Windows Weekly 908 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
 

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorat's here, richard Campbell's here. You know where they're not Microsoft Ignite we get the explanations and what's going on at Ignite. It looks like AI is a big push. What a surprise. They call it agentic AI. We'll also talk about a big Xbox segment coming up, some great new games coming to Xbox Game Pass and a couple of really old games coming back from the dead. It's all next on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people. You trust this is Twit.

00:43
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Therod and Richard Campbell, episode 908, recorded November 20th 2024. 26 boxes of Nopoli, it's time for Windows Weekly, the show we talk about, everything. Microsoft and the entire crew is back, and it couldn't make me happier. Oh, hello, hello, richard Campbell, we missed you. Richard was gone for a couple of weeks. Who is?

01:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
this third man.

01:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
First in Tunisia, where there was no internet, and then you fell ill in Lithuania.

01:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, I was getting nervous you would not have wanted that show. It was grim. Yeah, I bet.

01:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, we're glad you're feeling better and you're feeling better, yeah, and you're back in madura park, bc. Yep, in the storm, just in time for the bomb cyclone. Yeah, which it's interesting even though we are miles apart, we are sharing the same storm.

01:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, I'm on the. I'm on the top edge of it, you're on the bottom edge of it.

01:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there you go and poor olympia washington is right, smack dab in the belly button, taking it hard. Well anyway, welcome back, richard. We literally did miss you it was.

01:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I miss you guys too. It was really weird to not have that midweek conversation.

01:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love it yeah, I was telling richard before the show began that basically my friends are the show, other people I do the shows with. That's who I talk to you guys like six hours a day and that's enough yeah, yeah, he's got time for friends after that.

02:12
I don't need no one else and actually, to be honest, I, I would should include, like the, the, the club members in the chat room and all that because those are, even though somebody in there, uh, paul holder, said, well, I consider you a friend, even though you know you probably don't. I said, paul, we've never met, but you are absolutely my friend because he and I are coding buddies. He's like a really hot shot coder and so I ask him all my coding questions. We were talking about that the other day, where it's still probably the case that if you want, uh, if you're looking for a gray beard in, uh, you know php, right, it's not going to probably be in your community, right? Yeah, not these days, it's going to be online.

02:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Paul thurot is my gray beard when it comes to delphi you know, I I think I think it was mark rezinovich or maybe scott hanselman said recently that they had talked to some expert in some coding, like you know python or something, and they said well, you're a, you're a python expert in whatever this language is. And he said I used to be, uh, you know yeah and uh, and that's the thing you know, life goes on.

03:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Language has changed too.

03:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I used to I used to dream in vcl, but I that's a long time ago they call them pythonistas yeah, I was, I was a pythonista long, when it was 2.0 so I'm I'm way out of the loop, as long as I got my co-pilot with me and I can spew out some python that might actually nowadays cop.

03:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Copilot really is good at Python. Yeah, paul Thurot is at Thurotcom, richard's at RunAsRadiocom, and of course they are not. They're somewhere. They're not Right Right now, which is Ignite, what the hell.

03:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually, before we get to that, richard missed two episodes, so what I'd like to do is go through. Oh, let's go through them all, yeah, all of the notes, and just make sure yeah that we know where he's at because I feel like there were a couple of things in there especially. Uh, actually, we may reference a few things you missed, richard yeah, sure he is keeping up.

04:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know I make donna rocks episodes on lovenetcom yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I I announcement stuff in the can so I'm pretty happy. Yep to speed.

04:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, oh no, no, I was more interested in. There were specific parts of each of the past two episodes where I was like man, I really want to talk to Richard about this.

04:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, the NET right.

04:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not this guy, you know. But also no, no, because, Richard, specifically, I just you know, with your background and everything.

04:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I was super interested. Yeah, well, we should loop back on a couple of those things.

04:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and then I had a whiskey pick the first week, which was a whiskey movie, a movie about whiskey and then called Whiskey Galore.

04:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then Paul had a lovely cocktail from Mexico City, the Salmoncito, which we learned was invented by a guy we know there and he totally underplayed that when he described it to us. He, I, we took it as kind of a joke and then found out, research, my wife found out, researching it, that he actually invented the cocktail, which, uh, you know, this is pretty cool. Like you know, it's kind of a neat thing.

05:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So and then, richard, don't worry, we plugged dot net rocks every week. We didn't. I'm sure your, your latest episode was featured, thank you.

05:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I listened to the episode where you were talking about Windows on ARM and it becoming a first class citizen, et cetera, et cetera. Aria Hanselman, I was telling Leo and I just had this experience. We were flying home and I was rereading Steven Snowski's book and you know he talks about me in the book, like he references me in the book a few times. Right, so you get that weird experience like huh, you know. So I'm listening to the episode with the about Windows and ARM. And you said something about me and how excited I was. Every time I opened the lid of my laptop it just came on and I said to Leo, I said sometimes it's really weird being me, you know, or really interesting being me.

06:07
Because I listen to this, not because I want to. I'm interested in it. It's not completely coincidental that I know you, but it's an interesting. You've been doing this thing for a long time, so now you're a co-host here on the show and that's awesome. I get to see you every week. But like I would have listened to this regardless, you know, like it was just uh it was sometimes my stories involve you these days yeah, yeah, look, I am better or worse, you know so I understand listening to richard's show, but why are you rereading steven sanofsky's book?

06:39
it seems like once through would have been enough yeah, so I have actually reread parts of it, possibly a dozen times by this point the part where your name is brought up no, no, no, no, no, um, and I, I know part of it is just therapy.

06:54
I'm trying to get over that part of my life, but also, no, I, I on, given the way windows is gone, you know, I, I, uh, it might have been a couple of weeks ago, I don't remember I I'd written this story about reliability and windows and actually it will come up today. Actually we're going to talk about resiliency today, for example, but when you look at the state of windows today, um, it hasn't gone great and it's been rough and, yeah, at the time, very critical of windows 8 and all the stuff they were doing and everything.

07:21
And I go back and reread and reread and rereread. You know the rationale and I think to myself you know, actually there was some adult supervision there that we don't have today and I, um, anyway, yeah, I just think windows is in a weird place because it's not the center of the company anymore yep, and that's a big part of it. Yeah, for sure it's just a.

07:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a different. You've got the old timers who don't want to move and the new folks who what drew a short straw?

07:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're not attracting talent there, because the people who are aggressively looking to get ahead at Microsoft are going after those parts of the company that are top of mind, like cloud and AI and all that. So, yeah, you get the. Whatever that stuff is at the bottom of the coffee filter, that's the Windows team.

08:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think you know it was Osterman who left the Windows team, went to Azure and I asked him about that and he said you know, there's a couple of thousand 30-plus year folks still working in the Windows team, interesting, and they're very hard to deal with. Because this is his quote. He says unless they have eight wives and a cocaine habit, they don't need the money. This is his quote. He says unless they have eight wives and a cocaine habit, they don't need the money. So how do you motivate those people?

08:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I made the case just I think it was yesterday actually that there's also two parts to this. To the Windows team, like it's not really Windows team, but the groups that contribute to Windows, the groups that make Windows what it is. There's that backend stuff. This has been true for a long time, right, and so, jim alchin days that was like the server group, you know, these days it's the azure group. Those are the adults, these are the david weston's, the um, you know, the people who do the security stuff, the people who do the foundational work, etc.

08:57
And then you get this kind of a clown card, doofuses that are throwing out new features all over the place and they're not testing them and they're causing reliability problems. And so, you know, our relationship with the Windows can vary wildly depending on what part of the company we're talking about. There are very, there's very deep, fundamentally strong security work being done in Windows through things like Windows Hello, ess, et cetera. That is impressive. And then there are stupid icons on taskbars and doofus, you know UIs that, like I, I don't even know what they're doing anymore.

09:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Boxes and all of that.

09:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, so those, that's the. It's like a, a person with split personality. It's like a watching a, a loved one, fall to dementia. But you have to keep dealing with them and sometimes there's a little burst of something, something that sounds correct and most of the time it's you know. They're calling you by the dog's name or something, so it's, you know, it's, it's, it's a weird relationship. Um, but yeah, that's anyway.

09:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This week on paul's therapy, uh, we're gonna look at uh you have to say you're making friends on the windows team right here.

10:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't I who cares I? I do you think I care about the Windows team? I don't who cares I. Do you think I care about those people at all? They don't care about me and they don't care about people using Windows. So what's the difference? This is a different world. I could not care less about those idiots.

10:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Why aren't you at Ignite? I know I'm not at Ignite, but why aren't you at?

10:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Ignite Because I could be in Mexico for one more. No, the big reason was they did not invite, they didn't invite the press until very late in the game. Okay, and making it very expensive. And as the kind of calendar clicked by, I was like, yeah, I don't know. So I talked to my wife about it.

10:36
I said maybe this just doesn't make sense. And then they sent out a little feeler email and said, hey, we're trying to figure out, like, who wants to go and everything you know. And so I was like, yeah, maybe. And then they invited me and I I'm like, yeah, I'm not going, it's just too late. You know, you should have done this in September. I.

10:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I I would have booked this.

10:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I would have booked this a long time ago, Like I did back in the day. It just gets really expensive. You know, I went to build but they did the same thing and it wasn't as bad actually, but they did the same thing and it was expensive and it didn't have to be that expensive.

11:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's unnecessary yeah.

11:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I just made that decision and then, of course, because of me, I flew the day it opened. So I always try to fly on big Microsoft days.

11:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I am prone to booking hotels where I suspect they're going to want me early. And this canceling of it doesn't happen.

11:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I thought about this actually. I could have booked some kind of a flight thing in advance, I guess.

11:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you know what? You only fight so hard.

11:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I tried.

11:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, well, normally I would be doing podcasts from the event, but they decided they didn't want a podcasting space and I'm like do I want to find another gig or do I want to go home after I would have flown from Lithuania to Chicago?

11:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was going to say it's not like you haven't traveled enough.

11:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's not like I've been stuck at home with nothing to do To what do you ascribe this change in Microsoft's attitude?

11:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, why wouldn't they want to have podcasts there?

12:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it's a new leadership team for the Ignite show. They've been shuffling around and they've got a lot of learning to do.

12:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's complicated.

12:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think there was an events team that didn't have anything to do for a couple of years and they all left, and now there's a new group coming up and they just don't know what they're doing Effectively.

12:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Microsoft is relearning how to do events. And so you've got to have the conversations over again. So there's plenty of product teams that were reaching out to me saying hey, you're going to do the podcast, right, Can we get this and this? So I happily forward that all on to them. It's like if you want me, it takes a few weeks to set this up. Let's figure it out. They're like no they didn't budget for it in advance, so there's only so much they can do.

12:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it ended up being just not practical. You know I the irony for me I'd have to go look at this is that, um, I and I flew yesterday, right, so yesterday was a really busy travel day. But if I were to go back and look at what I got done and you know, I've got laurent writing news as well as it's incredible. I mean, we probably published 12, 15 articles yesterday so I probably wrote five to seven myself. Two of them were premium articles, like it was well, that's the other side.

13:06
You don't really need to be there anymore now well, sometimes it's good to be in person, see people you know uh the only way I got woolsey back on the show was to see him at bill and go dude right, I know and send an

13:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
email to your blue in the face that there's certain actions you make when you're in person, that's's right, you make eye contact for one second. It's priceless, it's no, it really is.

13:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I well, yeah, I mean it's like it's jail or you know, superstardom it could be. It's the spectrum, but it's it can be very good. This is true of everything you know in person meetings.

13:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
when I was at the company I was at previously, we talked online every week and we got nothing done yeah and then we would uh meet in New York for an afternoon and all of a sudden stuff happened you know, and that's I remember hanging out in a hotel room with you for a day and laying out an entire years of the editorial content. You could have batted that back and forth, the email, for a year, and oh we did we?

14:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
we did for two years, yeah, did nothing. Yeah, nothing happened, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, it's um, anyway, we're not there. I don't know what to tell you. I mean, I, I, I, I have mixed feelings about it. I've already heard from a couple people who said hey, you know where are you where are you?

14:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've got a bunch of those like I actually wanted to see it sounds like you're a little miffed at microsoft for not doing no right, no, no, no.

14:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I well, look I these two. These are two. The two issues I raised are separate. Right there's the the continual, uh, second class citizenship of windows, which is a problem you know, that this is my, the center of my career.

14:43
So that's you know. Yeah, um, as far as the night goes, it's not I don't that one's not personal to me, it's just, yeah, I wish they had gotten their act together. If they had, I would have my wife and I would have gone from mexico to there to home, um, but you know what it's busy. We have got the three big holidays are coming up, my daughter's graduating from college soon we got to go figure that out. There's gonna be a lot of driving and moving of things and whatever. We're busy. So I mean, honestly, having a kind of a week of downtime between things is, uh, not so horrible. So, yep, yeah, I mean. And richard, I mean, I think you know his, his year speaks for itself. He can look, you know, you don't have to know, all you have to do is watch the show and you know he's somewhere different. I don't know how he does it. I've said that many times, I mean you travel a lot.

15:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's yep, I'd be and again, I would be there if I, if I was doing the podcast junket thing, I would. I would have a good time and it would have been a very challenging to have done those two weeks abroad right before. Yeah, because you're wrangling a lot of podcasters. You see me play that game yes, oh yeah task, but yeah, it's enjoyable.

15:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it doesn't. You're not saying that it it means this is a reflection of the kind of the end of the in-person conference.

15:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, not at all this is no, no, no, no, I'm relearning how to do in-person conferences.

15:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, I thought I have the institution some way of preserving that institutional knowledge.

16:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not how this, you know, put it in loop or something yeah, no, the way that build went well enough that I thought, okay, here we go, they got it. You know they. They waited longer after the pandemic, you know ended than a lot of companies did and it got weird after a while. You know 2020, obviously understand, 2021 got it, and then 2022, you're like really. And then 2023, like oh, come on, guys, are you serious like what's happening here?

16:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you know.

16:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it it, they, they went a long time. Microsoft, these events will go through only a little bit of it. I mean, it's an explosion of information, um, and they, I, I don't know, they, they, they could do a better job of figuring that stuff out, but they're figuring it out so I think they'll get there. You know, it will come back eventually.

16:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, that may not be there, but you're paying attention to it. I sure am, yep.

17:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there's a lot going on, and I think this is something that's going to bleed into next week maybe, literally in that case, um, and then into the coming year. But you know, I a couple of things just to kind of level set this or whatever. You know we've been talking for a long time now, a couple years. We reference, uh, about what microsoft is doing with ai. We reference the stevie batiste stuff. You know, uh, bill, not this past bill, but the previous build, he talked about those three app inside, inside, outside and now what we're seeing is something he did talk about.

17:33
It was a year and a half ago, um, where he actually referred to inside. Is that the third one? Yeah, the inside ones, inside ones, right as potentially you could. He said you could think of these things as agents. You know they will become more intelligent.

17:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was outside.

17:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The third one is outside. Outside, they'll go off and do things on your behalf in an autonomous way, right? And that's literally what Microsoft is announcing or has announced.

18:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're not alone, like all of the movers and shakers in this space, are all about agentic right now that's right.

18:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um. I don't like the word, but we're gonna live with it. So you know we've it's kind of got it in there, it's um it's like uh, what is it it means?

18:15
uh, so that I just real quick. So just to take a step back, microsoft has been, uh, talking about and allowing developers and it pros to create things that have been called agents or something like agents for some time. The thing that puts agents over the top in this area is the LLMs that they're going to run against, right that you know. They've had all these different ways of doing this, but now, thanks to generative AR, this but now, uh, thanks to gender to bear just at least, uh, we'll say, llm, uh capabilities, they become much more interesting. So the way I think and I'm curious maybe richard will define this slightly differently, but to me, all these things are are online services that you configure to respond to certain events, perhaps, um, and to come back when something happens.

19:05
So I actually, leo, I referenced this last week, but when we were buying our apartment in Mexico city, we were playing that there's a term for this geo arbitrage, I think or where you, we're paying in US dollars but we have to buy it in pesos. There's an exchange rate and that exchange rate goes up and down every day. So my wife went to some service and said alert me when the exchange rate goes over 20, like a 20 to one. Uh, 20.5 to one was the one one she was looking for, and so every time that happened, she would transfer some amount of money into an account we had that was in pesos and we'd get a good exchange rate. And, um, and by her math, she believes we saved somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 doing this because she favorably played the exchange rate In the years since the peso has done tremendously well, the dollar has done poorly and the exchange rate changed to 17 to 1. At one point, I think, it even went into 16 point something to 1. And so we don't care anymore, so we just go on with our life.

20:05
So, uh, right after the election, um, my wife all of a sudden got an alert in her phone. She looked down and said hey, uh, the exchange rate's 25, 20.5 to one again. It's the first time she's gotten that thing in three years. She's like huh, the agent you know ever stopped it? Never that's. And it's just sitting out there doing this thing. It's like a. A simpler or an as simple example might be a Google flight alert, like I would like to. I, I'm going to go on some trip. I don't care when I go, but let me know when this particular flight falls under a certain dollar amount and at that point I will go book it. And so Google will send you an email or whatever. However, they alert you. It's that sort of thing, but it's but operating perhaps against an LLM or a set of LLMs you can imagine in the Microsoft Graph sense with Microsoft 365, you might be working against some kind of a corporate data set.

20:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I would also say softer metrics, like she's looking at a particular exchange rate from a particular source, not across all possible sources and and also she's setting the thresholds herself. She's saying this is the number I care about, as opposed to give me the optimal number but this isn't like ai, this you do that with.

21:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If this, then that that's sure no but, but, but I but it is ai, so that I'm being overly simplistic, what I'm. My examples are pre-AI examples.

21:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it's still agentic, would you say. Or does agentic imply AI?

21:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well agentic as a branding term is explicitly AI.

21:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
AI is a marketing term designed to leave people with their money, but generally speaking, ai is what you call it when it doesn't work.

21:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
as soon as it does work, it gets a new name right because large language models are something we've had forever since, since the von neumann architecture, which is, you know, a deterministic code where you say you know, periodically, pull this data source. If this number goes up, do that.

22:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's not AI.

22:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a step-by-step deterministic program. Maybe I poisoned the poll by being very specific.

22:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But it is important because I do think AI does something different. It's a little more non-deterministic. We're not really sure what it's doing. We know how it's doing it, but we don't know exactly what's going on in its little coding brain. It's not as simple as that. So when Microsoft says agentic, presumably they're talking not about deterministic programming.

22:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do compare it, though, to the if, then then, that type thing because, I think for a different reason.

22:41
I think for, but for a different reason, because conceptually I think people can hit like my you know my wife's thing with the, the exchange rate or Google flight thing. It's very simple. It's a simple concept Like a non-technical, normal person could, could be like yeah, no, I completely understand why I would want to do this, the, the, if, then then that stuff can get complex like it's it. It can get into an area where a lot of people might look at that and say, yeah, I can see the value in this.

23:13
you know, power automate now you're coding, though, but now you're yeah, now, now we're talking about something that's a little complex and it's outside of my, and it's possible that some of this agentic stuff may fall into that category, by which I mean it. Microsoft will provide some simple examples of things that work. You know that you could look at and say, yeah, ok, no, that makes sense, I like this, and. But then there are going to be these more complex things you can build using their tools. They have tools for non-programmers, like Copilot Studio, and then they have the Visual Studio type stuff that is for developers.

23:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
AI Studio yeah.

23:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
AI Studio. Yeah, that gets you know that can get complicated, right? So I don't know. I feel like I always reference Steve Bateach, right? I mean, he's my guiding light here in so many ways, but I always think in terms of things like orchestration. Right, this is something I talk about again and again. Um, when he talked about this type of thing and again this, I think, was a year and a half ago. I don't think this was this past year, I think it was 18 months ago, ish. He was talking about, remember he used the term a co-pilot of co-pilots.

24:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There you go.

24:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, which is some kind of nerdvana thing, I guess, for, like you know, ai and the Microsoft Graph and all that kind of stuff. But the idea is that AI is going to be the orchestrator and what it's orchestrating are these online services that are up in the cloud and then apps that you use as the user, and it's doing this. You have to give a permission and all that. I know people privacy, people are going to freak out when you start talking about this stuff, but you know you give it permission, just like you might have given cortana or whatever permission, because it's your personal assistant, right, it has to know about your schedule and has to have access to your data. The stuff that cortana might have done was pretty straightforward. Hey, you have a meeting. You know the stuff that ai might might have done was pretty straightforward. Hey, you have a meeting. The stuff that AI might do potentially, if they pull this off, it's going to be a little more complex.

25:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The big thing, if you talk about the automation side, would have been that it would have done the exchange for you, that it might have even fired off the email to negotiate a raid. You start to get into more sophisticated options there, right, or you know? Therein lies the question. If I have a bot of some kind that says, you know, normally just say give me an alert if the, if an airfare is a good price, as opposed to hey, I need to travel somewhere in this range to these locations, buy them when you find the breast right just do it, yeah, yeah, I mean, there's an element of trust there that I think has emerged too far for a lot of people for sure.

25:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But in my little world I see a lot of pushback from people who don't want Copilot specifically, whatever that might be, and that confuses me, not because I think it's so useful and why wouldn't you want it, but because Copilot is not in your face. Copilot is the thing that you can turn off. Well, unless you hit the stupid key all the time, like I do, then it's in your face, but okay, but forget, you know, forget about that. Or you use Microsoft word or Excel or PowerPoint or whatever it might be, or Outlook, right, you can use Copilot to improve your writing, to help you create a spreadsheet, or whatever it might be, but you don't have to right.

