Windows Weekly 964 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell are huddled around the fire in beautiful macunjee, Pennsylvania for a very special year end show. No Microsoft news, just stories, tales and a little bit of heavy drinking. Coming up next on Windows Weekly, podcasts you love from people you trust.
Paul Thurrott [00:00:24]:
This is.
Leo Laporte [00:00:32]:
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell. Episode 964 for New Year's Eve 2025. Happy New Year. Well, happy holidays, everybody. It's actually, I guess we're airing this on the New Year's Eve. Is that right?
Richard Campbell [00:00:51]:
Wow.
Leo Laporte [00:00:51]:
A special holiday recording of Windows Weekly. And lo and behold, look who the reindeer dragged in. Richard and Paul are together in beautiful Makunji. Paul's got some sort of odd.
Richard Campbell [00:01:09]:
It's real. It's not a.
Leo Laporte [00:01:10]:
Look at that. They're touching one another.
Richard Campbell [00:01:12]:
We can actually touch each other. There's no cup here.
Leo Laporte [00:01:16]:
Wow. It's really, truly a Christmas miracle.
Richard Campbell [00:01:21]:
I flew back from Lithuania and stopped in pens. I landed in Philadelphia and took an Uber out to lower macunji. So here I am.
Leo Laporte [00:01:30]:
So just in case you're tuning in expecting like Microsoft News, forget about it. This is.
Richard Campbell [00:01:36]:
That's not what we're doing.
Leo Laporte [00:01:37]:
That's not what we're doing today. Today we're just gonna celebrate the holidays with our.
Paul Thurrott [00:01:43]:
You know, those people do like normal human being adults like normal.
Leo Laporte [00:01:47]:
Well, you know, traditionally on. On the network we do best ofs. But I just thought, oh, heck. Oh heck. Why don't we do something different this time?
Richard Campbell [00:02:00]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [00:02:01]:
Let the editors.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:02]:
You guys aren't working hard enough. Let's involve you this time.
Richard Campbell [00:02:04]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:02:09]:
Let's not do Windows News. Let's not do a best of. Let's get. And it turned out because Richard was going to be in a country that it. You two could sit together and now Richard, you've got a Surface. Your look looks like there. Yep.
Richard Campbell [00:02:25]:
This is a Surface Studio 2.
Leo Laporte [00:02:27]:
Nice. That's a big one. And Paul's running.
Richard Campbell [00:02:31]:
It's got the. It's got the Nvidia 4060 in it. Which means I can melt casings on phones with it. Right.
Leo Laporte [00:02:37]:
You don't really need the fire, is that what you're saying?
Richard Campbell [00:02:39]:
No log. It's blasting out of the side of this thing.
Leo Laporte [00:02:42]:
Hot. Your own new log. And then Paul's using an HP laptop. Is that one of the elite books or.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:49]:
No, it's an OmniBook 5. This is the Snapdragon based 16 inch.
Leo Laporte [00:02:54]:
Nice.
Richard Campbell [00:02:55]:
So it's not blasting heat out.
Paul Thurrott [00:02:57]:
It's not blasting anything out except for oodles of battery life.
Leo Laporte [00:03:00]:
Something's blasting heat up because Paul, despite the fact that he's wearing a hat and a very odd vest, looks like you could be a school crossing monitor at a Christmas school.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:12]:
Yeah, like a future guy in a post office wall warning poster.
Leo Laporte [00:03:16]:
Yeah. But he's also wearing shorts.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:19]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:03:20]:
Is it a hot day?
Paul Thurrott [00:03:21]:
I'm sending a lot of mixed signals to my bodies about temperature right now because this thing is hot. Richard's laptop is hot.
Richard Campbell [00:03:26]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:03:27]:
This thing on my head is hot. Everything wear vests.
Leo Laporte [00:03:29]:
But are we in the thurat living room here? I like that you have the I like this over your fireplaces asl picture. That's very cool. That's nice. I have purchased. Purchased. No, actually, no, I had it actually. It's really the remnants of my collection here. I have about a fig of angels envy.
Leo Laporte [00:03:55]:
Yeah, I do have from the last time you were out, Richard, a little bit of the clonakilty left.
Richard Campbell [00:04:02]:
Oh wow, look at that.
Leo Laporte [00:04:04]:
This was really good.
Richard Campbell [00:04:05]:
Yeah, it's very nice.
Leo Laporte [00:04:06]:
And then I don't know why I have some Lagavulin 16 for some reason.
Richard Campbell [00:04:11]:
I guess you needed if you've got a bottle of dirty ashtray I need.
Leo Laporte [00:04:16]:
A little hit of Pete. Oh yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:04:18]:
That's not a little hit of peat. That's a thorough thumb.
Leo Laporte [00:04:20]:
Oh, good. The cork broke off so I'm good.
Richard Campbell [00:04:22]:
Oh yeah, that's gonna be harder.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:24]:
That's just more peep.
Leo Laporte [00:04:28]:
I think it would be appropriate to light the cork on fire and that would give it a really nice peaty glow.
Richard Campbell [00:04:36]:
Burning cork is not a pleasant smell.
Leo Laporte [00:04:38]:
No, it doesn't smell too well. It's a little peaty.
Richard Campbell [00:04:42]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:04:42]:
Let's get. Give it a second.
Richard Campbell [00:04:43]:
There's action.
Leo Laporte [00:04:45]:
Yeah. Okay. And then just for. For grins I brought because I'm more of a rum guy, I brought some and gin. I like. I like gnts. I brought some rusty blade gin.
Richard Campbell [00:04:59]:
Nice.
Leo Laporte [00:05:00]:
Which is from the single barrel of witty.
Paul Thurrott [00:05:03]:
What do you call these coasters. It says let's let the evening be gin.
Leo Laporte [00:05:09]:
Let the evening be. Oh, I get it. Like begin. I get it. Well, we can begin with the beguine. This is a cask strength single barrel blade gin. It's a rusty blade.
Richard Campbell [00:05:20]:
Well and it looks like it's got. It's a little brown like it's actually wood.
Leo Laporte [00:05:23]:
That's why it's rusty. So I wonder what the barrels are for. It slowly handcrafted on the shores of San Francisco Bay. Oh God they locally source the finest.
Paul Thurrott [00:05:37]:
California from the local superfund site and spices.
Leo Laporte [00:05:41]:
Well, it is. If it wasn't. It is now three stage distillation in a custom copper pot still designed by and manufactured exclusively for a master distiller. Evaporation of angel share finally reduces this precious spirit to 94 proof rusty blade gin. They don't say what it's aged in. It rivals fine single malt whiskeys, Exo cognacs or fine bourbons. We like it either neat or with an ice cube or in any brown spirit cocktail like the Rusty Nutcracker, which would be appropriate for this time of year.
Paul Thurrott [00:06:18]:
Wow. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:06:19]:
I wish I said what it was aged in something gave it all that color. Right.
Richard Campbell [00:06:23]:
Yeah. It'll be oak of some kind of.
Leo Laporte [00:06:25]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:06:25]:
Whether the most obvious candidate would be bourbon barrel. Just because they're so common it can only be used once. Right. So yeah, that's probably the safe bet.
Leo Laporte [00:06:35]:
Well, I think the Angel's Envy or the Clonakilty would be my choice.
Richard Campbell [00:06:39]:
They'll both go very well. This is actually the whiskey that's on the. The upcoming Windows Weekly which will already be out by the time this is out.
Leo Laporte [00:06:50]:
So we've already.
Richard Campbell [00:06:51]:
Pennsylvania Old Farm. You'll have already seen it and I've already told the story of it, which I only finished writing today. I think that's.
Leo Laporte [00:06:57]:
Isn't that Paul's name the place. I think that's. That's Paul's name. Old Farm.
Paul Thurrott [00:07:03]:
Oh, Old Farm.
Richard Campbell [00:07:04]:
Almost the same.
Leo Laporte [00:07:05]:
Okay. Okay.
Paul Thurrott [00:07:08]:
Oh man.
Leo Laporte [00:07:10]:
Anyway, so I hope you at home have something to imbibe while we engage in. We do friendly chatter. This show needn't be very long. If you decide you want to bail out, to tap out at any time, please be our guests. You know, Paul, you may. You may feel it at some point.
Paul Thurrott [00:07:35]:
I might cover your knees.
Leo Laporte [00:07:36]:
I don't know. You may pass out. So are you drinking that today? Tonight, Whatever that was that you had? Yeah. Good.
Paul Thurrott [00:07:45]:
It's a Pennsylvania old fart. It's nice. Local holiday tradition.
Leo Laporte [00:07:53]:
If it weren't. So if. If it's a. It is New Year's Eve. So I mean, I figure it's okay. We can be a little. A little outrageous here.
Richard Campbell [00:08:02]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:08:04]:
Number of people are drinking coffee because it is. We are recording.
Richard Campbell [00:08:08]:
Sensible. Maybe you're at a work day, you know.
Leo Laporte [00:08:10]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:08:11]:
Like that. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:08:12]:
Only a Monday at noon my time. So it's a little. A little early. But the sun as my old grandfather.
Richard Campbell [00:08:20]:
Is probably a good call then because the Irish don't Mess around. Lunchtime is whiskey time.
Leo Laporte [00:08:24]:
As my. My grandpa used to say, the sun's gone over the yard arm.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:30]:
Nice. He had no idea what that meant.
Leo Laporte [00:08:33]:
But it's time to have a drink.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:35]:
It sounds manly.
Leo Laporte [00:08:37]:
You know, I shouldn't drink it out of the bottle. Oh, but that clown is guilty. Is so good. It's a glass and there's not much. It's a glass bottle. Yeah. So I thought we'd just, I don't know, tell some. Some yarns.
Richard Campbell [00:08:50]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:08:54]:
Stories from our past.
Paul Thurrott [00:08:57]:
That's the only kind of story I have, Leo.
Leo Laporte [00:08:58]:
I wanna. Yeah, no, there's no stories from your future yet.
Richard Campbell [00:09:02]:
No.
Leo Laporte [00:09:02]:
What was your favorite Christmas memory, Paul? Maybe your favorite gift or a favorite moment?
Paul Thurrott [00:09:08]:
I do recall getting Barry Minnow's greatest Hits as a young man.
Leo Laporte [00:09:12]:
Really? Was. Did you actually get that as a gift?
Paul Thurrott [00:09:14]:
Yeah, I did. Those were more innocent times.
Leo Laporte [00:09:19]:
Did you. Were you excited about that or was that something?
Paul Thurrott [00:09:21]:
I was pretty happy about it. We just saw Barry live last year in Pennsylvania, actually. Really? Yeah. He writes this. Gonna be 80 something years old. He's doing great.
Richard Campbell [00:09:31]:
Is he still doing his thing?
Leo Laporte [00:09:32]:
Is he. Is he energetic still and all that?
Paul Thurrott [00:09:35]:
You know, he doesn't move as much, but I wouldn't either. I mean, but he's doing good.
Leo Laporte [00:09:40]:
We went to see Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road show, which was going. He said, you know, it's my last concert tour. But it went on for like four years. So it was his last. But I mean, it was literally his last. And he is not all that mobile. But they did something quite clever.
Paul Thurrott [00:09:58]:
He's a piano player. He can just sit in front of the piano, you know.
Leo Laporte [00:10:01]:
Exactly. They put his piano on a conveyor belt and the piano would move around the stage. He would just sit there. The piano would move around with him. And then.
Richard Campbell [00:10:14]:
It's efficient.
Leo Laporte [00:10:16]:
It was very efficient. Every once I stand up and kind of bow and then sit back down and the piano would move around some more. Then, you know, because it's goodbye, everybody, my last concert, which, by the way, is obviously far from. But anyway, my last concert. And so they're playing. He's playing Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, appropriately, and there's a stairway leading to, like, out to a door.
Paul Thurrott [00:10:45]:
Did one of those, like, escalator, like.
Leo Laporte [00:10:47]:
It's an escalator. He doesn't have to climb it. He hits. But the escalator slowly moves him up and he waves and it's out the door and.
Paul Thurrott [00:10:57]:
Yeah, that's amazing.
Leo Laporte [00:10:58]:
I mean, not to walk to the van yeah, right. It probably goes straight to the car. Look, I mean, I'm lucky I can still move. I think that that's admirable that these guys are still out there performing.
Richard Campbell [00:11:13]:
Crazy.
Leo Laporte [00:11:13]:
At the age 82. That's incredible.
Richard Campbell [00:11:16]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:11:16]:
What was. Richard, do you have a font?
Paul Thurrott [00:11:18]:
I don't know.
Leo Laporte [00:11:19]:
Do you celebrate Christmas in Canada?
Richard Campbell [00:11:21]:
Yeah, sort of. But we do it a couple weeks earlier. You know, it's like just like Thanksgiving.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:26]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:11:27]:
What's your mean?
Paul Thurrott [00:11:28]:
Nothing to you people.
Leo Laporte [00:11:33]:
Paul, you look like you're about ready to dance around the maypole. You know, you're really not. I don't know what's going on here.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:38]:
This is really.
Leo Laporte [00:11:39]:
It's just off that is a beard attached to that. That's now on your.
Richard Campbell [00:11:44]:
Yeah, you took it off. It's on the back of his face.
Paul Thurrott [00:11:48]:
Sits around the back. That's where all the hair is. Anyway, it's on my back.
Leo Laporte [00:11:54]:
So, Richard, a fond holiday memory of yours?
Richard Campbell [00:11:57]:
Oh, absolutely, yeah. My father, who's passed now as electrical engineer, getting me my first soldering iron.
Leo Laporte [00:12:05]:
Wow.
Richard Campbell [00:12:05]:
Because I'm that kind of geek, man. And he was.
