeah. So XB and then XP was kept in market artificial well because of the, what happened with Longhorn. And then it was also kept supported for longer for the same reason. Right. So many companies that adopted it, it's like, you know, they couldn't put the brakes on. I, I remember again, Terry, for whatever reason, talking about, uh, a hospital in London that had gotten attacked. They were all running xp and XP was not supported, supposedly. And he's like, what are you gonna do when the this Oh, huge hospital comes to you and says, we got a ransomware attack, you're gonna fix it. Right. <laugh>, like, you have to fix it. You can't say no to them.

Rich Campbell (00:25:28):
Yeah. And they do well in insane US Navy. Most bank, I mean, all the ATMs are running xp like that. This is the problem is those appliance-based implementations. But it's not, it's not the xp,

Leo Laporte (00:25:40):
It's not the X P U and I. No. Right. It's a

Paul Thurrott (00:25:43):
Special xp. It's XP warp <laugh> always three that replace was two. Yeah, it was three. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:25:51):
Uh, it's a special embedded xp. I

Paul Thurrott (00:25:56):
Mean, it's not, but it's, it's same basic code base, though. It's, it's not running, I hate, hate

Leo Laporte (00:26:01):
To say it. Windows 11 is the same basic code base. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:26:04):
Yeah,

Rich Campbell (00:26:04):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:06):
Get a beautiful coat of paint on the front. It's completely different.

Rich Campbell (00:26:09):
Well, and, and by the, by the pattern you just described, Paul, windows 11 will fall away and Windows 12 will become the important version while Windows

Paul Thurrott (00:26:17):
10 still. Yeah, actually. So, right. We don't know this for a fact, but one of the interesting things that might change now is Windows 11 could be replaced in like, after a normal three year time cycle like we used to have back in the day. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, although that didn't actually happen all that much. I mean, uh, you know, we went from seven to eight to 10 in three years. But I mean, honestly, uh, it was up and down all over the place. But whatever three, let's call it three years, you know, windows 10, by virtue of the fact that had been in the market for, you know, I don't remember remember name of six or eight years before they started to replace it will last forever. <laugh>, you know, it's just

Rich Campbell (00:26:48):
After saying this is the last version

Paul Thurrott (00:26:50):
Of window. That's right. That's right. Um, yeah. That guy, I can't believe he still has a job. Anyway, so <laugh>, poor, poor bastard, um, Jerry Nixon. Right. Um, anyway, uh, yes. So, yeah, I mean, we, I just like, apple was on OS 10 for, you know, forever and then suddenly it was different versions. I mean, maybe we're gonna see a, a 12 or 13 or 14, whatever. Right. You know, we'll have to wait and see. But

Rich Campbell (00:27:14):
This is, but you know, Leo's hitting on this point, which is that the operating system's becoming plumbing the same way. We no longer care about buys versions the same way. We don't care about cpu micro code. Like the operat system is becoming plumbing in the, and more importantly, it means all we want from it is reliability. We don't care about new features, just don't screw stuff up.

Leo Laporte (00:27:33):
And in fact, they're undermining it by treating it otherwise. Yeah, that's right. If they would just get out of the way.

Rich Campbell (00:27:39):
Well, and, and I feel like you saw this with Maui, right? Where they actually took a library out of Windows, the Win UI and put it into a developer library SDK so that it could iterate faster than Windows could.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:52):
Right, right. Well, and yeah, there's a lot of version, there's a lot of problems when you tie any developer technology to a very specific version of Windows, you know? Mm-hmm. Um, that whole effort to pull win UI in other parts of the stack out from Windows and make it a separate thing that will work on all supported versions of Windows. Super smart. Yeah. It's also

Rich Campbell (00:28:12):
A core change in mindset. I mean, yeah. Four decades, Microsoft only put things into Windows. They never took things out of

Paul Thurrott (00:28:19):
Windows. That's right. That's right. Yeah. That's the primary difference I think, between, uh, windows and Macro os,

Leo Laporte (00:28:26):
You know? So at what point does it become such a burden, you know, maintaining this legacy code base and, and compatibility and, uh, you know, I would say billions of lines of, of code?

Paul Thurrott (00:28:36):
I don't, I don't know that there is a point. I mean, I mean, obviously I guess there would be, but when you have billions, some, let's, let's call it a billion users, right? Um, you are making monthly, yearly subscription fees from these corporations and from some individuals. Like, you don't, you're not getting rid of this thing, right? So I think what we're seeing today in Windows, the thing I just complained about, the search button, which is crazy, right? This that level of detail, is you're getting a commensurate amount of support based on how they feel this thing is valuable. <laugh>, you know, that if there, there's, and tied to it is what Richard was saying, which is they feel like they have to put new stuff in it. Cause they want to be able to sell something. And they also want to help out PC makers who are probably trying to sell something who are also putting their own crap on there, by the way, to kind of differentiate from other computers.

(00:29:25):
Um, you, you're trying to prop up an industry because maybe the feeling is if we don't do this stuff, which we all, I think we all agree is not necessary, maybe this thing drops off a cliff faster, that what they're really doing is trying to maintain what they have as much as, as they can in a way that makes sense. And do it in a cost effective fashion. Cuz a lot of this stuff is just, um, surface level superfluous, little UIs, you know, there nothing. In fact, the next thing we're gonna talk about is a great example.

Leo Laporte (00:29:53):
Well, let's talk about, because I know if Mary Jo Foley would be here, she would be so excited about the notion and tabs are coming to note Pat.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:03):
Oh man. Yeah. So was this leaked accidentally? Yeah. Well, a Microsoft employee tweeted, I believe a photo, a screenshot, uh, showing this. And the screenshot said confidential. Do not discuss. Yeah. Don't discuss features that take

Leo Laporte (00:30:21):
Screenshots. Don't do this.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:24):
So somehow this person, uh, survived multiple rounds, rounds of layoffs, you know, but <laugh>, he's

Leo Laporte (00:30:30):
In Jerry Nixon's department now.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:32):
Yeah. Um, here, okay, so y I don't remember the year, years ago, uh, Joe be, I got up on a stage and announced at probably Build, uh, a feature coming to Windows 10 called Sets and Sets was this thing that they were gonna update the window manager in Windows to support tabs in any application, every application. So Microsoft Word could have tabs, you could do control t Open a New Word tab and different way of navigating, uh, that feature never arrived.

Leo Laporte (00:31:02):
You could see why they thought that people would want this, because, uh, look at browsers peop. Yep. Something not all. Well, not me keep hundreds of tabs open. This is, so you think in terms of, you

Paul Thurrott (00:31:13):
Know, six, you're the only people on Earth I can have this conversation with, cuz both of you know, we'll know exactly what I'm talking about. Yep. A million years ago, back in the 1990s, one of the big debates in software development back when Windows was literally everything, it was all that mattered was this notion of, um, multiple document interface and single document interface, right? Oh, mine. And it was kind of based around the same idea. Like, in other words, you, you're using Word and you wanna work in multiple documents. Do you open them all in the same window and have some form of, I guess, inter window navigation that is separate from the alt tab navigation we have in Windows? Or if you wanna have a separate window for each document. And Microsoft was so enamored of this, uh, MDI I thing, uh, uh, multi Yeah. MDI that they in Visual Studio with M F C created a, a very, actually the only easy thing you could do visual stu in visual c plus plus rather, was create MDI I applications. Like they, they had like a template for it. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you would have multiple sub windows, you could have an about box. It was all very, a very formal, you could always tell when it dock C Yep. You know, split screen all of those. Yeah. This was pre-time.

Leo Laporte (00:32:18):
You mean, you mean loop?

Paul Thurrott (00:32:20):
Hold

Leo Laporte (00:32:21):
On. So <laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:23):
Actually, this, that ties in in a way. Yes. Um, but you could in the frame of a window have floating windows that each recommended, uh, that each represented a document. They could be full window size as well, right? And then you could use some kind of a window menu or something, something to switch between them, however you did it. Um, but of course the web, when the web browser came around and, and uh, started this concept of tabs and also a, a navigation scheme where it's like controlled tab, right? You could see where they got to that. Uh, it's a switch between them. There's an interesting thing going on there, right? Because you could call, uh, a browsers, sort of an MDI I application. Some people call it like a tab based, uh, interface, like a TBI or whatever it is. Um, it, it's navi, you, you still have to deal with the fact that you have multiple documents in an application window and you have to navigate to them.

(00:33:12):
How do you do that? You know, windows up until very recently, didn't support a way to all tab into different views inside of application windows, right? So in Windows 11, I actually can't remember if this was in Windows 10. I, I probably is, I'm sorry if I don't remember this, but, um, you c by default, the first three tabs in edge will show up in ALT tab and you can configure it to be five or 10 or something, or all of them, or none of them, however you want. So if that's how you wanna navigate, you can navigate at the OS level to browser tabs. Fascinating. Um, but now we have applications, cause this is Windows 11, right? So back in the 1990s, the whole software world turned on its head to do this thing to, this was the biggest concern in the world. And now you move forward to Windows 11. We're talking about reduced resources and reduced level of interest and whatever. And all we can do is add tabs to individual applications one at a time.

(00:34:10):
And e geez, <laugh>. So we have 'em in File Explorer. We saw how poorly they rolled that out. Now they're gonna add them to Notepad and I, and here's my take on this is very simple. It doesn't hurt anyone who doesn't want to use it. I will never use it. Um, and it doesn't change anything. I, it, it is the epitome of a superficial change that the three people who need it for some reason will love and will be very happy. But it's a bullet point item on a list. Here's what we changed in this release and it just doesn't change

Leo Laporte (00:34:45):
Anything. The idea is you want to work, you wanna somehow group like things

Paul Thurrott (00:34:52):
Called documents. It's the easiest way documents, right? Okay. Yeah. Like, like web, like web tabs or web browser tabs are individual web documents, right? They're documents. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:35:01):
But we also have workspaces, which I do use

Paul Thurrott (00:35:05):
Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. That's a real power user feature though. Yeah. But by the way, there's another level of navigation, right? So mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. You know, how do you switch to a different workspace? I don't mean literally. I mean there are keyboard shortcuts and you obviously you can use the Yeah. Task

Leo Laporte (00:35:17):
Bar. Actually you have to turn it on and funny cause I was setting up this, uh, this new Lenovo to use mm-hmm. <affirmative> and it wasn't on, and it, I guess it's a feature in 22 H two or something that you can, but anyway, you had to turn it on. But that's, see I have Firefox chat, I have a Discord window. I have a slack window, I have copy, uh, ad copy I a system window. I, this is how I work.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:40):
So you have a different, you have one window in each

Leo Laporte (00:35:42):
One because I like full screen <laugh>. Right. And then I have set it up so the Windows key tab opens up this interface. Right. Um, yeah, that's kind of, I mean, uh, on other computers you, there are, I don't know if there is on Windows, there are gestures mm-hmm. <affirmative> to, um, to move from one workspace

Paul Thurrott (00:36:00):
Together. It's Right. Three fingers left Right. Or something like that. Or maybe four fingers.

Leo Laporte (00:36:03):
Let's see. Yeah. Well, yeah, something happens <laugh> Yeah, it works sorta <laugh>. It's confusing, but I

Paul Thurrott (00:36:10):
Don't, I don't do that a lot. But yeah, it's gotta be

Leo Laporte (00:36:11):
Something like, I like that, you know, where that comes to tell you that comes from iPad. Cuz on an iPad you keep everything full screen. And I just got used to that and then I use it on every operating system. Now

Paul Thurrott (00:36:23):
The one of the few smart things they've done in Windows over the past few years was make the mouse and, and touchpad and touch, I guess what I call it touch pad and touch base gestures as identical as possible. Yeah. So that if you were used to doing gesture Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:36:38):
That's good touch pad. Cause that's muscle memory. You don't, you don't want

Paul Thurrott (00:36:41):
To. Yeah. Like that was actually, I thought that was pretty smart.

Leo Laporte (00:36:43):
You don't want to change that. Yeah. Does this, the

Rich Campbell (00:36:45):
One evil thing you find with tabs that could be really problematic is you grab a tab typically from a browser and you drag it across the screen. Cuz you, you want to position multiple windows. I have these big wide screens where I never want to maximize, I want be

Leo Laporte (00:36:56):
Right,

Rich Campbell (00:36:57):
Right, right, right, right side by side. If I drag across another, uh, another browser instance that will snap to that browser.

Leo Laporte (00:37:05):
No, I know. I, which is annoying. It's so annoying.

Rich Campbell (00:37:07):
It also resizes the document.

Leo Laporte (00:37:09):
Yeah. That's, that's

Rich Campbell (00:37:10):
Very, now even if you drag it off, you now in the wrong size. And you know, that's,

Paul Thurrott (00:37:14):
I mean let's,

Leo Laporte (00:37:14):
That's actually a good point. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:37:16):
Suck it into the ugliness of, uh, windows laptops. And you are using a touchpad to do what, you know, to navigate to a tab and it grabs it. Yeah. And it pulls it out of the window you're in, which is not what you were looking to do. Right. Maybe I'm just clumsy, but I, this happens to me depending on the, the touchpad. This can happen pretty frequently.

Leo Laporte (00:37:34):
You can see though, what Microsoft's challenges is that there are as many ways of doing it and as many preferences as there are users practically mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And they want to support, they seem to wanna support everybody. Apple used to on the other hand, say, no, no, no. I mean this has changed somewhat over, over the years. But in originally Apple was what they called monotonous. There was one and only one way to do anything that was actually the tech, the term of art.

Paul Thurrott (00:37:58):
There are advantages, uh, to both of those schemes. I, I, you know, but, but you had asked earlier, at what point does Microsoft, like what would they, would they ever just walk away from Windows? Like how far does it have to fall? Right. And I would just say I, I don't know that, like I said, I don't know think, I don't know about there there being an answer to that. But one that I, I view the just an, it's only been five, maybe six years since sets, just in that short period of time, there has been a readjustment in the expectations in the Windows group because there was an engineering effort to change the window manager in Windows so that every window could have tabs no matter what it was, it was gonna be an automatic thing. No, you just got legacy apps. Yeah, no, they, they were working on it.

(00:38:39):
Obviously. I'd love to see the final report on why they didn't do it, because there were, I'm sure very serious technical issues with it. We tested this in the Windows Insider program. People loved it. And then they took it away and never talked about it again. And then one day, well one day October last year they added tabs to one app and now they're gonna add 'em to one more app and they're just built in apps. And you can, I'm just, what I'm saying is the engineering required, the resources you'd have to allocate the effort of those two different things is so stark that just in the past, you know, we'll call it five, six years, that's how far Windows has fallen inside of Microsoft. Um, they, they were gonna do some major engineering and change windows broadly. And now they're changing built-in apps that people just, and people just aren't gonna, well really use that stuff too

Rich Campbell (00:39:32):
Much. You may be touching on the political issue here, which is that they tried to do this broad thing and got pushed back by potentially more politically powerful groups inside of Microsoft. Oh, that's Now look at, look at the apps. They are changing. It's the ones they control.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:45):
That's interesting. So actually that's a good point. So I, I, when I said I would love to see the real reason, my expectation was there was a technical issue. I think there were technical issues, but that's just as good of a reason. Right. That answer would be just as interesting that yeah. The group that controls the, uh, you know, the Azure group that controls the internals of Windows finally said, guys, guys, guys, you're touching code that we use in Azure. We're not doing this for Windows. Sorry. No, it's not that important. I would love to, I, whatever the reason is, I'd just love to know. I'd love to know. Hopefully someday we'll know.

Rich Campbell (00:40:24):
Just as an aside regarding this little tab notepad thing, it's like, I don't really use Notepad anymore. I use VS. Code. Sure. Right. And it has tabs, right? Like that's sort of reality. Yeah. Yeah. Everything I can re recreate in Notepad can be created in, in vs.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:41):
Code. Yeah. People who are technical enough to want need or, or use tabs in a text editor are already using Notepad plus plus or Yeah. That's vs. Code or code or

Leo Laporte (00:40:51):
Whatever it's Yeah. Yeah. Notepad is for the, what? I don't, I don't want,

Paul Thurrott (00:40:55):
I don't know who honestly. It's just,

Leo Laporte (00:40:57):
It's it's uh, yeah, it's an appliance that comes with Windows that you use cuz you didn't have anything else set up or you just

Rich Campbell (00:41:04):
Needed to write. And why shouldn't it be vs code in the sense that Right. Most of the time you're just editing tax except now it's

Paul Thurrott (00:41:09):
Colorful. Interesting. Actually, I suppose technically speaking, file man, file manager file Explorer might be the, that's the best tabbed application in Windows 11 because Terminal is now part of Windows 11 and terminal supports tabs. Charles Tabbed. Huh. And it supports tabs that have different, um, inline environments.

Leo Laporte (00:41:28):
Terminal is the one application that tab, to me, the tabs make sense because you've got something running in a tab in a pain, right? You don't wanna

Paul Thurrott (00:41:35):
Interrupts a different type of thing. It's not just another document. It's a different,

Leo Laporte (00:41:39):
It's a, it's a new terminal essentially

Paul Thurrott (00:41:40):
In the, you could be like, I want a Lennox terminal, I want a command prompt, I want a power show.

Leo Laporte (00:41:44):
Or there's a process running and you don't want, you want to keep going and you could open a tab. That's the one place tabs to me make a lot of sense. And I think all terminals are tabbed

Paul Thurrott (00:41:53):
Well, okay. I but okay, I'm sorry I I for those cause I know I'm gonna hear from these people. Um, if you love and need and use File Explorer tabs or you want them in Notepad, that's great. That's great. The, the presence of tabs and File Explorer doesn't prevent me or from using it and it doesn't get in the way of anything. It's great. You don't have to use it. I don't mind that they're doing it. I'm just saying. Right. This, this, what this is really about is, um, this is a symptom of what's happening with Windows. You know, where back in the nineties where it was everything, my God, the engineering was like, bam, bam. It was like all, it was all over the place. Even as recently as five or six years ago, they were talking about doing something impressive with the Windows manager in Windows 10. I I'm just pointing that out because they're not talking about that stuff anymore. Um, where we're doing little, we're doing little goofy. The, these are college interns who come in and do little side projects. Um, the, this is not big Engine,

Leo Laporte (00:42:44):
But if you think about it, if you wanted to add some convenience for people, adding a tab is kind of the least you could do. The least Obtrusive doesn't affect Paul. Um, I can see why they might have settled on that. Well, to

Paul Thurrott (00:42:58):
Be, as

Leo Laporte (00:42:58):
Opposed to tiled windows or

Paul Thurrott (00:43:00):
Something least she could do would be, would be to do nothing.

Leo Laporte (00:43:02):
<laugh>. Well, yeah, but

Paul Thurrott (00:43:04):
Tabs. It's

Leo Laporte (00:43:05):
Probably easy to add. It's not a hard thing. That would be the least. And it doesn't get in anybody's way, but if somebody wants it, that's,

Paul Thurrott (00:43:11):
That's why it's

Leo Laporte (00:43:11):
Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:12):
All right. So actually, uh, I'm gonna bring up, my face is about to light up white because I just ran Paint <laugh>. So Paint is an application. <laugh> Paint is an application they just redid. This is a brand new app version of paint. I mean, I'm sure the underlying code is the, the same. It's, I'm, I always do this. I, I know this is probably not technically accurate, but I believe this to be a 1 32 app that has a win UI front end. I think that's what I'm looking at. That's how I would describe it. But it doesn't matter. This app, despite the fact that it is brand new, does not support dark mode. So I'm using my computer in dark mode. It comes up dark white. Yeah. It's the only mode it supports. Now, we may see a news report in the next year. They're gonna add tabs to paint. That's great. Could you support Dark mode first? Here's a, here's a thing you could support and paint. This is gonna blow your mind. Doesn't support a lot of keyboard shortcuts. I can't do Alt Ft. Actually, it does work. <laugh>. Nevermind. That's not true. Actually, they must have just added,

Leo Laporte (00:44:03):
Oh, they got dark mode. Woo.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:05):
All right. So, oh, that's very interesting. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:44:07):
That works. Okay, we're rewinding. That didn't work before. That's,

Paul Thurrott (00:44:10):
That's a new moment right there. Oh, that's brand new. That's I, no, you don't understand. I actually use Pan all the time. That's very interesting to me. Okay, good, good. So, but this is a, you know, an application. They redid the UI on this typical win is 11. Slap as shit together, get it out the door. You know, the version of Notepad we have now supports dark mode, supports all the keyboard shortcuts from before. It's basically the same app, but, but beautiful. Win UI style ui, um, no pa uh, paint looks great if you like white <laugh>. You know, if you wanted a, if you're looking for like a cheap way to add a ring light to your setup, just run paint while you're doing a work call, um, it will light up your entire face. It's, it's weird. So this is, again, I love that they edit that.

(00:44:48):
Now I want to go play with the, um, I, they, uh, th this is, these to me are symptoms. They're indications of where we're at with Windows. Like these are the types of things we get. We get a, a search pill on the task bar that n nobody knew was cut, that they never, they've never even acknowledged even happened, let alone announced. You know, we get new versions of paint and no padd. For some reason, paint is only white. Sorry. Hope you want the brightness. Uh, and no pet's gonna get tabs, apparently <laugh>. So it's like whatever. I mean, it's just, you know, in the remember like, why would they have done this stuff in the past? Microsoft would've added features to Windows and then they would've added to some stk. So you could add those features to your apps, you know? Mm-hmm. <affirmative> now they're just Thurrottwing stuff out in the world. Nobody's gonna, nobody's gonna look at Notepad and be inspired to add tabs to their app. Go look at the mi you know, uh, whatever the dev, you know, Microsoft Dev site and figure out what the framework is they used and then do it to their own app. Cuz that doesn't exist. These, it's like little one-off. There's like little toys.

(00:45:46):
It's not the same.

