Windows Weekly 982 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte [00:00:00]:
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott is here. Actually, he's in Mexico City. Richard Campbell is here. Actually, he's in Toronto. I'm here. This is Hawaii. And we're going to talk about Microsoft's earnings one week later, but we've got all the details.

Leo Laporte [00:00:13]:
Also, it was earnings palooza. How all the other big tech companies did. We've got some AI news, Xbox news, and yes, whiskey. Windows Weekly is next. 
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. Episode 982, recorded May 6, 2026. Don't Lick the Manta Rays. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft. And let me introduce our panel for today's show, same as it ever was. From Mexico City, Mr. Paul Thurrott of Thorat.com.

Leo Laporte [00:01:03]:
hello, Paulie.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:04]:
Hello, Leo. And the back of Lisa's head.

Leo Laporte [00:01:10]:
Kind of looks like cousin is visiting. And that is from I'm not sure where. Mr.

Richard Campbell [00:01:16]:
I'm in Toronto.

Leo Laporte [00:01:17]:
In Toronto.

Richard Campbell [00:01:19]:
There's the view of the lake.

Leo Laporte [00:01:20]:
Look at that. I could do a view of the sea if you could, but the problem

Paul Thurrott [00:01:24]:
is if it weren't for that giant.

Leo Laporte [00:01:27]:
It's right behind Cousin. It.

Paul Thurrott [00:01:29]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [00:01:31]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:01:31]:
We're in, we're in beautiful Hawaii in the big island of Hawaii. Yeah, it's really lovely. It's a beautiful day tonight. We're going up to the upcountry. They this is cattle country. In fact, the second largest ranch in America is here. Parker Ranch used to be the biggest, but the Texans decided they wanted the biggest. And so it's been there for a long time, like 150 years.

Leo Laporte [00:01:55]:
It's still in the same family. And we're gonna go up there and we're gonna go to a ranch and go to a cowboy barbecue. Apparently the cowboys here were trained by the Spanish before there were cowboys in the U.S. there were, of course, vaqueros. And so they learned horseback riding and cow cattle herding and roping from the Spanish. So they have a Spanish flavor to their cowboying. I'm very excited. It's going to be fun.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:21]:
Yeah, yeah. Sounds excellent.

Leo Laporte [00:02:23]:
Last night we visited the manta rays. I was telling you before the show, they, they swim right up to you. They brush your nose. They, the guide said you could lick them, but don't. They're allowed to touch us. We're not allowed to touch them. He said it's kind of like Vegas.

Richard Campbell [00:02:42]:
It's a Good sign. No lick in the manta ray. No.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:44]:
Yeah. Would not be licking the man array.

Leo Laporte [00:02:47]:
They're harmless. It looks like they're dangerous. They look like stingers.

Paul Thurrott [00:02:50]:
No, no, that's not the issue. It's going to be fishy tast. Nobody wants that.

Leo Laporte [00:02:54]:
See, I don't know. I wish I. I can't fill you in on the actual flavor of meta, so I wish I could. Anyway, we're not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about Windows and Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:06]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [00:03:09]:
I'm just gonna sit back, relax, enjoy the weather while you. So you take over.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:14]:
I thought I was going to be doing that too, because I was going over the notes and I was like, man, there isn't really that much. This might be a short show. And I was pretty. I was okay with it. And then I was like, oh, wait, I usually. Because, you know, when you think about the calendar, we do this on a Thursday, Wednesday. So I go back to the previous Thursday, usually for the news, you know, that's in the notes, and that's what I did. And the earnings were on Wednesday right along with the earnings from Alphabet, Amazon.

Richard Campbell [00:03:45]:
They were literally coming in as we were recording last week.

Paul Thurrott [00:03:48]:
Yep. And I was like, oh, no. All right, so top line, Microsoft's. They're doing pretty good. You know, crazy numbers. I know basically $32 billion of net income profit on revenues of about 83 billion in the quarter ending March 31st. Capital expenditures, which is what they're spending on AI for the most part. The AI dentist, data center stuff actually went down quarter over quarter.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:14]:
But Microsoft said they were. That was going to happen because of seasonality, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But it did go up. It's not. Where is this figure? I have it somewhere. But it did go up, I want to say 45% year over year, like hugely. We'll go through some of that stuff. The part of Microsoft that is Windows and Xbox is now the smallest part of Microsoft by far.

Paul Thurrott [00:04:37]:
The three business units used to all be pretty roughly even, you know, 11 to 13 billion a quarter. And they were consistent. And since the cloud stuff really started taking off and then now AI, you're seeing those parts of the company just explode past the more personal, competing part of the company. And as we'll get to in a bit, it's actually going to get a lot worse soon. So that part of the business, 13.2 billion in revenues. Intelligent Cloud Azure essentially is 34.7 billion, up 30%, by the way, year over year, more personal computing was almost Flat, well, actually declined 1% so you can see where that's going. And then productivity and online services, Microsoft 365, et cetera, but also Windows Commercial, by the way, which is part of the imbalance here. 35 billion in revenues, up 17% year over year.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:31]:
So there you go.

Richard Campbell [00:05:33]:
Cool.

Paul Thurrott [00:05:34]:
Except there you don't go because there's a lot to say. Sure, yeah. As I do the next day after earnings, I always write like a long analysis piece. Lately it's been really AI heavy, as you would expect, and I do get to that. But they made a point in the post earnings conference call of mentioning their consumer businesses quite a bit, which they don't do ever. And part of it, yeah, I mean it's just not. But I don't think this is what analysts want to hear. And, and I know that because the seven analysts who ask questions at the end of the call, none of them asked about any of this.

Paul Thurrott [00:06:06]:
But this is the part I care about. So that's what I'm going to talk about mostly. And also just I think everyone knows this, but with Xbox and Windows specifically, there's a sort of reset occurring in both businesses where they're trying to meet the needs of their customers for the first time in quite a while. And so they're, you know, they're both making an explicit effort to kind of improve those businesses. Right. In both cases, and I believe it was Satya Nadella, in both cases there was some like nice really positive sounding factoid, well, fact I guess at the beginning of the discussion, which sort of offsets all the bad news that is the reality of these businesses. But for Windows, that factoid was 1.6 billion monthly active windows, they said devices, but PCs, not mentioning the fact that that is a high of all time. It's never been that high.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:07]:
They've thrown at 1.4, 1.5 billion. At different times it had been going down. I don't know where these numbers come from. There's, you know, it's kind of hard to explain what that means. But okay, whatever he talked about, all the foundational, the work they're doing, we're going to go through some of that in just a bit actually. But prioritizing quality, well, you know, it's kind of begs the question what were you prioritizing before? Like, you know, but whatever, no one asks those questions and then as far as the actual numbers, I gotta find what are we getting here? Yeah, so it's. If you look at the past, previous past four quarters, right. You would see Gains in revenues from PC makers for Windows.

Paul Thurrott [00:07:54]:
And this is not strictly consumer, but pretty much consumer. Right. Because the, the Windows licensing revenue that goes into the commercial side of the business is over in Microsoft 365 now. And those numbers were okay. I mean, given the state of the market, 1%, 18%, 3% and 3% were the previous sequential quarters. The 18% one is obviously a bit of an outlier, but that's because of the end of year buying spree that occurred on the part of PC makers. Right. Knowing that component prices were only going to go up and that they should get these things in the channel.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:27]:
So there was a little bump there and you know, Microsoft will tell you that part of that was Due to Windows 10 end of life as well, but we're past that. And this year that part of the business, which does include Surface as well, which I, you have to sort of think skews things in a bad way.

Richard Campbell [00:08:45]:
Put nothing into Surface.

Paul Thurrott [00:08:46]:
Yeah. So revenues decreased 2% year over year in the quarter. So you know, excluding the 18% outlier, you know, up 1%, up 3%, down 2%. It doesn't sound that bad. The problem is this quarter, the quarter we're in now is going to be a bloodbath. And the first time this came up, I think it was Amy Hood, now at this point who's doing this kind of thing. She was saying that they expected Windows revenues from PC makers to decline in the high teens. Wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:20]:
So the high teens. And then they later explicitly said it was 18% was their expectation. So this thing's going to nosedive 18%. So it was down to this quarter. It's going to decline 18%. And that is not great. They even explained where those declines would come from. Evenly split between an unfavorable year over year comparison with the end of Life for Windows 10.

Paul Thurrott [00:09:45]:
The second factor was the inventory level declines. Right. Because PC makers are no longer buying bulk licenses to get that stuff going. And then the third one, this is the worst one, they call it a lower PC market. And what that means is people are not going to buy PCs because they're going to be really expensive. Right. Are now really expensive. Right?

Richard Campbell [00:10:05]:
They are really expensive right now.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:06]:
Yeah. Assuming they can even find them.

Richard Campbell [00:10:08]:
Well, yeah, it's hard to buy them, but also like you can wait because you don't expect these prices to last.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:15]:
Yeah, yeah. And, and look, this was already. Look, obviously everyone knows this. It's a mature business. I, I know PCs and Windows sometimes are the butter jokes, but the reality is these devices are much more secure that are reliable rather than they've ever been and can last longer than they ever have. And you know, no one is replacing a PC every two or three years. I mean these things get spread out now.

Richard Campbell [00:10:36]:
Four and five now. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:37]:
So. And maybe longer, you know, we'll see how it goes.

Richard Campbell [00:10:40]:
But yeah, no, regular consumers I think go much longer than that. But.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:43]:
Yep.

Richard Campbell [00:10:44]:
You know, most systems I'm talking to are getting five year warranties for a reason. They're going to turn them in five years.

