Windows Weekly 843, 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. Richard Campbell is here. Paul Ott. They're both at home. Weirdly enough, we will talk about the In Never Ending Microsoft Activision acquisition. Now a concession to the uk. But is it enough? Paul says, seriously, what's wrong with you people? Weekday, we get a preview of next month's patch Tuesday, and we'll talk about ai. Paul will ask the ultimate question, why binging? Why all [00:00:30] that Mork? Coming up next on Windows Weekly, maybe Binging knows podcasts you love

Richard Campbell (00:00:39):
From people you trust. This is Twit.

Leo Laporte (00:00:49):
This is Windows Weekly with Richard Campbell and Paul Thurrott. Episode 843 Recorded Wednesday, August 23rd, 2023. [00:01:00] The drawer of Broken Dreams, windows Weekly is brought to you by Lookout. Whether on a device or in the cloud, your business data is always on the move. Minimize risk, increase visibility, and ensure compliance with lookout's Unified platform. Visit lookout.com Today, it's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft. There is quite a bit of news this week. Thankfully. We have people who [00:01:30] really know what's going on here. Rich Campbell from Run as radio and dotnet rocks. Hello, Richard.

Richard Campbell (00:01:35):
Hello, friend.

Leo Laporte (00:01:36):
Friend. I always thought that was a weird thing to call somebody friend. It's like a little, I dunno. Hello, bub. Hey. Hello. Hey, bub. Bub. I prefer Pal. You're bub bub. Better Newman. Hello, new. Hello. Hello, ot. Hello. Leo. Paul Thurrott is here. From thurrott.com.

(00:01:56):
His book's at leanpub.com. Hello. So I have a question [00:02:00] before we get into this because I know you're going to get it back into this. I should have taken some gummies before this. I don't know what's going on, by the way. That's the only ad I see on X now is Cheech and Chong's gummies. And that's how I know I'm living in the future. Right? There you go. Someday man, you'll be able to go into a store and buy edibles, man. No legal man. There is a surface event coming up in the 21st. I don't see this in your head. Yes [00:02:30] it is. It's buried in here. It's under Windows 11 something something. So the only thing I'm going to ask you because I need to is we should cover that. I presume it's a surface event. Yeah. Assuming they're going to, well, yeah, we'll talk. Talk about that. Okay. Yeah, I think it is going to be an in-person event. It, I assume, I assume they're going to, Rich's head is floating on it now. Okay. Did they say what time it is or whether they'll [00:03:00] stream

Paul Thurrott (00:03:00):
It? All they said was, you're invited and we'll get back to you.

Leo Laporte (00:03:03):
Great.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:04):
Yeah, well, at least I was invited. I mean, the way things are going these days, I mean who can say,

Leo Laporte (00:03:10):
Alright, we'll get to that. But first we got to talk to you about the C M A, about the uk, the United Kingdom. Microsoft has made them an offer they cannot refuse.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:24):
Actually, Microsoft made them offer, they did refuse, which is the problem. I don't even, [00:03:30] it's unbelievable. I'm going to try so hard to be calm during this segment. I expressed my belief that the C M A is out of its fricking mind and has no idea what it's talking about and is the least responsible regulatory body on earth. And that the arguments it's made against this acquisition literally make no sense. They involve future crimes about some non-existent market. That's never going to be a market. And by the way, the solution that we're going to get [00:04:00] to that Microsoft is proposing doesn't fix anything. But we'll get to that because this whole thing is, I don't even know why they offered it. It's a crazy big You know what though? But the CMA iss so stupid. They're probably going to be, we'll get to that.

(00:04:14):
I'm trying. I really am trying. So everybody, well, not everybody, but most people probably know at least most of the convolutions that occurred over the past couple of months with the C M A and Microsoft and Activision places, right? The C M A was betting on the F T C prevailing. They latched [00:04:30] their horse onto that and that failed. And now they're out there hanging and blowing in the wind. And my belief until about 36 hours ago was that they understood that they had made a huge mistake when they ruled against this thing. When they blocked it. The competition commission from the EU back in May gave a wonderful speech where she explained exactly why, and she did this very politely, but said, the decision the C M A was [00:05:00] wrong. This is not the role of antitrust. It's not just to block things. It's to do the best thing for the market.

(00:05:05):
And that means protecting consumers and or competition, however you want to look at it, depending on the jurisdiction. And that Microsoft's remedies, Microsoft's not remedies, but the concessions they offered met the needs of antitrust, of the antitrust concerns, and they passed it. They allowed, they're allowing the deal. [00:05:30] The F T C lost as we know after a hearing. They appealed, lost that too. I dunno why Microsoft didn't just conclude this transaction at that time, but they didn't. They decided to work with the C M A and the C M A backtracked. They stepped back from the cliff. They said, we don't really ever do this, but we're going to revisit this decision because the information has come to light that Microsoft's going to provide us with. This is the information that came to light during the F T C hearing allegedly. I don't really think there's any new information there.

(00:05:58):
I will say, we talked about [00:06:00] this when the C M A published Microsoft's rationale for why this deal should now be allowed, it was notable in that there were no new concessions. They didn't offer them a single thing. They just said, look, nothing has changed, but now we have this, they called it evidence, but information that came out during the FT C hearings that I think will cause you the C M A to step back and say, okay, actually this makes sense. Also, the EU approved the deal [00:06:30] and had legally binding agreements by Microsoft that required them to do certain things that also address the CMAs concerns, specifically with cloud gaming, this cloud streaming thing that they're really just hung up on for some crazy reason, I don't have the numbers in front of me, but if the gaming world is a big pie, 50% of it is mobile, the rest of it is like 40%, 50% ish of PC console.

(00:06:57):
Used to be console is a little bigger now [00:07:00] PC is a little bigger. And then there's this one pixel wide, nothing that amounts to nothing and that's cloud streaming. And Google entered this market and left Microsoft entered this market and realized it could not offer it as a standalone product. So they offer it only as a perk as their most expensive game pass subscription. And what they have found over the last year or two is that people use it to look at something and then they go download it or buy it. They don't play it that way because most games frankly [00:07:30] do not work well. Streaming latency matters, oddly enough. And one of the games I tried to play on both Stadia and I guess it was cloud gaming back in the day, was that Doom, maternal and Doom already has, that game has a weird effect where you feel like you're running on ice, it doesn't feel natural.

(00:07:52):
And when you stream it, it's even worse. The effect is just exaggerated. So you go by a monster and you're trying to shoot it, but you keep going. It's [00:08:00] still reading the joystick input or whatever the controller input from before. Anyhow positive that we were engaging in something that I call regulatory theater, that the C M A was going to look at this thing, let a bunch of time go by, pretend they're evaluating it, and then come out and say, okay, you know what? You're right. This evidence does with the concessions as outlined, not that there were any, but just say it that way. Well, the concessions that were offered to the eu, Microsoft has made the, I know there are people [00:08:30] out there who just don't want the bigger to get bigger. And I completely understand that. We've had that kind of joking discussion with Leo, for example.

(00:08:36):
But I hear from those people all the time, I just don't want them getting more or getting bigger or whatever. And yeah, listen, I hear you, but whatever. So it was Kodak who simply said, cut the UK out of the deal then. Well, that's the thing. I mean, just pretend they don't exist because I have no offense if you're from the uk, love the uk, but from the size of market perspective, this is not worth, it's a 75 billion [00:09:00] deal and it's worldwide. And this tiny country with a very small relatives, relatively speaking population is blocking this deal. And the regulatory body doing it is not elected. They don't represent the will of the feature. They have now three times asked for the feedback from their residents, from gamers, from game companies, and every time they've heard the same thing, yeah, we don't care. Just do it.

(00:09:26):
We don't care. Let's move on. I'm really looking forward to see if the New Zealand [00:09:30] Commerce Commission gets back in on this now too. So it's still good for the CM A, please. Alright, so Microsoft came back with something that I think is a little crazy. Frankly, I don't think this makes any sense. We're going to get into this, and I ended up having to do a very careful reading of the two announcements. One from Microsoft, and there's one from this other company we'll get to in a moment because the EU in the wake of this said, wait a minute, we have these legally binding agreements with Microsoft. [00:10:00] Does this thing screw any of that up? And we're going to get to that. But so here's the deal, and this is weird to me and this deal, this applies worldwide, not in the uk, it's worldwide except for the eu because the EU has already said okay to this, but so is a bunch of other countries too.

(00:10:21):
I know that's what they said. I'm just saying. I was going to say, as has the rest of the world. Right? Right. Okay. But literally this is worldwide. And so Microsoft [00:10:30] is going to license to Ubisoft, which is another software, a game publisher, right, that they will have No, the word exclusive does not appear here. It is very easy to say exclusive. It's not exclusive. But any Activision Blizzard games that are currently available or will be available over the next 15 years, by the way, not 10, 15 years will go through Ubisoft Plus, which is a game subscription service that I bet most of you did not know anything about. [00:11:00] So there are two tiers. The announcement does not mention that, but actually technically there are sort of three tiers because there's an add-on for PlayStation, but we'll call it two tiers. The more expensive tier is called multi-access. That is the tier that's going to get these games. So it's actually not going to be, in other words, if this went through Xbox Game Pass, that's not true. Actually. That's not true. Okay. No. Well, it will be going through Xbox Game Pass. I'm sorry, there's so much [00:11:30] nuance here. Let's just talk cloud gaming for one moment. Sorry, this is just cloud gaming. I should say upfront.

(00:11:37):
I could already feel myself getting excited here. I should just say upfront, this does not impact the retail availability of games, right? Digital or physical? It does not. It's purely about cloud gaming, the thing that doesn't exist. So if you are a Game Pass subscriber, right, Xbox PC or Ultimate, you will still be able to get these games there. You'll just have to download them. You can't stream them. Okay. So Ubisoft [00:12:00] BiSoft plus multi access will be the exclusive place outside of the eu. So stupid to get any of the Activision Blizzard games in streaming form. That's going to be it for 15 years they call uspa.

(00:12:19):
Exactly. That's right. One of the best movies ever made. The only thing that I think is clever in this whole thing and whatever it's really about is that it be soft is headquartered in France, which means you just drank the, [00:12:30] you just, that's all point nailed. Did I out your punchline? This is my punchline. No, no, but I love that you know that and thought of that because that you're smart and of course you did. But a European company, I mean, well, but wouldn't it be a UK company? No, it's so much better. It's a European company, a uk. Oh, there is that company. Children fight with each other. But the point of this is you are a UK regulator's point. You're not an eu. That's a good point. This is like the FTC propping [00:13:00] up Sony in Microsoft. Activision Blizzard is the UK now propping up a French software house.

(00:13:07):
You can't make the stuff up. I love it moment. As soon as that hit me, I'm like, Brad Smith kidding may be a genius. Kidding. And he's like, you know what? I'm just going to make your life worse. I don't make it worse further. Now, if they refuse that deal, they're upsetting. Ubisoft. This is upsetting Europe, I guess. But the UK should be used to that by now. So [00:13:30] here's the thing I've established, I believe, I think it's a fact objectively that cloud gaming today is nothing. Even all the key game industry players who showed up at the F T C hearing, including the guy who runs PlayStation America, the guy who used to run stadia have all said, this is not a market and it will not be for the foreseeable future until physics changes and the speed of light, it can be exceeded.

(00:13:54):
Yeah. So there's 69 billion worth of value in Activision Blizzard. [00:14:00] There's probably about $17 worth of value in cloud gaming. But we're going to slice that off and we're going to hold the rest of this deal in balance. And I say that because by the way, cloud gaming not profitable. We're going to hold this whole thing in the balance so that you can make this decision about this non-entity and do something different with it and complicate this deal. And I just don't understand why we're even bothering the answer to this should have been like, no F you we're just doing it and you can deal with it later [00:14:30] after the fact in court. We're not doing this. Sure, it makes sure, tell us what services you want us to turn off to be compliant in your country. And you can explain to your citizens why they don't have access to that, why you're a non voted in commission of idiots decided to do this. Yeah, exactly.

(00:14:48):
I honestly think this is funnier. This is actually funnier. It would be funny to me if I wasn't, I just need this to end. So now we're go to real. The big thing that's upsetting you is he [00:15:00] just made it longer. What's really happened here, nonsensical is tough on me, nonsensical over a long period of time is it's just I have a hard time with this. Yes. No, no. In a lot of ways this reads like a threat. It's like, I'll get the French involved. You'll love them. Yeah, exactly. So here's the thing. Alright, so this stupidity just happened, right? I just mentioned that the eu, the European Commission, the ec, which is their antitrust regulatory body, had already approved [00:15:30] this deal and got concessions out of Microsoft, which are legally binding, which is one of the things that Microsoft went to the C M A with saying, look, you don't have to do anything extra.

(00:15:39):
We can't do things that you think we're going to do because we still have to deal with these guys. Well, the EC now has issued a statement. It's very short and it's very troubling. It says the commission is carefully assessing whether the developments in the UK require another notification to the commission, a notification. What does [00:16:00] that mean, right? Does this mean that they have concerns that this deal will contradict the legal requirements of their deal with Microsoft? Do you think the EU is mad at here? I don't think they're mad at Microsoft. Yeah. Well, so I mentioned the word exclusive. This is an important part of it. So part of the issue here is we don't know a lot of details about the Ubisoft thing. For example, we know that there's going to be an unstated amount of lump sum that Ubisoft [00:16:30] will pay to Microsoft upfront for this. So we'll find out more about, I'm betting a dollar. Okay, that's fine.

(00:16:37):
We also know that Microsoft will be paid based on some usage metric, which they've only described very vaguely for the games that are streamed over Ubisoft plus. So Microsoft is going to make money from this. The C M A has taken a product that is a money loser for Microsoft and figured out a way to generate revenues, and I'm sorry, probably profits because [00:17:00] someone else is going to put the Bill Classic. Okay, good job. C M A. Okay, that's hilarious. However, I keep saying exclusive. Nowhere does the word exclusive appear in the public descriptions of this agreement. Now, Brad Smith from Microsoft actually does use two renditions of the word exclusive but not related to this particular topic. So that's not in there. What Ubisoft says is that it has cloud streaming rights to games like Call of [00:17:30] Duty and more, and then later, actually, it doesn't matter.

(00:17:34):
It's basically it's all activation. Police games is what it really is. It does not say anything about these being exclusive. So that's kind of a soft evidence thing for me because Ubisoft wants to talk about Ubisoft. They wouldn't necessarily talk about other things, but Microsoft literally never says exclusive. So going back to the eu and this notion that all of, remember the deal with the EU is that all of Microsoft's cloud streaming [00:18:00] games would be available to competitors basically. And so this says to me, thatof will not be the only company doing this, right? That it is still going to allow other companies to do that. And Brad Smith says explicitly, he writes, Microsoft is engaged to, he says, we will maintain, we did this believing that we are in full compliance with the eus commitments, with our commitments to the EU U. It will still honor its legal [00:18:30] obligations, right?

(00:18:30):
Of course. I mean, it has to. And this tells me that Microsoft could in fact, possibly release Activision titles on Xbox Cloud gaming, but could definitely allow third parties to release those games and has to actually, and according to their EU thing. So I think, well, I'm, the two people who use it are going to be really excited. Yeah. The thing is, the game everyone talks about [00:19:00] here is Call of Duty. Call of Duty is not playable via cloud streaming. Most of Call of Duty occurs in the multiplayer arena That absolutely would never work with cloud streaming. So literally, this is the ultimate example of Much Ado about nothing, which is classic because as I said to Brad the other day, I referred to this as regulatory theater, but I forgot how much the British love the theater because they are going on and on and on and on and are not going to stop and we'll [00:19:30] see.

(00:19:30):
So here's my expectation. EU is going to be fine with this. As stupid as it is, I would love to have them come out and say, this doesn't violate our agreement. But what, this doesn't make any sense. Stupid Microsoft can license Activision Blizzard games and other games, their own games, two rival services, not just the one. And I think that's what's going to happen. The trick here is does the C M A fall for this? And I would say based on the evidence so far, where they keep harping [00:20:00] on this one thing, cloud gaming and how stupid this is, and how this doesn't address any concerns at all, I would say, yeah, they're probably going to approve it because it's stupid and they're stupid and I don't understand what goes on in their brains. It makes no sense. The things that they're concerned about don't make any sense, and now they have a solution.