Leo Laporte [00:12:07]:
You never forget your first, do you?
Richard Campbell [00:12:10]:
Never forget your first. And he made me solder and desolder LED displays for cash registers over and over again until I get my hand right to practice.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:18]:
Important for parents to turn anything fun into like a job, work, you know, like, my dad did this with me in basketball. Like I ran drills in the driveway. It's. Could we. Can we just have a good time or something or.
Richard Campbell [00:12:28]:
No, you gotta get a basketball. You're good at basketball.
Leo Laporte [00:12:32]:
Got a plan for your future? There you go.
Paul Thurrott [00:12:34]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [00:12:34]:
Did he think you were going to become a soldering fiend like in your future? That was what was ahead for you is assembling motherboards or something?
Richard Campbell [00:12:42]:
Yeah, well, I ended up doing a fair bit of that actually, and repairing PCs when they came along.
Leo Laporte [00:12:48]:
Is that how you got started after school? Wow. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:12:52]:
My after school job. Well, I bumped into Tierra Sadie in like 77, the model ones. And within a year I was working at a company called H S Microsystems after school doing lower case kits for the. For the Model 1 and RAM expansions. And then when the first floppy drives came along, they came as a kit and most people assembled it wrong. And the guy who was teaching me, a guy named Tyler, we'd make up these little bundles of the parts that people would usually screw up and so you could quickly repair them and get them on their way. So after school I. He'd literally have A line of like lowercase mods I had to do or repairs on drives and things.
Richard Campbell [00:13:30]:
And I'd fix them up nice. No, I'm really never done anything else.
Leo Laporte [00:13:33]:
You know, I don't know if it would. It would burn you if you touched it. But could you fix this Mac? Because I think it's got a dead capacitor. It got that fishy burning smell, like burning fish smell.
Richard Campbell [00:13:45]:
You know those old spun capacitors, they just wear out, Right. You probably have to do them all.
Paul Thurrott [00:13:51]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:13:52]:
They'd have to be desoldered at the USS Enterprise.
Richard Campbell [00:13:55]:
Desolder. Each one replaced with comparable and sold them back up again.
Leo Laporte [00:13:59]:
Don't get buy capacitors that would be comparable.
Richard Campbell [00:14:02]:
Yeah, probably on Amazon somewhere. They'll come from China.
Leo Laporte [00:14:05]:
You know, it's kind of one of the saddest things of the modern age is that stores where you like Radio.
Richard Campbell [00:14:11]:
Shack or others, discrete parts aren't a thing anymore. They're not worth stocking.
Leo Laporte [00:14:15]:
You can't go buy those anymore.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:17]:
Used to go buy it. They used to literally have just aisles of bins.
Richard Campbell [00:14:20]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:14:21]:
You know, and you had to know the resistor codes, the colors and what they meant. Right?
Richard Campbell [00:14:26]:
Yeah. I actually just bought. I had to buy some resistors for a thing I was assembling. And the only way I could buy them was as a huge kit of like a thousand pieces. But it was 10 bucks. Right. So for the two resistors I needed, I got a box like this. Yep.
Leo Laporte [00:14:43]:
I gotta move these resistors.
Richard Campbell [00:14:45]:
Yeah. If you need any resistors, I got.
Paul Thurrott [00:14:47]:
A salvage yard for electronic parts, you know.
Leo Laporte [00:14:51]:
Well, that your dad, I guess, kind of gave you your love for technology, you think?
Richard Campbell [00:14:56]:
Yeah, absolutely. Without a doubt. Here's one of the stories of working in H and S is that the head of the service department loves salvaging gear. And one day he brings in a spectrum analyzer they gotten out of the university. It was worn out, but there was still a laser in it and a bunch of other parts. It's like, hey boy, take this apart, right. And pull all the parts out. So as I'm yanking parts out, I pull out these can capacitors, like one Farad capacitors.
Richard Campbell [00:15:23]:
They probably weigh five, eight pounds each.
Leo Laporte [00:15:26]:
Wow.
Richard Campbell [00:15:27]:
So I'm like, you know what? I'm going to make myself a Jacob's ladder out of these things. So I wire them up, put them onto the power supply to get them charging, and I'm. And I'm assembling the wire assembly to put the thing together while I'm still pulling apart. But, you know, I'm 12. I get distracted and I forget that I've left these things charging. And I hear this crackle. And I look up and the side of the capacitor is expanding outward. Oh, that's not good.
Richard Campbell [00:15:54]:
And then there's this gigantic blue flash. And the whole building power goes up. So I'm in the. And we're in the service room. So we're in the back. There's no windows or anything, right. It's completely dark, and I can feel something touching me. Like there's something flying around the room, but I don't know what it is.
Richard Campbell [00:16:12]:
So there's much cursing and somebody finds.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:14]:
A main breaker like a time. Like a time shift, you know, continuum thing.
Richard Campbell [00:16:19]:
Until like, if I'm blown into another dimension. They were paper packed capacitors, and I blew paper all over the room. Like, absolutely everywhere.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:29]:
Well, better than like little bits of iron or something, you know, I mean.
Richard Campbell [00:16:32]:
And the only thing left of the capacitor was the two bolts that I had hooked up to the. To the. To the power supply.
Paul Thurrott [00:16:38]:
So I'm like, pretty sure. So they had no beginning of the movie the Arrival.
Richard Campbell [00:16:43]:
I had to vacuum up all the paper. Oh, but yeah, but all the capacitor. All those big capacitors were. Were layers of copper and paper wrapped together in a plastic container in the. That vaporize the damn thing. Was a good while. It was a good day. And Tyler comes in with the powers back on.
Richard Campbell [00:17:01]:
He looks at me with a paperweighter, goes, so what have we learned?
Leo Laporte [00:17:08]:
So your dad gave you a lasting love for technology and Paul's dad and gave him a lasting love for middle of the road music.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:19]:
That was not from my dad. But yeah, fair enough.
Leo Laporte [00:17:21]:
Okay, who is it from? Your mom?
Paul Thurrott [00:17:24]:
Yeah, I know. My. My dad actually had a really cool collection of, at the time, 60s and 70s music on album. So I learned a lot about the Beatles, the Stones, the Doors, you know, Pink Floyd, etc. So I had that kind of thing. But he also, it. He was, you know, one of my best early gifts from him was a NSLR cam. Like a Motorola X570, I think it was.
Paul Thurrott [00:17:48]:
And I always laugh now, you know, when you look at like iPhones or any smartphone, and it's like, oh, this is a 200 millimeter equivalent. I'm like, yeah, because that 200 millimeter lens looks like this. I had one. I used to go to the Boston Garden and take pictures of the Celtics playing. And it was like I was sent, you know, center Court. But that thing was.
Leo Laporte [00:18:04]:
Did you imagine you wanted to be a telescope when you grew up?
Paul Thurrott [00:18:08]:
No, but I was artistic and apparently autistic and I. Stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:18:15]:
Didn't you?
Paul Thurrott [00:18:16]:
Yeah, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:18:18]:
So in a way, yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:18:22]:
And such a fine paid job.
Leo Laporte [00:18:23]:
What did your dad do, Paul?
Paul Thurrott [00:18:27]:
My. Well, the. My real father, so to speak. Not to complicate this story is he worked in. Well, he was a Boston police officer.
Leo Laporte [00:18:35]:
Ah.
Paul Thurrott [00:18:36]:
And then he worked in lighting. And that's. They moved eventually here, which is why we're in Pennsylvania. This is where Lutron is based. And that's. He was there.
Leo Laporte [00:18:44]:
Oh, he worked for lutron.
Paul Thurrott [00:18:45]:
Wow. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:18:48]:
Yeah, we're right there.
Paul Thurrott [00:18:48]:
Right. Right by the heart of it. Heart of Lutron country.
Richard Campbell [00:18:51]:
Talking about Lutron Tech this week.
Leo Laporte [00:18:53]:
So I have, I think Lutron switches throughout my house.
Richard Campbell [00:18:56]:
Yes.
Paul Thurrott [00:18:57]:
Yeah, exactly. I'm just looking at those.
Richard Campbell [00:18:58]:
Yeah. Lutron Casita.
Paul Thurrott [00:19:00]:
I was. My brother in law no longer works there. When I was asking him about that and he was pointing me to a bunch of other stuff and I was like, you're not really recommending a lot of Lutron stuff. I see. You know, he's like, yeah, I don't want to talk.
Leo Laporte [00:19:11]:
Did you ever think about going into law enforcement?
Paul Thurrott [00:19:14]:
Yeah, I would have been an awesome state trooper. Right.
Leo Laporte [00:19:17]:
You would have been so great. You see the chin strap up right under your lower lip.
Richard Campbell [00:19:22]:
On a motorcycle.
Paul Thurrott [00:19:23]:
That would have been a great thing.
Richard Campbell [00:19:24]:
That's an aesthetic.
Leo Laporte [00:19:25]:
Black boots, jodhpurs.
Paul Thurrott [00:19:27]:
I mean, I probably. I've known so many police officers over the years. Like, I have so many police stories, but like the. When I was in a bank teller in Boston, they used to drive around the parking lot in the morning before we opened and they'd shine the spotlight in the door, you know, through the windows and stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:19:42]:
Stuff.
Paul Thurrott [00:19:42]:
They'd be like, Paul, throughout. We know you're in there. Come on.
Leo Laporte [00:19:46]:
Come on.
Paul Thurrott [00:19:46]:
With our checks. Yeah, classic.
Leo Laporte [00:19:52]:
We know you're in there. If you're a mall copy, get your own segue. That's pretty nice.
Richard Campbell [00:19:56]:
Yeah, exactly.
Paul Thurrott [00:19:57]:
Well, this is well before Segways, but. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:19:59]:
Yeah. Well, you. You know, that would be something to aspire to later in life.
Paul Thurrott [00:20:03]:
Yeah, exactly.
Leo Laporte [00:20:04]:
Richard, what did your. What did your dad do?
Richard Campbell [00:20:06]:
My dad was electrical engineering. Made S100 bus electronic cash.
Paul Thurrott [00:20:14]:
What are you, like data from Star Trek? What's going on?
Leo Laporte [00:20:17]:
Yeah, yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:20:20]:
I really didn't have much of a choice. You know, this is the path. I was.
Paul Thurrott [00:20:23]:
My dad was Jerry Purnell.
Leo Laporte [00:20:26]:
But he did Cash Register point of sales Systems. But they Were computers.
Richard Campbell [00:20:30]:
Yeah, they were effectively computers. Yeah, they ran on 80, 80 80s.
Leo Laporte [00:20:35]:
Wow. You guys are so young. Yeah, I would. I never thought I'd say that, but.
Paul Thurrott [00:20:40]:
I mean, I've owned TVs that had transitioned to them. I don't know what you mean by young, but I just.
Leo Laporte [00:20:46]:
I feel like I was an adult when. When S. 180 80s were.
Richard Campbell [00:20:52]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:20:52]:
All the rage.
Richard Campbell [00:20:54]:
Yeah. I was a kiss. Yeah. I was just a kid, but did.
Leo Laporte [00:20:57]:
Your mom work or was she a homemaker?
Richard Campbell [00:21:01]:
She was always. She was always an office manager.
Leo Laporte [00:21:03]:
Office, yeah. How about you, Paul? Did your mom work?
Paul Thurrott [00:21:06]:
Yeah, she was a nurse.
Leo Laporte [00:21:08]:
Oh.
Paul Thurrott [00:21:08]:
And also a homemaker, obviously, because, you know, mothers do everything.
Leo Laporte [00:21:12]:
Yep, that's right. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:21:16]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:21:17]:
Hey, everybody. Leo laporte here with a. A little bit of an ask. Every year at this time, we'd like to survey our audience to find a little bit more about you. As you may know, we respect your privacy. We don't do anything. In fact, we can't do anything to learn about who you are. And that's fine with me.
Leo Laporte [00:21:35]:
I like that. But it helps us with advertising, it helps us with programming to know a little bit about those of you who are willing to tell us. Your privacy is absolutely respected. We do get your email address, but that's just in case there's an issue. We don't share that with anybody. What we do share is the aggregate information that we get from these surveys. Things like 80% of our audience buy something they heard in an ad on our shows or 75% of our audience are it decision makers. Things like that are very helpful with us when we talk to advertisers.
Leo Laporte [00:22:05]:
They're also very helpful to us to understand what operating systems you use, what content you're interested in. So, enough. Let me just ask you if you will go to TWiT TV Survey 26 and answer a few questions. It should only take you a few minutes of your time. We do this every year. You. It's very helpful to us. Your privacy is assured, I promise you.
Leo Laporte [00:22:27]:
And of course, if. If you're uncomfortable with any question or you don't want to do it at all, that's fine too. But if. If you want to help us out a little bit, twit that TV survey 26. Thank you so much. And now back to the show. Well, I've run out of questions. Thank you, guys.
Leo Laporte [00:22:43]:
It's been great talking to you.
Paul Thurrott [00:22:46]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:22:46]:
Oh, I think this is an opportunity. I think this is an opportunity for us to get to know you guys. A little bit better.
Paul Thurrott [00:22:52]:
So we're usually buttoned up during the show.
Leo Laporte [00:22:55]:
So I know you keep close to the vest, never express your true feelings, do you, Paul?
Richard Campbell [00:23:00]:
We're a shy bunch.
Paul Thurrott [00:23:01]:
I'm glad to finally have this forum, Leo. Thank you.
Leo Laporte [00:23:04]:
Okay, what's irritating you this week?
Paul Thurrott [00:23:07]:
Religion, politics.
Leo Laporte [00:23:10]:
The works.