Leo Laporte (00:45:47):
Are you saying it sounds,

Paul Thurrott (00:45:49):
It feels like it's the B team. Oh, we're, we're way past the B team. This is,

Leo Laporte (00:45:53):
It's the intern <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:54):
This is the, the guy who's walking around with a, with a, a pot of water and a, like a stick is walked by a computer that no one turned off and started coding.

Leo Laporte (00:46:03):
Why does he have a pot of water in his stick?

Paul Thurrott (00:46:05):
Paul? I don't know what I, Janet, I don't know. I can't speak <laugh>. There's,

Leo Laporte (00:46:09):
There's some image in here.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:11):
He's like, got a broom in water and he like,

Leo Laporte (00:46:14):
He's the chia. He's like,

Paul Thurrott (00:46:15):
He's uh, it's like Saturday afternoon or building 33 and he's like, you, no, I think I'm gonna add tabs to a notepad. Okay. When no one's looking

Leo Laporte (00:46:23):
<laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (00:46:23):
Just check it out. A GitHub or whatever they use in

Leo Laporte (00:46:26):
These days. Another feature by your favorite chia, uh, tabs. A notepad. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:32):
Look like I, again, I don't It's fine that they're doing it. Yeah, but I mean, but it, but it's relevant to that conversation we had, which is, I think this shows, you know, when are they gonna, would they give up on Windows today? No, they're clearly not putting a lot into it. They're just trying to reap the, as many revenues as they can. Um, they're doing the minimum and the minimum, my God, we thought we knew what the minimum was. The minimum keeps getting less.

Leo Laporte (00:46:57):
It's also, I'm gonna defend them. Wow. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I don't know how this happened.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:02):
No, I, I can't

Leo Laporte (00:47:03):
Wait to hear this. I'm gonna defend them because you have, uh, the same problem you have with smartphones. You really have a mature, very mature products. Yeah. Same problem with Office. It's hard to do anything significant at this point to Windows, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:47:17):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:47:18):
I mean, can you think of a feature that guys,

Paul Thurrott (00:47:20):
I think we just made the argument that they shouldn't touch it at all. So Yeah, of

Leo Laporte (00:47:23):
Course. Yeah. Maybe they shouldn't do anything, but on the other hand, they want to sell the new version. Yep. Just like office. So, just like Quicken, you know, Quicken has a new version every year cuz that's how they get.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:33):
Okay. But,

Leo Laporte (00:47:34):
But what do you know, balancing a checkbook hasn't changed much since 1902.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:38):
Yeah. That thing gets updated for the new tax codes and the new whatever, right? Obviously new laws, whatever. Um, no Windows is a platform, you know, as an end user application, you know, word, Excel, PowerPoint, those types of apps. Yeah. I mean, they're mature. They shouldn't change as much, but they can change, right? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:47:53):
Um, so it's your, uh, you and Richard would argue best just leave it alone. But you know that as soon as you do that, people are gonna say win does. Oh my God. They haven't changed that in years.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:04):
I, so,

Leo Laporte (00:48:05):
So I think what happens is you look at that 12%, you watch it go to eleven ten nine, there's some point where you go, ah, good. It's only 3% of our revenue. Stop

Paul Thurrott (00:48:17):
<laugh>. But well, okay, but what do you do with it? Do you, um, you, it's, it's interesting. Hand it off to an open source community project or

Leo Laporte (00:48:24):
Something. It's plumbing, it's infrastructure. You just, you just,

Paul Thurrott (00:48:26):
Well, you don't just stop working on it. I mean, people, there's, there's still millions and billions of people using it.

Leo Laporte (00:48:31):
Yeah, right. But, but maybe they're not aware of the fact that they're even using it.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:37):
Listen, there are, um, several major PC makers that all earn an incredible list of money that that's true. There's a whole industry

Leo Laporte (00:48:44):
Going. And they put pressure on Microsoft, by the way, to have a new versions right's. Why Windows 11?

Paul Thurrott (00:48:48):
I think that might be what they're doing. In other words, like, what's the minimum we can do to make Windows 11 appealing? And the minimum is the fresh coat of paint on the surface

Rich Campbell (00:48:57):
Volume. License agreements still include, there's gonna be an operating system every X many

Leo Laporte (00:49:01):
Oh years. Oh, interesting. So they gotta do,

Rich Campbell (00:49:04):
They still have long-term contracts in place that require them

Leo Laporte (00:49:07):
Interesting

Rich Campbell (00:49:08):
Version windows.

Leo Laporte (00:49:09):
That's really interesting.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:10):
Yeah. I don't, I mean, I, I don't, right. I don't ever see it going away. I, I guess I, I think the thing I'm worried about is I can already see how little effort is occurring <laugh> in this group and how little oversight there is, and how the attention to detail is so outta whack. Um, and, you know, they're not done right yet. <laugh>, you know, it's like it could get worse. Right? And I just, I don't know. It's, it gets depressing. I, I, um, 12% of mi, 12% of Microsoft, the second biggest company in the world, <laugh>, it's still a lot of revenues.

Leo Laporte (00:49:46):
Oh, no, no, absolutely. It's

Rich Campbell (00:49:48):
Still tens of billions of dollars. Yeah. Yeah. Like, to be clear.

Leo Laporte (00:49:51):
And you, you know, he spent a hundred million on some guy with a bucket and a stick, and you're, you're golden for <laugh> years's to come, you know, a whole team of guys with buckets and sticks and, you know, life.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:04):
I perhaps misspoke about the gentleman with a bucket and a stick, but

Leo Laporte (00:50:09):
It's an, a charming image. <laugh>, I

Paul Thurrott (00:50:13):
Don't know what around like, no, no one's around. I mean, maybe I got a bucket. I

Leo Laporte (00:50:16):
Got a stick in. Let me see what I could do.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:19):
I mean, if monkeys could write Shakespeare, I could probably improve. No pet

Leo Laporte (00:50:23):
<laugh>. Alright, I wanna take a little break and continue on. It's so nice to have Richard Campbell here run as radio and, uh, dot net rocks and a lover of brown liquor, which we will soon learn about in, uh, in love to Be Back. Yes. It's good to have you back. You were our last guest of 2022. Our first guest of 2023. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> would almost be like he never left <laugh>. Our show today, brought to you by Melissa. We know we love Melissa. We all love Melissa especially. You should love Melissa. If you are a business and you have customer records, what business doesn't have customer records, right? Uh, if you have address information, it could be suppliers, I guess, huh? Contacts. If you have that kind of data you need, Melissa, a leading provider of global data quality. They add, add on to that identity verification, something.

(00:51:24):
They also do address management solutions. In fact, Melissa just acquired zip info and zip info.com. They've been doing zip code data for Fortune 500 companies for years. So now, and it's perfect alignment with what Melissa's been doing all along. Melissa's been doing this for years as well. Their zip code database, their software developer kits are aligned strategically with Melissa's comprehensive product suite, grounded in address verification, correction, enhancement, uh, as the foundation for smart and effective business operations worldwide. So this is zip info.com portfolio is a perfect compliment to Melissa's family of tools and services with technologies and capabilities that strengthen their position as the address experts. A reputation, Melissa has honed over nearly 40 years of continuous operations, serving diverse businesses globally. So now Thurrottugh Melissa zip info.com customers, we'll have access the zip info, products plus access, good news, the full range of Melissa products.

(00:52:33):
What does Melissa do? Oh, you know, there's a whole catalog, a solutions catalog of the things Melissa can do, but I'll give you a few of them. There's CAS certified, Cass certified mailers plus four postal automation tools. They have desktop or online versions for that. And also developer toolkits that feature on-prem or web APIs. This is something Melissa really does well. They deliver their product and in any way that suits your business. So you want an api, so you can include it in your software, no problem. You can do that. You want it, uh, online, A SaaS product. We got that. You want an prem, we got that. Mailers plus four corrects, verifies and standardizes US and Canadian addresses to postal standards. Uh, but more than that, it removes duplicates, performs national change of address processing. N C O A is a U S P S paved gold certified.

(00:53:26):
That means you can use it to presort bulk mail to get the maximum postal discounts. That's awesome. Right? Uh, residential business delivery indicators are included. Optional geocoding ads, location intelligence to support better mapping and targeted mail campaigns. You could take an address and build that in and just here's the longitude and latitude since they've been doing this since 1985. And what's really cool about Melissa is they don't rest on their laurels consistently. The top, you know, in address verification, always, you know, G2 Quadrant and all that mention, uh, consistently the best. But they don't rest. They always are improving their global intelligence solutions to help organizations unlock accurate data for more compelling customer views. That's kind of the bottom line of what they do. By the way, you should always be reassured. Melissa treats your data like gold. They can't undergo continuous independent security audits because they're absolutely committed to data security, your data being private and secure.

(00:54:32):
And of course, because of compliance requirements, many of us have, they do that too. They're SOC two, hipaa, uh, GDPR compliant. Your data is in the best hands. The best company with the best integrations, the best information, and it's secure. Make sure your customer contact data is up to date. Get started today. 1000 records clean for free, just so you can try it, see how it works. melissa.com/twit, m e l i ssa.com/twit. We're so glad to have their support in the new year. Uh, really helps us to, uh, keep Windows Weekly alive and running melissa.com/twit. And you support us, by the way. And it's really important when you go to that address, so they know you saw it here. melissa.com/twit. Thank you, Melissa. On we go with the show. Uh, let's see what's next on your, uh, on your rundown of, of horror, uh,

Paul Thurrott (00:55:30):
<laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:55:31):
Google is changing the Chrome release schedule. Again, it was monthly, right? Yeah. Now this is important because Chrome is, uh, is the chromium, the base code is the base for Edge, right? This is change edge.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:45):
That's the question. So actually they're not changing the release cadence. Like it's still gonna be on a four week release cycle, but the stable version of the browser will be released a week earlier to a subset of users unstable. They're following Microsoft's lead. Oh, no. They're gonna <laugh>. What are they doing? So, yeah. As Microsoft gotta do this, duh. They love doing this <laugh>. This is, this is their favorite thing to do only. So, listen, we released the browser, but only some of you're gonna get it, you know? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Sorry about that. So yeah, this is, when does early, early stable

Leo Laporte (00:56:18):
Even mean What is early stable?

Paul Thurrott (00:56:21):
I

Leo Laporte (00:56:22):
<laugh> Well, well, you've got Canary. You've got, uh, beta. Oh, no,

Paul Thurrott (00:56:27):
No, you got No, no. They're not adding an early stable. They

Leo Laporte (00:56:30):
Got stable. You got late stable. You got stable. Stable.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:33):
Yeah. No, it means that's some percentage of people unstable are gonna get, but you

Leo Laporte (00:56:39):
Don't even know early. Oh, so you're a Guinea pig, right? This is, by the way, this is, I'm seeing more and more companies do this release a small amount. Apple just did this. Oh, really? They, uh, and, and much to their chagrin, um, they released an update too. What was it? Uh, but only a small number. Got it. Actually, I think they,

Paul Thurrott (00:57:01):
I hope it was to that U2 album that gave out, um,

Leo Laporte (00:57:03):
<laugh>. Yes. <laugh>. It's

Paul Thurrott (00:57:06):
The new one. They released a, they released a couple of singles cuz the original version was

Leo Laporte (00:57:10):
Yeah. And then they, but what happened is the early users discovered, um, showstoppers. Oh, it was to their home automation. It was to Home Kit. Okay. And, uh, the u early users found showstoppers, and so they've yanked it. Wow. I think this is something companies are gonna start doing. Yeah. So in other words, it's like a lurker in our chat room says people

Paul Thurrott (00:57:29):
To test

Leo Laporte (00:57:30):
It, crowdsource development and testing.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:32):
So we're gonna force it on you. Maybe that's what the search button's all about, you know?

Rich Campbell (00:57:36):
But it's also speaks to a problem with insiders, which is that they're actually careful. And so Yeah. They don't put it on a critical piece of machinery, which means they don't use it every day. Oh, yeah. Right. And so often insiders don't find those problems that victimizing true's True. Just confined.

Leo Laporte (00:57:50):
That's true. How many times did you remember when the Kindle crashed your Kindle, the Windows update? Because, uh, they

Paul Thurrott (00:57:57):
Insiders found, they found that the, the day they released to the public, what's the

Leo Laporte (00:58:00):
Problem? Okay, <laugh>,

Rich Campbell (00:58:05):
But didn't who

Paul Thurrott (00:58:06):
Tooks a Kindle into a pc? What are you doing

Rich Campbell (00:58:09):
<laugh>?

Paul Thurrott (00:58:13):
Boy,

Rich Campbell (00:58:13):
An interesting part of all of this is this, are the beta testers are the people who sign up to test actually testing effectively.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:22):
Oh, I think the answer clearly. Okay. Actually, let me, let me divide that into two halves. I it for large part, no. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. I, I think there are people who would like to be doing that. And Microsoft has rejiggered the system enough that it's become untenable for a lot of people because they're like, look, I, I joined the dev b, you know, uh, program so I could get the most advanced stuff. And you're a being us, and I never get anything. I, you know, I've kind of lost interest. You know? So I think there's that part of it. But actually there's a rich body of evidence in the feedback hub of these people submitting bugs and explaining problems and, and lots of people seeing them. And Microsoft doesn't address it.

Rich Campbell (00:59:00):
Right. And, uh,

Paul Thurrott (00:59:01):
Those,

Rich Campbell (00:59:01):
And cause they think that's too marginal a number that the sort of person who signs up for insiders is doing things the regular consumer won't do.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:10):
So every time something like that happens, like the thing, uh, Leo mentioned the Kindle, um, blue screening windows mm-hmm. <affirmative>, um, people go back and say, yeah, the insiders reported this, this three months ago, you never did anything about it. Right. You didn't even respond to it. Right. You know, and it, it, it's, yeah. So it's a little bit of both. I think, um, uh, the raw numbers in the insider program I'm sure have gone down, but at one time were quite high. They were almost 20 million people supposedly in this program, but even back then, which is problematic. Yeah. But the engagement level is probably much lower. And it's, so to your point, yeah, I'm, I'm, I, I wanna be part of this. I'm a Windows enthusiast, whatever, but I'm absolutely not putting this on my, uh, day-to-day machine. I'll look at it occasionally. Um, not, there's not a lot of good feedback coming out of that.

Rich Campbell (00:59:54):
No. And, and so it was like, call the folks that aren't working hard that, you know, try and at least narrow the list of people who are really doing the thing. Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:00:02):
It's

Rich Campbell (01:00:02):
Leo, you're, you're

Paul Thurrott (01:00:03):
Hinting he's, what's he doing?

Rich Campbell (01:00:05):
<laugh>. He's outta control. <laugh>. Clearly

Paul Thurrott (01:00:08):
<laugh>. Um,

Rich Campbell (01:00:11):
But the other side of this is that, uh, being an insider was sort of a marquee thing. A lot of people signed up with no intent to do anything. Right? Oh, for sure. Like commitments on the beta testers.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:22):
They wanted to put their little signature file or whatever, and, you know. Exactly. Yeah. No, that's that for sure, for sure. Um, yeah, that's always gonna be the case. But there's that, this notion that Microsoft supposedly got rid of like their entire internal testing team, cuz the insiders were gonna do everything, which Yeah, I know. It's just, it's, it's one of those things like you can cut, you're like, oh, that sounds about right. You know? Um, but, but then again, you know, here we are, we have good stable builds with random features being put out to people. Chrome is gonna start shipping stuff randomly to some people. You know, Microsoft's gonna jump right on that with Edge. They love doing that. Sure. Um, they might already

Rich Campbell (01:00:59):
Wonder if there is, we aren't, we aren't seeing the evidence of a battle inside of Microsoft where people aren't believing the insiders or they have the problem. It's like, well, that's a marginal problem. Regular people never encounter it. Like they're undermining their own data sets. And Yeah. Some folks are like, we should just be testing against the consumer. Like, and they're doing it right to create data points. They say, here's proof. I tested this against the consumer. Everything was great.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:24):
I don't like that. However, I don't disagree if, if they were going to do it, if they are doing it, I think you need to say publicly, you're doing it. I think you need to, you can't just do it and not tell anyone we changed the search. But it's funny. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you know. No, you, you gotta, it's not just cuz I'm writing a book. I mean, I, I, it's, you just don't do that to people. I mean, without, you know, let them opt out something, you know?

Rich Campbell (01:01:50):
Yeah. Accepted a lot of folk. I mean, you've just seen it with Chrome. Like that's basically what they're the path they're headed on. You're going to get early stable.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:00):
Yeah. I, uh, boy,

Rich Campbell (01:02:05):
I love the, I'm, I'm my favorite thing now,

Paul Thurrott (01:02:08):
Early stable <laugh>, that's early stable. Right. If we eliminated all the bugs, it would be stable. Um, it would be, I think, okay, I'm just trying to, so I'm trying to, to rectify this in my brain. So if they didn't do early stable, which is an excellent phrase, they would release the product to stable a week later. Clearly they've been finding some problems. And what they're thinking is, if we just had more eyeballs on this, we would find this thing earlier. So is this better overall? In other words, let's say you're one of the random people that get hit by a bug because you were on early stable and you don't know that, you know, it, it just occurs. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, most people don't pay attention to their browser being updated. They, you know, well, they gotta put, they're gonna put telemetry on there or something so that they know.

(01:02:49):
Yeah. Right. Yeah, yeah. No, but so what I'm saying is, in other words, so you're, you're, they're, we got 300 computers crashing. Okay, well no, you're, but you're, but you're the person. Like, in other words, you're a normal person, so you randomly got a bug that would occur because you're an early stable. Google collects that telemetry, a bunch of people having the same bug and they fix it. And then when stable happens a week later, it's fixed. Right. If they weren't doing early stable, you would, you would now be a part of a much bigger group of people getting the same bug and same problem would still occur. So in that case, I guess you could make the argument, I'm almost being volume level down. Yeah. So I appreciate, I guess you could justify it that way. Um mm-hmm. <affirmative>. But what we just described was a strategy <laugh>, and this was the thing we were talking about with the search bill.

(01:03:36):
I don't think this is strategy. I, I think, I think someone flipped the switch and they were like, oh, screw it is out in the world. We're not gonna fix that now. Like, I think they're, you know, at, at some time there'll be a moment update that makes Mouseover work on the search pill. If that's what they decide to go with, you know, or they'll change it again. You know, I, um, I, I documented that the layout of the File Explorer application in Windows 11 has gone Thurrottugh three iterations. There was the version that shipped in the first version of the product, the version that shipped with 22 H two, and then the version that shipped in the November update <laugh> like literally 18, uh, uh, six weeks later, they changed a third dime. I mean, so it's really as a moment, think, well, I had a moment. Let me, I, trust me, I had a moment. But I feel like this search button thing will fall into, will do something like that. They, they'll either keep it and fix the mouse over, or they'll just change it again, you know, and, and one month will start seeing a report. Oh, people are saying they're gonna, you know, a different thing again. Or, or I just saw, I just mentioned the, uh, keyboard shortcut thing, um, in paint. Like sometimes things just appear <laugh>, you know, you don't know where they came from. Interesting.

Rich Campbell (01:04:51):
Well, and how do you know that they're there, right? I mean, this is a battle we deal with at Visual Studio all the time is right, because Visual Studio is so compatible since 2010 that you can keep doing exactly what you're doing in 2010, in 2022 <laugh>. And so how do you even surface the new features? Like how do you even notice that they're there if you're gonna quietly drop these capabilities? Like, what was the chances of you finding dark mode and paint?

Paul Thurrott (01:05:15):
But if you put out a change, change, oh, dark Mode's not in paint, but, yeah. No, I, if

Leo Laporte (01:05:18):
You put out a change log for everything, would anybody read that? Would you read a change log for paint?

Paul Thurrott (01:05:24):
I still feel like this has been solved. I, me, Richard knows Visual Studio has kind of a, what's new notification thing that could come up? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, um, you know, Chrome os when you install a new version, puts up a, an application, here's all the new features. It's kind of a cool thing. You know, windows could do that. You reboot, you just saw, uh, install cu whatever it is. Uh, we changed. Here's a little, a little, uh, notification down in the corner. You wanna know what's new? Click here. If you don't, don't worry about it. Just ignore it. Um, there, there are ways, you know, um, I just had a meeting on teams of sorting with Brad. I, I've complained about this two months ago. It keeps telling me that I can collaborate in Excel. I don't use Excel. Oh, and by the way, I'm in a meeting. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:06:03):
What?

Paul Thurrott (01:06:03):
Why are you telling me that? No,

Leo Laporte (01:06:05):
This is very clip, very clippy. You're

Paul Thurrott (01:06:07):
Blocking the meeting.

Leo Laporte (01:06:08):
Hi. Like,

Paul Thurrott (01:06:09):
What are you

Leo Laporte (01:06:09):
Doing? I got an idea for you. <laugh>. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:12):
Hey,

Leo Laporte (01:06:13):
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey,

Paul Thurrott (01:06:15):
Hey. You know,

Leo Laporte (01:06:17):
Okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:18):
I don't know. There are ways to do it, right? I guess is all I'm saying. I, I, I, I, I think they should be able to tell people about new features. I think they should tell people about new features and then us user can decide whether or not you wanna look at it, you know? Oh, but d don't, don't get there. There are ways to do it. Right. You know,

Leo Laporte (01:06:34):
I just got a critical update for my mouse

Paul Thurrott (01:06:37):
<laugh>. Oh, geez, Leo. I know that application very well. That's, this is not gonna go well.

Leo Laporte (01:06:46):
<laugh>. <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:47):
Yep. That's the thing. I used to raise the brightness on my, uh, webcam today. <laugh> the Dell peripheral manager. You can tell it. Put a name. You know,

Leo Laporte (01:06:58):
I'm on a Lenovo. That's the funny part.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:01):
That's beautiful. Oh, that is beautiful. That's hilarious. Okay. Cause using a Dell Mouse, is that

Leo Laporte (01:07:04):
Alright? I am using Adele Mouse. Okay. Which is probably my mistake.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:08):
Yeah. So just plugging that into your computer triggered the software download for that application.

