Windows Weekly Episode 849 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott is here. Richard Campbell's joining us from Perth where it is the middle of the night, but Richard somehow has kept his energy up there, his stuff to talk about, including an interesting change in the licensing for Windows 11. We've got some dev builds to talk about OneDrive problems and Paul's behalf. In fact, Paul's going to give you a little rant on why things have gotten too complicated. He wants 'em to go back [00:00:30] to dumb. All that and more coming up next, including a great brown liquor.

Leo Laporte (00:00:35):
Windows Weekly is next. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. Episode 849 recorded Wednesday, October 4th, 2023. [00:01:00] Back to Dumb Windows Weekly is brought to you by Duo Protect Against Breaches with a leading access management suite, providing strong multi-layered defenses to only allow legitimate users in. For any organization concerned about being breached and in need of a solution, fast Duo quickly enables strong security and improves user productivity. Visit css.co/twit today for a free trial. It's time [00:01:30] for Windows Weekly, the show We get together with the two fabulous with those commentators to get their latest opinions on Microsoft. We have on your right from Perth, Australia, Mr. Richard Campbell of EZ radio.com. Hello, Richard.

Richard Campbell (00:01:47):
Hello. We're starting to have real fun with this, so we're in the world. Is Richard thing now?

Leo Laporte (00:01:51):
Yeah, I feel like also

Paul Thurrott (00:01:53):
You are unusually subdued for you.

Richard Campbell (00:01:55):
Oh no, it

Leo Laporte (00:01:56):
Feel like

Richard Campbell (00:01:57):
Two o'clock in the morning

Leo Laporte (00:01:57):
Given the word. Oh, is it really? Oh, good Lord.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:00):
[00:02:00] Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:02:01):
Given the wood paneling, I feel like you're really calling it from the seventies, to be honest.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:05):
Yeah, exactly.

Richard Campbell (00:02:06):
I could open the curtains behind me, but the glass reflect pretty harsh. But the night lights of Perth are beautiful.

Leo Laporte (00:02:13):
I bet they are.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:15):
They're on

Leo Laporte (00:02:15):
The edge of the world. Also on your left,

Richard Campbell (00:02:19):
Certainly the edge of the internet,

Leo Laporte (00:02:21):
All thro from thro.com

Paul Thurrott (00:02:24):
With a different kind of terminus. It's called Macee.

Leo Laporte (00:02:28):
Did you move? It looks like the same [00:02:30] molding behind you as before. No,

Paul Thurrott (00:02:33):
It'll be mid-November.

Leo Laporte (00:02:34):
Why are you moving?

Paul Thurrott (00:02:37):
I hate myself.

Leo Laporte (00:02:38):
Yeah, no kidding. Because

Paul Thurrott (00:02:39):
No, we had a family thing come up where it's kind of a long story, but basically she's not my mother, but my stepmother sort of needed

Leo Laporte (00:02:47):
Some more needed to stay

Paul Thurrott (00:02:48):
With you. That was medical issues. No, but she can't stay in her condo, so we can stand there. It'll cost the same. Are

Leo Laporte (00:02:54):
You taking over her condo? Oh, that's cool. Well, just

Paul Thurrott (00:02:57):
Short term.

Leo Laporte (00:02:59):
You just love packing [00:03:00] boxes, don't you? Pauly?

Paul Thurrott (00:03:01):
Getting good at it. Certainly

Richard Campbell (00:03:03):
A lot of practice. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:03:04):
Every time I see your Insta, I go, oh, poor Paul. Yeah, I do too.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:09):
I hate myself. It's terrible.

Leo Laporte (00:03:11):
Poor Paul.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:12):
It's the right thing. It's the right thing to do.

Leo Laporte (00:03:18):
Yeah, good. I just put, as you may know, I just put my mom in assisted living.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:24):
Oh, I wasn't sure about that. Okay. I didn't know that, but that's why

Leo Laporte (00:03:26):
I was out there.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:27):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:03:28):
In fact, I'm going back in [00:03:30] a week from Monday, but I'm going to do the show from my mom's basement again, because as all

Paul Thurrott (00:03:34):
Podcasters, we should be like Wayne's World,

Leo Laporte (00:03:37):
Wayne. At some point you

Richard Campbell (00:03:37):
Have to, right? It's kind of the rules.

Leo Laporte (00:03:39):
Yeah, sure.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:41):
Just fulfilling the belief of everyone who thinks we're nerds.

Leo Laporte (00:03:45):
Well, she kept her house. I told her, I said, mom, if you hate this, you could call home. We just have

Paul Thurrott (00:03:51):
To get you a nurse to come in and

Leo Laporte (00:03:53):
Check you. But she's loving it. She likes

Paul Thurrott (00:03:57):
Three squares a

Leo Laporte (00:03:58):
Day. Apparently [00:04:00] she's the hit of the assisted living facility. Of

Paul Thurrott (00:04:03):
Course

Leo Laporte (00:04:04):
She is, because she's an entertainer. I kind of realize now where I got it from. She likes to, yeah. And this is

Paul Thurrott (00:04:12):
In Providence, right?

Leo Laporte (00:04:13):
Yeah, Providence area. So I'll be going back to Providence again, probably free spot. It's very nice. I grew up there, so it's familiar. Although last time

Paul Thurrott (00:04:24):
Province has changed a lot, by the way.

Leo Laporte (00:04:25):
Oh, sure.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:25):
It's gentrified. Big time. We think about Providence. I could [00:04:30] picture,

Leo Laporte (00:04:30):
Oh, it's a

Paul Thurrott (00:04:31):
Wonderful

Leo Laporte (00:04:31):
City. It's got Brown

Paul Thurrott (00:04:32):
University. There's Little City, Rhode Island School of

Leo Laporte (00:04:34):
Design. It's close. Easy to get to Boston. It's actually a cute little city. Yeah, it's

Paul Thurrott (00:04:41):
A nice little place.

Richard Campbell (00:04:42):
RISD

Leo Laporte (00:04:42):
As well. Risd, yeah. My sister

Paul Thurrott (00:04:46):
Works at risd, so it's

Leo Laporte (00:04:48):
A,

Paul Thurrott (00:04:49):
RIS was one of the colleges I got accepted at.

Leo Laporte (00:04:51):
Really? Oh, you really were a graphic artist. I thought you were just

Paul Thurrott (00:04:55):
Making that up. No, I went to art school and everything.

Leo Laporte (00:05:00):
[00:05:00] Yeah. Risd. Iss a great school. Very expensive.

Richard Campbell (00:05:01):
How did that career work out for you?

Paul Thurrott (00:05:03):
Well, I'm doing computers now, Richard, and

Leo Laporte (00:05:06):
He likes Microsoft Paint, which is

Paul Thurrott (00:05:08):
I do like

Leo Laporte (00:05:09):
And paint just explains everything. A graphic tool. So Mr. Pauly, I know you want to talk about Windows

Paul Thurrott (00:05:17):
11. I know you're thrilled to talk

Leo Laporte (00:05:18):
About Windows 11, know

Paul Thurrott (00:05:21):
You're dying to talk about. I appreciate you bringing yourself down to my level to use the topic.

Leo Laporte (00:05:25):
Can I just ask you if you ordered a Pixel eight?

Paul Thurrott (00:05:28):
I did. Good [00:05:30] Pro.

Leo Laporte (00:05:31):
I don't want to, I feel like Google has lost the thread. I'm still a little mad at them. I bought the Pixel tablet, which is junk, but

Paul Thurrott (00:05:44):
I appreciate them trying to do something different. I think it should have been a 16 by 10 device stand optional. Right. I feel like Android and tablet's getting there. So that's something I would consider in the future over the iPad I currently use, but it's just not there [00:06:00] yet.

Richard Campbell (00:06:00):
What do you mean by the iPad's? The only tablet worth using, and I'm not an Apple fan.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:06):
Right, exactly. But what about the Pixel phone Slay don't. What's your worry there? Or is it gone?

Leo Laporte (00:06:15):
No, I'm not gone. Yeah, I got up and left. I started the show and I'll be back.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:19):
He's like, here's

Leo Laporte (00:06:21):
Discuss. No, I wasn't going to order it. To be honest with you. It really doesn't look like it's a big improvement over the seven, which I have right here. [00:06:30] But I was

Paul Thurrott (00:06:31):
Always going to order it.

Leo Laporte (00:06:31):
I'm a Pixel. I'm a Google Fi user, so I need a five phone, and I've been using

Paul Thurrott (00:06:36):
The flip

Leo Laporte (00:06:37):
Samsung Flip five. And honestly, I don't like how the screen feels. It's plasticy, and I think for my FI phone, I should probably be using a Pixel Plus. I'm very, what's really intriguing to me, and I think this is actually a topic for conversation for

Paul Thurrott (00:06:53):
This show as well as all the others,

Leo Laporte (00:06:55):
Is they have announced that they're going to start integrating their large language model barred [00:07:00] into Google Assistant.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:02):
So

Leo Laporte (00:07:03):
Here's the thing

Paul Thurrott (00:07:04):
Is a couple of things with the new pixels, I would say the problem with the six and the seven is the tensor one and two we're kind of garbagey from a raw performance perspective, but they also caused overheating. So overheating problems, slow charging and bad battery life. Right now, supposedly each of those things has been fixed. We'll have to see. We'll see. Or at least

Richard Campbell (00:07:26):
It's the magic version.

Leo Laporte (00:07:28):
Well,

Paul Thurrott (00:07:28):
We'll

Leo Laporte (00:07:29):
See. [00:07:30] It's fair to give him a

Paul Thurrott (00:07:31):
Shot, right? To say, okay,

Leo Laporte (00:07:32):
Maybe it's

Paul Thurrott (00:07:33):
Fair 23 watt charging versus 27.0. We'll see. And the other thing is Pixel is the only mainstream camera to have high resolution sensors in all three of the lenses.

Leo Laporte (00:07:44):
So

Paul Thurrott (00:07:44):
It's 50 48. 48, and the new iPhones are 48. 12. 12.

Leo Laporte (00:07:50):
That's right. So

Paul Thurrott (00:07:51):
That's interesting right there. And then all the AI stuff they're doing, not just photography, but just kind of across the board, which was the point of tensor might be coming [00:08:00] together in this moment that God bless and Microsoft orchestrated, and here it comes. So we will see, I was always going to get this because for me, the battery life charging the curve screen on the seven just were a little much, and it fixes those problems so we'll, or it should, so we'll see.

Leo Laporte (00:08:21):
Yeah, it's

Richard Campbell (00:08:22):
Fair. I presume you have the new iOS device as well.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:25):
Oh, yes,

Leo Laporte (00:08:26):
I do. Again, another expense I can Ill afford, [00:08:30] but must for my sins do. And this is, yeah, actually, I've been very happy with this.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:37):
One of my earliest memories of something you said to me on this podcast, which dates back literally 15 years, was I was decrying the need to buy these devices, and you just described it as the cost of doing business, which is what I now reply to my wife every time.

Leo Laporte (00:08:56):
She says, can you

Paul Thurrott (00:08:57):
Explain to me why we spent

Leo Laporte (00:08:59):
Another $1,100

Paul Thurrott (00:09:00):
[00:09:00] On a device you barely use? And I said, well, honey, it is the cost of doing businesses.

Leo Laporte (00:09:06):
It's funny, it's ironic because that line comes from my wife who forces me to buy these things as the cost of doing business. And since she is the,

Paul Thurrott (00:09:16):
So this is just like the ham story from last week. It's like we don't even remember anymore why we're doing it. We

Leo Laporte (00:09:21):
Just keep doing it.

Richard Campbell (00:09:22):
I keep cutting the end off my phone, but nobody,

Leo Laporte (00:09:25):
It doesn't fit in the case. Exactly. So thanks, by the way, to [00:09:30] Micah for doing the show last week. I appreciate that. I won't miss more for a while. And thanks to Jason Howell for getting up Pacific Time 7:00 AM We broadcast the Google Stream with his commentary. God,

Richard Campbell (00:09:49):
You can't stop.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:50):
This is the end of planet of the Apes in here now.

Leo Laporte (00:09:52):
This is the national, if you're hearing this, this is just a test.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:56):
That one came up in Spanish for some reason. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:09:58):
Yours is in Spanish.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:00):
[00:10:00] One of 'em was

Leo Laporte (00:10:01):
Three is the test is test of the National Wireless Emergency Alert System. The purpose of maintaining proof, alert, warning capabilities at federal, state, and local, at tribal and territorial levels. And to evaluate the nation's public alert and warning capabilities. No action is required by the public. Everyone, please stay calm. Did y'all get it? Everybody in the discord? Did y'all get it? It was loud. It was

Paul Thurrott (00:10:23):
Pretty loud.

Leo Laporte (00:10:24):
We have to edit. I believe so. We had a debate last night on the

Paul Thurrott (00:10:28):
Editorial meeting.

Leo Laporte (00:10:29):
Can we [00:10:30] re-broadcast? Like what's going to happen? And I said, well, when we're live, it's going to go off. I don't know what else we're going to do. It's like taking

Paul Thurrott (00:10:39):
A photo of a dollar bill. Technically not legal,

Leo Laporte (00:10:43):
But Well, but what I'm pretty sure we shouldn't do, and we will, for those of you who are listening to the recording,

Paul Thurrott (00:10:49):
You'll

Leo Laporte (00:10:49):
Hear a dead

Paul Thurrott (00:10:50):
Air

Leo Laporte (00:10:51):
In that portion because I don't think we should broadcast it Again.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:55):
It's the sound of my soul.

Leo Laporte (00:10:57):
Dead air. Dead air. [00:11:00] Anyway, still

Paul Thurrott (00:11:01):
Flatten here.

Leo Laporte (00:11:02):
Anyway, good morning.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:05):
Yes,

Richard Campbell (00:11:05):
Good morning. In the words of

Leo Laporte (00:11:07):
Tim Cook,

Paul Thurrott (00:11:09):
Right?

Leo Laporte (00:11:10):
And for those of you not in the US who've heard nothing,

Paul Thurrott (00:11:15):
This was

Leo Laporte (00:11:15):
Only a test.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:16):
This is what it's like to live here, sort of.

Leo Laporte (00:11:18):
Actually this has other countries have had this for a long time. Oh, there you go. I was

Paul Thurrott (00:11:24):
Going to say, except with really bad healthcare, but

Leo Laporte (00:11:27):
Yeah, fair enough. Right? Yeah. [00:11:30] And an interesting political

Paul Thurrott (00:11:31):
Situation,

Leo Laporte (00:11:32):
But I guess the uk, our UK listeners used to that. Anyway, there it is. It worked Well. It didn't go off on this. Now, this phone, the pixel I was talking about earlier doesn't have a SIM in it, but it is on the wifi.

Richard Campbell (00:11:47):
It's eim, right?

Leo Laporte (00:11:49):
No, no, it's not even eim. It's just Oh, interesting.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:51):
So you got,

Leo Laporte (00:11:52):
Because I took the SIM of it and put it in my, actually

Paul Thurrott (00:11:56):
Same as mine actually, now that you mentioned it.

Leo Laporte (00:11:58):
You had to be on a cell network,

Richard Campbell (00:12:00):
[00:12:00] I

Paul Thurrott (00:12:01):
Guess.

Richard Campbell (00:12:02):
Cell transition.

Leo Laporte (00:12:03):
My watch went off too, by the way.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:05):
So I do have an SEM in it, but it's not activated, but it's still went off. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:12:09):
Interesting.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:10):
Yeah. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:12:13):
Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:15):
So my watch,

Richard Campbell (00:12:16):
Oddly enough, my Canadian phone did not go off in Australia.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:20):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:12:20):
Hey guys, can you give me the over the shoulder shot? So yeah, it says

Paul Thurrott (00:12:27):
This

Leo Laporte (00:12:27):
Is a test. So my

Paul Thurrott (00:12:27):
Watch,

Leo Laporte (00:12:28):
Watch made a lot of noise too, a

Paul Thurrott (00:12:30):
[00:12:30] Racket,

Leo Laporte (00:12:31):
But my watch has a SIM triumph.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:34):
So

Leo Laporte (00:12:34):
Anyway,

Paul Thurrott (00:12:35):
That doesn't have a SIM either, huh? Huh? I got it on two phones. With those sims,

Leo Laporte (00:12:42):
People are saying, does your phone not have a switch to turn that off? There is of course on all phones. You

Paul Thurrott (00:12:48):
Could turn off the Amber alerts, you're going to turn off the presidential alerts. This was an alert

Leo Laporte (00:12:52):
You could not turn off. You

Paul Thurrott (00:12:53):
Could have all of those switches off. It would've gone off. So

Richard Campbell (00:12:58):
Everybody just reminding your government does control [00:13:00] your phone.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:00):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:13:01):
Just to prove it. That's right.

Richard Campbell (00:13:03):
Just being sure.

Leo Laporte (00:13:05):
Conspiracy theories,

Paul Thurrott (00:13:06):
Extension of the EULA that nobody reads. Again,

Richard Campbell (00:13:09):
Is it a conspiracy? If it's true.

Leo Laporte (00:13:13):
Sure. Right. Sure.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:15):
Anyway, it's a true conspiracy.

Richard Campbell (00:13:17):
There you go.

Leo Laporte (00:13:19):
A conspiracy.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:20):
Patrick

Leo Laporte (00:13:20):
Han's

Paul Thurrott (00:13:21):
Said

Leo Laporte (00:13:22):
That

Paul Thurrott (00:13:22):
His

Leo Laporte (00:13:22):
Son, Caden, who is like five or six, has his mother's old phone. It [00:13:30] has a sim, but no service still went off.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:33):
Yeah, right. Same here.

Richard Campbell (00:13:34):
Same.

Leo Laporte (00:13:35):
Welcome to the New World Order

Richard Campbell (00:13:36):
Ladies'. A recognition that if you have a SIM in a phone, it's negotiated with a network.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:40):
The good news is, oh, interesting. You could take you sim out of your phone though. Google can't track you. So that works. At least it's the government. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:13:50):
Okay. Something I, enough distraction. I think we really do have to talk about Windows 11. I'm sorry,

Richard Campbell (00:13:59):
I thought [00:14:00] such a bad version of Windows.

Leo Laporte (00:14:02):
Not anymore. Anyone. So no more free upgrades from seven and eight. They've said this before though, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:14:11):
I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte (00:14:12):
I thought

Paul Thurrott (00:14:12):
I was like, pixel. What are you talking about?

Leo Laporte (00:14:15):
You really don't want to talk about this, do you?

Paul Thurrott (00:14:18):
No, I

Leo Laporte (00:14:18):
Really do. I

Paul Thurrott (00:14:19):
Never, you

Leo Laporte (00:14:19):
Said that. I didn't say that. Okay. I want to talk about

Richard Campbell (00:14:23):
You all the trouble of writing it,

Paul Thurrott (00:14:25):
Writing January, 2015, Microsoft announced that [00:14:30] Windows 10 would be a free upgrade for users on Windows seven and eight and also Windows, phone, whatever. We're not going to talk about that as, and it was going to last for a year. That was the plan. Now, this is a lot of things in the Microsoft space where we sort of feel like they probably did this for legal reasons and they don't really care, and yada, yada yada.

Richard Campbell (00:14:53):
This back when Windows 10 was the last version of Windows.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:57):
Yeah, right? Yeah. So what is it now? Eight years [00:15:00] later, eight and a half years later, and Windows 11 has occurred, the free upgrade is extended to Windows 11 because spoil alert Windows 11 is Windows 10. And one of the little side effects, and one of the things that I've been keeping track of ever since is that if you had a retail product key for Windows seven or eight, I have an incredible cache of product keys for Microsoft that came via M S D N back in the way when that was a subscription from TechNet back in the day when that was a subscription,

Richard Campbell (00:15:28):
And

Paul Thurrott (00:15:29):
Those things kind [00:15:30] of went out right as Windows 10 was happening. So I have this huge catalog of Windows seven and eight keys I can use to activate virtual machines for testing purpose, whatever. It's really nice. So those are the same as retail product keys. So Microsoft announced this past week that they are in fact, ending this free update, which upgrade? I'm sorry, which sort of makes sense, right? It was supposed to end on July 29th, 2016, right? [00:16:00] Long time ago. They let it go, extended it to Windows 11, like I said,

Richard Campbell (00:16:05):
Changed leadership in Windows a few times along the way.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:08):
Yes, exactly right. Twice. But they never said it's still on, right? They never admitted that they didn't shut it down. Well, they sort of did when 11 came out. Really? See, the thing is they never really talked about the product keys ever again, but when Windows 11 came out, they said just like Windows 10, this will be, it's a free upgrade. They want to get everyone on the latest version. Of course, these systems are out of support now. [00:16:30] So who's got a computer that came with seven or eight or was upgraded to seven or eight and is now like, yeah, I think I'm going to upgrade to 11. And of

Richard Campbell (00:16:40):
Course

Paul Thurrott (00:16:40):
People are raising their hands as I say that, but seriously,

Richard Campbell (00:16:43):
But you're talking about Gen 5, 6, 7 machines, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:16:47):
They're

Richard Campbell (00:16:47):
Pretty cool machines

Paul Thurrott (00:16:48):
And older. That's right.

(00:16:50):
So I'm surprised honestly, that they even announced it. But I think the thing I'll say to that is that, or literally the thing I will say to that is it's going to be the [00:17:00] next thing that comes out of my mouth is that Microsoft has gotten a little more serious about the hardware requirements with Windows 11, and we can obviously debate the nonsense that goes on around that. But the reality is with AI is coming, windows 12 is probably coming. I think they're going to be a little more stickly about this stuff, which is not a word. So we'll see. Anyway, they announced it. They said, we're not going to support the free upgrades anymore. Of course, I read that and I think, wait a minute, I get all these product keys. [00:17:30] I use this a lot. And in my job for writing books, testing software, whatever it is, I rely on this. It's actually really nice to have these product keys that work and have an activated version of Windows. So I tested it. Well, anyway, I can verify that as of today, as of the recording of this podcast, you're running Windows 11 stable, the mainstream out there, supported version. It works fine.

(00:17:55):
I tested it on a few insider builds. It works in the release preview. It works in 23 [00:18:00] H two, which is through the release preview. Part of that C F R nonsense of our world today is that you could be on the release preview and have 22 H two or 23 H two. Please don't make me go down that rabbit hole, but you can. And I have both, and it works fine on both. And the only one it doesn't work on is Canary. Canary is the furthest that one, right? So we don't know when this will take effect in the public. It could actually happen at any time the way that things go these days.

Richard Campbell (00:18:30):
[00:18:30] But you're presuming the

Paul Thurrott (00:18:31):
Canary

Richard Campbell (00:18:32):
Represents a lineage, right? That when it comes into Canary will show up on the under build.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:38):
We also know that Microsoft doesn't care and that they could just pop this in a stable at any time. So there is no guarantee that this will last. So it's happening. It is absolutely happening. I've never seen the error messages I saw in Canary ever using Keys either in setup or once you put into the desktop.

