Windows Weekly Episode 828 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/Paul (00:00:00):
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Throt here. Richard Campbell's here will have their reaction to Google's AI announcements. We'll also talk about Patch Tuesday. Windows 11 gets a feature Microsoft was awfully quiet about, says Paul Throt and the eu. It looks like they're gonna prove the Activision Blizzard acquisition. Can the Brits be far behind all of that coming up? And a lot more? Next with Windows Weekly podcasts you love

TWiT Intro (00:00:33):
From people you trust. This is twi.

Leo/Paul (00:00:42):
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Throt and Richard Campbell. Episode 828 Recorded Wednesday, May 10th, 2023 by Manon Windows Weekly is brought to you by Lenovo, orchestrated by the experts at C D W to help transform your organization with Lenovo ThinkPads, equipped with the Intel Evo platform for effortless connectivity and collaboration from anywhere. Learn more at cdw.com/lenovo client. And by Collide, collide is a device trust solution that ensures that if a device isn't secure, it can't access your apps, it's zero trust For Okta. Visit collide.com/www and book a demo today and buy a Ws Insiders podcast. Search for AWS Insiders in your podcast player, or visit cloud fix.ora.com/podcast. We'll also include the link in the show notes. And thanks to AWS Insiders for their support. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft. Yeah, we're starting a little late because there was a lot of non-new from Google, but we are here now Paul thero thero.com. He's rested tan, relaxed, ready to run thero dot com's, his website, lean pub.com for the books. Richard Campbell's in the Netherlands. He's he's joining us from Lock Mahaka, some planet in the, the Tatta Galaxy. There you go. What is it? Almar

Rich Campbell (00:02:19):
Almar. Yes.

Leo/Paul (00:02:21):
Amar. And you're, you're there for a conference. What are you, what are you doing?

Rich Campbell (00:02:26):
I'm visiting friends next week I'll be in Antwerp for the conference.

Leo/Paul (00:02:29):
Oh, nice. Pick up some jewels for me. Will you?

Rich Campbell (00:02:32):
I'll do what we can do. Yeah. Little train ride.

Leo/Paul (00:02:35):
Yeah. Yeah. Actually, this looks just like your house. They have cute blue and yellow trains you can take. Yeah, it'd be nice. Yeah,

Rich Campbell (00:02:41):
That'd be great. Be all.

Leo/Paul (00:02:42):
It'd be great. We are gonna talk about let's start off with Windows 11 kids. Although before we go, I, I, I kind of, I know you must have taken a nap during that Google io keynote, Paul, cuz usually I expect snarky tweets. Yeah. And I saw nothing. Yep. So just give me a little snark. Well, yeah. Just a, a palette content. Honest. No, actually I have to say honestly, compared to their previous AI nonsense, I thought this one came off pretty well. They were clearly, I mean, a lot of the keynote to me was their response to Microsoft on AI and their response to Apple on Android. And I, I guess the position I expect, kind of expect them to take, which is Microsoft's moving way too fast. We're gonna be the responsible AI company. There's a lot of sentences that could have been ended unlike Microsoft.

(00:03:41):
Yeah, exactly. Right. Well, exactly. And that's true. You know, I, these events, I I I go back and rewatch and rewatch these. I, this is common for me. I did watch the whole thing. I did almost fall asleep in the AI part of it, but that's cuz I was laying on a bed. That was maybe a stupid decision on my part. But <laugh>, it went on longer than I thought it was going to. It was very long, longer than anybody thought. And that's why we're starting an hour and a half late on the show, and I apologize. Yeah. When they finally got to devices at like 25 of three or whatever, and I was like, you know, this is, this is not going well. But they did 80, 80 minutes announcing at least Yeah. Seven new names for the same product, the same ai.

(00:04:25):
I know. Yeah. That's true product. Yep. So, and by, I will, I'll say this, I, I was I got, I was briefed on a bunch of the developer announcements that are gonna occur later in this hour and, and later in this day. Yeah. And there's, there's a lot more going on than just the AI stuff. Good. So there's some interesting stuff, but flutter news, everyone like Yep. Yep. That kinda thing. Flutter jet pack, compose wear os all kinds of stuff. Yeah. But yeah, I, I look forward to this kind of thing. I really like the developer shows. I think Google IO and Microsoft builds kind of track each other pretty well. They're both my favorite shows. Events that these guys do, you know, build's coming up in a month. Right. Build is coming up two weeks in a few weeks.

(00:05:11):
Yeah. Yeah. A couple weeks. Should we do unfortunately it's Tuesday at 11, which is normally when we do Mac Break weekly. But should we Right, right. Reorganize a schedule and cover that keynote. Let me, it'll be worth it. Let me talk to you offline about that. Okay. <laugh>. And we'll, we'll talk in private. Yeah. I will get a briefing from a source, we'll, a reliable source close to Microsoft knowledge of <laugh> of the situation. Yes. Yeah. Let's see, let's see how, let's see what happens. Okay, <laugh>. Yeah. I don't, I don't, I I don't, you know, there's some bills I would, I wish we'd done it and didn't. And then some bills we did it and I wish we hadn't. Yeah. so I don't know which one it's gonna on that I'll just say build is is possible. I can't say, I don't know.

(00:05:57):
We'll see. Say nothing. We'll talk in private. Yeah. All right. Enough of that. Enough fumbling around. Let's talk about Windows. It's there was a patch Tuesday. Yeah. So we just said nothing about Google. Let's say nothing about Patch Tuesday. <Laugh> <laugh>, is there nothing to say? No, there is something to say. So we've been talking about this notion of preview updates coming two weeks before the Patch Tuesday. Right? So two weeks ago yesterday, we got the preview version of that update that you installed on the show where it installs a little toggle button in Windows update that says something to the tune of, Hey, click this if you wanna get updates as quickly as possible. And at the time of that preview update, they, they kind of documented it. They have a, there's a page up in Microsoft Knowledge Base or Microsoft Support Now they kind of explained what it was and they're like, okay, you know, like, whatever.

(00:06:48):
Like, I wanna make sure I get updates as quick as possible. There's nothing wrong with that. But then what you find out is that it's actually part of this thing called controlled feature rollout C ffr, which is that I believe we talked about last week. And this is Microsoft's program to push non-tested feature updates to mainstream users in Windows 11 stable, as I call it. They're bypassing the Windows Insider of program. And, and this opens up a whole kind of can of worms in, in a debate. And the big example we have of a, of A C F R is that search pill that we always talk about. And the search pill, I, I can't say that it introduced any reliability issues into Windows, but it was unexpected. It was unannounced. They never even said they were doing it. It just appeared one day on some computers, but not others. And we didn't know why. I remember it was kind of mysterious. It did introduce a functional regression, which, you know, I think is a problem, frankly. And this is the all

Rich Campbell (00:07:41):
Of Windows 11.

Leo/Paul (00:07:43):
What's that?

Rich Campbell (00:07:44):
Wasn't that all of Windows 11?

Leo/Paul (00:07:45):
Yes. Well, it was very much in keeping with the yeah. The, now you said before the show, Richard, you had four blue screens in a row. Was that Yeah. The regression?

Rich Campbell (00:07:54):
No, that was another else that was a third party piece of software that

Leo/Paul (00:07:57):
Broke stuff. No, this is, this was a small thing. So I guess you know, for right now all we can do is kind of wonder what forum future CFRs will take. Right. And I can't, I don't believe if the

Rich Campbell (00:08:10):
Search pill was the original experiment Yeah. That they're now gonna follow more policy around this. Like they Yep. It did seem like they were winging that one. And I, I, hopefully that

Leo/Paul (00:08:20):
Totally makes sense. They're winging it. So Microsoft describes this in a more formal fashion than winging it, but I think the, the, the net result is the same. I think what you've just said is completely accurate. Right. The, it's like winging it. You know, wh when, when a new feature update comes out every year, capital F, capital U, which is beautiful you know, Microsoft does a controlled rollout of that thing, right? They, they have known good configurations that should have good results. They roll it out to those PC first, right? Yeah. And then they expand the pool over time. And I don't know the exact timing, but let's say sometime around March-ish this year which is about five months after Windows 1122 H two came out, they announced this thing is now broadly available. In other words, there are no blockers left to prevent anyone with a compatible PC from getting this.

(00:09:10):
And that's about how long that takes. But a feature update, a big feature update, an actual annual update has all kinds of things going on. It's not a little feature in the task bar or wherever else in the system. It's a, it's a big thing. So the notion that these little features will be rolled out using similar methodology is sort of fanciful. Right. Because there's nothing about a particular person's configuration that will make this feature work or not work better than someone else's computer. Right. It's just a little feature of the O os It's a small thing. So

Rich Campbell (00:09:42):
Then you're also truth here is that the update mechanism is being used for a lot of stuff.

Leo/Paul (00:09:47):
Yes. Like, yes,

Rich Campbell (00:09:48):
We, we do need security patches e early at all.

Leo/Paul (00:09:51):
Yeah. It's

Rich Campbell (00:09:52):
Hard to get only those a not search pill,

Leo/Paul (00:09:57):
It's impossible, is what it is. Right. That's the, that's the problem. In fact, Microsoft's language on this is kind of interesting because when they, when they announced the new schedule for preview update, that's two weeks between one patch Tuesday and the next, they referred to those patch Tuesday, these week B updates as mandatory. Right? Right. There is no way to avoid it. This is a, it's a non-security update, but it is mandatory, right? Yeah. You can't consume of course.

Rich Campbell (00:10:23):
Right. Exactly. Over it land. We have the new auto patch, which you can actually set automation levels on whether or not these patches should be included automatically. Those ones shouldn't. Yeah. Actually label everything correctly.

Leo/Paul (00:10:37):
<Laugh>, I wouldn't hope for that, but Yeah. Oh yeah. <Laugh>, but yeah. Okay. I, I, I guess the debate here is over whether there will ever be consumer harm from this or what is the harm, you know, and I think the greatest harm you can do as a platform maker is to release unannounced and unwanted and unbidden and without any way to prevent it changes to a system on normal people by what I, you know, are non-technical people. I, I these are individuals like my wife or my mother or my brother or, you know, friends I have who are not technical, who are out in the world and they're not actively involved in technology, don't care about it. They're not actively updating their computer, but they walk in one day and their computer has rebooted because that's what mandatory means. It's gonna happen. Right.

Rich Campbell (00:11:22):
And, and when they get fired up, their cheese is moved.

Leo/Paul (00:11:26):
Exactly. Yep. Yeah. Now, and in tactical circles we have this debate over whether, you know, is there any harm? And it's like, well, you know, maybe not for us. Right? We know how to work around problems. We know how to fix things. Yeah. but I'm, I'm not, I'm not complaining. For me, I'm, I'm concerned for, you know, the, the, the other 99% <laugh>. Right? The, it's not your

Rich Campbell (00:11:47):
Machine, it's all the phone calls you're about to

Leo/Paul (00:11:48):
Get. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, I, I do have that one example where I, in this case, I was writing a book about Windows 11, and I'm like, this is really strange. This thing no one has ever announced or tested has started appearing on some of my computers, but not others. You know? Yeah. So there's that, that's the the willy-nilly aspect of this. Anyway, this is now official. So a couple of months they've been a applied willy-nilly is what you're saying. Yeah. The, you, you kind of referenced the notion that the search bill was maybe the first implementation of the CFR thing. And I think you're right. But I, there's clearly, after the first year of Windows 11, i I, I, it's clear to me now that Microsoft internally has said, you know, we're not updating this thing fast enough. There were a bunch of things we needed to do to fix Windows.

(00:12:35):
11 and a year went by and we did a few things. We need to have a better system. Yeah. And I think they looked at different ways of doing that. And what they've arrived at is this preview update system combined with cfr, cuz it's tied to C ffr, and then they're gonna do these smaller things. So there's like, you know, we have feature updates, capital F capital, we have moments which are a collection of features, but I think we're gonna have individual features just popping in every month. I think that's gonna be the way it is, you know, so it's okay. I mean, I'm not, I don't mean to suggest it's well, I actually, maybe I do. I, we, I, I guess we don't know. So we'll see. So two weeks from now, we'll see. We'll see how they abuse it. Yeah. I mean, it's always, the question is some PM taking advantage of a mechanism to get their feature out outside of normal channels.

(00:13:22):
The other thing is we'll see how they, like, how they do it. So, so far the C F R usage we've seen, so to speak, has been stuff they've never really tested. Right. So it's just appeared out of, you know, out of thin air it seems. Right? Hmm. There is this formal process with the windows Insider program. We have a, a long list of essentially uninteresting updates that have appeared across all of the channels of the Windows Insider program over the past week. It's possible that one or two, or some number of those features may appear next month, the month after that as a C F R. Like, they, maybe, maybe they will pluck individual features and they will change the way they do things. But so far it's been untested features. And the famous one, the, the search pill of course, like I said, kind came with that functional regression.

(00:14:10):
And this is the type of thing that happens when you don't test something <laugh>, you know, like I don't and by the way, it's not like they fixed it a month later. The search pill wasn't fixed until March Right. When they released the new version of took a wild search party. Yeah. Yep. So again, no one, I guess no one lost any data or whatever, so it wasn't unreliable to that degree, but it is a concern. So anyway, everyone suck it up. Install the update and <laugh> we'll all ride on this rollercoaster ride to who knows where together. I guess that's what we're doing. Alright. Yep. Now, so it says one new feature that Microsoft was quiet about. Did I, did I miss? No, this is the the thing, the the toggle that you installed last week.