Leo Laporte (01:07:13):
You know what they added dark mode.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:16):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:07:16):
That was a critical update. So glad, so glad to have

Paul Thurrott (01:07:21):
Critical. If you could flip it, does your mouse turn from white and silver to like dark gray and black <laugh>? That would be amazing.

Leo Laporte (01:07:27):
<laugh>. Okay. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt this thrilling conversation.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:32):
Oh, that's just,

Leo Laporte (01:07:33):
That's, you know what I always felt a search engine really needed. Yeah. Actually, one, one of the stories, uh, that I didn't get to do because we were on vacation, but I thought was, was fascinating, was apparently chat, G p T is a red alarm. Uh, the three alarm fire for Google. Like, Google's terrified that somehow AI is gonna replace search.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:00):
You know what? I get it. But I, this could also be what I would call a Slack moment for Google, which is every once in a while you need someone to pinch you in the butt and wake you up. And then they kind of examine it and say, yeah, we could do this. You know, we could

Leo Laporte (01:08:15):
Do so, so Bing is adding chat. G p t, the text,

Paul Thurrott (01:08:18):
Rumored,

Leo Laporte (01:08:19):
Rumored, rumored the text-based, uh, chat, uh, sentient by the way. Chat. Um, sure. To, uh, it'll rate your login code, uh, <laugh>. So maybe this is why Google was all upset about it. Right? Right. Uh, new, this is a New York Times article from last week. A new wave of chat bots like chat, G P T use artificial intelligence that could reinvent or even replace the traditional internet search engine. And it's just this simple

Rich Campbell (01:08:50):
<laugh> <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:08:53):
It's a good, it's a good illustration. Why

Paul Thurrott (01:08:55):
Does that appear to be hand run?

Leo Laporte (01:08:56):
It's very, it's a great illustration from the New York Times. It's also, it's, it's got Latin What is pro? I don't know if that's Laura. I ipsum. It's

Paul Thurrott (01:09:06):
Gotta be, it's

Leo Laporte (01:09:07):
Gotta be. It's hysterical.

Rich Campbell (01:09:08):
That's great. Now, I mean, the essential problem with this whole idea is that chat G p t is not up updated routinely.

Leo Laporte (01:09:14):
Yeah. It's from April, 2021 is the latest. They, so

Rich Campbell (01:09:17):
They said they did an updated

Leo Laporte (01:09:19):
December. Oh, they did do one. Oh good. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:09:21):
Yeah, there was a, there was a time when I thought Bing actually had a pretty good strategy. And the idea there was that Google search was just pages and pages of links, you know, and those links can be artificially ordered according to the needs of Google. You don't really know that you're getting the best kind of thing. And so what the Bing team said they were gonna do was become like an answer engine. Like, in other words, you go to Google, you ask a question and they just say, yeah, here you go. This is the answer. We're not gonna give you, uh, 1100 links. We're gonna give you the answer to

Leo Laporte (01:09:50):
Your question. So turns, that's a guy with a stick and a bucket. Here he is <laugh> uh, he's waiting for your quickie. So just call me.

Paul Thurrott (01:09:58):
Listen, they, they got three, they have 3% market share. They, they, it obviously worked out great.

Leo Laporte (01:10:03):
<laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:04):
<laugh>. So

Leo Laporte (01:10:06):
<laugh>, um, actually there's

Paul Thurrott (01:10:07):
No, I know, I know. I got it. I got it. We're gonna add tabs to Bing. This is it.

Leo Laporte (01:10:11):
We should say there's no, uh, reason other than economic that you couldn't have chap beat G P T always up to date. Just like Google is constantly

Paul Thurrott (01:10:19):
Spidering you chat G B t sitting up at the top there answering your questions, and then provide

Leo Laporte (01:10:23):
Those things always up to date. But it's expensive. Um, I remember, uh, the, uh, open AI said it's about 10 times more. Each chap, G P t query costs about 10 times more than a Google query. So it's, it's millions of

Rich Campbell (01:10:37):
Dollars. A that seems very cheap considering how cheap Google queries actually are.

Leo Laporte (01:10:40):
Yeah, well, they're pennies a query. But that's, you add that adds up. As you said, billions here, that's

Paul Thurrott (01:10:45):
Where all the Windows profits are going. Leo. That's why they can't, it's you're getting tab notepad, but we're gonna get chat G B T over

Leo Laporte (01:10:50):
Here. So is the rumor that they will use open AI chat G B T or they'll have a chat G B T like agent,

Paul Thurrott (01:10:57):
It's gonna use chat, G B T. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:10:59):
Interesting.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:00):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:11:00):
The problem with

Rich Campbell (01:11:01):
Chat distributor open ai, right? Like Yeah, they

Leo Laporte (01:11:04):
Were heavily involved. They, they, they were one of the funders. Yeah. The question is, and the real problem I see is chat. G B T sometimes says with absolute confidence, something completely wrong.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:16):
Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:11:17):
That's not what you want. Your search results.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:20):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:11:21):
But you know, I

Paul Thurrott (01:11:22):
How they're gonna be sometimes

Leo Laporte (01:11:23):
Too, right? Yeah. But you don't want confidently wrong search results. <laugh>, you really don't. I mean, that's not an upgrade

Paul Thurrott (01:11:30):
Confidently wrong.com, you

Leo Laporte (01:11:34):
Know, the earth is flat. It turns out

Paul Thurrott (01:11:37):
<laugh>, uhhuh, <affirmative>. That's why planes hit 'em when they crash. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:11:40):
Uh, <laugh>. Otherwise they just fall right

Paul Thurrott (01:11:43):
Off. Yeah. If it wasn't flat, they would just go off the other side. Yeah. Um, I hate this world. Okay. So yeah, I don't know. I don't know. This is big

Rich Campbell (01:11:53):
Thing would happen if you have G chat G b T in the loop is not only would he give you the answer back,

Leo Laporte (01:11:57):
Then you could ask for the summarize and amateur. Yes, that's right. I want it as sonnet. Please, please, <laugh>. No, but it, it would, what chat G B D does very well among, actually there a number of things. It does very well. One thing it does very well summarize a lot of text content. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, uh, you remember the, that was a big feature. Well, this is the

Paul Thurrott (01:12:15):
Thing I was talking about, right? Yeah. Like, in other words that, that it could be useful. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:12:20):
Absolutely.

Rich Campbell (01:12:21):
The, the great thing is if it doesn't summarize well, you have no

Leo Laporte (01:12:23):
Way of knowing. Right. <laugh>. But, but Professor <laugh>, it told me that Hamlet ended up living at the end. I don't know. What would it tell you? Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:12:33):
I told you this. I took this test and they, the woman asked me who wrote Hamlet? Yeah. And I said, ah, I'm never gonna remember that guy's name. Lynn

Leo Laporte (01:12:41):
Manuel Miranda

Paul Thurrott (01:12:42):
<laugh>. He goes, Hamlet. I'm like, oh, she

Leo Laporte (01:12:44):
<laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:45):
I tell you something, Hamilton <laugh>, you know, and that was, uh, you know, that was a little bit of confidence. Well, I didn't really remember

Leo Laporte (01:12:53):
Confidently wrong.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:54):
Yeah. I thought I was going in the right direction.

Leo Laporte (01:12:56):
<laugh>. Well, you know, the, you know that guy, the rename guy <laugh>?

Paul Thurrott (01:13:01):
Yeah. Something like, you

Leo Laporte (01:13:02):
Mean William Shakespeare?

Paul Thurrott (01:13:04):
Oh, that guy.

Leo Laporte (01:13:06):
That guy. I know that neither of you are in Las Vegas right now.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:09):
That's true.

Leo Laporte (01:13:11):
No. Is that by choice or just couldn't get anybody to pay your way?

Paul Thurrott (01:13:16):
If somebody had offered to pay my way, I still would've stayed

Leo Laporte (01:13:19):
Home. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. I've missed it the last two years. Uh, and I always felt like that was a blessing.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:27):
It's been several years from me now, I think. Um, we're

Leo Laporte (01:13:29):
Talking about Yes. The show formally known as the Consumer Electronic Show, which is on weirdly right now. It started today.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:36):
Yep. Oh, well, I mean, so companies are starting to pre-game it. Right? So Lenovo went, announced some c e s stuff in December. Hilarious. And then, um, Leno, Acer, um, Nvidia,

Leo Laporte (01:13:48):
Oh, sorry, companies. It starts tomorrow. It goes Thurrottugh the weekend. Today's like the pep coms and the show stoppers and all that. Yeah. The, and the keynotes and all that. So it starts tomorrow Thurrottugh Sunday.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:00):
CS has got a problem that Google search solved on the internet, which is that there's a lot of crap out there and you have to find the good stuff. And it's hard. Yeah. You know, and, uh, it's often not worth it. It

Leo Laporte (01:14:11):
<laugh> it's actually often easier to do it without going.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:15):
Right.

Leo Laporte (01:14:16):
Right. You, you let the grunts, uh, go out there and comb Thurrottugh Hall C three and then, uh, yeah. You, you

Paul Thurrott (01:14:25):
Know, you, there's a lot of stupid, we're gonna get to some of the stupid, but I, I wanted to, you know, for I, I'll use this as an example. I thought this was an interesting example because I hear from all of the PC makers, right. This is what we're doing. Sometimes there are pre-briefing and everything. They send me like, unbelievable amounts of documentation, lots of photos and whatever. And really what we're talking about here, a bunch of new PCs, right? So as I said to Richard earlier, you won't be surprised to discover that Lenovo's gonna update all of this X one laptops, you know, uh, new generation. It's, you know, no surprise, everything's gonna be 13th chanin until processors. Like, no surprise. Okay. Although there's something interesting tied to that we'll get to, but I was looking Thurrottugh Lenovo's stuff earlier last month, and then again with asr, uh, this week. And, uh, yep. They're updating all their computers. But the, the things that are not computers that are kind of computer adjacent are, are often the most interesting. Right. So, for example, Acer's gonna sell something called the eConnect Connect, I guess bike desk. So it's like a standing desk <laugh>. It's a beautiful, a bike built today. Good.

(01:15:27):
But hold on. This is, why

Leo Laporte (01:15:28):
Are you at a breath? I'm Pedalling

Paul Thurrott (01:15:30):
<laugh>. This is the hamster. Will you think it is? The, the peddling can power is

Leo Laporte (01:15:35):
Power.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:36):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:15:37):
That's straight outta Gilligans Island.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:39):
Yes. Right. This is a good idea. More peddling than you think. I mean, I'm not saying I, you know, Gill Good.

Leo Laporte (01:15:45):
Get on the bike. I gotta surf than that.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:48):
Genius <laugh>. I think that's interesting. You know,

Leo Laporte (01:15:53):
Uh,

Paul Thurrott (01:15:53):
So stuff like that, I, I think stuff like fast,

Rich Campbell (01:15:55):
You're not pedaling fast enough for Gigabit. You have to. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:15:57):
Exactly. I'm trying to play a game. Do I need to pedal fast enough?

Leo Laporte (01:16:00):
<laugh>,

Rich Campbell (01:16:02):
I, I thought we sure you were gonna jump all over msi translucent laptop case. Ooh. So like, that was pretty, now there's a product. Ooh, my

Leo Laporte (01:16:10):
Goodness. Can you see the insides? You see, you

Rich Campbell (01:16:12):
See the hints of insights. It's only translucent.

Leo Laporte (01:16:15):
Yeah. I kind, I kinda like that. Um, you know, there've been a lot of phone mods on the cpu. Yeah. I kinda like that. Uh, that's popular in phones. In fact, I, I would buy a smartphone that had a clear case. <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:29):
Okay. Well there's some good stuff though. The one I saw that I will never write about was literally a gadget that will <laugh> You bring avocados. You can't bring it to a store. You have to bring it home. Yeah. You bring the avocados home and it will tell you if they're ripe.

Leo Laporte (01:16:42):
Oh, a little too late. <laugh>. Oh, it's not ripe. It's damn.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:46):
Uh, damn it. I got the wrong one.

Leo Laporte (01:16:49):
Here. Is, that's

Paul Thurrott (01:16:50):
A, that's a device. Sure.

Leo Laporte (01:16:52):
Yeah. Something everybody wants. So that's not, no, that's not What, is that what, that's not, that's not good. That's not clear enough.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:03):
Yeah. You wanna

Leo Laporte (01:17:04):
See the Cyborg 15? And of course, because of that, it's plastic. Right? Really plastic and plastic. Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:14):
No,

Rich Campbell (01:17:14):
That's, you'd hope it'd be hard enough. Yeah. Like there are some very, uh, hard, transparent coverings. It's just they're expensive.

Leo Laporte (01:17:22):
Isn't there, uh, something called transparent aluminum,

Rich Campbell (01:17:25):
Apparently. And it's not just from Star Trek.

Leo Laporte (01:17:28):
<laugh> the Problem. Cause

Paul Thurrott (01:17:30):
That would be cool. It's real. You can't see it.

Rich Campbell (01:17:31):
Ooh,

Leo Laporte (01:17:33):
Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Wow. That'd be cool.

Rich Campbell (01:17:35):
Now you, I wanna talk about the Masonite Smart Door because as soon as I that hit my inbox, I laughed for hours.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:41):
<laugh>. Now I'm, can I guess why you're laughing. Oh, actually, uh, I would just tell you my, uh, the guy who got me into writing the Jehovah Witnesses would come to the door mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And they would ask him if, you know, he'd found Jesus or whatever, and he says, oh, you don't need to stop here. I'm a Masonite. And then they would leave

Leo Laporte (01:17:58):
<laugh> Masonite.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:59):
<laugh> Masonite is a form of, um, cabinet or, um, like a, like a service on a, like a Right. Like a cabinet or whatever. It's not a religion. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:18:09):
Yeah. And they also apparently make smart doors.

Rich Campbell (01:18:13):
Yeah. Yeah. That's

Leo Laporte (01:18:14):
It. There's a smart door.

Rich Campbell (01:18:17):
I mean, the, the good part about the is, so it's got a Ring doorbell integrated into it. It's got the Yale lock into it. Okay. Apparently has motion sensing l e d lights. So

Leo Laporte (01:18:27):
Oh, so they light up, these lights light up when you get close. Yeah. Okay.

Rich Campbell (01:18:30):
And it has, uh, an AC connection. So it's designed so that you can power it and there's a battery pack in the door.

Leo Laporte (01:18:37):
Minute you have to plug in the door, <laugh>.

Rich Campbell (01:18:38):
Oh, the door has to be plugged in. Definitely

Leo Laporte (01:18:40):
<laugh>. Okay. Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:18:42):
You know,

Rich Campbell (01:18:42):
It's like security cameras and a battery pack in the door. So when you lose power, you Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:18:45):
Yeah, yeah. It'll, it'll run for a while. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:18:46):
Yeah. But my favorite feature is you need three apps to operate your door.

Leo Laporte (01:18:51):
<laugh>, <laugh>. Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:18:55):
Only two of them are on iOS.

Leo Laporte (01:18:57):
Well, it's always connected. Always protected.

Rich Campbell (01:19:00):
There you go. And, uh, yeah, you, the Ring app obviously

Paul Thurrott (01:19:03):
Need like the Ring app or

Leo Laporte (01:19:04):
Whatever that's called. Oh my God.

Rich Campbell (01:19:05):
And the AI app, and then the Mpower app, the, and Mac app's the best. Oh, that's the best three apps. Yeah. Uh, $6,500

Leo Laporte (01:19:15):
Msrp. Hey, that's absurd.

Rich Campbell (01:19:18):
Now you can buy yourself a $600 door and put the other, the three components in yourself. It'd

Leo Laporte (01:19:24):
Probably be cheaper.

Rich Campbell (01:19:25):
Oh, be

Paul Thurrott (01:19:25):
Cheaper. Little

Leo Laporte (01:19:26):
Cheaper. But, you know, you notice all these builders, uh, on the website that are gonna do it. This is gonna be one of the features when you go to a, uh, yeah. A model. Well,

Rich Campbell (01:19:33):
If I can find somebody who wants this door, I have a whole bunch of other stuff. I can

Leo Laporte (01:19:36):
Sell 'em <laugh>. Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:37):
Yeah. It's, there used to be, uh, you, it was just home theater, and now it's your entire house as a playground.

Leo Laporte (01:19:43):
I call it the sucker hat. When you're down in Mexico and you're on the beach, people come by to sell you stuff, and there's a person coming by that takes banana leaves and folds 'em and puts them, makes a silly looking hat. Oh. That's, if you now buy and wear that hat, you are announcing to every other vendor on the beach. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:19:59):
Come here. I buy dumb stuff. I

Paul Thurrott (01:20:01):
Buy dumb stuff. You're like, listen, just, just give him a hundred dollars and keep walking. Yeah. You're like, I just, I'm, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:20:06):
I'm wearing a sucker hat. Come on over. So this is the sucker hat for your house.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:12):
Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.

Rich Campbell (01:20:12):
I love it. Right on the door. <laugh>. Um, there's a, the, this is supposed to be the matter. C e s this is the c e s the

Leo Laporte (01:20:21):
First. Yes. That's why, uh, Stacey Higginbotham is down there, and I've asked her to, to give us a report for our, uh, show on Sunday.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:28):
Do you feel like Matter is where 5G was a couple years ago? It's like, it's here, but,

Rich Campbell (01:20:33):
But Well, I'm, I'm immediately looking at the xkcd gra uh, cartoon where the guy goes, oh my God, there's 12 standards for this one thing. We need to fix that. And now there's 13 standards.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:45):
<laugh>. Yeah, exactly. <laugh>, right. You know,

Rich Campbell (01:20:49):
Well, there's, there's ZigBee and Z-Wave. I mean, a lot of ways Matter is an amped up version of ZigBee.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:56):
Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:20:56):
Right. Their underlying protocols called Thread. And Thread is kind of ZigBee with some fiction. Yeah. But

Leo Laporte (01:21:02):
It's got Google, Google's, it's Google's thread. And so you got Google, you got Apple. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:21:07):
Yeah. Everyone's, they were all on board with ZigBee too, and it didn't work. They, their stuff wasn't compatible. Why is this stuff gonna be compatible?

Leo Laporte (01:21:12):
So you strike me, uh, Richard is not the kind of guy whose lights turn on from a nap.

Rich Campbell (01:21:17):
Oh, definitely. All of it. Everything here is automated.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:20):
It is. I was gonna say, I think his house is probably more wired than, than

Leo Laporte (01:21:23):
Anybody.

Rich Campbell (01:21:23):
Interesting. Yeah. No, I'm not fully down the home assistant path. Okay. Right. Like, I'm, I'm in the, and I, you know, as a conscientious human, I try not to talk to people who aren't also down that path about it. <laugh>, because it's a great way to alienate folks in a big old hurry. Yeah. Because I can talk about ha for hours, but, you know, the, the whole need a hub thing of all of these devices is the problem because then you're, you've got a command system, like an Amazon device or a Google device, then you're going Thurrottugh the hub to the actual devices, which just means you can't diagnose anything. And so their whole pro approaches matter's. Gonna get rid of the hub, which is a lie because the hubs

Paul Thurrott (01:22:02):
Yeah. You still, yeah. You still need hubs. In fact, you need a matter hub <laugh>, it's

Rich Campbell (01:22:06):
What you need.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:07):
Um,

Rich Campbell (01:22:07):
These days a matter Hubble B like in your acc in in your wifi access point or in, in the individual

Paul Thurrott (01:22:13):
Device. Well, you might have a matter, you could use an existing hub. Like you might have something for Phillips Hu or Yeah. Whatever compatible things there are. So anyway. Yeah. But yeah, I I the dream here, of course, I, I just don't see what this changes. Like, uh, it, it's important to have a standard. I don't mean it like that, but I, you know, as far as people buying smart home products, I think we've, people have dabbled in it. I think for a lot of people. They bought a couple of Alexa speakers and were like, okay, I think I'm done here. You know, a couple of HU lights, a couple of whatever. Yeah. And either go, they, you either do what you do heavily into it, uh, Smartsheets,

Rich Campbell (01:22:45):
You, you cross a threshold, right? Yep.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:48):
Or they, you just kind say, well, you know,

Rich Campbell (01:22:51):
Now, I mean, I, I am at the point now where my wife was worried that we kept leaving the garage door with lights on. And so I was able to say, okay, well look, now what's gonna happen is if you open any door into the garage, the lights turn on and they'll turn themselves off in 10 minutes. And if you tie, if you move one of the doors again, it'll reset the timer to 10 minutes again. Yeah. And so, because she kept checking to see if the lights were off after five minutes, she was complaining the lights never turn off.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:13):
<laugh>. Yeah. There's a, there's <laugh>. That's a di that's not a white, like a spouse acceptance threshold. No. It's more like a, uh, you have to outthink your spouse, uh, to get around

Rich Campbell (01:23:23):
That. Yeah. No, the, and, and I observe very carefully and you know her well enough to know she's an engineering type too. Yeah. Um, what are the features that she actually uses? She likes that She can say, just turn on the Christmas lights and all the different things turn on and Yep. Turn on the news is the one she likes the most. And when she walks into the kitchen mm-hmm. <affirmative> says, turn on the news. The news turns on. Yep. You don't have to Yep.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:43):
Exactly.

Rich Campbell (01:23:44):
With remotes or anything like that.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:45):
I just had a, a stupid, you know, 17 ish minute conversation with her wife that started with her saying, I want to play music in the kitchen, but this says it's the sunroom and the kitchen. How do I change it to just the kitchen that's like, oh, Stephanie, Stephanie <laugh>, please, one does not simply change it. <laugh>. I was like, do you have the Sonos app on your phone? And she's like, I don't. I'm not, I'm not. She's like, I'm

Rich Campbell (01:24:09):
Not even gonna out anything. It's like, you know what? Nobody's being hurt in the sunroom. Just leave it all

Paul Thurrott (01:24:13):
<laugh>. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Just play it

Leo Laporte (01:24:15):
Into it itself. Actually, the solution is to move the kitchen into the sunroom. Then you've solved it. It's probably easier than using the Sonos app. Just

Paul Thurrott (01:24:22):
Unplug the, uh, speakers. You can do that. You know, all kinds of things.

