Windows Weekly 768 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 and Mary Jo Foley are here. Paul's all head up about ads in windows, file explorerr. Mary Jo's very excited about all the beautiful search stuff coming to windows. 10 direct storage comes to the PC from the Xbox and teams turns five. It's all coming up next on windows, weekly Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is tweet.

Leo Laporte (00:00:36):
This is windows weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley episode 768. Recorded Wednesday, March 16th, 2022. UI Bouillabaisse windows weekly is brought to you by Plex track the purple teaming platform. Save time and increase productivity with the premier cyber security reporting and workflow management product. Designed to support proactive purity strategies from assessment through remediation. Visit Plex track.com/twit and claim your free month and by hacker rank it's time to reboot your technical interviews with hacker ranks, easy to use tools with a premade question, library, code playback, and built in whiteboard. You'll be conducting better technical inter views and instantly identifying the right talent. Go to hacker rank.com/ww to start a better tech interview for free today. It's time for windows weekly. The show we get together with Paul and Mary Jo and not my Amazon echo and talk about windows weekly. Hello, Mary Jo Foley all about my microsoft.com.

Leo Laporte (00:01:45):
Hello, Leo. I probably should hide this Linux penguin before should season. You'd just be sneaking into the show. That's Paul th all about I mean he's thurrott.com. She's mary, Joe Foley. She's all about microsoft.com and to you are not, although you you're still doing the pet stuff, right? Yeah, I am. Yep. So there's, we're still working on the book, so, you know, that's gonna be the great collaboration. Hall's writing your part. It's okay. You don't have to do anything. Just, I just have to put my name on it. It's the name on, okay. Collect the royalties. That's okay. That's about all areas to hello. Welcome. Good to see ya. Happy happy Wednesday. Let's see. Happy almost St. Patrick's day. You know, you meet it. Won't St. Patrick's day, which is tomorrow. We'll never have the same feeling for me because it's the second anniversary of the pandemic. That's when the lockdown began. I know that's right. So we'll never, we'll never forget that. How the Irish rule and everything don't okay. It's all their fault. All that green beer made us sick. Yes. Two years ago. That's and tomorrow. And so I, for me now, St. Patrick have that right? I mean, you know, yeah. Two years outta my life. We have, I don't have that many years left. I don't want to give him two years too late. Yep. Too late, too late.

Leo Laporte (00:03:15):
So as you know, it's on everybody's lips. It's the talk of the town. It's all. Anybody can talk about these days. Call duty. Oh no, No good try both of you, but it's as you know, advertisements in explorerr, what's the, the deal. It's like riding a bike. But once you go down that path, you can't stop. You can't stop. It's like riding a mountain bike straight down. So

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:51):
Slipper slope, et cetera, et cetera.

Leo Laporte (00:03:53):
So they showed up in a beta. Microsoft said, no, we're not doing that, but let's not this. They clear have the capability say, no, we're not doing that. They said, no, we're just testing that internally. Justing it. If you see that yet, clearly they have the capability. They've done it before. This is not the first time they oh, really advertising in file explorerr. Yeah. In file explorerr. Now when you 17. So advertising can mean many things to many people. Yep. They're not, there's not, they're not Casper bed ads in there. Right. Right. That's true. What are the ads for, but when you advertise your own products and services, it's still an advertisement. True. True. True. I get that. Some people are really okay. With what the dictator's doing, you know, I get, but you're you not, you Leo, but you, people who believe that these things you are advertising, why you people that's cute, but it they're advertising. They're advertisements. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:52):
I'm not that person, but I'm also that person who didn't even notice it, like when I saw the first picture. Yeah. And somebody said, look at the ad in that I'm like, where,

Leo Laporte (00:05:00):
Where you, it is subtle.

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:02):
I didn't see it.

Leo Laporte (00:05:04):
So yeah. It's not like minority report where he is walking down the street and the ads are falling him around. Although, you know, we're kinda heading in that direction. Aren't we? So you could say it was just Microsoft saying, Hey, here's a cool feature. You might not know about. Yeah. Right. You could, you could say that you could, what was it Chris

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:25):
Cap said to us? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:05:27):
What was it? Yeah. Just what was it? I didn't see what was the ad for? It was

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:33):
Editor. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:05:34):
Which has nothing to do with file explorerr. But, but it's in, but you already have, it's not like you buy it. Right. well, yeah. Get it as a browser plugin for free. 

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:46):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:05:47):
Yeah. Yeah. so I mean, I'm just, I'm look I'm I know trying to make excuses for 'em, but yeah, you are Liam. Listen, I'm trying to understand. No, I, you know, it's not exactly an ad. I mean, we're not saying here's a Harry, first of all, for you, it was just a test of the advertising delivery capabilities of follow. This is only a test. If there was for an actual advertisement, well, you mentioned Casper mattresses or whatever. I mean, there's no reason it couldn't become that in the future. And that's the problem. You, you don't go down this path to do less of this thing. You're you intend to do more. If this works, we're gonna do more of it. Right. And you know, this, like, this is the general conversation is when we've had a lot, people hold onto the PCs for longer.

Leo Laporte (00:06:33):
No one goes to the store and buys windows. Microsoft needs some way to monetize this thing that is used by billions of people. And they kind of look around at the rest of the world. They see how they're doing it. They tried the app store thing that didn't really fly. Right. So that's not working. What else can we do? Well, what about Google? Google's doing advertising. Let's try that. So I'm looking at the image in your blog post Paul where's the ad. That's just an image of file. Explorer. Oh, so if you look at the, okay. I thought it was just me. Oh, good. Here it is. Is more recent article. I right there. Right. With confidence across documents, email in the web with advanced writing suggestions from Microsoft editor. So, and it's got a little triangle with an exclamation mark. Yeah. It's like, if you don't do this, something bad's gonna happen.

Leo Laporte (00:07:16):
That's what that alert, alert. That's not the end of the world to me, but you're right. I mean, if it, if it ISN the beginning of the end of the world, it's the beginning of the end, the world. Okay. The thing I, you know, Mary Jo I think mentioned Chris Capella, I always think back to that conversation, which wasn't that long ago, by the way, it was just December. Right. Where he kind of said Microsoft had, has the right to do this kind of thing. And we all sort of nod our heads. Yeah. I guess they do. But you know, one of us brought up the right to install Linnux so that's right. Well, what I would like the right. See, I wanna use windows and, but I'd like windows not to be, so's your, I know. Well, none of us are perfect, but we, I, I look, I would pay, I, I, I mean, I am paying, I, I feel like as a customer of Microsoft, 365, I shouldn't see these ads or I should at at least that be interesting.

Leo Laporte (00:08:09):
A toggle where I can turn that. That would be good. You could put that in the paper, Chris capital, or he raised, he said, no, responded that he said no to that. He said, it's an implicit. He didn't say it exactly like this, but it's an implicit, it's Microsoft implicitly admitting that this stuff is terrible. If they offer you a way to pay, to get out. Oh yeah, you're right. Yeah. It's not kind of the way he put it. Right. Yeah. And yep. Yep, yep. I get that. But I mean, you know, people pay for threat premiums, so they don't have to see ads on my website. People pay other we, we have called the called club twit, no ads. Right, right. That doesn't, that's not admission. That ads are terrible. It's just an acknowledgement. Some people prefer not to have 'em and saying to them, yeah, well we make about seven bucks a month, actually more like five bucks a month out of those ads for you.

Leo Laporte (00:08:57):
So if you give us five bucks a month, cuz you know, we won't on the credit card. Yeah. Then we won't show it to you and that's a fair trade. Like, you know, you pay for it one way or the other. It's a, it's a good choice to have is Microsoft saying, you're not paying for windows so we can do this. Is that kind of you, but, but you are kind of paying for it. Cuz if you get windows never with that. Right. In other words, sorry, the, the, the justification isn't to the end user, the Microsoft as an entity is not coming to you as a human being and saying you were not paying for windows. So you will pay you're paying in this other way. Right. They're not saying that what they're doing is they've got a senior a senior leadership team is looking at the windows division and saying guys, you've like, like 1.4 billion of these things out in the world and we're not generating any income here.

Leo Laporte (00:09:43):
Mm. You know, we've got like X number of people using office they're generating subscription income. We got X number of people using Azure. Those guys are generating subscription income. You guys are generating nothing. How about we turn this into a, you know, a, a cash machine somehow. And, and they, you know, they've tried different things. I think it's fair to say nothing has worked. And I think just as a user, the, the issue with this kind of stuff is similar to what we saw in Microsoft edge, which started off as very felt and, and minimalist and Microsoft teams, which likewise started off that way. And these things have become overburdened by busy UI. You know, we used to talk about it's the content, not the Chrome. Remember these conversations we used to have around web browsers and windows people. Aren't there to look at windows they're to get work done. You know, this stuff is all just distractions. Whether it's a err item in the start menu, a popup on, on your desktop, an ad that's in file explorer. Or, I mean, it's just, you're, you're, you're making the experience less.

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:41):
I feel like you're making it annoying when it gets annoying though, is when you already have a product and the ad comes up and it says, try Microsoft 365. I'm like, I already have it. I'm using it right now. I was thinking it's unsophisticated. Tell that I have it. You know,

Leo Laporte (00:10:56):
That's annoying. I agree. That's why wants to track you? So that will never happen. They're like, look, you could have personalized that. We, if you let us personalize, it we'll know that you have this. Yeah. But we know person, one of the reasons people don't like personalized that is cuz they aren't personalized. They don't work very well. They advertise to you things you already bought for instance. Yeah. That's very common. Yep. Right. 

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:15):
I, I don't think these, that we're seeing right now in like file explorerr or placeholders for Casper ads. I don't think that's where they're gonna go with this.

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:25):
I, I think, I think they are gonna stay what they are, which is kind of like pointers to try to get you to use other Microsoft products. The place I'm the most worried about ads is in this new search thing that they started talking about, where they're gonna, that thing is gonna be loaded with ads. It like you already can see where that's going, right? Like, yep. It's not just gonna be tips for Microsoft products. That's where they're gonna sell ad space. When you click on the search box and it comes up and you see tip of the day and you see anniversaries, and then you start seeing ads underneath that because it's feeds coming from MSN, right. That's where it's coming from you.

Leo Laporte (00:12:02):
So you would never see anything like this in Macs, you would never see anything like this in ChromeOS, which is made by a company that only sells ads. You would never see anything like this and Linux, a product that is free. You know, it it's, it kind of boggles the mind that Microsoft has shot for the bottom among its peers, from a user experience standpoint at a time when we're told that details matter and we're gonna make this thing simpler and more pleasant and even the audio sounds are better. And it's a soothing environment, you know, you know, it's not soothing. There's a bunch of stuff moving around, blinking at you when you're trying to focus on the thing, you know, what's the term they use when you're trying to get in the flow,

Mary Jo Foley (00:12:45):
Stand your flow.

Leo Laporte (00:12:46):
You know, these things take me outta my flow Panos, come on. Yep. It's just it's it's it's to build and you know, for someone, anyone, I mean, people listening to the show, the services called windows weekly, I assume most of the people listening or watching this care about this product. Right? It's it, it it's inconceivable that most people doing that are like, yeah, no, it's okay. I don't care. You know, they have the right. They have the right to advertise.

Mary Jo Foley (00:13:17):
I wonder the, the way this keeps coming up, over and over and popping up up in different places makes me wonder if somewhere they have telemetry that shows people click on those things and then they start using the product. There's a reason they keep doing this, right. Not just to annoy,

Leo Laporte (00:13:34):
Not just because they're evil. Yeah, I suppose,

Mary Jo Foley (00:13:37):
Or too annoy. Right?

Leo Laporte (00:13:38):
Well, there's a reason people send mailings in the mail cuz some people respond to them. Right. You know, it's I listen, there's a whole conversation that we had around the fallacy of telemetry data and how anyone can use any bit of data to prove any point they were trying to make to begin with. And I'm sure the people that are using telemetry data to show that these things works are the people that wanted this stuff to work. You know? Yeah. What the data doesn't show is how fricking aggravated people get when they see it, you know, you just, you don't get to see that data

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:11):
The day you'll see

Leo Laporte (00:14:12):
Me. I'm speaking on behalf of that data.

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:15):
You know, you see me foam at the mouth will be the day. Notepad has a huge ad. That's blocking my view of my content. Right? If it's up in the toolbar, I don't really care cuz I never look at the toolbar. If it's, if it's blocking where I am putting my data, you can use

Leo Laporte (00:14:31):
Notepad for 30 years. Let me tell you something about notepad. There's no toolbar. It's never been at a tool bar.

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:36):
Well what's that thing at the top.

Leo Laporte (00:14:38):
The menu bar

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:39):
File. Edit B that thing.