(00:20:21):
Doesn't make any sense. So they should be happy. That's what I'm saying. Yeah. They can be like, oh yeah, that sounds good. What is wrong with you? People build us a conception. Yeah. [00:20:30] Although I will say, we talked about this on the show at the time, and I mentioned this earlier, but I think it bears noting, again, it was notable, right, that after all this stuff, after the 18, 20 months, whatever it was, that Microsoft came back to the C M A knowing that this acquisition was on the line and decided not to offer a single concession. They were like, yeah, no, here's my hands. This is what I got. I thought that was ballsy. However you want to say that. I find it hilarious [00:21:00] other than, I mean, again, they've got to October and it's only August. So clearly they needed something to do for a couple of months.

(00:21:06):
It's like you remember when you thought you were going to have a little bit of summer vacation? How about remember? No. Remember the week that Microsoft, the FTC lost, the judge ruled against the FTC and they fired, filed an emergency motion, worried that Microsoft was what I called a flight risk. In other words, that they would just immediately consume Activision Blizzard and to bypass any future legal challenges. [00:21:30] And they went before a judge and lost again. And so that was on a Friday night. I told this story, but I took a laptop on a Hutter balloon in July, convinced that Activision Blizzard would be acquired by Microsoft that weekend. And now it probably won't happen until the third week of October. And seriously, how is this taking so long? I don't know. See, m a amazing. It's, it's extraordinary. And it's dumb, dumb dumb, dumb dumb.

(00:22:00):
[00:22:00] Yep, dumb dumb, dumb dumb. So that was the big thing that happened this week, really was thinking this wasn't going to be the top of the page anymore. I thought we were sorry. So were everybody else in the whole, well, no. I mean, sorry. There's going to come a day, and I thought this day would've come by now where Microsoft acquired Activision Blazers. I felt like that would be a thing we could have right up front, [00:22:30] and we could just say, Hey, the acquisition occurred. Sorry it took so long. And then let's talk about Windows 11. Because the only thing that's interesting after that happens is what is Microsoft's plans for all of all the IP and the assets and everything? How are they going to do it? So one of the, we're not going to talk about this, whatever reason, I don't know why, but there's a new Call of Duty game coming out this year, which doesn't make, well, a new one comes out every year, but it's Call of Duty, modern Warfare three, which is a sequel to the game that came out last year, which is something they've never [00:23:00] done before.

(00:23:00):
We may have talked about that aspect of it that has the feel of the original team, the pre Microsoft world, going out with a bang, right? Because Call of Duty is a game that since I don't know what year, probably the original Call of Duty for Modern Warfare has earned a billion dollars in some silly number of days every year. So one to two days typically something like that. They earn a billion dollars. And one of the issues, one of the interesting things about Microsoft acquiring Activision Blizzard is [00:23:30] they have Game Pass and they have cloud gaming to a lesser degree, and they tend to make first party studio games not tend to, they literally do make all first party studio games available in those services day want.

(00:23:43):
Now, they can't do that with the cloud part of it, but who Caress? And if Microsoft made Call of Duty, whatever, 2023 or 2024 available via Game Pass on day one, would that not destroy that $1 billion record thing that they do every year? I think it would, [00:24:00] right? Because Game Pass would see a surge in subscribers. All of a sudden. I have access to all the Call of Duty games, including the new stuff on day one on all the machines if I want it that way. And that's a better deal than buying the thing outright. And I think that makes Call of Duty and all Activision Blizzard games potentially a little less valuable on a Big Bang Hollywood style release schedule, which has been the market so far. So I would like to know, and I think gamers would like to know what are they going to do?

(00:24:30):
[00:24:30] Are they going to have staggered releases? Is Call of Duty so big that each October it actually comes out at retail? Do you have to buy it? But then January, March, whatever time of the year, then they put it on Game Pass. I mean, we're going to find out, but that will be interesting. And that's about it, right? I mean, the only thing interesting then it's just like Scrooge McDuck counting is money. It's just how many games do we have at Game Pass now? We have a bunch sitting on a pile of games. Amazing. Yeah. But now we just have the C M A when this thing [00:25:00] not into delayed gratification, but my God, seriously, 69 billion and they had so much time to do this. Yeah. What are they doing? This could have been done six months ago, nine months ago. That's why somebody actually said in my comments, well, I don't see what the rush is here.

(00:25:16):
And it's like the rush, they announced this during the pandemic. What are you talking about, rush? We're closing in on two years. There's no rush. This is the kid who woke up the morning that an essay was due and [00:25:30] started writing it at breakfast. That's what the C M A just did. So the rush is you did this to yourself, you the C m A, the rush. I don't know. I would ignore this regulatory body and I would just do this. That would be my strategy, but I'm not a businessman. Well, I guess technically I am. But anyway, I don't know. I don't know. You are Now I control $67, not 67 billion, so what do I know? Or [00:26:00] 69 or whatever. So there you go.

Leo Laporte (00:26:04):
There you have it. Fantastic. Okay. It's great news. I

Paul Thurrott (00:26:11):
Don't know, is it? It's news. It's

Leo Laporte (00:26:13):
News. It is

Paul Thurrott (00:26:14):
News. That's correct. It is. Thank

Leo Laporte (00:26:16):
You for joining us on Activision Weekly and come back

Paul Thurrott (00:26:20):
Next week. Hey, for more $69 billion.

Leo Laporte (00:26:25):
No, you do not need to justify it. I'm teasing. As is Zumo in [00:26:30] our Discord. Who called it that? This is the huge story. This is the biggest acquisition Microsoft's ever made.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:37):
That's right.

Leo Laporte (00:26:37):
Massive until, and maybe one of the biggest acquisitions in tech until Apple buys Disney for 190, but until then, this is it. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:46):
Don't discount that either. We had

Leo Laporte (00:26:49):
A long conversation on Mac Break Weekly about that. I am of the opinion that's not going to happen, but you never know.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:55):
What was the Yahoo number? Microsoft was going to buy Yahoo for what? 2020

Leo Laporte (00:26:59):
1 billion. 21 billion.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:59):
Oh, [00:27:00] 21. 21 billion. And that was the one where they went, oh,

Leo Laporte (00:27:04):
That was close. We almost

Paul Thurrott (00:27:05):
Got it. Exactly. Exactly right.

Leo Laporte (00:27:08):
Oh boy, baby. We almost spent 21 billion on a

Paul Thurrott (00:27:11):
Dog. All the people in Windows Live who were looking at losing their jobs and consolidating products we're like, oh, thank God.

Leo Laporte (00:27:18):
And now look at 'em.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:20):
Yeah. Windows Live Hotmail still a thing. It's still

Leo Laporte (00:27:27):
A thing. Is it

Paul Thurrott (00:27:28):
Really? They call it outlook.com now. [00:27:30] Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:27:30):
Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:31):
SkyDrive Run in Strong.

Leo Laporte (00:27:34):
I forgot about that. SkyDrive now known as OneDrive,

Paul Thurrott (00:27:39):
Windows Live writer

Leo Laporte (00:27:41):
Writer. Loved that. We loved that. That was the blog posting thing of Jigy. It's

Paul Thurrott (00:27:44):
Great. Windows Live photos. It was good too.

Leo Laporte (00:27:46):
Is there any analog to that? Did they just kill it? They just killed the code base, the writer.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:50):
Yeah. When you go back to the original internet Tidal Wave memo, and you look at what Microsoft did with user facing web publishing tools, [00:28:00] there were like 50, and there was a point in time where worried was going to be that thing where publisher was going to be that thing. There was a thing called Front Page, obviously, and Visual Front

Leo Laporte (00:28:09):
Page. You can never

Paul Thurrott (00:28:10):
Forget. They went through a whole and no Windows A Brighter was, there's

Leo Laporte (00:28:15):
A box, by the way, at the Computer History Museum. There's a box of front page right there. Nice.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:22):
Front page was a good product for the day. I think I did a Windows Weekly from one of the Channel nine studios that had a front [00:28:30] page box in the background too. It's hysterical. Yeah. This was the V T I bin folders and all that crap that actually persisted for many years. It was a big part of the,

Leo Laporte (00:28:39):
You were screwed because no open tool would

Paul Thurrott (00:28:42):
Work because of all the

Leo Laporte (00:28:43):
Extensions.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:45):
It was the front page. I think it was just called the front page extensions. But they existed in i s for years and years and years, even when Front Page went away, this was, listen, one of the things that happens in this move is I retire my active directory infrastructure by turning it off, [00:29:00] and I literally migrated a P D C B D C implementation of Server 2000 to Active Directory 2000. Just to be clear what he's saying. It's primary and backup, right? Or primary and secondary, whatever domain controller. If you're bank controller before or after in a world in which you had to have one that was primary. It's such a stupid way, which by the way, an active directory, you still do. They're now called the F SMO roles. But who Caress? I have French page accounts still in this active director. This active directory [00:29:30] is the archeological dig of every active directory feature. So we're going to talk about my little data archive. I've been going through from my NASA and up on OneDrive, but I also, I have 50 something gigabytes of website archives, and there's a ton of front page in there. Ton of front page.

Leo Laporte (00:29:49):
See, by the way, I'm going to tear up my betting ticket. I was really sure you'd lead with the Python in Excel story,

Paul Thurrott (00:29:57):
But I don't even have

Leo Laporte (00:29:58):
That. You don't even have that [00:30:00] in your rundown. So, boy, I lost it. I picked a trifecta. I thought, oh, it's clearly going to be the surface event, Python and Excel, and then I don't know what the third one would be. I

Paul Thurrott (00:30:12):
Like to defy expectations. Yeah, you do.

Leo Laporte (00:30:14):
I

Paul Thurrott (00:30:15):
Talked to Lauren who writes most of our news about the Excel thing, and we were both like, I don't know.

Leo Laporte (00:30:20):
I bet you Richard might have something to say about it, but we'll see. I'm excited.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:25):
Know. Works for Microsoft now. It had to happen, right? Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:30:28):
Is that how that happened? [00:30:30] Yeah. Van Ross's a creator of Python. I didn't know. Is he a must be a fellow like a guy.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:35):
It's a curious choice if you're going to have one language,

Leo Laporte (00:30:39):
Python.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:40):
No, but you think that's the obvious choice in a Microsoft

Leo Laporte (00:30:43):
World? Yes. I'll tell you why. Because it's very widely used by data scientists. They all use Python. That's fair enough. And so the ability to use your Python code with Excel is, I think, I might be wrong, but I think for data scientists, they're jumping up and down.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:59):
If what [00:31:00] you're doing with Excel, which a lot of people do, is doing data analytics, then Python's a great ad. By the

Leo Laporte (00:31:07):
Way, you have, he's a

Paul Thurrott (00:31:09):
Distinguished engineer at

Leo Laporte (00:31:10):
Microsoft. Yeah, I knew he wasn't down there in the trenches.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:14):
Yeah, they didn't put him on Microsoft Paint

Leo Laporte (00:31:17):
Gui. Could you work on a paint tool for

Paul Thurrott (00:31:20):
It? See if you can figure out dark mode for paint and then we'll talk. Okay. No, but

Leo Laporte (00:31:22):
If he did that, I don't. I wonder if he even did that. But I think it's really, I think that's the right thing to do. That's somebody who said, I'm sure he was involved. Yeah. Somebody who said, [00:31:30] oh, data scientists, they all use Python and they also use Excel. We know. Yeah. Well,

Paul Thurrott (00:31:40):
You're supposed to use Power bi. Didn't you get the note?

Leo Laporte (00:31:45):
I guess you could if you really didn't like yourself much. Let's take a little tiny break and we will get onto the stuff you came for. Like Windows.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:56):
I think Activision was the stuff a lot of people

Leo Laporte (00:31:58):
Did. No, I'm teasing. I like to tease. [00:32:00] I tease. I'm a teaser. I like a needle. Our show today brought to you by, actually, this is a long time friend of mine, lookout. I've used Lookout for. They've been around for a long, long time. Great security company, and with a great new product, the business has changed forever. Boundaries to where we work, even how we work, have disappeared. Right? [00:32:30] Go downtown in San Francisco. It's deserted. Nobody's going into the office anymore. That means your data is always the move, whether on a device in the cloud, across networks, at the local coffee shop in Bermuda. While that's great for your workforce, I mean they're happy. It is maybe a little challenge for it. Security Lookout helps you control your data and free your workforce with Lookout. Complete visibility into your data so you [00:33:00] can minimize risk from internal and external threats.

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Paul Thurrott (00:34:21):
No, no. We were talking about real priorities here, Leo. They're moving my smoker. Oh, wow.

Leo Laporte (00:34:27):
What kind smoker do you have?

Paul Thurrott (00:34:29):
I have an [00:34:30] AmeriCU by Cook Shack. I don't know that. And I also have a big green egg. I'll have the big green egg. So I was more worried about a big green egg. It's ceramic. Yeah. Yeah. C. Can that the AmeriCU? Yeah. It'll break. You see, I've had one break. Have you? But

Leo Laporte (00:34:45):
All the king sources and all the Kingsmen Plus. Yeah. It does look like Humpty Dumpty, but it's also very heavy.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:52):
Yeah, the not trivial thing, but there are large humans walking around in here, make heavy things. That's their job. [00:35:00] Unfortunately, one of them knew what it was. So I'm like, okay, as long as you know what it is, and I have faith, it'll survive. Give me, fill it full of towels and cover it with towels. Something

Leo Laporte (00:35:08):
Like that. You know else?

Paul Thurrott (00:35:10):
Big green egg. I totally cleaned it out.

Leo Laporte (00:35:12):
Zuck has a big green egg.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:14):
There you go. Yeah. See a picture of it? Yeah. It's on top of his shoulders. I can only do like, that's the big five ribs in the big green egg. But I can do 24 racks of ribs in the America, and that's the important part.

Leo Laporte (00:35:29):
I'm have to look at the AmeriCU.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:30):
[00:35:30] Yeah, it's a capacity thing.

Leo Laporte (00:35:32):
My brother-in-law, Lisa's sister's husband, Joe, uncle Joe, took a barrel, cut it up, made a real smoker. I said, you have to put wood in it. He said, yeah. I said, you have to stay up. All that's

Paul Thurrott (00:35:48):
Original.

Leo Laporte (00:35:48):
Yeah, that's the way to do it. He said, I would call

Paul Thurrott (00:35:51):
That hashtag Mackenzie Life sliced a barrel. When you walk outside and it's raining, you're like, nice.

Leo Laporte (00:35:58):
Free car. Wash

Paul Thurrott (00:36:00):
[00:36:00] SG Mackenzie Life.

Leo Laporte (00:36:02):
I like acid rain because it cleans the bird poop wash.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:06):
It gets that stuff right off the window. It's

Leo Laporte (00:36:07):
Beautiful. All that resin. Then the

Paul Thurrott (00:36:09):
Window slides off the

Leo Laporte (00:36:10):
Car.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:10):
But we do have, I do have ash on my car. They had a few days of the fires coming through. That's

Leo Laporte (00:36:18):
Right.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:19):
That's

Leo Laporte (00:36:20):
Right. There were fires in bc. Yeah. They're east of you, most of them, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:36:26):
Yeah, east and north. The wind reversed for a little while. [00:36:30] So we had the project down at one point. We had 30,000 people evacuated. I think we're down to 9,000 now. Oh gosh.

Leo Laporte (00:36:37):
Is there any risk to your area?

Paul Thurrott (00:36:40):
No, not really. I mean, knock on wood, right? Who knows. We're surrounded by forest here too. Well, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:36:48):
Well, also four years ago got within eight miles of it.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:54):
Well, and West Kelowna took some hits. That fire moved so fast. [00:37:00] It took some homes, so Oh yeah. The old Okanagan Resort was burned to the ground. I remember that. Losses. But the people got out. So folks who survive,

Leo Laporte (00:37:10):
It's not like Lana. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:37:12):
No terrifying. Unbelievable. How many more bodies are we going to find? Several hundred. I think it's horrible. I can't disagree.

Leo Laporte (00:37:20):
Horrible. It's still 850 missing now. Maybe. Hopefully some of those just haven't reported in or maybe,

Paul Thurrott (00:37:25):
But I feel like by this point we would. That's tough. That's a tough [00:37:30] one. Yeah. The other thing that's happened is there are firefighters from all over the world here, South Africa, Australia, Costa Rica, who knew, of course, there's a big American contingent, we don't talk about this much, but Canadians and Americans, we help each other every day.

Leo Laporte (00:37:48):
You came down here, believe me, we had a lot of Canadian firefighters down here.

Paul Thurrott (00:37:52):
I think they're returning the favor right now. And then they evacuated Yellowknife, which is the capital of the Northwest territories. [00:38:00] 20,000 people. Yeah. Wow. And they're mostly here in bc. They flew 'em down. The big one was evacuating the hospitals and the care homes and things like that. You just can't do that fast. But you think about it, a 7 37 holds 150 people. You got to move 20,000 people. Exactly. It's a hundred something flights they did in Yep. Three days. Yep. Incredible. That's incredible. The fire may not reach yellow enough. Here's hoping things are going [00:38:30] building better right now.