Rich Campbell (01:24:28):
I, I caner you one last device from CES that as soon as I saw it, I thought Paul needs this <laugh>. Like, this is the thing. It's from a company called Shift Doll. It's called the MOT Talk or the Mute Talk. And it is a, uh, u sb slash Bluetooth microphone that covers your mouth with a head. You, where you're wearing a heads strap. <laugh>. You

Leo Laporte (01:24:49):
Look like a cow. Yeah. Eating oats.

Rich Campbell (01:24:52):
That's it. And so it's supposed to be worn with like a VR headset. Like if you didn't look like an alien enough already, <laugh>, you could put this on too.

Leo Laporte (01:25:02):
But how it's not compatible with a mask. They really should make a mask version. Are there? Oh my God.

Rich Campbell (01:25:09):
It doesn't look weird

Paul Thurrott (01:25:10):
At all. It's like a food bag, like a on a

Leo Laporte (01:25:12):
Horse. It looks like a food bag for a horse. Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:25:15):
It also looks like a c p a a little bit. Hmm. It's like, I, I like vr, but I often find myself snoring in the middle of it. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:25:25):
So, so strange. Oh, this is so you could talk and don't bother the household

Rich Campbell (01:25:30):
And nobody else can hear it when

Leo Laporte (01:25:31):
You're shouting. I got, I got,

Rich Campbell (01:25:34):
So my thinking here is that I, I get on an airplane, I put on a pair of VR goggles and the mute now and now and then see how one before I get arrested, no one

Leo Laporte (01:25:42):
Will sit next to you though. There's

Paul Thurrott (01:25:44):
The beauty, beauty of it. You know, a federal agent is ripping your mask off cuz the clean made an emergency landing <laugh> because of the terrorist

Rich Campbell (01:25:51):
Is of the alien on the plane. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:25:53):
Honey, this company needs to change the position of the T and the evidence name and it will have it just about right.

Leo Laporte (01:25:58):
<laugh>. I'll leave that as an exercise. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I'm a listener.

Rich Campbell (01:26:06):
You can figure that

Paul Thurrott (01:26:06):
Out. So close to being exactly the right name for this company.

Rich Campbell (01:26:09):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:26:11):
Uh, that,

Rich Campbell (01:26:11):
That's crazy. That's so great.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:12):
It's so That is crazy. <laugh>. I love that.

Rich Campbell (01:26:17):
And this way. Why do you go to C at Believe me, I would Or if I, if they were shipping, I would've ordered half a dozen of 'em all already and sent them to various people including

Paul Thurrott (01:26:25):
You. I've got my Christmas presents for next year. It's, it, it's

Rich Campbell (01:26:29):
Coming.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:29):
That's

Leo Laporte (01:26:30):
So good. You know, I, I always thought it was weird that British, uh, like sports announcers have a microphone that has a lip on it. Have you seen this? Yeah. And they press it to their, their mouth so that they're as close as possible. A microphone. Yeah. And I, I guess it's to avoid too much background noise. I don't know. I always thought that was really weird.

Rich Campbell (01:26:51):
You, but, you know, there was one BBC audio technician Yeah. That was really senior that made them all use

Leo Laporte (01:26:57):
That mic. Get you all to press the microphone against your lip

Rich Campbell (01:27:01):
<laugh>, but not too close. Not too close. So I'll put a guardrail

Leo Laporte (01:27:04):
On. There we go. Well, we'll just put a half inch little piece of metal <laugh> and you just press that against your lip and you're perfect. They need the mo talk.

Rich Campbell (01:27:15):
There you go. They just put it on. It's on. Yeah. You don't look weird at all. Everything's fine. You're willing to wear VR goggles. This thing's not a stretch.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:24):
I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest this product doesn't make it to market. I, I think this has the feel of something that's looking for funding. You know,

Rich Campbell (01:27:34):
The moura def definitely looks like a rendering. So,

Leo Laporte (01:27:37):
But wait, there's a products page.

Rich Campbell (01:27:40):
Here's more.

Leo Laporte (01:27:42):
They make fish more Hari Torah, X wireless space saving,

Paul Thurrott (01:27:46):
Wireless fbo, full body tracking system.

Leo Laporte (01:27:48):
What, what? Look at those two. Look at these pants.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:52):
Well actually one of them is a human and the other one appears to be a cartoon.

Leo Laporte (01:27:56):
What? <laugh>

Rich Campbell (01:27:57):
What is happening?

Paul Thurrott (01:27:58):
Oh, that's the avatar you're controlling in

Leo Laporte (01:28:00):
Or whatever. There you go. This is the strangest company. Here's Croy <laugh>, a very well named feeling <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:28:10):
Jesus. Wow. This is in search of problems that don't exist since

Leo Laporte (01:28:13):
2019. This is like from Man Magazine in the year 2023 <laugh>.

Rich Campbell (01:28:19):
But in this context, the Moo talk just doesn't seem that odd. No,

Leo Laporte (01:28:23):
This is a weird company.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:25):
The weird space that's pretty good.

Leo Laporte (01:28:28):
A device that allows users to wear a personal space equipped with noise cancellation technology and a partitioning function that visually blocks portions of the space. Sure. I wanna put a hood over my head.

Rich Campbell (01:28:40):
This is, this is Zappo Bele Bro's. Danger

Leo Laporte (01:28:44):
Know. Yeah. Which

Rich Campbell (01:28:45):
Just blocks out so you don't see the world

Leo Laporte (01:28:47):
<laugh>. And here are prototype in development products. The flip VR that lets you drink from a soda. Can

Paul Thurrott (01:28:54):
The drink and prove VR <laugh>? What is this?

Leo Laporte (01:28:57):
What I don't see? Oh, talk

Rich Campbell (01:29:01):
Is in develop mo talk is, yeah, that's

Leo Laporte (01:29:04):
Fine. The pebble feel a small device equipped with apelt device that can officially heat and cool the human body from the nap of the neck.

Rich Campbell (01:29:12):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:29:13):
Excellent. Strap that

Rich Campbell (01:29:14):
On. Add that into vr,

Leo Laporte (01:29:16):
Cook. Keep a time machine for your meals first you can put in pre-made meals or leftovers and they will be kept cool. Just like a tiny refrigerator. Oh. Later you can remotely reheat your refrigerated cool food as hot as night. The grim

Paul Thurrott (01:29:30):
Tim Cook would go to town on this thing. What are you combining? A refrigerator and a microwave.

Rich Campbell (01:29:35):
<laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:29:37):
Wow. This is a company drink shift.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:41):
They think differently.

Leo Laporte (01:29:42):
A proprietary refrigerator that combines with a smartphone app to automatically detect the inventory of beer in the fridge. And each customer's drinking pace.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:52):
Yeah. Right. And then you go up to get the beer and it's like, no, you have had way too much buddy. You've

Leo Laporte (01:29:57):
Exceeded your allotted pace. Does it come to you?

Rich Campbell (01:30:01):
I think it's for ordering, right? It automates

Leo Laporte (01:30:03):
Order automatically refills your beer so you never run out again. Oh, this project is currently suspended. It

Rich Campbell (01:30:09):
Says, Aw,

Leo Laporte (01:30:10):
Uhhuh

Paul Thurrott (01:30:11):
<affirmative>. It probably became sunshine fun.

Leo Laporte (01:30:13):
<laugh>.

Rich Campbell (01:30:14):
There goes your Christmas present time was a good one.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:16):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:30:17):
Wow. That is all from shit shift. I, oh,

Rich Campbell (01:30:21):
I'm sorry. What did you call it?

Leo Laporte (01:30:23):
Shift all net. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:30:25):
<laugh>. I love ces. I'm really glad I'm not there.

Leo Laporte (01:30:30):
Actually, this is the stuff I would go for

Rich Campbell (01:30:32):
<laugh>, uh, years ago, I, I went, I was, the first time I saw water cooling for PCs, was it c s And I immediately started buying parts and That's cool. Building a water cooled machine. That's

Leo Laporte (01:30:45):
Cool.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:46):
You don't wanna put actual water in there, but Yeah. <laugh>. Oh no.

Rich Campbell (01:30:49):
I put actual water in it, you know.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:50):
Oh, did you? Okay.

Rich Campbell (01:30:51):
It was good for a long set of blog posts back in the early odds. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:30:54):
There

Rich Campbell (01:30:55):
You go. The leaks.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:56):
I didn't think I was making a steampunk case, but apparently

Rich Campbell (01:30:58):
Yeah, days quiet. It was very quiet. You know, back in the p four days, it was a machine that doesn't make noise. Right,

Leo Laporte (01:31:07):
Right. Um, I Is Microsoft a c Yes. No, they stopped having booths there years ago. Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:13):
So assuming they've done what they've done in the past, they probably have a presence and it's gonna be just a little meeting room type of deal. Like, they're not gonna have a big, you know, they don't do a presentation or anything, but, um, I bet they're offsite, like in a, in an office.

Rich Campbell (01:31:27):
They, they say they're a featured exhibitor.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:30):
I actually, I might have heard from them about,

Rich Campbell (01:31:32):
Um, yeah, they, they, they have a whole mobility play going on, but, and by mobility we mean cars, right? Like stuff Right. But there's, there is a, uh, a 3D render of their booth and it looks, oh, so they

Leo Laporte (01:31:47):
Really, so this is significant. They haven't had a booth in a long

Rich Campbell (01:31:50):
Time. Hunter by a hundred.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:51):
I was gonna say, I think I heard from them and they asked if I was coming and I Oh, how I left

Rich Campbell (01:31:56):
<laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:31:57):
They used to be Caddy Corner from Intel, right? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:00):
Oh. But they used to be right in the front door. Remember at the, whatever the main hall was, that was the big thing. They were, in fact, I think Intel was upset about it. Bill,

Rich Campbell (01:32:08):
The bill keynotes were the best thing about going to it, right? Is he, he go to the mgm, you know, big K Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:32:14):
I started doing 'em, his mother was running a slide deck for him. Like a, like a, you call

Leo Laporte (01:32:18):
It a, in later years, that's where they would show those, uh, those great homemade movies and, and stuff, right? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>.

Rich Campbell (01:32:25):
Yeah. That's where they do all that. Uh,

Paul Thurrott (01:32:27):
Oh, the, the push me on the

Leo Laporte (01:32:29):
Swing. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. So five, the Future Myth Mobility is now, this is from blogs.microsoft.com. Five themes to watch at ces. Transparent Cars. Um, a resilient supply chain is top of mind. <laugh>. Okay. This is the guy with the bucket again, writing this. Okay. Oh Lord. Frontline workers. There they are with a, uh, Panasonic tough laptop.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:05):
Sure.

Leo Laporte (01:33:07):
Um, here's King Crimson in your car. Mm-hmm.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:11):
<affirmative> or Casey Lemon,

Leo Laporte (01:33:12):
Or Casey Lemon Lincoln Company has Microsoft Teams built into the infotainment system. Oh, Lord. Yeah. Yeah. Just we need teams for your car.

Rich Campbell (01:33:24):
Oh boy. Yeah. I, I found a floor map for the automotive West Hall.

Leo Laporte (01:33:29):
Oh, there're so in the car area, that's, that's where they're Oh, that's really interesting. I always enjoy the West Hall. You get kind of weird vendors over there.

Rich Campbell (01:33:37):
Well, one of them is Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:39):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:33:41):
Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, they used to have really nice carpeting. I remember on the Microsoft booth. That's all I remember. <laugh>.

Rich Campbell (01:33:47):
Yeah. You go

Paul Thurrott (01:33:48):
Stand there in Vegas,

Leo Laporte (01:33:49):
Something

Paul Thurrott (01:33:50):
For your feet. You, you come to like a, you, you're walking and then suddenly you're, you're not moving anymore because it's so plush. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you know.

Leo Laporte (01:33:57):
Wow. Wow. Very interesting. I don't know if that's a, that might be a word. Newsworthy story. Microsoft's return to ces and they're, it turns out they're a car company.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:10):
<laugh>,

Rich Campbell (01:34:10):
This

Leo Laporte (01:34:11):
Year, this

Paul Thurrott (01:34:11):
Year, filling the gap left by Tesla.

Leo Laporte (01:34:15):
Uh, I see you have in the notes the Surface Laptop two is out as Tesla.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:20):
Yeah. Curious what people think about this. So Microsoft who makes Windows, or which makes Windows, uh, which has its own kind of support lifecycle, has announced that, uh, this device, which was just four years old, is not releasing. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> is not getting firmware or driver updates anymore. So as of, uh, December 27th, like that's the end of support. Now you still get Windows, right. You'll still get updates to Windows and all that kind of stuff. But I, I, I'm just curious. It seems odd to me. Four years doesn't seem like a lot of years.

Rich Campbell (01:34:51):
No.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:52):
Um, for Microsoft, you know, the maker of the os. Um, but there you go. And interestingly, I, I think, yeah, my son is actually still using a Surface laptop too.

Leo Laporte (01:35:05):
Yes. Lisa asked. Lisa does too. Yeah. And I think it's that one. It's

Paul Thurrott (01:35:08):
A nice, it's a nice look. Was

Leo Laporte (01:35:10):
This the first C No, it was the second. I can tell from the name.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:12):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So how to support,

Leo Laporte (01:35:18):
But what, so Windows is gonna be updated. It just means no bios updates,

Paul Thurrott (01:35:23):
But also driver updates, right? I mean, that's a little, that's

Leo Laporte (01:35:28):
Maybe they got it right. Maybe they it's perfect. They don't need to update it.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:31):
Okay. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:35:33):
It's the thought.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:34):
Maybe

Leo Laporte (01:35:37):
I were them. That'd, that'd be the marketing line I'd use. Perfect.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:40):
It's perfect. I mean, maybe, maybe

Leo Laporte (01:35:45):
Does a, does a product ever in a, Steve Gibson always famously claims he hasn't updated spin Right. Since 2004. And uh, he famously claims, well, I don't need to It's perfect. There are no bugs.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:00):
Well, in his case they probably is true.

Leo Laporte (01:36:02):
No, it is true. But you know, it's assembly language.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:05):
Yeah, I it, right. Um, I think that's not true. Most software and I would just say having used a lot of surface devices. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:36:16):
I mean, it's a small, really, it's a simple small app that, I shouldn't say this out loud, but mm-hmm. <affirmative>, you know, it's possible to get, get right. It's not a Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:26):
Not a operating

Leo Laporte (01:36:26):
System with 200 million lines of code. It's not That's

Paul Thurrott (01:36:29):
Right. Yeah. It also average probably is 200 millions lines of code. But yes, <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:36:36):
It, uh, yeah, it, uh, yeah. And it doesn't work with U E F I, I mean, it's not, it's, you know, there was no U E F I when it was written. Right. That's why I was updating it. Hey everybody, it's Leo LaPorte, the, uh, founder and host of many of the, uh, TWIT podcasts. I don't normally talk to you about advertising, but I want to take a moment to do that right now. Um, our mission statement at twit, we're dedicated to building a highly engaged community of tech enthusiasts. That's our audience. And you, I guess, since you're listening, by offering them the knowledge they need to understand and use technology in today's world. To do that, we also create partnerships with trusted brands and make important introductions between them and our audience. It's how we finance our podcasts, but it's also, and our audience tells us this all the time.

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They started it pro TV in 2013, immediately started advertising with us and grew that company to a, a really amazing success. Hundreds of thousands of ongoing customers. They've been on our network for more than 10 years. And they say, and I'll quote Tim, we would not be where we are today without the twit network. That's just one example. Mark McCreary, who's the c e o of Authentic, uh, he was actually, uh, one of the first people to buy ads on our network. He's been with us for 16 years. He said, and I'm quoting, the feedback from many advertisers over those 16 years across a range of product categories is that if ads and podcasts are gonna work for a brand. They're gonna work on Twitch shows. I'm proud to say that the ads we do overdeliver, they work really well because they're honest. They have integrity.

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Our audience trusts us and we say, this is a great product. They believe it, they listen. Our listeners are highly intelligent. They're heavily engaged, they're tech savvy. They're dedicated to our network. And that's partly because we only work with high integrity partners that we have thoroughly and personally vetted. I approve every single advertiser on the network. If you're ready to elevate your brand and you've got a great product, I want you to reach out to us, advertise@twit.tv. So I want you to break out of the advertising norm, grow your brand with host Red authentic Ads on twit.tv, visit twit, do TV slash advertise for more details, or email us advertise@twit.tv if you're ready to launch your campaign now. Uh, alright, let's talk about, uh, stack Overflow and the 2022 survey. Yeah. This is of interest to developers primarily, I think. Yes. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:08):
But it's interesting to me how much Microsoft appears in this list, right? Or these lists, I guess. Cuz there are lots of lists, <laugh>. So, um, windows is the most, is the biggest developer platform. 62.33% of respondents using it for personal use and 48.82% for work. Uh, Linux was number two at 40%. And both of those categories, and the Mac brings up the route of 31 and 33%. So more people are using Linux. More people who are developers are using Linux both for work and for personal use than are using the Mac. Hmm. Which is kind of interesting. But fourth place Windows subsystem for Linux <laugh>, which is,

Leo Laporte (01:41:47):
That's really, wow. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:50):
That's fascinating to me. Um, and then, you know, non-developer stuff like, um, uh, uh, synchronous tools, right? Uh, zoom and Microsoft Teams are basically tied for number one with both with 56% usage, which is kind of interesting. Uh, chat, uh, slack rather is not that far behind asynchronous tools. Uh, there's nothing there from Microsoft, but, uh, notion comes in, I think in fourth place. Oh, good. Fourth

Leo Laporte (01:42:15):
Place. Nice. We 20%. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:19):
Most popular ide, Microsoft Visual Studio Code. Yeah. Uh, largely because it's excellent and is cross-platform, right. 75% usage. Uh, but in number two is normal Visual Studio, right? Is Windows only? Well, I assume it's, I assume they mean the Windows version. Yeah. I'm

Leo Laporte (01:42:35):
Talking about, look at that net 34.5%. Number one framework, fuck the developer

Paul Thurrott (01:42:40):
Framework. Net

Leo Laporte (01:42:41):
Net. Um,

Paul Thurrott (01:42:43):
I know it's, it's, it's a, it's kind of amazing how often they're in here. Even something like, um, asp.net on the web framework side is not in, it's probably number five or six, but asp.net core and asp.net are both have, and I guess if you combine those, uh, you could put 'em into third place <laugh>, you know, and, and on the web frame

Leo Laporte (01:43:04):
Side Wow. When you combine Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, Microsoft's got 106% of the market.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:11):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:43:12):
So

Paul Thurrott (01:43:12):
I don't, I should investigate them

Leo Laporte (01:43:14):
For, I don't understand how that works, but, okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:16):
Well, people use, people use both. People

Leo Laporte (01:43:18):
Use both. Use both. Yeah. Yeah. You use one for Notepad and the other for development.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:21):
Yes, that's right. I use one for the tabs. Uh, and then

Leo Laporte (01:43:24):
I love this that they have all respondents professional developers, and then they have learning to code. But Visual Studio Code wins in all three categories quite easily, quite handily. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:36):
You know what? Aw, can't argue. I'm

Leo Laporte (01:43:38):
Sorry. Where's emax on this though? I don't. I, I, I, yep. I'm gonna, oh, there it is. 4.5 didn't that far into it. It's Pretty's pretty low neck,

Paul Thurrott (01:43:45):
Actually. Vem appears. Vem Vem makes the

Leo Laporte (01:43:47):
List. Yeah. Vem Beats Cmax on this.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:49):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:43:50):
Huh,

Paul Thurrott (01:43:51):
Huh. On the, uh, I I'm calling them a, an

Leo Laporte (01:43:55):
Id. An ID is a little, much

Paul Thurrott (01:43:56):
A bit of a stretch, but, um, yeah, I, I, I thought it was really interesting how much of a presence Microsoft has on this list and kind of a healthy reminder that this stuff is popular. You know, I mean, obviously there's lots of stuff going on. I, I would say, uh, web dev is, you know, given the JavaScript and html, CSS are the top two languages, we'll call 'em. Um, you know, web dev is kind of probably the big, big deal. And I think that, I think you'll see a lot of Visual Studio Code use in that area. But then, you know, with the, uh, web frameworks, I mean, these are all, they're all, you know, fairly famous. No, JS React, GS j Corey, et cetera. Um, but Microsoft's in, they're in there, <laugh>, you know? Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, I don't know where Blazer shows up, if ever anywhere. I didn't, I I don't have the original in front of me right now. But anyway, I, I, I just think it's interesting how big of a presence Microsoft has in this. You know, I think a lot, if you would ask a lot of people on the outside who weren't really familiar with the developer world, you know, where do you think this is going? I think they would've pointed to a lot of other companies and technologies. But,

Leo Laporte (01:45:04):
Uh, this is, you know, almost what I would expect. Node number one, react number two, jQuery numbers. Yeah. Web. Web.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:09):
The web framework. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:45:10):
Yeah. Web permits. Yeah. Sure. Um, I thought it was interesting. They call it asynchronous Yeah. Tools. But, uh, I think, I mean, I think it's more like chat that Teams is actually in a dead heat with Zoom. With

Paul Thurrott (01:45:24):
Zoom. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:45:25):
And both are just a few points above, uh, slack. And then

Paul Thurrott (01:45:30):
Yeah. Think that says a lot about the developer market. I bet a lot of these guys are essentially freelancers mm-hmm. <affirmative>, and they're dealing with a bunch of different customers and you basically just use what they have. Right. You know? Right. Yeah. Whereas in-house, you actually in-house, I guess you'd also do the same, right? So you probably see a mix of Zoom and Teams, depending on the company,

Rich Campbell (01:45:49):
The first four ammo using every week. Yep. At least once. Yep. And, and even the fifth one is installed on the machine WebEx. Occasionally. Yeah. WebEx comes up. Yeah. But that's, you know, I'm almost never determining what chat system we're using. Right. It's,

Paul Thurrott (01:46:04):
It's the customer based on whatever the Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yep. And I bet that's what that is.