Leo Laporte (00:14:42):
Menu bar. Yeah. Yeah. Menu bar

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:44):
Bar. Yeah. Which we didn't really need. But now we have it. So yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:14:47):
Menus are good. I don't, I don't, we don't need it. I made ribbons and tool bars. Maybe not, but menus are good. I like menus. Yeah. Gotta have menus actually though. I off more junk. No you're right. You would like EEX I turn off the menu in EEX as well. Yeah, just a black screen. White text. I used word, but I, I minimize the, the ribbon. So you only see like a row of look a menu. It looks like a menu. You is. Well, you know, and I've got, I've got one note open for the show and it's got a big old, big old ribbon. Yes. It does big old ribbon. I don't, you know, which I'm not that fond of, but at least it doesn't have an ad for Microsoft editor in it.

Leo Laporte (00:15:26):
It will, if it can, it could those ads appear in Microsoft office as well actually. Oh they do. Okay. Yeah. Again. Okay. And I don't know why I'm taking Microsoft side on this, but I'm gonna just, you know, it stirs the pot. I like to give Paul blood pressure boost in the morning. My blood pressure's been doing so well lately. We really gonna, it is, it's just promoting a feature, right? It's not right. If it were a third party, if it were candy crush soda. Oh boy. That's not third party anymore. But I see what you're saying. Oh you right. It's not anymore. Okay. So let me be very, more, much more clear don't promote games. Sure. But productivity features that even that you could, well, here's the I'm sure actually that's a terrible thing. What you just said is a good example.

Leo Laporte (00:16:15):
If I open my start menu, this is windows 11, not windows 10. So if I open my start menu, there are entries in there for Spotify. And plus I hate that prime video. I agree. Right. Those the third party TikTok, I don't wanna see any of those and I immediately thing. Right? Yeah. I don't like that. I don't believe those apps are actually installed. I'm afraid to click on there's stubs. Most God knows. I, I don't wanna send them. I feel like some of them I'm trying to prove that this works right, but there's like a install or something. It's a stub. That's exactly right. That's a form of advertising, right? Oh absolutely. That's a promotion. Just like having the McAfee trial version of the antivirus. I don't want any of that crap. We talked about that last week, the signature PC, which nobody wanted to do, cuz there's money in it.

Leo Laporte (00:17:00):
And, and the truth is you know, you're right. I don't buy the, the, the, the logic. We're not making enough money. We wanna make more. Who cares? That's not my problem. You know, that's your, that's your bad business. But poor Microsoft, the second most powerful company in the world, isn't making enough money for one of its core properties. Yeah. I mean she prim river. I, yeah. I mean, look, I don't use operating systems that do that, to be honest with you Mac apple, doesn't do it with a Mac OS. They don't do it on I don't think they do it on the iPhone. Some Androids, apple do. I mean Samsung and embeds. Lots of stuff in it. I don't wanna get off on a tangent. Apple actually does. In some ways do this in iOS. When you look at the 47 apps, they installed by default.

Leo Laporte (00:17:44):
And if you, well, yeah. Look at the, where they used to prefer their own apps. When you did a search. I mean, they, they have in, in the storage, but those are apps. I mean, those are apps, but they're that you have they're, they're part of the OS. I mean, yeah, no iOS, you can't complain that Microsoft has edge in there. They have that's that's part of the living have complaints, right? Yeah. I didn't want access. You can't complain that Microsoft pushes you away from Chrome or other browsers. When you try to install one, you can complain about the fact that windows 11, they made it harder to set another browser. As the default, you can complain that when people came up with workarounds, they said, no, we're blocking that they updated windows to prevent the workarounds. I mean, actually you can, there's, there's a whole litany of complaints you can make.

Leo Laporte (00:18:28):
I'm just, I mean, this is just, you know, an ad appeared in file explorerr and then dev channel. So we're talking about that specific feature, but actually, I mean, look Google, apple, Amazon, whatever these companies are all terrible. They're all terrible in their own ways. No, they are. They're terrible. Microsoft is terrible too. Those other companies being terrible doesn't excuse Microsoft. I, although I, you know, I, as I pointed out with this kind of advertising thing, it is perhaps unique that Microsoft among all these companies is the only one building ads into the UI. The only thing I can think of that's like this a little bit, I guess, is Amazon does this with their Kindle stuff. Not just the Kindle e-readers, but the Kindle tablets are in a way a handheld giant ad for Amazon. All the fire stuff is for sure.

Leo Laporte (00:19:17):
Yeah. They're all the fire sticks and that makes them a little harder to deal with. And in fact, I don't use them for that reason. No, that's exactly why I don't buy 'em. So, okay. It's an interesting conundrum. Somebody's put apple puts ads in apple news, plus even after you pay for it, that's a little different to me though. That's more like a, a website coming. You expect ads. Yeah. But you know what, so that, to me that doesn't excuse it because I pay the New York times. I use their awful app and I get ads in the app and I'm paying them and I still get ads. And it's like, I get that. That's the model. That model is wrong. It's just wrong. Okay. And, and look, I, but you know what? I don't care about apple or Google or you care about Microsoft doing, you care about Microsoft windows, you know, by I, the Buntu did do it briefly.

Leo Laporte (00:20:03):
They put an Amazon icon ammo and they yeah. Did go over well, it's gone. Yeah. Yeah. Surprised there's still a company. Yeah. So look, I, I, Chris cap passel kind of downplayed this notion and I know a lot of people will kind of knee jerk, not like this suggestion, but I would be happy to pay, not to see this crap. I feel that I'm already paying them enough that I shouldn't. I pay for both a commercial and a family, Microsoft 365 account. I, these at great cost every year. I don't understand why I'm seeing ads or I'm not seeing an option that says, you know what, don't show me this stuff. I'm smart enough to figure it out. I got, I got this. You don't have to teach me how to use Microsoft editor.

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:45):
Yeah. You know what, when I think this is going to be push comes to shove and I didn't think of this, but Jordan novit from CNBC tweeted this today, he said, so, you know, if you're a third party company, like say you're a Salesforce and you see Microsoft put an add in for dynamics into your product, you could say they're tying, right. They're they're trying to influence, use their operating system to influence you to buy their product over a third party product. I'm like, oh, so once there's a lawsuit, maybe they will stop.

Leo Laporte (00:21:19):
Yeah. You know what they'll do? They'll let Salesforce advertise instead. Thank you EU. You're fantastic. You, you have opened up a ballot box now. So I, and see ads from third parties. I just don't wanna see ads. I don't think that the shell is an appropriate place to advertise. Yeah. I'm not there for the shell.

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:39):
You know, you know, who might save you? Panos might be your savior here because I'm sure Panos hates this. I'm sure though.

Leo Laporte (00:21:45):
It is actually only gotten more us under Panos, because think, think of the double whammy of this, everything that was terrible about windows 10, plus a bunch of functional regressions, right? Yeah. I mean I, when, oh yeah. And we get curve around window corners. Cute. It, it absolutely is better looking. I will 100% agree with that. Yeah. But it's, it, it is literally everything that was wrong with 10, with a bunch of new problems. And by the way, that cute new UI that I actually like is yet another UI that now exists in windows alongside all the UIs of the past. It's this giant boo. You bays of UIs. And UXs dating back to the 1990s, all swimming together. Like some kind of germ filled pond, you know? And they're never gonna come it up. They're not. Yeah. Right. It's just gonna be all of these different UIs living together side by side. And every once in a while you scratch below the surface, you're like, oh my God, it's windows Vista. Right. That's what windows is. Could you it's like an archeological dig. Could you spell boo you based so I can make that the show title just it's probably not. You say it right though. That's all that matters. Yeah. Yeah. Some JFI BU bass

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:59):
Bass

Leo Laporte (00:23:00):
Scum pond. Excellent. Not that bad, but

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:04):
Windows 11 ladies and gentlemen,

Leo Laporte (00:23:05):
What if they put it in tips? Windows 11. What if they just put it in the tips app? You know, just pop it up.

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:10):
Nobody, nobody will run the tips in,

Leo Laporte (00:23:11):
Then no one will run it. Like, yeah. Well, okay. That's actually an interesting point. Remember when you install windows 95 for the first time, there was a tip thing that came up. Yeah. And actually, you know, office probably did this for time. Visual studio. Think they think of it as that that's even why they put the triangle with the exclamation mark. They think of it as a tip this a tip. Yeah. Use a tip. You that's like saying great pain. The bridges out, just a tip. But if you keep driving, you're gonna go flying into the river. It's just a tip. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:37):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:23:37):
You can ignore it. Mary Jo wouldn't even see it. She was right

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:41):
Over the bridge. I didn't see it. No. When I, when that, like I said, the first time everybody was talking about this, I'm like, where is the ad? Everyone is talking about, I'm looking at the screen now. I don't see it.

Leo Laporte (00:23:50):
It, it doesn't look like an ad. Does it? It's very subtle. I know. I think the point of it was, they were trying, they were just testing placement and

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:58):
Placement, right?

Leo Laporte (00:24:00):
Yeah. I, I, the

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:01):
Feasibility of doing it right.

Leo Laporte (00:24:02):
I'm sure they had no intention of advertise Microsoft editor. I'm sure they, in fact were gonna advertise Casper mattresses. It's clear to me that that's where they would imagine Casper is an advertiser on the twittter. Right? I own many Casper mattresses. I do not saying it's not a, nothing wrong with it. I'm just saying, but I don't want my windows. I understand. I don't want to advertise the windows. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, advertising is ubiquitous everywhere and it is, and you can't get away from it.

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:30):
I know. I just don't see them caring that people are upset about this. I, I, if they don't care that that they're wrecking edge with all this blot wear, they definitely, aren't gonna care about running a one line ad and file explorerr.

Leo Laporte (00:24:43):
I think they think they're making edge better is what it, I think.

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:47):
Yeah, they do. Leah, what you do, or at least they say that

Leo Laporte (00:24:49):
They say

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:50):
Again,

Leo Laporte (00:24:50):
Reading from the book of devils, love the Microsoft making it or the environments, right? Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:59):
No like, like Chris capaz is saying, these are tips for people who might not know these tips or how to find this or that we even have this product. I'm sure the edge team says, you know what? We're just giving people things they want and making it more accessible to people.

Leo Laporte (00:25:11):
You know what I'm gonna project into what I think the edge team is actually thinking, which is, I think they think I hate it. I think they hate it. I think that this,

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:18):
I think some of them hate it

Leo Laporte (00:25:19):
Happening to them is similar to what's happening to windows. It's coming from on high. Yeah. And it's like, guys, we gotta try to make the best of this. We're we're forced to justify our existence. We have to do something along these lines. Let's try to make it as UN terrible as we can. And I, I actually think that's the mentality. I'm sure. If we were able to talk to people on the edge or windows teams, we would find people who were like, geez, I can't believe we're doing this. I'm so sorry. It's awful agree. Like I hate being part of this.

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:45):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:25:45):
Agree. 

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:47):
But I agree also with your assessment that the senior leadership team is looking at Google, looking at Amazon and saying, look, how much money these are guys are making for apps.

Leo Laporte (00:25:56):
Yep.

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:57):
Yeah. Why aren't we making all this money

Leo Laporte (00:25:59):
For apps? Yeah. We have Amazon and Bing over here. They're doing nothing. You promote 'em somehow, how can we integrate this?

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:05):
That's what widgets are. Right. Where widgets came from was the idea of repurposing the MSN content in a way that they're like, okay, we gotta get more ad dollars somehow. What if we make this part of windows? Right. And people don't be able to click on it.

Leo Laporte (00:26:20):
If you were to take a, a programming 1 0 1 course, one of the things you might create would be like a simple little app weather, apple, or app app, sorry, or application or widget or something. And it shows a picture of the sun when it's sunny and it's cloudy when it's cloudy and all that stuff. It's a simple thing to do. You integrate with online services? Microsoft has this and windows 11. It's just down in the corner where the start button button used to be. It's nice. Except that's not what that is. Right? Like that's the thing I think people like, and then you click on it and it's like, you've opened the gates of Hades. And now you're seeing some, a story about the Kardashians and someone looks great in a swimsuit and blah, blah, blah. It's this terribleness. And, and unfortunately the little cute weather widget, which everyone is not driving any revenues guys, you know? Yeah. It's the other stuff. Yeah. And that's the point of it? That's the reason it exists not to make your life a little happier.

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:13):
If they could just keep ads in widgets and MSN, I would be really happy. I'd be like, okay, let the poor people who accidentally click on that or who like it, maybe there are people who like, and click on it, let them have that. And then let us have the operating system with none of that. Right. That'd be okay.

Leo Laporte (00:27:30):
Yeah. I enjoy.

