Windows Weekly 970 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott's here. Actually, he's in Mexico City. Richard Campbell's back home in Madeira Park. Paul says he's really happy about 26H1. We'll find out why. We'll also talk about the dueling AI agents and the Xbox Excellence Awards, and Paul announces a new book. All of that coming up next on Windows Weekly.

Leo Laporte [00:00:26]:
Podcasts you love from people you trust.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:30]:
This is.

Leo Laporte [00:00:38]:
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell, episode 970, recorded Wednesday, February 11th, 2026. Token kill. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, all you winners.

Paul Thurrott [00:00:52]:
Hello, all you dozers.

Leo Laporte [00:00:53]:
Hello, Paul Thurrott joining us from his palatial estate in Mexico City. Roma Norte.

Richard Campbell [00:01:01]:
Hello, hello, hello.

Leo Laporte [00:01:04]:
How are you today, Paul?

Paul Thurrott [00:01:06]:
I'm pretty good.

Leo Laporte [00:01:06]:
All right, you feeling good?

Paul Thurrott [00:01:09]:
Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:01:11]:
Okay, just— Lisa says I should ask more personal questions in life.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:15]:
I see, I see. I felt personal until you said that.

Leo Laporte [00:01:19]:
But yeah, that's Richard Campbell. He's back home in Madeira Park, beautiful British Columbia, out in the boathouse.

Richard Campbell [00:01:27]:
Yeah, and I've, uh, I gotta say something off the top because I know there's a bunch of listeners in British Columbia. There's a little town on the east side of BC called Tumbler Ridge, like 2,500 people. It's like mining town. And they've yesterday had the worst mass shooting in Canada in a decade. 10 people, including the shooter, are dead, several in hospital in critical condition. It's terrible. And we're all devastated. This is not something that happens around here, at least of all a little town where everybody knows everybody.

Richard Campbell [00:02:00]:
I'm wearing the red today in solidarity.

Leo Laporte [00:02:03]:
Okay, okay, for Tumbler Ridge.

Richard Campbell [00:02:06]:
Tumbler Ridge.

Leo Laporte [00:02:07]:
At a school, of course.

Richard Campbell [00:02:09]:
Of course.

Leo Laporte [00:02:11]:
So sorry that it's, I don't think there've been a lot of those kinds of incidents in Canada.

Richard Campbell [00:02:17]:
No, no, there were 4 mass shooting incidents in Canada last year total, which all are horrible, but no.

Leo Laporte [00:02:27]:
But in a town of 2,000.

Richard Campbell [00:02:29]:
Yeah, it's unbelievable.

Leo Laporte [00:02:30]:
It's, it's like everybody will know somebody.

Richard Campbell [00:02:32]:
Everybody knows. Yeah. And so no names, none of that's necessary. Just, we're with you.

Leo Laporte [00:02:38]:
Yeah. Deepest sympathy.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:40]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:02:41]:
Uh, okay. Um, sorry I have to begin on a sad note, but this— such is the world, isn't it?

Paul Thurrott [00:02:48]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:02:52]:
Um, all right, moment of Well, thanks.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:55]:
For killing the buzz there.

Leo Laporte [00:02:57]:
Um, well, Paul, you're never Mr. Cheerful, so it should just fit right in.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:00]:
Oh, I got bad news for all of you. I have really good news.

Leo Laporte [00:03:05]:
Microsoft had a no good, very bad Patch Tuesday, didn't they?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:09]:
No, that would— that's immaterial. Um, okay, plus that was last month.

Leo Laporte [00:03:16]:
No, no, there was— there were— how many zero days were patched yesterday?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:21]:
Well, they were patched. That's not a problem.

Leo Laporte [00:03:22]:
Oh, that's good.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:23]:
Solution.

Richard Campbell [00:03:23]:
Of course, that's good news.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:24]:
Yeah, let me give you the family circus version of that cartoon. That's good news, Leo. Um, we fixed problems, you know.

Leo Laporte [00:03:32]:
Oh, what's the bad news then, Mr. Theron?

Paul Thurrott [00:03:34]:
I don't have bad news. I only have good news. That's what I'm saying. I— and I have to— I don't— I can't remember a time on this podcast that was like this. I mean Maybe, I don't know, going back to Windows 7 or something. I don't know, it's been a while. Well, you know, Windows 10 when it first came out was kind of good news, right? Return to the desktop, get rid of the touch-first nonsense. That was pretty good.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:00]:
No, but this is really good news, right? And the reason this is good news is because we've been suffering under what I would call an avalanche of bad news with Windows through both Microsoft ignoring the product or just maliciously enshittifying it, right?

Richard Campbell [00:04:16]:
Um.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:18]:
You know, Windows 8 was kind of a minor push in that direction in the sense that, yes, I know most people didn't like the new full-screen UI, but that's not enshittification, that's just bad UI. I mean, it was, you know, whatever. But, um, and they reversed it. But, you know, Windows 10 really escalated it. Windows 11 escalated it again. Last week we talked about this vague idea that Microsoft had that they were going to improve the quality of Windows, right? There was a quote from Pavan Davaluri who said that we've heard the feedback from the community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people.

Leo Laporte [00:05:01]:
They even appointed a full-time quality czar.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:05]:
He didn't, Satya Nadella did. See, this is— these things are all intertwined, right? Um, Separately, yes, Satya Nadella revealed in an email to employees, which was published publicly, that he has two new direct reports. One of them has been at the company for several or a couple of years at least. He was at Amazon for many years. I've already forgotten his name. Geez, I'm terrible at this. Charlie Bell, sorry. Most recently running a lot of the security efforts.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:38]:
Yeah, but now in charge of engineering quality. And they hired back a woman who had been at Microsoft for many years and was at Google for several years, and she is now executive vice president of security. So both these people are reporting directly to Satya Nadella. And, you know, this is one of those examples of it's easy to talk, you know, a good game about what you're doing. And but you can— this is, you know, when Satya Nadella comes out and says, hey, we're going to focus on security, It's like, yeah, but you're really focusing on AI, aren't you? You know, I mean, aren't you?

Richard Campbell [00:06:11]:
Um, but, but then to have it report to him rather than report to Vivaan, like, that just seems like— well.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:17]:
It'S not— this is company-wide, right? It's not just Windows. Not just Windows. Yeah, it's not just Windows. Um, so that's interesting. And then there's this stuff that is public. You know, we've— I talked about some of this last week. There are these features in Windows that are not glossy UI superficial things, but are in fact kind of deep foundational technologies that improve the security or reliability of the product. You know, quick machine recovery, smart app control, et cetera, et cetera.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:47]:
There's a bunch of that stuff, right? So that's been kind of ongoing. This is like the two halves of Windows and probably of Microsoft too, but where you have like the half that's sort of ensuring the UI with all this superfluous nonsense that nobody wants. And then you have people doing actual engineering work and making some gains, right? Which is you something, know, there was a period of time there where I felt like all the adults had left this organization, right? Because all the opportunity and advancement you could get at Microsoft was elsewhere. Cloud computing for a long time, Azure, etc. And then of you course, know, more recently the AI stuff. And so it's seeing them, you know, there's the reorg that Pavan did within Windows. Bringing server and client back together for the first time. So in charge of like the core engineering part of Windows.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:37]:
Interesting, you know, and we'll see how that goes. And then there's been these little things that I've noticed, right? Like the changes to that automatic folder backup feature in OneDrive, right? Which is absolutely a step forward. It's, it's not perfect. You know, there are issues like I think I discussed those last week, but That has been— that was the key in certification in Windows 11 that caused me to look elsewhere, right? Not for a different OS in that case, but for a different cloud storage service, right? So I used Google Cloud for a couple years— Google, sorry, Google Drive. And then more recently last year I got two Synology NASs, so I've been using Synology Drive instead. But it— that problem to me was so bad that I was like, I can't use this anymore. Like, this is freaking me out. And reversing that is very interesting.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:31]:
So that's what we had last week. Now this week, and it's only Wednesday, right? A couple of very interesting announcements. The first one, this one's vague admittedly, but Microsoft announced two initiatives that it says are designed to help restore trust in Windows, meaning user trust in Windows. Both are using— there's a lot of language here, but it's like consent-first approaches to making app and AI agent behavior transparent, to make decisions reversible, and make access limited to clear approved capabilities. This isn't in my post, but one of the ways they described this in their own announcement was that— and again, this is very vague— but basically kind of emulate the security model you see on phones where if any app wants to access your microphone or your, you know, whatever it might be, or your photos or something, you have explicitly give consent. And then there's a UI in the Settings app or wherever where you can go and revoke permissions or, you know, provide permissions or whatever it is. I do know, and I think we all know from decades of using Windows and or any desktop operating system, of course, you can think back to like when they introduced User Account Control and Longhorn originally, what became Windows Vista, you know, met with some resistance, right? There is the newer version of that, which is the Windows Hello-based authentication, which on the face of things should be fantastic, but they really bog it down with performance issues. And then you have to explicitly click on an OK button or whatever it says to get through it.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:04]:
Like, it recognizes you and says, all right, you're all set. You're like, I'm not all set, there's a dialog in the middle of the screen. So they've made that a little ponderous. And so I suspect that what they're talking about here is going to introduce that kind of UI as well. When you think about how phones work, like, so there might be some pushback here, but A couple— let me— I'll describe what these two things are, but I also want to talk about what I think this actually means. And then the next announcement kind of cements that, I guess, if that makes sense. So the Windows Baseline Security Mode is runtime integrity safeguards, right? So this is the secure by default type thing. Only properly signed apps, services, and drivers are going to be allowed.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:48]:
By default, right? Um, users, and if you're in IT, if you're in a managed environment, uh, IT admins, etc., will be able to override those safeguards. And you could do it on an app-by-app basis. And which is what you're going to need to do.

Richard Campbell [00:11:00]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:00]:
Yep. And I actually think that this is the thing that Microsoft has almost never done, which is— it's the right thing, right? So if you think back to something like Windows 10 S, back when that was the thing, right? We have S Mode still today. The big problem for me at the time was In S mode, you could only run store apps. And back at, you know, this is 10+ years ago, but 10 years ago, that was kind of a non-starter. The store wasn't— didn't have a lot of high-quality apps. The most common app that people would want to run that wasn't in the store was a web browser, you know, Chrome or whatever else.

Richard Campbell [00:11:32]:
And who'd want that?

Paul Thurrott [00:11:34]:
Everyone, it turns out. But, um, and, you know, whatever, we make bad decisions, but whatever, it doesn't matter. I mean, whatever, that's what people choose. And The case I made at the time was you need to have an exception list. I want Windows 10 S mode or S mode, whatever you want to call it, on all the time, but I also want to be able to run the 1, 2, 3, whatever number apps that I want and maybe have that operate outside of S mode because it's just too important. This thing is not a computer to me if I don't have those apps and they just never did it. I don't know why to this day, frankly, but they will do it for this and there you go. That to me is Microsoft learning something, so that's good.

Richard Campbell [00:12:12]:
So what ended up happening was you'd hit the one thing you had to have and boom, you were out of S, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:12:17]:
Yeah, you just left.

Richard Campbell [00:12:18]:
They made it impossible.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:19]:
Yep. So now there's no more S mode. So, and that's the thing, like, you— there, there are and were benefits to S mode, you know.

Richard Campbell [00:12:25]:
But the main thing here is if you have to give permission for the one app, it means no matter what else gets introduced, if it's not uh, properly, uh, certificated, like authorized, it's not going to run. Like, that's what gives you your protection. Is what comes next, not what you, you knew you were doing in the first place.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:43]:
Yeah. And, and look, the— as far as like web browsers go, I mean, there are a lot of other OS and web browser level protections built in to, um, you know, scan downloads in real time and, and look at sites and look, you know, use heuristics to figure out if it's a malicious website, whatever. But I, I never understood this. It's something they didn't do, but they're doing it this time. So it's like, okay, good, that's smart. That, to me, that's smart. And then there's user transparency and consent. And this is when— this is the— this is also like the phone.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:11]:
So in other words, when this is the part where an app needs to access some resource that might be sensitive, like a file or the file system, the camera, the microphone, etc., or an app just is sitting there, you know, we've all done this. You install an app and it installs this other thing on the side, you know, like McAfee's kind of famous for this or whatever, but prevent those little side installs from occurring as well. By default, it will prompt you and say, hey, this thing's trying to do this. Is this what you want? And I think for a lot of people, a lot of the time, the answer is going to be no, that's not— yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:13:41]:
I always— I'm concerned when you send up prompts like that that the user doesn't know the answer to.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:46]:
Yes.

Richard Campbell [00:13:46]:
Uh, yeah, it's doing this thing. If you say no, whatever you wanted isn't going to happen.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:54]:
Well, assuming that's what the you— point— to me, the point of this is it's not because you did something that you want, it's because the app you installed is doing something else. And it's like, actually, I don't necessarily want that. Yes, I mean, if you install like a camera app, you're gonna want to give it access to the right? And camera, the microphone.

Richard Campbell [00:14:09]:
Yeah, if you doubt it won't work, right? But by the same token, if it says, hey, I need this other driver here, the prompt's gonna come up and go, it's getting this driver, are you okay with that? And you just say no, well, that app's probably over.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:21]:
Well, so, okay, this is a very high level of, I don't know what the UI's gonna look like, right? So we'll see. These things are coming down the road. That's part of it. That's a big part of the discussion.

Richard Campbell [00:14:32]:
Yeah, no, I'm excited about it. The sysadmin in me is like, thank goodness, this is what I always wanted, was we are fully locked down except for these two exceptions, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:14:42]:
Right. Um, uh, the other part that's tied to this, this is even more vague or bigger, um, is what they're describing as a higher level of transparency for, uh, or higher level of transparency standards that will apply to both apps and AI agents. And, and this is, you know, Microsoft is very fond of saying that AI agents are apps, and the way that AI agents will present themselves visually in the UI of Windows will be very much like an app, right? There'll be a shortcut, uh, in the taskbar. It will have a, like, a jump list or a pop-up, and it will do notifications, etc. You can interact with it. Um, so yeah, that makes sense on some level. And the end of this conversation, eventually in about 45 minutes, hopefully not, but, um, we'll actually kind of get back to this point because I do think that AI, and specifically agentic AI, might be a big part of why this is happening. But the way they describe how this thing is going to be rolled out— because this is not something that's happening like in March, right? Um, if you are familiar with the calendar, and you know that— I don't mean the calendar in general or the Mayan calendar, but rather the Microsoft schedule— um, you know that in October-ish every year Microsoft releases a new feature update for Windows.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:01]:
And the last few years this has been the 25H2, 24H2, 20 3H2, etc. Um, they talk about how these things will be rolled out through what they're calling a phased approach. I hate that phrase because that's you know, feature, controlled, you know, release, CFR, and, you know, whatever. But in partnership with developers, enterprises, ecosystem partners, that more details are coming as well as discussions about the time frame. And this will be an upcoming communication, so like blogs and what they call dedicated feedback channels, which to me is like— means businesses and developers, not, you know, consumers. But that's okay. So when I hear that, I think, okay, well, we're clearly think— talking about October at the earliest, right? And we're clearly talking about what we now would think of as 26H2, right? Right. Or given how big this is, maybe this is finally— we keep talking, it's like the second year in a row, probably third year, where it's like I just, I'm gonna, it's just like a 1 followed by a 2.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:01]:
But maybe this will be called Windows 12. I, I will say it doesn't matter what it's called, but I just, in a sense of framing it, because this is a big change.

Richard Campbell [00:17:11]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:12]:
Um, and it makes sense that maybe this would be something that would be in a new OS version, right? It doesn't mean they won't bring number kind of change. I think so. And that's where I left it. At the end of that announcement, right? So I wrote about it. I think that might have been 2 days ago, I don't remember. Um, but yesterday, out of nowhere, I don't think anyone was asking questions about this, but it turns out that this, meaning 26H1, is quite a bit different than what we thought it was. And that's fascinating to me, and it's tied to all this reliability, quality security stuff. So out of nowhere, a random program manager who did not identify herself by name, which irritates me, but her name is Aria Carley, regular on my show.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:59]:
Okay, nice. Um, she wrote a post explaining what 26H1 was. Now, if you're familiar with Windows 11 and if you're familiar with what happened 2 years ago with 24H2, you might think you understand exactly what 26H1 is, and it is nothing like that. Maybe not, maybe nothing is a strong term. It's a little bit like that in the sense that it will ship in this case only on new Qualcomm Snapdragon hardware.