Leo Laporte (00:38:30):
Take a chance.

Paul Thurrott (00:38:32):
And it's just too far away from everything. The yellow life is a long way away. What a world. We're making it, and we're kind of good at forest fires around here. It's a thing. But that's been this year, right? You can be good at something like that, but this has been exceptional. It's just insane. Well, that's what they said in Quebec. It's like we've had 200 year fires in the past four years, right? [00:39:00] Yep. Yeah. We certainly experienced the after effects of that, even where I live. Yeah, crazy. Anyway, we're hammered through and grateful. Alright, let's resume the convers conversation. Something a little less depressing. Yeah. Windows 11. Oh, I'm sorry. That's not any less depressing. That's not depressing at all. Everything is good. Oh, good dude. It's week D. It's still good week D. We're living [00:39:30] with it.

(00:39:32):
So it's week D as someone Richard I think said, and I've forgotten about this for some reason, even though this has been my life for the past six months, but that means that yesterday on Tuesday, Microsoft released the week D preview updates of versions of the cumulative updates. It will release for all supported versions of Windows next month on Patch Tuesday because of the nature of weeks. This is actually a five week break because there are five [00:40:00] Tuesdays in the month or whatever. So it won't, no, wait, I got that backwards. I guess it's a five week month. It doesn't matter. So normally these week D things sit between each week. B, right? Okay. Last month, you may recall the week D and then, no, sorry, the week. It's so hard to get this straight. Last month, the week D update, which was this past month's, week B update patch Tuesday update was the first for Windows 1122 H two, not to include any new features.

(00:40:29):
And the [00:40:30] feeling is we're heading into 23 H two maybe things are slowing down, pumping this up. But actually this preview update has a couple of new features. Nothing dramatic, nothing exciting, and one of them is something we expected to see in 23 H two, but it's here early, which is the new app defaults behavior that Microsoft announced back in, I think March. This is literally nothing to get excited about. It's really kind of a backend change for developers to create apps so [00:41:00] that say you have an image viewing app or something, you just install it. The way Windows 11 works today is once any app that could take over a file type has been installed, you'll get that open with dialogue where you can choose. In this case, what they're allowing app developers to do is when you install the app, there can be a link in the app that opens the right page in settings that will let you just make that change there.

(00:41:26):
It doesn't let them make the change for you. That's been one of the big changes, [00:41:30] not just in Windows 11, but we'll call it Windows 11 in recent years, windows in recent years, which Microsoft is doing to make it harder to switch browsers, frankly. But they're acting like it's a user choice privacy thing. It's nonsense. But that's one of the two things. And then the other thing is something Windows phone fans will sort of remember from back in the day, which is that app developers can now create not just a primary pin on the task bar. Remember, this was a thing on the start screen when we had tiles. There was this notion of primary and secondary tiles. Do you remember this? [00:42:00] So for example, if you had the Outlook email app or whatever it was called at the time on Windows phone, you could have a secondary tile that was a specific inbox.

(00:42:08):
So you could have my Yahoo inbox is one pin. My Hotmail inbox is one my Gmail, whatever it was. And so they're allowing that for pins on the task bar now. And so there's nothing to see there because no apps do any of this stuff, and I don't think these are going to have major impacts and anything. But that is in there. There's a new search box behavior, which I've installed this build on two [00:42:30] PCs and have not seen, but apparently you can now get a hover on search. So if you think back to how widgets worked originally in Windows 11, and they finally fixed it to be more like Windows 10, if you mouse over widgets, by default, widgets will come up by, I'm sorry, if you also have the icon in the task bar, you can go into widgets say, I don't want that.

(00:42:51):
I just want it to appear when I click on it. They're now going to do that with search as well, because they're doing everything they can to drive you to search because it drives [00:43:00] you to Microsoft's services and advertising. Exactly. And then the third one is just for businesses for managed environments. And this is a way that administrators can use policies to configure how monthly and optional cumulative updates and controlled feature rollouts CFRs are installed for their users. So this is something you cannot explicitly, lemme just think about that for a second. Well, I would say there's light [00:43:30] configuration for this in Windows update, meaning one slider that doesn't do much, but they're going to give a managed businesses explicit control over that stuff because the way that Windows 11 updates has changed a lot this year. So this is kind of a new thing, and they're going to let businesses control that to some degree.

(00:43:51):
So this update will arrive for everybody on Tuesday, September 12th. That is in three weeks, right? Because that five week thing, that's what I was getting at [00:44:00] before the second Tuesday of September, and then we're looking at 23 H two, right? Right. So here's my guess. I think 23 H two has already been completed inside of Microsoft. It's August, it's the end of August, and this is not the type of thing they trumpets anymore. The way you will find out this is happened is Friday or next Tuesday or someday randomly, they'll say, Hey, this 23 H two build range we're at, where [00:44:30] are we at? 22, 6 3, 1 right in the beta channel is going to release preview. Now, that will be how they kind of do it. They're not going to say, oh, that's the next step on our way to final release. My expectation is that on week D of September, we will get 23 H two for seekers for early adopters, and that it will go out broadly to everybody, so to speak, in October, whatever the October patch Tuesday [00:45:00] date is. I'd have to look that up. So that's my guess. Not coincidentally, Leo mentioned this earlier. Microsoft has scheduled it's first in person windows. I'm going to call it a Windows, I'm sorry, surface slash Windows event in New York City. The Microsoft invite does not actually say anything about what it is, but these are based on sources. It does it say

Leo Laporte (00:45:21):
Surface event or did you add that? It's going to be a surface event though,

Paul Thurrott (00:45:25):
Right? It is. However, where's Pano

Leo Laporte (00:45:28):
Panay that day? That's the

Paul Thurrott (00:45:29):
Question. [00:45:30] Well, he will be there. So this is going to be this day. The day this happens is a Thursday. This is the Thursday before the patch. Tuesday. No, that's not true. It's the Thursday before the week D Tuesday at which they will almost certainly release 23 H two. So my expectation is that we will see one or more of the following things, some indication of how Surface integrates with these new features in Windows 1123 [00:46:00] H two, which we'll talk about in a second, because there really aren't that many or some indication or some more information about Windows copilot, which is something that is sort of available today in the Insider program depending on who you are. It's kind of a weird system they have, but almost certainly will be part of 23 H two and whether there's any improvements there over what we've seen so far, frankly, it's been kind of lackluster and or the Windows 12 stuff like the future of AI and Windows and that kind of thing.

(00:46:29):
And I [00:46:30] think the reason I think this is I've been told by a source that all of the new surface devices coming in the future at the time when I was told this will have NPUs or whatever the equivalent is from whatever chips I maker, and I think this is going to be the big push. Whether this triggers a surface slash PC market buying spree is kind of unclear. I would say probably not honestly, but it's all going to depend on what they show. What does Microsoft and what do the PC [00:47:00] make a show off that makes people excited to buy PCs? It can't be Windows Studio effects. We all have background blurring and follow your head and all that kind of baloney. That's very common now. That's been the big demo they have so far. It has to be more than that Windows copilot kind of a dog.

(00:47:21):
Frankly, maybe this would be a good time to come out and talk about Microsoft 365 copilot and show how having an N P U or it's equivalent on [00:47:30] the client will help those experiences because ultimately adding AI to Windows to the Shell or as an edge instance or to paint, which is one of the recent rumors or whatever. It is cute, but people are really using these kind of more complicated, more powerful apps like the ones in Microsoft Office and the services behind them. So I think that might be the better demo. So we'll see what they do, but I think it's going to be some combination of those things [00:48:00] and it would be worth us streaming if they stream it. We don't know though. That's the problem. They may not, they have a history of not streaming events when they invite the press like this.

(00:48:12):
Yes, I don't know. But they have a history of streaming 'em too. So in this day and age, it doesn't make sense to come out publicly and say, we're going to show you something, at least show it to press then. So I think my suspicion is they will go public with that. Good. Well, I mean, the thing is, if it's going to be the M P U thing, then it [00:48:30] should be new hardware. It should be Windows 12, it should be Windows copilot. That would be huge. If it's all a vehicle, you've got to make all those things make it. They all go together. Wow. How do you not do them all right? As a continuum. In other words, today you're going to get this for free in Windows. If you're a Microsoft 365 subscriber, although commercial only, which is a little bit of a problem, you're going to get this other stuff.

(00:48:54):
And then we have much bigger plans for this, and here's an early peak at some of this capabilities that [00:49:00] this hardware is going to enable and this is why you're going to want to upgrade now. Although frankly, with anything new V two V three maybe would be a better choice. But for average people, well, and I'm in the market. I want a machine, this is the time and that if they're going to, there's a new version of the studio with an M P U, I think I'm sold. It's got fancy features I don't necessarily need, but I'll take fancy and one of the big questions question marks here, which is [00:49:30] the only big question mark for people like me, I guess, but people and us, I mean people in the industry, whatever is the timing of this suggests that we're not going to see anything windows on armor related.

(00:49:40):
The next gen windows and ARM stuff will not be announced until November, December, which is on the normal schedule. And that stuff won't ship until next year at the earliest early next year probably. And there's just so little conversation going on around ARM that I can't be close unless they're really going to blindside it, which should be cool. Yep. Yeah, exactly. [00:50:00] If they allowed Microsoft to have do the early peak thing, I mean, it's possible. I wouldn't discount it, but we'll see. So that's kind of interesting. So lately with the understanding that 23 H two is being concluded this month at some point, and Microsoft has slowed down a little bit, honestly with the builds, I've installed this on a few machines to kind of see what this looks like. And I have to say, it's kind of a weird mixed bag because first [00:50:30] of all, if you go through this and Leo right now, please do not follow anything I'm about to say.

(00:50:35):
But if you were to go into settings, settings and enable Windows Insider program and I don't know, and roll in the beta channel, reboot your computer, and then you install the build, one of the things you would've seen in the past is that build, that first build that comes up, whatever it's called, takes a while to download and install. It's big. This one does not take any time at all, and when you reboot, it comes right [00:51:00] back. It's not one of those big feature update installs where a lot of things happen online. It's like getting ready, 9%, 17%. It happens very quickly, and this is related to that enablement package language that they used earlier. Remember, they're basically just flipping a switch. There are features that are kind of hidden in the code that this thing basically enables. In this current state, you don't get, I should say, you don't necessarily get all of the features.

(00:51:29):
They do that kind [00:51:30] of, I'm going to call it AB testing. I know it's not technically, but they don't enable all the features for everybody all the time, which I think is a stupid thing to do, period. But it's a stupid thing to do this close to release. But on both of the PCs I've installed this on, I do not have Windows copilot, although I have it on a third computer in a virtual machine that I did from two months ago. Whatever. There are methods to make that thing appear. There's a tool called Vive Tool, which used with certain parameters, [00:52:00] command line tool, you reboot and it's supposed to work. That's how I got it working. I think it was back in June. It has not worked for me so far. I'm going to keep trying different things, but I would like to see that. I think that's going to be the kind of the marquee feature, which is too bad because it's not that exciting.

(00:52:19):
There's some stuff that was released. There were Devon Beta Channel builds last week that have some of the features that will be in 23 H two. So if you see [00:52:30] anything in beta that's coming in 23 H two. So for example, they announced that build, I think it was that in addition to zip file support and Windows, which has been in the Shell since probably Windows eight, native support for RAR and other archiving format, seven Z, et cetera, et cetera. So that's kind of cool. What you mean, I don't have to pay, right? Yeah. There's a never combine mode for the task bar, which states back to, geez, probably Windows some version of XP or something. It's been [00:53:00] there for a long, long time, certainly Windows seven at least, but a long time bringing that one back rich thumbnail previews and start, by the way, can't get any of this stuff to work in my build. How do you get rich in a thumbnail? I don't understand. Oh, you mean as the ordinary thumbnail? Well, what it is is a, yeah, it's funny. The behavior has changed.

(00:53:24):
The way I take it to mean is you hover over something for which there is a thumbnail preview, an image is an [00:53:30] obvious example, and it pops up around the mouse cursor, kind of like happens in the Mac, on the Mac, although Mac, you might have to do a little command or something. I don't remember what the exact thing is. I think if you single click, maybe it does that, whatever, it's, I was not seeing that before. Instead, what I was seeing was a little flyout that was quite different from what there was before, which allowed you to go and open it with something else or go find where it was in the file system or wherever. I have rebooted since [00:54:00] then because I've been trying to get copilot working, and actually now that UI is gone, so I don't know what to say. The snipping tool is updated through the store, but if you have a 23 H two build, you get the new snipping tool, nothing major there. But when you do a snip, that is an image, like a screen capture, there'll be a little button for paint in the toolbar, so you can go edit it and paint, which is just one or two steps quicker than the old way. And then if it's a video, you can edit it in clip chat. Those I do see are still, I should say, that's kind of neat.

(00:54:30):
[00:54:30] And then we'll see. Because frankly, I was hoping, oh, I should say no, sorry. One of the biggest thing perhaps, and this is something I noticed, this is the type of thing Mary Jo would never have noticed is File Explorer has been partially rewritten with the Windows app, s d K. So it's kind of a weird hybrid app where the top of it, and I think the navigation pane or parts of it, actually, I'm looking honestly, the main view might be as well, but [00:55:00] it has been rewritten, and I'm going to turn some features on here so I can actually show you what it says. Yeah, so it has an almost like tile looking UI where each of the folders under quick axis is kind of like a bigger thing. The font sizes and icons are all bigger. The toolbar is bigger and it's taller.

(00:55:18):
So just been, it's almost frankly, a little thumb friendly, which I'm not necessarily happy about. And then there's a new gallery node, which I feel is horribly misplaced. But [00:55:30] if you look at File Explorer today, or if you're familiar with it, you might know there are three sections. The top section is just the home view, and if you have OneDrive installed, or even if you have two or three OneDrive, they'll appear up there at the top. The bottom is this PC and network, and you can add other things to it, libraries and folders and things. And then the middle is all your quick access pin, so desktop downloads, pictures, documents, whatever. It's by default, you can customize that, which I do pretty heavily. [00:56:00] The gallery's in the top, it's between home and OneDrive for some reason, and it is literally the gallery view from the Photos app.

(00:56:09):
So it's kind of a automatic layout of all the images on your computer by date, and you can scroll down and of course, because you have OneDrive integration, in my case, I can go back past 1990, I don't know how far it goes. I can only see 1990 on the screen, but you can scroll through and get all your, [00:56:30] you can see everything, and it just seems like it's in a weird place. I don't know quite what the point of this is, but it literally is the exact view that you get in the Photos app. So I've gone back to some random year and I'm seeing pictures of buildings in Europe. I don't know what this is. Anyway, I think it's a weird thing to have there in File Explorer, but I don't know what the alternative would be, I guess. I don't know, maybe a sub note of pictures or something, but I don't know.

(00:56:58):
It's okay. [00:57:00] I don't know that. I don't see any way to get rid of it. I'm sure there's a control in there somewhere. Yeah, that is the challenge, right? I'm trying to hunt down that popup for the Xbox Game bar because it rings sounds, even though all sounds are turned off, it doesn't kick an app. It's just this voodoo bar that appears every shop. It's like, Hey, listen, go away. Yeah. Well, I'm sure this will be exciting to some people. So this is an ongoing [00:57:30] thing. I'm going to keep trying on the co-pilot. Obviously I hope to, I wanted to do this in Mexico, but I'm going to do an episode about that for hands on Windows, of course, et cetera, whatever. And then if you are on the dev channel, you've got a couple of those features that are also in beta and they're working on a new Flyout for cast.

(00:57:53):
This is the mirror cast style Chromecast thing, so I think it's, let's see, what is, it should know this. What is cast? [00:58:00] It's not P, oh, wait, I can go ahead and get to it from P, I think P is project it's, is it Windows Key? Windows Key Plus C is now copilot. That used to be chat. What is Oh, K, I bet it's K. Yeah, K because cast, so Windows Key plus K is cast, so if you have a mirror cast display anywhere in your house, a lot of smart displays or mirror cast displays, they are changing the U. I don't see it here on beta and apparently my TV's off so I can't see it, [00:58:30] but they're just making it a slightly nicer ui. Nothing major there, but at least there were some new builds. We didn't remember last week. By the time we had the show, there was only one build and it was just mostly fixes and stuff.