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:33):
But to me that would, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:27:36):
Like I said, I'm happy to pay. I feel like I'm already paying

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:39):
Is the argument

Leo Laporte (00:27:40):
New time. We're not a lot of money. I don't understand why I'm seeing jumpy. I'm not gonna gets what I'm trying to read an article. Don't get it.

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:46):
Yeah. Nope. We're not gonna get that. Don't get it. Like, I, I think Chris made that pretty clear in December. Like they're not gonna get that.

Leo Laporte (00:27:52):
Yeah. No, I think so too. I agree. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:27:55):
But I mean, I just feel like this is a model and it's, it's an accepted practice and I don't the thing, I guess I'm worried. So for example back in 2017, when the first ads appeared in file explorerr, there was a setting in explorerr settings, I guess, file explorerr settings that you could turn off about search provider or something, something and remove exact language. Because at the time all they were advertising was like one drive type stuff. Although the first as search providers suggest they could have third party ads for Dropbox or box or whatever. And you know, for the most part, ed just true, a edge. Like you can go in and manually turn off stuff you don't like for the most part someday though, aren't you worried? Like that's gonna disappear. You've seen what they did with the default apps, you know? Yeah. The default apps is a pretty serious interface. I mean, not being able to turn off suggestions as they call 'em is not a big step.

Mary Jo Foley (00:28:54):
Yeah. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:28:57):
All right. Listen, you Neville Chamberlain.

Mary Jo Foley (00:29:02):
The biggest, what I'm saying gets unfortunate

Leo Laporte (00:29:05):
Is happening. That's what we're saying. We

Mary Jo Foley (00:29:07):
Have bigger fish to fry guys decent,

Leo Laporte (00:29:08):
Our time, bigger fish to, I wanna talk about the purple teaming platform and then we can fry some fish, the fish fry just around the corner. As we continue with windows weekly, Paul thurrott and Mary Joe Foley. Our show today brought to you by yes, you knew it. When I said the purple teaming platform, Plex track Plex track, speaking of the they're there to end the war between the red team and the blue team Plex track is the premier cybersecurity reporting and workflow management platform. Actually, there's not a war between the red team and the blue team. We're all on the same side, but sometimes, you know, there's communications issues. You want both teams to work at peak efficiency. The red team finds the problems. The blue team fixes them. That kind of thing. We want you to win the security battle. What if you could streamline the communication across the entire security department?

Leo Laporte (00:30:01):
So every team member could do their job more efficiently. Everybody would love that from simplified data aggregation and reporting to integrated ticketing for remediation to analytics and visualizations for a board reporting, cuz the board likes to see those pretty pictures. You know they do. And you know what? They're not so bad to have for yourself too. Plex track touches every aspect of the security management workflow. You can get a real time view of your security posture by bringing all your data sources together into one powerful platform where you can triage those scanner results. Pick the ones you gotta solve, generate powerful analytics and visualizations. You can assign remediation tasks. You can attest to your posture. I love that. That's a great phrase. I can attest to our posture. It's good and track progress over time. A one satisfied Plex track customer said it better than anybody.

Leo Laporte (00:30:56):
We see Plex track as a part of our strategy to move quicker and be proactive. This is the a key. Now we have a real time view of what we need to focus on and I have an easy way of showing senior leadership. So it goes really all the way up the chain Plex track serves every aspect of the enterprise security team program with features designed to improve workflow collaboration, communication, and it works for every team. With every role for red team data aggregation, you can import all of your automated vulnerability, scanners and tools and triage and report results. At half the time you've got report templates. So you don't have to spend a lot of time hunting and pecking. You can just boom, boom, boom paste paste paste for the blue team. Man remediation never has easier. You can assign remediation tasks right on the platform or through simple integrations with the ticketing tools you already use.

Leo Laporte (00:31:50):
And you can track your progress over time very easily. And you know, it's funny cuz when we first started doing these ads, I like to mention that the C-suite likes it too. And I think, I think they realize it's really true. It's really important stakeholders wanna know what are you doing? I know cuz I'm one, right? Stakeholder communication. You can use powerful yet simple analytics to attest to your security posture, to prioritize issues, tailor at a station and communication, the needs of both team members and the C-suite C-suite needs to be comfortable conf it. And by the way, they'll, they'll give you a better budget if you, if you're doing right, right. You'll also love the continuous purple team assessment begin purple teaming or power up your current strategies with runbooks. That's one of the tools that becomes a Plex track, the best in industry tool for test plan execution, it's actually fun to use.

Leo Laporte (00:32:45):
That's really the bottom line Plex track improves the entire security engagement life cycle. By making it easy to generate security reports, deliver them security, track the issues to completion straight from the platforms. So security teams of sizes and maturities can maximize efficiency and effectiveness. Book a demo today to learn more about the product and how it can support proactive security work in your organization. I know a lot of times you go no, not another tool, not another tool, but this is one you're gonna love. You're gonna actually want to use and it's gonna make your life easier. Tripex track free for a month. See how it can change your is a security professional. Simply go to Plex, track.com/twit claim. Your free month. Yes, the board will love those pretty pictures too. P E X T R a C Plex track.com/t w I T one month free waiting for you. Plex track.com/twit. Thank you. Plex track for support and weekly. You support us too, by the way you listeners and viewers, you support us too. When you go to that address so that they know you saw it here. Plex track.com/twit. Don't forget the slash twit. Thank you. Plex track. Getting back on track. Yes. With windows weekly.

Leo Laporte (00:34:03):
That was all the first bullet item. Yeah. Yeah. But you know what? I've got good news for you. Yes. If you're using windows 10, I know you're listening to this and you're thinking, man, I don't wanna upgrade to this thing. It's terrible. But you don't have to because Microsoft is gonna bring all the most terrible stuff from windows 11 to windows 10. You gonna stay right where you are. This isn't the search we were talking about last week. Is it? Yeah, it is. It's coming to win as ten two. Oh yeah. Oh son of a. Yep. Oh man. No terrible thing is too terrible. Not to share with everybody. No one should have to suffer alone. That's right. That's right.

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:38):
No. And you know, what's funny. I was saying this to Paul when Microsoft announced these search changes last week, they said it would be coming to the release preview channel first, but it never said it was coming to windows 10. I'm positive. It never said that in the blog post. And then when it debuted on Monday, it's like, oh, by the way, this is going to the release preview channel. But it's going to windows 10, right? I'm like right. What

Leo Laporte (00:35:02):
Mary Jo Foley loved it so much. We're gonna put it in windows 10.

Mary Jo Foley (00:35:06):
Yeah. So if you thought like Paul just said, if you think you're escaping some of these things by staying on windows 10, you're not, you are not, this is all that stuff you're

Leo Laporte (00:35:16):
Talking about. Still supported. Can we just use windows stuff?

Mary Jo Foley (00:35:19):
If you wanna pay a lot of money for the extended security, be updates who could keep running windows seven.

Leo Laporte (00:35:24):
I want a version of windows that doesn't have an app store. Doesn't have ads. Doesn't have like S mode doesn't

Mary Jo Foley (00:35:30):
Have no, this, these changes are the ones. When you click on the search icon in the task bar or in the start menu, you you're gonna get this thing that looks like MSN, right? It's gonna have like image of the day and it's gonna have what, what famous birthdays are there and what holidays are there and all this stuff. And yes, you can turn it off as an individual and administrator, which is good. But why are they doing this? Like why are they cluttering up the search box instead of just fixing search? Right.

Leo Laporte (00:36:05):
Why, why, why,

Mary Jo Foley (00:36:06):
Why? Yeah. so yeah, that's unfortunate. I, I was very sadly surprised. Just see that. And if it's in the release preview channel, it means it is definitely coming. Like the, when something is in the RP channel, it's not just like the dev channel where maybe it will and maybe it won't show up it. This means it's coming and it's coming pretty soon. Right? It's gonna come out. That's right. In a cumulative update. It's you're just suddenly gonna get this new search experience.

Leo Laporte (00:36:37):
So tell people what it is and why you hate it. So,

Mary Jo Foley (00:36:43):
You know, the reason, okay. The reason I hate it is I just feel like they're focusing on the wrong things, like search in windows 11 and windows 10. It's not a great experience in windows. It doesn't work that well. And now they're gonna add all this clutter to it. And this is, this is where you're gonna start seeing ads, because they've already said, they're gonna show you big rewards in there. And you can just see, talk about slippery slope. You can see, they'll definitely sell ads to people through that. Somehow like if you click on what's the anniversary date today for some big event, worldwide, a page will come a up with them as send and there'll be ads on that page. There will be, and this is how they're gonna monetize through the search engine. I think that one is much more offensive. And in your face than like this thing we just talked about with file explorerr. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:37:33):
This

Mary Jo Foley (00:37:33):
Is about the center, right?

Leo Laporte (00:37:36):
This is the, the very nature of the slippery slow. If you're running windows 11 today, at least. And I think windows 10 would be pretty identical and you do windows key plus S you can bring up the search interface without any search results yet. And you can kind of see yeah. Where it is today. It's, it's, it's mostly productivity focused. You can search apps, documents, web, et cetera. They have recent apps you've run. And then there's the, but there's this, this is the slippery slope, but there's is little corner there where it has quick searches right today in history. I think, which I think you said new movies translate and markets today. And I don't think most people

Mary Jo Foley (00:38:12):
It's very subtle, right? Like today

Leo Laporte (00:38:14):
It is subtle. What I was gonna say was no one, I don't think most people would complain about this. No. The thing is what you're doing. If you click on one of those things is you're running some MSN thing or a Bing search or a Bing service or whatever. You know, you may not be offended by that. Like, that's not a big, big deal, but I think that's part of the problem. It's, it's, it's just like the first inroad and the thing they're gonna start doing more explicitly is first of all, they're gonna make these big colorful things with graphics, you know, fun things like, Hey, everyone likes puppies. There's some puppy photos, you know? Yeah. And it's the point is to drive you to these MSN and Bing services, which, you know, again, okay. You know, however you may feel about that, the good news is we'll be able to turn it off, you know, for now, but we, or, you know, we'll see. And I will cuz I that's gross to me, but you know, again, you, you don't escalate to deescalate, you know? Yeah. Yeah. And the only, only way we could ever turn this around would be, I guess if enough people didn't use it, which is probably the only way. And maybe if enough people complained or the right people. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:39:25):
Maybe, maybe probably. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:39:31):
Yep.

Mary Jo Foley (00:39:33):
So you're gonna hear about this Leo on your

Leo Laporte (00:39:36):
Show,

Mary Jo Foley (00:39:36):
Like I know this is just gonna show up in windows 10. I know. And people are gonna be like, wait a minute. What just happened here?

Leo Laporte (00:39:41):
Yeah. Yeah. We, well, I refer you to last week's conversation for the whole. Yeah. But you know, the, when this does get enabled for people, the tip is gonna, we'll talk about this on the show at the time, whenever it happens is gonna be, well, how do I turn this thing off?

Mary Jo Foley (00:39:56):
You know, if you wanna,

Leo Laporte (00:39:57):
Some people are gonna look at this and love it. I mean, there's no doubt about it. There's something for everybody. You know, one of the things I found over a couple of signature PC sets of tests was some people like crap wear, you know, they feel like they're getting more on their computer. They're like, this is great. You know? They're not the most majority. Some people like crap wear no, it's, it's, that's what we file. Like one, one outta 10 seem to think was fine.

Mary Jo Foley (00:40:24):
If there are people who like MSN there are, and there are people like being rewards. There are people like all this stuff for sure. And

Leo Laporte (00:40:31):
I

Mary Jo Foley (00:40:31):
Don't have any problem with

Leo Laporte (00:40:32):
That

Mary Jo Foley (00:40:32):
Stuff existed.

Leo Laporte (00:40:33):
No. Yeah, of course. It's fine. I just, I just don't want it. They face, I don't use Bing for anything. Yeah. And I

Mary Jo Foley (00:40:41):
It's search built into windows part of it. Right. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:40:44):
Well, right. I mean, I don't use it on purpose.

Mary Jo Foley (00:40:47):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:40:48):
I guess is what I meant. Hmm. Okay. Okay. now I've been seeing a lot about this direct storage thing. People are excited about this. I don't understand what it is. So explain. Right. So when the Xbox series X and S launched, and that must have been what, the end of 2020, yeah. That terrible year. We'll never talk about again among the many things that Microsoft did in these consoles to improve the, before was implement this kind of, well, basically it's just a specific type of SSD storage hardware and interface. Just to make the loading of content off of disc cap and faster, it sounds kind of obvious we've had SSDs for a long time, but they kind of formalized this. And you know, one of the benefits of a console of course, is that, you know, it's a, it's a known quantity.