Paul Thurrott [00:23:11]:
I feel very strongly that women should not be allowed to vote. You know, things like that.
Leo Laporte [00:23:15]:
Oh, God. He doesn't mean it, kids. He's joking.
Paul Thurrott [00:23:17]:
Come on.
Leo Laporte [00:23:18]:
How did. So Dustin's asking in our club, twit, how did you end up with a home in Mexico? What? How did that come about?
Paul Thurrott [00:23:26]:
Yeah, I mean, my wife and I have been going to Europe the whole time.
Leo Laporte [00:23:32]:
You used to do home exchange stuff, right?
Paul Thurrott [00:23:35]:
Yeah, we took a break when we had the kids at first, and then we started going back and we. I think for about 20 years, we spend at least a month every year in Europe. And we always had this vague idea that we would try to split time between the United States and Europe at some point with no idea how that was ever going to work. And it would have been very complicated and expensive. But the year that pandemic happened, we didn't travel like most people. And then the next year, the United States opened up, but we did not open to people from Europe, so we couldn't do a home swap in Europe. We have friends there. We have a bunch of friends there.
Paul Thurrott [00:24:06]:
The last family we had done swap with before the pandemic, that Steve bank, and, you know, we talked and he said, look, if we can't figure anything out, we should just do swap again. We're like, yeah, of course. Like, outside of Amsterdam, and. But they couldn't come here. So I started researching things and, you know, like most Americans, I mean, Mexico was not on my radar. It was. It's a. It has a bad rep, you know, I don't know if you noticed in the news, it seems like it's a scary, bad place.
Paul Thurrott [00:24:32]:
I've seen, like, you know, what's that? The Denzel Washington movie based on the book man on Fire. Like, this doesn't seem like a good place. Kidnappings, you know, whatever, but I. It came across my radar somehow. I started looking into it, and I distinctly remember going to my wife and saying, listen, I have an idea. You're going to want to interrupt me. Just let me get through this. I said, I think we should go to Mexico.
Paul Thurrott [00:24:54]:
And she's like.
Leo Laporte [00:24:55]:
And like, let me stop you right there, Paul.
Paul Thurrott [00:24:59]:
But I showed her what I found, and we looked into it and we so we did just a week trip in June that year, and then we took the kids out later. We did a two or three week trip. I don't remember.
Leo Laporte [00:25:07]:
So this is instead of Europe, you thought? Yeah, because it's a lot less expensive. Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:25:12]:
Closer. It's a lot less expensive. Fewer time zones. It's easy, you know, getting older. It's like hard to travel overnight to Europe, etc. I don't know how Richard does it.
Leo Laporte [00:25:19]:
God, I don't know how Richard does it either.
Paul Thurrott [00:25:20]:
And we just.
Richard Campbell [00:25:22]:
I did, three days ago.
Paul Thurrott [00:25:23]:
The goal in 2022 is to spend years staying in different parts of Mexico City each trip and trying to think, maybe there's a place here that we might want to be in. And the very first trip on the last day, we were walking down the street to go to a real estate agency just to ask about next steps, like, how do we, what are the first things we should do? Whatever. Walked around the corner, there was an apartment for sale. We went and looked at it. My wife is the most pragmatic, dare I say cheap person on the planet. And I knew she was going to talk me out of this because I was like, man, I really want this place. And so I said, what do you think? And she says, I have to buy this place.
Leo Laporte [00:26:02]:
Oh, my God.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:03]:
It was the weirdest. It's just so against the way we have ever been. But it just kind of happened. And there we are.
Leo Laporte [00:26:11]:
You actually have created a website and a YouTube channel called Eternal Spring.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:16]:
Yep.
Leo Laporte [00:26:17]:
About how you did all this. And it's gonna be a book.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:20]:
It is a book.
Leo Laporte [00:26:21]:
It is a book. Oh, cool. So is you think of this as a second career or is this just a side?
Paul Thurrott [00:26:29]:
It's not. It's not.
Leo Laporte [00:26:30]:
You're both right.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:31]:
We're not going to make money doing this. It's. This is just sharing our love of this place and wanting people to get it right because there's a lot you could mess up and get wrong. And, you know, we stumbled into this badly, but did well and we just got lucky.
Leo Laporte [00:26:48]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:26:48]:
And so you did.
Leo Laporte [00:26:51]:
I'm very jealous, to be honest with you. I, I, every time you, you call from Mexico City, I think, you know, you go out.
Paul Thurrott [00:27:00]:
I mean, we hit Thanksgiving food. Well, no, sorry. A little bit after Thanksgiving, we were talking to a guy we know at a, the bartender near here, and he had moved to Maine, but he's back just for the holidays. And I said, I don't know, why aren't you in Maine? He says, It's 7 degrees. I'm like, right, that would do it. I looked at it. I said, well, it's 71 degrees in Mexico City right now, so it's close. I said, seven's pretty good.
Paul Thurrott [00:27:24]:
If it's Celsius.
Leo Laporte [00:27:28]:
What's the biggest challenge or difficulty you've.
Paul Thurrott [00:27:32]:
Faced with this in Mexico?
Leo Laporte [00:27:34]:
Well, just in general with this. This whole. Because you live in two places now, although you no longer own a home in the United States.
Paul Thurrott [00:27:41]:
So actually, in September, we bought this place.
Leo Laporte [00:27:44]:
Oh, okay.
Paul Thurrott [00:27:45]:
We had been living here for almost two years.
Richard Campbell [00:27:47]:
He blames me, you know, because I. When we were talking, he was talking about being home, and I said, home?
Paul Thurrott [00:27:51]:
He said, what do you mean by home?
Richard Campbell [00:27:52]:
Where do you.
Paul Thurrott [00:27:53]:
I said, well, they're both home. Yeah. He said, well, where do you own real estate? I'm like, okay, I see what you're saying.
Leo Laporte [00:27:59]:
That place.
Paul Thurrott [00:28:00]:
So you guys both know me well enough to know that the way we stepped into this was, I think, back in May or something. I said. I was looking at the calendar and I said, you know, I think we're going to spend more time in Mexico this year than we are in the United States, unless something goes south or whatever. And I said, obviously, we should buy a place here in Pennsylvania. And she says, it's funny you say that. I was actually thinking about that.
Leo Laporte [00:28:22]:
You two are on a wavelength. Wow.
Paul Thurrott [00:28:24]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:28:25]:
Isn't that nice that you agree on all that?
Paul Thurrott [00:28:30]:
You know, that we don't agree on everything.
Leo Laporte [00:28:33]:
It's an amazing face. I don't know how to interpret it, but I just had this.
Paul Thurrott [00:28:38]:
I was telling them this morning, like, I'm in the bathroom this morning putting my contacts in, right? And my wife is next to me doing the same. Yeah. But she has a different bottle of saline. I said, what are you doing? She says, what do you mean? I said, you have your own saline? And she goes, yeah. And I said, why? She says, you never leave. You never close the bottle. Oh, we've never discussed this.
Leo Laporte [00:29:01]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:29:02]:
She goes, I also have my own toothpaste squeeze.
Leo Laporte [00:29:04]:
Like, squeeze the tube.
Paul Thurrott [00:29:05]:
Be a normal person and just talk to me about this stuff. I'm like, I would close the cap. What else do you have that I don't know about? Like, what is this? I don't know. But I guess the big things, right? I guess we're on the same page.
Leo Laporte [00:29:21]:
No, I think so. I mean, it's amazing that you didn't have to persuade her to move to Mexico, for instance.
Paul Thurrott [00:29:27]:
She was thinking that she was gonna have to persuade me, I guess. Same thing. We were both like, now. Yeah, I think I want to do this.
Leo Laporte [00:29:34]:
What's the residency rule? Do you have to spend a certain amount of time back home, back here in the States?
Paul Thurrott [00:29:39]:
I mean, we have residency now, so. Oh, sorry. We have. Yeah, we do have. We have residency. We're not citizens, so we can be there as long as we want.
Leo Laporte [00:29:47]:
Okay.
Paul Thurrott [00:29:47]:
There's no. There are no limits.
Leo Laporte [00:29:49]:
And how does the United States feel about that? Or do they care?
Paul Thurrott [00:29:51]:
They're ambivalent.
Leo Laporte [00:29:53]:
As long as you pay your taxes. So they don't care. Do you have taxes?
Paul Thurrott [00:29:56]:
No. I mean, legally you have to have a home and you have to pay. Well, you have to pay taxes. Right. So we. We pay taxes in this state and in, you know, the United States, obviously, that's not good. So that doesn't change.
Richard Campbell [00:30:08]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:30:10]:
I don't know what taxes.
Paul Thurrott [00:30:10]:
In Mexico, property taxes are going to be in this place, but in the house, they were like $8,000 a year, and in Mexico, they're $35 a year. So it's a slightly different scale. Yeah, it's bizarre.
Leo Laporte [00:30:25]:
Richard, have you always lived in B.C. or are you.
Richard Campbell [00:30:28]:
No, I was born in New Zealand.
Leo Laporte [00:30:30]:
Well, that's right. You're a New Zealander.
Richard Campbell [00:30:32]:
Yeah. I've had two passports. You know, I have the choice of countries. That's why I'm always down there.
Paul Thurrott [00:30:37]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [00:30:37]:
Is I'm visiting family. I love that place.
Leo Laporte [00:30:40]:
You have a sheep farm down there? Yeah, now wired for WI fi.
Richard Campbell [00:30:44]:
There's a cow.
Paul Thurrott [00:30:44]:
I'm surprised you don't know the difference, Leo.
Leo Laporte [00:30:46]:
Yeah, they're all the same to me.
Richard Campbell [00:30:50]:
My family are part of the Ohyi settlers group outside of Taronga, and I was born on Ohuiti Road, so I am literally part of that settlers group. So. But my, you know, it's crazy story of how we even got there. Like, there's this sort of realization once you know, this story of my families, of why I travel so much. My father's family were Scottish Campbells that moved to Wales after the crisis with the Douglases and then immigrated to Saskatchewan. You know, they were wheat farmers, as everybody is. My grandmother, my father's mother did not want to be a farmer's wife. So she did the only thing you could do in that era, which was she was a schoolteacher.
Paul Thurrott [00:31:33]:
I like you, I just don't like what you are.
Richard Campbell [00:31:35]:
There you go. And so she married a man who also didn't want to be a farmer. He was a jack of all trades. He was a carpenter and a mechanic, and so forth. And she would get teaching jobs and then they pack up the family and go. So they made their way out of Saskatchewan, made it to British Columbia, and then she got an offer to run the English department for the Taronga Girls School in New Zealand. And so they took it, packed their four kids up, took a boat for six weeks and went down to New Zealand. I have the paid newspaper clipping of the new head of the English department arriving in Taronga in the 50s and they stayed down there for more than 10 years.
Richard Campbell [00:32:14]:
And then some point their kids grew up in New Zealand and at some point they decided, well, I'm not going to renew my contract, let's do something new. They'd always done this to travel, right. And they decided they liked British Columbia best. So they decided they're going to go back to British Columbia, basically announce it to the kids. Well, the kids that you know. My father had arrived there as an 11 year old. Now he was 21 and he didn't want to leave. Neither did any of the others.
Richard Campbell [00:32:36]:
His sisters all married off good Kiwis. And so that's one way to get all the kids out of the house all at once. Right. Move to a different hemisphere. So my grandmother, grandfather moved back to B.C. and my father married a Kiwi and had me. And then they came up when I was three to show me off as the first grandchild of the generation. They never left.
Richard Campbell [00:32:59]:
Nice. Yeah, that mother story's even weirder. Like that's the normal one. Like what's.
Paul Thurrott [00:33:06]:
That's the normal one.
Richard Campbell [00:33:07]:
That's the normal one. The weird one is my. My maternal grandmother was the young eldest of six kids that grew up on a Malaysian rubber plantation. Her grandfather had stolen rubber plants from Brazil and escaped with them. There's a diary entry for Emile where he says left Brazil precipitously.
Leo Laporte [00:33:32]:
Was he being used?
Richard Campbell [00:33:34]:
Yes, because it was illegal to take latex plants out of Brazil. They knew that was their important product. This is what's going to be rubber. Rubber.
Leo Laporte [00:33:41]:
Right, right. And he was he going to grow in New Zealand?
Richard Campbell [00:33:45]:
He grew it in Malaysia quite successfully. Was a wealthy plantation owner. So my grandmother grew up with servants, you know, her mother was a wealthy plantation owner's daughter and had married this somewhat ne' er do. Well, he was a game warden. He shot elephants to keep him off the rubber plants. But then when World War II is starting and the Japanese are working their way on the Malay Peninsula, the father goes off to fight in the war and dies and the mother and the kids get packed off to England by ship. And they, of course, being well to do, spoke multiple languages, well traveled, well educated. So they get evacuated just in time for the Battle of Britain.
Richard Campbell [00:34:30]:
And so my grandmother, yeah, my grandmother's multilingual, so she goes to work for the BBC, arguably for intelligence, translating documents. And my Uncle Ray.
Paul Thurrott [00:34:41]:
You say arguably or allegedly?
Richard Campbell [00:34:42]:
Yeah, arguably, it's likely. But my grandmother was always cagey about it.
Leo Laporte [00:34:47]:
She didn't say what she did.
Richard Campbell [00:34:48]:
She never. She never really said, but she had access to a lot of information.
Paul Thurrott [00:34:54]:
She's like, I'm no Julia Childs or anything.
Richard Campbell [00:34:56]:
But anyway, the youngest uncle Theo, who I've met, who's six years old when they arrive in England and gets put into school, gets into a schoolyard fight, as you do as a new kid, chews out the kid in German.
Paul Thurrott [00:35:08]:
Oh, boy, that's not a good story.