26:27
The thing about the agentic stuff is that, depending on your organization in this case, because right now we're speaking specifically to commercial customers, but this will come to consumers too is that this may be working on your company's behalf and it's just going to happen. There's an unavoidability aspect to agents that I think will alarm those people who already were alarmed by Copilot to a whole new degree. You know, and and I am not a conspiracy theory, whatever I don't I certainly have my pet peeves and all that kind of stuff. But, like I said, I look at Copilot and I think, well, you know, whatever, it's good, bad and different, but I don't have to use it if I don't want it. I do worry that. The agentic capabilities, richard, what was that? They came up with a service that would rate you as an employee's usage of internal resources and whether or not you were spending enough time in meetings.

27:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What was the thing, viva internal?

27:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
resources and whether or not you were spending enough time in meetings. It's a fee to learn, fee to learn right.

27:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that's an agentic capability in a way. Well, there's a whole area, especially in the email marketing side of things, or in marketing in general, called in prescriptive analytics. Before LLMs became hip, we were already doing this, and the prescriptive analytics was looking at variations on tickle emails. So you've been to the site, maybe you throw some stuff in the cart. You haven't bought anything, right? When's the right time for me to send you an email to sort of prompt you to come back? What's the language in it? So we'd write a bunch of variations. The tool would look at the response rate and tune itself. That's cool. There you go, yeah, yeah, it's cool but it's also scary oh, it's super right.

28:09
Like we're doing, you know we're immediately in the uncanny valley of software. Well it's algorithmic.

28:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the same thing. Tiktok does you know, it's just uh well observing behavior and adjusting for that behavior yeah, and that's where you get.

28:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what the terminator does too, you know like, and shoots you, yeah, then it kills you, it keeps going until it finally kills you.

28:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean getting away from the marketing side of things. I watched a prescriptive analytic models for deciding when to service steam turbines.

28:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, see, that's good stuff.

28:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Then it was based on when's the part going to wear out the thing's actually going to fail versus when's the maximum utilization. It was all these balancing act. There was also a prescriptive model for when to evacuate ahead of wildfires, knowing that evacuations cause injuries and death themselves. So do you evacuate earlier when it's less urgent, even though you're incurring more cost to decrease arm, or do you evacuate later? And so a lot of these models just analyze this is, I mean, what you're.

29:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I'm sorry you know it's again. I just said I'm not conspiracy theory guy, blah, blah, blah, whatever, but I always I mean like we're up reading asthma of you know the rules of robotics, etc.

29:19
Etc which, by the way, science fiction right, I understand, but that you went, but you, and this is what colors all of our views of this stuff. But it also, I think, will be pertinent in a moment, or something like hal 9000 in um 2001, where it gets these two conflicting commands right and then suddenly it's it's better for the mission if it has to kill one of the astronauts to get you know to the be clear.

29:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know it decided to kill all of the astronauts was the best way to get a successful outcome to the mission yeah, there you go.

29:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So in the view, in, in the human view, hal went insane, but in its view, or in the view, it was completely rational, it was just logical.

29:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you make a whole universe into paper clips, it's like this was the mission.

29:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, yeah, so in other words, in the, has ever made a mistake something like the example you gave, where um we looking at like we want to. We can't prevent forest fires, but we want to make sure that we get out in front of these things as quickly as possible. We launch the planes, minimize harm, et cetera. The first thing they're going to do is eliminate you, the human being, from this process, because you're the problem, you're the slowness, you're the waiting for you to decide.

30:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you burned all the houses down in advance, you don't have to evacuate so but I mean, okay, these are all nightmare scenarios of poorly designed but not windows every day.

30:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Of course, they're nightmare scenarios of poorly designed software. That's the point. That's this is the company making the software.

30:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean yes to be clear they're making tools so that you can make these. Yes, of course, of course. Right, they're not going to make the paper clips, they're going to let you make the paper clips.

30:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So look again, I don't want to come off as kind of a nut job about this, but so many times I see people in our industry kind of overreacting, overreacting, overreacting, and and I look at this stuff and I'm like I think I'm going to overreact.

31:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, this is where people do talk about AI safety and where some people were worried about AI. I think that's not unreasonable and really it comes down to who do you trust to create this and who? Do you trust? Okay, not Microsoft. Do you trust OpenAI? Do you trust Anthropic? Do you trust Meta?

31:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Who do you trust? You get microsoft's punting on this.

31:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're not creating it, they're just giving you the tools so you can create it yeah, but they trust, trust you but they're making you telling me that you wouldn't use bing forest fighter service to uh do what you just described like I, I look, I, I think every one of those companies you mentioned is chaotically evil, so it's kind of hard to like who do I trust?

31:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
trust? A new fundamental question is big tech. Do we trust it and should it be trusted? And what they've really seemed to be doing is becoming more and more rapacious and more and more justified and then then maybe you don't want to trust them with their your AI.

31:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think most of these tech companies are fairly panicked at the prospect of not winning this current race.

32:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's true, and so they're being, and so they're throwing protections out the window. Yeah, as fast as well.

32:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you know, one of the things microsoft talked about a lot this week. I'm not going to get this term right, but well, maybe I'm going to get it right. Let's see if I can find it. Um, you know there's a the, the human intervention thing. Yeah, they, they call it human in the loop.

32:21
So there's an approval military term yeah of course it is, because that's where this is headed. That's my point. It's gonna it's gonna be literally terminator robot, um. But again, it's hard to imagine that this process doesn't eventually determine that the human in the loop is the problem. So we have these things that are being automated, that were possibly jobs that people did. Okay, we're eliminating those jobs. I think we all understand that. So now we get this one guy in a lab coat or whatever and some kind of a tower, you know saying yay or nay to these things, making sure that the, the logic is sound or whatever. But I mean, I isn't he the problem?

33:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
now you know like it's like literally the terminator plot. You know it's going to be spread across a lot of people all trying to make those decisions right very so it.

33:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is, uh, I mean honestly, the fundamental question of our time, I think right, well, look I.

33:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's logical that, um, a service that would act on your behalf is the next step beyond. We have this capability where you can bring up a prompt or whatever interface and say I would like this thing, you know, make me this thing or help me with this thing, or summarize this whatever it is like. That's fine, but that's a very manual process. It's also kind of a weird throwback that we're suddenly typing again in a world which you know we've moved on to graphical user interfaces, you know, for 40 years ago.

33:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, eventually it should be a voice interface for all of us. Yeah, of course.

33:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But here we are doing this thing I still I did this morning. I typed in a prompt to get a pretty picture, you know.

34:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's not the end of the world, is it?

34:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, it's not. But the next prompt is going to be like let's end that, like now, make the world look like this picture and maybe that is the end of the world. I mean like I, you know, I well, or worse yet. I mean, so we talk about, I love that, we, I love all the terminology of ai, like hallucinations, hilarious, right, we have this fun new word that, uh, we used to just say, just call it what it is a bug, you know, or?

34:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
whatever a logic mistake, whatever a training.

34:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A literal bug got into the training data and now everything is colored wrong um you know, whatever it is well more.

34:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's more like um. It's something that the, the engine, made up. I don't think it's a bug in the training.

34:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean made up, but it's based on its input, Like, in other words, if you're going to train the data on the internet and then you ask it something for, like an objective fact, you know what is one plus one, and it's like you know there are 11,000 different answers to this. So we're going to have to, you know, deterministically decide which of these is the most accurate.

35:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, but a common hallucination would be who is Paul Thurott? Paul Thurott died in 1984. That's what I'm saying. The question is where did it get that?

35:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think the reason Well clearly that one came from Reddit and then it was-.

35:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I think sometimes it didn't come from anything. Yeah, that's Literally just putting two words together. That's the problem that it doesn't understand.

35:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so like a year ago or whatever in the past year, when you talk to someone you know normal, non-technical about AI or you'll see these warnings everywhere you run the chat, gpt or whatever it says hey, just so you know. It's not always right. You should check your, check the facts. You know, know and everyone's like okay and no one does you know.

35:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and then legal documents go out, uh, policy changes. You know like that's gonna become. I think you're right, but now it's gonna be automated check the facts. Yeah it's gonna be automated.

35:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now you're telling me this human in the loop is potentially will be checking this after the fact. Right, what is he standing over? The smoldering remains of like civilization? He's like hey, I found the bug it's funny.

36:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's funny, I mean, where's that undo button?

36:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I don't know if you're gonna laugh when you find out what it was. Hello anybody.

36:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This does take me back to a conversation I've been having since the very earliest days of, uh, you know, open ai a couple of years ago, which is ai is fine, don't give it agency, not agentic, but don't give it agency.

36:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not agentic, but don't give it agency. Well, you know those words are.

36:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Like, don't give it the nuclear codes, don't give it weapons, don't give it things that have agency in the real world. And that's exactly what we're doing.

36:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Or could do. Nobody's actually done this and this again.

36:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mentioned the military reference because that was a very specific part of the Defense Department is doing it right?

36:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no. This is specifically what the Defense Department said they wouldn't do. Right Is that in the end, a person still makes the call to press the button.

36:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They also said they wouldn't go into Laos. I mean, like what? No, no.

36:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And you can still question it, because certainly the software is framing up the view so that the person making a decision only sees, you know, one option yeah, some poor grunt who's in a double wide trailer in austin is going to say yes or no based on the information the ai gives it.

37:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what I'm saying. Imagine it seemed to become smart enough that it's like look we, we're not. We're going to pretend this guy's still in the loop, we're going to feed him bogus data so that we get the answer we think is correct, and then we're just going to do that thing we would have done if we didn't have this.

37:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So we don't think that anywhere in the world maybe ukraine ais are making kill decisions not, not officially now.

37:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That being said, right, there was a case in the UN specifically about a drone carrying a 40 millimeter grade with an image recognizer. See, so that doesn't mean Ukraine's deploying it, just said this product existed with an image recognizer. Yeah, so it recognizes a particular, it's tracking for a particular face. When it sees it, it charges towards it.

38:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you understand. This is the reason that Microsoft stopped selling facial recognition technology to police, because it was biased toward people of color, and it's why Google engineers rose up when Project Maven came along for Google.

38:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They didn't want to be doing that kind of work, but I think those days are they look great, all right.

38:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, to take it out of the apocalypse just slightly and look at it maybe from Microsoft's perspective, especially from you know, like, office productivity, right, what they're really when you think about it, like, just forget about the AI, the scary stuff, the Terminator robot that is literally going to kill you in your sleep this week. But if you just forget about that for a second, it's really about efficiency, right. You know the automation office automation has been with us since the days of AT&T, talking about paperless offices. That we still haven't achieved, by the way. You know this is what are the things that are hard for people to accomplish. How can we help them get over that? How can we help them get by that? And you know you can look at those positively or negatively. There's all you know. In the same way that I talk about, you know these services that create images, and I'm not hiring a graphics artist or a painter or whatever it is to make these images. I'm using AI, so I guess there's a job there that's kind of gone away, but for me, you know, this is more efficient, cost effective, et cetera, et cetera.

39:19
You know what are the doldrums, that, what we used to call a knowledge worker. You know faces in a day, or you come in in the morning, you know, like god I rich you might remember, I don't outlook uh 98, 2000, one of the versions way a million years ago started giving you this kind of daily view. You know, you'd log into the app and it was like here's what your day is going to look like. It was always terrible, right, it was all these meetings, whatever, but you would have this day view or whatever my day or whatever they called it.

39:48
And people, I think, use Teams like that kind of a dashboard. But this is the type of thing where it's kind of an advanced version of that. It's like we'll use AI to say look, these are the most important emails that you got overnight. You need to go go do this one first. Or, um, you know you're meeting with a person from whatever team and, uh, you met with this person 17 months ago. His first kid's name is this and you talked about this and you know that kind of helpful.

40:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know like you have a little like the guys were springing near, it's like I know you already get the viva emails if you're using office 365 saying hey you. You wrote an email yesterday saying you would do this for this person by the day. Have you done?

40:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it. Yeah, now they'll be like we know you didn't do it. We can tell you you didn't do it so asking, rhetorically, asking for a friend.

40:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, we just said.

40:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, exactly I don't think you did. No, that's that's what I want to hear from an AI. I want to hear an AI say I'm just asking questions, just asking questions.

40:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
People tell me I hear Yep, according to people in the know, you have not done their job.

40:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the opposite of not clink. What was that Schultz on? I know nothing, but he's like I see everything, I hear everything, I know everything.

40:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And we're starting to have these bots sit in the Teams calls now for exactly that reason. They keep better notes and they do. When we say, okay, well, I'll take that on. It's writing the summaries and saying you agreed to these things. You know, I'll play you back the transcript if you want just in the middle of a meeting.

41:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll be like, I think, paul's playing call of duty.

41:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't think he's actually paying attention, so we agree, though, that these are very useful tools. They can be really huge in business.

41:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, potentially Sure, of course.

41:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But they have some potential risk.

41:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Would you?

41:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
advocate against them for that reason.

41:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think we take risks all the time for potential benefit.

41:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, we drive down the highway at 60 miles an hour. Just pray that the other guy's not going to turn into our lane.

41:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I because we I just gave this to I gave a talk and I kind of mentioned this story and I told the story again in the podcast. But you know, I go back to that cloud computing thing and the exchange administrator freaking out because, like you're telling me that my final act as exchange administrator is going to be handing over the reins to my company's email to Microsoft and the answer is yes, you know, the world has evolved and you haven't. And, by the way, your company does not exist for email infrastructure. What are you talking about? You're not in a place where you can make a good decision for your company because you're worried about your job and all you've been doing for the past 10 years is every other exchange version. You've been doing a migration and that you sort of thought you were just going to ride out your whole career doing this. But the world changed.

42:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The joke is that there's still a role for the administrator on that. It's just doing more valuable things than that.

42:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, it's still involved with email, that's sort of the point Like, yes, you may or may not have a role at this company I guess we'll see but like it's up to you to kind of make yourself valuable and there's a whole bunch of stuff you weren't getting around to.

42:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
that was more preventative, right? You've never set the rules around monitoring for harassment via email. You've never bothered with box management because you've been too busy doing the day in, day out. Yeah, so crashing in the surfer, keeping a mailbox running.

43:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The positive spin here is that, instead of being reactive now which is the big story with IT right You're going to now be able to be proactive. You're going to get to those things Like AI if it works correctly and works well will automate those things that, for you, were drudgery and time consuming and prevented you from doing the things that were meaningful.

43:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've seen Microsoft use it a bunch of times.

43:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Things that I've seen microsoft use a bunch of time removing the toil from the work. Yep, right, so that you are. Eventually it's going to be the removing you from the work, but, yeah, yeah, the toy. That's always the implication, paul except that there's no evidence.

43:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's actually true, right like. The reality is there's higher and higher level work that wasn't gotten to. I don't know anybody in it that's gotten to the bottom of the to-do list.

43:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
In fact, they couldn't get out the third item, so no, no, I no, I'm not, I'm not disagreeing, I, I listen, I, in fact I would just say, uh, personally, I, though I am aware of this, it's very easy to fall into this. It sounds true trap, you know, there's probably a term for this, but and I, even though I am well aware of that, and I kind of try to preach against it and think for yourself and all that kind of stuff, yes, but I feel, you know, I feel like with ai I've been pretty clear-headed so far, definitely been all over the map because ai happened so quick and you know. But I look at this thing and I'm like, okay, yeah, I don't know yeah like for me very well with the science fiction tropes yeah.

44:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you know all the way back to the luddites. After they smashed the machinery, it was rebuilt and all of those folks ended up being supervisors running higher automation clothing.

44:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah and the price dropped worldwide yeah, right, right, right I mean that's.

44:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What actually happened is that the automation made it possible for the market to become many times larger. Yes, many travel agents lost their job and we put travel online, but the travel industry grew by orders of magnitude, and that's always four more people they're and right, good travel agents still have a job.

44:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yeah, yeah, but good humans, you know you just be a good if you said to a, a younger person especially, or I, I keep saying normal person I realize that's vaguely insulting, but I'm including myself in the abnormal part of that list.

45:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, that there are people who would sit at a desk and type away on a computer and book things for you. They'd be like what is?

45:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
this. Why would you do that? You're describing?

45:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
like what is this, you know? Like it doesn't make any sense but yeah, it's only. That's only 20 years and it's already irrational right, well then, but then again, 100 years ago, something like that didn't exist there was no such.

45:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean you're going to fly through the air?

45:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, I mean well just the notion of traveling for fun, like I would. I would travel because my uh people were being killed and I had to get out of here, like that was the only reason I would ever move, traveling for a better future.

45:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, traveling, my life traveling.

45:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is we're talking a post-world war ii thing. Basically I mean like, uh, yeah, this notion that you might, you're doing this for fun. You're not invading the company in the country. You say you're, you're going to go there and eat and drink and stuff and then you're gonna go back.

45:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Curious, then you're coming back yeah, exactly what are you doing?

46:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, that's, and you're taking pictures.

46:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, there's a whole lot of stuff there um, I just uh, can we take a quick break, because we're getting, of course, long in the tooth as one says as we, as we do as we do and uh and we have lots more to talk about. But you are watching windows weekly with paul thurott and richard campbell reunited and it feels so good, so good, oh boy without the bad wine, the peaches and herb of microsoft journalism.

46:28
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Visit ThreatLockercom. That's ThreatLockercom. I had a great conversation with these guys. I was blown away and just I mean, look at the reviews, look at what people say about ThreatLocker and you'll see this is what you need, threatlockercom. We thank them so much for supporting windows weekly and you support us, of course. If they ask, tell them. I heard it on windows weekly. Thank you, threat locker. I really like this ai conversation. I I don't mean to truncate it, but I I think it is very important and uh, and when you're going on about agentic stuff, it's important to understand what that we're gonna.

50:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The word agentic is going to come up a lot. Yeah, this year, it's just. You might as well just rip the scab it's happening, yeah I agree. So this is the start of it. So excellent, thank you, yeah sorry no no apologies necessary, thank you.

50:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what else is going on? New hardware. I got to send you that Snapdragon thing. I still haven't. I have to go down to the UPS store. Oh, no worries, no worries.

50:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so that box was so successful.

50:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft's doing it again 200 very happy users yeah.

50:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's important. So what they've announced in are releasing is not until next year I don't think it's coming out until the spring is a what is basically a a net pc, remember, uh, what were those? Um thin pcs, yeah oracle offered them.

50:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they had like sun microsystem.

51:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, yeah, talk this up, right, yeah, the network is the computer or something? Yeah, and they were onto something, it was just they were about 20 years too early on that.

51:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well and by the way, can I point out, paul, for years I've been saying this is what microsoft should do that the best, most secure way to offer windows is in the cloud, on a thin client which they have you mean to tell me that my last act as windows administrator is going to be handing over windows?

51:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but yeah, I mean it.

51:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, it's if they priced it better.

51:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now, the, the client's not expensive, right, it's just the, the monthly fee for it's the monthly cloud that's right and and that varies wildly depending on the resources you have in that cloud pc and uh, the type, the capabilities, etc but it doesn't cost much when you're not using it, like for intermittent use.

51:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it's true, a fact, point well, point. Well, we do that, yeah we do that.

51:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Our editors were working on Premiere in the cloud using. They would spin up Windows when they need it and they would spin it down as long as they turned it off. It wouldn't cost us anything.

51:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, right, and if you forget about it for a couple of weeks, you get a bill and you're really sad yeah so to those of us in the sort of what is now like the client, you know, windows community or whatever we look at this, we think could I have one of these please?

52:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I saw an interesting statement, though, that one of the reasons it's hardened is it doesn't have, it doesn't offer, win32.

52:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, it doesn't really do much locally. It's a very stripped down version of Windows that's just designed to do the connectivity stuff and some basic but you even in the cloud, do you have, when you don't have win 32 in the cloud either?

52:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, you do, it's, it's, oh, you do, I see, okay, yeah, I know there's some unspecified intel processor in this thing.

52:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's probably like a seller on, you know they said a custom os.

52:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it a windows os or just?

52:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's windows. Yeah, it's a stripped down version of windows. It's probably windows 10x. You know they had to do something with it it's probably edge. All you need is edge yeah yeah, it's, it's a web app.

52:48
Uh, no, I don't it's. It's unclear, but it has, you know, a couple ports and you know whatever. It's just the basics, but it's a cute little box. I, I, I still I I'm intrigued that leo actually had a really good real world example there, because I still I wonder about this from an it perspective how compelling this could be.

53:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I've certainly done some shops that have been all in this for years, right like they're. They use virtual desktop, going all the way back to zen with citrix, right, so that they just don't have the machines on board, and this was often when we had remote offices where they're going to be online anyway, so the the latency is unavoidable. Um, the bigger thing was control over data. I watched whole dev teams work this way. Where the the code never went to the destination machine, it was all executing yeah, there's a central repository somewhere.

53:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now that for this to make sense, you know back in the day it was, you know we had terminal services, like you said, zen Citrix, and you know.

53:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now you have Azure Virtual Desktop and Windows 365.

53:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, that's right and yeah.

53:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So the issues would be security, privacy, Because if you're uploading you know important, important secret code, you don't want it somebody on somebody's cloud microsoft could probably reassure or generally is the is the customer doesn't want the user to have the code right, so I'm keeping it in the cloud because it's actually safer.

54:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's safer there, but it's always late and and I mean, if you look, if you could play diablo over the network, latency shouldn't be too much. I you could play Diablo over the network, latency shouldn't be too much.

54:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I played Call of Duty online. Over the network, anything is possible, so yes.

54:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Depends on the quality connection.

54:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, quality of connection, which most businesses probably have a pretty high speed connection Right.

54:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I suppose, if your needs are minimal, which a lot of people's are, and, like Richard said, if you only need it sometimes, even better.

54:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, the question is how minimal is this? How much do you give up by doing this? I mean, in theory, it could have no in theory it could be anything.

54:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the point In theory you could be running against a box.

54:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That is more powerful than anything you'd have at your own desk right, You're also no longer upgrading those devices right Like here. I am on a two year.

55:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know Well, that's the. That's part of the.

55:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want to tell me, I mean I always thought this is the best answer Microsoft could offer to the security issues, because it's always up to date, it's always patched.

55:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Microsoft has secured their own infrastructure perfectly well over the past year alone. I mean I wouldn't worry about anything.

55:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Everything's fine.

55:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Fine, but they'd have to reassure people that the network, the center, network operation centers were the first hurdle here is that this is in the cloud.

55:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is not something that's in your cloud. It's not a private cloud.

55:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is in microsoft's public cloud right and, let's face it, they've had better uptime than you did no, that's not.

55:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's not my I. I 100 think it's a great idea. I don't mean it like that. I mean that for some organizations, some, whatever, that that's the untenable part of it. It's like well, hold on a second, this isn't in our own, whatever it is.

55:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you're already using Azure, Like that's already true, right?

55:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I'm not Again. I'm not, I'm not actually disputing it.

56:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you, you know, this is the thing. So I mean, and, that being said, if, if I was responsible for a company infrastructure like this, I would have a separate backup source, which I even have for my own m365 right, my synology backs up my m365 instances, okay, onto a drive here, just because. So if I lost access to m365, for whatever reason, I at least have a copy of everything.

56:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah okay, yeah, so it's sort of a reverse way of thinking.

56:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like I want to work in the cloud, so it doesn't matter where I go and what device it works, but I also want to copy elsewhere. So if I was on a submarine, richard, yeah, I've done this scenario with jeff snow, yeah, he's like let me make up the most, the stupidest possible example. We, we did this for um we we did this scenario for uh, a ship off the coast of Gabon, during the Ebola crisis in 2014.

56:48
Oh boy, right when we did the undersea cables going into the wet Western Africa, just not fast enough, and so they moved a ship with a couple of racks worth of gear in, and it was basically a localized Azure node to support the healthcare professionals that were fighting the.

57:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it was like Azure arc before there was our Azure arc, essentially.

57:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and so it was a a way we had. We had a better cell signal coming off that ship onto the, into the city in cote d'ivre, than than they had normally, and we weren't depending on any of those things. Right, and then, and then every so often it would synchronize I uh.

57:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean, I mentioned the exchange story because it's so relevant to everything, but it's um, yeah, this is the same type of thing, I mean, where windows security and updating and whatever else is not the point of your business, you know I just do for a living people. Yeah, we want them to sign in, securely, authenticate and, uh, get work done and then go back to their lives. And you're not shipping hardware around the world. You're not configuring laptops and then hope. You know their lives and you're not shipping hardware around the world.

57:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're not configuring laptops and then hope you know, the same way you change that exchange server, that exchange administers your life. You're going to change the desktop sysadmin's life too. Right now he's on a. You know he's taking care of 1500 seats in a mid-sized organization. He's shifted it so that every year he's replacing 25% of those machines under lease, and so that's 300 something machines that he handles every year to get redeployed with a team of folks. I put these thin PCs in. I don't have to standardize the machine. You can run different VMs as you need and they get upgraded all the time.

58:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right, so you've got this little little device 350 bucks or whatever. It is obviously keyboard, mouse and some kind of a screen. Yeah, and actually you don't even need that. I mean, they, you could run this off an iPad if you had to.

58:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean right, and people do that software.

58:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, of course, and uh, okay, I mean, it's interesting. I, I, I think connectivity has gotten to the point where this is possible.

58:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
When you're dealing with 20 millisecond symmetrical gigabit fiber, you know that's. As long as you maintain the bandwidth, you'll be all right. As the number of seats goes up, it gets more challenging. And also that's a great device to send home. They're not going to do anything else with it. Right? You're going to configure that device so, so you can only communicate with the company's instances yep the kids aren't going to play on it there's

59:10
going to be a very little porn on that device, I bet I bet you could play doom on it but yeah, no, fair enough.

59:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, you're right, you're right, okay, no, that's cool. I and microsoft said, by the way, there, there, there will be more of these types of devices. Yeah, I could imagine hybrid, not just from Microsoft.

59:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a reference device.

59:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean there'll be more right.

59:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean we can get into some interesting. Don't we already have such?

59:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
devices. Anyway, yeah, the thin PC movement's old, it's been around a long time, but this is a new wave, and the ARM hardware is especially good for this.

59:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the ARM hardware is especially good for this, but also the cloud is bigger.

59:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is not Intel, this is ARM. Well, it eliminates. Well, this one, I think, is Intel, isn't it? I believe, I think this one is.

59:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But this is a good point because actually you can make it out of an Arduino. It doesn't really need a lot of horsepower. That's right. It could be a Raspberry 5.

59:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly, and you could have this thing that's super efficient and silent, and if it is ARM, you don't have to worry about compatibility issues anymore, because you're running everything.

01:00:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love how they show it driving two giant screens. I know that's to reassure you that you know you're not. The user experience isn't going to change really.

01:00:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, they've been. You know, they're the dev box stuff that Microsoft does for visual studio developers, where you're kind of hitting you're potentially hitting this incredibly powerful computer up in the cloud and you could have a very thin and light laptop. You could have a Mac, you know it doesn't matter right that's better than that.

01:00:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you're only compiling once a day, you can run a light instance while you're coding and then give me more CPU. It's time to compile, right. There you go, there you go, or actually you push it off you push it through.

01:00:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is the initial promise of cloud computing. It's infrastructure when you need it and you're not paying for, and, uh, when you're not using it, et cetera.

01:00:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Instead of me sending $1,500 laptops out to my employees to work from home, I'm sending a $300 head unit unit. That's not good for anything else no, it's okay.

01:01:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, that's a good argument, I like it. Uh, yeah, okay yeah, no it's.

01:01:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I'm strictly thinking from a system in perspective. I don't know that a consumer wants this, although this is the machine you want an, a grandparent, to have, just because they can't break it really they should.

01:01:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They could call it web tv. Yeah, there you go um. No, no, I yeah okay I'm coming around to it. I I'll say you know azure um virtual machines. And then they did windows 365. I was like I don't I don't quite.

01:01:43
I mean, obviously there are reasons. You know, like there are certain things. I I don't quite. I mean obviously there are reasons, there are certain things. I don't. I didn't see it as kind of a mainstream thing, but actually, using my own words against me, which is probably smart, I think you know. Thinking back to that exchange guy, it's really, it's the same equation, right. At some point this becomes. This is the problem, right, where we're spending too much on the people and the hardware and the maintenance and upkeep and blah, blah, blah, whatever, and of windows in this case, and windows pcs, and that is not what the point of this business is.

01:02:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, it's um, yeah okay, there's a great side. I've done a bunch of run ads on avd, on azure virtual. Yeah, the subtle thing you don't get until you really start using this is that when the user logs off like, that instance is actually dismantled so that when you start it back up again it literally rebuilds it. You get a fresh copy of windows each time.

01:02:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There is no sort of like when the windows sandbox does something similar, except there's a state that you get back here. Obviously you're connecting to your data, et cetera. That's right.

01:02:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it's kind of a kiosk effect and it just means you're saying nothing's going to change. There's a big thing that's going to change.

01:02:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is a Chromebook experience.

01:02:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean really Right, but you still get to run that one weird, cranky Win32 app that you need, except now run that one weird cranky win 32 app that you need, except now it lives in a sandbox in the cloud with an administrator making sure it doesn't get out of hand.

01:03:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't have to make it run on everybody's machine by the way, they said that these are co-pilot plus too.

01:03:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, okay, that's so weird, that's weird, but okay, that's fine, I mean that's fine, I there, yeah, because it makes sense to run ai locally in the data center that is also hosting the cloud AI that is too expensive to run because, okay, I can't do the math on that. But look, this is when it was Terry Morrison. This is the event. They announced the surface laptop. They didn't. Microsoft did an education event one spring, so 2015, 2017, somewhere in there and he's walking around with a us thumb key and the idea was usb thumb key that, uh, you know you have a lab in this case of students and we need to reset these things between classes. And here's this goofy kind of sneaker net way to do this.

01:04:00
This is something I dealt with in the 1990s. I worked at a computer in a um a lab at a school, yeah, and same same situation. They were older, obviously. They were, you know, big honking desktop computers running word perfect and things like that. But the idea was that you would reboot and it would run a script and it would wipe things out and bring things back and the next students would come in. That would take many minutes, but they would come in in the next class, whenever that was, and they would have a fresh computer. Everything was back to the way it was supposed to be. Um, that's still a concern. I mean, this is you know, and and now?

01:04:31
we can do this in the cloud and it's, it's clean yeah, and here let's imagine you're running classes in a day.

01:04:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You've got four classes that day of 30 kids each. Yep, you pre-run them all. So all those 120 VMs are already ready to go right, and as one group of kids finishes and logs out, you destroy them. They don't need to be anymore.

01:04:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it happens automatically, but you're not waiting for them to start up.

01:04:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're already ready. So when the next kids sit down, they light up. That's the great thing about the cloud, right?

01:04:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You don't even just a basic productivity work or whatever you know that experiences this kind of windows rot, where the thing slows down over time. You get walkiness. So this is the one thing you have to admit as a windows user. You know, one day you'll run an app that runs every day and it doesn't start up right or something happens, or it stops connecting to the webcam or whatever it is like. This is a way to, this is an extreme way, but isn't a way, a way just to get around that.

01:05:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is the kiosk effect. You get back to the starting state every day. You turn it on, yeah, yeah yeah, yeah, okay, all right, all right all right well, and I just think I mean again, I'm thinking totally enterprise, because I think that's why you keep me around um, yeah, but that's what this is for.

01:05:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the audience. Yeah, right this, yeah, and that's what this is for. That's the audience, yeah.

01:05:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This could be a good consumer experience too.

01:05:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think, look, one of the things we're going to talk about in a few minutes is some of the Windows security innovations for lack of a better term that they discussed this week at Ignite and very much focused on the commercial customers, right, businesses, education, government, et cetera. Ignite and very much focused on the commercial customers, right um, businesses, education, government, etc. But a lot of this stuff is also coming to consumers and will eventually come to consumers, and that's kind of the point. Um, when you look at something like the security baseline of a co-pilot plus pc, it's astronomically in a different class than a normal computer and there's there are things that take long periods of time. That's something I just wrote about this in the context of co-pilot plus pcs.

01:06:29
Um, tpms were kind of invented in the time frame from longhorn, when they were looking at, you know, and at the time I was like what are you doing? Like what is the point of this? Um, and now they're just standard equipment? Um, the switch even to like 64 bits um started with xp, uh, went probably mainstream, maybe windows 8, windows 10, somewhere in there, and now it's the only you know platform for windows. So we don't even do 32-bit anymore. Um, so sometimes these things take a long time, but, um, but yeah, this stuff will. Yeah, this stuff is absolutely going to come down to consumers.

01:07:04
And then, I don't know, I feel like for a lot of people it's going to be software, but when the time comes to upgrade to a new computer and people might be like, well, maybe this is when I go to a Mac or a Chromebook, what Microsoft might be selling, or PC makers maybe, would be well, you had a pretty good experience with this idea pad or whatever it was. How about you buy an idea pad thin client and you know you have a Microsoft 365 subscription or whatever we're calling it now and you get access to this thing? That's kind of awesome up in the cloud, maybe.

01:07:36
And by the way, it's always going to be safe and clean and work Right. You know, yeah, maybe I can see it?

01:07:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I guess yeah, and when it does go out, it goes out for everybody.

01:07:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, taking the day off. The whole world's taking the day off.

01:07:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a thing On the extreme other end of this spectrum. So we have the CoPilot Plus PC, right, and so these are the PCs that have these additional hardware requirements. Instead, you, you know, not that anyone would buy such a thing, but you could buy a, or you could make a four gigabyte ram windows 11 computer. I guess that would be stupid, but you could slow storage, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, co-pilot plus pcs, 16 gig minimum, I think it's 256 on the ram. Mpu.

01:08:24
We all know the stuff you know, really modern, it's all the latest chipsets and all that kind of stuff. Um, those things launched on snapdragon back in june. Uh, without that major new feature, recall, and not a lot else to show for it in the ai sense. And so since then, microsoft's been expanding the platform to amd and intel, obviously, but also adding new functionality. So they announced some new features for these computers, I think back in September, october I don't remember September October somewhere in there. None of it has appeared, but they're talking that up more now during Ignite as well, like ClickTo do you know it was one of the big ones or, and also recall, by the way. Right, so recall has been delayed multiple times. Um, I enjoy every time they talk about, recall and talk about all the new features that they're adding. And I can point to the original documents and say are these really?

01:09:16
new features, you know um, we'll see, but, um, but whatever. Um, you know, there we're going to talk about windows in a minute, but there's some, there's some deep, you know, architectural stuff going on in windows, for security especially, but not just security, but in addition to the clown car of stupidity features that we talk about every week, there's actual, you know, like computer science occurring too. So, you know, there's a little bit, we get, we get a little bit of both, but, yeah, I, there's a little bit we get, we get a little bit of both. Um, but yeah, I don't. Hey, geez, I don't know what to think of any of this. Ai stuff, I, I keep. And by ai stuff I want to be clear I mean local ai suffering against the mpu. I feel like this is a solution in search of a problem in many ways oh, yeah, no, and it's a panic right Like yeah and I, yeah, I.

01:10:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We need an implementation of these LLMs for information workers. That really makes a difference.

01:10:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it has to run on device. It has to require them to buy a new computer. It's very important. That's a big part of it and I but I keep coming back there. I mean even the.

01:10:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The most by far the most successful lm right now is github copilot and you don't need to run it locally. That's not a thing, but it's got utilization like it's almost a justification for the stack for a very small sector of the world it wouldn't run.

01:10:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It would probably run great locally. I mean honestly. I mean, you know, especially if you were doing something very specific. I'm working in a specific language, in a specific framework. Yeah, I just don't think you care, because you're online anyway.

01:10:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You've got to be working interacting with github anyway. You know that's your normal workflow. What's the difference? Yep, yeah, so I don't think the customer cares about running locally. I really don't. I think microsoft about it, but I don't think the customer cares yeah.

01:11:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I. The thing customers will care about will be these specific features that improve their life, and they just won't understand that it's because it's running locally. That's the problem with it. So if you're a, if you edit video, for example, I mean obviously you need a bunch of horsepower and graphics capabilities, et cetera, et cetera. There's a, there's a growing list of capabilities that run off an mpu that are frankly rather amazing, and but I'm talking about a pretty small audience there. So when you talk about mom, pop and you know the, you know whoever, these people are kind of non-tactical and you're like all right, well, what's in windows or whatever in copilot plus pc that's going to mean anything to them.

01:11:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't think they. I'm like uh, geez. I just want it to work where it runs, and so, to the point, you're going to make a pricing difference. The cloud version costs more than the local for a small group of folks that's going to matter Most people. If you charge at all, they're not going to use it.

01:11:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean I for a Snapdragon computer. The big thing to me is the efficiency and performance and all that stuff and the battery life, and I tweeted about this yesterday. It's not a joke. We got on a plane, it was a four or four and a half hour flight, but one of the things they told us up front is like the first half of the plane doesn't have power, Sorry you're not going to be able to charge your devices, and the people next to us were freaking out.

01:12:25
They literally were handing their phones off to the flight attendants who could bring them back to the back of the plane, charging for you know. So I was like no problem, I have a co-pilot plus pc. Open it up, charged my wife's phone and my phone and ran this thing the entire flight and, uh, got a bunch of work done and had 55 percent battery they should put you in.

01:12:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's awesome, you awesome.

01:12:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, and it was that's life changing. Now, did I do a single local AI anything during that flight? No, not even one, right, and I didn't. That didn't matter in the slightest. Had I, it would have been super efficient, but I just don't. There's nothing there that's compelling. So there I honestly, the only compelling thing they've ever announced is recall, and that's the one thing they keep delaying. But I think I don't know that this will actually be. Actually, most of this probably won't be local In fact, it definitely won't be.

01:13:16
But tied to the agentic stuff and to the expansion of co-pilot capabilities in Microsoft 365, they're going to be changing the Windows UI a little bit to accommodate these things and, of course, the apps themselves are going to change as well. But there's a bunch of new capabilities coming across Microsoft 365 that will run across the cloud. But I was talking to Brad this morning. He was telling me he's like there's something weird going on with Windows 11, because I think it's like the beta channel. They changed the way things are rendered in the taskbar all of a sudden, out of nowhere. They never announced anything and I said yeah, I think it's because they're using it on stage at Ign to show off these new microsoft 3k 365 capabilities that run off a little page, or whatever they call it in the taskbar, and they needed something to run it against, you know, and uh, so they skipped the canary channel, they just went right to beta and, um, you know that work, that's happening.

01:14:18
Right, that's part of the clown car stuff, I guess. It's like we're just we're just rushing to kind of meet the needs of whatever group or whatever. So, um, yeah, new ai capabilities for copilot plus pc. Um, copilot actions is the name of the thing I'm referring to, by the way. Sorry, I didn't say that. Um, these are cloud-based capabilities, but I I think microsoft 365 is going to be the bigger benefactor from this stuff, or I should say users of Microsoft 365. I have I'm not saying there aren't any examples. It's fun removing a background from an image and paint or whatever.

01:14:52
It's good, like it's a good capability, like I like it. But I think the big advances are going to come across or come through. You know the applications we actually use to get work done Word, excel, powerpoint. You know whatever actually use to get work done word, excel, powerpoint, you know whatever. So I think that's the bigger space, or canvas or whatever, for this stuff. So anyway, I need to digest this stuff a lot, um, still more, I should say um. So I suspect we'll probably talk about more of this stuff.

01:15:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're still very much the announcement phase of this too. Yeah, this is a they dragging on wave two, like we're still. You know. You know what I miss at a, at a keynote, at ignite, is a you know, columbia sportswear or the case study, the company up there saying, hey, we've been using this for the past three months and here's the benefits we've had. Like it's been a while since we've seen that and I haven't seen it at all for AI technology.

01:15:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's an unspoken rule at any Microsoft keynote that the best part of it is some company that is not Microsoft, yeah, showing up with their own kind of unique brand of you know marketing and whatever it is they do for a living, and all of a sudden, wow, they're really interesting and it kind of snaps you out of this. Yeah, this boring.

01:16:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just tell you a story about what you could do here.

01:16:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and you're like oh yeah, that's always been the case. That's why, like you know, when they brought up the rock, you know to talk about, um, uh, the Xbox, or they brought out some drill Sergeant one time who was awesome or like what's the I can't think of I don't know clothing brands, it was like Laurent something or whatever the name of that company was was really interesting. They did that NASA thing. That kind of blew up in their face right before the pandemic, unfortunately.

01:16:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But that stuff is fascinating. Industrial light and magic that came up with.

01:16:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean that stuff is always interesting, you know, yeah. But or you can have some Microsoft guy drawn on and on about nothing.

01:16:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know like. These are the options, and the bigger thing to me is what's the implication when that that group is on the stage. Doing that is like we've been using this for months and here's our success story? Yep, not, hey. They just thought of this. Right, that's right, and it's not even a product yet.

01:16:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah this was a cool thing. It was one of the things about mixed reality that was actually pretty good they were. There was a good story there that they would bring in car designers and say you know, we get the guy making the car, instead of like having an elephant-sized lump of clay, he's going to design it with a HoloLens and then he's going to bring other people into the studio and they're going to walk around in real space but with mixed reality headsets on and look at it, and they could open the car door and they could look at the you know how things lined up and they could see it in 3d space. That's amazing. Now it's just kind of a small audience, which is kind of the problem, but but still, from the outside you would look at that and be like wow, that's awesome, you know, and it gets your mind working a little bit like well, how could we apply, um, what they did here elsewhere, you know, or maybe to what we're doing at work or whatever?

01:17:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, interesting, show us the wins.

01:17:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We need some wins as an elephant-sized piece of clay myself. Yes, I really there's a.

01:17:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a almond flavored candy that they sell. The kids sell on the street in mexico and I refer to it as the uh the best tasting clay I've ever had. It has the uh, it has the consistency of the, the grout that you put between like, is it a little gritty? It's like my. Um, what do you call? Yeah, it's, it's gritty and it's it's literally like compressed wet sand. It's like, um, wow, it's halva. Yum, it sounds like halva. Hold on one second, stephanie. What's that candy called that? I called clay Marzipan, I guess I don't know.

01:18:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Marzipan yeah, that's delicious. It's almond flavored clay.

01:18:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the best almond flavored clay I've ever had. Yeah, that's exactly marzipan.

01:18:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah it's good. There was a town in France when I was a kid that we went to that was like Marzipan city, and even the gas stations would have Marzipan sculptures.

01:18:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Cause it sounds like the name of a place and I'm pretty sure it's the name of a city on the, on the water in Mexico, somewhere Marzipan, Mexico. It's built on clay. It's perfect.

01:19:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love Marzipan yeah.

01:19:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Winter's era Fantastic yeah.

