Windows Weekly 881 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.
0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
This week on Windows Weekly, paul Theriot and Richard Campbell talk about the widgets. Oh boy, the new lock screen widgets in Windows 11. The snipping tool is updated. Dell PCs based on the Snapdragon X leak Anything, anybody? Bueller, how about Microsoft Word? It gets a long overdue overhaul to default paste. Really, there's some great stuff. Actually. We're going to talk about OpenAI's event on Monday, google IO's event on Tuesday, apple's possible response next month and what Microsoft's up to, plus a bunch of Xbox news. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is twit. This is windows weekly with paul thurot and richard campbell, episode 881, recorded wednesday, may 15th, 2024, 2024. Big boy teams. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft, with Mr Paul Thurott from thurottcom T-H-U-R-R-O-double-goodcom. Hello, paulie, hello, and I believe he's still in Madeira Park, still at home, mr Richard.
0:01:25 - Richard Campbell
Campbell of runasradiocom.
0:01:25 - Leo Laporte
Hello you two, and I believe he's still in Madeira Park, still at home, mr Richard Campbell of RunAsRadiocom Hello you two Winners, how's it?
0:01:32 - Richard Campbell
going Good to be at home. It's going to end next week, right? Oh, travels begin. Once again, we'll be together in Seattle.
0:01:47 - Leo Laporte
Next time you see this, I think it'll be one of the recording booths. Build is next week. Huh, yep, uh. Any changes in your expectation that build will be a fun-filled mirth fest? Oh yeah, no, I don't think.
0:01:57 - Richard Campbell
I think I don't think any changes in what we expect um, I'm not sure if the word co-pilot will be said a couple of times. Co-pilot, copilot, copilot, it was so funny.
0:02:06 - Leo Laporte
Yesterday at Google IO, senator Bacai said I'll save you some time, we've had our AI, count it. And we said AI 120 times, oops.
0:02:16 - Paul Thurrott
Because it was AI. They actually said it 130 times and it was hallucinating. Actually, I don't know that many people other than me and Richard and people like us would even notice this, but it's very clear that Google IO is morphing into build. They're doing like two days of keynotes. They've got like different announcements on different days. Now All the Android stuff is happening right now as we speak. Wow, yeah, just like I it. This is like uh. During the pandemic, microsoft realized that, um, their default meeting time of one hour in teams was too much, that we needed to go back to 30 minutes. Except in the exact opposite direction, like let's make this longer and more tedious you know well.
0:02:58 - Richard Campbell
And then remember there's also this dynamic of pulling stuff up into the first day because that's the one that gets the most air time anyway.
0:03:06 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so they didn't do any Androids, hardly any Androids, yeah so yeah, I wonder if Microsoft is moving away from that.
0:03:12 - Richard Campbell
They said Android more than they did last year, really they didn't talk about Android last year.
0:03:18 - Leo Laporte
That's ironic.
0:03:19 - Paul Thurrott
They said Android one time in the Google IOK not last year, are you kidding which caused a little bit of a problem in certain circles, but anyway, it's okay. We're used to that they don't say the word Windows in our keynotes. So weird, it's all good, I don't know.
0:03:35 - Richard Campbell
This is going to be an interesting set of keynotes.
0:03:39 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, you're talking about Windows, or you're talking about.
0:03:42 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah, of course, the real thing Not that we have the book of news, and if we did, we weren't allowed to talk about it yet but it's definitely. You know, what's happening to me right now is I'm organizing a podcasting space so I have various execs and their handlers coming at me saying, hey, I'd really like to talk to a podcast about you know this and that, so you get an idea of what they care about. That's interesting, yeah.
0:04:06 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, well, I mean, a lot of this is going to be obvious. Like you said, ai, there's going to be some device news next week. I don't know if we talked about this, but some. Snapdragon something, something.
The Monday event, yeah, and then I you know, this is the developer shows are difficult in a way, at least for me, because I care very deeply about big chunks of it and I care not at all about big chunks of it, right, and so you have to kind of get through the stuff you don't care about sometimes to get to the next step.
0:04:38 - Richard Campbell
I'm concerned about you calling build a developer show. Really, I just look at the session on catalog and say sure, it's a developer show, are you sure?
0:04:47 - Leo Laporte
what is it is?
0:04:48 - Paul Thurrott
it's not a developer show it's got it's got I mean it's got some developer content some, but yeah yeah, well there's a there's a marketing component to what's happening right now and also, like it's, about their new product.
0:05:01 - Richard Campbell
So lots of conversation about fabric, lots of conversations about Copilot, some power platform stuff. I mean on one hand you can say well, everybody's a developer now. Oh, boy, you know, you can also say the folks who make their living writing software wouldn't agree.
0:05:21 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, that's right. Well, that's like Microsoft, several years ago, said everyone's a creator, know and fair enough. I mean, some of us use finger paints, but uh, yeah no, some of us are dutch masters. I guess it depends. You know who we're talking about here. So yeah anyway, it's going to be interesting one way or the other, that's for sure. Um, we'll see. I don't.
0:05:44 - Richard Campbell
I don't know the details yet, so I know all I know is I'm going to be watching those keynotes closely.
0:05:49 - Paul Thurrott
We're taking some notes and on wednesday at 11 ish uh, we will be talking about them there you go there you go, that's all you need to be lining up, uh, the interviews you'll be having for your show for the next, you know, three months or more, right? I mean, yeah, some people aren't going to be around, uh during the show, and it's like okay, that's interesting, I got to talk to that guy, that's interesting, you know well and it's yeah, there's some like yeah, I got a pretty good vp catalog here, like they.
0:06:16 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, the july run as roster is microsoft vp heavy. Yeah, yeah, no, I'm not unhappy. All amazing people delighted to talk to him. But you know, normally, uh, with with the normal process to get a vp on the show, you're lucky you get one a quarter and I'm gonna get like four in a week. Yeah, wow, yeah. Well, there's a full frontal going on right now.
0:06:39 - Paul Thurrott
Right, there is. That's exactly who's coming at me all the keynoters yeah yeah, I mean some of these guys are like small woodland animals. You've got to kind of kick them a little bit to get up on the stage, you know. But I think there's an imperative now at Microsoft, Like we've got to get out in front of people and so on and so on.
0:06:57 - Richard Campbell
Because that's good, right. Like it's been a while. They've seemed very awkward on how to communicate. They've seemed very awkward on how to communicate and you know, I mean I've been using my access to back channel essentially to pull it off for a lot of things, which I still do. But I am appreciating the engagement I've got this time around. Just, you know, good folks know what they're doing. It's like let's go through the pipeline and then the joke, of course, is that half the time the chief of staff of whoever VP is like oh it's Richard, hey, great to talk to you right off. We go like, you know, I didn't do this a long time, it's fair, you know I do. I do know what I'm doing and this is where we're going and I really want you to talk to these folks awesome.
0:07:36 - Leo Laporte
Well, we'll look forward to that. Uh on rena's radio and you and I and uh paul will all the convene next week to talk about. By then we'll know what build is all about. Yes, yeah yeah, we'll.
0:07:48 - Richard Campbell
I the second day keynote, which is, I believe, mostly scott guthrie and his team of folks. A lot that'll be interesting. Uh are on the second day keynote and I think they're wrapped by 10 ish, so we'll have a little bit of time to digest before we go on Nice.
0:08:06 - Leo Laporte
Okay, okay, so that's our agenda for next week. What's on the docket for this week?
0:08:13 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's going to be a familiar mix.
0:08:16 - Leo Laporte
Maybe some.
0:08:16 - Paul Thurrott
Windows Windows 11.
0:08:20 - Leo Laporte
Isn't that an old Microsoft conference? It is Patch Tuesday yesterday, first Tuesday of the second month of the third eon of Satya Nadella.
0:08:32 - Paul Thurrott
That's exactly how they describe it when the moon is blue it's three quarters full. We release updates. And the crystal reflects on the point of the reboot key. Yes, patch Tuesday, as we know, is the second Tuesday of every month. That was yesterday. I was a little. Richard was like, hey, I'm here, I'm alone, you know. I'm like, yep, sorry, I sat down and had to reboot my computer. Oh dear, yeah, nothing major.
0:08:58 - Leo Laporte
That's why, when I came in my computer said something went wrong, but don't worry, we're redoing everything.
0:09:06 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, the thing that went wrong was Patch Tuesday happened and when you reboot you're going to have new widgets on your lock screen that nobody asked for. Oh, I think it was a month or two ago, I can't remember when it hit stable, but they added that one weather icon, which was, I guess, vaguely inoffensive. But now there's two more icons.
0:09:25 - Leo Laporte
Well, my update failed, my cumulative update for Windows 11 23H2 and my NET update failed, so should I do them again. You don't mind if we stop the show for about 30 minutes.
0:09:38 - Paul Thurrott
I mean you're going to have to do it eventually.
0:09:39 - Leo Laporte
It will happen.
0:09:40 - Paul Thurrott
You can do it if you want. There's nothing major as far as day-to-day use stuff goes you can do it if you want.
0:09:44 - Richard Campbell
There's nothing major as far as day-to-day use stuff goes. You can do it during the Mac show.
0:09:47 - Leo Laporte
There you go, when you don't need it. Mac Break Weekly is on Wednesday, today, right after you guys, so you can rip them all. There you go.
0:09:55 - Paul Thurrott
And also for Windows. Windows 10 also received updates today, or yesterday, rather, including the same lock screen widgets and then the account notifications that debuted first in windows 11. These are the things where you open the start menu is a little orange button or a little whatever overlay on your profile picture. Click on it. It's like, hey, you should use one drive folder backup or whatever message they want to send to you. Um, so enjoy that little bit of annoyance that I've been suffering from for the past six months, you know, you thought.
Windows 10 was a safe haven. You're wrong. So there's that. And then we let's see. Since the show last week, there have been several updates to the Insider Preview program. Some of them are like outside of builds, in other words, sometimes they just update apps or experiences in Windows that aren't tied to a specific channel. So the snipping tool is being updated throughout the system with emoji support and QR code scanning. I'm not really sure what the deal is there, because you can't just hit like a point where you're like, okay, this tool is actually pretty good. I wasn't really sure what the deal is there, uh, because I you can't just hit like a point where you're like, okay, this tool is actually pretty good. I wasn't sure about you updating it. Oh, you're going to keep going. Oh, I see, now you're just going to ruin it, like they did that with notepad. You know, like notepad, like, okay, nope, I like what you did. Oh, you're going to. What you see is what you got. Really, you know, it's like they just can't stop doing it. Right, and then Paint is being updated just to remove that co-creator name which was unique to that one app. They're just going to call it Image Creator, which is the name they use everywhere else with Copilot, so no big deal there.
This one is people were freaking out about ads in the start menu. Let's see the reaction to this one. They are testing widgets in the start menu, and not in the start menu but attached to the side of it like giant barnacles. And I don't know. I don't know what's happening anymore with these people. I think that Microsoft had a good idea a million years ago for something called Live Tiles, and it was a good idea for phones, where you pick up your phone and you can see at a glance what's going on in your world, and in many cases you realize I don't have to go into that app, I can see on this aisle what's going on, I don't have to go in and out. And obviously their Windows phone system did not succeed. But they brought this thing to Windows 10 as well, where it made a lot less sense, right?
0:12:24 - Richard Campbell
because it started windows 8 really right. Like the revamp of windows 8?
0:12:29 - Paul Thurrott
yes oh sorry, I, I meant literally the same, so you're right. I mean it debuted in the windows 8 start screen, right and. And. And that may explain, by the way, why the windows 8 start screen was a screen and replace the desktop for, into all intents and purposes, in the first release, because this kind of interface only makes sense when you can see it right. It has to be on screen all the time. That's not how we use our computers, right? The start menu is something you go into the launch and you get out of it, so it's a launcher, and so when we got to Windows 10, live tiles just didn't make any sense anymore.
0:13:02 - Richard Campbell
They were a distraction. If you pop up the star trees because you got something to do, get out of my way out of my way, buddy.
0:13:10 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, the live part of it wasn't just live data, although that was the point. They also animated and there were live tiles. That didn't do anything with regards to live information, but they would just sit there and spin in circles and do things and it was touch me, click me, click me.
0:13:23 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, distract me. Oh, you mean like Clippy.
0:13:29 - Richard Campbell
Like a set of five-year-olds with cotton candy Guys if you have.
0:13:32 - Paul Thurrott
So let me see if I can figure out which. I wrote a couple of articles related to this. Yeah, so there's an amazing description of Bill Gates' reaction to Clippy, where he swears I'm going to tone this one down but he referred to this thing as that effing clown. And so in the software code that they used to create the Office Assistant, which is the actual name of that product, you know, they use Hungarian notation and the prefix for that object is TFC, which stands for that effing clown. Oh no, so the guy who gives the demo the first time says okay, the assistant appears and each step in the sequence creates a chart, and the user interface does this, but it would be more friendly and approachable. And then Gates says so, when I want to create a chart, that effing clown will pop up and say I'm here to help.
0:14:29 - AI
And he's like the guy's, like no, no, it's not clown, it's an assistant.
0:14:30 - Paul Thurrott
He goes okay, so the clown. The clown pops up and I'm clicking on the clown and I'm saying clown, do this. Next clown, next clown, next, or something like that. He goes the assistant is just a more approachable and helpful version of the same number of clicks that you always had. He goes yeah, next, next, next and pretty soon. I just want that effing clown to get out of the way.
0:14:44 - Leo Laporte
And then, irony of ironies, he married the Effie clown's mama.
0:14:49 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so that was his reaction to the office assistant, which I think is beautiful. But uh, but yes, a well-meaning but poorly implemented idea, um that it's proponents will tell you what's ahead of its time. I I think flushing it down the toilet was the right choice there. But uh, yeah, it's funny you bring that one up because that just came up this week. I was just uh describing this in an article about software bloat related to these windows widgets things. Right, so widgets is microsoft's new attempt at this kind of a thing exists richard's saying excuse me, but uh, melinda Gates worked on Bob, not Clippy.
0:15:29 - Richard Campbell
That was the friendly puppy interface, not the paperclip interface. Okay, okay, I stand corrected.
0:15:36 - AI
No no, no.
0:15:38 - Paul Thurrott
Office had many characters, and one of them was the puppy. And the puppy was also in Windows XP in the search bar, so you could say she was Clippy's Clippy was just the default one.
0:15:45 - Leo Laporte
No, bob was the puppy. And the puppy was also in windows xp. Yeah, in the search bar. Yeah, so you could say she was clippy clippy was just the default one progenitor was the first version. Yeah, but clippy came from bob, didn't it? I mean?
0:15:52 - Richard Campbell
it was like that's right, that's great. Indirectly but um, it's the progenitor anyway progenitor.
0:15:58 - Paul Thurrott
It's all right, it okay. Anyway, I'm getting distracted, so um widgets.
0:16:03 - Richard Campbell
Let's talk about widgets paul oh boy so I think I like the idea. These widgets are just the lineage of bob.
0:16:10 - Leo Laporte
This is great the descendants of bob, that's it. So the difference?
0:16:16 - Paul Thurrott
between bob. Well, not bob, because bob was its own interface, really its own madness. Clip the office assistant or the search assistant in windows xp. Right was that those things would appear in a context uh centered way like that when you needed them, right that, um, live tiles made sense because they were on screen all the time and that's that made sense for a phone right.
0:16:39 - Richard Campbell
They were for partial attention, right.
0:16:41 - Paul Thurrott
It's like you often flip up your phone and look at it and flip away again and the tiles made total sense in that scenario yeah, I mean back for in longhorn they had this idea of a sidebar and they were going to have I think they were called gadgets originally, but the widgets essentially right, that would be written in, probably javascript and html, that would sit there and that thing would be on all the time, and that made some sense. Plus, we were moving to widescreens. At that time we had this extra real estate on the side. Um, it didn't take off regardless, but that was an idea. And then by the time we get to windows 10 and 11, we have this um widgets interface, as we call it now, windows 11, or news and interest in windows 10, and their icons on the taskbar. They're not always there and they don't even support pinning. You couldn't leave it on. So having this interface in many ways is, you know, it's superfluous, like for most people, it doesn't make any sense and it also kind of betrays a, I think, a central misunderstanding of how most people use their computers, which is not for Windows but to run apps right, like I'm here to run Word and Edge, edge or chrome or whatever and photoshop and I don't need, I don't want these distractions around me, but windows has a lot of distractions these days. Um, so, yeah, I. I guess the feeling here is we've created this widgets infrastructure for some reason, uh, no one seems to be using it, which makes sense, and maybe there's a better way to surface these. I guess you could put them on the desktop like active desktop, back in whenever that year was 97, 98. I guess you could have a sidebar of some kind that was always on the screen again and microsoft's like well, let's, uh, let's, attach them to the uh start menu, maybe.
So that's a depressing turn of events, because I will say, whatever anyone thinks of the Windows 11 start menu and I think there are opinions it's clean and minimalist and it does kind of get out of the way. In fact, if anything, it gets out of the way a little too much. But if you use it as a launcher, you can populate it with the shortcuts you want and get on with your life, and, and I don't know that adding junk to that is a great idea. But I obviously don't make decisions at microsoft or anywhere else for that matter, even at my own company, right? So, uh, who cares what I think?
Um, and then, beyond those two things, the widgets, the snipping tool, the paint stuff which kind of exists outside of builds. We've had new dev beta and now canary today builds since our last show, nothing traumatic at all. Like, in fact, today's canary build is just small fixes, nothing interesting. Canary build is just small fixes, nothing interesting. I joked last week, I think, about the share interface in windows, which is, uh, something I wrote about somewhere recently, where how this kind of evolved over time and microsoft is trying to bring like a mobile style share interface to windows because the legacy tools for sharing, like, like you know, folder shares, a home group, whatever it's all gone. You know it's not gone. It's just too hard for most people and the Microsoft account sign-in infrastructure they have doesn't accommodate that stuff very well. But, first of all, nobody uses. I mean I just I don't have the telemetry data I very confidently can state nobody uses this thing.
And they're just trying to make it better and I appreciate it, but I just think it's pointless. So remember they added specific apps to share because those app makers wouldn't do it themselves. So they're like we're just going to add them.
0:20:18 - Richard Campbell
We'll do it for them. I mean, this is the question is is there widgets we would want versus? Widgets that they make money from.