(00:15:00):
Oh, mm-hmm. I already another, I already got that one, so everybody else got it. Yeah. Well, yeah. So that was a, when you installed it, it was a preview version. You actually, interestingly, you still have to install the, the stable version of it. Oh, how funny. Did everybody get the preview version though? No. Previews, thank God, are optional and you ha and manual. So you have to Oh, that's what, that's, that's right. I said, yeah, I'll take it. You, you have to take it. Oh, you, but now everybody has to have it. That's right. It's mandatory. I get it. All right. Sorry. I'm so, no, no, it's okay. <Laugh>, I'm still thinking about Google a ai. Literally as this segment started, I thought to myself, how am I gonna wrap myself around Microsoft again after two hours of Google AI <laugh>? Now, come on.

(00:15:45):
I think, yeah, just enjoy it. It's great. Yeah, just, at least there's leadership at Microsoft. I really feel like Google is just a bunch of different people doing whatever the hell they want. Certainly how that keynote felt. Yeah. I, yeah, yeah. I sun Pia comes off as a good guy. Not to get off on a tangent, but I I was one. Oh, he's too nice, right? If maybe he wasn't the right guy for this. Right. Cuz they're going to war, you know, they need someone who maybe is more of a mc. They need a wartime cons. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Out there, their, their primary revenue source has been threatened. It don't seem to be reacting that way particularly well.

(00:16:31):
Yeah. I, I, I, yeah, slow and steady wins the race, I think is the theory. I <laugh>, I dunno anyone who's ever watched a race will tell you that's not actually how races are won. No. <laugh>. And I, I, and you know, I know there's a fun fable about a fox and a, or a a rabbit and a hair or whatever, but yeah, that's a, that's a children's story. That's <laugh> notorious never really wins. You surprised how the hair really does most of the time. <Laugh>. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know I'm an F word fan. I know, I know who wins. Yeah. Yeah. Anyhow yeah, he may be the right person, but, we'll, we'll see. So I don't wanna beat to death too much. I have three, I have three or 4, 3 4 <laugh> actually four stories here. They're kind of related to the insider program and things that Microsoft is testing.

(00:17:20):
And honestly, I can't say that a lot of it is super interesting. They continue to test and change widgets. There's new widgets coming, new ways of displaying widgets and so on, so on and so forth. I think the one thing that would, to me that would put widgets over the top is if they would just let people turn off the feed. Let me put, in other words, once, maybe there's a point where there are enough well, that's funny. I have dual screens, so widgets are appearing on the left screen, but not on the okay. Anyway, maybe there's a point where there are enough widgets that I can add that I want, you know, things like weather and sports or whatever it is, and I can get rid of all the new stuff that this interface would become truly useful. Like that to me would be fantastic.

(00:18:02):
Until, and unless they do that, they can kind of screw around with widgets all they want. I, I just don't think it matters all that much. Right. I mean, like, you know, who cares if, if you're just showing me low quality garbage from MSN start or whatever it's called now, you can keep working on that till you're blue in the face. So it doesn't really matter. But, you know, photo apps is getting a new slideshow and spot fixing tool in the beta channel, and that's fantastic. That's an app, that's a, an app that can be updated on its own. We're all gonna get that probably in the next two to four weeks. There was a sort of fix to that Windows lapse bug also in the beta channel. I don't know if you know more about that. I'm, I'm sure you know more about it than I do, Richard, but I don't know if there's anything interesting there, but

Rich Campbell (00:18:53):
Yeah, what, it's, what happens when a new team takes on an old tool? Yeah. Right. But that's, we talked about this when they first rolled out the, the, this official version of laps, right? For workstations that would work with 11. And that it, if you were already in the lapse ecosystem with the original version, and there were certain configuration issues, you could, you could basically knock the machine off where you just couldn't get into local admin access. And certain boy, there's some great Reddit threads on that one. Lemme tell you. And again, it says it's classic problem of like, don't punish the folks that are already committed.

Leo/Paul (00:19:28):
The thing there is, especially it rolls out lapses. They had this new lapse had been tested for months and months. It's not like this. They did just drop this,

Rich Campbell (00:19:36):
I just think it was mostly tested on fresh installs that they're trying to get new people in the lap. They're not thinking about the people that are already there. Okay.

Leo/Paul (00:19:42):
Yeah. And

Rich Campbell (00:19:42):
So they made some blunders for taking care of the folks that were already in there.

Leo/Paul (00:19:47):
And let's see. And then this is just <laugh>, what goes around comes

Rich Campbell (00:19:52):
Around. I, I didn't even wanna read this, it just gave me chills.

Leo/Paul (00:19:55):
This is the widget one.

Rich Campbell (00:19:56):
Yeah,

Leo/Paul (00:19:57):
Yeah. What, so

Rich Campbell (00:19:58):
What, I just switched the word Active

Leo/Paul (00:20:00):
Street, let's say the, a short history of widgets and windows. Right. obviously with the, well not, maybe not obviously, but with i e four, we had something called Active desktop, and we had something that was sort of like widgets for a little while. And then with Windows Vista starting with Longhorn, we had the sidebar and we had widgets in the sidebar. And I think those were actually, in some ways were very similar to what we have today, because I believe those were created with HTML and JavaScript. No, no, no. It was ActiveX. Yeah. No, no. I mean the, the Vista one. Oh, the Vista one. No, but the problem with ActiveX is you're basically letting a third party <laugh> Yeah. Run an arbitrary program on your computer. What could possibly go wrong? I just give Microsoft credit for getting rid of all those huge security problems really quick.

(00:20:44):
Wow. they got to 'em really early in their history <laugh>, so, well, they certainly saw it coming. Yeah. Yeah. So with Windows, with Windows seven they changed widgets so they could be on the desktop, remember? And then we stopped pretending that widgets matter. We went away. And that was the end of that. Well, apparently <laugh>, they're thinking about putting, well, also, we had live tiles, I guess Live tiles in Windows 10. Yeah, that's some, and actually Windows eight, right? They're sort of, yeah. Widgety, you know, there's some widget type technology there. It's a, an app view, if you will. Microsoft clearly thinks people want little do hickeys on their desktop. Yeah. But now they're the htm. You said they're html JavaScript. They're, they're, they're relatively, I believe they're, yeah. And the, the widget board. And they're, but they're cons, they're constrained. They're confined to the widget board, right.

(00:21:35):
That you have to bring up and see, this has always been kind of the problem. Like, how do you, how do you deal with stuff that you don't see all the time? I think this was the problem with live tiles in Windows 10, and I guess in Windows eight as well, assuming you were using a traditional desktop computer, which is that I'm, I'm looking at the desktop. And this the thing where these, where this live information is happening is hidden, you know? So now they're talking about putting them back on the desktop. So it's possible in Windows 11 v you know, 23 H two, whatever. Maybe you don't have to have the witches port open. So I guess we keep playing with this. I can't say that I'm excited, but anyway. And then last week, I think it was, we talked about Intel and AM MD and their earnings.

(00:22:23):
Right. And how bad there was more lack thereof. Yeah. Well, Callcom is doing great. Oh, no, wait, no, they aren't <laugh> Callcom, although I, Callcom revenues actually fell less as a percentage than Intel or AMDs. 17% down 9.28 billion in the quarter ending March 26th. Qualcomm of course doesn't just make, you know what I would call microprocessors by SOCs, but they also make other chip setss. So there's, they they're lots of modem chip sets. Radio. Yeah. Well, and their big business is licensing their patents. Yeah. Well that's, that is also one of their businesses. That's true. And, and Apple's one of their customers for now. I mean, until Apple figures out modems or whatever it No. Is it modems? Because they own, so Qualcomm owned, cdma, they owned they owned the technologies that are in a lot of all smartphones right now, right?

(00:23:21):
Yeah. Yeah. This Right. But I think the only, I think the only Qualcomm chip set that's in an Apple phone is the modem. Modem. And they're at apples. Quickly. Apple bought, remember they bought Intel's modem first. They used Intel's. Intel's modems were so bad. They were terrible. They had to slow Qualcomms down. That's right. Same. Your iPhone had both, you know, one or the other. And they didn't want one eye, one, one of one set of 'em to be much faster than the other. Yeah. I don't know if that's still the case, but they're, they're working as fast as their little appley feet can, can run to Right. To make new Apple only modems. Yeah. So qual Qualcomm unfortunately because they're in the smartphone space and tablet space, right. Those markets have declined in recent years, just like the PC market. They're bigger markets, but they, they've been down big as well.

(00:24:12):
And unlike with the PC market, where AM MD and Intel both said, we, we see the second half of the year as being kind of rebound. Not a rebound to pandemic levels, but, you know. Right. Do they break out, I mean, I see in your article it says the ferman's earned 6.1 billion related to smartphone chip setss. But is that manufacture in sale of smartphone chip sets, or does that include licenses? Cuz I have a feeling license No licenses is, well, okay, so when you said licenses, you click something in the back of my brain, cuz I, I wrote this article, I didn't mention anything about licensing. Right. So in the past they always called that out. And I don't mean it every single quarter. I mean, they used to call that out and then you're right, it's at some point they've stopped talking or I missed it or something.

(00:24:56):
I if, if it is in there, it is a very small part of the business. So, or they do what Microsoft, apple and a lot of other companies do now and roll that into some other larger category. Like for instance, no, I think, okay, chip, I think I actually, I think I dismissed it. So, okay. I believe that they have two main businesses. So Q ct, which I think is the chipset stuff. That's right. That's they spun logic, didn't they? Yeah, that's right. And then qtl, right? So yeah, actually they're I don't see it for the current quarter. Is it? Excuse me, sorry. Maybe they, I don't see it for the current quarter. Their, I'll just put it this way, their guidance for the current quarter is that they'll make somewhere around 7 billion in revenues from chip sets and somewhere around one to 1.25, or I guess it's 1.35 in licensing revenue.

(00:25:42):
Okay. So that's, that's how those things turn out. All right. So it's still there. Yeah, it's still, yeah, but actually it's not in their, it's not in their, I don't, unless I'm missing, I don't see it in their, maybe they report separately. Cuz they didn't No, they have it for their business in the business Outlook section. They call it out. Huh. And in the current quarter they do not. So I, I, that's how I, that's why I missed it. I still don't see it, actually. Yeah. So that's how I missed it. Well, they, they didn't make 7 billion in chip sets. They made 6.1, so they didn't live up to their <laugh> their predictions. <Laugh>. I don't, I have to think that licensing is becoming less and less valuable as companies like Apple try to go their own way. Although, you know, even if Apple makes it chill, well they're gonna probably have to license if they wanna support C dmma.

(00:26:28):
You gotta remember that. Well, so, you know, from a what do you call, like, a unit sold perspective or whatever, a user based perspective and Android's still like 80% of the market. Right? I know it's revenue. It's not, it's completely turned around. But you know, they, they, they'll still learn, earn something I would think from yeah, of course. No, no license. They license it to Samsung and Google and everybody else. Yeah, no, totally. Yeah. Anding. Yeah. Sorry, I didn't mean to slow you down. Continue. That's all the hardware vendors now. Like, we've gotten through the list of hardware vendors that have been brutalized. Like I can't really, this is are the cloud guys gonna get. You gotta understand. I, I, I not convinced in my own sort of mini form of Tourettes there's a time of the, the quarter I'll call it, where the results all start coming in and my life starts to really suck cuz I have to do math and it's, you know, it's all <laugh> and, and I always think I'm done.

(00:27:21):
That's the thing. It's like one more Microsoft, Amazon, Google, apple meta and then a couple small, and I'm like, good, now we're done. Like, nope. Intel a md. All all right. Alright. Scandal. Endless. And then you're like, all right, we're done now. Nope. Qualcomm, and like these guys, some of them are uns skewed, like Nintendo and Sony are also on this list, like, right. They they do most of them. Like when I write these things, it's like for the quarter ending March 31st is the typical thing. But some of them are like, this one is March 26th. One of the companies I don't remember, which was April 4th. I don't Okay. <Laugh>. But then you'll have some weird comp, I don't remember which one. There's one company that does, they're quarterly and then I do some PC maker stuff too, I should say. But some of these, some of the quarters will be like the, the, they'll call it the February quarter and it's like the February, March and April is a quarter for them.

(00:28:05):
It's like, guys, <laugh>, could we get on, we get on the same cycle calendars now, you know, because what I don't want is to have to keep writing this stuff and then like two weeks go by and then the next cycle starts up again. Like, I, I wish it was all as one week, but it, it, it gets spread out. You gotta do what Jason Snell does over on our Mac side. He mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, he has a website, six colors, and he is just got an Excel macro. He past in the numbers. It generates all these color graphs. And that's, that's the blog post. Oh, yeah, yeah. Is the grass. Yeah. Actually I only do that for one thing. And that's PC sale. That's right. So I only do it once a year. Yeah. In January. So actually, so I don't, I'm not an Excel guy.

(00:28:42):
Right. Obviously I'm a writer. So every January <laugh> eventually IDC and qu Gartner will both chime in with their results and I'll, I'll put the number, I'll do all the math, you know, <laugh>, and then I have to go fi I'll go back to OneDrive from January a year ago. I look for the Excel spreadsheet and pull it out and make a copy of it. And then I'm like, okay, how to use Excel again. <Laugh>. <laugh>. No, that's right. I like, it's like, it's like any language. Yeah, it, yeah. I, it's unbelievable. Like, I, I, it's the only thing I use it for. And every year it's like, I've never even seen this program before. What are these squares doing? What is this? Randall Schwar who to host. They're a perfect candidate for M three ai. Yeah. Right. Like we're, this is why, this is why I completely get it.