Richard Campbell [00:35:12]:
All the little kids are rounded up out of the school. They grab the mother, they put them in an internment camp. And my Ray, who had been working in a factory, comes home to find they're not there and asks around, and he too gets picked up, put in a different internment camp. And my grandmother Mona is smart enough to say, what happened to those people? Apparently they were German sympathizers. So she goes back to the BBC and says, hey, my home's been blown up and everybody's dead. Can I stay here? And so they put her up in the single woman's dorm, and she, you know, just kissed her mother goodbye to go to work, and now they're gone. Of course, the internment cans all get evacuated as they in in 1940, and they disperse them out to the colonies, which is why they end up in New Zealand. My grandmother doesn't know this, but she somehow finds out.
Richard Campbell [00:35:58]:
So again, we talk about maybe she was involved in intelligence that they'd been evacuated to New Zealand, and the only way she can get to New Zealand is to get deployed as a nurse. So she trained during the war, gets trained as a nurse, and gets deployed on a hospital ship in 1945. And so by the time she gets to the Pacific, the war ends and the ship just is going to turn around and go back to England, but they make a stop in Australia. So she gets off in Australia, still hasn't made it to back home, but now they're celebrating, meets a guy, things happen. By the time she gets to Australia and says hello every time he gets to New Zealand to say hi to her mother, after six years, she's pregnant with my mother.
Leo Laporte [00:36:44]:
Wow, this is a family story. Do they, they.
Richard Campbell [00:36:48]:
This is a family story.
Leo Laporte [00:36:49]:
Was it? It wasn't a family secret, it was a family story.
Richard Campbell [00:36:52]:
It was pretty secretive, but you know, as people get older it becomes.
Leo Laporte [00:36:55]:
You'll learn that story.
Richard Campbell [00:36:56]:
Yeah. A little more casual. Anyway, you know, at the point where I realized the amount of travel my extended family, my. All of my family's done is like, well, gee, no wonder. Like what the heck was I gonna do?
Leo Laporte [00:37:07]:
They're all. Yeah, we're all travelers.
Richard Campbell [00:37:09]:
But it means that I'm only second generation Kiwi. My mother was born in New Zealand, but her mother wasn't. And, And I was. And now we're in B.C.
Paul Thurrott [00:37:18]:
So actually, I mean, my father lived in England for eight or nine years and then spent the rest of his career living in South Africa, Japan, Brazil, until there were kidnapping threats. You had to get out of there. But doing the lighting thing. But you know, outside. Usually outside of the country.
Richard Campbell [00:37:34]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:37:35]:
So I look like a stay at home dad compared to both these guys.
Leo Laporte [00:37:37]:
But yeah, it's really interesting.
Richard Campbell [00:37:39]:
You both have still very well traveled.
Paul Thurrott [00:37:41]:
Yeah, but compared to most people. But not to compare to you guys.
Leo Laporte [00:37:44]:
And this is when traveling was a little harder. I mean today it's not such a big deal, but I mean that was. You had to take boats and stuff. I mean it was a. No.
Paul Thurrott [00:37:50]:
I, I envy younger people today because it's so easy to do. Like what we're doing now in our 50s was not possible in our 20s. Not really. And there are tons of people doing it now. I mean it's really easy.
Leo Laporte [00:38:03]:
Are there a lot of Americans in your.
Paul Thurrott [00:38:05]:
Yeah. Too many.
Leo Laporte [00:38:06]:
Yeah. You don't want that.
Paul Thurrott [00:38:09]:
No.
Leo Laporte [00:38:10]:
You didn't come here to hang out with America.
Paul Thurrott [00:38:12]:
I didn't come here to be with you people. But you're our people. Shut up.
Leo Laporte [00:38:19]:
Yeah, they're asking about being Canadian and a Kiwi, but they're both, they're both Commonwealth countries. So you both worship the same king worship.
Richard Campbell [00:38:31]:
So we got to have something on the money. Goodness knows we don't want it to be Alexander Hamilton.
Leo Laporte [00:38:36]:
That's a good. You know, I was looking too soon, man.
Paul Thurrott [00:38:39]:
Too soon.
Leo Laporte [00:38:41]:
Looking at my 50s and they. And they have Andrew Jackson on them.
Richard Campbell [00:38:45]:
Yeah, Andrew Jackson. There you go.
Leo Laporte [00:38:46]:
Not exactly a paragon of virtue by any means.
Richard Campbell [00:38:49]:
Old Hickory.
Leo Laporte [00:38:50]:
Old Hickory. Oh, I'm Sorry, that's the 20. The 50 is Ulysses S. Grant who granted was a good general who was a corrupt when he was a president. Yeah, he was a terrible president.
Paul Thurrott [00:39:03]:
Right.
Leo Laporte [00:39:04]:
So great. The Andrew Jackson and U.S. grant.
Richard Campbell [00:39:09]:
Let's celebrate the other angle is similar between Canadians and Kiwis is the Kiwis have a very close relationship with Australia to the point where there's work agreements between the two countries.
Leo Laporte [00:39:18]:
Oh, nice.
Richard Campbell [00:39:19]:
And Canada has this relationship with the US Right. Except occasionally you all seem to go.
Leo Laporte [00:39:24]:
Not so much now.
Richard Campbell [00:39:25]:
Yeah, it's a little difficult at the moment.
Paul Thurrott [00:39:28]:
I think The Katy Perry, Mr. Trudeau thing is going to. I don't think this right out there'll.
Leo Laporte [00:39:34]:
Be a marriage that will unite us. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, we'll be united in song anyway.
Richard Campbell [00:39:39]:
I don't know the answer to that. But anyway, it's. It's all. It's all an interesting dynamic. And, you know, I just spent a month down there with the grandbaby.
Leo Laporte [00:39:47]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:39:48]:
Yeah. The familiarity is very clear. And, you know, the same way, if you're not sure if someone's a Canadian or American, it's best to just ask them they're Canadian, because the Canadian will be pleased and the American will be amused. If you're not sure if someone's an Aussie or a Kiwi, just ask if they're a Kiwi, because if it's a Kiwi, they'll be a please, and if it's an Aussie, they'll be amused.
Leo Laporte [00:40:07]:
But don't ask a Kiwi if they're an Australian because that's.
Richard Campbell [00:40:10]:
They'll correct you quickly and vice versa.
Leo Laporte [00:40:12]:
Yeah, interesting. It's like France and Belgium.
Richard Campbell [00:40:16]:
Yeah. Nobody. Nobody pick.
Leo Laporte [00:40:18]:
That's a pretty bitter.
Richard Campbell [00:40:19]:
Nobody picks their Belgians. Yeah, it was just with a bunch. There were several Belgians speaking in Lithuania as well. They're easy to tease. They're the country that went without a government for three years and barely anybody noticed.
Leo Laporte [00:40:31]:
Nobody noticed. You know what? That's an interesting thought. I wonder how that would be for us.
Richard Campbell [00:40:35]:
How strange. You know, really just let the system operate.
Leo Laporte [00:40:38]:
Don't really need that. Do you. People, I think, want to know more about. About you guys. By the way, somebody's saying, why. Why aren't you wearing these brown Zune Microsoft sweater?
Richard Campbell [00:40:54]:
Yeah, I haven't been able to get one. I've been home.
Paul Thurrott [00:40:56]:
I was asking my wife, I have a Microsoft sweater. We couldn't find it, so he gave me this pile of Christmasy things I could try.
Leo Laporte [00:41:06]:
This is a forever. This is a forever sweater. It's called.
Richard Campbell [00:41:09]:
That's the greatest sweater.
Leo Laporte [00:41:10]:
Holidays. I'm so glad I got this one. I remember Chris Capicella used to join us by the time he was on, but he always had It. But it was always sold out by the time he came on.
Richard Campbell [00:41:20]:
Yeah. Apparently they're consistently a hit.
Leo Laporte [00:41:23]:
Right, These sweaters.
Paul Thurrott [00:41:25]:
According to Kevin King, people say Microsoft's not popular with consumers. You know, I don't know. They could go to clothing, they'd be fine.
Leo Laporte [00:41:33]:
Maybe they should just, maybe they should just do swag. Forget the hardware and software.
Paul Thurrott [00:41:38]:
Remember all this.
Leo Laporte [00:41:39]:
Look at all the different ones they have.
Paul Thurrott [00:41:40]:
But now you think it's funny. Yeah, it's on. Now it's on sweaters.
Leo Laporte [00:41:44]:
Now it's sweaters. It'll be available through the Microsoft Company store, the Redmond Co. Store in Seattle, and the Microsoft Experience center in New York City. So you could run over to the Microsoft Experience center and experience a sweater.
Richard Campbell [00:42:01]:
Okay.
Paul Thurrott [00:42:03]:
We used to do live shows from there. That's the, the former Microsoft store there.
Leo Laporte [00:42:07]:
I remembered we did a live show there. Yeah. When they had HoloLens. They had the HoloLens demos there.
Paul Thurrott [00:42:13]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:42:13]:
You and Mary Jo went in the back.
Richard Campbell [00:42:17]:
I, I, I know where my HoloLens is. I'm gonna put it on the shelf behind me in my office when I get back there.
Leo Laporte [00:42:24]:
You should.
Richard Campbell [00:42:24]:
Yeah. That's a display. Yeah, I can hold the charge anymore.
Leo Laporte [00:42:28]:
Yeah, no, exactly.
Richard Campbell [00:42:31]:
It's an old device.
Leo Laporte [00:42:32]:
I guess I should ask you, like, your favorite Microsoft product.
Paul Thurrott [00:42:41]:
Oh, boy.
Richard Campbell [00:42:42]:
Do you have a favorite?
Paul Thurrott [00:42:43]:
Those are hard.
Richard Campbell [00:42:44]:
Tell me. It's loop.
Paul Thurrott [00:42:47]:
So I mean, my earliest understanding of Microsoft was really negative because I had Amiga, they did the basic, I hated it. On the Commodore 64, there was like a super expanded cartridge that, like, turned BASIC into something pretty good. The Amiga, you know, garbage basic. It was terrible. So I really didn't respect Microsoft a lot, but it was, I think it was, well, it was Office, whatever. I think it's Office 6, essentially. Whatever. Right before Windows 95, my wife was at a company that had, like, early access to this thing, and I was really impressed by that.
Paul Thurrott [00:43:20]:
And then they got into the writing and stuff, and I was on a lot of the betas for things like Windows 95 and Office 95 and MSN and whatever was happening at that, plus 95, whatever. And I thought that was where they started to pick up a little bit of, I don't know what you call it, good design or good software. It seemed like it was good software. NT4 especially was a big leap for me.
Leo Laporte [00:43:46]:
I remember the first time I saw 31 1. I was a Mac guy from 84. I'd use DOS and PCs before that and did not really think much of Windows 1 or Windows 2 or even Windows 3. But when I saw 3.1.1 I remember vividly I was doing a show with.
Paul Thurrott [00:44:05]:
Paul John C. Windows for Work Groups and then whatever the second Windows for Work Groups.
Leo Laporte [00:44:09]:
Windows for Work Groups.
Paul Thurrott [00:44:10]:
They had the 32 bit file access. 32 bit. I think it was 32 bit memory access as well. You had to turn these things on. But it had the guts of what was going to be Windows 95 without that new UI. And that seemed like they were on a good path.
Leo Laporte [00:44:26]:
I had an epiphany I thought. I remember looking at it saying this is actually good. This is like Apple's in trouble.
Paul Thurrott [00:44:32]:
That's what I mean. So you like me. I think before that didn't disrespected what everything they did was not impressed. And then you have that moment where you're like oh they're starting to grow up a little bit here.
Leo Laporte [00:44:41]:
Like to the point where I prefer Dr. Dos to Ms. Dos, that kind of thing. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [00:44:47]:
I think the first Microsoft product that made me money was their Professional BASIC before Visual Basic came out. So in the 1980s in between cub.
Paul Thurrott [00:44:58]:
Basic and visual basic, GW basic.
Leo Laporte [00:45:01]:
GW they had.
Richard Campbell [00:45:03]:
Yeah. In that window. But I remember the box was like.
Paul Thurrott [00:45:06]:
Their Professional basic because they had one you. There was one that was built into DOS but then you could buy one where you could actually compile the programs right. And turn them into exe.
Leo Laporte [00:45:14]:
So it's a real programming language.
Paul Thurrott [00:45:16]:
But back then though. But Turbo Pascal was amazing. Turbo Pascal was awesome. That was mind boggling mind just way.
Richard Campbell [00:45:22]:
Better than working in Dbase.
Paul Thurrott [00:45:26]:
And.
Richard Campbell [00:45:26]:
But these guys had an IBM PC and they wanted. They didn't want Dbase.
Leo Laporte [00:45:31]:
I wrote a giant Dbase 2 program on CPM on a North Star Advantage computer. Right. This must have been 90.
Richard Campbell [00:45:42]:
No 83 North Star Advantage. Those are great machines man.
Leo Laporte [00:45:47]:
Great. It was Vector Bus. I convinced. I convinced.
Paul Thurrott [00:45:51]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:45:51]:
Northstar was famous for their S1 hundreds. I convinced I was working at a radio station in San Jose Klok I couldn't afford anything like that. But I convinced the boss, you know, we need a computer.
Richard Campbell [00:46:03]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [00:46:03]:
Nice.
Leo Laporte [00:46:03]:
And for a while we looked at a thing from a company called Fortune that was an 8088 or probably 8086 or maybe even. No, actually would have been a Z80 based multi user system one Z80 multiple users. Because I thought for, you know, for the business that'd be good. But I managed for some reason somehow I got him to get a North Star Advantage and then I wrote a large program in DBASE 2 for keeping track of music playlists. And it did graphs on the screen because in North Star.
