Windows Weekly 836, 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 here. A ghostly visit from Richard Campbell, who's stuck at dia. We will talk about the eu. They finally named a big tech giants. You might not be surprised at who is on that list. Maybe you will be. Microsoft just released the first public preview of Windows Co-Pilot to some people. And Satya Nadella, his day on the stand in the last day of trial in the Microsoft Activision. Hearing all of that and more. Coming up next on Windows Weekly podcasts you love

Paul Thurrott (00:00:38):
From people you trust, this is to it.

Leo Laporte (00:00:52):
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. Episode 836 recorded Wednesday, July 5th, 2023. Sharepoint under every desk, windows Weekly is brought to you by Collide. Collide is a device trust solution for companies with Okta, and they ensure that if a device is not trusted and secure, it can't log into your cloud apps. Visit collide.com/ww to book an on-demand demo today, and by ACI Learning it skills are outdated in about 18 months. So future-proof your business by staying ahead of the competition with customizable worthy training. Visit go dot aci learning.com/twit to fill out the form and get more information on a free two week training trial for your team.

(00:01:42):
It's time for Windows Weekly Show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft. Rich Campbell is out doing something fun. I think so. There'll be no fifth on the fifth, but we do have Mr. Paul Thurrott thurrott.com. Hello, Paul.

Paul Thurrott (00:02:01):
Hello Leo. How are you today? I'm good. I'm a little lonely, but it's okay. Well, it's like the old days. Yeah. The very old days now. That's true. Goes back more than 10 years. You've had a co-host. Now it's just you and me, bud. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Well, I'll be like you've watched Succession, right? <Laugh>? I'll be like what's the kid Roman's speech at the funeral? I'll, I'll, I'll just step right up and everything will be great. Oh my gosh. That's such a scene. Oh my gosh. Oh, man.

(00:02:35):
<Laugh>. So I thought you'd be in Mexico, but you stayed. Yeah. You stayed home to celebrate the Nation's independence. Well, I don't know if I, I'm surprised. What, what are we in 16 something years into this podcast? Yes. Yes. And I, I, I literally book all of my travel around this podcast. You are. I like that. You have, you have more of an influence over my travel than my wife does. <Laugh>. I don't know if she likes that, but I'll take it. She doesn't care. I'll take it. Yeah. did you do something for the for, for the fourth yesterday? Well, <laugh> Yeah. Sort of. So, <laugh>, we have you know, we just moved from a country. Mac country is a, it's a poor community, I think's. The way I would describe it. Is it? Oh, I didn't know that. Oh yeah.

(00:03:17):
It really is. It's, it's funny cuz it's like this little place of 3000 people that's inside of Lower Macungie, which is a really big place of 33,000 people and it's very affluent. Oh, that's interesting. So I would've thought it's the other way around. Like Macungie would be the primary and lower Macungie the subsidiary. Exactly. I, I never knew. I I, we were right next to it the whole time. Literally seven minute drive from our old house. And I never knew I've been in the country who I never understood what it was until I got here. And then you get that slowly dawning realization, you know was it, people here are fantastic. Was it a coal community? No. Cold. No, it was a nothing community. That's why it's poor. So it's, I think of it as the drain from which lower Macungie <laugh>, you know, oh God.

(00:04:02):
Drains itself or whatever. Yeah. but I love it here. And what's interesting is right on our the edge of the apartment complex is a a beautiful golf course and country club and mostly used by the lower macun. Oh, it's notably inside Lower Macungie. It's not <laugh>. It's not in Macungie, but we are right on the board of it. Uhhuh. And so <laugh>, that's actually dividing line, isn't it? Yeah, it is. It's really is. You can say it's like 10 feet from my window. Live on the wrong, wrong side of the golf course. Sorry. It's literally sunnier over there. So <laugh> we discovered, oh man, we were walking one night and I said, you know, there's like a, there's a hole in those bushes, but that it goes into this rough part behind the country. Like they, the golf area owns it, but there's not, there's not a golf course there.

(00:04:47):
It's all like wild. And I said, we should go take a look at that. And we did. And there was a, someone had mowed a path Oh my God. Which we later discovered was so that you can access the like, you know, the brook here just, or the, the creek just like near our old house, there are these kind of sewer outlets and so they have to bes accessible brain drains, not sewer. I mean, that implies, so I think Sure. It's water that probably drains down into rain into the creek. Yeah. Yeah. So they ha those have to be accessible. And so they actually mow it. And I said, you know, it's interesting because that means we can walk around here and they will never know we're here <laugh>. So but for the 4th of July we decided to do that for this country club, which had a beautiful fireworks display.

(00:05:27):
You can see it on my Instagram account. And you can see where we were standing in the pitch, black <laugh>. And I, I literally said, I, I don't understand like how guileless are the kids here. There was no one out there drinking or doing drugs. Right. That we were the only people there. <Laugh>, Spackler, get over there, fill that hole, the Macon I to go door to door and be like, yeah, what are people doing? <Laugh>, we've found the found source of the vermin. <Laugh>. Yeah. Wow. Nice. So were there was no one else there? No, no one. Wow. Just us. Your sea secret spot. How romantic. Maybe time to start another family right there. What do you, <laugh> what did what did you do for the fourth? I'm sure. We were, we found as, as you did a loophole and the fireworks, the Petaluma City fathers decided that the fireworks display should not in fact be visible from the site of the fireworks display, but instead they were gonna shoot 'em a little higher.

(00:06:24):
So you could go, you could go elsewhere and look up and see them and be awed by their splendor. So we went to the downtown parking garage, <laugh>. Wow. Nice. To the, and going up to the top, going up to the top. There were a lot of people there. Had a spectacular view. Sure. and then we went home. Oh, that's cool. Anyway, happy force for people from outside the US who might have been a little confused that nothing happened yesterday. That's why it's a US holiday. Although actually something big did happen yesterday. We got a little fu from Europe as a little FY 4th of July. Oh. A little. Like, see, see, you deserve this. What happened? It's like, oh, is the United States off today? Let's release this information. Oh, wow. So you may remember that back in, I think it was November, December, the eu reached a consensus on the Digital Markets act the dma, which is designed to reign in big tech, spec tech, specifically what they call gatekeepers.

(00:07:25):
Right. These are the the app store owners, the online, you know, the huge online services, et cetera, et cetera. And when they did that, they said look, we've got three things we gotta do to kind of follow up on this. One of them is we're gonna identify who the gatekeepers are, you know, and then there's a couple other things. We're gonna figure out what the remedies will be and yada, yada yada. So <laugh> yesterday, on July 4th, literally thi Briton, the French commissioner, he is not the French commissioner, he's French, but he is the commissioner for the internal market of eu. Said who? The seven companies. The first, the first seven companies. Well, let me guess Apple and Google, cuz you said Absolutely. Okay. Yep. And I'm figuring cuz you're reporting on it here. Microsoft, which is where the, we did it came from <laugh>.

(00:08:11):
Cause Microsoft was finally included with the Big boy pants. Big pick Companies is let's see, that's three. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Amazon obviously meta, obviously that's five. This is where the obviousness drops off the cliff because after those, you're like, what are the other two? Well, Tencent in China, do they, I mean okay. Yes. You're you are correct. Okay. So by dance, I think by dance a Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was placed on the list. They are, they should be confused by this. They, they think they should not be there. They, they're gonna try to get off of it. And then oh, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sorry, what's the last one? Yeah, it's a tough, well, I'm thinking cuz like who our friend Amy Webb did a did did a called the Big nine, which was the nine Okay.

(00:08:58):
Big tech companies. And was Amazon, Google, Facebook. Oh, Baidu and Alibaba with it, with the two Chinese. So let me think. And those companies don't do business in EU probably. Oh, it would have to be an eu. Maybe that's it. Yeah. So she was Google, Amazon, apple. Oh, ibm. How about ibm? Did they mention ibm? Not IBM at all. I'd like to think IBM will make the list the next time around. Cause this is gonna be a 2.0 <laugh>. Oh, good. Something to look forward to. How about Alibaba? That was also on her big nine. No, nope. No, I give up. You geographically, you're getting there. Samsung sa Oh, cuz of the Samsung phones. So here's the deal. They do have their own app store. Yeah, yeah, yeah. When they first announced it, it was like, gatekeeper is a large internet platform. They're gonna have over 45 million active users market of capitalization of over us.

(00:09:50):
82 billion or 75 billion euros. Right. Okay. And then there's the, the vagueness, the beautiful vagueness of the has to, has to have, or is about to have an entrenched and durable position in the market. Meaning that it's stable over the time. If the company met the two criteria above in each of the last three financial years. So a little bit of wiggle room. Like you could drop out technically one year, but if you're in there, two or three, you're in, you know, I guess Samsung very fair. They must be, it must be the phones. Cause I can't think of their, maybe their TVs. It's not their washing machines. Well, it's internet platforms, right? Oh, okay. I think, I think you're right. It has to be the phones. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They have online services associated with their phones, obviously. They do, they do. Including a store, which might be, they've got them in, they must have hundreds and hundreds of millions of users.

(00:10:37):
So it's possible there are 45 million active users of Samsung services. You know, I don't know if they have to be in the eu. I don't. I mean, I, maybe they mean worldwide. I'm not even sure about that part of it. But they you know, okay. I I don't look at Samsung as being a big abuser of their gatekeeper. Well, capabilities now they should start, right? Because Yeah, I would, yeah. It worked for Microsoft, you know, <laugh> and what's the funniest thing about this is booking.com said that they were told by the EU that you're making it. Next time we make the list, what, you know, booking do com. I know what, because, you know, you know how we all go, maybe Europe uses booking.com a lot. I don't know. I I thought this was kind of odd. I mean, we, I'm not an expert on how no, I'm not either.

(00:11:30):
But I think that's a, that seems strange, right? I think we can all agree it's a little weird. Well, but here's the good news folks. They're gonna go after these companies and let's see companies that do not comply with the rules. Actually we should talk about the rules. So they're prohibited from, there's things they can do and things they can't do. Right? So they're prohibited from treating their in-house services more than those made by third parties. That's fair. They can't prevent consumers from linking up to businesses outside of their platforms. As I, as I say, that's a big one for Apple, by the way. That's huge. Yeah. I want you to think, think app. Think App Store, as I say, cuz this is, this is clearly right. That's for, that's aimed at Apple. Yeah. Cuz Apple won't let apps mm-hmm. <Affirmative> say in fact, apple is going to the Supreme Court to let it do this right now.

(00:12:14):
Right. Right, right. Crazy good boy. Preventing users from Uninstalling any pre-installed software or app if they wish to do so. Samsung tracking users outside of the gatekeepers core platform service for the purpose of targeted advertising. Google Meta. Google Meta. Google Meta. Possibly Microsoft too, actually. Actually Meta's not gonna be able to launch their new Twitter mm-hmm. <Affirmative> clone because it's sonars up so much information, including and thank you Apple for making them do this. So they've got this thing that your health information, like that's somehow relevant. Yeah. To your threading, you're tweeting. I'm excited that there is yet another Twitter alternative. Cuz I gotta tell you, I'm not saturated yet, so I can totally, I can handle five more Easy. Yeah. Easy. I just have a folder for them. What's the one that was made by the former guy from Twitter?

(00:13:09):
What's I think Blue Guy? It's Blue Sky Guy. And then there's some former Twitter people call it that did t2. And then there's some former black Twitter developers and users who've created a new black version of Twitter. Oh, I, I don't remember. I think it's, I can't remember the name of it. I don't wanna say it wrong. Let me see. I'll find it. The, it's the black owned app surges to number one after Elon Musk's shenanigans. It's called Shenanigans spill, as in Oh, I get it. Spill the t I see. So I'm just gonna take issue with the word shenanigans. Spiz shenanigans suggests there's no malicious intent. Well, that, no, I don't know if there is. He's so you think he's just an idiot. He's, cause that could be true. He's, he's like the idiot billionaire in Avenue Five.

(00:14:00):
If you've ever watched that show <laugh>. I have not. But that's I think he's modeled the guy in Avenue five is kind of modeled on Elon. Oh, interesting. Yeah. It's worth watching just for that. That's the one that stars the guy who was in house. I think the healthiest thing we could do as a people is to stop being fascinated by individuals who are in fact, terrible. Because most people are in fact, terrible and billionaires the worst because nobody worst. Nobody says no to them. Worst convinced that they are geniuses. Yeah. When in fact, luck probably played the biggest roller ball. I, it makes me crazy. Well, they got some money. So good. That's Yeah. That is not by itself qualification. No. This means you got some money. No, it's like the, well, Steve Martin, I must must have said this in your presence.

(00:14:38):
I know your friends are Steve Martin, you know, the great Steve Martin joke from the 1970s, how to turn a billion dollars in real estate into $10,000 in hard cold cash, <laugh>, you know, step one, get a million dollars. Yeah. <laugh>. So <laugh>, it's, it's literally that stupid <laugh>. What else we got for these guys? Oh, Steve. He is, he is a philosopher for the ages. He really is. And I think that was most of it. Oh. tracking users outside of gatekeeper's car. Oh, I already said that. Without effect. I think all of this, you know, a lot of this kind of is at Apple on Google and I feel like, I feel like Amazon and Facebook and, and Microsoft. Yeah. But, you know, got sucked in, you know, in the undertoe of this. Yeah. This is like, you, you're deep sea fishing and you cast a net and you're looking for tuna.

(00:15:22):
But sometimes some dolphins come up, you know, so you get these other things some of 'em you throw back and some of them are like, maybe we could eat this. And that's what Mike, I think Microsoft and Samsung <laugh>, you know, maybe are certainly fall. I don't, I, you know, we'll see, we'll see. In fact, well, we have a story coming up that may partially explain what they're going after. But Microsoft certainly qualifies from all of the points. You know, they have the, the active users, they have the market cap. They are entrenched. They, they are entrenched. There's no doubt about it. Yep. So, I mean, we'll sees, although they're not, as, Apple's not as entrenched in the EU as they are in the ue. I mean the US Sorry, who is it? Apple. Apple apple's really, you know, they're a dominant force in the US That's, but I think Android devices, particularly Samsung, I would imagine, but again, Nokia and others, but it doesn't say anything about being first in the market.

(00:16:16):
Right? It, it's 45 million active users and it's a market cap of whatever month. Apple qualifies for market cap <laugh>, you know, forever, 3 trillion this week. And they have a billion users overall. So it's reasonable to think that there are hundreds of millions of apple users in the eu. Right. Camp Brewer who's a a Brit says booking.com is kind of like Airbnb in the, in the eu. Okay. So they, well, and Airbnb would be reasonable. I mean, they really control the rental. Maybe they could go after Ticketmaster, you know. Oh my God. That's a terrible gatekeeper. Right? Yeah. At least in the us I don't know. Again, you know, we, we suffer by being chauvinists, but well yes, yes. You know? That's fair. W yeah, yeah. Ignorance, you know, it's <laugh>, you know, for, for those of us in the US right?

(00:17:03):
Or for those of us who are outside of the eu, generally speaking, it's unclear what the outcomes here will be. Right. Because it's po you know, in the eu obviously they're gonna go after these companies. They're gonna try to prevent them from doing their egregious behavior, but they might choose in many cases just to make that change in the eu, you know? So we, we'll have to wait and see. We, we have this hope in the US reran as we may be. If anyone is paying attention to antitrust and big tech, the hope is that EU will step up and do something about it, because they seem like the most aggressive out there. Yeah. Possibly will. Yeah. Again, though I mean, as much as I, I want some curbs on these guys, I also fear that these will be the wrong curbs and have unintended consequences.

(00:17:49):
And it's such a difficult thing. I mean, if, if government doesn't control big tech, who's gonna, not big tech for sure. Yes. But Leo, we go to regulation, not because it's is easy, but because it is hard. Yes, it's true. Thank you. Jfk <laugh>? Or does Steve Martin say that too? <Laugh>? Well, this is like the what was it like George W. Bush and stem cells. It's like, you know, we don't really know. So why you even trying <laugh>? You know, it's like I'm, we don't know. It's like ai, we don't know. It's not, maybe that's not the best way to do it. So I don't, you know, I mean, there's only three things that could control big tech. Big tech. Yeah. The market. And that's the problem, is they get so big that the market no longer impacts. Well, they tilt the, they tilt the market.