Richard Campbell [00:18:28]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:28]:
However, right? So just to, I should step back for a second. 2 years ago, Microsoft in May announced Copilot+PCs at that time running for only on Snapdragon X-based chips, which were brand new at that point. Those computers, the first wave shipped that June, so about a month later. And then in the Insider Program throughout the summer and then later in stable, as I'll call it, in starting in September, October, you could get 24H2 on x86 or x64-based computers running Intel or AMD chips, right? And that's been the situation since. So early release for the, the you products, know, that were shipping mid-year. And then, and they kept working on it, by the way, there were additions and changes. And then October, we'll call it, they they announced, released it for everyone, right? And so then we went forward with 24H2, and we entered 2025, and we eventually started testing 25H2 that released in October for everybody. And we thought, well, okay, this is a one-off.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:29]:
But then Microsoft admitted they were working on something called 26H1. It seemed pretty clear that this was going to be based on the new Snapdragon X2 generation of chips, which Qualcomm announced, what, last September and promised new computers running these chips in the first half of the year. We were hoping it wasn't going to be June, but closer to January maybe. We didn't know. Now we have a clue, by the way, it's going to be earlier. Um, and so we thought, okay, fine. Um, and then not to confuse matters even further, but this is my brain in action, I'm sorry. Um, at some point late last year, early this year actually, I mean, I don't remember, it doesn't matter.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:10]:
Microsoft moved the Canary channel, which to date has done absolutely jack nothing, uh, to 26H1 testing. And then they stopped aligning briefly the Beta and Dev channel builds, which were both on 25H2— sorry, eventually both, you know, were both on 25H2. Um, and then they did a new build number stream for, for the Dev channel. So I was like, okay, this is going to be 26H1. It's going to right? Yeah, it doesn't have to be, as it turns out. Um, so as of today, you can— you could install Canary, and you could, if you wanted, and run essentially what's a pre-release version of 26H1. It's not going to help you. You're running on an x64 computer probably, or a first-gen Snapdragon X.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:58]:
It's functionally going to be the same as— well, it's going to be a little behind, it's the Canary channel, but eventually it will functionally be the same as what you see elsewhere. Meaning dev, beta, stable, whatever. All right, so now you gotta hold on to your hats a little bit because this is gonna get weird. So 26H1 is what Microsoft is calling a scoped release. It's designed only for PCs running select new silicon, and by select new silicon they mean literally and specifically the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 series of computers they're going to ship, probably in March, I think is the time frame for that. It looks like March, by the way, is when Mobile World Congress is. I'll just throw that out there. It seems like an obvious time to announce this stuff, but that— they haven't said that.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:42]:
But it, it seems, given that they felt the need to announce this, this is not something for June. It's going to be sooner, you would hope. Okay, so we have 26H1 only for Snapdragon X2. Cool. But obviously it will be updated to 26H2 later in the year, like x64 computers? No, it will not be. So if you're running a computer today that is running 24H2 or 25H2, these are the two supported versions of Windows 11, you cannot upgrade to 26H1— asterisk— because you can technically in the Windows Insider Program, but they're not going to release that to stable. No one's going to get that out in the world. If you are on 24H2 or 25H2 when October rolls around, we're going to have a 26H2.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:24]:
You will get that. Um, you will not get it if you're on 26H1. So if March or whatever time frame comes, you buy an X2-based computer, you will have 26H1. October comes around, 26H2 comes out, you're not getting it. That's bizarre, right?

Richard Campbell [00:22:42]:
Do you think they'll align them back in 27H1?

Paul Thurrott [00:22:46]:
Like, well, what they're— this is what they're saying, and this is why I said the, the dreaded Windows 12 phrase earlier. Those on 26H1 will eventually have a path to update in a future Windows release. The future Windows Done, done, release. done. Yep. So they're not calling it Windows 12, but look, and by the way, I.

Richard Campbell [00:23:07]:
Should— What other major Windows release could there be? Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:10]:
I mean, maybe they have a different name. I don't know, but it's, it's not going to be 26H2. That's interesting. The reason for this is that— let me see if I can find the exact language on this one because it's weird. Windows 11 26H1 is based on a different Windows core, is the way they'd said it, wrote it, than 24 and 25H2 and soon 26H2. It's a different core. That's interesting because, let me see if I can get this right, 24H2 also had a different core than its predecessors. It was a big deal.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:42]:
They didn't talk about it too much.

Richard Campbell [00:23:44]:
Yeah, we considered 24H2 like a new version of Windows actually.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:47]:
It really was.

Richard Campbell [00:23:49]:
I even got Aria to say that on RunAs, that it's like basically this was a full OS upgrade.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:53]:
There is a post somewhere, I'm not going to get the language right, it was a strange term, but it was a— oh man, I wish I could get this language right. They said it was like a full reinstall, you know, because they literally changed the foundational parts of it. So 25H2 EKB, enable MMPACK, it's easy because it's based on the same codebase. Which is great for compatibility, et cetera. But 26H2, no, sorry, 26H1 and whatever comes next is this new thing now. Right. Let me pull this together, hopefully into something that makes sense. Microsoft just announced, and remember, this has been in the works for many months probably, that they're gonna work to make everything they do, but we'll just talk about Windows here, more reliable and more secure.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:41]:
We have these specific security and reliability features they've already added to Windows and some that are still coming, like administrative protection, etc. They just announced a new Windows Baseline Security Mode and user transparency and consent. And they said in that post that— let me find it. No, no, no, no, I can't find the exact language. But the inference, the way they described this was this is going to be a different version of Windows. And I wrote that, I said, my guess is that what we're looking at— this is before they announced this 26H1 thing— we're either looking at a Windows 11 version 26H2 deliverable or perhaps even a Windows 12. Given that if you go back and read that post that Microsoft wrote about Windows Baseline Security Mode and user transparency and consent, they never used the term Windows 11, they just used the term Windows.

Leo Laporte [00:25:33]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:34]:
They very specifically are not naming the version. So this Windows Baseline Security Mode and User Transparency consent, I believe, will be part of this next thing, the thing that's 26H1, which probably won't either have this stuff or will just have early versions of it. And then when they ship whatever the update to that is, we'll call it Windows 12 for now, that will have that. That's, that's the target for that stuff. Here's the I'm interest— not the interesting bit, this is all pretty interesting, I think. But yeah, um, one of another interesting, uh, thing here is the— and I forget now, but I want to say 23H2, probably certainly by the time we got into 24H2, Microsoft did this interesting thing which was a very sly way of undercutting enterprises that wanted to stay on the same version of Windows and never upgrade. Which was they made every version of Windows 11 functionally identical, right? So even though 24H2 had a different foundation, so to speak, or core, meaning like kernel and everything around the kernel, like the driver layers and all the stuff you that, know, makes the foundation of the OS. If you're looking at it and running it on a computer side by side with one running 23H2, aside from the fact that features roll at different times and we deal with that nonsense, they're the same features, right? And that continues forward.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:53]:
So 23H2 goes out of support. Now we have 25H2, 24H2, 25H2, same features. Now same foundation as well. And now we get 26H1, different foundation, same features, at least backwards, you know, to what we see on the earlier versions. We'll see if this stuff makes its way across everything. And then there'll be a 26H2, same thing. They very— they explicitly say this, it's going to be same features. So In many ways, yeah, it doesn't matter what version of Windows 11 you're using from a kind of a features perspective, although we'll see if there's a dividing line here with this baseline security and user transparency and consent stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:34]:
That's not clear because it's very vague and it's still coming in the future. You know, if you think back to when Windows 11 was still an ongoing concern, as Windows 11 comes out and they add features to Windows 11 that in many ways are unique to that operating system, in time those things many times made their way to Windows 10. So it's possible we'll see either all of or a subset of this new functionality make its way to 24, 25H2. But then again, by the time this stuff happens, it's possible those things will be outta support anyway. But 26H2 I guess would still be supported. So that's, I'm just kind of speculating. It's kind of hard to say. mean, fascinating.

Richard Campbell [00:28:09]:
There's.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:10]:
I.

Richard Campbell [00:28:10]:
A hardware difference here, right? Between ARM and the x86s.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:14]:
Well, oh, that's, so that's the other bit of it. This thing is launching only on Snapdragon X2, right? But that doesn't mean it's only going to be on Snapdragon X2 forever, right? And whatever this next version of Windows is, in the same way that eventually the Copilot+PC functionality came to x86-64, I would imagine, you know, it may not literally be 26H1 because versions don't matter, right? But certainly if it's not 26H2, it'll be Windows 12 or whatever we're calling that thing. That will run on all computers, right? Yeah. question question The, the The here is if you think about, well, Windows 11, right? So one of the controversies when it launched was the, what seemed at the time and was at the time kind of arbitrary hardware requirements, right? Secure Boot, TPM 2.0.

Richard Campbell [00:29:02]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:03]:
I'm missing something. And then, you know, whatever else was. And then the Copilot+PC starts in mid-2024 and that's when the, it really goes up, right? So we have 16 gigs of RAM as a minimum. Compared to 4, which is ridiculous on normal Windows 11. The MPU, that's, I think it had to be 40+ TOPS. Windows Hello ESS, right? Which is available on non-Copilot+ PCs but is a requirement of this platform. And I've often wondered if Copilot+ PC wasn't going to form the basis for a new, well, it is literally right now, like a new level of hardware requirement but maybe a new level of hardware requirements for Windows generally. Like that it might be slightly updated, like maybe by the time we get to 26H1 slash Windows 12, right? Maybe it's gonna be 16 gigs of RAM, it's gonna be TPM 2.0 or Microsoft Pluton, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:59]:
And maybe the, you know, the disk space, you know, disk might go up, whatever, but maybe the NPU requirement goes up to like 80 TOPS, right? 'Cause I think that's what X2 has. So the current versions of Copilot+ PCs in the market right now don't meet some requirement that we don't know about. So they're not gonna get 26H1. So they're gonna communicate more, we'll learn more, but they will get 26H2. I mean, there's gonna, I have to assume there's always gonna be an upgrade path, you know?

Richard Campbell [00:30:27]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:27]:
Well, not always.

Richard Campbell [00:30:28]:
Well, it's not, and it's not in Microsoft's best interest to run two lines of Windows. That's a lot of money for to them make.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:34]:
It's amazing that actually.

Richard Campbell [00:30:35]:
To both and yeah and so forth.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:37]:
I mean, look, the good news here is that functionally it doesn't matter what computer you have, basically. I mean, there's, there's a, a difference between Home and Pro, there's a difference between Copilot, non-Copilot Plus PC, but, um, but, but functionally it's the same thing. So if you sit down in front of a computer, okay, maybe you don't have Windows Hello ESS, maybe you don't have some of the, you know, Copilot Plus PC features in Paint or something, it's whatever, but it's Windows, it's the same, it's the same basic app, same.

Richard Campbell [00:31:04]:
Basic Yeah, and most of the time it's actually the same chunk of code, just features turned off, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:31:08]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:31:09]:
You can literally change your license on a Windows machine and you don't reinstall anything. It's just new things appear.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:15]:
That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, this is, these things have all kind of happened, right? To me it dates, well, back in 2025 and maybe even before then, 'cause the Windows Resiliency Initiative was announced, I believe in November 2024. 2024, 2025 is when we got a lot of the, the real-world features that are part of that initiative, right? This is the quick machine recovery, etc., etc. The Patch Tuesday we'll talk about in a moment that just went out yesterday includes the improvement to Smart App Control where you can just toggle it on and off on the fly, which is something you could not do before easily. So they've been doing that kind of work.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:57]:
then, And but, but to me, the, the first light in at the end of this tunnel was in late December, which I discussed last week where I'm resetting computers, I'm bringing up new computers, and I'm seeing a different behavior in OneDrive with regards to automatic folder backup. And that was a problem that I've been dealing with for 2+ years. Like I said, it was so bad I stopped using OneDrive. I couldn't stand it. It was making me crazy. That's good. This is a little bit of a reversal, if you will. On, um, you know, this enshittification that's been occurring.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:36]:
So naturally you have to wonder, why is this happening? Like, why? Yeah, what, what triggered this, you know? And one of the things that Corey Doctorow says, uh, Corey Doctorow being the person who invented the term enshittification, has said is, you know, it's not possible as an individual— he's writing for people, right? When he talks about enshittification, he's talking about Netflix and Facebook and Google and the services we use as people, like individuals, consumers. It's not possible to vote with your pocketbook or your wallet, meaning you could say, "Look, I'm tired of this crap that's going on with Netflix. I'm not using Netflix anymore. I'm going to subscribe to something else or just whatever, watch videos." And that's great, but you know what? Netflix doesn't care. There's no class action version of this that's going to impact this company at all. That's true with Windows as well, right? So when I complain about OneDrive folder backup or, uh, forced telemetry or the crap we're in the Start menu, I'm just— all I'm doing is yelling at a wave coming at me.

Richard Campbell [00:33:38]:
You're shouting to the void.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:39]:
No one cares. Yeah, yeah. And there is no number of us, meaning enthusiasts or people actually still care about Windows to any degree, who could ever collectively get together and have Microsoft listen to us. They do not care. And look, I don't like it, but I get it. We're not the ongoing concern. But there is an ongoing concern. Actually, there are two.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:00]:
So the first one is antitrust, right? And this is Cory Doctorow's ultimate solution to enshardification. He's like, "Look, we need antitrust to rein these companies in." And we are seeing that now, right? Microsoft was semi-immune to this for several years when in the EU, in the US too actually, they were primarily going after the bigger abusers, companies like Apple and Google especially, but also Meta, And I guess Amazon to some degree, but Meta, I would say those three. And then the Teams thing happened, right, with, uh, you know, the Slack lawsuit, which has just gone on and on and on, um, uh, came to a head and the EU started looking at Microsoft again and determined that they were abusing their dominance in office productivity software to force Teams down people's throats to harm the competition, which is, you know, okay, I mean, it makes some sense. Yeah, yeah, we took a couple years to figure that one out, but now if you— actually, they did it everywhere, so you could as a company buy Microsoft 365 and not get Teams if that's what you want and save a couple of bucks a month or something. And so that happened. But that also means that antitrust regulators around the world are now honed in on Microsoft too.

Richard Campbell [00:35:07]:
It's back on the radar.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:08]:
Yeah. Microsoft, you you may, may recall, just announced 1 billion Windows 11 users. Windows 11, 1 billion is a, that's a big number. That's an antitrust number. You know, it's possible. And we might might not— we just not know about this yet. It's possible that antitrust regulators have begun the first feelers about Windows, like, hey, this is an you audience, know, you're abusing this to some degree, which I think logically they probably are. But the second audience that matters, or the second factor, is their, uh, what I would call the Fortune 500, their biggest business customers, right? Not the mom-and-pop guy with 3 employees, or me with 1 employee, or whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:49]:
But rather the big one, the ones with tens of thousands of seats, right?

Richard Campbell [00:35:52]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:54]:
As, as an individual, Richard knows more about this than anybody, but as an individual, the one thing you may not realize or may not be obvious is that Microsoft gives controls in the form of policies and tools that allow IT and admins and enterprises and managed environments to control the experience that users see and which apps they get and how things work, etc., right? And this is all for all the right reasons. You know, you want to protect corporate data. Um, maybe you don't want to, you know, people mixing and matching personal and corporate data on their laptops that you've given them or handed them, or whatever, whatever it might be. So this has you been, know, they've been doing this for a long time.

Richard Campbell [00:36:28]:
They're really good at costs alone, my friend. Controlling the number of versions of Adobe Reader in your organization is money every day, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:36:36]:
So there's a whole world of support for this scenario, right? And it's a big world. It's not my world anymore, thank God, but You know, so if you look at like, I, it's last year sometime, I think, or probably a year or so ago, I wrote something called the Windows 11 certification checklist. And if you go down the list of things that people may or may not consider to be in certification Windows 11, 5 or 7 of them, none of them apply to businesses, right? All of the concerns I have, or you may have as an individual, businesses can get around, right? The asterisk being eventually, yes, you're going to have to update PCs to newer versions or to whatever updates, but they don't have to do it immediately. It's— they don't get as long as they used to, which I'm sure they don't like, but they don't have to do it immediately like consumers basically do. But that's, that's just a kind of a minor issue. So I don't know this for a fact, but I do know that Microsoft heavily markets Microsoft 365. I should say, I don't know for a fact that these are the companies that complained and that's why this is happening. But I do know for a fact that they are marketing or Copilot Microsoft 365 Copilot very heavily to these businesses.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:45]:
They're offering deep, deep discounts. Now, this is something that's been revealed. Yeah. So if the retail cost of Microsoft 365 Copilot, sorry, is $30 per month per user, if you're a big enough enterprise, tens of thousands of seats, whatever, whatever versions of Microsoft 365, They were offering half off, 75% off, anything to get you to use this product, right? To help pay for all the work that went into this. Very few have accepted this offer, right? When they did their earnings a week and a half ago, whatever, or almost 2 weeks ago, I guess, one of the things they revealed, I'm not even sure why they said this, was 15— was it 15? Yeah, 15 million paying Microsoft 365 Copilot seats compared to 450 million for all of Microsoft 365. Less than 3.5%.

Richard Campbell [00:38:36]:
Yeah, but in the AI space, 15 million is still a big number.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:39]:
It's not a bad number, but I suspect I could be wrong, but Anthropic Cloud and OpenAI ChatGPT, I bet they have, if not as many, almost as many and combined as more. And the trend is obviously going in one direction. Yeah, there has been a lot of pushback on Microsoft 365 Copilot or just Copilot.