Paul Thurrott [00:46:34]:
Did you call it Napster? And that was the real story.
Leo Laporte [00:46:37]:
And then I got sued by Lars Ulrich and everything changed.
Paul Thurrott [00:46:40]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:46:42]:
Was able to draw graphs on the screen because North Star Advantage had vector graphics. And I made him this beautiful thing where. Because he would. Every week he would look at the. Look at all the charts. You know, they opened the Billboard and all the charts and all the. And he actually had the 45s and they put them on and he'd listen to him and decide what the playlist is going to be. This is weird because he wasn't the.
Leo Laporte [00:47:04]:
He was the owner, he was the general manager. But he. That was. He loved doing that. And I thought, well, I'm going to make this really easy for him. His name was Bill Weaver. It was kind of a legend at the time in the radio business. And I made this beautiful thing.
Leo Laporte [00:47:18]:
So you don't have to look, Bill. You don't have to look at the magazines or anything. I'm gonna show you the charts, how the record's going on the graph where its position is, what's. You know, all this stuff. And he never used it, but it was beautiful. I was very proud of that.
Paul Thurrott [00:47:31]:
A lot of people are just born on the edge of different eras and they can't make that transition.
Leo Laporte [00:47:35]:
No, he liked the way he did it. He didn't need it.
Paul Thurrott [00:47:37]:
You know, like my. When we got like an Intellivision, whenever that came out. And my dad really wanted to play this thing, but he was just never going to be able to do it. Like, he just couldn't get there, you know. Wrong generation.
Leo Laporte [00:47:49]:
You did?
Paul Thurrott [00:47:50]:
Yeah, a little bit, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:47:51]:
Did you did, Yeah, a little bit, yeah. Are. Are you down playing. What was your favorite game on television?
Paul Thurrott [00:47:59]:
Yeah, it depends, right? Like, so we se. Battle was amazing.
Richard Campbell [00:48:04]:
It's got to be hockey.
Paul Thurrott [00:48:05]:
No, it's definitely hockey. On the Intelliv was amazing. Football, NFL football was amazing. My brother had this trick play where he would throw the pass on the upper sideline. So the ball was white, the line was white, and the ball would be. And you couldn't see it. So his, like his receiver would run over to the far end of the field, catch it, it would go. Because it had that white noise fan thing and they'd run it.
Leo Laporte [00:48:28]:
That was all the noise it could do. It wasn't. It was very limited. This is, believe it or not, Mattel. This is when toy companies made fed hitting systems yeah, Yep.
Richard Campbell [00:48:38]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:48:38]:
You.
Richard Campbell [00:48:38]:
If a guy skated straight at you on the upper boards, you hit him with your stick just right. He would flip over the board.
Paul Thurrott [00:48:45]:
My grandmother was over one time, sitting in the den, my brother and I were playing Utopia or Sea Battle, one of those cartridges. And after a while, she says, I don't like this show. Could you change the channel? So we just put a different cartridge in. This is so abusive grandma. She had no idea what she was looking at. You know, look at this.
Leo Laporte [00:49:04]:
They had a voice synthesis module. Did you have one?
Paul Thurrott [00:49:07]:
And Televoice 17 bomber.
Leo Laporte [00:49:13]:
Oh, my God. And that. And the joystick was attached by the same kind of cable you have in a phone in your kitchen.
Paul Thurrott [00:49:20]:
It was hardwired, too, in the first one.
Leo Laporte [00:49:22]:
Yeah. You can't. Yeah. Ridiculous. Well, I guess they didn't have wireless. Yeah, well, they didn't.
Paul Thurrott [00:49:29]:
It wasn't detachable. I mean, you couldn't replace it, you know, easily.
Leo Laporte [00:49:32]:
Right. It's hardwired.
Paul Thurrott [00:49:34]:
Fix that eventually.
Leo Laporte [00:49:34]:
But unless you were, you know, like.
Paul Thurrott [00:49:37]:
Yeah, like. Like Richard Champion with the side. Richard would have rewired it, but.
Richard Campbell [00:49:41]:
Yeah, but if you had those pop pads, once they wore out. They were wore.
Leo Laporte [00:49:44]:
Oh, they were terrible.
Paul Thurrott [00:49:45]:
Which is why you would have to replace them.
Richard Campbell [00:49:47]:
Yeah, yeah, they wore. Well, you know, speaking of the North Stars, after the Advantage, there was a machine called the Dimension, and I became a reseller of that in.
Leo Laporte [00:49:56]:
Really?
Richard Campbell [00:49:57]:
Yeah, you know, just out of high school because it ran Netware and Ms. DOS and it had an 8186 as the central processor. So it's a multi. No main workstation, you know, machine. So you could have. I think it was up to five or six consoles attached to this one machine.
Paul Thurrott [00:50:15]:
Yeah, like the one with 186.
Richard Campbell [00:50:17]:
The 186 was the. Was the server processor. And then you could have 8,086 boards for each of the workstations, all inside of the one chassis. That was a hell of a machine. I made a lot of money.
Leo Laporte [00:50:29]:
You know their original name before Northstar. Yeah. Kentucky Fried Computer.
Paul Thurrott [00:50:38]:
I was gonna say. Yeah, I can imagine that one didn't last.
Leo Laporte [00:50:40]:
They had to change the name, so.
Paul Thurrott [00:50:43]:
They changed the next name was Alabama. And they were like, yeah, you're not doing that one either. It's not gonna work.
Leo Laporte [00:50:47]:
Kentucky Fried Computer, I actually remember that. That name. But they made a nice system. But all those companies are gone, aren't they?
Richard Campbell [00:50:54]:
I mean, they're all gone.
Paul Thurrott [00:50:55]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:50:55]:
Even debt, even digital is gone.
Paul Thurrott [00:50:58]:
This is the inevitable consolidation that happens in any Industry. Right. And this is what we're going to see with all the AI nonsense that is happening now. We have 3,000 companies doing AI things and eventually it's just going to be three again. It's going to be the same three we're all really happy with. So don't worry about that.
Leo Laporte [00:51:12]:
But Advantage came out in 82 and the dimension in 84. So I. Yeah, I guess that was 82 when I did that. This was actually a pretty impressive computer. 4 MHz z 80, 64 Kbps kilobytes of RAM, which is a lot in those days. 20 KB of graphics RAM.
Paul Thurrott [00:51:29]:
Whoa.
Richard Campbell [00:51:30]:
Dedicated graphics. You got an expansion board for it so you could run a PC DOS on it?
Leo Laporte [00:51:36]:
Yeah, it had 88. Oh yeah, you have a good memory. 8888. A CO process that ran Ms. DOS one.
Paul Thurrott [00:51:42]:
I didn't have a PC until when.
Richard Campbell [00:51:45]:
You had to boot off the A drive. So I was configuring those. Remember they had. They had the two five and a quarter bays in them, right. So I take one of the five and a quarters out and put a shoe guard five megabyte drive in it. And then I. You had to boot off the A drive. So I boot off the floppy to configure the hard drive and then rewire it to make the hard drive the A drive.
Richard Campbell [00:52:05]:
So you could boot off the hard drive.
Leo Laporte [00:52:06]:
You could boot.
Richard Campbell [00:52:07]:
I made so much that made me a bucket of money. That was a good time.
Paul Thurrott [00:52:10]:
I had like a Commodore Amiga 500. They had like PC MCIA drives that were, you know, credit card size roughly. And they. I had a 20 megabyte drive. I think it was my first hard drive. And today you couldn't download an MP3 that was smaller than that. Like, you know, like they're like an MP3 file. They're all bigger than that.
Leo Laporte [00:52:31]:
Like the double sided, double density floppies on the North Star van were 360 kilobytes.
Richard Campbell [00:52:40]:
Yeah, yeah, you were a God with that.
Leo Laporte [00:52:42]:
I wanted, I wanted a C compiler for it. There was no way you could run it. I got White, bought White Star C. And you had to compile, bootstrap it up. So it gave you the kernel and you had to build all the libraries and everything. And there was no way you could run it on floppies. So I must have had some sort of persuasive powers. I got Bill to buy me a.
Leo Laporte [00:53:02]:
That five megabyte Winchester drive.
Richard Campbell [00:53:04]:
Yeah, yeah, the sugar.
Leo Laporte [00:53:05]:
Thousands of dollars.
Paul Thurrott [00:53:07]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:53:08]:
Do you remember how much it was RAM Drive.
Richard Campbell [00:53:10]:
I think it was a thousand bucks.
Paul Thurrott [00:53:11]:
I mean, sorry for the Apple iigs that had to have been this size. Like I was just 4K RAM drive. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:53:17]:
I'll never forget going into a computer store listening to somebody saying, well, what you really want is eight megabytes of RAM. Because then you can have a two megabyte RAM drive. Two megabytes.
Paul Thurrott [00:53:28]:
The Amiga 3000 was out. I was in the Amiga store and I heard the guy saying, you need all the Megs. Like at the time, all the Megs was five.
Richard Campbell [00:53:38]:
That's what you got, many Megs.
Paul Thurrott [00:53:39]:
Five Megs. You know, that was all the Megs.
Leo Laporte [00:53:43]:
Kids today, you don't remember, you don't know.
Paul Thurrott [00:53:46]:
Yep, all the Megs.
Leo Laporte [00:53:48]:
And we suffered. We suffered.
Paul Thurrott [00:53:53]:
I had the talking about making money off of a PC. My wife got an IBM PC, PS1 one right for Sears.
Richard Campbell [00:54:00]:
Nice.
Paul Thurrott [00:54:01]:
She couldn't figure out how to launch Word Perfect. So I went to, sat down at the computer, I typed wp didn't launch. I'm like, I don't understand your problem. And she's like, well, at work we have this menu. I just choose. She didn't know how to use it. So I bought a book on Ms. DOS batch programming.
Paul Thurrott [00:54:16]:
You know, programming. It's not programming. And I was like, this is so quaint, you know, because I had like Amigas at the time. I was like, this is a joke. But I wrote this front end thing so she could launch whatever apps and she could modify it so like she could change what the programs were and how to launch them, whatever. So a friend of ours worked at this. No, I'm sorry. A friend of ours moved to Phoenix at the same time we did, and he had bought a computer from another friend of ours who had his own company and he had a 486.
Paul Thurrott [00:54:43]:
I was super impressed by this computer. I only had like a 386SX. Whatever. So I'm over his house one day and I booted up and it booted up to my program. Like, what's. I'm like. I'm like, lou, where did you get this? And like my. A friend had stolen this for me and he sold it on his computers.
Paul Thurrott [00:55:00]:
And I'm like, dude, what the. What is this? Never told me.
Leo Laporte [00:55:05]:
This is the me. This was the thing that everybody looked at.
Paul Thurrott [00:55:09]:
Yeah, I remember well, because you would.
Richard Campbell [00:55:11]:
Pull standing up and cheering for this.
Paul Thurrott [00:55:15]:
Multitasking because it had.
Richard Campbell [00:55:16]:
But it had sound too like it.
Paul Thurrott [00:55:17]:
Yeah, but the point was the OS is you could bring up the window and have There were other things running at the same time.
Leo Laporte [00:55:24]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [00:55:24]:
This is a miracle. In 1985. Yeah. Yeah. Inconceivable.
Leo Laporte [00:55:29]:
Yeah, that's from the Amiga history channel on YouTube.
Paul Thurrott [00:55:35]:
Clearly made with Movie Maker in 2003 or something. That terrible video. But.
Richard Campbell [00:55:44]:
It was the greatest thing we'd ever seen.
Paul Thurrott [00:55:46]:
Standing ovation, this Genlock thing. It was a camera mounted vertically on a stand and you put a photo on it. And it had three. The color wheel with the three colors. You would scan it each time and then it would turn it into a single image that would be color. And this process took about 40 minutes, you know, to scan, like one photo. And I'm sure it was like 320 by 240 at the end of the day, whatever it was. But it was.
Paul Thurrott [00:56:09]:
Was amazing at the time, you know, could do that stuff on a Mac.
Richard Campbell [00:56:13]:
Or a PC at a time when the IBM PC was CGA with all 16 colors.
Paul Thurrott [00:56:17]:
Right, yeah.
Leo Laporte [00:56:19]:
So. So that demo everybody saw and gave a standing O2 was at CES in Las Vegas, and I'm not sure what year that would have been. What do you. What do you. 80s, right?
Paul Thurrott [00:56:31]:
Well, the Amiga 1000 came out in 1985.
Leo Laporte [00:56:34]:
Yeah, 85.
Richard Campbell [00:56:35]:
So I'm sure I saw it in Vancouver. I wasn't going to ces, but, you know, they were touring it around.
Leo Laporte [00:56:41]:
What was your first.
Paul Thurrott [00:56:42]:
Launched it in New York at some big gala event with, you know, Blondie and. What's that guy's name, the artist. Everyone's famous for 15 minutes. That guy, or Soup. Yeah, whatever he is.
Leo Laporte [00:56:54]:
I remember him.
Paul Thurrott [00:56:55]:
Anyway.
Leo Laporte [00:56:57]:
Blinded me with science. Thomas Dolby.
Paul Thurrott [00:57:00]:
Oh, yeah. He was probably really into this stuff.
Leo Laporte [00:57:04]:
Do you remember your first computer trade show?
Richard Campbell [00:57:11]:
I think I went to a database conference in Seattle in 85.
Paul Thurrott [00:57:18]:
Oh, that's early. I went to a world of Amiga.
Leo Laporte [00:57:22]:
I. I remember the Windows 90.
Paul Thurrott [00:57:24]:
Not for work. I mean, just like as a person. You're like a day.