0:20:26 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, they're widgets we would want, versus widgets that they make money from. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think that's their concern.
0:20:29 - Leo Laporte
Honestly.
0:20:29 - Paul Thurrott
I think it should be but I don't think that's their concern.
0:20:32 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, I think. I think it's the widget. It's just the widgets. They're making money from way that they make money by putting these things on our screens yeah, that could be so they.
0:20:41 - Leo Laporte
they don't make money from weather, do they?
0:20:44 - Richard Campbell
No, but I think that's your one small exception.
0:20:47 - Paul Thurrott
That's the one exception. No, it isn't. Weather drives traffic to an MSN website.
0:20:52 - Leo Laporte
Oh, of course, microsoft ads.
0:20:54 - Paul Thurrott
This is all related to their attempt to be the next Google in that space. So it's a profit thing? Yeah, of course it's a revenue source, it's also. So go back to the widgets thing, I guess. Um, the widgets that are on the lock screen, you know you can turn it off, right, right, so that's nice. What you can't do is configure it right. You can't say I want the weather one, but I don't want the other ones. Right now, all or nothing. There's no doubt that that will come right and that there will be more widgets that you can put on your lock screen. But this is the way microsoft does things now, right, they just kind of, they just throw it out into the world, like in half, in a half formed form or whatever, and uh, that's what we get, and I, you know it feels like an afterthought. I don't like it. But anyway.
0:21:38 - Leo Laporte
Um, they swore to me this would take three minutes. Oh it is. Look at that. It went from 20 to 92 percent in about five seconds. Now, because numbers are hard. Why is that so hard to get a progress bar to be accurate? I mean?
0:21:49 - Richard Campbell
what?
0:21:49 - Leo Laporte
because you don't you don't know how long it's going to take.
0:21:51 - Richard Campbell
You have to guess yeah, I I've played with a lot of variations on this as a developer over the years. The only thing I've learned for sure is if you go back down again, it makes people really angry.
0:21:59 - Leo Laporte
So don't do that so I'm trying to see. I don't have any lock screen widgets so I have to turn those on. I guess you shouldn't.
0:22:06 - Richard Campbell
It should be on by default. It'll come at you. Give it a minute.
0:22:10 - Leo Laporte
Okay.
0:22:13 - Richard Campbell
Okay.
0:22:14 - Paul Thurrott
They've come up on the first boot for me on every single computer.
0:22:17 - Leo Laporte
I didn't see any.
0:22:20 - Paul Thurrott
I just saw the beautiful. Are you sure that's what you installed?
0:22:23 - Leo Laporte
Oh, you mean I may not have installed the thing? Yeah, I don't know. I mean you might have gotten an earlier update, I don't know.
0:22:31 - Richard Campbell
Now there's more updates. Maybe you only see it's like going to Home Depot. If you go to Home Depot, you know you're going to have to go back to Home.
0:22:37 - Leo Laporte
Depot. Checking for updates. Let's check for updates. Checking for updates. Let's check for updates. Checking for updates. Update checking. Now I checked this box. Get the latest updates as soon as they're available. Is that okay, paul? I didn't join the Windows Insider program.
0:22:56 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I mean it's a halfway step between stable and the Windows Insider program. That just means you're automatically going to get the preview updates.
0:23:04 - Leo Laporte
Okay, so I'm up to date. Let me, let me just lock this. Uh, lock this old screen. How do you do that?
0:23:10 - Paul Thurrott
well, don't do that yet. Uh, go to um settings.
0:23:13 - Leo Laporte
Okay this is always the fun part, where you lead me through windows a little live stream. No idea how this works. Okay, go to personalize Personalization, personalization, personalization and then lock screen, and then down to lock screen.
0:23:33 - Paul Thurrott
All right. So the second item down says lock screen status, weather and more.
0:23:39 - Leo Laporte
That's good, you do have it. That's it. I think I'll stick with weather and more, because it's Not just weather, it's got to be weather and more.
0:23:46 - Paul Thurrott
Well, it used to be weather and now it's weather, and more because it's got these other things. Okay, how do I lock her Windows key plus L will do it.
0:23:54 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's right. I remember that from my grade school days. There they are, there's stuff, there's lots of stuff. Oh my goodness.
0:24:03 - Richard Campbell
I got weather.
0:24:04 - Paul Thurrott
I got markets, I got the.
0:24:05 - Leo Laporte
NBA scores. I now know the Knicks won.
0:24:08 - Richard Campbell
They're attractive, that's not ugly.
0:24:10 - Leo Laporte
It's not horrible.
0:24:12 - Paul Thurrott
No, that's not the claim. The claim is nobody asked for this Right. Also, if you have Windows Hello with your facial recognition on you'll see it for one second, right. So the whole thing is not, it's just ill-conceived, it's. The whole thing is just, we've already given it more thought than microsoft has. I mean, right in this show.
0:24:36 - Richard Campbell
I love it well, and I keep hearing that term. It's like we're customer data driven right so what's the customer data that says that we need these widgets?
0:24:46 - Paul Thurrott
it's like, um, like, we threw a grenade in the room and, uh, now we're just collecting the feedback there we go.
0:24:51 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, our customer data shows we're not going to collecting enough money per customer, so how can we fix that? But I do now know that it's chocolate chip day, national chocolate chip day, not just any old chocolate chip day.
0:25:05 - Paul Thurrott
I mean macOS doesn't tell you that?
0:25:07 - Leo Laporte
No, it's true, I don't know that from my macOS. You're absolutely right.
0:25:12 - Richard Campbell
That would only be iChips.
0:25:16 - Paul Thurrott
Stupid. The iChips are too fast to display the weather. They couldn't even handle it. I don't even know what we're talking about anymore.
0:25:24 - Richard Campbell
Anyway.
0:25:25 - Paul Thurrott
I guess the short version here is just that across dev, beta and Canary there's been nothing of interest, that's all, other than this weird testing of widget. Well, that's not even occurring officially. So, yeah, this is not. They added so I mentioned. They added the ability to email yourself from the share pane. Right, because that's how pc people think, right. So in the, in the, no, I'm serious in the beta building.
They added copy to clipboard and it's like guys, serious like I just who am I sharing a copy to clipboard? I'm sharing it with myself. What does that mean? Why would I need that?
0:26:01 - Richard Campbell
it's ridiculous, wow that's I gotta tell you something I did today or this week. I was, I recorded a show and, for whatever reason, one drive just barfed on the recording machine. It's, it's mad, I'll deal with it. The other machines working fine, so I did stick a us. Now, of course, I still use those rack mount workstations, so they're literally one on top of the other. So I plugged the usb key into the top one, copied the file on, pulled it out, moved down six inches, plugged into the lower one went to the other machine.
0:26:29 - Paul Thurrott
Listen, I've said this a million times I think I'm the only person on earth who uses the nearby sharing feature in Windows 11. That said, I use email and I use USB keys. I use portable hard drive SSDs. Now I do all the same stupid stuff that every windows user does, because you know it works yeah, you know like sometimes sneaker debt is, I had something to do right like it wasn't.
0:26:55 - Richard Campbell
I wasn't worried about optimizing this process, I was worried about getting it done well. The other thing is it?
0:26:59 - Paul Thurrott
um? So my wife also works from home and I actually think it helps sometimes if I stalk around the house in a menacing fashion and it's like he's obviously busy. I should leave him alone you know, I'm part of it is just for perception, yeah, but uh, yeah, I mean it's just well, or you know, look it's windows. Let's just be honest here. Right, I am on this computer and I go to do nearby share and I click it and the computer I'm sharing to doesn't come up. It's sitting right here.
0:27:24 - Leo Laporte
I can see it.
0:27:26 - Paul Thurrott
I'm next to the router, they're both on Wi-Fi and you're like you know what USB key works every time.
0:27:33 - Richard Campbell
I'm just saying it's hard to argue with, I mean these two machines are connected to the same switch.
0:27:40 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, yes, in the next section we're going to talk about a hardware-based solution. That will be yet another way to solve this problem, but for now we're stuck with what we have, and you know, sometimes it works. That's Windows. Sometimes it works.
0:27:55 - Richard Campbell
There's a logo for you, there's a motto for you.
0:27:59 - Leo Laporte
Sometimes it works, in contrast to Apple's slogan, which is it just works, yeah Right.
0:28:04 - Paul Thurrott
Which you know. Both of those things are not actually true.
0:28:07 - Leo Laporte
No, I know In both fictions.
0:28:10 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, microsoft had the old. Where do you want to go today?
0:28:13 - Paul Thurrott
Oh yeah, I'll tell you where I want to go, buddy. Oh sorry, what did we talk about?
0:28:18 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, and they made management operations and we called it Microsoft Mom.
0:28:25 - Leo Laporte
Where do?
0:28:26 - Paul Thurrott
you think you're going today? Oh boy, yes. Where do you think you're going today? Which became Microsoft Stepmom, which nobody likes?
0:28:31 - Leo Laporte
And then to the cloud.
0:28:34 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, Our world is so screwed up, but you know what I miss that ad about?
0:28:40 - Leo Laporte
the cloud. That was a good ad To the cloud To the cloud.
0:28:42 - Richard Campbell
That was a good ad To the cloud To the cloud.
0:28:44 - Leo Laporte
That was a good ad. Do you want to talk more about things like dev and beta and Canary, do you want to? No, thank you, please, come on. You've pushed me too far, I'm done.
0:28:58 - Paul Thurrott
All right? No, it's good.
0:29:00 - Leo Laporte
This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by HP and Intel and the new HP Elite book 1040 g11. This is hp's first ai commercial ai pc, so it's got that co-pilot key intel core ultra processor like that which has that has the npu right, the ai acceleration right, yeah, that's the one.
Yeah, that's intel's big boy to empower your workforce, deliver exceptional performance. Battery life outstanding. On this I thought you know they're saying 29 hours battery life. I thought wait a minute. So I haven't plugged it in for three days it's still going. Yeah, it doesn't get very warm, so they've definitely got. They've figured it out right, yep.
0:29:40 - AI
They figured it out somehow.
0:29:41 - Leo Laporte
It's world-class security with the HP Wolf security. I love that you get SmartSense. This is the. I should give you the numbers the 1040G11. The HP EliteBook 1040G11. Of course it comes in different styles and stuff, but I like this kind of clean white style.
0:30:00 - Paul Thurrott
Very light, Nice and trim. This is actually pretty much my favorite PC.
0:30:04 - Leo Laporte
The EliteBook 1040s has been for a long time Comes with SmartSense, which monitors your PC's vitals, your innards, making automatic adjustments. Maybe that's why I'm getting such great battery life too. Energy hogging resources, 29-hour battery life. They balance the battery, the fan processor, everything that runs in your laptop. You just work on, you know getting stuff done, and they'll take care of the guts. It's also got this new poly. You mentioned that they acquired this company. It's Poly Studio is on the front here. The new Poly AI-driven audio and Windows Studio effects. Now this is really cool.
It does the eye contact. It's got a Windows Hello camera and a fingerprint reader. I set it up for both just because it's nice to have both. Right, but Hello is so fast I rarely get my finger to the fingerprint reader. It will automatically adjust your eye line, so you've got eye contact with whoever you're talking to. Face framing. It's got dynamic voice leveling that adapts to the environment, so you get the great voice clarity based on what's going on, background noise reduction and so forth. Of course, that co-pilot key means you have access to co-pilot. I think the AI Assistant is really cool. It will suggest personalized optimizations for the system.
Streaming for efficiency. You can use learning deadlines and personal productivity patterns to help you set priorities, manage your time effectively. This comes with Windows 11 Pro. I love it. The latest you could have your choice of the Intel Core Ultra 5 or 7. A 14-inch I love an OLED display. That's all I'll ever do from now on. This has a nice OLED display on it, five-megapixel camera, hp Wolf security for business and so much more. On and on. This newest laptop will adapt to your workers' personal needs and behaviors so they can regain meaningful time and focus on meaningful work.
Go to hpcom, search for the HP EliteBook 1040G11 to learn more today. There's also a link in the show notes. You can check that HPcom and search for the HP EliteBook 1040G11. You heard it right here Paul's favorite Windows laptop. So thank you, hp, for supporting Windows Weekly and you should take a look at a HP EliteBook 1040G11. It'll make you happy because the price is right and you'll make your employees happy because they've got a sweet ride. Thank you, hp. I'll be using this from now on. I don't even know where I put the other one. It's gone. Get out of here. Uh, all, right on, we go with the show.
0:32:44 - Paul Thurrott
Still more windows to talk about, yes yeah, sort of related to windows, I guess we'll call it. Um. There was a big, big leak about dell's pc lineups for the next several years and there's a lot of stuff going on there. But the thing I'm most interested in is their first snapdragon x series laptops, right, which are coming out this year, um, including like a new version of the dell xps 13. Um, you know which, as you would expect, thin light, you know, fanless, silent, beautiful, looking like, just can't, cannot wait. Um, but I, this, this actually first happened to me. I went I guess I wasn't in mexico, but it was like a month or so ago it occurred to me.
You know, we're we're pinning so many of our hopes on this chip set, right. But the thing we might've forgotten about here a little bit is it will be an improvement, right, there's no doubt this is going to be great for the ecosystem, et cetera, et cetera. But what if this is a bigger deal for other platforms? Right, know, windows is complex, like one of the big problems with porting windows to arm and this is something sanofsky writes about in his book hardcore software is this.
You know, you don't just like take the code base and recompile it. You know you have to refactor a lot of code, there's a lot of stuff that goes on under the the hood, so to speak, a lot of backward compatibility stuff in there that has to be rewritten, and what you end up with on the other side is like the exact same system, just running on a different chip. You know, and what you want is for this thing to be, you know, to take really take advantage of the underlying architecture and have that efficiency and performance and all that stuff. And you know, there are more modern systems, if you will, like Chrome OS right, that run Android apps that run natively on these chips. And hmm, you know, and it's one of those like ideas that once it got stuck in the corner of my brain, I was like, oh God, like what if?
0:34:37 - Leo Laporte
So I got something else to be stuck in your corner of your brain. I just asked Copilot to generate an image of two podcasters who love to talk about windows. And uh, do you like this? That's more cartoony goodness.
0:35:00 - Richard Campbell
Uh, this is I'm waiting for stadler and wal.
0:35:03 - Leo Laporte
I know that's good, you're twins, you're brothers. Practically this could be the new Windows Weekly logo here. I noticed they don't hesitate to do the Microsoft logo in there, which is great. So change your expressions to look excited. Make one of them wear oh, let's make one of them wear a Microsoft t-shirt. Sure, why not? I'm sorry, paul, were you saying something?
0:35:30 - Paul Thurrott
Who knows?
0:35:33 - Leo Laporte
This is so fun. This is actually good. There's five fingers on each hand. I like it. What's happening?
0:35:44 - Paul Thurrott
Nothing, I'm sorry, I just started playing with Copilot.
0:35:47 - Leo Laporte
That's all that's it. What's happening? I'm sorry, I just started playing with Copilot.
0:35:49 - Richard Campbell
That's all that's it. You press that Copilot button, funny things are going to happen.
0:35:54 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I like how the I asked for that was a picture. I can't remember the exact image, but it was basically like an older couple waving goodbye. Yeah, and their older people all look exactly the same.
0:36:07 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's interesting. I said middle-aged, so I probably should have said young. Yeah, I like this one. Sure, this is like a mirror image Look at these guys. Okay, that's the one I'm going with this one.
0:36:25 - Paul Thurrott
Do I have to grow like a hipster mustache?
0:36:27 - Leo Laporte
your mustache, you need it yep, anyway.
0:36:31 - Paul Thurrott
Um, sorry, go ahead. There's also been a leak that, uh, qualcomm will release, obviously, uh, second gen snapdragon x chips sometime in 2025. No surprise there, um, but let's get through the first one before we get too excited about that. Yeah, at least it means they've got the dyes underway, right? Yeah, I mean, it's good, right? I think the fact that there are going to be four skews of this initial generation right at launch was more than anyone expected, honestly that's I.
0:36:59 - Richard Campbell
I thought that was binning it's.
0:37:01 - Paul Thurrott
It's one okay, but no, that's fine, but I'm just saying it's still not what we. You know, they've typically just released a chip, right? So the fact that they're doing this is, I think, is interesting.
0:37:10 - Richard Campbell
Yeah.
0:37:13 - Paul Thurrott
And then just kind of tangentially related, intel today announced something called Thunderbolt Share, which came out of nowhere, frankly, and this is an interesting kind of a PC to PC hardware cable experience, basically.
0:37:26 - Richard Campbell
So you, have two computers. Does anybody ever do that Actually need to move files between two PCs?
0:37:30 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's crazy, I know it's like we're living in the future, so, but the thing, the thing that's cool about this is it also supports like Thunderbolt hubs, like you might have in a monitor, or Thunderbolt docs, obviously, so you can have two systems and they're both just sharing a bunch of the same peripherals and, uh, over this connection.
0:37:51 - Richard Campbell
So, yeah, okay, okay, so this is sharing a peripheral, not sharing files well, you could share files as well.
0:37:59 - Paul Thurrott
If that would be, one of the peripherals would be storage right. I mean all right. What do you mean? What do you mean by that like? What do you mean? Like I was making?
0:38:04 - Richard Campbell
fun of that? Like what do you mean? I was making fun of the fact we were talking about sharing, and you know USB and yeah, no, I referenced this earlier.
0:38:10 - Paul Thurrott
I said we're going to talk about another Right.
0:38:12 - Richard Campbell
So this is the one, but now it's share by cable. Like I should just make sure I get, yeah, two motherboards in with Thunderbolt on the back by Intel it's pretty fast and stick a cable between them and just leave them, yep it should be super reliable.
0:38:26 - Paul Thurrott
It doesn't require Ethernet or Wi-Fi, right? Right, it doesn't require. One of the many, many, many ways I share with myself is to copy something into OneDrive or Google Drive right on one computer and then go to the other computer. And actually you know right, I mean there's a million ways to do this, but, um, I think this is according to intel. Anyway, there are a lot of like dual pc households, so you have like the site, maybe you have like a desktop and a laptop or something, and that's not a bad idea. I mean, I, I have this setup which right now is tied to a desktop computer and, honestly, being able to plug in a single cable and just use it all with a laptop is actually kind of compelling yeah right.
So a bunch of pc makers have signed up, uh, including lenovo, uh, acer, msi and razor.