Paul Thurrott [00:10:50]:
Right. And yeah. And look, the reality of the world is that as things have moved to mobile, even for older people like us, I mean, the PC becomes more of a secondary device. It's the thing you turn to when. When I want to do what I would call real work or.

Richard Campbell [00:11:04]:
Yeah, when I need a big screen.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:06]:
Need the big screen. Right. And sometimes for older especially, I do this all the time. Like I want to do something important like book an airline flight. Like I could do that on my phone, but I am not a child, so I will do that on a computer. Like that's how I think, you know,

Richard Campbell [00:11:18]:
and I think, I think I have to do real.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:21]:
Yeah. If I. Right. If I was a child, maybe I would do it that way. I don't know.

Richard Campbell [00:11:26]:
You mean someone who can see their phone?

Paul Thurrott [00:11:29]:
Yeah. That's a huge problem, by the way. Yes.

Richard Campbell [00:11:33]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:33]:
How many times you do this? You're like, what is that?

Richard Campbell [00:11:35]:
Oh yeah, no glasses. Off, like.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:38]:
Yeah, it's on, off, like, you know,

Richard Campbell [00:11:42]:
since it works today.

Paul Thurrott [00:11:43]:
Yeah. But you know, for the broader market, I mean most people are probably younger than I am, so there's. But they're still not using, you know, they're not using computers as much as say we did at that point in our lives. Like computers are no longer the center of this.

Richard Campbell [00:11:54]:
Well, and for most people a computer is a laptop anyway. Like desktop is just a rare category now.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:02]:
Right, right. They mentioned Microsoft Edge, which kind of blows my mind. Edge does not contribute directly to revenues in any way, shape or form. No, there are indirect revenues that come out of Edge related to the advertising stuff and which explains all the forced usage of Edge, Windows 11 and all this stuff. They want to get you in front of, you know, MSN and all the Microsoft advertising.

Richard Campbell [00:12:23]:
We want your digital effluent.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:26]:
Yeah. But slash, Nadella said our Edge browser has taken share for 20 consecutive quarters. Now for a person like me, that's a record scratch moment because I'm like, what did it? I like that you said that. Because literally what I wrote in my little write up here was really how taken Share from what browser, from what they're like. Let's roll the tape. So you go to stat counter and you look at stat counter over. You can look at it on total usage across mobile and desktop. You can look just at desktop.

Paul Thurrott [00:12:58]:
Microsoft's web browser obviously has higher on desktop because it's pre installed and Windows is huge. So, yeah, all right, we'll give them. We'll just give them that. I'll just. What does it look like? And it does not look like they gained share for 20 consecutive quarters. I don't know where this comes from.

Richard Campbell [00:13:13]:
So I don't know how you cook that number.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:15]:
Edge's market share has been higher than it is now in the previous five years. It's not that it's going down, it's going up and down, you know, and the highest high was a couple of years ago, I think. I don't remember exactly. But it's never exceeded 14% market share, despite the use of Share. Really. Despite the fact that it is bundled on the most popular desktop by far.

Richard Campbell [00:13:39]:
Well, it's the old joke, right? Edges used primarily to download Chrome.

Paul Thurrott [00:13:42]:
Yeah. And the reason that's not a joke is because that is what is used. That's sadly. Right. So in that same time frame. Oh, I should say I went back five years because 20 consecutive quarters is five years. Right. So Chrome has had over 65% share of the market the entire time.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:01]:
If you go back further, there was a period where it actually did fall to 61, 62%. But Edge, like I said, has never exceeded 14% of the market. Right now it's 12.75% or at least it was at the time I wrote it.

Richard Campbell [00:14:15]:
And that makes it third or fourth.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:18]:
No, actually I think it might be second. I mean, this second, I could just click on the link and find out rather than guess. Let me look. I think it is second. Yes. And then Safari is third. Yeah. And then.

Richard Campbell [00:14:34]:
Right, okay. So that's always the question, is Safari versus Edge, because.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:37]:
Yeah, so Edge, Chrome was clearly owned. Right. When I'm looking at it now, the, the number has changed. Now it's 11.51%, but Safari is 6.17 and Chrome is 71 point or 72%. Really. So Chrome has actually gone up since I wrote this. So that makes this. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [00:14:53]:
It's possible. Microsoft is looking at numbers they don't have access to. I tried to do this like maybe just on Windows, you know, okay, maybe. Anyway, I couldn't find any supporting evidence for this. So moving on. Bing, same thing. We're going to throw it a nice, we're going to throw it a nice little factoid for Bing. You know that, that search engine we all love to use,

Richard Campbell [00:15:17]:
both guys really like it and they don't like how mean you are too.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:21]:
I'm okay with it. Bing monthly active users reached 1 billion for the first time. Satya Nadella said. I'm like, okay, hold on a second.

Richard Campbell [00:15:32]:
That's the search to find Chrome to download it.

Paul Thurrott [00:15:36]:
I'm actually wondering if they're defining users in a different way than I would define users. For example, I would say a user is a human being. And I think what they're saying is that AI is driving traffic to Bing. And by AI I mean Copilot typically or Microsoft products of some kind and that they're counting that as usage, like a user, like you might describe an agency.

Richard Campbell [00:15:58]:
I wonder if internally they call it unintentional usage, but that's a good term

Paul Thurrott [00:16:03]:
because, let me see, I think I wrote something to that. Let me see if I can find it. Well, the way I wrote it is the right question to ask is who uses Bing purposely The answer to that

Richard Campbell [00:16:17]:
question into a browser.

Paul Thurrott [00:16:19]:
Right. It actually goes there or it's in Edge and they know it's in Edge and they still keep using it and they can't explain why, but they do. Statistically no one is using Bing. So when you look at like Edge as a distant number two in the browser market where it has 11, 12, 13, 14, whatever, percent, whatever you want to call that, Bing's share of search is far smaller, you know, and you can do some math. It's hard to get come up with exact numbers for users and number of people who use things or whatever. But it is fair to say that the supportable bit here is looking at the same five year time period. Bing usage has grown from 2.5% to about 5% which is double yay stubble. Yeah, Growth.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:04]:
Yeah, but it's also just 5%, you

Richard Campbell [00:17:07]:
know, like it's still 5% after all this time.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:09]:
And I think most of that usage is in fact driven by unintentional usage and or AI driven background processes, whatever.

Richard Campbell [00:17:16]:
Right? Yeah. If every time you click on Copilot it's going to involve a Bing search, that's a great way to drive that number up.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:23]:
I did some math in here to try to figure out like if there's any way on earth they could have a Billion users and there is none there, there's none. I, and I'm not going to go through all that.

Richard Campbell [00:17:32]:
Not as you define users. Like next you're going to tell me users are people.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:36]:
Not as I define math and not as I define. Yeah, I mean it's just like, it's crazy. And, and this is a minor point, but Bing and Edger are important to Microsoft because they drive ad sales. And Microsoft now we're going to have

Richard Campbell [00:17:51]:
to define a Nutella currency or.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:54]:
Yep. So a Nutella currency.

Richard Campbell [00:17:56]:
Nads.

Paul Thurrott [00:17:58]:
So I had like, so every look if you were in technical field here. Right. So we know a lot about certain things. We don't know anything about certain things. And sometimes you see a term, an acronym or something and you're like, what, what is this? I like, I also like when I'm especially technology company uses a tech term like an acronym, but does not explain it once. So in this case I looked, I looked it up. I was just trying to see did they ever explain this? They don't search advertising revenue Ex TAC Tac increased 12% in the quarter. What is Tac? Tac is what I call Spotify math.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:35]:
If you ignore the fact that there's a cost of doing business, we're doing great. It's literally minus the cost of paying affiliates that direct traffic to the engine.

Richard Campbell [00:18:46]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:18:47]:
I. So okay, so what's the revenue when you include or you know, I guess it would be profit. Like they're not talking about that. Right. And that number has been sort of going down. I mean it was 21%. 21%, 16%. It was 10% last quarter, now it's 12%.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:04]:
So it's quarter over quarter. It's up, but year over year, which is how we actually measure these things. It's gone down and this quarter, the current quarter, it is going to fall into the high single digits for growth, meaning up to 9%. So it's going to fall yet again. So yeah, a billion users. But oh, also a bunch of bad news. Like, okay. And I don't think that billion number is real, but okay, Xbox, obviously, Xbox is doing fantastically.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:31]:
We all know that. I don't have to explain anything about, oh, wait,

Richard Campbell [00:19:36]:
and they've got a new leader. She's just figuring things out.

Paul Thurrott [00:19:39]:
Like, I'm not, I'm not pointing fingers. I'm not pointing fingers. I, I like her. I, I gotta say, the more, the more I see. I mean there's some little areas, but we'll get to this because we're going to talk about here more at the end of the show. But not this past quarter, which is the one we're talking about, but the previous quarter, which was the last calendar quarter of 2025, which was the holiday quarter. I never looked this up. I meant to, but they actually suffered a decline in revenues of Xbox content and services for what I believe was if not the first time in history than one of the few times I don't remember this ever happening.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:16]:
That happened again in the quarter we're now discussing. Right. So the first quarter, calendar quarter this year, their fiscal third quarter, 2026. So that revenue declined 5%. And this one I'm not. I should have looked this up. They blamed a prior year comparable that benefited from strong first party content performance. In other words, Microsoft released some game that did particularly well in that quarter.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:40]:
And this year we didn't have something like that. And so it went down. Okay. Xbox hardware revenues fell again. Again. Again. Again. Jesus.