Leo Laporte [00:57:27]:
That was pretty good in 1995.
Richard Campbell [00:57:29]:
I remember starting me up, right.
Paul Thurrott [00:57:31]:
And I think maybe was probably. Or PC.
Leo Laporte [00:57:36]:
My first. My first Comdex was. Was around 91 or 92 in Vegas, and Gina Smith brought me. We were both working for Ziff Davis at the time and I was very excited. I'd never been to a. I mean, maybe I'd been to a cigarette.
Paul Thurrott [00:57:52]:
Yeah, No, I carted around 10 pounds of paper. Everyone was giving up.
Leo Laporte [00:57:56]:
They give you bags and they just load you up with material.
Richard Campbell [00:58:01]:
Flyers, Flyers.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:02]:
The plane couldn't leave because everyone had 20 pounds of paper with them.
Leo Laporte [00:58:05]:
Eventually they had a FedEx in the lobby there and you would just bring your box of papers. They ship that back home so I can throw it out in.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:13]:
The first time I checked into the hotel, this crappy hotel that we. The only thing we could afford in Vegas for the first COMDEX Circus Circus. No, it was well, 30 bucks. No, this was.
Richard Campbell [00:58:23]:
Comes with free chlamydia.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:25]:
I've stayed at Circus Circus. This was actually worse. It was the New Orleans theme when whatever it was.
Leo Laporte [00:58:29]:
Oh yeah, yeah, that riverboat.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:30]:
And they, they handed me the key card for the. The room and it was like it had OS2 logos on it. And I handed it back, I said you have a Windows version of this.
Leo Laporte [00:58:39]:
Was that.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:40]:
It was Debbie Reynolds was like nice.
Leo Laporte [00:58:42]:
Didn't it become Debbie? It was the Orleans and then it became the Debbie Reynolds.
Paul Thurrott [00:58:46]:
I think it was the Orleans. Yeah, it was terrible.
Leo Laporte [00:58:48]:
We just opened and Ziff Davis had a long term deal with MGM to house its, you know, many hundreds of people that they would send us COMDEX every year at there and was pretty cool. It was when it was a Wizard of Oz hotel and Frank L. Frank Baum's grandson would sit in the lobby all day every day signing wizard of Oz books. It was.
Paul Thurrott [00:59:11]:
That's crazy. I'm the guy that wrote these stories.
Leo Laporte [00:59:14]:
Yeah, it was his, but it was not him. It was his. Like.
Paul Thurrott [00:59:16]:
No, that's what I mean. Like I'm not even the guy.
Leo Laporte [00:59:18]:
I'm not even the guy. But I'm going to say I have.
Paul Thurrott [00:59:20]:
The same last name exactly. It was like I do that for Henry David Thoreau. I show up in like sure, whatever that is.
Leo Laporte [00:59:28]:
Fashion clothes. Yeah, sign. Yeah, sign some books, make some hickory furniture. Anyway, we stayed there for several years. Then I could tell Ziff Davis was starting to, you know, kind of tighten the belt. We'd stayed at the Luxor and that's the hotel. That's the pyramid. And there's rooms in the sides of.
Paul Thurrott [00:59:49]:
It where the wall triangular at the top. Like most of the room is unusable because it's a triangle of space. It's horrible. It's the stupidest design.
Leo Laporte [00:59:58]:
Horrible. And then finally at the end when I think it was probably ZDTV and they were trying to sell it. We stayed at Circus Circus and I knew we'd really come to the end of the line because I was in.
Paul Thurrott [01:00:08]:
Line at Circus Circus and to eat breakfast at the buffet thing and there's a TV every 10ft that it's like this clown comes and he's like, if.
Leo Laporte [01:00:17]:
You guys come back, play some keto.
Paul Thurrott [01:00:20]:
I'm like, what fresh hell? I'm like, I have to get out of here. And I started moving forward in the line. This woman goes, what are you doing? I'm like, I'm sorry. I'm really hungry. I gotta get out of here. I'm like, I gotta get outta here.
Leo Laporte [01:00:31]:
I can't take clown.
Paul Thurrott [01:00:32]:
I'm like, you gotta be kidding me.
Leo Laporte [01:00:34]:
I knew we were in a dump when I noticed that not only was the lamp bolted to the bedside table so you wouldn't take it.
Paul Thurrott [01:00:40]:
Yes.
Leo Laporte [01:00:41]:
So was the remote control for the TV nice. It was in a little metal.
Paul Thurrott [01:00:46]:
You're wearing a black metal thing. It would've looked like a crime scene.
Leo Laporte [01:00:49]:
Bolted. It was like crime scene. And it swiveled. So at least it was a little more convenient. You could swim. It's like, what a dump.
Paul Thurrott [01:00:56]:
I stay. What's the Excalibur? Where it's like wallpaper that looks like the wall of a dungeon, but it's just flat and terrible looking, you know, like, that was a long time. Like almost everything in Vegas was terrible.
Leo Laporte [01:01:06]:
Cheesy as hell. It was, it was. That was the King Arthur place across Excalibur.
Paul Thurrott [01:01:12]:
Ridiculous.
Leo Laporte [01:01:13]:
All of those places, I think are mostly gone, right? I mean, yeah, I think it's kind of more upscale now. It was. Vegas was a kind of dumpy place.
Paul Thurrott [01:01:20]:
It was kitschy and terrible.
Richard Campbell [01:01:22]:
It was inexpensive. And now it's not. Well, that was.
Leo Laporte [01:01:25]:
The funny thing is because they were. Gambling was what supported them. You know, the drinks were free. The, you know, all you can eat for a buck fifty, you know, I mean, it's really not the way anymore. The way anymore. They realized we can make money on gambling and everything else, including park.
Paul Thurrott [01:01:41]:
I think. I think I stayed at Excalibur. It was the show. I arrived really late. It was like one o' clock in the morning. It would have been CES by this point. And I had to wait in line for like 45 minutes just to get into the room. It was all these people checking at the same time.
Leo Laporte [01:01:55]:
Yeah, yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:01:56]:
So when I finally got up to the desk that I at that time booked it through like Expedia or some stupid third party service. And the bill was basically double what I had been quoted like, what is this? And they went through the list, it was all these additional fees, like room fee, Vegas fee, whatever, not paying attention fee, Thursday fee, like whatever it was. And so the next day I met with Terry Morrison and he was telling me about at the time it was called Windows 10 Cloud, but it was what became Windows 10 S, and they were going to charge for it if you wanted to get out of it to get back to normal windows. And I was like, terry, this is exactly what just happened to me, this hotel last night. You can't do this to people. I'm like, this is the. This is what happened. Like, you find out about it after the fact.
Paul Thurrott [01:02:41]:
This is the worst possible user experience. And he literally laid back in his chair, like it was one of those chairs that goes back and he's looking up at the ceiling and he was.
Richard Campbell [01:02:49]:
Like.
Paul Thurrott [01:02:51]:
It went on for like 12 seconds. And he's like, we're not doing that. I'm like, thank you. Because I was like, that is a huge pro. That's gonna be bad because people don't want. You don't want to screw them after the fact. You know what I mean? Like, you don't make them buy the computer and then be like, oh, surprise, there's another 50 charge upcharge.
Leo Laporte [01:03:07]:
Yeah, good. So you had some influence on them.
Richard Campbell [01:03:10]:
Does that weren't already angry enough with you?
Leo Laporte [01:03:13]:
Is that the last time they listened to you, Paul, or.
Paul Thurrott [01:03:16]:
Yeah, yeah, probably actually, because I haven't really downhill for anyone since then. I met the first time I met with Pano Spinae, he locked the door behind me and he's like, I need to. I needed to tell me exactly who leaked you the information about whatever the Surface 2 stuff. And I'm like, I'm not doing that. It was like a mob meeting. I'm like, what are you talking about?
Richard Campbell [01:03:36]:
Are you going to beat me up?
Paul Thurrott [01:03:37]:
I'm like, I don't think you understand how the press works. Not telling you my source is like, what crazy?
Leo Laporte [01:03:42]:
What's the implication? I'm not letting you out until you tell me.
Paul Thurrott [01:03:46]:
Yeah, it was like this back room. I got a call. He's like, panos is going to be in Boston. At the time they had the Microsoft store. Can you meet him at the store? And I'm like, sure. So I went into town. The guy ushered me into a back room and then he closed the door behind. Closed the other guy out.
Paul Thurrott [01:04:03]:
It was just me and him in the dark. And I'm like, what is going on here? And it was like. He's like, I need. He's like, you're gonna tell me who did this. I'm like, no, I'm not. He's like, no, you need to tell me. And I'm like, no, I don't. I'm like, what do you mean? I'm not.
Paul Thurrott [01:04:15]:
That's crazy.
Richard Campbell [01:04:16]:
And what are you doing? Like, are you nuts?
Paul Thurrott [01:04:18]:
He was really upset about it.
Leo Laporte [01:04:20]:
How did that resolve itself? Did he just say, okay fine, unlock the door?
Paul Thurrott [01:04:23]:
I mean I. I think he eventually understood somehow through all his gold chains that. I wasn't going to say it. I don't know, I was just. It was a very strange guy.
Leo Laporte [01:04:31]:
But he did. He had a thing for you, didn't he? He took your laptop at one point.
Paul Thurrott [01:04:35]:
Yep, we had an up and down is the way I would say it. Mostly down.
Leo Laporte [01:04:40]:
You. You were at a announcement event that he was.
Paul Thurrott [01:04:44]:
Yeah, I was typing on a laptop and he picked it up out of my hand and held it up. I don't remember what the point of it was. Held it hostage or something.
Leo Laporte [01:04:53]:
It wasn't a Mac, it was a Windows laptop.
Paul Thurrott [01:04:55]:
No, it was a Surface laptop too is what it was.
Richard Campbell [01:04:57]:
It was one of theirs Service laptop. His machines.
Paul Thurrott [01:04:59]:
Yeah, that's like when it leaked ironically. No, actually no, that's not true. It was one of the originals, the Surface 2. Literally Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2. So it was later picked it up.
Leo Laporte [01:05:10]:
To make a point of some kind, but it didn't.
Paul Thurrott [01:05:13]:
It felt a little good person to make an example of. I scribble it. It's fine. It's like I get it.
Leo Laporte [01:05:19]:
Didn't Steve Ballmer at one point stop on an iPhone?
Paul Thurrott [01:05:23]:
At a. Yeah, he threw someone employee's iPhone on the ground. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:05:27]:
And sty like a sales excited.
Richard Campbell [01:05:29]:
He was the drama guy, you know, he was through the chair, through the glass wall. When the first time Gotra left went to Google.
Paul Thurrott [01:05:37]:
First time I met Ballmer, I was walking around. It was right COMDEX at that time, but I was like the sort of my day off, I was just walking around as a person. I didn't have any, you know, I wasn't there like dressed up or anything, but I had. I was literally wearing a. You killed. Oh my God, you killed Kenny. South park shirt.
Richard Campbell [01:05:53]:
Nice.
Paul Thurrott [01:05:54]:
And he look, he's standing next to me. He looks down at my shirt. He goes, nice shirt. Nice to meet you too. Oh well.
Leo Laporte [01:06:06]:
So this was at Safeco Field. A Microsoft.
Paul Thurrott [01:06:10]:
Yeah, it was one of those all hands meetings or whatever.
Leo Laporte [01:06:12]:
Steve comes, you know how he does this running around slapping his hands and.
Richard Campbell [01:06:19]:
He sees he would down a pint of honey before he'd go on stage.
Leo Laporte [01:06:23]:
No, you're kidding.
Paul Thurrott [01:06:24]:
For his throat.
Leo Laporte [01:06:25]:
What that thing?
Paul Thurrott [01:06:27]:
Well, it's throat.
Richard Campbell [01:06:28]:
They coat his throat and a jack him up and he wanted everybody else to do it, too. Like it was a thing, not a good thing. They always have this stack of honey.
Leo Laporte [01:06:36]:
It gives you the shakes about five minutes later.
Richard Campbell [01:06:38]:
Anyway, did you see him on stage? Now that, you know, it's like.
Paul Thurrott [01:06:44]:
You know what, though?
Leo Laporte [01:06:44]:
He's hyped up on honey.
Paul Thurrott [01:06:45]:
I still miss the guy.
Richard Campbell [01:06:46]:
Hyped up.
Paul Thurrott [01:06:47]:
He was. He was a good cheerleader for Microsoft.
Richard Campbell [01:06:50]:
Oh, yeah. He was enthusiastic. I played mini golf with him.
Leo Laporte [01:06:53]:
Mini golf with Palmer.
Paul Thurrott [01:06:55]:
Yeah. He was gonna win at all costs.
Richard Campbell [01:06:57]:
And every. And every business unit we talked about, he knew every. All the leadership, all the business. Like he needed the entire company backwards and forwards.
Leo Laporte [01:07:06]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:07:06]:
He was detail oriented.
Richard Campbell [01:07:07]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:07:07]:
Still is. He does like his. He runs the Clippers now into the ground this season, but whatever. And. But he's a big Excel spreadsheet guy. Like everything.
Richard Campbell [01:07:15]:
He likes the stats.
Paul Thurrott [01:07:16]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:07:17]:
Did he know everybody's shoe model, make and model shoe? Remember Mary Jo said that Steve Ballmer remembered people's shoes. That was a salesman's old salesman's trick for remembering people.
Paul Thurrott [01:07:30]:
That.
Richard Campbell [01:07:30]:
I don't.
Paul Thurrott [01:07:30]:
I don't know.