0:39:10 - AI
It's going to be the chipset you might as well use it.
0:39:13 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, and then belkin kensington oc. You know a bunch of the purple guys too, right?
0:39:17 - Leo Laporte
so nice, oh, it's hardware.
0:39:19 - Paul Thurrott
It's hardware sharing, hardware based yeah, right, lower yeah over thunderbolt horrifying which is still a usbc plug, so it's not just a digital thing. There's something going on in the chip or no, it's just how do they implement this? I don't know.
0:39:38 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, that's yeah this sounds like there's a protocol aspect of this, of the different kinds of sharing that can be done, like we talked about sharing a peripheral right, like that's interesting to me. Yeah, so it's not just file sharing. In other words, you have a dock.
0:39:55 - Paul Thurrott
It will be a new dock, right? Not an existing dock, but you have a new dock that is connected to a keyboard and a mouse and maybe some external storage, a couple monitors, whatever it is Ethernet, and you have two cables coming in, one to one pc, one or the other, and they both use all the same stuff, right, it's kind of it's interesting.
0:40:12 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah, so it might be a kbm alternative. Yeah, like when you as a byproduct.
0:40:16 - Paul Thurrott
Oh yeah, when you when you review, like when you look at um or yeah, if you look at reviews of laptops or just specs for laptops, like you'll see, there'll be a port like USB. It's a USB type C port. It's got Thunderbolts, whatever capabilities, which delivers some form of data transfer performance, 4080, whatever the number is, and it will have things like display port, whatever version. There's some kind of a storage standard Like this will probably be added to that list.
0:40:51 - Leo Laporte
Like you'll see, one of the things that port will support will be thunderbolt chair, I'm guessing, just based on the one more, just one more little logo to silkscreen on the cable.
0:40:55 - Paul Thurrott
Oh yeah, that's honestly, that's intel's version of a licensable moment. Right?
0:40:59 - Leo Laporte
they probably get a buck every time they put a sticker on something, so yeah nice and one more reason to be confused about what this cable will do versus that cable drives a lot of people crazy because it all looks like type c, right?
0:41:15 - Richard Campbell
yeah, it all does look like yet another variation of c yeah, why is this so bright?
0:41:22 - Leo Laporte
oh god, yeah, he looks like you're working in the lab late one night.
0:41:26 - Richard Campbell
I know All of a sudden, you cannot stand in front of the grammar ray emitter. There we go Much better.
0:41:34 - Leo Laporte
Let's talk Microsoft 365.
0:41:36 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so, as a recovering wordaholic, I have to exercise this muscle again. But I will say one of one of the interest well, not one of my deals with word over the over, many, many years, like 25 years was that I would always configure it in a very particular way and I could actually step you through that whole thing. I won't, but if you go into word options, advanced and scroll down, you'll see a cut, copy and paste section. And one of the things I changed on every single install of Word for me was I changed pasting from other programs from its default, which has been keep source formatting. Actually, that's not true. They changed it because that's what changed Keep destination formatting, I believe, was the default. It doesn't really matter, but whatever it was, I thought it was keep source formatting. Oh no, you're right, it was source formatting. It doesn't really matter, but whatever it was, no, I thought it was keep source forming. Oh no, you're right, it was source forming.
0:42:25 - Richard Campbell
Sorry, sorry, Nobody ever wants that, right? Yeah, nobody ever wants that. I know somebody doesn't understand it when I get an email with 17 fonts in it, right.
0:42:31 - Paul Thurrott
So I've always changed that to keep text only. I don't in fact.
Just keep text is always the correct answer, my default want any formatting nonsense. But microsoft is making a change. This is sort of like the change they made to the print screen button in windows, where this has been this way forever and is thus the way all caps um. They're changing it and they're changing it to. I believe they're changing it to merge formatting, if I'm not correct, but they're changing it.
Whatever the change is, and the reason is because people have been complaining for 25 years I don't want the formatting, you know. And so there's obviously in place uh, formatting changes you can make as you paste right, you get that little quick toolbar thing that pops up whatever it's called, um, and from there you can say we'll change the default formatting. I think a lot of people are reactive that way. They'll see that option and then make the change then. But you could just if you're someone like me who likes to, you know, really configure things, you could just do it yourself, or now they'll just kind of do. I don't know if this is the right thing, but a better thing than what they were doing before.
0:43:39 - Leo Laporte
Doesn't control, shift, paste do. That? Isn't that how you do that In Word?
0:43:45 - Paul Thurrott
See, that's't that how you do that where you do in word. Uh see, that's, that's something that works everywhere, but I want to say but word, but let me, I I know I really do want to say that, but let me, uh, let me look at that one. No, actually, okay, well, that's just let me look. Well, see, I've already changed it it's with or without? No, that doesn't no, it works okay, it does work, all right I'm just concerned.
0:44:03 - Richard Campbell
This merge mode scares me because it sounds like it gets to make decisions that are almost certainly incorrect.
0:44:08 - Leo Laporte
It's doing more than yeah, you know I wouldn't, I wouldn't.
0:44:12 - Paul Thurrott
This is I mean, this is not something. I I mean literally as someone who has relied on word as the core tool of this entire adult life. I couldn't care less about this because, like I said I very specifically, you don't want to customize this you, you want minimal format because you're a writer as opposed to text, a poster maker or whatever.
That's right, yeah, that's right well, maybe you're in a workplace and you have a corporate standard for fonts and styles and I I get that right and maybe you get something from outside but then you'd have a custom style sheet, you'd have a custom normal, normal sheet.
I feel like what I just described. If you're at that level, you know how to do this, so I don't see what the big deal is, but whatever, anyway, they made the change. Everyone thinks it's super exciting, super, super Fabulous. The first time you paste, you get that little pop-up thing Change to the default pace. Just put it to what you want, don't worry about it. Yeah, that's sensible, that's reasonable, that's just my, that's my deal.
Yeah, um, if you were worried that, uh, antitrust regulators from around the world were ignoring Microsoft, so they could focus on, uh, apple, google and Meta and Amazon welfare no more. Um, according to a report, according to a report after I want to say this is I thought this was longer than this, but I guess it was it's a year long investigation into Microsoft bundling teams in office, office 365, really Microsoft 365. They have apparently decided they're going to charge Microsoft with a formal complaint, meaning that they have violated EU antitrust laws and will face some form of remedy, which could inform, include fines. And this is mostly interesting because we knew about this for a long time. Microsoft promised to make adjustments to put this off and run it from happening, and then, a month ago, they announced they were just going to pull teams out of office, and then they did it. They just did it proactively, and apparently that's not enough for the EU, so that's amusing on some level.
What more do they want? So the issue, as I understand it, is that when you decouple teams from we'll call it Microsoft 365, and, as a customer, choose not to use it or pay for it, save five dollars a month, right, and slack charges uh, I don't know what. It's nine or fifteen dollars a month for the same thing, and thus this isn't fair. So now we?
so there was a whole generation of people who complained that, and we're doing it today with apple, of course, that antitrust regulators are in some way designing the os now because they're they are putting in a ballot browser screen in windows 10 or what. Back then it would have been windows xp yeah, but it was select the browser.
Yeah, right, so they sort of so, but now we're escalating. See, I didn't agree with any of that. I, I, I honestly thought that, like, actually, I will tell you point blank what are the great things that came out of the us antitrust trial with mic? Which everyone, or most people, would describe as completely ineffectual, was the default apps interface that we still have in Windows. Now, granted, they're completely violating the spirit and point of it today in Windows 11. But for many, many years, we had this default app interface. That worked pretty great and okay, but that's one thing.
Now we have the EU describing how much an individual feature of office is worth per user, per month, and it's like, I don't know, it's. Yeah, that sounds pretty slippery. I don't know, I don't know. So I, I, it hasn't happened yet. This is based on a third party report, obviously, but but from the financial times, this is not exactly a rumor mongering publication. So probably is the case. I don't know, I don't know what to say. It's kind of weird. Right, like I, you did exactly what we wanted you to do.
0:47:56 - Richard Campbell
Yes, it's not, and arguably, did they really say had to give a discount at all, like why not? I would think the first move is not to give a discount at all like why not?
0:48:07 - Paul Thurrott
I would think the first move is not to give a discount. Yeah right, I look there is a an internal debate in our industry about the kind of monolithic, integrated approach offered by something like microsoft 365, where it's everything from the same company. It makes it really easy and it's maybe not in a bundled price right, yep, versus the kind of roll your own thing, right, you're like I'm gonna get google workspace I'm gonna.
0:48:26 - Richard Campbell
Maybe it works or maybe it doesn't. I'm gonna pay for slack you know whatever it is there's different ways to do things. Um, I I don't. C soon as you have multiple vendors with products we said are supposed to work together, you get finger pointing.
0:48:55 - Paul Thurrott
It's like I am looking for one throat to choke I think there I just came up with brad today I in in my sort of ape brain. I feel like one of the reasons windows has been so successful in the years in which it's been kind of less emphasized is just kind of inertia and that there's a there's a real stickiness in the in the commercial space with not making change. Right, that this is an organizationally these are. I mean, that's not my point, right?
0:49:22 - Richard Campbell
my point no, it's not, no I want that collective.
0:49:23 - AI
Thing. No, no it solves a lot.
0:49:24 - Richard Campbell
That's not my point, right, my point was no, it's not, I want that collective thing?
0:49:26 - Paul Thurrott
No, no, it solves a lot of problems. Not your point, but it ties into it. Like the, these are people that don't want to even upgrade to a new version of Windows.
No, let alone Because you think they're going to change platforms, because it's not broken like right, no, I I am not arguing, I'm just saying they're not going to notion or slack, that they've chosen their path. They're. You know, they're not so as consumers. Like when we look at things like google search or google maps or gmail or whatever, pick your product, I mean, yeah, they're like they're switching between music services or browsers, even or something. I guess there's issues, but it's not a big. You know, these things aren't super sticky Like. I think it's like it's doable. I don't know Spotify playlists. No, I'm not saying it's. Nothing is absolute. I'm just saying there's a real stickiness to the commercial space.
So when Microsoft makes this change A, it has 400 and whatever million Teams users, right, obviously, that bundling has been successful, plus no offense, but the product's good too. I I use teams and slack and I would drop slack in a heartbeat if I could. I hate slack, but team started off not so good but is much better than it used to be, so they're in a good place. They can say, yeah, we're gonna drop this and who cares? Because it's not. Honestly, I bet teams it's not like do you think this is going to be a month next, you know, next month or the next, where they're like, yeah, teams usage fell a couple of points because the eu did whatever they did never gonna happen?
0:50:53 - Richard Campbell
yeah, right, no, no. I mean, I always wondered how many installs of windows n wherever was? Um, what's that windows n? The version of windows that didn't haveE installed in it, that they had to make. But again, that was about consumers, right.
0:51:08 - Paul Thurrott
So, faced with a choice, honestly you could imagine I mean, was this even offered to businesses? Because I got to be honest. I could picture businesses saying you know what we are going to go with, that I don't want these people playing media stuff on their computers, I want them working.
0:51:28 - Richard Campbell
You could almost imagine the stupidity that could occur there I still think the count is probably zero.
0:51:31 - Paul Thurrott
I think virtually. Yeah, yeah, no listen, all these ideas were not winners. I'm not not claiming that default apps that was a good one, um, but as far as this goes, yeah, I, microsoft, uh, made the right decision because it doesn't hurt them. But it's also just the right decision because it should address this complaint.
0:51:47 - Richard Campbell
But apparently it does not, no so, and of course, the question now is if you lower, if you increase the discount to the same price as slack which you should not do, and this whole thing is stupid do you think it would change the customer in any way? I don't know, not at all.
0:52:03 - Paul Thurrott
No, this is a complete right so you have this user base that has just been alerted to the fact that they could save five dollars a month per user by not using the tool every one of them uses every single day, yeah, and now you send out a second email that says well, the eu came back and said no, so actually now you're going to save eight dollars a month, but you have to go pay for slack. Yeah, like no, we're not learning a new tool, screw that.
0:52:24 - Richard Campbell
Like there's not, no one's going to say yes no, and I'm not going to battle with the integration problems. I'm not going to to uh, you know create a separate icon. I'm not going to have a separate upgrade path. I'm not going to have to run different back-end services. Are you crazy?
0:52:39 - Paul Thurrott
right. Yeah, that's why it's this is a this doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I guess is the maybe easiest way to put it. So we'll see when they come out with the actual formal complaint. But what are you doing? Like this is, I don't know, We'll see. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now, but to me this doesn't make a lot of sense.
0:53:02 - Leo Laporte
You gave me the idea that I unpin teams from my taskbar, so thank you for that well, that's because the, the teams that's in windows is not teams, it's baby teams, baby teams.
0:53:13 - Paul Thurrott
I don't want baby, don't want that you should uninstall teams.
0:53:17 - Leo Laporte
How do I get big boy teams?
0:53:19 - Paul Thurrott
you can go to the microsoft store. That one I know is in the store wait a minute, I'm confused.
0:53:24 - Leo Laporte
What is it on here then?
0:53:25 - Paul Thurrott
oh, leo geez welcome to our horrible world, all right. So for right now, temporarily, on windows, there are multiple teams clients. The one that ships in windows 11 is for consumers. Even with pro named yep, confusingly named windows are microsoft teams. Yeah, the one you get in the store or download from the web is called Microsoft Teams Work or School, and that's real Teams. That's actually Microsoft Teams.
0:53:53 - Leo Laporte
So Big Boy Teams is actually for school. That's okay. It is or work, or work. Let's take a little break while I figure this all out.
0:54:04 - Paul Thurrott
We'll never figure this out, but we can take a break. It's not you.
0:54:08 - Leo Laporte
It's not me.
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0:56:49 - Richard Campbell
Edmonton managed to beat vancouver last night in game four of the second round of the playoffs ah, I like.
0:56:54 - Paul Thurrott
I love that you didn't identify the sport and I also love that you are a stereotypical canadian and that you love hockey for some reason seriously listen like it's optional.
0:57:03 - Richard Campbell
What are you talking about?
0:57:06 - Leo Laporte
well, you could be like curling is actually the national sport.
0:57:09 - Richard Campbell
Well, and my wife, and my wife plays in it. So, and as did my younger daughter back in the day. And have I read the two scientific papers to try and explain the the physical dynamics of how a curling rock works? Yes, I have. Do they contradict each other also? Yes, it's my mc'd end of year. Have I mc'd end of year curling events? Yeah, yeah, I've done that too. Do I have a set of curling widower jokes? Why?
0:57:35 - Leo Laporte
yes, I do. Does she make you sweep up?
0:57:40 - Richard Campbell
because she's, her arms are tired no, my experience of having a wife who curls is that on Tuesday nights she leaves before dinner. She gets back after midnight with whiskey on her breath and freezing cold feet that she puts in the small of my back. I love it.
0:57:59 - Leo Laporte
I think I want to curl. We have a curling league in the Bay Area. Jason Snell plays in it.
0:58:05 - Richard Campbell
We have a curling league in the Bay Area. Jason Snell plays in it. We have actually rented a sheet during the Christmas holidays and got all our friends and neighbors together to do a little bit of curling, which is really a great way to give your friends and neighbors a concussion. The curling ice is a lot harder than the skating ice. Oh, interesting. Well, because the ice is so hard, it's very slick.
0:58:26 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's interesting. They keep it really really hard.
0:58:29 - Richard Campbell
It's really hard, yeah, and so it's very easy to fall. Very famously, one of the best curlers in the world a guy named Brad Gushue fell on the ice during a tournament he's a skit. For one of the Canada teams Broke his nose. Skipped for one of the Canada teams, broke his nose. Oh no, bleeding, missed the rest of the end. Ran across the street to the clinic. They stuffed his nose full of batten and was back for the next end.
0:58:55 - Leo Laporte
Because curlers are badass man. It's a manly sport. That's what we know now.
0:58:58 - Richard Campbell
Well, here's the thing that I liked about having a daughter who curled Every curling rink has a bar. So it curled, every curling ring has a bar. So so I go, I gotta take you to practice, I can stay, and wait for you to finish.
0:59:10 - Leo Laporte
So now I have two candidates for the title of this show a wife who curls or a daughter who curls curls yeah, both legit, hey, thank you uh, we've got a. We've got a cleanup on aisle two. We have a new look for the Microsoft Teams hosts. Is that Richard and Paul that you've put in the image there? Jason Snell, hard at work? I don't know.
0:59:38 - AI
I guess it looks more like them.
0:59:41 - Leo Laporte
That's Paul on the right, isn't it no idea?
0:59:48 - Richard Campbell
Didn't know it was modified at all.
0:59:49 - Leo Laporte
Old sea captain. There you go, all right. Enough silliness, let's continue with the show. Where are we on the rundown now? Paul, I defer to your good judgment. I'm sorry, what? What are we doing? Oh, we're talking about AI, open, ai, open, ai. Did you watch the ridiculously short event that said nothing, did you? The open AI event yeah on Monday.
1:00:20 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I think it was nice that they repurposed an IKEA showroom.
1:00:24 - Leo Laporte
I like that set I was going to say I want to use that set.
1:00:27 - Paul Thurrott
I love that.
Here's the thing that event was short and, to the point, completely eclipsed Google's event for the next day. Yep, that was definitely a middle finger at Google, which I love, but here's the thing In their own awkward live way of doing things, they for the first time appeared to be humans Like. This is a company that appeared to date to be like robots, you know, and I have to say there was something a little refreshing about this event and its clarity, and this was driven home the next day when Google gave what felt like a four and a half hour keynote, about three million announcements that no human being could ever follow. And this was tied to something we were talking about earlier, where, you know, you go into this saying, well, I care about some things but not about others. You know, saying, well, I care about some things but not about others, you know, and that if we're going to have dev show keynotes that are marketing events, maybe it's time to split this thing up into better groups of things and keep the developer stuff to its own thing, right, and maybe even multiple developer keynotes where it's, you know, client side stuff for Android or Chrome OS or whatever it is, and then the backend stuff and the LLMs and everything.
I found the Google thing to be a mess and I feel bad because there's a perception that they're behind. Nothing that's happening right now could have happened with what Google did first, right, without that happening. I mean, I don't really think that they're behind, but there's a very real side effect, I think, to the perception of them being behind and they like I talked about stickiness earlier. They're a company that could suffer greatly, very quickly, in a way that Microsoft never did, if something better comes along right, yeah, 70 something percent In the end it's a one product company.