(00:29:26):
This, I, I did you see the Google Sheets stuff they were doing with AI did. I thought that was pretty, pretty cool too. The slides. Anyway. Beautiful. Let's, let's take a little break. Well, Paul suffers in silence. <Laugh>, how about that? How about that? I never suffered that <laugh>. Oh yeah. What was I thinking? <Laugh>, speaking of hardware manufacturers, I want to talk to you about Lenovo orchestrated by our sponsor, the experts at C D W, the helpful people at C D W. Understand as the world changes, your organization has to adapt quickly to be successful. So how can C d w keep your business ahead of the curve? Well, one way is with Lenovo think pads. I love my, I've got it right here. One, love it. These powerful devices deliver the business class performance. You're looking for thanks to Windows 10 and the Intel Evo platform.

(00:30:22):
With your remote teams working across the country and around the world, collaboration. Not a problem. Because Lenovo think pads keep your organization productive and connected from anywhere. Plus C D W knows your workforce has different work styles needs flexibility. That's why Lenovo think pads are equipped with responsive tools and built-in features that let your team work seamlessly across all their favorite tools. Now think about that for a second. And let's not forget about security. Very important these days, right? These high performing machines protect at the highest level with built-in hardware to guard against modern threats without slowing your team down. When you need to get more out of your technology, Lenovo makes seamless productivity possible. CDW makes it powerful. Learn more at cdw.com/lenovo client cdw.com/lenovo client. We thank CDW and Lenovo for helping keep Windows Weekly rolling. And we invite you to go to that address cuz that's that's how you help cdw.com/lenovo client I a font of useless references from the seventies.

(00:31:35):
Yes. So roll, roll. Rolling. This is just what went through my head and I finally remembered. Ro Hide. Keep those doggies. Rolling. Roll in. Rolling. Rolling. Ro hide in wind and rain and weather. Hell, Ben. Leather. You're gonna make me forget the other one by <laugh>. Oh, sorry. You had another one. What's the other one? I just forgot it. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought Richard said Richard said, not Sundar, but he said it in a sing songy voice. So it was like, yes. Not Sundar. And I was like, that's an ad from the seventies. And it's like, and I just forgot know what it of it not Sundar? No, it's like, it's Menon Or like, like, oh, Menon. It's, you know, right. Yeah. It's something like that, right? Yeah. Oh, now you got me the chat removal. It's killing me. Scooter X is probably already pulled up the by Menon. Right by men. There by men. It was, it was Menon. I had Menon in the head. Yep. Okay. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Shinji by Menon and Amen. Seven. They both knew it was Mennon. No, this wasn't a great ad cuz I don't know what Menon is. It's an underarm deodorant. You probably don't need it. There you go. There you go. Because you smell. There you go. <Laugh>. I smell like a man is what I saw. Like a man. <Laugh>. But <laugh>.

(00:32:53):
Menon. There you go. Right, right, right. Five Manon. That's funny. Thank you. God. That was killing me. <Laugh>. Oh, then I sang the Raha theme for nothing. I gotta I gotta close the a d d loop on that one, you know? Yeah. I, I know the feeling. Good luck. Wait a minute. Let me see. I could probably find the it's tough being broken. Yeah, if you want. I did. I saw, I sorry. It's Yeah, you're right. It's a Yeah, yeah, yeah. The tch. See was it the, oh, maybe it wasn't the underwriter. Deodorant. Maybe it was Menon skin bracelet or something. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah.

(00:33:27):
<laugh>. I love Voice America wakes up. That's so good. Those were the good old days, weren't they? It sound like those afternoon <laugh> after shaves. I needed an evening after shave. Thanks. I needed that. That was actually the the slogan. That's funny. Thanks. I needed that. I needed that. Yeah. Yeah. <Laugh>, I needed that after that Google show. That's what I should have done. Slapped some men. Abrar. You know, I actually I'm a little on a cut. It'll wake you right up. <Laugh>. Exactly. I tried it because I thought, you know, for a while mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I've, I'm sure every man goes through this. I thought, boy, wouldn't it be nice to shave with an electric razor? Right. Cause I'm cutting my face up. Same. But then you slapped on that stuff afterwards. <Laugh>. Oh no, <laugh>. Yeah. Well, I think the idea of skin brar was you put it on, I don't know, before you shave with the electric razor and it helps, but it really didn't.

(00:34:36):
And then you're right. If you do it after a shave, this, I literally, sometime in the past six months, had a conversation with my wife about what do you call this? Sh the shampoo. And then what's the stuff you put on after Shamp? I don't even know what it is. Conditioner. Conditioner. And I'm like, what is this stuff? What is what, what is, what do you use this for? And she's like, are you kidding me? And I said, no. I mean, do you leave it in your hair? Do you rinse it out? <Laugh>? She's like, you're 55 years old, you don't know what conditioner is, <laugh>. And I'm like, I don't, I I don't, I see it in the tub. I don't know. What's it here for? What does it do? All right, I take you back. Put in my hair. Cause I want a shampoo. I know we shouldn't be doing this cuz we're running late, but I'm gonna take you back to 1979 okay. And see if you recognize this actor in the Menon ad.

Mennen ad (00:35:22):
Ones too strong. One light, one Strong. What? Strong.

Leo/Paul (00:35:30):
Oh, that's John Goodman. That is a skinny, that is a young John Goodman. Skinny young John Goodman. Look at him. A lot of hair, skin

Mennen ad (00:35:36):
Braces. The nice clean smell you're looking for in an aftershave skin. Braces got those skin

Leo/Paul (00:35:42):
Type. Oh, that's amazing.

Mennen ad (00:35:42):
Chin chillers that really wake you up and there's nothing heavy.

Leo/Paul (00:35:46):
He recognized the smile, right? Yeah. It was all downhill for his career. This one. But

Mennen ad (00:35:50):
Right.

Leo/Paul (00:35:51):
Skin Bracer hits you just right. Just right. <Laugh>. Wow. Okay. Put put some of that on. Get some conditioner going. I did not, my I tell you, I had no idea that he did the the Men and Skin Eraser ads. That's, that's hysterical. All right. Back we go to the excitement of Microsoft 365. Okay. Well it is pretty exciting. Yes. yeah. So a couple of big developments this past week. One is that if you were waiting in line to get into the Bing Chat bot, no worries. Now it's an open preview. Anyone can get in now. There's some, you know additional capabilities related to you know graphical answers and so forth, you know, or creating graphics. All we care about is the icon here, Paul? Like are they gonna fix the icon? The icon is still big and blue actually.

(00:36:43):
So there's a, there's a weird there a weird icon. There was a weird little bit about Microsoft Edge. They mentioned that we're re we Microsoft, are we designing Microsoft Edge? Which is really interesting because this browser is, you know, become a huge problem with additional features. And this is all they said about it. You'll begin to see. I like begin to, what does that mean? You're just gonna start rolling it out <laugh>. Yes. Anyway, you'll begin to see happen. You are going to be a victim of God, this company a sleeker and enhanced user interface, including a streamlined look, rounded corners, organized containers, and semi-transparent visual elements. That's how they describe it. Wow. Okay. So it's fair to say whether you stream language, fork, get ready for g shuffling <laugh>. Yeah. there's a rumor that Microsoft is going to give users the chance to choose which of these kind of superfluous features are in the browser.

(00:37:39):
I I welcome that. Maybe that's part of the streamlined or what are the hell they said it. Yeah. Streamlined. Look we'll see. But yeah, this is, I feel like one day someone who's using Edge is gonna be like, does this look different? What, what happened? Is it using conditioner? This what is <laugh>? What shampoo is that? What happened? <Laugh>. It's using Menon. <Laugh>, right? Oh boy. Thanks. I used to need that <laugh>. Thanks. I used to need that. Wait a minute, I found it. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Wait a minute. What am I, what have I done? Oh, I got it muted. Okay. Unmute if you The edge. Oh, oh, the edge. If you the edge, the edge speed stick, super dry, anti crisps, sprint by men. There you go. <Laugh>. That's just to ref reaffirm your memory is a nice shot.

(00:38:34):
Yeah. When Richard said that he woke up this long dead, geez, no cell in the back of my brain somewhere. There is a Seinfeld episode where okay. Seinfeld stuck in the George Costanza and he said, I don't know how you ever get a date. He says, well, I'm like a commercial jingle. At first you hate it <laugh>, but then you hear it over and over, you can't forget it. And then he actually sings by Menon. Oh, really? Yeah. Oh, that's hilarious. That's great. So it's not just you, it's you and George Za <laugh>. No one's stuck in there. Yeah, it's like a little cancer. You don't get rid of it. All right. Okay. Okay. Yes. Serious. Now. Okay, let's get serious. All right, so <laugh>, we can do this. So we just <laugh> we just watched the Google event and a big chunk of it was this AI stuff.

(00:39:20):
Oh, to me, you know, catch up to Microsoft. Totally kidding. Yeah, they were, it's clear from watching the event, they were shaking in their boots. Okay. Right. And they felt like, we've gotta respond to this. Okay. I mean, I'm less cynically Leo, I would say <laugh> that both Microsoft and Google are in the same place. They have the same kind of backend capabilities. They have a lot of the same front end productivity capabilities. I think we're gonna see some overlap, you know? I think Microsoft, no, I think they're both gonna do pretty well in the productivity stuff. I think Microsoft, just by virtue of the fact they have a bigger market or usage share, whatever, will have more of an impact there. I think Google's gonna have more impact on the search stuff, you know, we'll see. But I, it was hard not to think of Microsoft during the Google workspace part of the show, which I think was right near the beginning.

(00:40:11):
And they were talking about how you could use it in Gmail to help you write emails and how you could use it in docs to help you write documents. I could use it, you know, in spreadsheets or not, I'm sorry, in whatever the slides thing is called. Slides the presentation package to create you know, talking points based on the slides and all this stuff. And I'm like, yep, this is exactly what Microsoft is doing in, in Microsoft 365. And they just expanded the co-pilot to a broader set of commercial customers. And that's exactly what you're seeing, you know, Dolly integration and PowerPoint. The ability for this thing to rewrite slides for you in PowerPoint. So if you have a bunch of bullet points, it'll turn it into a paragraph of text, which is exactly what Google just showed off.

(00:40:56):
You know, suggestions and outlook, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, these thing, this is an arms race, there's no doubt about it. I, I think the thing that's interesting about it is that I don't know that there's a clear winner, you know, across the board. I don't think it's like Microsoft wins ai. I don't, I don't think it's not a tourist and a hair thing to, to call back to your previous Yeah. Thoughts. It, they're much more equal. No, it's, it's right between equals. Yeah. I mean it's, there's gonna be a lot of ple companies I guess that finish the marathon, you know, that come through with some form of AI functionality in their products. So you're gonna see this everywhere. Actually, I

Rich Campbell (00:41:34):
Think that's the question of what are they using on the backend, right? I mean, yeah, open ai, all all of chat G B T all got implemented against Azure. They originally weren't, you know, part of Microsoft spending money on them was to get them to move to Azure. Right? and, and the big thing with large language models is they are computationally intensive. So only the big cloud vendors are gonna be able to host these things. Realistically. They're gonna license it out to others. That's right. So, you know, you can go use open AI and in both the, the Azure Way and others so that, you know, but in the end, you're just consuming Azure, which is what Microsoft wanted in the first place.

Leo/Paul (00:42:12):
Yeah. The right, I mean there, there's a perception problem or a per a perception thing where front-facing services that are popular are gonna live or die on AI now, right? So let's say Google search, Google search is very high profile. Everyone knows about it. Billions of users. If Google search continues to be the market leader, that kind of is the story. They survive this AI thing, they move forward, they have AI capabilities. Great. But I do think what you're, to your point, I think the backend stuff, so if you're Amazon or Microsoft in particular, but also Google to a lesser degree mm-hmm. <Affirmative> I think there's great success to be had on the backend by people. O o other companies adopting your service. Yeah. So they're using Azure on the backend in this case. And it's some super popular thing other people isn't

Rich Campbell (00:42:59):
Talked about much like M 365 is very big on this idea. They call the Microsoft graph, but it's mm-hmm. <Affirmative> essentially that your organization's entire behavior is manifested instead of M 365 between emails and chats and documents and all of those workflows, right? Am I presume Google has all of this because of docs

Leo/Paul (00:43:19):
And

Rich Campbell (00:43:19):
Workspace?

Leo/Paul (00:43:20):
They didn't talk about it though. They they don't really

Rich Campbell (00:43:22):
Talk about, talk about it. And when you add in this large language model, this copilot aspect, I mean, what does that really mean? It means that the, that the information worker is literally going to send their intent to a piece of software, right? But then for the day, that's then going to help them navigate the tools to be productive. I mean, for start, that's a great solution from 365 cuz there's way too many icons. I do not know <laugh>.

Leo/Paul (00:43:49):
So there's

Rich Campbell (00:43:50):
A tool to help me use those. That's pretty cool.

Leo/Paul (00:43:53):
That's a great solution for workspace and Microsoft 365. But I think the thing that will set Microsoft apart in that space and the, and the way that they sort of win productivity if you will mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, is that they, that the Microsoft graph bit is all of the permissions and et cetera. So you're not just feeding a large language model into this thing, but this thing has an understanding of, well this is private company information and this can't go out to a public facing PowerPoint presentation for this. I think that aspect of it is gonna be huge too. And that's where Google, not necessarily, I mean Google has permissions and whatever, but I don't know that they have anything that's even close to the Microsoft graph.

Rich Campbell (00:44:29):
Well, and we don't normally talk about the Viva products here anyway. Yeah. But to me that the, especially the original Viva line, the experience engage all the, the insights mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, those were all things that were actually ways to surface the graph that were kind of non-discriminatory and resisted the creepiness factor

Leo/Paul (00:44:52):
Cuz they've Right.

Rich Campbell (00:44:52):
They've made several attempts to build tools to utilize the graph that always fell into that uncanny valley of surveillance software.

Leo/Paul (00:45:01):
Right. Right.