Paul Thurrott [00:20:50]:
Like 33%. So the previous four sequential quarters. I'd like to go back, I should go back and figure out how far back this goes. But hardware revenues in Xbox declined by 32, 29, 32 and 6% over the past four quarters in reverse order. Right. This business is not doing great. But don't pay no attention to the man behind the curtain because you'll be fine. Xbox set new records for monthly active users in the quarter and for game streaming hours.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:24]:
Okay. It's like, it's like saying the Nazis had an awesome party in the Reichstag right before Berlin fell. And it was a great day. Yep. The rest of it's going bad though, so. Yeah, I know. Anyway, this quarter, the quarter we're in, Xbox content and services will decline in the low teens, which I take to mean 11 to 15%. Thus that will.

Paul Thurrott [00:21:51]:
Those revenues will fall three quarters in a row. That has absolutely never happened. That's incredible. And the blame here is because of the prior year comparable thing again. But also, hey, we just lowered game pass prices. See, we're listening.

Richard Campbell [00:22:07]:
Right? We're going to lower revenues too.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:10]:
Well, I mean, they had to know that was going to happen. And then Xbox hardware, they didn't even guess. They were like, it's going to decline. What does that mean? It's going to decline? Like 50. What are we talking about? That's insane. Like, they didn't even try. They didn't say anything vague. They just said it's going to decline.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:28]:
Yeah, we know it's going to decline, but okay, so. And then AI. I mostly stuck to the consumer stuff. But we got to talk about AI. Obviously, Microsoft is now saying, I had guessed before based on what they were doing, and they had never said this for the year yet, but this past week they did. They're going to spend in calendar 2026, $190 billion on capital expenditures related to the AI.

Richard Campbell [00:22:54]:
More than 40 billion a quarter.

Paul Thurrott [00:22:56]:
Yep. Remember, the number last year they were talking was 20 billion a quarter and they exceeded that. But, you know, now they're talking. Yeah. They don't, I don't know.

Richard Campbell [00:23:04]:
They've spent 40 billion yet. It's always been 30 something.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:07]:
Yeah. So this quarter was, like I said, almost 32 billion. Last quarter was 37.5. The quarter we're in now is going to be over 40 billion.

Richard Campbell [00:23:19]:
Wow.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:19]:
And then of course, the next one will be too, because that's how that math adds up. They didn't say that, but that's math. They also had one specific, what I would call hard number, like actual number. I mean, assuming, you know, well, ignoring the fact that most of these people probably got discounts and whatever, there's a lot we don't know. Microsoft 365 copilot now has 20 million paid seats. So 20 million is a good number.

Richard Campbell [00:23:46]:
Yeah. Out of how many copilot, how many M365 use?

Paul Thurrott [00:23:50]:
I've done the math. So.

Richard Campbell [00:23:52]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:23:52]:
And my math is out of date because they didn't give us a new number for total Microsoft365 commercial subscribers, but they did the previous quarter and when. And that number at that time they had, they're claimed 20 million paid users out of 450 million paid seats. So 3.5% of the of that customer base was paying additional money every month for Copilot.

Richard Campbell [00:24:16]:
Now, okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:17]:
It's probably not actually 20 bucks a month, by the way, but there's no way to know that this assuming nothing has changed. Meaning 450 million Microsoft 365 paid seats, that figure has gone from 3.5% to 4.4%. So, yes, we have 100% growth. But when your numbers are relatively tiny. Right. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:24:40]:
From 1 to 2, 100% is easy.

Paul Thurrott [00:24:42]:
Yep. And I will just point out again, because my mind is wired this way and I'm terrible that 4.4% is lower than Bing's market share and is lower than Microsoft Edge usage here. Really? But like, way. Okay, like. So I also, this is an awesome one where this guy asked specifically so every question was about AI and spending and return on investment. What are we getting our Money back. And, and it was like the change bank thing, you know, it's like, you know, we're going to make money through volume. So Amy Hood is super pumped, you know, she's like super positive.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:16]:
Everything's great. Anyway, this the first, I think it was the first question the guy asked, you know, well, how did, how does this spending actually get paid for? And then this is Satya's answer. He goes, you want to start? Amy like handed it off. It's beautiful, it's a beautiful moment. I don't, it's not worth going through all of these questions on air. I wrote about every one of them in this article that's quite lengthy. It's just the same thing over and over again, you know, it's literally. And people would start at the question saying, well, I know you talked about this but you know, it's like, but could you do it again please? Because you know, yeah, I'm not hearing a name that makes, you know, sense or a number.

Paul Thurrott [00:25:59]:
I'm sorry, a number or an answer or whatever. And I, I don't know. He also, the one thing I will point out that I thought was kind of interesting, if you think back to as long ago as last week, Microsoft and OpenAI Re engineered their partnership yet again. There was a big announcement about that. The next day OpenAI and Amazon announced an example. And I think from the outside world's perspective it feels like Microsoft is probably right to get rid of what is probably a financial and resource boat anchor or whatever in some ways. But it's also heavily reliant on open AI and chat GPT for the GPT models for their own, you know, first party services and they can't afford to let them go completely. And it sort of feels like from on the outside that maybe OpenAI got the better part of the deal.

Paul Thurrott [00:26:49]:
But I, I have to say Satya Nadella did a pretty good way a job of kind of defending it. And, and you know why this makes sense for Microsoft still. And I'll just read part of this because I thought this was, I, I think this is relevant. He said, you know, we have a Frontier model meaning open AIs, you know, GPT, five point, whatever. It's on now with all the IP rates royalty free. We have access that all the way through 2032 and we fully plan to exploit it. That's good. I mean that's, yeah, you know, that's.

Richard Campbell [00:27:18]:
And then that's what it means.

Paul Thurrott [00:27:20]:
No, I mean that's. He talks about how they're a customer and they're not really paying them, but sort of paying them and whatever and. Okay, fair enough. But I think that's the. That's the thing that we're in 2020, we're talking six years, and AGI is going to happen or not before then. Right. They have access to. If it's not the top.

Richard Campbell [00:27:41]:
Because it's on schedule. Is that what you're saying? AGI is like, right on schedule?

Paul Thurrott [00:27:47]:
I'm not clear that it exists, but.

Richard Campbell [00:27:51]:
Or will there's even any reasonable path to it

Paul Thurrott [00:27:57]:
anyway. Apple announced earnings.

Richard Campbell [00:28:00]:
No.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:01]:
No, I don't. I don't know what to say about that. I. I don't. I don't know.

Leo Laporte [00:28:07]:
AGI. That's what you say. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:09]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:28:09]:
Someday you're setting business deadlines based on a technology nobody knows how to. So remember when defined meaningfully.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:16]:
Yeah. When one of the big things this came up last week, Right. Microsoft was buying Activision Blizzard. They were going through the whole antitrust process, and people like me and others, I mean others did this. We're trying to do the math. Like, how does this make sense to have Call of Duty be in Game Pass? And the ultimate answer is it does not. And so years later, they scale back and they announced what they announced recently, which is we're rejiggering Game Pass again. We're going to lower prices, but we're taking Call of Duty out.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:40]:
And that's the only thing that makes sense financially. Yep.

Richard Campbell [00:28:43]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:44]:
Why? How did I from the outside know this? Five years ago, three, whatever number years ago.

Richard Campbell [00:28:48]:
Grabbed it right off the bat.

Leo Laporte [00:28:49]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [00:28:50]:
So I didn't have time to look at this. This is a report from a third party. But Microsoft has a commitment to be, like, carbon neutral by 2030. And you have to think with all this AI buildup, unless you intend to use the power of the sun somehow to power these AI dentist setters, I don't understand how you're going to do that. And they might actually drop that pledge. And I'm sorry, but you had to know. You were never doing it. Like, you had to know.

Leo Laporte [00:29:20]:
We're going to pause at this juncture and for a commercial message, but we'll be right back with more. More earnings learnings, actually, because it was earnings palooza, as you point out.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:33]:
Good. Last Wednesday was a. You know, I get out of the show and I'm like, all right, I got the day. I'm just gonna be great.

Leo Laporte [00:29:39]:
Relax, Have a taco.

Paul Thurrott [00:29:40]:
It was Apple, Microsoft, Amazon. Well, Apple's the next day. Amazon, I think, amd well, AMD was more recent. Qualcomm, you know, like it was all at once.

Richard Campbell [00:29:50]:
They all want to drop it once.

Leo Laporte [00:29:51]:
Meta. Yeah, the only, the only one that suffered in the stock market though was Meta. Everybody thought they're spending too much money on AI, which is kind of ironic.

Richard Campbell [00:30:00]:
Interesting shift in the tone, right?

Leo Laporte [00:30:01]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everybody's spending a lot of money. I don't know what too much means.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:06]:
Anyway, it's not a story.

Leo Laporte [00:30:08]:
Let's take a break and when we come back, okay, more earnings learning. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. All right, back to the show we go. And you, Paul, you, you're just a glutton for punishment. More earnings.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:24]:
What's the Sisyphus? The guy who pushes the rock up the hill. That's me. Yeah, I'm not going to spend too much time on these companies, but I'll just. Couple of high level things. Apple, you know, almost 30 billion in net income, which someone pointed out to me by the way, under Microsoft's net income.