Leo Laporte (00:41:39):
It's not gonna change. You don't have all different configurations of this thing. So it's kind of a nice thing to have. But they announced actually before those consoles launched right before they launched that they were gonna bring this technology at the time to windows 10, we didn't know windows. I don't think even Microsoft knew windows 11 was gonna happen. So direct storages coming to windows 10 was the story. And then windows hap 11 happened. And one of the things they announced right around the windows 11 reveal was, Hey direct storage is coming to windows 11. You know, it's like, okay, but what about windows 10? You know? And they were kind of silent on that for a while. And then eventually they came clean. Yeah. Yeah. We're gonna bring it to windows 10, two. It's gonna be better on windows 11, you know?

Leo Laporte (00:42:17):
Okay. Why like, why, why wouldn't it be the same? And they're still being very vague about that. But direct storage is now available for windows 10 and 11. They are still saying vaguely, it will, the better experiences on windows 11. And they cite is a strong word cause they really don't explain why, but basically there are storage optimization advantages on windows 11. I have no idea what that means, but the point of this is that if you are a, a game developer, you can now release games to take advantage of direct storage. You know, windows PCs are different from consoles because we do have all those different configurations. So it does require a, a specific set of not just hardware, but matched drivers that meet these performance characteristics that are necessary to deliver a certain baseline of performance. And the best experience actually is gonna be with the new PC, which I think is probably the real reason they're talking about windows 11, cuz that's, what's gonna be on those new PCs. But the point of this is that at what are we talking about here about a year and a half, almost a year and a half. We've had this on the console as of, I think it was yesterday, it's now available technically available in windows again, assuming you have a piece that meets those cool. Those standards. Yeah. Nice. So it is gonna be fast basically. It's that's the point? That's the whole point, right? It's gotta be fast. It's gotta be fast. It's gotta be fast.

Leo Laporte (00:43:43):
Ah, steam Dick, which I thought was a, I kind of snuck some Xbox. He like stories in the, I see this, I see this was happening. It peel off, spread it out. Yeah. It's kinda like a, a little ad for Microsoft editor in, in your, it is it's exactly like that. Its oh you notice that. Okay. Yeah, I did. So. Yeah, no it's fair enough. Yeah. So valve shipped the stream deck a little while ago. This is running Linux. It's gotten pretty reviews. You know, it's kind of low end in some ways for a PC or gaming PC anyway, but it seems to work pretty well. But one of the stories around this semi-open platform is you'll be able to install windows if that's what you want. That's what I want. That's what I want. Yeah. So you want those windows drivers and those drivers are now available.

Leo Laporte (00:44:36):
So technically I think as of now I, I, you can install it. There's no way to dual boot between Linux and steam west, which is the Lenox based system. Maybe that will happen in the future. And there are still drivers to come. So there's still some stuff that's not there, but I think it's like GPU, wifi, Bluetooth, and some other things are available. But there's more to come so nice. And then of course you, you have to update the bios and all that kind of blah, blah, blah, whatever. So yeah. Anyway, it's happening. So if you are interested in steam deck and specifically from a windows perspective, it's happening, KKI, I'm happy to hear that, you know, one fewer Linux install in the world,

Mary Jo Foley (00:45:24):
I dunno, is a win.

Leo Laporte (00:45:26):
No, the truth is the fact that the, the steam deck runs Linux primarily is been good for Lennox gaming cuz that all these games are now available on Lennox. I don't know if you followed the, I don't think I have anything about this in the notes, but the Google had their game event yesterday kind of dry and boring. But one of the things they were talking about was porting windows, games to Linux and all the work they've done to make that much, much easier. And because they, this is basically the basis of stadia which now they're opening to third parties and you know, yada, yada, yada. But anyway, I, I suspect a lot of that work will benefit the, the steam deck as well. Hmm. Just make it because, you know, game makers, target windows obviously, but if you can bring it to Lennox kind of frictionlessly yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:46:13):
Why not? I mean, the thing is it's a PC, so I'm not surprised you can install windows on it. I mean, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Do you have to buy a license? Of course. Okay. So, but don't worry, Leo, even with that license that you buy, you still get it. That's all I care about. You're gonna get the full experience. I don't want you think it's a so less of an to get everything. No. Yep. Now let's move to Microsoft 365. Let's see if Paul can get some gaming into this. Actually what I wanna hear from this is how Mary Jo can make sense of what they just announced. It's like 1100 different things.

Mary Jo Foley (00:46:49):
Yeah. Okay. Well, First's crazy. Let's talk about first. Let's talk about what I, I think should have been the lead of the show to me. Yes. Not the odd thing. No, April 5th. There's going to be an event that Microsoft is holding. Panos is keying. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:47:05):
Cico it's

Mary Jo Foley (00:47:06):
About windows.

Leo Laporte (00:47:08):
Should we stream that? Is it gonna be a big announcements of any kind?

Mary Jo Foley (00:47:12):
So, okay. So we don't know what they're announcing. The title of the event is windows powers, the future of hybrid work. Okay. And it's gonna, Skip's a business event

Leo Laporte (00:47:22):
Say I was gonna say, if that doesn't sell it, I don't know what will just took that off my list. Fall asleep before

Mary Jo Foley (00:47:29):
You

Leo Laporte (00:47:29):
The title,

Mary Jo Foley (00:47:30):
But guys Panos. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:47:32):
Right.

Mary Jo Foley (00:47:33):
Okay. So it's not just gonna be, I's kinda hoping it was gonna be system center 2022, but I guess that probably isn't gonna be that, but I don't know what they're gonna announce. I, I was thinking of all the things they could announce at this. So what's a business oriented event, so it's not gonna be games. Right. but still you could see them finding a way to talk about things like teams, consumer, because they could talk about how teams is, you know, working in the, in the enterprise and how and why they added teams consumer to windows 11. So there could be some extensions into the consumer space with this event. I also think the timing is right. Maybe they're gonna talk about one outlook at this thing. Right? I mean, we keep pairing spring as for the new version of outlook and that has a direct connection to windows. So like maybe that's where they're gonna announce one outlook. I think

Leo Laporte (00:48:27):
They probably announce it with ads inside a windows, but that's another way they could do it.

Mary Jo Foley (00:48:31):
That's another way they could do it. It says at the bottom of the landing page. So the landing page for this is microsoft.com/h us windows business event. Right. It's it's, that's the working title

Leo Laporte (00:48:43):
That is exciting.

Mary Jo Foley (00:48:45):
I know bottom says three breakout sessions on windows tools, productivity, collaboration, management, and security. So they're gonna talk about those themes for sure.

Leo Laporte (00:48:55):
Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:48:56):
But I keep coming back to Panos. If it, you know, if this was the main keynote or was somebody like on the business side? No, that makes

Leo Laporte (00:49:03):
It much more interesting. I agree, right? Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:49:05):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:49:07):
Well, Panos in what capacity from windows or service or

Mary Jo Foley (00:49:11):
Both? No, not from surface. This is not a surface event.

Leo Laporte (00:49:15):
Definitely. Well, but a lot of today's announcements involve surface. It's a windows 11 event, right? Cuz it has the foldy paper.

Mary Jo Foley (00:49:21):
It's a windows 11 event,

Leo Laporte (00:49:22):
The Kleenex, the windows 11 Kleenex. That's what, but you cry into when you can't stand the ads anyway, blue

Mary Jo Foley (00:49:28):
Kleenex

Leo Laporte (00:49:28):
Actually you zoom in, I think there's an ad right day, right into somewhere it's yeah. Yeah. If you can see

Mary Jo Foley (00:49:34):
This it's Kleenex

Leo Laporte (00:49:34):
Right there, the future I've

Mary Jo Foley (00:49:39):
Speculating. They could announce the loop app. You know, that whole thing that they're building, that's like notion they could, this could be where they finally say, okay, we already showed and talked about it at ignite last fall, but maybe now it's available in preview or something. Maybe

Leo Laporte (00:49:54):
I am gonna beat a dead horse, but I love beating this dead horse. What about this is when they announce virtualized windows? Like for real,

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:05):
I already

Leo Laporte (00:50:06):
Have it. I know, but it's so expensive. Like maybe, oh,

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:09):
Okay. No, that's not a bad guess. Right? Because I keep hearing, they're gonna talk about windows 365, the cloud PC stuff. And one of the next steps for that is making it available to consumers. Yes. That is like something they said, they're going to do course

Leo Laporte (00:50:23):
This is business,

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:24):
But it is, this is a business event, you know,

Leo Laporte (00:50:26):
When I see other people offering this now fairly inexpensively, not as much as Microsoft's charging. So I wonder

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:33):
Seems I think they have to work out the kinks a little bit more before they offer it to consumers. But I think, yeah, that's, that is a fair point to bring up that. They'll definitely talk about windows 365 because this, that, cause this is

Leo Laporte (00:50:43):
About work from home, right? The future of hybrid work, we must have talked about this last year at the windows 365 launch. But really, I don't think what PE maybe I'm missing the point, but I, I don't think people looking for a windows environment and a window, you know, per se, like I, is it like remote delivery of apps, the end game here, you know, you're using Linux or a Mac or a Chromebook or something or a web browser and you get the app. Right. I mean, isn't that kinda,

Mary Jo Foley (00:51:11):
Yeah. So the way to, way to the best way I've heard to think about this is it's your, it's your PC in the cloud. It's your PC virtualize. So if you live in an app, like say you live in teams or you live in tweet deck or whatever, that's your environment that there re in the cloud, it's not just windows by itself. Right? It's like if when you shut down and start up the next day, you, everything is exactly where you left. Not just your files right. Where you left them, but everything is like, right. You're how you left it right there. Right? Yeah. So that's the right way to think about it is it's your cl it's your PC in the cloud represented virtually that's that's what cloud PC is. 

Speaker 3 (00:51:52):
Hmm.

Mary Jo Foley (00:51:54):
But yeah, this is not the idea that they were trying with windows 10 X, which was when we were hearing about them. Like having virtualization three different ways inside of windows. That's not this, that's not the same thing as this, Remember that whole thing when 32 apps were gonna be virtualized and kept on

Leo Laporte (00:52:12):
Container. Yeah. But you know, in a world in which windows 10 existed, the ability to blast windows apps or an entire environment down to that desktop too, would make sense. Right. That, that makes that constrained version of windows make a little more sense. Right. If you could have that capacity. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:52:29):
Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. I think we'll hear windows 365. We'll definitely hear security. Probably some more defender, more things called defender, whatever. Like cuz they keep calling everything defender.

Leo Laporte (00:52:40):
Is there gonna be an aquarium with Alex Kitman in it?

Mary Jo Foley (00:52:43):
No, I believe there will be nothing about the metaverse I'm hoping, although I saw somebody else speculate, they're gonna show the, a teams avatars thing and the metaverse again, because they think this is what they need to keep showing people. So they think they have a metaverse story. So maybe we will see that again in

Leo Laporte (00:53:00):
This we're gotta keep that dream alive for sure.

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:02):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (00:53:06):
Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:07):
Anyway, I'm I'm excited about it. April 5th. It's a one and a half hour event starts I think at 8:00 AM Pacific. So 11 Eastern. What day? It's a Tuesday. A

Leo Laporte (00:53:18):
Tuesday. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:19):
It's a Tuesday. Yeah, We'll see. We'll see Panos. Not in as usual guys. We'll see him talking about business, which will be interesting and weird.

Leo Laporte (00:53:33):
You think maybe this is a new role. Like maybe they want to expand Panos presentation.

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:40):
He's in charge of all of windows, right? Like right. Windows, client. Not just like consumer stuff, but he's in charge of business stuff too.

Leo Laporte (00:53:47):
But Microsoft 365 is so much bigger than windows is. That's not right. It is. It is interesting that it's a Panos event. It is maybe, maybe. Well I'm

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:57):
Sure there'll be others pitch

Leo Laporte (00:53:58):
Guy.

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:58):
There'll be other people. No, there'll be other people keying too. I bet. Right. Like it won't just be him. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:54:05):
All right. Hmm.

Mary Jo Foley (00:54:07):
Stay tuned. We don't know what it is. So we're all just throwing ideas out at this point because nobody's under NDA on this and we're all

Leo Laporte (00:54:13):
ING. Yeah. This, you know, maybe we should, I don't know.

Mary Jo Foley (00:54:18):
I know hard to say. It's hard to say if you guys care about the, no, we, that thing they were showing with teams, teams in the, do you care about teams and the metaverse stuff? You know those legless icon.

Leo Laporte (00:54:30):
Yeah. The avatars avatars. Yeah. We can have a, our own burning man and

Mary Jo Foley (00:54:34):
The ghost. I mean the loop stuff is pretty cool. If you care about notion, you're gonna care about loop.