Rich Campbell (00:45:01):
And

Leo/Paul (00:45:02):
Well, the onboarding stuff is, I don't mean to say easy, but it, that's a, it's an easy win. Sure. The Hey Bob the people in your organization have spent this many minutes in teams meetings and you'll notice Sally's lagging a little behind. That stuff is hugely problematic.

Rich Campbell (00:45:19):
Well, and you know, when, when I was doing real IT work and goodness as I don't anymore, one of the things you did was you watched the logs to see who was using what products. Right. And often if you saw someone who just wasn't using a particular product that was important to the organization, you could do targeted training. But as soon as a person's involved in that, you have a discriminatory aspect. So when you go look at the way Viva learning works, Viva Learning is about expressing algorithms that say based on utilization send for training. So it's non-discriminatory.

Leo/Paul (00:45:51):
This is tough because there are actually good reasons to use that data in a way that's meaningful to the company. So for example, Microsoft 365 comes in 117 different tiers. Bob is only using the features that are available in the one of the lower tiers. It's not impacting what he has to do for work. That's fine. But we can save money by making sure we're only

Rich Campbell (00:46:13):
Providing him down a couple of That's right. Or where the tools could turn him up. But to me, the, the crazy one, the one I'd want to jump on board is the sentiment analysis of the conversations being had in with the copilot.

Leo/Paul (00:46:24):
Interesting. Okay.

Rich Campbell (00:46:25):
The ability, you know, when I've been managing software developers, what do I watch? I watch check-ins into the source code repository,

Leo/Paul (00:46:34):
Right? Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:46:35):
Because if you keep interrupting a developer, you slow down the productivity. It's like yank and flowers outta the ground to see how the roots are growing. So you leave 'em Malone, but you watch the check-ins. Right. Because a happy developer checks in several times a day. Some only check in once a day, but they do check in once a day. But here's the more salient part, if they haven't checked any coding in three days Yep. Do you really think on day four you're gonna get the best check-in known demand?

Leo/Paul (00:46:56):
I think you need to do a proof of life check first. I mean that's

Rich Campbell (00:46:59):
Basically,

Leo/Paul (00:47:01):
You know, at that point I'd like a welfare check on coder three. Yeah. Can we can we send a police officer over to

Rich Campbell (00:47:07):
Oh And usually most of the time when I'd stick my head in the door of that particular person, they've got keyboard imprints on their forehead cuz they've been smashing their heads. Right. Right. For Dave.

Leo/Paul (00:47:15):
Don't, doesn't, don't you think about stuff though? I mean, sometimes you want to think about something before

Rich Campbell (00:47:21):
You Absolutely. But you also tend to experiment a little. So you'll kick off a branch and you'll play with some stuff, but

Leo/Paul (00:47:27):
You won't commit it. I

Rich Campbell (00:47:28):
Mean No, no, no. You'll, you'll probably kill the branch off. Right. But again, for me as an an administrator, it's a way for me to watch without interrupting,

Leo/Paul (00:47:37):
You'll see that they're at least doing something. Yeah. You see, you're just looking for activity.

Rich Campbell (00:47:40):
It's gone up some code with knocked out. Like you're not

Leo/Paul (00:47:43):
Just

Rich Campbell (00:47:43):
Looking

Leo/Paul (00:47:43):
Commits, you're Yeah, you want to see some

Rich Campbell (00:47:45):
Activity, but if I see no action on source code for days, then it's a good thing to sort of poke your head in. And I think that's tougher to see with information workers. So the idea that you could have Yeah. Sentiment analysis against the conversations to just say, Hey, I, I think this employee is frustrated. Right. Like, you should see what they're saying to the co-pilot.

Leo/Paul (00:48:05):
Well, okay, when you say senti, give me just darn log <laugh>. That's right. Exactly. Is that what you're looking, you're looking for tone? Is it because Yeah. I, you, I have a, obviously people who read my website are on the technical side and I can say one thing they don't like is this comment system we have that is checking for tone and checking for abuse and you know, and has these words that it doesn't want you to use and it won't allow certain things through. And man, man, are we, are we all adults here? You know, is the the thing I hear a lot and it's like, no, we're not. That's why it's there. Because Yeah, the thing is you people go after each other like pit bulls when there's not <laugh> when something doesn't prevent you from doing it and now you're just getting mad cuz something's prevent you from doing it <laugh>. You know, so it's like you kind of need to have this, I don't, that's an interesting thing in a, in a workplace just for I don't know. What do you, I don't know, what do you call that? Just for the wellbeing of everybody involved, right? That you don't have the the one guy especially we're not across from each other and if the internet has taught us anything, is that anyone can be their worst self online very easily.

Rich Campbell (00:49:14):
Yeah. And often

Leo/Paul (00:49:15):
It seems to be the default posture. Unfortunately. It,

Rich Campbell (00:49:18):
I think it is a cultivated skill to have orthogonality between your digital self and your physical self.

Leo/Paul (00:49:26):
Hmm. Interesting. Wow. I'm gonna really have to think about that. I'll check in in a couple of days. Okay. Because yeah. Yes, exactly. <Laugh>, I dunno what the hell that means. I'm gonna put on my big thinking hat and <laugh>, I do my best thinking in the tropics <laugh>. Yeah. That's it. I like to have my fa my feet in some sand when I'm thinking <laugh>. Yes, indeed. Yeah. Me and Brian Wilson <laugh> you know, it does strike me. I was just thinking, this is kind of random, but Microsoft, unlike Google, which has a different name for every possible facet of its ai, right? I know they have so many names. Microsoft is exactly the opposite. The outlook means 20 different things. Co-Pilot now means the GitHub co-pilot, but there's also Microsoft mi Microsoft acts as it, like a stingy meiser. Like, oh, there aren't so many names.

(00:50:20):
You know, we don't, and, and Google's just like the crazy uncle. Just go here, have a name. Have a name. Everybody gets a name. It's very odd that they're so obvious. I was, I I was thinking during the Google thing, I'm surprised there were names to take. You know, <laugh> actually they, they used, they used the name Continuity. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. That's been used before. Yeah. Apple uses it. Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was kind of interesting. You know, it's, it's very strange. I I think it's, I think it's actually a measure. Gosh, this might be overstretching it, but it's a measure of their corporate structure that on Google, you're rewarded. I, I was gonna call it. Okay. No, I think you're on the right path for spinning up something new. You know, you're the new thing, the new thing, the new thing you're rewarded for that. Microsoft used to be, this is like the corporate personality. It's their personality. It's, and it's driven by the founders in both cases. I think Microsoft's more cooperative mentality that was kind of laid into the company. Yeah. yeah. I, I, and I think you're, I think you're absolutely right. I, I don't know that I'm, I have the right words for it, but it's, I think you're on the right path. Not, not to forget that Microsoft invented Hungarian notation, so they <laugh> Yeah, yeah. Worked at Microsoft <laugh>. Microsoft

Rich Campbell (00:51:36):
Also had serious problems with naming like Metro. Yeah. Right, right. That's right. So maybe there's enough legal wrapped around producing a name that these

Leo/Paul (00:51:46):
Could be, that could be that, yep. Everyone knows the Metro one, but, you know, for some reason people forget SkyDrive

Rich Campbell (00:51:53):
Skyr another

Leo/Paul (00:51:54):
Great. You know, which is I, yeah, but they got sued by Rupert Murdoch for crying out. I, I know. It's crazy.

Rich Campbell (00:52:01):
That's goodie. So, yeah, I think they, so the whole idea that you have a name that is already acceptable and you can just stick a word in front of it and it's good. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> co-pilot, all the things.

Leo/Paul (00:52:10):
Wouldn't that be interesting? It might, you might be more, not a measure of a solidarity, but more measure of, of Timor Timidness legal timidness on Microsoft's in Microsoft's case. But this thing specifically co-pilot, I will just say this. Microsoft has a really, does a really bad job at branding. Like you said, this is a great brand. They know that, that we're using this everywhere. No, I think is the right brand. Yeah. It's just, they just go, go and it's, I don't, it's Skid Hub time. Microsoft 365 co-pilot. Yeah. Those flavors tell you what you're getting. I mean, that's right.

Rich Campbell (00:52:43):
Sure. No co-pilots a phenomenal name. Yeah. A name, a really great product name. It was Silver Light

Leo/Paul (00:52:50):
<Laugh> <laugh>. Okay. Too soon. Tell

Rich Campbell (00:52:53):
Me I'm wrong. If you like, I'm okay with you too soon.

Leo/Paul (00:52:56):
I I liked it when it was called Windows Presentation Foundation everywhere, but yeah, no, silver Light was pretty good too.

Rich Campbell (00:53:02):
That was Brad Abrams line. It's like, if I give it a terrible code name, I get a good call.

Leo/Paul (00:53:04):
Well, you gotta tell 'em why Silver explain the silver light name and why it was so great, cuz it is a great name.

Rich Campbell (00:53:09):
Oh, the, the, the, oh, the, this is what's left in an old, you remember the old Kyle Mechanical flash bulbs that rotated and they, they

Leo/Paul (00:53:17):
Like on a Kodak camera? Yeah. They had like that long filament that would all go off at once. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (00:53:22):
Yeah. So when that filament has burned, it's called Silver light because silver light is what comes after

Leo/Paul (00:53:27):
Flash. After flash <laugh>. Oh my God. Okay, now I did not know that. Yep. And that is actually, that's great. Freaking awesome.

Rich Campbell (00:53:36):
Great,

Leo/Paul (00:53:36):
Isn't it? That's clever. And Brad, who thought that up, Brad,

Rich Campbell (00:53:40):
That, I don't know that he thought it up, but he was part of the team. He, he was the guy who did the original.net rocks where he announced the name and, and that whole story.

Leo/Paul (00:53:49):
And that's a great example of what Microsoft would've done traditionally is the name They had originally Windows Presentation Foundation everywhere. This totally plunders name W P F. Yeah. And, and yeah,

Rich Campbell (00:54:00):
Because the code name was Avalon and Avalon was an

Leo/Paul (00:54:02):
Awesome name. Exactly. Exactly. Yep. I had no idea. Silver light is what comes after flash. I, I wrote that down. Yeah, that is, no, it's good stuff. Awesome. It's a

Rich Campbell (00:54:12):
Good one.

Leo/Paul (00:54:13):
See, this is why I like you guys. Getaway was the open web <laugh>. Yeah. So, yeah, you guys have the history in your, in your, you guys tell me the run is the dot net rock story sometime too. We'll save that for another another day. Yeah, I hear that. I thought you came up with it. All right. Nope,

Rich Campbell (00:54:30):
That's Carl.

Leo/Paul (00:54:32):
Very good. Okay. meanwhile, where we that at Microsoft 360 4, where are Project 50? So, a, a couple weeks ago there was a story about Microsoft working on its own in-house chip sets for its data centers to lower the cost of the cloud computing capabilities necessary for ai. Bloomberg reported this past week that they are partnering with, I'm sorry, I should say that Chipset, I think is Codenamed Athena, which by the way is a name Microsoft has used in the past at least twice, in fact yes, if I'm not mistaken, outlook Express the original or Microsoft Mail-in news. I think that was Athena. And it was also a project Athena that was a project they're working on with HP to create a modern Longhorn computer that had a phone attached to it with a cord. It's all kinds of stupid stuff now.

(00:55:22):
And now they're using it for this chip set. Anyway Bloomberg reported that Microsoft is partnering with a M D to bring this thing to market. They cited mar multiple sources. They had this whole story about it, and then Microsoft came out and said, AMD is a great partner. However, they are not involved in Athena <laugh>. This was just the shortest quote of all time. So I don't, I don't know, I don't know what that means. I don't know if that means Microsoft is partnering with a M d. See, it doesn't say they're not partnering with them. Right. So they're clearly partnering with them on hardware. They do AM MD chipset and some of the surface devices. They have partnered with them to make sure that future am MD chipsets. And actually some current chipset have that m p we've been talking about the neural processing unit, which is for ai. It is possible that Microsoft wants to use AM MD in a future surface device with some kind of M P U from, you know, innate AM MD chip set. So maybe that's what that is. I don't know. But apparently what they're not partnering on is the chipset Microsoft's gonna use in their data center. So we shall say, okay. Is it the difference between being involved and being committed? The difference between

Rich Campbell (00:56:33):
The chicken and the ham? Yeah.

Leo/Paul (00:56:34):
Yeah. <Laugh> and the ham. I think the difference is Athena is the wife and Am MD is the mistress. No, I don't know. No, I dunno. No, I dunno. Okay. I don't know where you're going with that, but I'm gonna stop you right there, buddy. Boy, Leo, I'm a little it's a little punchy today, but I think it's something like that. Yeah. Okay. So they're three, but it sounds, I mean, partnering sounds like they're in like AMD's involved really. Right? If they're saying they're not involved, look on, on some level, Microsoft is partnering with amd, right. And, and Intel and Qualcomm. And the only question is what comes out of that? So I think what they got to the heart of was that these guys, there's work going on between these two companies on chip sets that are related to ai. Okay. it's not apparently the a AI chip sets that are going into Microsoft,

Rich Campbell (00:57:20):
They included the wrong code name, but that's

Leo/Paul (00:57:22):
About it. Ah, but the fact that they didn't deny the pun part on AI chip sets is interesting. I think that is happening. It's just not, it's just not Athena. Yeah. Got it. It's probably, you know

Rich Campbell (00:57:34):
The client side technology, you know,

Leo/Paul (00:57:35):
Or it's project Zeus, the follow up tour, Athena, see how we got you there. Right. You know, whatever. Yeah. finally, well, not really, and this is the, the greatest headline with the least amount of impact in the real world, but it's <laugh>, it's a, it's controversial. So Microsoft is gonna, or has now, as of I think today started throttling traffic from legacy exchange servers. Asterisks, asterisks, asterisks. Right. So it's, first of all we knew they were gonna do this. They'd warned about this, right? Yeah, they did. Yeah. I remember. So what they, Steve Gibson was, was, you know, like up in arms over it. Oh, wow. Okay. Well, let's, let's, let's, let's, let's cut to the chase of what this is then. So Microsoft is concerned with what they call persistently vulnerable instances of Exchange server. These are on-premises exchange servers. They're older versions.