Richard Campbell [00:30:44]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:30:44]:
Microsoft actually had a higher profit. Now in most, you know, timelines that would make sense because Microsoft sells software and services. Apple's hardware, you know, mostly higher margins. They should make a smaller profit, but they've been making higher profits. I didn't go back in time to look this up but you know, Microsoft

Richard Campbell [00:31:02]:
used to have really high margins because they used to just sell software since they've gotten into the infrastructure business.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:08]:
Oh yeah. Their margins are going to that quarterly

Richard Campbell [00:31:10]:
margin is 36% which for a lot of industries is wildly healthy. But that's no software business. That's right. It's an infrastructure business.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:17]:
Yep. So that's interesting. For whatever it's worth, the only thing I did look at was the year ago, quarter and a year ago Microsoft also made a higher profit than Apple. So maybe it's a something about seasonality, you know, it's hard to say, but whatever. But don't worry about Apple. They're doing great.

Richard Campbell [00:31:33]:
It'd be fine.

Paul Thurrott [00:31:34]:
Yeah. 111 billion in revenues. I know, double digit gains, net income and revenue. The iPhone is just about 50% of their revenues which by the way is going down. I mean it used to be like seven, so I mean that's actually good. So there's that.

Richard Campbell [00:31:55]:
But what's picking up the slack? Is it, is it?

Paul Thurrott [00:31:58]:
No, it's actually so watches did well, but services now are services the second biggest business? Yes.

Richard Campbell [00:32:06]:
The thing they, they always tried to build.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:09]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [00:32:10]:
Well and that's a Tim Cook thing, you know, he gets a little credit for saying, yeah, we got to increase ARPU average revenue per user.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:16]:
Yeah, we don't, we don't monetize our uses enough is something no Apple executive should ever say. But okay, fair enough. And he did do it. And it's smart. So I, I can't. It is smart. It's smart. And, and by the way, you get a diversify somehow.

Paul Thurrott [00:32:29]:
All of Apple's other businesses are really dependent on the iPhone to some degree. Because I, I think if you look at indirect benefit of the iPhone ecosystem, whatever it is, I mean revenue, it's probably close to like 80% of the revenues or whatever. But, but yeah, the server. 31 billion in revenues from Apple services. You got to remember this is stuff like Apple Music iCloud+, blah blah blah. You know, compare that to Microsoft's top level business units. That's the same number almost as intelligent cloud, which is all of Azure. It's almost the same number as productivity and online Services, which is Microsoft 365 and including Windows Commerc.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:06]:
So Apple services, I mean we can all make fun of that if you want but like that's a lot of money.

Richard Campbell [00:33:11]:
It's real money. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:12]:
That's incredible.

Richard Campbell [00:33:13]:
Any normal business, that would be an extraordinary sum of money. It's only when you play in the hyperscaler landing, like only 30 billion.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:21]:
Is that a Fortune 100 company by itself? I mean it's certainly a Fortune 100 easily.

Richard Campbell [00:33:25]:
You're exactly right. Easily a Fortune 100 by itself.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:28]:
Yep. Google, very similar numbers. 62.6 billion in net income. So their margins are way better. Revenues of about 110 billion, we'll call it. The profit is up 45%. The revenues are up 22%. This thing's going gangbusters.

Paul Thurrott [00:33:47]:
Advertising is. I know I put this in here somewhere. This number is actually, yeah, this. The revenues from advertising are now over 81% of Google's overall revenues. That's gone up. That used to also be around 70%. So that's kind of interesting. Google Cloud, you know, distant number three I guess in this kind of market.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:09]:
Yeah, still 20 billion in revenue. So again like two thirds of Apple services business.

Richard Campbell [00:34:14]:
But yeah, still a Fortune 100 company.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:17]:
Still humongous. Exactly.

Richard Campbell [00:34:18]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:19]:
So these numbers are kind of hard to know, but it now has over 350 million paid subscribers or subscriptions. Right. YouTube and Google one being the key drivers. So YouTube is meaning YouTube premium. People paying to not have ads, which is ironic. Or Google one is that whole. There's all these dumb names for these things now. It's like Google AI Pro, Google AI, whatever they are, you know, it's, it's that stuff.

Paul Thurrott [00:34:47]:
You get the Google Google Drive Storage, you get the Gemini AI rights, etc. Etc. So they're doing good too. I mean, that's. Yeah, that's great. Amazon also kind of kicking it. Amazon's tough because if their press release is 10,000 words, about 100 of them matter to me. It's like the most pointless every quarter.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:07]:
It's like an insane list of things we've done which don't have anything to do with anything but net income of $30 billion on revenues of 1 81.5 billion. Their profit kind of thing almost doesn't matter because it just goes up and down so sharply it's hard to even know what that means. But for our purposes, Amazon Web Services AWS 37.6 billion. Right. So again, that's bigger than all of Azure. You know, that business intelligent cloud. It's bigger than all of. More productivity.

Paul Thurrott [00:35:39]:
Sorry, Productivity and business processes. Right. Which is Microsoft 365 growth was 28% in revenues. There's a. I don't know what this means. Well, I mean, I do know what it means, but it's kind of weird. They don't really call this out elsewhere, but their, their chips business is the way that Andy Jassy described. It grew triple digits to.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:01]:
I don't know why I assume this number, but about $5 billion in the quarter. So this is in other words, customers paying Amazon to use their cpu, tpu, whatever they're calling those things on AWS essentially. Right, right. And their advertising business all by itself is $17.3 billion a 24. So they're also, they're doing pretty good. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:36:25]:
AMD figure the run rate of a bottom tier Fortune 100 company is 25 billion.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:31]:
Oh, is that what it is?

Richard Campbell [00:36:32]:
Okay, 25 billion a year. We're talking quarters here.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:36]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [00:36:36]:
So that these individual business units have quarterly revenue the equivalent of the bottom of the Fortune 1002s.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:42]:
That actually, that's an interesting way to kind of level set this because yeah,

Richard Campbell [00:36:46]:
I often think about 6 billion in a quarter.

Paul Thurrott [00:36:48]:
You're ranking my 6 billion in a quarter. I mean that. So remember, in this. And when I say remember, I mean literally this is like 20 years ago. But Microsoft would have trouble getting businesses off the ground if the expectation was that they couldn't figure out a path to this being a $1 billion a billion.

Richard Campbell [00:37:05]:
That was ballmer's line don't bring anything is in a billion dollar business.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:09]:
And when we say a billion dollar business, that's a year, it's not a quarter.

Richard Campbell [00:37:13]:
Exactly, exactly.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:14]:
So if you look at individual business units or businesses or whatever inside of any of these companies. Microsoft, Apple, Google, Alphabet, Amazon. Right. The sheer number of them that are high. Well, or double digit billions. Right. Is that might be worth looking at. That's astonishing.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:36]:
Like that's an incredible. Because you can look at users. Google often talks about how many of their services have over a billion users or whatever numbers of users. And they, it, they're big. But at the end of the day it's about this money. Right. I mean, you know, your business. And that's an incredible.

Richard Campbell [00:37:51]:
We say the number billion too casually.

Paul Thurrott [00:37:54]:
Yeah. And we also use the term big tech too casually because a lot of tech is big. But these guys are big, big, big, big.

Richard Campbell [00:38:00]:
Like really biggest. These are the biggest companies that have ever existed.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:04]:
Yes, right. I mean people like the alien being the famous version everyone's heard of. But there's a lot of science fiction that involves how the future is run by giant corporations, not by government.

Richard Campbell [00:38:15]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:15]:
You know, and that's what you see here.

Richard Campbell [00:38:17]:
Like giant corporations are here. They're not quite running the government, but they're awfully close.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:22]:
But they are talking about putting spaceships out there and they're gonna, you know, like it's gonna be, it's gonna turn into aliens. I mean it's. I don't know, it's incredible. AMD is one of the smaller of the big tech companies, I guess 1.4 billion of net income, 10.3 billion in revenues. That's a 38% gain on the revenue side. Now their data center business is their biggest business. Right. And they are, you know, to Nvidia, what maybe Bing or edges to their markets, meaning a distant number two.

Paul Thurrott [00:38:55]:
But you know, over half. Is that right? Yeah, over half their revenues, 5.8 billion came from data center and that's up 57% year over year at the time I wrote this. Oh, I should say, I'm sorry client and gaming, which is everything related to PCs. Right. So actual chips for PCs, Verizon chips and then the Radeon graphics, you know that people might buy for gaming PCs. That business went up 23% year over year. 3.6 billion. That obviously used to be their biggest businesses.

Paul Thurrott [00:39:25]:
Basically used to be their only business. I didn't have this information at the time I wrote this article, but I guess in their post earnings conference call which I did not listen to or read. They're predicting like a big double digit shortfall in that business in this quarter and for the rest of the year. So what's her name? Lisa sue, the CEO and chairperson for AMD has made a big and very public bet on AI data center activities and it does seem to be paying off. And I, I think this is the dark side of that because of course, you know, they have to have that kind of growth because if they were only PC gaming, whatever, this would be a much smaller company.

Richard Campbell [00:40:08]:
One of the arguments I'm making in the AI hype keynote right now is that Google, Amazon and Microsoft are all cementing their leads as the world's data centers.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:16]:
That's right.

Richard Campbell [00:40:18]:
The same way that cell phone companies have. Like you wouldn't start a new cell phone company, expect to put up enough towers to matter. It's not impossible now. Yeah, actually that companies have now just so much in data centers.

Paul Thurrott [00:40:29]:
That's a perfect comparison. And you're also going to see the Data center or AI equivalent of MVNOs or whatever they're called. The, the little mobile companies that are really using t mobile bandwidth or using Verizon or whatever it is. And yeah, it's, but it's really, you know, in the US at least we basically have three companies, you know, and that's it.

Richard Campbell [00:40:52]:
It turns out that's basically the world except the world's getting really concerned about data sovereignty which now gets into this whole MVNO model where we might now start see national sovereign entities that utilize a portion of this multinationals data center under some different rules.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:10]:
Right, Yep. Yeah, this is, this stuff's moving quick.