Richard Campbell [00:39:00]:
A lot of Anthropic's latest shot over the bow. Makes it very obvious those guys have been going in the wrong direction.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:08]:
Yeah. So what he's referring to is these essentially agents that run inside of apps like PowerPoint and Excel and allow you to interact with the data within in ways that it's very sophisticated.

Richard Campbell [00:39:20]:
And we're built-in weeks.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:23]:
Yeah, Microsoft is working on that, by.

Richard Campbell [00:39:26]:
The way, for years.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:27]:
Yep. You can look at the Microsoft 365 roadmap. You can see they want to do it.

Richard Campbell [00:39:32]:
I presume we're jumping ahead here, that this is in the AI section, so.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:35]:
We'Ll talk about it too. No, I actually didn't add anything about that, so go on.

Richard Campbell [00:39:39]:
Okay. Well, it just, to me, it read like Conway's Law. Like this is an issue of organization. That the problem when you, it just sort of hit me when I saw what Anthropic pulled off in no time with Excel. This is people from outside of Excel saying, what do I need Excel to do? And building the product we need.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:54]:
Right, right.

Richard Campbell [00:39:55]:
As opposed to people inside Excel who own their features and are all trying to do their features. Like arguably the people least qualified to make a great LLM for Excel are the guys making features in Excel.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:06]:
Which is ironic and weird, right?

Leo Laporte [00:40:09]:
Now, we better talk to Lou Mureska about this 'cause he's the guy in charge of Copilot for Excel. So we have somebody who actually might know. Well, I'll ask Lou about it.

Richard Campbell [00:40:18]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:19]:
Yeah. Well, but the— Microsoft has what I, historically, has had what I would call a very top-heavy kind of infrastructure-based approach to everything. If you think about something like Loop, which has been kind of left aside because of this AI push all of a sudden, this was a fairly dramatic attempt to over time replace these classic office documents, which in many ways from Microsoft's perspective have been usurped by open standards and, you know, open document format and the complaints from regulators and competitors and everything. And do something different. But you have this thing called Notion that is basically what Loop is, but it works great and it's simple-ish. I mean, simple compared to like a Microsoft heavily engineered product or platform. You know, it's such a top-heavy, long-term approach to solving a problem. And it's possible— this is overly simplistic— but what Richard said is exactly right.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:17]:
You know, these people from outside of Excel or whatever the products are like, look, this is what we need, let's make that thing. Whereas the guys inside of Office, or whatever they're calling it now, look at it like, okay, this thing has 11,000 commands, we need to support all of them. And, and that's, you know, because that's how they think. And right, this smaller, faster-moving company is moving faster to deliver the core features that people need. I'm sure they'll improve it over time, you know, they'll add different things, but, um, both sides will. But This is maybe an example where the size of Microsoft is working against it a little bit.

Richard Campbell [00:41:52]:
It makes me, going back to Charlie Bell and now the woman whose name's jumped out of my head.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:58]:
Yeah, same.

Richard Campbell [00:41:59]:
New EVPs reporting directly to Satya. It reminds me Satya is now the engineering CEO 'cause Judson is the commercial CEO.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:07]:
Exactly, exactly.

Richard Campbell [00:42:08]:
Like, is he building up this cross-cutting team that goes across the whole organization that works on the engineering problems they have, starting with quality and security.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:19]:
Which is where everything like this should start, by the way. But yeah, 100%. I wasn't going to go in this direction, but I will say I've been critical/confused of Satya Nadella's giving up responsibilities to others. And it's like, what's he doing now? Is he blogging or whatever? But I suppose you could draw a parallel here between what he's doing and what Gates did at one point by saying, look, I'm gonna— I'm not gonna be CEO anymore, I'm gonna, uh, Chief Software Architect, I'm gonna go hands-on, we're doing.NET now, we're doing whatever, whatever the initiatives were at the time. But he was like a big— he was like involved personally. Yeah. And maybe from Satya who, Nadella, you know, was more to me more of an engineer than a business person, I guess.

Richard Campbell [00:43:03]:
That's true.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:04]:
CEO of Microsoft for 10 years, I guess he's also a businessman, but, but it is in his or, heart, you know, at his core.

Richard Campbell [00:43:11]:
Um, well, we've also always had this sense that he's trying to be Bill, not Bomber.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:15]:
Yes.

Richard Campbell [00:43:16]:
And so being more engineering is a good idea if that's what you want, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:43:21]:
Um, with regards to the, um, the comment— the over— overly generalized comment that I made, uh, earlier, I'll make another one, which is that just, again, this is super high level, but if you're a business and you're paying per seat per— well, yeah, per seat per month for whatever level of Microsoft 365 and whatever you get around that and whatever else you're paying Microsoft, whatever it might be. Um, and whatever the reason, I mean, I— we can kind of quibble over who is driving this push, but you are going to get these AI/agenic AI capabilities that are going to interact with office, essentially, right? So your knowledge workers, as we used to call them, are going to now have these AI capabilities. Yeah, it's a lot easier to get it from Microsoft, right? Like, it's— again, I'm over— I'm overly simplifying, but it's, it's one check to one company. That's not how it's paid, but just bear with me. Um, rather than 8 checks to other companies. So I— so one of the problems when you kind of build your own infrastructure, so to speak, if you pick all these kind of big, middle, little tech companies and whatever, you know, I want to use Slack because I feel like that's the best over there, and I want I'm gonna use this thing over here 'cause I think it's the best over there. A lot of complexity to this, right? And actually when you add it all up, there's a lot of added cost too.

Richard Campbell [00:44:41]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:42]:
How bad does Microsoft 365 Copilot have to be when Microsoft is offering incredible discounts that companies are still choosing cloud or ChatGPT or even Gemini, right?

Richard Campbell [00:44:55]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:56]:
Like people aren't just ambivalent about Copilot, they seem to hate it. And I'm not judging it per se.

Richard Campbell [00:45:04]:
Well, I think Microsoft's done their classic thing and called everything a Copilot, which means you always remember the worst one, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:45:11]:
There you go. That's pretty good.

Richard Campbell [00:45:12]:
Yeah, there's just like really bad ones.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:14]:
Yeah, that's true. That's funny. A lot of redundancy too, you know, etc. So for a company to decide as a, as a just a matter of course that we're going to start paying another company to improve productivity service we're already paying for is astonishing. And I think that these things combine. So again, to— oh, and I should say too, I mentioned businesses by and large are not influenced or affected by the intranetification that we as individuals see in Windows 11, right? Or to a smaller degree, maybe in Microsoft 365 as well, but whatever. However, the one thing they do see is all the reliability problems with updates, right? So in addition to Microsoft jamming AI down their throats, which most seem to not want, they also just issued 2 emergency fixes for 1 cumulative update in January. That's insane.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:13]:
Yeah, this is really bad timing.

Richard Campbell [00:46:16]:
It should be a giant red flag, and I, I suspect it is internally. Like, they're just like, Holy cow, what is going on?

Paul Thurrott [00:46:22]:
Yes, and this audience is big enough to get Microsoft's ear. Microsoft will pay attention to those people because the thing is, Windows hasn't been the center of Microsoft's strategy and world or whatever for decades, actually. Decades. Yeah, decades. Um, the first of those two decades, I would say it was part of it. Today it's not— almost none of it. But the thing you need to remember is that Windows generates several billion dollars in revenues every single quarter. And it's done so despite Microsoft's best attempts to make it the crappiest thing imaginable.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:56]:
And the reason is at least two-thirds of those customers— and we could measure that by users or by dollars, it's probably worse, it's probably a bigger chunk by dollar— are these Fortune 500/very large organizations, right? Um, when you have these kinds of problems, when you have the push that they don't want for AI, when you have reliability problems all over the place, after you force them to upgrade more often than they want, those people will be heard by Microsoft. And we are living in an era where we think, look, most of what we do with personal computing has already moved to mobile. The one thing we have left, which I think is a great thing by the way, is just what I would call kind of traditional productivity scenarios. So this is office productivity, stuff like Office, right? It's professional creator activities where you might be using like a DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere or whatever it is to you make, know, videos and do that kind of thing. These are important customers, really important customers. They are, I think, two-thirds to three-quarters of the several billions of dollars that this business generates every quarter. This business that Microsoft has either ignored or made worse actively made worse, right? Um, if that disappears or declines, uh, they can't afford this AI bill anymore.

Richard Campbell [00:48:22]:
No, you know, I'm with you. Yeah, I would throw one more layer on top of that too, because you're— now we're talking about how the government of France is getting rid of Microsoft technology across the board, and that's a geopolitical conversation based on the current, uh, states of government going on right now. And it's not so much that that's a huge number of seats, it's that As you start to have examples of significant organizations building a stack that doesn't involve Microsoft and showing their which effectiveness—.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:48]:
Now can work for anybody. That's right.

Richard Campbell [00:48:51]:
That's right.

Leo Laporte [00:48:51]:
Can I interrupt just briefly so we.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:53]:
Can get a commercial in?

Leo Laporte [00:48:54]:
And we will continue with this fascinating conversation. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. I should point out, by the way, stage 3 of Insurtification does involve extracting every penny from businesses.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:10]:
Yeah, but those are consumer services, right?

Leo Laporte [00:49:12]:
Oh, okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:13]:
In other words, Microsoft's business customers are not like advertisers on Facebook. They're literally paying them every month for direct product or service.

Leo Laporte [00:49:24]:
Harder to squeeze.

Richard Campbell [00:49:25]:
It's a different— And in large IT, we think about platform changes in 4 or 5-year increments. You just can't otherwise.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:33]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:49:33]:
That's why you tend to skip a Windows version when they were coming every other year or so, because you're, you are only going to do it when you do a hardware refresh.

Leo Laporte [00:49:40]:
Yeah, makes sense.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:42]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:49:44]:
Uh, we, Richard's going too, I think, are going to Orlando.

Richard Campbell [00:49:47]:
And we are.

Leo Laporte [00:49:48]:
This episode brought to you by our sponsor ThreatLocker, uh, who's sponsoring that big Zero Trust World that we're all going to be going to in just a little bit. Let me tell you first about what ThreatLocker is. ThreatLocker is Zero Trust done right, done affordably, done easily for you. Zero Trust takes— the simplest way to describe it is it takes a proactive deny-by-default approach to everything. You can't assume that just because somebody is in your network that they're one of us, that they're safe, that they're— you can't let them do anything they want. Modern attacks love hiding inside endpoints. You know, your employee takes a laptop home, It gets infected, they bring it back. Now they're inside the network and so is the bad guy.

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Richard Campbell [00:51:32]:
You.

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Leo Laporte [00:53:21]:
ZTW26. Zero Trust World TWIT 26 for the year, right? Make sure you come to uh, Steve, Steve Gibson's presentation. It's the last presentation of day one. We thank ThreatLocker so much for their support. ThreatLocker.com Twit. Richard, we're getting a, uh, a podcast studio for you so you can do Windows Weekly from there, which will be fun.

Richard Campbell [00:53:44]:
Yeah, I'm going to check up a couple of run-as while I'm there too.

Leo Laporte [00:53:46]:
I bet you are.

Richard Campbell [00:53:47]:
One of them books. It's a great smart people at that show.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:50]:
Yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:53:51]:
Don't, you don't miss out the opportunity to get face to face with clever folks, have some good conversations.

Leo Laporte [00:53:56]:
All right, let's, uh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, uh, your conversation.

Richard Campbell [00:53:59]:
I think you hit that timing right on there.

Leo Laporte [00:54:01]:
Okay, we got everything.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:02]:
This was, yeah, yeah, just, just to reiterate I, I don't remember the last time I felt this good about Windows. It's— yeah, there's a lot of quality in— it's been so long. I mean, Windows has been a second-class citizen at Microsoft for so long, I forget what this feels like. But there's deep engineering work occurring that will improve the quality of the product and the security. They're adding specific security, I would say, features across the board. They've been doing this pretty much for the past year or so. There's this new silicon coming, not just from Qualcomm but from Intel and AMD as well, which may or may not enable specific, uh, new features we don't know about yet. There's some, uh, um, vagueness to this, but something good is happening, right? I mean, it's like, I don't even— it's so unfamiliar of a feeling.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:57]:
I don't know how to react to it. It's like, is this real? Like, is this I like your graphic.

Leo Laporte [00:55:03]:
With the blue screens.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:06]:
Yeah, I mean, Microsoft in their stupid way during the Windows 10 timeframe, one of their many attempts at plain English, which they thought would be better, would literally put the phrase, "Something happened," on a computer that was rebooting because of a hardware fault or whatever the failure was. And it's like, guys, if the Mac, remember the Mac bomb thing? If that taught us anything, it's like people who are serious, experienced saying a horrible computer problem. Do not want cuteness. Um, yeah, they just wanted to be fixed. And, uh, so that was misguided. But, um, that's— anyway, that's part of our, you know, we have a couple of phrases in the Windows world these days like a hard computer problem, you know, etc., etc. But something happened is, uh, is one of them. And in this case, something is happening and it's clearly positive and So like I said, it's been a while.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:00]:
Like it's been a long time. I'm super to be excited back.

Richard Campbell [00:56:03]:
Windows went through intentional neglect, right? Like I think it was very much the organization trying to convince Windows, you are not the center of the world anymore.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:11]:
Yep. Yeah. It was like a punishment, you know?

Richard Campbell [00:56:13]:
Yeah. And now, now they've neglected it enough that it's genuinely suffering. It's harming the business. And so it's like, okay, time to put some focus and some talent into the equation and see if we can make it the product it ought to be. You know, I keep thinking back to after Shalaise's presentation at Build in '23, and you and I having that conversation about the logical interface point for any work need should be the operating system. I don't care why are we talking about products. I need to achieve X at some point, which makes sense at the OS, and then various tools come into play to achieve the, your intended goal. 3 years later, we're just nowhere near it.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:58]:
I'm not going to remember the details of this, but we had a conversation on the show. This could have been a couple years ago, but you know, it's like, are there any adults left here? I mean, there was a time, though, you brought this up last week, um, you know, there was no one directly responsible for Windows. There was no one on the senior leadership team responsible for Windows. Yeah, it's like, does this product matter to anybody? And then all the horribleness, you know, it started with Windows 10, um, I mean, in a big way. And then, you know, with the Windows as a Service and the built-in crapware, the advertising, you know, that everything we— everyone, you know, the telemetry, etc., continued, got worse in Windows 11. They, you know, tighten the vice on things like using up— forcing the Microsoft account on users, etc. So it's, it's, it, it never seemed like it was ever going to get better, right? Like, you don't make something worse and then make it worse and make it worse so you could make a little, you know, make it better later. Like, it just didn't— like, that doesn't typically happen.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:57]:
So this to me is, um, a miracle is a strong word, but it's— this is not what I expected to see.

Richard Campbell [00:58:04]:
It's almost a generational shift that— I mean, I do remember In those early times, having drinks with certain senior folks and saying like, we are deliberately shaking this team up. I can't fire all these people. The cost of, you know, would be astronomical. So I have to make them uncomfortable.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:25]:
Okay.

Richard Campbell [00:58:25]:
And I'm going to do it with quarterly updates to Windows 10. You're not just making the team uncomfortable. You're making all of us uncomfortable. Like, come on.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:33]:
Yeah. It's like when, when When parents fight, the kids are the ones who really lose. And that's what I felt like as a kid.

Richard Campbell [00:58:39]:
You even use that line. It's like nobody likes it when mommy and daddy are fighting, right? But we're past that now. And I think a lot of the folks that were going to go are gone. The ones that have stuck around are waiting for something new and having new leadership and also having genuine pain. Like this is a crappy way to do this. But it is also what has happened. And now presumably we're changing gears, and you know, the eye of Satya is upon them. I used to— yeah, I heard that line from the Gates point of view.

Richard Campbell [00:59:12]:
It's like folks say, oh my God, yeah, you do not want Bill's direct attention. It's like the eye of Sauron stares down upon you.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:19]:
Yeah, no one's— no one's like, yay, he knows who I am!

Richard Campbell [00:59:21]:
You're like, no, no, it's like, crap, oh no, right?

Paul Thurrott [00:59:25]:
You don't want— you do not want No. Yeah. So, you know, like I said, I, I, I, maybe just to maybe drive the point home a little even harder is I don't see anything in any of this that is concerning. Um, there are details we don't know about those two big initiatives. I mean, for sure, that 100%, that, that's, that's But, something. you know, we'll see. And, and there are questions around the timing and, and what we call these things. And, you know, I, I use Windows 12 as an easy shorthand, but Whatever.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:52]:
I mean, uh, this stuff will all become clearer over time. I feel like we're going to see these X2-based laptops sooner rather than later, which is fantastic. Um, I— this, this seems good to me. Now look, this, it's— this is the community. I mean, we're have, uh, gonna oh.

Richard Campbell [01:00:09]:
There'S a lot of things wrong from here.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:12]:
Yeah, right. If they raise the, uh, hardware requirements for Windows 12, you know, people are going to freak out. Whatever. So we'll see, we'll we'll see, see what happens. You know, I to I want don't know. I don't, I don't want to give them the benefit of the doubt, actually. I don't think they deserve that. But I, like I said though, I don't— there's nothing that was coyly worded in such a way that was concerning.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:34]:
I think things were vaguely worded because they just can't talk about it right now for whatever reason. I, you know, I'm sure this is going to be fairly complicated, but I, like I said, I'm, I'm so unfamiliar with this feeling I'm doubting it, you know. But to me, this looks good. So I, like I said, I haven't, I haven't been able to say that in a while.