(00:18:27):
They they control it. Or government. That's right. I guess we as users, if we could all act in concert, could, could also harm them by saying, well, we're just not gonna say yes. You would think, you know, but pe like I just talked about celebrity worship and whatnot. I, I mean, I think this exists with the companies as well. I think Apple in particular is this company that has this kind of fan base that seems to be kind of blind to all the terrible things about the company. Yeah. and so I I, you just get kind of a, a, a blunt kind of, I don't care. I just, I like that this stuff all works together. It's good. It works. Yeah. They stop paying attention, you know? Yeah. Something we know well from the years in the nineties of Microsoft dominance, <laugh>.

(00:19:09):
Yeah. Well, listen, I was all for it back then, but I gotta tell you now that things are a little different. No, it's no, Microsoft was terrible. Right. and actually the interesting thing I will say, you know, I, I did have this a little bit of insight back in the early two thousands. I mean, I sort of made the argument at the time, you know, if you think Microsoft is terrible, I mean, imagine how terrible the world would be if Apple was this dominant <laugh>. I said that back in the day. I totally said that. Yeah. All the time. And now it unfortunately my dream has come true. I know. Oh, of how we laughed. Oh, how we laughed. <Laugh> our dream has become our nightmare. I do, I have to say, I mean, on my phone, Mac, I'm kind of all in.

(00:19:48):
Yeah. cuz it does all work, you know? Sure. I'm one of the suckers. You're gonna be like that guy at the end of invasion, the body snatchers who points at me and then screams. So, you know, points me out like the last windows you all Sutherland. Yes. Yeah. We are the, they are the body snatchers. And we we are the plant people. That's right. Alright. All right. So this is, now that you've brought me down, so what is the EU in this, by the way? The eus Oh, right. Penalties should talk about what they can do are significant. Yeah. They're usually pretty good. So companies that do not comply with the DMA rules will face fines of about 10% of their total world worldwide annual turnover revenues. They don't, by the way, they've been talking about this for a long time. I don't think any company has ever been fined any percentage of their annual turnover.

(00:20:40):
Right. They talk about that, but, and maybe that's because the companies eventually come around. The fines are getting bigger though, right? I mean, yes. So if you're repeated infringements, it's like bonus round or driving fast or a work zone <laugh> you could be fined up to 20%. And then there are periodic penalty payments of up to 5% of the average daily turnover. Wow. Systemic infringers. This is another level. It's just like air quality index. You didn't know there was something beyond red until it happens. Face additional remedies behavioral and structural remedies, I should say, including potential divestiture parts of a business. Like there are people that want to get meta to give up Instagram or WhatsApp or whatever. Right. That kinda stuff. And I obviously, I think it's, I think it is the EU wants them to divest themselves of what was double click the advertising business.

(00:21:26):
Right. And I'm not against it, by the way. I think Google has really been egregious in the way that they have well dominated online ad sales. I hundred, a hundred percent agree. But on the other hand, I think we should, I think we can also clearly admit that you see the trouble there though, right? I mean, this is a, a radical step. Yeah. and it's one that's gonna be fought tooth and nail, and not just by Google, but by various other parts of governments. And, you know, it's, it's, that's a, that's a, it's not doable. Yeah. Yeah. That's a tough one. I mean, I agree it should happen, but I, you know, it's kind of closing the barn door after the horse is bolted. Yeah. Although, well, it's like bringing the horses back in a way. You know, you can if you do it right.

(00:22:10):
Yeah, you can. I, yeah. Yeah. I don't know how you make that, right? I mean, what does that mean? Like, you know, Microsoft gets to Google 'em up, Google 'em up, goggle 'em up, and be the, gobble them up and be the next, you know, terrible advertising company or whatever. I like Google 'em up, <laugh>, Google 'em up. I know it makes those words up. <Laugh> gobble Google and Gobble. Yeah. You got your Google in my Gobble <laugh>. Yeah. So I was, yeah, I don't mean to say excited, but I will say as antitrust attention has turned to big tech in recent years, it's been notable to me that Microsoft has not been part of that conversation. I would say over the past couple years, that has started to change. And of course, with the Activision Blizzard acquisition, it's right in your face.

(00:22:53):
Right? I mean, this, this one has been obviously very, very hotly contested. But don't worry. Microsoft fans, the EU <laugh>, actually I should say there was a report from Reuters, right? Saying that antitrust regulators, meaning the European Commission in the eu will now launch a formal antitrust investigation of Microsoft Office because remedy discussions with the company have broken down. And we have gotten hints of this over the past several months. Slack, of course, fire filed their complaint back in 2020. That came off as a little bit whiny to me. But then again, you know, this is the eu and there are some interesting parallels between what Slack is complaining about in what Microsoft did in the 1990s and early two thousands with Internet Explorer and media player and all that kinda stuff. So basically the EU started their, in, you know, kind of an informal small investigation.

(00:23:45):
Obviously, they went to Microsoft and said, Hey, you know, what can we do here? And Microsoft said it was willing to cut the price on a version of office that does not include Microsoft Teams. You know, the, the issue being the bundling of teams with office. A lot of people have given me feedback saying, I, you know, I don't understand what this complaint is because no one buys Microsoft Office anymore. But I would just remind people that there are between 1.5 billion and maybe 2 billion office users worldwide, and the vast majority of them are not subscribed to Microsoft 365. Right. granted, the vast majority of them are probably also not using teams. But, you know Microsoft 365 is one of the ways, and probably will become one of the primary ways that office is you know, distributed. But I, you know, it's not clear what the mix of new sales is.

(00:24:35):
Right? I, so I don't really know that. But, but anyway, basically the EU came back and said, look, we want you to cut the price more than that. Microsoft said, no, they didn't reach an agreement. And now they're going up with the formal investigation mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and I'll charge Microsoft with antitrust violations. Wow. So here's, I mean, other than the obvious, right? This is interesting <laugh>, it just, it just is interesting. Like what someone, you know, of course I'm going back and forth with people about this and someone's like, I don't understand, you know, how would this even work? And I'm like, think about it. I mean, think about what Microsoft went through in the EU in the early two thousands. And that thing was really protracted and drawn out. Basically they were charged with bundling what was called middleware at the time, right?

(00:25:16):
In Windows. And what they ha what they ended up doing was releasing special Windows versions, the end editions that didn't include the bundled middleware. And so as a European European Union or a European customer, you could choose which one to get with a new computer when you bought it at retail. They also had that kind of ballot box thing, remember, for Internet Explorer. So you could choose the browser when you first, I wonder how much sleep nears market capture went up. Exactly. Well, it doubled from yeah. From 0.01% to 0.02% <laugh>. So it's reasonable given that background and precedent that there will be two major tiers of Office. One will include teams and one will not. And you can think of the one that does not as office and additions, you know it will probably only impact the EU market, by the way.

(00:26:08):
And I'm absolutely not saying that makes any sense doing such a thing, but I, it's happened before <laugh>, right? So sure. Right. I mean, Microsoft dominates office productivity for sure. You know, not that, right. Others have not tried to compete. Right? I mean, we all, we've all tried Amazon's no, we haven't. We talking about No, we never heard of it <laugh>, but it's, but it exists. But the crazy thing is, it's there. I know, you know, Amazon has an office. It's, it's online only right? Office solution, I think it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like Google Docs, <laugh>, like Google Docs. Yeah. And I, so I have to say, I, this is very much a business issue, not a, an issue for individuals. I think one of the more interesting trends in recent years, and this really started on the Mac there, was, so there's something unique about the nature of the Mac market where instead of these sort of integrated solutions with lots of stuff, you're getting these little apps that just do one thing, like a markdown editor type thing, or a note taker, a calendar app, or whatever that kind of a thing is.

(00:27:12):
And I think in the case of individuals, there are enough consumer services and little apps like that that, I mean, I think people might be slowly weaning themselves off of office. I mean, for all we know, I, I don't use office as much of office as I used need to. Sure, yeah. Yeah. Don't need to, or, but there are better things. You know, just in the context of this show, we switched from Microsoft OneNote to Notion, I think last year we had used, I think I had 12 years of notes for this show, but I also had 20 years of usage of OneNote overall at that time. And, you know, it takes a lot to make someone, you know, switch like that. In my case, what that was, was it not working <laugh>, right? It didn't allow for reliable you know, co-editing, right?

(00:28:01):
We couldn't do the live, the live editing. But I, I don't think I'm, I'm unique in that regard, and I bet there are a lot of individuals out there that are kind of moving along. Like, I still buy Office 360 or Microsoft 365 now because it's such a good deal, and I want the storage. Yeah. They're smart to make, make it, it's less than eight bucks a month. Yeah. It's, it's like bundling. Are you suggesting that bundling is smart? Oh, whoops, <laugh>. No, they don't bundle. No, no. Of course not. But it is, it is smart. And maybe they need to be divested of this asset. I don't know. Not saying they have to, but I don't know. So we'll see. We'll see. We'll see where any of this goes, but Interesting. Interesting. That's awesome. What a world. What a world. Yeah. What a world. Exactly. all right. You know? Yeah. It's one of those things where I agree with it, but only with great trepidation. Right? That's the point. And that's, and that's what, and the divesting part is, is very, a very good example of that, because it's like, I do agree with that. I, I it should absolutely happen. And then you think through it and you're like, I, but how? I don't see how they could possibly how Yeah. Do this. Yeah.

(00:29:11):
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(00:31:54):
Ah, Leo LaPorte. Paul Thout. Richard Campbell, he's, he's like, is he traveling? I forgot what it is. Is he going? He looks like Obiwan Kenobi's ghost <laugh>. He's right behind you. Oh, no. Yeah, he's gone, he's gone off to no, no, he's here. He's actually signed in. Is he here? Yeah. Should we, should we invite him in? No, wait a minute. Sure. No, no. Let the right one in. Let the wrong, don't let the wrong one in. I don't know. Signal us. We'll have to stop our constant hazing of him now, but maybe he's just listening in but doesn't feel like he's in a position to, I dunno. He signed into the Zoom. I think he wants to try. I I just see a Please. We're working on it. I see a Please stand by message him say, do, do is this? Yeah. Ask him a question. Only he would know the answer to. Well, I mean, I <laugh> why not drink? Right. Macallan 10. What are, what is the best possible Cheetos alternative? There you go. Only he would know the answer. Is that, is that correct? He would know the correct answer for sure.

(00:33:07):
Okay. Well, is he there, John? Oh, yeah. Okay. We're gonna let him take over. I'm gonna pot him up. Hello? Hello. Richard, you weren't supposed to be here. Where are you?

Richard Campbell (00:33:19):
I'm in the Denver airport. I dunno if there's enough bandwidth to make this work. I'm laid over for three hours with flight delays. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:33:26):
Well, we'll be glad to entertain you, <laugh>, while you're stuck.

Richard Campbell (00:33:32):
As I as I already, I already messaged Paul. There is no Macallan 10 <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:33:37):
You see, it is him. I knew it was him. Now what's the only suitable Cheetos replacement?

Richard Campbell (00:33:45):
Oh, why? Hawkins Cheesy. Don't be crazy. Of course. That's

Leo Laporte (00:33:48):
The only thing. All right. He's legit. He's legit. Let him in. You do look like he'll be once goes Now. I see what you were saying, Paul. He's, he's no, it's okay. We'll take it.

Richard Campbell (00:33:57):
I'm a little bleached out.

Leo Laporte (00:33:58):
We'll take it. Are you, where are you on your way to

Richard Campbell (00:34:01):
A I'm just a forest projection.

Leo Laporte (00:34:03):
<Laugh>, where are you? Come tomorrow. You know, I'm comfortable with that. Where are you headed to?

Richard Campbell (00:34:09):
I'm headed to Billings. We're fishing the Yellowstone.

Leo Laporte (00:34:12):
Oh, that's right. That's right. Oh, well, wonderful. So we were just, we just concluded talking about the eu Anything you want to say about that

Richard Campbell (00:34:28):
You're off? They've all gone mad

Leo Laporte (00:34:30):
<Laugh>

Richard Campbell (00:34:35):
That

Leo Laporte (00:34:35):
Good? Save and duplicate. Okay. I'm fixing you, you two talk amongst yourselves while I fix this. Did we involved with the next, next topic or just talk about anything else? Let's you can go to the next topic. I, I don't know if he's had the, the luxury Yeah. To AirPod. You're in the AirPod. Yeah. Well, so Microsoft announced Windows co-pilot at Build in May. Yeah. promised they would release it in June, which we all do was insiders, not obviously the final release. Every seven to 10 days in June, I have been meticulously berating them on Twitter for not, you know, it's June, whatever date, where's my copilot? And then on the second to last day of the month, they released it to the Jeb Channel, and by released, I mean released with an asterisk because they're Microsoft and they only released it to a small subset of those people who are in the dev channel using literally a controlled feature rollout because God <laugh>.

(00:35:40):
So that's what they do speaking, which it will require Microsoft Edge to be signed into your Microsoft account, and you'll be using that. You can use an Azure ad account as well. So yeah, like everything else that's on the Windows 11 taskbar by default, you can remove the icon, you can use a Windows Key shortcut to access it. Interestingly, it's Windows Key plus C, which you may remember used to be for Cortana. So if you're not sure that that gray has been hammered shut, this should seal that deal. So to be clear, windows copilot is not the same as GitHub copilot. It's not gonna help me do some coding.

(00:36:22):
I've told you the story about going to a hamburger restaurant in France, and I described it as someone from France, went to the United States, went to McDonald's, is said, my God, this is a brilliant business. We need to replicate this in France. But rather than taking any notes or photos, they just went back and worked off their memory. <Laugh>, that's what Windows copilot is to get home. Copo, like, you know, they have the same name. They're vaguely, but, but you have a Royale with cheese instead of a Big Mac. Yeah, but the one in France is slightly off. Okay. Yeah. Fromage. Okay. Okay, good. It's called Quick Burger, by the way. If you're ever in France, you can enjoy that. So Windows Quick Burger, or copilot is first of all, it's in, it's in a preview state, right? So it, the, it doesn't have all the features yet. But you know, I gotta say <laugh>, it's pretty clear where this is going. And I just, for you and the audience who are afraid of AI and think it's gonna take over the planet, I beg you to look at this because you will feel so much better about the future. This is really just not much of anything. Okay. Frankly, and I don't think I will. Okay.

Richard Campbell (00:37:27):
Is it just that it was rushed to market, that they, they tried to make your deadline cuz you were so upset about it?

Leo Laporte (00:37:32):
Well, you know, more than anybody actually about Microsoft and marching orders, right? So we know back when Gates was running the show and Net was the big new thing, everything had to be net right? And if you kind of flash forward to today, you can, you can see clear very clearly, AI is everything. This is the market cap, we gotta get this stuff going. Everything is co-pilot. And they went out to all the product teams and said, you're making a co-pilot, just figure it out. And, you know, the guys in Windows, I mean, this is like, normally I'm pretty critical of this team, but I gotta say, I don't know what they would do with this exactly. This is not, what are you gonna do? Like this is basically Cortado 2.0. Like what things can this do to kind of help you as you use Windows, right? So we can do the, the stuff we already have,

Richard Campbell (00:38:13):
They just rebranded Cortana. That's not a bad play.