Leo Laporte (00:54:39):
Yeah. Yeah. It's their version of notion, right? Yeah, it

Mary Jo Foley (00:54:42):
Is. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:54:43):
And Monarch. So I don't know. There's some, yeah, there's some, there's a story here. There's stuff to talk about. Yeah. It's focused on hybrid work. So I think that's kind of interesting. It is. What does that mean? And that's where the world is going. So there there's smart be well so I alluded to this earlier, but they just announced a million new features for Microsoft 365, especially teams today, all around the theme of hybrid work. It's interest thing that two weeks or whatever ahead of this event, they decided to announce now instead of waiting for this event. Yeah. So maybe the, because with the Panos thing, maybe this is, there's more how they're going to improve windows for the same thing. You know, we got the office stuff. Now maybe we're gonna hear about the windows stuff.

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:25):
Yeah. Maybe the, a lot of the stuff that got, so today they announced like Paul just said a million features for for teams basically. And yeah. If you go back and look at the list of what they announced today, they, they had already announced 95% of this at ignite. Like this is a repeat of ignite. Well, it's, it's just starting to come out

Leo Laporte (00:55:46):
Against you know,

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:47):
It is right. They're giving us dates now because at ignite they talked about like the, our outlook RSVP capability and, and teams front row, they talked about all these things, but they didn't give us dates for most of them. And now not every single thing, but most of these things they're saying are going to roll out in Q2, which starts in April. Right. So it could be connected to this event, you know, it's like, okay, we told you that it was coming and here's the stuff it's rolling out. It's April. 

Leo Laporte (00:56:17):
You know, yeah. I wonder if this isn't a mini, you know, they're not doing a second ignite, thank God. And maybe this is just a mini mid-season milestone for that kind of stuff. You know, that might have been in the other night could something

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:30):
Like that could, it could be

Leo Laporte (00:56:32):
Okay. All right. Yep. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:36):
Maybe as we get closer, we'll get some good leaks.

Leo Laporte (00:56:39):
Yeah. Scoops cats

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:40):
Looking right. Everybody's looking for stuff. Right. So you

Leo Laporte (00:56:44):
Might find, I feel like the office related stuff is pretty clear. Cut. It's mostly teams, like you said, it is now I'm curious if there's gonna be some windows.

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:53):
Well, they've said it's a glimpse about the future of windows. Like they said, windows in. Oh, in the, there you go. So, well,

Leo Laporte (00:57:00):
Maybe we'll see V2 for windows 11,

Mary Jo Foley (00:57:03):
Whatever that looks like. Yeah. I feel like that's just gonna be a collection of all these features that they keep rolling out before October. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:57:12):
They do such it. Yeah. And, and a bunch of ads. So you know, and

Mary Jo Foley (00:57:15):
A bunch of ads on top. Yeah. Because you can't have enough of those. Never

Leo Laporte (00:57:19):
Can have enough. Let's see. Mike CF teams is five years old. That's

Mary Jo Foley (00:57:25):
Cute. I know. Can you believe

Leo Laporte (00:57:26):
That? Yeah. So

Mary Jo Foley (00:57:28):
It's just kind of crazy. It's like five

Leo Laporte (00:57:30):
An this like this kid you haven't seen in a while, you don't recognize him anymore. Yeah. It's it's yes. It's not the same. It used to be humble chat based collaboration solution. Yeah. And now it's like this gangly teenager with a squeaky voice and inheritance chin. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:57:47):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:57:48):
It's very strange.

Mary Jo Foley (00:57:50):
It is. But it, it was fun to kinda look back at 2017 when they started rolling this out. And at first all it was really was like Skype for business. Right. It's it was like group chat, collaboration with video. And then suddenly it became like the operating system. Right. Like it just kind of mushroomed into something much bigger. And then the pandemic happened and that really just catapulted teams were like, meteorically pretty much. So yeah, it, you know, when people say what's next, now that they've done five years, Paul answered on twittter. Of course it's gonna turn six because he so helpful. And always, always

Leo Laporte (00:58:26):
Captain obvious, just jump into the conversation.

Mary Jo Foley (00:58:30):
No one of the, one of the big things to come next for teams is gonna come and within the next week or two it's this teams connect thing, which is the idea of having a shared channel. So, you know, now if you have people who you have to keep switching context, like when I'm using with pet, I have to switch out to use teams in a different organization in order to get the full experience in the other organization, they're gonna have it so that you're sharing a channel and not have to keep doing this weird rotating between channels. So that's coming in preview like in the next week or two that's one of the biggest things coming. And then, you know, there's gonna be just more and more features. I feel like this is just gonna continue every week. We're gonna get a laundry list of features and the roadmap will be updated with a million new things. Lots of telephony stuff is gonna be coming, cuz that's a big emphasis for them with teams now replacing your company's PBX replacing the way you use carriers on phones basically. So yeah. Well, we'll see. I feel like we're just gonna be talking a lot about teams going forward as we have been for the past five years.

Leo Laporte (00:59:42):
Yep. Yep. Welcome. Welcome to the world. Welcome The teams, teams era. Yeah. And office.com redesign. Yeah. So was ignited November. I mean, at that time 17,000 announcements, literally one sentence mentioned office.com and the office app in windows 10, I guess at the time, windows 11 today. Also getting a refresh just to design refresh. And that is now live. I think it's just for commercial customers. Right. Is that true? Cause I don't see it. I'm not seeing it on my consumer account, but they finish the re yeah. Business. Yeah. Commercial customers. So

Mary Jo Foley (01:00:24):
It's really nice. And I don't, I like it.

Leo Laporte (01:00:26):
I like it too. I, I don't I don't think it's, let me just check me. Sure. I don't believe it's on the windows app, which is a bright white light

Mary Jo Foley (01:00:34):
On the phone

Leo Laporte (01:00:35):
Thing. Yeah. It's the same, same as it used to be, but yeah, so it's, it's it's just a new layout. It's kind of, it almost has tiles, but like big content sections. And when you search for stuff, now you can filter by like the application or if it's like a PDF, a meeting, an image, a video, that kind of stuff. It's it's nice. Looks nice. I wish they bring it. I use the consumer stuff more than the commercial stuff. So I kinda like, I like to see 'em bring it over there, but that will happen. It will happen soon. They

Mary Jo Foley (01:01:01):
Will. They will. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I was talking to somebody about this today and I was saying, I really love the office app, the office.com app on my phone. Yeah. That's all I use. I never use like word or PowerPoint or Excel on my phone. Right. I use that app. And even on the desktop, if I just need to do something fast, I just go to office.com like that. It's just so much, much easier, better cleaner 

Leo Laporte (01:01:26):
Quicker. Don't you wish that was the windows 11 start menu.

Mary Jo Foley (01:01:30):
Yes. Right? Yes. That would be perfect. Right?

Leo Laporte (01:01:34):
I feel guilty. It's so funny. I feel guilty using the office app. I feel like, oh no, you're supposed to have all the individual apps. No, it works great. That's no, it's fine. Mobile.

Mary Jo Foley (01:01:44):
I never use the individual

Leo Laporte (01:01:45):
Apps anymore. Thank you. Just gave me permission. I feel like, oh, I'm supposed to download everything. It's just enough.

Mary Jo Foley (01:01:50):
No, you don't have to

Leo Laporte (01:01:52):
Like, well, why do they then have separate

Mary Jo Foley (01:01:55):
Apps? Because some people need the full app.

Leo Laporte (01:01:58):
Oh, there is a difference in capabilities. Okay. Well see, I'd that's not like to understand actually. So is there, I don't even, I'm not sure

Mary Jo Foley (01:02:04):
If that's yeah, there is. Okay. There is for sure. And the office.com app also, or the office app and office.com. It has a lot of things that make you help you do tasks very simply like say you wanna sign a PDF on your phone. Right, right, right. Like just, all you have to do is click on this little thing that says, what do you wanna do? Sign a PDF, click on it. Auto generates your signature and you sign something. That's nice.

Leo Laporte (01:02:28):
Isn't

Mary Jo Foley (01:02:29):
It? Yeah. That's how that should work. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:02:31):
This is how nice it is. I, I, I still get, I Samsung sent one of these recently different comp Microsoft has done this. Actually we need you to sign this, document it and send it back and they send it via email and I'm like, okay. So what do I do? I, I, I could print it out, sign it, scan it, and then send it back electronically. What I often do is I'm like, okay, I gotta open this email on my surface device with the pen, sign it in word and then, or you know yeah. Word or actually, or in a PDF reader. And and then to send it back. But yeah, you're right. It's just, you get it on your phone. You're like done, you know,

Mary Jo Foley (01:03:03):
It's nice. So great. It is.

Leo Laporte (01:03:07):
Let's take a little break then we're gonna talk about hardware. We've got Xbox still to come. Paul thurrott Mary Joe Foley. Our show today brought to you by hacker rank. Everybody knows hacker ranks a great place to go, to get a gig in the in the technology world. Did you know though, they have a tool for helping you hire in the technology world? I actually could have hacker rank cuz I like solving the hacker rank problems, which is fun between deadlines and frustrating interview tools that aren't set up for technical interviews. If you're doing tech hiring and you're trying to conduct a tech interview, it is kind of a time sync. It's kind of annoying, but we can make this easier. You don't have to spend the first 10 minutes of your interview, just trying to set up an environment to share code from a dozen documents that waste your time and your candidates time.

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Leo Laporte (01:05:41):
What's the latest, sorry. Intel is investing big in Europe. It's Paul. Paul are you are, he might be muted. Oh, you're muted muted. I see his lips moving, but there's no one home. Okay. Sorry. I muted myself during the ad. Sorry. No problem. Yeah. So 30 they've announced at an investment of at least 36 billion in Europe. 19 billion of that for new German fabrication facility 13 billion for an expansion of existing Ireland facilities and in whatever amount of money on either new or updated facilities, every doing this, we've gotta, we've gotta get outta China and start making stuff all over the world, right? Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, this is kind of incredible. I mean it's yeah. I mean, they're just spending money. They're spending money. This is prop up the economy trying to save the company. And this is what they need to do. I think it's the right, right thing to do. Go do Joe Mary Jo, there is a question in the chat room. They wanna know if that thing over your left shoulder is a Terminator's skull That's is it a plate? What is that? Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (01:06:53):
No. So it's like a green glass vase.

Leo Laporte (01:06:57):
It's a vase. Okay. It's a Terminator of a Terminator skull, cause

Mary Jo Foley (01:07:02):
It's not a Terminator skull. Surprisingly it is not

Leo Laporte (01:07:07):
Burn down. And the only thing left will be that skull. So you say, so

Mary Jo Foley (01:07:11):
You say, so I say, I know I don't want people to really focus in on it, but

Leo Laporte (01:07:15):
For ring tone, is that sound from terminated to

Mary Jo Foley (01:07:20):
You guys know me all too? Well,

Leo Laporte (01:07:23):
They're on me. More Lenovo laptops. I was surprised. I thought we'd heard it all at mobile world Congress. They have so much stuff I did too. So I, I think Intel staggered 12th gen rollout is what triggered this because normally they probably would NA us all at front. So they announced new X, one S Z series, which is brand new X 13 S and updated T series at CS. Yes. And then this past week they announced new versions of the X 13 X, 13 yoga, and then the think pad L, which is kind of the four online, they're all 12th gen Adobe voice, full sheet, web cams, by the way, which is amazing wifi C et cetera, et cetera. So most of them offer battery options, which I think is kind of cool. You have two different battery sizes so you can opt for better battery blade. Get the big battery. Always do I do anyway. And they're think pads, you know, think pads. Yeah, I loves, yeah. Yeah. All that kind of stuff. So that's good's good. Good. And wait a minute. What? There's a new $800 webcam.

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:33):
I was like, wait until Leo's a wait,

Leo Laporte (01:08:35):
What? Wait,

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:36):
What? Yeah, that was one of the announcements today in this big hybrid work thing they announced today, right? Surface hub, two smart camera. So it's only for the surface hub, two S oh the reason they say it costs $800 is it's their first AI camera. So

Leo Laporte (01:08:56):
Did you have an apple logo on it? What, what, what, what

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:58):
Exactly?

Leo Laporte (01:08:59):
I think they figure, if you own a surface hub, you can afford $800

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:03):
From can, you can afford it, right? Yeah. Well, there's a Terra flop of compute power in this thing.

Leo Laporte (01:09:09):
It sounds like a lot. I don't know,

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:12):
12 megapixel,

Leo Laporte (01:09:12):
Don't worry. It's it's seven 20 P.

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:18):
And so what it can do is it automatically compensates when things change in the view of the camera. So say you're in a big room with a bunch of people and people leave, you know, there's like gaps. They it'll

Leo Laporte (01:09:30):
It'll, it'll zoom

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:31):
In configure. It'll reconfigure what you see. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:09:33):
That's cool.

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:34):
See that. All right. That's cool. Yeah. Okay. But $800 also, and only works with the surface hub to us.