Richard Campbell [01:00:57]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:58]:
I can't even remember. I don't know. I forget. It's too been long.

Richard Campbell [01:01:01]:
Like you said, it's been a decade easy.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:03]:
Easy. Yeah. Yeah. More, more than a decade. Yeah. Well, you know, minor things, like I said, like Windows 10 was kind of a nice rebound from Windows 8, but it did all, you know, but it, but the legacy there is mixed because of all the un-certification that it brought with it as well.

Richard Campbell [01:01:18]:
Well, that's part of the side effect of neglect is you don't have a senior person saying no to all these adjacent teams. And so, you know, the effort to play ball, you get all this incertification from adjacent teams, right? There's there to nobody say— I also.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:32]:
Feel like a lot of this is just, there's no direct oversight upper level because the upper level executives, the people who are above like Windows as an organization, right? Have other concerns, right? And for 10 years-ish, it was cloud computing and Azure. For the past, what would it be, 3 years now, right?

Richard Campbell [01:01:53]:
17 minutes. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:55]:
It's been all AI all the time.

Richard Campbell [01:01:59]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:00]:
So, you know, Windows was given specific directions about the types of things they needed to do, but the specifics of what they did were up to them. And I don't think there was— there were many good people left, frankly.

Richard Campbell [01:02:12]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:12]:
You know, so you're just going to listen.

Richard Campbell [01:02:14]:
If you're ambitious at Microsoft, be on the Windows team is not a thing to do, right? For a long time it was cloud, and now obviously it's sprinted over to AI. Like, you're not even third or fourth.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:26]:
I I did, did make this you observation, know, probably at many points, but, uh, the one thing that is interesting about AI from the perspective of Windows is that Windows is an obvious place to put AI functionality. It's an operating system, right? Um, you're seeing Google and Apple do the same thing with their operating systems. You're going to see it in Well, you already have, but I mean, obviously it's in Microsoft 365 as well because there are these productivity scenarios. But as far as things like orchestrating and where the actual models are gonna live, et cetera, that's Windows. Windows, Like the little silver lining to the AI nonsense is that Windows didn't have a role to play in cloud computing at all other than manufactured nonsense. With AI, it's like, no, this has a central role to play. You know, if AI is actually very important to Microsoft, it behooves them to make sure Windows is as good as it can be, because otherwise they're going to use a Mac or Linux or Chromebook.

Richard Campbell [01:03:19]:
And plus, it could be the ultimate gateway drug.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:22]:
Yeah, right.

Richard Campbell [01:03:23]:
Yeah, it really could be. It couldn't be an also-ran. It could be the logical place for a billion users to start, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:03:31]:
So anyway, there's my good news, probably for the decade. We'll see. We'll watch it crumble in the weeks.

Leo Laporte [01:03:37]:
Don't worry.

Richard Campbell [01:03:37]:
No, we'll Your soul will be crushed in near— in, in good time. Just give us a minute, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:03:42]:
This is like the Grinch's heart, uh, was, you know, came back to life or whatever when he saw the little kid.

Richard Campbell [01:03:48]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:49]:
Um, you know, we'll see what happens. Um, and then, okay, so moving on from that topic, but it's a big one. I— this is— this, this is kind of snowballed in a way that I did not anticipate. It's pretty cool. Um, yesterday, like I said, was Patch Tuesday. Uh, We've already talked about these updates multiple times because this stuff was in the Insider Program, you know, Dev Beta. It made its way to the Release Preview channel last month, probably. It was part of the Week D update that they shipped a couple of days late 2 weeks ago, but now rolling out in what I call stable are those features, right? And so again, I'm not going to beat this to death, but the agent settings supports more languages.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:30]:
There's the cross-device runtime— sorry, resume improvements. So if you have an Android phone, that stuff works on more devices. There's a couple more features. The Windows MIDI services stuff, that's not going to impact too many people. The Smart App Control improvement where you can now toggle it on and off like an actual feature, that's pretty cool. And then the Windows Hello Enhanced Sign-in Security improvement, we can— it has to be a supported fingerprint reader. I've never seen one, but you can at some point buy an external fingerprint, fingerprint sensor and use it with a desktop PC or laptop or whatever. And sign in and retain the Windows Hello ESS advantages without having to give that up.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:10]:
So that's, that's good. And maybe someday we'll have a facial recognition system. It's hard to say, but that stuff is rolling up now. So you should really get that. This is tied in a small way, I suppose, to all the engineering reliability security stuff, Microsoft introduced Secure Boot in— he says that as a Canadian for some reason— in Windows 8, right? And that's why we forget that, because as far as everyone's concerned, Windows 8 was that terrible full-screen interface, touch-first, etc. But actually— click me, click me. Yeah, but there were a lot of really good technical improvements in that release. You know, File Explorer got dramatically faster, you know, etc.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:55]:
But there were desktop improvements. Secure Boot requires a certificate. It's stored in your PC's firmware, what we used to call the BIOS. That's actually like the, what do you call it? UEFI or UEFI, right? UEFI, whatever. If you bought a computer in 2025, almost guaranteed. If you bought a computer probably the second half of 2024, you already have the latest new generation secure boot certificates, you're all set. If you have an older computer and it's still supported by Windows 11, you will be getting a firmware update sometime this next, I don't know, couple months, I think before— I think this switchover is happening in June to ensure that you're up to date with this new generation of certificates. The, the current gen, previous gen, I guess, are expiring in June.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:47]:
So they have to be refreshed. Secure Boot, you know, obviously is uh, important, and unless you like Linux, I guess, uh, in which case it becomes a problem depending on which distribution you're using. But, um, it protects your, um, computer at boot time, right? Because there are vulnerabilities that can try to attack the machine while you're booting before you get into Windows, and that's what that's for. Um, so Microsoft has worked with PC makers, etc. So, um, this is something that will happen. So if you have like a, you know, an older Surface or an older PC of whatever kind, um, you're going to be a firmware update. So have fun. We all like those updates.

Richard Campbell [01:07:26]:
And one of the major providers is change servers and things like it's, it's really going to be very breaking if you've got an old machine that you've left off through this year. Next year when you turn it on, you're going to be really sad.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:39]:
I guess the, I mean, according to Microsoft, this would be interesting to kind of see what this looks like in real world terms. But the computers will still work, right?, but you'll you'll be, have a reduced level of security protection, I think, specifically around the, the boot time, protections. You know, I feel like boot time vulnerabilities are similar to the notion that like, text messages are easily intercepted and thus are not good to use for like 2FA. Like, I think we all sort of understand this, but I, it's not clear to me that like, this is actually widespread. Like, I don't really know don't know I how big of a problem that is in the real world, but I can tell you, man, your computer will complain mightily if this isn't on or up to date. And by mightily, what I mean is you might find yourself having to type in a BitLocker GUID, which you'll have to get from wherever that's stored. If you're an individual, it's gonna be up in OneDrive. And that's a lot of fun.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:39]:
I do that a lot.

Richard Campbell [01:08:42]:
It's awesome. Yeah, typing in those GUIDs is a gas. Oh, it's the best.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:46]:
Feel I like there could be an easier system for this, but there isn't. So is what it, 25?

Richard Campbell [01:08:53]:
When those patches start rolling out, I'm just gonna dig around and say, what's some old machine that I'm likely to turn on again? And just light 'em all up and let 'em go through their patch twitches. I mean, I don't have the problem you have where you have boxes of the bloody things, but.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:06]:
I have typed in a 25, I believe it's 25-character BitLocker GUID at least 10 times since we got to Mexico a month ago. Yeah, it's good.

Richard Campbell [01:09:13]:
It does, it does make me— I still have a stack of machines from a couple of friends who, who send them to me after they're done with them to distribute to kids who need computers. Like, I really got to get those things out the door. Yeah, before the summer.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:26]:
That's a— that could be a blocker, you.

Richard Campbell [01:09:28]:
Yeah, because.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:28]:
Know.

Richard Campbell [01:09:28]:
I had them to a machine that just became a little problem now. Yeah, so it's definitely an incentive to not take any more, make sure I get rid of all the ones I got.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:38]:
Yeah, I need a little— this has got list, but there's, um, there's probably a known good list of like Linux distributions that can work if Secure Boot just stays on, but most of them cannot. And that means you have to go into the BIOS and turn it off, which is a huge problem. And then you think boots and you have to type in you the, know, and then you're in Linux, you're like, all right, I don't want to use this anymore, got to go back to Windows. Yeah, good luck. Uh, yeah, it's just, it's, it's a, it's fun. It's, um, I don't, I don't recommend this for the faint of heart, but it's, uh, you know, it's something that's.

Richard Campbell [01:10:09]:
Gonna keep happening every few years, right, until smooth this process out. This is the first time for Secure Boot having a complete certificate replacement.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:17]:
So, right, right. And and obviously, you get the feeling like they probably put this off as long as they could, you know, like, we don't want to do this, we have to do this, we don't want to do this, we have to do it.

Richard Campbell [01:10:27]:
Okay, we're gonna— yeah, well, and plus there's so much pressure to make all these certificates shorter lifespans, right? Which will— because of— right, right, because of other hijacking.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:38]:
Well, hopefully going forward you're running, you know, Windows in this case, and obviously you can trigger a firmware update from Windows Update and the thing reboots, and it's a lot of fun. You know, if you want to ever hear how loud your fan can get in your computer, this is a good way to do it.

Richard Campbell [01:10:52]:
This is the way, yeah. Everything turns up to maximum when you're on a BIOS update. Oh yeah, sure. Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:57]:
Yeah, it's like the smallest chip in the world. Apparently it requires a 250-watt power supply to get it. It's crazy. But okay, um, this one just happened today, uh, and I don't understand this. Um, Microsoft announced 3 improvements to Windows Store for developers. So I, I almost skipped right over it, but the third of the 3 was something called Store CLI, meaning Microsoft Store Command Line Interface. So if you open a terminal window right now in Windows 11 and type store, you will see this UI. It's, it's bizarre.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:28]:
Um, it's mostly exactly what Winget is already, the Windows package manager, right? So you probably know you could bring up a terminal window Type winget search Brave and it will tell you what you can do with Brave. And I think in Brave's case, Brave is a good example of an app where you could install it from their web repository, essentially the winget repository, or from the store. And if you install from the store, there's a product ID which is an alphanumeric code, which is probably— it looks like 15 characters-ish. Um, so it's not, you know, you can't look at the number and understand what it is, but you can search and find out what it is. You can install that way. And so, you know, I use scripts to bulk install all the apps that I want, and most of them— well, yeah, at this point over 50% come from the store. But there's that. You can also use it, like I said, you can install, you can update, right? There's a command, uh, you know, winget upgrade or update --all --silent, um, will update everything that needs to be updated.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:24]:
And that's kind of cool because it works across both repositories. So you've installed apps from the web, you've installed from the store, it will just update all of them basically. I mean, there are exceptions, but basically works pretty good. So what's the point of this thing? I'm not— I have to be honest, I don't know. It may be AI, to be honest, because part of the thing that's unique about this thing, it does the things that Winget does, right? So you can search for an app, you can install an app, you can update an app. There's a specific command to update all apps, right? It's a different syntax than winget, but whatever, it works. Well, actually it doesn't work similarly, it happens in the background, but it, you know, all intents. The one thing that is unique is what I'm going to call like browsing.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:12]:
So, um, it has this specific syntax. You can type in, uh, store browse-apps and then some other term. There's a list of these in like, so for example, top-free will— in actually a pretty nice for text formatted thing— will give you the list of apps that are the top downloaded apps that are free at this moment in the store. So presumably if you did this tomorrow, it might be a little bit different, right? And so looking at it when I did it, it's like WhatsApp, Spotify, iTunes— iTunes, Jesus— uh, Discord, ChatGPT, Windows Scan— hilarious, that's a Windows 8 tool, by the way, we don't have a scan, we don't have a modern scan app in Windows because whatever, You get the idea. But so why, like, why, like, why, why do this? Like I said, I think I'm guessing right now. Not a lot of evidence here, but I think this browsing bit speaks a little bit to why you would want AI to be able to control this, right? AI could control WinGet very easily. It's a command line utility. But sure, this is when you ask it something like, hey, I would like a free app that is a Photoshop alternative, you know, and it could say, okay, here's the list that are available in the store.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:23]:
And because it would use this in the back, you know, it'd be controlling this in the background. So I, I'm gonna guess and say that's why. But I— but why not just update Winget?

Richard Campbell [01:14:31]:
Because Winget also works with— well, Winget could have a flag for store only, right?

Leo Laporte [01:14:36]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:14:37]:
I mean, I know there's folks that are very nervous about Winget because it is so broad-reaching where Everything's in the Store. You're putting some good parameters around it. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:47]:
This one is a little confusing to me. It's cool.

Richard Campbell [01:14:49]:
We just did a.NET Rocks episode middle of January with Shmuley Englard, who works on the Store team, and he was talking about the advantages of packaging up your apps to be deployed through Store.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:00]:
So listen, full stop, very general but very strong advice. You install apps on Windows, get the store version first if it's there. If it's not, then you go to the big thing.

Richard Campbell [01:15:11]:
When you tell a store CLI update, you know you're only getting updates from store.

Leo Laporte [01:15:15]:
That's right.

Richard Campbell [01:15:16]:
Yep. When you use Winget for updating apps, it uses whatever that app uses for an updater, which could be anything.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:22]:
Yeah. So the, the asterisk here is that Microsoft has loosened the controls on the store enough that you as an app developer could put your app in the store. It doesn't have any of the background licensing stuff, which is always very liberal in, and like Affinity did this when Affinity 2 was the thing at the time, Affinity Photo 2, Designer, and whatever the other one was called, you could get it from the store. Actually, that name— I know, I'm sorry, that's not true. This is an example of an exception. So you would get it from the store, but when you downloaded the app from the store, you would then have to sign into your Affinity account in the app. Like, you weren't getting the licensing from the store, you were getting it— you get it directly from Affinity. So the only The only benefit in that case of getting it from the store is you have maybe one source for apps and it's like, whatever, it doesn't, doesn't hurt you.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:08]:
But the updating is not, in this case, it doesn't have to come from the store, right? I mean, probably most of them or a lot of them do come from the store. That's what I want. But I think in Affinity's case, and I don't think the new version's even in the store, but at least in version 2, I believe the updates just, it was as if you got it from the web, right? So there's a little bit of confusion there, but the, Yeah, I don't see how this changes anything. I don't know, it's, it's very interesting to me. I suppose one thing I maybe should try to look into is if you use Winget to update an app like that where you're actually— the updates actually come from the web and then you use the Store app to update and download that app, does that change it? I I you know, I don't, don't, don't know. It just happened today, but I'm a little bit confused by this. Um, so we'll see. It's prettier looking than Winget if that matters.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:56]:
It has nice, more nicely formatted output.

Richard Campbell [01:16:59]:
Put, you know, uh, version of Windows, right? I remember NT 3.1.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:04]:
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, like, uh, when I went back to college in the early '90s, like, I, I used to have to format reports from like 3 dBASE Plus or something. And yeah, you know, it was text-based, so you could draw like lines around, like, and make a box around text and stuff. And it would, you know, like, this kind of formatting was very important. If you do anything with command lines on in whatever environment, I. You'll see some that are kind of fun. They have rainbow colors and, you know, text-based graphics and stuff. And the store, when— if you just type in store, you'll see that the store CLI logo is text-based graphics in kind of a rainbow pattern.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:39]:
Um, so you can do fun stuff. By the way, I didn't intend— I never even thought to talk about this or write about this, but last weekend, um, I used Edit, which is the Microsoft command line editor, text editor, to write an entire article, a really long article. Um, and I loved it. Like, like, I love it. Like, it is literally like an MS-DOS, you know, text editor, like you would get with like maybe like a you programming, know, like Turbo C++ or Microsoft's whatever the Microsoft— what it was called— Microsoft Quick QuickSee or whatever it was called, uh, back in the day. Um, it was— it's awesome. Like, and it runs in a terminal window, so as you resize that window, you can use like Ctrl+Minus to make the text bigger. It just auto-wraps, you know, corrects itself.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:35]:
It's honestly, it's pretty awesome.

Leo Laporte [01:18:37]:
Like, it's— I love TUIs. I'm so glad TUIs are happening.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:41]:
Yeah, the only thing it doesn't do, which unless I'm missing something, is you can't right-click on a file in File Explorer and say Open with Edit. It.

Leo Laporte [01:18:48]:
That's the one thing, the terminal limitation. Some terminals you can click with your mouse. Kitty, uh, Ghost— oh no, it supports.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:55]:
Inside the terminal, the mouse works fine. What I mean is like you're in the, you're in the GUI, you see the icon for the file, I can't right-click it and say open in that thing. I have to open terminal and then file open, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:19:06]:
They should have coded it with Claude and it would be able to.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:09]:
I think they coded it in Rust.