Leo Laporte [01:07:31]:
You would memorize the shoes that they were wearing? I don't know how that would help you. I think it'd be better to memorize their name, but. Oh, hey, Manoa blonx. Am I right? Doesn't seem like that would be useful, but. No. I remember Mary Jo telling us that he knew. She knew every shoe that every. Everybody was wearing.
Leo Laporte [01:07:52]:
What kind? Who was your. Okay, so is Panos your least favorite Microsoft executive of all time? I don't want to get you in trouble here, but why not?
Paul Thurrott [01:08:05]:
No, no, no, no.
Richard Campbell [01:08:07]:
So many worse people than that.
Paul Thurrott [01:08:09]:
No, that's a hard. That's a hard. There were just people like. Like people like Julie Leshing Green who were just unqualified to be where they were and had no right being there and were awful.
Leo Laporte [01:08:19]:
They may be.
Paul Thurrott [01:08:20]:
He was awful, but he was just going there. He was just like a marketing guy. He didn't know. I don't know that he knew anything about technology. Like, he wasn't a technologist.
Leo Laporte [01:08:28]:
Right. Was Bomber a technologist? He knew technology.
Paul Thurrott [01:08:32]:
No, but, but, but he's a sales guy by being there for so long and, you know, he'd absorb. He understood it. Like, yeah, hey, look, he set him down this path that they're on right now. They did. He. He was the guy. It was like, we got to do cloud, you know?
Richard Campbell [01:08:46]:
Yeah. Yeah. Did you. He had to go against everything he was arguing for with a Windows Centric company. He knew that and it's one of the reasons he had to move aside was he was an obstacle to the.
Paul Thurrott [01:08:57]:
Next thing, you know, just the Kevin Turner's who were like not God shouldn't have been there. This, you know, whatever we, we Johnson that guy.
Richard Campbell [01:09:04]:
We did a.net rocks tour and they asked us to do a show in Bentonville which is the craziest damn thing. And several Arkansas came up to Bentonville, headquarters of Walmart.
Paul Thurrott [01:09:16]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:09:16]:
And several of the guys came up and said, hey, when you see those Microsoft guys, thank him for taking Kevin Turner off our hands.
Paul Thurrott [01:09:23]:
Nice.
Leo Laporte [01:09:25]:
He was a former Walmart guy.
Paul Thurrott [01:09:26]:
Oh boy.
Leo Laporte [01:09:29]:
That's qualification enough. I'm satisfied.
Paul Thurrott [01:09:33]:
This is a hard thing because I care about technology obviously. And there are guys who are just kind of engineers and technologists who I would just sort of knee jerk like because of what they were, but maybe they weren't the greatest leaders too, you know. And then there were people promoted, right? Yeah. And then there are people who maybe like Ballmer who didn't go into technology but ended up being great at leading that company. And so it's. You can't really. I don't know. You never know like you never know what you're gonna get.
Paul Thurrott [01:09:59]:
That's why like the jury's still out right now on Pavan Davalari. But I see, I like what I see so far a lot.
Richard Campbell [01:10:05]:
You know, I like that he exists. I like that there's a new unification to Windows. There looks to be a future because for a long time there it's just like Windows was in stasis.
Paul Thurrott [01:10:15]:
Oh my God. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:10:16]:
And I think that was partly intentional because it takes a long time to convince a company of 200,000 people, hey, we're not a Windows central company.
Paul Thurrott [01:10:24]:
Remember the thing we only cared about, now we don't care about that at all. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:10:27]:
And the only way we can convince you of that is to utterly paralyze that group while not actually destroying the product and still collecting several billion a year from it.
Paul Thurrott [01:10:36]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [01:10:36]:
You know, that's a tough balance, right? That's the old joke. Unless they have eight wives and a cocaine habit, they don't need the money.
Paul Thurrott [01:10:43]:
I mean, in the modern era there's no version of this for Apple because the iPhone hasn't hit that stage. But it would be like, it's like I still care about the Apple IIe. Like it's a tough place to be in today.
Leo Laporte [01:10:56]:
A lot of people leaving Apple though, the last few weeks.
Richard Campbell [01:10:59]:
Yeah, there's something going on. Internally, that's got people up to.
Paul Thurrott [01:11:03]:
Well, I. I would just. I think they've done so well for so long. There's not a lot of up. You know, what do you call, like a. Like, up?
Leo Laporte [01:11:13]:
What am I trying to say?
Paul Thurrott [01:11:14]:
There's not a lot of headroom for success. Like.
Richard Campbell [01:11:16]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:11:18]:
You can do is be compared against these huge successes they've had. I mean, who's going to.
Richard Campbell [01:11:21]:
You really going to make another iPhone?
Paul Thurrott [01:11:24]:
No one's been able to do that.
Richard Campbell [01:11:25]:
So, yeah, it's hard.
Paul Thurrott [01:11:27]:
It must be hard there to get ahead. And you'll make a meaningful difference.
Leo Laporte [01:11:31]:
A lot of them are in their 60s, so a lot of them are retir. Um.
Paul Thurrott [01:11:35]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:11:35]:
And they've all made plenty of money. Right. They're not. They don't need the money anymore.
Richard Campbell [01:11:40]:
That's sort of the truth of all the leadership and all of these companies. Like, none of them need them.
Paul Thurrott [01:11:44]:
Which always makes me wonder, because what are you doing with your life? I mean, why bother? You're not gonna make. You're not gonna do it again. You're not gonna.
Leo Laporte [01:11:53]:
It's hard to.
Paul Thurrott [01:11:55]:
You know.
Richard Campbell [01:11:55]:
But this. You know, see Satya jumping so hard on the AI thing.
Leo Laporte [01:12:00]:
On.
Richard Campbell [01:12:00]:
This is the first thing he gets to hang his name on.
Paul Thurrott [01:12:02]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [01:12:03]:
That's happened to Microsoft. And so he's going for it. Yep.
Leo Laporte [01:12:06]:
That's. That's.
Paul Thurrott [01:12:07]:
I guess every CEO's folly or satch will be beloved for the rest of history. We'll see.
Richard Campbell [01:12:13]:
Yeah. Well, you know, he's number three, so he has a choice. He's either the next Gates or the next Bomber. Which one does he want to be? That's his choice.
Leo Laporte [01:12:23]:
You'd rather be Bomber?
Paul Thurrott [01:12:24]:
He's already.
Richard Campbell [01:12:25]:
I don't know.
Paul Thurrott [01:12:26]:
He's presided over an incredibly successful run.
Richard Campbell [01:12:30]:
Yeah. The stock price is through the roof.
Leo Laporte [01:12:32]:
Ironically, Ballmer was the idea who had the cloud guy, who had the cloud idea, and. But Satya came from the cloud.
Richard Campbell [01:12:39]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:12:39]:
He was the astronomy.
Richard Campbell [01:12:42]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:12:42]:
So he can't use a cloud.
Paul Thurrott [01:12:44]:
I mean, let's not forget what he really was.
Richard Campbell [01:12:46]:
I mean, he was the Bing guy, you know?
Paul Thurrott [01:12:47]:
I mean.
Leo Laporte [01:12:48]:
Okay. Okay. All right.
Paul Thurrott [01:12:50]:
All right.
Leo Laporte [01:12:50]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:12:51]:
Okay. And he only became the Azure guy because Bob. Moo.
Paul Thurrott [01:12:57]:
Left, right.
Leo Laporte [01:12:58]:
He was the Bing guy. Okay. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:13:00]:
He was the Bing guy.
Paul Thurrott [01:13:01]:
We never forget is all I'm saying. Hashtag neverforget.
Richard Campbell [01:13:03]:
Yeah. And it was him and Guthrie that rided the Azure ship because Azure was struggling those first few years.
Paul Thurrott [01:13:13]:
Yeah. It's just that when being a CEO, Steve or Bill Gates is Bill Gates, I mean on a sale of sense from what he did at that time. Right. For a business C. Ballmer unfortunately will be known for flat lining the stock price for 10 years plus. But they did great obviously under Steve Ballmer as well.
Richard Campbell [01:13:34]:
Well, and he kept the company together. He got the consent decree.
Paul Thurrott [01:13:38]:
Right. He got through that stuff.
Richard Campbell [01:13:39]:
Yeah. That was his job. Right.
Paul Thurrott [01:13:40]:
So Satya has led the company during this incredible expansion of financial power. But if you asked any normal person what do you know Microsoft or they would all point to stuff from the past. They have no idea what any of this stuff is. And it's a curious. We don't know what that legacy is yet. We'll see.
Leo Laporte [01:13:56]:
But that's normal. We're watching the football game the other day and Lisa's ex husband comes over to watch the games with us, which is not awkward.
Paul Thurrott [01:14:08]:
Yeah, not awkward at all. Yep, got it.
Leo Laporte [01:14:11]:
And he says, what's this? Aws. I keep seeing ads for aws and I have to think that's gotta be what most people, people are going, I keep seeing that for aws.
Paul Thurrott [01:14:19]:
It's the most profitable business that Amazon has by far.
Richard Campbell [01:14:23]:
Oh yeah, right.
Leo Laporte [01:14:24]:
But nobody, but. And so Lisa says it's, I don't know, some networking thing.
Paul Thurrott [01:14:29]:
Yes, there you go.
Leo Laporte [01:14:30]:
Nobody knows.
Paul Thurrott [01:14:31]:
It's plumbing. It's, it's a synthesis.
Leo Laporte [01:14:33]:
If I were to say it's the cloud, that would be like, well, that's electricity.
Richard Campbell [01:14:37]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:14:38]:
It's air developers.
Richard Campbell [01:14:39]:
Basically it's the next utility, you know, that's compute on demand.
Paul Thurrott [01:14:43]:
It's.
Leo Laporte [01:14:44]:
Well that's what the whole Internet is.
Richard Campbell [01:14:46]:
It's the Internet.
Leo Laporte [01:14:47]:
Right.
Paul Thurrott [01:14:47]:
Really you're asking people to know like remember the names of executives at electrical companies and because their companies did great for 10 years. And you're like, I don't even know what you're talking about. And unfortunately for Satya Nadella, that's kind of what Microsoft is.
Leo Laporte [01:14:58]:
We remember Jack Welch's name. We don't forget his name.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:02]:
Yeah, but have you read his book? Because Satya Nadella's book is terrible by comparison.
Leo Laporte [01:15:07]:
No, you know, I haven't read Jack Welch's book. I'm reading a great book about George, the History GE and mostly about Jack Welch. And it's really.
Richard Campbell [01:15:16]:
But all of that is at the end of his career. Right. Nadella's book is the one he put out first to sort of position himself as the, the yoga CEO.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:25]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [01:15:25]:
The warm cuff, cuddly. We're all going to get along CEO.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:28]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [01:15:29]:
Which that played, you know, then Dark. Sacha showed up and everything's different now.
Leo Laporte [01:15:36]:
Is there any CEO book that's really any good?
Richard Campbell [01:15:40]:
Only at the end of their career, right?
Leo Laporte [01:15:41]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:15:41]:
Like why?
Leo Laporte [01:15:42]:
They can't tell. They can't say.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:47]:
Whatever.
Richard Campbell [01:15:48]:
Like they have to have pulled something off.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:49]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [01:15:49]:
Like, well, did the turnaround of GE and that's the book that everybody remembers.
Paul Thurrott [01:15:53]:
The problem is when you're successful, you, you might, you write a book, you don't. Or someone writes a book about you and. But you, you've done this thing and it's great, but you're never repeating it like. So I don't know sure what the lesson to learn here is exactly. No one followed these people and did their own amazing things like you're. And they never did anything else either. So I don't know, like we all, we're all looking for that magic formula or whatever. But whatever happens to Microsoft or any of these other companies, if they're successful or not, it's going to be something we don't even know about right now.
Paul Thurrott [01:16:23]:
So, you know, I'm not sure what lesson we can learn from them other than they got really lucky. Right place, right time, you know, which.
Richard Campbell [01:16:33]:
Is the most likely.
Paul Thurrott [01:16:35]:
Yeah. Which is how I feel about you guys.
Richard Campbell [01:16:40]:
Right people. The right time. Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:16:44]:
Well, gentlemen, I don't think we need to belabor the point. It is New Year's Eve. Everybody who's watching is wondering what the hell happened here. This is not your usual Windows Weekly. Because first of all, A, we don't want to make anybody work on New Year's Eve. Right. And B, there isn't going to be a whole lot of news on the day before a new year begins.
Paul Thurrott [01:17:08]:
No, I mean enjoy the two week break between Windows updates. Always happening. We'll have that little bit of time off. That will be fun. Is this new thing? It's the longest weekday in the calendar. Just enjoy that.
Leo Laporte [01:17:23]:
Just live it up. I'm just really glad to spend some time with you guys. Just talking about some stuff. So many great stories. Any final wishes you wish to send along to all our winners and dozers and the twit broadcast.
Paul Thurrott [01:17:39]:
You're all winners in my eyes, guys. Well, except for you, Kev Brewer. You're kind of a no kid. No, I love Kevin. Thank you, Kevin. Really.
Leo Laporte [01:17:47]:
We should thank Kevin King who is the producer of this show and most.
Richard Campbell [01:17:51]:
Of the time keeps this stuff together.
Leo Laporte [01:17:53]:
Yeah, he's going to have a fun time editing this, taking out all of the stories. We don't want anybody to know about.
Paul Thurrott [01:18:00]:
The Unsung hero who is now hopefully.
Leo Laporte [01:18:04]:
A little bit all the drunk. I was really hoping you guys would get just sloshed and we could.
Richard Campbell [01:18:10]:
It takes a little longer than that. I'm doing my best.
Leo Laporte [01:18:12]:
You're way too disciplined.
Paul Thurrott [01:18:14]:
Yeah. Speaking of which, look me up over here. What are you doing?