Leo Laporte (01:09:42):
No, but these conference room spaces are so expensive and everything they, they are in there. I think this is just, no, it's true. If you charge less, they'd go. Why is it so cheap?

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:50):
That's a good point.

Leo Laporte (01:09:52):
I mean, it's crazy what people spend on these conference rooms.

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:56):
That's very true. Yeah. And if you can afford an 85 inch surface hub to us, right. You can probably afford this camera. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it, I was surprised this is what the surface team announced because we knew Stevie Beit was gonna be part of today's set of announcements. And I was guessing they were gonna announce the surface display, especially after apple just announced a display. I'm like, yeah, that's what they're gonna do. They said they were gonna do this two years ago and they never did, but no, they, they announced

Leo Laporte (01:10:26):
This camera a little thing happen in between though. Right. You know, surface two S was released right before the pandemic. Now they thousand dollars screen sitting in buildings is using. Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (01:10:39):
No. And then they also never completed the vision of that product. Remember it was supposed to be a modular thing and you could replace it with the guts that were gonna be surfaced to X.

Leo Laporte (01:10:48):
Yeah. Compute what they call it, a compute

Mary Jo Foley (01:10:51):
Module, comput engine module, or something. Yeah. That never happened at all. Because again, the pandemic happened right after they shipped to us. Well, they still do it. We don't even know whenever you ask them, is that still the plan? Are you guys still gonna do that with the surface hub? They're like we'll we'll see.

Leo Laporte (01:11:09):
Maybe, well remember that was something existing customers had driven them to do because they had existing surface one hub ones and they wanted them to all, to work together. Yep. And then they probably did the work to make that happen. At least some of it. And then the pandemic happened and then no one was in the office for 18 months to two years or whatever. Yeah. And I'm sure, I mean, I'm sure they're start. Is there anybody out there still interest this? I mean, I bet they don't even know for sure.

Mary Jo Foley (01:11:35):
Yeah. You know, it's weird because I feel like even during the pandemic, they claim, they were still backlogged on orders for the surface hub. Like they were so far behind in filling them that they were still filling them through the pandemic. I, and now I don't know with component shortages and everything I else. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:11:54):
I don't know. All these CFOs are getting this bill, you know, for $25,000. Like, what is this thing? Did we just put a screen in a building? No. One's using like, yeah. You order it two years ago. Remember?

Mary Jo Foley (01:12:06):
Yeah. But now that people are starting to come back to work you gotta wonder if Microsoft is gonna be like, okay, we, you just put that vision on pause. Now we're gonna kind of come out with surface two hub, two X, we're gonna come out with the display, the standalone surface display. I don't know. Maybe they will, or maybe they've moved on and they're not doing that anymore. I don't know.

Leo Laporte (01:12:27):
They we had heard about a surface hub camera. I mean, it must be three years ago and I was literally time ago. Yeah. And it was USBC base and, and the surface hub had around its top and inside edges, a number of USB ports. And the idea was you could put multiple cameras on there, I guess. Yep. And maybe we could also use them with PCs. I mean, there was all this talk about what this was gonna be. And I feel like this new thing, they had two years to kind of sit back and think about it. It was like, how about we put one camera and it has a wide angle lens and we can do distortion, correction, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. And maybe they kind of replace the old idea.

Mary Jo Foley (01:13:05):
Maybe, maybe, maybe, yeah. Zach, Zach Bowden, net window central said the code name. I, I have forgotten this, but it was Perry. Remember that, like that, that was the name that we heard for the surface camera. Like you said three years ago.

Leo Laporte (01:13:18):
Yeah. It was

Mary Jo Foley (01:13:18):
A long time ago. P R I yep.

Leo Laporte (01:13:21):
Think before, at times as we know, say

Mary Jo Foley (01:13:23):
It was, it was, but yeah. I, I mean, I'm sure this thing is a beautiful piece of hardware that can do amazing things because you know, they've had a lot of time to work on it and I just, I just kind of was like, Hey, I thought you guys were gonna do something else, like a surface monitor or display or something.

Leo Laporte (01:13:40):
Well, I there's still this April 5th event. Right. I mean, yeah. You know, we'll see a windows display might make more sense for that event.

Mary Jo Foley (01:13:50):
That's true. That's true. Maybe

Leo Laporte (01:13:53):
I have heard nothing about it, but you never know

Mary Jo Foley (01:13:55):
Same. Yeah. It's possible.

Leo Laporte (01:13:59):
Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (01:14:00):
Okay. It's all possible.

Leo Laporte (01:14:02):
Yeah. I mean, I think we're kind of still trying to figure out what back to work's gonna look like. I know we are, everybody's saying come back to the office, but a lot of people are saying, oh, for my dead body.

Mary Jo Foley (01:14:12):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:14:13):
And I bet you we'd end up doing this hybrid thing that they're talking about

Mary Jo Foley (01:14:17):
And yeah, me too.

Leo Laporte (01:14:18):
Yeah, for sure. So then something like this becomes even more important because you, a lot of employees are remote, so you have some, yeah. Some remote. We, we, we didn't go through any of the details of the announcement today, but among the seven, 1500 things, they announced were many things designed to make those hybrid meetings better. So you've got some people in the room, some people not in the room, what do you see, depending on what screen you're looking at? That's all, you know, they've had time to kind of work through this stuff. So it's all a big part of the, that hybrid work story. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah. And of course many people just wanna stay home and play Xbox. And for that, thank you. Thank you. We have Paul thurrott and your Xbox news. God waited like 40 minutes fast.

Mary Jo Foley (01:15:07):
Come on. You've already given us a preview

Leo Laporte (01:15:10):
Speed. Preview is not Xbox. Let's be clear. There is a halo TV series debuting on paramount plus on March 24th, which means I'm gonna have to pay for paramount plus. And they just released the final trailer. It looks, it looks awesome. I saw one review, I guess some people get it. Or I saw one review that said master chief was great, but the show itself wasn't I don't know. I think if you're a halo fan special effects look good, you know, you gotta watch it. Yeah, yeah. Could be great. Looks good to me. I mean, if you're familiar with halo, it, everything looks right. Although, oddly, it's not, I don't believe it's even in this trailer, but it was in an earlier image, the woman who did the voice for Cortana in the games and on the, you know, windows phone and everything is playing Cortana in this, which I think, you know, as a fan, that's awesome.

Leo Laporte (01:16:03):
But she doesn't have like a blue, you know, aura about her, like, you know, in the, in the games, which it's little unfortunate, but as far as the, like the ship designs and the costumes and the aliens and all that stuff dead on. Perfect. And then you get the halo music at the end, which is really nice. You're gonna have to subscribe to paramount plus though, just beyond our, yeah. There's always a downside. Yeah. But it looks like the game, but it's, it's it's live action. Yeah. Cause it does look lot like you're in the game. I mean, exactly. That's interesting. Oh, there's a person. There's a human, It's a ring world though, right? Yeah. Why does it look like a planet?

Leo Laporte (01:16:53):
This a holy universe. You know this, not just the halo planets. Oh, I see. Also, apparently it was filmed in the same place as the Mandalorian. Oh, on a, on a green screen stage in Culver city. Yeah, absolutely. This might be good. That's the point in saving humanity. Oh, that's what's her name? Isn't it from battle star Lac. Is that Trish? Oh, I don't Trish sheer looked like a no, it's not that. Oh, it's I know who it is. It's no, I it's another person I know. Okay. Alright. She was okay. Oh, and, and that's the guy from Westworld. Yeah. I don't know any actor's names I needed to mark people's names protecting, do you? No, not really. I should read people magazine while I'm standing in the grocery store. Well, pretty soon you be able to get that right. The windows 11 task bar. Yeah. Thank goodness. Bikini rich content coming soon. Oh look, he really does look like master chief though. That's kind of cool things. Blow up things, jump outta airplanes. Are you gonna crank up the, the sound here

Speaker 4 (01:18:06):
Where

Leo Laporte (01:18:11):
He just does? He doesn't have a parachute. Did you notice that? Oh, there you go. There's the halo sound. You can feel the, the chills. I, you know what, it's funny when I hear that music, I do. That's so funny. You're right. I always thought this would make a great movie. And of course today things are done in the longer format. You know, Netflix style shows, but Mandalorian yep. Filled in the same places. Mandalorian. Well, it looked just like it. Didn't it like this? Yeah. It's all a great tattoo. No, it's right. That's exciting. That's exciting. I can't wait. There's some good gaming, new Mary Jo. You gonna get excited about that. Can I, it'll be a nice preview for your your move through the entire master chief collection and then you can play ALO infinite wrap it up. Oh, so excited.

Leo Laporte (01:19:06):
Two or three gaming right there. Xbox game pass for March. Yeah. So it was the odds of March yesterday. So we got another dump of games that we'll be getting through Xbox game pass across PC console and cloud for the rest of the month. I don't see anything in there, honestly for me personally, but you know, shredders, I can't pronounce that tainted grail. Zeroscape Norco F one, 2020 21 Cru Kings. Supposed to be pretty good. I might play that. Yeah. I don't actually don't yeah, none of these really register with me, but, but there you go. Now, holy, the dungeon of NA holy book. I know like I, I week I told you, I read the there's a book called I I'm gonna call, I pronouncing it wrong, but it's sort of Schara, which is the Lord of the ring rip off 726 pages wrong long.

Leo Laporte (01:20:03):
Yeah. Terry Brooks. I read it in the sixth grade. Yep. I got to do a book report on it over two periods, cuz it was such a big book. I wow, nice. I did analysis of all the times. It ripped off the load of rings. I got an a plus wow, whatever this is. But I met the author a couple years later and I discovered that the book is called the sort of Shrah Hanrahan Sharah. So I'm not gonna try to pronounce that name, name. I just, I just, it doesn't matter somewhere. Somebody's doing a book report on it. It doesn't a problem getting a name wrong. That's what the world's turned to come to. Yeah. yeah. So we get that. And if you are an Xbox fan, you may remember the perfect dark series perfect dark of dark zero, et cetera, et cetera.

Leo Laporte (01:20:49):
The game studio that creates it is called the initiative. They are a Microsoft actually they're doing the reboot I guess. They're do they, the Microsoft game studio doing the reboot of the perfect dark series. And we just learned that this so-called quadruple a game studio. Right? Not true. It's a quadruple it's one better. It is just as terrible as every other game studio. And so unfortunately, yeah. I mean, I, I, I, I'm starting to get the idea that game studios are just toxic and yes, it it's filled with bros. What did you expect? I don't, yeah. I don't know. Well actually what did I expect? I play Xboxs every day. Of course it's full of bros. Yeah. Yeah. You've had those conversations, I guess they've lost 34 people over the past. If it's been a year or two years year over the past year, including senior writers, the projects, they love designer technical director.

Leo Laporte (01:21:40):
So yeah. Anyway, I'm sure the perfect dark remake or whatever they're calling. It will come out still someday. But do you think Microsoft buying into this industry might have been a little bit of a mistake? Well, or you could look at it from the glass half full side of the fence. Like I always do and say, you know, oh yeah. M optimist over here. Well, so for all of the terribleness at Microsoft and all of the terribleness of video games, I mean, one of the little high points of the company for me right now is Phil. Phil, I will say Phil specter, Phil Spencer's Xbox group no Microsoft gaming. If anyone can turn this around, it's gonna be this organization. So we'll see. Look, if they could fix division blizzard, this guy should win a Nobel award at this point. I don't, I don't even know what to say anymore. That's true.

Leo Laporte (01:22:34):
We'll see. And then just two Xbox adjacent stories. I, I actually, I did mention, so I mentioned Google did their their game event yesterday. It's maybe if you're into the gaming space, you might wanna just take a look at it, see what they're doing. This is all about stadium resume. Yeah. Yeah. Well that's only actually stadium was only part of it. Which is interesting, cuz of course they're bringing Android games to windows right through the play store, which now actually we know how they're doing it. Remember when they announced this, it wasn't really clear. They said it's not streaming. So you're like, well they have to be doing something they're referring to that as super high performance emulation. Okay, fine. You know, whatever. So they're, they're also bringing basically Android apps to windows. Yeah. Which is what Microsoft is doing separately.

Leo Laporte (01:23:19):
But not with Microsoft and specifically for games. That's interesting, but they're doing it in a very Xbox's way, which I appreciate, which is that the idea is you're on your phone or a tablet and you're playing this a Chromebook I guess, and playing this game. And there are gonna be other places where you can play that game, including windows PCs and in the future, probably max and probably smart displays and all that around I'm sorry, smart TVs. And the idea is you it's, you're not, aren't separate game sessions, you're playing the game. So you play to a certain point in the game on one device, you pick it up on another device you keep going and you come back to the first device, like actually, you know, that's a good system. So I'm eager to try it. The, the beta is only in early access and it's like Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore.