(00:58:28):
It includes versions that are unsupported, right? That are not getting security patches every month, like Exchange Server 2007. But it also includes older, well, or not even just older, but supported exchange versions that are significantly behind on the security updates. Right. Those are also considered persistently vulnerable. The, the big asterisks here is that they don't have a way to block traffic from on-premise SY exchange service. Right? These are on-premises exchange servers that are used in a hybrids hybrid setup where the other half of the chain is an exchange online instance in the cloud. So you have a business that, you know, has, part of their email is on this legacy server, but they're still using Exchange online. Microsoft is blocking the traffic. Well, and to

Rich Campbell (00:59:12):
Be clear, it's because there is basically no way to completely shut down your on-premise

Leo/Paul (00:59:16):
Exchange. Okay. So there you go. Okay. If you,

Rich Campbell (00:59:20):
If you're doing any management or anything like that where you have to keep the active directory for exchange in place, you have to leave an exchange server. You have

Leo/Paul (00:59:26):
To leave it. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. Okay. And, and honestly, that you

Rich Campbell (00:59:30):
Forced into a permanent hybrid state.

Leo/Paul (00:59:32):
I'm guessing that's not what Steve Gibson is outraged by, but that is what people should be outraged by, right? That Microsoft did not give these companies the ability to shift completely to the cloud. But of course, what they don't wanna do is hire a guy to just do this <laugh> keep trying, keep charge of this one server and keep it up to date and whatever. So there's a lot of these things out in the world. I, I think, you know, look, I unders I think I understand Microsoft's motivation. This is how you, there seems to be no other way to get people to update these, you know, manifestly insecure servers

Rich Campbell (01:00:04):
Problem should just be blocking anything higher. It's not up to date.

Leo/Paul (01:00:08):
No, but see, that's the problem. So Steve's point is a, this is Microsoft's fault, cuz those bugs are theirs. And b, Microsoft's breaking email. You know, it's not just breaking somebody's server, it's breaking email. Here's, I'm not, I'm not defending Microsoft, but I will, I will take their stance and just tell you that one of the problems here is they don't have any way to reach these people. Right? No, I understand. They don't have a way to, yeah. So, so they literally said something to the tune of, this is how we get them to notice us <laugh>. So, so we can say, guys, you gotta keep this thing up to date or move on to an, a newer version, or whatever it might be. So this is how they're, they're using this to get their attention. They're not doing it just blanket across the board. Right? They're starting with a very, I think it's exchanged 2007. And then they'll move up the chain as they go, they'll, they'll

Rich Campbell (01:01:00):
Broaden. And as I understand it, there are, there is evidence that exploited old exchange servers are being used to farm spam into exchange online through these hybrid interfaces.

Leo/Paul (01:01:13):
Yeah. Right? Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:01:15):
And that's the problem.

Leo/Paul (01:01:15):
There certainly is a precedent you know, black holes and so forth for keeping badly behaved servers out of the, you know, internet. Yeah, I kind of am sympathetic with Microsoft, you know, these server, but at the same time, Steve's saying, look, you don't break email just because somebody isn't patching a thing you broke in the first place. That was his episode. But yeah, if it's, if they're spewing spam out into the ecosystem, 2007 is, we're talking about it. I know it's really old, 16 years old. I mean,

Rich Campbell (01:01:49):
Yeah, it's fully out of support, but it's

Leo/Paul (01:01:51):
Not just, it's not just publish, not just punishing the server admin, it's publishing it, it's punishing anybody sending emails through that server. I guess those are all employees of that company, so, right.

Rich Campbell (01:02:01):
Because it's only an hybrid. Right? Right. Like the bottom line is, if you wanna run that, that old server and run it just through an IMAP interface into Exchange online, that's fine. They'll treat you as the spammer you are. It's the hybrid interface is the problem. Right. And I would argue they're being too soft on it. You, that hybrid interface should shut down. Yeah. You're not in full component. Yeah, yeah,

Leo/Paul (01:02:20):
Yeah. It's

Rich Campbell (01:02:20):
Like there's no reason they couldn't say it has to be 2016 or above patch to CU 23.

Leo/Paul (01:02:26):
Is Microsoft offering

Rich Campbell (01:02:28):
Otherwise go up

Leo/Paul (01:02:28):
Patches to those old versions of Exchange?

Rich Campbell (01:02:31):
Not anymore. No. No.

Leo/Paul (01:02:32):
So they, they're not, they're not, it's not Patchable,

Rich Campbell (01:02:36):
Right? No. And it shouldn't be allowed in hybrid full stop.

Leo/Paul (01:02:40):
Right. Like, I mean, <laugh>, this is the equivalent of using Windows XP today, you know? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's, it's that old, I mean, it's Right, you're right. Well, Vista had just come out, I guess, as a maybe Windows Vista. Yeah. But

Rich Campbell (01:02:53):
Nobody used that. So, you know, s P three.

Leo/Paul (01:02:56):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, X XP was in market for probably five years past than or more, I don't

Rich Campbell (01:03:01):
Remember. But, but Al always, the question is, do they really have to support a given version indefinitely into new situations that it was never designed for? You know, arguably the mistake was allowing you to hybridize 2007 at all.

Leo/Paul (01:03:13):
Yeah. Right. There you go.

Rich Campbell (01:03:17):
Hmm. And, and, and again, throttling not eliminating mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Right? Right. The male will go through what they're doing is stopping spam explosions.

Leo/Paul (01:03:29):
Right. Well, that's fair, actually. That's completely fair. Yeah. Let's take a little break. We've got Xbox, we've got tips, and I think we are gonna have some time for Brown Liquor. All come Yay. Woohoo. All coming up in just a little bit. Paul Throt and Richard Campbell, windows Weekly is on the air and brought to you this week by Collide. I've talked about collide before for people using Okta. Collide is a device trust solution that ensures unsecured devices cannot access your apps. You're gonna say, well, wait a minute, you're not. We're a zero trust architecture. What are you talking about? Well, that's the problem. See, if you're an Okta user, collide can get your fleet to 100% compliance by patching what turns out to be one of the biggest holes in zero trust architectures. And that's device compliance. Think about how this works. Your identity provider, Okta, for instance, only lets known devices log in right to the apps to the cloud to get to get to your stuff.

(01:04:36):
But let's not forget this, just cuz the device isn't, is known as that's the DevOps guy's laptop, but do we know who he is? Doesn't mean it's in a secure state. Oh, turns out he was running an out of date insecure version of Plex. Whoops. Whoops. Plenty of the devices on your fleet I bet should not be allowed into the, into the network. They shouldn't be trusted. Maybe they're running an out-of-date operating system. Maybe they're running exchange 2007, but maybe they're not an unencrypted credentials lying around if a device isn't compliant or isn't running the Collide agent. That's how this all works. It can't access your SaaS apps or other resourcers. The device user can't log into your company's cloud apps. Not until they fix the problem, they fix the problem on their end. And then that's one of the cool things about Collide, it enlists the end user army to get your system to a hundred percent compliance.

(01:05:38):
I'll give you an example. Let's say an employee doesn't have an up-to-date browser, right? The collide agent notes that blocks him from logging. It's, you know, he, he tries to get in through Okta. Oh, nope, you're not allowed in. And let me tell you why. And this is what Collide does is so good. Your browser's outta date. So let me walk you through updating it. End user remediation drives your fleet to a hundred percent compliance and it doesn't overwhelm your IT team. Plus there's a benefit because it's the IKEA effect. The user did it right? Hey, I'm pretty good here. I made my, I got my I'm a secure. And now they're on your side. They're on your team. Instead of fighting your attempts at compliance, they support it without collide. IT teams just don't have a way to solve these compliance issues or stop in secure devices from logging in.

(01:06:28):
With Collide, you can set and enforce compliance across your entire fleet. Completely cross platform, Mac, windows, and Linux collides. Unique in that it makes device compliance part of the authentication process. So when a user logs in with Okta collide alerts them to compliance issues and prevents unsecured devices from logging in and its security you can feel good about because, well, not only has it taken the load off the shoulders of the IT department, but it puts transparency and respect for users at the Center of Kale's product. To sum it up, collide method means fewer support tickets, less frustration for you and your team. Most importantly, a hundred percent fleet compliance. Patch that hole in zero trust architecture. Visit collide.com/ww K o l I d e.com/ww Learn more book a demo collide, K O L I D e.com/ww. Thank for their support of Windows Weekly. You support us when you use that address too. Make sure you do that way they know you saw it here. K O L I d e.com/ww. Now we have, you know, dessert always comes last on this show, <laugh>. Yes. Yep. It's it's time to talk Xbox.

(01:07:52):
I I need something where I can pull a chain and a bunch of confetti comes down from the sky. But basically, <laugh> has reported Microsoft's, oh sorry, <laugh> exposition of Activision Blizzard will receive the green light from eu. What next week. Oh yeah. But who cares cuz the Brits are blocking it. Eh, Brits, who cares? <Laugh> you know, <laugh>, I mean, there, there's an island. They're an island. I mean No, I know, but they, but no, I know. So I, the first of all, that's gonna be appealed and it's not, you know, it's not done yet. So I, we'll, we'll see. I think when the rest of the planet kind of aligns up with this thing, you know,

Rich Campbell (01:08:30):
Clear UK companies like Booster.

Leo/Paul (01:08:33):
Yeah, yeah. Even which the other thing that keeps happening is more and more European cloud streaming companies, like what are you talking about? Nobody cares. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:08:42):
Nobody cares.

Leo/Paul (01:08:43):
So, yeah. Well, I hope so. I hope so. I don't know. I don't, wait a minute, what am I saying? I don't have a dog in this hunt. Does it matter? I mean, I do,

Rich Campbell (01:08:53):
You'd like the story to go away, right? Like this should

Leo/Paul (01:08:57):
Stop. No, no. Cause there's no story. Then I got nothing to talk about. So

Rich Campbell (01:09:01):
Story like I, I wanna see always I wanna see an Activision PO post Bobby Kotick. I want to see Microsoft.

Leo/Paul (01:09:08):
I do wanna see Kodak Gone. Yeah. that's for sure. Maybe that's the real, I wanna see Activision titles on game Pass, right? Yeah. Okay. And cloud streaming. So there is, so there is a, a reason to support it. Yeah. Okay. Yep. I I will say that I, I don't know if this came up on Windows Weekly, I apologize, but I I, the one thing we maybe shouldn't You were here forever show, dude. Whatcha are you talking about <laugh>? I don't remember. I I've said this out loud. I don't remember if I said it on this show, but, okay. The one thing for all of the ra ra stuff around Microsoft and I, I feel very strongly that, that this should be allowed to go through, et cetera, et cetera. There, there is one thing they have done wrong. And that is they've talked endlessly about how this is all about mobile. Why haven't you done something about mobile? Like you have tremendous ip, halo, gears of Wars, you know age of Empires, whatever, on and on a ghost. Why aren't you putting that stuff on mobile? Yeah. it, it shouldn't be, it shouldn't be all based. Like, if this doesn't happen, we're screwed and mobile, you know, I

Rich Campbell (01:10:12):
I it seems like an artificial constraint.

Leo/Paul (01:10:14):
Yeah. This is you have a 60, what is it, 69 billion to spend on this company. You couldn't spend couple of billion recording these games for the iPads being a little disingenuous in saying it's percent Leo. They're, they're on the up and up. I, you know, this is the, it's a good company, good leadership. They got the right policy. No, I they're a kind, you know, for whatever. The one thing that they do do, right, I think is just the general strategy strategy. This is something I was talking to Richard about before the show. And you know, this all comes out of Phil Spencer and the, the wake of the debacle that was the Xbox One, right? Where they got rid of I just forgot name The Rid Ring of Death. Phil Spencer. No, the guy before Phil Spencer. Boy, I'm losing my mind. And it was, it was after the Red Ring of death actually. It was the, you know if you are gonna play Xbox in the sub range, you have use an Xbox 360. That guy. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, he's really turned this business around and he's made Xbox Makes sense in this cloud focus company that is Microsoft, right? They I think cloud gaming is good, but game passes better. And I think this is kind of an interesting thing. But anyway, Jason Halman no.

Rich Campbell (01:11:32):
You thinking Don Box?

Leo/Paul (01:11:35):
Oh, Don, it's Don, not Don Box. Don Matrick madd. Don Matrick,

Rich Campbell (01:11:39):
Right? Sorry,

Leo/Paul (01:11:39):
Don. Yeah. Right, right. Yes, he

Rich Campbell (01:11:42):
Went on to Zynga and didn't last long.

Leo/Paul (01:11:44):
Yeah. That's weird. He was such a, an effective executive <laugh>. So anyway he recently spoke at length about the di disappointment of the C m A decision and some of the disappointing reviews on Red Fall again, which we're gonna talk about in just a second. Hmm. And he has come under a lot of fire for this interview. I, to me, that's

Rich Campbell (01:12:06):
Not what I took away from that

Leo/Paul (01:12:07):
Interview. No, not at all. I, the, the key phrase that people are latching onto is, you just admitted that Xbox is never going to out consul Sony. Thus you are a failure and you need to be fired. My reaction to that is, excuse me, that was what the strategy admitted 10 years ago or whatever it was. Yeah. And the, the, the re the point of this is Xbox isn't just gonna be about consoles. We're going to go to where gamers are. We're gonna bring gaming everywhere. And that's what they've been working on that, and it's been pretty successful. He's done a yeah, I think I think it's Game passer, maybe their subscription business in general is gonna be a billion dollar business this quarter for the first time. Easy.