Yep, yes, by the way, that's something that appears to have come along and we've had several threats to it, but this one's pretty compelling, this one's, yeah, exactly so. Uh, yeah, we kind of ran through a couple of those reasons why, like you know, businesses have kind of stuck with windows over the years. I mean, uh, google does not have this advantage when it comes to, especially, search, which is, you know, tied directly to that 70 of of their income thing. So this human-sounding AI thing, laughing and joking and singing and handling interruptions with ease, has got to, although, by the way, google showed off a lot of stuff very similar to this right 24 hours later, open AI is riding kind of a PR wave. That, I think, is not benefiting Google in the slightest, and I think they would have done better, maybe toning it down a bit.
1:03:12 - Leo Laporte
What do you think of the Windows Weekly podcast featuring Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell?
1:03:21 - AI
Windows Weekly is a popular podcast, especially if you're into Microsoft and Windows News. Paul Thorat and Richard Campbell are both knowledgeable and provide in-depth insights. They have a good dynamic mixing expertise with a bit of humor. Do you listen to it regularly?
1:03:38 - Leo Laporte
I do. What do you think of Richard's whiskey recommendations?
1:03:45 - AI
Richard's whiskey recommendations are usually spot on. He seems to have a great palate and knows his stuff. Have you tried any of his suggestions?
1:03:54 - Leo Laporte
I'm afraid I've tried a few too many of his suggestions.
1:04:00 - AI
Haha, I can imagine he does make those recommendations sound pretty tempting. Do you have a favorite whiskey?
1:04:06 - Leo Laporte
She's real big on asking questions. Is that Scarlett Johansson? Yeah, that's what I thought.
1:04:13 - Richard Campbell
This is 4-0, which no wonder they're calling it her. Yeah, oh yeah.
1:04:21 - Leo Laporte
And now I don't have the perky Scar Jo that that they used in the demo, but I think this one's okay. I probably could make it so you can customize it with some you know, previous prompts. I think they beat google. I've been using gemini, gemini, gemini. Sorry, I keep interrupting you, paul, please go ahead. I'll stand down. I don't even know. I don't know. I just wanted to talk to her and she likes you. She really does, don't you like her?
1:04:55 - Paul Thurrott
I feel like that seemed fake Really To me. Yeah, it's almost like she's not a person and doesn't actually know anything about windows she's not.
1:05:03 - Leo Laporte
You know what she's not projecting? Yeah, she's not I.
1:05:07 - Richard Campbell
I think we can call it eliza 2.0, because it just kicks the question back to you.
1:05:13 - Paul Thurrott
Essentially, it's very rogerian it's, it's the way a um like a future. What do you call it? A palm reader works, like you know, asks insightful questions and it's like, oh my god, they know me it's, but it is better than bob in your life it is better than that um of course it isn't. It's just joking, but I'm just it's uh, but it isn't in a way, because I I don't know the whole the way that went down was just like. Let me ask you to uh something on your mind, leo?
1:05:40 - Leo Laporte
yeah, I was just wondering. I was just wondering what the latest version of Windows 11 is, because you can ask her questions. She's thinking that's that sound. She clicks when she thinks.
1:05:51 - AI
This version includes various improvements and new features, such as enhancements to the Microsoft Copilot, which now supports more commands and can be undocked to move around like any other app window.
1:06:04 - Paul Thurrott
Additionally there have been updates to File Explorer.
1:06:07 - AI
Quick Settings and Phone Link capabilities. This version is expected to launch later this year.
1:06:13 - Leo Laporte
Oh, later. Okay, that's true. What about widgets?
1:06:22 - AI
In the latest updates to Windows 11, Microsoft has made several enhancements to widgets. For example, the start menu update includes the ability to display widgets on either side of the interface. This change is part of a broader effort to make widgets more integrated and accessible across the Windows environment.
1:06:42 - Leo Laporte
Additionally, the quick settings panel has been updated to support more customized Anyway, I don't have to go on and on, but you see that it is more than just Rogerian psychoanalysis here. I mean, there's actually information she's offering because it can search the web now and stuff like that Also. You notice how much faster it is. That's the big improvement. You can almost have a conversation with it. Yeah, and it was tripping out to the cloud to do how much faster it is.
1:07:05 - Richard Campbell
That's the big improvement. You can almost have a conversation with it. Yeah, and it's, and it and it was tripping out to the cloud to do that, so it was a pretty good. Trip, yeah, quick trip.
1:07:13 - Leo Laporte
Anyway, sorry, should I ask it about the Edmonton Oilers? No, please don't. No, no, no, I can do it.
1:07:30 - Paul Thurrott
I don't know what to say other than they're doing everything, and I'm not sure if it matters, you know.
1:07:35 - Richard Campbell
Um, I don't. It feels like a race, you know, I'm also I'm glad to see the nano versions and that term becoming popular. Microsoft's got one now Google's got one, like yeah what are they?
This is how products. They're the versions that will run in the phone. Remember we were having this conversation a year ago about how big llms are, and it's like we're going to be dependent on the cloud until they figure out how to make a smaller one. Well, here we are a year later and they've got it down to something small enough that it can run in a top tier smartphone, which is, of course, by any metric, a supercomputer right, which is why also this next generation of phones we've seen rumors about this for pixel and iphone.
1:08:16 - Paul Thurrott
It will happen to samsung, obviously are going to have a lot more ram than before. Right, this has suddenly become an explosive need on the phone because of these llms yeah, expecting phones to get a lot warmer.
You know those gpus are fine because you don't use them much, but you're about to yep, um, we're also going to see, uh, gemini nano in google chrome on the desktop, which is kind of fascinating. Yeah and uh, they didn't talk about this too much at the show, but I actually talked to google ahead of the show and I asked about this explicitly, and they're working with their partners in chromium, including microsoft. They're also working with other browser makers, like mozilla and Apple, to make sure that there's basically a standard for how AI works locally in web browsers. Right, and they did not say it this way, but the way I took it, well, they did say explicitly based on WebGL and WASM WebAssembly. And then the part they didn't say explicitly and this is my opinion, or my educated guess is you know, google, google will have Gemini nano, of course, in their browser.
Microsoft, of course, we'll have whatever, um, local LLM. I, they have, I, they would be smart to think about a rebranding there. You know, call it co-pilot something, co-pilot nano, perhaps you know? Um, just for that kind of a effect. Um, apple's going to do what they're going to announce next month, whatever that is, and we'll have all these browsers that are running on devices that have MPUs and can have multiple LLMs, in many cases right, installed locally and you as the user, maybe, or the platform maker, whoever, will decide what you get? But maybe you just decide based on the browser you choose.
1:09:50 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, just like you, sometimes some folks will pop up with three different search engines and run the same search term. You know, I always look at the LLM's approach to finding out information, like hitting the I'm feeling lucky button on the Google homepage. Right, because it just gives you an answer and it gives it to you confidently, right? You know, accuracy is secondary to that point. And so what's the workaround of that?
1:10:13 - Paul Thurrott
well, let's run more than one yeah, I mean I, I look at this more of a. This kind of hybrid approach is you can? Google's been very explicit about this in the past with the ai features that are on their phones, but we're going to see a lot of this. We're going to see this, I think, next week, with microsoft and windows. You know there'll be specific workloads, whatever their tasks, that run locally, and then there are going to be these hybrid instances like Leo, distribute Chat, gbt, where it's actually going up to the cloud for information, so, and they'll combine them in whatever way makes the most sense, depending on what it is you're doing.
1:10:45 - Richard Campbell
And noticing. You know, once upon a time we were talking about how Google wasn't jumping into this, wasn't leading this, because it impaired their primary revenue stream. What was showing ads on the Google search page? And now they are jumping into it because even only getting a single search is better than no search at all.
1:11:01 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, and actually anyone who uses Google search will know because you see it all the time that they're doing AI summaries right at the top. I mean a lot of times you just want that answer. I'm not. Look, I didn't want you to give me work, I wanted you to give me the answer, right, I don't know you spend a lot of time. You know control clicking on links in a Google search result.
1:11:22 - Richard Campbell
Because we have a habit of looking for accuracy.
1:11:26 - AI
And so we look at multiple results and correlate for accuracy.
1:11:29 - Richard Campbell
Right, that's right. Now we're heading over a tool that is clearly identified that accuracy is not important I'm going to make something up here.
1:11:36 - Paul Thurrott
But you know, you have, like, a particular fitbit and you want to configure a particular feature and you google search that thing and you're in your explicit I have a fitbit, charge six, I want to, whatever it is, turn off this feature. Um, if you go through the search results aside from the annoyances like, the top three results are videos, which is not what I want. I want text and there's no way to configure that you get into a point where you dive into stories and as you're reading it, you realize they're talking about a different Fitbit or they're talking about a different feature and the AI, unfortunately, is informed by the same problem, right, and so they'll read it off as an answer. Yep, with, you know, no sense of humility whatsoever and you think, well, that must be it. And when that's not it, because that feature doesn't exist or the interface is different, you know, you're just, you're on your own right and so this is, and to be clear, software has no humility.
That's not a thing well, I I should have said with uh, great confidence, maybe it was the better way to put it, using confident language that it doesn't actually understand. So what do you think about this, though? So we have two companies that dominate mobile. We have mobile dominating personal computing. What's Microsoft's role here other than on the PC? Like what can they do?
1:12:51 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, no, you're right. And now you see them making moves with alternatives to open AI. Like, do they have?
1:12:58 - Paul Thurrott
to open the store? Yeah, but what does that look like for an app? In other words, you're an app maker, it could be anything, it doesn't matter what you do. Maybe you make images or something right and you're like I'm going to make an app for the iPhone.
1:13:18 - Richard Campbell
I mean Apple, apple's gonna have something to use that. Or what's the? What's the value proposition? For going with the microsoft solution.
1:13:21 - Paul Thurrott
I think microsoft's pretty happy with the, with the shovel role they have open, ai runs on azure, the back end right. Yeah, the plug part or whatever.
1:13:24 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, so they can afford, they can. I don't think they feel like they have an existential threat on the front end. Yep, they're definitely trying to play because they should, uh, and they're happily, you know. Do you see any threats to m365 co-pilot? Like, where's google in the doc side of the equation. On, this.
1:13:43 - Paul Thurrott
So that was that's all that was. They announced that. So my central complaint about the google io was that the first 30 to 40 minutes should have been. We have and, by the way, I pointed this out in an article I wrote this morning. One hour and 51 minutes into a one hour and 52 minute keynote presentation, google CEO Sundar Pichai said we have 15 products that all have over half a billion users. Each and every one of them is getting better because of AI.
Here's an idea, sundar, that should have been the opening line of your keynote and the next 30 minutes should have been you showing off those features, right? So Gmail and Google Workspace and Docs and all that stuff is getting the same kind of a co-pilot pain on the side that will do all the AI whatchamajigs. They just didn't bother to tell us it's out there.
1:14:33 - Richard Campbell
I mean there are screenshots and they blog posts and they talk about it. But yeah, now you're talking about the culture of google with this, this was this.
1:14:37 - Paul Thurrott
Was you leading right?
1:14:38 - Richard Campbell
if you, if you're coming after microsoft in a way that matters to microsoft, right if you're going to try. But the thing is, are you google an enterprise company or you google a consumer company? So I.
1:14:50 - Paul Thurrott
I I'm not contradicting what I said earlier, but I but, in the sense that I know that this contradicts what I said earlier, I will just say this um, companies or people pay for Microsoft 365, and that is whatever cost it is per user, per month, per year, whatever it is. Um, the cost of copilot on top of that is astronomical. I'm not saying it's not worth it, but it is extremely expensive, right. Economical, I'm not saying it's not worth it, but it is extremely expensive, right. And if, what? If there was? And then, because there will be these ad hoc solutions. I was saying most like you said, you want to strangle the neck or whatever. You what?
if you could save 67 or whatever it is, by going with a third-party ai that you plug in because it's you know these office apps and microsoft 365 are extensible and you choose open ai chat, something, something, or you choose the anthropic something, something or some uh grammarly suite that's coming or whatever it is, and that's that in some ways is a threat to microsoft right, because that is a potential world in which growth slows dramatically maybe yeah no, I think the advantage of voting the front end is have is having more control over where the pipeline goes.
1:16:01 - Richard Campbell
I think they've got the back end advantage of an awful lot of this. Stuff runs on azure and they have, you know, done very well in terms of cornering the compute resources for operating a lot of these things. But they should not give up the front end. They've got to go to the front end.
1:16:17 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, no, I agree, I'm just curious, I mean, and I know they have today little on-device models and I was kind of suggesting maybe what they should have is one they call Copilot, something whatever. That's just branding. But you know, I'm just curious. I mean in my own little world and I have a very narrow view of, uh, how I might use AI because of the narrow way that I work, right, but, um, I, you can install a Grammarly client on desktop. Uh, that works in any app that has text. You can do it. There's a language tool version which I actually prefer, but whatever, um, and that means you could use a text editor. You could use a text editor, you could use a LibreOffice writer, which maybe hasn't had spelling or grammar checking updated in 10 years, for all. I know who cares, it won't matter, because there's this outside service that in many cases is free and just does it for you. So the how do I say this?
1:17:08 - Richard Campbell
I mean, the problem is they aren't free. Somebody does have to pay for them. Okay, because they are. Pay for them. Okay, because they are computationally intensive.
1:17:16 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but the threat to paid Microsoft Copilot or whatever is cheaper AI? Because the problem about AI, as we keep saying, is AI is not a big bucket killer app.
1:17:30 - Richard Campbell
It's a million things in a million places and it begs the question, question like how long does this stay? $30 a month, right, I think they put that. They put that price out there to anchor and to get people to think that way and to get as many customers as possible. I think it was a total race. Remember, this product is an accident.
1:17:49 - Paul Thurrott
No, no, I understand, but do you think it's good?
1:17:57 - Richard Campbell
You actually believe that the price is going to go down or do you think the amount of features will go up exponentially in the prices? Look at what happened to the pricing of cloud. They, they smash, they slash the price of cloud. And then people bought and spent more to the point where now they now they can't really cut the price anymore.
1:18:07 - Paul Thurrott
People have to optimize just talked about stickiness. I mean, I I'm not. I don't mean to argue the point, but it's more like an open question. I mean, uh, there is a stickiness associated with uh, cloud storage, because now your stuff is there, you know. Yeah, um, if you're just again, I'm limiting this to a very specific use case, but if I'm worried about spelling and grammar checking and uh, I'm like, well, grammarly is not doing it for me anymore, I'm going to switch this other tool.
1:18:29 - Richard Campbell
It's not very sticky, you know it's easy to do that, yeah, especially when they're independent like that, as opposed to integrating the product, and I would speak. I know microsoft is clearly concerned about doing a better job on the consumer space, which is why they've got the deep mind guys, you know, and are trying to do a separate consumer play. Not that we've seen anything yet. Maybe next week.
1:18:50 - Paul Thurrott
I doubt it, but I don't know for sure that's going to take some time, right? I mean, I think so I think it's going to be a year, I mean I you shouldn't expect and I don't mean you, richard, I mean no one should expect an immediate turnaround on that.
1:19:00 - Richard Campbell
It's no, I, but I'm all. I really look at this and go, hey, this feels like the html5 races again. You know when yeah yeah, ie9 and and chrome going back and forth, which, by the, by the way, benefited the entire system. Like, javascript grew up as a language because of that duel. Not that you know, javascript is all that and sliced bread, but it is a lingua franca of the web and it does run outside the browser pretty darn well these days. It has its own problems.
1:19:31 - Paul Thurrott
Even Microsoft has contributed to its quality, absolutely so through text script, and so if this is the shape.
1:19:38 - Richard Campbell
You know. The shape of the thing I took away from google is okay. They're all on this. They want to compete, they're no longer holding back trying to defend their turf and we're going to benefit because it makes both companies have to get better. I am very concerned when one tech giant believes they are dominating a stack like this because they don't get it.
1:19:59 - Paul Thurrott
I do think google is kind of operating from a defensive position in a sense. Um, you know whether that's real well?
1:20:07 - Richard Campbell
the biggest proof is that keynote. If you were feeling confident I know you'd go after the other guy that this the story you told of the 15 apps so forth. That is I'm feeling confident. I know you'd go after the other guy that this the story you told of the 15 apps, so forth. That is, I'm feeling confident. To go punch microsoft where it counts in the enterprise.
1:20:20 - Paul Thurrott
Everyone was asleep by the time he said that. That should have been right up front and that's just proof that they're not confident.
1:20:26 - Richard Campbell
They're defending their turf first and then talking about maybe we can go on the offensive. I, I agree.
1:20:32 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so Microsoft's event is going to be very interesting. I've got to say, the Google IO thing this year and maybe not just this year, but this year specifically felt very much like Build. The same kind of this could have been shorter, could have been more concise, could have been more targeted.
1:20:50 - Richard Campbell
Just a reminder that Google is a big company with big company politics. If you didn't believe that, watched yesterday's keynote well, look at how much flack they took last year for no android. And so, okay, android's in, but it's day two, right?
1:21:04 - Paul Thurrott
yeah, I mean, look, there's a certain confidence to android in the sense that this thing has. What is it? Four billion users or something.
1:21:09 - Richard Campbell
I mean, it's like you know. Sorry I didn't have time for a keynote.
1:21:12 - Paul Thurrott
I was too busy selling product yeah, sorry I didn't have too much time to describe the air that you all take for granted. But uh, we're, you know we're talking about this other thing. Yeah, yeah, um, yeah. So I, you know build's going to be interesting. I think apple wwc is going to be particularly interesting. Yeah, I don't know they're ready yet either. That's why, that's why I, I, um, there's a sense. Well, we'll see what next week looks like.
But you know this, these shows always come down to the wire, as you know better than anybody, from the people who are presenting and the topics. And I, you know, I know last year at uh actually this was at ignite I was talking to someone about all the uh from microsoft, about all the um co-pilots, and they were saying, up until like 10 pm last night there was going to be another one, and someone on our team said guys, we're nine months into this. These two things are the same. We're not really going to announce two. Right, we're going to do one. And they pulled one at the last second because you know they were right. But you get into kind of a frenzy.