Richard Campbell [00:41:14]:
We are in interesting times, but it, and I, but I also say not unprecedented because we've seen these kinds of consolidations before.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:22]:
Yeah, it's just the scope and I guess scale or whatever of it that is what's notable. Because look, we've, our monopoly laws in the United States date back to the 1800s and things like, you know, steel and railroads, you know, and so I mean they were big and bad in their day, but I mean they look,

Richard Campbell [00:41:39]:
they look like and, and those companies consolidated control and you're seeing these ones consolidate control.

Paul Thurrott [00:41:45]:
Yes, yep. Qualcomm was last Wednesday. These guys are actually down. So Qualcomm is the biggest maker of ARM chips. They're the biggest maker of chips that go into mobile devices. Mobile devices like PCs are having a down year, especially smartphones. So their revenues actually declined 3% year over year, which honestly is probably not too horrible to 10.6 billion, but they had a net income of 7.4 billion on that. So they're their margins crazy high.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:14]:
Like for a hardware business. That's amazing. The vast majority of that, like 9 of the 10.6 billion came out of their hardware division. The part of the business that makes the chips and all that kind of

Richard Campbell [00:42:25]:
stuff, but not specifically the X and X2.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:29]:
Not specifically the what?

Richard Campbell [00:42:30]:
The XR X2? No, the snapdragons.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:35]:
Right. So. Well, actually the way it's structured now. Let me look at this before I say this. It probably is part of that business now. Like a small part.

Richard Campbell [00:42:45]:
Yeah, and I would think it would be. But I think their, their broader arm mobile manufacturing is a far larger portion of their business than.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:52]:
Oh my God.

Richard Campbell [00:42:53]:
Yeah, but laptops.

Paul Thurrott [00:42:54]:
But I could be. I had this vague memory that that stuff used to be clear.

Richard Campbell [00:42:59]:
I want their laptop chips to dominate. To be monsters. Yeah, right. To be the best thing that ever happened to them.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:05]:
Right, but.

Richard Campbell [00:43:06]:
But I don't know that's true yet.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:07]:
There's no, I don't. I mean, look, I, I question them getting into the PC business because relatively speaking, it's so small and they're. And it's already been anybody who's going

Richard Campbell [00:43:17]:
to make Windows on ARM come true, it was these guys, of course.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:20]:
But in other words, let's say they. This won't happen this year, but in, in good years we'll have like a billion of these devices grow. So this. They're selling a billion of CPUs, they're selling a billion of wireless chips and other things. They're selling billions of chips. Right. If you go gangbusters in the PC market and get like 10% somehow in

Richard Campbell [00:43:41]:
the first year, it's 20 million.

Paul Thurrott [00:43:42]:
Yeah, it's like, it's just, it's a, it's. That's what I'm saying. It's not, it's. It doesn't matter how successful it is, it's never going to be huge, you know.

Richard Campbell [00:43:50]:
Well, this was strategy's argument always about when intel missed mobile, they missed the opportunity to go to the ultra high nanometer stuff because you need billions of sales to make that make sense.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:02]:
Right. And you know what I think on just on behalf of the planet Earth, I'll just say thank God they never figured it out because x86 on mobile would have been

Richard Campbell [00:44:13]:
really tried, man. I know, but it's not the chipset for it. Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:18]:
Exactly. Exactly. What anyone ever thinks about x64 or x86 versus ARM, whatever. But yeah, I'm sorry, but on these types of devices. Yeah, yeah, you need, you don't, you don't want a fan. You don't want it to be an issue.

Richard Campbell [00:44:31]:
You're gonna carry design elements from the 1980s forward. You're gonna pay for it. I was explaining the itanium and the X8664 architectures the other day and just how badly intel got punished for making a new chip for Scratch. And gee, I wonder why there's. They're jumpy about trying to do that again.

Paul Thurrott [00:44:54]:
I mean, don't get me started on titanium. It'd be like if you were driving around in a car and then had to pull a second car. That was just the battery. That would be Itanium. It's like it was just so big and heavy in the wrong direction.

Richard Campbell [00:45:10]:
But, well, but you know, they, they blame it on. The customer only wants us to maintain our old design, not we couldn't make a new design to save our lives.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:18]:
Right, right. That's depressing. Okay, just two more points about Qualcomm. They previewed the fact that they are going to very soon announce a, a data center based chipset. Right. For AI, of course. Yep. A leading hyperscaler has engaged with them on a custom silicon engagement, which they could.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:45]:
Could you be more vague? No, but. So they'll be down to five companies.

Richard Campbell [00:45:49]:
So. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [00:45:50]:
Yeah, so June 24th, they're having an investor day and they're going to announce that stuff there and some other things related to what they call physical AI, which I think is going to be for wearables like pins and you know, whatever. Whatever comes out of that, which is IoT IoT is the smallest part of their business basically. But that, you know, maybe will help change that. The other one is that there's a bunch of people I really like at Qualcomm and this guy was one of the good guys. So. And I'm going to, I'm going to butcher his last name. I'm so sorry. But Alex Katusian, who was an executive vice president, group general manager of mobile compute and extended reality.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:31]:
So he was one of the guys, you know, behind Snapdragon. X was hired away by Intel. Interesting. Yep. And he will be. It's a similar position. Let me see if I can find this. Where is this thing? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:46:42]:
He will assume the role of executive vice president and general manager of client computing and finance, physical AI. So that's that thing I was just talking about. Right. So client computing is, you know, x86 and physical AI is hopefully something that's not x86, but whatever, that's surprising. I assume they intel chip back the intel truck backed up and dropped a bunch of money on his front line. I don't know. But you know, good luck. Obviously to him, he's a good guy.

Paul Thurrott [00:47:11]:
Okay. I didn't write about this, but late last week I think it might have been Friday night. You know Marcus Ash, who's a guy I know, I've known for a long time. When we took the kids to Germany 5ish years ago, we met him. He was working at Microsoft in Germany at that time and he's a great guy, but he's now one of those people that's back in Windows doing some of this stuff to address all these pain points.

Richard Campbell [00:47:43]:
And so what, he was over in msr, wasn't he?

Paul Thurrott [00:47:46]:
I don't think so. He was doing. It was like mobile apps. And this was a while ago. It's possible between that and now he's done something different too. But you know, it was like the, like the one. Was it one note or. I don't remember.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:02]:
So like some of the mobile. It was a bunch of mobile apps. Oh, remember they bought a company from Germany that did the to do app. Not todoist or. I don't remember, but they turned.

Leo Laporte [00:48:12]:
Oh yeah, yeah. It had a funny name.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:14]:
That's where those. That's. That's right. Was there like that. They were in Berlin and that's where that was from. And it was. So they moved.

Leo Laporte [00:48:22]:
They did, it became Microsoft to do.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:24]:
Microsoft to do. Right. And.

Richard Campbell [00:48:25]:
Oh, wonderful.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:28]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was.

Leo Laporte [00:48:31]:
Boy, this would be a good time.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:32]:
That group was from that team of people. Right.

Richard Campbell [00:48:35]:
And he moved to Berlin.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:37]:
Yeah, he was living in Berlin for several years.

Richard Campbell [00:48:38]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:48:41]:
So now he's back and he's. He's working Windows like I said. So we're starting to see these guys, they, you know, they're communicating, they're tweeting, whatever. So back a couple of months ago, Pavandav Lurie comes out and says, look, this is what we're going to address, the pain points. You know, we went over that whole thing. I made the point of saying, well, you're not addressing some of the big insertification stuff, blah, blah, blah, whatever. I didn't write about his little post here because we've already covered all this elsewhere and we wrote about it as it was happening. But I do think it's worth just kind of doing what he is doing, which is just providing a progress Update.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:11]:
So what has happened in just a month or so. Right. Which is kind of interesting. The only problem I have with this is that some of this is shipping in the Insider program only. So it's like experimental right now, but we'll get it in what Microsoft calls retail. Now, what I think of as, I don't know, it's stable, you know, in stable or what, you know, not in the Insider program. Right. In the next couple of months.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:34]:
Some of this is already shipping to stable or retail. I'm gonna have to wrap my head around that term. The two big ones, of course, are the ones we talked about last week of the week before. I don't remember the changes. The Insider program where you can now enroll in two new top level, one of two new top level programs or channels, I guess. Right. Experimental and beta. It's a little more complicated than that, but that's.

Paul Thurrott [00:49:59]:
That is available. And then the Windows Update improvements where you can basically spread that thing out as long as you want, you can pause it basically forever. And so like that's. That's happening. I mean, that's cool. They started removing the copilot icon from superfluous places in the UI, like a notepad, for example, as a reminder. That does not mean they're getting rid of the AI features. They're just getting rid of that obnoxious icon that everyone seems to hate so much.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:25]:
Then some of this is. I've not seen this, but Microsoft is going to configure widgets the way I actually configure widgets, which is fascinating to me. Meaning by default. In other words, I go in and make changes so that this is what it is. But now this is going to be what it is. What that is, is that feed will be off by default. So it will just be the widgets. You won't get all the garbage.