01:19:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, let's take a little break and we shall continue. We're going to get to Windows 11. It's funny, the minute the show ended last week, microsoft put Windows on arm on an ISO and Paul sent me a note saying it happened Again.

01:19:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Start recording. We can we can.

01:19:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's do another show. We'll get to that in just a minute. Paul thurot is here. He's actually back home in pennsylvania. Thurotcom, also back home in madeira park, british columbia. Richard campbell uh, we are glad to have them both back home. Our show today today, brought to you by US Cloud.

01:19:46
I had never heard of US Cloud. I talked to these guys and I went wow, more people ought to know about you. They're the number one Microsoft Unified Support replacement. So, yeah, it's not really about the cloud, it's about support. But it's like Microsoft support better, faster and cheaper. Pretty good, right.

01:20:06
Us Cloud is the global leader in third-party Microsoft enterprise support. They support 50 of the Fortune 500. A lot of big businesses switch to US Cloud because they can save 30% to 50% on a true, comparable replacement for Microsoft Unified Support. Us Cloud supports the entire Microsoft stack 24-7, 365 days a year. They respond faster and they resolve tickets quicker for clients all around the world.

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But you're always talking to real humans in the US and your data stays in the US, and so for a lot of companies that's very important, and the engineers are the best in the business. Us Cloud really works hard to get the top. They pay them well. They give them great benefits to get the best engineers out there. So when you call, when you say I got a problem, you're going to talk to an expert level engineer with an average of 14.9 years. That's for break, fix or DSE. They're, as I said, 100% domestic, so your data never leaves the US. Oh, and here's another thing they do that I really like. I don't think Microsoft offers this Financially backed SLAs. On response time they're giving you a guarantee Initial ticket responses average under four minutes. When your network is down, your hair is on fire. You don't want to wait any longer than you have to four minutes. The cavalry's on the way In 2023,. Last year they talked to their clients. 94% of US Cloud's clients said they had saved one third or more when switching from Microsoft Unified Support to US Cloud. Now when I talked to these guys, I said that's great, but really you should focus on the fact that it's better support. It's not just less expensive From Fortune 500 companies, large health systems, major financial institutions and, yes, federal agencies. Us Cloud ensures vital Microsoft systems are working for over 6 million users globally every day. I'm talking the biggest brands Caterpillar uses US Cloud. Hp Aflac uses US Cloud, dun Bradstreet Under Armour KeyBank. And this might be the best endorsement of all. Even the IT folks at Gartner have chosen US Cloud for their Microsoft support needs.

01:22:24
I saw an interview with the director of information technology with a great quote. He said and within an hour, us Cloud responded with, I want to say, four engineers. So they not only did they bring the right guys to the call, but they brought the cavalry. I just felt like wow, that was amazing. That was unlike anything I experienced with Microsoft in my eight years of being with Premier. We made the right choice. You should make the right choice. Oh, and, by the way, when it comes to compliance, no one gets it better than US Cloud. They're ISO, gdpr, esg compliance. It's a strategic imperative that drives operational efficiency, legal compliance, risk management and corporate reputation. They adhere to these standards not because they have to, but because it fosters trust and loyalty among customers and stakeholders. It attracts investment and ensures long-term sustainability and success in a competitive global market. And they are succeeding. What a great company, us Cloud.

01:23:20
Book a call today to find out how much your team can save. Oh, again, with the saving, it's not just you're saving money. Better Microsoft support for less, oh, it's faster too. Uscloudcom. Uscloudcom. Book a call today. Better, faster Microsoft support for less. How about that? We'll put that all together in one uscloudcom. We thank them so much for supporting the show. You support us when, if they ask you, you say, hey, I saw it on the windows weekly that those guys really, uh, they, they told me to call and I did. Uscloudcom. Thank you for your support. Us cloud uh, all right, it's time to talk about windows weird.

01:24:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I figured we'd get to it eventually.

01:24:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, as Leo mentioned, I read after the show concluded last week Because we were saying why isn't there an ISO for Windows on iOS? We've been talking about this for months.

01:24:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So sometime in the past month or so, probably when 24H2 was released, they put a little note on the download page hey, it's coming we promise, that's what Aria said too on the show.

01:24:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like, don't worry, hey, it's coming. You know, we promise that's what aria said too on the show. It's like, don't worry, it's coming yeah yeah, it's unclear what took so long.

01:24:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, if you go back well, I mean to the original there's never been a downloadable iso other than through the insider program for windows 10 or 11 on arm, and there was never any for windows rt right. Of course that required new hardware. Why would there be? But you know, this is becoming more mainstream. This is kind of necessary.

01:25:01
There's a this part of that conversation you were talking about with Aria on your show is that ARM devices have always been a little different than x86, x64 devices, in the sense that the I kind of I don't know what to call it it's like the um, the support stack for these things is more integrated. You know, um, pc makers ship this thing. That is kind of a. It's a thing you know and I know it's serviced over time. But if you were to try to do a bare metal install of this, you run into these issues where you have to have all the correct drivers and you can't go to hpcom and download arm drivers. Really, right, it's still kind of a weird problem. I think that's part of it. Yeah, um, so there's a.

01:25:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's a big difference, um there's also a general push by microsoft to just build the drivers for everybody. Yeah right.

01:25:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a quality control thing and that has factored into it as well.

01:25:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Imagine you have a chance to reset this nightmare of the driver problem.

01:26:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There are a variety of ways to restore or reset or whatever it is repair a running install of windows on a pc and if you have an arm based device, especially a new snapdragon x based, whatever you should avail yourself of all of those things before you ever try this that thing already has the driver set in it right like that's the main thing, that's the built for your machine.

01:26:24
That's right. If your pc maker offers you a recovery image of some kind that you can use to create a bootable recovery desk which Microsoft does, by the way, for its arm-based surface devices you should use that, you know, because you could run into problems. One of the interesting things that Microsoft advises is something I've actually seen many, many times, which is you take an x64 computer, of whatever kind, and you're like want to do a clean install this, and by clean install I mean like an actual clean install. I want to make sure there's no way bare metal this thing, phone homes phones home to hp or lenovo, whoever it is.

01:26:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I want windows you know all my crap.

01:27:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're gone right like yep and then you run the installer and what you find is that the mouse doesn't work, so you have to use the keyboard to pad around and do that kind of thing you can't connect to a network because the network stack doesn't.

01:27:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Those drivers aren't there right.

01:27:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I have no problem moving around with a keyboard. I have. I'm. I've gotten very good at the disk um setup tool and setup. Uh yeah, using it with the keyboard, right, no problem there. But I've often had to attach a usbc to Ethernet adapter to an Ethernet cable and plug that thing into the box to get that to work, or use another machine to load the drivers on a USB key to stick it in the machine.

01:27:36
Now that part you can't do with ARM, but the plugging into Ethernet. Microsoft recommends it if you run into this problem. So I guess here's the good news. I guess the here's the good news. The no caveat ways in which you can use this ISO are to install Windows 11 on ARM in a VM, which you can only do on an ARM-based PC, right, and if you have a Mac and Leo brought this up last week when you were gone, but for some reason you're stuck on 22, 23h2, using Parallels or whatever typically parallels, but also other, you know, fusion, whatever you might be using um, download the iso and just run setup from there and just do an upgrade, you know 24 h story.

01:28:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't have to worry about the drivers, because it's yeah, because I am on 22 h2, as we talked about just use the straight up iso, okay?

01:28:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
um, there is no media creation tool for microsoft that works with the Windows 11 on arm.

01:28:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's no installation assistance. You can't make a USB key.

01:28:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, yeah, could you use Rufus or something to do it?

01:28:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Does Rufus support it? I haven't tried that yet, so I just got home. So that's one of the things I'm going to look at. I'll try it. I'll try it.

01:28:44
When you use Microsoft's downloadable Surface what's the term, I guess restore image, whatever they call it you actually use the restore I'm using the wrong term, sir, I'm sorry the recovery drive. There's a recovery drive wizard that creates a recovery USB drive right in Windows. You can use that and then you overwrite with the Surface specific stuff with that thing. It has the drivers, etc, etc. So that's actually the better option for that kind of computer. Yeah, I mean, could you create like a raw? I don't actually, I think you could right, it's just an iso. I mean I I don't see any reason why you couldn't. I haven't tried it. So that's one thing I haven't tried. But um, I don't see any reason why you couldn't.

01:29:28
Um, you could use this on an older pre-snapdragon x uh or snapdragon elite whatever the actual name of that thing is uh pc to just kind of upgrade in place if you're not getting the upgrade through um windows update like that should work. You don't have to worry about drivers in that case, but as a kind of pure um, restoration kind utility. It's not quite there, you know, in the sense that it won't work for everyone and it's not the type of thing you want to take the chance on. Like we'll see what happens, like no, because if you screw this thing up, you know you're going to have to go back to the PC maker and say, hey, could you fix this for me?

01:30:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know you don't want to be careful with it.

01:30:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But, um, if you have a windows 11 on arm device, you want to run hyper-v and put a vm in there. This will work for that. If you have, like I said, parallels on a mac, no problem. Um, it's better than using that uup dump site because it's official, it is from microsoft, but it might not have all the drivers you have to get online. If you can get online with the ethernet cable, then you can go into windows update and that will. That should get you the drivers you need. Right, that's how that works. So that's true on X 64 as well. But at least it's here, it's.

01:30:40
I don't mean to say there are caveats, but there's just more to know. That's all you know. Just be smart about it and know all the options you have If you are actually having issues. There are existing options. Everyone knows about their Windows recovery environment, the reset, this PC functionality. But there's also new stuff. I think it's new to 24-H2.

01:31:00
If you go into the recovery options and settings, there's an option called fix problems with the Windows update and it actually reinstalls Windows without impacting your apps, your files or your settings. And that's true of apps you've downloaded from the web. That's the first time they've offered something like that. A lot of their restore tools in the past were like well, we'll keep the store apps, but you're going to have to go reinstall Chrome and Office and all this stuff. This actually keeps that. We'll keep the store apps, but you're going to have to go reinstall Chrome and office and all this stuff. This actually keeps that. So you just, if you're, if you're doing this for restore reasons, just avail yourself of the other tools First. This should be a last ditch answer. Like don't. Don't say like I have a, like a new whatever you know was apilot plus PC Snapdragon. I just want to have a really clean install. So I'm going to like yeah, I'd be careful with that, I wouldn't. I just uninstall the things you don't want instead. That's a better approach, but at least it's there.

01:31:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So, yeah, I did find some blog posts from folks who figured out to you can use Rufus, okay, bill upset. But the main thing they said was, because all drivers are slipstream you need, the smart thing to do is to take the woa drivers and put them on the usb key.

01:32:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How do you, how do they get them though, like get them out of the computer itself, like um?

01:32:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
no, they're talking about the generic. With the generalized woas from microsoft, there are sets up. Oh okay, like the class drivers, yeah, so you take all of them, you put them on the usb key as well say why aren't those on there? They should be so, but they're not right, yeah and so if you add those, then it will, as it's setting up, find them and slipstream them in I'm trying to remember where I saw this, so and that is an arm ufie boot, so that's yep, okay, that's good. I mean, that's good so I don't remember.

01:32:46
Your. Mileage will vary, right? Good luck. I'm trying to remember why I ran, so I don't remember your mileage will vary, right, good luck.

01:32:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm trying to remember why I ran into this. I don't remember, but one of the issues I've kind of questioned in the past about copilot plus PCs on Snapdragon is they ship with 20-something SLMs right on the disk. So I was always curious. You know, when they make this ISO available, is it going to be?

01:33:07
10 gigabytes or 20 gigabytes, it's not, it's just a 5.1,. You know, normal size and that means that those things will have to download as you need them. And I actually saw this one time, and this is what I'm. I can't remember where I saw this, but imagine you are running a Copilot Plus PC Maybe you just did the clean install with this thing and you go into paint and you use the image what?

01:33:30
And you use the image, um, uh, what's the one that's only on copilot plus, whatever the feature, it doesn't matter, use some feature in paint or photos or whatever that's unique to copilot plus pc so it shows, the feature shows up and you click on it and it says, uh, you don't have the lm you need for this, and it actually downloads it. Then, right, so this thing. I don't know if there's some facility in the system where it will do this automatically in the background if you're not doing anything. But I do know and I just I can't read the heck, I can't remember how I ran into this but you, if you run into an on-demand or you run into a feature that needs an llm and it's or an slm, it's not on the disk it will download it. It will actually tell you, like, give us a minute, we have to download this thing, so that's how they're doing it.

01:34:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it's the answer to that and and as it's just that you need the basics, like the, the default arm configuration doesn't even have a display driver it has no network keyboard yeah, so you, you can install it, but then you can do nothing. You can't do nothing?

01:34:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, you can do nothing right which is, by the way, was what you did with windows rt, so it's like going back in time.

01:34:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah Well, I feel like the reality, of course, when you're on OEM who builds your own machines, is that this is the base install of Windows. It comes with nothing, and then you actually build out your driver set for your machine.

01:34:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The thing that Right, so I don't know why they would have shipped it like this, like it's right the reason this is confusing is that the base configuration in windows and arm with snapdragon x is virtually identical for all of these computers. Now they all have their own things for sure. I mean, I'm not, I'm not I don't mean to downplay that, but the it. One of the things that's astonishing about these computers is how the same they all are, right, right. So it seems like the I'll just call it class driver. So I'm not really sure how they do it on an arm, but like the class driver for the keyboard, the trackpad, the screen, the whatever. This networking would be the biggest one. Really, I'm not the biggest one, but one of the top whatever five or eight. Why aren't those in there? I don't understand that, like I, I think that's absolutely everybody would need.

01:35:25
Yeah, that surprises me. So maybe this evolves over time. I, I don't. I'm. There are reasons, for sure, but I, you know they're quiet about they never even announced that they did it. They just put it up one day, you know. So, whatever, it's better than nothing, for sure. It's certainly better. I mean, my god, we've been waiting for this for years, so it's it's good that they did so?

01:35:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
where did they put it?

01:35:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm looking and I don't see so if you go, if you google, download windows 11 yeah, I mean I've got the windows 11 website page, yeah, so there are. There are three or four, uh scroll down yeah, uh, go down.

01:36:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is our. And now, ladies and gentlemen, the moment you've all been waiting for paul. No, no, it's how to use a computer.

01:36:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This will be great. There you go right there. So it says download windows 11 disk image iso. Yeah, there's a bold link. It says windows 11 isos for arm 64 devices are here. It's in the next section down. Ah, yes available here.

01:36:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ah, there's a link, so there's a four letter link in that yes, it says here see it. I'm surprised you didn't see it no, and then it has all that stuff before, but I'm not going to worry about that, so all right. And what the nice thing about uh parallels is, I don't need it on a usb key, I can do it from that's right, you just run it right up there.

01:36:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You just mount it and run setup. Yep, so you have to choose language. You could, yeah, you'll get it very nice okay and actually, since we did let me skip ahead just for a second, because this is arm related and I don't know why I didn't put these next to each other um, google some months ago announced they would bring google drive to windows 11 on arm, and now they have, so it's in beta I just put it on.

01:36:59
I put on my surface laptop. I think it was the morning I flew home, actually, so it would have been yesterday. It feels like a million years ago. But, um, assuming I'm gonna, I'll use it for you know, some number of days, but I that I I had switched temporarily back to onedrive because this was not available. Um, assuming all goes well, so far it's been great. Um, yeah, I'll go back to google drive because it's better, but, um, yeah, I've been waiting. This is my only significant actually I think it's my only software incompatibility issue with windows 11 11 on arm to date. So, um, yeah, problem solved, so that's good, okay. Um, the big message for windows at ignite is not these new co-pilot features. It's not, you know, whatever. It's, it's security, because I don't know if you got the memo on this, but security is job one at microsoft now and it's the priority. It's weird because they really push the ai thing.

01:37:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You would think it might be ai but it's not a security and um they were talking security around the cloud, like I don't see a lot of conversation about security in windows there is, there's a whole thing, there's a, and so you're familiar with the secure future initiative.

01:38:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, they have one for, just for windows. Now, they announced this because, of course so, um, I, I, I wrote this in the notes, I wrote this in my article, but I want everyone listening or watching this podcast, I want you to close your eyes for a second and just think. When I say the words microsoft, windows, you, what are the first things that come to mind? Now, it's going to be a range, some of it's going to be imprintable, but I'm guessing that what no one thought of was security or resiliency or anything like that. I'm guessing no one thought that, which is interesting because that's what Microsoft seems to think is top of mind for most people that use windows. I think windows is the result of a lot of inertia, especially with businesses, but, um, but to be fair to them, like I said earlier I think I said this up front in the show, yeah, I did.

01:38:59
Uh, there are, there are two halves to the equation. When it comes to windows, there's no like, like, there's no singular team, really right. There's the architecture side, which is in Azure, and then there's the client cars. I call it the stuff that they throw features out like an ape throwing its feces at people at the zoo. So the security side it's pretty solid, right, and there's a bunch of stuff in Windows 11 now and there's a bunch of stuff coming. That is actually really exciting. And one of the things I've talked about a bunch and I really think people don't understand this is the Windows Hello ESS stuff that's in the Copilot Plus PC. So we talk about how they raise the bar on the system requirements, but they also raise the bar on the security requirements to a degree that is actually kind of off the charts and this will become the baseline for Windows security going forward for all computers. Right, it takes time. You have to transition the whole customer base over to these newer computers that have this kind of stuff, but it's an exciting. It is an exciting change.

01:40:00
And for businesses, they've announced a bunch of specific features that I think most people don't know about. Some are new, so that explains that, but I mean some of them have been around for a while, like Windows Hello ESS, which I think PC makers had never really rolled out because it's super expensive. Customers didn't understand it. No one was really asking for it. It's a very stringent set of requirements, you know. But now this is getting added into the, into the mix.

01:40:32
I went back and looked this up. I had this vague idea that this might be true, but microsoft announced their secure future initiative, the new version of trustworthy computing, late last year. Um two weeks later, uh, russian hackers broke into their infrastructure and started a two-month long escap that they all they still to this day have not fully admitted to Microsoft. And and so May came and build and they were like, all right, we're going to re-announce this Like we never did it in the first place, because, you know, people probably don't think we're serious about it. So they sort of pretended they were saying it for the first time. And then, two months later, a month and a half later, crowdstrike happened right.

01:41:08
So now it's November again and we're like all right. So, listen, we're really serious about security, so we're doing this again and it is worth looking at the stuff that they're doing to secure Windows. There's some very interesting things coming up. I'm super curious both you, leo and Richard what you think about this one, because this blows my mind. I, um, I saw that in windows 24 H two that Microsoft was enabling they call it bit locker Sometimes. Sometimes they call it full or they just call it device encryption. It's because the branding on it's different depending on what kind of you know, version of windows you have.

01:41:46
It's. It's, it's really it's just full disk encryption is what it is. But whatever they said, they're enabling it by default on all computers, you know, all PCs and I'm like, oh, that's kind of interesting, since, given that you've been doing that for like five or seven years already, what does that mean? Right, and so in later versions of Windows 10 and Windows 11, they enable disk device encryption of BitLocker when you sign into a Microsoft account or to a Microsoft work or school account. And the reason they do it then is because when you do that, they can save the recovery key up to your OneDrive. Right, if you have Windows 11 Pro or better, you can go into the BitLocker control panel and you can enable it manually. If you sign in with, like a local account, right, so you can do that. And but you have to save the recover key first. You can't save it to the disk you're encrypting, right, it has to go somewhere else. But once you save it, they will let you then encrypt the disk. So I was like, well, how do they, how would they possibly enable it automatically in all computers, because they still allow people to sign in with these older account types? And the answer is they't. So I don't know what they were talking about. Like they, you can't, it can't be activated until you back up that recovery key. So I wasn't sure what that meant.

01:42:56
But in a coming version of Windows, first for businesses that are using Enterprise Edition, they're going to enable this blows my mind a folder-based encryption capability. That, sorry, it's tied to folder backup in some way, so it's like desktop documents, pictures, folders by default, but I guess you can add other folders. I'm like okay, and you have to sign in with Windows Hello to authenticate with windows to get into those folders as an admin. Interesting, but the disk is already encrypted. I'm curious, what is this? They literally refer to it as double encryption. Okay, and that reads like a joke. It's twice as good.

01:43:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's twice as good it's like double secret probation only I, I.

01:43:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I often like I. This is the type of joke I make. I'll say something like my password is one, two, three, four, but I'm gonna make it one, two, three, four because now it's 64 bit, so it's way more secure. It's a joke, right? It's stupid. Yeah, that's what this reads like. It's not a joke. They're actually doing this. They call it double encryption. Okay, I guess it helps how I don't cause it's two encryptions. Come on, man, it's twice as good. It's more encryptions, better. It might be exponentially as good. I don't know. It's I don't know. Anyway, hot patch is great. This is the ability to install uh security patches without requiring a reboot you know, times we heard that one.

01:44:30
I exactly. Uh, there's this stuff like that. There's a feature that's been in windows 11 for a couple years now, called smart app control. So if you're running windows 11, go look for it. It's hilarious. Um, run windows security. I'm actually going to do it on this computer. I'm curious what it says, because I think I already know what it's going to say. But, uh, windows security. And then you go to App and Browser Control and it will say Smart App Control. It's one of the things. So you go into Settings and on most people's computers by this point it will be all grayed out and it's off. That's how it works.