(00:58:43):
So there's been some developments there at least. Nice. Yeah, so that's most of the Windows 11 stuff, but we have a couple of sort of related things. Probably two weeks ago, three weeks ago we talked about Microsoft [00:59:00] Edge for Business, which contrary to the name is not a new version of Edge just for business. It's actually just a usage mode. If you use Edge today and you have profiles for both work or school I should say, but work and personal that you can switch between those profiles and Edge using your user photo there, it gives you different windows. The work and school account has a brief case on it to kind of differentiate it. There's also a thing going on with Edge that is not [00:59:30] everywhere in the world, but they're changing the UI with a new layout and actually lemme just bring up Edge and see what it looks like on this computer.

(00:59:37):
Yeah, this one still has the old ui, which is amazing to me. The only way you're going to see, it's crazy that this still has the old ui. I updated all seven Edge chapters in Windows 11 field Guide back in IT as long ago. It was March, but April, somewhere in there and using the new ui, which is still not out in the world's crazy. But anyhow, the only way you'll see this [01:00:00] now is if you actually sign into Windows and or Edge from the get go using, what's it called? Enter id enter. Id used to be Azure Active Directory is what Microsoft calls a work or school account. If you do see that, if you do do that, you will get Edge for Business. And Edge for Business is just an evolution of that profiles system I was describing previously. If you sign in with a Microsoft account and then add a business account, like a Enter id, whatever [01:00:30] we want to call it, you'll continue to use the old system where you have profiles.

(01:00:34):
It's still two windows. They still kind of look the same. The second one, the business one, I guess the first one in the original scenario has that briefcase thing on it, and there's some little styling up in the corner in the future. They're going to allow organizations to brand this window so that it could have your company logo on it. There is, it's a one directional unit [01:01:00] directional capability for opening. You go to a work site on the personal version of Edge and it will open an edge for business. You can, as the user specify sites that will open either one in the future. This will be a IT org policy-based thing where they can specify that's coming soon, I guess. So it's really a lot of talking for something that is a very subtle difference from what's available today for everybody, frankly, and I've got a couple of notes, some friends [01:01:30] in the IT space, look, edge for Business is here.

(01:01:33):
Now I have to explain it to all my users exactly what's happened because some people, it just rolled out, and I've already heard from people, now I've gotten all these help desk tickets. How come there's a briefcase on this icon? What's going on? And it's like, well, you're signing within a D or whatever, and they just enabled it. They do a little bit of, there's a little thing at the top that says, Hey, it hopefully is clear to people that it's not like malware or something, but I guess not. So they therein lies the question, right? [01:02:00] We're busy torching these guys with different fishing exploits to see if they fall for any of that. Now there's suspicious of everything and good on 'em. Maybe they'll graduate to have it in their own tinfoil hat. They're getting closer. What Edge for Business is not, as I said, is a separate application.

(01:02:16):
It's not like a cleaner version of Edge. It doesn't have all those stupid AI features or whatever. You still get all the crap. It really is just a way to basically visually, but not just visually, but to the user visually separate work and home. It's a [01:02:30] profile. It's a profile. It's a profile. If only we had a system for it already. Oh, wait, profiles profile. Yes. Yeah. Maybe you've opened Chrome and you have seen profiles. Yes, you might have seen profiles. Yeah. No, Chrome would work the same way. I mean in the Microsoft space with Edge to date, I would say as an individual, some people might have different personal profiles. You can do that. You can have two different edge if you want. Sure. You could have probably an arbitrary number, but most people I think probably use it for one work account, one [01:03:00] consumer account or whatever. And I definitely split the T net Rock's run ads account. So there's very different search criteria, different topic areas. When you match 'em together, it makes you sad. So I can keep 'em separate. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, I'm never going to use this. I don't care. Alright, so I just don't, just don't care. Just don't care.

(01:03:24):
Microsoft is not going to say this, but it's very clear that they have stepped back big time from all of their mixed [01:03:30] reality stuff. The one big exception of course is HoloLens, and even that specifically is kind of Army related. I mean they're maintaining that brave space kind of deal, but they still sell HoloLens too. They still have a set of customers that are using it. They're still happily collecting. It's roughly like a thousand dollars a month to support a HoloLens on Azure. They're making money, but I don't know that they're pushing anything out. They're waiting on hardware and it seems like the Army's willing to pay them to experiment with hardware. So they're letting that happen. [01:04:00] I don't remember the exact history of this, but I would say over the active lifetime of Windows 10, there were various initiatives with Windows or with mixed reality Windows. Mixed reality. They relied as well as they used to with PCs on partners. Microsoft never made their own mixed reality headset, which is kind of interesting. HP had a big one for a while. Samsung as well. Dell Acer both had them back in the day, but as we kind of moved forward in time, [01:04:30] you were starting to see a quadrupling of resolution in each eye, and I think that was just HP and Samsung I think, and probably HP most recently.

(01:04:43):
There's no one working on this anymore, frankly, at Microsoft, basically. Right. I think there's like two team's been drastically cut, do you think? But it's interesting to see it open up. Yeah, do think, go ahead. Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm not important. No, that's okay. [01:05:00] Just the news is that there's something called the mixed reality toolkit, which is an open source S D K that developers can use to create these apps. I don't know that a lot are. They have moved that to an independent organization on GitHub. Qualcomm and Magic Leap are joining Microsoft and the steering committee. That's kind of interesting. It suggests a possible future, and maybe this was always the right way to handle this. This is probably what I would call the smallest fiefdom inside of Windows Plus devices. [01:05:30] The guys that are just quiet, they don't want anyone notice that it's still there. They saw the job. These guys are still drawing a shot. Else does Whatcha doing. Nobody does. I would argue that it's also, while we're waiting on hardware, let's all collaborate on the software. We come to a common software suite that's just more opportunity, a common software suite that works across the various VR platforms. So Windows Mystery reality is probably not going anywhere, but there is Meta and other companies. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:05:57):
There's this company down in Cupertino, [01:06:00] I think.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:01):
Well, no, no, no. They would not factor these plans. This is, we're going to ignore that

Leo Laporte (01:06:09):
Completely.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:10):
No, no, no. Apple would just not allow them in. Right? No, that's how Apple does things.

Leo Laporte (01:06:15):
I almost feel like they're bound getting together so that they have a united front against

Paul Thurrott (01:06:21):
A bahini thinner in this category, which is never going to work. So the future of this will be a zarin slash flutter, something that does [01:06:30] to xr, whatever you want to call this whole market, what those things did to mobile app development that Apple does not want these bastardized meta ports coming to their beautiful clean platform, so they're happy. Even Wall Garden. Yeah, but I was not insinuating that. No, but I see the play of the Mr. Rtk very much the same way that the Chromium and the IE and [01:07:00] EDGE guys got together to push forward the standards on HTML five to the point where even Safari had to eventually comply. Nobody wants to be the new i e six. So you make your way, and this is, I'm not saying they're there yet. They're not. They're not. Okay. If you were going to head in that direction, this would be one of the, that does seem to be the plan.

(01:07:20):
They already have experimental support for these other platforms. This is going to be a case like, well, exam exam's a good example because Samin back in the day, supported Windows phone [01:07:30] as well as Android and iOS. Today, net Maui supports Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS, and I guess sort of ties it, but the Windows thing is kind of gone. And so Windows phone thing, this is, we've looked at this market and said, well, we had a Windows thing, but now we don't. And maybe it's time for this thing to survive to be more of a broadly compatible thing. And with any luck improve enough that if and when they decide they're going to [01:08:00] make new hardware, they'll have something to run on. They don't have to roll themselves. They're right once run everywhere. Dream is true of XR V, whatever you want to call this as it is of mobile, as it was of Desktop Bag the other day.

(01:08:14):
It's right once run maybe. Yeah, right. Once run poorly everywhere. So we'll see. We'll see. But that's told you that We did this on the show years ago, the thing called the Drawer of Broken Dreams, right? That's right. Where you start with your phone and you make it work [01:08:30] on your phone, and once it's working on your phone, you go to the drawer of Broken Dreams, you get the next phone. It doesn't quite render. So you do some tweaks. You get it written on that phone, then you address that back to your phone. Now it's working on two phones. Sure. And then Apple, they say UI and nothing works. And round and around we go. We always talk about how many phones in the drawer, broken dreams. And at one point in the Android world was like 200. I was going to say all of them. Yeah. Yeah. The drawer doesn't close anymore. Yeah. Yeah. That's a minor thing. But it's interesting.

(01:08:59):
I feel [01:09:00] like Microsoft is going to progressively step back from a lot of these initiatives that seemed really important at the time. And actually I wrote this in the notes. AI is the new ar, remember this thing we cared about all the time over there? Now we're doing this thing over here, but let's get back to the point, which is that the cloud has been the thing. They've been doing well in it and they needed the next thing and they've been fishing around for a while. See, honestly, aside from all the obvious stuff, and these markets [01:09:30] have nothing to do with each other, I would say, this is going to be a weird sentence, but an advantage of AI for Microsoft is that it does require that backend infrastructure. Whereas with ar, it's like managed to make HoloLens consume a heck ton of Azure iot.

(01:09:48):
And I think for the most part, vr, AR experiences are always going to lean on the cloud. They're always leaning on connectivity, but AI is, I mean, it's just intense. It's a different level. Well, [01:10:00] the sheer, yeah. And for Microsoft, that makes more sense. I mean, Microsoft can now cleanly argue. We could have made it with ar, but you know what? AI is so much more valuable to us. Well, and it's literally like GT four is so huge, it's barrier to entry for anybody. It barreled over these other things, which may have been important otherwise, but now are superfluous to us. And that's not really what happened, but it's okay. Part of the mission was to consume more cloud and they did that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:10:28):
It sure feels like though in the [01:10:30] tech world that they got all excited about ar, vr mixed reality. Then they got all excited about Bitcoin. Now they're all excited

Paul Thurrott (01:10:37):
About ai. Yes. Yep. This all goes back to the paperless office. Yeah. Oh yeah. Paperless office tablets. Oh my god. Tablets twice. Just because people get

Leo Laporte (01:10:47):
Excited about it doesn't mean there's a market.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:51):
At some point you realize people just get excited about anything. Well, they're

Leo Laporte (01:10:54):
All looking for the next thing, and they're the next big thing, and they're trying to

Paul Thurrott (01:10:58):
Look, if you're a venture fund right [01:11:00] now and you're sitting on several billion dollars worth of money to invest Exactly. You've got a problem. That's a lot of money to put somewhere. That's true.

Leo Laporte (01:11:12):
Hey, speaking of ai, AI coming up and Xbox coming up and the back of the book with some brown liquor included, we're going to probably, you can watch for this, start using AI for our show notes. And yeah, at first I [01:11:30] was, yesterday we were talking about it and they showed me some examples. I said, that's terrible. That looks like an AI wrote it. There's no point of view. It's bland, it's empty. There's no voice. And what we do is human driven, but it turns out, so Anthony Nielsen, who has really become our guru of ai, he's kind of amazing, wrote a new prompt and I'm blown away. I thought this is the best show notes we've ever had, so watch for this. It'll be slowly [01:12:00] rolling out, but we're going to, oh boy. Okay. We're going to use something called Claude. I don't know who that is, but is John Claude, Jean Claude?

(01:12:10):
I think it's called Claude. Am I right, Anthony? I think that's the name of it. And I'm blown away. I could show you. Wow. Okay. Yeah. I could show you what it did. It put emojis in. All he had to do was add the thread. Oh, and have a point of view. Tell us who's excited about it [01:12:30] and what he said and all that stuff. This is the have a point of view. Have a point of view. So I've been really negative on ai. I'm getting, I could see some real value to this. These are the show notes from yesterday's Mac Break Weekly. So what they do is they use an AI tool called Podium to transcribe it. Then they feed the transcription to Claude. I think that's his name. And this is what Claude wrote on this week's info packed Mac Break weekly Leo and guest dive into the [01:13:00] latest Apple News and rumors, including whether you should disinfect your bacteria ridden Apple Watch.

(01:13:05):
The hosts say yes to good hygiene, but question is news. But Apple says, just upgrade to a new whenever you do. I mean, don't worry about the content. I think this is really interesting. It reads well, like a human wrote a summarizer and it's putting in cringey, cleans up cringey titles and descriptions of it. I mean, this is really interesting. Alex Lindsay [01:13:30] plays with trippy ambi sonic microphones for surrounding sound experiments, but can it enhance their show audio? I mean that AI wrote it, and all Anthony did was change the prompt just a little bit. He, sorry, interns. Well, if we had interns, I'd be using them. They're cheaper than ai, but we don't all you interns leave the building. Don't let the AI kick you on the way out, added to the prompt. Try to include the hosts [01:14:00] and guest positions on the topics. That's the prompt. He added that to a longer prompt, and it did. It's blown me away. Anyway, so this has been always a problem with our network is that we just don't have the manpower to do the fancy show notes. And that takes a lot of energy, a lot of,

Paul Thurrott (01:14:20):
Not to mention having the same style across shows is kind of useful and it's

Leo Laporte (01:14:26):
Not. That's part of the problem is very inconsistent. Some shows have elaborate

Paul Thurrott (01:14:29):
Shows. Yeah, because [01:14:30] everyone, I'm sure the way I do notes is different from the way

Leo Laporte (01:14:32):
Does. Yeah. Thanks to you. We have good show notes for this show because you write

Paul Thurrott (01:14:36):
Notes. It's just me, my stupid style. Did you

Leo Laporte (01:14:39):
Know how much necessarily is? Yeah, well, it's a week's worth of Don't Have something.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:45):
He's pretty fast at it. I've watched. I've been sitting there watching him while I put 'em. Oh really? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:14:51):
Well, in that case, no, no. I think the day will come soon when we're going to have chapter markings and all sorts of stuff we've always wanted to do but [01:15:00] couldn't do. So AI is interesting. Anyway, we'll talk about AI in a moment. Yeah, that's cool. Paul Throt, Richard Campbell, you're listening to Windows Weekly, ai, time AI and developers.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:13):
I've been waiting on this news, so to speak, go back in time. And it was Richard who said, when I asked sort of rhetorically, what is the impetus for Microsoft to come up with this AI stuff, so suddenly out of nowhere seemingly, and [01:15:30] go with Bing and do the things they did, and Richard said, and I'll never forget this, they saw the a hundred million monthly active users that opened Web Hat on, not Delegate 60 days Flat Chat D. Yep. And yeah. Yep. And Microsoft, I don't know if they said this during the February event, but in some of the collateral interviews or whatever that occurred at the time, someone from Microsoft said every percent of usage share, they call it market share, by the way, market share something else, but [01:16:00] usage share, I'll call it correctly, is worth billions of dollars to them. So that even if Google had 90% share and binging had like three, but they went to four or five, that would be worth billions of dollars a year.

(01:16:13):
So it still made sense and it was like, yeah, okay, okay, cool. But in the back of my mind, not in the back of my mind, in the front of my mouth, I have been saying, yeah, but it's Bing. It's still Bing. Bing to me, is one of the most failed brands that Microsoft owns. It's horrible, worse. Bing is a terrible product. And [01:16:30] yeah, okay, we're going to add binging or AI to Bing, and that's cute, but Google's going to add it to Google search. So that's the end of that. And actually it was Richard, again, you believe you called it Table Stakes. Now ai, it's not even a thing anymore. It's just a feature of everything. It's not its own product, it's not its own wave, its own service or whatever. It's a part of everything. And in that world, which I do believe is correct, binging is still Bing.

(01:16:59):
And if [01:17:00] binging doesn't have a differentiator, it's still binging and binging stinks. So I'm waiting. It became pretty, I mean, I did take it out for a spin and I liked the Footnoting that it did. I like those were good features. Listen. So except for that part where it didn't search out the stuff that mattered to me, it was really great. I'm not going to get the date right on this. It doesn't matter too much, but the thing that we now call binging, I want to say started life as Windows live search or M S N Search, and it became, I buy that. Yeah, it was Emerson [01:17:30] search Windows is live search, live search. And then binging. And I don't remember the timing on this, but there were various reinventions of this service. One of the things that Microsoft found early on, for example, was that people were looking for celebrities.

(01:17:42):
And so they went to their image display thing and they made it really nice for that kind of thing, and they got a little bump from that for a little while. People liked the way that that looked. Google of course just responded by fixing theirs and whatever. That was the end of that. But the one that I really, really remembered, I just don't remember what it was called at the time, whether it was Windows Live Live or [01:18:00] MSN Search was they called it the answer engine. And the idea was not the idea. They literally promoted it its way. Instead of an endless page of Blue Links, you ask a question and we're going to give you the answer. We call that AI. Now, by the way, it's so easy on what was the day of the week of Christmas last year or something where there's like an answer, whatever, whatever.