Paul Thurrott [00:50:47]:
New stories, nice. You won't be able to hover over the icon and have it pop up inadvertently, which I do all the time by mistake. That's when I remember to turn it off. And it will do. Far fewer interruptions, meaning like notifications, little alerts about like stock market went up or down and blah, blah, blah, whatever. Now you can turn all this stuff back on if you like it and are a child, but they're going to go to a default configuration. That to me makes sense because like I said, it's what I do. The other things that they're doing.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:17]:
And again, it's not 100% clear to me with each of these where this is meaning if it's happening in the Insider program or if it's happening in stable slash retail. But we're still CFR ing to some degree. So your mileage will vary, but performance across File Explorer for things like performance and reliability, consistency, etc. And then there's going to be some deeper changes coming down the road. System performance across the board, like smaller memory footprint, be more aggressive about giving a RAM back to the system when it's not being used by anything. Improve the responsiveness of the core shell experiences, meaning like Start file explorer, taskbar, etc. That stuff. That's pretty much most of it.

Paul Thurrott [00:51:59]:
And then the Taskbar update, the thing where you're going to be able to move it around and hopefully make it small. By the way, they don't talk about that as much. The Start updates where they're rewriting parts of it to be not JavaScript but native or WinUI code. Whatever is happening soon. I take that to mean we're going to see in this month of May those things appear in the Insider program as soon as this week.

Richard Campbell [00:52:20]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:20]:
So Friday maybe. We'll see. And then the updates they promised to search will come later. So I take that to mean June. And then they explicitly did say that they will have another update like this for build, which happens in June.

Richard Campbell [00:52:35]:
So, yeah, soon it's like, yeah, when

Paul Thurrott [00:52:38]:
will then be now? Soon. Yeah, but it's happening, right?

Richard Campbell [00:52:42]:
Doesn't this feel to you like this is this pavan started in. In sort of January. Like now we're a few months on and they've starting to build a list of what people want and what they can do. Sort of the prioritization, getting. Getting a long time to get here, but here we are.

Paul Thurrott [00:52:58]:
Yeah. The two things they're doing right, and these are the same things that the Xbox team is doing right Right now is communicating what they're doing and being, you know, really clear about it for the most part, and then providing updates. Right. This is a nice status update because it's only been a few months, maybe arguably less than a few months. We'll call it a few months. And that's. It's a pretty good. You know, it's like, look, this thing is out in the world.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:21]:
It's. We're not. We're not changing code for something that no one. This is. A billion people have this thing. Right. Like we, you know, you have to be. We all want these changes.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:31]:
It's great. But you have to, you know, there's a certain bar they have to meet here as well for quality and so forth. So I mean this is. I think this is good. This is keeping us apprised of what's happening because some of the stuff wasn't completely obvious, the back end stuff, you know, you might not notice or know, you know, even though it was happening. Right. So it's. It's nice.

Paul Thurrott [00:53:49]:
I think it's nice they're doing this now. Let's see. This is. Where are we? It's May. So next week, right? Next week. Let me make sure that's correct. Yeah, I think next. Yes, next week on Tuesday is Patch Tuesday.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:04]:
So this will be, I think this is right, the first month this year where we're actually going to get some major feature updates in Windows this year. Last year we had major feature updates all but one of those months because January is kind of an off time. So this is a nice change, right? But we are getting to big changes, right? So one of them is Xbox Mode. This is the replacement for Game mode. This is the also the replacement for full screen experience which debuted on those Xbox Rog Ally gaming handhelds. I do not see this on any of my computers. And it's freaking me out because. I'm sorry, let me.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:43]:
I should explain why I said that last Tuesday or. No, well, sometime last week. I don't think it was Tuesday. They released the Week D update. Right. This is the preview of next month's Patch Tuesday update. So if you want this now, you can go. And it's available in preview.

Paul Thurrott [00:54:59]:
You can kind of go look for this. I've installed it on multiple PCs. I don't. I'm not seeing it. I think we're still stuck with the CFR thing for a little while. And then the other big one is AI agents on the taskbar. And that's big because of what I just said. It's AI agents on the taskbar.

Paul Thurrott [00:55:14]:
It sounds really big. But you're not gonna see this, right? Like, you're not just gonna like wake up one day and some agent thing's gonna pop up like, hey, we're here. What do you want us to do? It's not like that. So this is the capability in your operating system that enables this to work. And so if you have a Microsoft 365 copilot subscription, there is a researcher agent that is available now that you could potentially run. And it would, you know, it would do this thing, you know, the thing that was so outrageous last fall when he made the stupid move of talking about it ahead of not build of ignite so I've not seen it, I've only seen the demos they've done. So we'll see. But this is a big change and it's going to go down like a lot of medicine, poorly.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:00]:
And then there's a bunch of minor things. I. The drop tray is being renamed, but they're also making it a little more elegant, meaning small. I just turn it off. I hate that thing so much. And then minor, you know, File Explorer, Microsoft Store, etc, whatever. The other stuff's small, but Xbox mode and AI agents on a taskbar is. Yeah, that's big.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:24]:
Potentially. We'll see, we'll see what happens.

Richard Campbell [00:56:26]:
But yeah, we just got to figure out where the customer's actually act here. Like, you know, the devs are getting, are using a bunch of agents, but they're using it through their own tools. They don't need it on the taskbar. I know a regular mortal user is going to have one widget wiggling away on the taskbar going, hey, I got something for you.

Paul Thurrott [00:56:43]:
Yeah. This is not like, you know, if somehow I was magically in charge of UX at Microsoft or whatever, I would never have come up with this scheme. But I will say that watching that demo from Ignite and that, you know, that session or whatever, I was like, okay. I mean, like, you know, they're, they're making it make sense within the context of how Windows has worked for, you know, since 1995, basically. Right? So it's like, yeah, maybe, you know, we'll see. I, I still feel like agents are complex and for technical users only at this point. It's gonna get there. I mean, it's gonna get there quick.

Paul Thurrott [00:57:17]:
But I mean, you know, it can't help any normal human being with some stupid thing pops up in the task brand like, what fresh hell is this? You know, and it's some agent thing like, hey, buddy, we can blah, blah, blah. It's like, oh, no, I don't want to do that. I do not want that. I don't know, we'll see what happens. But it will go great. Then finally, a security researcher, hopefully not the same guy that found the supposed security problems in Recall, discovered that Microsoft Edge is loading all of your saved passwords into memory and clear text, even when you're not using those passwords. It just does it as part of its boot process.

Leo Laporte [00:57:58]:
Don't save passwords an inch for a bitward nat. Geez Louise. Holy cow.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:05]:
I don't, I don't know what to say to this. Like, that's not good. So maybe Microsoft could talk to Anthropic and get a little red team going there.

Richard Campbell [00:58:18]:
Well, and I wonder if that's what's actually happening. And some of these things are starting to leak that could be, you know, after the Firefox experience. If you've got a commercially facing piece of software. If you're not on this right now,

Paul Thurrott [00:58:30]:
I hope everyone that is running any kind of a software organization should be pointing to this and saying, we need to do this right now.

Richard Campbell [00:58:40]:
Right now.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:40]:
If that's not your response, if your response is to do the ostrich head in the sand thing, that's going to be fine. Yeah, you need another job. You're doing the wrong thing.

Leo Laporte [00:58:50]:
Well, and Microsoft has access to Mythos, so this may well be a Mythos.

Richard Campbell [00:58:54]:
I presume that it's in work. This is the one that's. Well, the thing is just leaked.

Paul Thurrott [00:58:58]:
This is an external researcher, supposedly.

Leo Laporte [00:59:00]:
Oh, was it Microsoft?

Paul Thurrott [00:59:01]:
No, no, no. They haven't said this. No, no. Microsoft would do this in what I would assume a fairly responsible way and saying this was happening, but we have fixed it, you know, and that you would find out about it after they'd already fixed it.

Richard Campbell [00:59:13]:
Yeah, no, my, my expectation is that every one of these companies is going to abruptly announce 200 plus patches, security patches to their products. We already.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:23]:
I didn't, I don't know who, like, who, who has this kind of adhd, but like somebody last, yeah, last patch Tuesday was like, this was the most security vulnerabilities Microsoft has ever fixed in a single month. Ever.

Richard Campbell [00:59:36]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:36]:
And it's like. Okay. I mean, you don't really see that in the top level announcement. You know, Microsoft doesn't say it.

Leo Laporte [00:59:42]:
No, I think Steve Gibson said it was the second. It was the second.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:45]:
Big second. Okay. Yeah, it was, it was just enormous. But it was like.

Richard Campbell [00:59:48]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [00:59:48]:
And you have to think that has to do with it. And yeah. Firefox 271. Vulnerable or not. Vulnerabilities, Bugs. They didn't say vulnerabilities. We don't know how many of them were actually security for us, but 270.

Paul Thurrott [00:59:59]:
Yeah, I guess there's. Right. So, yeah, there's the vulnerability bar or whatever.

Leo Laporte [01:00:05]:
But then this many bugs lead to vulnerabilities. That's the lesson I've learned from doing security now for 20 years, that it's often the bug.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:14]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:00:14]:
That then gives you an instance of vulnerability.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:16]:
Buffer overflow says, hold my beer.

Leo Laporte [01:00:21]:
And Steve said, and I think this is true, that you can count on AI not to make those kinds of dumb mistakes. It might make dumb mistakes, but it knows about buffer overflow.

Richard Campbell [01:00:30]:
But only when those. That aspect is prioritized, you know.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:34]:
Well.

Leo Laporte [01:00:34]:
Right. But I think I would imagine adversarial

Richard Campbell [01:00:37]:
models we're starting to use now is literally. You have a tiny foil hat agent is attacking every piece of code for its vulnerabilities and spitting out issues to fix them.

Leo Laporte [01:00:46]:
Yeah. And Chat GPT has done the same. They've announced a security model that they want.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:52]:
Everyone's doing it.

Leo Laporte [01:00:53]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:00:54]:
It's this. Everyone should do it. It's fantastic.