Leo Laporte (00:38:16):
It's, this is very strongly a, a follow up to Cortana. Yeah. So it can bar, it can create a, instead of a, it can create a Spotify playlist for me. I be, well, I bet I can't do that, but I remember

Richard Campbell (00:38:26):
When <laugh>, but remember when the internet tidal Wave letter came out on Under Gates and every product team had to do something, internet and for the SQL server that ended up being a, being able to output a table as

Leo Laporte (00:38:38):
Htl. Yeah, html. Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. So here you have, yeah, here you have one of the most complex products on Earth. It's, it uses all these online resources, transactions, and everything. And it's like they're doing the equivalent of a, a tic-tac-toe board. <Laugh>, you know, and it's like, look Microsoft Word very briefly was an internet webpage or a blog editor, right? Remember that there was a lot of stu, you know, a lot of stuff they kind of stepped back from. So in this case, I would just say you know, this is gonna be one of those things most people are probably gonna look at once and just leave off, you know, frankly especially in the beginning. So it's

Richard Campbell (00:39:15):
A perfect time to put something in Canary, like, why wouldn't you put it up in Canary? Like, do, don't you, don't you see a schism between delivery mechanisms inside of the insiders?

Leo Laporte (00:39:24):
Yeah. Like

Richard Campbell (00:39:25):
This stage three guys, canary guys, I think they're different people.

Leo Laporte (00:39:28):
This is in the military, like skipping up the ranks and going, you know, skipping by your superior officer and going to someone above his head. You know, it just, it's, it's weird. Like it, I feel like there's a natural order of things. I agree with you a hundred percent. These should start in Canary and they should work your way down. Now I am working off this theory that Canary is Windows 12. So I guess if you accept that to be the truth, which Microsoft has never said, then maybe Dev is the place to start. And I don't know. We'll see. I do expect this to appear in the next version of Windows 11, right? This September, October.

Richard Campbell (00:39:58):
I'm, I'm more cynical. I think there's literally different teams that have different access to the deployment. Yeah. And some of them have access to Canary and some of them only have access to stage deployment and they haven't bothered to consolidate it.

Leo Laporte (00:40:12):
Yeah, I, yeah, I, I, it does feel messy to me and disorganized. But anyway, this is you, you know, it's whatever, whatever it's, it's, it's to have channel. So there's kind of a list of things it can do. It's not a particularly compelling list, <laugh> or whatever. Some of it, one thing you can do, I should say, is it's very much like the Bing AI integration in Microsoft Edge. If you've ever used that the initial view of this sidebar will look a lot like that. It has the same, this conversation can be more creative, more professional, more whatever. You can ask it questions just like you do on the web or in that edge sidebar. You can have it create an image for you. Although I found that to be incredibly limited, and I'll get to that in a moment.

(00:41:00):
It, but <laugh>, like, think about like the three, like I'm gonna call it four examples that Microsoft gives themselves to explain what you can do that's related to Windows are such things as you type, you type this out, by the way, you don't say this, you type it. Change to dark mode. Turn on Do not disturb, take a screenshot, summarize this website, which by the way, I never got to work. That has to be in Microsoft Edge. It has to be the active tab. Of course. That's, you know, as expected. The thing is my biggest complaint is it my complaint, one of my complaints about voice like Google Assistant, my voice assistants is that I will tell it to do something and then they check back with me to see if I'm sure. And then I have to talk to it again where I just want you to do the damn thing.

(00:41:46):
You know? So if I say if I type in, I can't say change to dark mode, it will does a little thinking thing and it's like, oh, it looks like you wanna change the dark, dark mar, you know, to dark boat. Is that correct? Yeah, that's what I wrote. <Laugh>, you know, like it's is with a voice you could possibly have misspoke, but I, I don't see how with text it, it's exactly what the thing is, how it could be wrong, but it makes sure, I find that to be annoying. And then it's, you know, kind of dumb. If you think about what people think of as dark mode is an oversimplification because the reality is that there's actually three different things going on in your computer that sort of control what I think most people think is dark mode. Meaning you can have dark mode applied to the os.

(00:42:28):
You can have a dark mode applied to the apps that support it, right? The modern apps that support that kind of a thing. And you can also have it applied to the wallpaper, right? Those three things combined are sort of like a theme almost. There's more two themes, but that's partially a theme. So I think when people say like, I want to turn on dark mode, I guess it's, it, it is at least like if you're using the default Windows 11 wallpaper, it will it will do the os and the apps, it does both. It does not change the wallpaper of course you didn't ask it to, right? I mean that's the, that's what computers do. They do what you tell 'em. But I mean, I think, I think the issue is, I, most people, some people maybe might have a bright wallpaper for light mode, but they want, might want a darker one for dark mode. It's not that smart. You know, it's not that smart. And that's how, you know, it's not really AI or machine learning or whatever. Even though we're using these terms like the main anything. Because if this thing actually understood you, if this thing was actually learning, it would say, Hey, when you turn on dark mode yourself it looks like you're actually changing the theme. Is that what you want me to do? It seems like that would answer, you know, it seems like that's what you want, but it doesn't, it will never, yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:43:33):
No, sometimes l m means limited language model <laugh>. Like it's, and this, and this is just parsing text ultimately. Exactly. It. Thank you. The office's exactly right. That's still

Leo Laporte (00:43:44):
Quite limited, right? This reeks of they've been directed to do something and they were like you know, and I I, there is an opportunity in Windows to, I don't know, tell people about functionality. They don't even know, like the vast majority of people don't know about all Tab, which is crazy, which means they don't know about lots of other stuff, you know, and we, we kind of get into this conversation about how annoying it is when Windows or some other Microsoft products tells me about something I'm a either already using or have b explicitly turned off, you know? But there is a learning moment that might occur here that could occur here. I mean, it'd be kind of interesting. This

Richard Campbell (00:44:21):
Is, I mean, this is arguably the most compelling feature of copilot as a concept is you have a vitrified ui, right? One that's, that's so mature that when you change it, you make all your incumbent users furious. And so now you get to introduce the new UI that the novices can easily grasp and that won't interfere with the existing one.

Leo Laporte (00:44:44):
Well, you know, I, we keep referencing that Steve ACH thing at build and, and how this is happening in stages. And this is just the first stage. It's that thing that sits next to every, the thing you're already using. They're not changing the basic UI to accommodate it. It's just, you know, how far can we go with this thing that's a thing on the side. I don't know, it's not clear

Richard Campbell (00:45:04):
To me. Well, I mean, we've run it up ideas for address bars and right clicks. Yeah. So this is just another place for you to pour your energy into. But you know, you've got a ton of functionality. You just haven't surfed it, surfaced it, right. Not in a way that anybody can find.

Leo Laporte (00:45:18):
No. And if you want to be really cynical, it's pretty clear this is yet another vector for forcing people to use Microsoft Edge. And thus Microsoft's online services and advertising even when they've chosen another browser. Because the, the Windows co-pilot is not like this native Windows app <laugh>. It's, it's the, it's just the Bing ui. It's, it's almost certainly like a web thing. It's almost certainly Microsoft Edge, right? And and you ask your questions and Bing is in invoked, and when you ask it to do something, if you go to the web from it, it will go to Edge, right? It's, it's, it's, it's, the Windows desktop is getting a little crowded with avenues that Ali to edge, right? From search highlights to the widgets now to this thing. It's like, I mean, what's left, you know?

Richard Campbell (00:46:06):
And now you're hinting at the real problem with it trying to help direct your work. You said it's always gonna direct you to Edge for everything,

Leo Laporte (00:46:13):
Right? So, you know, I use this thing, and I went through all Microsoft's examples. I did some of the things I do on my own when I test these stupid AI tools. I could never get summarize this website to work, which I found to be amazing. And I tried that so many different ways. The only thing that sort of worked is I could say, summarize this website and then paste a URL <laugh>. It's, you know, sort of the one that really failed for me though was they used the example make me a picture of a serene coy fish pond with lily pads. Okay? So I usually will, I'll go to Dali or one of the other tools and I'll say something like, create me an oil painting in the style of Frita kalo of Mexico City or something like that. And when I did that with this tool, it told me that it could not create an oil painting. It was an AI bot thing. It's, it doesn't create oil paintings, <laugh>, it's just says something else. So I had to reword it and I just had to do a picture. And then they came up with these data of the dead pictures that had kind of nothing to do with, with, with what I was talking about. The, the person was in fact standing in front of like a Mexican. The question is,

Richard Campbell (00:47:16):
Is there certain difference between literally and figuratively, even though Websters, doesn't it?

Leo Laporte (00:47:21):
Yeah. So, you know, unimpressive is what I'm, I guess is the overall impression that I got. Look, it's gonna get better. It's an early preview. They're not giving it to everybody, right? It's a CFR now, it's only in the dev channel. It presumably it will expand to other channels. Presumably it will hit Windows 11 this fall. And by that point, hopefully we'll have more features and some that kind of make sense. But there's nothing vital here. I guess the argument is if, if all it does that's useful is provide that an interface to that bing, bing chat stuff, right? Which it does just like Edge does. If you turn on that bing sidebar thing, is that an, is that okay? And it's like, it's is nothing wrong with that, right? Honestly, I wouldn't use it or like it, but I, I don't mind it being there and I don't mind other people using it, obviously as long as I can turn it off. But you know, this was, you hear copilot and you think, here we go. We're entering the 21st century here. And this just seems really basic to me. It doesn't seem sophisticated. It absolutely doesn't seem like AI beyond the Oh no,

Richard Campbell (00:48:26):
This is, this is a grade eight or rushing their homework in before it gets called for. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:48:30):
Yeah. <Laugh>,

Richard Campbell (00:48:31):
You know, the real question is how many APIs can you hook to, and how do you hook language to them? And, and more relevantly, it's like inventorying the apps that you have on the machine and saying, Hey, when I say edit a photo, you know what app do I mean?

Leo Laporte (00:48:45):
Right, right. That's right. And that's what I'm talking about. In other words, the, every, every, well not every so many products I've used, whether they could be things like Fitbits or whatever, they're, we'll, we'll claim the more you use it, the better it's gonna get, you know, and I would like to that use some windows for 30 years. Could you figure it out? Like, I, I, I, I know that there are no hooks in Windows today for it to have an understanding of me, but we, we, we've gone from a system where Windows eight started with this fairly sophisticated way of sinking settings, which I thought was really good. And then they backtracked from that and Windows 10 and then again in Windows 11. And to me, those are the foundational steps toward Windows actually understanding you and the way you like things.

(00:49:26):
But there's nothing in Windows that actually understands me. I know that because I see ads for things I already have. I see ads that mean nothing to me. I see suggestions for products I either don't use or long ago mastered. I get suggestions for saving documents and Microsoft Word that when, when they're saved, I, you know, I, there's no smarts behind any of this stuff. And maybe there will be someday I, maybe I'm dismissing the point or something. I don't know. But this feels like that. It's just like more of that. So some people will probably love it, you know? But I just don't quite, I dunno, you're just not, some people you're special. I think I'm people <laugh>, I don't know. Well how do we try it again? Is it, so I'm gonna get to that in the tip at the end of the show.

(00:50:17):
Okay. Save it for the tip man. Yeah. But the first step is to, to try it at all. You have to install the dev channel, build windows. The first step is admitting you have, that's no power at all over your AI companion. Yeah. Well, and then no power of over, whether you get this feature or not, either because that's the way you, you don't, cause you don't, okay. Really irritating. Yeah. <laugh>, you may or may not have access. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative> only the higher power noses. I all right. What else you got? So this happened while you were doing your ad <laugh>, so I have Holy cow. It's hot, it's fresh. It's just off the ticker tape. He ripped it off. And, go ahead. Read that hot news. I really wish you hadn't sold it that much. It's not that interesting, but, okay. <Laugh>, Microsoft took windows 365 for frontline out of preview, meaning it's general, generally available.

(00:51:16):
So Windows 365, of course is the windows and the cloud that, you know, the cloud PC deal. The idea here is I, I always think of retail. It's not just retail, but retail is a simple example. You have a retail store, there's one device that everyone uses, and they do stuff on it. And you can all have your own sign in. The version of Windows that's running is actually up in the cloud somewhere. That devices could be an Android device, it could be anything. It doesn't run. So Frontline is a point of sale system. It's no, it's not. I'm sorry. That's why I didn't wanna say it though. I'm sorry. No, it's not a point of sale. It, it's, it's for any commercial environment in which there are multiple people, but only one, or a very few computers or, or devices.

(00:51:51):
But everyone needs their own sign in. Ah, they have their own stuff and they're not all getting their own computer. You know, you're not getting the computer. Bad news. Here's the good news. Yeah. One of the ways you can do that is you have a cheap device instead of a really expensive computer. Yeah. And you license everybody for Windows 360 4 Frontline, which by the way is it's a little expensive, but $42 per month for three users. That's the first time I've seen that kind of thing. So you can do the math and what that is per user, but you have to do it on a, you know, three users at a time. And it goes up from there. But it, this is in addition to the more kind of what I would call traditional enterprise versions of Windows 365. Hmm. okay. Where, yeah. It's in it for a workplace, like a normal office or whatever. So anyway, just happened. I, that's probably all the attention I'm ever gonna give it, but <laugh>, it's out in the world. So if you want it, here it is. Yep. Come and get it. Yeah. But you better hurry cuz you don't know if you got it <laugh> or something. I dunno. Sounds like you got, how's it going in the airport there? Richard?

(00:53:04):
Nothing. I don't, well, the

Richard Campbell (00:53:05):
Weather's good. I can give you that much at least. Right. But

Leo Laporte (00:53:08):
Why are you stuck? Fly five hours, you're flying united. It sounds like you're flying united. Yeah, he must be right.

Richard Campbell (00:53:14):
I am flying United. No,

Leo Laporte (00:53:16):
There you go. He's And his, well, no, by which I mean there are flight delays. That's the United is Yeah. Notorious. They're not doing good right now.

Richard Campbell (00:53:26):
His, they've been having an especially exciting weekend, so. Yes. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:53:29):
Or long. That's right. And you're also flying on the busiest day of the summer, the day after the 4th of July. Is it? Is it? Oh, wow. Yeah. For flights. Yep. So your flies right now are somewhere stuck in the many, many miles of the Denver airport luggage system. I remember when they opened that airport, it was check. Yeah, it was crazy. It's big. I think the baggage area looks like that scene at the end of Yeah. The Raiders lost arc <laugh> where it's just Yeah. Boxes. Like, just go off into the

Richard Campbell (00:53:57):
Distance. They also had that software problem where they lost Yeah. Every bag for a week. Oh. Like every, if your bag went into Denver, it was gone. That's right. And took a long time to entangle that same thing to happened at Terminal five in Heathrow.

Leo Laporte (00:54:10):
Are you in the Polaris Lounge?

Richard Campbell (00:54:13):
I am just in the regular the

Leo Laporte (00:54:16):
Everyday human being lounge.

Richard Campbell (00:54:19):
Yeah. It turns out there's not a first class to Billings. Who knew

Leo Laporte (00:54:23):
<Laugh> Billings? No, of course not. Beautiful Billings, Montana. But it's gonna be worth it cuz I hear a river runs through it. Well, it's gonna be so awesome.

Richard Campbell (00:54:33):
Turns out that's, turns out that's most cities

Leo Laporte (00:54:35):
<Laugh>. Yeah, actually, it's a good point. In fact, I just made that comment to my wife about Mexico City, how interesting it was that there was no river going through the middle. But of course there was at one time it was a lake. But today Mexico City is this giant city that really, there's water there. I mean, sort of. But is it, was it a lake or a swamp? Can we be It was a lake. Oh, okay. They built a, yeah, the Aztecs built like an island basically for their, and turned it into a city.

Richard Campbell (00:55:00):
Wow. Yeah. And then series of floating structures, like apparently it was quite spectacular. Wow. Yeah. And very defensible.

Leo Laporte (00:55:05):
You can still take a little boat ride through the mangroves. Yeah. To the old That's right. See the old stuff. Yeah, we did. I I held a giant snake. That's probably how I know that that exists. Yeah. Yeah. It's fantastic. But is there, it's just a tiny part of it and it's not anything like it used to be. No, no. They built it up on top of it. It's like Rome. You dig down and lo and behold Yeah, that's right. There's a whole city down there. Microsoft's licensings. So a little story. A little story. Yeah. Yeah. Steve Gibson makes a program called Spin. Right. Hasn't updated it actually since 2004, but Right. It runs on dos interestingly enough. Right, right. And so in, back in 2004 he just had something, I think it was called Free Doss. That's right.