1:22:14 - Richard Campbell
I think this is how you get things like the side remember the sidekick. Yeah, there's your frenzy. You know we're so worried about mobile. We actually have competing teams and they both release. Yeah, it's like, yeah, now you need to clean that up, mess up in public. So I mean it's good that they're starting to rationalize and that and that was always my concern with this whole thing it's like you guys are going too fast and you're going to make the situation worse, exactly right.
1:22:38 - Paul Thurrott
So, like I said, I I'm like we're microsoft focus, obviously, but I pay a lot of attention to google and to apple and all this stuff.
1:22:46 - Richard Campbell
And this is a particularly fascinating year for this because I mean, I mean, we're clearly leading into your, into your apple story. Uh, I am fascinated with what. How angry was uh tim cook to create that meeting that killed like they missed the ai wave?
1:23:06 - Paul Thurrott
I. That story, which is based on the story he's referring to, is, is based on multiple sources, but essentially, craig federighi and one of the other top level executives looked at chat GPT for right after early and it would have been 2023. So that had come out, remember, in November of 2022, 22. Yeah, yeah, and we're we're shocked by how high quality it was and how it obsoleted instantly Siri a service, by the way, apple ignored for a decade plus Um. But okay, you know, fair enough. I don't know why it took that to make them realize that there was something horribly wrong, but you know, fair enough.
But literally, apple leadership came to understand this as an existential threat that if other companies do AI and we don't, it's the same thing. It's the same reason. They went after game streaming services. You know, we have this hardware that is awesome and we sell the hardware because you need it to do, in this case, play games. And if you sell a service that plays games over the internet and our hardware doesn't matter, no one's going to pay a premium for it because they can play these games anywhere. You know, it's kind of a cycle that could lead to their downfall and they realized that AI was the same thing and they had a reorg that they never discussed publicly and as part of that, they killed this self-driving program and they put a lot of those engineers on AI.
And that was a year ago, February. That was probably their best AI people working on arguably and so far unsolvable problem yes, how would you like to do something that will ship next year instead of something that may never ship? Totally, does that sound well? It doesn't matter how it sounds because you're doing it. Yeah, this is what. This is what we need.
1:24:46 - Richard Campbell
It was, yeah, we need this now so, especially if you, if they, if they were looking at from the chat gT point of view, it's like this is the new UX and we built this company's. This company's fortunes are built on a UX of a phone that defined an industry and now we're about to be disrupted.
1:25:03 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, and the component like okay, look, it's not hard to imagine Siri being more sophisticated. Right, it's ridiculously inept, but you look, and it's not hard to imagine the thing I described for Google. Uh, them and Microsoft will describe in windows and apps and stuff and Apple will. You know, our photos app will get better like this. Our camera app will get better like this. Our chat app will do this, or you know, you can. You can see it like it's going to happen. There's no doubt about it. But the big thing to me is Google just paid them 20 million, $20 billion or whatever, last year to be default search.
1:25:33 - Richard Campbell
Yeah.
1:25:34 - Paul Thurrott
I gotta think that's up in the air yeah.
1:25:38 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, so, um, now we'll swap that over for a different product If you can get it ready in time, or we'll make it, I think, although I think it's it doesn't have the backend for this. They don't, I know, I know, but it's not that easy to build out the infrastructure you're talking about. Right Again, microsoft is lucky that they were in the right place at the right time, although, admittedly, kevin Sott was sent on the mission to go get workloads. He just happened to get the right one.
1:26:05 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, apple has one advantage over most of the planet, which is that they have a near infinite number of dollars. Yeah, and they have the UX, and they have the UX and they have a crazy, a steady income stream. You know, a bad quarter for Apple, like last quarter, was like oh, they didn't do it, the chicken ass. Like I mean, you know they're doing great, so you have to kind of put it they're a multi-trillion business for a reason, yeah, so anyway, they're the wild card yeah, so anyway, they're the wild card I'm, I'm fascinated to see what they come up with, because the google stuff you're like yeah, no, this makes sense like but yeah, well, now you're talking about the culture there.
1:26:38 - Richard Campbell
It's like cook is not familiar with chasing. Cook came into a company on uh, was part of making that company on top and that's been his life. I'm glad he's afraid company.
1:26:51 - Paul Thurrott
They were still. It was mac os 10, right? Yeah, I guess yeah, but you know they were, you know?
1:26:56 - Richard Campbell
no, he was part of what meant putting them on top. And the question now is, now that he faces what I think they perceive as an existential threat, yep, can he respond? Can he chase? Does he know how?
yeah, we're going to see whether he can be as decisive as sachin nadella was with the ai stuff yeah, so yeah, no, we're doing this, you know we'll see I can't, like I said I can't, I can't wait no, I think, and all in all, like I'm so, this looks so good for the industry, for us and for the industry as a whole. Yeah, because it is moving forward. We have been somewhat stagnant. Oh my god, yes, the cloud, the keyboard screen, keyboard mouse touches a variation on mouse has been pretty much the same for quite a while.
1:27:38 - Paul Thurrott
Phones have been the same since 2007. Pretty much the web has been the same since Chrome.
1:27:45 - Richard Campbell
You know I mean well and cloud's been just a replacement web approach and now we're starting to get diversity. Like computing, unique computing resources is a diversity element to it that opens up new possibilities. You don't get the large-scale llm revolution without cloud and that's probably the first time you can really say that cloud's been replacing existing infrastructure for quite some time. You know, once upon a time I signed contracts with akamai for, you know, cdn services for performance and endpoints and stuff. Now you just position in the cloud Like that's just been evolving. But this is a product that only emerged the way it did because the cloud infrastructure was already there and got repurposed.
1:28:27 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, and there are only three companies on earth that could even do this.
1:28:32 - Richard Campbell
I mean maybe four but yeah, it would be very tough to start now. Right, right, and that's largely what you're talking about, abilene, you do Right. Well, I can't, I'm just going to say the same thing. If they're going to go racing after these guys.
1:28:47 - Paul Thurrott
I cannot wait. I also want to read about what didn't happen.
1:28:50 - Richard Campbell
I also want to read about what didn't happen, right? Look, they bailed on maps and they bailed on search. They can bail on building their own LLM, yeah. Or they can be the ones who focus solely on the client side. Llm.
1:29:07 - Paul Thurrott
There is going to be a race on the client side and it's going to be interesting to see which combinations come out as being better for different workloads or whatever. Interesting to see which combinations come out as being better for different workloads or whatever. Um, we talked about this just in the context of, uh, intel, amd and qualcomm all having their own little mpu implementations on windows. Yeah, and what we're going to find over different generations, what's going to go up and down, but some of them are going to be awesome for this, some of them are going to be awesome for this and eventually, well, I'm sure it will even out in time. But, um, apple does have a I mean, they have a years long head start in the um client mpu space, for sure.
1:29:41 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah, no, and they own the hardware. Like that. They got tools. They do not have a worldwide collection of massive data centers, and so hopefully they won't try and build one. That seems foolish.
1:29:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so I just fill you in from the other side of the aisle, because we talk about this a lot Apple there were strong rumors that Apple was actually going to build their own AI PC for data centers. They do have data centers, but they also use AWS and Azure, as you know. They also hired John Gianandrea away from Google, who was one of their big AI guys. He's in charge of AI now at Apple. The thing about Apple we never know is what are they doing inside?
1:30:22 - Paul Thurrott
They may have been developing AI solutions for 10 years you would have told this story would have been when Apple started their self-driving car efforts. There would have been stories about apple hired some expert from.
1:30:34 - Leo Laporte
They did they hired a ton of people in tesla. Of course they did. That's what I mean. Like they did, they hired a guy from waymo.
1:30:40 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, yeah, yeah, this is what happens, right?
1:30:42 - Richard Campbell
so yeah, we'll see, I you know, it occurs to me because literally in the past less than a day, saskovar has announced leaving open ai.
1:30:49 - Leo Laporte
Where do you think?
1:30:50 - Richard Campbell
he's going. Yeah right, where do you think he's the other? The other who would make him the largest offer?
1:30:56 - Leo Laporte
is, as you know, apple has is apparently very close, the rumor says, to a deal with open ai and has also been talking to google, so it's perfectly possible that apple will avoid this whole safety conundrum.
1:31:08 - Paul Thurrott
You know google's gotten some spots on their escutcheon because well, that Well, you still got to have something on the end that's preventing us to really you could have Siri as a front end. By the way, they didn't develop Siri in-house.
1:31:20 - Richard Campbell
They acquired it. Yeah, it was acquired.
1:31:22 - Leo Laporte
So they could easily, I think, take Siri and plug it into. I would love to see them in fact plug them into the OpenAI 4.0.
1:31:32 - Paul Thurrott
I think that's exactly what it's going to be. That's what I think. That's what I'm doing. With an iPhone, I press the action button Exactly when you hear that woman's voice, whether it was at the OpenAI event Monday or on your phone or whatever. It's hard not. You think like that's Siri, isn't it? Is it literally the same woman?
1:31:50 - Leo Laporte
It's Scar fake, oh, and by the way it sounds, shortly after I did that demo, sam Altman tweeted oh, we don't have the new cutesy voice in yet. Wait till you hear it. So the voice we heard at the demo is not the voice you're hearing. It sounds like it's not, that it's not the natural voice and I've been trying really hard to get her to be like. I asked her to do it as a like as a valley girl.
Like as a valley girl, can you recommend a good whiskey, but do it in a perky valley girl voice.
1:32:22 - AI
Oh my gosh, like you have to try Woodford Reserve. It's totally amazing. It's like super smooth with these yummy vanilla and caramel vibes. Plus it's so classy. Trust me, you'll love it.
1:32:33 - Leo Laporte
See, we don't need you anymore, richard, you can.
1:32:36 - Paul Thurrott
Clearly, oh my God. Actually, the problem was we don't need anybody anymore, we don't need Google anymore, oh my God.
1:32:44 - Leo Laporte
But that's still not the perky, perky voice that we heard in the demo. Imagine that as Siri.
1:32:51 - Paul Thurrott
Well, that's what I'm saying. It's not hard yeah. You can see it coming so.
1:32:55 - Leo Laporte
I think we don't. Here's always the problem with Apple we have no idea because it's an opaque box and we're just guessing. Yep.
1:33:01 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
1:33:02 - Leo Laporte
Who knows what they've got. That's why it's so fascinating.
1:33:04 - Paul Thurrott
So they're going to come out and they're either going to excite or disappoint something in between, whatever it is. And then there are going to be the Mark Ehrman stories or whatever, where they're like oh, they were right at the cusp of you know, the last minute they said no to this thing and we'll see what happens.
1:33:19 - Leo Laporte
I'm fascinated by it. I love it that we got a race and everybody should be beating their butts off. And there's also Anthropic and Perplexity. There's all these other companies Right, that's right. And many companies are building on top of OpenAI.
1:33:31 - Paul Thurrott
That's right yeah exactly.
1:33:33 - Leo Laporte
In fact, that's one of the things Google announced yesterday. Is they really want to make Gemini more palatable?
1:33:38 - Paul Thurrott
for developers when it looked like Sony was going to use Microsoft's I guess, was it Azure? It was Azure, I guess, for their cloud service, right? The conversation then was you know, microsoft could still win by losing, right, and companies like OpenAI, microsoft, google, amazon, I guess yeah could win by losing. In other words, there's not an Alexa logo on something, there's not a Google logo on something or whatever it is, but whatever wins, so to speak, is running on their infrastructure in the back end. They're still going to be okay.
1:34:11 - Leo Laporte
And don't leave meta out of the game. They've got an open source solution that I think is very interesting. Yeah, so, uh, I mean it's, it's a, it's a great, it's a horse race. It's just what you want. You were bemoaning the fact that tech got boring after the iphone. Well, this is everything we've been asking for yeah it's bad and it's a little scary crazy it's a little scary.
1:34:30 - Paul Thurrott
It's scary because it came out of nowhere. You know, uh, companies like microsoft and google have been kind of talking about ai for so long. It's it turned into like spell check. You know. I'm like, yeah, this is pretty interesting.
1:34:40 - Richard Campbell
Um, the open ai stuff I was doing the the software development and challenging times keynote, you know, in 2022, and saying, yeah, you know you should probably shelve your AI projects because you got to focus on things that are going to have immediate return. Yeah, whoops, yeah.
1:34:59 - Paul Thurrott
This is like. This is like when people like oh man, you're like, Microsoft didn't respond well to the iPhone. You know, nobody did Nobody did.
1:35:08 - Richard Campbell
It was a 2G phone. It was terrible.
1:35:10 - Paul Thurrott
There were companies that did only that. Yeah, nokia, a Palm, motorola, you know whatever a rim. Like I, my phone was a tiny part of Microsoft. There were companies that only did this and didn't see this coming and didn't respond properly. I mean some.
1:35:27 - Richard Campbell
This stuff is disruptive you know these are black Swan events.
1:35:31 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, the thing, the thing that is really interesting. We talked about this yesterday on this on the google io show, the re, and this was alex canter. It's a big technology podcast and blog. The really interesting play for this is not is is moving from the phone to the glasses or the earbuds or something. Uh, and I think we're very close. We're the year or two off from I'm not talking hololens, I'm not talking vision pro. From what you're wearing right now, richard, with a heads-up display earpiece. It's hearing what you're, what you're saying, it's seeing what you're looking at and it's and it's whispering in your ear and I think I can't wait for that. That's going to be amazing.
1:36:13 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, presumably it's at least in a tethered model where it may or may not be local, wireless or wired.
1:36:19 - Leo Laporte
The medical glasses are not, or did they do their thing?
1:36:23 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, just put the sensors on the glasses, put the compute down in the pocket.
1:36:27 - Leo Laporte
Maybe. Yeah, We'll see at first.
1:36:30 - Paul Thurrott
Eventually, it'll be embedded in your skin. You know you'll be a cy. Eventually you'll be embedded in your skin, you know I mean there'll be, you'll be a cyborg full of sensors look the as soon as you, as soon as you get upset because you've left your phone somewhere.
1:36:40 - Richard Campbell
Like you lost a limb. You are a cyborg.
1:36:42 - Leo Laporte
You have a digital extension well, that's all of us now, isn't it?
1:36:44 - Richard Campbell
yeah, that's right you, just you keep it on the outside of your body because a where's my phone?
1:36:49 - Leo Laporte
yeah, and you see my wallet. I'm cinder, I'm used to. You used to be my wallet, right, I used to pat my pants for my wallet. Now it's my phone. I don't even know where my wallet is. Who needs a wallet? I got a phone.
1:36:59 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, I live in Pennsylvania, so unfortunately I do need a wallet for right now.
1:37:03 - Leo Laporte
But yeah, I'm with you Out here in the 21st century, we just use our watches to pay for everything.
1:37:13 - Paul Thurrott
Look from here. California is just shining light on a hill.
1:37:15 - Leo Laporte
I can't even imagine what this utopia is like but we'll get, we'll get there, you'll get there. Cash is still king in central pa I literally had someone forward.
1:37:23 - Paul Thurrott
Someone from pennsylvania forwarded something from a business in pennsylvania. That was literally like we got to bring cash back, because when we have, we use cash, the bank doesn. We use cash, the bank doesn't get any money.
1:37:33 - Leo Laporte
Credit cards don't get any money. Yep, there's all kinds of the government doesn't get any of it there.
1:37:38 - Paul Thurrott
I have an idea why don't we go back to the barter system? Yeah, I was just going to say you're a step back away from barter. I'll grow sweet potatoes so you can give me like a computer.
1:37:53 - Leo Laporte
I got a couple of chickens in the back of the way I get to buy mushrooms.
1:37:55 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, I had to write a check the other day and I really couldn't remember exactly right.
1:37:57 - Paul Thurrott
What do you put on these things? I can't get through writing a check without my hand cramping up that's how bad I write.
1:38:02 - Leo Laporte
I could type better than anybody, but when it comes to writing, does this look right? If I did anything wrong, tell me. He said no.
1:38:08 - Paul Thurrott
I think that's like well if one thing gets upside down, um, lisa, usually we put that information on the front of the check.
1:38:15 - Leo Laporte
Lisa wrote the wrong date on it. Uh, at least I got the year it's pretty.
1:38:20 - Paul Thurrott
I had someone tell me one time I couldn't write a check with a red pen that used to be the case, right I, I listen. I used to work in banking. I know nothing is universal, but all these things that people think are real just don't exist. It's just like yeah, that's what everyone says Like Mama Cass was killed by eating a sandwich.
1:38:42 - AI
That never happened, but you know what the story's fun, I get it.
1:38:46 - Leo Laporte
Well, one thing that is true and I think, richard, you kind of nailed it is this stuff sneaks up on you and it's hard to know what's going to be next. That's right, and anytime you make a prediction in tech you know you're running a big risk.
1:39:00 - Paul Thurrott
It's not even a prediction. It's like something will come out Like an iPad is a good example, apple Watch is a good example, or actually the iPhone may be the ultimate example, because there were people who were like nope, actually the iPhone may be the ultimate example because there were people who were like Nope, not going to do it. You need a keyboard, whatever it is you know like, and you're not even confronted by the future. Sometimes you don't see it, you know. So it's bad enough trying to predict what's going to happen in the future. But someone announces something. When the future arrives, you go and you're just like Nope, I'm on the back of the pickup truck, I'm doing great. You're like yeah, you're going to run out of gas. You know, I don't know.
1:39:37 - Richard Campbell
And I'm not pointing fingers at other people.
1:39:38 - Paul Thurrott
I'm doing the same thing. I'm including myself in this. We all do this.
1:39:44 - Leo Laporte
Well, today's the new iPad. We will have new iPads coming up in a bit on MacBreak Weekly. Jason Snell has his, john Slonina has his. I'm waiting. I'm looking, watching my nest cam with eagle eyes, waiting for the UPS man to come.
1:39:59 - Paul Thurrott
I wow. Okay, so just real quick. Last item in the AI list it's only semi AI related arm announced their revenues. You remember this company has only been public for a little while, so that's a make anything every quarter, um, they almost had a billion dollars in revenue.
They're getting there um revenues up 47 year over year. That's hilarious, uh, handily beating expectations. However, their full year forecast was disappointing because I think wall street expected, and I think wall street expected arm to benefit more from this kind of ai wave than they are. So, not coincidentally, they announced two days later we're gonna make ai chips, so, um. But the best thing to me about arm is just their um, uh, what, their uh, what do you call it? Their margins arms margins are. Let me go to find this exact figure. It's so beautiful, uh, I can't. Why can't I find it? I want to say their margins are 97 and the reason is they don't have any overhead at all, right, which is hilarious oh sorry, 96, they're literally just royalties and and licensing.