Leo Laporte (01:46:08):
Operating Systems's personal use, 62% Windows professionally use 48% Windows, then Linux 40 of 40, and then Mac OS 31 and 32. But W s l 15%. I know.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:24):
That's crazy,

Leo Laporte (01:46:24):
Isn't it? Thanks. If you add WSL and Windows together, I mean, that's, that's pretty dominant.

Rich Campbell (01:46:29):
Which I

Paul Thurrott (01:46:30):
Mean Yeah. But the only, only way you get to

Leo Laporte (01:46:32):
Use w that's the only way you could do it.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:34):
I was gonna say, you could also add WSL and Linux, frankly. But I mean, the, the wsl, I mean, to the average person is probably this thing that doesn't make any sense. And why is this even here? And it was probably very, it part of that work to keep Windows relevant. I actually think it plays a big role because I think developers play an outsized role.

Rich Campbell (01:46:53):
Yeah. No, I mean, if you're developing against a Linux server or a Linux box of any form, you end up having to run in the Linux desktop until Wisdom came along and suddenly said, Hey, you know, you don't have to, you can keep working in Windows and do your thing. And it works. The main thing is just running the Bash scripts that work the same.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:13):
Right.

Rich Campbell (01:47:14):
Right. Your pipeline's still the same, even if your dev machine is different.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:18):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:47:20):
Uh, this is a fun, uh, loved versus dreaded.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:24):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:47:25):
86

Paul Thurrott (01:47:25):
I Rust Love Rust Loved, and then look at Used and like, rust is probably, it's probably flipped tiny,

Leo Laporte (01:47:31):
I think know. Yeah, it's exactly.

Rich Campbell (01:47:32):
Got a mythology

Leo Laporte (01:47:33):
Around it. It's a mythology. It's like, oh, I love Rust. I wanna use it. But

Paul Thurrott (01:47:36):
Everyone's right. I mean, you love Rust. I

Leo Laporte (01:47:38):
Can't wait. Can't wait to use it someday. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, uh, and remember, this is a stack overflow, so this is a certain

Paul Thurrott (01:47:45):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:47:46):
Kind of user

Rich Campbell (01:47:46):
Kind of developer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The same for Elixir. The, the usage of Elixir's quite low and it's programming style is very exotic. Um, the, so it's got a mythology,

Leo Laporte (01:47:57):
It's, uh, functional. Right. It's highly functional.

Rich Campbell (01:48:00):
Yeah. Yeah. It's

Leo Laporte (01:48:00):
Functional. Closure is up there too. Also very functional type script, also very functional. Julia, which is a great, uh, language for, uh, da data scientists is, and then Python,

Paul Thurrott (01:48:10):
I mean, sea Sharp

Leo Laporte (01:48:11):
Delphi, Paul

Paul Thurrott (01:48:12):
Look, and

Leo Laporte (01:48:13):
Delphi

Paul Thurrott (01:48:14):
Sea Sharp, uh, actually, Kotlin, uh, swift and Dart are all run on top of each other. Yeah. Like Dart Delphi. Geez. Delphi didn't make sense when Borlin was a thing.

Leo Laporte (01:48:24):
I don't understand why Delphi is so high. It's just below Python. That's bizarre.

Rich Campbell (01:48:29):
I think, again, you're getting fond memory effects here,

Leo Laporte (01:48:31):
Right? Yeah. Yeah. It's not what I use, it's what I,

Paul Thurrott (01:48:34):
Right. I like the idea of object Pascal, but then again, I actually write in, uh, JavaScript, which Yeah. Probably couldn't be further

Leo Laporte (01:48:41):
Away. JavaScript should be number one on this list for everybody. I mean, I'm sure that's the most Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:48:46):
It is, it is number one. So as far as, um, actually used. Yeah. Ah,

Leo Laporte (01:48:50):
There's another, another camera.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:51):
JavaScript. This

Rich Campbell (01:48:52):
Is you talking about. Yeah. How often are you using this against your will?

Leo Laporte (01:48:56):
Yes. Right. <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:58):
Oh, listen, everyone, all these JavaScript guys are gonna need, uh, mental health services later in life. <laugh>. I, I can't even,

Leo Laporte (01:49:05):
It's encouraging. That type script is, is up there. Uh, people want to, yeah. So

Paul Thurrott (01:49:09):
I'm actually, I'm in the middle of writing a little thing about TypeScript. There. There's, there's actually some blowback against, uh, TypeScript in the developer community. Um, and it, it's kind of multi-level. I, it, it, it's, to me, it's very clear. Well, I don't know a developer, so I, I feel like TypeScript is important, but there's, there, you should look this up. There's a lot of people who think that TypeScript is bad and not necessary. What? And that it doesn't really do anything, uh, useful.

Leo Laporte (01:49:37):
It's a functional, uh, kind

Paul Thurrott (01:49:39):
Of, it's a, it's a

Leo Laporte (01:49:40):
Subset of JavaScript, so

Paul Thurrott (01:49:42):
Yeah. But it's optional. Right? So they, to, to make it compatible with JavaScript, they had to, you know, this is not Microsoft 1996. Right. They're embracing and extending, but they're doing it with a party hat and a smile. Like it's, uh, they're trying to be nice about it. And, uh, it's got a lot of good uptick. But, um, there are people who think it's too verbose that it doesn't really add much. If you're writing, if you're writing, uh, you know, you have to deal with frameworks, right? You're dealing with some kind of a framework. And some of them are type script compatible, but some of them aren't. And then you run into issues with that. And, um, I don't know. It, to me, it, to me, it, it forces you to write, uh, cleaner isn't maybe the right word. Um, better code and it generates is

Rich Campbell (01:50:24):
More meaning anyway, attainable, right?

Leo Laporte (01:50:25):
Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:26):
And it catches errors at compile time rather than running it on a web server and being like, oh, great. You know,

Leo Laporte (01:50:32):
Richard, you mostly

Rich Campbell (01:50:33):
The same has been the Angular team, right? That the Ang Angular got to a point where they're like, they, that they, they brought type script into the equation because they needed to make it more maintained.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:43):
Yeah. That was, it's like Java scripted scale, basically. Like, um, yeah, we're not running cute little apps. We're running, you know, gigantic web services

Rich Campbell (01:50:52):
Here. Stuff that needs to work and needs

Paul Thurrott (01:50:54):
To be reliable. And it does work server at client side, so mm-hmm. <affirmative>,

Leo Laporte (01:50:59):
The number one paying language.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:02):
Mm-hmm.

Leo Laporte (01:51:02):
<affirmative> closure.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:05):
Interesting.

Leo Laporte (01:51:05):
<laugh>. Well, because it's, you know,

Paul Thurrott (01:51:08):
<laugh>, wasn't that like an eighties

Leo Laporte (01:51:10):
Dance? No. Closure. Closure is a nice, is a lisp that compiles down to Java. So use the jvm. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And it's a nice lisp. It's a very, it's a little opinionated, but it's nice. I noticed that functional is very high closure. Ur Lang, F sharp lisp, all functional languages and the highest paid. But that may have more to do with the, the dearth of developers.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:30):
Well, the, yeah. The esoteric nature of it and, yeah. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:51:34):
Because I mean, I bet you there's a lot of JavaScript programmers out there. They all go to those boot camps.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:39):
Sure.

Leo Laporte (01:51:39):
And that's why you're only gonna get 65 K a year, buddy.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:43):
If you're can only get, make that much, you might as well just use VBA

Leo Laporte (01:51:46):
<laugh>. Yeah. You know, uh, cobalt, uh, cobalt salaries have gone up, jumped significantly. Sure. 50%

Paul Thurrott (01:51:55):
That Y two, two K

Rich Campbell (01:51:57):
Thing. No more. You're running out of them and you still have dependencies on them. So

Leo Laporte (01:52:02):
Get That's

Rich Campbell (01:52:03):
Right. Not retire.

Leo Laporte (01:52:03):
That's right. Same, uh, for assembly language.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:07):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:52:08):
Swift and are going up too. Objective. C Do you mostly use C Sharp, Richard Cuz of, uh,

Rich Campbell (01:52:15):
Yeah. It's always funny. I just went and looked at my GitHub review, like what did I do last year? Yeah. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> and, uh, C Sharp came third. Oh, after JavaScript and Python. Yeah. Wow. Which can't, I mean, I'm not doing any production code. Goodness knows. I wouldn't use my own code. Uh, but the stuff that I end up writing for whatever I need ends up as the language you end up being in. But, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:52:36):
That kind of makes sense. Python

Rich Campbell (01:52:38):
Language isn't the issue. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:52:39):
Python's quick to code. Quick to prototype.

Rich Campbell (01:52:41):
Exactly. You know what it is? I'm smashing data and I often to smash data with Python. Cause I'm, I'm good at it. It's quick. Right. It doesn't take very long to munge, you know, a multi gigabyte file and get, get results out of it.

Leo Laporte (01:52:54):
You should look at Julia. I really like Julia. Yeah. The only thing I don't like about Julia is a raise start with zero. Uh, with one, not zero, which is, no, this, I can't, it's like I can't, I can't stand it. <laugh>.

Rich Campbell (01:53:06):
I mean, it starts with one B 11 element, right?

Leo Laporte (01:53:10):
Yeah. Uh, and, and everything. I mean, talk about one F errors. I would have, I mean, I did some co I did some coding in it and I like it. And vs. Code has very good support for it. And it's a nice little language. It's actually a, it might be, it might be my second choice, but, um, the reason I don't use Python is cuz I can't, another thing I can't stand is the idea of white space being significant.

Rich Campbell (01:53:33):
It's like, right dude. Well welcome to Yammel Land. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:53:36):
No, I know, I know. I like parentheses. That's all I got. Lots of parentheses. How do you feel

Paul Thurrott (01:53:42):
About, um, semicolons?

Leo Laporte (01:53:44):
<laugh>? No, there's no semicolons in my world. Blockchain. How do, how do people feel about blockchain? Not so good.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:54):
Not so good. <laugh>. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:53:56):
Not so good. Only 11%. Very favorable. 21% favorable. 26% indifferent. 15% unfavorable se 16%. Very unfavorable.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:08):
I unsure. And indifference seems similar to

Leo Laporte (01:54:11):
Me. <laugh>, I, yeah, I'm not, you know, this is, you gotta take this with the grand show. Sure. Hey, as long as you're doing surveys, forget, forget, uh, doing the, the, uh, the stack exchange, stack overflow, uh, survey. Do the twit survey. This is where you're gonna get your real payoff here. We're doing, we do this every month, uh, every year rather in the first year, month of the year, January, we're doing it again. It's a chance for us to get to know you better. Understand what kinds of content you like, what shows you like. And I'll be frank, it also helps us sell to advertisers cuz we don't track you otherwise we can't, it's rss. So, uh, we do the surveys so we can say, you know, when an advertiser says, well, who listens? We can say, well it's, you know, it's this and this and this and this.

(01:54:51):
And so it's very useful. We do not ever gather individual information about you. Uh, don't worry about that. We, we get your email. I think, uh, I'm not sure why we do that. Probably to eliminate dupes, uh, mo. But the whole idea is get this aggregate of the audience as a whole. It shouldn't take more than a few minutes. It's completely optional of course. But I would appreciate it if you do it. Go to twit.tv/survey 23 for our 20 20 20 23, uh, survey. Uh, which will be open. Uh, normally we, we don't give you a deadline, but I guess they decided this year be good to say, uh, Thurrottugh the month of January. So take it as soon as you can. But you have till January 31st. Twit TV slash survey. Thank you for letting me interrupt with that. Uh, and we go on with the show.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:42):
Do you have like a Go Lang section of the

Leo Laporte (01:55:44):
Survey? Go Lang. Last year in a, in a seal people field in an error on the factory floor, they left Linux out as the operating system choices. And we heard about that.

Rich Campbell (01:55:55):
What? That there was some noise. We

Leo Laporte (01:55:56):
Heard about that. So Linnux is the, my

Paul Thurrott (01:55:58):
Master plan has been unveiled <laugh>. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:56:01):
I think

Rich Campbell (01:56:01):
Think, you know, the, the, the amount of.net developers do you consider are deploying to Linux is stunning. Oh yeah. Working in the modern version of net. And the bottom line is it costs less. Right. Same app running in an app service in a Linux context. Isn't

Leo Laporte (01:56:15):
That interesting? Yeah. Yeah. Do you develop differently for Linux than you would, uh, for a Windows server or a

Rich Campbell (01:56:23):
I'm not really. If you're doing web dev, it's crush platform and services dev. Yeah. Yeah. For the most part. Yeah. It, it's, it's the client stuff that it's not. Right. Okay. And also, you

Leo Laporte (01:56:32):
Know, well, you're not developing client software for Lennox. You assume your, your clients using Windows.

Rich Campbell (01:56:38):
Yeah. For the most part. Yeah. But mostly they're using phones, right? They're using iOS and apps like that. Apps,

Leo Laporte (01:56:43):
Reality apps. So app. Yeah, an

Rich Campbell (01:56:45):
App. Well, not even apps,

Paul Thurrott (01:56:46):
It's at Microsoft is getting the phone where they're getting on automotive, which is, is a backend service.

Leo Laporte (01:56:51):
Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So that's interesting. PWAs, which have, uh, had kind of weak take uptake in, uh, consumer space are doing all right in the enterprise space.

Rich Campbell (01:57:01):
Absolutely. Interesting. You get rid of, I don't need to go Thurrottugh the flipping store. Oh, oh yeah. I get rid of that problem. Right. Well, I still got the icon

Leo Laporte (01:57:08):
Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:57:09):
I agree that PWAs have not grown as fast as maybe some expected. But on the other hand, I think they're deployed often Thurrottugh stores. You know, so you get things like, uh, clip Champ or Spotify.

Leo Laporte (01:57:20):
You don't know that, that it's a pwa.

Rich Campbell (01:57:21):
Yeah. They're basically, they're it's electron hours.

Paul Thurrott (01:57:23):
Yeah, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:57:24):
Yeah. But ele to me, electron is not pwa. It's heavy.

Rich Campbell (01:57:28):
Well, it's not really, it's,

Leo Laporte (01:57:29):
It, it's like comes it's

Paul Thurrott (01:57:31):
A browser dump truck

Leo Laporte (01:57:32):
Is what? It's <laugh>. Yeah. <laugh> services. We don't need services. We've got a browser.

Rich Campbell (01:57:37):
Yeah. I mean, in the end, most people, the only thing people who do with PWAs are creating a manifest. So they have an icon. Yeah. You know, it's just a way to give people an icon that leads to a webpage that looks right. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:57:48):
Oh, okay. So it's really a webpage wrapper for most of these guys.

Rich Campbell (01:57:51):
Yeah. Basically. Really? Do they have any offline, the browser to run differently?

Paul Thurrott (01:57:56):
You can have it, but you don't have to,

Leo Laporte (01:57:57):
To, I know you can have offline, but if people don't do that, oh, that's interesting. People don't do it. So

Rich Campbell (01:58:01):
They're

Leo Laporte (01:58:01):
Not using service workers or any of that stuff

Rich Campbell (01:58:03):
Because figuring out how to make offline work work well. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> is hard. What's easier? Just presuming you always have a connection and letting it

Leo Laporte (01:58:10):
Fail. That's right. And you're almost always right. That's exactly right. Except for

Rich Campbell (01:58:12):
The, and you're almost always

Paul Thurrott (01:58:13):
Right. There's simple little things you could do. You know, you could, uh, support native notifications no matter which platform you're on. That stuff's easy.

Rich Campbell (01:58:20):
Well, and most important, reasonably you don't bother with the offline stuff, is those guys can't complain cuz they're offline. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:58:27):
<laugh>, we'd, we'd give you a complaint form, but we can't,

Rich Campbell (01:58:32):
We can't

Leo Laporte (01:58:32):
Get to

Paul Thurrott (01:58:33):
You <laugh>. It's like when I, uh, I, I had to call T-Mobile for them to switch my, switch my EIM over because they, right now, they don't let you do it self-service. And, uh, in the middle of the phone call, the call dropped. Cuz they switched the em over.

Leo Laporte (01:58:45):
<laugh>, your phone is not gonna work right now.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:50):
It's like, and I'm like, uh, I'm like, I guess it worked. But to their credit, by the way, they did call me back on the new phone. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:58:57):
Might have a little warning. Might have been nice.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:59):
Yeah. Right in the middle of the call, it just dropped. And I'm like, here we go. No, they, they worked. It was fine.

Leo Laporte (01:59:05):
Let's talk Xbox. Paul's favorite. Yes. Segment.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:09):
<laugh>. Okay. Well, Leo, I don't know if you caught wind this little story, but, um, this week on Tuesday, yesterday there was a pretrial hearing. And previous to that Microsoft responded officially to the FTC complaint. Point by point. That's what you have to do. And, uh, I read it, I wrote a story about it and I thought this is over. And then, uh, ne it was over Christmas, I guess it was between Christmas and New Year's. All of a sudden the Looky-loos started reading this thing and he started seeing articles like this Microsoft professes not to know when Call of Duty was first released, how could Microsoft, the company that's gonna spend 69 billion on activation a call. So here's the thing guys, let's step back from the, um, you know, the, the, the lectern there. Um, they have to do this guy. You, you can't, you can't admit to anything in a legal document. Right? Right. It opens you up to further avenues of attack. Um, all you have to do is say, we don't know <laugh>. You know, you don't ha it doesn't matter if it's e easily Googleable <laugh>. It's, it's not a matter of corporate memory. Um, it is the most nonsense part of it. There's a, I don't know how many hundreds of points they had to go Thurrottugh. We agree that Microsoft is a corporation that was established in 1976 as alleged by the ftc. That kind of stuff. <laugh> you, you, you have to, yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:00:29):
There's some proforma

Paul Thurrott (02:00:30):
Stuff. There's Exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:00:31):
But here is a smoking gun that, uh,

Paul Thurrott (02:00:34):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:00:35):
Cleverly came out right before Christmas Day. Microsoft says three future Bethesda games will be Xbox

Paul Thurrott (02:00:43):
Exclusive. Great. So what

Leo Laporte (02:00:46):
<laugh>? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:47):
And like, so

Leo Laporte (02:00:47):
What, but this is of course the FTCs fear with the Activision Blizzard deal. Is

Paul Thurrott (02:00:51):
That all right? Let's look at actual numbers. What percentage of Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft Games are exclusive to their consoles? Yeah, probably.

Leo Laporte (02:00:58):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:58):
Huge as of last year. Yeah. Mi Sony 50%. Nintendo 40%. Yeah. Microsoft 10%.

Leo Laporte (02:01:07):
Okay.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:07):
Yeah. There you go. So the point is, don't allow us, shouldn't be allowed to do this <laugh>. Right. The point is, they should be able to decide whether to do this or not based on market conditions. They've already a if, look, if your a deal is, I don't want Microsoft to get this company cuz they're gonna keep everything Xbox exclusive. You can build legally binding agreements into, uh, consent decree that will ensure that whatever it's Call of Duty will appear on, uh, the PlayStation for 10 years or whatever it is you want. You can just do that. That's fine. The, the three games that you're talking about, I this, I don't think this disenfranchised anybody <laugh>, there was nobody like what? I've been waiting for three years for this game. You know, I don't think that's, this is, these are not big games, you know, this is not a big, big deal. Well,

Rich Campbell (02:01:52):
They're kind of new

Paul Thurrott (02:01:53):
Games, right? Like Yeah, yeah. Right. I'm sorry. Yeah. But they're not existing franchises that

Leo Laporte (02:01:57):
Are,

Paul Thurrott (02:01:59):
Uh, elder

Leo Laporte (02:01:59):
Scroll, scroll Elder Scrolls is a franchise. Scroll Starfield, elder Scroll six, and Indiana Jones, perhaps.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:05):
Well, again, this is their right. And by the way, if, if this market worked correctly, you would be able to get Xbox Game Pass on any of those other consoles and play those games. Right. Are we really worried? What are we worried about here? Are we worried about protecting Sony? Or are we worried about consumers not getting access to games? Because right now we have two dominant parties in this industry that are restricting the access to their games, to their own consoles. And then you have Microsoft, which by and large is not, it doesn't mean that they're not gonna do it ever. It just means that don't, they're not gonna do it as much.

Rich Campbell (02:02:39):
Yeah. I think they would happily be third in the restricted games market. Uh, yeah. As part of the consent decree,

Paul Thurrott (02:02:45):
Right after this is over, we'll still be in third place. What's the problem?

Leo Laporte (02:02:48):
Yeah, we're number three. Yeah. As Bobby Codick said in a statement to the

Paul Thurrott (02:02:54):
Verge, we love him. There

Leo Laporte (02:02:55):
Is no sensible, legitimate reason for a transaction to be prevented from closing. Air industry is enormous competition and few barriers to entry. I might disagree with that. We've seen more devices than ever before. Enabling players a wide range of choices to play games. Hey honey, I like your skirt. Engines and tools are freely available. That that was a,

Paul Thurrott (02:03:16):
A startlingly accurate depiction of that

Leo Laporte (02:03:18):
Man. But engines and tools are freely available. Developers, large and small, the breadth and distribute distribution

Paul Thurrott (02:03:24):
Applic. So go back up to the um, yeah, sorry, go ahead. The forward

Leo Laporte (02:03:27):
Charts or whatever. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:03:28):
Yeah, yeah. The little purple ones. Right? So this is Xbox share of, uh, mobile gaming. Right?

Leo Laporte (02:03:34):
That's such a big, uh, share there. Nothing.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:37):
That's why they're doing this. This is the acquisition.

Leo Laporte (02:03:39):
But wait a minute. What, wait a minute. <laugh> Xbox is not mobile. Why should it have any share of mobile

Paul Thurrott (02:03:45):
Gaming? Because the one on the right says what it's gonna look like after this acquisition goes

Leo Laporte (02:03:49):
Thurrottugh.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:49):
Okay. They're gonna go from 0.3% to 4%.