(00:55:58):
Was free, I think Open source. Anyway, maybe he licensed it. No, it's open source, but I guess now he needs something else. So he is bought a eternal license to a Doss, some sort of Doss. Oh, really? Clone. Yeah. By the way, if you go to HP or Dell and it maybe Lenovo, you can, in fact, I, I dunno if you have to be a business or if you can this as an individual, you can make, build a computer that runs free Dos and not Windows if you want to. And you'll save, you know, $35 <laugh>. Like, you could just, they, they don't ship it with nothing, but if you don't want Windows, they'll ship it with free dos. Not in all cases, but I, I just ran into this in a configurator yesterday. Yeah. That's a choice. I think. I think something's going on with Fri dusts, like it doesn't work on.

(00:56:49):
Yeah. Maybe it maybe it doesn't work on U E F I or something, but he has, he had to get a new version. Not a goofy problem to have. I know. <Laugh> you. So he actually licensed and then I think I remember reading that like a couple weeks after he licensed it, got a perpetual license for this Dos Clone. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. I think I heard that they went out of business, but I might be wrong. It <laugh>. Anyway, he owns it now. It's on <laugh>. It's on him. So, interesting. Yeah. I'll have to ask him anyway. So do, but there, the reason I mention this is, is Doss is in the news, well, it's not in the news, but it's something I'm writing about. So I've been going down this kind of tech nostalgia thing lately. Right. And that will come up during the the app pick at the end of the show too.

(00:57:36):
And in doing so, I've been watching a lot of documentaries. I've been rereading and rereading books I've already read. And there was a story that came up. I was like, you know, this is classic. Everyone knows the story of Microsoft and how they became successful, right. That IBM came to them, they licensed basic, they license licensed Ms dos, which they, you know, bought from someone else. And that the genius behind this decision was they get money every time any unit goes out the window at the door. And they reserved the right to also sell that product to other companies. And so when Compaq reverse engineered the bios and the IBM pc, the PC market was born, and now they had all these new customers to sell to. And Microsoft shot two fame, fortune and infamy. Right. We, everyone knows this story.

(00:58:18):
What few people know is the story of before Msdos was the thing, what they were licensing was basic that they went to Commodore and other companies that had 65 0 2 microprocessors to license basic. And when that happened, bill Gates ran into someone who was even bigger dick than he is. And that guy was Jack Trammel, the great Jack Tramel, Jack Tramel from Commodore. Oh my God. A legend. And he But he's forgotten today, right? Cuz they're gone. Yeah. But what people don't kind of remember is that Commodore won the home Computer wars. They sold more computers than everybody. Yep. And there was series of, but Jack Tramel being Jack Tramel. But when the first of those computers, which was the pet, was in development Microsoft found out about that and contacted them and said, Hey, we have a 65 0 2 basic, would you like to license it?

(00:59:02):
And I said, yeah, sure, let's talk about it. And so they had meetings. Bill Gates met with Jack Tramel and Jack Tramell said, I'm not licensing it. I'll pay you, but I'm not gonna license it. I don't want to ever, like, I don't want anyone to have mu make money every time I sell something. And this is because Jack Trammell almost went outta business with com in the days of the calculators because ti was vertically integrated, made their own processors and could undercut them on price. And so he said, I'm gonna buy, he, he bought Moss Technologies, which makes the 65 0 2 processor. He said, we're gonna be vertically integrated and this is never gonna happen to me again. So anyway, gates amazingly agreed to this. And they paid them $25,000 for perpetual license to basic they could do anything they wanted to.

(00:59:45):
It Microsoft or Yeah, Microsoft was free to sell to other companies. And they did. And the only deal was like, look, if you ever upgrade this thing, like you release new computers, you just have to license the changes back to us so we can also sell those to your competitors. And Commerce said, sure. Because Jack Tramell knew he would never make any changes to this basic. And what this jerk did was for the next three generations of computers ship the same exact out of date version of basic on everything they ever did. So whether you had a pet or a Vic 20 or a Communist 64 or whatever else, any APIC computer, it's the same garbage version of basic. It was terrible until the 1 28. Eventually they, I think they finally woke up to this. But but the thing is they paid 25 grand for this and this thing.

(01:00:31):
They sold more computers than everybody. And Gates realized at it's like, I just left a million, you know, millions and millions of dollars on the table. And so by the time IBM came to them and said, we want you to create an os, he's like, yeah, we'll license it to you and we're gonna make sure we can give it to everyone else too. And that's kind of why that happened. He was so burned by Jack Tramel, this person, no one even remembers that that's what he did. The thing that's interesting about the story, beside the fact that no one kind of knows about it, is the fact that the reason nobody knows about it is because none of the histories that have been written about Bill Gates and Microsoft mentioned this <laugh>, this is, it's not in the book Gates by Steven Manus and Paul Anders.

(01:01:07):
It's not in any of the books hard drive. It's not no one that book, the first one man the Manus book never mentions Jack Tramel and only mentions Commander a couple of times and does so in a very disparaging way. These El cheapo computers that were just like a kind of a joke before we had real computers. So I thought that was kind of, I just thought it was an interesting story that there's, there's this big chunk of Microsoft, or there's a part of Microsoft history that no one's really ever heard of, that actually I think had a, a major impact on what they did later and led led to them becoming dominant because they, they were never gonna make a West.

Richard Campbell (01:01:41):
And it wasn't a branded version of basic, like that was called it Commodore Basic. They

Leo Laporte (01:01:44):
Called it com basic. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. But it was Microsoft basic. And the thing is like if you went to an Atari or an app, maybe not Atari, but an Apple or a ti or whatever it was, any of these other companies, the same commands always worked everywhere. Like the Oh sure. You know, they, it was, were

Richard Campbell (01:01:59):
All Microsoft basic. The first time I ever saw Bill Gates in person was at Heathkit in Vancouver and he was trying to convince us to buy the level two heath kit cuz he could run Microsoft Basic.

Leo Laporte (01:02:10):
Sure.

Richard Campbell (01:02:10):
Because 16 k,

Leo Laporte (01:02:12):
The, the other fun part of this story is that bill Gates actually worked on this basic for Commodore he didn't write it himself, but he did some work on it. And he he put an Easter egg in. So there's this great story from the commander engineers where they're at I think it was winter CES 1978. And Gates sneaks into the booth, walks up to one of the pet computers and starts typing on the computer and they're like, what the hell's this guy doing <laugh>? And he typed in, he typed in like a wait 65 0 2 comm one. And then what came up was Microsoft all caps. And he, he's like, nice. And he clear discriminate. He left. So what he, what he was doing was making sure, like he could always tell when it was his basic, if it's legit, right? Yeah.

(01:02:51):
So this, this, this engineer who had worked on the basic, he's like, I've been over every line of code in this thing. How the hell did, I don't, I didn't say anything like this. It took him months. But he finally figured out, he did a pretty ingenious thing. He, he kind of messed around with the Ask E codes and shifted a couple bits. But the thing is it also caused like a major bug in basic Oh God. So he, that was unrelated. Like they had no idea these things were related. So this guy just fixed it. Oh. So at the 1979 Winter CSS Gates against Sneaks and the booth, the guy's like, here you go. Here he goes. And he typed the exact same thing. And the quote is, he goes, I remember Gates walked up and one of the machines typed that in, didn't do it anything anymore.

(01:03:25):
It, and he didn't do it anymore. And then he looked around and he's like, he was kind of tweaked about it cuz he had spent all that time and effort hiding it <laugh>. And so they'd kind of, you know, outsmarted him or whatever. That's awesome. That's a great story. Yeah. Classic. And it's a great story. But you know, like I said, like you know, Microsoft emerged victorious from all this stuff overall, like obviously Right. So when you read a story about Microsoft or about Gates, or you read a book or whatever, it's all about all the awesome stuff. You don't really hear the little times there were setbacks or whatever cuz you know, things could have been, things could have been quite different. You know, Bill's, I mean, Bill's real skill was, was screwing the opposition. Right. Honestly. Yeah. But he could code, I mean, let's not forget he could code in the early days.

(01:04:08):
Sure. he wrote some good code. Yeah. And he did. He did. He contributed to basic, you know. Yeah. He's very, he's very proud of his basic, the programmers at Workbook yeah. Has a That's right chapter with him and has some of his code. And he was so proud of how, you know, how few lines he was able to do something really awesome. I can't remember what it is. I'll have to bring that book in. Mine's pretty tattered, but what a great book. I think it's not outta I I had it. Yeah, I know you did. We've talked about it before. Yeah. This is a problem because there are a lot of books that I would like to get back and they're not available electronically. No. And I really don't want books and I wanna be able to search I understand. And things and it's a huge problem.

(01:04:45):
Huge problem. That's, that's why I, one of the best books of all time about this era is called The Home Computer Wars. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. It's written by a guy who worked at Microsoft com and the, the premise is Microsoft, or I keep saying Microsoft com won the home computer wars. And they did, I mean, they absolutely did. They sold more units, they made more revenue. Unfortunately they were really crappy computers. No. The Com 64 was fantastic. For the most part. I mean, all of them had problems. And Jack Tramell was a jerk. He was just so cheap. And he didn't even understand computers. He just was, you know, whatever. But he he got back at ti by the way ti lowered the cost of the TI 99 4 A. And so Jack looked at, he looked at it and said, okay, let's we're gonna lower our price even further.

(01:05:27):
Literally the next day. No, this was during the comedy 64 hour, but the next day ti exited the computer business. Yeah. Killed like, literally commenter lowered their price so low. They were like, we can't do this anymore. And he did to them what ti had done to them with calculators. So he got got revenge on them too. Yeah, he's a good guy. He's he's probably gonna be sainted, I think after <laugh> Boy. Okay. Yes. Well, I, you know, by the way, are these thro premium subscription articles that you're writing? Is this one? That one? Yeah. The the nostalgia ones are. Yeah. I love them. And that's a great reason people should go out and buy the premium. It's not expensive. How much is a premium subscription? It's 40 bucks, seven bucks a month or Yeah. Yeah. Like I would know this 50 worth $50 a year.

(01:06:21):
Same club twi $84. Yeah. But you have a discount for the year. Yeah, I, I buy it every year. Well, well worth it. We'll have a sale soon too. I think sometime in July we're gonna have a sale. O don't tell anybody. No, it's fine. There should be secret. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. You can see, you can see the stub. I'm not logged in, so I'm, but where you see that diamond upgraded premium, you push that button so you get to read the whole thing. Cuz this is, this is great stuff. A little plug for Paul and the rot.com Upgrade to premium. That's my suggestion. You can read the whole article. Will this go into Windows everywhere? Probably not. Cause it's Doss, huh? No, I, it's too, I I wanted to blow by the pre-history stuff. Pretty quick. Yeah. Yeah. Pre Windows.

(01:07:06):
Yeah. I logged in. So if you read really quickly, you can catch it. There you go. Here's the whole story. Scrolling by now. See somebody will slow it down and then I'll, I'll sure I'll, it'll end up on there's, there's bell. This is why he could walk up <laugh>. Yeah. Cause you know, he looked like nothing. He's, who's that 12 year old walking up to the, the computer? What's he doing? And just Bill, God, he, this is 1979, so he would've been maybe, I don't know, 27, 28. But he looks like he's 18. Yeah, he looks like he's 20. Yeah, exactly. Looks like a kid. Little kid. Yep. This is the era in, in which he would his mom would ride up in the elevator with him, take his glasses, clean it, put it back in his face. His dad used to run the slide deck for him. Right. The slide projector. Dang. Yep. Dang, bill. Alright, what else you got? What else should we wait, should I do a break? Let just look here. Yeah, let's do a break. A break. You gotta go. You gotta go do something. So go do something. Okay. I have another podcast. I'm recording. I'll be right back. Okay. Go, go do that other podcast. Hey Richard, I'm glad you could join us from the Denver airport where he is stuck in a layover. It's good to see you though. I appreciate it. We

Richard Campbell (01:08:20):
Didn't. Yeah, it's weird. As weird as it might be. You're the, I just hope I have enough bandwidth.

Leo Laporte (01:08:24):
Yeah, I think there's latency is all, I mean, the sounds Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a little tubby, the sound cuz you're in one of those study carols at the at the lounge.

Richard Campbell (01:08:34):
Yeah. Me and 250 of my closest friends <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:08:37):
Okay. We'll do some studying while I talk about our sponsor. A c i learning. We love these guys. They're more than just a sponsor. They sponsored our whole studio. You may say, well, how'd you get to be such good friends with a c i? Well, you may remember for the last 10 years we've been talking about it. Pro good friends with the founders of IT pro. We went out and visited their Gainesville studio some years ago. Lisa and I was so much fun when they did that grand opening. And Don and Tim are, are still there. And they, they have joined with ACI learning, which really expands their capabilities. As part of the ACI learning family, IT Pro can do so much more with their highly entertaining bingeable short form training for all areas of it. More than 7,000 hours to choose from.

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(01:13:56):
We did a little ai but let's do a little bit more. What do you say, Paul? Yeah, this is as little AI as the last thing we talked about <laugh> <laugh>. But Microsoft announced this week that they're adding AI powered shopping features to Bing the Edge web browser. Specifically, well no AI private shopping feature. So specifically AI generated buying guards across both review summaries, which I think everyone's doing these days. And then a new price match feature, which is specific to the us. I wonder if it'll look different at all. I am I wonderful. Recommend about show Microsoft products. Oh, you know, there you go. I mean, I wonder all kinds of things. Is this really ai? Is this Yeah, I don't, I actually, if, if AI could make recommendation engines better, that would be a huge victory. Cuz they're terrible.

(01:14:47):
Yeah. I I I mean, on some level, assuming the reviews that are out there are real to start with you know, summarizing them is not a horrible idea. No. Good at does this already. I don't know how they do it, but it's fine. It's, and, and for whatever it's worth, I'm not an Edge fan. I'm, I'm, I hope I'm, I've made that clear. But among the few things that people do cite when they want to use Edge the shopping stuff is actually one of the big ones. Yeah. And there are a lot of shopping features in the browser already. Like, this is just a, an augmentation of what they already have. You know, coupons, cash back, price, history, et cetera. I have, it's funny cause I only write, I only sort of use this when I'm writing the book or updating the book.

(01:15:28):
And so the three times I've had to update this chapter so far, or write or update, I get completely different results every time. <Laugh>. I, it's, it's, which is kind of a problem. You're like, oh, I'll, I'll, I know this example showed me an, you know, price history, so I'll go to this exact thing. Oh, it's different. And now it doesn't. Yeah. It's, it's a little annoying. But yeah. I don't know how you write a book about windows these days. It's just a moving target. It's crazy. It's right. It's like writing a book about jello. You know, it just, I just, you touch it and it changes, you know? I don't know. It's, it's confusing. It's hard. So anyway, that's happening. I don't think that's a big deal, but I don't think there's any, there's nothing wrong with this is fine. These are just basic, you know, basic functional, you know, what people are making a big deal about, which is hysterical.

(01:16:11):
Is Google saying, oh, we're gonna scrape the internet for our ai everything public is a, is a, you know, fair game. Right. Well, duh. And I was gonna say, if, if you follow Google at all your response, that should be like, right. Yeah. So of course. Look, it's, yeah. How did, how did you think search engines worked? Yeah, yeah, yeah. <Laugh>. So the thing that I, the thing I will give Google some credit for, and I think even if you're super cynical about Google, which maybe you should be they actually document the changes to their privacy policy when they make the changes. So there's a version of the privacy policy that actually has markup in it showing you what they added or removed. So you can actually go and look at the they. Oh, that's actually cool. I love that. Yeah, it's really well done.