Leo Laporte (00:19:00):
[00:19:00] So it is

Paul Thurrott (00:19:01):
Happening. Yeah. I guess what I can confirm at least is that someday in the future could be later today, could be next year, you will no longer be able to use Windows seven or eight product keys to upgrade to Windows 10 for free. So that is going away. And other than the convenience for me personally, I can't, there's nothing to complain about here. They kept this thing going for way longer than they said they were going to way longer. So not a big deal, [00:19:30] but a reality. We

Richard Campbell (00:19:33):
Need to, I would debate whether I can find a Windows eight key.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:37):
Let me know. I've got about 50 of 'em. So if you need one, this is the time to ask.

Richard Campbell (00:19:42):
I think you just ask for them from chat, G P T. They're not that hard to come by,

Leo Laporte (00:19:47):
But you have to tell her that. Your grandma used to tell you bedtime stories. Yes.

Richard Campbell (00:19:51):
My grandma used

Leo Laporte (00:19:52):
To tell me

Richard Campbell (00:19:52):
A bedtime

Leo Laporte (00:19:53):
Story about Windows. Keys.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:55):
Do it as you say, draw me a

Leo Laporte (00:19:57):
Photo, realistic

Paul Thurrott (00:19:58):
Image of a unicorn flying [00:20:00] in space with a Windows 11 product key on Its perfect.

Leo Laporte (00:20:03):
Good thinking. There's a prompt.

Richard Campbell (00:20:06):
That's what Dolly three is for

Leo Laporte (00:20:09):
Those keys, by the way, were real, but they were demo keys. They weren't going to do what you wanted them to do, which was give you a free copy of Windows. Right? I that's remember story. It was also an

Paul Thurrott (00:20:19):
Story, ancient version of Windows. I think it was for Windows 95.

Leo Laporte (00:20:23):
Oh, was it really? Oh, that's funny. Oh, that's cute.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:27):
Okay. Nothing to worry about. But these things are always amusing [00:20:30] to

Leo Laporte (00:20:30):
People. Hey, do.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:34):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:20:34):
Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:36):
It's like putting doom on an alarm clock. It's like, guess what? Doom runs on next. It's like at this point, it runs on everything. No one cares.

Leo Laporte (00:20:41):
Everything stop. I don't want to play it on alarm clock, but thank you.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:44):
If it doesn't run on it, it's not a thing.

Leo Laporte (00:20:47):
So let's just move on. Okay, so that's interesting. I mean, I never understood why they said they were going to kill it and didn't kill it. So I mean, don't even, well,

Paul Thurrott (00:20:58):
This is a conversation [00:21:00] we had over many years of Mary Jo and the two of us both kind of agreed that for legal reasons, because you don't want to support it. The whole point of e eula, remember, we've had EULAs in a Microsoft space forever or something.

Richard Campbell (00:21:15):
Arguably Bill Gates invented the eula.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:17):
Yeah, exactly. Because people were stealing his basic,

Leo Laporte (00:21:19):
He's stealing

Richard Campbell (00:21:20):
My

Leo Laporte (00:21:20):
Paper tapes. Stop it,

Paul Thurrott (00:21:22):
Whatever. That California Computer club was gone. But this came to the public forefront, I would say, with iTunes, right? [00:21:30] All of a sudden there were news stories in mainstream press that were like, does anyone even read these things? Do you even know what you just gave away? You don't own anything. And now we're so immune to it who

Leo Laporte (00:21:41):
Caress. People don't even care about privacy. No, we don't care. Why

Paul Thurrott (00:21:44):
Would they care about this? We don't care about government. We don't care about privacy. We don't

Leo Laporte (00:21:47):
Care. We don't care.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:50):
So EULAs were things written by lawyers, and I think the people at the companies don't care what they say either. And I think that basically it's just there to protect the company [00:22:00] in the event that some person or more likely organization comes and says, well, guess what, guys? You have to support this because yada, yada, yada. The

Leo Laporte (00:22:07):
Point is this time they mean it.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:10):
Well, the point is this time that they're doing it, I guess,

Leo Laporte (00:22:12):
Okay,

Paul Thurrott (00:22:13):
Maybe

Richard Campbell (00:22:14):
They at least have the software report. This mean, they mean it.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:16):
See,

Leo Laporte (00:22:17):
It's

Richard Campbell (00:22:17):
In the,

Leo Laporte (00:22:19):
Here's a question from Jarno G in our discord that I think is legit. Do the keys still work? If you already upgraded them for a previous installation, can you use them [00:22:30] for a reinstall? In other words, I had a Windows seven key. I upgraded Windows 10, now I'm on Windows 10.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:37):
Can

Leo Laporte (00:22:37):
I reuse that key?

Paul Thurrott (00:22:38):
Yeah. Once Windows is activated, yes, it's because you're not really dealing with a key anymore.

Leo Laporte (00:22:42):
Now it's an entitlement.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:43):
It's not a key. You have a different kind of license. There you go. That's the right word, Leo, look at you.

Leo Laporte (00:22:48):
That's exactly right.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:50):
Dictionary

Leo Laporte (00:22:50):
Right,

Paul Thurrott (00:22:50):
It is. No, that's exactly right.

Leo Laporte (00:22:52):
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:22:53):
No, that's good.

Leo Laporte (00:22:54):
They do that based on the hardware. That's right. That's the key, so to

Paul Thurrott (00:22:58):
Speak. That's right. A matrix of hardware.

(00:23:00):
[00:23:00] They don't really talk about this anymore. When activation first appeared, and then for probably the next version or two, they would talk about it and they would explain how they were One of the problems, like Vista came out with, now what does XP came up with? Activation. So someone would replace a hard drive and then they couldn't activate it anymore. So Microsoft would adjust this over time to certain things would weigh more the amount of time you had. Certain devices would weigh more, and it got to the point where you could pretty much replace them motherboard. It'd be okay in most cases. [00:23:30] And then of course, if you call them, they're not going to,

Leo Laporte (00:23:33):
Yeah, they were always

Paul Thurrott (00:23:34):
Very good. If the

Leo Laporte (00:23:35):
You called them, they would always

Paul Thurrott (00:23:37):
Say,

Leo Laporte (00:23:37):
Okay, fine. Well,

Paul Thurrott (00:23:38):
Yeah, no. So yeah, if you have an existing device that you upgraded, however you did it, you don't have to worry as long as it meets the hardware requirements for the operating system you're running. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:23:51):
Is this an indication that maybe Microsoft doesn't care about everybody that they wanted to upgrade, upgraded, and so now we're good? Is that kind of, [00:24:00] we don't need to give

Paul Thurrott (00:24:02):
You free windows. I can only guess. But look, when they did Windows 11 and they had this, what I would call an arbitrary hardware set of hardware requirements, you had this glimpse of a future that I think we all agree is coming where they're going to be just stricter about this kind of stuff. And they have to almost be semi artificial about it every time. Because the reality is Windows runs fine on all kinds of hardware, and

Richard Campbell (00:24:26):
Those

Paul Thurrott (00:24:26):
People like Richard,

Richard Campbell (00:24:29):
They don't want to support [00:24:30] it. And they'd rather upgrade you for free than pay the cost of maintaining a support team for the older product.

Leo Laporte (00:24:36):
But at some point

Paul Thurrott (00:24:38):
That

Leo Laporte (00:24:38):
Sucks. And they say, okay, now you got to pay if you want. Well, we talked

Paul Thurrott (00:24:43):
About this a little bit last week, I think, but Terry Morrison said, I don't think he came up with it personally, but he was the one who first communicated this notion of supported for the lifetime of the device. And for 10 years or eight years, we were like, what does that even mean? Got some dark signals, what it might mean. [00:25:00] And honestly, I think Windows 11 kind of closed the loop on that. Windows 11, Microsoft was basically saying lifetime of the device is what we say it is, and that could change at any time for any device. They talk a lot about the microprocessor of course, but it's not just that, right? It's the T P M chip and in the future I think it's going to be N P U too,

Leo Laporte (00:25:21):
And they are need those. It's just setting.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:22):
Those are capabilities future they want.

Leo Laporte (00:25:24):
They're going to want, right? Yeah. So even if now you don't need it. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:25:28):
Because you're not going to be able to change dark [00:25:30] mode by typing unless you have an n p. Come on. Come on.

Leo Laporte (00:25:35):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:36):
I mean, we'll see, right?

Leo Laporte (00:25:38):
We'll see.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:38):
Unfortunately with Windows and Microsoft, I have to say, we'll see a lot because you think things are going to happen at that Microsoft event a couple of weeks ago, and then nothing happens, and then you're like, I guess we're still going to see, I thought we were going to see last

Richard Campbell (00:25:49):
Week. I mean, I always read these things as we are putting this out there to see how the responses, but in the end, the way we stay in front of the parade is by figuring out which way the parade is going. [00:26:00] So if it doesn't stick, if people aren't responsive to it, they're going to change their minds. Again,

Paul Thurrott (00:26:10):
Microsoft does have a rich history of changing its mind when it gets enough negative feedback. It really does. There are certain things you will not step back from. Obviously it didn't do that for activation. That was a different era. We'll see, we will see. But

Richard Campbell (00:26:22):
They also created manual activations. You could call in and do them. I mean, there's an argument that Windows 12 requiring some kind of [00:26:30] N P U, and I wonder if they won't take a flyer on that just to say, Hey, you have to buy new hardware if you want to buy. Well,

Paul Thurrott (00:26:37):
I blurted that out in January. I made it up as I said it. I don't know. We don't know. Microsoft's not going to talk about this, but someday Microsoft will talk about a future version of Windows, whether it's 11 or 12, that will have a different set of hardware requirements that's not happening for 23 H two. That itself should be suspicious to people the way they're doing this enablement package. But I think we [00:27:00] settled the debate on that last week that they're doing it to force these features down everyone's throat to make sure as many people get the copilot and other new features as possible outside of the feature update scheme. And then we'll see what happens in 24. I mean,

Richard Campbell (00:27:17):
And to be clear, the thing that wags to dog here is not the consumer version of Windows. This is about Windows Enterprise. And if the big customers say, we're going to be doing this, Microsoft's going to go that way.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:30):
[00:27:30] There's also the this, I mean better than I do. I mean, there is a kind of natural refresh cycle coming for a lot of enterprises in the next year or two,

Richard Campbell (00:27:40):
Just because the age even on run, its, I advocated like this is not the year for the hardware refresh by the extended warranty. Your C F O is jumpy. You can help calm 'em down by just delaying some purchases for a year.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:55):
So I think next few years, and whether that's tied to knowing enterprises, [00:28:00] windows 12 will come out and they'll stick with Windows 11. It's a known quantity. Oh

Richard Campbell (00:28:04):
Yeah. And we'll wait for at least SP one. Let's not get crazy now, Paul certainly s SP one.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:10):
Hey, you just said S SP one, who's the crazy one here? But yes, fair enough. So we'll see. I do think there's something going on. I always have, like I said, the first

Richard Campbell (00:28:23):
Clue was I think positioning for a hardware break and whether or not they can pull it off, nobody actually knows, including Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:30):
[00:28:30] Wait a minute, you better

Leo Laporte (00:28:31):
Positioning for a hardware break?

Paul Thurrott (00:28:34):
Well, hardware requirements, a new one, an additional one to the one we've already got. In other words, windows, they don't require an N

Leo Laporte (00:28:42):
P U, right? So you think that's what

Paul Thurrott (00:28:44):
It's, yeah,

Richard Campbell (00:28:45):
And as it turns out, they don't really require TPM two, right? Every time they tried to put a hardware break in front of us, we pretty well went. Nah,

Paul Thurrott (00:28:55):
Right? But they're trying. They keep trying, but

Richard Campbell (00:28:59):
At the same time, this happens [00:29:00] naturally on the hardware refresh cycle, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:29:04):
You can't

Richard Campbell (00:29:04):
Pay a machine now without too,

Paul Thurrott (00:29:06):
Right? So tying it to a natural hardware refresh cycle actually makes some sense. Right? And we also speculate about whether Microsoft will extend support for Windows 10. One of the reasons they would do that is because there will be companies in this span of time doing a refresh where the ones that are further out will want to stick with what they have for a little bit longer,

Richard Campbell (00:29:28):
And

Paul Thurrott (00:29:29):
To ensure [00:29:30] that they then go to the M P U version of hardware, Microsoft will probably extend the support of Windows 10. That's one of the things they could do. And I could see that happening too.

Richard Campbell (00:29:41):
No, I think 10 will last longer than anybody wants it to.

Leo Laporte (00:29:48):
There is also the issue, that

Paul Thurrott (00:29:49):
Bad case of the clap,

Leo Laporte (00:29:52):
Intel's new N P U based processors are desktop only, right? They're not going to be in the laptop, actually.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:00):
[00:30:00] So Leo, you missed this. This was on me, I apologize. So historically, Intel releases the desktop version of their core chip sets in the fall. This is the first time ever that they're launching the laptop chip set first. So the Meteor Lake that they announced was for laptop CPUs.

Leo Laporte (00:30:18):
Now

Paul Thurrott (00:30:18):
They have different names now it's like Core Ultra whatever, blah, blah, blah. But this is the first time they've done that. So actually the chip sets we're getting now are for laptops or for

Leo Laporte (00:30:29):
Mobile

Paul Thurrott (00:30:30):
[00:30:30] Computers. What they said was, and this is what you heard, was we are not sure if we are going to do this on the desktop side. So here's the rationale there. With the current 13th gen desktop chips, Intel actually offers an add-on M P U. You can put on a motherboard separate from the S O C. So for the desktop chips, big or die, whatever it might be. I think they're just thinking we want to do that. We'll do it separately. Almost like you would do a, obviously G P U comes on a data card and whatever, but this will be adding a math [00:31:00] processor to a 3 86 ssx or whatever.

Leo Laporte (00:31:03):
Well, and you remember how well that went. So wait a minute. But the reason I bring that up is that Microsoft's going to have a hard time making a hardware requirement if different media like chips have different processes capabilities. What

Paul Thurrott (00:31:19):
Percentage of PC sales or desktop these days, right? It's actually kind of a small percentage

Leo Laporte (00:31:28):
Is Microsoft did say [00:31:30] you have to have a laptop. That would be one year.

Richard Campbell (00:31:33):
One would argue that with a desktop machine comes a high-end G P U anyway.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:39):
Yeah, and that might satisfy some of that need.

Leo Laporte (00:31:42):
That might be N P U in effect.

Richard Campbell (00:31:45):
That's your N P U process.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:46):
We were talking about enterprise driving the boat, so to speak. I mean, what percentage of Enterprise PCs being deployed to users this year and beyond our desktop? It's probably very small.

Richard Campbell (00:31:59):
It's getting smaller. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:00):
[00:32:00] Now that doesn't mean we don't need them on desktop, but I think the plugin M P U is, and plus that's something, and that's something that PC makers can do. It's a value add. They can charge for it.

Leo Laporte (00:32:12):
Oh, you can have a standalone N P U. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:16):
They already have it. The 13th gen desktop ships saw for this.

Leo Laporte (00:32:19):
Oh, okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:19):
In fact, you missed this too, Leo, but one of the unique, well, maybe didn't, but one of the,

Leo Laporte (00:32:23):
If you missed, a whole lot happens. I tell you what,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:25):
Everything

Richard Campbell (00:32:26):
Microsoft

Paul Thurrott (00:32:27):
Announced, the Microsoft at that event, a Surface [00:32:30] studio, a laptop, studio two, which has a 12th, nope, 13th Gen H series processor, which is mobile and is, to my knowledge, the only such computer to offer a plugin, M P U, right? So Microsoft is providing an m p on that motherboard. It's a separate part, right? So it's probably a custom version or the version that Intel already offers on the desktop side, and I'm sure the battery life is fantastic, but whatever. It's unique in the space because [00:33:00] it does have an N P U, but it's an add-in N P U, so it exists.

Leo Laporte (00:33:05):
Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:09):
We're early in the scale. Remember? What was it not open? Well, I guess it was OpenGL. There was a GL something something. There was a graphics card that came out that John Carmack supported in Quake that did hardware accelerated graphics, and everyone bought it to run GL quake. Most people didn't have a hardware accelerated anything in their computers [00:33:30] today. It's very common. Even in integrated chip sets, we have that. So maybe this is the first crawl days of ai. We'll get to walk and run later, but

Richard Campbell (00:33:40):
It inevitably end up on the die. I mean, certainly Apple set the staber with the M one and the M two.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:45):
That's right.

Leo Laporte (00:33:46):
Yeah. They have been

Richard Campbell (00:33:47):
Intel's dancing with this just because it's going to affect the price point,

Paul Thurrott (00:33:51):
Right? That's right. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:33:53):
Well,

Paul Thurrott (00:33:54):
I wonder Apple still doesn't support external GPUs, and I think they've said they will never do so, or at least they have no plans [00:34:00] to do. So it would be interesting in the PC space if we had the equivalent of Intel integrated graphics, but for N P U and then also the ability to add on a card might, wouldn't that

Leo Laporte (00:34:10):
Be interesting? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:12):
Better. Yeah. Maybe. I mean you could see it or a combination of T, the same

Richard Campbell (00:34:15):
Way we did Cuda cards back in the day, if you needed a lot of G P U compute, you could have a dedicated card for it that didn't necessarily have an interface out to display port or H GM I it had G P U processing [00:34:30] and then the audio quit. Again,

Paul Thurrott (00:34:36):
We do that. Microsoft is moving toward a new set of standards for hardware requirements, and that's going to be an interesting day. You got to market it like a positive pro for everybody, but we're

Richard Campbell (00:34:49):
All going to, well, I think they're hoping that the copilot product is compelling enough that you want it badly enough that buying new hardware for it's no big deal.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:58):
And I can tell you image background removal [00:35:00] and paint's going to do it, so I think we're in good shape.

Richard Campbell (00:35:04):
That's the one. That's the one

Paul Thurrott (00:35:07):
I know. It's it.

Leo Laporte (00:35:08):
Yeah. Nice. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:10):
Okay,

Leo Laporte (00:35:11):
Let's move along. That was the first item. The first bullet point of many, and we wanted to show before Richard sees the sun come up. I know. My god, what's next?

Richard Campbell (00:35:24):
I've already had a good sleep. You guys got to know this. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:35:27):
You took

Richard Campbell (00:35:27):
That dead early.

Leo Laporte (00:35:28):
Oh good.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:28):
Okay, so

Leo Laporte (00:35:29):
This is concerns

Richard Campbell (00:35:30):
[00:35:30] Had sleep. I'm organized. I have

Paul Thurrott (00:35:32):
Concerns about his constitution here, but good. Okay, so we have had two dev channel builds since we last spoke on the last show. Neither of them are as substantive in any major way. The one that just occurred today, literally right as we were starting the show, added co-pilot to the alt tab, hot key, the feature, [00:36:00] which I assume means that you can tab alt tab to copilot even if it's not, oh, actually it must mean when it's running because one of the

Richard Campbell (00:36:10):
Goofy, that means it is always running, right? Isn't that really what it says? Right. I was going to say that's always there.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:15):
It's always there. It sopping up your ram whether you want it to or not. Clear yet, be

Richard Campbell (00:36:22):
Disabled. You could have referenced there, but okay,

Paul Thurrott (00:36:25):
And as Lauren, my site pointed out, Microsoft at [00:36:30] some point in Windows 10 added the ability to alt tabbed edge tabs. Copilot is an instance of edge, and I bet it was super easy to work it into that little scheme.

Richard Campbell (00:36:41):
It may have already been happening and somebody said it's a feature. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:36:45):
That's beautiful. That's true too. Actually that actually makes even more sense.

Richard Campbell (00:36:50):
It seems likely.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:52):
Okay, so I avoided last week going on an extended rant about 22 H two plus the fall update versus [00:37:00] 23 H two and all that. So now I'm going to go into that. No, no, I'm kidding. But I will say since then what I've experienced is what I feared I would experience, which is that just in trying to understand 23 H two and what the schedule is and all that kind of stuff, if you're on Windows 1122 H two today, you can grab that preview update that we talked about last week. It's in Windows update and get it. Anyone can get it. What you get on the other end of that is kind of [00:37:30] fielders choice at this point. It depends. Some of the features that are in that fall update slash 23 H two are CFRs, right? These controlled feature release features, and that means that Microsoft is literally rolling them out randomly. This

Richard Campbell (00:37:45):
Or at least appears to be

Paul Thurrott (00:37:47):
Yes to us it, right? Right. Exactly. Like a random playlist in iTunes. It's not actually random, but it's random enough they

Richard Campbell (00:37:55):
Don't have it. I'm also a big believer in this, so like an insiders insiders list, and those folks always [00:38:00] get the CFRs including something don't get any other way unless you're on that special list.

Paul Thurrott (00:38:05):
Yep. I think you're right because in the beta channel, as we often say, they are, in fact fielding two builds every time they release something and one of 'em has features and one doesn't. So they clearly have that capability. There's obviously a switch. There are third party tools, like five tool that can enable features if you know the right codes. I haven't screwed around with that since this fall up day came out, actually, I should probably look into that. But between the [00:38:30] stable version of Windows 11, which right now is on 22 H two obviously and is adding and has added in preview, that fall update and all those features, and then version 23 H two, which is available through the release preview, but not always, by the way, I'm coming to an understanding of how this works and it works really poorly. Unfortunately, you sometimes we'll have copilot.

(00:38:53):
Sometimes you'll have the new teams, sometimes you'll have both, sometimes you'll have neither. There's also a new version of [00:39:00] Edge coming down the pike. By the way, remember the copilot icon that was an edge in that show has never appeared yet. It's not in Canary, it's not in dub, it's not in beta. So these things are going to kind of coalesce into what will be 23 H two, whenever that's released, right? November, December most likely. But if you want to get 23 H two, which is honestly, this today is not a big deal because you can get most of it and stable. [00:39:30] Just join the release preview channel and then keep checking for updates because you probably aren't going to get everything right away. I did a system reset last night at one PC because I've been doing this for a week and I'm like, what's taking so long? And I finally got a working computer on 23 H two that has everything. 23.

Richard Campbell (00:39:47):
All you to do is routinely write your machine and update, and maybe you'll get it

Paul Thurrott (00:39:53):
Or just listen to what I say, because honestly, my life is terrible and you don't want to do this to yourself.

Richard Campbell (00:39:58):
Well, I would also argue only someone [00:40:00] with multiple machines who's also making a living, documenting the details would even notice

Paul Thurrott (00:40:06):
That or an insane person. Tell me the difference or both. It's all that. It's a subtle distinction.

Richard Campbell (00:40:13):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:15):
Okay. So there's that couple of things, and Microsoft in its infinite wisdom is also rolling out features just kind of randomly outside of these channels. The big story on that last year was OneDrive, the big one this year is Windows backup. [00:40:30] This new kind of, I don't want to call it a modern app. It's barely an app, but it replaces the old Windows backup, which was that system backup and restore utility from yesteryear, which by the way, it's still in there, which is kind of fun too. If you want to get it. It's still there.