01:45:00
There's nothing you can do to turn this on. So when you get a new computer or you reset a computer, windows App, computer, windows app control or smart app control, goes into evaluation mode and it will sit there and learn about the apps you use and if it can be turned on, it will. It will actually automatically turn. It turn itself on, which, by the way, I've never seen that once. So I I don't know what to tell you, but, um, you can turn it on manually.

01:45:25
If you do it quick, it has to be within the first week or so of using a new computer If you, once you turn it on, it uses AI to evaluate, uh, the behavior of apps that you've just installed, and if it sees weird behavior, it will actually prevent you from running that app. Uh, when it does that, you will, of course, turn it off, and when you do, you can never re-enable it. Now, technically, you can re-enable it if you know the registry things to change, but there's no UI for re-enabling it, and so for businesses, they're adding a I think it's just called app control for business probably, or something. They're adding a policy-based way for IT admins to force that on users.

01:46:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, it should just be group policy.

01:46:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It should just, yeah. So I was told earlier this year that this was going to be enabled by default, so it would not be in evaluation mode, but it would just be on in default in 24H2. It's not so. This is one of those things. I've looked at a bunch and it's not. The behavior's not changed, but it is something that's been in Windows 11, I want to say, for at least two years. It's kind of experimental in a sense, and it literally is an evaluation mode by default. But if you're.

01:46:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So is this like in Canary, Like where is it? No, it's in stable. You can do it right now it's in stable. It's just off by default.

01:46:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So if you run Windows security, the app, you know it's like a dashboard and then. So if you run Windows security, the app, you know it's like a dashboard and then go to I think it's called app I just did it, I'm sorry, I just lost it App and browser control. I think, yeah, App and browser control, and then the first link in there is smart app control and if you go into settings, like I said, if you've been running Windows 11 for a while, this thing's off and there's nothing you can do. If you've reinstalled Windows or new computer, you can actually enable it. It's in evaluation mode by default, but you can enable it and it will protect you against, you know, untrusted apps and drivers. I guess is the way to kind of put it.

01:47:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
How do they assess untrusted?

01:47:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
AI. So, if you trust that, I don't even know why you're questioning this.

01:47:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's weird to me. You would even ask that question.

01:47:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, my experience with this so far is that I've never found a good way to demo it. I've never found a good example of something I could definitely run where it would be like, oh yeah, no, this is not good. And then it's just kind of you know, I enable it and I never have any problems, right, but if you run into a problem you can turn it off. But I do know if you do turn it off, you can never turn it back on, not using the standard UI. I love that. Yeah, it's good stuff. There is a new modern version of Windows Hello from a user experience that's coming where they explicitly mentioned the PASC stuff they've been using under the covers for the past year or so yeah, about a year which is cool, right. And so sometime in the past month, microsoft talked about how they're expanding PASCII support in Windows. It's going to get nice. So that stuff is that stuff's cool, like that's happening or will be happening soon. That's cool. I'm trying to think what oh here's the big one.

01:48:24
Actually, this is the big one. So, starting with Windows XP, to my memory, microsoft simplified the types of user types you could have or well, it's really permission types, really. But there are administrator users and standard users right, we've had this since Windows XP, rather than having different, you know, more granular control over that kind of stuff.

01:48:47
So, administrator, standard user, it's sort of like Windows SKUs, Like that was the same time where they introduced the home SKU right To the NT product line. So we had home and professional, and so, you know, Microsoft kind of sits back and they look at all the features and they're like, all right, this one's going to be in home and also pro, this one's only going to be in pro. Right, Like yep, you make these kind of decisions. And so they made the same decisions with permissions.

01:49:10
right, Like administrator class users will be able to do certain things that standard users can't right, and so the way Windows has worked ever since is that if you need to, as a standard user, do something you can't do, you could escalate and basically you would send a notification to an administrator class user who could approve it for you. Or if you knew the administrator class user's username and password, you could enter that information then and bypass the block and go do it. So this system's not great, fair enough. So I don't know if this let me think about this Is this Windows? I think this is straight across Windows, so it's probably windows pro and enterprise.

01:49:50
But um, in the, yeah, like the managed versions of windows, they're going to allow you to authenticate against windows hello, to allow things to happen as an administrator. So in other words, we're recognizing that most people set up a computer and they're administrators right, but they're gonna run as a standard user most of the time, and when they need to do something, some action, some task, whatever it is that requires administrative privileges, they're going to have a temporary administrator token created that occurs when they authenticate with Windows Low, so hopefully it's facial recognition or a thumbprint, but it could be a pin and then, as soon as that thing's done, you're back to standard user, I mean the thing that Linux has done for forever.

01:50:36
You know what I feel like. Microsoft invented this and I don't know why you have to Anybody would talk to anybody about that. So I'm sure that it's look, it's a good idea, wherever it came from. If that is how? Yeah, that sounds right Like it's like a visual, like a GUI version of pseudo, I guess, maybe is the way to think of it Windows slow based pseudo, yeah, so it's a good idea.

01:50:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean for sure Just getting people to not operate routinely in with admin privileges.

01:51:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This has been the dream. Yeah, you know forever, right?

01:51:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, it's like I dealt with one shop where they had a script for every admin account where the moment you were running an admin account, there was a red flashing light.

01:51:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh boy.

01:51:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just like it's only when you went down to a domain account that you didn't have that problem Although now folks complain about power of domain accounts. Yeah.

01:51:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
People who care about security have tried this. Right. You're out there, You're going to hear this go. Yep, I did this. You create an administrative class accounts because you have to. The first one you sign into with the computer is an administrator, and then you're like all right, but that's just there for me to approve things. So now I'm going to create a standard user account that I'm going to use yeah, and I'm going to. Every time something happens, I'll just enter the the authentic. You know, whatever I need to authenticate against the administrative account yeah, to authenticate against the administrative account yeah. And then you use that for about 15 seconds and you're like no, screw this, this is a pain in the ass.

01:51:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah.

01:51:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like it's horrible, so no one does it. And yeah, so this is there 25 years later Like all right, maybe we solve this, maybe this is it. It sounds like a pretty. This sounds good to me. A lot of the security stuff they right now is relying on this windows hello based authentication.

01:52:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and I think it's smart, I think this is, I think that's a good idea. So, yeah, well, and it's just the it's partly to do with windows, like the login process has such an extensive impact that the only really way to do it had been to log all the way out. To log back in. There was a uac escalation, but it's only if you trigger uac, so it only works on certain circumstances where you can temporarily use it in min privilege to apply the uac constraint uac.

01:52:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, I was, I was I think I was wrong about this, but I, I always compared uac to that third brake light. They added the cars in like 1986 or whatever year. I remember they did that and I and I, you know, okay, why are we adding an extra brake light? And it's like, well, people will notice this and they'll, like, they'll see the brake lights better. You know, right, I'm like, yeah, then they'll just get used to it and they'll ignore it.

01:52:58
You know, and I I actually seem to ignore but you know, the third brake light has persisted, so maybe it works.

01:53:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know once you put a rule in place do you?

01:53:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
see this a 24 h2 is installing good things coming your way, it's so excited. I can't wait till he loses his keyboard and mouse capabilities but, the good news is, the emulator handles all of that yeah yeah, of course I don't have to worry about that.

01:53:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, anyway, I feel like people don't pay attention to UAC anymore. I think that's part of the problem. Right for my, I don't think most people do what I do, but I know that if you hit tab three times and hit enter it gets rid of it.

01:53:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't tell people that.

01:53:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know I'm sorry I, but I'm like tap, tap, tap, enter, like that's what I do?

01:53:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
doesn't it sometimes ask for your password?

01:53:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, oh, uac. No, you're, it will. So actually this just came up when richard was gone. So in the insider program somewhere they're updating uac to, I think, avoid the thing I just described. Right, similarly to like a 2fa app, like sometimes it will give you a number, sometimes it'll give the number on the other side, sometimes you have to, you know it does something a little bit is playing that game because they're trying to get rid of the. You know like the.

01:54:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Thing I do. You know the pattern.

01:54:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so they're tap, tap, tap enter.

01:54:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're doing that with no, I love, I love the way authentic here says you know, look, look at the requester for the number.

01:54:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's right look at me for the number.

01:54:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It keeps showing the number in yeah, yeah, I do actually.

01:54:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, were you being sarcastic or do you actually appreciate it?

01:54:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, I really do appreciate it. Yeah, I think that's Because it makes you think.

01:54:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it's smart, it's a little extra. It's different every time that's so smart. It's a third break light.

01:54:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But it also you know, I've also talked to an administrator who they talking to a user whose account was under attack. And while the account was under attack, the guy approved an authentication.

01:54:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, that wasn't him Like oh, he was on the phone.

01:54:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Cause you're like stop, cause he always this fricking thing is always asking me stuff Like yeah, this is and the whole thing with the authenticator numbers is you have to be both sides because you need to be able to see the number right, right so right it was right in front of me, like while I was there. Yeah that's.

01:55:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But that's what it's like being a human being you're flawed. That's why ai is going to take us out. I can't wait. It's only a matter of time.

01:55:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The I will win if it presents a wizard where you can go next, next, next done the owl way to present a wizard where you can go next, next, next done.

01:55:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're like um, hey, co-pilot, how do I like just get rid of uac prompts all together? Is that a thing? Could I do that?

01:55:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
would you like the end of civilization?

01:55:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
wizard, I can do that you have to, but you can do it. But there's a uac prompt.

01:55:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm just you know, so I'm just gonna have to sit okay, just oh.

01:55:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
just authenticate with windows hello and we're good. There's been a bunch of stuff through the Windows Insider program since we last spoke, including one that just happened today. Most of it is not particularly interesting. They're getting rid of the beta channel for Windows 10, which is hilarious because they just started it up again in June. But whatever, windows 10 was over.

01:56:10
I guess it is again. So there's a bunch of just. I don't even care about most of this stuff, honestly, but the big one, the one that people are going to want to pay attention to, came out last week, I think after the show as always Last week's show, which is a new release preview channel build of Windows 11. 11 which has a lot of additional things, which means it's almost certainly coming out on patch tuesday in december. So if you look at this list, you could you you get an idea that this was supposed to be 24 h4 and they didn't quite make the final cut right for the initial release.

01:56:48
Um, it includes some things we've seen before, like the android sharing capabilities, um, from file explorer and on the desktop there's like that start menu thing where the, if you have your android set up and phone link, it pops up in a weird little regurgitated side panel thing. Um, system tray updates, where like, uh, it's like the shortened form of the clock now right, which they showed like six months ago, you know, jump lists in the start menu. It's a bunch of like little things, like just a bunch of them, but so that I think this represent. This to me is like okay, this is what we, this is what we really wanted to do for 24-ish too, so that I'm guessing here of, but I think this is going to be.

01:57:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Did they stop going to 24H2 at some point? Can it be 25H1?, can't it?

01:57:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, all right, I'm fascinated. You just said that, because this is not in the notes.

01:57:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but it's November.

01:57:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
A couple of weeks ago, google announced that they were going to change the schedule for Android Right. They've always released toward the end of the year. They kind of finalize it in August usually, and then it goes out a new devices like later in the year. Now, for them, what that meant was typically in August, I'm sorry, in October they would release new pixel devices and it would have that version of Android. They would usually be the first ones, right, and then it would go to others. You know Samsung would follow in January, whatever they claim because of their third-party OEMs which I read as, because Samsung the only one that matters that they want to change the schedule so that they release this thing by the middle of the year, so in the second quarter. And so Android 16 is going to have this shortened schedule where all the behavior changes that you see in the UI will occur in probably, you know, may or June, something like that. Android 16 will come out, and they said they're doing it because of these partners, right, samsung, samsung, who, increasingly, is releasing their best and most important products in August, right, which is the folding devices.

01:58:50
Right, this past year, actually last year, and then again this year, they tried to move this timeline up. They tried to ship it early. They missed last year, they missed this year by two months. They didn't even come close. So they announced new pixels in August. They did all their pixels in August, just like Samsung does for folding phones, yeah, with last year's Android, yeah, nice.

01:59:11
So if you thought microsoft was stupid, that you know they're right there, um and now. But now they've started up this thing. So I think, honestly, I look at this and I think, yeah, this is the right time to do it. You want to hit the end of the year stuff. You want to hit back to school, you want to hit holiday, whatever. Why wouldn't microsoft do the same thing? Right, they sort of half did it last year. They released 24h2 first for snapdragon, right in june, right, but then they waited until november and or october, sorry, and now, I guess, sort of december for the full version we're still playing with that idea that there's a six month exclusivity and we don't really know when it ends.

01:59:47
Yeah, I don't want to give them ideas. I, I don't want to give them ideas. I definitely don't want to go back to our system where they do two major releases every year. But right, I actually do think that the second quarter of the year um is the better time for that, that major release. I think that is the better time. I don't know. So interesting, you just said that because that to me like, why not have a 25 h1? Why not?

02:00:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
right, you know, and then go to 26 h1, like skip the h2, forget h2.

02:00:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Who cares about h2?

02:00:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
do in the first half of the year, yep, in which case you're already late. It's november, h1 is upon us. Yes, uh, anyway, that's that would be my recommendation. I just really never want to say 24 h2, ever again, that's what I'm looking forward to.

02:00:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I 24 h2 is uh, I don't remember if you missed this or not, but it's been easily the buggiest, most unreliable version they've ever got.

02:00:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just installed it. When you knock that off you know.

02:00:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But they have cute icons in the context.

02:00:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Man, it was nice remember when it said you know, great things are in waiting for you.

02:00:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I believed it see, I'm on 24 h2. That was the iso I downloaded, I think.

02:00:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let's see, let me look. I'm gonna look at mine. I think you're on the. Oh, I actually have a newer, but you might. So you should go to windows update it. But you have a newer, oh yeah I haven't done, I do you have the monthly updates because you updated, now you'll need to update. Yeah, that's right, you might want to destroy the insider program Leo.

02:01:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I've learned my lesson.

02:01:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then, just real quick, this is just semi-related, because earnings never end. Lenovo, the world's biggest maker of computers, had significant double digit gains, profit and revenue, year over year. Wow Oddly not from PCs, necessarily Like their revenues from PC sales only went up 3% year over year. Wow oddly, not from pcs, necessarily like their revenues from pc sales only went up three percent year over year. However, they did predict that, uh, for full year 2025, which for them is when is their fiscal year? I don't, can't remember exactly. It might be the next, we might be in the first quarter now um will be significantly better, uh, pc sales. So they've actually upped their prediction for PC revenue growth for the coming year so.

02:01:55
I think it was five to 10%, now it's 10 to 15%. So they're talking like, like, we pretty much guarantee it's going to be double digit PC growth, uh, in the coming year, which is kind of amazing. And they credit two things for that AI PCs, cause they kind of have to, um, but but also the, that windows 11 replacement cycle which you've been talking about for years but you know has to happen eventually. And with windows 10, uh, exiting mainstream support, not mainstream support to support, I guess, um, unless you pay for the extended support stuff, um in october next year, um, probably probably will start happening.

02:02:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it wasn't the pcs that gave them double digit growth. What was it?

02:02:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, um, it was. It wasn't cars, it wasn't iot. Uh, it wasn't smart devices. No, it was um data center. Okay, yeah, so everyone, even like companies that are just not big players in this market, like AMD kind of falls in this category in an even bigger way. Even though they're nothing really, a lot of their growth is coming from that part of the business. Lenovo has been trying to diversify beyond the PC for a long, long time and they obviously have a phone business, you know, et cetera, but you were gone for this.

02:03:08
But amd announced layoffs and they're actually laying off people in their pc and gaming divisions to focus on ai in the data center, which they see as a major growth um area for them. They are not. That's not fair. I was gonna say five percent, but it it's some. I can't remember how small they are compared revenue-wise to nvidia, but it's somewhere in that, it's somewhere in that area. It's very small compared to nvidia but for them, you know, the pc has a as a very definitive, you know, size to it. It's not like if they go gangbusters, they're not going to be a much bigger company than they are now. But if they can make some growth happen in the data center with ai. That's a huge growth potential. Yeah, all right. Lenovo never broke up like HP did, right, so they still have both sides of that kind of fence. I think Dell yeah, dell does as well.

02:04:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okie dokie. Maybe we do a little breaky wicky here.

02:04:05
And then I know you want more AI, so you're going to get more AI. Yeah, we're're gonna smack it with it. You've been asking for it. Now you're gonna get it. Uh, paul thurott, richard campbell, you are listening, dear winder and dozer, winders, winter and dozers, to Windows Weekly, this show brought to you today, as it always has been, literally by Cachefly. How many times have you heard me say it? Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cachefly at C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com. Slash twit. Actually, in the early days of the show Paul remembers this Back when we were in audio, it was like brought to you by AOL Radio for a while and brought to you by BitTorrent for a while.

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02:09:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Do we have an audio?

02:09:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
only live stream of this show you know, actually, at least let me, since our CEO.

02:09:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Someone asked on Twitter.

02:09:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not asking we want this? Uh, we used to. We used to be on tune in and because we now stream on eight different platforms, we're uh, we've been constrained. One of the platforms could be the audio stream, but we wanted to get it to YouTube and Twitch and Discord and TikTok and LinkedIn and Facebookiktok and linkedin and facebook and x and kick. That's eight and we so I don't.

02:09:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, you could listen to the like I, you know no but people want.

02:09:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know what they want. We used to have a you could just listen to have an audio stream, a live audio stream. Uh, it was at twitam. Check if it's there or not. I think we're working on on getting it back. We I look, I want to have it back, but remember the thing that has changed. We used to do 24-7 streaming right, so we would do reruns and stuff. We don't do that anymore, so it won't be that you just turn it on and leave it on all day and all night, as much as you might want. Paul.

02:10:13
Farratt's Seltzer Tones yeah exactly, I think twitam might still work. If, yeah, exactly, I think twitam might still work. If it doesn't, russell's working on that, we're going to. So I apologize, I know it's been down since the studio closed. It's not something I've thought about, I just Well, I'm glad you asked because actually I've been getting some email from people and I do want to tell people that. Yeah, also, I should mention we're working on a best of for this show.

02:10:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
As long as we're talking uh, business uh.

02:10:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So if you, have some ideas of moments of great rage on paul's part, or a comment that you enjoyed, or whatever we're. We're looking for those clips. Anything that happened in the year 2024, go to twittv. Slash best of. The more information you give us, the easier it will be for our editors. But anything that you remember that you'd like to see in the end of year, best of which is coming up in not too long, believe it or not, about a month. Yeah, all right. Now back to the AI and antitrust and more, the section you've all been waiting for.

02:11:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's actually no AI in here that I can think of. Well, I guess it factors into this a little bit. So, according to a report in Bloomberg, the DOJ and the ninth the States that are arrayed against Google and it's losing a search antitrust case in the United States are going to recommend or have recommended to the judge, because he gave them various choices that Google sell off chrome as part of its remedy. Um, there's a lot more to this. They looked at selling off android. They looked at selling off the advertising business. Um, they are apparently also going to require them to, uh, make various changes to android and the app store, etc. Etc. But, uh, the big one, of course, is this chrome, android and the app store, et cetera, et cetera. But the big one, of course, is this Chrome thing, and the reaction to this has been entertaining to me. I'm not 100% sure, personally. This is the right thing to do, or whatever it doesn't generate any revenue?

02:12:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
How do you make a business out of a product you give away?

02:12:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, because it's the distribution vehicle.

02:12:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't disagree. Yeah, that's the theory.

02:12:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, I know. Yeah, yeah, that's the theory. Yeah, no, I know I, I don't know, I it's. It's hard not to look back at the microsoft thing. You know, remember when microsoft was found guilty of antitrust violations?

02:12:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
late.

02:12:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, in the order of 99 yeah, they were going to separate microsoft into the os company and the application company, that was the. Yeah and I. This is not as dramatic as that, no, but it's still, you know it's kind of interesting.

02:12:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It sounds like table stakes in a consent decree negotiation.

02:12:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah. I think one thing we can 100% guarantee is there will be no more of these special deals, right? So the 20, whatever billion that they pay Apple every year going away yeah, the thing that keeps Mozilla in business going away, sorry mozilla.

02:13:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you do have a new administration too, so it'll be interesting to see.

02:13:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, although the new administration hates google, so uh, yeah, I was gonna say I that it doesn't improve no one seems to remember this and I'm going to include myself in this list.

02:13:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, this lawsuit was actually brought under.

02:13:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The trump started so yeah so, and it's still been running through the Biden administration.

02:13:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But that's the point. It's been going on so long. Yeah the Biden administration continued it.

02:13:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then yeah, government moves slowly. I mean, it's years off whatever remedy.

02:13:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What do you think of selling Chrome, though? I mean, I don't even know how you sell Chrome. It's an open source project.

02:13:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, could this? I think the three of us could afford to buy chrome like I, like what is like chrome is a standalone business, like some analysts said.

02:13:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It was worth like 20 billion. Please for what?

02:13:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
how would you?

02:13:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was told, the super site for windows was worth a million dollars when I tried to take it back like I. I, yeah, sure it is, but I who would buy?

02:13:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it. And why would they buy it? Man would want her. No, it's just yeah, no, yeah, it would be well, well, but Microsoft.

02:14:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
there's no way Microsoft could do it. No, Microsoft would be prevented.

02:14:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Do not touch it with a 10-foot pole. There's no way.

02:14:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no way, honestly, I think, the one company that makes sense here is Mozilla, oh Mozilla ibm.

02:14:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, terrible amazon, but it won't. Amazon, this isn't gonna happen. You think it's like I?