Leo Laporte [01:00:55]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:00:56]:
It's going to make things. And it speaks to sort of the reality of what's happening as we get faster at building code, is we're building more code. You know, working on our long list.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:08]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:01:08]:
Because there is a lot of AI slop out there too now. Holy mo.

Richard Campbell [01:01:12]:
Holy.

Leo Laporte [01:01:12]:
We're gonna talk in the next show on Intelligent Machines to Troy Hunt, the legendary founder of have I Been Poned.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:21]:
Oh, nice.

Leo Laporte [01:01:22]:
And of course, he's the guy who's been cataloging all these breaches. Yeah. Troy's amazing Australian fella from the Gold Coast. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:31]:
We need people like Sydney, a few weeks ago.

Leo Laporte [01:01:33]:
Did you.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:33]:
Yeah, this wouldn't be my area ever. Like, I just. I'm not interested. I'm not inclined or whatever. But I love that we. These people exist.

Richard Campbell [01:01:42]:
Oh.

Leo Laporte [01:01:42]:
You know, he's so. You remember we always talk about that XKCD cartoon where the entire Internet is supported by one developer. This little brick, this whole house of cards.

Paul Thurrott [01:01:51]:
That would be funny if it wasn't true, by the way.

Leo Laporte [01:01:55]:
He listened like 14 billion requests a day.

Richard Campbell [01:01:58]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:01:59]:
From every browser.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:00]:
Every open source maintainer on Earth is like. Yeah, right. Like, it's.

Leo Laporte [01:02:05]:
It's Troy Hunt and his wife doing this thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:07]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:02:07]:
You know, Charlotte. Yeah. I mean, it was an accident, really. Right. He made a thing just to sort of demonstrate. Look, you can't reuse passwords. The fact that it turned into a business was kind of accidental. He was working and now it's all consuming.

Leo Laporte [01:02:20]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:20]:
Richard, as it turns out, you can reuse passwords. It's a hugely problematic thing to do.

Leo Laporte [01:02:25]:
But a lot of time.

Richard Campbell [01:02:27]:
Oh, my God.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:27]:
All you have to remember is one password.

Richard Campbell [01:02:29]:
It's fantastic.

Leo Laporte [01:02:30]:
Monkey. One, two, three, and you're done.

Richard Campbell [01:02:32]:
Bob's your uncle and I. I was on his beta. And so the first. First time he put the thing up, I was already in a breach. I was in one of the. I was one of the original Stratford breaches. That was on its system.

Leo Laporte [01:02:42]:
Yeah, I think that. So he put it up as a kind of project while he was at Pfizer, and then there was a big Adobe Breach and all of a sudden everybody in the world is coming to have.

Richard Campbell [01:02:52]:
I've been pwned.

Leo Laporte [01:02:53]:
And he said, you know, this could be a business. Terrible Australian accent. I will never do it again.

Paul Thurrott [01:02:58]:
And I said, this is a vulnerability.

Leo Laporte [01:03:02]:
Hey, let's pause for a minute and we'll get back with more Windows Weekly in just a bit with Paul Thurrott in Mexico City and Richard Campbell in beautiful Toronto. You're there for what, a conference?

Richard Campbell [01:03:14]:
Yeah, NBC Toronto.

Leo Laporte [01:03:16]:
Nice. Speaking.

Richard Campbell [01:03:17]:
Yeah. Yep. Doing this.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:19]:
The N stands for Norwegian, I think.

Leo Laporte [01:03:23]:
Yeah, that's right.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:27]:
Of Norway. That's in Toronto.

Richard Campbell [01:03:30]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:31]:
Like, I'm an American, so I don't quite understand geography, but yeah, that's for.

Richard Campbell [01:03:37]:
Yeah. One of my favorite talks and one of the. One of my favorite books I've never finished writing. And there's a bunch of Microsoft Hanselman's. Here's here. Like, there's some great, great.

Leo Laporte [01:03:51]:
I love Scott Hanselman. He is. He is. He's.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:54]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:03:54]:
Exactly what you want at a company. Yeah, I bet he is.

Paul Thurrott [01:03:57]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:03:57]:
All right. We'll have more right after this. How could it be? Look at the beautiful Hawaiian day behind me.

Richard Campbell [01:04:05]:
It's gorgeous.

Leo Laporte [01:04:06]:
Yeah, It's a little bright. So I have all these. Yeah, it's really silly. And I think at some point window washers are going to come and they're gonna. They're gonna be. They're gonna be behind me on ladders. So just awesome. A word of warning.

Leo Laporte [01:04:20]:
Let's go on with AI. Paulie.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:25]:
Yeah. I don't want to talk about any of this, but I'm going to just do this. So Microsoft announced something called Microsoft Agent 365 at Ignite. It's been in preview probably since then. I guess that. All right. It's out of preview now. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:04:46]:
I guess it's an agent for monitoring agents. It's like, what? I don't know. It's an open cloud something. I don't know. Geez. I don't know. This is like, gross. Also A related Microsoft 365 for agents.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:00]:
This is in public preview or I guess semi related. I'm not sure if that's related.

Leo Laporte [01:05:04]:
Whatever.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:06]:
Anyway, also on the phone, and this to me is slightly interesting only because we were talking earlier about this Windows 11 UI for agents, where they'll behave like apps, sort of where there'll be an icon in the Taskbar and notifications and that this is a, a familiar way to interact with this stuff for people that used to Windows. So if you. Now let's think about mobile a little bit. Right. So in partnership with Anthropic, interestingly Microsoft created a copilot cowork capability which is now available on mobile. Right. And this is a way to. And I should say it's extensible with reusable skills, third party plugins, right.

Paul Thurrott [01:05:49]:
This is an early preview. So the AI era version of what used to be like the RDP program, the rapid deployment program Microsoft used to have for a long, long time is called the Frontier program now for Microsoft Frontier, that's where it's at. So it's not like you can't go to the app store and just get this thing. But there is a, I'm going to call it a copilot cowork app on mobile that can send autonomous agents out into the world to create multi step tasks or complete multi step tasks on your behalf which is very similar to what cloud cowork. Right. So same thing built on cloud code or whatever. The UI is almost ridiculously friendly. It reminds me of something from the distant past in the Microsoft sphere.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:40]:
But. But it's basically just big buttons and it's stuff like organize my inbox, arrange my will. Sure.

Richard Campbell [01:06:50]:
It's not a paperclip.

Paul Thurrott [01:06:52]:
One of them is a paperclip. Prep for a meeting, research a company. Right. So what you can do is connect this to whatever data sources and this is where it gets. It's a pretty UI but it's stuff like Dynamics 365 customer service dynamic 365 sale fabric IQ and then whatever third party services. Right. So it's like it's not for. But the UI is.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:11]:
So it's just, it's like silly, you know. So obviously if you're using Microsoft 365 Copilot you're going to have different entry points into this thing. Right? You could do this from the web. You could do it from a sort of a native app on Windows. You can access it from within individual Microsoft 365 apps, you know, like Word and Part whatever. And now mobile is well mobile. There's already a mobile app, but there's going to be an app for agents and I. The way this should work is that you get some kind of a native or normal or familiar mobile like UI on mobile.

Paul Thurrott [01:07:44]:
But you could then go back to your PC login and maybe you get like a notification on the taskbar because that's how we do it on Windows. Right. So I'm kind of curious to see how this stuff all interacts.

Richard Campbell [01:07:58]:
I hope they coordinate together with each other. That hasn't been my experience so far,

Paul Thurrott [01:08:02]:
but one of the connectors, by the way, is for notion. Okay, interesting. So, and then my least favorite article or, you know, story of the week, Microsoft has announced a legal agent for Microsoft Word.

Richard Campbell [01:08:20]:
Why don't you like this idea?

Paul Thurrott [01:08:22]:
Because there are already examples of lawyers who have used AI to fabricate legal precedents or whatever it is, or write their, you know, arguments and so forth. And this thing literally is designed to do exactly that.

Richard Campbell [01:08:38]:
I mean, they, this is not trying to do legal cases. This is just trying to be a legally intelligent contract editor. I think I put it in the right place because you usually open contracts in Word.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:51]:
Yes.

Richard Campbell [01:08:51]:
So the idea that then there's a tool there that has some visibility into legal language is interesting.

Paul Thurrott [01:08:59]:
It's inevitable. I mean, I, I, I accept that this has to happen. I, I also just think the, the timing's not really totally bad. It was, it's not, there wasn't a famous case last week we can point to, say you're doing this now, but there are unfortunately several examples of this kind of thing.

Richard Campbell [01:09:15]:
So, but that was, you know, that that lawyer did it to himself. He, he asked the tool to come up with citations and it fabricated citations. Then he showed it to a judge without validating it. That's on him.

Paul Thurrott [01:09:28]:
No, no, 100%. Yeah, you're right. You're right. So, yeah, look, this is the, without being cynical, which is hard for me. I mean, this is the definition of what AI is and should be used for. Like, it's, you know, you're going to save people time, save the money, etcetera, you're going to get, get some of the, the gross, you know, work out of the way, you know, hopefully.

Richard Campbell [01:09:49]:
Well, just a legal translator. You take a paragraph of legalese, you're like, what does this actually say?

Paul Thurrott [01:09:55]:
Okay, yeah, yeah, no, this is a good, I hate this. Let's move on. All right, so I just hated so much.