(00:40:49):
Windows backup and OneDrive are things we need to talk about, unfortunately. So Windows backup is not new and it doesn't do anything new for the most [00:41:00] part. The point of it is actually there's two points. One, it tells you what the system is backing up syncing really, right? It's not really backing up anything but syncing to your Microsoft account. This stuff was already syncing to your Microsoft account. So if you sign in with a Microsoft account, which almost everyone does these days as individuals, because Microsoft makes it hard to, impossible to do otherwise depending, to

Richard Campbell (00:41:25):
Do anything else, has nothing to do with what you want.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:28):
So when Windows 11 first came, one of [00:41:30] the little insidious things that they did was they required 11 home users to sign it with an M S A. They don't even give 'em the option and set up

(00:41:37):
To not do. So in 22 H two, they did the same thing to pro users. It became mandatory. Essentially. There were workarounds, but as far as the UI goes, in normal people, you're signing in with an Ss A. There were a lot of reasons Microsoft does this, and I know there are a lot of reasons people hate this, but when you sign into an M Ss A, you get a bunch of different things, but among them are this setting sync stuff, [00:42:00] which factors into the Windows backup, the OneDrive folder backup, which factors into Windows backup and also OneDrive and other things, whatever. There's a bunch of stuff.

Richard Campbell (00:42:10):
It also means you have automatic

Paul Thurrott (00:42:11):
Authentications

Richard Campbell (00:42:12):
Internet. I've certainly talked to folks who are being connected. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (00:42:15):
Yes, it does. It's

Richard Campbell (00:42:16):
Big deal.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:17):
That's right. You can't just unplug it, right? It is a big deal. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:42:21):
Well, the good thing is you have to connect it to do that. Once you've done it, you can disconnect for a while.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:29):
Yeah. Yep. [00:42:30] But you have to do that. You have to make that connection the first time. I mean, most people are just going to leave it connected. This is aimed at normal people. The idea is,

Richard Campbell (00:42:36):
Yeah, most people want to be on these

Paul Thurrott (00:42:38):
About this stuff. So in Windows 11 home, you sign into your M S A and set up and then it says, Hey, congratulations. You're using Windows 11 home. Your folders are being backed up to OneDrive. You don't even have an option to turn it off. The story with Pro was that if you sign it with an M S A, you have the option to [00:43:00] turn it off and set up. I can tell you having installed Windows approximately, I don't know, 150 times probably since last year, that that's a roll of the dice. I would say more often than not, especially recently, Microsoft Treats Pro like home in that regard. You actually don't get the choice. And so if you don't want that, I'm telling you one of the first things you got to do when you hit the desktop is open settings in one drive and look at folder backup and just make sure it's doing what you want. Because that to me is one of the more [00:43:30] insidious things

(00:43:32):
That Windows does, and it's about to get worse, and we'll get to that in a minute. Anyway, windows backup. So what is this thing? Well, it's really a front end to tell you what you can back up or what is sinking already with your Microsoft account. There's almost nothing you can configure in this app. The one exception is it actually does give you a UI to turn on folder sync in OneDrive, but only for three of the five folders because Microsoft, the other stuff [00:44:00] is all stuff that was already happening in the background. The big thing that's changed actually is not new to today. It's over two years ago, Microsoft added the ability to restore from a backup, A backup that none of us knew we were making. So you sign into a Microsoft account and the very first thing it says is, Hey, do you want to restore this some computer? And it's super dumb. It's super dumb. And the reason I know it's dumb is because I have computers that are in the list of things I could restore from, and the one that's at [00:44:30] the top is never that, even though on that computer.

Richard Campbell (00:44:32):
So it's not actually doing a device computer know which one to go, Hey, this is the backup from this machine. You want it?

Paul Thurrott (00:44:39):
No, it's super dumb. So that capability has actually been around for over two years. I have backups dating back to August, 2021. I don't actually remember know or remember when it started, but that's how old some of my backups are, and I have a lot of 'em. The other thing that Windows backup does is it gives you a button called backup. And backup is a fun little button. [00:45:00] It doesn't do anything. The only thing, well, well, I shouldn't say that. I'm sorry. I can't actually say that. I'm sorry. If you made changes to your OneDrive folder sync, it will apply that. Then it will do that. Technically, it probably does give you an updated backup, but the truth is you don't need, it's doing this seamlessly in the background all the time. It's nothing. It's not like you remember to wifi network password. You're like, oh, back up.

(00:45:27):
I got to back it up. It's going to your Microsoft [00:45:30] account, it's all fine. It doesn't do anything. But it gives, I think it's for just people, and I think it's going to become something because one of the other things that's coming in Windows 1123 H two is this thing called Dev Home, which as its name applies, is a feature for developers. But Dev Home has some interesting stuff in it. And one of those things is a machine configuration feature that Yes is designed for developers that allows you to, as a person, as an individual, [00:46:00] use a tool very much like WIN App, windall app Utility I talked about a while back. That creates for you a script of win get commands to install all the apps you want. It does the same thing. And in managed environments, they have tools. They have to use yaml, which is a XML based text file format to create configuration files, not XML based, sorry, xml, like sorry, to do the same thing at scale. [00:46:30] And they also have the ability to remotely install applications on your system. I think that Windows backup is going to turn into a thing that bridges the gap between store apps and all apps, right? We'll call

Richard Campbell (00:46:46):
It. This is more like words, something Apple Time machine ish, which would be helpful. I mean, the bottom line is how many people have actually had their bacon saved by this backup tool? You've wrecked [00:47:00] the machine somehow oh zero. Like, oh, no, what am I going to going to do? Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:47:06):
No, the reason it's zero is because this tool is not a tool. It's just a front end to other tools. So there are pieces of time machine in Windows, for example. We had file history still there, but OneDrive, if you're doing all your documents and files through OneDrive also has a file history functionality. You can reach it from the Windows Shell. So if you're using that part of it, you've got that [00:47:30] functionality built in, right? But it doesn't give you that thing we were talking about maybe a few weeks ago, one click Restore. In other words, you want to go back in time, not just the files, but your operating system and the apps, or maybe you want the operating system to be new and the apps to be new, but you want your files to be from a certain time or the newest files or whatever it might be. I think that's what they're heading toward. Because if you remember, reset, this PC used to be tool tools. It was called Reset this PC and [00:48:00] Refresh this pc, and then they put it all in, reset this pc, and one of the options was you can come back with your apps, asterisk your files and your settings. And the asterisk on the apps was only store apps. We can restore those. We can't restore web installed apps, but

(00:48:20):
I'm sorry, WIN gives you the, we're getting there, and I think this might be the coming front end to a full OSS app [00:48:30] and settings, backup and Restore, which is not system image backup and restore, but is kind of a modern, right?

Richard Campbell (00:48:36):
No, it's a manifest based restore.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:40):
Yes. Yes. And Richard, again, I have to say so many times in the space, and I'm not, but in the commercial space, in the enterprise space, Microsoft has also had this notion of known good configurations and what do you call for a configuration? What do you call that when you [00:49:00] have a configuration for something that you want it to be like the right configuration for your environment?

Richard Campbell (00:49:05):
Desired state configuration.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:06):
I apologize. Desired state. Thank you. Exactly. They have this for Wing Get app installs. So it's a script. Again, there's no tools for it yet. It's all handwritten now. But they have the ability, it pros and enterprises to not just deploy apps to your system, but to deploy them with a specific configuration, which is getting us so close

Richard Campbell (00:49:30):
[00:49:30] And I

Paul Thurrott (00:49:31):
Think is something that will come to consumers. So I think between Windows backup and Dev Home, you see the beginnings.

Richard Campbell (00:49:38):
You don't want consumers writing yaml. It just makes people sad.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:42):
No, no, of course. Exactly. But again, this is step one, right? I'm making it up, but that's how I see this. So there's that. The other big thing is OneDrive, and this one's depressing to me because between all of my decluttering work recently, and then just general writing [00:50:00] part of my scheme to create a time machine-like thing for Windows, that three step process for restoring OSS apps and settings, sorry, OSS apps and files technically involves using OneDrive exclusively, right? If you don't ever want to lose something and you're working in Windows, save everything to OneDrive. You can configure it however you want, but if you put something on your desktop and your desktop's not syncing to OneDrive and you reboot your computer, it doesn't come back and you can't get into that thing. It's kind [00:50:30] of on you. I mean, we're at the point now where this is something that can work.

(00:50:34):
And so after writing so, so much about this, I brought up that computer I talked about in 23 H two, I reset it. It took a long time. Usually PC Reset takes a very short time. This one took a long time, came back, it's pro, it asked me, do you want to sync your files to OneDrive? I said, no, I do not. And I went into the desktop and I did a couple of things, install a couple of Windows updates. And this [00:51:00] morning I went to do my win, get based script rights, bulk, install all my apps, and that plastered a bunch of shortcuts of the desktop, which I promptly deleted. And then I saw a dialogue box I did not want to see, which was just to let you know, Paul, when you delete from OneDrive, it goes to a recycle bin in the cloud. And I said, you know what? I didn't.

Richard Campbell (00:51:19):
I told you not to use OneDrive. Dang it.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:23):
Yep. So I went into the settings and sure enough, it enabled it after the fact.

Richard Campbell (00:51:28):
Well, because you've made a poor [00:51:30] decision.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:30):
I damn, all this is 21st. Okay, that was your mistake. We would like to fix that for you. This is a problem. This is a problem.

Richard Campbell (00:51:41):
How many different M S A entities do you, hang on, do all of this?

Paul Thurrott (00:51:47):
I use the same one for most of them. I actually have two main

Richard Campbell (00:51:51):
Wonder why it takes a while.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:55):
I've never had to take this line, honestly. I did this a lot. It was unusual. I [00:52:00] expected to complete this process last night and I didn't finish it until midway through the morning today. And this OneDrive thing freaked me out. Now, to be clear, and to be fair, this is the only time this has happened, but this is also the only time I've had a full 23 2 install, and I am given the past, given the fact that there were literally three versions of OneDrive floating out the world right now that you could have on your computer right now running Windows 11. I'm worried that this might be like the [00:52:30] Windows 11 Pro thing during setup where it even asks, I'm worried that sometimes it will respect your choice and sometimes it will do what it does with browsers and not respect your choice. And that is a dangerous and scary new world. So something to just be on the lookout for. I'm definitely the canary in this little coal mine, but I have never seen that happen before and I am freaked by it.

Richard Campbell (00:52:55):
So there's that. Your point being a 23 H two should consolidate this problem. This should be [00:53:00] them tightening up on there is a right way.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:05):
I'm not sure. I have a point, I guess in the continuum of they have changed little things with each release of Windows 11, especially with regard to M S A and OneDrive, that we have a new version coming and we might be seeing another change use one, the location of one Drive.

Richard Campbell (00:53:29):
Interesting. [00:53:30] It's concerning, but usually that leads to narrowing that they come down to a specific version.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:42):
It might lead to me using Google Drive, by the way, are Dropbox, because I cannot afford for OneDrive to be screwing with the stuff that's in OneDrive. And listen, we all have our own way of doing things. I'm not suggesting that I do things the normal or right way, but I do things the way I do them. And I have top level [00:54:00] folders in OneDrive that I use for very specific things. And when you sync a folder from your computer to OneDrive, it blasts a bunch of crap into those things that I do not want there. And that to me is scary and wrong. There's also apps that don't, anyone right now could open your open file explorer, go to your documents folder and look at the weird folders that are in there that apps have left, including apps like Microsoft Office, Adobe Dumps crap in there. Obsidian Power Toys is [00:54:30] a Microsoft product, visual Studio, Microsoft product. Zoom has got stuff in there. My website. I

Richard Campbell (00:54:35):
Just like that. It just reminds me that every time you say the word folder, you're an old person because the younger generation doesn't know anything about

Paul Thurrott (00:54:42):
Folders. Yeah, fair enough. But that's fine. But you know what? Those folders contain files, and maybe you're one of those modern search kids, and that's all you care about, but you're going to search for some term, you're going to come up with files that don't make sense to you because they're in those folders, right? I mean, this whole thing is there needs [00:55:00] be a separation of my personal data and the data that an app uses for their configuration, A configuration that will not sync between computers, even if it's in OneDrive. It doesn't work that way. What

Richard Campbell (00:55:13):
If I presume user folder

Leo Laporte (00:55:16):
On this computer as

Richard Campbell (00:55:17):
See that stuff?

Paul Thurrott (00:55:20):
They're not hidden folders. They're right there. Like I said, anyone can open this. You can see 'em. Everyone can see 'em. Everyone do it right now. You'll see folders that you did not create and do not want everyone. [00:55:30] It's on everyone's computers.

Leo Laporte (00:55:33):
Can I ask you a question? Why do you guys even use Windows? I mean, really?

Paul Thurrott (00:55:41):
Yeah, you don't

Leo Laporte (00:55:41):
Seem very happy. Someone

Paul Thurrott (00:55:42):
Asked me this on

Richard Campbell (00:55:43):
Twitter. It's our happy place.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:46):
No, this is an important question. If you hate Windows so much, Paul,

Leo Laporte (00:55:49):
Why

Paul Thurrott (00:55:50):
Do you use Windows? And I always give the same answer to this question, which is I love my son, but when he came home from school with a bad report card, I worked to

Leo Laporte (00:55:57):
Fix it. That's a good point. I

Paul Thurrott (00:55:58):
Was mad at him. It didn't [00:56:00] mean I didn't love him.

Leo Laporte (00:56:01):
Okay. If

Paul Thurrott (00:56:02):
Anything, my concern about this indicates how much I care if I'm, I didn't. I'm

Leo Laporte (00:56:08):
Understanding this Windows talking about your son and you love him. The Windows

Richard Campbell (00:56:15):
Is my son. The report card is very bad,

Leo Laporte (00:56:17):
And boy is a report card. See if an operating

Paul Thurrott (00:56:21):
Season report bad, lots of regressions. If an

Leo Laporte (00:56:23):
Operating system did that to me,

Paul Thurrott (00:56:27):
It would be hard for me to forgive it

Richard Campbell (00:56:29):
Straight to the orphanage.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:30):
[00:56:30] Yeah. So you're touching on, I wrote a big editorial about OneDrive today, and I said, ideally this relationship would be symbiotic and positive, but eventually it becomes toxic. This is part of that in certification stuff that the doctor talks about. And then one day you realize the pros have started to be outweighed by the cons. And that's the point where you used to have hard decisions to make, right? So I'm going to spend some time experimenting. I'm going to look around, and I don't mean switching to the Mac, I don't mean that, but the

Richard Campbell (00:56:58):
Don't get

Paul Thurrott (00:56:59):
Crazy, but solving this OneDrive [00:57:00] problem in particular because yeah, I mean, come on, keyword shortcuts. Guys. I need to get work done. I don't want things getting in my way.

Richard Campbell (00:57:09):
What you're dealing with here is this, every time Windows puts its priorities ahead of yours, it's concerning and OneDrive be integrated into Windows. You're now being reminded, oh no, our priorities are more important than yours and we're going to use OneDrive the way we want to use

Paul Thurrott (00:57:24):
It.

Leo Laporte (00:57:24):
And to be fair,

Richard Campbell (00:57:25):
The reason we use a third party storage product is to disassociate those two things.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:30):
[00:57:30] If

Richard Campbell (00:57:30):
I'm paying for Dropbox, Dropbox, separate those

Paul Thurrott (00:57:33):
Systems.

Richard Campbell (00:57:34):
This

Paul Thurrott (00:57:34):
Is not the only place. This goes back to one of the central debates. It's everywhere. This is universal. No, this is an ecosystem problem. In fact, this is my tip today. I'm literally going to go into this. So a million years ago, and by which I mean three years ago, somebody on Twitter or somewhere said something to me and I can't find the original. It was so profound, and I thought it was so smart, and it was probably tied to Microsoft [00:58:00] was on the seventh version of their music service or whatever the hell it was at the time. They went from em n Music to urge, to zoom to Xbox to groove or whatever it was. It was like, what are you doing to yourself? Why do you keep following along with the stupidity? Someone said to me, something so smart, but it's a debate, which is this, the reason I don't use the Microsoft Music Service or whatever the thing was at the time, is because music is not important to Microsoft. That's why I use Spotify because music is important to Spotify. Music is Spotify's only business. [00:58:30] Now that's not true anymore. So here's the thing, do you go with a company like Dropbox because that's all they do. It's their whole business or the focus of their business. Or do you go to a company like Microsoft where it's the smallest fricking province in the corner of a giant grid of features that they have and where do you put your time, effort, and money? And it's honestly, it's not as clear cut as it sounds, but it's an important debate because

(00:58:56):
Sometimes those little services go away.

Richard Campbell (00:58:59):
You don't want to put [00:59:00] your service, the stereo component model versus the Allin one, right? Long ago we used to make fun of, oh look, you've got a vinyl player that's got a cassette tape in. Now they're both bad.

Leo Laporte (00:59:10):
When

Richard Campbell (00:59:10):
I bought a that player and a dedicated LT player, well, you have

Paul Thurrott (00:59:14):
An iMac and the screen goes bad, and you're like, great, I've got this powerful computer inside about screen I can't use anymore because the screen's

Richard Campbell (00:59:20):
Bad.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:22):
So anyway, this is a debate. It's something we all need to worry about, but I think in, this is my tip. I'm ruining it. I'll get to it, but [00:59:30] it's a big topic. This might be the biggest topic of our times.

Leo Laporte (00:59:37):
I agree.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:37):
And in the personal technology sphere, in a world in which subscriptions are getting more and more expensive in a world in which services are getting more hostile to users, we collectively need to make decisions for ourselves and maybe make a stand. I made the point earlier that Microsoft has shown itself to be very responsive to negative feedback. [01:00:00] If OneDrive is being inured in the way that I believe it is, we as a community need to stand up and say, no. I very strongly feel that.

Leo Laporte (01:00:10):
But what do you do? I mean, how do you tell a company like Microsoft? No. I mean you don't buy the product or you get on the podcast and complain.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:18):
Well, yeah, that's the right, that's right.

Richard Campbell (01:00:22):
This also comes back to the services model where you're paying a flat fee. And so [01:00:30] it's not like any of these products directly make money. They're all part of that fee. And so

Paul Thurrott (01:00:37):
Listen, the

Leo Laporte (01:00:39):
Problem with this

Paul Thurrott (01:00:40):
Topic is it's everything. It's everything. You could toss out the name of any service, anyone who knows it's not throw you five or 10 things that ly you've seen it everywhere. Here's an example I just had the other day in my Google newsfeed. There was a story that I clicked on. It turned out to be from the New York Times and it wouldn't let me read it. You have to sign into the New York [01:01:00] Times and I have a New York Times subscription. So I clicked on it and the screen appeared on the bottom third of the screen that told me that you have whatever subscription you have, you should upgrade to this better subscription that costs a lot more money. And I couldn't get rid of it. It would not let me. There was nothing to, well, I'm sorry there was an X and I'm like nothing. It would never go away. That is exactly this thing. This is crazy.

Leo Laporte (01:01:25):
We were talking about this. I'm

Paul Thurrott (01:01:25):
Already paying you. You're still showing me ads and now you're going to put up a [01:01:30] freaking blocker on a third of the screen. We were

Leo Laporte (01:01:32):
Talking about this yesterday on Mac Break Weekly with regard to Apple TV and well, for instance, H B O Max or now Max has that slide out thing. And Alex was saying, I just try to skip

Paul Thurrott (01:01:46):
Through those before

Leo Laporte (01:01:47):
It slides out because I don't want, but they don't play. I know because you don't want

Paul Thurrott (01:01:51):
It to play. They

Leo Laporte (01:01:52):
No longer care about the

Paul Thurrott (01:01:53):
Customer. Now you're playing a game.

Leo Laporte (01:01:55):
Yeah, it's all about trying to get more money.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:57):
I know it's like a dexterity test. This will [01:02:00] be part of my tip, unfortunately. But I do think this is the biggest issue of rage for people like us who are concerned about this stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:02:06):
I think there's going to be a backlash. I think customers

Paul Thurrott (01:02:09):
Are

Leo Laporte (01:02:09):
Getting the point now where we're

Paul Thurrott (01:02:11):
Starting to get fed up,

Leo Laporte (01:02:12):
Whether it's Amazon, apple, Microsoft, it's happening universally. It's the insured notification of the internet. Corey was absolutely right

Paul Thurrott (01:02:21):
Of all

Leo Laporte (01:02:22):
Technology. I think people are just going to turn their back on technology at some point. They're counting on the fact that we're counting on that fact [01:02:30] that we're addicted and can if you it, I know, but you can push people too far. Yeah, part of it will be price. I think we were hitting a real issue there

Paul Thurrott (01:02:40):
This

Leo Laporte (01:02:41):
Year, and then part of it's going to be this

Paul Thurrott (01:02:46):
Caring about their needs over our

Leo Laporte (01:02:47):
Needs. And it's like I'm paying you for some reason, I'm paying you. What are you doing? Every tech publication this week has the story that Netflix is going to raise prices

Paul Thurrott (01:02:57):
As soon as the SAG after a strike is over. [01:03:00] Even though, by the way, they've never said that. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:03:03):
I'm thinking the only reason that you see this in the journal and

Paul Thurrott (01:03:05):
Everywhere else is they've been

Leo Laporte (01:03:06):
Planning this. Netflix is planning the story. They're floating a trial balloon.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:10):
Very good. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:03:11):
Right. Why else? But you know what? At point, so here's the problem with this story. At some point, they're going to raise the prices point. It's like any other

Paul Thurrott (01:03:17):
Conspiracy theory. Where would we say no,

Leo Laporte (01:03:22):
We just go, okay, bye-bye.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:25):
Our show today

Leo Laporte (01:03:27):
Brought to you [01:03:30] by our great friends at Duo, you've used Duo Duo's. Great duo protects against breaches. It is, I would say the leading access management suite, strong multi-layered defenses and

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Paul Thurrott (01:05:45):
Yeah. How about

Leo Laporte (01:05:47):
Chromebook Plus, are you excited? You know what,

Paul Thurrott (01:05:51):
Excited is a strong word for someone like me, but I would

Leo Laporte (01:05:53):
Say I'm

Paul Thurrott (01:05:54):
Interested. I mean, I've always found Chromebooks to be incredibly limiting, but I also feel that their kind of inherent [01:06:00] advantages have never really been broached by Microsoft stupidly and that there's an opening here. And if they could make one that makes sense for more people, maybe this makes some sense. So Chromebooks plus, is

Leo Laporte (01:06:11):
This the gaming Chromebook?

Paul Thurrott (01:06:13):
They keep

Leo Laporte (01:06:13):
Pushing?

Paul Thurrott (01:06:14):
Well, I think it came out of that. It's this notion of we can have Chromebooks that have good specs and still are affordable relative to premium computers and that these might appeal to more people. And

Leo Laporte (01:06:25):
Honestly, all

Paul Thurrott (01:06:27):
The things that make a Chromebook good are good. And [01:06:30] there's some things that are limiting. So I don't know. The prototype of this was the HP Dragonfly Pro Chromebook that came out back in probably March. And it is high-end PC specs. Very nice, but it's Chromebook. So you run into all those stupid little limitations that for me are big blockers.

Richard Campbell (01:06:54):
Yeah. Is it Android or isn't it just that?