02:14:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
said, I think this is table stakes in a consent decree negotiation. I think what happens is, uh, some form of behavioral change where they can no longer tie their you say they'll be spankings spankings they will be. Do not make me make you go in a timeout. I will do it. I'm going to Blair Witch, you get up against the wall. No safe words here. Yeah, I don't know.

02:14:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't have an opinion about this one. It's hard to understand how it would even work, because Chrome is based on an open source project called Chromium, which, admittedly, is mostly Google employees, but it is not owned by Google.

02:14:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft uses. Chromium for Edge Right like Google, Microsoft uses Chromium for.

02:14:59
Edge, Right it's roughly comparable to Android when you think about it, right, so Android, aosp, but the thing that people want is what we call Android, and that's the Google Play, google Maps, gmail, and you pay for that, right, and so that's obviously not true of Chrome. But Chrome, google makes money through their advertising engine, right, and, by the way, all the built-in tracking, right. And so when Microsoft made Edge, the big promise was we're going to give you Chrome, but without all the Google terribleness. Fair enough, they did it, but they added their own terribleness, right, and so, instead of getting tracked by Google, you get tracked by Microsoft. So is that better? Maybe, but I don't know. It's kind of a thin line.

02:15:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So Bloomberg whether how intelligent Bloomberg is or not said it's worth $20 billion $20 billion Wow. Yeah.

02:15:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But, again, I don't know what people will actually pay, right?

02:15:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's all you want, and I don't understand really what selling it even means. I know, I know It's's bizarre. It's bizarre, it's like selling linux you can't sell.

02:16:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the real reason that they're talking about basing chrome os and android. Now you know, I don't know I.

02:16:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's very strong. Actually, what they're talking about is is porting chrome os to android, to uh, okay, well you know.

02:16:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, so now it's, it's. It's basically chrome on top of some thin linux like yeah, I mean, the whole thing doesn't matter what happens to?

02:16:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
chrome books. What happens to chrome?

02:16:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't, I don't, it doesn't make sense this is a judge yeah, I don't know, I just I, I, to me it's fascinating, actually not the judge's doj. I should say yeah, we didn't get to see what might have happened to microsoft, right, Because that fell apart, but there's going to be some. When you hear about breaking up Google, it sounds super dramatic, but what it really means is there are parts of the company that are going to maybe maybe could get sliced off right. To me, it seems like the advertising business should be the thing like that.

02:16:58
I think they'll do that too, but that's what I mean.

02:17:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Chrome feeds into the advertising business because they gather this information.

02:17:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You make these technology products they're actually making they're doing pretty good. I mean, they're not. It's not a top five big tech company, but Google Cloud, whatever paid services have, hardware et cetera.

02:17:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's a business. The argument would be the google cloud and the google suite would be better off being away from the ad business.

02:17:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you know, because right now they're all hampered by anything that impairs ads right, right, yeah. I mean, that was the thing, like when microsoft was going to split up into, uh, the two businesses there was talk of like, well, now microsoft will put out office or that, whatever that company's called, will put out office on linux, because now they're not constrained by these competitive demands that you know, the broader company at that time had right, but that already that did happen to microsoft once the azure was their focus.

02:17:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Suddenly there was office for ios and android right yeah, right different yeah you know, that's exactly what. Yeah, but first you had to make the operating system not the focus of the company.

02:18:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right yeah, so advertising is the focus of this company. Yeah, the majority of the business right, and that's why they want them to sell Chrome.

02:18:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because what they're saying is sell the Chrome and Android, the things that gather data for your ad business.

02:18:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How are you distributing your abuse? Right? You're doing it through these unfair deals you have with apple, etc. Right worth tens of billions of dollars. You're doing it through honestly, through android as well.

02:18:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But cory doctorow points out that selling chrome actually will have the exact opposite effect. He says no company that buys chrome will. Any company that buys chrome will know it only has a couple of years before google will be permitted to create a new browser like just create a new browser yeah, I mean.

02:18:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this company, whoever buys it, would be incentivized to extract as much value from chrome as possible so it could make chrome worse yeah, yeah, yeah, so yeah, that's why, but, by the way, I I didn't read that but, and I don't mean to say that's why I, but that's why I think, like mozilla would be the best possible outcome here, right away, right, right, um uh, you don't have 20 billion dollars.

02:19:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can tell you they're barely no, no, no, no, no, but they could get a loan.

02:19:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's no, it's, it's um, no, it's. People, for example, like one of the things I've said about xbox, is like, look, they want to get out of hardware. Maybe there's a model where the xbox console that could become something that they license, allow hardware makers to make. Right, there could be multiple consoles or whatever these devices are. And then people say, well, hold on a second, like if microsoft can't make money making this, how could these other companies make money? Well, microsoft doesn't make money making pcs either, but these companies do so. Smaller companies that just focus on this one thing, that have maybe smaller margins, whatever, can make a go of this thing, and so I think in this world, a company like mozilla could take this product and without all that advertising nonsense, um, it would be a smaller business.

02:20:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They can do that today. If they wanted to take Chromium, if that would have worked.

02:20:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It would have done it with Mozilla.

02:20:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's un-Googled Chromium out there that people can use.

02:20:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But Chrome had their finger on the scale the whole time Because Chrome was paying to play or Google was paying to play. That's the point. Like Google, look I don't want to understate they made a good browser too, right I mean. But the problem is they also abused it, right? There was stuff going on behind the covers that is bad for consumers. So Mozilla got kind of pushed aside because Google has infinite money they can pay to make sure.

02:20:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's hysterical that people are even talking about this because it's all going to go away January 20th. You might as well just throw everything up in the air. I don't think this one is going to.

02:20:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't think this one is going to, but we don't know what shape it will take. Yeah, it'll change, you know, the funny thing is it's not worth $20 billion. It costs more than $20 billion, right? Well, google spends billions getting Chrome placed in front of everybody.

02:21:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's true. It's a cash sink, not a revenue source. That's an interesting point, yeah.

02:21:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, but when Google pays Apple for you know whatever 20, 22 billion bucks a year, they're making 40, 60.

02:21:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, there's certainly revenue in Chrome.

02:21:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But you have an ad business tied to it. That's what I mean. That's how they're making money revenue, but you have an ad business tied to it with that. That's what I mean. That's how they're making the revenues in the ad business.

02:21:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's right that's what I mean.

02:21:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's why it's not really worth 20 billion dollars? Because when you strip away the revenue that it makes, from.

02:21:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's just a nutty. It's a nutty. Uh request from the doj, to be honest, and I honest I think nobody.

02:21:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He said I think it's a way to try and negotiate a consent decree and that you know, I understand.

02:21:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think what seems to be happening right now in washington is the current administration is trying as best it can to get whatever it can in the next two months, whether it's oh well, I started by the previous administration.

02:21:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yes, I, I do. I yeah but what do?

02:21:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
you think elon musk's gonna say about that?

02:22:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
maybe, maybe X could buy it.

02:22:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I think you know, I think you're not wrong. The relationship with the tech billionaires and the incoming administration is not small.

02:22:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not at all, that's true.

02:22:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And Sundar Pichai has very much been kissing up to the new administration.

02:22:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sure, you have to Kiss the ring. You know like I would if I were him. He's just the ring. You know like I would if I were him. Um, he's not exactly a tech bro, but I you know he were a bandana or something he could get in there.

02:22:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it's funny because j it's so confusing. Jd vance loves lena khan and thinks yes, that's funny because he's praised her publicly right okay he thinks that big. So there is this kind of by bipartisan consensus that big tech's bad for different reasons but completely different. Yeah, yeah, uh. So there is definitely a target on big tech, but it's. I think that we know that the trump administration is pretty transactional, so it's really going to come down to transactional how it's a great term, by the way way it is.

02:22:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's accurate.

02:22:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, yeah, to me it's interesting. I don't actually have a strong opinion about it, I don't know what to think of it. I don't think it's a remedy.

02:23:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know what.

02:23:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think, Richard's onto something.

02:23:10
I think, as a regulator. It's sort of like when you're playing a football game, final seconds of the game a team is on the verge of potentially scoring a touchdown, but it's fourth down and they they're trying to get the other team to come off sides and it doesn't work and you call a timeout and you just kick, you know, and like what they're trying to do is like maybe we can force them to the table and say, look, you've, I guess you're going to go for this nuclear option. Okay, that's our mistake. Uh, let's make some concessions, because the better outcome here is behavioral concessions that come from google, that the government agrees to the courts or whatever.

02:23:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, stop although I guess you've already you've also.

02:23:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean you've been found guilty. It's kind of too late for this? I don't know yeah, um, we'll see yeah, we'll see.

02:23:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's fascinating paying for chrome placement. Wouldn't that actually be the real remedy? Wouldn't that correct the problem itself?

02:24:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go. Yeah, but it kills Mozilla.

02:24:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It does, I know, but see, everyone says that and you're right. But look if your business is being propped up by what is essentially the mob.

02:24:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe you should be killed.

02:24:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe you should be killed, maybe you should be allowed, yeah maybe you should be killed, yeah, well maybe you should be allowed no offense.

02:24:20
But I mean, I I love what mozilla stands for. They've made a lot of mistakes and if, if your business is literally predicated on the world's worst company feeding you money every week to keep you alive so they can point to you and say, hey look, we have competition. Uh, it's not a business, you know? Sorry, I mean, I'm sorry, but that's not a reason to allow the abuse of this company to continue it just isn't it's, I'm sorry you know I love mozilla.

02:24:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wish no, we need, because we need the diversity we don't want and we need more of that kind of company too.

02:24:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, but they, I, you know this is not working, so okay. Okay, um, richard, you missed the whole dot net conf thing. I mean you have no idea. I I feel like people are quite annoyed that I wasn't there to host a session too, because I was yeah, I I maybe this is something I gotta talk to you about this, so I have so much I want to talk about.

02:25:14
Um, the union guys have a three-hour show I know, I know, so I gotta move on, I'm gonna move on so we're two and a say really quickly now.

02:25:22
Uno platform, which I've kind of ignored for a long time, is is is sort of a WPF replacement, but cross platform, so inherently interesting. They have a. There's a lot of hot reload in the industry right now, but they also have what they call hot. I think they call it HUT design, which is horrible, but basically you have a designer and code and you can update the design in real time and it refreshes on the assistant.

02:25:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It depends on Hot Reload, which is a NET capability.

02:25:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's very very interesting.

02:25:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But, the Uno guys are taking on a really hard problem because these relativistic UX approaches where you just dynamically build, they're really hard to build a designer for and so, yeah, so for people to donate.

02:26:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
People who aren't programmers will probably remember classic visual basic well, anything with this canvas a form. Yeah, you would drag controls onto it. You would double click the control and you would write a little bit of code to handle that event. And it was awesome it was really.

02:26:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was also still true today, right in studio 2022.

02:26:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can make a win forms client and you will get the designer right, so yeah, so the, the successor to that stuff, they, you know microsoft got c sharp with andrews hilesburg and they did windows forms. It was probably roughly 2000, whatever it was. And then for the uh dot net wave or whatever the initial, they did avalon, which became wpf, and they've had that and that that's been kind of brought back from the dead, like I've been working in wpf this past year. Right, we've talked about this a lot you know there's a bunch of.

02:26:55
They've made some attempts at a designer for wpf but they have, but that's where it where it's falling apart. So this is where I just looked at this today In fact, I was working on this before the show there's a lot more information about the updates they did for WPF and NET9 and videos from NET Conf. So I've been watching that stuff. There's some new capabilities they never talked about anywhere else. They've done a horrible job of communicating what they've done. So there's more work to be done. That will occur in NET 10.

02:27:21
But in WPF today, if you bring up an existing new project, whatever in Visual Studio, what you get is sort of a wireframe view of the UI in the XAML designer. If you go to WinUI, which is the most modern, whatever version, you do not get a visual designer. Microsoft has basically given up on this like. So there was a time period where they remember they had expression and blend and whatever they were doing over time. But um they microsoft have you asked and and uno has they asked they said you're gonna do this like nope, we're done, like we're not even gonna try anymore. So the reason they made platform studio is because Microsoft's not going to address this problem.

02:28:02
So it is a very real problem because complicated apps like professional I'm not the stupid things I make but, like you know, like apps that, like a company would make, is a team of people involved and you have programmers obviously writing code and then. But you also have designers working in things like Figma and never the twain Shall Meet, and so I talked to these guys this past week. It was kind of interesting because I'm sort of vaguely aware of this stuff. But today you know, if you create a design of an app in Figma or whatever, whatever app you might use, and then you hand it off to the developers, I said, well, surely this must export to XAML or whatever they're like? No, they literally look at a picture and they recreate it and it's like his figment definitely generates c-sharp and xaml I know it does.

02:28:46
Yeah, I think it does do c-sharp markup, but the problem is like it's not. It's not like a live view, like it's it is literally. It's definitely a stage you, you just yeah, so thing and you you spit it out, and now you embed it in your app.

02:28:59
So uno is basically given, uh, or made, this capability to take a figma design and in real time do a hot refresh into a code-based version of it so that, as you maybe remotely even like and cross-platform we're looking at this app with multiple people. Someone could say, hey, I think we should move the button up three inches or whatever it is. They can do it in Figma and it comes up in the code.

02:29:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's like this is it's kind of it's exciting. Well, and it addresses the bigger problem here, which is I need us to work on a tablet as well as a screen.

02:29:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
PC yes, and that's right. It's also cross-border, yeah, so it will work on web, work on android, it works on ios, etc.

02:29:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So that's good yeah, I know it's compelling and it's uh long overdue in some respects I need to talk to you about that.

02:29:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're gonna talk and seriously, dude, not done that book, can we could just make yeah, okay, all right. So I'm sorry, I didn't mean, I don't mean to pester you and like live on a podcast, but then wouldn't be the first time. Can we talk?

02:29:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
okay, okay, um, I go away for two weeks. I know, yeah, I know it was like the critical two weeks too, like, oh, I'm just, I'm laughing, and you messaged me a couple of times, you're gonna make it this week, but kev messaged me too, so I'm like yeah somebody's been missing me, I think.

02:30:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I just want to go on record.

02:30:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I did not send you any emails you did not, leo, and I'm a little sad.

02:30:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know where the love is gosh, I wish richard the first week you missed, I, I, I tell my wife this story too, like um, I talked about um the guy, uh, uh, the I almost said the line the witch in the wardrobe. The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy was written by Douglas Adams.

02:30:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Douglas Adams. Sorry, yep yep.

02:30:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So he, like a lot like Stephen Fry, was like this in the early 2000s, had a tech blog and then sadly passed away. But he had this tech assistant who worked with him and he kept the thing going for a little while and at the time what had just happened was like Mac OS X Tiger had come out. I remember he said he had written in this blog like you know, douglas would have loved mac os tiger, douglas would have got tiger, and I don't remember what the topic was. It was two weeks ago, but um I I said to leo, I'm like richard would have got this, like I I want it I want I know.

02:31:16
No, I know, but you were gone and I was like I wanted to talk to him about this Gone but not forgotten, richard, yes, he's that far away.

02:31:25
I got to talk to you, man, okay. So, xbox, we've had our week weeks. We've had our less than exciting weeks. We've had our really big weeks. Actually, this year has been kind of interesting. This is a big one. This is a big week for, like games, you know, xbox and otherwise.

02:31:44
Um, phil spencer gave another interview and, as phil spencer does, he just starts talking about stuff. He's like you know, and I, I have to think at some point, someone, uh, and there's only really one person higher up than him at microsoft to come to think of it, we'll say, hey, dude, shut up. You know, but he kind of talked about how, hey, you know, the hardware is not the future. That said, we do think about portable Xbox, something, something, and we're working on it and I'm not saying it's coming out anytime soon. But this is an area I've kind of speculated a little bit about, um, whether this thing might be, uh, like a steam deck type thing, like pc based, or the future could be this arm based thing of which we know they were working on.

02:32:32
We don't know what came of it. Um, you know, we'll see, but he actually talked about it. It's like, dude, what are you doing? Like it's crazy, like you've got stuff to sell and you're just talking about something else. Yeah, and he also talked about this. The mobile app slash game stores they want to make on iOS and Android and those in the US has been delayed because the you know, the Google stuff has been pushed back and you know they're allowed.

02:32:55
They're going to obviously appeal and I said we'll see what happens. But it's inevitable that microsoft and others will put their app stores on these platforms.

02:33:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you know it's necessary, right, like in the end the microsoft owns the game studios. They're going to make the games for all the existing platforms. Like why would you make an xbox portable when there already is a steam deck and all of your games run on it and you will make money every time a game gets installed on it?

02:33:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that right. So this comes. So the next story is about this new ad that microsoft put out. That is freaking people out, even though they've been talking about this for two years. But this notion that xbox is not the console only, it is in fact, the console is. You know, remember when, like, steve jobs got up on stage one time and he said, hey, the Mac used to be the center of the ecosystem. Now the Mac is out here and this is other stuff. And the other stuff was, you know, mobile devices, you know, iphone especially.

02:33:49
This is that moment for Xbox. Like, we made a go of this. It's been 20 years. It hasn't really gone great for us, but now we own all these game studios and they sell cross-platform. We're going to bring more of our stuff to those game studios. And one of the things that Phil Spencer alluded to is this notion of, like, you know, the next Xbox, the next Halo, it's going to be on PlayStation. I mean, come on Now, the way you react to that, not you, richard, but anyone is kind of telling right For the hardcore kind of Xbox guys, they don't want to hear that.

02:34:20
Like they get freaked out. I like my tribe, don't mess with my tribe. Here's the thing, though I played Call of Duty a lot and Call of Duty improved dramatically when they made multiplayer cross-platform. They first did it console to console, playstation and Xbox together Dramatically expanded the audience right Way better, yeah. Audience right way better, yeah.

02:34:41
And the network effect is a bigger benefit more players now, you also pc users in there and, by the way, you also have cloud, uh, streaming guys in there so you could have a guy like, literally, in a game. You could have a guy on an xbox with a controller, guy in a playstation with a controller, guy on a pc with a controller, guy in an ipad with a controller. He's doing it through cloud gaming, yeah, and why not? You know? Why do you care so? So it's tied to your question earlier like why?

02:35:04
Yeah, I think part of it is they. They want the hardware thing that they do to be arm based and because it's efficient for all the reasons we know. But but that the xbox hardware, whatever it might be, will be sort of like a. You know, it's a pc place platform, with one exception every place or xbox console has been a pc, essentially pc, yeah, except for the 360, except for the right, which is power pc, so I feel like the next one. They want it to be arm and now they'll have off. They can offer this. You know this didn't work.

02:35:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's been 150 million dollars developing an arm-based xbox that you're going to make no money on. You basically sell it for cost, right? Unless?

02:35:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you have a hardware flaw, in which case it's going to cost you billions. They could farm out to hardware makers.

02:35:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, that's part of my, that's just yeah, I think I invented, but you still have the basic problem of there's no point in improving the machine right now and giving it more performance when the studios cannot fully utilize them as they are Right, like the real inflection point. The reason there's no PlayStation 6 is that the studios are screaming don't give us more compute, we can't use it.

02:36:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We can't even Exactly, we can't take advantage of the thing we have.

02:36:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, it costs too much. That's right and arguably generic AI may change this, but if you can consolidate, right Like this.

02:36:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But part of the problem right now is you have mobile, which is two discrete platforms. You have desktop, which is one but two if you include Mac, and three if you include Linux platforms. You have Xbox or console, sorry sorry, which is three discrete platforms. So you know, I, I know we went down this path really didn't go great.

02:36:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, nintendo lives on its own, it's its own games.

02:36:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you, but you can't ignore that market, is it? They have won again.

02:36:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know this, this generation by far right well, nintendo got off the hardware race 10 years ago.

02:36:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They've been right and it's worked out pretty well for them, yeah exactly, which is why I sort of wonder about this notion of xbox hardware thanks to ai based in this. We were great on qualcomm or arm hardware, um, upscaling and all this stuff where you could have like this thing. That honestly, could not run this stuff very well, but because it does upscaling it looks great.

02:37:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean it was run efficiently. So much compute I can afford to not actually fix the game. Just yeah, don't worry about exactly yeah, it's, it's, it's all, I feel like it's still back to the problem of it. Why do I need to build a new piece of hardware?

02:37:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, because I think what they. I think the plan here would be a singular platform that would run across what we think of as console and pc. Yeah, and um I, it would just make it easier on developers to create app or games that would run across platform I think we are in stasis right now, while generative ai penetrates the game development market yep, and while I, I you know, maybe arm is not well, I feel like arm is there, but actually the weakest part of the qualicom platform is the graphics.

02:38:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, and we just don't see native games running on no the hardware is not going to be relevant until we actually can utilize it yeah, so I you said stasis, great word.

02:38:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, I think of it as like a holding pattern. It's like are we ready yet? Nope, we're ready yet.

02:38:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, we're waiting we're waiting for a title to come out that utilizes generative ai to cut the cost of development more than in half, I would say by yeah, so it's like 70.

02:38:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Dear co-pilot, could you make a version of halo that doesn't suck?

02:38:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you know, get. Get rid of having to pre-generate all those backgrounds, get rid of having to generate all those scripts. Get rid of the most expensive parts of making a game that costs hundreds of people.

02:38:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right so this also has not gone well, and this is a little down the list, but I would just mention that yesterday, no today. Today, I think it was today, no yesterday I don't know what's going on.

02:39:03
Relative I just flew back from mexico. I'm out of my mind. Uh, microsoft flight simulator 2024 arrived right. So this is the world inside of the game. Like it's insane, and part of, but part of this is the science experiment where, in previous versions of the game, as you downloaded these world expansion packs, they would get all the high res assets and whatever.