Leo Laporte (02:03:52):
Right.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:53):
This is not gonna shake the market up. I

Leo Laporte (02:03:56):
I have a question for you. Yeah. Because, uh, it's, and it's still pure rumor, although it came from Mark Erman, who is a, a well connected mm-hmm. <affirmative>, uh, guy at Bloomberg, that Apple is going to in fact allow third party app stores, uh, because it's gonna be forced to by, uh, the eu. Uh, at which point, and, and Epic, you know, Tim Sweeney kind of went nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:18):
You'll be able to fortnight on Bill in every time something happens.

Leo Laporte (02:04:21):
By the way, you'll be able to get Fortnite on iOS. It is here. Yeah. So it's, well, I mean, I think it's expected that Epic, uh, uh, will have a app store. Microsoft finally will be able to have its app store on iOS.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:33):
Yeah. The, the issue is gonna be what the terms are. Right. Because you, you, this is Apple, right? Yeah. Let's, you want to get excited about something like this. Oh, apple. They always have a slow walk it as they'll figure out a way much as possible.

Leo Laporte (02:04:43):
Nevertheless, that's gonna change this pie chart significantly. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:49):
Oh, sure. I guess, I mean, I <laugh>, you know, but I just, I know there's a lot of debate around the stuff we, we argued about that time, about, um, apple and app stores and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But I, I think that the thing we could probably all agree on is that it is an Apple's best interest to fight this as hard as they can to secure the best possible percentage on the other end. Right. I think mm-hmm. <affirmative>, that's what this is really about. I don't believe that Apple believes that what it's doing is right. I think it just knows it has to fight as much as it can so that when, when we're done, the, the revenue share doesn't go from 30% to 3%. Yes, yes. Yes. It goes to 15% or whatever the number is. It

Leo Laporte (02:05:26):
Doesn't matter. It's a negotiation at

Paul Thurrott (02:05:28):
This point. That's right. I soton tender in the same boat. That's right. For the same reason. Although smaller small markets have Yeah, yeah. They all have incentive. Yep. This, this once the biggest domino falls, <laugh>, you know, we're gonna move on to the other markets for sure. Hmm. But Apple, Google, or, you know, one and one. Right. So, um, I, it is inevitable that this changes. It is. Oh, I'm trying to, it's proper. It is. Right. It is as expected that Apple would do everything it can to ensure that it's as solid as it can be. On the other side of it. There, there's no stopping this, but it's gonna come down to the details, you know, the terms of the agreement and so forth. So yeah, I, I do expect this to happen sometime. It was surprising to me that it could happen as fast as maybe Gurman was suggesting it might happen, but it's inevitable. Apple

Leo Laporte (02:06:16):
Still has not confirmed that, by the way. So

Paul Thurrott (02:06:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. You know, but that could be a big thing. They announce that, you know, ww d c would be the obvious time. They look like they'll present it. Like we're Magdi Manly giving away, you know, all this money cuz we love the industry so much, you know, whatever. It's,

Leo Laporte (02:06:32):
Uh, what else is going on in the Xbox world, Paul?

Paul Thurrott (02:06:36):
So there was a great, I dunno if you read this story in the New York Times, but, um, there was a great story with a interview with Brad Smith and they were talking about like, you know, how has your strategy changed since, uh, you guys went up against the FTC and then the Justice Department back in the late nineties, you know, and he was like, it's, he's like, Bob, it's like riding a bike. No, he said

Leo Laporte (02:06:53):
<laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (02:06:54):
No, he, he, he's actually interesting because they brought him in, uh, Steve Baer hired him to solve the antitrust thing. Really? And he came in really? When he got the job. Was he like, you

Leo Laporte (02:07:04):
Mean back in the late nineties? Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:07:06):
My early 2002. He was like, you have to compromise. And so he set that all in in place and, and did the right thing with, you know, finally blatantly. Right. So, um, you talked to him now and his like, their basic strategy is Microsoft's the nice guy of big tech. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. He's like, we're gonna work with these guys. This is a great quote somewhere. I think it's toward the bottom of the article. He's talking about a meeting he had with the, uh, chair of the FTC and, uh, yeah, see if you can just find it. He basically just, he, he, he, he couldn't get her to agree with him, but she smiled, <laugh>, and he said, you know what, I'll take it.

Leo Laporte (02:07:39):
I got the smile in

Paul Thurrott (02:07:41):
The right direction. Got the smile. That means, yeah. That means there, there's hope. You know,

Leo Laporte (02:07:44):
<laugh>, uh, I wonder who it was who smiled. I guarantee you it wasn't, uh, Lena Kahn,

Paul Thurrott (02:07:50):
I think it was. I think that really, I think it was, yeah. Yeah. Discover all the way to the bottom. I think

Leo Laporte (02:07:54):
It's right. Yeah. That might have been the kind of the smile of a shark about to eat you. Uh,

Paul Thurrott (02:07:59):
No, you had it. I think you had it right there. Uh, right at the bottom, right? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:08:06):
Our team, let's see now

Paul Thurrott (02:08:08):
Somewhere now just

Leo Laporte (02:08:09):
Search for, I just search for smile. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. It's, it's an all right. S m i l e. But in an interview this week, Mr. Smith was sanguine. That means covered in blood, by the way. She did not take

Paul Thurrott (02:08:22):
Yes, exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:08:23):
<laugh>. It's one problem with, with the English language, Sangu can mean many things. She did not take me up on my offer, but when I said give peace a chance, she smiled at least a little. Maybe she was a Beatles fan or John Lennon fan you said of Ms. Khan. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, Mrs. Khan. So, anytime, uh, somebody can end a meeting by smiling even a little, there's always a little hope we can sit down together in the future and make sweet, sweet love

Paul Thurrott (02:08:51):
<laugh>. Well, uh, well, that's Bobby Kotick, but I think Oh, yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:08:55):
Right. That's, sorry. Um, I was channeling Bobby again. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:59):
<laugh>. But I think the point here is that, you know, is what we just looked at with the charts and everything that, you know, Microsoft's argument is sound, which is like, look, when this is over, you've not created a new industry juggernaut. You've mm-hmm. <affirmative> elevated number three, little higher, but still number three. Yeah. I

Leo Laporte (02:09:14):
Think that's fair. Um, I do too. I I think the whole prosecution seems a little unfair.

Paul Thurrott (02:09:21):
Yeah. It's the wrong get it, you know, you get, you get what you get. But

Rich Campbell (02:09:26):
It's like the FTC needs to make a show of we're against this. Yes, exactly. And then Microsoft has to talk them down, and then, then there's some concessions made.

Paul Thurrott (02:09:34):
Like, we're gonna stop monopolies you. If it's a little girl selling like lemonade, do you, like, you have a monopoly on this corner. It's like, we meant Google <laugh>, I not these stupid, what are you doing?

Leo Laporte (02:09:44):
Uh, I also think Lena Kahn has something to prove at this point. And, uh, unfortunately Microsoft is the one that got caught in the crosshairs, but

Rich Campbell (02:09:53):
No, so far it's just shuffling paperwork and press releases. Right? Like, they're not actually blocking anything. It isn't costing anything. They may miss their deadline, but so

Leo Laporte (02:10:00):
What,

Rich Campbell (02:10:01):
You know, August, anything that's happening here is Bobby Kotlin has to wait longer for his money.

Leo Laporte (02:10:05):
Bob Bobby Kotlin,

Rich Campbell (02:10:06):
Right? I

Leo Laporte (02:10:07):
Know. Yeah. Bobby Kotlin is the beloved version of Bobby Kotick. Okay. <laugh>. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:10:11):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:10:11):
<laugh>, you know, Bobby Closure is the one that makes the most money, that makes the most <laugh>, uh, all right. Be the nice guy. I think that's a good strategy. Hey,

Rich Campbell (02:10:20):
Hey. Bobby Tables is the guy who ruined your team.

Leo Laporte (02:10:22):
<laugh>. Yeah. He's ruined your, my, your sequel database. Okay. <laugh>, uh, Microsoft Embracing Unions something. Uh,

Paul Thurrott (02:10:30):
Yeah. So obviously

Leo Laporte (02:10:31):
Google don't

Paul Thurrott (02:10:32):
Has been fighting unionization, right. All over the place. And Microsoft has come up publicly and said, look, if this is what happens, we support it. We'll, you know, act in best Faith. They said with regards to Activision Blizzard, there's been some Union Union talk there in certain parts of that company, we will support that. No problem. And, uh, Zenni Max, which is the company that owns Bethesda, which Microsoft bought almost, uh, two years ago, I guess 18 months ago, whatever the company before Active bli. Right? Remember, they, they own ID software and the Wolfenstein games and all that. Um, there is a, I think it's like a software, like a quality assurance team, 300 people-ish, uh, alerted Microsoft, uh, parent company that they were interested in starting union. They said, yeah, we won't stand way, just vote. And if that's what you vote, we'll recognize

Leo Laporte (02:11:14):
It. It's actually the law requires them to do that. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:11:18):
But what,

Leo Laporte (02:11:18):
Odd enough, oddly enough, <laugh>. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:11:20):
Yeah. But they did it. And, uh, they voted to unionize and Microsoft says, we'll, we will engage in good faith and negotiations and work toward a collective bargaining

Leo Laporte (02:11:29):
Argument. It's so funny that they get credit for doing what they're supposed to do, do law, but only because Starbucks, apple, and who's

Paul Thurrott (02:11:37):
Gonna say, there's so many famous examples of pe of companies trying to undermine these efforts. Uh, Amazon, I would say most notably, yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:11:44):
Uh, Microsoft gets points for, uh, not bringing in the pick for doings. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, games with gold. This is the, uh, the moment we all look forward to Richard, when, uh, Paul lists the new January, uh, games with gold titles and there are a whopping two.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:04):
Yeah. Let me take up 10 seconds of your life.

Leo Laporte (02:12:06):
Okay. <laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (02:12:07):
Uh, Iris Fall is available to, uh, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and Xbox Live Gold, uh, members for free now, uh, for the entire month. Yeah, I know. And then, uh, OTO Knots comes out on January 16,

Leo Laporte (02:12:23):
Not psycho knots. Don't get your hopes up, OTO. It's not that knots.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:26):
Yeah. And again, I don't recognize either of these games. I, I, I frankly think they're starting to run out in a way. Well, obviously they're used to have four, right? So they literally ran out of Xbox 360 and OG Xbox Games they could add to this program. They're, they're all done. And, um, I was kinda hoping they were gonna go to four games for Xbox One in series X and S, but it's sticking with two. But you know, what do you want a few 60 bucks a year? You cheap? Oh, come on, <laugh>. We're gonna talk about that soon,

Leo Laporte (02:12:51):
Actually, is January. Maybe it's just a January is a bad, you know, year. Don't

Paul Thurrott (02:12:57):
Time of year. It's been bad. It's been bad for a while. Okay. It's just, I just, I don't know. This is not much of a perk,

Leo Laporte (02:13:03):
Unfortunately. It's getting to be less the Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:05):
The big problem I have with this is that you don't actually own these games, so as long as you, your subscription is around, you have access to those games, but,

Leo Laporte (02:13:12):
Oh, I didn't know that. Okay. So

Paul Thurrott (02:13:14):
Yeah, they go

Leo Laporte (02:13:14):
Away. It's, so, it's like game pass a little bit.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:17):
Yeah. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:13:18):
It is Game Pass,

Paul Thurrott (02:13:19):
Right? It

Leo Laporte (02:13:19):
Is. Well, is it?

Paul Thurrott (02:13:21):
Oh, no, I mean, you no, in the same No, it is what you're saying is correct. Yeah. It's, uh, you have to, the month and the time they're available, add them to your library, and if you don't, they're not available late. You can't go get 'em later. And if you close down your subscription, they disappear. Oh. So

Leo Laporte (02:13:37):
Yeah. Oh, that sucks.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:39):
Yeah, it's not great. I

Leo Laporte (02:13:40):
Didn't know that. Uh, yeah. And there's one more F T C story.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:47):
Yeah. So speaking of the villain from the Batman movie, um,

Leo Laporte (02:13:51):
Mr. Freeze,

Paul Thurrott (02:13:52):
Tim Sweeney,

Leo Laporte (02:13:52):
Tim Sweeney,

Paul Thurrott (02:13:53):
Um,

(02:13:55):
Like, you know, Tim. Anyway, um, his company, epic Games, which is embroiled in that big lawsuit with both, uh, apple and Google over their online stores, has agreed to pay a $520 million fine related to allegations. And it will not admit to, uh, that it used dark patterns in Fortnite, especially to trick kids into buying things they couldn't afford and weren't paying for anyway. And, um, what was the other one? Uh, oh. And collecting the personal information of children under the age of 13 and enabling real-time voice and text check communications for children and teens. By default, these children and teens were bullied and threatened and harassed, et cetera, et cetera, as you would expect, because if you've ever played a game online, that's what happens.

Leo Laporte (02:14:39):
That's Fortnite baby. Yeah. That's what they're loving.

Paul Thurrott (02:14:41):
That's, I mute the world on Xbox. That's why I just mute everybody. I don't wanna listen to any of that stuff. So, wow. None of it's good.

Leo Laporte (02:14:47):
The FTC says,

Paul Thurrott (02:14:49):
I know this is the word. I know what you're gonna

Leo Laporte (02:14:51):
Say. The word. Children and teens have been bullied, threatened, harassed, and exposed to dangerous and psychologically traumatizing issues such as suicide while on Fortnite, these default settings along with Epic's role in matching children and teens with strangers play Fortnite together.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:11):
A tre coat and a hat.

Leo Laporte (02:15:13):
<laugh> harmed children

Paul Thurrott (02:15:14):
And teen, listen, I mean, the upside here is they have a really good matchmaking system now. No. So <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:15:19):
Unfortunately, this is like, they never played a game. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:15:23):
I know. It's like, but these are children for internet, it's children. The issue is children, in other words. Yeah. No, let Little Bobby play Call of Duty while we're having dinner and he, you know, he's in there with adults and they're all doing what they do.

Leo Laporte (02:15:33):
Now. This is more legit fortnight's counterintuitive, inconsistent, and confusing button configuration. Yeah. I have a confusing button configuration right here. I can't get the middle

Paul Thurrott (02:15:45):
Button. The thing that cracks me up about this is, back when my kids were really little, we had this weekend event where I was doing something on my computer and I got an email and it said, uh, your bill from Apple. And it was like, oh, $300. Yeah. And then I got another email, it said $250. Yeah. And then another email said, $150. I'm like, what? Eventually it was like almost $900 worth of stuff. It was all Mark. My kids were playing some little virtual fish tank thing. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:16:09):
Yeah. Yeah. Fish. What? The fish one.

Paul Thurrott (02:16:12):
Apple gave me all my money back. It was a, it was a harrowing day, but, uh, you know, you learn, and I wrote a story called Even a Child, so Easy, even a Child Can Do It. And that was 10 years ago. I mean, like, the fact,

Leo Laporte (02:16:25):
A cop to it and they fixed it, but it really was a problem.

Paul Thurrott (02:16:28):
It was a big thing. Well, here's the problem for Epic Games, and this is why they, they're paying so much money. Um, they, there were over 1 million customer complaints and employees inside the company who kept raising this issue, and it was just ignored, uh, over some period of years. Wow. So, um, uh, they're paying, what is it, 520 million, 240, half, half, half million of that. Yeah. Is going back to refunds. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But us look at how much money

Leo Laporte (02:16:55):
They

Paul Thurrott (02:16:55):
Make. Like I know, I know. I can't, you know, look, look a $500 million fine and say we are not bankrupt it ma it made sense. Like we'll pay that fine. And we're still whole, you know, because Yeah. We're good. So much money. Yeah. Yeah. Yep, yep, yep, yep,

Leo Laporte (02:17:11):
Yep. Um, oh, and I have just been informed, we do not actually ask for your email address in the survey. So there's another reason to go right now to twit tv slash survey 23. Uh, the only thing we do is we, uh, we track the IP address, so you can't do it twice or a hundred times as people on the internet might want. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (02:17:31):
I just wrote, I just wrote my headline. Twit tracks users who fill out Survey <laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:17:35):
Exclusive, but we don't save that information. It's just a little script that says if

Paul Thurrott (02:17:39):
You Oh, you sell it to advertisers.

Leo Laporte (02:17:41):
Of course we do. What are we, Hey, when you wanna buy a couple of thousand, uh, i p addresses numbers.

Paul Thurrott (02:17:46):
These

Leo Laporte (02:17:46):
Numbers, they're hot. They're hot. They don't,

Paul Thurrott (02:17:49):
They don't,

Leo Laporte (02:17:50):
People I know I'm saying that they don't keep it. Once the survey's

Paul Thurrott (02:17:53):
Closed, they're like, Leo, seriously gonna get

Leo Laporte (02:17:55):
The smaller manage management really wants me to make this clear. Yep. We don't track you and we don't wanna, we don't care to, we don't need to just take the survey. Tweet tv slash survey 23. It's harmless. Mostly harmless. Uh, alright. Uh, you know what, I would like to make a plug for a club twit. Oh, because don't gimme that sigh. Paul, you

Paul Thurrott (02:18:17):
Are, my family is texting and I'm like, guys,

Leo Laporte (02:18:19):
Oh, okay. It wasn't me. How'd

Paul Thurrott (02:18:21):
It work? You

Leo Laporte (02:18:22):
Buy any

Paul Thurrott (02:18:22):
Fish? What? Can't hear it. It's like, d ding,

Leo Laporte (02:18:25):
Ding, ding, ding, ding. Oh, my daughter invariably calls me in the, you know, right about now, actually

Paul Thurrott (02:18:31):
It's a bunch of text. It's

Leo Laporte (02:18:33):
All like, and I told her, I'm, I'm on the air, honey, I'm on the eaves. Are you in a group chat with the people?

Paul Thurrott (02:18:38):
My family is as stupid as people can be. It's just <laugh>. Like it's the middle of a

Leo Laporte (02:18:43):
Workday.

Paul Thurrott (02:18:45):
What, sorry.

Leo Laporte (02:18:47):
Well, now we know Paul, uh, hates everybody, including what

Paul Thurrott (02:18:51):
Are you do when touching at three? It's four o'clock

Leo Laporte (02:18:53):
In the afternoon, what are you doing? Hey, what work? Hey, get outta, Hey, you dumb. So sorry. Paul does a show <laugh>

(02:19:06):
Called Hands On Windows, but you know, you might say, I want that choke. Sure you would. Who wouldn't? Micah does a show called Hands On Macintosh. We do a show for Linux lovers called the Untitled Linux Show. We do Stacey's Book Club with Stacey Hiab Bathum. And you might say, well, where are those? They're in the club. See, club Twit members support our efforts, uh, greatly with their $7 a month. That's all it costs is $1 less a blue check on Twitter, and you get so much more ad free versions of all of the shows you get. Uh, the special shows we do only for the Club, and they're quite a few of them. The GIZ Fizz is one of them. Uh, you also get stuff before and after the shows that don't make it into the podcasts. And I think probably, in my opinion, the greatest benefit is our wonderful club, twit Discord. Paul's in there, many, in fact, Richard, I'd be glad to send you a membership. So,

Paul Thurrott (02:20:00):
Oh, I hear the new, see, this is what happens. I put, I set up a new computer. I always

Leo Laporte (02:20:03):
Forget Discord. You gotta put Discord on there. TWIs. Great. We got three events, uh, in the, in the books. The book club is, uh, January 12th. Next week, uh, on a Thursday. The following week, Lisa and I will do our Inside Twit show, which is, uh, a great, a great favorite of all of us. See Lisa and, uh, my, uh, marriage dissolve into tears, uh, right before your very eyes. It's so much fun. Uh, Wintu Dao, who is one of the hosts of All About Android, does a fireside chat in the ninth. And there's much more coming thanks to our club twit, uh, manager, community manager, uh, aunt Pruitt puts all this stuff together. You get all these great, uh, groups. Not only chat about all of our shows, but about a subject's nerds, love anime autos to beer, to comics. I hang out in the coating section where we go back and forth over, uh, abstruse topics, <laugh>, very fun stuff.

(02:21:00):
Uh, breadboard prototyping, which sounds delicious but isn't <laugh>, uh, things like that. There's movies, there's all kinds of stuff. There's a Maker's section show and tell a let's play section where, uh, you can be in our, uh, our Minecraft, join our Minecraft server servers, plural. We've got a really tough survival server. There's all sorts of stuff. This is all for seven Smackers a month. That's it. Go to twit tv slash club twit. Uh, and you will also get HandsOn windows. Paul does that every week with lots of great stuff. We occasionally, as a tease for non-club members, put out HandsOn windows and hands on Macintosh on, uh, on YouTube so you can see it there. And get an idea of what a great job Paul does on that show when he is not hitting on his family. Paul is the king of Windows tips. <laugh>, okay. Club twit, TWI tv

Paul Thurrott (02:21:56):
Slash club. Twi almost called the show. Just the tips. Just

Leo Laporte (02:21:59):
The tips. <laugh>. Hey, that's a nice street you're wearing in there, <laugh>. Uh, all right. Uh, uh, there's something about this show brings out the worst in me off we go with our tips, our picks, and our bourbon of the week. Yeah. We'll start with, uh, Paul TH's tip of

Paul Thurrott (02:22:18):
The Week. So I gotta ask you a question. So my, my tip of the week is, is kind of this debate around whether people should dump blast

Leo Laporte (02:22:24):
Pass. I will, will point you to, uh, yesterday's Gib hearing now. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:22:28):
I've had multiple people tell me that. What Steve Gibson said basically was that from a technical perspective, I think there's no reason to leave Les Pass. Is that right?