Richard Campbell [01:18:16]:
Yeah, way too pickled, slacker.
Leo Laporte [01:18:19]:
Yeah, I haven't been. So this is. This was from last week's Windows Weekly year. Pennsylvania whiskey pick.
Richard Campbell [01:18:27]:
Pennsylvania whiskey pick. Cuz I was in Pennsylvania, so I need.
Leo Laporte [01:18:30]:
I actually was trying to find. And I. I couldn't. In the liquor club closet. We must have drunk it all up our local petaluma whiskey.
Richard Campbell [01:18:37]:
Griffo.
Leo Laporte [01:18:38]:
Yeah, it's actually pretty good.
Richard Campbell [01:18:39]:
Grifo.
Leo Laporte [01:18:40]:
Grifo. I'll find a bottle and then you can come up to the attic.
Richard Campbell [01:18:45]:
Yeah, I will. That sounds fun.
Leo Laporte [01:18:48]:
Richard Campbell. Are you doing a run? His radio end of the year thing.
Richard Campbell [01:18:53]:
Oh, yeah. Well, I think the last show of the year is going to be Paul and I a little drunk.
Leo Laporte [01:18:59]:
Okay.
Richard Campbell [01:18:59]:
You know, doing a happy Christmas thing. And then I always lead off the year with the sort of. Okay. What's it like going to be a system in 2026?
Leo Laporte [01:19:06]:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:19:07]:
Which I've been taking a lot of notes on.
Paul Thurrott [01:19:09]:
What will be the saying no to AI?
Richard Campbell [01:19:12]:
Yeah, I don't think. I think that. I think the bubble bursts next year. And so just how do you position yourself to deal with that?
Paul Thurrott [01:19:19]:
I mean, Gartner just came up with this report and said, do not install any AI browsers.
Richard Campbell [01:19:24]:
Nice.
Leo Laporte [01:19:25]:
Well, that's true, but I think you would if you were a business and you aren't using AI. You're missing the bet.
Paul Thurrott [01:19:33]:
This is a hard thread to. Or needle to thread. I guess. You want to give up all your data.
Leo Laporte [01:19:39]:
Well, you have to do it.
Paul Thurrott [01:19:40]:
Your employees are smart, your controls are good.
Leo Laporte [01:19:43]:
Yeah. You have to do it intelligently.
Paul Thurrott [01:19:45]:
This is a tough one. This is early days.
Richard Campbell [01:19:48]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:19:48]:
I do feel like AI is an advantage for business intelligence, if nothing else. Right. Or am I wrong? I'm not a business. I don't know.
Richard Campbell [01:19:56]:
Because generative AI was useful for business intelligence long before we labeled it with the LLMs.
Paul Thurrott [01:20:01]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [01:20:01]:
So, you know, that part's still there.
Paul Thurrott [01:20:03]:
It makes good infographics. It's good at summarizing things. And if you can do that graphically, it's fantastic.
Richard Campbell [01:20:09]:
I mean, the bigger issue here is how big is the. How hard is the size S and P500 being corrected by 30% going to be on everybody?
Paul Thurrott [01:20:17]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [01:20:18]:
We're Back to a sort of hunker down moment.
Paul Thurrott [01:20:20]:
Yeah. 2008, 2029. What are we talking about here?
Leo Laporte [01:20:23]:
Yeah, there's a real consensus about that, but I, I'm not convinced only because I feel like there's genuine value being created.
Richard Campbell [01:20:32]:
This stuff, without a doubt. Imagine there was genuine value being created in the web.
Paul Thurrott [01:20:36]:
This is dot com bubble stuff. Like we, everything that occurred there is, we're still using it, you know, but there it, there was an inevitable, well.
Richard Campbell [01:20:45]:
I don't know, change in economics.
Paul Thurrott [01:20:46]:
There was a, a bit of a correction.
Leo Laporte [01:20:48]:
What caused the dot com collapse, the 2008 collapse. AOL.
Richard Campbell [01:20:54]:
Yeah, there were. But also, you know, you now had investors that had gotten in, in 95, 96 and it had been five years and they weren't seeing the returns. And at some point, if you've been taking money from other people to invest in these companies, you're expected to show a return. And so you hit this threshold where you have to tell folks that you're not seeing this and that starts to cascade.
Paul Thurrott [01:21:18]:
The only company in history that has had the same sort of impossible kind of possible profit to debt ratio as OpenAI was AOL All Time Warner.
Richard Campbell [01:21:31]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:21:32]:
You know, and if you look at like companies like Amazon that ran for whatever 12 years or 10 years without a profit, or Spotify or Tesla or Uber, little, little amounts of money and then you get to open AI and it's this giant massive, it's 20 to 30 times as big.
Richard Campbell [01:21:48]:
But all of those companies were making, bringing in significant income and investing it and choosing not to share.
Paul Thurrott [01:21:54]:
Amazon was always going to be profitable.
Richard Campbell [01:21:56]:
Yeah, it's just, they were just grabbing. It's like that's open AI so enormous and the only thing you can see is only a bigger gap. Like they're saying things that are crazy.
Paul Thurrott [01:22:06]:
Yep.
Richard Campbell [01:22:06]:
So they're. I expect them to be acquired by somebody.
Paul Thurrott [01:22:10]:
It's that. Yeah. It's gonna be a question of fire sale time or when it happens. I don't know, we'll see. Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:22:17]:
Anyway, you were hoping for a soft decline. It doesn't seriously damage the market. And if it's not that way, then we hunker down and focus on our fundamentals.
Paul Thurrott [01:22:27]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [01:22:27]:
I mean, what more advice can I give?
Paul Thurrott [01:22:29]:
I love the economic outlook is, look, the plane's crashing. You're just hoping for a water landing.
Richard Campbell [01:22:33]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:22:34]:
You know, like we're hoping you skip.
Richard Campbell [01:22:36]:
Along the ground a bit.
Paul Thurrott [01:22:38]:
Just don't go like nose dive. Like hopefully you just like a stone across the top.
Richard Campbell [01:22:42]:
Get a couple of Good bounces in there.
Paul Thurrott [01:22:45]:
So that's fun.
Leo Laporte [01:22:46]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:22:47]:
I hope you guys don't intend to retire anytime soon. You know, you'll be fine.
Richard Campbell [01:22:51]:
Five year gap.
Leo Laporte [01:22:52]:
I'm living on my portfolio. I don't know.
Paul Thurrott [01:22:55]:
How big's your mattress, Leo? Are you gonna get that going?
Leo Laporte [01:22:59]:
Well, you know, it's too late to buy gold. Yeah. If you bought bitcoin to hedge your bet, you're not.
Richard Campbell [01:23:06]:
How's that going for you?
Leo Laporte [01:23:08]:
That's not been a good thing. I'm just, I'm. I'm gonna ride it out.
Paul Thurrott [01:23:11]:
I figure I can't wait till the US Economy's on the bitcoin standard. You know, that's going to be the next one.
Richard Campbell [01:23:16]:
Oh, boy.
Leo Laporte [01:23:17]:
I'm gonna write it out. I'm staying in. I think. I think it's all going to work out.
Richard Campbell [01:23:23]:
I'm just glad I built new machines before RAM went out into the stratosphere. Wow.
Leo Laporte [01:23:27]:
Is that a crazy. And then Micron's announced that it's not.
Richard Campbell [01:23:32]:
Going to sell the consumers at all.
Leo Laporte [01:23:33]:
Why bother? We make so much money selling to.
Richard Campbell [01:23:36]:
AI companies and they don't complain about the prices and they buy all the.
Leo Laporte [01:23:40]:
Chips we can make. So. See you, consumers.
Richard Campbell [01:23:43]:
Yeah.
Leo Laporte [01:23:43]:
Wow. Yeah. I'm a little nervous because I've been.
Richard Campbell [01:23:46]:
These all seem like harbinger, right?
Leo Laporte [01:23:49]:
Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. I'm gonna. I'm gonna hope for a Christmas miracle.
Paul Thurrott [01:23:56]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:23:56]:
I think your Christmas miracle might come in August, but.
Leo Laporte [01:23:58]:
Okay. As long as it comes before I'm 80, I think we'll be all right. I'm gonna. I could. I can live 10 more years on.
Richard Campbell [01:24:09]:
Well, my experience, we recover pretty quickly. We're pretty quickly from, from 2008 recovery from 2001. It always seems to be faster.
Leo Laporte [01:24:17]:
Every time I think, oh, I'm going to cash out. Then the market doesn't make sense anymore.
Richard Campbell [01:24:23]:
All of a sudden, probably is a good time to cash out.
Paul Thurrott [01:24:26]:
You know what, though? You could live to be 100 and that will always be. That's the problem is when you're. When you seriously think I'm going to cash out, it will never be right. Right. You can't plan that.
Leo Laporte [01:24:38]:
I don't believe in market timing. I'm.
Paul Thurrott [01:24:40]:
No, you can't. It's impossible.
Leo Laporte [01:24:41]:
I'm a. I am betting on the long term success of the country in our economy. Maybe that's foolish, but. But honestly, if it is, it's all.
Paul Thurrott [01:24:52]:
We got.
Leo Laporte [01:24:54]:
In Mexico.
Paul Thurrott [01:24:55]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:24:56]:
Yeah. Well, that was a lot.
Leo Laporte [01:24:59]:
That was a uplifting way to End this fine program.
Richard Campbell [01:25:02]:
Nice.
Leo Laporte [01:25:02]:
Your. Your hopes for 2026 was. Which starts tomorrow. Paul Thurat, what are you. What are you looking forward to in.
Richard Campbell [01:25:09]:
The new a gentle plane crash?
Leo Laporte [01:25:11]:
Well, I mean.
Paul Thurrott [01:25:13]:
I mean to keep it to the sort of Microsoft Windows space. I'm hoping we learn something about Windows 12. You know, we've been talking about this one for two years now.
Richard Campbell [01:25:21]:
I think so. And now we see the pieces in place finally. It's exciting.
Paul Thurrott [01:25:25]:
Yeah.
Richard Campbell [01:25:26]:
I look at how changing it'll be.
Leo Laporte [01:25:29]:
All right.
Paul Thurrott [01:25:31]:
I hope the lesson learned here in Microsoft's part was opt in is important and always give people an escape hatch for those that don't want it. They do seem to be trending in that direction, so hopefully that continues.
Leo Laporte [01:25:45]:
Richard, what do you think for 2026? What are your hopes?
Richard Campbell [01:25:50]:
I'm in the same boat here that I looked at what Visual Studio 2026's roadmap looks like and how they've gone all AI for software development. I think it's a good roadmap for what Windows could be. I like the realignment of the leadership and some of the new people are coming into play. That speaks well to a younger generation wanting to take the company places it hasn't been before. I think this situation between Judson and Satch is a little weird, but we'll see how that pans out.
Paul Thurrott [01:26:19]:
Yeah. It's a new era. Maybe that's the, you know, we would just talk about this. The sense of like first, second, third, CEO.
Richard Campbell [01:26:24]:
Yeah.
Paul Thurrott [01:26:25]:
And maybe the future is a little different. It's. Well, leadership is split up a little bit more between different people.
Richard Campbell [01:26:30]:
Satch has been in 10, 11 years.
Leo Laporte [01:26:32]:
Right.
Richard Campbell [01:26:32]:
Like he has run his course in that respect. That's as long as Ballmer was in.
Paul Thurrott [01:26:37]:
I know.
Richard Campbell [01:26:38]:
So, you know, it's not out of realms. We might see a leadership change in the next year or two.
Paul Thurrott [01:26:43]:
I think that's what you're seeing at Apple too. Not that we care that much about that. But the. But in general, newer generation coming in.
Richard Campbell [01:26:48]:
Yeah, there's a new generation coming in. You know what? They're smart, they're hungry, they want to change things. And I'd like to be on that ride. That's exciting.
Leo Laporte [01:26:56]:
I think we're going to be in some very interesting times.
Richard Campbell [01:27:00]:
We're in time without a doubt.
Leo Laporte [01:27:02]:
No doubt about that.
Paul Thurrott [01:27:02]:
Doesn't seem that complimentary, but yeah, you're probably right.
Leo Laporte [01:27:06]:
Thank you. My friends. It's wonderful to be able to spend the year with you. I look forward to a great 2026 worth of Windows Weekly episodes every Wednesday 11am to 2pm Pacific, 2pm to 5pm Eastern, 1900 UTC. We'll be back here next Wednesday, January 6th for the next Windows Weekly. Happy New Year guys. I hope you had a wonderful holidays. We thank especially the members of the club who've been our great support all this year.
Leo Laporte [01:27:38]:
We look forward to a nice Next Wednesday is January 7th. Thank you Kevin. He's paying attention. Thank you for your support. Support through the year and I promise you 2026 is gonna be very exciting for all of us on Twitter, especially if there's a crash. We'll have lots of fun watching this.
Richard Campbell [01:27:54]:
Oh boy.
Leo Laporte [01:27:55]:
Burn. Watching the world burn.
Richard Campbell [01:27:58]:
No, there's not gonna be the marshmallows.
Leo Laporte [01:28:03]:
I am contrarian on this one. Paul Thurat thurat.com leanpub.com for his books. Have a wonderful New Year, New Year's Eve, enjoy your fire. Put some pants on and we will see you next week.
Paul Thurrott [01:28:19]:
The clothes are only coming off at this point, Leo.
Richard Campbell [01:28:22]:
It's sitting by this fire. Things get toasty right now.
Paul Thurrott [01:28:25]:
This is, this is as much as it's ever going to be today.
Leo Laporte [01:28:28]:
Thank you guys. We'll see you next time.
Richard Campbell [01:28:31]:
Bye bye.