Leo Laporte (01:24:04):
So it's, it's, it's not broadly available yet, but that will happen. I still have a stadia membership. I don't think I've played it more than half an hour. So by the way, I, I, I tried to look up exact numbers for this. I couldn't find them. But if you look at Xbox cloud gaming, which is the game X cloud game streaming service, there are some low hundreds number of games. I'm gonna guess it's between a hundred, 200 games somewhere in there. I haven't found an exact number. I think they pretty much ever has a hundred, but it's, it is well over a hundred. Google said yesterday that there were over 200 games on stadia and honestly of the game streaming services, it has the best experience. Assuming you use a stadia controller, right? With the least lag and latency and all that kind of stuff of, and they are making steps to make it a better service and make it easier for developers to get there, make it more lucrative for them to be there, et cetera, et cetera.

Leo Laporte (01:24:55):
But clearly they have an exit strategy and this was hinted at last year and they kind of made it explicit yesterday, which is that they're making stadia available to third parties to host their own services. And at, and T was the first to do this. I think they put up, I think it was Batman, one of the RCA games. Oh, that's kind of, you could just be a single game. Yeah. You could. It could be the backend to deliver it to your customers. Oh, that's, that's kind, that's interest on at T and you get this game for free. That makes sense. That's a good, that's a future. So yeah, they have a good infrastructure. It's it seems to be working out pretty well. So I still like stadia. I think stadia is a good service, but you know, what are you gonna do? And now Paul's, this is Paul's dessert.

Leo Laporte (01:25:41):
He's been saving this, the entire show. Yeah. So one of the weirdest things I've ever experienced is call of duty on mobile is actually a great version of call of duty. There's one thing I would change. It, it it's, it's a lot of the classic levels, which is one of the reasons I like it. The playability is very good. I have to use a controller. I can't play with the onscreen controls, but a lot of people do. I mean, it, it works obviously. The only thing I don't like about it is when you're, you know, running toward a, an enemy, it auto fires if you're on them. So you can, you can flick the trigger all you want, but you're only gonna, it's only gonna fire the weapon when it's pointing at an enemy. It's kind of, I'm sure they dumbed it down because it's Buble.

Leo Laporte (01:26:20):
Yeah. That's for me, not for you. Okay. Yeah. Well, I don't like that, but no, but you like to run up war right up to him and shoot him in the face. I know you well, I'd like to, I'd like to be a little more, little more subtle than me. Yeah. A little more subtle. Yeah. but they're bringing college duty war zone to mobile now. So war zone is that free to play battle Royal game mode that you get when you buy any of the modern car, you know, from modern warfare on games. It's, it's, it's part of it. You can just get it for free too, but they're actually bringing that to mobile. And that makes total sense to me. In fact, I'm, I'm rather surprised that wasn't the first thing they did. Yeah. But they yeah, I think this is gonna make a lot of sense on mobile because games like Fortnite and they're huge PGY, PGY are huge, huge on apex legends.

Leo Laporte (01:27:07):
Yeah. Yeah. So that's smart Overwatch. Hopefully they won't let 'em play with like people on consoles and stuff, but you know, in their own little kind of mobile ghetto, it's fine. It's just keep over. Keep em over there. Him over there. Are you Android wheel dos? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Cross population there, no heaven for fend mobile users with their mice. And they'll just annihilate everybody. You are listening to windows weekly, Paul thurrott and Mary Joe Foley. And guess what? The back of the book has arrived. We go to the back of the book and tip of the week from Paul Thurrott. Yeah. So last week I think we mentioned the latest build we got from the out of the dev channel with windows 11. I heard today from someone that we are not getting a new bill today, by the way. So that usually does happen.

Leo Laporte (01:28:01):
So okay. Get a week off, but apparently the bill, no, not a literally the build that came out last week to the dev channel actually has tabs in file explorerr hidden inside the application. And Rafael of course figured out how to, oh, get that working. Cool. And so I wrote up a little how to on that, I'm just using the instructions that he provided to me, but basically used something called vibe tool. And you just run a specific command line reboot, and then you have tabs in file explorerr. And if that's the kind of thing you want, I mean, honestly it seems like a semi obvious feature to me. I will literally probably never use it ever myself. I, I find it easier to have two windows and copy between them and that kind of stuff. But there's people, everything there's purposes for tabs, everybody works differently.

Leo Laporte (01:28:47):
So that's so yeah, I I'm guessing this means it's well, it nothing's a hundred percent, but I assume what this means is it is coming. You would call, I don't know what year it was, but maybe during the creator update era that they were talking about adding a feature called sets to windows 10 and sets would've added file sorry. Tabs to, I think, any window, right. You could have done it from file explorerr, word Excel, you know, any application that doesn't support tabs already. So this is just bringing it to that one specific app. But honestly, I think that makes sense. And that's a good way to, what is this file of which you speak? I do not know it's a it's up on GitHub. It's probably malware injecting. Yeah. That's what I'm thinking. No, it's open source. You can, they post the source, although in a zip file, which is a little strange. Yeah. It's always good. Yeah. No, and you, right. It's it addresses the inability to configure features on X 86 proxy arm, 64 as well. So, huh. I mean, it must be safe. They provide you with a source guide. Yeah. In a weird way. Yeah. Huh? From the book is closed live. Yeah. Huh. Right. Okay. But your computer is now open. Yes. Thank you. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:30:00):
The book is closed though. Whoever that person is, is very reliable and a good tips for oh, you know them, the Microsoft world. Oh, okay. I don't know who it is, but he is very useful and friendly. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:30:12):
Okay. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (01:30:13):
He's a friendly,

Leo Laporte (01:30:14):
He's a friendly,

Mary Jo Foley (01:30:15):
Okay. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:30:18):
Interesting. It's written in C sharp. So that's a good sign. Thank you. We can agree more. Yeah. We have to try really hard to screw up a computer with C so, oh man, you gotta work at it. Okay. And now a surprising app pick of the week, and I wish you told me that you used notion, well, I didn't tell you on purpose because beknown to marry Joe and I, but unbeknownst to you this week we tried notion for the show notes. Yeah. How'd you like it? And I, well, I, I wanted to ask Mary Jo, we didn't really talk about it too, too much, but what did you, what do you think? Do you think this will

Mary Jo Foley (01:30:56):
Yeah. Work. I think it, it solved our problem. Our problem with OneNote was even though they claim you can have two co-authors working simultaneously. You can't really right. And we would always have conflicts and overwrite each other. We both were in notion at the same time typing at the same time and nothing went aro amiss.

Leo Laporte (01:31:17):
I didn't get a, didn't get a single dialogue, a warning, nothing. Mike and I used it when I was doing a iOS today for a while. And really like it. Yeah. I think it's a little more, well, that's my complaint maybe is it's a little less easy cuz you fuss with it more, but maybe you guys didn't put icons and graphics. We didn't well, so it has its own way of doing things. Look, what we want is text and links. Right. You knows easy to do. Yeah. Yeah, it's very it's look. I was cuz I like boring the hell outta my wife. I was describing this to her this morning as we were walking the dog and I was saying, you know, there's a whole world of legacy productivity apps we all grew up with were in Excel and PowerPoint and all that stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:32:00):
And, and they're very specific and they're super powerful. They have millions of commands. And then there's this newer generation of tools. I think teams came up out of this, this notion of chat based collaboration, sorry, collaboration. A lot of markdown text editors you see, especially on the Mac, but also also the web and windows and then these notetaking out and this one specifically is designed for collaboration purposes, but you can use it yourself. You could write in it, it outputs really clean like kind of HD milestone text. If you wanna paste it into a, like a website or whatever, which I think is where a lot of things are going these days, you know, it's not big on the, what will it look like when you print it out? Kind of thing, which was the concern for word, you know, back in the day.

Leo Laporte (01:32:41):
Yeah. Which is not really a concern for most normal people today. So it's, it's different. And, but you know, if you're used to a lot of the keyboard shortcuts shortcuts you might use in any application, still work bold at italics and hyperlinks and all that stuff. The way you make things like Hey, headings are different, but they have these little inline hints, you type a slash and it gives you a dropdown of all the things you can do. It's honestly it's I love it's fairly. Yeah. It's fairly intuitive. Yeah. Notion S couldn't

Mary Jo Foley (01:33:12):
I couldn't figure out how to drag and kept saying you could drag. Yeah. An item. I couldn't get that to work. Like I kept trying to, so

Leo Laporte (01:33:20):
One of the items, I same thing. Here's the, so when I first started testing before I shared this with you, yeah. I, I did move things around and I, or cuz you know, you want the, like the shows ordered in a certain way, whatever it is. And I'm like, great. And I shared it with you and then I was screwing around with it and I'm like, I can't move anything around. But since then I've created other pages, I guess, that are not shared with anybody just for me. And I can move those around. So there's something about sharing it that prevents like the ordering of items.

Mary Jo Foley (01:33:50):
Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:33:50):
Huh. It's not, you might have locked it. You can lock it. There's a handle. Every item has a handle. It does. So it's really easy when you're, I mean my my, yeah, yeah. So you see, it turns into a hand and it's very easy to just drag this stuff out.

Mary Jo Foley (01:34:05):
I know I could grab it. And then I, when I dropped it, it didn't, oh,

Leo Laporte (01:34:08):
It didn't stick. Yeah. It doesn't work. The shared one doesn't work. I, when I do this in maybe it is cuz it's shared maybe the non shared one, it works fine. It just works. This is another thing it's nice to do. You can do stuff in columns as well. You see that word right? By the way, look on that side. This thing probably does a thousand different things. You know, OneNote probably does 10,000. Very powerful. It does. We want one thing. Yeah. We just want text links. Like I said, headings are fine. And we wanna be able to work on it at the same time. Not because we sit there and work on it at the same time, like what we're talking to each other, but we not know that the other person is editing it and who cares? Like why can't we both?

Mary Jo Foley (01:34:47):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:34:47):
That's the point of this? Isn't it. We're supposed to be able to write at the same time. Yep. And it seems like this is working better.

Mary Jo Foley (01:34:54):
So we originally said, you know what we should do. We should just use the loop app from Microsoft because they they're basically doing what notion did and it's gonna be exactly like that. Yep. But we figured out after looking around for a bit, they know we look for it. Isn't out yet.

Leo Laporte (01:35:09):
It's not well, and I wonder how closely they'll hu do it. I mean, I wonder if it will be how much it will be. Like it looks super

Mary Jo Foley (01:35:16):
Viciously.

Leo Laporte (01:35:16):
Superficially looks exactly the same, but you know, they can't copy it or could they,

Mary Jo Foley (01:35:21):
They can. Why, why

Leo Laporte (01:35:24):
Microsoft copy something Leo? I don't know where that

Mary Jo Foley (01:35:26):
Really.

Leo Laporte (01:35:28):
So no. Yeah. Who knows? I it'll

Mary Jo Foley (01:35:31):
Be a little different, right.

Leo Laporte (01:35:33):
Whatever. Yeah. I'll have to Leo. I will add you for next week. And then I think it should be fine. You know, that will make me happy and I promise not to do weird things with it. Like turn it into tables. Okay. As long as, you know, tables, I think maybe should be disabled. That's fine. I use it for, yeah. We just wanted to test it and make sure this is the only time we've ever done it. So you can turn it into a webpage, which is cool. You can log, make sure you don't lock it because that might another thing that's going on. Maybe sharing does say I've never, you know, I don't, I've never, it's all I can say is like right now I can see it again. Like the non-shared pages. I can move those around the but not, not be the ones I can't. So it must be yeah. I think that be it. Yeah. It's okay for all sorts of stuff. And I do do the graphics, you know? Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:36:21):
Onenote, you can do all that stuff too. You just were very frustrated with the co-authoring. It really was getting to be a huge,

Leo Laporte (01:36:27):
Well, that's good to know that you can, the co-authoring is easy. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. Well, they also went in a direct, so the guys that, you know, do OneNote sort of understood this app had become kind of ponderous and by the time windows 10 came on, they did that OneNote for windows 10, which has the simplified ribbon. And it's a little dumb, Down's not the right word. It's just, it's simplified. I, I really preferred that app, but now they're going back to the other app. And of course now they're doing loop. And so I think loop is probably close to the type of thing we're looking for.

Mary Jo Foley (01:36:55):
It is one loop comes out. We can try that.

Leo Laporte (01:36:58):
Yeah. We'll try those. Cuz your needs are few and simple. You're not very few. Yeah. You're not. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. But

Mary Jo Foley (01:37:04):
I wanted to use notepad. I'm just saying I, I

Leo Laporte (01:37:07):
Try. Yeah. I, I, so one of the things back in January I was saying, well maybe I'll just share a folder in one drive and we can have like a, a word document or something, you know? But I, I like, I like this kind of thing. So yeah, it seems, it seems good.