Leo Laporte (02:22:40):
Uh, no. You haven't heard the latest from Steve Gibson. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (02:22:42):
Oh, oh,

Leo Laporte (02:22:43):
Okay. So he was, you know, he was saying, uh, you know, last pass, like virtually all password managers does. Yeah. Basically the right thing. That's an encrypted blob. You're, yep. Oh, see, my, my daughter's calling. Did I

Paul Thurrott (02:22:55):
Tell you? Oh, must be. If that's my, um, stepmother, would you tell her

Leo Laporte (02:22:59):
<laugh>? She's probably in the same group again. She's going in the same group.

Paul Thurrott (02:23:03):
Yep. Wow.

Leo Laporte (02:23:04):
It's time <laugh> honey. I'm on there. Air, uh, <laugh>, uh, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, last pass. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, that blob. So look, last pass, somebody in the chat room said you had one job, which was to keep that vault out of the hands of bad guys. Right. You're storing the vaults for all of us. They did the right thing, they encrypted it, but, and they were slow to reveal this, which is another problem. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>, those vaults got exfiltrated by a

Paul Thurrott (02:23:37):
Bad guy. That's what, right. Exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:23:39):
What they have not told us, and this annoys me, and I think this is another reason to be angry, is they haven't been completely forthcoming. They've, they, they, they dragged their feet. They finally told us, yeah. They got the vaults right before Christmas. Again, the best time to bury a story, uh, did not get buried. Yeah. But what they didn't tell us is, well, they got a backup of my vault, but a backup from when, uh, is it an older backup with a poor, I

Paul Thurrott (02:24:01):
Know there was so

Leo Laporte (02:24:02):
Vague about that. Oh, very vague. Uh, but

Rich Campbell (02:24:05):
The implication that I read was that there are different vaults with different levels of encryption based on when your account was

Leo Laporte (02:24:11):
Created. Precisely. Yeah. And that depending on the, you know, nothing effectively that you know nothing, they use pbk DF two. Uh, and that slows down brute forcing if you use enough iterations. But in the early days, last pass used 5,000, which is completely insufficient, uh, with today's modern, uh, brute force attackers using G P U and so forth, which presumably whoever owns has these vaults now is, is banging on 'em. Uh, so you may have a vault, an older vault that doesn't have a high enough, uh, iteration. They upped it to a hundred thousand and one, uh, some years ago, but it wasn't automatic for everybody. So you may even, you know, if you have a, a few years old account,

Paul Thurrott (02:24:49):
So if you go to the website now, it will try to upgrade you. I've never had it successfully work. I've, I've been

Leo Laporte (02:24:55):
Doing the, it's also too late. Uh, you know, you could change your master password, doesn't matter. The vault that leaked matter had the old master password. Yeah. Uh, if you had two factor doesn't help because two factors not used in encrypting the vault. So Steve's last episode yesterday, and I'll just give you a hint, Paul, the, uh, title was Leaving Last Pass

Paul Thurrott (02:25:17):
<laugh>. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:25:17):
Uh, easy to find. And, and your point, which you make in the show notes is it's not a matter of, you know, know technically Well, is it secure or not? It's a matter of trust.

Paul Thurrott (02:25:25):
Right. I think the way they handled this was bad. I guess the que I, I, i, I, Richard and I were talking earlier, I think I referred to it as a knee jerk, knee jerk reaction. He's like, well, it's not really knee jerk <laugh>, but you know, fair enough. I mean,

Leo Laporte (02:25:36):
It's a little bit of it. No, it's a little bit, yeah. Like, well, screw them.

Paul Thurrott (02:25:40):
There's a lot of work. Right. I mean, by the way, oh, even if you're staying with Last Pass, there's a lot of work you should, you maybe should be

Leo Laporte (02:25:48):
Doing. And I would say also for most people, you're fine. And yeah, for Mo I mean, and for most people, any password manager even, uh, a not so good one is much better than no password manager. But if for instance, you used your master password anywhere else, uhoh I know. Trouble Uhoh. Um, yeah. In which

Paul Thurrott (02:26:10):
Case I still had a Windows phone registered in my last pass account. That's how long it's been.

Leo Laporte (02:26:14):
Oh yeah. Why ever take a password out? Yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:26:16):
Smart. Well, and and that's one of the things I do with last passes is I do go Thurrottugh sorted by last login and Del and get rid of smart accounts and things.

Leo Laporte (02:26:23):
That's very smart.

Rich Campbell (02:26:24):
Why?

Leo Laporte (02:26:24):
You know, because those, those passwords are probably encrypted with pkd F two poorly. Yeah. Right. So you're right, right.

Rich Campbell (02:26:31):
To do things. And it's not, I would move off of last pass. I've been in it for years. The problem is the wife, I finally got her using it. Exactly. In, in the family's configuration. Exactly. We have a shared pool. Like we have all the, like, it's not me, I'll do it. I I would even find

Paul Thurrott (02:26:47):
That my

Rich Campbell (02:26:48):
Wife Sunday afternoon,

Paul Thurrott (02:26:49):
A two room sono zone. She's not gonna be able to handle this <laugh> <laugh> because this is,

Leo Laporte (02:26:53):
Uh, put her on the sun porch and say, honey, you can't get out until you change a password manager. Yeah. But, uh, and it's important to mention him. And so Steve did move, he moved to our sponsor bit warden. He, but he, but he mentioned last one password also. Good Dash Lane also. Good. There are plenty of That's

Paul Thurrott (02:27:08):
What I hear. One password's the big one,

Leo Laporte (02:27:10):
It's the second largest. It might even be a little bigger than

Paul Thurrott (02:27:13):
Last password. I mean, the big one I hear from people like the,

Leo Laporte (02:27:15):
I like Bit Warden cuz it's o not because they're a sponsor. I used them before then because they're open source, which is a, and you can host your own vault if you decide you don't want. That's right at your fault in the big pile of other

Paul Thurrott (02:27:26):
People's faults. And that's actually of interest, you know?

Leo Laporte (02:27:28):
Yeah. Um, so I think bit warden, but the problem is yeah, you got a, a week's work because you gotta go change all those passwords because they are now potentially, you know what

Paul Thurrott (02:27:41):
The, okay, I, I, listen maybe this is a good thing and I, I I, I mean that in a kind of roundabout way because this is maybe work that people should have been doing all along and don't, and maybe this is the push we need.

Leo Laporte (02:27:54):
Oh, that's a good point.

Paul Thurrott (02:27:55):
To start changing some passwords and, and get rid of old things that are no longer relevant. Who every, you ever just look at your list of passwords. It's every, it's like looking at email. You're like, Ugh, silly. Okay. Later, later, later. Yeah. I don't wanna deal with maybe this was the push we needed to get the cleaning done.

Rich Campbell (02:28:09):
Well the big thing I found when I started going Thurrottugh the passwords, I needed to changed. I went after the important ones. Right. That's right. The bank accounts and things like that. They were all two f fa.

Leo Laporte (02:28:17):
Right. And that's

Rich Campbell (02:28:19):
Every one of them. I

Leo Laporte (02:28:20):
Realized that does protect you of court.

Rich Campbell (02:28:21):
Yes. Yep. And I changed the password anyway. Cuz why wouldn't you? You already and

Paul Thurrott (02:28:26):
You use, cause I'm a diligent, you pay for last pass. Right. So you

Rich Campbell (02:28:30):
Use Key and I, yeah. I also use a Fido key, which doesn't help. Right. That's

Leo Laporte (02:28:37):
Just another kind of two fa I use my ubi, I use my key.

Rich Campbell (02:28:41):
I got mine right here. Yep. Uh, but it, the real problem here is it's got nothing to do with the soul involved. Right. It only could controls my access to my vault myself in Thurrottugh their interface.

Leo Laporte (02:28:52):
There were some things that they did. Yeah. Poorly in it could have done better. Bit more than one password and others encrypt the names of the sites you have passwords for. Mm-hmm. <affirmative> apparently Last pass did not. No. Right. Uh, which means the bad guys at the very least got a list of pa uh, sites you visit, uh, and you have

Paul Thurrott (02:29:09):
Passwords. Passwords, good information.

Leo Laporte (02:29:10):
That's useful. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So it's, and I should also say I've only heard one report from somebody who thinks perhaps their vault was compromised. Um, and they don't have any proof and

Paul Thurrott (02:29:24):
<crosstalk>, but they don't, they probably aren't protected.

Leo Laporte (02:29:26):
Well we don't know, probably not using yet, but there hasn't been, there haven't been a thousand people saying, oh my God, uh, my bank account was just hacked. And the only place the password stored was Laspas. Haven't heard that yet. So it may be, now what does, what does that mean? It means maybe the person who stole it is selling it on the dark web and hasn't found a buyer yet. And so it, but

Paul Thurrott (02:29:46):
It's stole.

Rich Campbell (02:29:47):
I don't know anybody would buy that. It's just so brute force. Right?

Leo Laporte (02:29:50):
Yeah. But if, you know, if you were into that kind of thing, could also the

Paul Thurrott (02:29:55):
I know I can't do a brute

Leo Laporte (02:29:56):
Force. That's right. All And the other point is that your name is in the clear. So if I say, I say, look, you know, I really want, uh, I don't know, um, Jennifer Lawrence's, uh, passwords. Yeah. Um, I can find her last pass vault and I can say that's the one I want to get into. Right. And, and put all that brute force on that one vault. Eh, maybe that's valuable to somebody. I don't know. Hmm. Uh, but last passage didn't even say when the vaults were exfiltrated, they aren't clear if it was all the vaults or if, was

Paul Thurrott (02:30:28):
It August? Was it November? November? Was it, I mean, this is what I'm talking about. Yeah. This is the trust thing.

Rich Campbell (02:30:33):
I, I still don't know that they know. Right.

Leo Laporte (02:30:34):
They may not know. Well,

Paul Thurrott (02:30:35):
That they may not know. Okay. Then maybe it is a technical issue because if they don't know, then that's a problem too. It's, it's been several, several months,

Rich Campbell (02:30:43):
You know? Yeah. And the question is, is it better to say we don't know than it is to say

Leo Laporte (02:30:47):
<laugh>. They're, in my opinion, what it looks like. And by the way, I love, I, they were a, a sponsor for years, uh mm-hmm. <affirmative>, we rec, I feel a little guilty cuz we, I think

Paul Thurrott (02:30:57):
No, INDed this

Leo Laporte (02:30:58):
Thing last pass, uh, Steve recommended it. We, we, we, they were studio sponsors in 2020. Um, but they've gone Thurrottugh a couple of ownership changes. Um Right. They're not the same people we dealt with.

Paul Thurrott (02:31:09):
Which, by the way, I think a lot of people don't know. Um, they're owned by go-to now.

Leo Laporte (02:31:13):
No, they're not. And did that

Paul Thurrott (02:31:15):
Oh, they're not.

Leo Laporte (02:31:16):
So they were bought by the log meeting that just happened Yeah. A while ago. They were bought by the LogMeIn folks who then sold it off last year to an equity, uh, capital company. Oh geez. Who has then, which is, by the way, the worst thing can happen to any, any company. Right. You, you know, as soon as the equity capital,

Paul Thurrott (02:31:32):
They also own the music of Fleetwood Mac or something. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:31:35):
What, what is, as soon as they buy that, they try to start making the debt back. Yeah. By selling pieces off and doing stuff, and perhaps even saying to the executives, uh, and so by the way, it's all new executives as well, uh, you know, really gotta cut the cost here, maybe, could you not? Salton hash does that, uh, does that make a difference? And, uh, <laugh>. And so, and then they spun it out. So it's now an independent company spun off of LogMeIn, which was bought by equity capital. So Huh. It's gone Thurrottugh different hands of last year. How

Rich Campbell (02:32:06):
How many skilled people were shaken off in those shuffles shackles. Exactly. Whose options were messed with, whose share buyouts were played with. Like all of those other things, like, you know what, I'm just gonna, so

Leo Laporte (02:32:17):
Many of us, some of the catch up

Rich Campbell (02:32:18):
Will never happen to Twitter. So

Leo Laporte (02:32:20):
<laugh>

Rich Campbell (02:32:21):
<laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:32:22):
You know, what's great about that is we now have a kind of like a, a transparent view of what happens to a company. Yeah. When, uh, equity capital mm-hmm. <affirmative> or somebody who's trying to make back the debt buys it, they take the Twitter paper out.

Rich Campbell (02:32:34):
The chain of dollars is amazing. Yeah. Right. Like LogMeIn got it. For a hundred million dollars. Yeah. And they, and then Francesco partners got it for 4 billion. Like, did it really become 40 times more valuable?

Leo Laporte (02:32:45):
Really? What can I, by the way, one of the reasons they got so much is because they advertised for several years. They've told us this, they said thank you. It really helped us up our price because of, uh, we helped build awareness. We certainly built the number of customers and, and the most valuable customers, which are enterprise customers. Now, I should

Rich Campbell (02:33:07):
Say, and I I'm actually totally misstating this, the 4 billion cash deal was to take LogMeIn private. Yes. Right. They bought out the stock Right. Of every, or everything that was in there. Right. But they they

Leo Laporte (02:33:17):
Took it private, the value, and now they've spun off just like

Rich Campbell (02:33:19):
Yeah. They spun it off.

Leo Laporte (02:33:20):
Yeah. That's it. So, um, but, uh, I, anyway, I apologize. Oh, <laugh>, sorry. Uh, is that your daughter now, Richard? So, uh, we got a full sweep here. All the family. Me, <laugh>.

Rich Campbell (02:33:33):
I know, you know, the big thing that I do, I have all of the ringers turned

Leo Laporte (02:33:37):
Off. Oh, that's smart.

Rich Campbell (02:33:38):
So they may be calling me. I

Leo Laporte (02:33:39):
Chose, I got my phone turned off the watch sometimes

Paul Thurrott (02:33:42):
Too, but it comes to my

Leo Laporte (02:33:43):
Watch. Yeah. The watch.

Paul Thurrott (02:33:44):
That's what I'm trying to figure. I put it on airplane mode. I still got a

Leo Laporte (02:33:47):
Text. Yeah. The watch, the watch is in, uh, work mode. Um, I don't know. I don't know. Um, these things are

Rich Campbell (02:33:57):
These icons,

Paul Thurrott (02:33:58):
One looks like Theater of Payne or something. What

Leo Laporte (02:34:00):
Is Yeah, that's the, that's for the theater mode. Yeah. <laugh>, you never looked at that. That's the theater mode. It tarens it so you don't blind people with your Apple watch in a theater. I,

Paul Thurrott (02:34:10):
It's not like a Motley Crew

Leo Laporte (02:34:11):
Thing. I can't can't, can't cry Apple watch in a crowded theater. I think that's the rule.

Rich Campbell (02:34:17):
I gotcha. So, I mean, here's my problem for getting off a last pass. The right thing for me to do is change all the passwords. If I change 'em in pa last pass, it doesn't affect the spouse. She just, she doesn't even know the passwords are changing this

Leo Laporte (02:34:26):
Work. Right. So that's easy

Rich Campbell (02:34:28):
If I go set up. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:34:30):
Well, it's a lot easier than moving

Rich Campbell (02:34:31):
Time. Or I go to one pass and I start moving stuff and which of course is, is gonna involve changing the password as well, which means now she breaks.

Leo Laporte (02:34:40):
Well, and I got a worse one for you, Richard. I, uh, was on last pass as is Lisa my wife. Uh, I left last pass, went to bit warden, and after a suitable period of time, a few months, I wisely deleted my last pass vault. What I didn't know is that deletes all the shared passwords that Lisa had. Right. So all of us, so they, so <laugh> all of a sudden her

Rich Campbell (02:35:02):
Internet

Leo Laporte (02:35:02):
Broke everything broke every shared password with my wife gone.

Rich Campbell (02:35:06):
Yeah. How I made my spouse angry.

Leo Laporte (02:35:09):
Yeah. So don't do that step. And you know, we have last pass, we still use last pass the enterprise version for the business. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. And we're gonna talk with our IT guy, but it's an even greater challenge. It's to move huge task.

Rich Campbell (02:35:21):
Huge.

Leo Laporte (02:35:22):
And is it really necessary? I'm not sure. Is

Rich Campbell (02:35:24):
It necessary? I I don't know the answer to it. I mean Yeah, you kn you know, the bigger thing I'm prouder of at the end of the, at the end of the year, we're, rather than dealing with this and getting my passwords changed, I shot off my exchange server by the end of the year. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:35:37):
Woo.

Rich Campbell (02:35:37):
Two decades, the last domain Wow. Moved into forward only Thurrottugh my DNS services and I closed those parts once and

Leo Laporte (02:35:47):
For all. You were running an exchange server

Rich Campbell (02:35:50):
Since 2010.

Leo Laporte (02:35:51):
Are you a masochist? <laugh>? Yes.

Rich Campbell (02:35:53):
Because you know what it is because deep down I hate myself. Yeah. <laugh> now that's, thank

Leo Laporte (02:35:58):
You. Thank you. Wow.

Rich Campbell (02:35:59):
But as we're but as the run as guy

Leo Laporte (02:36:01):
No, you had to That's good. You, you

Rich Campbell (02:36:03):
Were, I could look an exchange guy in the eye and say, listen, I feel your pain. I know

Leo Laporte (02:36:07):
What it's like. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:36:09):
Now I, I want it now. It's like, get to the clouds, save

Leo Laporte (02:36:12):
Yourself. How many exchange, uh, flaws were there this past year? Kept going

Rich Campbell (02:36:18):
For months, kept going, but, and they were big ones too. Yes. And in many cases they were, they were unfixable. They were like, you should close your ports <laugh>. Like, until we get this dealt way, it

Leo Laporte (02:36:28):
Sounds like it's fixable then <laugh> just close your ports. Yeah. Just turn it off. I mean,

Rich Campbell (02:36:31):
Does that turn the spen

Leo Laporte (02:36:32):
Into acceptable? What did you, what did you do with that, uh, mail? Did you move it somewhere else?

Rich Campbell (02:36:38):
Uh, I had, I've been migrating to M 365 for a while and shading accounts for friends and things bit by bit. I had, uh, one domain left that was really only used by a couple of people. And you're constantly dealing with that. And finally, just so you know, the answer is just, I'm just gonna mail forward to your Gmail and I'm shutting this down. Bye-bye. I'm keeping the domain, but, and, and to be honest, the VMs still running. The ports are closed.

Leo Laporte (02:37:03):
Yeah. Well that's, well, that's fine. Yeah. So the mail's still there. You still could access it if you had to, or

Rich Campbell (02:37:08):
It just said, if you send email to those accounts now it forwards to another box. So you can't send mail to it. In theory, it could send mail out. Uh, it's my, you know, the funny one of course is I own g.com. G h.com. I got it in like 1995. It's, there's no three letter dot coms left. And it is a portable D D O S attack. It gets six to 10 million spam a month. <laugh>, I can point that MX record at any IP address you want to screw up and it will screw it up. <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:37:39):
That's great. G g u h

Rich Campbell (02:37:42):
H.com. What

Leo Laporte (02:37:43):
Was, is there is that an initial is that

Rich Campbell (02:37:45):
It's just a sound you make when you fall in your face. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:37:48):
Exactly. What a great sign

Rich Campbell (02:37:49):
Tip over hit the ground. It's like food. That's right. Well, it's just a,

Leo Laporte (02:37:54):
Just a word. My, one of the guys who helped me start TWIT many years ago, uh, Dan owned, uh, hey, h e y hey.com. Wow. And he always said, this is, uh, my new retirement. Uh,

Rich Campbell (02:38:06):
Many offer I get, I get six figure offers on it routinely.

Leo Laporte (02:38:09):
Why don't you sell it?

Rich Campbell (02:38:11):
Because I got so many email addresses attached. Too many accounts attached to it. You made me, Hey, untangling that from myself. Like that cost me a hundred grand insanity.

Leo Laporte (02:38:21):
<laugh>. He sold it, eventually sold it to Jason Fried, uh, uh, they created a hay mail. I love that. And, uh, I think he, I hope he sold it. I hope, Dana, I hope you dangled and I hope you sold it for millions of bucks. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:38:34):
I I don't know if that's true. I guess there is a number there where it's like, it's worth

Leo Laporte (02:38:38):
It was a big number. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, uh, fried said it was a eye watering number, so I'm gum

Rich Campbell (02:38:44):
Gun mail could be something,

Leo Laporte (02:38:46):
You know, gum mail,

Rich Campbell (02:38:47):
<laugh>. Yeah. But over the years, I've literally different services I've used for proxying that, where I've called them and said, listen, you need to understand. And they're like, let's, let's just do it. I'm like, okay, I'm gonna move it over. And then the guy's watching his machine and just like, oh my God. It's millions.

Leo Laporte (02:39:04):
That's hysterical.

Rich Campbell (02:39:06):
Why

Leo Laporte (02:39:07):
Would, is it because people want that three letter domain they're trying to steal?

Rich Campbell (02:39:09):
No, cuz it's so old. It's on every list. Oh, you've been around for so long. It's never been back from the internet directory was a paper book.

Leo Laporte (02:39:18):
Yes. That's why I generally don't, uh, tell people my email addresses cuz I don't want that to happen.

Rich Campbell (02:39:24):
No, and, and you know, you're exactly right. And, and for better or worse, like I'm sure you're in your boat too, where it's like, hey, a lot of people who listen to the show email me periodically, right? Yeah. Like,

Leo Laporte (02:39:33):
It's Right. You want to have an, you're

Rich Campbell (02:39:34):
An email, you're part of their lives. Yeah. For better or worse. And so I don't hide my email address. This is not that.

Leo Laporte (02:39:39):
I I don't hide it. Right. I bury it. Yeah. And I figure if you want me bad enough, you'll figure it out.

Rich Campbell (02:39:45):
Yeah. And I, and, and I've got good filters. There's email addresses that go into separate boxes that I only on Sundays. Oh yes. Right. Like, I mean,

Leo Laporte (02:39:52):
You gotta do I do have a, uh, domain that I is my primary, uh, well's not primary. It's my, my, it's near and dear to my heart. That's three letters, two letters. Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. So that is a nice short

Rich Campbell (02:40:04):
Short

Leo Laporte (02:40:04):
Mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. I like that. Love it. I use that one a lot.