(01:16:54):
So's a diff. Yeah, it's nice. And I think, oh, that's a nice bit of transparency. It's I don't know if they, they're required to do it. I've never seen anyone do that before, I thought. I think it's pretty cool. Anyhow, not surprisingly, now that they have Bard and other AI products coming they're just kind of augmenting the sentences. They already have the privacy policy to note that they're gonna use publicly available information to help train this stuff. And it says, this kinda says explicitly, if your business' information appears in a website, we may index and display it on Google services. Yeah. That's what's gotten you in trouble in Europe, by the way, but yes. I <laugh> this is right. The problem that news publishers have the world around is that you're scraping their data and not paying them enough, or not paying them at all in many cases.

(01:17:38):
I guess the difference, I mean, look, any search engine does that. I mean Bing has to look at all the contents of every page that's publicly available in order to produce their search results. Just like mm-hmm. <Affirmative> Google. I guess the difference is yeah. But then it's gonna different take what it's learned from these sites and, and, and regurgitate differe difference in some, well, the difference is, the difference is theft, right? So in other words, <laugh> Google can make, well, no, I mean, Google can make a pretty good, good argument right now. And they do that when they link to something that's online, that's information. You're almost, it's almost like a compliment. We've decided that you're a good source of information. Of course we wanna link to that. And when people click on it, they go to your website. So what's the problem?

(01:18:14):
You know, the, the thing with AI is that it's gonna do the same scraping, but it's gonna collect that data. It's gonna, you know, contort it with other data and it's gonna regurgitate something out that will appear to be a unique holy created thing. When in fact, a lot of it might have been based on content that someone else created. But, and this is the whole issue of copyright and ai. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, that's also what humans do. It's transformative. And I think most of the like, okay, like any, like, there's no such thing as new music, but you take things that have come before as long as it's transformative, as long as it's not a copy of it. Well, ed Sheeran appreciates your argument there, Leo, but I gotta say <laugh>. Ed Shean is not making billions and billions of dollars. He did win. That's true. Yeah. off of advertising, which is gross. You know, at least, at least he's making a creative. Yeah. And this is, I mean, there are a number of copyright ai cases Yeah. In progress right now. But most people, most attorneys agree that I've talked to. It's gonna be a hard thing to prove because it's transformative. It's, it's what humans do. You know. Yeah. They they read stuff, they look at art and then they create their own. Yeah. I, I mean,

Richard Campbell (01:19:28):
I wonder if 2023 is gonna be the year of the scrape between different, you know, Reddit and Twitter charging for APIs, like everybody's scraping on

Leo Laporte (01:19:37):
And no, we're not using that as the title for the show. I just wanna stop that right now. Oh no, I'm writing it down Year, the year of the scrapes is great. It should be shutter in inducing <laugh>, call it Papsmear. But you're right. That's why we were talking earlier Richard before you arrived about to the shenanigans going on a Twitter over the weekend. And that's, I don't know if I believe him, but that's Elon's excuse for those rate limits on Twitter is because people have been scraping. Did he use the word shenanigans? I use the word shenanigans. Oh, <laugh>. That would've been funny if he actually described himself that way. No, no, no. But

Richard Campbell (01:20:11):
It always starts with jacking up the rates on the api or limiting access to the api. It's like, well if you're gonna limit our access, then there's other ways for us to collect your data.

Leo Laporte (01:20:20):
Right? Yeah. Right. Yeah. And don't, don't threaten us cuz we'll use them. Does, I mean I guess Google I know Google searches Mastodon I presume it searches Twitter Right? Lot. You search, you could do a Google search and you'll see, I wonder, I wonder how this's very clear if, if it is on a public facing website. Right? It is. Fair game for Google. That's kinda what El has done is made this less of a public facing website. Right. That's an interesting question. That's true. Although he started scaling that. But I dunno if you followed today's news, but oh no, I haven't seen the latest. It's, that's been scaled back a little bit. Yeah. It broke Twitter <laugh>. Yeah. So they had broken the, or removed the ability for non, you know, a non account holder to view tweets. Right. This is crazy. I'm sure everyone, like, you know, my website, we had a Twitter feed on the side and we had to get rid of it because not no data was coming through. Right. well, I mean that's what Google does. Google doesn't log into Twitter before it's spiders it, but it's not gonna be able to Oh, they're smart. They probably log in his Elon Musk <laugh> and then they, you know. Wow.

Richard Campbell (01:21:27):
I don't know because you know, he uses the same password everywhere. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:21:30):
Exactly. <Laugh>. It's amazing. That's the same password I have on my luggage <laugh>. 0 0 0 0 <laugh>. Yeah. You told me my butt looks so big. Anyway. I

Richard Campbell (01:21:43):
Thought, I thought there was supposed to be a new CEO to Twitter and he was gonna go, you know, build rockets

Leo Laporte (01:21:48):
Is really just running ad sales. Linda Yao. Right. Elon is clearly in charge of everything else. And probably that too. You wouldn't ever want to work under

Richard Campbell (01:22:02):
Immediately go work on your rocket. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:22:05):
You wouldn't want to be Elon's boss at anything cuz he was just go's noon's boss. He's un he's unmanageable. Yeah, precisely. Yeah. Yeah. Well anyway, it's just a Twitter is just an Eli the gift that keeps on giving, but I, but I think people are done with it so we can We'll stop. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll stop talking. Google's privacy policy I guess we'll talk about on this weekend. Google. Okay, fine. It does seem like kind of, I'm sure you, you'll have to Yeah, we will. I yeah, we'll debate it. You have to, you got any hardware news? Well, again, it's not so much news, although I had that pixel fold. Oh yeah, I have to say, so you had, I have you had to return it by today if you didn't want it. Yeah. Cuz they're flying tomorrow. Exactly. Did you?

(01:22:49):
Unfortunately I did. So here's, but here's the, but well here's, here are the reasons I, when I went to buy this at the time, you gotta remember they had incredible trade-in deals. I could have, I could have knocked almost a thousand bucks off this thing by trading in my phone and my wife's phone. They also were throwing a pixel watch at you, which is worth three $50 ostensibly, but rather have three $50 off, but, you know, whatever. I didn't do that because my expectation was that I wasn't gonna be keeping this thing. And, you know, why lose, you know, God knows what gray area that we're in now when my phone's gone and they're evaluating it, and I did, you know, so I thought if, you know, if I, if if I somehow fell in love with this thing, I would just send this thing back like I planned to buy it again.

(01:23:35):
You know, and then I fell in love with this thing and I thought, goddammit, what am, you know, so the problem is those incredible training offers are gone now. So, oh, I my wife wants one too. So, but they're expensive. So I think we're gonna see, we'll see whether how the sales go you know, maybe we'll back. So you do want it, you just don't wanna pay the price. I don't wanna pay full price. I don't wanna feel full pay full boat. I also think how Samsung gets me every time. Right. It's incredible. It's the trade. Exactly. Yeah. Google does the same thing, but the, one of the th the big differences with Pixel, at least over the past two years, the Pixel six and seven series, is that they are undercutting their direct flagship competitors by hundreds of dollars. Right.

(01:24:16):
They also have regular sales where hundreds of dollars more comes off the price at some point buying a Pixel seven is like getting a, a prize in a box of cereal. Like anyone could get one of these things and they didn't do this with the pixel fold, which kind of blows my mind. If you look at the two major configurations, they're identical in price to what Samsung is charging for their Z fold. Right. that is not gonna work because I don't think Google or Pixel at least has the name out in the world. I don't think they're a trusted brand. I think Samsung kind of is, you know, and, and plus let's face it, Sam or Google's had a lot of product quality with hardware and they're getting a bad reputation for support. I see. Yeah. Although they do pledge six years of security updates.

(01:25:00):
No, I mean like if the phone screen breaks Oh yeah, no, you're on your own. Yeah, no, the, the, the asterisks to that is they are putting the pixel fold into that kinda su repair program. You can go to, I don't dunno if it's the, what's that major Fixit company, I think you'd be able to get a service there and there. I, I break you fix, I, I I fix you break. I think. I think so. But they're, they're actually including the internal screen in that. Ah, like you, you could as an individual, I don't know who would want to do this. It'd be like doing surgery, but Yeah. You could app apparently someday soon you'll be able to replace that yourself. That's good. Because, you know, if you get a crease in it or Yep. The gonna tell you the

Richard Campbell (01:25:37):
Issue, right. Is this screen creasing.

Leo Laporte (01:25:40):
Right. That and also there's a

Richard Campbell (01:25:41):
Lots of software o only appearing in the middle right across the crease.

Leo Laporte (01:25:45):
There's also a and Ron Amadio was talking about this at our Technica, and and this is true on the fold too because the ole screen is right there. They put a plastic covering over it. That's right. There's no gorilla glass cuz Gorilla Glass doesn't bend. You can't. Yeah. You know, so

Richard Campbell (01:26:01):
You can fold glass once

Leo Laporte (01:26:04):
<Laugh> Yeah, I'm sure Corning's working as fast as they can with foldable glass. And I bet you there's something, but Oh, I bet if Steve Jobs wanted it, they'd do it. But anyway, <laugh>, so bitter much. No I, I gotta say I 10 years ago and this was 2013, so a couple, well, three years after the iPad came out, you gotta remember back then the iPad was a just a tablet. People watch movies on it. They read books and stuff, but there was already this growing collection of people who wanted to make it into a, a laptop. And so you'd have these idiots that would show up at like a internet cafe or whatever, and they would pull out their, the tablet stand and the Bluetooth keyboard, the Bluetooth mouse and then No, they were trying to make it like a laptop, you know, <laugh>.

(01:26:49):
And I infamously had a con, you're describing Mike Elgan here, so be careful. Yeah. Just dirty, you know. And <laugh>, you know, I just, my whole thing was like, look, and I still feel this way by and large. I mean all these years later, for the most part, my experience has been over the years, like in my case, like when I travel, I'll bring a laptop and that's great for work and I bring a tablet because I want to read, I read every day and I like the bigger screen. I'm middle aged and and sometimes when I travel, I'll actually watch a movie, I'll download a couple movies, whatever. And then of course you use your phone for like, everything, right? So your phone is your phone. And there's some real advantages of this, including that every one of these things has its own battery.

(01:27:25):
So when I open my laptop, I don't waste time on it, like playing a game or reading a book or something because I'm using battery that should be used for productivity tasks. Right. And I sort of, I, I didn't sort of, I called this the right tool for the job at the time. Right. And I've kind of adhered to this principle ever since. And I've been looking for that one product that was gonna do the work of two things adequately without enough compromises that it, it still made sense. And I think that these folding phones, and I would say especially the pixel fold be for me because I like the aspect ratio stuff compared to the really tall and thin Samsung screens is the first I've seen in 10 years where I'm like, yeah, this could, this can replace, this can replace two ta two of the devices I use every day.

(01:28:09):
And that's really interesting to me. That said, you buy a new brand new Pixel Pro and a brand new pixel tablet and save 500 bucks <laugh>. Right. It's, you know, cuz pixel fold is very expensive and that's where this kind of falls apart for me. Yeah. and I think, but, but it's interesting. You liked the form factor, you liked the device. Yep. You and Stephanie both want one. Yep. Wow, that's really interesting. That's incredible. And that was not expected. I just, yeah. I have a, yeah, I mean look, I can fall for marketing as hard as anybody. I, every time Apple holds an event I'm like maybe, you know but you know, you kind of scale back from the cliff or whatever. And I, I, and look, when I review products, I, I usually take many weeks or even months and I really go in depth and I didn't have that time for this.

(01:28:56):
I felt kinda weird about that, but I did what everyone else does, which is you spend a week with it and then you cough out, you know, whatever. And I just wanted to be really clear about that cuz I just didn't have a choice just timing wise, you know, it was bad for me, but yeah. I I I didn't expect to like this one so much. Yeah. Now Samsung's gonna have an event this month. We don't know when yet. That's right. In August. Yeah, I think right. Or or August. Yeah, maybe it's August. Anyway, it's unclear. I think it's usually August. Maybe it is gonna be this month. I think they said it was gonna be July this year anyway. Yeah, you might be right. They haven't announced a date and the presumption is they'll announce a new galaxy fold in a new flip.

(01:29:29):
Would you look at those or are you, do you want I would, but every, I would, and like you, like you noted like they do a, like day one, my God, you can get incredible money on a trade-in from Samsung. Right. They do. That stuff is amazing. I don't like Samsung, frankly. Yeah, I'd like the whole clean Android image thing. I like all the picture Good hardware though, I gotta tell you. No, I know, I know, I know. I would love a a Samsung device, but with Google's software and services on it, I don't like the Samsung kind of superfluous nonsense. But I mean, well the is gonna make it possible for you to remove all that Samsung Superfluity. That's true. Good news. They don't live in, don't live in Europe yet, but you know, you never know. Yet <laugh> no, I, all of the rumors I've seen and that there's some really recent ones too, suggest that from a foreign factor perspective, they're not changing too, too much.

(01:30:18):
There's a small, I dunno if this is a small or big thing, but the pixel fold closes flat existing Samsung looks not Samsung. Yeah, no. Looks like a surface book like with a hole in metal. And by the way, that's particularly damaging when the most sensitive part in the entire system, which is that where the hinge and that folding display intersect is the part that's exposed to the air even when it's closed Yep. Is a little concerning. Yep. On the flip side, I would say Samsung has been doing this, what they're on the fourth generation now, so soon to be fifth. So obviously number one and, and they keep improving the hinge and it's sealed. That's right. But I just basically crunch is gonna get right in there and it's gonna be all exactly, you know. Exactly. That's Yeah, you don't wanna go down.

(01:31:00):
Nope. Like Ron did it ours text. So exactly. I don't, although by the way, it's interesting. He's the only major example of that. I know. I think Ron either he had a defective phone, in which case, so was it the, was it the note 20 that what was the version of the note that was exploding and catching on fire? What was that? 7, 6, 7, something like that. Seven. Okay. So whatever that was, if you were to go back in time and would look at that product's released one week later, everyone reviewed it as the greatest smartphone Yes. Ever released. I loved it because when you only have, when you only have one week with something, yeah. You have no idea what's wrong with it. Unless it's like a glaringly obviously problem. Like you, you actually have to use things over time to understand where some of the flaws are.

(01:31:41):
And I unfortunately in the case of whatever the that circuitry in there that was causing the fire, got battery had a, a significant flaw. <Laugh> catching fire takes time. You can't rush catching fire. You can't rush it. Yeah. so yeah, I get my point though is that maybe there's something like that with the pixel fold. It's this, I can't possibly predict how well the screen will hold up. How Well that's my figure. Samsung, what is this their fifth fold? Yeah, I know. I just, I've got some, I like the shape experience under the belt. I know prefer I, I prefer the form fa the aspect I really do issue. Yeah. I, my prediction is, I don't know next year or whatever this is, but that we will see a pixel fold pro that will be a larger phone but with the same aspect ratio.

(01:32:24):
And that is very interesting to me. Cuz I would, I would, I, the outside screen is 5.8 inches little small for me mm-hmm. <Affirmative> 6.1 inches by the way is this standard kind of iPhone non iPhone pro non, you know, mega version, whatever. Right. those pixel seven is probably 6.3 inches. Pixel, you know, the pro is probably six, seven, you know, whatever that is, it's bigger. So it's also just weird. These extra tall screens are so weird looking. I don't, I just Exactly. I don't like creepy. That's my big thing. Yeah. Because honestly like, as exciting as the folding stuff is, the reality is most of your interactions on a phone are these kind of glanceable quick things. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> your phone buzzes, you look at it, maybe you do a little quick response to a text message or whatever. It's, but you don't open it.

(01:33:06):
And that's where I think the Samsung fold falls apart. I, for me, I just don't like that tall, skinny form factor. Yeah. If I weren't all in on the Apple ecosystem, if I weren't a sheel mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I would probably get the flip, the new flip because that's gonna have a bigger screen. Yeah. It's a, I think that's a great size. I would just say, so, so I wrote this article about hybrid stuff and I, I went back about, you know, if you think about like a laptop when I came out, it's kind of a hybrid device in a way. It's like you don't have to go to a room to use a computer. You can bring it with you. It's kind of a cool idea for its time. Yeah. The flip is an excellent phone and I'm, I I and I very much see the use case for it, but it's not really a hybrid device.