Mary Jo Foley (01:37:22):
Seems fine.

Leo Laporte (01:37:23):
I use it for a lot of stuff. And in fact, I'll make a webpage when I wanna share content, you can make the webpage be locked down and it's just a real webpage that people can get surfed to. And it's really cool. There's a lot you can do. Nice. I used it to, I've been writing part of the book and it just to kind of get a feel for the whole like actually using it heavily. It seems like it's, you know, it's good.

Leo Laporte (01:37:45):
Nice. You have a, a additional app of the week. Yeah. So this is in beta, but startup has released a beta version of the next version of start 11. So this is that 5 99 tool that fixes the start menu in windows 11, but also is starting to fix a lot of other things in windows among those things, the, the task bar. So I think everybody understands by now that one of the things they did in windows 11 was they didn't take the windows 10 start bar task by rather and simplify it. They start it over from scratch. So you can't do anything with it. It's ridiculous. You can't put it on different sides of the screen. You can't resize it. You can't, they don't do grouping. You can't re click it and get any options or whatever. So start 11 actually fixes a lot of those problems.

Leo Laporte (01:38:32):
And this 1.2 version, which is out in beta now brings back a task bar feature from the past called grouping and ungrouping. And so the notion here is you have the notion here. The idea here is that you have multiple windows say like browser windows, or word windows or whatever. And back in the day as like probably windows seven, windows eight, you could choose whether those to be grouped. So they're kind of stacked on top of each other, visually, or they're on group, meaning each one of them has its own icon. And that's one, you know, that's not a feature windows 11 because you know, this thing doesn't work. But they are adding that feature as well. So good. A lot of, lot of, I like, if windows is frustrating to you, you gotta get start 11. It's just no brainer.

Leo Laporte (01:39:19):
It's six bucks. How's Brad. Definitely. Is he happy? He's doing good. Yeah. This is what he's working on. Is he, is he a coder or does he do marketing? He's like a, I would say he is a product bander, probably that kind of role. So he does a lot of the communications now for that the photo product also perfect. Have somebody like him say, you know, this is how this should work or this is what the feature should be. Somebody really knows windows that's really, and they have developers there who obviously know the in nerds of windows. Right. And they're looking at what Microsoft did in windows 11. And they're like, are you kidding me? Like this, this is this really what they did. I mean, like I've heard this multiple times. Oh, interesting. Yeah. Yeah. They literal have ripped out the task bar. I just started over with this new thing and they're like, I, well, at least something, Hey, at least Microsoft makes it doable. At least you can do that, you know? Yeah. You know, they don't want you to do this. But yeah, this is a, a vest of the past, I think. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:40:16):
Mary Jo F only has an enterprise pick of the week that could surprise you.

Mary Jo Foley (01:40:22):
Yes. Surprise. Okay. You know how we thought there would just be one version of, of what do we, what do you call it? A feature update of windows 11 every year, because Microsoft said that was what the plan was. Then we found out later kind of like there were, are gonna trickle out other updates in between. And there be like the thing we just got in February, like a bunch of features packaged together, but not, it's not a feature update, just a bunch of features in an update, but not a feature update. Well, sounds like they're doing the same thing in server, which is kind of crazy. So last year they said, we're only from now on going to have one version of windows server every two to three years. I'm like, oh, that's what it, people want. They want fewer releases, very predictable, you know, very well tested have a lot of features all rolled up.

Mary Jo Foley (01:41:15):
Then this week there was a blog post kind of hidden away on the tech community site, under storage, which was a weird place to put this. And it says I gotta get the exact wording cuz it's funny. Unless they changed it because I pointed it out, let's see which they might have. It sounded like, yeah, we will soon be starting the Azure edition insider program. So there is a product already called window server Azure edition where you can get preview of new features coming to our first major releases, autumn. I'm like, oh wait. So there, isn't just gonna be one server release. Every two to three years, there's gonna be in this autumn. And there just was one last year. So they're doing the exact same thing. It seems in server as they were doing in client, there's gonna be other updates in between that they probably won't call new additions. But if you care about server and you, you happen to be using the Azure edition, you wanna get in on this new and tighter program, which is gonna be announced soon. They're gonna be bringing changes to storage, replica, SMB, and some surprises it says, and then they'll also be stickers. I

Leo Laporte (01:42:26):
Knows what you want when you're running a server is

Mary Jo Foley (01:42:29):
Ads. It might be ads, ads. I dunno. Like I don't know stickers

Leo Laporte (01:42:35):
Sticker.

Mary Jo Foley (01:42:35):
Yeah. But I, I just think it's interesting because wait, we just heard you guys are cutting back because people want fewer releases, but no, wait, there's gonna be another release this year. We can't help themselves.

Leo Laporte (01:42:45):
They just can't help themselves. It's like, no, we have to, we gotta, we can't have a build button if we're not gonna push it. Well, of course we're gonna make new build.

Mary Jo Foley (01:42:54):
I just was like, what? Wait a minute. You get everybody all excited. One, one every three years. And now here we go again. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:43:02):
Anyway, enterprise pick number two,

Mary Jo Foley (01:43:05):
Right? I know we have a lot of Microsoft reseller partners who listen to windows weekly. So if you're one of those people you are going to want to know about something Microsoft just announced during this show, this happened at 3:00 PM Eastern today. They are making some pretty big changes to their partner program in October this year. Not one of the things is they're changing the name of it. So right now the Microsoft reseller program is called the Microsoft partner network MPN. But as of October, it is gonna be called the Microsoft cloud partner program. You know how everything at Microsoft is about the cloud. They wanna make sure it's very clear that everything they want those resellers to be selling is cloud. They're, they're gonna be making some changes around how partners are certified, what kinds of certifications that are available. And there're gonna be things around Azure and dynamics, all the things you think of when you think of the Microsoft cloud.

Mary Jo Foley (01:43:58):
So if you go up to the Microsoft partner network site, and you're a partner, you can see right now, some of these changes are starting to outline them, put up FAQs that you can get ready for all these changes you're going to have to make. By October, you're gonna have to get re-certified because there's gonna be different certifications. And yeah, it's gonna be kind of a lot of changes for you. They're they're saying this is their biggest change in the partner network in something like 15 years. So if you thought these changes might include something we talked about on windows weekly before called the commerce experience, that a lot of people who are in the partner network are very angry about cuz they hate the changes. Those are not changing. Those things are not changing. They're not, unfortunately that's not part of the big change. They're still pushing forward with this new commerce experience thing and are a lot of things that partners really, really hate and are really screaming about. But so far, Microsoft is turning a deaf ear to the CE stuff I hear from my sources. They may change that and may give in on some of that. But for now, all you're getting for changes is the name of the program, how you get certified. And when you need to get certified

Mary Jo Foley (01:45:13):
Go partners

Leo Laporte (01:45:14):
Go, you know, if we zoom in on that Terminator, head over your shoulder, you see that we can see, we can see everything. We can see an ad. Yeah. We can see the room. Its you see the ads. Yeah. It's really interesting. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:45:27):
The reflections you can see all the people I'm talking to during the show

Leo Laporte (01:45:31):
And the source filming and excellent.

Mary Jo Foley (01:45:35):
Excellent. You could see Sorachi over there.

Leo Laporte (01:45:37):
Yeah. Don't that's not, not having a USB cable. Are you gonna do a corn beef and cabbage tomorrow? Mary Jo?

Mary Jo Foley (01:45:45):
No. You know I'm a vegetarian pescatarian. Oh that's right.

Leo Laporte (01:45:49):
No corn. I do something pod corn, perhaps corn,

Mary Jo Foley (01:45:53):
Maybe salmon salmon or something like that for sure.

Leo Laporte (01:45:56):
Yep. I I totally, so we should do that. Cuz her folks love corn beef and cava. She said it's St. Patrick Day tomorrow. We should. She said over my dead body, she hates it. She does not wanna get you.

Mary Jo Foley (01:46:06):
I used to love you

Leo Laporte (01:46:07):
Grew up on that love. It's like a punishment. Yeah. I think that's it. I loved it. And I had poorly made corn beef where it's just like boiled that's then you hate it. It's terrible. Yeah. I don't. It's awful. But if you have the right beer to go with it in exactly, you might be, have a different point of view.

Mary Jo Foley (01:46:25):
Right? So the traditional beer for St Patrick's say obviously is Guinness and preferably a well poured Guinness, properly poured Guinness. But you know, what's funny, a lot of breweries now are making their own beer in this style, which is called the dry Irish stout style. And one of my local breweries here in fact is making one other half. They they're making a beer called bang on 

Leo Laporte (01:46:51):
Cause it's bang on 4%. It's perfect.

Mary Jo Foley (01:46:53):
Bang on it's bang on 4% tastes a lot like Guinness, dry, Irish out style. Low bitterness, very low alcohol like around yeah. Four percentish roasty tasty. It's funny. When I used to drink Guinness and other dark beers in bars, people would come up to me like, oh, you like the hard stuff? I'm like, no, this is the lightest beer here. It's

Leo Laporte (01:47:14):
Four. Isn't that funny? It looks like the, the hardest beer there, but it isn't. Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (01:47:18):
Yeah, yeah. And yeah, I've had this and it's very good if, if you like that style and it's just easy drinking, you can have more than one and be able to still roll out of there and go to the parade tomorrow. So yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:47:29):
You're good. Bang on from the new York's other half, you've done a lot of good other half, actually that looks a lot like the little Terminator head you get behind you on the shelf. Oh, maybe that's what it is behind her there. That's what it is. It it's a, it's a bang on a bang on beer. That is it for wind does Wakeley for this fabulous Wednesday the day before St. Day. ORAS we like to call it St. Patrick's day Eve. That's right. You gotta start early. Yeah. Pregame of St. Patrick's Eve eyes of St. Patrick's in between the oh and there's SRA making a, a perfectly tight. Oh, I heard, I heard my name. Did you want me to be petted? Yes. Pet. Yes. Pet's involved. Yes. we do windows weekly every Wednesday 11:00 AM Pacific 2:00 PM. Eastern time, 19 0 1800 UTC.

Leo Laporte (01:48:17):
And I'm sorry, somebody did show up an hour late and I apologize because we've gone to summertime in the us early. They'll be going to summertime later this month in the rest of the world, cuz we just really like to mess things up. You know, not enough that we change the clock twitce, twitce a year, but we gotta do it at a different cadence than everybody else. Anyway we are now 1800 UTC. If that helps you can do the calculation from there, if that I only say that if you wanna watch live, you don't have to watch live. Obviously on demand versions of the show at our website, twitt TV slash WW, there's a YouTube channel. Every show makes its way up there. So you can watch the video there. You could subscribe in your favorite podcast player, get it automatically.

Leo Laporte (01:49:02):
Just go to say podcast or overcast or apples podcast, Google podcast, all of that. And subscribe. In fact, if they, if they Le let you leave a review, you please leave us a five star. If you would let the world know about windows weekly, little nice pros saying how wonderful Paul and Mary Jo are and things like that. They give it like an Airbnb review. Yeah. You know, good communication. Yeah. Yeah. Good location. Yeah. They never popped in to bother me. The toaster worked, toaster work. That kind of thing. Yeah. let's see if you're not a member of club twit, I invite you to join. You won't hear ads like this ad. I'm about to do for club twit. Plus you'll get access to the fabulous disc code and discord. And there may be a good reason to do that this week because Paul Thurrott will be our guest of the week on Friday.

Leo Laporte (01:49:54):
You excited Paul what's happening? Aren't you doing something? Oh no. That's the 31st. Nevermind was this week. I scared him on Friday. Tomorrow. It's Patrick Delehanty actually. Oh good. Twit engineer. This is a club. Twit members only event. Paul will be March 31st. 9:00 AM. Okay. Sorry about that. Paul me scare you and Stacy's book. Club's coming up next week. Unauthorized bread will be the book of the week. So we got lots of stuff. Lots of events going on. It's fun. The club is a lot of fun. And if you want to join seven a month gets you all the rights and privileges of a club. Twit member. Just go to twit.tv/club twit to sign up. Sorry, Paul didn't mean to scare you. No, it's it's okay. I am a little out to lunch, you know, as it is. No, I'm more out to lunch than you are. We've proven now. That's okay. Thanks everybody for joining us. See you next time you dozers on windows weekly. Bye. Bye.

Speaker 5 (01:50:52):
Don't miss all about Android. Every week we talk about the latest news hardware apps, and now all the developer goodness, happening in the Android ecosystem. I'm Jason Howell also joined by Ron Richards, Florence ion, and our newest co-host on the panel. When to now who brings her developer chops, really great stuff. We also invite people from all over the Android ecosystem to talk about this mobile platform. We love so much. Join us every Tuesday, all about Android on twit.tv.