02:39:27
So, you know, you'd fly over Paris. It would look amazing, it looked like Paris, it would look like some blob. You know, nope, you would have to download all those things, yeah, to your computer or to your console. Now, that stuff is going to be streamed from Azure, and so they're actually. This is the step toward this thing you're talking about, where they're not necessarily generating new content on the fly which I think is what you mean really but they're not. They're also not even allowing you, even if you said look, I got a two terabyte hard drive, I don't care like, download it, like nope, that stuff is coming from Azure, we're going to stream it, right. And so we have our first example of what I would call kind of a hybrid game. You know, hybrid, this is hybrid, cloud, on-prem, I guess.

02:40:10
But day one did not go great, by the way. I guess there were a lot of problems getting online and performance was terrible. But you know, give it a second. I mean, we'll see. I think it will be okay eventually. But, yeah, it will be okay eventually. But, um, but yeah, I think this is the this. They're going to look at this and say, all right, well, what about the next halo? Can we do. What about the next gears? What about the next?

02:40:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
call. I think a lot of pms are struggling mightily because they're looking at their budgets and looking at the risk and they're worried they're going to get totally scooped. You spend 150 million trying to develop a tier one game and somebody does it for 50 million and it doesn't matter what happens after that.

02:40:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right yeah, this is the netflixization of games, the. You know, we're gonna have ryan reynolds or whomever, and I pay him a lot of money and we're gonna make this piece of garbage that's all green screen, and then never actually go to europe, yeah, or whatever. It is right, like, like you know, but but why not? I mean, and games have gotten too expensive to make and too time consuming to make, frankly, and it and the stakes are so high that if you screw this up like you have a version only a dozen billion dollar games a year only yeah, I mean like, and yeah, and there's hundreds of games made right like yep, it's so you.

02:41:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's why we keep retreading the same ideas over and over again, why there's yet another call of duty because that one will make a billion right, right.

02:41:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I hate that call of duty was the inspiration for the marvel universe, but god damn it anyway.

02:41:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um okay, is that true?

02:41:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, you just make no, but I mean no but in the sense that like, not not really, I mean not literally, but you can see the progression right, not literally, but yeah, call of Duty is not that terrible. So this has been an awesome month for Game Pass. I mentioned Flight Sim. If you have Game Pass, you get Flight Sim standard and you get that on PC. The latest consoles x and s get it on. Uh, game pass, ultimate and pc game pass you get it on game streaming if you have ultimate right, so you can kind of play that one. I I haven't yet played it. I, like I said, just flew home but I think today or tomorrow stalker 2 that game that takes place in chernobyl, right, we've been waiting on this thing for I don't't know 15 years is available. If it is well, as you watch or listen, this will be out. But if it hasn't come out yet, you can actually preload this PC or console. So get it going because seriously, it's like $100.

02:42:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it going to be really great.

02:42:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's huge. It's supposed to be very great. It looks beautiful. We We'll see. I am definitely going to play this one. I have preloaded it. I did take the time to do that today, so you're wandering around Chernobyl.

02:42:44
Yeah, actually it comes out today, I'm sorry. Yeah, november 20th, so that's happening. Aliens Dark Descent is coming at the end of the month. This has been a good one, so there's been some good stuff. Yeah, big one, these are big games Flight simulator, fight flight simulator. Outside of Activision Blizzard is in college. It is arguably the biggest you know Microsoft studio game of the year. I would say like this it's big, and I don't just mean on disc, I mean like it's a big you know physically. Just yeah, it's, it's a big title for microsoft. So that's a good disc you speak of, yes, um, avowed, which is uh, uh, eagerly anticipated. Um, is it blizzard?

02:43:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no obsidian. Uh, I'm gonna play this starker stalker two uh video yeah, it's beautiful looking, it's made in ukraine. Did you notice that?

02:43:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that's yes, no, that is what chernobyl is a month or so ago I I mentioned this, but there's a documentary about the making of this game that's for free at youtube. Wherever go watch this. It's incredible. Um looks a little like half-life.

02:43:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, has that feeling a little bit you know that in a video game there's no compassion.

02:44:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It looks just like half-life it looks a little bit like call of duty too.

02:44:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Until well, of course everything looks like fps yeah, it's all gonna look like call of duty soon. That's all. It'll be left duty all the time all the time it looks really, really, really good.

02:44:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um so, uh, for you xbox holdouts you, you goons. Microsoft has a message for you this boy, that, this boy, that, this boy, that, this boy that these are all different Xboxes, including an iPhone.

02:44:43
See to me, this is just common sense. This is what they've been talking about for two years. We're going to meet you where you are, right. You're a game. You buy into this thing, whatever it is a subscription or purchase games, whatever and your games will be available, like where you are. To me, this is common sense. And then you read headlines. You're like, oh, microsoft doesn't even know what an xbox is.

02:45:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like, guys, you got to start paying attention a little bit here yeah, this is an xbox, it's right well, I mean I, it's not an xbox, but it is a place where you can play xbox games right and uh well, it brings into the question that, like, what does it mean to say it's an Xbox and Xbox is wherever you play Xbox games?

02:45:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, but when, when? When Apple introduced the iPhone and they said there's an iPod in there where people like, oh, yeah, but what does it mean? You know, an iPod like I mean? Guys, like, the world evolves, like you know, and in this case I don't know if you paid attention, but they didn't really win the console war.

02:45:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It makes perfect sense.

02:45:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They might have won the game wars, though the people who are the most offended by this are the ones who will benefit by it the most, because your investment in Xbox continues. Right, you know what I mean. It brings it to more places. This is what you should want.

02:45:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep.

02:45:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know.

02:45:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All restaurants are Taco Bell and all games are Call of Duty. I don't know. All restaurants are Taco Bell and all games are Call of Duty. I love it, yep.

02:46:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a Taco Bell.

02:46:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is also a Taco Bell yeah.

02:46:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a picture of a bathroom and like a rest area.

02:46:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is also a Taco Bell. Pretty soon we have to talk about the three shells.

02:46:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's one of the. I don't remember when one of the earliest things I remember that Richard said was you were joking about that place, arby's.

02:46:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You said it's.

02:46:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like meat. That's an apt description. I was like meat.

02:46:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're like, yeah, it's, it's. It's sort of like meat. Microsoft does have our Blizzard, which is part of it yeah, microsoft does have. Or blizzard, uh, which is part of. Is it blizzard? Yeah, but blizzard has a an xbox console exclusive coming. All right, actually, I think it's coming on pc too. Actually, um called avowed, so that's coming in february. We have that to look forward to. And then we have this crazy set of I I keep mentioning this like this notion of um games being remastered, or games just being upsized automatically and suddenly becoming replayable again. Yeah, so warcraft one and two remasters are, I think, available now, uh, celebrating the 20th anniversary of that franchise warcraft. Warcraft 3, reforge 2.9 uh is also available. Uh, days ago, valve announced, uh, the celebration of the 20th anniversary of half-life 2 yeah, a year ago.

02:47:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I can't believe it's 20 years, I know. So a year ago was the 20 very old.

02:47:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah the 25th anniversary of the original half-life. I think was last year, about a year ago now this game was so revolutionary when it came out. It's like it was given to us by aliens. If you look at Half-Life and then look at Half-Life 2, that leap does not make sense. That game still looks great now and, by the way, I would make in fact I will make the case that this might literally be the greatest video game ever created ever.

02:48:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And it is still. That's an interesting debate.

02:48:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I know it's an unwinnable debate in many ways, but it's. Whatever you're, wherever you land on that, it's in the top five. I mean, it's right there. It is as influential as anything id Software ever made.

02:48:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's the impact on the gaming industry.

02:48:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like the way games were made awesome, awesome, yeah. And then they completely effed it up and they did episode one, two and not three, and then not half-life three and I could murder because they never left this thing but you know, they got.

02:48:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They started making money on online games and suddenly those games they did left for dead.

02:48:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
To me like no, it makes me crazy but back to the same mantra like it's just so it's too expensive to make games.

02:48:44
The uh, the sales over, but over the weekend this game was available for free, which they've done a couple times on steam. It's cheap. I mean, if you want to buy this right now, it's probably 10, it's five or ten dollars. There's nothing. It's still worth playing. It's amazing. It's a really great story. It's so much credible. It's awesome the. It's been updated so it looks awesome on modern computers. Yada, yada, yada. It's got all that stuff and they've integrated the two episodes into, you know, the main app UI, whatever. It's just God damn, it's so good.

02:49:16
Separately and completely unrelated, but still related. Um, separately and completely unrelated, but still related. Um, gogcom uh, gog, which used to be called good old gamers, announced a sort of like um game preservation effort and they have some I think 20 something games that are classic games that they certify run perfectly well in modern computers, look great and they'll, they'll keep updated, blah, blah, blah. There's no drm and all that stuff. Um, separate from that, uh, basically, a group of game enthusiasts released the original unreal and unreal tournament, both which, by the way, just is just like another one some of the greatest games ever made.

02:49:54
Yeah, uh, unreal primarily for single player, unreal tournament solely for multiplayer. Um was so frenetic and fast and amazing and this is the one remember this one. It was always like First blood multi-kill, mega kill. It was awesome. They had all different game types, like Carry the Flag and whatever Awesome. And then they did a bunch of sequels 2002, 3, 4, whatever my son and I played these games endlessly.

02:50:21
Yeah, um, these games are available for free. They work fine on modern computers. They're owned by epic games and these releases were not by epic games, but people asked. They said, yep, we don't care no, it's fine, they let it.

02:50:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They let them out. It's good to go. What happens?

02:50:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yep, it's awesome. So this is, uh, it's, it's video game history. I'm not saying I, I I'm actually not saying that unreal is necessarily playable, but actually the um, a lot like the original half-life I guess, and I'm trying to think what else it's like. The, the um duke nukem is like this a little bit. The, the first episode of this, the first part especially, is amazing. You, you wake up in a prison, the door is open, you don't know what's going on, you can get out and there's an alien race and bad things happen. But um, awesome game, awesome, awesome, awesome. So a lot of really neat stuff happening.

02:51:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, it's I mean, some of this is nostalgic, some of it is just we have excess compute, let's do something with it.

02:51:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And look, when it comes to Half-Life 2 especially, I would say, yeah, nostalgia Right now. It's awesome to play this game. It's a great story In the end. It's fun, it's so good.

02:51:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's so very fun. It's so so good.

02:51:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, it brings back the most important point about gaming. Well, it brings back the most important point about gaming, which is it's the game and not the technology. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right.

02:51:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Although that's the thing Absolutely 100%. The world is so immersive in your introduction. You arrive on the train and you go through the process and so perfect that by the time you step out into the you know the square and the thing comes up and takes your picture and the the, you know the thing, walks by. You're like what is? How? Is this not a movie?

02:52:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
well, how is this not a Netflix series, you know the other day about Half-Life 2, because Half-Life was all inside a building, right? It was your, your standard wolfenstein scroller right, right, fps scroller and then the whole trick with half life 2 was you started out in a building and then you went out the door and it's not just, it's like the wizard of oz, where it just like opens up and well, what? Is happening directly into a derived soviet brutalism landscape it is so perfect.

02:52:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I literally to this day like I, I've done this. I've done this everywhere in europe. I did it with the last time I went back to boston. I was standing on the uh, the subway platform at the t with my friends and they did a little um like announcement, and I it was half-life 2 to me and I'm like yeah, civil, civil inobedience will not be tolerated you know please proceed to the processing facility.

02:53:03
Like it, you, it impacted me so much that I hear things in the real world and it sounds and it's half-life. 2 yeah yeah, it's such a good so

02:53:13
by the way, take the time, go watch the um, uh, the documentary about this. It's incredible the way, and sure enough, like the guys who designed the game went to these. Incredible the way, and sure enough, like the guys who designed the game went to these abandoned train stations and wherever else in eastern europe and they were like and I'm like, yeah, no, obviously you did, it's, it's perfect. Um, so, anyway, it's awesome, okay, and then, uh, my play state, sony has something called the playstation portal. So playstation portal is not actually a portable gaming device per se, but it's a way to stream, you know, games or whatever. So now they allow you to stream PS plus games through this device, which I know. As I say, you're like, wait, you couldn't do this before.

02:53:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What was the point of this?

02:53:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But now you can. So yeah, now there's. I think there's, but now you can. So, yeah, now I think there's. I don't know what. The I'm not sure of the number of games. I want to say there's over 100 games. So if you have, like, playstation Plus is their version of what used to be Xbox Game Pass, you know now Game Pass, right? So I think they have different tiers. They have you know, different.

02:54:15
I am not really as much into that, but I am not really as much into that. But they have expanded this. So, playstation 4, playstation 5, and, I think, windows PC I think there's an app for it as well you can play a bunch of their games over this service. So obviously of interest, but not like of the Half-Life 2 level quality of interest. So, anyway, some good stuff. So, yeah, this has been a good week for games. This is a good week for gaming might be the best week this entire year I mean other than all the layoffs and studio closures.

02:54:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, aside from that, like this, has to be a game developer, but it's fun to be a gamer, yeah yeah, I want to play stalker 2 now I have to check. I know I like I said, I pre-loaded it I'm going to check that game is pretty dark man. Yeah, it looks dark yeah, it looks beautiful, though right I'm still.

02:55:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I still play a game I started playing in covid. I can't stop.

02:55:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Valheim, oh valheim I look at what they're gonna say okay well what's?

02:55:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they've been smart. They released it pre-release for 20 bucks and then every year or so they had another biome so you do?

02:55:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you still play this on some giant screen. Yeah, my 55 inch oled you bet.

02:55:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've tried playing on smaller screens and, uh, it's not.

02:55:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I need to be a viking, I need to live as a viking, literally sit there and like, like furs and whatever.

02:55:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, yeah, uh, yeah, I have a wolf are you gnawing? On a turkey leg.

02:55:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What are you doing?

02:55:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, You're like actually lox meat is the meat you really? Yeah, it's very good, they're lox.

02:55:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the. That's what you're going to dip in Richard's drink later.

02:55:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We will get to Richard's drink in a bit and the tips and picks of the week. The back of the book is just around the corner. You are watching windows weekly with paul thurott and, uh, richard campbell and our show today, brought to you by our good, our good, good listeners, the good people at club twit. We love you club twitters and we thank you. If you're listening and you're not a member, I would love to invite you to join. We may. We keep it pretty affordable. It's only a 20 bucks a month, which is nice. You don't, did I say 20? Yeah?

02:56:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it's only 10 bucks a month.

02:56:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, it's not that. It's only seven dollars a month. How much would you pay? How do they get away with that many podcasts? You'd get one show for seven dollars, but no you get them all you get.

02:56:37
You get ad-free versions of every show we do. You get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a community of you know. It's a self-selected community of smart, interesting people who love technology, so it's a great place to hang. You also get to watch shows that we don't put out in public, like Micah's Crafting Corner. We've got the Chris Marquardt photo show coming up in a little bit.

02:57:03
Stacy's Book Club, another coffee clash with Mark Prince. That's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to do a coffee tasting, so that should be really interesting. All those are just, you know, benefits. But the real reason you join the club, I hope, is to support what you do, what we do, if you like our shows, if you think the shows are worthwhile, if you like our hosts.

02:57:25
By the way, I don't get any of the money, not dollar. One goes into my pocket. It goes to Paul and Richard and John Ashley and Kevin King, our producers, and Benito Gonzalez. It supports. It takes a big team to do this. It supports them, keeps the lights on. We've cut back as much as we could. We shut down the studio. We're doing what we can, but we really want to keep doing the content, because I think that's what really we bring to the table. That's unique. If you like it and appreciate it and you listen, join the club. Seven bucks a month, that's all it keeps it going. That's the key.

02:58:01
Twittv slash club twitter. Scan that QR code in the upper left-hand corner of your screen. Twittv slash club twitter. A couple of good things I should mention Two weeks free so you could try before you buy, if you want, and when you join you will get a code that you could post on your socials and everywhere else, and everybody who uses that code to join gets you a free month. So seven did I say seven bucks a month. It could be free forever, as if you have enough friends. Twittertv slash club twit. Thank you in advance. We really appreciate it. Uh, it's time for the back of the book and I think now would be a good time to introduce a man, a myth, a legend mr paul, wow, the rats yes, so one of the big differences maybe between the xbox series x and s and the playstation 5 is that sony went with just normal m2 slots for storage, like.

02:58:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So if you want to add more storage, it's actually pretty straightforward. Microsoft went with more of a traditional looking cartridge thing, you know kind of proprietary whatever. It's still an ssd obviously, but uh, haven't had too many options for storage and they've been pretty expensive and they still are. But right now the, the middle tier western digital storage module, which is one terabyte is, is a pretty good price for this kind of thing, like better than apple prices, right? So typically I think the 512 is about 75 bucks, the one terabyte is maybe 130, 140 somewhere in there, and then two terabytes is. We don't want to talk about that, um, but the two lower end ones are on sale at Amazon and Best Buy. This is physical storage, not cloud storage.

02:59:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's like a plug-in little. Yeah, I have one in my. Yeah, but you have to buy the one that's specifically for it. That's right. You can't just buy anything, so the?

02:59:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Western Digital version. The one terabyte is 99 bucks. It's usually 160 actually. That's a good deal. That's actually a pretty significant price cut, yeah, so, if you need to, especially on an s, if you like, I do like the initial s, I think it was 512 uh, gigabytes, this is a pretty good upgrade. So you know, if you've been kind of holding off on that, this is the time, um, and I'm not going to spend too much time on this but microsoft has announced their black friday deals across xbox, surface etc. Etc.

03:00:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, uh, getting to, that time of year aren't?

03:00:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
we yeah, get in there this time. Yeah, you already had thanksgiving right, richard?

03:00:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
uh, we do it in october like civilized. Yeah, so do you have black friday in october as well, or?

03:00:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no, no, I, I listen. I'm pretty sure you guys put gummy bears in your stuffing and I don't want to hear about this.

03:00:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But november 29th is the year all the canadians come over the border to shop at costco. It's a tradition to use amazon.

03:00:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We do have a family member who's us, who's coming up next week, so we will do thanksgiving. Oh, there you go with him.

03:00:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, it's just an excuse I'm going to bring. I'm bringing thanksgiving to mexico. This is.

03:01:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've talked to my friends there.

03:01:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm like, I think Mexicans would love Thanksgiving. I think they would love the food aspect of it. I think they would love the food but also just the whole family vibe of it. The point of it is not.

03:01:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You've never met people so into family to you.

03:01:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what I mean. Like I've been telling so many people like like they're all curious, but they know about it, you know, and but that and arguing politics, which is a very keen thing in the mexican family.

03:01:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh no wait, that's wrong the best drunken uncles, that's what they do drunk yeah, yeah, yeah no, um, yeah, that's actually one thing.

03:01:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, people they're just kind of open about. They're like who did you vote for? I'm like, excuse me, like I don't know, I don't know if, uh, I don't know I don't know if I'm prepared to talk about that

03:01:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
actually whenever I'm in a foreign country. I just announced I didn't vote for him. Yeah, yeah, I just said well we were.

03:01:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We were in france one year, so this back was like george w bush time frame and this guy in a market we had never been to and I don't, I think we only went the one time it's just random guy said, uh, you know, if I ask you a question? I said sure. He said, uh, do you support, you know, george w bush? I'm like no, that guy's an idiot and he says he goes, let me he goes. I don't understand he goes. I every american, I ask yeah, who voted?

03:02:11
for the same way, like how did this guy become president?

03:02:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like you're not going to meet anyone who voted for him in your country those people don't travel, they don't, they can, you know, like I, yeah, so yeah, people are intrigued. Monkeys, yeah, yeah, yeah okay, anyway.

03:02:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um meantime, some time ago, a month ago or so, uh open, ai finally released their initial early version of their chat gpt app for windows, which was like a little bit of a middle finger, honestly, because the mac version had been available for a while. The iphone version had been away available for a while. Not, I always just use it on the web pretty sure those apple didn't invest 13 billion dollars in open.

03:02:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I had to look it up, but anyway I think it's more about dev resources than it has to do with.

03:02:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I know, but seriously like. But anyway, I guess it's gotten a lot better. So there's an updated version of it. It's freely. It's now available to everyone who uses chat GPT. I don't know if they have a paying subscription like used to before.

03:03:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's kind of cool.

03:03:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so it's available, but actually they've also updated the windows I'm sorry, the Mac version, and I think this is the. This is an interesting peek at the future. So the way they're billing it is that it integrates with certain apps that you have installed on the Mac and I'm like, okay, what does that mean? But actually they're all developer apps, so it's Visual Studio Code, xcode, terminal.

03:03:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so it'll notice you have Xcode and say, hey, you want me to fill this in. So it would be like a pair of whatever yeah that's very interesting.

03:03:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I think obviously that will come to Windows eventually, but I also think it will expand out to other apps, right? And so I think you know, if you've been kind of like eh, you know, like chat or a copilot who cares, like maybe this is kind of an interesting thing, and then of course, last week or whenever it was, Microsoft now allows you to remap the copilot key.

03:04:00
I mean, well, I guess one thing you could do is remap it to chat gpt, you radical leftist you, you troublemaker, uh. And then just briefly, like uh, stardock, uh released their first one, the 1.0 version of desktop gpt, and this is their. You know a lot like, you know same thing. Like prompt opens up in the middle screen. But the big thing there there's two big things there is that they let you connect to multiple or different llm so it's not just tied to a single thing and you can, so you can pick whichever one you want for certain tasks. But they also have this kind of template capability, which I look at as sort of a, like a scripting capability, so you can write these templates that run against specific llm, so that you're always you're doing kind of a manual orchestrator kind of a thing.