Rich Campbell (01:12:50):
Well, and, and the, and the whole point of rolling up these companies is to fill out Game Pass as much as

Leo/Paul (01:12:55):
Possible. That's right. Because that

Rich Campbell (01:12:57):
Is the end game

Leo/Paul (01:12:58):
Here. You make it the, the no-brainer that Microsoft 365 is. You know, you just make you, you like, I I have to have this. And if you be crazy,

Rich Campbell (01:13:06):
You don't have this, it's a huge number of games.

Leo/Paul (01:13:09):
Now. I, so I just fundamentally disagree with any criticism of him for that. I, I, to me,

Rich Campbell (01:13:15):
Slots stuff, other stuff to be upset about

Leo/Paul (01:13:17):
<Laugh>. Yeah, there is. And we're gonna talk about some of that. You just don't get that kind of honesty, you know, from most corporate executives. And I, I just, he's, to me, he's refreshing. I, I, yeah. I hope he never leaves. I think he's incredible. And he, and he,

Rich Campbell (01:13:33):
He clearly loves video gaming, right?

Leo/Paul (01:13:35):
Yep. Like he, he's a player. Yep. That's right. It's, no, that's it. The other disappointment, when was this game Red Fall? Lemme see if I can describe this accurately. An open world vampire shooter <laugh>, which is, you know, yeah. So you were talking about this before the show, you said, it's awful. So I I I've read reviews, I've, I've read the consensus of the reviews. Yeah, me too. I played it, watch, played watch a YouTube video where this guy kind of tore it down and explained why this thing is horrible. And I just, before the show, I played it. I played and it's it's so, it's so bad. It's <laugh>, it's unbelievable. It's, it's unbelievable how bad it's, and I would say bad, bad game, bad graphics, everything about it. It's, it's, it's not a good game. I'm only playing the single player version.

(01:14:29):
Now. It's possible. I think this kind of game shines when you can find friends to play with and you play together. Cuz you can go on these little, you know, you go through each sequence and you go on Quest and do things, whatever. The story is ludicrous. The graphics are terrible. It just, it it's, it's unfinished. It is very clearly unfinished. And without having played it, I sort of said a week or two ago, or whenever it happened, I said, you know, this seems like the type of thing that could be fixed over time, right? We've seen this with Cyberpunk 2077 or whatever. It could be fixed over time. Having played it, I still believe that it could be fixed outta time over time. But I have to say, there is no excuse for shipping this game in this state.

(01:15:10):
And I, I, the story I told at the beginning before we, I think we started the show, was that time you and I, Leo watched the showcase for Xbox and they showed Halo Infinite about two or three months before it was going to come out. And I thought they were showing last Gen graphics so they could kind of Wizard of OIT and, and have it explode into which 4K wonderfulness. And that is not what happened. And then all of a sudden they delayed it for a year. And when Halo Infinite came out, you know, 15 months later, we'll call it it still has problems. It still has problems today, but much, much better looking game. And I, this thing apparently doesn't run at 60 frames a second on a X Xbox Series X. Like, guys, I, I'm sorry, but that's gotta be the baseline.

(01:15:52):
I don't, you don't release a game like that. That's a flagship title. That's, that was just a huge mistake. So I'm not gonna say Fire Phil Spencer over that, but that, that is actually really, it was shocking. They shipped it, right? This thing six months in development. But here's the thing. Those two stories, the, you know, Phil Spencer should be fired cuz you know, he, he didn't you know, he, he said we we're fail. You know, we're never gonna win in consoles and Red Fall being a terrible game. These, there's a huge overlap here because Red Fall proves that Phil Spencer's strategy, which is Xbox Game Pass, essentially is correct. And here's why. This is the first game that Microsoft has sold that costs $70. The first flagship title. Right? Sony's been doing that since I think late last year. This is the first big title for $70.

(01:16:36):
Based on a lot of the advanced press and all the excitement over this game. A lot of people would've shoveled whatever the cost is. They would've, the only way to try this thing would be to buy it. But, cause it's on Xbox Game Pass, you could download it to your console. You can play it not for free. I know you're paying for the subscription, but the pres the subs subscription. But you, you get it as part of your prescri, Jesus, I really wanna say prescription for some reason. Hmm. subscription. Did you, did some doctor write out a little script for you? You should play with? No, I wish I probably a bad name in a day and call me in the morning if this show has proven anything. I need a prescription. So <laugh>, but it's really the case that this is not new.

(01:17:16):
I mean, look at, I mean, I could, a lot of the most recent Big Splash event launches were flops like cyberpunk. Yes. But, but, but because this thing is on Game Pass, and by the way, it's also on game Xbox Cloud gaming, which is game streaming. You don't even have to install anything. Isn't that great for me? Yeah. For me to play this, I just waited 30 seconds, whatever for startup and no cost and no, no. And then I can see it's a steaming pile of garbage. And now I need, and now I never have to look at it again. No. Really solves a problem. $70 on it. This has been a problem since gaming began. I remember going to the Atari store Yes. And looking at all of these boxes and going, I know two thirds of them are crap and I'm wasting my 39.99.

(01:18:00):
You buy Yas Revenge cuz it has an awesome cover. And actually that game was pretty good, but you just don't know <laugh>. But that's how you do it. It's like it's like buying wine if you don't know what you're doing. You're like, I like the label of this one and you're just kind of taking a chance game. You no one let's, let's not take it for granted. It's a gamers paradise really. Right? That's right. Yeah. And much more than what Amazon is doing or what Stadia was. Cuz you don't have to buy the game. You buy the pass. Right. You, we can blame Phil Spencer for Red Fall, I guess. But let's also credit him for Game Pass because this is the thing that tells us we can skip Red Fall <laugh>, you know? Right. Yeah. It, it's $70. Let's not please, let's not forget. Yeah. And I also, I also

Rich Campbell (01:18:37):
Wonder if Red Fall, like cyberpunk can be fixed because Cyberpunk was actually a great game with some serious implementation problems.

Leo/Paul (01:18:44):
Yeah. Is often the case. It's released before it's done, frankly. Yeah. They, they, there's way, by the way, it's, there's way too much, much of this going on. No Man's Sky the same, same problem. The, the Sea of Thieves kind. That's right's sort of the same problem. It's not unusual in gaming that they, they, they've spent four years and hundreds of millions of dollars and they just gotta ship it. Even if it's not done. You know, I don't understand how this mentality has come up to the forefront. Again, it's everywhere now. And when you see it in Windows this is, this is the complaint about we're gonna test features with individuals in stable and then if it's, if it doesn't work, we'll just fix it later. It's like, guys, well, you know what is, at least they can fix it later. Hollywood puts in a crap movie.

(01:19:30):
It's crap movie forever. Well, that's why they have director's cuts and <laugh>. And it doesn't make a difference. <Laugh> <laugh> bonus Sequels, sequels and sequels. Nothing's gonna save Snyder's, Superman. That's all I'm saying. I know <laugh>. So, so in a way I think they're doing it because they can, you know, it's like well ship it, we'll fi we can always fix it later. We'll push out a patch, go back in time to, it would've been I guess 2005. And I visited Micro the weird Microsoft campus where the Xbox stuff was at the time. Millennium Campus, I think it was called. And you walk by a seven foot tall master chief and everything. And they're gonna show me the Xbox 360, which was not out at the time. They had just shown off the, what the shell was gonna look like at like an event that April or something.

(01:20:19):
And, but it didn't exist as a, as a console yet. So I got to see a couple things. I got to play around with an Xbox 360 wireless controller, which compared to the OG X Xbox controllers. Perfect. It was, they got it exactly right. It was like the S controller and I gotta see the development workstation, which was two giant Mac G probably four, whatever, towers n stapled together with cables. And the controller came off of it and you could play the Xbox on it cuz it was a, you know, the same chip set, right? So I was like, I don't understand how, how are you gonna get that thing into this little box? You know, this thing was like, this gigantic, the size of a car and then you get this beautiful little apple looking device. And they said, oh, we okay guys working on that.

(01:20:59):
You know, and the guys who were working on that were responsible for the red ring of death that you just referenced. Like that's what happened. Like, it turns out doing that is really, really hard. And but one of the conversations we had on that trip was the Xbox 360 was gonna allow game makers for the first time to update games. And so the idea was you go to store and buy a desk, you bring it home, you install it, and not on day one, cuz we weren't doing that yet, but at some point there would be updates and they could fix bugs and they could even add features. It was exciting. And I said, you know, are you worried that disability is gonna result in a lack of quality of some time? And they said, no, no, no. We have a system in place.

(01:21:35):
We're not gonna let 'em ship crap and blah, blah, blah. And here we are. And they're, they're shipping crap. You know? Of course. And it didn't take, it's not like it took whatever that is, 18 years or whatever. This happened immediately, right? There were a lot of Xbox 360 games that just shipped out of the gate as crap. And and it's, that's been, it's just gotten worse. I, I think we're, I, I don't understand, I don't understand how we put up with such a lack of quality, you know, across the board, but we do well and they, and the side of game passes, like, there's nothing to return now either, right? See, I think that's kind of solves the problem. I love the, there's, there's a natural progression here where you can stream it with cloud gaming just, just to get an idea.

(01:22:18):
And you're like, okay, yes. Now I'm gonna install it using Game Pass because I know I'm gonna play this thing. And then maybe a couple of months go by, maybe at some point it comes outta Game Pass and now you have an opportunity to buy it and you can buy to a discount. Cuz you're part of Game Pass, right? And that's the decision. You have this decision making process you can make all along the way. If this game is so valuable to you that you can't stop playing it now, it's not even on Game Pass anymore. You know, now you know, it's the perfect heading process. You know, it's, you, you actually did make the case for what I asked you earlier mm-hmm. <Affirmative> the Activision merger. Right? That's a actually a really good point. Yep. This is the, right, this is how games should be delivered, right?

(01:22:59):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yep. Can, can Microsoft, I mean, are they making money at it? I mean, is it a That's good question, <laugh>, because I mean, so they make as, but Well, that's the question of if you release a game for 60 bucks, so one time only, or maybe you get a bunch of DLC purchases, that's seems, seems like a lot more money than whatever. Yeah. 15 bucks a month. There have been it. So there's, there's two questions here. Is Microsoft making money? Are game studios making money? Right? Right. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So from the perspective of, it depends on the game studio, right? A lot of big game studios are probably kinda like, eh, I don't know if I wanna do that. Smaller ones like, come on, this is gonna get us in front of people in ways that would be impossible otherwise, very difficult.

(01:23:40):
It's like you're an indie artist. How do you get on a radio station when radio stations mattered? Or, yeah, that makes sense. You're not gonna see Madden on there, you're not gonna see. So the the big Turo titles on there, I think, I think, yeah, these companies are pr restricted from speaking about specifics when it comes to money. But if you look up, you can, I think there are videos on YouTube like this, I'm sure articles as well, where some people have said, Hey, this has really worked out for us. They can't really get into specifics. Probably because of a contractual thing, right? That would betray some sort of a competitive, you know, whatever it is to their, to Sony or whatever. But I, I have seen instances where developers of con said, yeah, this is really valuable to us.

(01:24:22):
Like this is a big deal. It's also, by the way, a way for a game to have a second coming, right? So you have a, you make a whatever splash you make when the game first comes out, and now you're just like a, a back title for some studio or for some publisher. And, but one day it gets added to Game Pass and then it gets in front of a whole new audience of people who are never gonna pull it off. Well, they don't pull it off Shells anymore. They were never gonna go buy it. I guess that's the argument for selling your movie to Netflix, right? It's the same Yep. Same thing. Another

Rich Campbell (01:24:50):
Revenue.

Leo/Paul (01:24:51):
Sorry. Yep.

Rich Campbell (01:24:52):
It doesn't preclude an art theater running it, running it again. You know, they, it's all those possibilities.

Leo/Paul (01:24:59):
Very, it's, it's really interesting. I don't think you can say it works out a hundred percent for everybody. I don't think that's ever gonna be true of anything. But the the question is if this thing scales enough, and I think th this is the bet, they're looking at Activision Blizzard and and saying, look, if we get this, this is what puts us over the top right. You know, it's a big bang way to make that happen. And to some degree depends on what proportion of gamers are like you, Paul, where you play the same game over and over and over again. And what proportion of people like me where I, you know, I'm not that committed, I might play they little, this little of that next time is this, I haven't talked about this too much, but I have not played Call of Duty since the first week of March.

(01:25:39):
What? And I haven't, did you go to a rehab program? I'm doing all kinds of prescriptions and <laugh> different things. No, I'm just trying different stuff, you know, so I've been doing Xbox Game Pass, I'm playing different games. I've actually been playing Halo Infinite go Figure. Which is, I can't say is a great game, but it's a well-made game. It's actually a lot like a typical, like a a Netflix movie these days where it's like really well made. It was it great. I wouldn't say it was great, but it, it was, it's looks nice <laugh>, you know, that kind of thing. But I've been trying different stuff. I mean, I've been trying to figure something out there. So. Interesting. That's, boy, yeah, it's a big shift for you. The longest gap in since Theus the Call of Duty two. There's no doubt about it. Okay.

Leo/Paul (01:26:30):
What else you got in there? Any more? Xbox? Yeah, let's just, right, yeah, just a few more things. So the May Xbox update is out. The big thing here is that the actually disc discre, I feel like Discord integration came a few months ago, but I don't know if it's, maybe they just improved it. I, the big thing is Discord integration, which I thought was already there, but discord integration is either new or improved. I guess it's improved. I don't actually use this kind of thing on a console. It's an interesting,

Rich Campbell (01:26:58):
Yeah, it's a particular style of play for with Discord, right? Like it's, yeah. If you don't wanna set up a Twitch channel, you can be playing through Discord and other people can comment on your play, like

Leo/Paul (01:27:08):
Right, right.