1:41:12 - Richard Campbell
That's it.
1:41:13 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, they have like three guys working in a corner office, uh, one guy's got a drafting board and uh, that's their whole business. It's hilarious. So yeah, 96 margins.
1:41:22 - Leo Laporte
So take that apple well, I'm just glad they're on top of the spatial computing revolution. I okay, let me revolution is it?
1:41:33 - Paul Thurrott
is it a revolution Computing revolution? I?
1:41:37 - Leo Laporte
Okay, is it a revolution? Is it? Is it a revolution?
1:41:40 - Richard Campbell
Is it going to be a revolution? It'll be part of the history once the future is written.
1:41:44 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, and then there was this thing called Vision Pro, I mean. Or there was a slow boil thing called VR. That happened over 30 years and it never happened. Never happened. What do you call that?
1:41:57 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, but the same way that the mutant predicated the iPhone. Like you can see the lineage, maybe yeah.
1:42:04 - Leo Laporte
Maybe, I think it's a dead end. I think it's a cul-de-sac on the road to the future. It's just a little place. Somebody turned and said, hey, the gps says go this way.
1:42:14 - Paul Thurrott
And then they got there and the bridge was the glasses you were describing or whatever contact lenses eventually are essentially sort of an ar experience. We have an overlay and information. That's not what the vision pro is I mean, that's no. No, I understand but I mean. But you could argue that it's a yeah even that is making something different, right. Yep, I'm not defending Vision Pro For a friend. I don't want to put myself in the. I don't know why you guys hate Apple so much here at Twitch, but let me set you straight.
1:42:46 - Leo Laporte
I love my. Have I mentioned my HP? I love this. Yeah, beautiful machine. It is very pretty. Let's take a break, we'll come back and we have lots more to discuss, so I think you better come to the office and the vice principal will be seeing you in a moment. But first a word from our sponsor.
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1:45:37 - Paul Thurrott
have a ton like a metric ton of Xbox.
1:45:42 - Leo Laporte
Oh yay.
1:45:44 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's been a curiously momentous week and it's only Wednesday.
1:45:51 - Leo Laporte
It's all the Blizzard stuff right, it's all about the Blizzard. Oh, all those Blizzard games that are finally coming to Game's. All the blizzard stuff. Right, it's all about the blizzard. Oh, all those blizzards games that are finally coming to Game Pass. Isn't this exciting, richard. I hate you both. I'm very excited.
1:46:02 - Paul Thurrott
I wish, I wish that was happening. We'll get to that. Microsoft revealed last week that they were going to open a web-based mobile game store to take on Apple and Google sort of or just not a lot of information. There was no official announcement. This was mentioned by Sarah Bond, xbox president, at a Bloomberg event. So we have questions. So I guess putting it on the web puts it outside of the you know, the app store fees system. But some of the language kind of suggests is this like just about in-game purchases? Is, are you actually going to have full-blown games? It is going to be first party stuff at first and then they're going to pull in third parties eventually. So we still have questions here. But we've been wondering, since the DMA stuff has been happening in the EU, when or if Microsoft would finally do something like this. And I don't think this is exactly what we expected, but we'll see. So that's interesting, whatever it is. Let's see there's so many, uh, let's see there's so many. Um. I this is. This is a statement on the world that we live in.
Just briefly, because I know I've told the story, but in 2004 or 5 I went out to the microsoft campus and I saw them that what became? What was the xbox 360 development stations, which were two giant mac g5 towers next to each other, tethered together somehow with this wire that came out to an Xbox controller. And I was like they had just announced what the Xbox 360 was going to look like this little white thing. And I was like, how are you going to fit that in there? And they're like, oh, we got guys working on that, so obviously that worked out great. There was no red rig of death problem or anything like that. But the other thing I learned that day was that xbox 360 was going to be the first xbox console that would allow um games to release updates any at any time.
And, like blurted out, my knee-jerk reaction was but wait, aren't you worried that that will reduce the quality of games? You know, because they know they'll be able to update. And it was Aaron. Grayberg said no, no, it wasn't, I'm sorry. No, it wasn't Aaron, sorry, it was someone else. But he said no, no, we're not worried, we have a system in place. It's going to be fine Now if you're an Xbox user today, or probably any other console, but I, you know, you know what it's like, right? Um, not only do game makers.
1:48:38 - Leo Laporte
Ship updates all the time they ship stupid huge updates, often on day one, right, and it's so, team two as you, richard, right, I mean it's probably everywhere.
1:48:41 - Richard Campbell
It's pretty seized too probably everybody, but this isn't so specific to games. All software now it's a good point, completely okay, but but you know the the?
1:48:49 - Paul Thurrott
But you know, the appeal of the console is this kind of combination of simplicity and ease of use, and I think you're begging for the right amount of that kind of thing.
1:49:00 - Richard Campbell
You want the DVD back, don't you? You miss your DVD.
1:49:03 - Paul Thurrott
I'm not saying that, no, I'm not a big fan of optical media, but so look, as someone who has bought every one of the last every Call of Duty games, I know the last several. As someone who has bought every one of the last every Call of Duty games, I know that the last several you. You spend time preloading it, and then, day one, the day comes and then you spend time reloading it because the day one update is bigger than the original game, like it's. It happens every single time and then there are multiple updates over time. So you know you finally get that Friday afternoon. You're going to kick back. You're gonna kick back, play games for a little while, turn the console on.
1:49:34 - Richard Campbell
Sorry, we gotta install an update for your game seriously, that was always a running gag, right, you turn on your xbox two hours before you want to use it yeah, or you.
1:49:40 - Paul Thurrott
This is actually a setting that will you. Supposedly it will keep it on at a low level and do those downloads right. I mean, they do have that. So to solve this problem, uh, microsoft is going to institute a policy for quality. I'm just kidding. What they're going to do is, uh, allow a game maker, allow gamers to pre-download updates, right. So now, now, not only are you going to pre-load the game, but you can pre-load the update. So the day the update comes out, there might be a diff download that you have to do, but hopefully you won't suffer from this problem. I just described where you're sitting there, for, you know, several minutes an hour, whatever it is now.
You're the cdn hosting your patches ahead of your software it's incredible, but you know what I, as stupid as it is, it's still sort of it might actually help you get to play your new games yeah, it's a brute force approach. Uh, it's inelegant.
1:50:32 - Richard Campbell
But you know what? I would also argue this, paul it's easier on their network because you do your game release and the first thing is every single person needs to patch.
1:50:40 - Paul Thurrott
So you're just absolutely getting hammered there, oh my god yes you know the patch is coming, so now you get to manage the patch over 24 hours.
That's exactly. Yep, you can meter it out. Yeah, no, it's it's. I know it's so unsophisticated it's hard to argue with right. Um, okay so, but oh yeah. So the xbox 360 uh store online store is closing in july and ahead of that there's a big sale on digital games. Obviously, none of the discs, um, but there are over 70 xbox 360 games on sale for up to I think it's 80 off. A lot of them are at least 70. It's a huge discount. Um, you know, these games are. These games are. They're almost 20 years old.
1:51:20 - Richard Campbell
If they're old, yeah, some of them are and the 360 at the time. This was the custom hardware, right like. This was the whole idea of we're going to build chips specific for gaming, um, and that's why you had that crazy double mac thing, because you couldn't. You couldn't emulate. Yeah, it was power pc based yeah, it was power pc based. So and I mean every game developer, it was now something like a 25 000 commit purse per rig to to be able to develop for the 360 like.
The only thing that saved you was the ps3 said the stupid thing, or is the ps2?
1:51:52 - Paul Thurrott
ps3 was yeah, but that was the experimentation right, actually, yeah, custom yeah, well, you have custom hardware, right? You can't. You can't develop games on a you know, gaming rig, pc. You have.
1:52:01 - Richard Campbell
Then they figured out that that was a mistake. Go back to it's just a.
1:52:05 - Paul Thurrott
It's just a crippled pc although, yeah, I don't know as much about the sony side, but this I mean, sony is still using their own kind of custom Well, whoever makes them for them? I don't believe Sony uses PC type processors, but who cares? I mean, screw Sony right Anyhow. So if you look, there were a lot of great Xbox 360 games. Some of them probably play pretty well today too. So anyway, it's something to look at. Alluding to your comments from earlier, yes, there is another round of uh game pass titles uh for this month. And yes, where are they? None of them are activision blizzard titles and, seriously, what is everything in my life?
1:52:43 - Richard Campbell
they are closing down studios faster than releasing games so, by the way, um, obviously I should.
1:52:50 - Paul Thurrott
I should have put this in the notes. Um, since you mentioned it, I'll just throw this out there. I'm going to talk rough numbers, not actual numbers. Everyone's freaking out over this, right? Everyone is like Xbox is adrift, the management doesn't know what they're doing. You know, everyone's freaking out, right? The number of people that Xbox and its associated studios has laid off since January 2023, not this past january, but a year ago, january is approximately I can't forget the exact number, but about, I want to say, 2200 people. The amount of people that microsoft, uh, laid off in a three-month period after they got rid of nokia was 20 000. So, um, in the scope of things like this is not on the same level, right?
1:53:34 - Richard Campbell
No, no, there is a right-sizing thing, and the reality, of course, is it's not specific to Microsoft. No, no, no, no. Lots of gaming companies are doing that.
1:53:44 - Paul Thurrott
The complaint that is valid and I think we should be making is that they should have handled this better and that does show. Look, I know it takes time to figure out who's what and who's doing what and whatever, but this purchase went through last october, I don't know. I I I feel like this. This could have been like a one big whack kind of a thing. It would have gone down a little bit better. Um, I think when you dribble them out like this, it just makes it. It's like is this thing circling the drain? And it's not, but it it's and I'm of two minds.
1:54:15 - Richard Campbell
One is it takes time to understand your orgs and figure out where the dead weight is. There is also how did a the reconciliation of the of winter sales and you know what, how much should we got? You're also collecting your projections for how much you're going to spend in the next year and saying what can we do, what can't we do? You know there's all. And then there's one other piece and I and I hate to say that this is true, but how do I also keep my employees from being so comfortable? They start demanding more and so they, you know the occasional layoffs to just put a little dread into them.
Be happy with what you're getting. You may be the next guy laid off. I hate to say that as a strategy, but I'm running out of excuses.
1:54:55 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I don't remember where I read this and I looked for this, cause. I wanted to add this to the article I was writing about, but someone was talking about how, um, we're entering a season where these you know, my Microsoft has asked these studios to say all right, what are you working on and when's it going to come out? What do you need? And a lot of them use this as an opportunity to try and bulk up hiring, and so you know so and wages raised they yeah and it was like wait a minute.
What are you doing exactly? And a lot of this stuff was just, they were just sitting there. I don't want to say doing nothing, but a lot of these places weren't really working on anything. They were just trying to position themselves for something in the future.
1:55:32 - Richard Campbell
It was like, guys, we, we could, we're gonna put on games here, and one of the ways you push back on that on mass, is you just do a few layouts just to go. Now ask me again what you need for next year yeah, yeah, there you go.
1:55:44 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I don't. They did not handle this properly.
1:55:47 - Richard Campbell
I know I want to be super clear, and I don't but know that there's any simple way to do this other than being honest with folks, which just seems to be really unfashionable right now.
1:55:56 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so for you folks that were excited about the NHL playoffs, ea Sports NHL 24 is one of the games coming to Game Pass starting tomorrow. By the way across actually a cloud.
1:56:08 - Richard Campbell
I have a dear friend who's now long retired, who used to run that program. Oh geez, that's great, that's fine.
1:56:15 - Paul Thurrott
Um, and then the rest of this I don't care about. So there you go. Um, you may recall the drama around Starfield when it launched last year at 30 frames per second on the.
Xbox series X. And then the announcement, I don't know, a month or two ago there they were going to release an update. Uh, that update is out today, so it does add 60 frames per second and v-sync support on xbox series x. So you know, microsoft's flagship console can now act like a flagship with their flagship game, like the way that all the pc people have been experiencing yeah, right, I know, and probably playstation too, right, or is that?
no, no, sorry, they didn't bring it to playstation excuse me, that was PC people have been experiencing yeah, right, I know, and probably PlayStation too, right, or was that? No, no, sorry, they didn't bring it to PlayStation.
1:56:56 - AI
Excuse me, that was the other drama with Starfield. Sorry.
1:56:58 - Paul Thurrott
What Hard to keep this stuff straight. It would have been 60 though, right, am I right? Anybody knows. So everybody knows.
Microsoft has this thing called Xbox Cloud Gaming Game Streaming Service, formerly Project xCloud.
These games that they're streaming are console games, right, there was actually kind of modified Xbox Series X machines up in the data center, but they've been doing things to make them work better on the types of devices you would stream to right. So, for example, on mobile, these games have that overlay where you can do the controller. They've made other concessions with the UI, where they've actually modified the game so you can actually see the ui on a tiny phone screen, that kind of thing. And uh, today there has been an update that kind of puts it in the reverse direction, which is, when you're playing on a pc, they'll support, uh, mouse and keyboard input, right, um, and it's only, it's 26 games. It's not the full thing, but if you look at some of these games, like pentament, which is actually brand new, or quake 2, which is the first person shooter that would came out first on the pc and would benefit from this kind of interaction, uh, halo infinite. Another one, doom 64, which was a nintendo 64 title originally but, neat, that's fine.
There's nothing wrong with that so that's cool.
Um, I don't think we're ever going to see like, uh, well, I shouldn't say never. But you know, you stream Call of Duty from the data center and play it with a mouse and keyboard and compete with people online. We're probably a little way, we're probably closer to VR or Vision Pro taking off than we are to that, but you never know. Xbox app on PC.
There's been talk about this becoming the interface on handheld gaming PCs and they just made a new kind of push forward in that direction. They have had something called compact mode for a while and it's basically just a more efficient way to see this interface on the small screen. And that has been updated and you can do it's. It's basically just navigational type stuff, but it's a it's. It's, I think, pointing to a future where you could actually, you know, remember the old days, you would replace progmanexe with a different shell or whatever. Um, there might be a shell switch for um running windows on a certain class of device with a smaller screen and different hardware attributes, where it's, you know, considered a handheld gaming pc or whatever, and it has a different interface. It may be the Xbox app. So that's kind of an interesting idea, if it happens, sony just reported their annual report, or annual financial report, which is a fun time for me, because they report their numbers in yen, because they're from Japan and I have to do a lot of math and I love math.
It's really big, doesn't it?
1:59:30 - Richard Campbell
About to buy by 100,. Right, it's close to a penny, it's really big.
1:59:33 - AI
Isn't it About to buy by 100,? Right, it's close to a penny.
1:59:34 - Leo Laporte
It's very close to a penny.
1:59:35 - Paul Thurrott
Samsung does you know Kwan? Obviously South Korea. And, oh God, god, god, Because you have to do net income revenue and then you have to do the percentage difference year over year. You have to do it for different parts of the business. It's horrible. You write a 500 article and it takes like three and a half hours.
So long story short, they're doing great 6.3 billion for the entire company on revenues of 72 billion for the year. Uh, up 10% year over year. The part that makes PlayStation also doing great. Um, two, 27.3 billion in revenues in the year, not the quarter. Uh, a gain of 14.6% year over year. Um, that part of the company is almost 40% of their total revenue. It's about 38%. So it's big.
They just missed their revised target for the year fiscal year. Remember they had big plans and then they had to downtune it because the holidays did not go as well as they expected. But they still sold almost 21 million units in the year of PlayStation 5. Yeah, sorry, yep, and 4.5 million units in the year of PlayStation 5. Yeah, sorry, yep, and 4.5 million units in the most recent quarter. And they've now sold not quite 60 million units over the lifetime of the product, which puts it not close, not far behind the PlayStation 4, by the way, at the same time in their life cycle, which I don't think a lot of people expected. I don't think it's going to have the same tail. I think we get that playstation 5 pro this year and they're they still had. I think it. I don't think.
2:00:58 - Richard Campbell
But there's no justification for ps6, so we've got years to go.
2:01:02 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, we still have years, but it's going to be. I think we're on the downward side of that.
2:01:06 - Richard Campbell
You know that curve there, I mean if I, if I was responsible for hardware for video game machines right now, I would be sitting on my hands and waiting for arm to mature more yeah, I yeah.
So this right and we know in the xbox side that's a big yeah if I'm going to actually talk about sweden five or six hundred dollars out of somebody again it better be uh, new, more efficient hardware and I think mpus are essential. Like you see the cusp of hardware change right now, the I'm sorry, like, if you look at the cusp of hardware change right now, if you're going to lock your someone into a five-year console a year from now, it will be dramatically better than it'd be right now the.
2:01:40 - Paul Thurrott
The issue for playstation is that and they they literally announced this well, we do not have a major existing franchise title coming out in the next fiscal year. They have no big bang well releases coming, should we? So?
2:01:55 - Richard Campbell
have we talked about the hell divers thing yet I?
2:01:58 - Paul Thurrott
mean, not that it's really about. Yeah, last week. Yeah, we mentioned last week, yeah, yeah just be.
2:02:02 - Richard Campbell
You know sony is clearly diversifying. Part of what caused the hell divers thing is their relationship with steam. Like they know they need to do this, they they hired arrowhead gameshead Games. They're getting into other studios and they're doing other deployments. They're feeling around for how they sustain their market. What's? Interesting is they've run their franchises to ground. Where's Final Fantasy?
2:02:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, yeah, right yeah they don't have it right. By the way, paul, I think Scarlett Johansson has something to tell you. Uh-oh, can you tell me Sony's recent financial results in dollars instead of yen?
2:02:47 - Paul Thurrott
Oh, I had this conversation with my wife. This is my future.
2:02:51 - AI
Sony recently announced their financial results for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2024. The company reported a revenue of approximately $85.4 billion. This represents a significant increase from the previous fiscal year. Net income was around $1.3 billion, showing robust performance across its various segments. For more detailed information, you can visit no yeah threat story dollars.
2:03:20 - Paul Thurrott
Um, yeah, no, I commented on this to my wife that then yeah, it's, they're all. We're going to do an ai, summarize this in dollar thing pretty soon.
2:03:26 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they're all, because these reports are often pages of pdfs, of numbers, what they you know and they do with this, which is actually quite cool, is they give you references right, so you can click that and it'll come up in the links.