Paul Thurrott (01:06:58):
Yeah. Do we care more about Android [01:07:00] this year or Chromebook? I can't remember. It kind of goes back and forth. So I think there's an opening here for them and not just in education and not just in low cost computers. I think a lot of people like you guys, they announced that first Pixel Chromebook. Come on. You were like, oh, that's interesting. And then you look into it and you're like, oh, it's a Chromebook. So I

Richard Campbell (01:07:19):
Think they first I bought one, then I figured out it was a Chromebook.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:24):
So I've had the same, I've owned many Chromebooks. In fact, I owned the firsts Chromebook, that CR 48 that Google [01:07:30] gave out for a little while to people. I had one of those, I had a Pixel Chromebook, I had a Pixel book, various hpss and Acers transforming convertibles, traditional laptops, some advanced hardware along the way, fingerprint readers. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (01:07:45):
It's not the hardware that's the problem.

Leo Laporte (01:07:48):
So

Paul Thurrott (01:07:49):
I think adding Android app compatibility was a big step because you're addressing kind of an app gap, but then you're like, well, these are Android apps. And so the emphasis in recent years has been [01:08:00] adapting Android to big screen devices, which people hear and they think of folding screens and tablets and yes, but also by the way, Chromebooks, these big screen experiences in the Android apps, as they get more and more mature, that's a cool idea. And now of course, AI is coming down the pike, and so they're talking about that stuff. So I need to spend more time with it because when I do spend time with it, I always run into something. And so I wrote a very lengthy article about this in Google Docs on a Chromebook. [01:08:30] I got Adobe to get me into Adobe CC for a little while so I could use Photoshop for the web, which is one of the things they're pushing.

(01:08:37):
And you can only access through a CC subscription, which is Adobe, and it doesn't have enough. It's not there. It can't even do cropping, let alone cropping to specific aspect ratios is a feature that's missing right now. So it's kind of goofy. So it's not even essentials level of Photoshop, but it will get there. I mean, [01:09:00] we have apps like Clip Champ that are web-based video editors. There are Android app video editors that Google is promoting for Chromebook plus Luma Vision. I think it was one of them, and I don't remember the other one, but it's sort of like the discussion around an iPad. The size of the audience that could use an iPad is a primary or a sole computing device other than a phone grows more and more each year. And it's possible for that to happen in Chromebook too. Right? And this is a more traditional [01:09:30] kind of computer that I think will be familiar to people. Microsoft should really get off their butts and make full P w a offline support office app versions of their web apps and they haven't, although Outlook is going to get there first. I think I'll outlook that com, but Word, Excel, PowerPoint, et cetera, I think this world's

Leo Laporte (01:09:52):
Going to

Paul Thurrott (01:09:52):
Happen. So there's a chance. I mean, they've never had a virus, right? Not once. Do you

Leo Laporte (01:10:00):
[01:10:00] Think Microsoft's once bit twice shy because of Windows SS and then Netbooks and both of them were kind calamities.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:09):
Yeah, the Netbook was the first of those, obviously. And that was them bringing back xp, right? When Vista was current, they brought something out called Windows XP Starter Edition because Vista was too heavy to run a netbooks. And they did that because of Linux, right? Linux was what asus and the other companies were putting on the early netbooks. And then for [01:10:30] Chromebook and ChromeOS, whatever took off in education, especially in the low end of the education market that really cash strapped schools. And Microsoft responded with Windows 10 Ss and walking around with the U S B key and a teacher could do configuration on computers between classes, which is one of the dumbest things I've ever seen in my life. But Windows 10 X might've addressed this space as well. I think we're going to see more. We talk about Edge Books, which is something we all make up, but [01:11:00] Edge has is getting more and more OSS features like split screen support and things like that. You could kind of see it. It's possible. I think they're onto something. And by the way, Google just eliminated their biggest heel by doing 10 years of support, eight years

Leo Laporte (01:11:17):
On the new pixels, right? Seven or eight years

Paul Thurrott (01:11:19):
And the seven on the pixels, and by the way, that's OSS and security updates. That's really fantastic. Three slash Yeah, that's unbelievable. They went from last place in both of those markets to first. That's [01:11:30] pretty incredible. And by the way, that's in the span of about a month and a half a

Leo Laporte (01:11:33):
Month.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:34):
No, seriously. They were laughing stocks in both cases.

Leo Laporte (01:11:37):
I agree.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:38):
There's something going on. I mean,

Leo Laporte (01:11:40):
We'll see the

Paul Thurrott (01:11:42):
Reason you

Leo Laporte (01:11:43):
Want this market is so big or because you want to get 'em young and get 'em hooked on Windows.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:48):
A little bit of all of that. I mean, I've often, the thing I've argued about Microsoft and to Microsoft is that Google has this stranglehold on [01:12:00] education in many cases that people who come into the workforce are going to start expecting the things they used then assuming they liked it. I, and I get a lot of pushback from the old IT prototypes to which I respond, yeah, what are you retiring? Exactly. Because guess what's happening soon? You're not going to be making the decisions and it's going to be one of those kids that came up with Google Docs and Chromebooks. My daughter in high school heard me talking to my wife about PowerPoint and she said, [01:12:30] what's PowerPoint? And I said, it's a computer program that lets you make presentations. And she goes, oh, is it like Microsoft's version of Google Sheets or whatever the Google thing's called? I'm like,

Leo Laporte (01:12:40):
Go to your room. That's hysterical.

Richard Campbell (01:12:42):
Oh, you mean like,

Leo Laporte (01:12:43):
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:44):
No, I know what that is. Yeah, so that's her background and she's 21 now, by the way, guys and entering the word workforce and God help every one of you,

Richard Campbell (01:12:53):
And it's going to lead with slides over power slides, Google

Leo Laporte (01:12:56):
Slides. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:57):
Sheets. Is the Excel the thing that's [01:13:00] better than Excel

Leo Laporte (01:13:02):
Neither? Well, the point is interesting. Neither of

Paul Thurrott (01:13:05):
Them are

Leo Laporte (01:13:05):
Better than Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:06):
No, of course they aren't. But you know what? They're

Leo Laporte (01:13:08):
Good enough. But

Paul Thurrott (01:13:09):
This is the conversation. Seriously, you talk to a guy who's an accountant or in any field where they need Excel and all those crazy advanced features and they're like, oh, the Google thing, it's a laughable. It's like, yeah, but not everyone's like you. Most people need pretty basic

Leo Laporte (01:13:23):
Features. Yeah, that's the real thing is maybe that's the problem. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:13:27):
Simplicity is better. Yeah, you're going to become a unicorn. [01:13:30] Simplicity has its

Richard Campbell (01:13:32):
Place, still has Python now everything's going to be fine.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:35):
Yeah, that speaks to simplicity, right? Yeah. So anyway, look, we don't need to debate the whole thing, but this thing is interesting to me because these premium spec Chromebooks are going to run four to 700 bucks, 800 bucks, and they are the equivalent of a 1000 $1,500 PC laptop, much smaller on disc and in [01:14:00] Ram system than Windows. A much simpler system, a much easier system to manage. The updating is laughably easy, it's predictable.

Richard Campbell (01:14:09):
Once a month, reboots in two seconds. I just don't have the baggage of the old window.

Leo Laporte (01:14:14):
I gave my daughter a fancy M two MacBook Air for her work and writing

Paul Thurrott (01:14:20):
And

Leo Laporte (01:14:20):
She ended up saying, now can you give me back the Pixel

Paul Thurrott (01:14:22):
Book I had? I really, I prefer that. That's crazy. Wow. There you go for it. I shouldn't say that's crazy. That's not crazy. I mean good for her.

Leo Laporte (01:14:30):
[01:14:30] And by the way, she keeps everything in the cloud in Google Drive.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:33):
There you go.

Richard Campbell (01:14:35):
Not a folder in sight.

Leo Laporte (01:14:36):
It was easy for her. The folder shut up, but it was easy for her. I had already wiped the Pixel book. I said, sure, I still have it.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:44):
Yous

Leo Laporte (01:14:44):
Old as I am, what are you talking? So I gave it to her, she logs in and everything's there. It's good to go. It's a nice setup.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:49):
Really. Yep. And by the way, this is the rationale behind what Microsoft is doing with MSAs and OneDrive, but

Leo Laporte (01:14:57):
As soon as they do it, it's more complicated. [01:15:00] I know

Paul Thurrott (01:15:00):
It's complicated because the system's complicated. It's complicated because a lot of the use of a are me and Richard and you, and we're like, what

Leo Laporte (01:15:07):
The hell you doing?

Paul Thurrott (01:15:07):
Screwing around with our system. We have a way of doing things here, right? That's right.

Richard Campbell (01:15:11):
Microsoft has a terrible problem with always deferring to their existing install base.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:16):
10

Richard Campbell (01:15:17):
X was not for us, it was for another market. But when they had a tough time reaching that market, they started talking to us, we ripped it apart.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:25):
We're like, no, we don't want this. So lemme get this straight. After all of the 10 s things that [01:15:30] you did after Windows rt, you're telling me that you're coming out with a system that won't run 1 32 Fs? Okay, so do you not learn from anything? Because that was the problem the whole time, which is part of the thing that we talked about earlier about getting those win 32 apps, not necessarily into the store, although Microsoft might present that as the ey, but rather

Richard Campbell (01:15:51):
Have you, that was the belief of the workaround, right? The whole point here was, hey, 99% of what you do is fine in 10 x, you need this one [01:16:00] app.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:00):
That was the

Richard Campbell (01:16:01):
Problem. And everybody one app is different. And so if we find a way to modernize that

Paul Thurrott (01:16:06):
One app, I begged Terry Morrison to make Windows 10 s a switch where you install the one like Chrome or maybe iTunes back in the day, whatever it was, the printer driver. And then you flip the switch and everything else is 10 s. Just do that.

Richard Campbell (01:16:21):
It's harder than in that one would argue that's the path they're on now with Windows 365

Paul Thurrott (01:16:28):
And

Richard Campbell (01:16:28):
With Azure Virtual Desktop, [01:16:30] it's like, hey, for the one app, it lives in the virtual desktop and it's just an icon on your machine and you launch,

Paul Thurrott (01:16:36):
There's different language and there are different technologies you can use to describe what's happening. Sometimes it's a vm, sometimes it's a container, sometimes it's a thing up in the cloud. It doesn't matter in a way, it doesn't matter. The point is we want to reduce our reliance. I want

Richard Campbell (01:16:50):
My one app

Paul Thurrott (01:16:51):
Yes. On all the security problems of 1 32, but still give us Chrome or whatever the app is that we need.

Richard Campbell (01:16:57):
And also that innate security that [01:17:00] comes from that. That's the thing.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:01):
That's exactly right. Exactly. That's exactly

Richard Campbell (01:17:03):
Right. More reliable L power consumption. Fewer problems.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:07):
The most secure computer in the is possible today. It just doesn't run apps and doesn't connect to the internet. Do you want that computer? Because if you don't, we got to make some compromises, right? And

Richard Campbell (01:17:18):
But it's very secure.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:19):
It's very secure. It's very secure. In fact, you could be running windows,

Richard Campbell (01:17:22):
Don't turn it on.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:23):
Yeah, you don't have to turn it on. Exactly.

Richard Campbell (01:17:27):
Keeps absolutely safe.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:29):
Yep.

Richard Campbell (01:17:30):
[01:17:30] Are we going to talk about Uncle Satya? I was

Paul Thurrott (01:17:34):
Surprised

Richard Campbell (01:17:35):
Uncle Satya.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:36):
Yeah. What do you think of this?

Richard Campbell (01:17:40):
I think everybody takes a cautionary page from what happens to Gates and it's all different when you're in front of government.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:48):
Under oath is a tough thing because oath is tough thing. Marketing versus reality. Google is in, for those who don't know, is facing the d OJ in a federal court for [01:18:00] antitrust charges related to its abuse, alleged abuse of its search engine, which is dominant, by the way, is a monopoly. Absolutely. Ly

Richard Campbell (01:18:08):
Dominant. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:11):
Literally you can have debates about different platforms. This one, I don't know, there's not much of a debate happening here. So it's been very interesting because what you hear is the other side of the story. So for example, apple infamously, Steve Jobs said because of Android, we are in a thermonuclear war with Google. Sadly [01:18:30] or not, he passed away. But since then, what we learned is Google and Apple might have the most lucrative partnership in all of personal technology. And when you get Apple executives on the stand under oath, it's not like those marketing events where everything we do is great. It's actually everything Google does is great. And the reason we partner with them, it's not the money, it's the money is because it could be both by the way. And it is both. It's because it, it's lucrative for them financially. [01:19:00] And be

Richard Campbell (01:19:01):
Google pays them a huge amount of money,

Paul Thurrott (01:19:03):
It's lucrative. And what it allows them to do is essentially partner, no, not essentially, literally partner in that. The iPhone has a huge and lucrative user base. They're searching for things that are kind of high end and they tend to buy things that are expensive. And Google has the best search engine. So it allows Apple to take advantage of that. It allows Google to take advantage of that audience and they both share the revenues. It's essentially a revenue [01:19:30] share is what it's, it's always presented as Google paying Apple because that's where the check goes. But literally Apple pays in the form of opening this thing up to their audience. They talked about some of the compromises they have to make under the covers because they promote privacy pretty big over in Apple land. I dunno if you noticed that,

Richard Campbell (01:19:47):
Right?

Paul Thurrott (01:19:48):
What happens on iPhone stay as an iPhone unless you use Google. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (01:19:51):
That's what it goes to Google.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:52):
Yeah. Eddie Q gave a nice little tip in court. If you want, avoid that, don't sign into Google. You can use Google search on an iPhone [01:20:00] and if you don't sign in, Google cannot track you. If you do, it does. So it's just like every other phone. Sorry. And I bet most people do. That was very interesting, right? We got the other

Richard Campbell (01:20:12):
Side. Have you tried using Google? Not signed in. It's pretty fussy.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:15):
Oh, is it? Okay. No, I signed in. I've given my soul to Google now. It's okay. He,

Richard Campbell (01:20:22):
He'd already owned it eventually. You acknowledged that he owned it. Might as well take advantage of it.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:26):
Yeah, I might as well use the services. I mean paying with my soul. [01:20:30] And then Microsoft CEO E O Sat showed up on Monday and yikes. As a bit of background, back in August, or I guess it was August, the Wall Street Journal published an amazing kind of tear down of binging and all the AI stuff they were doing where they basically looked at every possible web stat there is. And said, when this thing came out, Satya Nadella was a little over the top. He was talking about how proud he was, he could make a Google dance and that every percentage of search market [01:21:00] share that we take back from them is worth billions of dollars. And can anyone tell me how many percentages of search they took from Google in the past six or seven months? Zip zero. In fact, they lost a tiny bit of market share and he described this as a $100 billion bet. Hundred billion. Wow.

Richard Campbell (01:21:21):
And I think that's true, but it's not on binging.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:24):
Yeah. Well, it's across everything. I think. Look, they've been keeping binging afloat for many, many years. But [01:21:30] here's the ugly truth, because this is a great debate. This is the type of thing in my world where people get a little upset. So I'm a Microsoft guy and maybe if I criticize a surface product, you get the surface, guys are like, whoa, what are you talking about? Paul Surface is great. I hear from those people with binging, if you can believe that. So I'm like, Bing is terrible. It's a waste of time. I don't know why anyone uses it. And they'll say, well, Paul, in my experience, binging delivers much better search results than Google does. Okay, when was the last time you used [01:22:00] Google? 1999. So it's like, okay, that's cute. But most people understand Bing to be a running joke. It's the butt of jokes to normal people. And other people might try it from time to time like I do. And then they're like, oh God, right? This is why I used search.

Richard Campbell (01:22:16):
The usual way you try binging is because defaults have been reset again.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:20):
And you're like, what?

Richard Campbell (01:22:20):
These search results terrible.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:22):
That's right.

Richard Campbell (01:22:22):
Full weighted binging.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:23):
Yep. That's the experience. You're like, I'm going right back. I go back to the warm embrace of the thing that

Richard Campbell (01:22:27):
Works. You don't detect it because of the page or anything. [01:22:30] You detect it because of the results.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:32):
So here's the horrible truth in all this. To the people who love binging and maybe just want it to survive or even beat Google because they love Microsoft, whatever the reason is, doesn't matter. And to the people who argue, well, yeah, maybe they're abusing their monopoly, but Google search is the best. The horrible truth is this. Both of those things can be true. Bing is worse. He said it. This is Satya Nadella saying this, not me. Satya Nadella admitted that binging is [01:23:00] worse and will always be worse because they don't have the users to get either the data to improve the engine to make

Richard Campbell (01:23:07):
Difference a way. Well, it lies the question. Is the majority of the customer base using Google, it's better, or is Google better because they force the majority of the customer base

Paul Thurrott (01:23:16):
To use? I believe it to be the former, but I'm going to throw everyone a bone here. Both can be true. Because now both are true because more people use Google. Google is better because fewer people use binging. Binging is worse. This is the Microsoft c e O saying, [01:23:30] it's not me. The problem for Microsoft is there's no amount of money they can spend that will fix this problem. They can't pour more billions of dollars into binging to improve the service because even if they do, no one's going to use it. That's not how it works. No one is looking to consumer reports to find out what the best search engine is in the world. They can't do anything to fix it. And there's two huge problems with this. One is that this means even if Bing was better, no one would notice. And it wouldn't matter, tree falling in the woods, et cetera, et cetera. It's not. But [01:24:00] even if it was, so why even bother trying? And also they just spent tens of billions of dollars integrating AI into binging and it didn't move the needle at all. That's the biggest push

Richard Campbell (01:24:13):
They'd ever made. They'd spent a lot building the large language model. The integration part was not that costly. The bigger issue here was the large language model, a better way to present search results that could have.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:27):
Yeah, so it's a different thing. [01:24:30] I think we're going to evolve our understanding of the stuff just as they're evolve the products. I think the knee jerk reaction back in February is this is the next search. This replaces

Richard Campbell (01:24:42):
Search. That was the hope, and there's a reason to make the binging play. Can we move the needle?

Paul Thurrott (01:24:47):
I think this is really about, I'm trying to say this sort of making pervasive intelligence available kind of everywhere, including search, right? So

Richard Campbell (01:24:57):
This

Paul Thurrott (01:24:58):
Past week, I must have a story about this scenario. Do I? [01:25:00] Yeah. So I'm going to get to this, but binging image creator was updated with Dolly three capabilities. This is one of the things they showed off at the Microsoft event. This is amazing. Concurrently with this, Microsoft has been updating binging chat all year long. I mean, it's like the new teams every day almost. It feels like there's a new up. Bing does this, Bing does this, blah, blah, blah. And I use it because I am trying to figure out what it's good for where it works. Do you play with it or do you actually use it for something? I play with it and use it, right? Yeah, I play with [01:25:30] it. I haven't found it real useful. So here's something I did. So this is a good example of maybe you could search for this exactly in Google search and come up with this exact answer, but I was thinking about a topic that is that thing that's my tip of the week.

(01:25:42):
And I was trying to come up with a title for it. And the phrase that came into my brain was Love and anger. And Love and Anger is the name of a Kate Bush song from late 1980s, which I love. It's a great song, but so many songs, I could probably sing the whole thing for you right now. I have no idea what the lyrics mean. I know the [01:26:00] words, but I don't actually know what they mean. So I wanted to find out if the song meant something that would be relevant to the article I was going to write. Maybe if it's similar, that would make more sense. So I asked Binging Chat, what is the meaning behind the song Love and Anger by Kate Bush? Oh

Leo Laporte (01:26:14):
God, I to this. And it does what Chat does to, yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:26:16):
It does what it does. What Binging Chat does. It reaches out to places on the internet that already have this answer and put it into a little narrative. So here's the thing, I believe it's correct. It makes sense what it wrote. In other words, I don't think it made anything up. I didn't actually research [01:26:30] that. But the thing that struck me about it wasn't so much that it is a, what some people might call a glorified search result. You got to remember, it's doing two things here that I think are important. It's combining information from multiple sources into a coherent narrative. And that three paragraph thing that it responded with, which I could read

Leo Laporte (01:26:50):
If you want, it's, it's a synthesis,

Paul Thurrott (01:26:52):
But it's also presented in a way that is articulate and intelligent,

Leo Laporte (01:26:57):
Deceptively

Paul Thurrott (01:26:59):
Concise. [01:27:00] Well, it doesn't matter

Richard Campbell (01:27:01):
Even if it's incorrect

Paul Thurrott (01:27:03):
In this case, I think it's correct. All I'm trying to say is, look, this thing will get better. It might have already gotten better. And the problem for Microsoft is it might not matter because not only do these I or you or anyone else could talk about how much better it is. Oh my God, it's getting so good. It's like Apple maps people saying, oh, you don't understand. It's caught up with Google Maps. And it's like, I don't think you understand, but whatever. I'm sure it's gotten better, but it's not going to move the [01:27:30] needle. And that's the potential problem for Microsoft that he voiced. He said, we could pour hundreds of billions into this, and what if on the end of it we're at 4% instead of three? That's

Richard Campbell (01:27:42):
But also point out, not necessarily that he's telling the truth, but that he definitely has a spin in that scenario.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:49):
He's

Richard Campbell (01:27:49):
Not going to advocate for Google while Google's ur an antitrust trial. He's going to show how Google is suppressing Mark.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:55):
That's right. So actually that's the important point. Apple interestingly was [01:28:00] a witness for the defense. They're there for Google, that's why they're there. They agreed with Google to explain the benefits of the service that they get and why it's good for everybody. Microsoft is there for the D O J, which is ironic, maybe if you believe that history exists in a continuum or something. But Microsoft, which was

Richard Campbell (01:28:22):
Right, I sure Brad Smith said, it's the right place to be.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:24):
There you go. Yes, I love Brad Smith. So yeah, from his [01:28:30] position, you get this sense of futility. It's a little bit like what we got out of Xbox in the F T C hearings where you're like, oh my God, he makes it sound so dire. And what he came out with was, and trust me, don't trust me. I believe that he, no, don't trust me, but I think this makes sense. I don't think he meant this literally like you should as the courts order this to happen. But his answer was, the only way this gets fixed [01:29:00] is Apple either buys binging or pays us to use it, and we get access to that user base that Google now controls, and now we have this virtuous cycle of an audience that is of an depreciable size and good information and we can improve our service. And you can make a case bing, probably at Microsoft, we go to Apple and say, look, I mean it's us. We're going to be more private. We're going to do things better on those lines. We align in that way. But here's the problem for Apple to do that, either one, they would have to tify [01:29:30] their own customers by offering them a worse off product. And

Leo Laporte (01:29:34):
That is a

Paul Thurrott (01:29:35):
Catch 22 period

Richard Campbell (01:29:35):
Of time

Paul Thurrott (01:29:36):
For some period of time. Can you imagine that little bit of marketing from Tim Cook yelling across the rainbow there on the grass

Leo Laporte (01:29:43):
From the Apple thing? Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:29:43):
You could say,

Leo Laporte (01:29:44):
And I think it would be right, it's more private. We've chosen a more private solution. We've gotten fed up with you

Richard Campbell (01:29:50):
Told us you care about your security. So here we go.