(01:18:26):
And it was a good idea and it went nowhere because this thing has never done well [01:18:30] at all. Well, we've got our first, this is not, I wouldn't call this a fact in the sense it's just broadly accepted, but there was an awesome report in the Wall Street Journal that looked at Bing used to share, cited two major analysts that look at these things, talked to a bunch of individual analysts, one of whom gave the greatest quote I have ever read in my life, which said, binging is cute, but it's not a game changer. Nice. The basic deal, [01:19:00] whether you're Stat counter or a similar web or whoever else is that binging usage share today is either flat with what it was in January before they added this AI stuff, or is actually a little bit behind.

(01:19:14):
I should know. That's not right. I'm sorry, is I'm sorry. Up briefly. Meanwhile, chat, G P T four exploded since it was released in [01:19:30] November. Its momentum seems to have come off somewhat too. That's true. But compared to what's happened to binging, it's still night and day. Still night and day. And I'm going to look for this exact look, I pointed this out, I said this day with regards to the C M A and Microsoft and Ubisoft, you always want to look for the word exclusive when you see partnerships. And one of the problems with Microsoft investing 11 billion in OpenAI is [01:20:00] that they don't have anything really all that exclusive there. No. There are deals that there with big partners. Binging is the default search engine now for chat G P T or whatever. But chat, G P T usage surpassed Bing usage during this timeframe. Binging was launched 14 years ago, and I don't think that includes the previous permutations. I have to look that one up. I'm not sure. Maybe I'm wrong about that part of it. And like I said earlier, [01:20:30] the issue here is what I said. It was upfront. When we are still doing our stages of grief, trying to figure out AI stuff back in February, March, whatever that was, which was, it's still, it's binging. It's still going to be Bing.

Leo Laporte (01:20:45):
Excuse me. But isn't that the whole point of doing the investment in open AI is that they want to also reap the rewards of the next thing.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:55):
It's the

Leo Laporte (01:20:55):
Acknowledgement that binging isn't the thing.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:58):
I actually think that binging is holding back [01:21:00] Microsoft's AI work and that what they should have done is bought OpenAI and gone with that is the brand. No,

Leo Laporte (01:21:08):
Because the money transfer from OpenAI is all towards Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:12):
Yeah, it's all Azure in the end anyway. Yeah. Even that

Leo Laporte (01:21:14):
$10 million, it's Azure Credits,

Paul Thurrott (01:21:17):
Microsoft's looking at, and they do own 49% of ai. I'm sorry that this is not the important point. The important point is that Binging is a terrible brand and that they should have done something new. That might be the example I'll use is what they did with Microsoft Teams. [01:21:30] Well, in other words, instead of going forward with Skype, they did Microsoft Teams, they created a new brand for that. Right? Well, first time they had Skype for Business. No, I know, I know Link. No, you're right, you're right. And response Point, there were probably others I'm forgetting. So yeah, there were many Office communications was one. Yes, server. But Teams as a brand has succeeded. And these are things, it's hard to understand why, honestly, in some cases, but Teams for whatever [01:22:00] reason is the most successful Microsoft platform in decades. It's the most successful. I'm going to call it an office app since the original Big three, right?

(01:22:11):
OneNote for a little while was sort of the big thing back in 2000. But I mean, this thing is blowing OneNote out of the water as far as popularity, usage, whatever it is a force of nature. Yeah. Well, it's just trying to displace Outlook and is succeeding in certain sectors, which is, I mean, I don't think anyone could have foreseen, so they couldn't [01:22:30] have done that with a Skype branded product. So that time they got it right. I think moving forward with Microsoft already has a very tenuous relationship with the consumers moving forward with something that just doesn't resonate at all. That sounds like literally my father's Oldsmobile, zoom, whatever you want to call it. I mean, there's also discussions going on now of is Microsoft competing with open ai? They are offering their own services. They absolutely are. And they have a [01:23:00] huge own chunk of it. It's

Leo Laporte (01:23:03):
Not using open AI though when Microsoft does it.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:07):
No. They are using open AI to compete with open ai. In fact, Microsoft was caught that True. Are they

Leo Laporte (01:23:12):
Really competing?

Paul Thurrott (01:23:14):
Microsoft salespeople were caught saying to potential corporate customers that you should go with us and not with OpenAI because managed environ, we've been doing this forever, whatever it is. And the guys at OpenAir were like, excuse me. Hello, what are you doing? [01:23:30] I mean, you could make an argument and Microsoft probably would that some of their offerings are in some ways like a superset of what OpenAI does. But

Leo Laporte (01:23:44):
Honestly, I think Microsoft has a two-pronged strategy. They have consumer facing products like Bing and Surface, which are okay, but really, and I know and everybody knows the real business is the cloud business, and they're going to make money, whether it's open [01:24:00] AI or Bing or whatever.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:02):
I hear you. And the biggest success of Microsoft over the past 20 years honestly, has been this shift in its business away from that window centricity of the past to this new cloud centricity. No doubt about it. This is a business case study. Microsoft is looking at transforming its business in the wake of the, I'm going to call it web slash online service slash mobile thing that happened where Apple and Google, especially in Amazon, actually [01:24:30] all became dominant parties in their own right. They had different business models that they could try to emulate, and Microsoft tried to emulate all of them. They emulated a w S with Azure. They emulated Google with a live search, whatever it's called today being whatever. They emulated Apple with any number of devices, some of which they still sell today in the form of surface. Apple is the biggest company in the world, and they are almost 100% consumer focused, device-based, blah, [01:25:00] blah, blah, whatever.

(01:25:00):
So there is an argument to be made that there's a market there too. And that if Microsoft somehow could have its fingers in both sides of that pie online and hardware, that it could be even bigger. Microsoft's the second biggest company in the world. I think it's hard when you have a good brand and are leading a company and you do have this history to sort of decide strategically we're going to be infrastructure, even though that is, they're clearly doing both. I mean, the growth area for Apple now is the backend services. [01:25:30] I think they nv Microsoft's cloud, and now you're hearing rumors. They're trying to make their own large language model product. Everybody's trying to get on everybody else's bandwagon. Nothing unusual here. No, that's exactly right. I guess my point is only

Leo Laporte (01:25:42):
That I don't, that's the case. I don't think Apple's looking at Microsoft at all,

Paul Thurrott (01:25:46):
At all. Well, I think is saying

Leo Laporte (01:25:49):
The services came about because Apple's saw the slowdown in the sales of iPhone. It was so saturated, and they said, well, what do we do? How do we change from unit sales to arpu [01:26:00] average revenue

Paul Thurrott (01:26:00):
Pre user?

Leo Laporte (01:26:02):
We get them some services that they have

Paul Thurrott (01:26:04):
To buy. It's the same high level goal, more money per user per month.

Leo Laporte (01:26:08):
I don't think iCloud is running on, I mean, I guess Apple has some network operations centers, but it's running on Azure, isn't it? I don't think it's

Paul Thurrott (01:26:17):
Running on. I don't think it's running on Azure.

Leo Laporte (01:26:20):
They'll never admit it, but it's not running on their cloud.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:24):
I think Apple might surprise people by being one of the biggest owners of data centers in the world. [01:26:30] I mean, they do.

Leo Laporte (01:26:30):
I know they do. And there's a lot of reason for that. Maybe because of music and apps and all that stuff. They,

Paul Thurrott (01:26:37):
90% of it is device backups. Leo. But the point is

Leo Laporte (01:26:41):
Actually, actually I'm going to try to find out who services iCloud. It used to be a bundle of services.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:48):
Us, I think IT mix. That's Azure. Maybe a little Google Apple's model is always drop the partners as quickly as possible, do it yourself. And Apple will approaches things in a very open way. I

Leo Laporte (01:26:56):
Don't know if it's that way with NOx, and I'll tell you, Knox are [01:27:00] really a burden on the bottom

Paul Thurrott (01:27:02):
Line. I know, but Apple, silicon-based data centers running as these things are running on uni's. True for free. This is definitely the vision. This is the compass. Steve Jobs had the vision of putting a factory on the ocean so they could import salt from the sea and puke out computers on the other side. It was the stupidest idea. You didn't do

Leo Laporte (01:27:26):
That,

Paul Thurrott (01:27:29):
Somebody out of it. [01:27:30] But Apple does things in their own Apple way. And Richard hit on the, I think, which is an important point, which is Apple. Apple is rumored to be working on their own. LLMs. Apple is a company that does things behind the scenes for years and years and years. Sometimes they don't come out like the Apple car thing or whatever.

Leo Laporte (01:27:47):
Yeah, that's right.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:48):
They tend to come to market and we'll see if they're right about this VR stuff, but they tend to come to market when they think they have something that addresses a need that's better than what's out there in the world. And I actually do think they could do [01:28:00] this with AI

Leo Laporte (01:28:01):
Slash Oh, here's an interesting, in the iOS security guide in 2018, apple disclosed it stored iCloud file data in both Amazon and Google's commercial cloud storage. They didn't mention Azure. Other third party services may also be used. Apple's language says such as Google and Amazon. Previously Apple had listed Azure. Now this is five years ago. So [01:28:30] it's just, well,

Paul Thurrott (01:28:30):
They're pretty secretive.

Leo Laporte (01:28:31):
Not going to tell you. And they certainly have big network operation centers. But

Paul Thurrott (01:28:36):
Listen, I can tell you when they will talk about it when they no longer have that need. And I'm not saying that is going to happen, but that is a playbook and honestly a part, the arm I p O was announced the other day, and there's been a lot of regulatory revelations from that company about the spread of arm through different ecosystems. Obviously mobile, it's 99 something percent. [01:29:00] The figure in data center, maybe Leo remembers it, or you do. It was lower than I thought it was. Teens, I think 14%, some number like that. And I'm thinking to myself, this has got to be the biggest opportunity, arm-based anything. And Apple has, we're going to, we'll talk at the end of the show about the new version of parallels running Windows in arm, better in virtualization than we can on real PCs.

Leo Laporte (01:29:29):
There is [01:29:30] an argument against it, which is that Apple is already bought up every bit of capacity. T S C has that. They're the ones who make it and well, I think they want every one of those. I think they want every one of those for iPhones and Max, I don't know if they want to start putting those in data centers. This is from 2021, Apple's spending on Google Cloud storage on track to SOAR 50%. We

Paul Thurrott (01:29:53):
Talk about a couple of years ago how much Google pays Apple for search

Leo Laporte (01:29:57):
Eight exabytes of data stored [01:30:00] on Google Cloud eight exabytes.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:05):
I think this is something that changes over time. We are only going to hear little cherry pick bits when Apple says such as, they also could mean including Azure. We just don't want this time. We're not going to mention Azure. And then five years will go by and they'll say such as Azure and a w s, but they're actually still using Google. This may be a competitive thing.

Leo Laporte (01:30:23):
Yeah, we don't know. That's right. And they don't have to reveal it, so they probably

Paul Thurrott (01:30:27):
Won't. No. And they may well be building out, they [01:30:30] have data centers all over the world already.

Leo Laporte (01:30:32):
As of November, 2021. Apple was Google's largest cloud storage customer.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:37):
Nice. Wow. Nice. And that just might be a storage capacity issue. They might be frontend to their own data center. That's fascinating. I mean, I've made the argument that Microsoft could win in gaming by just being infrastructure thanks to Azure, right before the pandemic. Sony and Microsoft did not, which is a bizarre thing given how things have gone since then. Announced that Sony was working on a [01:31:00] cloud gaming platform of some kind. They were going to run it on Azure. Now, I don't know what's come of that, but there's an interesting case where the future of PlayStation at the time might have been this cloud thing and Microsoft would've lost with Xbox, but they still kind of won getting paid this money. And so Google, which does much better in well, search and advertising frankly, but they do have a commercial cloud business that's a small fraction of whatever Microsoft and Amazon have. But they can still win by losing [01:31:30] in a way, thank God there are all those iPhone users that need a device backup and whatever else they're doing there. Or just user storage, right through iCloud, because that's propping up Google Cloud.

Leo Laporte (01:31:42):
Isn't that ironic? The smallest of the big three?

Paul Thurrott (01:31:45):
Yeah. Well, I just had this conversation with some folks who were talking about who gets to build cloud data centers. How many companies can there be? Well, that's the thing, and we always talk about the obvious ones, but Apple is right there. Yes. Yes. [01:32:00] Because Apple has a worldwide workload. The main thing to justify this right now is you need to get footprint in all those locations. And you don't do it on a hope. You do it because you have work to do there. And so the fact that you have a worldwide product with the demand level that sat, that you're paying a premium to other companies to support, gives you an R o I to start building out those data centers. However small. And once you have the footprint in place, then you can grow it out with additional products. So I would just say that with, [01:32:30] I sort of forget how we got up on this topic.

(01:32:33):
I think it was something about consumers slash Bing, whatever. But you go back over 20 years, maybe more than 20 years, and you look at all the things Apple did over that time, and all the times Microsoft Poo-pooed it and all the times that the Apple thing surpassed whatever Microsoft had for client or for consumers. It's not hard to imagine a future where, because I really do think binging is a broken brand. It's a bad brand. It's not something, and it needs a reboot. And I hope Satya has [01:33:00] the nerve to do it because it used to be his brand. Yeah. God help them if Apple ever does come out with a consumer or something in this space, because they were, remember, they were rumored to be working on a search engine at one point. I could picture them. They also made Mac servers for a while, and that didn't go well. Yeah, that didn't, yeah, that's true. So we'll see.

Leo Laporte (01:33:22):
I have a policy on Mac Break weekly. I don't cover patents because there's actually a whole site called Patently Apple that's [01:33:30] every Apple patent. And they have a building entirely consumed by lawyers. They're one and only job. Well, no, they have many jobs. But one of the jobs is to go to every meeting, every single meeting and sit in and say, yeah, we can pay. Oh, but say, let's write that down. We can, every time

Paul Thurrott (01:33:47):
Someone says, it's no different than Microsoft. Every developer is expected after each sprint is expected to sit with lawyers and review for Paps. Now, some of their projects are open source, but a lot of them, these doesn't

Leo Laporte (01:33:59):
Mean [01:34:00] that they're going to make products out of this stuff. This could be a brainstorming meeting. This

Paul Thurrott (01:34:04):
Used to be tech, very reluctant, all IBM report on

Leo Laporte (01:34:07):
Patents.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:07):
Because remember, I B M was the patent guy. The patent company. Yeah. Today it is Microsoft, Google, Amazon, apple. Right?

Leo Laporte (01:34:14):
Because times change. Those patents get less useful as technology advances.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:18):
Well, and plus, after they got tired of suing each other, they all cross licensed. Right. It became, that's the

Leo Laporte (01:34:24):
Other reason,

Paul Thurrott (01:34:25):
Distractions.

Leo Laporte (01:34:26):
It's defensive too, right? You create those patents of defense,

Paul Thurrott (01:34:30):
[01:34:30] But it's not defense against the incumbents. It's defense against new folks coming in. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:34:38):
Sure.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:40):
If you talk about a new tech company that's actually broken through the patent wall and is now part of that game, it's Facebook. All of those other tech companies are from the seventies, eighties, and nineties. There hasn't been a company to become a big player in this space years ago. Today, there's a very good chance that Microsoft [01:35:00] announced they were suing some Linux company for doing something, patent something, something. It's a cancer.

Leo Laporte (01:35:05):
There's no doubt about it. Anyway, honestly, I think there's a big discussion to be had, not on this show. We'll do it on another show. But there was a great article this week in the New Yorker by Ronan Farrow about Elon Musk and how basically Musk's, SpaceX has taken over space exploration from the federal government. And actually, it turns out that's a very lucrative position to be in, is to privatize [01:35:30] stuff the government used to do.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:32):
I would also remind people, that's the plot of the movie Alien, and

Leo Laporte (01:35:37):
Just

Paul Thurrott (01:35:38):
Remember how that turned

Leo Laporte (01:35:38):
Out. But that's interesting about this is now the US government's terrified that Elon's going to turn off connectivity to Ukraine because he keeps talking to Putin. And this is this weird position suddenly we're put in. And honestly, that to me, conjured up visions of this sci-fi future where corporations are the governments. [01:36:00] Frankly,

Paul Thurrott (01:36:02):
Next week I'm doing a talk on space in 2023, and so I just did the numbers on how big SpaceX actually is. And the number that stood out to me was that last quarter Q two, they lifted over 200,000 metric tons into space. Yeah. The next largest was China at 23,000.

Leo Laporte (01:36:26):
A 10th,

Paul Thurrott (01:36:27):
Yeah, a 10th. Everybody else combined in [01:36:30] the world, is it as much weight as what they lifted?

Leo Laporte (01:36:34):
But that's actually scary. And I think the other side of

Paul Thurrott (01:36:37):
This has an issue.