2:03:42 - Paul Thurrott
I check my math by seeing like I'll look at Bloomberg or Reuters because they'll cherry-pick a few numbers. But what I found recently? By the way, in the last couple of quarters, both those publications they just reported in yen. They're not doing the math.
2:03:56 - Leo Laporte
They're like I can't, they need an AI.
2:04:00 - Paul Thurrott
I did ask what the exchange rate is. It's hard.
2:04:04 - Leo Laporte
And it's now 154.9 yen to a dollar.
2:04:07 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, didn't it say it's just the strength of the US dollar right now. Yeah, yeah, didn't Scar Jo say $80 billion?
2:04:13 - Leo Laporte
$85.4 billion revenue, where your article was $70 billion. Net income $1.03 billion. Hmm.
2:04:22 - Paul Thurrott
Hmm.
2:04:23 - Leo Laporte
Well, let's, I guess we can go to the source. Exchange rates are hard. Yeah On his official financial report.
2:04:30 - Paul Thurrott
Anyway, when is this thing Actually? You know what?
2:04:35 - Leo Laporte
She said it's ending March 31st. Oh, that's right, because that's when the quarter ended. No, that's correct.
2:04:39 - Paul Thurrott
That's correct, yeah yeah, that's the end of the fiscal year. Yeah, yeah, at least it ends on the end of a month. They don't always Just for fun. Another little bit of fun um, the number one downloaded game on sony in europe in april was sea of thieves, a microsoft game hey um, yeah, interesting so that's kind of cool I mean I, and I guess it did well around the world.
But that was a, that was their high point. Like they, they're killing it in europe, just like the amiga, so nothing's gonna go go wrong there. Great comparison.
2:05:14 - AI
I think that's fun.
2:05:15 - Paul Thurrott
Oh, and I should say oh, I'm sorry I missed the other one. So this is oh, this, I'm sorry, is this the one that's only in here? No, no, this is uh, this is across the world. Yeah, so in the first quarter now I just the numbers I discussed were annual for sony, but in the quarter um, actually I have the figure for uh, sony in the quarter for the playstation the number was it was less than five million. Right, it was four point. I want to say it was four point. Yeah, 4.5 million PlayStation consoles. According to our report, they outsold Microsoft, meaning Xbox, by over 5 to 1 in that quarter. So that means that Microsoft sold fewer than a million.
2:05:55 - Richard Campbell
Now how many of those are new customers and how many of those are replacing PS4s or PS3s.
2:05:59 - Paul Thurrott
That's a question that I don't know.
2:06:03 - Richard Campbell
And therein lies the battle. Right Like if you're an Xbox household, you're probably already on an XRS by now.
2:06:10 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, right, right, and I would hope that. By the way, as we're talking, Copilot just launched spontaneously on my computer, which is hilarious. I've never seen that happen before.
2:06:21 - Richard Campbell
You must have hit the context menu button. Context menu button by a special key.
2:06:25 - Paul Thurrott
I am so far from that thing, I there's no, I don't know what happened.
2:06:30 - Leo Laporte
I don't know. I hit it on purpose all the time.
2:06:34 - Paul Thurrott
I'm just that way okay, um anyway, uh, xbox hardware is not doing great.
2:06:41 - Richard Campbell
I think that's not a surprise to me yeah, and, but the is what would you build now?
2:06:47 - Paul Thurrott
Well, short term, I do think they need that interim little update, like they're going to do the Pro and the PlayStation side, and we've seen rumors of cylindrical Series X and S. Yeah, make something pretty.
2:07:00 - Richard Campbell
And, just you know, update the chip, cost reduce, you know, yeah, and a better chip density so that it's consuming less power and it can make it smaller. You can have more fun with it, but yeah, but you're right long-term.
2:07:13 - Paul Thurrott
You want farm to be there.
2:07:14 - Richard Campbell
If I'm, thinking about game design right now, knowing I have LLMs in my future, knowing I want to do MPU. You know my generative creations are about to radically change.
2:07:25 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, like how about this thing be able to create worlds on the fly as you play? Yeah, and have it make sense.
2:07:30 - Richard Campbell
You know there's no man's sky, like we already have games like that. No, but I mean All games should be like that, like you're talking about an awful lot. Again, I'm being a producer here, not necessarily a game developer.
2:07:45 - Paul Thurrott
How? Producer here, not a game, you know, necessarily a game developer. How big of a team do I need with generative we? Um, we do this. Uh, like I said, some single player games do this. But how about a version of call of duty where you don't launch with 16 maps, you launch with infinite maps? Yes, it's going to be different every time?
2:07:59 - Richard Campbell
and even, why make up? Why make up all your characters in advance? Why? Why isn't everybody's own version of the game, generating their own characters?
2:08:06 - Paul Thurrott
Right and they could base it on the people who are playing. They could take little bits and pieces of your history in the game and make a special version, I think we're just not that far from an adaptive gaming mindset.
2:08:17 - Richard Campbell
If you want to take a year off of shipping a new title, spend some money and change the industry. This is it. I'm hoping you know a gabe newell who has that's the, the, the, the valve steam guy, valve guy who has an infinite amount of money. You know he's, that's one of the totally privately held company. Huge amounts of money.
2:08:37 - Paul Thurrott
What a john carmack who has experience with ai and is one of the world's best programmers.
2:08:42 - Richard Campbell
I mean, yeah, it's possible that might be exactly what he's doing, you know, maybe blowing Quake out of the water. I would love that.
2:08:50 - Paul Thurrott
I would love that so much.
2:08:53 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, but you're thinking the right way. It's going to be a Newell or a Carmack who's just going to go. It's time to disrupt this thing with this new technology and make a game that is profoundly different.
2:09:05 - Paul Thurrott
Well, keep in front with this new technology and make a game that is profoundly different. Well, keep it fresh. That's the biggest problem with these games. It's one of the things that part of the fatigue of call of duty was. Just like the year of sameness, you know that turned into a decade of sameness no, and it's because I'm still married.
2:09:18 - Richard Campbell
When you're, when you're paying three to 500 people for a year to put out a title, you can't take any chances.
2:09:28 - Paul Thurrott
You're spending a lot of money With a budget of a Hollywood blockbuster movie. That's right.
2:09:33 - Richard Campbell
So you're spending $150 to $250 million to make $1 to $2 billion. This is perfect storm stuff, and if you don't, this is better game, lower cost.
2:09:42 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, you know it's like, come on, yeah, no brain. Anyway, there you go. So we haven't had this much Xbox news in a long time.
2:09:51 - Richard Campbell
No, it was a lot and not a bit of Activision in it.
2:09:57 - Paul Thurrott
Thank you, that cut so deep? I don't think I'm going to make it.
2:10:02 - Richard Campbell
I have a feeling October, october is going to be your month man, october. It'm going to make it. I have a feeling October, october is going to be your month man, october.
2:10:08 - Paul Thurrott
It's going to be a year After I've spent $165 on Game Pass for nothing. What did I get? I got NHL 24 on games. It's cloud gaming. God damn it.
2:10:26 - Richard Campbell
It's okay, it's all good, we's all fine, we're fine, we're fine. I I gotta tell you that hell diver thing made me so happy because the community did so much. Wasn't that great? Yeah? Yeah, you know it was a hugely highly rated game on steam. They made it one of the lowest rated games on steam and then, when sony backed off, they made it one of the highest rated games.
2:10:41 - Paul Thurrott
Again, this notion of review, but or like, uh, I guess it's reverse bombing right.
2:10:47 - Leo Laporte
I take it back Reverse review bombing yeah.
2:10:51 - Paul Thurrott
Very technical people. You're making a big mistake, that's it.
2:10:54 - Richard Campbell
It's funny and Newell must be laughing, just killing himself right Watching those. He sells the shovels and it doesn't matter whether they're digging holes or burying bodies, it's the same job, it's the same gig. He still sells the shovel, yep it's true.
2:11:13 - Leo Laporte
okay, kids get ready back to the book just around the corner. But before we do that, I would like to just put in a little teeny, weeny plug for Club Twit, for those of you not yet members. We have some great members in there and I have to say I love them all and welcome you all. It makes it a great time inside the Discord, our Club Twit chat headquarters. But we need more. Let's face it. Audience numbers are dwindling. More importantly, ad dollars are dwindling. More importantly, ad dollars are dwindling. This is good, this is across the board in the podcast universe, uh, but we want to keep doing this, so you need to vote. Do you want us to keep doing it? If you do, uh, let me. I guess I'll put it this way if you watch more than one show a week, I think it's worth seven bucks a month. Right, that's, that's less than a buck a show.
To get ad-free versions of all the shows, video versions of all the shows, including Paul's great Hands on Windows show, which is available in audio for free, but the video you have to be a member. Hands on Macintosh, untitled Linux Show, ios Today, and so on. We have a lot of great club events, stacy's Book Club's coming up. You also get access to the Discord so you can hang out and chat with us and our hosts. As they say, it's very exclusive, except you're all invited Seven bucks a month. There's family plans and corporate plans too. Visit us at twittv slash club twit, and if you will join the club, it would be great to have you. It's a wonderful group of people in the community and we want you in it too. All right, now back of the book time with Mr Paul E paul etherot and your tip of the week, sir my tip of the week is don't use threads.
2:13:08 - Paul Thurrott
These people are ridiculous. No, that's not it I agree with you. God damn, I agree with you. If you thought you know, every time you think you've eliminated toxicity from your life, just doing a new talk it's social baby.
2:13:22 - Leo Laporte
Keep posting on insta.
2:13:23 - Paul Thurrott
I love your insta and forget the rest of them forget the rest okay anyway.
So, um, some time ago, last month or something, I, uh I went down the rabbit hole of what does it look like to do an old-fashioned file share over network in windows? Right, this is something we used to do in the 90s. You know it was so hard that in Windows XP they added a simple share feature that never really worked great, and that was so hard that they added a home group feature in Windows 7. And then they got rid of that in Windows 10. And you know we just don't have a good way to do this. So I found a workaround to make that work. The problem is something to do with MSA authentication, et cetera, et cetera. So I had written an article about that at the time. But there are other legacy technologies at Windows that suffer from the same problem, like the feature's still sitting in there like some vestigial leg or whatever, and we don't sign in as local accounts for the most part.
Now, I mean some of you guys do, like people listening to the show probably do, but I mean Some of you guys do, like people listening to the show probably do, but normal people don't. And if you want to remote desktop to another computer it's kind of hard Now. There's a bunch of workarounds and none of them are as convoluted as the one I had to do for the file share thing. But basically what you have to do is go into account settings in the settings app, right, and you go down to the sign-in options and there's an option in there excuse the brightness on my face, but I'm looking at this interface now that says for improved security, only allow Windows Hello sign-ins for Microsoft accounts on this device Recommended. This is the reason why, when you set up Windows the first time, you have to create a PIN, because a PIN is the minimum level of Windows Hello. So at the very least you have to have a pin.
So to make this work, to use Remote Desktop on the computer you want to remote to I guess we'll call that the host you have to enable Remote Desktop first. You have to uncheck that option. You have to sign out. You have to sign in using your password, right, one time. Then you can remote desktop into that computer using those credentials. You could actually type in your username and password for your MSA and it will work.
I recommend, once you've done that one time, turning that checkbox back on and then using a PIN, because you can now use your PIN to sign in again. You don't have to worry about using a password every time. Once you flip this switch, it will work, I think, forever. I have not encountered a point where it stops working, but it obviously writes some kind of a credential somewhere, and you know, for reasons that nobody remembers, because it's not 1999 anymore. Anyway, the point is it's a workaround and it does work, so you can do it. And that came up because of hands-on Windows, because I wanted to connect to a Windows 10 computer to do a show and I did not want to connect obs, studio or, uh, all the recording stuff to that computer because it's underpowered, right, I was like, well, surely there must be a way to remote desktop into this computer and there is that's how you do.
It works in windows 10 and 11. Um, and then a couple of app picks. Uh, rodcom, which is a horrible company that no one should trust, uh, purchased VMware and yesterday, or two days ago maybe, uh, they released VMware workstation pro and fusion pro, which are paid products for free to individuals. They're still licensable to businesses. You have to pay. It's an annual thing now. Um, now these back in the day, awesome, right, these are awesome apps and I got. I gotta tell you I'm not recommending it. Um, in many ways, uh, vmware workstation pro is a better kind of a client virtualization solution than, say, hyper v client. Uh, but, my god, what you have to go through to get this stuff is a little weird and I'm not sure I trust broadcom in this.
2:17:03 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, just just a reminder that you're like. You see the evil in the signup process. Right, oh, that's, it's, oh yes, you do, just give us all your info.
2:17:13 - Paul Thurrott
Yep and look, I'm not saying they're going to get rid of these products and maybe that has something to do with this. I hope they don't do that.
2:17:18 - Richard Campbell
These, they are great products, but I I yesterday they've been smashing up VMware Like yeah, so I?
2:17:25 - Paul Thurrott
installed fusion pro on the Mac, right. This is kind of a was back in the day, still is, I guess, kind of a parallels desktop competitor paid product, right. They have their own coherence type mode called unity, and, uh, I spent a lot of time on this and what I? I've never seen you ever watch the end of like uh prometheus, where their weird hybrid alien creature comes crawling out of the belly of the uh, uh, the alien guy there. It's what I got. Was that meaning I installed?
This is my fault. I'm, this is not the product's fault, but I downloaded from uup dump the uh latest of Windows 11, 24 H two for arm, and what installed was. It said it was 24 H two, but it was the windows 11 desktop and start menu with windows 10 apps, like the settings app was from windows 10. The file explorer was from windows 10. I've never seen a Frankenstein disaster like this before and I updated it multiple times to try to get it in it. Slowly the apps came back, but it's stuck on 21H2. It's like what is this freaking thing? Anyway, I don't know what happened there, but I'm just throwing this out there. They're free If this is interesting to you. If you have client-side virtualization needs are technical and can get past the Broadcom terribleness. Maybe sign in with a different, like Apple, apple or other services. Let you use a fake account. Maybe do that. It's something to look at so you have to make.
2:18:52 - Leo Laporte
I'm looking at it right now.
2:18:53 - Paul Thurrott
You have you have to make an account and and they, they literally email you something that you click and then it lets you download it like you can't, you can't just go get it like it's.
2:19:03 - Richard Campbell
It's unbelievable, it's horrible yeah, that's their motto, right I don't trust this calm we make the hair stand up the back of your neck.
2:19:10 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, exactly, we make the chinese look open and fun.
It's just not, I don't know, it's just not good. Um, and then, uh, separately. Uh, opera has got a bunch of updates. Uh, recently, one the one yesterday, two days I guess. Yesterday they added their own AI-powered Help Me Write feature in their developer channel, remember, they're doing like AI feature drops. They have their ARIA AI built in, which is very good.
We were talking about browsers a couple of weeks ago and at the time I was playing around with Vivaldi. I've been using Edge a lot because I've been updating that part. I started using Opera, probably, I guess, over the weekend, and I got to say I got over a hump with Opera and what did? It was I've been using Arc a lot, right, and so Arc has all these weird features that you have to kind of adapt to and that actually helped me get over the hump with Opera.
If you do use Opera, I'll just tell you one of the weird things it does is control tab, which is how you go from tab to tab right in the browser. In most browsers goes from left to right or whatever, through your, your list of tabs. In arc it goes through only your. I think it's five most recent tabs in opera. By default, it goes through some list of your most recent tabs and I hate that. I hate that. Some people love it, some people don't. But one of the cool things about Opera is that it's infinitely configurable and they have a keyboard shortcut section of settings and you can change anything to anything and you just change control tab to be the normal behavior and it works fine. So that's what I did and it's actually I have to say I'm kind of digging it.
2:20:39 - AI
Like it's got a nice kind of minimalist.
2:20:42 - Leo Laporte
UI. It's good. Don't make me change browsers again, man. You don't have to. This is what I do I move around?
2:20:53 - Paul Thurrott
I'm promiscuous when it comes to browsers and other software. Don't switch.
2:21:04 - Leo Laporte
Because I know if I switch, you're going to say, gonna say vivaldi, you're just gonna do that to me. It's only a matter of time before sleep near pops up in your vocabulary.
2:21:12 - Richard Campbell
Let us uh, get run as radio on the air here, mr, mr, mr richard campbell, sure ah, one of the shows I grabbed while I was in romania I think was the only one I grabbed in romania. Annie tabasso was also a presenter there. I have her. I've had her on dot was in Romania. I think it was the only one I grabbed in Romania. Annie Tavasto was also a presenter there. I've had her on NET Rocks before she. I think I opened the show with this.
She was doing machine learning before. It was cool, so like a real expert, like she'd always been there. And so look, look, all these people coming rushing around her. And I'm very much a cloud native person, cloud native person. So, you know, not hugely enamored of the Microsoft stack or anything like that. She's worked all over the place, but the wave and the show I wanted from her was okay.
Well, more of us are using machine learning. But how do you make it sustainable? You need to update those models and it can't. You have these sort of heavy lift moves to build the first model where everybody's paying attention, but what do you need after that to keep it relevant? You know it's going to be good for some period of time, but over a while they become less and less relevant as the company moves on and the model hasn't changed, and so she has been teaching this mechanism of sort of what machine learning DevOps looks like the way that you build out infrastructure so that machine learning models can be routinely updated and then hit us with the reality, which is, when machine learning models generate data sets, somebody skilled enough to be able to smell that the data is this is wrong needs to look at it, and that's usually more than one person, depending on where the data is coming from. So if you had this really powerful conversation about yeah, this tooling was going to make this process easier, like you thought, you were one and done using machine learning in the company, that's a mistake. Now you're going to need updates, and if you don't have the ability to look at the sets that it's generating from the latest model and go, that's not right, which is exactly what you did the first time around, you're going to be led astray, like the software isn't going to protect you from you.
You know, uh, the way I've described it was software is only an amplifier. The question is, is it amplifying your intelligence or is it amplifying your stupidity? And uh, and he got down in there, right, he's like look, this is what you need to do to keep this stuff accurate and valuable. It's not simple garbage in, garbage out, that's it. Like, really, gigo's never been cooler than since chat gpt took off. Like we're very much in a gigo world. Did you train on 4chan again?
2:23:40 - Paul Thurrott
why do you?
2:23:40 - Richard Campbell
think your results are poor.