Leo Laporte (01:29:54):
Here's the question. You could change it. Could they get 12 billion from Microsoft? That's the thing. You know what? I

Paul Thurrott (01:29:59):
Think

Leo Laporte (01:30:00):
[01:30:00] They could, they make a lot of money off of Google.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:03):
Well, I mean that's the thing. So there are other issues that relate to this that I think are part of a problem Google, part of the Google antitrust thing is that they own a monopoly in this space on online ads. And so that Microsoft wants to have these companies advertise on Bing as well, and they're like, yeah, we can't, according to our little agreement with Google, we can't even do that. So even if they got that audience, a lot of things have to change for this to make sense, which was the point of having [01:30:30] an antitrust trial, I guess. But

Richard Campbell (01:30:32):
There's an interesting thought here to say, what if there were two search engine products out there that each owned like

Paul Thurrott (01:30:37):
45% of the market? Yeah, exactly. Like we have in mobile.

Leo Laporte (01:30:40):
Would we be

Richard Campbell (01:30:40):
In a better place?

Leo Laporte (01:30:41):
Yes,

Paul Thurrott (01:30:42):
I think so.

Leo Laporte (01:30:43):
If Google has free

Richard Campbell (01:30:44):
Range, garbages, overall searchers, all quality would be lower.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:48):
We need,

Leo Laporte (01:30:49):
Why would you say for Google

Paul Thurrott (01:30:50):
Search, we need search him?

Richard Campbell (01:30:54):
The argument is that by having a gestalt of everything in one place, you have the optimal search result. When [01:31:00] you split the search result,

Leo Laporte (01:31:02):
The counter argument is that because Google is 80 or 90% of the market and they know they've got a captive audience, honestly

Richard Campbell (01:31:10):
You wouldn't. They spend no money on search

Leo Laporte (01:31:13):
And their front page is not better because the search is being moved farther and farther down below the

Paul Thurrott (01:31:17):
Fold,

Leo Laporte (01:31:18):
The actual results. So they can show Google results up there. This

Paul Thurrott (01:31:21):
Is kind of getting a little farther field, but one of the things we have learned about Google, by the way, is that Microsoft came up with their AI stuff in February, kind of shocking the world a little bit. [01:31:30] And Google stumbled a little bit in the beginning messaging wise. But the thing we all understand about Google is they have this stuff. They've been doing this too. They have been as aggressive internally as Microsoft has. The only difference is they've been kind of doing it themselves. They didn't have to invest in a company like OpenAI to do this. They actually have it. So what's the narrative? The narrative from Google is the public narrative is, well, yeah, no, I mean we had this stuff, but it's not safe. It,

Leo Laporte (01:31:58):
We decided not to use it.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:59):
We [01:32:00] decided not to

Richard Campbell (01:32:00):
Do it.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:01):
But what's the reality? The reality is those people inside of Google who were doing this AI stuff said This is going to replace search. Let's get going on this. And the money guys at Google, were like, are you out of your mind? We're making this thing is a cash cow. We're

Leo Laporte (01:32:14):
Making so much

Paul Thurrott (01:32:15):
80% of our revenues, we are not scoring

Leo Laporte (01:32:18):
With this thing.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:19):
I think you're exactly right. That's stupid. So Microsoft, they

Richard Campbell (01:32:22):
Have innovative dilemma in a big way.

Leo Laporte (01:32:24):
So

Paul Thurrott (01:32:24):
This is what happens with monopolies. You move into maintenance, you stop innovating. So Microsoft, ironically [01:32:30] or not triggered what is starting to be a Google avalanche of AI products and services because this stuff was all just sitting there waiting and now they're burping it out. And we saw some of it today at the Google at the Pixel event. This Bard stuff come in Google Assistant. And of course, of course they're doing this. So anyway, it it's a messy awesome big topic. It's very interesting. I love anything that gives me insight into what's going [01:33:00] on behind the scenes because marketing is always so different from reality. And we got to see it big time with Satin and Eddie Q so far in the Google trial. I can't wait to see the Google guys love these trials by the way. Love this. Same thing with Microsoft, Activision and Apple, epic. All

Leo Laporte (01:33:16):
That's the best we're finally seen behind the curtain.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:19):
Yes. Yep. It's the best.

Richard Campbell (01:33:21):
I'd say it's still a spin, at least it's a different spin.

Leo Laporte (01:33:25):
But when you get

Paul Thurrott (01:33:25):
Discovery

Leo Laporte (01:33:26):
And you see these emails, there's not much spin in the emails.

Richard Campbell (01:33:29):
It's closer to [01:33:30] the truth.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:31):
One because of big tech's experience with antitrust thanks to Microsoft, Google, bill, bill and also Jim Alton on the stand, who was shown to be lying essentially, which is too bad. But there were certain documents that were part of discovery that Google did not want let out into the world. Now in the Activision Blizzard trial or a hearing, there was a lot of that stuff as well. You redact things because it's private information either to one of the two companies [01:34:00] involved or a third party, and that's completely understandable. But this particular one, the rationale for it was, was just embarrassing. And they didn't want it out in the world. And the judge finally said, screw you. There's nothing proprietary here. We're putting it out. And all it was was some Google idiot bragging about how awesome search was internally and talking, using a phrase, very much cutting off the air supply, which is the famous Microsoft thing from the 1990s. And it was just embarrassing. And they had to say, this person's opinions did not reflect the views of the company, [01:34:30] blah,

Leo Laporte (01:34:30):
Blah,

Paul Thurrott (01:34:30):
Blah. They didn't want it out.

Richard Campbell (01:34:34):
But the guy's literally using the Microsoft term that got Microsoft declared,

Paul Thurrott (01:34:38):
I'm sorry, I'm paraphrasing. It was not exactly the same term, but it was very, very close. It was something very similar. So I love this stuff. I love it, I love it. So this is aside from a leak, like the Xbox thing, which is also freaking amazing.

Leo Laporte (01:34:55):
Juicy. Juicy,

Paul Thurrott (01:34:57):
The best, most of the time what we're talking about [01:35:00] is the Swift key keyboard and a new character code. And it's like,

Richard Campbell (01:35:04):
Okay, and we only can guess decoding corporate speak about product.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:07):
Exactly,

Leo Laporte (01:35:07):
Yeah. And we're just

Paul Thurrott (01:35:08):
Reading the tea

Leo Laporte (01:35:09):
Leaves instead of actually seeing under the kimono,

Paul Thurrott (01:35:13):
Which is not

Leo Laporte (01:35:14):
Good image. But you get,

Paul Thurrott (01:35:16):
It's not

Richard Campbell (01:35:17):
Every time we read those emails and realize these are just people who have their own foibles and are trying to make things. That's right. It's relieving,

Paul Thurrott (01:35:25):
Isn't it? When you see a good marketing event like Apple, maybe a little over the top [01:35:30] with the Hollywood special effects, but God do they own messaging, even Google in their own kind of downmarket way or Amazon does a good job of this to the devices event. You get this kind of what seems like a cohesive set of things and then when you look under the covers, you realize these guys have no idea. They're just throwing it together. I think it's, I always think this thing is fascinating. So anyway, with regards to Microsoft and binging and Google and Apple and yada, yada, yada, whatever anyone's opinions, the reality [01:36:00] is that Google, sorry, Bing is in a hole. They're never getting out of it, and it's going to take some kind of a Hail Mary miracle on the part of Apple. Frankly don't know who else could do this or a regulatory divestiture, divestiture of Google's ad DoubleClick business, getting the ads away from search.

Leo Laporte (01:36:23):
Boy, that would be interesting. Their revenue.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:27):
That's it. And

Richard Campbell (01:36:30):
[01:36:30] These are pretty specific remedies you're pushing.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:33):
They're also very farfetched, right?

Leo Laporte (01:36:37):
Well, they're

Paul Thurrott (01:36:38):
Draconian,

Leo Laporte (01:36:39):
But I think they are correct. And I don't

Paul Thurrott (01:36:41):
Think, but they should be considered, these are the biggest companies on earth. If you're serious about severing their control over our society, this is what you have to look at. Taking Instagram and WhatsApp away from Facebook, taking ads away from Google, Google without ads, I think [01:37:00] could still be a great business. They would still be able to get ads and make money from it, from various third parties. But it would be like this open, healthy market of different companies that could provide that service. Microsoft has an ad business and it can't compete because of search.

Leo Laporte (01:37:17):
Do you think, I mean, the thing that's really changed and is changing is this addition of AI to search. I have yet to see it deliver material [01:37:30] advantage. But do you think ultimately

Paul Thurrott (01:37:32):
In search, in search, in search

Leo Laporte (01:37:35):
Specifically like traditional, I'm typing in a

Paul Thurrott (01:37:37):
Term and tell me what I'm looking for. I do. I really think this is, I think maybe the problem is is that we saw this chat feature because this is very specifically a chat feature. It is literally a text-based prompt

Leo Laporte (01:37:54):
That

Paul Thurrott (01:37:54):
Achieves some end. And that end is not the answer to what day of the week was April 5th, 1972. [01:38:00] That's a search,

Leo Laporte (01:38:01):
Right?

Paul Thurrott (01:38:01):
It's the thing I asked

Leo Laporte (01:38:03):
About Bush's song

Paul Thurrott (01:38:05):
Or create an image based on certain parameters or I would like a five day itinerary for Mexico City, that type of thing where it's a little more involved. But honestly, I think that is important on some level. And maybe it's a side feature to search I guess, or it's,

Leo Laporte (01:38:20):
Or here's a bunch of PDFs show

Richard Campbell (01:38:22):
Coming in a couple of weeks where we're talking to one of the scientists in this space and he said, it's a language computer

Paul Thurrott (01:38:29):
You plug in. [01:38:30] That's

Richard Campbell (01:38:30):
Interesting. You plug it in prompt, you get out a result.

Leo Laporte (01:38:33):
I like that take.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:35):
But as far as it impacting people, I honestly think, and there's no reason it can't happen in search, but Google, throughout Google Workspace, Gmail docs, et cetera, Microsoft throughout Microsoft 365 especially, I think these are the two great examples. It's going to impact basic productivity. It's the same example I always use. I don't know how to use PowerPoint, but I have to do this one presentation and it helps you get over that. And there were pros and cons [01:39:00] to this because on the one hand, it's allowed me to do my job better. On the other hand, you could make a really good argument across the board that means someone over there doesn't have a job because the guy who was good at PowerPoint maybe isn't needed anymore for this. And what's the net gain to a business? I think it is a net gain, right?

Leo Laporte (01:39:17):
Yeah. But again,

Paul Thurrott (01:39:18):
The only thing,

Leo Laporte (01:39:19):
Yeah, we can go on and we have a lot about that, but what is it going to be in search? Is it going to help search? Is it going to make search better? Is this

Paul Thurrott (01:39:27):
Is hope that they can beat?

Leo Laporte (01:39:29):
Finally?

Paul Thurrott (01:39:30):
[01:39:30] So a million years ago when the last time Microsoft made a big push with binging, they had various, I could come up with a couple of these if you want, but the best one I thought, and I actually thought this was a good idea, you you'll remember this came up with a term, the answer engine. And the idea was at the time and today that Google is just this endless sea of blue links. And of course they weren't saying this then, but now we know that those blue links could be manipulated that you're seeing a non-organic list of results that includes sponsor [01:40:00] results, et cetera, et cetera. But you go and you say, what day of the week was February 5th, 1972 or whatever? I said earlier what I was born on whatever date, what is my astrological sign? Or the idea is sometimes a search is you ask a question you want, there is an answer and you want that right there. That's it. That's all you want. That's search

Leo Laporte (01:40:23):
That,

Paul Thurrott (01:40:24):
Well, that's determinative search, but part of search is also what's the best vacuum cleaner. [01:40:30] And then there's a set of parameters depending on

Leo Laporte (01:40:33):
Your needs, the size your I would submit in that case, I don't want an AI answer.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:36):
I'm searching for a but an AI answer. I would like wire cutter that

Leo Laporte (01:40:40):
Will tell me what the best valuable

Paul Thurrott (01:40:42):
Consumer reports. Yes, you have to pay for wire cutter. And what if this thing pulled from good, we're in the world today, we don't know, but let's pretend that AI was being trained on good sources, like

Leo Laporte (01:40:55):
Known good sources. No, I know

Paul Thurrott (01:40:57):
Silverman.

Leo Laporte (01:40:58):
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:58):
Okay.

Richard Campbell (01:41:00):
[01:41:00] I thought you were going to say eight chan, but

Leo Laporte (01:41:01):
The point is

Paul Thurrott (01:41:04):
The answer is not a thing. It's a list of things. And then, or maybe you've

Leo Laporte (01:41:08):
Dive in further be part

Paul Thurrott (01:41:09):
Of this prompting is you going right?

Leo Laporte (01:41:11):
If you get that result, are you going to say, oh, great, thank you chat, g p T, thank you, binging chat. No, because we don't know. They may even have made up a vacuum cleaner. I want a definitive authoritative source to tell

Paul Thurrott (01:41:25):
Me what the best vacuum of you do, but not

Leo Laporte (01:41:27):
Some ai,

Paul Thurrott (01:41:29):
But maybe [01:41:30] the AI is leaning on authoritative. That would be the point. In other words, when you use AI in Photoshop today or going forward Firefly capabilities, you know that you're not stepping on anyone's ip, right? This that's great. That's the artist version of what you're asking for. My wife writes about health and fitness and nutrition and wellbeing and all that stuff, and she cannot use Wikipedia. She can't.

Leo Laporte (01:41:56):
You

Paul Thurrott (01:41:57):
Cannot trust that as a source. You

Leo Laporte (01:41:59):
Can't. It's same [01:42:00] problem with binging

Paul Thurrott (01:42:02):
And with everything.

Leo Laporte (01:42:04):
But

Paul Thurrott (01:42:04):
The goal here should be, but okay, but in a world in which search is what it is and the sources of information are what they are, most people are looking for, sometimes it's an answer, sometimes it's a whatever. Sometimes it's as simple as this is something you would be really good at of the top three vacuum cleaners which are available to purchase today in my area.

Leo Laporte (01:42:30):
[01:42:30] Now you're just

Paul Thurrott (01:42:31):
Ignoring though, need it right now.

Leo Laporte (01:42:32):
A fact of nature with these things, which is they hallucinate and there is no, oh, no, no, I'm not putting prospect for them. No longer hallucinate. That's not what they do. They're conversational computation engines. They don't understand what they're saying. So I think that you're saying, well, someday they'll be this good. The

Paul Thurrott (01:42:54):
Question was, but they're

Leo Laporte (01:42:55):
Not

Paul Thurrott (01:42:56):
Okay. But it doesn't matter because that's how search works today too. So [01:43:00] what's the difference?

Leo Laporte (01:43:01):
Most you points to a human

Paul Thurrott (01:43:04):
Well, but AI will point to sources too. That was one of the things I didn't

Leo Laporte (01:43:08):
Made up sources sometimes or made up stores or made up hours. Every single time you get that result, you're going to want to check before you get in the car. Okay?

Paul Thurrott (01:43:17):
Before the internet was a big thing. There was something called Yahoo where these two guys in the dorm room said, we are going to look at sites and determine which are the best, and we're going to present this as the curated list of what's good about the internet. And then Google [01:43:30] and Alves and whatever came around with these algorithmic search results. And it was probably someone back then saying the same thing. Well, you don't know where they're getting this information in. I mean, it's

Leo Laporte (01:43:38):
Not in that era, and we're not in an era, and I submit we never will be where you can trust the ai. Right now, search is not the same as ai. Sorry. AI is not going to second AI's not going to improve

Paul Thurrott (01:43:51):
Search my All you did was ask me what I thought it would work, search. I didn't invent it. I'm not

Leo Laporte (01:43:56):
Just saying it's not going to, I'm

Paul Thurrott (01:43:57):
Just saying it's

Leo Laporte (01:43:58):
You've yet to give

Paul Thurrott (01:43:59):
Me a reason

Leo Laporte (01:44:00):
[01:44:00] Why AI will improve search.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:02):
I think it will for most people, honestly. Because there will be a, because there are a range of things that people search for, and a lot of times what people end up doing, and I guarantee you this is for the non, there is a single answer searches. I bet 90 something percent of people who search for things that are a little more complex go in and out of sites. What they find oftentimes, say you have a brown mark in your skin or some health thing and you're scared about it, and you Google it, and then one site will be like, oh, you got nothing [01:44:30] to worry about. Next site's like, oh my god, you have cancer. You have to deal with that now. Now you're saying that AI will never be able to be trusted, but we live in a world of misinformation. I don't think people care. But

Leo Laporte (01:44:40):
You wouldn't right now, send that picture to an AI and say, oh, thank you ai.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:47):
I

Leo Laporte (01:44:47):
Guess I'm not dying of cancer. You would want to look at WebMD or even a physician.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:53):
Well, I'm a reasonably smart person. I would go to the

Leo Laporte (01:44:56):
Doctor's. What I'm saying, I don't think AI is going to

Paul Thurrott (01:44:57):
Improve

Leo Laporte (01:44:58):
Search anytime soon.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:00):
[01:45:00] Okay,

Leo Laporte (01:45:01):
That's my contention.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:02):
That's fine. But honestly, when you originally asked that, my original point was I think the bigger impact of AI is going to be in these productivity products and services.

Leo Laporte (01:45:10):
Oh, I agree. And I'm not disputing that. In fact, I did the Kate Bush search on chat GT four, and actually, actually it was kind of impressive. Love Angle is a song by Kate Bush, blah blah. Interpreting a song, especially one written by an artist, is poetic and intricate as Kate Bush can be subjective. What Listener takes away from a song might differ from the intended [01:45:30] meaning. However, love and anger touched on themes of communication, connection and the challenges of understanding one another's song lyrics speak to the complexity of, this was very good answer. I don't know if it's true. I don't know

Paul Thurrott (01:45:41):
The song, what a song means. So lemme tell. It does

Leo Laporte (01:45:42):
Say, by the way, for the complete understanding, it'd be best to listen to the song and read its lyrics.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:46):
Alright, so I'll read you part. I won't read this whole thing. It's three, four paragraphs. It says, the song is about self-analysis, expressing one's true feelings and turning to someone untrustworthy When something difficult is happening, the lyrics suggest completely [01:46:00] different lead to improvement. But this actually explains what the song's about and it's about who you can and cannot confide in when there's something you can't talk about and it quotes from the lyrics to give the example of where that would be. That's the song also seems to be about breaking through personal limitations and like a spiritual cleansing.

Leo Laporte (01:46:21):
Yeah. This says it suggests even in moments of anger or misunderstanding, there's underlying love and need for connection.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:26):
Mean knowing the song. I read that and I said, [01:46:30] yeah, I think that's it. I think that's pretty good. And they quote four places that there are four sites out. There isn't

Leo Laporte (01:46:36):
Being Chet the same as Chet, G p T. I mean this is Che, g p T for,

Paul Thurrott (01:46:39):
It's based on Che gt.

Leo Laporte (01:46:40):
So they came, but that's one, by the way,

Paul Thurrott (01:46:43):
That's one of the

Leo Laporte (01:46:44):
Mistake. No, but that's one of the

Paul Thurrott (01:46:45):
Issues with

Leo Laporte (01:46:46):
This L l M. It will come up with a different answer every time.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:52):
Well, Microsoft puts their secret sauce on top of that as they put it, which is a proprietary set of whatever learnings from Bings and blah, blah, blah, [01:47:00] blah, blah. So the things you'll get on binging Chat will be even more different. I do the five day itinerary Mexico City thing all the time. I do it on the same service over and over again. It's fascinat and you get different results each time.

Leo Laporte (01:47:13):
Yeah, the thing that's the, you don't want when you show a picture of a mole. No, I know, but that's, well, one day you're going to say it's cancer one minute, but you're

Paul Thurrott (01:47:22):
Looking, no, but that's, in that case, there is an answer, right? I mean, there is an answer, right? [01:47:30] I do think there is a net gain to search from ai. Does

Leo Laporte (01:47:35):
Microsoft obviously, I mean that's, and apparently so does Google, they're all terrified about this, right? Right. The

Paul Thurrott (01:47:43):
Question is how you monetize it. Right and

Leo Laporte (01:47:46):
Remains. These things are expensive. Remains be seen. We'll see.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:48):
Well, it remains to be seen that we're going to get ads. And I didn't put this in the notes, but someone has seen ads on the Windows desktop with copilot.

Leo Laporte (01:47:58):
Oh wow.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:00):
[01:48:00] Supposedly. I've not seen that. But anyway.

Leo Laporte (01:48:04):
Richard, are you still with

Richard Campbell (01:48:05):
Us or

Leo Laporte (01:48:06):
Have you given up entirely?

Richard Campbell (01:48:07):
Oh yeah, I'm absolutely,

Leo Laporte (01:48:08):
I would've given up on us. Frankly, it's four in the morning.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:12):
He's like, what am I doing?

Leo Laporte (01:48:13):
Which is Wonder questioning his life choices at this point. Richard Campbell is here.

Richard Campbell (01:48:19):
You're having a classic debate that's going on it

Leo Laporte (01:48:22):
And everybody's talking. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:48:24):
About this

Leo Laporte (01:48:24):
From Perth, Australia.

Richard Campbell (01:48:25):
Richard Campbell

Leo Laporte (01:48:26):
Run his radio.com. Paul ott ott.com. From

Richard Campbell (01:48:29):
Pennsylvania,

Leo Laporte (01:48:30):
[01:48:30] You're listening to Windows Weekly. I think we hit on big

Richard Campbell (01:48:34):
Topics.

Leo Laporte (01:48:35):
Sometimes we do. Well,

Richard Campbell (01:48:37):
I think that reboot served you well, Paul. Things have been stable.

Leo Laporte (01:48:40):
Yeah, it's all

Paul Thurrott (01:48:41):
Okay. I'm glad it was my computer. That's an easily solvable problem.

Richard Campbell (01:48:45):
Just throw

Leo Laporte (01:48:46):
It out the window.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:47):
Yeah, that's going to be the end game.

Leo Laporte (01:48:49):
Yeah,

Richard Campbell (01:48:50):
Don't

Paul Thurrott (01:48:50):
Worry about. That's

Richard Campbell (01:48:51):
A lot of throwing.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:52):
Yeah, so let's just wrap up this segment I guess, if that's okay. There's a new version of OneDrive coming [01:49:00] down the pike. Microsoft as always, does a horrific job. I've reached out to them so many times. I did it again with this. Please, please, please, please, please specify when what you're talking about is for businesses, for consumers or for both. And they do sometimes. So it's kind of hard to say what's going on here. But the big stuff is UI changes. Who Caress copilot coming to OneDrive as part of the Microsoft 365 thing, which will include Microsoft 365 chat, improved [01:49:30] photo search, which Google's had for a long time, but it's the type of thing. My son's name is Mark. You want to search for something like Mark riding a bike in Paris? I don't want just pictures of bikes. I want pictures of that kid on a bike in that place. So it's going to do that kind of stuff. Integration throat

Richard Campbell (01:49:49):
Mark's a doubly tough word because it could be a name and it could be a smear on a piece of paper. Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:56):
Okay. Right. That's true. I guess I could use his full name. I mean, Google [01:50:00] Photos and OneDrive both know Mark as Mark as a person

Richard Campbell (01:50:04):
You would hope, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:50:05):
Well, I can see that they do. I mean, it recognizes him in photos and things.