Rich Campbell (01:27:09):
Interesting aspects

Leo/Paul (01:27:10):
To it. I used to like a million years ago when I was still PC gaming, although actually I am, I should say for the past two months I've been PC gaming, but a million years ago I used to get, you know, put on a headset and I would talk to people that we, you know, we'd talk to people, we talk to each other in game and we used to a friend and I used to really make other people upset by just joking around and the whole time. And everyone else was like, would you just shut the hell up <laugh>? And we would just run around and we would just chase them around in like Quake or whatever the game was. Duke Newcomb and just belittle brief the entire time. You know, it's just, I was a terrible younger person. Anyway there's also, there's a wireless controller update firmer update that you get with the May update. So you should nice. You sure to install it? Oh, don't worry. You don't have to worry about installing it. It's mandatory. Just like Windows seven windows 11 updates. Right? so

Rich Campbell (01:28:00):
Here's a question. Is there anything called Super Fiesta mode That's good.

Leo/Paul (01:28:04):
<Laugh>? So I would love to tell you, but I, here's the problem I have with this. So I, I, I just said I've been playing, playing Halo Infinite. What I didn't say is I've been playing it on the pc. Hmm. I've been playing it with a controller, so it's like a console, right. I, I have a serious problem. I don't know if it's this computer or where, I don't know what's going on, but this thing cannot download stuff. We like stuff from the Xbox app. Well, at all. So when I, I did an episode of Hands On Windows, you know, weeks, weeks and weeks ago about the Xbox stuff, a couple of episodes. But when I did the Xbox Game Bar episode, I wanted to do some in-game footage. And this thing had downloaded the shell of it Halo Infinite at the time, but not the game.

(01:28:49):
So I couldn't actually go into the game and show the game. And I'm like, what is this thing doing? And it just sits there. It, it's like downloading zero of 82 gigabytes <laugh>. So this Fiesta update, well the May update for Halo Infinite has not download. I don't have it yet. And as of as of until today, that's not been a problem. It just came out, I guess. But today it's like, yeah, you can't start this game until we download the update. It won't download it. It's a si it's like literally on zero of eight, it's 82 gigabytes. That's how big this thing is on the computer. So Super fiesta. I know, I, I, so obviously super, it's a good thing for a margarita. Yeah, it's a, it's, it's a Cinco de Mayo thing because no one in this country understands Cinco de Mayo, obviously.

(01:29:33):
That's it. It's a multiplayer mode. It was previously available in Halo five Guardians, blah, blah, blah. I dunno, it's just <laugh>. It's just, I dunno, I've been playing single player, so I dunno. I haven't tried it. I'm sorry. I just can't stand names. Like super Fiesta mode. Come on. Hilarious. Yeah. What else we got here? So a couple of years ago and maybe, I don't know if it was with the launch of the consoles, or soon thereafter, Microsoft introduced its first set of external storage expansion cards for the Xbox Series X and X. They're made by Seagate. So, you know, they're terrible and they're really expensive. And they, and now they come in five 12 gig, one terabyte and two terabyte. I wanna say when it first came out, it was just one or two terabyte, I don't remember. But now they have choices.

(01:30:24):
They've always been really expensive. And the story from the beginning was always, oh, don't worry, they're gonna be third party versions, blah. They've never appeared. This is all we have. We have this one company making this one set of expansion cards. So now they are less expensive than they were before. And this is a permanent price cut. I'm trying to find the exact price. Oh, it obviously depends on which version you're getting, but the 500, yeah, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing. It's not tedious. I will go to Seagate now. <Laugh>, I'm trying to find the price. I'm sorry. Yes. Nope. Still where to buy every, I've gone to three different sites. It's like, where to buy, go here, where to buy, go here. Where to buy, buy now. We've gone amazon.com. Yes. The terabyte ones for $150. There you go. So I wanna say it was double that probably when they first launched or something like that.

(01:31:19):
It was a lot more expensive. They, did they really offer an eight terabyte one? Maybe not. I don't think they do. I think it's 5 12, 1 and two, but I could be right. Could be right. That would be nice. Oh, here are the prices. I'm sorry, five 12 is $90. Yeah, one terabyte like said 1 49 and two terabytes is 2 79. So the joke at the time was the expansion card. It cost almost as much the initial one cost almost as much as the console. Right. Because if you bought an Xbox Series s, we would really need this thing. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, because it comes with much less storage. It was super expensive. So actually, so, oh, this is interesting. So apparently there is a Western digital Xbox series x s suspension card coming. It has not been officially announced, but it appeared briefly in Best Buy. And Microsoft sort of said, Hey, we always look at offering new choices, blah, blah, blah, whatever. You know, they're not admitting it, but it is obviously coming. But you know, how long, how far are we into Three years. Four years. Yeah, three years. It's only been this one choice and, you know, whatever. So eventually that's gonna change.

(01:32:29):
Okay, what else? Oh, and then the last story is just the nten Nintendo Switch sales stuff. So Nintendo announced a quarterly earnings. This is the, Ooh, second year in a row. Yeah, they, they, I mean, honestly, this thing has done great overall, but for the second year in a row, sales have gone down. Last year was 18 million units. This is last fiscal year. This now they expect 15 million units. This fiscal year machine look, I think pretty much people who wanted to buy it have bought it. Yeah. But this is where this thing is put broken ones at this point stolen. Well, they could see, they could do a 4K version. They released an old lead version a couple of years ago. That was very good. There's a light version. And no, I know, but I mean, I, I have couples they they could do a 4k.

(01:33:16):
I'm just, but they're not going to. So the Nintendo has said, we're not doing pro, we're not, we're gonna have a new console. They could, they could have announced that as soon as they year, by the way, they're for how long has this been out? They would do for a new console, 2 20 17. So six years. That's a long time. Yeah. Here's the thing. They've sold 125 million units. Right? It's a serious that puts it in third place all time. Yeah. Yeah. Only the original PlayStation two, which is over 50, 155 million units. And the Nintendo ds, which is about 154 million units have out sold it in the history of video games. So pretty impressive. People are still buying switches, like lots of 'em. So Yeah, it could beat them all in a few years. Yep. Yep. I was too lazy to look this up, but Sony, you know, recently announced how many PlayStation fives they've sold since that thing came out.

(01:34:05):
And it was, you know, 38.5 million units. And it's like, okay, what year did the, I could probably go back and look to see where the switch was at that point in time, but I'll just tell you off the top of my head, it was obviously much higher. But the conditions are different. A these two consoles costs are a different ballparks price-wise. And the, the PlayStation five came out right as the pen right in the middle of the pandemic, right? Yeah. And there was all kinds of you know, supply issues and component supply issues and all that kind of stuff. So it's not really fair to do that. But it's probably fair to say, although Sony claims otherwise Sony seems to think they have the possibility of outselling the previous gen. And the previous gen, I wanna say, was, I, I think it was 120 something.

(01:34:47):
It was a pretty big number. I don't think they're ever gonna do that, but, but you know, maybe Nintendo will have something a little more competitive from a technical perspective this time around. We'll see. It gotta be working on the new hardware. It has been a while. Yeah, we could do that. The Switch is an awesome platform. I'm, yeah. Yeah. Do you know it's not, did Nintendo create a purpose-built os just for the Switch? Or is it, it's not Windows, is it what's behind the, it's not Android, maybe it's purpose-built? I guess the reason I ask that question is if they could make a newer platform that was com right, right. Compatible so that they wouldn't throw away the old games just as any other console would. I love the Switch. I mean, the Switch is really a great platform, I have to say.

(01:35:33):
Yep. Yep. All right. Let's take a little break back of the book coming up, brown Liquor Tips tricks. I want to just quickly go down to the Twit Studios South. Like, what am I, they are gathering right now at Google for a very special, all about Andrea. There was Jason Howell, Ron Richards on the left, went to Dow, and I think one of their very special guests said that guy was on stage Yeah. From Google. So this is very exciting. We're gonna do, they're gonna record it. They're not gonna stream it live. They're gonna record it. It will air as soon as it's done on our TWIT News feed. So if you're not yet subscribed to TWIT News, subscribe because we are, they're gonna have a number of people who were on stage at the Google event. This is gonna be really cool.

(01:36:17):
We've done this in the past. We're all set up. They're all set up down there at the Google Plex, getting ready for a very special, all about Android coming up in in just a, a, well, I guess a few hours. They'll be doing it. They'll be doing it in a few minutes, but we're not gonna stream it live. But we will have it by this evening or early tomorrow morning, subscribe, Twitter tv slash news. Meanwhile, let's talk about oh, here's an <laugh>. Oh, this brand new sponsor. We're thrilled to have a w s Insiders. The AWS Insiders Podcast is a sponsor, fast based, entertaining, and I think really interesting look behind the scenes of AW WS and Cloud computing, Amazon Web Services. Now, this isn't your typical Talking Heads Tech podcast, like, say, I don't know, something we might do.

(01:37:11):
High production value, high energy, high entertainment, and full of great, interesting. My favorite part, anecdotes from the early days of a w s to today and then to tomorrow as well. Raul Superman is the host along with Hillary Doyle. They are very knowledgeable. They dig into the current state and future of a w s, but they also bring in great guest talking with people and companies that know it best. Rauls, he's an AWS pro, 15 years managing more than 45,000 aws instances. I mean, this guy knows how to push an AWS product to its limits. And he is absolutely a believer in the future of A W Ss C in a way, the operating system of the future. Right? Aw, w s insiders, you gotta, you gotta write this down and subscribe full of information, opinions, takeaways, untold stories about the challenges, innovations and mind-blowing promise of cloud computing.

(01:38:16):
And honestly you've got, you've got two hosts who are very good, and Raul really knows a w s I'll give you some examples. Their's season two just came out episode one, filling the Cloud Talent Gap. They talk about staffing your cloud team with the right resources. One of the hardest things to do too, of course, Raul and Hillary discussed solutions defining, retaining, and leveling up cloud talent. Episode two was actually fascinating Moderna version one where Holand Hillary talk about when Moderna was born in the cloud in 2010. AWS was brand new, only, I think a few years old by then. They talk about how Moderna uses the cloud to become one of the top biotech companies out there. That one's really interesting. Search for AWS Insiders on your podcast player. You can also go directly to the site cloud fix.ora.com/podcast cloud fix, just like it sounds.

(01:39:24):
Dot a u r e a.com/podcast. I figure you probably know how to spell podcast. We'll also include a link if you go to twit tv slash www, it'll be there in the show notes. Thanks so much to a w s insiders for their support. Really interesting show. Check it out, cloud fix.ora.com/podcast. Or just look for AWS insiders on your favorite podcast player. All right, now let's see here. Oops. There they are again. Oh, oh, ooh. You know, Ooh, there's the Irish guy. Ooh, it's gonna be good. Irish guy. The Irish guy. <Laugh>. that'll be a, this is, I'm really looking forward to this straight news special coming up. They're they're getting ready to get that started, but before we do that, let's go to Paul Throt, cuz it's time for the tip of the week. Just wanna point out that it's gotten dark where Richard is.

(01:40:21):
Yes. Cuz he's in Europe and stuff. Yes. Yes. It's late night. Late night PM Yeah, it's 11 o'clock here. Well, we'll get this over with. We're almost done. No, no. It's just, I I just always enjoy that about the I know. Yeah. It's fun, isn't it? It's different. It's, it's just interesting watching it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So I had just recorded a, an episode of Hands-On Windows where we talked about keyboard shortcuts. And it occurred to me that this is an excellent example of something where it Did I just say keyboards, <laugh>, screenshot, screenshots. Geez, I'm losing. I am literally losing my mind today. I re not did, I did an episode about screenshots, not about keyboard shortcuts. Yeah. But there were one of those too, there shortcuts to get the screenshots. That's right. And that's what I kind of wanted to go through because this is about to change.

(01:41:04):
And I think that's really interesting. So Microsoft has various tools built into Windows for taking screenshots. Some of them date back literally to the original version of Ms. Os and the I B M pc, which had a dedicated print screen key. We still have that key on our computer. It no longer is used to print out to a printer. It prints out a screenshot to the clipboard, which is kind of probably not what people might expect. And so I just wanted to run through a couple of these real quick and then tell you about how it's gonna change. So right now, if you hit print screen on your keyboard, a screenshot is captured, but it's captured to memory, it's captured to the clipboard, and you can paste that into another application and then save it or do whatever you want. You can also do something called alt plus key print screen to capture just the current window, the, the window that has the focus in Windows, I wanna say it was probably Windows eight, because that's when we started going to these kind of taby type devices.

(01:41:56):
But they added a Windows Key plus print screen keyboard shortcut that not only takes a screenshot, but saves it to a file, which is kind of neat. It creates a screenshot folder in your pictures folder where you can go find the screenshot in ping format, which is nice. And you might assume, well, of course there must be an Alt plus print screen or Alt plus Windows Key Plus win print screen. And there is but that's been taken over by Xbox Game Bar for reasons I don't care to get into. But <laugh>, it's crazy. But the problem with that, the reason you need to know that is it, it still gets saved. You can still save that a file that is a screenshot of an application window that way, but that is saved in the Captures folder, which is in your videos folder.