(01:33:45):
Right. Because the, in the, in the end you're, it's always a phone, you know, you have this little thing and you open it and it's still a phone <laugh>, you know what I mean? Like, it's not replacing a tablet, it's, it's just replacing your phone. So it's, it's very much an interesting form factor, but it doesn't to my mind kind of fall into the category of hybrid, you know? Yeah. It's just a new, oh, it's not even a new form factor. It's a form factor from like a nineties. No, it's the old form factor. It's like applied, applied to smartphone. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the star tack. Anyway, it's a, it looks like a nice device. I, but I want the, you know, I want the little tablet thing. You want a little tablet in your pocket some time. You didnt feel like he was too big to carry around too thick?

(01:34:25):
No. Nope. Okay. No, no. I mean, if you're wearing skinny jeans you have other problems I can't help you with, but, but I, but I think this thing is for any man, certainly, and I think even for a woman, if you have like a small, you have people sometimes, like my wife has a little, like, not, she has a purse, but she also has like a fanny pack. I think pack. Yeah. It would fit fine in that. Fine. Alright, the pizza's here, so I'm gonna let you take over and do the Xbox segment. Okay. And and then, and Richard if you have anything to say, just say it. Paul is Yes. Is now by the just Richard as a general rule you should always do. Yeah. If you have anything to say, say it. Yeah. <laugh>,

Richard Campbell (01:35:01):
Normally I'm very shy, right?

Leo Laporte (01:35:03):
Yes. Yeah, yeah. Self-Effacing. Yes. Mm video game exclusives. This was the last day of testimony on, on last week's trial. And they carted out the big guns and among them, Microsoft ceo, SYA Nadella, and I <laugh>, I almost said something like, I like Sya Nadella. And I'm like, I'm not even sure I can say that. I mean, he, he is, you know, whatever, he's fine. But he claimed that he wants video game exclusives to go away, especially in the Xbox. And yeah, sure. No, that's why you've spent tens of billions of dollars buying game studios and want to spend $90 billion or whatever it's buying Activision ly. I, I understand you exist in this market that, you know, that is there and it's Sony's fault, or Nintendo's fault or Atari's fault or however you wanna blame it. But I, you can't claim that you want this to happen when you're actively working to make sure that you're now a big player in this space.

Richard Campbell (01:36:02):
Yeah, but I think it's because they wanna do the game pass model and you'll buy Xbox for a game pass rather than paid.

Leo Laporte (01:36:10):
Right. Well, so the Sony, this is that kind of definition of market issue. Like you know, when you're antitrust, when you're looking at antitrust and you want to prove that someone is dominant, you can narrowly define a market however you want to make them look, do you know, dominant, right? Like the Apple is a, the dominant player in Mac based operating systems, you know, it's like, yeah, well yeah, duh. So in Microsoft's case, we used to have this notion of Xbox games or Xbox platform exclusives. And what that meant was those games would only run on an Xbox, but it a console. And as Microsoft expanded Xbox to include Game Pass and other subscription services and whatever else it's kind of hard to define these things because in many cases they can also run on PCs. We have these cross-platform games that are kind of common now.

(01:36:56):
And then because of game streaming, there's still, I mean, there's still exclusives, but you can access them on more devices, right? There's still exclusives to the Xbox ecosystem with asterisks, right? Because in some cases, these games, because of all these deals Microsoft has been doing lately will be available from competing services too. And I, the the problem with this is it's not pervasive. It, it, it's still very much a weird subset. So if you're like a, an Nvidia GForce now customer and that's what you like, and there's some part of the Microsoft Xbox exclusive game thing that will run on your service, the thing that you're subscribing to, but it's not the whole Xbox thing, right? It's not, you know what I mean? It's, it's this's still, the, the superset, the big circle in this bubble field is Xbox. And, you know, some of the games will leach over into other things, but it's, you know what I mean? So it's still, it's still exclusivity, it still benefits Microsoft every time, you know,

Richard Campbell (01:37:59):
It definitely benefits Microsoft, but I, I mean, it makes sense to me, Hey, they've been burned by exclusives, so they have a lot of case for Yeah, that's true. We wanna resist exclusives. Agree. But also the fact is they have, they have more financial models than Sony does here. And so they have ways to make money that even when it is exclusive, they would likely win.

Leo Laporte (01:38:17):
Right,

Richard Campbell (01:38:18):
Right.

Leo Laporte (01:38:20):
Yeah. I I I I, I, I am very naive when it comes to this stuff. Like, I, I would like to live in a world where Microsoft puts its exclusives on Sony, and Sony puts his exclusives on the Xbox, literally on the console. I, I know Xbox, I will say Sony does something and then someone pointed this out to me, I'd kind of forgotten about this. And I guess I can say I didn't completely understand the strategy, but MIC or Sony, like Microsoft is bringing console games to PCs. And the way that in, in Sony's case, they are bringing their exclusive to the PCs. That doesn't mean that they look at whatever they have here in 2023, and they port that what they've been doing is going, going to their back catalog and starting from the back and coming forward. So, you know, it starts off with older games.

(01:39:05):
They get a little no newer as we go forward in time, but it's not one of those day and date things. That's one of the things that Microsoft does do a lot of times. Not always, but a a lot of times. So there, if you wanna join, I think it's the PlayStation now, I think is the service, if I'm not mistaken. You can stream to games that you bought in the cloud, you can stream them to your pc. And if you, you can buy some pc, like native PC games that are made by Sony, you know God's war and so forth. And I don't know, I just want everything to work everywhere. You know? I wanna be able to choose, like, I wanna use a Nintendo Switch, or I want to use a, you know, a phone or I want whatever it is. You know, I don't know why Nintendo doesn't bring all their classic NS games to, you know, iPhone and iPad.

Richard Campbell (01:39:49):
So you want, you want Xbox streaming on a PlayStation? Is that where you wanna go?

Leo Laporte (01:39:53):
I w I would like Xbox Games downloadable and installable on a PlayStation. I absolutely streaming as well, for sure. I, I just, I, I, it's one of those can't we all get along moments? You know? I feel like this is a big enough market that you're

Richard Campbell (01:40:08):
Not being to be capitalist Paul, honestly.

Leo Laporte (01:40:11):
Well, but hold on a second. So think about it from Sony's perspective. So Sony would, no, no, no. Right. Sony would never want this. But you know what? Sony has this big lead that they have, and the reason they have this big lead is that they have more and better exclusives. So in a world in which both companies were putting their stuff elsewhere, Sony would benefit from the increased market penetration of having additional machines that would buy the software. And I'm, I'm sure there are Xbox owners who would be happy to buy some of those big Sony games. Just like, I'm sure there are some PlayStation owners who would be happy to buy some of the, you know, halo or whatever it is, some big Microsoft slash Xbox ams on their, the console they chose. You know, I want it to be more like the PC space, I guess. Like, you can have a pretty low end PC these these days and still play some decent games. Of course, you can stream anything. But you can also choose, like, I'm gonna spend more and get the better PC in this case,

Richard Campbell (01:41:01):
But Yeah. But talk to a Mac owner about that.

Leo Laporte (01:41:04):
I think it's gonna be there too. I think that's coming, right? We saw the ww DC stuff, and it was actually some news about that today, about this ability to port Windows based games to the Mac more easily now because of what's going on with Apple silicon. I think that's a, I think that's gonna happen. Yeah. I

Richard Campbell (01:41:19):
Know we're gonna solve this with brute force and hardware emulation.

Leo Laporte (01:41:22):
Yeah, I think we are. I really do. But you know what, whatever I, I, I know it's naive and I, I, and i's, it's simplistic, but I, I just, I, I hate, I guess that's what Sachin Nadella was really saying. I hate that this world exists. I wish it was better. I wish it was different. I don't think it's gonna be

Richard Campbell (01:41:41):
<Laugh>. You know, and your comments at the top of this about Nadella were interesting to me because in Subways, Nadella is very much a generic c e Yeah. Like, the previous CEOs were such characters we sort of expect in tech character CEOs. Yeah. But when's the last time you saw him have any kind of gaff other than the first year that he was ceo? He, that's a good point. Well, and, and I mean, I get to bump into him every so often. He's never off script. Ever, ever.

Leo Laporte (01:42:08):
Yeah. That takes us a certain kind of person that's very unusual. It's, but you know what? It's more mature. I mean, I think the you know, bill Gates Steve Ballmer stuff, these guys were rougher, you know, around the edges. And

Richard Campbell (01:42:21):
Yeah. They had the self-made element to, to,

Leo Laporte (01:42:23):
Yeah. When you're going to war hired role, you want that guy when you we're, we're trying to carve out new markets and blah, blah, blah. You want that kind of MacArthur type. But once you're this big established, you know, ostensibly slow moving company, and you're, it's not exciting and fast moving anymore, it's cloud. You know, maybe you want, you know, I not, maybe I think you do want a guy like Sachin Nella, you know, this kind of, I don't want, I don't mean to say plotting like a methodical, logical engineer type. I think it's also possible the public version that we see is not what he is privately. Right. I would give anything to think that this guy was, he's very

Richard Campbell (01:42:58):
Much on script

Leo Laporte (01:42:59):
Private. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. He is. I refuse to believe that he ever actually left any good ceo. He's extremely cautious in his public. Yeah. But, you know, announcements, he's not a Steve Ballmer. I, I really like about Phil Spencer, who's the guy that runs Xbox, is that he, first of all, the guy walks in in a torn t-shirt and jeans, right? Doesn't care. He's plainspoken. He very, is very upfront about the mistakes that he's made, that they've made as a business. Whatever. He, he just, he doesn't think about answers. And I, I always I, this is my favorite example from a million years ago, but there was a program in Microsoft called XP Reloaded. Remember Longhorn was taken forever, and they were trying to renew excitement in Windows xp. They had done service Pack two, but then they started doing over the, the media programs.

(01:43:45):
They're trying to make it more exciting. It's the same thing, but let's say make it more exciting. We wanna market this. Right? And so we were at some but they refused to admit publicly that that's what this was. So we were at the launch event that again, they were not calling it XP reload. So I was talking to a PR guy and I said, Hey, I said, come on, admit it. I mean, this, this is what this collection of things you're releasing is XP Reloaded, right? And he said, well, Paul, you know, Microsoft is always reevaluating how we ship solutions to our customers. And right then Greg Sullivan walked by and I was like, shut up for a second. I said, Greg, he's only, so this is XP Reloaded, right? And he goes, yep. And then he hoist his glass of wine and he walked by and Oh my God.

(01:44:20):
I said, that's how you answer No, the question. But see your agenda as the press and our agenda as users is different from the company's agenda, especially as a publicly traded company. Their tr their whole audience is not us. It's the stock market. I feel, look, I feel very strongly about transparency and every aspect of every part of this business. And, you know, Leo, cause I complained about this endlessly every quarter, when you look at the nonsense, they talk about, you know, windows does Azure was up 16% year over year. Oh, what was the last year? We don't know. You know, like, they don't, they don't give you any hard data. But then we have like this trial, and all of a sudden we've got 1800 pages of documents with the very hard data Microsoft revealed when the next PlayStation was coming out, and it's in documentation and how much it's gonna cost.

(01:45:08):
You know, these answers, this is why I don't, these companies hate these trials. Yeah. And Discovery, apple, epic, apple one in every regard. And it was still a horrible loss for Apple because we heard all what the stuff that they're saying privately. Okay. I, I, I don't, I look, again, I'm naive and I'm simplistic. These are publicly held companies. They have shareholders. We have a right to this information. That's how we make decisions about where we're gonna invest it. It is, I think it is, but I don't even understand how it's legal to be this big. I feel like we stepped into it over the past 10 years. Every quarter each one of these companies was like, how little can we say? And then after a few years, they're like, holy crap, we don't have to say anything. No, that's right. Like, I just think people stopped asking.

(01:45:52):
That's cause the SCC does not enforce. Yeah, it's nuts. The rules or doesn't make the Congress doesn't make the rules requiring what is clearly in the public interest. I think every step, but you can't blame a company. It's same thing with tax law. You can't blame a company for taking every advantage they can take. That's like saying, if I could kill this guy and get away with it, I would Yeah. <Laugh>, you know pretty much. Yeah. I don't know if it were legal to kill people who are left-handers, there would be no more lefties. Jesus <laugh>. But fortunately it's not sadly true. So we need to go to Congress and, and, and we need to go to the S E C and we need to vote and say, enforce the GD rule. So my wife is left-handed. So this is a constant source of smi that's why I bring it up.

(01:46:41):
So I I, one, one of my best jokes about this was I saw, I said to her one time, I said, you should try to get a handicap plate. And she's like, why, why, why? And I'm like, well, you're left-handed <laugh>. You know, you don't even, you just left-hand. I, if I could get a handy cla put for that, I would. Yeah, right. Anyhow I, I just wish, I'm just from my little role in the side corner here. I look at these companies and I think I really like when they're transparent and I can't stand when they're not. And I kind of have a hard time understanding how it hurts them not to be transparent. I think it's the, unless of course they're just a scam or they're in a, you know, well, yeah. Fail until you win kind of a situation. It's the home comes to mind.

(01:47:26):
Well, by the way, that's what Microsoft was with the cloud for a while. That's what Microsoft is right now with ai. Oh, I completely, you know, if you think about it, Elizabeth Holmes was taking the lessons learned Yes. From the tech industry. From the tech industry and applying it. Yeah. The thing is, fake it till you make it. The problem is when Windows puts up an ad that I don't, like, I don't get cancer or whatever, you know, like, it doesn't, this is a different area. The biggest problem in, in my opinion, it was a, she was a woman, and B, she ripped off George Schultz. And you don't rip off George Schultz in this country. I know. Not to mention she imitated Steve Jobs. She faked this voice. I don't care that she was a woman. I think if anything, we need more women leaders. No, no. You and I agree across the board. You and I agree. But I think that there was this subtle

Richard Campbell (01:48:10):
Like, hey, yeah, you can fake it till you make it, but in the end, you have to tell your insider you have Yeah. Investors. Yeah. With your product doesn't work. Once you're actively lying to the people who are financing you. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:48:22):
You're especially, you're in trouble. And especially it's a healths consequence. Yeah, exactly. It's a health product. Right? This is, you know, if if <laugh>, you know, windows copilot is lame, and you promise this, all these great features, I mean, okay, big deal. But when you're not telling people that they have some medical issue because your blood test doesn't actually work that is not just ethically wrong. I mean, it's illegal. It's just not, it's not right. It's just not, it, it just, it's dangerous. You don't hurt people. Yeah. So, yeah, she should be in jail for the rest of her life, but you know, whatever. Anyway,

Richard Campbell (01:48:57):
Speaking about ho hurting people talk about mobile development cuz that can hurt people.

Leo Laporte (01:49:02):
<Laugh> <laugh>. It's hurt. It's hurt Microsoft, I can tell you that. In fact well

Richard Campbell (01:49:09):
That's because they haven't gotten into mobile development. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:49:11):
Well, not for games. Yeah, you're right. And, but, you know I, the iPhone was obviously like this asteroid heading toward their earth that destroyed everything. Microsoft learned all the l wrong lessons from Apple, unfortunately, you know, they spent so much time trying to copy them in tablets and phones and, you know, turning PCs into tablets. I think they lost sight of, you know, where the strengths are. But the, the Xbox thing, I have to say I love Phil Spencer. Like I said earlier, I, I think this business is in a good space in some ways. But the one major misstep, if I had to point to one, and it's really easy to do that is the mobile thing, right? Microsoft buys Activision Blizzard, they spend,

Richard Campbell (01:49:54):
They could've built a mobile team. Yep. The problem is that there's no money in mobile games unless you're willing to deceive or determine your customers. And I don't know that a big Corp can do that.