Leo Laporte [01:19:11]:
Yeah, Rust has a great, uh, Ratatouille is its TUI interface. All of my two— I do a lot of TUIs with Claude, and I always use Ratatouille. Rest. I bet you that's Vibe-coded.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:22]:
Yeah, maybe. It's pretty— by the way, it's a nice, it's a nice editor. Yeah. Um, okay. Uh, and then the other, the final, uh, Direct Windows story is, I want to say yesterday, or at least this week, they released new Insider builds to Dev and Beta channels. They're both on different streams or builds. I don't know what you call this, build number stream. I don't know, I don't know what the term is, but they're technically both on 25H2, uh, and they both get the same features.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:51]:
There's nothing major. Emoji 16.0, so a couple of new little graphics, and then some, uh, small improvements to camera, uh, control. So if you go into Settings, there's basic and advanced controls for cameras, and if your camera supports pan and/or tilt, those will be made available in the UI in the Settings app. I mean, it's— I know, super exciting. Um, and that's it.

Richard Campbell [01:20:18]:
There you go.

Leo Laporte [01:20:19]:
Well, there you go. I'd like to talk to you— there was an ad that says— I remember in the— I said, I'd like to talk to you about impotence. I don't know what it was.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:33]:
It happens to everyone. Um, It's not your fault. Well, actually, it's probably your fault, but.

Leo Laporte [01:20:40]:
I'd like to talk to you about your mattress. Uh, this portion of Windows Weekly brought to you by my mattress. It's talking right now.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:48]:
Helix Sleep.

Leo Laporte [01:20:49]:
I love my Helix mattress. Uh, you will too, by the If you way. have— have have you, uh, you gone to the website, or are you getting ready for the— you know, uh, up here in the northern hemisphere, it's getting a little chilly. If you're living in Boston, it's freezing. I imagine Mukunji's not much better. Are you spending more time indoors? You're probably spending more time in bed. I know I do with the covers pulled up and my electric blanket on high. It's a great time to invest in a new mattress.

Leo Laporte [01:21:20]:
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Leo Laporte [01:21:52]:
They make it on order So it's assembled, packaged, and shipped from their Arizona, beautiful Arizona facility within days of you placing your order. It couldn't be fresher. And you open it up and man, you smell the fresh desert air. You should do what we did. We realized, and I've read it somewhere, after 8 to 10 years you should get a new mattress. They wear out. You kind of forget that, but they do. It starts to sag a little.

Leo Laporte [01:22:17]:
It starts a little motion transfer and all sorts of stuff. So we went, we looked around and looked at reviews, found Helix. Man, the reviews are incredible. Did the Helix Sleep Quiz too. That matches you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences. We like a firm mattress, you might like a soft one. So you get to say, you know, what you want, plus how you sleep, whether you're a side sleeper, stomach sleeper, back sleeper, that kind of thing. They have that.

Leo Laporte [01:22:42]:
That's— they literally can tune it into that. And it works. In a Wesper sleep study, Helix measured the sleep performance of participants after after switching from their old mattress to a Helix mattress. And here's what they found. And I would say this is anecdotally, this has been my experience exactly. 82% of the participants saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle. That's the most important one, the one that for health clears your brain of those, you know, whatever that is, the waste that gets in up there. Participants also on average achieved 25 more minutes of deep sleep per night.

Leo Laporte [01:23:18]:
That's that's a, a huge improvement. Let me just see what my deep sleep was last night on my Helix mattress. Oh, my sleep was great. Yeah, 28 minutes. Okay. That, that for me is— you don't do that much deep sleep at night. I've had some, some nights I get as much as an hour, and I have to say on my Helix, and I've had those days, I feel great. I'm happy with half an hour.

Leo Laporte [01:23:44]:
That's even great. Participants on average achieve 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night. Actually, you know, I, I have, um, just exported all my sleep data. I should put Claude on it for the last 6 years. And I just— I will, I'll show you the graph. I bet you, I— you can pinpoint where I got my Helix Sleep. Suddenly sleep gets better and better. Time and time again, Helix Sleep remains the most awarded mattress brand.

Leo Laporte [01:24:09]:
Like I said, the reviews are amazing. Forbes, take a look, or Wired and everywhere. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door with free shipping in the US. That's nice. And you can rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The Happy with Helix Guarantee provides a risk-free, customer-first experience, ensuring you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. But I got to tell you, you're not getting— I'm not, I'm not sending mine back. Love our Helix.

Leo Laporte [01:24:37]:
Go to helixsleep.com/windows those right now for 27% off sitewide. It's their President's Day sale, Best of Web, and it's exclusively for listeners of Windows Weekly. That's helixsleep.com/windows for 27% off the President's Day sale, Best of Web. This offer ends February 25th. Please make sure you enter our show name after checkout so they know we sent you. And if you're listening after the sale ends, no fear, check them out. Great deals always at helixsleep.com/windows. helixsleep.com/windows.

Leo Laporte [01:25:14]:
Back to Windows Weekly with Paul and Richard.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:20]:
Hello, Paul. I think we talked about Microsoft Rings last week.

Richard Campbell [01:25:25]:
We did.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:26]:
It feels like it was a million years.

Leo Laporte [01:25:27]:
It does, doesn't it? It's so funny.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:29]:
Um, at that time Microsoft is not predicting, at least not yet. Last year, remember, they said they were going to spend at least $80 billion on infrastructure in the fiscal year. They it spent, was like $85-ish. The numbers this year have gone up $35-ish billion each quarter, predicting somewhere $140, $150 billion if things don't change. Right after the show, or I think right as the show was ending, Google/Alphabet announced their earnings. They're doing great. They're doing fine. But one of the things they said is like, "We're going to spend $175 to $185 billion this fiscal year on AI CapEx, AI infrastructure." And then Amazon announced earnings and like, "Yeah, we're going to spend $200 billion this year." It's like, "Guys, what the frick?" I don't know what's going on here.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:22]:
So we get Microsoft probably $150 billion plus, you get Google up to $185 billion, And now Amazon's $200 billion. And then you add in Meta and whatever else, and I think the number total committed by big tech is like $650 billion or somewhere in there. And yeah, I guess we haven't learned the.

Richard Campbell [01:26:40]:
This is past the.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:40]:
Lesson.

Richard Campbell [01:26:40]:
Money they have in the bank anymore. This is now, we are going to start borrowing money to build more data centers.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:44]:
Yeah, I'm not going to write about this, but one thing that happened since then is Google raised, I don't know, $20-something billion— I think they do it in a stock sale or something. They're leveraging. They're going to borrow this money essentially. And so is Microsoft, but they already are, by the way. A lot of borrowing here. And this is like these big tech companies becoming more lower margin, higher cost hardware assets and real estate assets. They're becoming very different companies. I mean, even though in the face of things you're like, well, The transition from cloud computing to AI is pretty obvious, but no, the costs are astronomical.

Richard Campbell [01:27:29]:
Well, the transition to cloud was the thing, right? You went from a zero-cost-to-distribute product software to owning land and concrete and buildings.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:40]:
I know, it's crazy. Power systems. Now Microsoft's moving into Three Mile Island. I mean, it's all kinds of weird stuff going on. It's just bizarre. So there's that.

Richard Campbell [01:27:50]:
They're funding Constellation restarting Reactor One.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:55]:
Now, I keep having to say this because it's true, but I'm not a financial expert, but I am fascinated to see that finally Wall Street is pushing back. So the analysts on the call, I listen to the Apple call now since last show, I listened to the Microsoft call live when it happened. I've not listened to Alphabet, Google. I read the transcript actually of the CEO statement anyway on Google, but Amazon, no, I don't even know if there is a call. But analysts are like, please explain to me how this is going to make sense ever. And there's not really a good explanation in my mind, but everyone else is doing it, I think, is the rationale. It's kind of hard to say. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:28:38]:
No, it definitely seems like a groupthink. And it's, again, I think there's this whole whole dynamic between these three specifically, between Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, to who's going to own the cloud going forward. Like, the three of them now have such an advantage over the rest of the world, right? They're just racing each other.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:56]:
I wish I could remember the but, number, um, Apple— Apple's spending on CapEx, they're the only company of the top 5 big tech that went down year over year. And, uh, but I'm gonna— this is off the top of my head, this could be wrong, but I believe their, their number I mean, remember Microsoft was like 37, somewhere in there, $37 billion. Their number for the last quarter was like 2 or something, or maybe 12. It was some smallish number. I mean, but it was less than, way less than anyone else and had gone down year over year. Like, it's amazing. They're going to be in good shape, I think. And then just some smaller companies I'm just throwing up because they're kind of within our sphere of interest a little bit.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:39]:
$12.5 Qualcomm, billion. 2.5 billion in up 5%. revenues, Um, one thing.

Richard Campbell [01:29:44]:
That'S going to come from, right, like, this is what we're excited about. Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:47]:
Um, those guys are gearing up to deliver, uh, AI data center chips as well, by the way. So that's not happened yet, but they're working on that. And, um, they're— the one thing they have in common with a lot of the big tech companies, um, Amazon, I believe Alphabet, I think even Apple, although that sounds impossible, but definitely Microsoft saw a lot of value disappear the second they announced their earnings. That also happened with Qualcomm, unfortunately, because memory prices are going to impact them, of course. And their prediction for the quarter we're currently in was below expectations. And so they suffered a small thing there.

Richard Campbell [01:30:27]:
Being up 5% was not enough.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:29]:
No. No. I mean, Google— well, I don't see it here. I didn't write it down, but Google was up 18%. Amazon was up double-digit percents. Microsoft was up double-digit. All of them them saw our major value fall apart right there. Um, and then Spotify is a small company, but well, you know, small compared to these companies.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:48]:
Um, I, I've just thrown this in here because, uh, profitable, you know, in Spotify's case, you got to really read between the lines on that one, but they are profitable. Um, they have over 750 million monthly average users now. Now, 290 million of them are paying premium subscribers, right? The rest are are ad-supported. But still, like, that's that's like— a big number. That's a big number. That's a— that's a Windows number. That's like a, you know, like an Apple platform number. That's— it's pretty good.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:17]:
And those customers, well, well, they get paid by those customers in some way every month, but in a very good way for the premium. So 290 million of those guys are paying— I don't know what the base price of Spotify is, right? It's got to be close to $12 or $15 or whatever.

Richard Campbell [01:31:33]:
And there's this whole conversation going on about AI-generated music inside of Spotify, right? That, yeah, you know, the number of times I turn— I ask Spotify for to play something and then it just continues on, and if you're not paying close attention, like, it's way off the playlist. What are you playing now?

Paul Thurrott [01:31:49]:
Yeah, it's— I, I, there are, um, particular bars and restaurants in Mexico City that are playing what is clearly, um, it's like remake radio. So it's like a song you know but not the version you know by the band that made it, you know, that kind thing. And it's like, did you— is this cheaper or something? Like, what is this? It's kind of weird.

Richard Campbell [01:32:08]:
Like, there's at least— yeah, lots of chill versions of Pink Floyd.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:12]:
Exactly. They're always chill. Like, that's a part of it. They're chill versions. Like, and it's like, okay, the cool vibes, you know, whatever. Well, yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:32:20]:
Just how far are we from that just being 100% synthetic?

Paul Thurrott [01:32:24]:
I— depending on what you listen to, it could be happening right now, you know?

Richard Campbell [01:32:27]:
Yeah. That's not right. Um, then, you know, another Spotify pays artists much anyway.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:33]:
It's that like now.

Richard Campbell [01:32:33]:
Now they won't spend anything on them.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:36]:
I'm gonna find out the guy with the oboe is actually like a guy with a laptop and it's like an AI thing. That would be great, because if it's not, I'm gonna beat him to death with that instrument.

Richard Campbell [01:32:46]:
Um, it's OboeGBT, stop hurting me.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:50]:
I don't pay for it, it's okay. Yeah, I know, that's the problem. Um, okay, so this literally happened— this happened like on the same day at the same time, basically. So Anthropic announced, um, we thought it was gonna be Sonnet 5, but it was Cloud Opus like, 4.6, okay, um, which is an, uh, an agentic AI model for coding specifically. But remember, this was also the basis of their Cowork product, and now this thing is being used for that kind of thing more and more often, right? So it's, it's also like a productivity thing. This is when they updated their, um, or released or whatever their Excel and PowerPoint agents or whatever, right? But in the time it took me to write that article, OpenAI announced— and I swear they must have come out like at the same time, 20 minutes.

Leo Laporte [01:33:40]:
Excuse me, they were that close.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:42]:
Yeah, minutes. They had to have been, uh, chat or something called GPT-5.3 Codex. So Codex is their AI coding model, and guess what? It's also really good at these productivity things. Like, it's exactly the same thing. So This is no big surprise. I mean, we've seen this with Microsoft too. I mean, all the major AI guys, it seems like anytime any of them does anything that's of significance, the others like just trip over each other to do exactly the same thing. It was just kind of comical, um, how this just like, you happened, know, just like simultaneously almost.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:16]:
It was really funny. Um, not to me because I had to keep writing, but you know, uh, and then, uh, probably last month I think it was, OpenAI revealed that their free and Go tiers, they were going to start to introduce ads because, you know, that's what's going to make AI make sense financially. Um, and then as, as promised, that started appearing. I think— I don't know if it's US only, but, um, it might be US only. Uh, but you're, you're starting to see it. So you have to be an adult, you have to be logged in. Um, they promise this stuff's not going to appear anywhere near sensitive topics, things like health, mental health, politics, etc. They also promise this will not impact the quality of the result.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:00]:
Like, in other words, the Anthropic claim, or, you know, fearmongering maybe, is that by having ads in the product, they will be beholden to the advertisers and thus might tailor the responses to you them, know, in the same way that you might see like a sponsored result in Google Search or in any app store, by the way, right? Like including Apple's. Um, but they say they're not going to do And, that. you know, I trust them. They're not robots or anything. Interesting. Um, so that's fine. I don't know. Um, and then DuckDuckGo has a private anonymous AI called DuckAI, and they just added real-time AI voice chat to that product, which works as you would expect.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:36]:
You have to opt into it, and of course you can opt out. And, uh, there's a little caveat here because, uh, you know, like Proton would do, they try to do everything in the most, uh, private way possible, but they're also, uh, channeling, um, your request to, say, OpenAI, I think is is the big one that they use. And they, they do say, look, there— we don't know of a way yet that this is working, but we've done this web browser thing long enough to know how this does happen, which is it's possible that OpenAI could fingerprint you based on the interactions you have with it, like that there'll be these commonalities and they'll figure out eventually, um, that you are one person. And they won't know who you are, they don't have your IP address or anything like that, But the other aspect of this is you're giving them your right? And so voice, you, you have to opt that— in, and the part of the problem is your voice is right? semi-unique, Um, and they can use that to help fingerprint you as well. So you they're, know, trying to be as open about that as possible. Um, I'm kind of hoping, Richard, that you have information about this one, because, uh, yesterday the.NET team released the first preview of.NET 11. So this will be another November release. This is a standard term, support version.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:49]:
The last one, remember, was long-term support, right?

Richard Campbell [01:36:52]:
Long-term, 3 years.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:54]:
3 years versus 2, I think.

Richard Campbell [01:36:56]:
18 months.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:56]:
Months. Every 2 Okay. Um, they describe it as, uh, major enhancements. I went through every single page of the updates. I didn't see a single major enhancement.

Richard Campbell [01:37:10]:
So that's a stretch.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:12]:
Yeah. So I was hoping you— do you— I don't— I mean, obviously before they're.

Richard Campbell [01:37:16]:
Messing with on async system is important long term.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:20]:
Okay. And that's in the runtime or the It's part libraries? of the runtime.

Richard Campbell [01:37:24]:
Yeah. And that's actually been gestating for quite a while. There's been a rethink of async going on for some time. So the fact that they're going to try and start to surface it in 11 is kind of a big deal because it's one of those realities when you know you're going to ship a version every year is that often there are features that are left dark that sit out there and are still in testing and so forth before they actually show up for anybody to see. I mean, you know what, it's also Preview 1. These things may not make it.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:50]:
Yeah, okay. I thought you were going to say there could be more coming. Um, okay, so, and there could be.

Richard Campbell [01:37:56]:
More coming, but yeah, there easily could be. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:59]:
You know, core language stuff, C#, F#, I, I don't see too much major there. Um, yeah, the things I care about, which would be WPF primarily, and then maybe Windows Forms and maybe MAUI, very minor or non-existent. I think in Windows Forms case, actually, there's nothing there. I don't know. Anyway, they announced this and I— There's.

Richard Campbell [01:38:21]:
A lot going on on MAUI at the moment that I don't think they're ready to show what they're working on yet. It'll probably be later in the year before some of those bits start to appear. MAUI is finally starting to grow up.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:34]:
The one thing I saw, let me see if I can find this. There was one thing in here I was like, wait, what is this? But I don't see it. I'm sorry. Well, whatever. There'll be further previews and betas and RCs.