(01:42:40):
And I, I know, wow, I know now in Windows 10 and 11, there's a new tool and it's changed a few times, but now it's called the Sniping Tool. And if you bring it up, you will see that there is a keyboard shortcut for that. But you can, if you like the snipping tool, and I don't, but if you do you can change it to be what happens when you hit print screen, which is kind of interesting. You have to do that in Windows settings. And it brings you to an the accessibility section of settings. And you'll see an option in there for use the print screen button to open screen snipping as they call it there for some reason. This is going to be the default in Windows 11 soon. And I don't know if that means Windows 1123 H two or before then, but it is happening sometime this year.

(01:43:25):
So they're actually gonna change the meaning of print screen for the first time since Windows was released wow. Back in 1985. So that's happening soon. Now, the, the other part of this tip is the one thing you cannot get with any tool built into Windows is the mouse cursor. So if you wanted to get the little pointer in the screenshot, you actually have to use a third party utility. So you don't want, want the mouse cursor, but sometimes you, well, depending on what you're doing, if you training or like, you know, I've write books and stuff, I need that. So if you do want that you need a third party utility. I use something called Green Shot, which is free. There's also, there are a lot of tools. Share X is another one that's a good one that people like.

(01:44:02):
So people like Green Shot Icor as he likes it. It is good. Hey, and that is an example of what you're missing if you are not a Club twin member, cuz the Hands-on Windows show is a great show for the club we release sometimes release episodes. I think actually that one of those episodes is gonna be released under the, yeah, actually that one might be one of the ones. I think it is. That one might be coming free. Yeah. so we put those out on YouTube, but if you wanna see 'em all or the hands on Macintosh or you know, the UN type of Lennox show or the Stacy's book club, or now we brought back Home Theater Geeks, the Club is a great place to do that. Seven bucks a month gets you ad free versions of all of our shows, access to the Club Twit Discord and the Feed with all a bunch of shows that we don't put out anywhere else cuz we really wanna make the Club a great place to be.

(01:44:50):
By the way, I should point out tomorrow, Alex Wilhelms ama aunt Pruitt is begging you for questions for Alex. He's now he's a news editor at tech Crunch, but you know him from twit. Alex, a great guy, expert on finance, ask him about crypto, ask him about you know, the, the current down slump in the tech community, that kind of thing. Ask him what it's like living in my childhood home <laugh> and what they did with my bedroom. He literally does, he lives in my childhood home in Providence, Rhode Island. Anyway, that's tomorrow morning. If you're around, if you're a Club Twit member just to go to the, you know, the specials section, you'll see that club Twit members get a lot more access. And that's that's kind of my intent cuz we want to encourage people to join TWIT TV slash club twit.

(01:45:37):
If you're not yet a member and get Paul's fabulous series. We should have in hindsight made that whiskey series part of the club too. <Laugh>. Still good? Still good, still not too late. Not too late. You have an app pick Paul? Yeah, I have too, in a way. So Star today released Groupie two and that, I'm sort of thinking about this. If you go back to the Great Tab Wars of 2017, you may remember that Microsoft was gonna add tabs to everything in Windows 10 via a feature called Sets. They actually tested it, the Insider Program, everyone loved it. And they said, oh, just kidding. And they took it away. And then years later in Windows 11 they added it to File Explorer first and then to Notepad. So they're kind of doing it on an app by app basis.

(01:46:23):
Now, I'm sure there were technical reasons somehow Start, was able to work around those because in 2017 they released something called Groupie that added tabs to every single window in Windows 10. Yes. You have to ask Brad, like, what do they, have they special programmers or what, what, what do they do? They have a, well, there's a lower bar for them. You know, they're, but so the interesting thing to me about Groupie is I kind of forgot about it. I mean, I know it exists and, and whatever, but Groupie two, it just came out in beta today, so it's been six years. Wow. and now it supports Windows 11, of course. The key new thing here, obviously Windows 11 support Windows 11 look and feel and all that stuff. There's a couple of new things, but the key one to me is they have a grouping feature go figure that lets you save a group of applications.

(01:47:06):
They're together in with a set of tabs in one window, pin that to the task bar. It looks like a little, a cool Windows 11 folder, you know, with the little, you know, icons for each to the apps. And when you click it, they all open in the same window in the, with the tabs. You know, that sounds kind of obvious, but kind of a neat feature. And there's some color coding and some other stuff. But the, the good news here is if you don't own this, it is now it's normally 9 99, which is not expensive, but it's on sale for 6 99 if you want to take a look at that. So I think you can just download it for free and try it first if you want to do that. And then just real quick Firefox one 13 is out this week.

(01:47:43):
There's a bunch of new features in there, improvements to the picture and picture stuff improvements to private windows and passwords and accessibility and blah, blah, blah. But this one thing really stuck out to me. I just thought this was beautiful. Mozilla fixed a 13 year old bug that has been a feature request since then that allows Fire Frogs to now support files being dragged and dropped directly out of Microsoft Outlook. Huh. <laugh>. So it never worked before. I guess you could drag and drop files out of Outlook to the desktop, obviously to other applications. It never, it, Firefox never worked as a drop target. And I guess now it does <laugh>. So if you are that weird person who is using Microsoft Outlook and Firefox, God bless you, <laugh> that will not work. So I just wanted to, I just thought that was kind of cool.

(01:48:31):
It's about time. Yeah. Finally, finally, <laugh> of course if you use Firefox, you get these updates automatically and I do, that's my default browser everywhere. And I by the way, did you hear there's, I think it mul, is Muld the VPN company? Is that right? Yeah, MULD. Yeah. I guess they have a new privacy browser based on Firefox. Well that's funny cuz Firefox has been reselling Mul ad as their vpn I think. Who coincidental? Hmm. I don't think so. Hmm. Yeah, I haven't seen it yet. Firefox is open source. You know, there's a, there's a, a fork of it called Ice Weasel. There's, that's a great name. Great, great name. <Laugh>. actually I think there's several you know, forks of it there. What's the point of ice bas other than having an it's name? It's it's unencumbered. I think, I can't remember encumbered distro, what Distro uses it, but it's got no proprietary I see. Coding it at all. It's fully open source for those guys, for those guys, the people who care. What is Richard Campbell coming up on Run as Radio Next?

Rich Campbell (01:49:39):
This week's show I did with Jen Sharon has been on a few times and she's always been one of my go-tos for Azure Virtual Desktop. So this is the tool to basically allow you to host a desktop environment in the cloud that then might have special privileges into different resources. A V D got a huge kick in the arm during the pandemic when it folks were struggling with apps that did not work well over VPNs. So rather than trying to run the client at home through a V P N to a backend service, you ship the whole thing into the cloud and then you give them credentials to get into these cloud instances. Think modernized terminal services a little more efficient, a little more cost effective. And this week's show was really a focus on the fact that it's now part of the cloud adoption framework. So they've built better tooling to make it easy for you to follow your security and landing pads solutions. But Jen also dug into the idea that, you know, certain classes of application are just well served by a v d, so no reason for you to only take your existing apps and move them if you've got certain kinds of apps running that would work well in the scenario. It, it's for, for greenfield deployments as well. So fun conversation.

Leo/Paul (01:50:53):
Azure's your virtual desktop accelerator with jen sheeran runners radio.com. You also find.net rocks there. No, let's talk whiskey baby.

Rich Campbell (01:51:05):
You know, I figured we'd recap the entire Scottish whiskey conversation.

Leo/Paul (01:51:09):
Good, good. I wanna especially go deep into barrels like I feel like we didn't get enough. How is barrels, how is AI impacting

Rich Campbell (01:51:15):
Scott? 35 minutes to barrels. Not enough for I am

Leo/Paul (01:51:18):
Gonna bring, I am gonna bring out one of these days. Stacey Higginbotham must have been as an insult or a joke. No, no. I mean, no, it was Amy Webb sent me a bottle of synthetic whiskey. Oh boy. It's a San Francisco startup and I guess they're using flavor pellets or something to simulate an aged whiskey. I mean, it's alcoholic, the alcohol's real, but the flavor is, and it tastes that way to be honest with you. Interesting. I'm not gonna recommend it. Let's put it that way. Give us something you would drink. How about that?

Rich Campbell (01:51:52):
A whiskey I just encountered for the first time today since I was in an Netherlands, I had an opportunity to taste a little bus whiskey. So the busk whiskey is a Dutch based whiskey maker and they make a series of special editions, typically five.

Leo/Paul (01:52:08):
Can I stop one second, I'm sorry. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, can we, we have to address what you just said. A a Dutch whiskey maker. Yeah. This is a thing

Rich Campbell (01:52:19):
You could have made Geneva, but you chose not to hurt people. <Laugh>,

Leo/Paul (01:52:24):
I've spent lot of time, if you're making beer, it's not such a far, I don't think I've ever heard of a Dutch

Rich Campbell (01:52:30):
Pills. Me neither. But I had a chance to taste it. In fact, I got a little right here. And the fruit note was surprising. Like it's very approachable on the nose when it, when you actually drink it. It is these are cast strength and single malts. So they come across quite potent depending on the bottling, the bottles run about 65 euros, piece of six

Leo/Paul (01:52:53):
Proof.

Rich Campbell (01:52:56):
Depends on the version, right?

Leo/Paul (01:52:58):
Yeah. That's number 20. Yeah.

Rich Campbell (01:52:59):
Yeah. So you can, there's, there's some pot one

Leo/Paul (01:53:02):
Kabar in there. Be good.

Rich Campbell (01:53:04):
Very, very drinkable. Nice. And nice to see. It's just a sort of a sign that it's becoming easier to make good whiskey in lots of places.

Leo/Paul (01:53:13):
What I like about this company's website is that it has introduced a third level of age check. Sometimes you'll see when it will say you actually have to put in your birth date, which is crazy. And then sometimes it'll say, are you over 21? And it's like, yes or no. And then this one it says, are you over 21? And then there's this one button that says, yes, <laugh>

(01:53:32):
The touch. Get right down to it. They, there's no, there's no getting by it. <Laugh>. No, you're getting into, it's a Microsoft tile style. So here, this is the whiskey, it's called Glyph. And it's provocative Spirits for curious minds. Small batch hand bottled, proudly made by endless West Tradition is, I think you should try that as soon as right now. No, I've tried it. Oh, you have? Yeah. All of the spirit, none of the rules. It says we've never shied away from doing things differently. Learn more. They, they're trying to simulate a sherry cask. Hmm.

Rich Campbell (01:54:14):
That's interesting.

Leo/Paul (01:54:15):
Yeah. But it's, they call it spirit whiskey with natural flavors. That should give you some idea. Get the bus. There you go. Get get on the bus. On

Rich Campbell (01:54:25):
The bus. Try the

Leo/Paul (01:54:26):
Bus. Get on the bus. Get on the, get on the bus. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know,

Rich Campbell (01:54:31):
Next week in the whole diamond thing. Right? And, and these days we can synthetic island diamonds that by any measure are superior to the natural. Exactly. And yet and cost less, but still have a stigma related to them. Cuz they're not natural. I,

Leo/Paul (01:54:44):
Oh, I tried to buy red breasts last week, by the way. And it's completely struck out. It's cuz of him. This guy created a run on the red breast. They just sold. No, they literally, I asked, they said, yeah, we just, we just sold the last one. It's so good. And then I just, I bought another Woodford Reserve just to

Rich Campbell (01:55:00):
Yeah, go wrong.

Leo/Paul (01:55:01):
Well, I had to get something. I was there

Rich Campbell (01:55:03):
When we saw some folks posting up on Twitter about Nicky. So folks are trying the whiskeys.

Leo/Paul (01:55:08):
That's good. Yep. That's good selling. Well, I think Woodford Reserve was the sponsor of the Kentucky Derby this year. So how that happen?

Rich Campbell (01:55:15):
The tough tuck derby though. Lost a few good horses. So yeah,

Leo/Paul (01:55:19):
A few more than a few, few good hats too. Kinda shocking. Yeah. The other hat goes down, my friends, I hate to say it, but it's, it's time to say goodbye to the wonderful Richard Campbell runners radio.com. Enjoy the low country and and an yeah,

Rich Campbell (01:55:37):
A little further south. Yeah. Next week we'll be at a different location. That'll be

Leo/Paul (01:55:40):
Fun. That's cool. Call trot.com. Lean pub.com is where you'll find the field guide to Windows 11 and his new book Windows Everywhere. Two good places. Two good books. One good place. Lean pub.com. Thank you both for being here. Appreciate you being patient. And no, and I also, we, I we watched it, you know. Yeah. What are you gonna do? You know, actually now I'm, I've been looking as we've been doing this show at all the news announcements and actually it's, I think, I think Google had a lot of great stuff that they could have talked about. Yeah. I I I will say during the course of this show, I think I, there were 250 Google News releases. Yeah. It's gonna take me a long time to get through this <laugh>. And a lot of it, frankly, is more interest in what they talked about.

(01:56:28):
I feel like actually they, they hid their light under a bushel. They <laugh> or, or a, or a bus whiskey. I don't know. They, they could have done a better job, let's put it that way of showing off some stuff. We'll talk about it on Twig and just, it's so Google though. That's just the way it's so Google. That's so cool. <Laugh>. we do Windows Weekly Norm on a normal Wednesday at about 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern Time, 1800 utc. You, you can tune in and watch us do it live if you want, or listen live at live TWI tv. There's live audio and video streams after the fact on demand versions of twit tv slash ww. And if you're at the website, you'll see there's a link to a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. There's also links to your favorite podcast players. Actually. Doesn't matter what you listen to podcasts on, you can just, you know, type in Windows Weekly. You'll find it. We've been around for a long, long time. We're everywhere. Please do subscribe. We'd appreciate it. We'd also appreciate your membership and Club twit and a big tip of the hat and a thank you to all our Club TWIT members. We will be back here next Wednesday. I hope you will too. Thanks for joining us on Windows Weekly. Bye-Bye. Bye-bye. Bye everybody.