03:04:39
So this is a perk of object desktop. So if you're already paying for that, you get this for free. It's worth checking out. I don't think. Yeah, no, you can't. You can't actually buy it separately, so you have to, you have to have object desktop and then just real quick, uh, arc search is now available on android, right? So it was, uh, open beta for about six weeks. Now it's broadly available and the big thing here is it's not like a straight up web browser, but it's more like a kind of a front end to search so you can just you can just do a search and it will go to google search or whatever you configure. Um, but the big thing is their browse for me capability, where they generate, use generative ai to create like a nice presentation of something. So when you have a, a question like who is you know? Fill in the blank this person or what is like, like what is a latte, or whatever they you know it's a nice presentation.

03:05:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, which is a question.

03:05:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I often ask at dunkin donuts when I order a latte and they say, would you like some sugar with that? And I'm like, excuse me. I said I would like a latte. Do you not know what a latte is?

03:05:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
do you not know what duncan is?

03:05:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
because you know I just you know, if I see where you are, I feel like if I wanted sugar in this, I would have asked you for that, but that's a not that he has strong opinions about this I, I think, things mean things.

03:06:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is where you go wrong. Right there, honestly.

03:06:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's probably true.

03:06:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, all right, yes From.

03:06:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Duncan Donah's perspective. The reason they do it is because they make a latte for someone and then they go there's no sugar in this. Yeah, you didn't ask for sugar.

03:06:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Did you order a latte? That's one one.

03:06:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You ordered a latte.

03:06:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Latte does not have sugar this is a good sugar in a latte, but it is not a requirement. You could, but then you're thinking frappuccino is what I think. Yeah, yes, exactly.

03:06:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Can I get frappuccino just code language for milkshake for adult?

03:06:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yes, yeah, it's like can I have six different forms of sugar in a glass. Yes, we actually have a name for that, it's. How many pumps would you like?

03:06:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, yeah, would you like? You can ask that question something is like the large frappuccino and a shot of insulin, anything.

03:06:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm walking out the door right there'll be no pumping.

03:06:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I like it. You're a coffee pierce. Do you get good coffee in mexico?

03:07:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm so sad you asked me this so I spent, so there is good coffee in mexico, but we spent 20 years doing home swaps in europe, and every with one exception, I think they all had like those little espresso machines right, right right I wanted one of these for 20 years and I begged my wife and she said no, these things are an ecological disaster.

03:07:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're not doing this, blah blah, blah, whatever.

03:07:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you know, she's smart. So we got to Mexico and I was like listen, I want to get a fucking Nespresso thing, can we just get an Nespresso? And she's like all right, screw it. Yes, we can get an Nespresso. I hate it.

03:07:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hate it so much it's not good coffee.

03:07:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not good coffee. So we went through every single. They're all like city names and stuff, where there's a, there's a kaleidoscope of colors. We went through every single one of them and we only found one. I like it's called it's milan, I think it's all comes from the same courag.

03:07:51
I know it's the stupidest thing, yeah so we go and buy we, we have to, you know, get more and we bring the capsules back, but you know it's mexico. They throw them in the trash and then they're like like what would you like? We're like we were like 36 boxes of milan and they're like you don't want it.

03:08:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like no just milan, just the one flavor I hate it so much.

03:08:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Funny, I wanted one for so long.

03:08:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Get a bambino, get a breville bambino. You can make real espresso. But what would I be like if?

03:08:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was happy. Leo, you don't want me content oh yeah, that's true, it's you know it's better I'm, I gotta be honest you're miserable. Yeah, but you're right.

03:08:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, you're right, there's better coffee, but but there, and I'm sure you can go out and get good coffee out there oh no, there's fantastic, but one of the highest rated coffee shops in the entire city is like two seconds from her. It's stupid mexico is the home of coffee and chocolate. I mean, there's really good stuff there. That's All right. Enough of this guy. Paul Richard Campbell has some stuff to tell us. Let's start with Runners Radio, Richard.

03:08:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
My friend, dan Mallett, who I got to get face-to-face with at NBC Porto, which was a few weeks back, and got to chat a little bit about how we test databases.

03:08:55
So this was really getting into the development practice of continuous integration to continuous deployment, which is normal with your application.

03:09:03
But it's a little trickier with databases because you can't just throw the database away and rebuild it. You kind of need to keep the data. But there's better and better tooling to make it more feasible to actually validate that your updates to databases aren't going to break anything. And so we got into a conversation around. You could write this code yourself to test your database, but there's again you want a framework to make it simpler and that framework is called T-SQL-T, although there are some others. We also talked about dbfit as basically a mechanism for getting into that process of okay, this next version of this app needs these changes to the database. These are validated at deployment as part of the pipeline so that the whole thing can get fixed together and treats the database changes the same way it treats a version of the application. So great conversation and great to sort of press against DBAs that are more on the administrative side to say there are ways to build your databases, the same way that developers are building the app.

03:10:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, there you go. Well, there you go. Now, one thing we always miss. I mean, we miss your genial presence, your knowledge, of course, of enterprise.

03:10:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But really it's the alcoholism.

03:10:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the alcoholism. It just gets you at the boost. Let's face it, yep. It's the alcoholism. It's the alcoholism, really. It's the booze. Let's face it, yep.

03:10:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So one of my friends, glenn, who is from Norway, dropped this on me last week Ooh, halvedsen, halvedsen. And you know it's funny, we talk about Vikings all the time, right, when you think about Norway, you think about Vikings, right? And in all these conversations about Scottish whiskey, whiskey, you know they, we have the treaty of perth and how the hebrides were controlled by the vikings, like all that sort of thing, you kind of think why, why don't those guys make whiskey? Because they really don't. It's very rare, uh to, to run across. If there's only a handful of whiskey distilleries in norway, um is well on the west side, northwest corner of Europe. It's the, as it was described to me, the rock in Norway is the stuff the ice couldn't crush it was fully covered during the Ice.

03:11:13
Age, which is a plus and a minus. It means their mountains are very pointy, they thoroughly scour, but also that all that pulverizing of the rock turned into great silts, so their valleys are very pointy, they were thoroughly scoured, but also that all that pulverizing of the rock turned into great silts, so their valleys are full of excellent soils and so, as the ice retreated at the end of the Ice Age and humans sort of populated the area, by the time wheat makes it up there, somewhere around 8000 BC or so, it grows incredibly well, and by the Neolithic era, when agriculture really starts, it's barley. Barley is dominant Again. Why aren't they got good water, they got great conditions. They even have oak trees. Why aren't these folks making whiskey? Why aren't they as keen as the Scots were?

03:11:56
Now it's not like there hasn't been alcohol in Norway, going all the way back to Tacitus, the Roman historian, who was of questionable quality in his writings talking about, in 1000 AD, how much feasting is an important part of the Germanians, of the Scandinavian people at that time, that they don't make decisions about having a big feast and they drink copiously while they do that. Now, one of the big parts of that is that written language wasn't a big part of early norwegian culture, and so you had feasts so that everybody was there, because you needed witnesses for any agreements, because you don't have a written form of any of that.

03:12:39
But when you really get into distillation which remember when we talked on the irish that the first still sort of show up in the 15th century well, they arrive in norway then too, and that's when norway gets its definitive alcohol, initially made with grains. We know it today as aquavit, uh. And so this is a high, a multi-distilled grain-based product, although they switch potato when the potato shows up, which won't be for a while yet, but flavored with caraway, because if you with juniper, it be gin or geneva, depending on your dutch or your or your english, and of course by by the 1750s, when the potatoes come from the New World, because it grows, it can make more alcohol per acre. They use potato for that they do. There are some versions of Aquavit that are aged in oak barrels. There is a species of oak up there, the querulous robust, which is a very sturdy oak. It's great for making ships when you want to go raiding around the world. Then they did make barrels from it as well, around the world, but they did make barrels from it as well.

03:13:45
But when the wave of Aquavit mass production really comes on because of the potato, you start to see the first laws passed in Norway to manage the production of alcohol. So 1757, there's already laws in place limiting who can make the alcohol, who can sell it, import it. Importations are control, and that has a lash back in the early 1800s where they lift a lot of structures because the landowners who are now growing even more grain want a right to distill, for no other reason than they have excess grain. They don't want it to spoil, so making it alcohol is a way to preserve that, and so, and if you're producing it you can sell it, and 20, 30 years on from that there's alcohol everywhere. There's explosions with small stills, alcoholism really starts to get heavy, and this is when you're starting to get the proper state involved, and so it's actually the local municipalities that take control of liquor production. They take control of all of the sales, initially of liquor, but ultimately by the 1870s with wine and beer as well, and so that by the end of the 19th century, in 1894 and so forth, those same communities that are controlling it start to put in prohibition, restricting the sale of alcohol in general, region by region. And by 1917, when we get World War I, with restrictions on supply and so forth, you get the first prohibition of alcohol in Norway entirely, which goes into the 1920s, actually somewhat ahead of what happened with the US. But coming out of Norwegian prohibition, the federal government the state instead of the municipality started controlling all liquor, both production and sales, which is basically true ever since.

03:15:23
So Norwegian liquor laws are very strict. They consider anything under 0.7% alcohol to be non-alcoholic. 0.7 to 2.5 is what's called a low alcohol beverage, and those are more freely sold. You have 2.5 to 4.7% are most of your beers, and things like that are considered category one, 4.7 to 22. This is generally a category would be like wine, that is. Though both of those could be sold by people 18 or older and are readily available in most places. 22% and above are considered spirit only up to 60%, and anything over 60% is illegal in Norway to this day. So certain casks drinks like Abelers Abunda, they actually have to sort the bottles because some of those come over 60 and they're not allowed to be sold in Norway, and plus you have to be 20 or older to sell spirits.

03:16:17
So and this of course only applies to intoxicants, industrial alcohols and things like that not particularly a concern, but I would argue the biggest reason that Norway has always struggled with alcohol here is that they don't have a small producer model. In the 2010s, largely through the EU and we've talked about this before and it certainly applies in Denmark they started making tax breaks for small producers so that you had a bunch of little companies starting to make different kinds of alcohol. They have done that for breweries, but they have not done it for liquor, and so they're kind of missing the market on all that as well. But it does mean that the handful of distilleries that make whiskey in Norway and there's literally only five are all big producers of other things, typically aqua feed. So, um, the coolest distillery norway is not what I really want to talk about today, and that's the aurora spirit distillery, which is actually above the arctic circle. That's kind of their claim to fame. Wow they. They use an old world war ii german military fort as their distillery space and like well, we'll get into them sometime later.

03:17:20
The one I've got here because Glenn gave it to me, is the Halvorsen, so this is only about a half hour out of Oslo. In Dramersford is where it's on a farm, and Stanley Halvorsen Johnson started it in 2007. Although he wasn't making whiskey, he was making what they call herb spirits, and that is acaavit and gin and the like, and in fact, his first production batches by 2009 start winning awards almost right away and the distinction between gin and acavit again being the caraway flavor versus the juniper flavor. But really, in contemporary gin production today it's about the local herbs, what makes it distinct? And that was under a brand they call kimmerud, which is named for the farm that the distillery was started on. Uh, and not that I'm a big gin fan, but they do make a version called navy strength which is 57 alcohol. Drink carefully, boys, like that is very dangerous, like my goodness. Essentially an ounce and a half right? Oh, by the way, you can't order a double in norway. It's against the law.

03:18:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They really don't like drinking and yeah they.

03:18:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They are very concerned about the social impacts and I think it has a. In general, the scandinavians deal with this pretty seriously and part of it is that in the wintertime, when it's dark all up, there's nothing else to do, yeah, and it can get very dark Right, and both emotionally as well as environmentally, and so the liquor controls are pretty strict.

03:18:44
That being said, I routinely order two singles, pour them together and give them back one of the glass. That's fine. Oh, that's hysterical. You know, just follow the rules. Yeah, so the Halvorsons only started making whiskeys in 2023. So they don't have long duration batches. This particular one is called the Sledgehammer 2024. And so this is a three-year-old. No wonder they're worried about doubles Sledgehammer.

03:19:16
So initially aged in Virgin American oak and then they do a finishing of less than a year in Woodford casks. In fact, they even identify specific cas cask. This is cask strength, that is to say, it's at 46.3 percent, and they only make 900 bottles of it. So this is bottle 803 and it's only a 500 milliliter bottle. So you really, they talk about they only need four um 450 liters of this spirit. Wow, uh, you can't. They're all sold out. Now it sells for 800 norwegian kroners, which is about 72 us.

03:19:48
Okay, I don't have much to say about halvorsen's distillery because they don't have any of the specs published. I found one photo of uh of stale who's the the lead of the place in front of a column, still now, since they make gin and aquavit. Of course it's a column still. They probably have a rectifier or finishing still as well, but have no specs on that at all. All right smells uh, it's 46 percent right. So it's going to be pretty alcoholy and it is, but not burning, which is nice. Like my hair they know my nose hairs have not curled up, oh okay. So wow, that's. That's a lot smoother than you would expect for only a three-year-old, like. They've done a good job. Lots of heat at the end, though, hello, I can feel it going down and heating up. So gentle on the mouth, little fruit notes, maybe a bit of that kind of leathery feel, but first sips are always an illusion. You got to hit it again, right?

03:20:48
paul and I are going wow, okay, yeah, it's got a kind of roughness to it, like it reminds you. I can almost say it's like the west coast of norway, like British Columbia Rocks and ice and trees and deep water. It's pokey and lots of heat, but boy, that's special. It's like a glacial moraine sliding down your throat. You know, the first hit is like being hit by a sledgehammer.

03:21:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The second one. You don't care anymore. Yeah, you're good, I'm vaguely stunned.

03:21:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is fun. I'm not going to hunt this down, and it's good because there's not very many of them right, like you don't want to go crazy for that, but um, but they're making an interesting whiskey, you know, and that's uh. It's nice to see the norwegians starting to do this. I don't think it's easy to make whiskey for them there right now, especially imagine only making 900 bottles of this, like that's all. That's all there is. Wow, they do they do an addition.

03:21:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They do that's like they do have another single malt, the steiger right, yeah so, and and steiger means it's the form of oh, okay, yeah, and that's uh that's it was um.

03:21:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Stale's great-grandfather worked in the coal mines of uh in Svalbard, which is the only coal mine in Norway.

03:22:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, it's now closed and it's where the seed is called the stagger. Wow, yeah, neat.

03:22:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So we don't know what this tastes like, because it's not the same no, um, the, the, the sledgehammer 24, is a special edition, again finished in woodford barrels. Yeah, yeah, so that would change it considerably. Yeah, it is like I said, the oak tree, that the robust oak tree is different from the, the, the other oak trees it's again. It's the stuff you make masts and ships and stuff out of make grows very large, very straight. It's good masts and drinks and ships so I don't know.

03:22:41
The barreling is particularly that. I bet their gin is good. I wouldn't. I would well in there, I mean, make an aqua for 100 years, right, so right yeah gin is basically just a different set of herbs. Aqua is a little close to lighter fluid for me.

03:22:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, really it's just caraway instead of juniper.

03:22:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's, that's the main decision, the whole difference oh okay, you distill up till you get to 80-90% range, then you soak it in botanicals, then you cut it with water to 40%. That's booze If you don't put the botanicals in it. You just made vodka Right.

03:23:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right.

03:23:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They sell that too. You put the bot is you can sell it the day. You made it. Right, there's no three years of aging and all that expensive stuff. Right, make it and ship it. Very awesome.

03:23:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it's fun to be home.

03:23:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I have a couple more stories from this trip that I will save for later weeks. I would love to hear them. Oh, I got a taiwanese whiskey, so oh, wow, well, yeah, we'll have some fun I think you're baking that up yeah, I wish I was.

03:23:45
And it's not, I would have found trying to find something in tunisia, but it's islamic they. They had a little bit of alcohol only in the hotel, generally frowned on to be drinking it. So I would tend to go into the down to the bar in the evening and have a couple of shivers and call it a day, mr richard campbell, that's kind of his motto.

03:24:02
I had a couple of shivers and called it a day yeah, no, yeah, many days ended like that, but I'm going to be drinking the habits, and for a little while now dot net rocks is his website, dot net rockscom, where you'll find that and, of course, run as radiocom.

03:24:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a pleasure, welcome home, glad you're feeling better. Yeah much we missed you, as you can tell, because this is a three and a half hour show I did offer to talk to paul yesterday.

03:24:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We just couldn't get it to work.

03:24:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's okay, I know I I literally saw your message after we arrived home, when I was like uh, I guess you know it's going to be a three-hour call, right?

03:24:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, we'll do it.

03:24:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We'll do it. We should talk soon.

03:24:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, yes, uh, paul thurot is at thurotcom t-h-u. Double r o double goodcom. That's where his blog is, and you should become a premium member because that's where the really good stuff is that's the only way I'm gonna afford to get a haircut that's how he gets a haircut and those delicious pods. What's the name? By the way, it was the name is napoli, it's not I always screwed.

03:25:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's the red, it's a red box and it's the only one. It's always comical when we buy 30 or whatever number of them and they're always like you know, if you buy 40, we can give you a free cup. We're like yeah, no, we'll get 40 we have all this nespresso merchandise in our apartment now but anyway, what 26 boxes of napoli stat and I'll take the free cup yeah, I left one more link under the brown liquor.

03:25:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There should be in the show notes for the people to look. I didn't do a future of energy talk about norway. Yeah, I saw that youtube. What is so? This is this is one of the talks that I do, and the future of energy is to talk about energy improvement in general. But I tuned into the country. So this June when I was in the Oslo show, I talked about Norway's power generation and how it's evolving. Oh, very cool.

03:25:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and it was fun.

03:25:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is it geothermal, I would expect, or no? No, they're almost entirely hydroelectric. Hydro, yeah, they got mountains and they got water, right. So iceland is very is geothermal they're geothermal because they have volcanoes, volcanoes very nice, uh, so you could watch this.

03:26:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a ndc conferences channel. On youtube, search for richard campbell the future of energy. I will. I will be watching that tonight instead of the desperate housewives, housewives.

03:26:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oslo, yep, those are the two obvious choices. Yeah Right, it's like Desperate Housewives.

03:26:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul's books are at length.

03:26:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know I did that. Dedicated nuclear power one. Yeah, I want to see that too. Is that up anywhere? It's up there, but now that all the tech companies want to buy nuclear power I cannot tell you how many conferences have called me I bet I'm going to do it.

03:26:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a hot topic. Yeah, you're a hot topic.

03:26:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah Well, and doing it in Poland, when I was talking about the Chernobyl disaster and I met a bunch of people who, as kids, were taking iodine drinks.

03:26:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

03:26:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

03:26:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're probably not real thrilled about the. I just need Cheetos. It's the same thing, almost the same, you know but just a quick summary.

03:27:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You, modern nuclear power is a very different thing.

03:27:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, nuclear power has always been incredibly safe. Coal's killed way more people, yeah yeah.

03:27:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The new power, really Christopher Reeve, superman. He's like you know. Just to be clear, uh, flight is still the safest form of travel, you know uh, good, I'll watch this.

03:27:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That'll be very, uh, that'll be very interesting and enlightening, I might add. Uh, paul thorat's books are at leanpubcom, including windows everywhere and, of course, the must-have field guide to windows 11. Now that I'm 24 h2 I I have to check the new 24 h2 chapters a lot of updates, a lot of updates.

03:27:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Your cheese will definitely be moved.

03:27:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There's been a lot of moving of cheese. You've moved my cheese again. Uh, we do windows weekly. Normally it's only a couple of hours, but every once in a while we get a little excited about the topic and um oh I could tell this one was gonna be big.

03:27:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, xbox ignite a lot of stuff.

03:28:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there was a lot of stuff. It's good. Nobody's complaining that the shows are too long.

03:28:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You just you know as long as my wife would like to eat dinner, but other than that dinner, we do the show normally 11 am pacific, 2 pm eastern.

03:28:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That would be uh 1900 utc, as I mentioned, streamed live on eight different platforms, including youtube, twitch, kick, facebook, linkedin, xcom and tiktok, and, of course, our club members can also watch inside the discord after the fact. On demand versions of the show are available at our website, twittv slash ww. If you go there, you'll see a link also to the YouTube channel. A great way to share the uh the the show or little clips from the show with people who are not familiar with it, and we appreciate it when you do that cause. That helps us spread the word about the goodness that is windows weekly. Best way to listen, though, probably would be uh be by subscribing your favorite podcast client. Merely go to any podcast app of your choice and click subscribe. It's free and you will get the show the minute we're done with it, which is exactly what you want. And, of course, we thank our club twit members for the contribution that they make. Just remember, great podcasts thrive thanks to the communities they build and value. I know I host a few. Thank you, joe.

03:29:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't always drink twit beer, but when I do.

03:29:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's good. That's good stuff. Joe's a madman. Thank you, joe, for that. Join the club twittv, slash club twit. Tonight micah's crafting corner, bring your it he's gonna be doing quilt.

03:29:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What's he doing he?

03:29:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
does? Uh, he does actually really great cruel work. But people, there are people there doing lego. There are people doing any kind of craft at all, it doesn't matter, it's just a chance to hang and talk and have some fun. It's a community and that's what we love about it. So, uh, that's just one of many events at twitter tv slash club twit. Thanks to richard campbell, thanks to paul thorat, you guys rock. I will see, as doesnet. I will see you next week on windows weekly you.