Richard Campbell [01:38:50]:
Don't expect too much on Preview 1. They're just still getting this going.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:55]:
I feel like each release of.NET should in some way be a response to pain points that never got fixed or maybe were introduced by the previous version, etc.

Richard Campbell [01:39:04]:
Well, and lots of stuff they often often the first things you see in a preview, one of the things that got cut out of the previous version, right? That at some point in the build, in the development cycle, when they were getting close to release, Ken is like, we're not making this, off you go.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:16]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:39:17]:
Oh, one thing before we move on to Anthropic's fast mode, which I don't think I mentioned because I just like the, I like Anthropic's confidence. They're not just making stuff. It's like saying, hey, we know this is so valuable to you that if you're willing willing to pay double, we'll put you at the front of the queue.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:36]:
Yeah, this is why they're not— they didn't get the Siri contract, right? They were so confident that they were like, you're gonna have to pay for this. And Apple's like, yeah, we don't pay for stuff.

Richard Campbell [01:39:45]:
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:39:48]:
But there are two features in 4.6 that are documented but not turned on. One is that fast mode, although they encourage you to do it because you spend tokens. Like, I think think it's— I it's 6 times the spending Yeah, so it's.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:01]:
It'S a— it's like a little pattern.

Leo Laporte [01:40:05]:
The other thing that's interesting, they said it's not smarter, it's just faster.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:08]:
Just faster. Yeah, you know what, so it's always my advice, just wait a second, you know, just wait. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:40:15]:
And then the other thing that's— these are both research previews that they've added— is, and I think even very maybe more interesting and possibly more costly, is the ability to spawn agents. So what you will now do is you'll have, uh, one Claude code that's running a bunch of sub-Claude codes, all each running independently.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:33]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:40:34]:
At doing different parts of the task. And that's what they used to do that C compile.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:38]:
That's like, uh, that's like a video game where like you get like a multi-kill. It's like, um, token kill. Token kill. Like you're using tokens exponentially. Wow. You're like, oh, I'm out of money? What happened? Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:40:53]:
How did that happen?

Leo Laporte [01:40:53]:
Oh, don't worry, we can auto-charge you if you, if you want.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:57]:
Yeah, exactly right. You gave us our credit, your credit card number, you idiot.

Leo Laporte [01:41:01]:
Um, I have that too.

Richard Campbell [01:41:01]:
This also feels like, hey, I'm— I can see the end of the bubble coming here and I need to be able to show revenue, so I'm trying some things to make some revenue.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:09]:
This is what I— this is what.

Leo Laporte [01:41:10]:
I missed from— that's what's interesting is companies aren't doing this. Rakuten did the same thing. They had 40 agents running at once, uh, I think through the C code, uh, the 2 weeks of C code. More what Anthropic was testing— Oh, this.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:21]:
Is the guys that made the new C compiler, right? Anthropic did this.

Richard Campbell [01:41:24]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:41:25]:
With 4.6. This was a test of 4.6. And I think they only spawned up 5 or 6 subagents to do this. What they were really testing is how long can this run without going crazy, without hallucinating.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:37]:
Yeah, right.

Leo Laporte [01:41:37]:
And it ran for 2 weeks.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:37]:
Until it says, I'm sorry, Dave.

Leo Laporte [01:41:40]:
I can't do that.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:41]:
Your compiler is going to kill you now. It's going to kill you.

Richard Campbell [01:41:43]:
And back to that whole, the Excel and PowerPoint agent. Is they built those things so quickly, like you can see they're using their own tools and they're starting to accelerate.

Leo Laporte [01:41:54]:
Well, and I'm gonna talk about this.

Richard Campbell [01:41:56]:
The promise of these tools starting to come around.

Leo Laporte [01:41:58]:
I'm gonna talk about this on intelligent machines. I have a long tweet I'm gonna read, but what it's pretty clear they're doing is, at least Anthropic and probably OpenAI, is they're focusing on the coding tools first because once they get that self-improving,, then you can do writing, graphics, anything else you want.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:18]:
It is interesting that coding, you know, like everyone who were— everyone working on this stuff basically is a coder, so they write this thing that benefits them but also benefits external developers. But it's fascinating in a way that these codex-type tools, uh, lean themselves into like productivity scenarios. Like they, they— this, I don't think that they created this expecting that.

Leo Laporte [01:42:39]:
Like I— well, what happened for both, certainly for Anthropic, a little bit so much of not so much, but a little bit for OpenAI is they have a command— these Codex and Claude are command line, and they wanted to open it up to people who weren't comfortable on the command line. So they created Cowork, Anthropic's Claude Cowork, and the Codex app, by the way, only on the Mac for some reason.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:03]:
Well, that's very common with these.

Leo Laporte [01:43:04]:
Think.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:04]:
AIs.

Leo Laporte [01:43:05]:
I it's because of the security profile.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:09]:
I was gonna say it's because that's what they use. You know, like, I don't know, that's.

Richard Campbell [01:43:13]:
What it feels like.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:14]:
So, but Microsoft and OpenAI had this major partnership where they were the only big partners. Now that's different, but they were still shipping on Mac first, right? That always felt a little weird.

Leo Laporte [01:43:23]:
I don't know if they're shipping on Mac first or only, because what they said is, but if you launch Cloud Codex— Alex Jones was talking about this two weeks ago— it launches a virtual machine. It's actually slow.

Paul Thurrott [01:43:34]:
You watch, by the way, this may be related to that stuff we talked about at the top of the show, these two big initiatives. Where Microsoft wants to make Windows more secure and more reliable, maybe it is tied to this AI agent stuff. I did, without knowing this particular detail, sort of tie it to that in my brain. Like I felt like AI essentially, or especially agentic AI, was the, maybe the impetus for that, those efforts, right?

Leo Laporte [01:44:02]:
Yeah, could well be. I mean, that's the future. I would, I mean, that's my contention that that's the future, so.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:08]:
Yeah, we're gonna find out a year from now, like everything we talked about today is related related to this. Like the— yeah, uh, why is there a store CLI AI agents? You know, like, I— you could almost—.

Leo Laporte [01:44:18]:
But that TUI that you were talking about, probably genetically coded, um, it's really easy and simple and fast to write TUIs. And I think people are getting more and more comfortable, frankly.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:28]:
It's so awesome though. Like, I love it. No, like, I— I love it.

Leo Laporte [01:44:32]:
Yeah, I, I all— I'm mostly— I haven't written a GUI yet with cloud code. It's all been either command line Or, or a TUI, which is fascinating. I— yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a really nice, uh, way to work. And it's, and it's very fast. I re— I wrote, uh, and a lot of people have done this, I'm not the only one, a RSS reader, because, yeah, a big part of my.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:56]:
Job— well, it's— this is the canonical, uh, AI, you know, vibe coding, you know, example now, right?

Leo Laporte [01:45:02]:
Like, look how fast this is, you know. I don't need— and there's no— I'm I have a mouse, but I don't need a mouse. I hit return. Oh, I haven't entered the key here. But if I want to bookmark it, I can have a quick bookmark or I can actually just save it with it. Benito said, why do you, why do you type your bookmark in? Oh, you're right. So I made it, if you hit a spacebar, it automatically bookmarks it. I mean, there's it and it's super fast because I don't need, I don't want a mouse.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:28]:
I mean, just looking from, this is literally reading.

Leo Laporte [01:45:30]:
It's pure information.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:31]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:45:32]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:33]:
It's fascinating that this kind of old-school CLI is back, baby, is back. And, you know, look, if this was in like Linux or something like— yeah, I know, I get it. Like, you know, but this is like happening in Windows and the Mac. I mean, you know, I know the Mac has had a terminal forever, but I mean, but like major work occurring at that level is— it's very interesting. It's very weird.

Richard Campbell [01:45:52]:
The GUI ain't what it used to be.

Leo Laporte [01:45:55]:
Yeah, well, what the GUI was, training wheels, I uh, think. Think, for to get people used to the whole notion. Same thing with, you know, having a folder icon for files and stuff. And, and I think, uh, some of us don't need the training wheels. We're more interested in productivity and speed, efficiency, essentially, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:46:12]:
I mean, it's um, just, yeah, interestingly.

Leo Laporte [01:46:14]:
A lot of coders are turning their back on IDEs now. They're— because that's slowing them down.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:20]:
I'm just going to memorize like msbuild, you know, whatever they call the parameters or whatever. I was like, okay, I mean, you can— I mean, you can Right? Like, it's— I'm— I, you know, I.

Leo Laporte [01:46:31]:
Still use Emacs, but I'm much less interested in IDE than I used to be. A lot of times because you're not writing code You're— anymore. yeah, you're writing.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:37]:
Yeah, you're describing what you want. And yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:46:40]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:41]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:46:42]:
Let's take a little break. Come back, we have more to talk about, including the vaunted Xbox segment. And yes, it's another PowerPoint. We're going on another tour. I'm excited with that. Well, he spent some time in Scotland and he has some things to— some stories to tell. But first, a word from our sponsor, and a great sponsor this is for this particular show, Trusted Tech. If you're using Microsoft 365, there's a pretty safe bet that you're paying for licenses you don't need, or conversely, missing ones you do need.

Leo Laporte [01:47:20]:
It's, it's kind of a complicated thicket, and it's going to get worse because in July— and this is not news— but Microsoft's going to implement a significant price increase for M365, and with it, a lot more nuance. You need some help? Well, Trusted Tech is here. They help businesses of all sizes get the most out of their Microsoft investment by making sure their M365 environment is well supported and aligned with how the business actually operates. Things change too, you know. You may been perfect 2 years ago, but now you're doing more than you need to, or less. Microsoft licensing, very complicated. The options vary widely. Trusted Tech's team helps organizations understand what they have, what they need, and how to make the most of what they're paying for.

Leo Laporte [01:48:10]:
And then of course, the other side of Trusted Tech's business is they, they also provide support. But I wanted to talk about licensing because we, we've talked about the support before. I wanted to kind of focus on the licensing. If you want to make to make sure you're getting M365 done right, Trusted Tech is offering a free Microsoft 365 licensing consultation. You just go to trustedtech.team/windowsweekly365, trustedtech.team/windowsweekly365, and get a clear data-backed view of your current licenses, optimization opportunities, and next steps. You know who loves, uh, Trusted Tech? Kevin Turner. You know him, of course, former Microsoft, uh, Chief Operating Officer. Here's the quote.

Leo Laporte [01:48:54]:
He was talking to Trusted Tech. He said, you have an incredible customer reputation and you have to earn that every single day. The relentless focus you guys have on taking care of customers gives them value and differentiates you in the marketplace. He's talking about Trusted Tech. Trusted Tech also, as I said, can elevate the Microsoft support experience. With its certified support services used by some of the best and the biggest, and they save 32 to 52% compared to the average Microsoft Unified Support Agreement. Whether you're looking to fine-tune your Microsoft 365 licensing or improve the way your organization receives proactive Microsoft support, or both, Trusted Tech offers free consultations to help you understand your options. Go to trustedtech.com trustedtech.team/windowsweekly365 and submit a form to get in contact with Trusted Tech's Microsoft licensing engineers.

Leo Laporte [01:49:48]:
trustedtech.team/windowsweekly365. We thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. Now back to Paul and Richard, and, uh, time to talk about Xbox.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:04]:
Yeah, mostly about non-Xbox gaming, I guess. There's one Xbox story we didn't even cover because it seems kind of but, whatever, uh, Microsoft, uh, today announced the results, or I guess the recipients, of their second annual, uh, Xbox Excellence Awards, uh, so the uh, 2025, rendition, um, across 4 categories. So, uh, ratings in the store, player engagement, um, this is hours per play, I guess, in the first 6 weeks of release, daily active users, and units sold. Um, and I would, you know, Arc Raiders, interestingly, uh, number 1 in daily active users and units sold. Uh, player engagement, uh, number 1 was Borderlands 4. And this one blows my mind because I played this game and I know it's not true, uh, but store rating, uh, Black Ops, uh, Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, which is possibly the most frustrating game from a reliability perspective I've ever played. Um, and yes, I played Daikatana. Um, so I don't know what's going on.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:09]:
It's kind of, you know, I don't know what to say, but okay, that's fine.

Leo Laporte [01:51:13]:
Did you like Daikatana?

Richard Campbell [01:51:15]:
Well, in between the crashes, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:18]:
I mean, so is it a good game in the sense that it like was Quake graphics where it was raining all the time for the first 2 hours? I, I mean, it was okay, you know. There was a lot of— I, I I appreciate what they were trying to do.

Richard Campbell [01:51:32]:
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:34]:
You know, there's— there were problems. I think that's the way to say it.

Leo Laporte [01:51:37]:
Um, this was— was it Carmack or Romero?

Paul Thurrott [01:51:39]:
This was Romero. Romero's— this was— what was that company called? He left, uh, id and started, um, Next Software. No, what was it called? Um, what was this company called? Jesus, I can't remember.

Leo Laporte [01:51:52]:
It was a good book. I read that book that you recommend.

Richard Campbell [01:51:54]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:54]:
Uh, geez, I don't remember. It doesn't matter anyway. They— yeah, what was it called?

Leo Laporte [01:51:58]:
Legions of Doom. Doom?

Paul Thurrott [01:52:00]:
No. Oh, the book, Masters of Doom.

Leo Laporte [01:52:02]:
Masters of Doom.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:03]:
Yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:52:03]:
So the book is with Romero Games, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:52:06]:
I thought— no, I thought they had a— no, there was a name. And now it became Romero Games. Um, who put out Daikatana?

Leo Laporte [01:52:13]:
Jesus, I'm looking it up on Wikipedia.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:16]:
I know, please, it's killing me. I can't think of Like, um, this. where is this?

Leo Laporte [01:52:22]:
Ion Storm.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:23]:
Ion Storm, thank you. Okay, yeah, there was an Iron Storm.

Richard Campbell [01:52:27]:
All right, but okay, you've made a ton of money making games, so you— now you're going to make the mother of all games, unlimited budget, and you find out you have a limit in your budget.

Leo Laporte [01:52:38]:
Yeah, it turns out 40,000 copies.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:41]:
Yeah, it didn't do good. Wasn't a good game, uh, but like I said, you know, and plus, uh, you know, they suffered from that typical, uh, game engine problem where they finally got this thing together to a point where they could ship it. And then id had come out with like the Quake 2 engine. They were like, guys, like, what are you doing? And there was a big argument about, you— oh no, you have to pay for this again. Like, you know, you paid for the first one, you have to pay, you know, it's a whole— it was a whole thing. Um, I don't know, I don't know what to tell you. It's just weird. Anyway, that came and went.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:15]:
Um, and by the way, you know, Romero Games was one of the, uh, studios that was working on a game for the Xbox or Microsoft Game Studio in they— Microsoft canceled it, you know, whatever it was. Um, also didn't cover this, and interestingly tied to what we just said, uh, id Software turns 35 this year.

Richard Campbell [01:53:31]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:32]:
Um, they did some um, you early, know, PC games obviously, but to me the beginning of this was really Castle Wolfenstein 3D. And that was something— the reason I could tell there was something special happening there without knowing anything about about it was that I had an Amiga 500 at the time. It was awesome for games. My wife had a 286-based IBM PS/1, you know, the thing you bought in Sears, because, you know, that's what it was. This thing had no memory, no graphic— it had 4 levels of gray. That was the, you know, black, white, and 2 grays. Like, that was all the colors. Um, but I downloaded this game and you could play it on that computer wonderfully, other than the fact that it wasn't color.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:14]:
It was, you know, 4 grays, whatever. Um, it ran unbelievably well. And look, eventually people who programmed games to Amigas figured out how to do that kind of first-person thing, but by that point the Amiga had imploded, didn't matter. But, um, that was like an eye— that was eye-opening. And then of course they did Doom and Doom 2, unbelievable. And then Quake, which we just talked about, and Quake, um, Um, uh, what was that? Quake World, and then Quake II, and Quake III Arena, and on and on we go. But, um, yeah, 35 years.

Richard Campbell [01:54:48]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:50]:
Okay. Um, Sony also did their financial, you know, quarterly release. Their biggest business, by the way, is game and network services. That's PlayStation. Um, their revenues in that business actually declined 4.1% year over year., because of lower hardware sales. And so they sold, I think it was 8 million units of PlayStation 5 in the quarter, down from 9.5 million the year ago. But they have now sold, I think it's 92, is it in here? Yeah, 92 million. That's, um, it's a lot of machines.

Leo Laporte [01:55:23]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:25]:
I, I feel like PlayStation 4 ended up somewhere in the 120 range. Um, and I know PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 were in the 88 8 million range, somewhere in there, 85, 88, something like that. So this is pretty good. Um, and I'm pretty sure like Xbox Series X and S, I think they've sold 17 or 18 of those. So, you know, they're close. Um, yeah, yep. Uh, but they're doing great with monthly average users, their software sales are up, you know, etc. Uh, PlayStation, all that stuff's going great, so they're doing good.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:55]:
Um, Valve, I think we all sort of expected— I don't know why they announced this when they announced this, but remember back, I think it was December, they announced the Steam Machine and also that headset thing Steam Frame. And, uh, this is basically a PC in a box running Linux, well, running, um, SteamOS. And, uh, pricing to be revealed. And then we've been suffering from this memory price gouging problem, yada yada yada. Like current gen and next gen Xbox and PlayStation hardware, like a console hardware, it's running a custom AMD, uh, in this case Zen 4 CPU, which is kind of interesting. I'm kind of curious to see this thing. Um, but now they delayed it. They never announced a release date, so it's like they've delayed something they never said when it was coming, you.