Richard Campbell (01:50:10):
I'm always fascinated by how trained we are to write search expressions now

Paul Thurrott (01:50:15):
That

Richard Campbell (01:50:18):
We presume we're going to speak the language of the tool rather than,

Paul Thurrott (01:50:21):
Which is the exact opposite of the way this thing should be

Richard Campbell (01:50:24):
Going work.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:25):
It should be bending to our needs. Not

Richard Campbell (01:50:27):
The one thing you don't see an L l M do [01:50:30] is ever ask for clarification,

Paul Thurrott (01:50:33):
Which by the way, I think is also part of where this goes. So the example I gave earlier, imagine you go to some future AI based search thing and you say, what's the best vacuum cleaner I can buy in this area at this time today because I need it today? And it might come back and say, and it

Richard Campbell (01:50:48):
Should clarify the area.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:50):
It should. Okay, well I hope it knows right, location services, et cetera. How far are you willing to go? Maybe it could follow up with specific needs. It should prompt you.

Richard Campbell (01:51:00):
[01:51:00] So what you're talking about essentially is a prompt pre-processor, something leveraging a large language model to improve,

Paul Thurrott (01:51:09):
To make an intelligent decision. Yeah, exactly. They added this to, well, at least Google did probably to, but the ability to say the code word to get it going. You ask it a question, but now it's still listening. So you can ask follow-up questions, right?

Richard Campbell (01:51:26):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:26):
And this is the next kind of natural stage in that equation [01:51:30] I would say, where it kind of comes back to you and says, we'll do this. Sometimes this is a stupid example, but sometimes I'll see a picture of my smart screen that I don't want to ever see again. It shouldn't be there. So I'll say, Hey, go, sorry everybody, every one of my devices just came up,

Richard Campbell (01:51:50):
Split up.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:51):
Yep, sorry about that. Delete this photo. And if there are two photos side by side, it will say, did you want me to delete the one on the left? The one on the right. And that's [01:52:00] just common sense, right? It's just common sense. But I feel like that kind of interaction, that's got to be the next step.

Richard Campbell (01:52:05):
Very uncommon. But yeah, honestly, the device asking for clarification would give you encouragement really to be a little more precise. When you say bicycle, you mean let's go get that.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:21):
When you say Mark, do you mean a mark on a piece of paper or do you mean mark your son of 25 years or whatever and then it will know going [01:52:30] forward. I probably mean the other one, right? The second one,

Richard Campbell (01:52:32):
Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:33):
So I see this coming also, I also, this voice interaction with which Amazon talked about at the devices event a week or two ago, and Google talked about a little bit today during a pixel event to me was always the next logical step, which is asking people to go back and type is a little goofy. Most people are on phones. This is something people are going to want to say, and I know you can click a little microphone thing, but [01:53:00] this is the world, I'm sure Gates and Jobs and other people envisioned 20, 30 years ago, well, 30, 40 years ago, where the computer would be sitting there aware of your presence all the time, that type of thing we're freaking out about now for privacy regions and would understand if I said something to my wife and that I was not talking to it, but if I had said something declarative in its direction, it would say, yeah, I can do that. Or No, I can't, whatever. Right? I mean,

Richard Campbell (01:53:26):
Sorry, Dave,

Paul Thurrott (01:53:28):
Science fiction.

(01:53:30):
[01:53:30] So there's that. And then this is just kind of a fun one in a way because there's this thing called I clicked on, I connected to the wrong article, so you can't look at it, but there's a thing called Microsoft Lists. And Microsoft Lists was a thing that debuted in Microsoft 365 commercial several years ago. Several, I mean probably been three or four, but as a web only service, it came to the mobile devices over time. It came to consumer on mobile a couple of [01:54:00] years ago, and now it's available to consumer on mobile as well. And so what the heck is this thing, right? It's a list. A lot of people, it's a list. There's lots of terms for this kind of thing, like a task manager or whatever. It's not a to-do list though specifically. It's not a to-do list. And so here's my definition.

(01:54:16):
I think you might enjoy this because I write books and because Microsoft uses this terminology when I write about things like Windows, calendar, outlook, there's this notion of an event. An event is a thing that you put into your calendar. It is a [01:54:30] specific day and time and length and all that kind of stuff. And if you add another person to that event, it becomes a meeting. And that's a meeting. A meeting is an event for which there are two or more people. So an app, like a list is a list, and if you can check those things off and mark them as done, it's a to-do list. So it's kind of like the same thing. So

Richard Campbell (01:54:51):
I don't know why list isn't in Loop. Why are these

Paul Thurrott (01:54:54):
Separate? I think actually I think lists and to-dos are in Loop. I think those things are also loop components. So they [01:55:00] could be anywhere, but I would just kind of argue in the old world of apps before we get into these kind of weird containerized things like Loop. And speaking of which, did you know that Google has something like Loop? It's got a stupid name and I forget it, but they've been working on it since the spring, so they're doing a loop like thing as well. But anyway, if you can have one app called a calendar that could do events and meetings, why can't we have one app that does list than to-dos? I don't know why we have separate apps, but we do.

Richard Campbell (01:55:27):
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:55:28):
I

Richard Campbell (01:55:28):
Don't know. There's way too many [01:55:30] icons in M 365. It's making me crazy.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:34):
I used

Richard Campbell (01:55:35):
Notion I though,

Paul Thurrott (01:55:37):
What's that?

Richard Campbell (01:55:38):
I have set up Loop now between the wife and I.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:42):
Oh, that's

Richard Campbell (01:55:42):
Interesting.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:43):
Did you do it through M S A or through a commercial account thing?

Richard Campbell (01:55:48):
I thought I was setting it up through my M 365 E fives and I think it ended up going up through M S A because it's now giving me prompts to make me think You're not associate my E five are you? [01:56:00] Which is going to cause problems later.

Paul Thurrott (01:56:02):
You know that you're working with people outside of your environment. Do you trust these people? Did you know they added themselves to you? Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:56:09):
Interesting. And real question is, can I tell from Loop whether I am associated with that tenant or

Paul Thurrott (01:56:18):
This is on your phone or

Richard Campbell (01:56:20):
Primarily on the pc, on the phone? It doesn't matter. You cannot tell. There's no way to know. And it might've even popped that prompt just because it wasn't sure yet. But yeah, [01:56:30] I

Paul Thurrott (01:56:30):
Have no idea. I'm going to be writing about this soon. But Loop is sort of like the new Outlook, which has been on a slow boil for I five years

Richard Campbell (01:56:40):
Luck than you OneNote because it's not email related per se.

Paul Thurrott (01:56:44):
No, I'm sorry. What I meant was it just seems like it's always in the back burner teams boom, boom, boom, boom, boom features, right? AI loop. It's like it's been very slow. I'm kind of curious what's going on with Loop because I want to get going on this thing. I am kind of interested [01:57:00] in it,

Richard Campbell (01:57:00):
But I get how you feel it's notion ish.

Paul Thurrott (01:57:04):
Well, the thing I like about Notion is it is one place to do all these things. So Notion is a place to take notes. Notion is a place I could use to write articles if I wanted to. I collaborate with my wife on lots of things, personal and work related as well. And you could do to-do lists. You could make a list. It's a list. It doesn't have to be. I mean, notion is a place where you could do all these things at once. And this is, by the way, we talked about great debates for our industry, a company that does everything versus a company that does one thing. Same thing with [01:57:30] apps, right? The notion is an Outlook style app. It's an app that does a lot of different things. Lists is a Unix style app that does one thing and there are pros and cons to both, right? And there's no answer to this debate. I don't mean to suggest there is, but we all have opinions on it. And I think lists and lists and to dos could be one thing, but draw the line wherever you want. That's where we're at. And then finally in the [01:58:00] ai, Microsoft 365 space Surface laptop, studio Two and Laptop Go three, which were announced at that Microsoft event are now generally available if you'd like to buy them and

Richard Campbell (01:58:12):
Trying to decide if this Studio two is my new device. It loaded. It's expensive.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:18):
Oh yeah. How much

Richard Campbell (01:58:20):
Grand?

Paul Thurrott (01:58:20):
Almost I bet

Richard Campbell (01:58:22):
Four. If you go for the high end,

Paul Thurrott (01:58:24):
Oh four. Geez. Okay.

Richard Campbell (01:58:25):
High end G P U

Paul Thurrott (01:58:27):
And then you start looking at it, you're like this [01:58:30] thing, I mean it's

Richard Campbell (01:58:30):
Good, but is it that good?

Paul Thurrott (01:58:34):
And do you need the convertible functionality?

Richard Campbell (01:58:38):
No, we need that

Paul Thurrott (01:58:39):
Not at all. Right, so like Surface Book, even though you could detach it and do pens and

Richard Campbell (01:58:43):
Stuff. Listen, there's one reason to detach a Surface book and it's Tono an iPad owner,

Paul Thurrott (01:58:48):
Right?

Richard Campbell (01:58:50):
Zero. What I can do, you're in a business class seat and they're wrestling to try and put their iPad on the back of the seat and you unclick your screen, you flip it around and you hang, use the keyboard to hang [01:59:00] it and it works perfectly. That's the only reason I've ever done it,

Paul Thurrott (01:59:03):
Right? Yep. I agree. Yeah, that's funny.

Richard Campbell (01:59:07):
But I would also argue, and the resolution on the screen's down

Paul Thurrott (01:59:11):
Down from the book,

Richard Campbell (01:59:13):
The book two is three K by two K and the studio is less.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:17):
Really?

Richard Campbell (01:59:18):
Yeah, yeah. No, these

Paul Thurrott (01:59:19):
Solution, this is a, okay, this is a 14 inch device, so Surface book was 13 and 15

Richard Campbell (01:59:25):
And

Paul Thurrott (01:59:25):
You had a

Richard Campbell (01:59:26):
I had 15.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:27):
You have a 15. Okay,

Richard Campbell (01:59:28):
So I mean the moment I'm [01:59:30] staring at Dell X P Ss 15 with the four K display and all the toys for a thousand dollars left,

Paul Thurrott (01:59:38):
It doesn't have, and I think there are potential reliability issues with all of those things. You're never going to use the screen that flips around and the not

Leo Laporte (01:59:48):
Use it.

Richard Campbell (01:59:49):
Yeah. It's just things to break, which by the way, this screen removing feature on the surface book too, which is now old occasionally just is unhappy

Paul Thurrott (01:59:59):
And

Richard Campbell (01:59:59):
Won't play [02:00:00] anymore.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:01):
Yep. You do the detach reattach thing or you try to detach it and it won't,

Richard Campbell (02:00:06):
Or it's just spitting errors at me where I haven't done anything. It's like, listen, you're not being asked to do anything, please go away. I watched the event and I looked at the machine and I looked at the specs and I was really wanting to just pull the trigger new machine I'm in on the

Paul Thurrott (02:00:25):
Beginning. It should have been a no-brainer.

Richard Campbell (02:00:27):
Should, and it wasn't. It

Paul Thurrott (02:00:28):
Just wasn't. That's too bad

Leo Laporte (02:00:29):
Because the price. [02:00:30] Because of why?

Richard Campbell (02:00:32):
Because, yeah, because the feature, she wasn't good enough.

Leo Laporte (02:00:36):
It's not comparable.

Richard Campbell (02:00:38):
Then the price was also high. I don't think the driver, most of the time

Paul Thurrott (02:00:41):
It's a 13th gen, which is just on the way out. It's the first gen of, well, I guess yes, the first gen of an Intel M P U, which whatever, you can't get around that. I guess

Richard Campbell (02:00:52):
Once upon a time you wanted the flagship machine, but this is not a flagship machine. This looks like an end of a line machine.

Leo Laporte (02:00:58):
Oh, that's not good if it's just [02:01:00] coming out

Richard Campbell (02:01:00):
Now.

Leo Laporte (02:01:01):
Yeah,

Richard Campbell (02:01:01):
It seems like the last of the 13th rather than the first of the 14th.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:04):
Yes. No, I agree. Yes, I agree with that. Yep. Yep. Interesting. Okay. I was hoping you'd have a clear choice. They announced

Richard Campbell (02:01:13):
It's clear.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:14):
I was thinking, yeah, isn't quite, this isn't the no-brainer. It needs to be,

Richard Campbell (02:01:18):
It's not shiny, it's just not beautifully. You must own this.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:23):
It's

Richard Campbell (02:01:23):
Shiny. I still swear that M two Air is the shiniest laptop on the planet right now.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:29):
It

Richard Campbell (02:01:30):
[02:01:30] Should,

Paul Thurrott (02:01:30):
Yeah, but you know what? So pretty, if you are going to go in that direction, I would strongly recommend looking at a 14 inch MacBook Pro.

Richard Campbell (02:01:37):
I don't disagree,

Paul Thurrott (02:01:38):
But

Richard Campbell (02:01:39):
I'm not going in that direction. It's fun to admire from a bar.

Leo Laporte (02:01:43):
He's not tempted, so don't bother.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:45):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:01:46):
I do think the new MacBook Pros may come out this month. There's some wrong.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:50):
Oh, okay.

Richard Campbell (02:01:50):
And believe me, there are days where it's like this Zi, I'm going MacBook. I want a vision pro and a knife, and the latest, I'm going all the way.

Leo Laporte (02:01:58):
Come over to the dark side, Richard. Yes. [02:02:00] It's okay

Richard Campbell (02:02:01):
If I'm going in that walled garden, I'm going way in that cold.

Leo Laporte (02:02:04):
I'm go that wall. The She will welcome you. We'll welcome

Richard Campbell (02:02:06):
You

Paul Thurrott (02:02:07):
Right?

Leo Laporte (02:02:08):
You're love Richard. We're all your friends. You are love. Oh boy.

Richard Campbell (02:02:14):
I'm happy hating out here.

Leo Laporte (02:02:17):
I'm bathing in the warm waters of

Paul Thurrott (02:02:20):
The Apple ecosystem

Leo Laporte (02:02:21):
And it's nice, Richard, it's,

Paul Thurrott (02:02:24):
Would you call it the Appalachian Lake

Leo Laporte (02:02:27):
Warmth? I don't even think anymore. [02:02:30] I just,

Paul Thurrott (02:02:31):
Yeah, that would be nice. Honestly, not having half a brand in your head and being worried about the issues that Richard is worried about would actually

Leo Laporte (02:02:39):
Be very stupid. Yeah. You guys stress out so much

Paul Thurrott (02:02:40):
Over all this stuff.

Leo Laporte (02:02:43):
I don't have to worry about Intel. I'm not Intel.

Richard Campbell (02:02:45):
Hey, I don't even own an exchange server anymore. I am way more loyal.

Leo Laporte (02:02:49):
Good, man. You're moving in the right direction.

Richard Campbell (02:02:52):
Yeah. I e wasted the last of the domain controllers, like they're gone. They don't live in my life anymore. I live in Sonology [02:03:00] and E 360. I

Leo Laporte (02:03:02):
Am on the other hand, getting the third update to iOS 17 today. I know on my phone because it overheated and they don't, well, we

Paul Thurrott (02:03:09):
Can fix that

Leo Laporte (02:03:10):
And blah, blah, blah.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:11):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (02:03:12):
So,

Richard Campbell (02:03:12):
Oh, you were holding it wrong.

Leo Laporte (02:03:15):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:15):
Meaning you were holding it in your hand. Well turned on,

Leo Laporte (02:03:17):
But at least they updated. I mean, it's not like they're just sitting there.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:20):
They did update it. And by the way, unlike this Google update today, which I have not gotten on three phones, that Apple thing came right through. There's something to be said about we announced [02:03:30] an update is available.

Leo Laporte (02:03:32):
It's an

Paul Thurrott (02:03:32):
Interesting concept. I forgot by the way, I skipped over being image creator for all whatever you perceive of my attitude about Bing, I think it's important that everyone take a look at this. The Dolly three upgrade for binging image creators is pretty impressive. Bing slash bing.com/create, I think is the ui, but you'll see a link to it and it went from cartoon to Pixar near photographic quality graphics. It's [02:04:00] pretty good. It's

Leo Laporte (02:04:01):
Actually, that's one area that's

Richard Campbell (02:04:02):
The dolly name that makes you jump, not the bing name.

Leo Laporte (02:04:05):
That's one area. There are a few, but that's one area where AI seems to have found a nice niche to create graphics. And

Paul Thurrott (02:04:13):
It's, by the way, related to that productivity thing. We're not all artists or even those who are, I don't have all day. I just want a picture of a woman in a bikini holding a flag on the moon. Can I just have that? Why do I need, do need to make it? I'm not doing a here. Why

Richard Campbell (02:04:27):
Am in paint? What's happening?

Paul Thurrott (02:04:30):
[02:04:30] Right? And by the way, I said woman in a bikini, I asked it for a hero standing on the surface of the moon holding a Microsoft flag, and it came out with an astronaut and a woman in a bikini. And I was like, it's still doing this, huh? It's still doing this. Thought

Leo Laporte (02:04:44):
That was well, but maybe it knew better than you what to do. That's true. Maybe that is what it's AI you called for. I know. I've got an astronaut, A in a bi bikini. Finally.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:55):
Those are the heroes of my life. Astronaut, not a woman in a bikini driving a train or [02:05:00] something. Anyway,

Leo Laporte (02:05:01):
I have to say, the image you did create for your article looks just like our little doggy here, Birch. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (02:05:07):
I didn't create that. That was a Microsoft

Leo Laporte (02:05:08):
Exam. Oh, it's a nice, it's just like Li

Paul Thurrott (02:05:12):
I think it's a very nice picture.

Leo Laporte (02:05:13):
Very nice picture.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:15):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (02:05:16):
It's just like every other picture. I never can get the pictures to look as good as the ones the company says you're going to get. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:23):
The other thing is, so being a image creator, at least to my knowledge at least I could find when you go to Dali directly [02:05:30] OpenAI, you can, I forget what they call it, but you can kind of expand the image out in different directions. It's kind of like an edit function and you know what I mean? Make

Leo Laporte (02:05:40):
It blind screen. Yeah, they call it out painting. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:43):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:05:43):
So I don't

Paul Thurrott (02:05:44):
Believe that bring image credit does that. So it creates these square images, and I cropped this one, but the images I created are all cropped and, sorry, not cropped all

Leo Laporte (02:05:55):
Square.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:55):
And I didn't see a way to, because

Leo Laporte (02:05:58):
I

Paul Thurrott (02:05:58):
Created some image that I thought would be kind [02:06:00] of cool for an article. That's why I was doing this, but I couldn't get them to be wide screen. So

Leo Laporte (02:06:06):
You can't just say, try saying, I know you can't read Mid Journey. You can say maybe

Paul Thurrott (02:06:10):
You can

Leo Laporte (02:06:11):
16 colon nine and

Paul Thurrott (02:06:12):
I'll give you 16.

Leo Laporte (02:06:13):
So try it in the prompt. I think in the prompt you can.

Paul Thurrott (02:06:15):
Yeah, there you go. Can

Leo Laporte (02:06:16):
Tell it what you want.

Richard Campbell (02:06:19):
Prompt pre-processor is my new idea. I'm excited about it.

Leo Laporte (02:06:22):
Prompt Prepro, prompt. Prompt. Let the prompt write the prompt for you to use the prompt.

Paul Thurrott (02:06:29):
Yeah. [02:06:30] Look at these images are

Richard Campbell (02:06:31):
Also when to request an image thing. Did you want it in a 16 by nine?

Paul Thurrott (02:06:36):
Yeah. I don't understand why there aren't options like that. It seems

Leo Laporte (02:06:39):
To me there might be. I mean, look and see. I'm not a big image.

Paul Thurrott (02:06:42):
I didn't find them. I'm not

Leo Laporte (02:06:44):
Necessarily

Paul Thurrott (02:06:45):
The most sophisticated guy in the world, but I didn't see it.

Leo Laporte (02:06:49):
Stable. Diffusion does it Mid journey.

Paul Thurrott (02:06:52):
Does it? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:06:53):
I'd be surprised if, but come on,

Paul Thurrott (02:06:55):
You tie this to a brand as well. Loved and known as Bing. I mean

Leo Laporte (02:06:59):
It's just [02:07:00] a, it's square man.

Richard Campbell (02:07:01):
Lifts it.

Leo Laporte (02:07:02):
Square man. What's Square? Nice. Maybe they know you're going to put it on Instagram.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:10):
Yes. In 2007.

Leo Laporte (02:07:12):
Yeah, why don't they? So there's no help.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:17):
Here's

Leo Laporte (02:07:18):
Some suggestions or I don't know. I'm just curious.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:22):
I'm unlike a lot of people. I try something, it doesn't work and I give up.

Leo Laporte (02:07:27):
And you're using it in binging, not standalone.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:30):
[02:07:30] I did do it in binging.

Leo Laporte (02:07:31):
Yeah. Okay. All right. So let's see. What does that mean? That means it is time beautiful for the fine. You're prompting it wrong. That's

Paul Thurrott (02:07:46):
Going to be a title someday for you somewhere in some show. That's a perfect,

Leo Laporte (02:07:49):
You can use it in this one. That's a good show title. I like it. Good

Paul Thurrott (02:07:51):
One.

Leo Laporte (02:07:52):
You're prompting it wrong. What about Xbox? Lemme prompt you, right? Yeah, only a couple

Paul Thurrott (02:07:57):
Things here. We're all in this [02:08:00] holding. It's October, by the way, and that means the CMA iss going to come back with me. Culpa. We'll see. But in the meantime, it is a new month, so we've got a small amount of new games coming to Game Pass. The big one is there's a new Forza Motorsport coming, which is interesting on a number of levels. It's one of the more popular Microsoft slash Xbox kind of franchise games. It's only going to be available on the latest generation

Leo Laporte (02:08:25):
Consoles

Paul Thurrott (02:08:29):
Through Game Pass. Sorry, through [02:08:30] Game Pass. So it won't be on Xbox One apparently. So

Richard Campbell (02:08:33):
X and X,

Paul Thurrott (02:08:34):
Yeah, so that's Kain. And then we just have some sort of industry news. So Sony, PlayStation, C E O, Jim Ryan, the Dark Prince of the Microsoft acquisition of Activision Blizzard is retiring. I assume he was beaten down by the terribleness. That was that event. But honestly, this guy might be one of the biggest success stories in the history of industry, at least from a c e O perspective. I mean, PlayStation [02:09:00] under his reign, I guess has thrived and has beaten Microsoft horribly in the last two generations. Current and previous. I mean, incredible. PlayStation five 40 million units in what, three years in a time in which two thirds of that time there were serious supply component supply problems, pandemic.

Richard Campbell (02:09:26):
Although I would argue that's an advantage for Sony because they are fairly

Leo Laporte (02:09:29):
Burden

Paul Thurrott (02:09:30):
[02:09:30] That could be. Well, it certainly was. They worked out, so they seem to suffer less from it and then they came out much earlier. Microsoft I don't think has still even admitted this. I don't think anyone would notice, but Sony, I think it was last year, said, we're over it. We're done. This holiday day is going to be great and next year, year's going to be fantastic.