Leo Laporte (01:36:38):
The other side of this conversation is as companies like Microsoft, SpaceX, apple, Amazon, Google becomes so big. I honestly feel like maybe this is foolish. They've reached a point where they've reached critical mass. They're too big to fail, and they're too big for somebody to challenge. [01:37:00] And that's, to me, this is a scary thought. I mean, we're dominated essentially by a half dozen companies. Is that not the case?

Paul Thurrott (01:37:11):
Yes. And it's all a question of what are they willing to do with the position that they're in?

Leo Laporte (01:37:15):
In the old days, you could say, well, the business cycle is a given, and at some point they will the sunset and the next guy will come along. I don't think that's, they've broken that cycle now. They're so big. [01:37:30] The next guy can't

Paul Thurrott (01:37:31):
Come along. You're not the first You said

Leo Laporte (01:37:32):
That either. I know, and I've said in the, I mean, remember the patent officer

Paul Thurrott (01:37:36):
Said everything that ever needed to be invented has been invented. We don't

Leo Laporte (01:37:39):
Need it in 1910. So

Paul Thurrott (01:37:43):
Bing, we were talking about Bing.

Leo Laporte (01:37:46):
Oh yeah, Bing. What's that all about?

Paul Thurrott (01:37:47):
This is Bing. You speak of, I don't know. It's binging.

Leo Laporte (01:37:52):
Go ahead. Go ahead. I

Paul Thurrott (01:37:54):
Didn't mean mean to No, no. It's a big topic. Just think Apple. Think this [01:38:00] is interesting. Yeah, no, I do do actually. But my point here is that binging is just, Bing's not binging is not going to be how Microsoft succeeds with consumers. It's just, and they don't even need to care. Why would they care? But they seem to care, and I'm a little freaked out by, they were very indignant at this Wall Street Journal report. They claimed that these studies don't take into account all of the traffic. They get through the app based stuff they're doing and blah, blah, blah, whatever. They talked about [01:38:30] how Edge, which this almost has nothing to do with this, but Edge took share in this same time period. And it did. It went from 4.9% to 5.27. So exciting. I guess. I mean, I just don't understand why this was the push.

(01:38:51):
Microsoft has a very strong and dominant position in what I'll call productivity, right. And [01:39:00] a good position in the cloud. And I feel like they should have led with that stuff. I don't quite get bothering with the consumer stuff. They should. I don't know. I don't know. But we'll see. It could turn around. I could be wrong. I feel good about my position on this one, but you never know, Richard, I assume you heard the travel guide story. Yeah, sure. It's a good one. Good one. So if you visit Ottawa, Microsoft [01:39:30] is used AI to write a travel guide, an M S N travel guide that recommended visiting a Ottawa food bank with the tip as one of the top places to visit in Ottawa. Consider going into it on an empty stomach. Nice. Yeah. Like the poor and homeless people that have to eat there.

(01:39:49):
And people have figured out where that language came from, because obviously AI just pulls from everywhere. And there's a quote on the Ottawa Food Bank website that says, someone [01:40:00] who works there probably says, people who come to us have families and jobs to keep with bills to pay. Life is challenging enough. Imagine facing it on an empty stomach that turned into a travel tip from Microsoft ai. That's not, oh, that's, oops, that's a bad one. Oops. That's a bad look. Empty stomach. Go to the food bank you'll love. There you go. I know if you are going to go to the food bank, make sure you don't eat before you get there. Yeah, exactly. Definitely go with an open stomach. [01:40:30] I mean, you want to fit in. That's terrible know. That's the worst. That's terrible. There's no version of this. That's any good. No, you're supposed to do that before you go to the buffet at the M G M Grand. Jesus. Right? I wouldn't recommend it, to be honest, but okay.

(01:40:46):
I dunno. Buffets just not once engaged in a steak eating contest in Vegas where we couldn't finish our steaks. And so we said the next, we're not going to eat until we go back. And then we went back and we ate the whole steaks and we finished it, and then we said, what the hell are we just do? I'm going to be sick for two days. What's the point? Why did you do that? [01:41:00] Why? I don't know. Nobody wins this contest. We lost nobody. It was stupid. And then in the context of the only way to win is not to play, is to not play their nice, which AI could have told 'em Table stakes, ai, et cetera. So Brave is my preferred web browser as I always beat that one to death. They are usually a little slow on the new feature stuff. Right. And I kind of like that. But Brave announced that they're adding, you'll enjoy this name. They're [01:41:30] adding an AI companion to the browser, a native AI companion called Leo.

(01:41:38):
It's called Leo. It's called leo. It's called Leo because of Lion and the Brave. Oh, right, the buzz. Those all go together. Sorry. So they're using the openish Meta LAMA two source available large language model with a special focus on safety and privacy. LAMA [01:42:00] two is getting a lot of love. It's nice to see something other than open ai, and it's not available in any of the mainstream versions of Brave yet. It's in the nightly bills if you want to do that. So it's coming in the future. It does not currently have access to live information, but that's going to change over time. Obviously, brave has their own search engine, but in keeping with the whole point of brave, it's private it. They're not saving any chats. They're not using any chats for training purposes. You can't even review your own chats [01:42:30] because they're discarded immediately.

(01:42:32):
They're not stored on Brave Servers. There's no way to review past conversations or delete data. There is no data, et cetera, et cetera. So they're doing all this stuff you would expect brave to do. It's kind of a brave centric way of handling AI in a browser. So that makes sense. I will say I don't use Brave Search, and I doubt I'll use this, but anyway, it's coming. That's fine. I was hoping to give you guys a detailed report [01:43:00] of Project I D X, the Visual, visual Studio code-based web editor from Google. I was invited to join. I cannot get it to work, but it works long enough that I can see its Visual Studio in a browser, and every time I try to start up a project, which I believe spins up a vm, it crashes. So typical Google product for now, but I'm sure it'll be fine.

(01:43:24):
In fact, I bet I test it tonight. It's fine. I was hoping to write about it and look at it and see what it was like. But the thing I did [01:43:30] see was there are project types upfront. Actually. Do I still have it in the browser? No. There are project types up front for Flutter Web. Is that it? That might be it for now. And then you can start your own blank project. You can import projects from GitHub, as you would expect. It's going to be Okay. That's that. Yep. I'll move along from that. You don't want to talk about I D X? That is it. I'm sorry. That's [01:44:00] the name of idx. Sorry. That's the curious thing. I immediately thought it was Midori, what's always new. I mentioned to Lauren today, I'm like, Hey, I got into I D X, and then he usually writes back and I could see it like it is waited, waited, waited.

(01:44:13):
And he goes, I had to look that up. I was like, fair enough. Okay, so moving on to Xbox. Microsoft announced this week, I believe that they will be closing the Xbox 360 Store on July 29th, 2024. So bit under a year. What will I do with my 360? [01:44:30] Of course, the natural reaction to that sentence is, wait, they still have it at the Xbox 360 Store. This is a console that came out in 2005. It was replaced by the Xbox One in 2011, I think. Something like that. But yeah, this thing's still open. And so you can buy Xbox 360 content, including games and add-ons and blah, blah, blah, whatever.

(01:44:53):
Everything you bought will still work after that date. So all of your games and content, you'll be able to do multiplayer. Your machine doesn't burst into flames. [01:45:00] Yep. No, that was something Kevin Marick wanted to do. You can continue playing multiplayer, et cetera. Kevin, mad or Don? Mad? Don Mad. I'm sorry. There you go. I have a Don Marick video to discuss soon. I do blah, blah, blah, backward compatible games on Xbox One and series X and S will always be available, et cetera. So honestly, that's impressive that this thing's been around this. This will be 19 years by the time. Yeah, I don't know why. They just wait for a nice round 20. I know. [01:45:30] I mean, at 20 years old, when did the traces start falling off the circuit boards? Like I've had stuff just disintegrate that got out of those things were falling apart two years in from the Red Ring of death.

(01:45:41):
I mean, they were burning themselves up. I dunno, maybe because they're all refurbished Integr. I think that's a real question. How many 360 are actually running? Well, okay, OG 360 is probably not too many, but honestly, there was the S and the, was it the last one called the cost reduced smaller versions, and those are pretty durable. They got the power management, [01:46:00] right? Yeah, they're probably, yeah, I don't know how many, but I mean, that was the most successful Xbox of all time, by the way. Roughly neck and neck with the PSS three at the time. 81, 80 2 million units sold. Unbelievable. They still both got killed by the Nintendo. That was just a sad fact of circumstance. But yeah, the last release was 2013 and it was the E 2013, excuse me. Oh, oh, the E, okay. The E. I'm sorry, not the E. Yeah.

(01:46:25):
Yeah. So maybe 2013 was when the, I believe that one was styled, like the Xbox One sort of. So maybe [01:46:30] the Xbox. Yeah, the black styling and so forth. 2013. Yeah. And even then it's like, okay, that's 10 years old. That was 10 years old in June. Yep. Come on. People forget it. Still had the composite video connectors on it for crying out loud. Yeah. But they were smart to do that plugin thing so they could change that. And the other thing they changed was when it first came out, it was seven 20 P and it became 10 80 I over time. And if I'm not mistaken, I think 10 80 p as well. They actually somehow managed it, I think. But at least 10 80 I [01:47:00] You can't be

Leo Laporte (01:47:01):
Though. The new Atari 2,600, we're going to talk

Paul Thurrott (01:47:04):
About it. Where are we? Yeah. Yeah. Are you as any? Actually, I love you can beat it, but we'll talk about that in a second. Should you beat it? That's the question. Well, yeah, you should actually, this thing could have been better than It's age of Empires. Four is out. It is on Xbox. So an Age of Empires, game of Xbox Love.

Leo Laporte (01:47:26):
I saw that you played on the pc. I almost bought it. And then I thought, [01:47:30] what am I going to do with a controller in this game?

Paul Thurrott (01:47:32):
Well, it's been optimized for that. I don't know what that means. I'm not going to try. It needs a carefully tuned, inferior playing experience. Well done.

Leo Laporte (01:47:41):
It really is a point and click game. I don't know how you do it with a controller. It's just not, I love age of vampires, but

Paul Thurrott (01:47:49):
2000 to 2003, four timeframe. I did not think it would be possible to do third person shooters effectively in a console with a hand controller and Oh,

(01:47:58):
That's golden. [01:48:00] Yeah. Oh, that's just, I bet that's the majority of it now. Yeah, you never know. Don't count the calls a lot. PC Game Pass. That was part of Microsoft's antitrust related promises during the whole Activision Blizzard thing. Oh, wait, that's not over yet. Just kidding. Anyway, it's actually going live tomorrow on GForce now. So that was one of the announcements. I don't remember the exact date when they first announced that, maybe months, sometime months ago, but for at least 10 years, Microsoft [01:48:30] has this deal with Nvidia to make its PC game pass games available on rival services, including Nvidia. So that's happening starting tomorrow because it's a PC support four K resolution, 120 frames per second, unlike the Xbox Series X. Am I right? Anybody know?

Leo Laporte (01:48:47):
And I have GForce now playing on that Nvidia Shield, which has that nice Tegra processor, and that's a pretty good platform for gaming.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:55):
And that's been around for a while. Yeah, I've had that one pitched to me a few times. It's [01:49:00] quite a nice device. Yep. So that's interesting. And I'm not going to do that, but that's interesting.

Leo Laporte (01:49:07):
You're skipping over the PlayStation, you're skipping that over?

Paul Thurrott (01:49:11):
No, no, 26. I, sorry. I meant I'm not going to do PC game pass on in. I'm pretty much going to pay Microsoft and no one else. Some couple of months ago May, I guess Sony announced what looked like a gaming handheld, I guess it technically is, but it's called a Portal remote player, which is a terrible name. [01:49:30] It's basically a little tablet with two halves of a PlayStation five controller on it. It looks like a switch. Yeah, it does.

Leo Laporte (01:49:37):
Well, guess what the thing is? That's exactly what they're aiming. Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:49:41):
Except only It's Streams games. And it's Streams games. Not over the internet, but from your PlayStation.

Leo Laporte (01:49:46):
Oh, it's just an Android

Paul Thurrott (01:49:47):
Device. That'll be great. On an airplane. Oh boy. Wait a minute. Paul

Leo Laporte (01:49:50):
Thoran has a free gift for me.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:53):
Really? I like

Leo Laporte (01:49:53):
The way you,

Paul Thurrott (01:49:55):
I like the

Leo Laporte (01:49:56):
X that you chose. It looks a little familiar. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:00):
[01:50:00] Wow. I'll get that

Leo Laporte (01:50:01):
Free gift later, I promise,

Paul Thurrott (01:50:03):
Paul. Well, you'll have to wait a month because it only comes up once a month. Oh, what? Well, we don't want to span people, right? It's going to be $199. It's going to launch later this year to be vague. Don't why? What is this? Sony used to make handheld gaming machines, right? The P S P and then the second one, what's the second one called? The, the

Leo Laporte (01:50:26):
P S P was great. I had that.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:27):
Yeah, but what was the sequel port? [01:50:30] They call it something out, but it was a PSP basically. So the problem with the first P S P, from my perspective as the first person shoot a fan, was it only had one dpa, and you need two for, we have on controllers. So the second version, I can't remember the name, someone will know that in the chat had two, and I was like, there we go. We have now a portable gaming system I can play Call of Duty on. And there was a version of Call of Duty on the whatever that thing was called, and then they got rid of it and now they're coming out with this. [01:51:00] It's like, seriously, this is what we're doing. I wish they had Sony, like Nintendo, like Microsoft actually now has a vast library of games from what we'll now call legacy consoles. That would play very effectively. The Vita on a hand device. Vita, thank. Yep, that's it. Thank you.

Leo Laporte (01:51:19):
I R C Thank

Paul Thurrott (01:51:20):
You. Two deep pads, right? So I mean this thing does too, right? If you look at it, they have the D pad on either side. It's fine. Not D pad. [01:51:30] I'm sorry. Thumb sticks. Sorry. Thumb sticks. Sorry. It had a low profile thumbs stick. It looked like a D pad. Not a D pad. Sorry. Anyway, this is just a little, we have these ways to remotely, in other words, have an Xbox or a PC or a PlayStation, and there are different ways you can kind of remote the thing that's installed on it or whatever and put it on some other devices. We have different ways to do this. This is another way to do this, and I wish it was more than this. I'd like to see them be a little more aggressive. I'm just kind of stunned that they said they discontinued the vita in 2019. [01:52:00] You'd think the moment you've had that come out of your words, you show off the new device. It's been four years, they walked over and then it's kind of really underwhelming. The only thing I could think of is that the Twitch blew them out of the water and they're like, well, we got to rethink this. And their answer was, well, let's just make something really crappy from the get go.

Leo Laporte (01:52:19):
Yeah, but Rayman Vita, you're

Paul Thurrott (01:52:21):
Only going to play this in your house. This is a, alright, so you know this with your PS five. This is an example of when you're a hammer, everything's a nail, right? So Sony [01:52:30] has been successful in consoles. I don't think Sony like Nintendo has given any effort at all to mobile. And I think that's stupid on both parts. I think they both Microsoft, same thing. But remember, I don't understand.

Leo Laporte (01:52:42):
Sony makes an Android phone and I bet you anything the of that phone, the Experian or what's in

Paul Thurrott (01:52:47):
In that device, it will be as used by as few people as those Sonys funds, which this is stupid. So it's too bad. I'd like to see them make a dedicated, portable, something that actually did [01:53:00] take on the switch, right? I think there's a market for this. Well, gee, you asked Nintendo, it's totally overwhelmed their whole business that has become the business. They used to sell consoles. Now they just, and nobody cares about anything but the switch now there's coming out of the Weu. I get it. I'm going to

Leo Laporte (01:53:16):
Have service.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:17):
They have a service that would make it viable.

Leo Laporte (01:53:19):
A lot of the people who have switches also have either a PSS five or an Xbox.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:24):
Right? Right. Okay. And that would probably always be true because the games are so different, right? And [01:53:30] it's

Leo Laporte (01:53:31):
Relatively inexpensive and it's portable and you take it with you and the games are designed for it, which is not the case of the steam deck.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:40):
Okay, fair enough. So this kind of brings us to that 2,600 plus thing. So Atari, which from what I can tell is like a crypto shell game company right now has been trying to do something hardware. Hardware for a little while, right? They had that V c s console, the new one that hasn't really gone anywhere. I've been writing [01:54:00] a lot about tech nostalgia recently. So this is kind of coincidental. It is very easy to emulate. Atari has 2,600 stuff today. Anything from the eighties, right? Because the games were all like four K, K three. The big ones. Like this

Leo Laporte (01:54:13):
Is the funny thing. It's not an 85 0 2 processor, it's a more modern processor emulating an Atari.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:20):
That's where I think they may be. So my guess is Atari has, if you go and look at the Atari site, they've been doing this thing where they're releasing special edition versions [01:54:30] of some of the early Atari cartridges, which I'm sure you know all about. So this console comes with a cartridge that has 10 games on it, 10 classic games. I would say it's like three or four good games and whatever. A lot of crap the crap is. But I'm guessing that their goal here is to sell more of these cartridges where there's, yeah, it

Leo Laporte (01:54:46):
Works with your old cartridges apparently it's completely,

Paul Thurrott (01:54:49):
Completely compatible. But who wants cartridges? Why would anyone want cartridges with this thing? Look, only games should be built in and maybe a cloud service. Get a raspberry [01:55:00] pie, get an SSD card, download every single 2,600 game ever announced. Tell me.