Richard Campbell [01:56:43]:
Um.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:43]:
Know.

Richard Campbell [01:56:43]:
But it's not their fault. The supply chain is so messed up right now, it's, it's not easy to build anything.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:49]:
I just don't know why they even announced this. Like, I, I feel— I wonder why.

Richard Campbell [01:56:53]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:53]:
Well, whatever. They're, they're kind of— I think they've.

Richard Campbell [01:56:55]:
Been promising some test units Oh, okay. yeah, mean, So, no, I I just.

Leo Laporte [01:57:02]:
Imagine you have to get to the game publishers early.

Richard Campbell [01:57:04]:
Yeah, yeah. I bet you did. They just got the price tag for the 1,000 units they're going to need for the initial round. Oh yeah, we should wait.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:13]:
Can we just BM this or something? Yeah. Um, and, um, I didn't write about this. This could have been a tip, I guess, but, uh, Epic Games is having a winter sale right now. So if you were waiting on some particular game, you might to just check, see, because for example, one game I've been meaning to buy is the remake of Silent Hill 2. Um, somehow this game is normally— I don't know if it's $69 or $59, but it's expensive.

Richard Campbell [01:57:37]:
Still, it's an old game.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:38]:
I know. And it's half off right now, so I bought— I did. I bought that one. But GTA 5 Enhanced, if you're waiting for the next GTA, uh, also 50% off. Uh, Battlefield 6 is only off about 35%, but, um, Red Dead Redemption 2 is 75% off, so it's only $15.

Richard Campbell [01:57:55]:
Apparently they're gonna make a TV series.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:56]:
Series. They should. They could be the next, uh, what was that show called, the, um, the HBO show? Fallout? The last one? No, the, the Old West one. Uh, um, Deadwood. Deadwood.

Leo Laporte [01:58:07]:
What a great show.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:08]:
Yeah, fantastic show. Uh, anyway, yep, check that out. Um, you know, obviously all the big— all the stores have the sales over the holidays, but, um, it's kind of interesting, like beginning of February they're having a sale, so it's worth checking out. Like if you're a PC gamer, just, you know, if there's some game you weren't sure or didn't buy or whatever. Like, I should have bought that Silent Hill game back in December and I didn't. And then I was like, I'm not paying $60 or $70 for this thing, but it was half off, so that's good. Good.

Leo Laporte [01:58:37]:
Well, you know what, we're ready to go to the back of the book in just a moment. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. Paul's got a new book in the works, we're going to find out about that. Richard's been traveling, and we're gonna find out about that in just a little bit. But first, a word from our sponsor, Cashfly. Really more than a sponsor, this show is brought to you quite literally by Cashfly, our content delivery network. TWiT runs on Cashfly because our global tech-savvy audience— that's you— deserves no less than the best. When you're pushing petabytes of video and audio every month to every corner of the world, good enough CDNs just don't make it.

Leo Laporte [01:59:16]:
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Leo Laporte [02:00:29]:
Learn how you can get your first month free at cashfly.com/twit. You've heard me say it for years. Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cashfly at cachefly.com/twit. Thank you, Cashfly. Now to the back of the book. And speaking of books, Paul's gonna write another one.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:52]:
We'll say I do like the concept of degrading services.

Leo Laporte [02:00:55]:
I know, I meant— I didn't mean degrading.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:58]:
It's like, why must you degrade me? I pay for you. It's good. Yeah, so I've been working on obviously like a 25H2 version of Windows 11 Field Guide. The problem with that book is it's humongous, like it's way too big. So part of the effort there is just figuring out a way to communicate this information in a more concise way. But I think we, this came up somehow, just of course it did because, you know, I had mentioned a week or two ago some, this notion of, you know, when you think about people like me who support really the people who use Windows, but support Windows essentially, how the focus has changed over the years. Like in the you beginning, know, it was about finding the secrets that, you know, that were you like, know, and eventually there's no secrets and it's like, well, uh, helping people be more efficient or, you know, know about like maybe obscure features they wouldn't otherwise find out about, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But it seems like in recent years the focus has shifted a lot to what we would now call like the insurification stuff and how to You know, I added chapters like in the beginning, it's like how to configure this thing.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:01]:
As soon as you get out of the out-of-box experience, you're at the desktop, like what you should do right away, because a lot of bad things might happen if you're not careful, or how to correctly configure things like, you know, OneDrive folder backup or Edge, you know, Edge, whether you're going to use it or not, you know. And it kind of occurred to me that maybe there's a small subset of this book that I could do that originally I thought of as like a field, like a mini field guide or What are we going to call it? I'm just going to— I think I'm just going to call it De-Insuredify Windows 11. I have published the first preview, I guess you'll call it, of the first two chapters. Not chronologically, not the first two chapters as they'll appear in the book, just the first two I wrote to the site. So I've got one on Microsoft Edge, one on OneDrive. I've written most of what will be a setup chapter, I guess, if that makes sense. So that will be available soon as well. And I'm hoping to get this thing done by the end of February if I can.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:53]:
Like, I'm trying to do like a monthly kind of focus thing. So this is like my February focus, um, kind of get this thing cranked out. So there you go. The one, by the way, um, we— because I talked about this last week, I mentioned how if you bring up a new or recent or just reset computer and now you have the latest version of Windows, so it's 25H2, but it's also 25H2 like the January version or whatever, whatever the latest is in the, you know, the update to, I guess February now, um, they changed the behavior for OneDrive. And I, as of last week, I had done this across multiple machines multiple times, and I figured out that with rare exception, as soon as OneDrive comes up, the little icon appears, remember it's a line through it, it's updating, and then it disappears and comes back. If you click it right then go into settings and go to backup, you can— it actually, there's a little info bar and you can actually turn off OneDrive folder backup from ever happening, and it seems to never come on. And I was pretty excited about that. But of course, this leads to a related question, which is like, how long could you wait, you know? So I've spent the week since testing that, and if you're familiar with how OneDrive works when you bring up a new computer or reset computer it analyzes the files you have in OneDrive and it processes them because it has to display the stubs for those files in File Explorer.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:24]:
And that process takes some amount of time depending on how much storage you have. So I'm using almost 900 gigabytes of storage, so I, I don't remember the net number of files. I guess it doesn't matter. It takes OneDrive 30 minutes to pro— in my case, to process that. Now if you have less, I would imagine that's going to happen more quickly, right? So I gotta figure out a way to you artificially, know, have 500 gigabytes of storage in OneDrive somewhere, but I'll get to that eventually. Um, you have at least that amount of time to do this. So on multiple computers, once it finishes processing, it will turn on folder backup within 5 minutes, let's say. So however long it takes plus a couple minutes, you have that much time.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:07]:
I recommend doing it immediately. Immediately. So that's one of the things that will be in the book. And then because I don't really have much of an— Actually, maybe next week I'll write something. Before next week, I'll write about that edit thing, which I love. But if you do need the full Office kind of treatment, LibreOffice is actually fairly incredible. It's been around forever, obviously. It's free.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:27]:
It has all the major apps. It's mostly compatible with Office. I mean, some stuff there with the open/not really open file formats and yada, yada, yada. But if this is where you're at, like I've kind of moved on from this full bloat office suite thing personally. But if you need all the word processor, the spreadsheet, the presentation package, et cetera, it's free, works everywhere. It's on Windows, Mac, Linux, supports 120 languages. There's no licensing issues of any kind. You can use it at home, you can use it at work, doesn't matter.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:01]:
It may not work for everyone, I get that. But, um, this might be one way to wean yourself off of the, you know, you pay every month for the rest of your life, uh, kind of thing that is, uh, modern office suite. So it's, it's, it's worth looking at. I don't have a presentation, sadly, but.

Richard Campbell [02:06:20]:
Look, if you're looking for an alternative— but, you know, they don't have a.

Leo Laporte [02:06:23]:
Presentation manager in there.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:24]:
No, I don't have a presentation. They do have a presentation app. I probably should have used it to create a little presentation about LibreOffice.

Leo Laporte [02:06:29]:
Richard has a presentation.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:31]:
That's what I hear.

Leo Laporte [02:06:32]:
But I hear he used loop, so—.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:35]:
And I don't have a Google, like, news thing to write right now, so I'm actually going to pay attention to this.

Leo Laporte [02:06:39]:
Uh, ladies and gentlemen, this would be an excellent point in the show to talk about Run As Radio with Richard Campbell.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:47]:
Yeah, uh.

Richard Campbell [02:06:50]:
Did a show with one of the DART members. This is the, uh, folks that are involved in security at Microsoft, Ron Orestia, who's been writing a series series, used to be a premier field engineer, and he's been writing a series about properly securing Active Directory domain and certificate services around Entra and so forth. And so why do we care about this? Well, if you're running a domain infrastructure, you always have security issues around this, primarily because it's the lateral move that black hats make. They phish a user, get into that machine, and then they'll immediately lateral onto AD. If they can get out of the individual's credentials and onto a server credential, now they can propagate software to sort of the second tier. And so locking this down properly is important. And all too often, they're all minimum configuration. You got it up enough to make it run, and then you never touched it again.

Richard Campbell [02:07:45]:
And normally, a regular AD install wouldn't have its own certificate services, but you can set that up. And the usual reason you will is that you're using secured Wi-Fi where devices have a certificate on them, they're allowed on the Wi-Fi, otherwise you're on the guest Wi-Fi. But if you haven't configured that properly, boy, that can really hijack everything, right? This is how supply chain attacks happen. 'Cause off, you know, normally if you are running your own cert services, you'll also use that to sign all of your code. And so now the hacker can get in there, modify code, have it signed with your own cert, propagated onto your customers. And boy, that's a big old pile of lawsuits just waiting to happen. So Ron walks us through what it really takes if you're going to run this infrastructure to do it properly, starting with the primary certificate holder is offline. That is literally a machine that is never plugged into any network ever.

Richard Campbell [02:08:36]:
It's only used to update the primary cert and to delegate to controlling, servers from there. And once a year or so, probably every 9 months, you have a signing party where you renew all the certs and so forth. It's a bit of a ritual, but it's also what keeps systems safe. And so we just sort of talk through the reality of what your responsibility is when you run certificate services like this and how to do it properly and where to get more information. And the guy's clearly the expert in the space. He, all his blog posts are well worth reading and he's fighting that fight every day.

Leo Laporte [02:09:12]:
Very nice. Now, time to put down your swords and pick up your shot glasses, because it's time for a little tour.

Richard Campbell [02:09:26]:
That's the Craigellachie. That's where we stayed. So now, a week later— last week I talked about my Saturday in Scotland with my my buddy David, and in the morning he picked me up from the hotel in Glasgow, and then we went to, we drove for several hours to get to go to the Glendronach tour in the morning. And after that was done, we went and checked into the Craigellachie, which I've talked about before. And if you go to the second slide, you know, you'll see me have, I've mentioned the Sportsman's Entrance to the Craigellachie. So it is a hotel, but this part of the, uh, of Scotland is very much for fishermen and hunters and so forth. So this is Sportsman's Entrance. If you've got a brace of salmon or you've bagged yourself a stag, this is where you go to clean it, and then it has direct access to the freezers to actually store it.

Richard Campbell [02:10:22]:
So this is really a thing. Again, I've mentioned it, but I just wanted to show you that this pretty cool. The reality of what we were doing.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:29]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:10:29]:
Did you see any sportsmen entering there.

Richard Campbell [02:10:31]:
Or just— No, this is now we're off season, right? And I've been there in January. It's nice the hotel's open. It wasn't too busy. There was a few folks there, but it's also a great time for the places that have, have tours all year round, and many don't. You can usually get a tour this way. And so David wanted to see Glen Doronach because it's in the midst of this change that I talked about the new master distiller and so forth was happening there. And I want you to, if you remember from last week, that was a very conventional, normal tour, right? That's what I'm used to. I've done a ton of them.

Richard Campbell [02:11:00]:
In fact, it's exactly the tour I did at the Macallan in 2011, you know, back in the day. But since then, Macallan has built this new facility. And so it was time to go see it. Now you can't get a tour. You have to go on an experience. And so just to sort of, I want to convey the level of pretense we're talking about here. You have to book in advance. If you, you know, most distilleries, if you show up, if there's any room there, you're allowed in.

Richard Campbell [02:11:30]:
It's no big deal. But apparently Macallan, nope, don't. You don't. You book in advance online. It is complicated to do so. And normally, like, the tour we did at Glendronach that morning, I think was £25 and includes a taste of 4 whiskies, right? You spend an hour walking around seeing stuff, which I love. And then we tried a few of the whiskies. Thanks for playing.

Richard Campbell [02:11:49]:
Now there are less expensive tours at Macallan, but not very many of them. The one I booked was the Legends Tour, and the Legends Tour is £175 per person, which is really, really an outrageous amount of money for a tour. Now, I've talked about McCallum before, so I don't know how to explain it all that much. We talked about Alexander Reid and he gets the license in 1824 and he's, and he talked about this place. I mentioned Easter Eichels, which if you fire up the third slide, I did get a good picture of the actual Easter Eichels house, which is from the 1700s. There had been barley has been growing on that chunk of land literally since Neolithic times. And there are very clear records involving this structure and this estate from the 1500s. That house, and I took this picture myself in the dark, so this is the enhanced mode on the Pixel 9, is basically exactly as it's looked since 1760.

Richard Campbell [02:12:55]:
And by the way, this is exactly what's on the bottle of Macallan these days. On the next slide, I got a closeup of the Macallan 12, and you'll see the little Easter Eichels graphic at the top, which they only adopted in the 1980s. Like, Macallan's brand is very carefully crafted. Edrington knows exactly what they're doing, and so they've tailored to this look. But that's the building. It's the oldest thing. It's only the, the only heritage structure anywhere on the place. So I've set the stage.

Richard Campbell [02:13:24]:
We're at Craigellachie. I have paid for this £175 tour. So they come and pick you up, which is nice because you don't want to drink and drive, right? Like, that's one of the upsides of this. But what they pick you up in when you do this Legends Tour is the Macallan Wienermobile. It was a A Bentley. Bentley? And when I mean it was a Bentley Bodega, or Bottega, painted in Macallan red.

Paul Thurrott [02:13:54]:
Wow.

Richard Campbell [02:13:55]:
And the door was so light, you know, when you open door and normally have a little, you know, uh, Bentley logo on it. No, it said Macallan on the ground.

Leo Laporte [02:14:03]:
Very nice.

Richard Campbell [02:14:03]:
And a nice young lady with a heavy brogue, uh, got us into the vehicle and drove us. It's not very far to go to Macallan from Craigellachie. It's all right in the same area. And, uh, you know, the one thing you didn't need to coach us too much on was the distillery to, you know, the distillery itself, but this was this new facility and that's the entrance you're looking at there.

Leo Laporte [02:14:23]:
It is how green things are when it rains every single day.

Richard Campbell [02:14:27]:
It rains all the time. So this is the new distillery facility, and it is absolutely enormous. So when I did the tour back in 2011, which by the way cost £15 included for samples, right, the old distillery was not a pretty distillery. It was not as good-looking as Glendronach. It was sort of a hodgepodge building, was all over the place. And in 2012, like the year after I did that, they announced this new development they were doing and they spent £140 million building this new facility up on the ridge. And it took them 6 years, it finished in 2018. And if you again, look at that graphic, it's this sort of rolling green roof.

Richard Campbell [02:15:07]:
It's absolutely massive. It's 12,300 square meters. That's 3 acres. And this is the approach to it. That black box at the end there, those are the doors. It's all this truss, this truss structure. It's like 1,800 beams, 2,700 wooden roof panels with the green roof growing on top of it. The peak of those domes are 90 feet high, and the dome itself is like 600 feet long.

Richard Campbell [02:15:36]:
And there's 4 of them.

Leo Laporte [02:15:38]:
And it looks like you could put cows up there and to graze.

Richard Campbell [02:15:42]:
You probably could, but you know, they might mess with the smell of the whiskey. So this is quite a long stroll up there and there's not a lot of people around. Again, it is off-season. It's not— the weather is not nice. Uh, there were a few people in, in the facility and they were absolutely expecting you. They, you know, we'd come in by the Bentley, for crying out loud.

Paul Thurrott [02:16:00]:
Wow.

Leo Laporte [02:16:00]:
You didn't get a picture of the Bentley?

Richard Campbell [02:16:02]:
I did not take a picture of the Bentley. No. And to be honest, I'm all— I missed a lot of photos here because we're just a bit overwhelmed. Yeah, this is a long way from a normal whiskey tour, right? Like, this is just like kind of the height of pretense. Like, unbelievable, uh, what we were looking at. And when you get inside, it's absolutely massive inside. The display wall covered in bottles, uh, these video sequences running all the time. There was a check-in area where they took our coats and so on, and we met our guide.