Richard Campbell (02:09:46):
As many as you want. We got him.

Leo Laporte (02:09:48):
Yep,

Paul Thurrott (02:09:49):
40 million.

Leo Laporte (02:09:50):
It's

Richard Campbell (02:09:50):
Really a question of how many people want, I mean, he's only been c e O for five years. It's not like he's been at Sony a long time.

Paul Thurrott (02:09:58):
That's right. That's true.

Leo Laporte (02:09:59):
He's going [02:10:00] to spend,

Richard Campbell (02:10:00):
It's interesting to think why leave now, but

Leo Laporte (02:10:02):
To spend more time on his money. I think that's fair. He can't

Paul Thurrott (02:10:06):
Face a world in which Call of Duty goes to Xbox Game Pass.

Leo Laporte (02:10:09):
He just doesn't want to be part of that. I just can't take it. Can't take it,

Paul Thurrott (02:10:12):
Can't do it.

Leo Laporte (02:10:13):
Who

Richard Campbell (02:10:13):
Knows how much flack he's taken from the board, what he promised around those deals. Maybe it's just to walk away now

Leo Laporte (02:10:21):
I'm meant to asking in the Chromebook section with Google promoting Chromebook gaming Chromebooks. Obviously you're not playing the game locally, you're playing on a streaming [02:10:30] service. Google killed Stadia. This has got to be a benefit for Xbox Game Pass, right? I mean I guess it could be Nvidia now. Yeah, although gaming

Paul Thurrott (02:10:39):
Class Chromebooks often do have some kind of G P U, so I wonder if there isn't. Oh, they're

Leo Laporte (02:10:43):
Local, you think?

Paul Thurrott (02:10:45):
Well, no, I'm not saying they're local, I think No, I think they're too, but I think But you need to have some kind of local, it can't be like a bare bones device to have a really good experience,

Leo Laporte (02:10:57):
But they're pushing this as a gaming machine, which means [02:11:00] since they killed Stadia, they're effectively pushing Microsoft

Paul Thurrott (02:11:05):
Or GForce now

Leo Laporte (02:11:07):
Or some other, they don't have

Paul Thurrott (02:11:09):
A Minecraft came to Chromebooks this year.

Leo Laporte (02:11:12):
Yeah, it's on Java, of course.

Paul Thurrott (02:11:14):
Yeah. Well, but that's,

Leo Laporte (02:11:17):
You're not going to see Call of Duty on a Chromebook.

Richard Campbell (02:11:20):
Well, it's always Farm Bill.

Leo Laporte (02:11:22):
I don't, honestly, when they're saying gaming Chromebook, I don't think they're saying, I would like to see,

Paul Thurrott (02:11:29):
See [02:11:30] a Call of Duty Minecraft crossover where it's Call of Duty, but with Minecraft graphics, they could redo all the maps and those block graphics would be fun and shoot

Leo Laporte (02:11:37):
Little creeps and mops,

Paul Thurrott (02:11:38):
Shoot little blocks out of your gun and blow them up as the

Leo Laporte (02:11:41):
Big, big

Paul Thurrott (02:11:41):
Apart

Leo Laporte (02:11:42):
And

Paul Thurrott (02:11:43):
Block graffiti confetti.

Leo Laporte (02:11:46):
Maybe that's the plan.

Paul Thurrott (02:11:48):
Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I always thought the notion of a gaming Chromebook was like an oxymoron.

Leo Laporte (02:11:56):
I just think this is a perfect example of how disjointed Google's strategies [02:12:00] are. They kill Stadia and within a few months announced gaming Chromebooks.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:07):
And also no one remembers or even knows about this, but Google play games on Windows, which takes Android games down to Windows using an emulator. So those are locally installed. Listen, it's possible. If you get into the premium PC space with a Chromebook, none of the,

Leo Laporte (02:12:25):
They call them cloud gaming machines, so it is definitely streaming,

Paul Thurrott (02:12:30):
[02:12:30] But you could put a G P U in a Chromebook and it is Linux and maybe, right? I mean now that you have a minimum of 128 gigabytes.

Leo Laporte (02:12:40):
Oh, now, now, yeah. Oh, now there's Microsoft and Amazon's Luna, so they don't Well,

Paul Thurrott (02:12:49):
You got to give them a note. It's

Leo Laporte (02:12:51):
Hysterical. I mean, they must've planned this when Stadia was a product and they thought, oh, this will be great for Stadia

Paul Thurrott (02:12:57):
Because Stadia and C Chromebook had that kind of natural [02:13:00] symbiosis.

Leo Laporte (02:13:02):
That's really interesting.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:04):
Somebody tells me there is a game called Battle Bit, which is what I just described, sort of.

Richard Campbell (02:13:09):
I'll have to look that up. That Cyberpunks in the list, that's a pretty processor intensive

Leo Laporte (02:13:13):
Game. But you're not playing these native, these are all streaming. Absolutely.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:16):
They're

Richard Campbell (02:13:16):
On streaming cheese, but what

Leo Laporte (02:13:18):
They have is a high res, high refresh rate display. They have better, one of the big problems Chromebook port,

Paul Thurrott (02:13:24):
Because you're going to need ethernet

Leo Laporte (02:13:25):
Because that's going to be the big thing. One of the big problems with Chromebook also is Bad Track Pads. I'm sure [02:13:30] they've upgraded. It does say best in class graphics.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:33):
The HP that I have for March is incredible. It is a premium Windows PC running. It's a gorgeous, beautiful machine, great keyboard, great track pad four,

Leo Laporte (02:13:43):
Thunderbolt four ports. Yeah, these have i threes and I fives.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:48):
Yep.

Richard Campbell (02:13:49):
Four.

Leo Laporte (02:13:51):
Yeah. Yeah. It's weird.

Paul Thurrott (02:13:53):
I dunno. That's not for me. And I say that having tried cloud gaming, so it's like I'm going to pay [02:14:00] money for a device that can only do that. It doesn't sound like,

Leo Laporte (02:14:02):
No, it doesn't make sense.

Paul Thurrott (02:14:04):
Maybe someday, but that that's always been the Chromebook story. Maybe someday the Chromebook biography,

Leo Laporte (02:14:10):
An ethernet connection is required for best results. So these must have ethernet. It says in their FA

Paul Thurrott (02:14:15):
Q. Well, probably U S B C, right? Right. They can,

Leo Laporte (02:14:17):
Oh yeah, you could do that. Let me look at the one of these, the A Chromebook

Richard Campbell (02:14:23):
Will save us all.

Leo Laporte (02:14:24):
Sure, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:14:26):
Once we get to Ussb five, everything's going to be fine. Fine. [02:14:30] I'm sorry. And then I just finally, epic is going to be laying off people.

Leo Laporte (02:14:37):
I like the way that we told you Apple, that you would kill us and now you have, how can this company that made more money than God on Fortnite

Paul Thurrott (02:14:47):
Be

Leo Laporte (02:14:48):
Laying people off now?

Paul Thurrott (02:14:49):
Yeah, well, because everyone

Richard Campbell (02:14:51):
Else,

Paul Thurrott (02:14:52):
Because Big Tech during the pandemic hired too much, and this is Universal. I don't know that there's an example [02:15:00] of a big tech company that didn't fall for this, which makes me really sad.

Leo Laporte (02:15:02):
I complained about this at the time.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:05):
Epic, to be fair, to Epic. I mean, compared to Apple, they're smaller than the corner store down the street, right? I mean, they're a big company compared to my company, but they're tiny. I mean compared to Apple, someone on Twitter or Macedon kind of said something like, well, it looks like they shouldn't have taken on Apple. That was stupid. It's like, guys, come on. At least give 'em credit for doing disagree, agree, whatever. But taking on big tech, at least getting [02:15:30] this thing argued in court, whatever. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:15:32):
They're still taking on Apple. They went to the

Paul Thurrott (02:15:33):
Supreme Court, they've appealed it

Leo Laporte (02:15:34):
To the Supreme Court, as has Apple. Ironically, that's good

Paul Thurrott (02:15:39):
Because those guys are really into Fortnite and I think their take on

Leo Laporte (02:15:41):
This will be interesting. I can't wait to hear what an and Scalia thinks of, oh, he's gone, but still grab Dad.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:48):
They might as well be there. Who cares?

Leo Laporte (02:15:50):
How can you tell the difference? It's the difference.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:53):
Bunch of old people in robes. It's like,

Richard Campbell (02:15:57):
I'm pretty sure Kavanaugh plays Fortnite.

Leo Laporte (02:15:59):
Yeah, he

Paul Thurrott (02:16:00):
[02:16:00] Looks like a, he has a

Leo Laporte (02:16:01):
Nice beer. It goes home. Has

Paul Thurrott (02:16:02):
A beer. He looks like a tea bagger. Am I Rice? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:16:06):
Classic Cavanaugh. Classic Cavanaugh. Oh, bread. He's at it again. Alright, is that it for the egg? Do you have anything more for Xbox? Anything more? No, that's it. This

Paul Thurrott (02:16:18):
Whole thing. I'm hoping to have good news in the next week or two. Big, big news. You know what

Leo Laporte (02:16:23):
I mean?

Paul Thurrott (02:16:23):
Big news. It's a big news.

Leo Laporte (02:16:25):
Brisky

Paul Thurrott (02:16:26):
The biggest,

Leo Laporte (02:16:26):
But first I want to tell everybody [02:16:30] why it's so important they join Club Twit. We are having a big event tomorrow. I know a lot of you're Sci-Fi fans. You are definitely going to want to join the club for this one. John Scalzi in conversation with Aunt Pruitt. Big event tomorrow. So here's the idea with the club. Originally we thought if you give us seven bucks, that's all it is, seven bucks a month, two grande lattes a month, [02:17:00] we will give you ad free versions of the shows because you're kind of taking over that responsibility. And now that ads sales are really dwindling on podcasts in general. It's not just us. N p r laid off a bunch of people, it's just terrible across the board. The club's more and more important to us, but then we thought, that's a lot of money. Maybe we can make it even more valuable.

(02:17:21):
So we created the Club Twit Discord, which is a wonderful place to hang to chat to be with the other Club TWIT members and Geek out. And then once we had the [02:17:30] Discord, we thought, well, let's do some events in the Discord. So tomorrow 9:00 AM Pacific John Scalzi. That kind of ties into the fact that Stacey's book club's going to feature one of Zis novels, the Kaiju Preservation Society that's coming up next month. We've got Home theater geeks, the Untitled Linux show AI inside our new AI show with Jason and Jeff. They're prototyping it in the club. That's another thing the club can let us do is launch new stuff [02:18:00] next month. I'm sorry, this month coming up in a couple of weeks, we're going to do an escape room. All the twit hosts will gather together and we will try to do an escape room.

(02:18:10):
You can watch and laugh and mock Renee Richie's coming up, old Farts Chat with Jeff Jarvis, doc sles and me. Those are some of the events. Then there's also the shows we do, like Paul's show, hands-on Windows. It's club only Hands-on McIntosh with Micah Sargent. If you want to go to the Dark Side Club [02:18:30] only, Scott Wilkinson's, home Theater Geeks, the Untitled Linux show, the Unentitled AI show. These are all unique club shows because there's no advertisers for 'em. The club pays for 'em. So you get first access. There's also a trip plus feed with stuff that happens before and after shows and just extra stuff that didn't fit in the show, the national alarm going off, things like that. Now that I think is now we're talking seven bucks. You're getting a lot for your money if [02:19:00] you're not a member. And I know we have 8,000 members now, but I would love to see it get up to, that's just a little more than 1% of our audience.

(02:19:09):
Let's get 2, 3, 4, 5% of our audience. That's frankly what it's going to take to keep twit going at the speed that we're going. Otherwise we're going to have to slow down. I'm sorry to say. So please help us out. I don't want to beg, but please twit tv slash club twit. We'd love to have you as a member and I think you will love [02:19:30] the club you're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Throt on your left. He's in the US in Australia, Richard Campbell, and it's time for Paul's tip of the week, which he has tried all show not to give away all show.

Paul Thurrott (02:19:47):
I screwed it up. Who cares? It's over in keeping with what we were talking about earlier. It's weird how all these things have kind of, I don't know, segued into each other. This year [02:20:00] has just been kind of horrible on a number of levels and in our industry with regards to subscriptions, products, services, how these things are serving their masters, that's the certification stuff. How things are more expensive and it's just causing a lot of rethinking. I see it every day on my site. People are killing services, doing the thing I talked about, but I've never done, which is like, I'm going to do Netflix this month and Hulu next month and I'm not paying for all this stuff. And [02:20:30] I actually brought this up with my wife for a couple of reasons, but one of her ideas was that pushback might institute change, which is when I told her the thing I was talking to Richard about earlier, which is actually Microsoft's pretty good about that.

(02:20:44):
So maybe some kind of forum for complaining or whatever, some publicizing of the problem. Something, something, something. And I'm starting to think of this as the biggest issue of our day, which is sort of what I alluded to earlier. And I know a lot of [02:21:00] people, if you look at what I do for a living, probably think of me as the Microsoft guy, windows guy, whatever. But honestly, I'm really more about productivity or efficiency or whatever I discuss and think about and write about it, work on things like workflow and which products and services work the best for what it is I'm trying to do. And I'm always experimenting with different things and whatever, but I'm starting to wonder if this isn't in some ways more important than that. The time to take a stand against these things that are getting worse is not [02:21:30] now. And I don't know what the tip is exactly other than to join me as we kind of take on these topics. I don't know

Leo Laporte (02:21:39):
How they'll, so you're saying think more about productivity, about what you do with the computer than the technology, not just computers

Paul Thurrott (02:21:45):
Is everything honestly. It's about ecosystems. And so for example, you can and I think have made a good case for the numbing and embrace of the Apple ecosystem and there are great reasons for that,

Leo Laporte (02:21:56):
Right?

Paul Thurrott (02:21:57):
No, there really are. I was being

Leo Laporte (02:21:58):
Facetious, but okay. No,

Paul Thurrott (02:21:59):
I know. [02:22:00] But one does and there are good reasons for it. There are reasons not to do that. There is by the way, a grass is always greener effect. Richard was half jokingly saying he wakes up one day with a Mac and an iPad Pro and a whatever, and what if he did, what he would discover is some things are better, some things are the same and some things are worse. But the point is to kind of evaluate this stuff. And the weird thing is I kind of looked at my site, I know I write about this from time to time. It's a little while, but I think the whole ecosystem debate, that conversation we had [02:22:30] earlier about big company does a bunch of things versus small company that does one thing is all kind of plays into this. What's important, I don't think going back to vinyl is the answer. I think that's a little bit of a hipster affectation, but

Richard Campbell (02:22:42):
There are hundreds of thousands of hip that you disagree with you,

Paul Thurrott (02:22:45):
But there are hundreds of millions and billions of people who don't. So you're right. And then Richard and Leo and I all have naes. This is kind of an old white guy thing to do maybe, but

Leo Laporte (02:22:56):
Maybe we're No, it's not just white people that use naes. Okay,

Paul Thurrott (02:23:00):
[02:23:00] I know I

Leo Laporte (02:23:00):
Can only

Paul Thurrott (02:23:01):
Speak to my own

Leo Laporte (02:23:02):
Little

Paul Thurrott (02:23:02):
Subset of as

Leo Laporte (02:23:03):
An old white guy, I know what you're saying.

Paul Thurrott (02:23:05):
As an old white guy who is very confident in everything he says and knows nothing about anything, I will tell you that

Leo Laporte (02:23:10):
No,

Richard Campbell (02:23:12):
I've got an NA story for you. Exactly right. We all have ologies and QAPs and all those variations, but there is a teacher in our circle of friends who is not a technical person. She's a proper teacher and occasionally asks us for technical help. And she had run out to buy a U S B drive

Paul Thurrott (02:23:30):
[02:23:30] To

Richard Campbell (02:23:30):
Do some backups on some things and was talking through all the things she needed to do. And I'm like,

Leo Laporte (02:23:35):
Why are you getting a drive? You need

Paul Thurrott (02:23:36):
A mess. And you know how scary that is to people. It's scary

Richard Campbell (02:23:39):
Normal, and it's not like you're not technically competent. I think as soon as you saw the console of this, you'd know what to

Paul Thurrott (02:23:47):
Do.

Leo Laporte (02:23:48):
I am so torn, and I know you guys will understand that. I don't know if the audience will, but I am so torn. I am

Paul Thurrott (02:23:54):
Almost at

Leo Laporte (02:23:55):
The verge of saying I give up.

Paul Thurrott (02:23:57):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:23:58):
So

Paul Thurrott (02:23:59):
This [02:24:00] was the thing I wanted to say earlier that I held back on. If you watch any action movie, now granted, most action movies like John Wick, whatever it is, the lead character is almost always a man. But the interesting thing is this is true when there's a woman as the main character too. Salts universally. Yes, almost a hundred percent universally. These people do not use technology. No. They drive a seventies muscle powered

Leo Laporte (02:24:22):
Operator. First thing they do, they take your cell phone and they break in half, take out the battery, throw it out the window. They know technology is

Paul Thurrott (02:24:28):
The enemy. I'm not just, they're onto something. [02:24:30] But there is an interesting thing, and I've said this to my wife,

Leo Laporte (02:24:33):
The bad guys at headquarters are using all this technology and the individual with his bare fists and brains.

Paul Thurrott (02:24:43):
I don't mean all movies. We all know a MacBook saved our power book. It saved the world and Independence Day. What I'm talking about that long

Leo Laporte (02:24:51):
Time ago,

Paul Thurrott (02:24:51):
I know I'm talking about action movies, almost the near universal constant is that this guy usually, [02:25:00] but a woman also is anti-technology and it is because of a life of experience. Part of their

Leo Laporte (02:25:09):
Whole thing. They thing they also like the individual like John Henry beating the steam engine. I mean, we like that. So

Paul Thurrott (02:25:20):
To me, that's interesting. I don't mean to say it means anything, but I think if you think about it, think through all your little movie collection you have when you're na you nerd, you probably know what I'm talking about, right? [02:25:30] So anyway, I think there are multiple discussions to be had on multiple fronts. You could talk about anything, storage, storage from an external hard drive, an external hard drive. If they have such things that has two drives inside and there's a redundancy to it, a nas whatever, two nass in two different locations that you're syncing over the whatever. There's a whole spectrum of things just on that one topic. The way that we consume content, whether [02:26:00] it's reading or movies and TV shows or music or podcasts or audiobooks. I think we've pushed so far in this one direction. I think there's going to be a pushback and I think we need to think about this and I think it's not, there's no answer. There's different answers for different people and we'll all come to different conclusions, but I think we need to, this is a time to rethink ecosystems is I guess maybe the word I'll use, I'm not sure the right word for this. Ecosystems [02:26:30] where you decide where you plant your flag, whether it's productivity or entertainment or whatever. It is shocking and disappointing to look at your however you pay for things, your credit card statement, whatever, and realize how many things you're paying for every month maybe or

(02:26:48):
That are redundant in any cases. Even more than that, it was supposed to get easier. Technology was supposed to get out of the way. And it has done the opposite actually. Here's one Leo that you'll find [02:27:00] interesting and relevant to you. Look, I create content. We all create content. This is one thing. So not surprisingly, I see the value in content and I see the value in paying for good content. I try to support content sources that I think are high quality.

(02:27:18):
There's a podcast that I listen to that I really like, and for the most part, and the problem is there's not enough of it and I'm running out of stuff to listen to and I wish there was a thing. And they have a Paton, and so [02:27:30] they have little excerpts from these Patreon episodes. So I was at the gym and between sets I literally went to because I ran out of stuff and listened to. I was like, all how does this work? And the thing I wanted to figure out was if I pay them, can I use the app I use to listen to that content? I think it's four bucks a month or something for this particular thing, and I couldn't figure it out. I think I have to go to the Patreon website frankly, however, and this is the partly, I would be very familiar with Apple, maybe not a loan, but somewhat unique among [02:28:00] podcast platform providers has subscriptions in their podcast app that you can do on a per subscription basis. So the podcast, if I pay them directly, it's four bucks a month. If I pay through Apple, it's only through the Apple podcast app, which I don't want to use. I prefer cross platform. And it's more expensive, right? Because

Paul Thurrott (02:28:20):
Apple, because account that

Richard Campbell (02:28:22):
They're 30%,

Paul Thurrott (02:28:23):
So it's five bucks, right? That's the cost. And that is a great example [02:28:30] of something that should just be easier. It shouldn't matter what app I use. I should be able to sign into the account through the app and get that premium content through any podcast app. And I don't think I can. I could be wrong, but I don't think I can.

Leo Laporte (02:28:44):
I've always said the podcasts are not going to take off till it's as easy to listen to the podcast as punching a button on the old, remember the old car radios? You'd punch a button and there's your, or

Paul Thurrott (02:28:52):
Even serious radios is an interesting example because you get a new car and they're like, Hey, it's six months for free. And they make it hard to, [02:29:00] well, they make it hard to kill it. They make it

Leo Laporte (02:29:02):
Really hard to cancel. I'm still getting bills. But what they

Paul Thurrott (02:29:04):
Do, which by the way might soon not be something you can do anymore, but they make it hard to cancel it. And then when you actually get on the phone with them, they offer you a lower price than you do it again, right? Is one does it, which is kind of interesting. But podcasts are just a tiny little corner of the story. But all of these things, I think this is all, I don't know, I think there's a whole fertile field of, [02:29:30] it's like D in certification. How do we fix this problem, which we all acknowledge exists, but we have to apply it to a million little things. There are a million little things.

Leo Laporte (02:29:42):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:29:43):
I'm going to think

Richard Campbell (02:29:43):
About it. There's couple of Patreon podcasts that I've been involved in, and in the end it's an r s s feed. So once you

Leo Laporte (02:29:49):
Know, oh, so you didn't

Paul Thurrott (02:29:50):
Subscribe to that. Oh, okay, okay. I did this on my phone. So all middle-aged white guys, I can't do anything on a phone. I'm ridiculous. So I'll have to do [02:30:00] it on a real screen, on a computer, how I view the world. So I'll look at that. I would like to pay these guys. I'd like to pay Netflix less than pay them more. I get much more enjoyment out them.

Richard Campbell (02:30:13):
Do you have other subscriptions on Patreon?

Paul Thurrott (02:30:16):
Not anymore. No.

Richard Campbell (02:30:18):
I

Paul Thurrott (02:30:18):
Did. This is something I've done intermittently

Richard Campbell (02:30:21):
Over. Yeah. I spend about $250 a month on Patreon.

Paul Thurrott (02:30:23):
Really? For a bunch

Richard Campbell (02:30:25):
Of creators that I like.

Leo Laporte (02:30:26):
Good for you.