Leo Laporte (01:55:06):
But that's not the point. This is TAL

Paul Thurrott (01:55:08):
In a U S B key. So it should come with needs, needs to come with a pencil eraser then too. So you can clean the It

Leo Laporte (01:55:14):
Should. Yes, exactly.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:15):
It should have an SD slot the inside to let you do that. Then I would be like, okay, I hundred 29 bucks. What? It should just have an ether and Jack on it and it plugs into a cloud service. And which 2,600 game would you like to play? 10 bucks a month? I don't feel like they understand what they're doing. [01:55:30] I just

Leo Laporte (01:55:31):
Don't get think you're wrong. I think this will sell hotcakes. In fact, it'll probably be sold out within a few

Paul Thurrott (01:55:36):
Days. You know what? And you're totally right and then they'll play it once and then it'll sit on a shelf. Yeah, it's

Leo Laporte (01:55:40):
A nostalgia play. People want their old 2,600. It has an H D M I port. So you can do it with your modern tv.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:48):
No, no. It's even

Leo Laporte (01:55:49):
Got crappy joystick that breaks after 20 games.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:52):
Here's the thing, so we forget this, but back in April, I think it was April, yep. Atari announced that they [01:56:00] had acquired over a hundred classic Accolade, infragram and Micro Pros games in 1980s and nineties, along with the trademarks for two of those brands, accolade and G T I. So it was hundreds of games, classic titles. Some of them were amazing and what are they going to do with this? So at the time they did admit that they were changing their strategy and that a big part of it was reinventing old classics, re-imagining storylines and developing entirely new [01:56:30] narratives inspired by the games that set the course for an entire industry. So this Atari 2,600 plus to me seems like a holding pattern. It has nothing to do with what I just said. It is about nostalgia, like you said, and it'll probably raise some money. It's probably the cheapest thing in the world to make right. They right the look and feel. The

Leo Laporte (01:56:47):
Plastic wood trim. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:56:50):
No one looks a lot like the original

Leo Laporte (01:56:52):
Console. It's basically it's a little smaller. So

Paul Thurrott (01:56:54):
They bought up the right to all these games. They put 'em in bundles of 10 with three good games and seven terrible ones, [01:57:00] and they sell the cart. It's dollars a shot. Exactly. It's like the cable

Leo Laporte (01:57:04):
TV industry. I mean, I can buy on Xbox, I can buy, I don't know how many, is it 500 Atari? There's a huge Atari game bundle on the Xbox.

Paul Thurrott (01:57:14):
So there's

Leo Laporte (01:57:15):
D one. It was the games. It's very easy to play those games still,

Paul Thurrott (01:57:19):
Right? Yeah. Yep, for sure. So we'll see the company that bought the rights, the in television stuff, which was,

Leo Laporte (01:57:29):
By the way, these are [01:57:30] not bad games. Adventure Combat, Dodge Haunted House Maze Graze Missile Command, real Sports Volleyball. Nevermind Surround, nevermind. Video pinball. Yeah. Yas Revenge. Yeah. So there's some classics on here. They didn't completely garbage wear it.

Paul Thurrott (01:57:48):
You can download every one of these games for free right now. The

Leo Laporte (01:57:51):
Internet. Well, I know everybody knows two

Paul Thurrott (01:57:51):
Seconds.

Leo Laporte (01:57:52):
Anybody who buys this knows that. Yes, of course.

Paul Thurrott (01:57:56):
I dunno. You could go on Amazon right now and buy an original Atari 2,600 [01:58:00] if you wanted or a 7,800 and just get both sets of games that way. I mean, I don't know. I just don't. I don't know. I just feel we're just regurgitating the same thing over and over again except this is an emulator. It's not even a real thing. Why

Leo Laporte (01:58:13):
Is there a company list? Atari? I mean, honestly, they're the same thing. It's a nostalgia thing.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:18):
Sure. Yeah. And you've got all the folks that are making the giant opening, like literally an arcade cab that ends like what game set would you like to play? We

Leo Laporte (01:58:28):
Had that. We used to have one in the Bcast. [01:58:30] We gave it to a fan because we didn't want to take it with us. So berserk is 29.99.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:36):
Yeah, right. Come on.

Leo Laporte (01:58:39):
Wow.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:40):
Wow. The right answer there is berserk and 1000 other games is 29.

Leo Laporte (01:58:45):
I mean honestly, take it from me. That was my first game machine.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:50):
They're being pretty hopeful

Leo Laporte (01:58:51):
Here. These aren't great games and you play 'em and then you go, yeah, so play 'em on emulation and 33,

Paul Thurrott (01:59:00):
[01:59:00] You get the nostalgia out of you and then move on. That's kind of what I've been writing about. Literally when I went into the series that I'm writing, I was like, I'm not going to write about this hardware stuff because I don't think anyone should buy these things. They're going to be bought as gifts. You're going to play with them on It will be somebody put up on nostalgia, put it on your shelf. Look,

Leo Laporte (01:59:18):
This was the best thing that ever happened to you when you're eight years old and you want to relive that 40 years later.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:24):
Yeah. So was Kentucky Fried Chicken and now it's awful, right? Oh, I might [01:59:30] disagree with that. But anyway, maybe in Mexico. It's actually, it's terrible in Mexico. Is it

Leo Laporte (01:59:38):
Really? It's different.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:39):
Yeah, it's different. It's different. There's no concept of crispier original recipe.

Leo Laporte (01:59:46):
Oh yeah, they have jalapeno flavored.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:51):
I don't remember. It was awful. I was so disappointed.

Leo Laporte (01:59:54):
Do you want to, that completes our Xbox segment. So let me interrupt [02:00:00] for a moment before we get to the back of the book. Your tip, your app, your Brown Liquor of the week, all coming up, the moments you've waited for, frankly the whole show. I do want to use this opportunity just to briefly recommend Club Twit. We've had great success with this. Lisa started this two years ago. She was smart. She saw the apocalypse coming and it really has hit podcasting very hard. It's hit everything [02:00:30] hard. If you're not Google or Facebook, you're a small fraction of the potential ad sales in the world. And since we are not Google and we are not Facebook, we are struggling, I'll be honest with you, and we'd like to keep doing what we're doing. We'd even more, we'd like to bring back shows and start new ones and the clubs made that possible.

(02:00:51):
So I think it's very much part of our future. It's critical, frankly, for our future. Now I think [02:01:00] we've done it right? Lisa did a lot of research. She said, we're only going to charge seven bucks. I said, the people charging more than that for one show. We're offering 'em a bunch. Said no, seven bucks. Here's what you get for your seven bucks. I think it's a very good deal. Ad free versions of all the shows ad free and tracker free. So you get everything like this show free of ads. You also get shows that we don't put out in public. Paul was talking earlier about his hands on Windows show. We put a few of those out as a little teaser, but there's How many have [02:01:30] you done Paul? There's like 40 or some,

Paul Thurrott (02:01:32):
No, no, it's over 50. I don't remember exactly tons because we started in July last year. So it's 50 to

Leo Laporte (02:01:38):
60. I've been doing more a year and those are fantastic. There's Hands-On Macintosh with Micah. We brought back Home theater geeks. That was a show we had to cancel because there wasn't any support for it, but the club members support it and so we brought it back. So Scott Wilkinson's doing that. [02:02:00] We're starting the AI show now. That's going to be Jason Howell. Jeff Jarvis want to do that. We've been prototyping it in the club. We do special events. Yesterday, Dan Patterson was on Dan from Twit, he was a C B SS reporter. He's worked in War zones. Fascinating stories with Jason Howell yesterday. Those are club events. We've got a lot of 'em coming up. A photo walk at the end of the month, so forth. You get access to the club Twit Discord, which we were talking about earlier. We've reorganized quite a bit. But it is a fantastic [02:02:30] social network.

(02:02:31):
My favorite because it's it's quality people, it's twit listeners and it's the most dedicated twit listeners, the ones who care enough to spend seven bucks a month. And that's great. There are now almost 4,000 members in the Discord. I think they're more than that for the club, but that's still less than 1% of total audience. And I would love to get it to 5%, 10%. We get to 10%. We probably would just stop doing ads [02:03:00] entirely. They may stop. Anyway, that's the real point. I don't want to overburden you with a big long pitch. Just visit twit tv slash club twit, look at the benefits and please consider joining. There's family memberships, there's corporate memberships as well. It is big for us. And I will tell you this, I do not take a penny of it. None of that goes in my pocket and I know that I haven't been paid for three months, but Paul has, Richard has the hosts, the engineers, [02:03:30] the lighting bills, all of that get paid thanks to you Club TWIT members. You have my eternal gratitude and if you'd like to join that club, we'd love to have you twit TV slash club twit

(02:03:43):
Back to the program at hand. And Paul, you have a tip of the week.

Paul Thurrott (02:03:49):
Yeah, this semi that's not self-serving. You're going to love this. So

Leo Laporte (02:03:55):
I

Paul Thurrott (02:03:55):
Love it. Every couple of years. I love it already. I go through some sort of a decluttering [02:04:00] routine that involves the digital stuff. So I have all these scanned photos that are all loose and unsorted and blah, blah, blah, whatever. So since we got back from Mexico, I've been working on all that stuff. So I somehow in two weeks went through all of our unsorted scanned photos and filed them away properly. They're in the right places and all that stuff. So then I turned to my document archives, which is horrific. So I have stuff in one drive, which I only have [02:04:30] a terabyte of storage there. I have six terabytes of mirrored storage in my na and it's my God, I have so much stuff and I've already picked out some just real gems of stuff that wasn't anywhere else. I found some photos of people that I never even knew existed.

(02:04:44):
There's been all kinds of neat stuff in there, but a lot of it's my work archive stuff. So part of it has been organizing it and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But one of the things you do is part of this process is you bring stuff down onto a pc so it's local and easy to work with and you look at it and you're like, [02:05:00] what's taking up all the space? So in my Work archives, which literally date back to 1993 and go all the way through 2000, well, to today actually, but this part of the archive, what I think of as the pentin part of it, which goes through 2000, well technically 2015, but 2012 in the folded structure was 116 gigabytes. Whoa. And I'm like, that's the other parts of it, which were just Word documents was [02:05:30] like one gigabyte even though it was the same amount of stuff.

(02:05:33):
So I'm like, something's taking up space, what could that be? Well move files, MP fours, all kinds of video files, which are really big compared to JPEGs or whatever. And so I started going through it and what I realized, I wasn't surprised. I also, you could see folders like Windows, windows, phone, zoom, Xbox Office, et cetera, server dev, whatever. The three big ones were Windows, windows, phone and Xbox. Actually, Xbox bought 'em in number two and I thought, well, I know [02:06:00] why that is. There's going to be a bunch of video crap in there. And so I went through that and sure enough, and I whittled this thing down to 48 gigabytes, pulled out, not all of the videos, but all the biggest video, the big ones, the ones that really matter. And then I went through 'em and I thought, I have a lot of internal Microsoft videos, I've got a lot of Microsoft promotional videos, I've got a lot of little product run-throughs that I did, like the Xbox ui as we would talk about the Xbox 360.

(02:06:26):
I have at least three versions of those UIs where I just click through the [02:06:30] UI and you can just see it. And I thought, you know what, I'm going to put these on YouTube because I won't have to store 'em. It's free and I can still reference them easily enough. And so I've been doing that. Now it takes a while to upload. It doesn't actually take that long to upload. It takes a while. You get write a little description. You want it to be right. So it's not in any order. I'm going to play with playlist and do things better. Lord, look at this. I went straight to the one that says Microsoft delays Longhorn. I remember this. There's already some good stuff in it. There will be lots more, lots [02:07:00] more. Wow, Steve. Now Steve Ballmer talks Dynamics C R M. That's a dynamic one.

(02:07:06):
Lemme tell you, boy, Pete Bomber reads off of a screen, but still these are slices of history. The one that's kind of fun, that one you click on what's in a name is how they named Longhorn Server. It's a humorous video. It basically involves them going through different ideas supposedly as Ian McDonald, right? Remember him and if you skip to the end, they get [02:07:30] to how they named it. It's a joke, but it's actually pretty funny. You remember the previous version of the server was Windows Server 2003, so he just added the, he's like what call Windows 2008. It's a cute one. There's lots of names. So this was an internal Yeah, I think that might've showed it. It's

Leo Laporte (02:07:49):
Like a slideshow though. It's not even a server.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:51):
They're just making fun of themselves. Yeah, yeah. It's meant to be fun. Yeah, we know they really named it Longhorn because the bar. Yeah, exactly [02:08:00] right. It's just a fun little, it's cute. It's so cute. Anyway, as Long's, awesome dude. So today that YouTube channel, it's sort of my personal channel. It's like Paul Thra whatever, but I'm going to read right now the Throt name in YouTube is on my Gmail account for some stupid reasons. So I'm going to swap those and it will just be like YouTube slash at throt and then, we'll right

Leo Laporte (02:08:20):
Now it's at paul dash throt if you want to jump to it.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:25):
Yeah, but I mean there's more

Leo Laporte (02:08:26):
Coming, right?

Paul Thurrott (02:08:28):
This is only uploaded maybe 60 of them. There's [02:08:30] a lot more.

Leo Laporte (02:08:30):
Wow,

Paul Thurrott (02:08:31):
I have a lot. Holy,

Leo Laporte (02:08:33):
There

Paul Thurrott (02:08:34):
Were a lot of the videos I just deleted, they were just like Microsoft or some GameMaker has, it was a preview of a game, so it was a one minute video showing gameplay often in HD or a four K, and it's just a waste of space. There's no reason I'm not going to repost that. Oh, you definitely need a Vista collection here. There'll be long grown and Vista and I'm going to break it down. Yep, yep. Yeah, this is amazing stuff. This is incredible. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:08:59):
It's good. [02:09:00] Love this.

Paul Thurrott (02:09:01):
Yeah, so I think people who watch this are going to want to see this useful. Thank you. Thank you.

Leo Laporte (02:09:08):
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:09:08):
Yeah, no, this is all, and then look, I'm going to lose the desire to do this at some point and then I'll put it off for another year. But I'm right in the middle of doing all that decluttering stuff, so it's love it

Leo Laporte (02:09:18):
That you're saving. It's really great.

Paul Thurrott (02:09:19):
Just caught up in it. Yeah, so I'm doing it now. So there's that Parallels desktop. A 19 came out this week. This is the virtualization solution for the Apple Silicon [02:09:30] Mac that allows you to run Windows on Arm on a Mac. And yes, I can confirm that it still runs faster in virtualization even on a system with just eight gigabytes of ram, by the way. I'm not kidding, than a actual hardware Windows on arm pc. Wow, that is depressing. And it's a fact. So there's no arguing that, so maybe my new machine should be a MacBook Air with parallels. Well actually

Leo Laporte (02:09:55):
That's not a bad idea.

Paul Thurrott (02:09:56):
Parallel if you wanted to

Leo Laporte (02:09:57):
Run. Anyway, the arm version of,

Paul Thurrott (02:09:59):
I [02:10:00] finally asked these guys, I'll talk about some of the features.

Leo Laporte (02:10:03):
What you give up though, if you're running the arm version. I mean, is it not?

Paul Thurrott (02:10:07):
Well, that's the thing. So what's the point of this? Why would someone do this, right? It's always that one app thing or some organization maybe, or some person has that one Windows app or maybe a handful, a small handful of Windows apps, whatever it might be. In that case, honestly, by the way, I know this for a fact now most people don't do this. As it turns out, most people are not that sophisticated. But one of [02:10:30] the cool things you can do with this product, and I think with VMware as well, is run what they call coherence mode where you don't have a window at the Windows desktop or you don't have it full screen, but rather you just go to the doc or you go to search, whatever they call Sherlock now, whatever type of notepad or whatever, and it just runs as a window next to all your MAP app, Mac apps, right?