2:23:45 - Leo Laporte
Okay, and I think a little snoot right now wouldn't be ready. I wouldn't be adverse. Yes.
2:23:54 - Richard Campbell
I have been holding off doing this whiskey for a while because I was trying to figure out why it's as revered as it is. We're talking today about Lagavulin Now. Admittedlyly, I've been running my through the classic malts, that collection that united distillers put together in the late 80s. Uh, because they are great whiskeys, without a doubt. But and I don't drink a ton of isla like, let's be clear, it's pete's interesting to me, but it it's rare that I really want it. Right, I'm not a cigar smoker. If you're going to drink a Petey whiskey, you want to have a cigar. Kill your taste buds first. I think that's rare. The only time that I find I crave it is when we're doing a whole day of smoking meat. For a while there we were doing annual summertime brisket competitions, and if you're steeped in hickory smoke anyway you know, the smoky whiskey is just right, perfect, yeah, that's true, that's a good point and saturated and uh.
So I mean I'm glad I spent time on this. I've gotten too into researching whiskey. Now this has gotten out of control that's good this is good I feel like I got to the bottom of lag of our own little scarlett johansson smart chat GPT.
So look, isla was making whiskey before whiskey was a legal product. There is evidence that there was a distillery on the site of where Lagavulin is today in 1742. And in fact it was referred to even then as Lagavulin. The first license to make whiskey on that location was taken out by a guy named John Johnston in 1816. It's very likely he was licensing what was already there. That was likely his, and you know these were not really businesses.
In a lot of ways this is the way that you used to barley in those early days. So they changed his hands a bunch of times and I could run them all down, but who cares? Where it becomes important is when the mackie family takes control of it, and really in 1889, when peter mackie gets it because peter mackie is one of the original gods of contemporary whiskey, uh, for as far back as this. So his, his uncle, james logan mackie, passes away, he takes it over and this is when they've got a couple of different distilleries and so he rebrands the whole group as Mackey and Co. And one of the products that Mackey and Co started making then this is 1889, is a product called White Horse, which is a blended whiskey where the base of the blend is Lagavulin. So you know people wanted an expensive whiskey and again, one of the things I love about the story you can still buy White Horse today. It's still out there. I looked it up on I think it was on BevMo, and I found the 60 ounce, you know, the 1.75 liter, 30 bucks. Wow Right, 30 bucks. Hard to argue. Mackey made a bunch of Peter, macie made a bunch of jellies, also responsible for the craig elachi, which is the place. Uh, well, I drink a little of the whiskey because it's not my favorite. It's the space side. That's the hotel I prefer to hang out when I'm in the area. It's the old train station, so forth. It's sort of in the center of space side. Your stones throw from from uh mccallan and just down the row from dufton and all the good stuff.
Uh, when peter mackie passed away in 1924. He's got a bunch of partners. He's the company's been wrestling around, but they actually renamed the whole group white horse distillers, which will then be acquired by the distillers company which you know, and dcl at the distillers company limited uh is best known I mentioned this a number of shows ago for making a customized strain of yeast. We're recognizing that Pasteur first identified the very first bacterium in the world as a bacterium, and it was Brewer's yeast. And so DCL tailored a yeast that virtually every distillation company used for some period of time, although they've diversified in there, and DCL is also one of the ancestors of diageo, along with united distillers.
Like most distilleries, uh had a tough time during the uh prohibition, shut down over world war ii. Uh, they make a note that they only got electricity to the factory in 1948. So you think about that place was running making whiskey for a couple hundred years without electricity. Big fire in 51. That forced a big rebuild, like many of the distilleries, as things got rough in the 70s and 80s in 1974, they stopped doing floor mountings and then in 88, when United Distillers has control of it, they declare the classic malts and we've talked about this a bunch of times right, the six different whiskeys.
And what's hilarious is that, according to the paperwork, when they added Lagavulin to the mix because it was a peated whiskey and people don't like peated whiskey they said it wasn't going to sell well. Right, dalwini? You know some of the others that we've talked about. They're that group Krag and more. Those are the ones that are going to sell. Well, and they were wrong. Lagavulin outsold them all by miles and it was the first peated whiskey that really took off. It's kind of. It started the revolution and, by the way, they had not laid up enough. They didn't have enough, so now they were in a panic to actually try and make more and did all these things like it got nuts now. And then, of course, 97, diageo takes it over, which is where we are today and the page that I've sent you to themalscom, that's actually owned by diageo. They have all the all these different products there. Now, what is the deal with peat? We've talked about this a bit before. What's the deal?
2:29:28 - Paul Thurrott
What's the story with peat.
2:29:29 - Leo Laporte
I say it about my friend peat all the time. What's the deal?
2:29:34 - Richard Campbell
So it turns out, peat is partially decomposed vegetable matter I knew it, probably different than peat, I knew it.
Yeah, and partially decomposed, because it ends up in a peat bog, and a peat bog is an acidic bog which slows down decay, and so it sort of gets trapped in what would arguably be a high carbon state. And so, literally for millennia, humans have been aware of the value of peat. That you can cut it out into bricks, you can dry it and you can burn it. That you can cut it out into bricks, you can dry it and you can burn it. And so Eylee, which happens to not have a lot of trees with its southwest exposure. This is how people heated their homes, and so heat was not a feature, it was an unfortunate byproduct of the fact that this is how you made heating when you wanted to distill something, you need some heat, and so they burned that. In fact, there are references in the early 1800s to the peat reek of Islay that it was not a feature, it was an unfortunate thing.
Now this is not common in the rest of Scotland, because Scotland is the origin of the coal revolution, the first coal seams, James Watt, all that stuff that happens there, and coal is the rock that burns. Coal is the product that was saving the forest. This is how it was referred to at the time. Right, it would deal with acid rain later, but the fact that you had the rock that burns it got distributed, and so of course you don't have those peat flavors. Although, and then of course rail lines come along as part of this process. Right, you have concentrated energy in the form of coal. You can burn it in a pressurized tank along with Watts engine and ta-da. You're able to move coal around a lot of these places, and so coal comes to most of the rest of Scotland. The Highlands, Speyside, the Lowlands, all those areas, because of rail, have access to coal, so that's what they use. But Islay being an island, and same for Jura and Arran and the other islands, they don't get train lines because you can't put a train through water, and so they continue to use peat because that's what they have.
Right, Highland Park up in Orkney peated. That's just the way it is, Although some distilleries, as whiskey becomes more popular, come to appreciate the value of peat and start doing combinations of a little bit of peat in their heat, as well as using coal for their heat. This is drying the malt, right, so that's where the flavor comes into play. Oh, and there is a point that's made in a few different documents along the way that coal was being taxed but peat wasn't being taxed, and the one thing the Scots appreciate is not having to pay taxes. They don't have to pay. So here's an aspect and I ended up reading a whole paper on this that I hadn't thought about. But peat has terroir, that is to say, different peat from different locations has terroir.
2:32:32 - Paul Thurrott
It is literally dirt, so that makes sense, yeah it literally is terroir.
2:32:38 - Richard Campbell
One of the things in the composition of the peat on the islands like Is and aran is seaweed, but there is a lot of seaweed in it and so those so we talk about in peated whiskeys from isla having that sort of iodine salty flavor, and part of the argument of that is that it's the composition of the peat itself, where, when you do see peat used in the highlands is typically what they call heather peat, that it was the ground cover of the area making the peat and so it has a different flavor. The peatiness of whiskey is measured in phenolic levels. They call it in parts, per million TPUs.
2:33:20 - Paul Thurrott
What's the AI measurement Tops?
2:33:23 - Richard Campbell
It's measured in tops, and one of the reasons ai measurement, yes, tops, it's measured in tops, and so a and one of the reasons this measurement system came along is, like I mentioned, in the 70s, when they stopped doing their own floor maltings, they started buying their barley already malted and the peat gets introduced during the malting. So you have to be able to order it in the right concentrations, and so Lagavulin has peat phenolic levels of 45 parts per million. That's sort of where you aim it at. And as the peat thing took off and we started getting into Petey or Petey whiskey, so, like the original Octomore from Brooklada, which was famously this very Petey Whiskey 100., although today their masterclass edition, the BO39, which I've tasted and do not recommend 300. So that's a lot of Pete, right, but the fact is, because you needed to be able to order it to specification, they had to standardize a lot of this stuff, and I would be remiss not to mention this last point about peat, which is that it is a massive carbon store and burning it releases all that carbon back into the environment, which has become a huge issue. And there are large initiatives to restore the peatlands, so to protect that land and as industrialization of maltings has improved. There are ways to introduce the phenolic flavors of peat into the barley without cutting peat out of the ground and burning. Anyway, we were talking about lagavulin. Sorry for the sidetrack, but don't worry, there's at least one more before we're done.
Today, uh, the lagomodal distillery has gone through many, many iterations, including the major burr down in 51 and so forth. Today it is a uh, contemporary distillery, lots of electronics but rooted in the fundamentals still. They did switch to stainless mass tons a couple of decades ago but they've stuck with the cypress wood washbacks. They've got 10 washbacks. They used yeast and I only bring that up because both of you react strongly when I say yeast cream. When I saw it I was like, oh, I'm including that because it seems to amuse the boys.
They only have four stills. They are very large stills, two washes and two spirits. The lie arms on the wash stills are unusual. They kind of curve up and then curve back down again and flatten out, which you know. Lye arms are a whole study onto their own because it changes the reflux of the still. Their spirit stills have much straighter arms.
Their new make is considered low. It comes in at 68 or 69 percent, where many distilleries are higher than that. I think that's got a lot to do with the age of their stills. Of course they barrel at 63.5 because they barrel in bourbon and pretty much you always barrel at 63.5 because the americans make bourbon in their barrels at 62.5 and so you come in a percentage point higher to pull certain flavors from the wood, and virtually all lagavulin is initially aged in American first use bourbon barrels. They finish in sherry casks and the amount varies depending on how the flavors are coming. All right, I debated whether I was going to do this, but I can't see how I don't. Let's talk about Ron Swanson. You know who Ron Swanson is, from Parks and Rec. From Parks and Rec Is that what he drinks Is Lagavulin. That is correct you?
2:36:46 - Leo Laporte
know who ron swanson is from parks and rec, from parks and rec. So in the character is lagavule that's. That is, oh my god, that's hysterical and it became.
2:36:51 - Richard Campbell
It became a thing, okay. So I mean you can give or take, I I can pick up or leave parks and rec, it doesn't change my life to me, he is the reason you watch, yeah without a doubt, I mean a character that's far lived beyond.
So here's the joke. Of course, you know Swanson has these great monologues and he talks about Lagavulin and so forth and at some point one of the producers finally clues in They've done all this free advertising for Lagavulin and contacts the distillery and just says I don't know if you know this show and one of our characters drinks lagavulin. And they're like, oh no, we're well aware. And and apparently they get along to the point where they end up writing a story, a two, a multi-parter, where ron swanson goes to the uk and ultimately goes to lagavulin. Yeah, yeah, okay, and the the actor behind ron swanson is nick offerman. And genuinely nick offerman not only loves lagavulin but loved the crew, like, like the people there, they like everything about it, uh, and they've been collaborating ever since to this day. One of my favorite arguably my favorite thing of this entire thing was nick offerman made a yule log video, I don't know 10 years ago, where he literally sat and sipped lagavulin 45 minutes, never said a word. I love it.
And it starts with him digging peat, which is hysterical yeah, yeah, fire in the background sitting in a chair looking you dead in the eye and taking a sip of lagavulin. There's a 10-hour version of this, by the way, but it is clipped together. There are cuts, cuts, but the 45-minute version Nick Offerman did that. It is genuinely a real shot. I love it. You've got it up on the screen. Now. They do the pullback. There's the model they leave it there and it just stays.
2:38:39 - Leo Laporte
It's my favorite Yule log. It's the best.
2:38:42 - Paul Thurrott
It's truly great.
2:38:43 - Richard Campbell
How did I not know about this? So, uh, they asked nick offerman if he wanted to get involved in making whiskey. He's like, yeah, yeah, I do. And so in 2019 they put out a version of lagavulin called the offerman oh wow release, which is an 11 year old. And then, and then a couple years later, they did a version where they finished in Guinness casks. They called Offerman's second release and just last year, the Offerman third edition. They did in charred oak, which was new oak charred off, and, like last week, they announced a Caribbean rum cask finish called Offerman's fourth.
2:39:20 - Leo Laporte
I see this Offerman on the page. I didn't realize it was that.
2:39:23 - Richard Campbell
Offerman, it's Nick Offerman. Oh, that's hysterical. It's this.
2:39:27 - Paul Thurrott
Okay, I'm sorry to interject here, but the best part of this Nick Offerman Ulog video is that, like all YouTube videos, it has most replayed sections. Yeah, and nothing new happens in those sections, like it's like he's just sitting there holding and or drinking a glass of whiskey.
2:39:45 - Richard Campbell
That's it, that's all it is. So look, there's a bunch of editions of Lagavulin because that's what Diageo does right and the 12-year-olds, the 11-year-olds it is still this edition. I mean, if you really dig around, they get as old as 37 years old.
2:40:01 - AI
Is it better?
2:40:02 - Richard Campbell
No, there is one. Look, don't waste your time, don't? There is one. The lagavulin 16 is the one. It is the whiskey they referred to as part of the classic collection back in 88. Uh, it should be on your shelves today. If you're going to have one isla, this is the one. If you want to get introduced to to islas, this is the one. Uh, it's a hundred dollars in in america to own a lagavulin 16. You will not drink it quickly. I know now some folks will describe it as licking a dirty ashtray. Uh, I think the polite term is it is drinking a campfire, and so it's. For me, it's very much a mood. I'm always the person who says like, look, I like the whiskey in front of me and I will drink. Uh, and I do enjoy it, but only at times. How often?
2:40:54 - Paul Thurrott
the person that moves in a circle as the fire, as the smoke, and the fire moves like I don't want to be in front of it.
2:41:00 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, you know and if you don't care, then you should drink your Lagavulin.
2:41:04 - Leo Laporte
So when you see whiskey snobs they often say, oh, you got any Lagavulin Like, that's like the king. Sounds like that's kind of a tell of a phony whiskey snob.
2:41:19 - Richard Campbell
So this goes back to that whole classic malt deal. So when United Distillers put together those classic malts, then they marketed it. So you can here's the kicker, and Paul's certainly seen this I go to a bar, I quickly go study their whiskey collection and I knew who sold it to them. I know by what's on the wall. And so if you see Dalwini, cragamore, talisker, lagavulin, they bought the classic ball collection. They were pitched that they bought them all. Well and to be fair.
2:41:51 - Leo Laporte
that may also be what people come in and ask for Sure.
2:41:54 - Richard Campbell
Because it's what they know. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
2:41:57 - Leo Laporte
So they've got to give people what they want.
2:42:00 - Paul Thurrott
I'm going to dress like this at Build Next Week. I'm going to dress like this at Build Next Week I'm going to wear that jacket and jeans and a flannel shirt and walk around with a glass of whiskey. That's going to be my thing. That's going to be your look the whole time.
2:42:11 - Richard Campbell
Being confronted with a wall of a couple of hundred whiskeys is terrifying. That is the paradox of choice. What was brilliant about the Classic Collection was it was six, it's enough. You can try them all, right, right. And collection, it was six, it's enough. You can try them all, right, right. And uh, it's just picking enough.
And it's not glenfiddich, right, the original single malt that was marketed first. They had the only. You know. There's lots of places we go into hot fiddick and nothing else. That's their, that's their one single malt. It's the easiest to get access to. It's well known. The next stage passes this is a classic malt and that's what a lot of people know and how they anchor on that. And if you can stomach Lagavulin, like, if that flavor doesn't turn you off, it's a style thing, because most people pick it up and go what? Why would you drink this Like? I'm afraid you picked up the ashtray instead of the glass, but it's got a finesse to it. It is a beautiful drink. Once you get past that initial smoky hit, this thing has all that sort of briny, iodine-y, like the sitting in front of the campfire thing. It's absolutely real and it's a groove. You know an ounce into this. Everything's fine, you're fine, and you're in a place.
2:43:24 - Leo Laporte
It's always true. You know what. The place we're in right now. The end of the show, that's the place we've got to. I'm in a place called Vertigo, hello, hello, paul Therot, therotcom. That's his site on the net. Make sure you become a premium member for all the best content. Lots of free content too, but the premium stuff's great. Pay for it. Just support Paul. He also has some books you might want to buy Windows Everywhere. It's kind of a history of Windows through its development and its languages, and, of course, the Field Guide to Windows 11 featuring Windows 10. That's all. At leanpubcom. Richard Campbell lives at runasradiocom. That's where his podcasts are Run. As Radio and NET Rocks, he is going on the road again.
2:44:13 - Richard Campbell
Well, Paul and I will be together in Build.
2:44:15 - Leo Laporte
Build is next week. We'll have our Build wrap-up right here at the usual time, that's Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. Live streaming at YouTube youtubecom slash twit slash live. So you can go right there when the show starts and watch it from beginning to end. But you don't have to. You don't have to say, oh, I have to be available Wednesday at 11, because, honestly, we make a podcast out of it. You can download it and listen to it or watch it at your leisure Audio or video, either from the website twittv slash www or on YouTube. There's a dedicated channel to Windows Weekly. Best thing to do is subscribe to your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get it automatically. Of course, club members have a special URL they can use for the ad-free version of.
Windows Weekly. We do thank our club members for making this show possible and you, Paul, and you, Richard, for showing up, Not too drunk not too hungover. Yeah, it's good. It's good, we appreciate it.
2:45:16 - Richard Campbell
I know I pitched it well, when all the comments now are like oh God, I want a whiskey.
2:45:21 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that always does it, that always does it and I like your line here in the discord. Whiskey is a drink for older people because our taste buds don't work well you know, it's true you need a stronger flavor to cut through exactly right.
2:45:37 - Richard Campbell
All of the damage for those young. You know the way I equate it when a younger person wants to try it, it's like listen, this is a very bright light. Do you you really want it shining in your eyes?
2:45:47 - Leo Laporte
It's really true. In fact, the first time you have a drink it's like oh, why does anybody drink this? You have to work your way up to it. Thank you, boys, have a great week, Go have some fun with her and we will be back next week. Live from Seattle Washington for a little bit. Thank you Paul, Thank you Richard, Thank you all you, winners and dozers. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.