Richard Campbell (02:30:26):
Exactly. That

Leo Laporte (02:30:27):
Reason for the

Richard Campbell (02:30:28):
Money goes to them,

Leo Laporte (02:30:29):
Support them, and

Paul Thurrott (02:30:30):
[02:30:30] I'm okay. You know what? I'm not surprised to hear that, honestly, because I've spent a lot of money at the guys who used to do M S T three K, right? They do riff track. I've spent thousands of dollars on them. But I love those guys and I enjoy that content and yeah, I mean I think it's important to spend money in the right place, but that's part of this discussion where you've got X amount of dollars you can spend or want to spend or whatever. Where are you putting that money, right? Someone asked me today about subscribing to HandsOn windows [02:31:00] probably on Apple. I guess you can do that 2 99 or just through you, I guess, because you, us and I told them they wanted to subscribe to premium too, and it is kind of interesting. These two subscriptions are completely separate. That was something we should probably talk about. But I said to this person, you really need to look at the full club twit thing because I think I know you would get way more value

Leo Laporte (02:31:27):
Out of that. Three bucks more. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:31:29):
Three bucks more. [02:31:30] To me, that's just a hundred percent.

Leo Laporte (02:31:34):
Well,

Paul Thurrott (02:31:35):
This is something, this is going to come up again and again

Leo Laporte (02:31:38):
About. The answer is I really don't.

Paul Thurrott (02:31:40):
No, that's the problem. And it's going

Leo Laporte (02:31:41):
To

Paul Thurrott (02:31:42):
Hopefully through regulation and customer pushback, some of this stuff will revert or get better. The problem is

Leo Laporte (02:31:50):
We've been, or I'm going to move to the jungle and live on coconuts. It's that or it's one of the other.

Paul Thurrott (02:31:57):
It's fine. As long as you're driving a 67 Mustang [02:32:00] and

Leo Laporte (02:32:01):
Throw that cell phone out the window, battery out,

Paul Thurrott (02:32:04):
There's some kicking of

Leo Laporte (02:32:05):
Ass involved. Honestly, that is part of our national psyche. I swear to God, going back to John Henry beating the steam engine, we always want to celebrate the human over the machine, and we still feel that way. There's still a lud

Paul Thurrott (02:32:19):
In all this. Every Michael

Leo Laporte (02:32:20):
Creon book ever written

Paul Thurrott (02:32:21):
Was that exact topic. If you want generalize

Leo Laporte (02:32:25):
It, just because we can do it doesn't mean we should do it.

Paul Thurrott (02:32:27):
Right? Which literal line from Jurassic [02:32:30] Park not invented for that movie, but just ham headed, Steven Spielberg, whatever.

Leo Laporte (02:32:35):
So yes.

Paul Thurrott (02:32:37):
Okay, so I don't know what that means as a tip, but I wanted to get that out there. I want people to think about this, and I am going to be writing a lot about that. I don't want to say, don't mean to say it's more important than productivity, but I feel like, I don't know.

Leo Laporte (02:32:52):
I think what's really going on

Paul Thurrott (02:32:55):
Is

Leo Laporte (02:32:55):
Kind of natural,

Paul Thurrott (02:32:56):
Which is,

Leo Laporte (02:32:57):
I thought this would happen a long time ago. [02:33:00] The analogy I always use is stereo music. In the fifties, you really focused on the stereo gear and the R m s and Watts per channel, blah, blah, blah, and distortion. And then it became about the content and we stopped paying any attention. We no longer, unless you're the most hardcore nerdy music fan, you don't really care

Paul Thurrott (02:33:21):
About your playback capability

Leo Laporte (02:33:23):
And your headphones or your speakers. You just get something and it works. And what happens, we focus on Kate Bush

Paul Thurrott (02:33:29):
Is probably the [02:33:30] start of this, right?

Leo Laporte (02:33:30):
Yeah. We focus on Kate Bush, not on T H d, and that's a normal thing. And I thought that would happen with technology, that the technology would take a backseat to productivity to what you do with it. But the companies have made this thing so complicated that in order to be productive, you somehow have to be this guru and no one can do it.

Paul Thurrott (02:33:51):
I have a lot of Sonos equipment and it is what it is. I happen to like it. I don't like the app, but I like the whatever whole house audio. So [02:34:00] we're in Mexico and everything's more expensive there, and I don't want to buy. I just can't. I'm just not going to buy that stuff. It's too expensive. So we bought on sale these really nice big Bluetooth speakers. You can stereo pair 'em and everything and they sound great. And we got the thing set up and we're playing music and I'm like, I don't, man. This is so much better or as good and it's so much cheaper. And then an alert came through on my phone and the song pause and it went through the

Leo Laporte (02:34:24):
Speaker like, oh

Richard Campbell (02:34:25):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:34:25):
Nevermind. Nevermind. That's what it's, [02:34:30] sometimes

Paul Thurrott (02:34:30):
Having a separate system is good. So it's pros

Leo Laporte (02:34:35):
And cons,

Paul Thurrott (02:34:35):
Everything. It's

Leo Laporte (02:34:36):
When we went away last week to Green Bay, we had a house sitter, young guy, high school kid, and Lisa said, you need to make an manual for him so that he can watch TV in the living room. And I had to take pictures of all the remotes, label them. I had a five step, we've got to

Paul Thurrott (02:34:55):
Do this on home swaps, same thing. So

Leo Laporte (02:34:57):
You do this. If that doesn't work, then do this. But if it doesn't do that, then [02:35:00] do that. And then, I mean, it was insane. I doubt he was able to watch tv. It was so freaking complicated. And Lisa says, you can't ever die. I won't be able to figure this out.

Paul Thurrott (02:35:10):
We live in a world where a TV's booted up.

Leo Laporte (02:35:12):
They're all computers,

Paul Thurrott (02:35:14):
Everything's gotten

Leo Laporte (02:35:14):
Stupid, and they're all fighting with each other. By the way,

Paul Thurrott (02:35:17):
I don't want a computer. I want to a screen. I just want

Leo Laporte (02:35:20):
Hit a apart. You need to go back to dumb,

Paul Thurrott (02:35:22):
Dumb, dumb is

Richard Campbell (02:35:24):
Simple. Simple

Leo Laporte (02:35:25):
Sold, not dumb, simple. Sold you smart house. There you go. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (02:35:29):
And one of [02:35:30] the things I did was move all of the accounts that the house depends on into an outlook.com account so that the new owner could have it.

Paul Thurrott (02:35:37):
Love it.

Leo Laporte (02:35:38):
Oh, you had to do that. You had to do that.

Paul Thurrott (02:35:40):
And then you handed them the account, which here's

Richard Campbell (02:35:42):
The account, the account.

Paul Thurrott (02:35:43):
Make sure you change the password. Right? That's beautiful.

Richard Campbell (02:35:45):
Change the password on this. We

Leo Laporte (02:35:46):
Can never sell our house because I can't do that. I'm thinking, well, I put in all this ubiquity stuff and ethernet and the walls. I think I can't take that with me.

Paul Thurrott (02:35:56):
You're like a high tech version of a hoarder.

Leo Laporte (02:35:57):
I know you're dooming the next year, [02:36:00] and we have a 20 year lease on our solar panels, and it says in the lease, if you sell the house, you have to make sure the new buyers will take over the lease. We can't sell the house. It's too complicated. That's amazing.

Richard Campbell (02:36:12):
We're stuck. I did write the manual and I've ended up having to help the new owners directly. They're lovely people and they're very, part of what they wanted from the house was that automation

Leo Laporte (02:36:22):
That you literally, that was a selling point.

Richard Campbell (02:36:24):
Pass the house to turn on the TV and it does all the switching.

Paul Thurrott (02:36:27):
We also gave the owners of our house [02:36:30] something from the house, which was a grandfather clock. We didn't want to carry it,

Leo Laporte (02:36:34):
But you didn't have to write a manual on how to wind

Paul Thurrott (02:36:36):
It up.

Leo Laporte (02:36:37):
Well,

Paul Thurrott (02:36:37):
Actually you probably do, but I didn't.

Leo Laporte (02:36:40):
They'll figure it out.

Paul Thurrott (02:36:41):
Honestly. It's a little complicated. They'll

Leo Laporte (02:36:43):
Figure it out.

Paul Thurrott (02:36:44):
That's someone, do

Leo Laporte (02:36:45):
You have an app of the week?

Paul Thurrott (02:36:46):
I do.

Leo Laporte (02:36:47):
What else this could crap our lives up with.

Paul Thurrott (02:36:49):
Yeah, exactly. So as part of my gigantic decluttering crusade there, I did a bunch of scanning and blah, blah, blah, whatever. I somehow managed not to write about this despite the fact that [02:37:00] I wrote 18 articles about this, and that is that at some point in the past, using a flatbed scanner, I scanned multiple photos all on one page together. So you have dozens and dozens of files that are multiple photos.

Leo Laporte (02:37:13):
Oh, this is clever.

Paul Thurrott (02:37:14):
Yep. So you have to separate 'em right now. You could do it manually, which is awful if you don't value your time or your life at all. You could do that. Or you could try to find an app that does it. Like Photoshop for example, has this function built in. It's terrible. I have scanner apps that have this function built in terrible, [02:37:30] but I found this thing that was so good that I paid for it. It doesn't look like a, it

Leo Laporte (02:37:35):
Looks terrible. Yeah, it's awesome.

Paul Thurrott (02:37:37):
I think I paid 20

Richard Campbell (02:37:37):
Little old school of a website there.

Leo Laporte (02:37:39):
We had a call on the radio show where I asked the tech

Paul Thurrott (02:37:42):
Guys about this, and I didn't know about this scan spear. Listen, this was on page three of a Google search. It's research, and I finally came across. I tried so many different things and through the process I have on some computers, a half a dozen music utilities, a half a dozen photo utilities, [02:38:00] a half a dozen, whatever. I've tried everything on God's earth to solve different problems. This one solves

Leo Laporte (02:38:04):
Some problems. It was nice. This is incredible.

Paul Thurrott (02:38:06):
It works very well. And if you say you have an image with five pictures on it, sometimes it will get four correctly. Sometimes you have to do a little edge correction, but you can also draw new edges and add them. The thing that's really cool about it, the thing that really put this over the top, other than the obvious is you can kind of eyeball it and it will do the crop pretty much correctly. Not every single time, but almost every time. So if you have a little bit of [02:38:30] white space on one side, it will actually kind of do that for you. It works great. It looks dumb, frankly. This is one of, I think there was, I can't remember the other app, but there were a couple apps. Oh, I bought a store app, which is crazy, which was very good as well. It has the dumbest ui. It was made for Windows eight, but this happened that up. They both look so old school. They look like the type of thing I would never use, and it's just fantastic. So if you need this, and I think people do, [02:39:00] right? If you have a flatbed Skinner, and that's how you're doing it, obviously you're going to have multiple photos on a page or whatever. This does it. It's nice.

Leo Laporte (02:39:10):
There you go. Thank you. Awesome. This is a great catch. This is

Richard Campbell (02:39:13):
A bind.

Leo Laporte (02:39:14):
Yeah. Yeah. Now we go. I'm

Paul Thurrott (02:39:16):
So happy to find this now

Leo Laporte (02:39:17):
To Richard Campbell and a check-in on run as radio this week.

Richard Campbell (02:39:24):
Well, I've been pretty persistent, and so here we are at episode 900 to run ads radio.

Leo Laporte (02:39:29):
Wow. Congratulations. [02:39:30] Thanks much. We're

Paul Thurrott (02:39:33):
Catching up with you though,

Leo Laporte (02:39:35):
But you'll always be a little bit of,

Paul Thurrott (02:39:37):
I'm not sure. It's like my son is catching up to me in age. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:39:41):
Not really is, yeah, maybe.

Richard Campbell (02:39:43):
Well, normally I only put on an episode a week only, but once in a while you have specials or there's a pandemic and now you need two a week. There were things that happen. What I have been, these Augh shows are kind of a challenge too. It's like what do you do when you've had [02:40:00] your ninth Augh show? So I have gotten in the routine of reflecting back on the last a hundred shows. And so I dragged my friend Dana pp to bounce against some of this stuff and just like, what

Leo Laporte (02:40:11):
Were we thinking

Richard Campbell (02:40:12):
Back at 800 and so on

Paul Thurrott (02:40:15):
Years, roughly

Richard Campbell (02:40:16):
The last two years.

Leo Laporte (02:40:17):
Nice.

Richard Campbell (02:40:18):
And of course that 800 was mid pandemic. So just funny that we were already talking about, hey, we're really blowing up the security perimeter right now because everybody's got to work from home. How are we [02:40:30] going to clean that mess up? Which I think is half of what I've talked about this year, is the challenges around all of that. So yeah, it's fun to have a little bit of an indulgence, just sort of be reflective. But yeah, there we're, do another Augh show in roughly two years.

Paul Thurrott (02:40:46):
Nice.

Leo Laporte (02:40:47):
Ought 900 double

Paul Thurrott (02:40:49):
OT show. Nice.

Leo Laporte (02:40:52):
Very nice. Ricardo.

Richard Campbell (02:40:54):
Thank

Paul Thurrott (02:40:54):
You. Did you miss anything from the old days on-prem servers rather [02:41:00] exchange windows service?

Richard Campbell (02:41:02):
I mean, I really am a screw drive spinner and the had racks in my house up until two months ago when I sold that house. But I got to tell you how gleeful it was

Paul Thurrott (02:41:11):
To shut that stuff down. Exactly. Are you kidding?

Richard Campbell (02:41:15):
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:41:16):
I know. And

Richard Campbell (02:41:16):
Now I'm annoyed that my synology is as noisy as it is. I'm going to have to

Paul Thurrott (02:41:22):
Consumer version because my office thing is in this room with the living room and all this. We were watching TV the other night and I was like, is it raining? [02:41:30] He's like, whatcha talking about? It's beautiful. I said, hear rain, and it was my nest just gurgling behind me. And I was like, that's kind of nice.

Richard Campbell (02:41:38):
Oh good. I'm glad you could, that's that's your white noise generator.

Paul Thurrott (02:41:43):
It wasn't too loud.

Leo Laporte (02:41:44):
I want a brown liquor

Paul Thurrott (02:41:45):
To wrap this up.

Richard Campbell (02:41:46):
Well, I have one for you. And of course I'm in Perth, right? So I'm like, I've drank a few Australian whiskeys along the way, but I'm looking, are there any perian whiskeys? And turns out there is, there's upshot. Yeah. [02:42:00] Perian. You like that word? That's a good one. They

Leo Laporte (02:42:02):
Call it a corn liquor though. I

Paul Thurrott (02:42:04):
Mean, because Dragon writers of Perth.

Leo Laporte (02:42:09):
No, that's a different,

Richard Campbell (02:42:10):
That's Adam McCaffrey, right? So the distillery is called the Whipper Snapper Distillery. Why? Because it's run by a couple of younger men who when they said they were going into whiskey, were told, what do you two young whipper snappers know about? Anything Started back in 2014, Jim McEwen and his brother-in-law, Alistair [02:42:30] Mallick started it up. They had been enamored of whiskey for many years. In fact, Alistair's story is that he had a neighbor named Vic who was a World War II vet. He was in L Pilot and having survived the war, and if you'll notice the image on there all over the place is a Lancaster with a pair of barrels strapped underneath it.

Leo Laporte (02:42:51):
Oh yeah.

Richard Campbell (02:42:52):
So Alistair helped Vic writing his memoirs and Vic on the side, but was distilling in his backyard [02:43:00] as you do, nobody bothers a World War II vet. And so that sort of got him drawn into whiskey doubly so when he wanted to reconnect with a friend from the US Air Force, they ended up in Colorado and looking for the friend in the process ran into a guy named Tommy Cooper who made Colorado gold whiskey, which is an award-winning whiskey out of Colorado and ended up mentoring the two of them to actually get a whiskey business up and running. And so [02:43:30] again, 2014, he sort of establishes here in the city, like 15 minutes walk from where I am is their distillery.

Paul Thurrott (02:43:38):
I assume these prices are Australian dollars.

Richard Campbell (02:43:41):
I've converted it to US dollars. It's a hundred Australian. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:43:45):
Okay. I'm looking at their site. I'm sorry.

Richard Campbell (02:43:47):
Yeah, right. So yeah, so that's Aussie dollars and unfortunately only available in Australia.

(02:43:53):
So very much what makes this whiskey their whiskey, it's all Western [02:44:00] Australian ingredients except for the barrels. So the mash bill's 80% corn. I mean that's more than American bourbon, 10% wheat, 10% malted barley. And the malted part is important because they need that amylase, right? This is a lot of corn that can produce a lot of methanol, which is not good for your customers. But the entire facility is in Perth. They grind their own grain. They actually cook the grains together so they're not doing [02:44:30] separate grain. They blend it together so it comes kind of a purge that's quite sweet and they cool it down, add yeast to it becomes an 8% distillers beer. And then they start the distillation. And if you see the picture of the still, you're going to go. That's a weird looking still. And that's because it is an Arnold Holstein still, which is the same kind of still that coop used up in Colorado.

(02:44:54):
I've mentioned this a few times on other shows about the whole, what's really broken, the distillery business open [02:45:00] is the Germans. This is one of those Germans. Arnold Holstein makes a line of adjustable stills. They are combined reflex column stills. So again, if you see the pictures there, you'll see there's sort of a pot still looking thing, which is really just the cooker. It has a stir and a heater in it, and then it feeds into a series of column plates. There's lots of eyeglasses that represent the cliff and plate locations with some coolers. So the way that upshot is made [02:45:30] is that after they've made their brewers beer, the 8% beer, and they load it into the still, it's heated electrically and the initial stage feeds into a secondary stage with a 13 plate column still, and that raises the alcohol level. And then the third stage has some additional plates and then the condensers.

(02:45:49):
And so in their initial run, they'll take that 8% up to about 65%. That's called a stripping run. Or you're basically getting the extras out. You're getting to the alcohol [02:46:00] product, and then they'll clean the rig. They'll actually do several batches like that, taking off the head and the tails and just keeping the hearts. And then they'll take those batches and run them through still again for what's called a rectifying run, where they'll land at about 90%, which is almost vodka territory. You're taking a lot of the grain flavors out to go that high, but they'll cut it with water. They actually sell the moonshine at that point if you would like to buy the moonshine. But in a particular case with upshot, [02:46:30] they have been buying American oak barrels the same stuff as bourbon. They buy it out of Missouri, but they're virgin barrels.

(02:46:37):
They've not been used for bourbon and they have them charred heavily. So there's almost a charcoal on the inside and they barrel it quite low. We're only talking in the forties because Perth is warm compared to Scotland. Well, pretty much everywhere is warm compared to Scotland. It's more of what they call the Mediterranean climate. So they have [02:47:00] cool winters, but they have quite hot summers. And so their angel share runs in the 5% range annually. But it also means that the whiskey ages quickly. So upshot is only two years in the barrel, but remember all this color comes from the barrel and I have the whiskey. I've been drinking it every time Paul dropped out, which was a lot for a while there. You're

Leo Laporte (02:47:22):
Speaking pretty eloquently.

Richard Campbell (02:47:23):
That's a lot of color. The upside to this American approach is that that [02:47:30] charred barrel has a lot of sugars in it, and they've gone into the whiskey. So for two years in the barrel to get that much color, they use no chill filtration and no caramel dyes. Not that there's any restrictions on that in Australia. Australia really doesn't have rules for whiskey. So in a lot of ways these guys are making an American bourbon. They're even using American barrels. But yeah, I got to take a taste. I it's quite sweet the first [02:48:00] time you touch this, it's heady. There's a lot of nos to it. It smells like alcohol even though it's down at a 40%. It's really not that potent a spirit per se. But yeah, this is in a very approachable whiskey in the sense that folks that don't like strong whiskeys are going to not mind it. They're going to enjoy that. It's also going to be brilliant in cocktails. It's got that sort of sweetness. There's no rye here. You've really got no spicy note coming at you. It's just sort of big and rich [02:48:30] and round for a pretty straightforward whiskey. So well done to the whipper snappers and

Leo Laporte (02:48:36):
They're now bring it to the us you pastors.

Richard Campbell (02:48:38):
Yeah, they've got to push, their production is a bit small right now and they are just about to release a cast strength. That's 63%.

Leo Laporte (02:48:48):
This is good. Their Instagram has a lot of great images in there.

Richard Campbell (02:48:51):
Yeah, look at that. Oh, by the way, the name of the still is Darth two and one of the control knobs is a Dar failure helmet.

Leo Laporte (02:49:00):
[02:49:00] Nice.

Richard Campbell (02:49:02):
But you look at that thing, that's a funny look. And still that is not, it looks like

Leo Laporte (02:49:05):
A flu musical instrument. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (02:49:08):
Yeah. And I mean, not that different from what you find in smaller American bourbon distilleries, but Maker's Mark stills are much, much larger. And Mark goes column still for the initial distillation to around 60%. And then they do a pot still for the last five to 8%. They do tours. I [02:49:30] haven't had a chance to take one. I tried to get one before we would do the show, but they were booked up. So things are busy over at the whipper snapper.

Leo Laporte (02:49:38):
You've got an assignment though. Get on over there if you can.

Richard Campbell (02:49:41):
Yeah, I might just have to wander by for a while and could look with that. I

Leo Laporte (02:49:45):
Assume they're closed now.

Richard Campbell (02:49:48):
It's four 30 in the morning, so Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:49:51):
Well, we better let Australia

Richard Campbell (02:49:52):
Though at 5:00 AM

Leo Laporte (02:49:53):
We better let you go, Richard. I am so grateful that you stayed up all night just to, I

Richard Campbell (02:49:59):
Did not stay up all night. [02:50:00] I went to bed early. I had a good sleep. I got up to do that.

Leo Laporte (02:50:04):
Okay, thank you, Richard.

Richard Campbell (02:50:05):
Now I've had a few whiskeys I can probably snooze for a couple

Leo Laporte (02:50:08):
Hours. Richard Campbell run as radio.com and.net Rocks. He's in Perth. Are you going to be there next week? What's the plan?

Richard Campbell (02:50:15):
I'm home. You'll get him. Get my first shot from the New Coast rig.

Leo Laporte (02:50:19):
Nice. Can't wait. Let's get some seashore in the background there.

Richard Campbell (02:50:23):
Yeah, we'll make sure we get the ocean.

Leo Laporte (02:50:24):
Nice. Paul Ott, who knows where he'll be next week, but right now he's in Macun, pa. [02:50:30] I'll be here. But after that I'll be in Mexico. And you can find him on ot.com. T H U R R O T t.com. His book, the Field Guide, windows 10 and his new one, windows Everywhere. Both those books are available@leanpub.com. Set your own price, but get a great book. Paul Richard. Yay. Great show as always. We will see you next week. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern Time. That would be [02:51:00] 1800, I'm sorry. Yeah, 1800 utc. It'd be 1900 in a couple of weeks. We go back to standard time the week after Halloween. But for right now, 1800 utc. I tell you that's you can watch us live if you want at Live Twit TV club members. Get to chat with us. Live in the club.

(02:51:21):
Twit Discord. If you're not a member, TWIT tv slash club twit to join. The fun is always a great conversation [02:51:30] there, even when there's not a show on the air, there's always great stuff to talk about. And after the fact, OnDemand versions of the show available at twit tv slash dub dub or on YouTube, there's a YouTube channel dedicated Windows Weekly. Best thing to do, be subscribe in your favorite podcast player so you get the minute it's available. Paul Richard dozers and winners alike. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next week. I'm Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.