Leo Laporte (01:50:06):
Then you don't use Windows 11 <laugh>. So I, you know, I I well, of course they're not offering you a way out of it. Yes. I, no, I I know what you mean. I, there are different business models in gaming, obviously. I think this I don't like the whole loop box thing. I think we talked about this last week, but I, but I, I think, and I think I mentioned this notion of shareware and how, you know, the, I think there are ways around this that that'll make it horrible. But I also think, you know, look at something like Apple Arcade. I doubt anyone here subscribes to this, but a version of Apple Arcade that was more adult and maybe, you know, not, not restricted to the iPhone, I think would be of interest to a lot of people. I would like to, I would game on mobile if it made sense.

(01:50:47):
I looked at call, you know, call of Duty mobile is a surprisingly good port or version or whatever you wanna call it, off Call of Duty. It looks, and mobile devices have incredibly high resolution screens. They've got great hardware, accelerated graphics. I would want to use it with a controller not touch, cuz you know, I'm not 10. But those are all options you can do. I mean, this is, I think, what prevent that part of it. I think what prevents Microsoft from going, going all in is that there are gatekeepers in the mobile space that prevent them from having an app store. I mean, apple and Google won't even, well, apple won't even let them have game Xbox Cloud gaming, which is a streaming service. They want to, it's like they don't understand what they're talking about. It's like, we want, we wanna be paid for every game that someone plays. It's like, no one's, no one's buying the games. They're, they're just, these are, you know, these are streaming. It's like it is literally the same thing as when you watch a video on Netflix. And I, it's, it's, it's,

Richard Campbell (01:51:46):
Yeah. It's just Netflix with buttons.

Leo Laporte (01:51:48):
Yeah. You ha you have to the people at Apple who will complain, like, why this makes sense, you know, they know it's not right. You know, they do. That's the, that's the big problem with that kind of thing. So may, I may, I don't know that that excuses it, but I feel like Microsoft could live in this world that does exist already and then hope for this future, which maybe they'll get from the EU where they can do the store thing. But they have some really good ip. I don't understand why this stuff isn't running on mobile. Listen, one of the big arguments that the FTC has made about Microsoft and Activision Blizzard is this notion that, well, yeah, you say you're gonna port Call of Duty to Nintendo Switch, but Nintendo Switch is like a really low end device compared to most of the things that play Call of Duty.

(01:52:33):
So this game's gonna be hugely compromised. It's not gonna look good. It's not gonna sound good, whatever. It's, and okay, we can have that discussion. But, you know, that's not true of mobile. You could Port Call of Duty to mobile. They have <laugh>, but, and it would look great. It would sound great. It would play great. That's, it's there. And so Microsoft could have done that with Halo, with Gears of War, with Flight Simulator Pro, probably with whatever else they have. See if these, these are, they could have done native games on mobile. They just didn't. And I, I know they looked into buying some, you know, that's why I wanted to talk about the spray. Why do you think they didn't? Why? I can't explain it. I don't know.

Richard Campbell (01:53:14):
Yeah. Well I, if you're gonna go with the gatekeeping scenario, then the obvious one is, I need to buy a product that's already in the store. So, no, I forced Apple or Google to take it out of the store cuz I own it.

Leo Laporte (01:53:25):
Right. I, I wonder, you know, one of the things that came up, I will say one of the things that, that guy from Sony, I can't remember his name, the CEO of the Amer, you know, Sony America, whatever had kind of said, you know, he was talking about the past and how in the Xbox 360 timeframe, it was absolutely true. Xbox started to become known as the console for like third party shooters. You know, I think that was one of the reasons they bought Activision or they did their licensing rather with exclusive licensing for Call of Duty. They wanted to get the biggest chunk or a big chunk of those kind of first person shooter guys over in Sony. And I think they've kind of maintained that impression or whatever. You know, that a lot of the people who do play shooters on console use Xbox.

(01:54:09):
Like, it's just, it's kind of gone that way. And I think those type of games, I don't know, I think it's, they just view the world through that lens. Maybe it's one of those you're or a hammer. Everything's a nail. I don't know. I I, I think they got stuck in their little rut. There's also stuff goes on inside Microsoft, and I know this is both of you, your mission to ferret it out. But there's always stuff that goes. We had a guy come by last week to say hi started at Microsoft out of college, rose up. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> to be a pm I won't say his name. At one point he was on the Windows phone team and he said, he told me something, I was shocked. He said we had Windows phone ready for Samsung. They were gonna use, use it instead of Android. Wow. well, Samsung. Samsung. Okay. So actually Samsung was the biggest maker of Windows phones in the first, I call it two generations. The seven and seven point, whatever. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> when that thing launched, there was like one Htcc device. I don't remember the other one, but there were three Samsungs at one time. He gave me the impression Samsung was prepared to do that instead of Android. Okay. And it it, you know, for political reasons, it was killed at Microsoft. And well

Richard Campbell (01:55:29):
That's already knew it was political reasons so much. If it was just they never built a working ecosystem, why would you do that? You need the ecosystem. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:55:37):
Well, I don't know. You get on Samsung

Richard Campbell (01:55:38):
Phones or they built two, they they built several ecosystems. They just kept tearing them down.

Leo Laporte (01:55:43):
Yeah. I mean it was a focus, a focus s a focus two, you know, they had a bunch of stuff. I mean man, I wish you had been here to talk to him cuz he seemed like he had some very good information. He retired as one does if you start at Microsoft and college and worked there 25 years. Sure. And so he is a young guy happy spending his Microsoft money, but he had some stories to tell and I just didn't have the knowledge you guys had. I wish I had to ask him the right questions. If if Microsoft is not allowed to acquire Activision Blizzard if this deal does fall apart, I think that single biggest thing they have to figure out is some mobile strategy, which could involve, you know, buying smaller companies, right? Yeah.

(01:56:26):
Go get a Zynga or, you know, one of those guys. Yeah. They gotta gotta figure this out because they're they're not just a small part of the overall all gaming pie. They're a really small and unprofitable part of it. <Laugh>, you know they don't earn a profit on the hardware. Consoles are the smallest part of the gaming market. The, you know, the big, the big parts of it, right? I mean, cloud gaming is obviously the smallest, but you know, the, both Sony and Microsoft, like I said, had done something to get going on PC and I, I, I think both of them have done decent job. Microsoft Think has done a better job, but they've not really either of them done anything to figure out mobile. And I, this is a, this is a big glaring hole. It's a problem.

(01:57:15):
So, I dunno, maybe you will make apple open up their devices and you can have third party app stores and Microsoft to make this happen. There you go. You know, that's what they want. Maybe we'll see. Okay. and then just wrap this up. It's July <laugh>. I'm sure you all know that. And that means we have new games, a avail or available or coming to Xbox games with gold and game Pass. And as has been the case so often, I will say <laugh>, the two games that are arriving this month, the first one's available now, Darkwood and the other game, which is called What When the Pass was around. I had no idea what these games are. Darkwood is a survival horror game. It's like ones for once for guys and one's for gals. It looks like <laugh>.

(01:58:00):
Yeah, it's totally looks like that. Yeah, exactly. It's like you're a teenager. You're a boy or girl. Oh, you're getting Darkwood, you're a boy. Yeah. and then Game Pass, this one came, arrived a little late. Interestingly, Garin Theft Auto Five, which used to be available in Game Pass, has come back to Game Pass. I think this is there a new G t a game coming out soon or something? I think there might be. Anyway, it's available on cloud and console that's available now. And then again, it's like, yikes. What are these games <laugh> like, what is this? One of them is literally called McPick three <laugh>. I, it's not a sandwich at McDonald's. I don't know what we're talking about here. Pixel three. Well, it's about time they put that on on game Pass. Cuz I, I should know.

(01:58:43):
Oh, I should have said, by the way, the GTA five is a remastered version. It supports 60 frame per second Nice. On series X. Yep. And there's a re chasing mode too. So it's kind of fun to play these old games for, you know, outta nostalgia. I enjoy that. I do this again and again. Yeah. I play so many old games. Yeah, yeah. Well that's, we're gonna talk about. We're gonna, we're gonna go as old as you can go actually in a, a few minutes. Yeah, I like that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It a good game in the nineties. It's probably gonna get now. Well, and it's also, you know, you're part of your youth, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's part of your memory. You know, it's a little talked about this in the past. You did. When you weirdness, like, you go and, and you're in a map, you golf.

(01:59:20):
Yeah, I know. Exactly. Yep. Yeah. You, you. Oh, we're back. Yeah, we're home, baby. Yep. Here I am. Yeah. Daddy here. It's going back to a town he used to live in. You're like, I know Exactly. The shortcut of the woods. Yeah. You know. Yeah, I know the hold of the golf course. Yes, I know. We're all the teenagers. What are you guys doing? <Laugh>? I'm gonna have a little, I'm gonna have a little community meeting. Hey, we're gonna go to the back of the book in a moment. Absolutely. Richard, since you're here, do you want to, you know, tell us which, which Brown Liquor you'll be drinking in in the river in Montana? Or all all prepared and added to the notes very quickly. Yeah. Yeah. You got time. Nice. I'm gonna do a little in there. Little plug right now for our club.

(02:00:04):
And then we'll get to the back of the book. If you're not yet a member of Club Twit. And if you're hearing this, you're not, because one of the beauty parts of being a member Club Twit is no ads. Not even the, not even the, my import tuning you to join Club Twit. That's, that's the good part. You know, no ads all of our shows. But actually that used to, that was kind of the initial premise two years ago when we launched the Club. Seven bucks a month, you're paying us, we don't need to give you ads. No ads, no tracking. None of that. But then we added The Discord, which is a wonderful community in its own right. Lots of fun, great people in there. Not just talking about the shows, talking about everything geeks are interested in from, from comic books to booze to gaming.

(02:00:53):
And then we added shows that our club Twi exclusives Paul Show hands on Windows, it's in the Club, hands on Macintosh with Micah Sergeant, our new AI show, which Jason Howell and Jeff Jarvis are working on coming soon in the club because the club lets us launch shows. You know, they have a financial footing. Otherwise without the club, you know, you're, you're taking a big gamble on shows and we've lost lots of money on shows that didn't take off. This way the club finances it. And sometimes, like this week in space, the shows a success. We put it out in public. Sometimes we just keep it for ourselves. Like the HandsOn Lennox show the GIZ Fizz with Dick DeBartolo Stacey's book club. We had a couple of great events last week because Aunt Pruitt, our community manager, puts together some real good stuff in the club, including an interview with Hugh Howie who wrote the wool sci-fi series, which is what Silo was based on an Apple TV plus.

(02:01:53):
Stacy had her book club last week as well. We've got great events coming up. You get so add free shows, shows we don't put out anywhere else. Hands on Mac, hands on Windows, oh, Scott Wilkinson's Home Theater Geeks. You get the discord seven bucks a month. I think it's an amazing deal. And here's the best thing. You can feel good in your heart cuz you're helping us keep the lights on. Times are getting tougher and tougher for podcasts. A lot of podcast businesses, including Spotify's going under we wanna stick around, we really do. And with the club, we can go to twit tv slash club twit sign up today. There's a family plan, there's a year plan, there's a business plan. I think it's very affordable and you are helping us keep the lights on, keep the staff employed and launch new shows.

(02:02:44):
Lots of new shows. TWIT TV slash club twit. All right, I'm done in importing you now. We may continue <laugh> time for tips and picks. We'll start with Paul Barratt's tip of the Week. Numero uno. Yeah, so we talked about Windows copilot or earlier. If you install, most people who install this Jeb Channel Build will not get this feature. Fortunately, there is a way to do so. So, like I said, three steps. I didn't say this. I said, well, the first step, get the dev channel built. You never know. Maybe you'll get it. I don't think you will, but it could happen. So look, right, the way you can tell is there's a new icon in the default set of icons in the task bar. It looks a lot like a blue version of the Microsoft 365 app icon. It's very, very similar.

(02:03:33):
But if you don't see that you need to install something called Vive Tool. And then you need to use a very specific command line with a administrative athe or ac you know, administrative. But, but he is run it as an administrator. <Laugh> I, I can't say it out loud. It's in my article about hands-on with Windows copilot. I will put it in the show notes. It is in the show notes for the show if you are in Discord right now. I don't know what you guys do with the posting it on your site, but it will be in my version of the show notes when I post it tomorrow. So there's that. You can get it. Prepare to be underwhelmed <laugh>, but you know. Yeah, there you go. I w I didn't think Richard was gonna be here.

(02:04:21):
So I, I have two tips and two AP picks, so I'll try to be quick here. Tony re Redmond reached out to me. He writes, he, he and others write an amazing book about Microsoft 365 slash Office 365 called Office 365 for it Pros, they just released a 2024 edition. This thing is over 1300 pages long, by the way. Windows Weekly viewers and listeners can get $10 off using a special U R L, which is also in the show notes. So it's normally 49.95. You can get it for 39.95. And I'll read this, but you know, you're better off finding it in the show notes. So it's oh 365 it pros.gumroad.com/i/oh 365 it slash Windows weekly 24.

Richard Campbell (02:05:07):
So definitely. And they do monthly updates of that book. Like That's right. It's constant because oh 365 is always a moving

Leo Laporte (02:05:13):
Target. Yeah, it's right. You think Windows is a nightmare as I do. Office slash Microsoft 365. Even worse. Also bigger.

Richard Campbell (02:05:22):
So, and, and the whole governance discussion, like it's a book for it pros because we have to manage this bloody thing.

Leo Laporte (02:05:28):
That's funny. You wouldn't think that the office book would be bigger than the Windows book, but I guess Well, I mean, there's more, look, I'm not done with the Windows book. I mean, I'm getting closing on the 900 pages, but it's, you've mentioned this one before. I mean, this is the book, right? Yeah. It's, you know, this is the defendant. This is the Elephant book. Exactly. This is the elephant in the room, <laugh>.

Richard Campbell (02:05:47):
Right. It's, it's almost the end of road for this kind of concept of a book. Wow. They're continuous updating and they keep bringing new writers in. Yeah. Cause people burn out, keeping this thing alive. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:05:58):
Yeah. Look at all the people. I've also hardware, I, I didn't, I don't wanna go on too long in this, but I've talked to Tony a lot about business models and stuff. So for example, I write my books, I put 'em on Lead Pub. People can buy them. They always get updates. And he's, you know, this is kind of a subscription deal basically. So I believe that when you buy the 2024 edition, you get a year of, of monthly updates and then it's a good deal. They might even bucks for, it's even a straight up 1300 pages by itself. Yeah. Would be a good Yeah. Good deal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, it's, it's hard to,

Richard Campbell (02:06:27):
But then, but then they keep getting the updates cuz they sort out all the new features for you. Right. And that's the biggest challenge is new stuff comes in and you don't know what to do. This book is ever green if you support it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:06:38):
Right. That's great. Yeah. But you think this might be the, the end of the line for this kinda volume? No. <laugh> No. I mean, I would say so. No.

Richard Campbell (02:06:50):
I they modernize it. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:06:52):
I misunderstood. Yeah. And, and more to the point, the audience is always gonna be there. Right. So if you think about like, the books I write, you know, the kind of books for consumers or individuals, I mean, you know, 20 years ago you could make a huge case. People need like they don't know how, how these things work. I mean, there's still stuff in Windows I think is confusing, obviously. And I'm not trying to undercut my book here, but I mean, you know, the people listening to this who watch Windows Weekly or whatever, probably don't need the Windows 11 field guide. But if you're an IT pro, you probably do need the, you know, the Office 365 for it Pros book. So it's just a, it's a different part of the market and I don't, I don't see this part of it going away anytime soon.

(02:07:30):
Yeah. You know, until AI just manages everything for us, which I'm sure is the next step. On the other hand, you're not gonna see, you see a 1300 page book on the shelves at your local Barnes and Noble either, right. Or That's right. I don't even, can you even produce a book that's thick? So this is a problem I've run into with, you know, my books, which are less than a thousand pages. It, it's impossible. Yeah. Basically to print something like that. You could do like a two volume thing or something. Right. I think that's what happened. Our friend Glenn Fleischman who produced a, a book about you would love this by the way, about typewriters called Shift Happens. That's right. And it got so big that they ended up splitting it it into two volumes cuz they couldn't print it.