Richard Campbell [02:16:31]:
And then she took us on upstairs and showed us a model middle of the actual distillery. So there's— each of these domes has a collection of the mash tuns and processing, and then 4 wash stills and 8 spirit stills. And if you remember from previous times I've talked to Macallan, I've talked about Macallan so many times, they have the smallest spirit stills in the industry. They're tiny little things, uh, and, and they're sort of famously small, right? There's a 4,000-liter stills, uh, They actually put them on the £10 Scottish note at one point back in the '90s. And so they have a ton of these things. And there's— they initially said they built 2 of the pods right away because they're producing something like 15 million liters a year. And there was a third pod that was being held in reserve, but they've already started assembling it now. So clearly their production is only increasing.

Richard Campbell [02:17:21]:
Also within this facility is a restaurant built by the Roca brothers. The Roca brothers built the restaurant called Le Cellier de Cap Roca, which has twice now been awarded the best restaurant in the world. And so they've now got a restaurant on the facility which has a 9-course tasting menu with whiskey and wine pairings, but only 24 seats. You have to book 2 years in advance. And it wasn't open this time of year anyway, so we, we— this is so upscale. Wow, it's, it's madness. Uh, so, but after seeing the pod, the next thing we did was actually walk around around the stills and you could just get a sense of how vast all of this actually was.

Paul Thurrott [02:17:59]:
Wow.

Richard Campbell [02:17:59]:
So, you know, you've seen the model, now here's the actual thing. And by the way, all of these are running 3 shifts a day, 24 hours. They are cranking out the whiskey because they sell it. They are making an absolute fortune at their level of production. And they store 200,000 barrels on site, plus more in other locations. So the scale of this place is almost indescribable. And it almost didn't seem real. You thought it was a play piece and went, no, this is a working distillery.

Richard Campbell [02:18:32]:
And they built this sort of metal tier level where we can walk around everything. All the operations are going on below you so you can be right in the action. Normally these stills are running hot, like you don't want to touch them. They're not safe. But unlike the tour at Glen, the contrast in the tour was very interesting because Glen Dronach back. It was just the two of us, just like it was in Macallan, with a tour guide. And this tour guide learned very quickly we know a lot about whiskey, we're asking very specific questions, so she's not explaining the basics to us. We're digging into more history and details and so forth.

Richard Campbell [02:19:04]:
This— the lady here at Macallan was very nice, but she could not, just could not divert from her script. So I got to learn what a washback was, which was very exciting for me. And so we were patient with her, like, eventually took the pictures we wanted to do. And then we finally got over to the tasting area, which was that, that loungy, you know, typically a tasting area is a, is a small wooden room with a big table and, and a bunch of glasses and so forth. And there are a couple of tables like that at, at, um, but there we were sitting in a lounger because it's just the two of us. There was a couple other couples around, there was not many people around, and we had 4 whiskies to taste. The first is on the screen now. This is a Classic Macallan 12, which is incredibly hard to find these days.

Richard Campbell [02:19:45]:
They're just, they're really rare. You wanna know how rare they are? Even Macallan's out of them. What it, the picture I didn't take of this bottle was the backside because it's actually the Russian edition of Macallan 12 and the back label's all in Cyrillic.

Paul Thurrott [02:19:58]:
Wow.

Richard Campbell [02:19:59]:
'Cause that's all Macallan has. They're so short on whiskey and they probably, the only reason they have that is they're not allowed to ship it to Russia. Second whiskey we tasted was the 21 Color Edition. I've already made fun of the Color Edition., and they call these the travel versions. This is stuff you find in duty-free shops and of course on cruise ships. And, uh, the, the case, you know, the 12 is, is beautiful in its own classical way. If you can find one, it's true sherry cask. This is the seasoned, uh, sherry seasoned oak style, which I just don't think has as much time in the barrel.

Richard Campbell [02:20:31]:
So even though it's a 21, it's, it's got its own issues. Did not impress. Third up, uh, was this special non-age statement they call the Rare Cask Black. Um, yeah, I, you know, utterly unmemorable.

Leo Laporte [02:20:47]:
Huh.

Richard Campbell [02:20:48]:
Which brings us to the fourth one, which is the showstopper. Unexpected. We did not know what whiskies we were gonna taste. Friends, this is a bottle of Macallan's Reflection M. This is a £6,000 bottle of whisky. Normally I would never try this whisky. You've heard me tell the story before, like, don't You don't taste 6,000-pound bottles of whiskey 'cause there's no good outcomes. A shot is 500 pounds, right? So either you're gonna spend 500 pounds on a shot and hate it, and then you blew 500 pounds, or you're gonna love it and you're gonna get a divorce 'cause you need a 6,000-pound bottle of whiskey.

Richard Campbell [02:21:24]:
That is Lalique crystal.

Leo Laporte [02:21:26]:
It's a beautiful bottle. modern. Very.

Richard Campbell [02:21:28]:
It has a different stopper when it's sealed, and then you have the crystal stopper in there because it's not airtight. This whiskey is otherworldly. I couldn't even call it whiskey. I don't know what I drank. It was profound, and, and at that same time, like, just kind of shocking. Like, yeah, okay, I get it now. I know why you're charging £6,000 for that. I still don't want one.

Leo Laporte [02:21:51]:
Like, how would you describe it? What does it taste like?

Richard Campbell [02:21:55]:
Literally otherworldly. I mean, you know, what do you expect from a Spey? This sort of rich, caramelly, smooth smooth, uh, you know, unbelievable flavors of wood. Like, and that's exactly what you got. Again, it's got no age statement on it. You don't even know what's in the bottle, right? I don't even know if it's whiskey.

Leo Laporte [02:22:14]:
It's just— if it were inexpensive or less expensive, would you drink it?

Richard Campbell [02:22:19]:
I would. I would get one so you could all try it, right? You know what it wasn't? It wasn't what I was looking for in a whiskey.

Leo Laporte [02:22:25]:
Interesting, right?

Richard Campbell [02:22:26]:
Like, I kind of have a set of expectations now, what I like to drink, I feel like, and I never feel like that, right? Like I don't even know what to say. It was just staggering. And by the way, suddenly the £175 for a.

Leo Laporte [02:22:39]:
I.

Richard Campbell [02:22:39]:
Tour.

Leo Laporte [02:22:40]:
Know, what a deal.

Richard Campbell [02:22:41]:
Bargain. I know, right?

Paul Thurrott [02:22:43]:
What a deal.

Richard Campbell [02:22:45]:
Which is, yeah, again, an outrageous amount to spend on a tour for what lasted an hour and was completely scripted to tour this enormous cathedral to how much whiskey do we have to sell to build $140 million building, right? Uh, but yeah, and then we, we— the tour wasn't quite done. We went into the, what they call the Heart of Spirit room, which is in this little private area. I don't know that we were— it was just quiet enough that they let us do this. And so, uh, in the next slide, there was— there's a wall of like years of whiskey, and it reminds me like there's no— what, there's no 1926 there because there was a 1926 edition of these that went for $2.5 £1.5 million. Like crazy, you know, crazy expensive whiskey. But in the middle of the room is a display, and it took me— it's— it looked like a piece of art, but what that actually is is a brace for a bottle. That's that red thing at the top, a sort of circular, yeah, called Time and Space. That is the oldest whiskey in the world.

Richard Campbell [02:23:47]:
Oh, that is— that is an 84-year-old bottle of whiskey. Whiskey.

Leo Laporte [02:23:51]:
Wow.

Richard Campbell [02:23:51]:
Uh, from a, from a barreling from 1940. It is oddly enough not for sale. Yeah. And no tastings. So we just got to stare at it with this structure around it. This, again, I thought it was a piece of art, but no, it was a stand for a bottle of whiskey in the middle of this room. In this— do you think they believe—.

Leo Laporte [02:24:14]:
Break it out for special occasions? I mean, really, you know, if you.

Richard Campbell [02:24:17]:
Go on website for, uh, for the Reflection as well. Like, if you go to the Reflection— Reflection's not for sale. If you go, I included the link in the show notes. There's a click there, there's a link there to click on called For Inquiries. If you— all of these whiskies, that's what it is. Yeah, it's not on the shops, it's not for sale. It's if you would like to inquire, you may. Uh, you know, we often talk about the experience of of, of going to distillery, because I'm very much, very much a person who likes the craftsmanship of making whiskey.

Richard Campbell [02:24:55]:
Uh, and you know, one thing I didn't see while that facility was running full bore, any craftsmen at all, any workers of any kind.

Paul Thurrott [02:25:02]:
Huh.

Richard Campbell [02:25:03]:
You know, it was, it was running full bore, but it looks almost automated, it seemed.

Paul Thurrott [02:25:06]:
Uh.

Richard Campbell [02:25:11]:
Often I go and tour a distillery and I come back liking the product more. That did not happened this time.

Leo Laporte [02:25:16]:
Interesting.

Richard Campbell [02:25:17]:
I was just shocked at the, at the scope of the place, that like, this is what happens when you have this much money and, uh, and what you end up making as a consequence. Uh, there was another couple there that were buying a lot of whiskey, uh, that were English, and they were lovely people. We partied with them that night, that dog party and all of that insanity I think I talked about last time, or did I talk about it? Maybe I didn't.

Leo Laporte [02:25:42]:
I don't remember it.

Richard Campbell [02:25:44]:
I'll tell you in a sec. But, uh, they were buying whiskey for friends and for a wedding and things like that. They spent a tremendous amount of money. I just don't know if they got things that were really that good for what they were.

Leo Laporte [02:25:57]:
Uh, I thought Macallan was a pretty good whiskey.

Richard Campbell [02:26:00]:
You know, it is. The line is, it used to be. It used to be a definitive whiskey. Remember when I got that bottle of 18 as a gift and I did it on the show and I said like, I haven't bought one of these in ages. It costs a bundle. It's twice— literally what I said was, for this, for the price of this bottle, you could get two Glentronic 18s, which are also sherry casks and equally easily as good. Like, you're just paying a lot for the name. But also, their popularity's gotten to the point now where they can't make enough product, and, uh, and they're running around the clock trying to do it, and they're coming up with all these other strategies to keep you people having the Macallan name in their hands one way or the other.

Richard Campbell [02:26:38]:
There's, you know, which you won't find anywhere in Scotland in a local pub, somebody drinking Macallan. A local won't drink it. No, it's way too much money. It's no need, right? Why would you? It doesn't mean it's bad, just that it's, they're so deeply down. And this is the Edrington Group, right? And Edrington is not just Macallan, but also Highland Park, which makes excellent whiskey as well. Famous Grouse, right? Which Famous Grouse is a blend that's mostly neutral spirit with a little bit of Macallan and Highland Park in it, right?

Leo Laporte [02:27:12]:
Interesting.

Richard Campbell [02:27:12]:
And they've done such a good branding job with Famous Grouse. Like, even I have been pulled into it. I came to appreciate that. But yeah, though, they're in a crazy spot, and it's not entirely their fault. Like I said, it's unbelievable amount of money. And in this current market where we have, you know, we're first-class ticket seats on airlines are always sold out because there's a, there's a wealthy class that don't care what stuff costs. Macallan is catering to them. If you make the inquiry, like, I'm sure there's a way to get those things.

Richard Campbell [02:27:42]:
And they have very high-priced tours if you want to go down those things. Like, I get what they're doing. Uh, in the meantime, not able to supply the regular folks. So we, uh, we finished the tour and thanked them all very much. We did not buy anything, unlike in Glen Dronachan, where we did come home with a bottle. And we took the Bentley back to the Craigellachie and had a, we had a very nice dinner.

Leo Laporte [02:28:06]:
And you think they're making too much whiskey?

Richard Campbell [02:28:08]:
Is that, yeah, I think that's exactly it.

Paul Thurrott [02:28:10]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:28:10]:
They're just so big and so much money. You know, like we talk about this in the startup industry where if you raise that much money, you kind of not can't help make bad decisions. You know, Uber gets $60 billion in investment and can't not make a good decision at that point. It's too much money. Money. Like, I feel like McCallan's in that same place. They've built this cathedral and it's just shocking.

Leo Laporte [02:28:30]:
Same thing with wine up here in the wine country.

Richard Campbell [02:28:32]:
Yeah. Look what to Opus happened One.

Leo Laporte [02:28:34]:
Yeah, right, exactly.

Richard Campbell [02:28:36]:
I've been— that's what I said to David at the time. It's like, I've been to the Opus One cathedral. I know what happened when they won that award.

Paul Thurrott [02:28:42]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [02:28:42]:
And they tripled their price and then dumped it into building that facility.

Leo Laporte [02:28:46]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [02:28:47]:
You know, it gave me the sense of this is not for me.

Paul Thurrott [02:28:50]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [02:28:51]:
Right. Like just anyway, you know what happened that night that was lovely? Like it's Scotland. There's a dog under every table. Right.

Leo Laporte [02:29:00]:
And that's why it's called the dog party.

Richard Campbell [02:29:02]:
Yeah. And that's why we had a dog party. So we, at dinner, we had David's dog, Zach, named after my old Karen, Zach, uh, who I miss terribly. Um, my new puppy, uh, Josephine Lily is sitting at my feet right now. She's being very good. It's only a year old. Uh, there were a couple other couples at, at dinner and they also had dogs. And so we all went up to the Quaich, uh, which is the whiskey bar I've talked about before in, in the Craigellachie.

Richard Campbell [02:29:30]:
This is all wooden floor, wooden ceiling, you know, potbelly stove, windows on the Spey, and all the whiskey ever. So we all piled up there and we brought all the dogs and they, there was a couple of British bullies that, there was a couple of whippets who were appalled the whole time and.

Paul Thurrott [02:29:43]:
It was just a riot.

Leo Laporte [02:29:45]:
Shivering constantly.

Richard Campbell [02:29:49]:
Just pure joyful chaos while we drank excellent whiskey and our laughed brains off. It was a kind of evening party after dinner, after a long day also drinking whiskey, where everybody hugged everybody at the end of the night, and then we all said hi at breakfast the next morning because, you know, go for your Scotch breakfast afterwards. Yeah, it was a blast, uh, and what a great whiskey tour day. But, uh, yeah, I just come away from Macallan going, there's a reason I haven't been buying these bottles lately. Like, I don't recognize that company anymore. I don't even know what to say. Uh, there's— I, I like digging down into the, into the woods. Like, they are just the most mainstream of mainstream, super brand, and, uh, and I'll buy something else.

Leo Laporte [02:30:32]:
Mr. Richard Campbell, you see, the true connoisseur seeks The surprise, the little, the special, the small ones, the unique ones, not the ones everybody else is drinking.

Richard Campbell [02:30:46]:
And that's why— That's the Yogi Berra line, right? Nobody goes there anymore. It's too busy.

Leo Laporte [02:30:49]:
It's too popular.

Richard Campbell [02:30:50]:
Nobody goes there anymore.

Leo Laporte [02:30:53]:
Rich is at runasradio.com. That's where you'll find his Run As Radio podcast and Dotnet Rocks, the show he does with Carl Franklin. And where are you going next? You're peripatetic.

Richard Campbell [02:31:05]:
Oh, next try, I'm coming with you. We're going to Orlando for— oh, that's 3 weeks off.

Leo Laporte [02:31:12]:
Yeah, that's gonna be a lot of fun.

Richard Campbell [02:31:13]:
So it's a long time, but that's about the threshold I'm allowed to be home for anyway.

Leo Laporte [02:31:16]:
Yeah, well, have a nice 3 weeks in that park. Uh, thanks to Paul Therrott. He's the author of, of course, The Field Guide to Windows 11 at leanpub.com, Windows Everywhere, and soon De-Enshitify Windows. Also, of course, you can find his blog at therot.com, his news site. What am I saying, blog? That's diminutive. It's it's it's a, a, a Windows news site. Everything you'd ever want to know about Microsoft. Thank you, Paul.

Leo Laporte [02:31:45]:
Together, the dynamic duo of Windows coverage comes by here every Wednesday at 11 Pacific, 14 East Coast time, 19 UTC. You can watch us live on YouTube, TikTok— no, we don't do TikTok anymore, it was too hard, too hard— YouTube, Twitch, x.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Kick. Of course, club members can watch in the Club Twit Disco.

Paul Thurrott [02:32:13]:
Someday I'll be a TikTok star.

Leo Laporte [02:32:15]:
TikTok will be the real deal.

Paul Thurrott [02:32:17]:
Today is not that day.

Leo Laporte [02:32:18]:
Not that day. Not that day, Paul. After the fact, on-demand versions of the show available at twit.tv/wtf. Www.windowsweekly.com. You can also find us on YouTube. That's the video there, and of course a great way to share clips with friends and family. You see a click— a link right there on the Windows Weekly page. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client, get it automatically the minute it's available, audio or video.

Leo Laporte [02:32:41]:
And if you do that, leave us a nice review. Those reviews help more than you know. They're a great way to spread the word about the best darn Windows show in the world. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. Have a wonderful week, and we will see you right here next Wednesday on Windows Weekly.