(02:10:53):
The Mac has also evolved from a UI sense where they have full screen apps that actually take up full screen and Mac uses [02:11:00] a very useful use to doing the touch pad swipe thing where they swipe between environment between apps and you could run, and I guess a lot of people just do use the Windows. It's a Windows desktop, but they treat it like an app for the Mac and they're probably just running an app and it's running on the desktop, but it's in its own little space and that you could do that too. I like Coherence. Yep. Personally, but I guess most people actually don't use it, so there's different ways to do it. It's also big with developers of course, for obvious [02:11:30] reasons.

(02:11:32):
Is this, I don't know, I dunno. I guess this is obviously it's for Mac users for a start who have whatever need for occasionally accessing Windows. These could be students, they could be professionals, they could be developers, whatever. But I'm sure there's a million use cases, but it's not, no. Would you as a Windows user buy a Mac to do this? No, probably not. I wouldn't recommend it, but I mean you could. [02:12:00] This version adds Touch Id support, which is not quite Windows, hello. But pretty close. What that means is, that's another thing I've learned most people, the way this thing installs by default, you don't actually sign into Windows. It creates a user account for you that mirrors your one on the Mac. There's no password associated with it. So this thing when you need to fire up the vm, which by the way happens nearly instantly, it's infuriating. This thing boots in like three seconds.

(02:12:30):
[02:12:30] It just is there running in the background silently. You don't even know it unless you have it displayed as a window. So you just do your thing. However, you search for an app, you run the app, it runs next to Mac apps, you don't even notice it. It's kind of incredible. But obviously in some cases you need to sign in with an Azure, sorry, an Enter ID account or a Microsoft account or whatever it might be. And maybe you're using that environment more and you want to auto sign into apps and do all that stuff. So if you go into settings and create a Microsoft account or a school account or convert that account that they created [02:13:00] for you to one of those things and reboot first time you come up, they actually modify the sign-in screen in Windows 10 or 11 so that it says enter your password once and well.

(02:13:11):
You have to authenticate just to create it. Obviously the first time you create the account you have to authenticate, but it says enter your password once and we'll add it to the key chain and you can sign in with your finger on Touch id, which is that button they have on the Mac and it's not Windows. Hello. And what that means is that doesn't pass through. Oh, that's interesting. [02:13:30] You can't use it to sign into apps. Your authentication passes through as it does natively in Windows. So it's pretty much what anyone would want, but of course I think people look at this and they think, oh, this must be Windows, hello fingerprint, and it's like it, no, you have a pen, but from the sign in screen, which you will see if that thing ever has to reboot or reboot the Mac, you just press the little button and it just works.

(02:13:54):
It's nice. Wow. The other thing I would, there's other stuff, but most of it's like a new icon because Mac, [02:14:00] but the other big one to me, and I haven't gotten this to work yet, I've gotten the extension to work, haven't got the whole thing to work, is they have a Visual Studio code extension. A big part of their audience is developers and they want to stay in Visual Studio Code and you can manage Parallels now completely from within Visual Studio Code using this interface. You don't need to use the parallel parallels to UI and so you have to install a couple of, oh boy, like Docker style container something. Something's in [02:14:30] Visual Studio Code. I just didn't want it to create the accounts. But once you do, and I did get a live demo, but online there's a Parallels button on the side in Visual Studio Code alongside the other ones that are there by default, you click on it, it's full interface, you do whatever you want with the VMs.

(02:14:46):
Beautiful. I mean really kind of a neat, specially targeted tool. Cool. So pricing is unchanged. $99 a year if you want to do the subscription version, blah, blah, blah, whatever, and there's some other optimizations [02:15:00] for CAD type applications for students and professionals and blah, blah, blah. No one is doing that for ARM because there are so for users, but they're seeing a lot of that in parallel, so they're doing it for you or for those application makers actually. So anyway, great. Works great. Nice. Beautiful. Amazing. Thank you Paul. Richard, what's coming up on Run as speaking to Mary Jo Foley sometime ago was exchanging [02:15:30] some messages with MJ and she was asking me if I wanted to talk to any of the directions on Microsoft folks, and I said, I've always been looking for someone that didn't work for Microsoft that wanted to talk about Microsoft Fabric.

(02:15:41):
There's not a lot of folks out there yet. It's kind of a new thing. Only announced back in Build and I got myself an Andrew Snodgrass, so this is one of the directions of Microsoft folks very enjoyable conversation, and he had a very measured view of fabric. I mean Fabric obviously is a group of [02:16:00] existing products that are now being repackaged and reorganized with some new tooling to get to the next generation of data analytics. It kind of goes hand in hand with new leadership at the data team at Microsoft as well. So it's going to be important. They would like you to believe it's important. Right now I have some other shows coming that are already in the can. Along this line said one of the cautionary tales is like if you're already deeply engaged in data, [02:16:30] step carefully into fabric because it changes some things, but if you aren't, it's a really good time to move and get in early because they are offering some pretty cool capabilities. But this was sort of our first conversations in this space and what we're really trying to do here. Looking forward to seeing more. It's great to see some energy around this and just see how they're going to more tightly integrate together Power BI with all of the various data manipulation tools on the backend.

(02:17:00):
[02:17:00] Very

Leo Laporte (02:17:02):
Cool. Now,

Paul Thurrott (02:17:03):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:17:05):
The moment you've all been waiting for,

Paul Thurrott (02:17:08):
And this is what I've had. Oh yes. Well, I wanted to go, I've been kind of bouncing around on some classics here, so I thought it was time to hit one of the classic classics and certainly a favorite of mine as well. So let's tell the story of Obon because it's a great story. The distillery is one of the oldest in Scotland, originally built in 1794. [02:17:30] It was built on the Bay of Oban, which in Gaelic is Anban, which means the little bay, and now there's been humans living there for a very long time. That distillery was kind of the first thing. There was a farm and a distillery. The town grew around it, although one of the renovations they did of the distillery in the late 18 hundreds, they found a cave that found evidence of habitation going back to Mesolithic times, not even neolithic.

(02:17:59):
So [02:18:00] very, very old. There's also an argument that those sets of caves or these red sandstones caves are the origin of the stone of destiny. Love it. If you're familiar, you mean the stone of schoon? Yeah, that's the stone ofs scone that ultimately ended up in scone that all of the kings Ric Kings went to, and then along came Edward the first in 1296, and he stole it and then they were using it for the English kings and then [02:18:30] only it lived in Westminster Abbey until only in 1996 that they returned the stone to Edinburgh castle. Although recently it left Edinburgh castle because Charles III was coronated with the stone of destiny.

Leo Laporte (02:18:45):
It's kind of a funny thing too. They have to make this whole ceremony taking it, and it's wild. It's really

Paul Thurrott (02:18:51):
The name of a, and of course their argument is it's red sandstone, but I'd point out that Redstone has stands zone is everywhere in Ireland and England [02:19:00] and Scotland, but okay. Anyway. Anyway, let's talk about the distillery. So 1794 is very early on a pair of brothers, John and Hugh Stevenson, they ran it till 1866 when they got into financial trouble, it moved around from a few different owners, including the folks who owned Altmore until ultimately it landed in 1923 with the group that runs doers. Doers in 25 becomes part of the distiller's company and that'll become [02:19:30] relevant later. It is famously one of the smallest distilleries, arguably second smallest distillery in Scotland as well as being one of the oldest. It is exactly one wash di and one spirit still. You see them both there. They are a very old design. They have been replaced several times.

(02:19:47):
If you take the tour, you'll see a couple of the older ones in the still garden as you do, but the design has remained consistent and is quite archaic. It is a very, very high reflux [02:20:00] still design, so it takes a long time to produce with such small stills, so they don't put out a lot for wash backs. They still use the old worm ton design for cooling. Again, super vintage 18th century approach where they're actually pumping the raw distillate outside into multiple loops of pipes in water that's run in relatively high temperature to cool the stuff down. It's all about keeping the distillated contact with copper as [02:20:30] long as possible because it is nominally a highland whiskey in the general categorization, but it is the western most of the West highland distilleries, and so it kind of lives in both worlds. We usually think of highland whiskeys as sort of fruity and light and sweet, and yet it's almost inside of the aisle of sky where tusker is.

(02:20:53):
And so there's actually a little bit of peat in noon. It's part of the mash bill, and so while the stills are [02:21:00] designed space side, the mash bill's a little more pd, and so you get this sort of balance between the two. There is a group of folks who said that the Highlands being the largest region are actually misnamed and they should be broken down because there are style differences, and we've already bumped into this because we've talked about Glen Ji and Delmore, which are both very much farther north in what some folks call the North Highlands Tomins up there as well, and in the east side of the Highlands you get places like Feder Caren and [02:21:30] Glen Garra and then in the South, which they also arguably call the Midlands distilleries. Most people haven't heard of like Aberfeldy and Blair Atal and Glen Turret, and in the West you have of course Obon, Dal, Winnie, Ben Nevis, and they all have a fairly calm and style of that balance between the salt peat and the sweet that is the highlands. I would also then carve off another part of the Highlands really is [02:22:00] I would also say pushing back on this that in the Ger and Aaron Highland Park, which is actually on the Orc knees, nominally the similar terrain, but they're all islands different from Iley.

(02:22:18):
One last point I'd make about the Obon is that it's considered one of the classic malts of Scotland, and a lot people refer that to me. There were six whiskeys that are considered the classic malts. I would also remind [02:22:30] folks that that was a marketing strategy by the United Distillers. So when doers became part of the distillers company that was ultimately merged together with Arthur Bell and Sons that had then were both owned by Guinness, and that's in 87, and then all of this gets rolled up in 97 to become part of Diageo along with Grand Metropolitan and a few others. And so in 88 when United Distillers were United distillers, they did a marketing push called the Classic [02:23:00] Malt of Scotland that lots of people refer to and they use their own regioning for that. So they had Glenn Kinsey for the lowland, Al Winnie for the Highland Craigmore for the space sign, Toker from Sky, Lagavulin from Eley and Obon from the West Highlands, which was probably the only time I've been referred to that way.

(02:23:22):
They didn't mention Campbellton, which is part of the normal set of regions, but that's because the United Distillers had known a distillery [02:23:30] in Campbellton like Springbank or anyone's like this, and for the most part, this Boban 14 that I'm referring to is the only thing they were making. Remember that one of the smallest distilleries, they only make a few bottles and so they just made one the oban 14 in recent years, this is largely an influence of Diageo owning them for the past 15 years or so, they started to produce a few other distillations. They did a year appellated version called [02:24:00] Little Bay named after the Obon. There is a distiller edition, which is by the way, lovely, and it has additional finishing in Sherry casks. They normally age purely in white Oak and Sherry, and so it's a very consistent product. You know what you're getting. I keep it on the shelf. It's reliable. If you're not into Pete Scotches, this is a little bit of Pete without poking you in the eye. It's something beyond a space side [02:24:30] and it is without a doubt, one of the most original whiskeys of Scotland going back well over 200 years,

Leo Laporte (02:24:37):
They have an 18, but you like the 14,

Paul Thurrott (02:24:41):
The fourteen's, the regular, the eighteen's a recent invention, relatively speaking, just the past decade or so, they've been starting to make an 18 as well. You

Leo Laporte (02:24:47):
Don't need the 18. You don't need,

Paul Thurrott (02:24:50):
You mean if you like the new stuff, the is already $70. The 18 is more than twice that. Oh, that's crazy. There's no inexpensive [02:25:00] bonds, right? Well, it's so

Leo Laporte (02:25:01):
Small. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:25:03):
Yeah, but yeah, you know what? When I'm looking, I'm assessing a whiskey bar that we've just walked into. If they have a small collection, they should have an oon on the shelf because it is one of the classics, and if they don't, we are probably in the wrong place.

Leo Laporte (02:25:21):
There you go. It's your litmus test for the whiskey bar.

Paul Thurrott (02:25:27):
In terms of the scope or in terms of any bar, any whiskey bar ought [02:25:30] to have one, but when you're a bar manager and you're starting to stock, when you're just doing basic brown liquors, you're going to have a Jim Beam and a Wild Turkey and a Glen Fiig. That's the minimum. You

Leo Laporte (02:25:43):
Might have a lagavulin if you really want to show off

Paul Thurrott (02:25:46):
If you lagavulin because you're fancy. Because you're fancy, right, because three times the price, it does cost more, but as you start to round out a collection to get beyond just the common space you live, it fit and [02:26:00] maybe a alini then and then your classic IESs, a Bour and Ella Froy and maybe an abo, you're going to get a highland of some kind and what is it going to be? Probably it should be Obon. That's the first one you would grab.

Leo Laporte (02:26:14):
I look for an aore and if they don't have it, I

Paul Thurrott (02:26:17):
Leave. Thank you. I hope you would destroy, so you knock something down on the way out.

Leo Laporte (02:26:21):
Screw you.

Paul Thurrott (02:26:25):
I'm out of here. I'm here for the castings,

Leo Laporte (02:26:30):
[02:26:30] My friends. Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure. Windows Weekly featuring Richard Campbell is a good Scottish name and there's a good Scot. No, true Scotsman would go into a bar without an ab or bun. That's all I'm saying.

Paul Thurrott (02:26:49):
Oban is like, my name is Oban. It means eight. What does that stand for? What does the

Leo Laporte (02:26:53):
Name what it? It's the name of the bay.

Paul Thurrott (02:26:55):
It's the shortening of Anban, which means Little Bay. Little

Leo Laporte (02:26:59):
Bay. [02:27:00] It's a little bay. That's all. It's Richard is@runasradio.com and that's where you'll find that podcast and.net rocks and this is moving day.

Paul Thurrott (02:27:12):
Yeah, it sounds like they're pretty much done. The big furniture's leaving today. They're waiting

Leo Laporte (02:27:16):
For the chair. We're going to camp in here

Paul Thurrott (02:27:18):
And getting in my chair. They're just

Leo Laporte (02:27:20):
Two

Paul Thurrott (02:27:20):
Big guys standing like How long is this going to take? I'm carrying my own chair out of here, Richard. They did admire my on the air light above the door [02:27:30] though. They like that.

Leo Laporte (02:27:30):
More importantly, how does the whiskey collection get moved?

Paul Thurrott (02:27:34):
The whiskey collection has already moved. It's in boxes I a couple. I'll have a LaCroix and an and that's it. It's here. They're both open, mostly done's, a break

Leo Laporte (02:27:45):
Glass if thirsty kind of a thing.

Paul Thurrott (02:27:48):
It's just like, I don't want to carry this quarter filled bottle up there, glass finish it. PT

Leo Laporte (02:27:57):
Paul Campbell, Paul ot. What is ot? Is [02:28:00] that French?

Paul Thurrott (02:28:01):
It's French Canadian, and I am neither French nor Canadian. There you go.

Leo Laporte (02:28:05):
Paul Ott is@ot.com. T h u Doubler O Double Good Do become a premium member, support Paul, but also get all sorts of great extra stuff. The articles in the premium section are really good. In fact, they formed the basis of his newest book everywhere, which is available@leanpub.com along with the field guide to Windows 11. Maybe we'll be doing Windows 12, September 21st. [02:28:30] We'll see. Maybe you'll have to start a whole new book. It's going to be so different. I can't wait. It's the AI version. Yes, we do this show every Wednesday, 11:00 AM Pacific. In theory, if Leo shows up, if he's late, maybe a little later. I'm sorry. Today I was busy Balder's Gate. I was stuck and I couldn't leave until I moved. Richard and I try to get through the awkward silence. You seem to find something [02:29:00] to talk about. Yes, we're working on it.

(02:29:02):
We actually went live. It was such a good conversation. We thought, well, why hide this 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern, 1800 utc. The live stream is operative day and night at live TWI tv. There's audio and video there. You can even ask your smart assistant to most of 'em if you just say, play twit Live, some of them you have to say, play twit live. Sometimes you have to say on tune in or actually [02:29:30] YouTube, something like that, but play with it. You will be able to get echo look back on these days and laugh. Yeah. Yeah. It was all different languages. This is how the Tower Babel began. It all was one language when we started.

(02:29:47):
What else do I need to tell you? Common common people separated by a language. Okay. Exactly. We do make, of course, on-demand versions of the show available at twit tv slash dub dub for Windows Weekly. [02:30:00] You can also find a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. There's actually a link on the webpage and I think this is the best way to do it. Subscribe in your favorite podcast player and that way you'll just get it automatically. You have a choice of audio or video. Thanks for joining us, you winners and dozers. Thank you Paul and Richard. We'll see you next time on Weekly. Bye-bye.

Jonathan Bennett (02:30:25):
Hey, we should talk Linux. It's the operating system that runs the internet, but your game console, cell phones, [02:30:30] and maybe even the machine on your desk. 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 [02:31:00] slash club twit and sign up. Hope to see you there.