Rich Campbell (02:40:07):
Uh, I feel very, I'm very happy about being exchange list.

Leo Laporte (02:40:11):
Yes, I bet you are. Yes. Paul, have you decided whether you're gonna dump last pass or No,

Paul Thurrott (02:40:17):
I, so I haven't been actively using it. I still have an account. My wife is actually Oh, that's good. Be using it. She's, um, I just, I I think it's, you know, it's something we have to talk about <laugh>. You know, I, I think I, I understand the argument in either direction.

Leo Laporte (02:40:30):
Lisa wants to move, understands how hard that's gonna be.

Paul Thurrott (02:40:35):
Yep. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:40:36):
Um, and I said, I'll help you. We'll, you know, we'll get it done. It's the good news'.

Rich Campbell (02:40:40):
Easy. I would do it.

Leo Laporte (02:40:41):
It's easy to move the con the data, you know, it's a, it's an export from LastPass and important to whatever you

Paul Thurrott (02:40:48):
Yeah. It's probably the tiniest, you know, little, that's

Leo Laporte (02:40:50):
The simplest part

Paul Thurrott (02:40:50):
V file or

Leo Laporte (02:40:51):
Whatever. Yeah. It's a CSV file. Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (02:40:53):
Yeah. It's fairly tiny.

Rich Campbell (02:40:54):
But this, this, that's not the scary part. The scary part is you're gonna uninstall last pass from your device and you're going to install the new thing on your

Paul Thurrott (02:41:02):
Device. Device. Don't

Rich Campbell (02:41:03):
Device both of them on their list. Once

Paul Thurrott (02:41:05):
<laugh>, you have to do this everywhere.

Leo Laporte (02:41:07):
No, I, for a long time had both last pass and, and bit warden running because I wanted a smooth transition. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (02:41:14):
Interesting.

Rich Campbell (02:41:14):
To a side by side.

Leo Laporte (02:41:15):
Side by side.

Paul Thurrott (02:41:16):
Actually, if you're fine, I know on iOS you can have two or more associated ones have autofill.

Leo Laporte (02:41:21):
I use Apple's password manager auto fill as well as bit word.

Paul Thurrott (02:41:25):
That's right. You can choose at the time of password insertion.

Leo Laporte (02:41:28):
Right. So you can do that. And I did that cause I thought it was prudent. And for, I think I probably kept that last pass account for a, maybe as much as a year before. Wow. Interesting. Wow. There was, the hard thing was go, okay,

Rich Campbell (02:41:37):
But how, what happened went do autofill. If you have two of them,

Leo Laporte (02:41:40):
Uh, you choose, you choose, you choose, you choose. It's not, it's not hard to do that. Yeah. Um, and I think it was prudent. It was absolutely prudent to, uh, keep them both just in case. But at one

Rich Campbell (02:41:51):
Point it could be weeks of talking points as we

Leo Laporte (02:41:53):
Do this. Oh, it has been various

Rich Campbell (02:41:55):
Of screening.

Paul Thurrott (02:41:57):
I think at the very least, this should be an op, like I said, an opportunity for people to at least go look at their passwords and maybe ch you know, change the most important one. Refresh at the very least, banks, uh, anything that has your credit card information, whatever, you know, merchants, et

Leo Laporte (02:42:10):
Cetera. Yeah. I gotta go the septic tank guys.

Rich Campbell (02:42:12):
I'm gonna start the,

Leo Laporte (02:42:13):
I more important than that, I gotta pump the septic tank. Uh, yeah, you go, it's kind of related.

Paul Thurrott (02:42:18):
Is that what we're calling ending the show now?

Leo Laporte (02:42:20):
Thetic, same time to pump the septic tank,

Paul Thurrott (02:42:23):
If you know what I mean.

Leo Laporte (02:42:24):
You know what I mean? Nudge, nudge, <laugh>, uh, your app pick of the week, Paul is kind of contrary to what you were just talking about, but okay, I'm gonna go with it. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (02:42:32):
Yep. So I have been paying for an Xbox, uh, game pass Ultimate subscription for a long time and it's expensive. Yes. And the truth

Leo Laporte (02:42:43):
Is, 15 bucks a month pay attention.

Paul Thurrott (02:42:45):
Yeah. I dunno if you pay attention to my video gaming escapades, but I, it's only one can just play one game.

Leo Laporte (02:42:50):
There is, but one. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:42:51):
And that game is not on Xbox Game Pass. Although I'm hoping it will be <laugh>. So

Leo Laporte (02:42:55):
Were you thinking maybe you'd find another game? Like, oh, maybe it's just that I haven't,

Paul Thurrott (02:42:59):
I always think that I would, you know. Yeah, me too.

Leo Laporte (02:43:01):
I never do, never do.

Paul Thurrott (02:43:02):
And here's how I really, it is the thing. Maybe that should have been the clue. I haven't the new Call of Duty game I play. So the previous three games I did not play. I tried to play each of them. I bought each of them and I just, they were awful. Like the online experiences were so terrible. So for the past three years, or plus I have been playing a four or five year old Call of Duty game, not the new one. Right. Oh. Oh wow. I didn't know that. Maybe that should have been the hint that I don't need Game Pass <laugh>, you know, like, like confronted by the fact that I don't like the new Call of Duty. I will instead play another Call of Duty <laugh>. Anyway, the point is, none of those games are on Game Pass. So, you know, game or, um, Xbox Live Gold is 60 bucks a year.

(02:43:41):
Uh, game Pass Ultimate is like $180 a year. I mean probably maybe 150 if you bought it in two six months chunks or whatever. But it's significantly more expensive. So, uh, I guess the point of this is I'm gonna do what's right for me, <laugh>. And that's what everyone should do. Right? I mean, so I'm not saying everyone should quit Game Pass. I think Game Pass is a great value. It's just not the way I game. You know, so it doesn't really make sense for me. I like the idea of it. Uh, but it, it's not right for me.

Leo Laporte (02:44:11):
Okay. Dump it. Awesome. Yeah. Dump Last Pass. And That's

Paul Thurrott (02:44:16):
Right. And pass this week. It's, it's not so much pitch as

Rich Campbell (02:44:19):
It is. Tricks.

Leo Laporte (02:44:20):
Tricks. Finally, I've been waiting for this. I'm very excited. Uh, Richard Campbell, uh, as some of you may know, is a, uh, guru. He's my personal, uh, guru, uh, brown liquors.

Paul Thurrott (02:44:33):
Yeah, me too.

Leo Laporte (02:44:34):
Yeah. I've learned everything I know from Richard. And

Rich Campbell (02:44:37):
He is, I've introduced you to a few.

Leo Laporte (02:44:39):
Yes. I had a little angels envy over the, uh, holidays, actually. Very nice. It's quite good.

Rich Campbell (02:44:43):
Nice. Very drinkable. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:44:45):
Drinkable. That's a good word for it. It's, it's like your daily driver, so to speak.

Rich Campbell (02:44:49):
Totally. And, and if you want and if you want to drink it on its own Right. It's not, I wouldn't blend.

Leo Laporte (02:44:54):
No, no, no, no. I put it on a big ball of ice and

Rich Campbell (02:44:57):
Slur paint. Yeah, that's fine. Let's legit. Right. Like I, I, I, that's, you know, and at Maker's Mark, I'll drink that way occasionally, but typically made into, you know, a Manhattan or an old fashioned,

Paul Thurrott (02:45:06):
So Yeah. I was gonna say cocktail. That's a cocktail drink.

Rich Campbell (02:45:08):
It's cocktail cocktail. Although a nicer cocktail bourbon. Yeah. And we're all bourbons here cuz I, I got 'em New bourbon for Christmas that, uh, mysteriously has vanished at this point. Oh. Uh, and it's Christmas.

Paul Thurrott (02:45:20):
Christmas was only a week ago, Richard.

Leo Laporte (02:45:21):
What

Rich Campbell (02:45:21):
Happened? Only Christmas was only a week ago. <laugh>, uh, which is the, from the Orphan Barrel Distillery. So this is an interesting group because they don't do their own distilling. The, the, these folks are out of, of Tennessee. And for many years now, they clearly have relationships with a lot of distilleries because they buy old barrels from different distillers. I like you. And you know, normally bourbons, you don't find them much more than five or six years old. And generally they don't mention how old they are when they're that class. Like most Maker's Mark is five, five and a half years. That's about it. Uh, you do see the occasional that the Weller twelves and some eighteens and so forth, but many of the orphan barrels are substantially older than them. Uh, and I still have the, the other problem of course is they buying these barrels. They're combining them and doing their own bottling. And when those barrels are gone, they're gone. Hence the name Orphan Barrel. So I have one barter house 20 left that I bought several years ago. I don't know what is going to make me open it, because once I do open it, it won't last,

Leo Laporte (02:46:26):
But it's

Rich Campbell (02:46:28):
Probably the last one. And, and they've make up, they've have a bunch of different whiskeys very much made the same way. And I've had many of them. They had forged oak, uh, certainly the barter house, a few of the different rhetorics, um, which they have, they, they've clearly bought enough barrels of that, that they're actually only bottling a certain amount each year. So they started with a 20, and now they have a 21, I think they're up to 25 now. But this particular one that I got this Christmas is a bottle, uh, uh, called Fable and Folley. And it's, uh, marked as a 14, although it is actually a blend of the remains, uh, the, the leftover barrels that they made forged oak and barter house and rhetoric from. So, and had an interesting character. You know, we talk in bourbon, we talk about spiciness, and that's typically because of rye. Um, all bourbons are made with typically at least three grains. Um, primarily corn. The FDA requirements for bourbon is 51% corn. And because corn doesn't fully get consumed properly by yeast, it'll make methanol, which will make you go blind. And that's not a feature of people with corn bourn. That's not No, that's what my friend makes typically. And five to 10% barley to the blended because it provides the amylase to properly digest the corn. And so they're called the

Leo Laporte (02:47:47):
Did not know that. That's quite

Rich Campbell (02:47:48):
Interesting. That's how they work together. Right. Whereas opposed to Scottish whiskey where it's purely barley and I and Irish whiskey where anything goes <laugh>, uh,

Leo Laporte (02:47:57):
But the f who requires corn in your bourbon,

Rich Campbell (02:48:01):
So the to be declared bourbon, right. If you're gonna follow the Appalachian rules to be allowed to be used, to use the term bourbon, you need to have 51%. Who

Leo Laporte (02:48:10):
Sets the

Rich Campbell (02:48:12):
Kentucky, the fda.

Leo Laporte (02:48:13):
Why would the FDA require something that's potentially well, poison

Rich Campbell (02:48:17):
The pain of whiskeys? The, the distilleries asked for it, right? Yeah. They didn't want other people making, making, uh, alcohol, calling it bourbon when it wasn't bourbon. Right. Yeah. And the drive for America to use corn in their liquors was that they had a lot of corn, which is turned to be the dry for most alcohol. It's

Leo Laporte (02:48:33):
The corn manufacturers again. Exactly. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:48:36):
So that middle grain between the corn and the barley is kind of the defining aspect of any bourbon. Uh, and the majority of them use rye. And rye tends to have a spicier character to it. But where you typically find very mellow bourbons is when they don't use rice, when they use wheat. And for example, in maker's markets, it's red winter wheat. Um, same is, uh, also true for, um, one of the, uh, uh, uh, name jumped outta my head. Head. There's a few of them. And that's what I think makes this fa f and folley interesting is because they, some of the barrels were ride and some of them were wheated. And so you get this little spice note up front and then it chills out. It doesn't get as hot. Uh, it's a, it's an interesting combination. Uh, and so, uh, very special bottling. And, and I don't know how long they're gonna be around, uh, which typical of, uh, orphan barrel. So while you can find it, you should grab it reasonably

Leo Laporte (02:49:35):
Close. So Orphan Barrel just finds these barrels lying around and

Rich Campbell (02:49:39):
Exactly. And, and this is a big business. This has been going on in Scotland for many, many years. Gordon McFail and the connoisseurs, like these are all organizations do that. It's also common for wine in France that there are wine bottlers that buy barrels from other wineries. Yeah. Right. Uh, and so to me, it seems like Orphan Barrel was one of the first to do it for American Bourbon. Uh, and have made some lovely things in the process. I wanted

Leo Laporte (02:50:03):
To, and I love the bottle. Uh,

Rich Campbell (02:50:06):
They have a lot of fun with their bottles.

Leo Laporte (02:50:07):
It's really, it's really pretty. So these are all, uh, different, uh,

Rich Campbell (02:50:13):
Liquors, orphan barrels. Orphan barrels. Yeah. They're all bourbon Ely. Think of, um, they've come from a few different, Rick Ho Rick House is basically where you store barrels for aging. Yeah. Yeah. Do

Paul Thurrott (02:50:25):
You, what do you, uh, do you drink straight up rise? Like what do you think of rice compared to bourbons?

Rich Campbell (02:50:29):
They're actually fairly hard to find because rye is expensive. Right. Wheat is inexpensive. Corn is inexpensive because we've now tuned their growth to increase their density so

Leo Laporte (02:50:41):
Much. Right?

Rich Campbell (02:50:41):
Yeah. Yeah. Like why, why, you know, why, why did we mostly find wheat and, and corn? Because we've learned to grow a lot of them per acre where barley and, and, uh, and rye don't grow. Well, there are a few I have had them. They're not great. Yeah. Uh, they, they, they, they're very strong. They come across very harshly, uh, as are most single vintage, you know, think about it from the wine perspective. A single vintage wine, a single grape wine versus a blend. And the reality is, for the most part in whiskeys, they're all blends.

Paul Thurrott (02:51:11):
So, I mean, I think the big rye that's up in the world is probably like, uh, bullet rye, you know, compared to say bullet bourbon.

Rich Campbell (02:51:18):
I mean, it except bullet rye just has a higher component of rye. It's still mostly corn.

Paul Thurrott (02:51:22):
It's still mostly

Leo Laporte (02:51:23):
Okay. And isn't bullet one of those, um, whiskeys that looks, uh, fancy and fun, but is really made by one giant factory somewhere in the big,

Rich Campbell (02:51:32):
It's from the Frank, that's from

Paul Thurrott (02:51:34):
The, well, I was using it as a, an example of a

Leo Laporte (02:51:35):
Widely Yeah. I stand of awry. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:51:37):
They, I didn't, their company pretty sure issues. They,

Rich Campbell (02:51:40):
They're out of, um, Frankfurt,

Leo Laporte (02:51:43):
Kentucky, Frank Kentucky. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. They're

Rich Campbell (02:51:45):
Kentucky Bourbon. And they, and so there's a massive distillery there that makes a huge array of different, that's

Leo Laporte (02:51:50):
The thing to, to know. I mean, they make so many different ones and you think, oh, I'm getting, you know,

Paul Thurrott (02:51:54):
Yeah. Pappy Van Corn Husker and it's, you know, handmade, you know, something. It's like, not not exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:52:00):
There's a list somewhere I've read of.

Rich Campbell (02:52:02):
Yeah. And, and the same comes down with, with Scottish whiskeys where Diagio owns Yeah. Over half of all the distilleries in

Leo Laporte (02:52:08):
It's true in all liquors, you

Rich Campbell (02:52:10):
Know, inevitably, because the business of selling alcohol worldwide is expensive. Right. And

Leo Laporte (02:52:15):
So, and there are economies scale. If you, uh, you know, you can have a big factory, it's gonna always be cheaper. Mm-hmm.

Rich Campbell (02:52:22):
<affirmative>.

Leo Laporte (02:52:23):
Uh, very good. Well, I am now off to order some orphan barrel <laugh>. You think fa fol and fables the best. I see some others.

Rich Campbell (02:52:31):
I you may, you know what? None of them are bad. Full stop. What, what can you find? Yeah. Um, which you should be able to find the, uh, the falling and fable right now.

Leo Laporte (02:52:42):
Uh, and and I'll have one more question cause we don't get a chance to ask Richard these booze questions as often as I'd like <laugh>, folley and fables. 14 year. Yeah. But they have a 25 and a 20 year. Other, other Sure. Is older better. Like wine isn't always better when it's

Rich Campbell (02:52:58):
Older. Yeah. Like wine depends. Depends. Um, one of the things, and I'm, I'm not sure if this is true in the FDA rules for bourbon. It's certainly true for Scott, uh, for Scottish whiskey, which is that the youngest thing that goes in the bottle is the year you're allowed to u use. So often there are older things also in the bottle. You're just not allowed to say that.

Leo Laporte (02:53:17):
Oh.

Rich Campbell (02:53:18):
Um, and so it's typically that's what's youngest in the bottle

Leo Laporte (02:53:21):
Because these are blends. All of them are blends.

Rich Campbell (02:53:22):
Yeah. Oh, this is the truth, right. They're all blinds. Right. They're either a blend of grains, they're inevitably a blend of barrels. Even if those barrels all came from the same year, it's multiple barrels. Right. You a given barrel's gonna only hold two to 300 bottles of, of

Leo Laporte (02:53:38):
Food. But you do see single barrel, you know, bourbons or single barrels, scotches, are those really single barrel or that's just,

Rich Campbell (02:53:45):
Some of them are okay. And some of them are from a given casking. Like you pull they play with language. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:53:51):
Yeah. That's close though. You know, it's all in the same place. Typically

Rich Campbell (02:53:54):
A true single barrel or single cask will have a number on it. Right. Because it'll be one of 300 which

Leo Laporte (02:54:00):
Barrel? Yeah.

Rich Campbell (02:54:00):
Yeah. Well it'll Which bottle

Leo Laporte (02:54:03):
From that barrel. Yeah,

Rich Campbell (02:54:04):
Yeah, yeah. From that given barrel. And, and, and often the funny part is they're often priced accordingly if they're export. I typically buy single casks in Scotland. Yeah. Because they're not labeled for export. So there's quite inexpensive. Yeah. Uh, if you, but you have to go to get them. But she's not a,

Leo Laporte (02:54:24):
We have a friend. Not

Rich Campbell (02:54:25):
A terrible problem. You

Leo Laporte (02:54:26):
Have a friend who was a special suitcase <laugh> for going to Scotland or Ireland buying whiskey and

Rich Campbell (02:54:32):
Bringing it in. That that would be me. I have one of those. Right. So I have a, I have a, I have a bag that will comfortably carry eight bottle. Yes. Which then I, and then, and the order's gotten to know me. Molly, you're only allowed to bring in one bottle. Undeclared. You have to declare it doesn't mean they're gonna charge you for them. All you have to do is convince them that you're not going to sell them. It's

Leo Laporte (02:54:50):
Just for me.

Rich Campbell (02:54:51):
It's

Leo Laporte (02:54:52):
For me. They take one look at you and they go, yeah,

Rich Campbell (02:54:53):
I'm a click. Yeah. Get in there. Well, there's a couple of things you can do that make it easy. One is don't have eight of the same bottle. Right? No. Not that they're all different matters. Yeah. But I've also learned, be excited to show them what's in your bag, which generally is good for borders, for a full stop. Like, wait, that's great. Till you see what I have in this bag. And then tell a story about, I have something to clear.

Leo Laporte (02:55:12):
Look at this. Because you really know, you really care.

Rich Campbell (02:55:14):
I really know. And I'm excited about it. Yeah. I'm an enthusiast. Cuz by the second story, they're like, please stop. And Joel away <laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (02:55:23):
I should have done that when I got cut, smuggling him on into the United States.

Leo Laporte (02:55:27):
Red Con five says, we got Call of Duty here and Call of Duty free. So, uh, there you go. Two versions of the same game. Richard is always a pleasure to have you on. Thank you for joining us. Run as radio, uh, and, uh, that's rens radio.com and uh, of course, uh, dot net rocks. But if you go to run radio, can you find it all?

Rich Campbell (02:55:51):
Oh, it's all there. It's

Leo Laporte (02:55:52):
All there. Write it down at Rich

Rich Campbell (02:55:54):
Campbell. And this week's show is, yeah, at Rich Campbell's, the Twitter handle. This week's show is Martina gra talking about, uh, M 365 governance.

Leo Laporte (02:56:03):
You know, those are the topics we oughta do more of. Paul, I just,

Paul Thurrott (02:56:06):
Leo, I I think we should table that and, um, we could discuss it at the next meeting.

Leo Laporte (02:56:11):
Okay. <laugh> <laugh>. Well, Thurrottt is it Thurrottt.com. T H U R O R R O. Double good. There's doubles in all of it. T H U R r O double good.com. His new book, uh, the Field Guide to Win is 11, which includes the field guide to win as 10. It's, uh, the turducken of computer books, uh, is available@leanpub.com. And like a turducken, you can cut it with your bare hands. Uh, no, I don't think so. Actually, it's probably, if you, if you had it in paper, it'd be pretty darn thick. You, you probably, you probably couldn't. Um, Paul, have a wonderful week, Richard. Have a wonderful week. We will, uh, see at least Paul back here, right here next week for Windows Weekly. We do it 11:00 AM Pacific on a Wednesday. That's 2:00 PM Eastern Time, 1900 utc. You can watch us do it live at live dot twit tv.

(02:57:09):
There's also an audio stream there. You could chat with us at irc twi tv or in the Club Twit Discord if you're a club member after the fact on demand versions of this show available@twit.tv slash ww. Paul also posted, I never mentioned this, but Paul also kindly posteds it, uh, on his website Thurrottughout.com, along with his, uh, first Ring daily show that he does with Brad Sams every day. So, uh, that's a good source as well. You know, what the best, and there's a YouTube channel of course, but the best thing to do would be find it in your favorite podcast player. Subscribe that way. You get it automatically. You're supporting the, uh, I think very important ecosystem of free independent r s s based podcasting. Uh, yeah, you can listen to us on Spotify. Sure. But, uh, but, but, but subscribe in your favorite r s s client in your, uh, podcast client. And, uh, that'll make everybody feel like they're, they're doing a good thing. Thanks Richard. Thanks Paul. Thanks everybody for joining us.