(02:08:08):
So that v that kind of book, you could make a case for it. But I think for these books, my books and Tony's this is a, a product that gets updated all the time, like I said, and you don't want a paper version of it that's outta day, two weeks later you Yeah. Plus where are you gonna gonna put it? <Laugh>. Right. <Laugh>. I mean, I don't have, I often the Delphi three Bible pretty much took up all my ba shelf space. <Laugh>. I don't have any anymore room for anything else. That was, that was some good reading too. Oh, oh, that was so good. Was good reading such a good book. <Laugh>. so I know, by the way, we talked about nostalgia, playing old video games. Yeah. I don't think I ever reread old computer books. I'm maybe it's just me. Oh, I do, but I'm, I'm broken inside.

(02:08:51):
We've already established that. Really? so most people don't. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I totally do. But not like, I just manuals. Alright, listen, let me, okay. I'm gonna say this, this is stupid, but, and as part of my I'm not gonna call it research cuz it, you know, makes me sound great. But as part of my research into like this kind of vid, you know, video game, computer nostalgia stuff I have bought a crazy number of weird technical books, how to program an Atari 2,600. I bought the Oh, Vic 20 programmers reference guide. Yeah. Okay. I've watched documents documentaries and whatever. So yeah, I, I listen, you know. Yeah. That's not nostalgia, that's research. That's, no, I'm in this, I'm in this camp. I realize I spent a lot of money buying an old copy of Inside Macintosh from 1984.

(02:09:36):
Yes. I I owned those. I owned, yeah. I owned them in the back day. I owned those after they were outta date. Yeah. I love those book, the hardcover originals. Yeah. And by the way, that source code Pascal. Yeah. just like the Del Bible three Super Bible. Yep. Oh yeah. There's a, there's a straight line One or the other <laugh> <laugh>. So I wrote an article recently about the Atari 2,600 and the ways that you can emulate it on PCs especially, but obviously this hardware emulates these <laugh> the Atari story is so interesting. I actually, because of the Bill Gates store, I mentioned the Moss Technology 65 0 2 processor. This was one of the first devices to use it. And anything that was eight bit. And with rare exception, there were, I know in the UK there were some Z 80 things, but the vast, well the majority of eight bit machines, whether they were games or computers were 65 0 2.

(02:10:26):
And the Atari was one of them. Apple, the apple was 65 0 2 as well. Yep. Yeah, they were, or I should say a variant of it. Like actually the Atari was a 65 0 7, but it's the same Right. Instruction set, whatever. So if you want to emulate Atari on your pc, very easy. Very, very easy. The, you're looking for something called Stella. Stella is the code name for the original 2,600 Stella. Stella was named after a bicycle, not a woman. Oh. But no one knew that. So every subsequent Atari code name was a woman's name and, you know, whatever. So anyway, Stella is free. Obviously I'm not gonna discuss how, you know, Google is your friend, but all of the Ros are out there. Obviously they're tiny because, you know, they're two to eight k games at the, you know, most of them, that's all like, can put in a cartridge.

(02:11:14):
Yeah. I mean, an MP3 fi the size of an MP3 file could included an entire 2,600 in a full catalog of games. Like, it's stupid. And they play great by the way. I I it's astonishing how good this could be. What's your favorite game? What's your favorite? So, I, the funny thing about Atari is I never owned an Atari. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I knew everyone had an Atari. It was my first computer. Yeah. Yeah. My favorite would have to be a cross between, well, pitfall was one of the big ones for me. Yep. And I would say, I mean, I like the classics, you know, missile command Asteroids. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Mm-Hmm. I like Pacman didn't, even though it was nothing like the arcade. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> River Raid. Yeah. Which is an Activision game. Yeah. demon Attack was fantastic. Frogger obviously they don't, you know, I had to say blacks, I, this is one where, this is going way back.

(02:12:02):
Yeah. this is a million years ago. Yeah. I mean, it's soon gonna be what, 40 years old? It is over 40 years old right now. Yeah. It's over 40. Yeah. It's almost gonna be 50, almost 45. That's 45. Yeah. Yep. So these are very primitive games. And yet, and you know what though? They play really well and there's, there's a fascinating thing. There must be a term for this. It's well understood when you have to work with incredibly constrained resources. You, you can be very creative over time and create a trap. Lifter is another trap. Chopper command. Yeah. Yeah. Which was a is amazing as well. Yeah. The game. Yeah. Another activation game. These games are still fun to play. I, they, they just are, river Raid is a tremendous elite was the game that never stopped. Which was it?

(02:12:51):
Elite. Elite. The space, the generative space. It's now Elite What? Elite Dangerous. And Yeah. They, I had Elite did a wireframe, a modern version of it on the Amigo, which basically sold the computer to me at the time. You know, in the mid, I don't think there was an elite. Was there an elite for the Atari 2,600? Wow. I missed out on that one. 64. Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. We had Star, Raiders Star. We're gonna, we're gonna get to the 64. Okay. This is no doubt about it. Also just a fun fact about the Commander 64 everyone calls it the Commander 64. It's actually the Commander C 64. And everyone assumes the C is for Commander and it's not <laugh>. Oh. It's, it's a generation of computers. The previous generation that no one has ever heard of were B 2 56. B 1 28. And then when they advanced it, and then this one went to consumers, they called it the C and the next one was gonna be the D.

(02:13:42):
Which by the way, it was cuz the original version of the, the 1 28 was the D 1 28. Hmm. Yep. Well you are full of Nerdery. I know. I, my brain is full of useless information. Leo <laugh>. You know <laugh>? Yep. No, I am not. I know I am my basement. This scene does not stand for Commodore as many people. I don't like people like me <laugh>, you know? Yeah. Wow. Wow. Huge problem. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Is that it? Wait a minute. You have, you have two app, another app picked, do you wanna do that or no? Oh, Firefox. Oh, I forgot. I forgot all about it. Yeah, so also just coincidentally this week Firefox released one 15, Mozilla released Firefox one 50. And the only reason I really mention this one, although there's some new features in there is that it is the last version that will support Windows seven and Windows eight. And the, the interesting thing about that to me is that they actually have something called the extended support release version of Firefox. And that will continue to support Windows seven and Windows eight. And basically what that does is just ensure you keep getting security updates. So good for them Right. For doing the right thing there. So that's kind of cool.

(02:14:57):
Well I know Richard sounds like he fell down a Well he's not actually, he's at the Denver airport. Well he technically did. He is in a Denver airport. Yeah. So it's like falling down a well. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. Was that an ET reference? Is that what you just said? <Laugh>? Did you do an ET reference? I don't know. You did. Cuz that was the biggest problem with et. He fell down a well well, oh yeah. All the time. <Laugh> because he was so short. Yeah, yeah. No, cuz the game was so terrible. And then he go, Alex, oh, that Eat the Game. Oh yeah, yeah. The Atari. That was the everyone, if you touched one Pixel to a well, you fell in it. <Laugh>, everyone hated it. I have it here somewhere, somewhere. I actually had two copies of it. Awesome. And we had a guy on who was had worked on the development of it.

(02:15:40):
And like I said, you probably don't have a copy, but I have one for you. And now I have, so there's a documentary Yes. Called GA Game Over. Yeah. Where they find all those cartridges in the desert worth watching <laugh>. And the guy who programmed the game wrote a book called Once Upon an At Once upon Atari, which is also the name of another documentary about Atari. But anyway, he, he wrote the what's called Yards Revenge and raises Lost Ark and et. So two for three is not too bad. Sorry Richard. I didn't mean to go. And as long as we're talking emulators not to worry. And C 64. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I should show you this. Jerry Ellsworth did this. This is a C 64 emulator that fits in a joystick. In a joystick Yeah. And then plugs into your tv Sure. Has all the games. And as I remember there's a Easter egg in this, you could drop down into the actual C 64 interface and use it as a C 64 and like, like programming basic and stuff. Yeah. Because in order to do the emulator, they had to really make it a C 64. So that is a C 64 and a joystick right there. We're totally gonna get to the seats.

Richard Campbell (02:16:48):
That's really quite a bad basic though.

Leo Laporte (02:16:50):
Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Basic. And, and I can, I'm gonna though that's gonna be a big part of that conversation cuz there was a good version of the basic too. Ah, you had, you had to buy a cartridge and then they shipped it in the 1 28. I should I should send you this. You'd probably get some value out of it. <Laugh> collecting dust in my collection right now. I take you now to the Denver airport where a little boy has fallen down a well <laugh> Richard Campbell has the, the story.

Richard Campbell (02:17:18):
Ouch. I'm, I'm waiting. I'm I'm waiting for Leah Lassie. Lassie will help me. Woo. this week's run as was with Louisa free, so recorded it in person in in Antwerp of all places. We were talking about power platform and I got Literative this day. Because what we're really talking about was the fact that if you haven't restricted creation of power platform inside your organization, it's happening. And if you don't pay attention to it you're gonna get surprised. And so it's useful to get this center of Excellence tools, actually a governance tool for power platform. Cuz it'll go out and find all power platform apps that exist in your organization cuz they're under individual accounts. They usually have problems with security and then, you know, and they're gonna abruptly disappear when somebody changes departments or gets, or gets let go. And so it's kind of run rampant inside of the organization. It reminds me of SharePoint back in the day where everybody had a SharePoint server under their desk where, and an it, nothing about it until it fell over and they were upset. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:18:21):
That doesn't sound like a good idea. Do not have a well any, I mean Airpoints, whatever under your desk, a SharePoint under every desk. That was Microsoft. That's the dream. That's the dream. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (02:18:32):
Well, and, but it's happening for the same reason. If you lock it completely down, nobody will use it and it'll never go anywhere. You have to live loose enough that it starts to propagate and then bring it in. As I think way the way we said it on the show is you should let the puppy run. Just don't let the puppy throw up. There

Leo Laporte (02:18:48):
You go. Fair enough. Boy. And if the puppy poops strike you, strike that balance. Well now thank you Richard. We didn't expect you here. We were not prepared. We thought we wouldn't have to do a brown liquor or Paul was gonna do his, but you have come up with one and actually a nice one. I'm excited.

Richard Campbell (02:19:08):
Well, one of my favorite, one of my favorite scenes

Leo Laporte (02:19:10):
Around an old standby.

Richard Campbell (02:19:11):
Yes. And well, and also to resist the theme that I only talk about really expensive whiskeys. We're talking about doers 12 today. Yes. So John Durer and Sons owns a bunch of distilleries. They own Aber Altmore, Craig Achi McDuff and the Royal Brackla. And they make blends from their whiskeys. A few different kinds. But the doers 12 is a blended whiskey notice, not a blended scotch because they do use grain blends in it, but famously for it to be called 12, the youngest thing in the bottle cast test can be 12. It's not the oldest thing. In fact, one of the staples they put in a do is 12 is a 40. So they you but put a bunch of different whiskeys together to get to Oh, it is a very popular blend. It comes in about 20, $25 a bottle and you just can't go wrong drinking this. Like it's just, you know, you'll be very happy.

Leo Laporte (02:20:07):
Wow.

Richard Campbell (02:20:08):
But definitely a blended whiskey, not a blended scotch. A chunk of it is is grain whiskey. It's grain distillate. So,

Leo Laporte (02:20:16):
And I, this webpage is kind of fun because it's a, apparently a a still cuz I see a little steam escaping over there on the right from the handle <laugh>.

Richard Campbell (02:20:27):
That's awesome. It's like, it's co it's a copper backing, right?

Leo Laporte (02:20:30):
Yeah. Isn't that hysterical?

Richard Campbell (02:20:31):
Careful. That's probably

Leo Laporte (02:20:32):
Hot. It's probably very hot. A lemon wedge. Would you put a lemon wedge in a, in your doers? Well maybe you would. The recipes at the website,

Richard Campbell (02:20:41):
If you're, if you're, if you're making the lemon wedge, you're putting soda water in your, in your whiskey anyway. Yeah. Listen, you're never gonna abuse doers to the point where I'm gonna be upset with you short of spilling it. <Laugh>. Right. That's alcohol abuse, everything else. Do what you want to do.

Leo Laporte (02:20:56):
Richard, I'm glad we could get a visit from you. I hope your flight to billings is it uneventful and you get a nice amount of time. Yeah. How much time do you have? Like when, when are you leaving?

Richard Campbell (02:21:09):
Boarding's supposed to be in 45 minutes, but I'm skeptical.

Leo Laporte (02:21:12):
Perfect, perfect timing. And and how long are you gonna stay in Billings? 45 minutes.

Richard Campbell (02:21:19):
Yeah, we're, we're three days of fishing and then fly back out, so out on Sunday.

Leo Laporte (02:21:22):
Nice. Well we'll see you right here then. Next Wednesday, I think back in <inaudible>.

Richard Campbell (02:21:30):
Yep. I'll be back home, but not for much longer. We sold the house in Coquitlam, so that's right

Leo Laporte (02:21:34):
To the offer right away. He's moving to the coast. Well that means you're gonna get to see his the lake house. Is that correct? Ah, yes. Every Canadian, a salty lake has a salty lake house. Richard Campbell is, what do you, go ahead? Coast House I guess.

Richard Campbell (02:21:48):
Sorry. We call it the coast. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:21:49):
Coast House. We

Richard Campbell (02:21:50):
Call it the Coast. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:21:52):
You don't have like a, a fancy name like the ridings or something do you? For Clem Flats, <laugh>, you know, something like that

Richard Campbell (02:22:00):
On, on V rbo. It's called Sunshine Coast Chill.

Leo Laporte (02:22:05):
Oh, nice, nice, nice. Well, coming to us from the Sun Sunshine Coast Chill. He's the host of Run as Radio, run as radio.com.net Rocks as well on his way to a little fly fishing. Thank you for being here, Richard. We appreciate it. Thanks to Paul thaat theat.com is his website. Become a premium member for those great trips down memory lame t h u r r o t t.com. And his new book, windows Everywhere is@leanpub.com. Right next to his field guide for Windows 11, lean pub.com. Windows everywhere is is some great stories about the, the early days and the middle and the later days of Windows. Paul, thank you. Have a great week. I'll see. We'll be talking to you in Mexico next week. Yeah, I hope so. <Laugh>, I'm also flying United, so we'll see how it goes. Oh boy.

(02:23:00):
Well you should, you should be able to get there in seven days. I hope you can <laugh>. That's what I'm thinking. Yeah, we'll be back here next Wednesday, which will I guess be July 12th 2023. We do the show 11:00 AM to 2:00 PM Pacific, two to five Eastern time. That would be about 1800 U T C. You can watch us do it live at live TWIT TV or listen live. There's audio and video streams there. If you're watching or listening live chat live. The IRC is open to all. You can use your browser to go to IRC twit tv if you're a member of the Club. Of course Club Twit Discord. Another place you can converse after the fact. We have two communities that you can post your comments and thoughts on. There's our Mastodon instance also open to all at Twit Social and our forums are@twit.community.

(02:23:54):
That's a a discourse forum and a really nice one too. I think we'd love to see it. Either or all of those. You can also get copies of the show after the fact at our website, twit tv slash ww. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. You'll find a link there at twit tv slash ww. Best thing to do though, subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it automatically the minute it's available. Just search for TWIT or Windows Weekly in your podcast player and you should find all our shows. Thank you Paul. Have thank you Richard. Both of you have safe travels and we'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye-Bye.

Jonathan Bennett (02:24:35):
Hey, we should talk Linux. It's the operating system that runs the internet, but your game consoles, cell phones, and maybe even the machine on your desk. But you already knew all that. What you may not know is that Twit now is a show dedicated to it, the Untitled Linux Show. Whether you're a Linux Pro, a burgeoning CISs man, or just curious what the big deal is, you should join us on the Club Twit Discord every Saturday afternoon for news analysis and tips to sharpen your Linux skills. And then make sure you subscribe to the Club TWIT Exclusive Untitled Linux Show. Wait, you're not a Club Twit member yet. We'll go to twit tv slash club twit and sign up. Hope to see you there.