Richard Campbell [01:10:03]:
But this is the kind of integration this is not, hey, go to my new app, check out my new icon. It's like, hey, in this tool that I use all the time I was trying to do this thing, and all of a sudden the tool got better at doing that thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:15]:
Yep. Yeah. I mean, the last holdout use major use case for Word Perfect was the legal market. Right. That was a big thing for them. And so Microsoft Obviously got that going at some point and now all lawyers, everyone, like everyone on earth who uses Microsoft Word. So yeah, I understand. I, I just, I'm looking forward to like the nuclear reactor agent.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:36]:
You know, the, you know, it's like I just, please don't tell me about this.

Richard Campbell [01:10:39]:
So you want to build a nuclear reactor.

Paul Thurrott [01:10:43]:
It looks like you're trying to shut down reactor five. Would you like someone like. And then these two are just interesting because of what the companies are and the different approaches. The, the first one which is, is a leak in this case from Mark Gurman who's super reliable. So it's almost certainly true. And the next one was an actual announcement from the company which makes it also interesting. But Apple is going to do in its platforms what it's doing now just with chat TPT where you can kind of hand off to this third party AI, but they're going to expand it to basically any AI. And that makes total sense to me and I, this is a, it also

Richard Campbell [01:11:21]:
is a punt by Apple. This is not how they presented their plan for AI that they were going to curate the best version. So you'd have an excellent experience. Now they're going, yeah, we don't know, use what you want.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:31]:
I mean there is a $250 million settlement because Apple over marketed an AI that still to this day does not exist.

Richard Campbell [01:11:38]:
Does not exist. Was complete vaporware.

Paul Thurrott [01:11:40]:
Anyone who bought an iPhone 16 and or 17 will get between 25 and 95 per device because of this. So yes, to your point, that's true.

Richard Campbell [01:11:51]:
I mean what it does is it just says to Apple, it says to all of us, Apple is a mortal company also.

Leo Laporte [01:11:56]:
Well, or I'll give you a different interpretation, Apple realizes that there's more money to be made being a hardware company that provides a portal to the AI of your choice instead of trying to become an AI company. It's pretty, going to be pretty hard to compete with Microsoft, Google Meta, Amazon.

Richard Campbell [01:12:15]:
I mean Apple dealers try and compete in the search base. They just get the best search engine to the phone.

Leo Laporte [01:12:20]:
Exactly.

Richard Campbell [01:12:21]:
So this is not what they're doing here. What they're saying is we don't know what the best of anything is.

Leo Laporte [01:12:25]:
Well, as a user I'm, I'm thrilled.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:28]:
Right. Apple's marketing department. I want to just be clear, they will never say that.

Leo Laporte [01:12:33]:
Well that's true.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:33]:
You're not.

Richard Campbell [01:12:34]:
But yeah, these guys were supposed to be the curated experience. That's why you live in their walled garden. And now they're doing what everybody else, the Privacy.

Leo Laporte [01:12:42]:
If you sign up for privacy and you decide to use them as your model, it's all going to open AI.

Paul Thurrott [01:12:49]:
Yeah. If you sign into that account. Right. I mean one of the things, I think there's a model here for Microsoft as well. If Copilot continues to tank, etc. Etc. Giving customers the ability to either choose the model they want to use or the AI whatever or automatically kind of orchestrate that on their behalf is.

Richard Campbell [01:13:10]:
Well, and I think you've seen this example with Claude Cowork, right. Claude coworker booted M365 copilot in the butt and Microsoft response is to bring Cowork into the product stack. That's not unusual for Microsoft. They will always go and recruit elsewhere when they can.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:25]:
Apple a little more hubris. So yeah, no, that's true.

Richard Campbell [01:13:30]:
And I'm not saying Apple's making the wrong choice. Right. What I am saying is this is not how Apple normally presents itself. They normally present the curated experience.

Leo Laporte [01:13:39]:
They're going to still say and you want the curated experience. We're hosting Gemini, which they're paying for on our servers and you'll have that.

Paul Thurrott [01:13:47]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:13:48]:
I guess the question is Apple so far has said, well, people want AI to do things like correct grammar or writing or you know, summarize emails. Very simple things which, you know, I, I guess people want and they say if you want the, you know, heavier duty inference, well, you're going to want to use a heavier duty model and we'll let you do that too. You know, Walmart is apparently making new devices that are going to have Gemini built in. Of course.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:15]:
Well, they have a big, so Walmart is a big Microsoft or a Google partner and.

Leo Laporte [01:14:19]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:19]:
Google has like first party hardware for things like TV streamers and smart speakers and you know.

Leo Laporte [01:14:24]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:24]:
Little smart devices, whatever they are.

Leo Laporte [01:14:26]:
And, but that's not a failure for Walmart. That's no, I mean Walmart sell a lot of devices. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:14:32]:
They're gonna, they're gonna sell for cheaper and a lot of them are actually fantastic. I mean the Walmart version of whatever the Google TV streamer is called looks identical to it and I think it's like one third the price.

Leo Laporte [01:14:43]:
You know, I guess the question is going forward, how important is it for Apple to be an AI company?

Richard Campbell [01:14:50]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:14:50]:
And, and you know, there are some, and maybe you feel this way, Richard, to think that's going to be critical to their future success. I think they're a hardware company and

Richard Campbell [01:14:59]:
if you're a hardware company, they always have been yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:01]:
So this is the difference between, you know, kind of fully embracing, I hate to say this term, but like vibe coding essentially to allow people to do fun things in the UI of whatever system or whatever is, versus kicking them out of the App Store, you know, which is kind of the, the Apple approach is a little different, you know. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:15:21]:
The App Store is Apple's Achilles heel. There is no doubt about it. They make so that's part of that services income. They make so much money on it. They're so disincented to let anybody do anything different. But it's not a long term strategy.

Richard Campbell [01:15:35]:
It's a reminder that Siri was once an app in the App Store.

Leo Laporte [01:15:38]:
Yeah. Which they then bought, right?

Paul Thurrott [01:15:40]:
Yeah. Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:15:43]:
I was just reading, there's a. Oh, go ahead. You have one more story and then I want to mention something that I thought would be interesting. Go ahead. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:15:49]:
I'm sorry, I just. Canonical, which makes the Ubuntu Linux distributions announced how they're going. Did I talk about this last week actually as I'm saying this, I feel like I kind of did.

Leo Laporte [01:15:59]:
I don't think so, I don't remember.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:00]:
So they announced how they're going to roll out AI functionality into Ubuntu now if you know anything about anything. Right. And in, in my world I deal with the like the older, more set in their ways. It's like technical people in the Windows community, that's everyone in the Linux community. I mean like literally. And, and I, and I saw this and I was like, oh, oh, this is not gonna go well.

Richard Campbell [01:16:25]:
This is not going to be happening.

Paul Thurrott [01:16:26]:
He is being completely reasonable and he is going to get eaten alive. And that's exactly what happened. It's literally like, it's like, all right, so we're going to fork Ubuntu so there's a version without this crap. And then. Or like what other distributions could we move? Like this is literally what's happening right now. But I have to say this plan is a solid and smart. It's a little bit like the thing that Mozilla is doing with Firefox where they're saying like look, we understand there's a big segment of our population as knee jerk just doesn't want this stuff. But, but there are features in Firefox that are actually AI where they're like whoa, hold on a second, I want that.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:01]:
And the version for Firefox is language translation.

Richard Campbell [01:17:04]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:05]:
And that's why in that UI in the browser you can turn it all off, but then you could Go turn on individual ones if you want. And the top one is language translation. Because even the people that hate AI viscerally are like, well, I need that, that works. And that uses the local model. It's kind of, it's interesting. And so they're differentiated in Ubuntu's case or Canonical's case, I guess they're differentiating between what they're calling like explicit and implicit AI. And implicit AIs are AI features are those features that are just making something that's an OS feature a little bit better. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:17:44]:
And so instead of language translation, they're talking about speech to text and text to speech. Right. In other words, we already have this. Right. And maybe it doesn't use AI today, maybe it will in the future. It's not about AI. It's not like, look, a copilot icon. It's like this is, you know, and you could, you know, there's all kinds of, like, they don't really say this exactly, but like system monitoring tools, you know, whatever you want to call it.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:05]:
Like you could imagine where they would want to use AI, where it makes sense to use AI. Right. That's kind of the way to say that. So in what they're going to do is there'll probably be a checkbox and set up. We could just turn this off. Yeah, an initial setup. But unless you choose otherwise, those implicit features will be on by default because they're just augmenting something that already exists. They're not, you know, they're not.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:30]:
Actually, they do have some. These are general, but these are things that might be. No, that's, I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah. Actually they don't. I'm sorry that the examples that we're going to give for, for explicit AI. So explicit AI is new features, like features that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for AI. This is the thing we're doing because of AI.

Paul Thurrott [01:18:51]:
Right. And these are AI centric features. Right. So authoring new documents or applications or automating or troubleshooting workflows or personal automation, you know, things like that. And so those will be off by default and they will allow you to turn those on if you want them. And you know, they bring up the whole AI slop thing, you know, we're not doing that. It's all very, it's honestly, it's logical and I, you know, even thoughtful and in their language, deliberate, secure and aligned with their values, etc. Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:23]:
And nobody wants it like the, the reaction to this. I saw this.

Richard Campbell [01:19:28]:
Yeah, it's obvious it was gonna be.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:30]:
I. I told my wife about it, knowing I'd have to explain why this was so serious because she doesn't know anything about this stuff. Like, what would she. She's normal. But I was like, oh, my God, this guy's. They're gonna. This is gonna be a. This is gonna be a little bit of.

Leo Laporte [01:19:43]:
He's gonna get crazy gamers. Hey, you're gonna love all the AI in the game. We're only gonna do it.

Paul Thurrott [01:19:48]:
The next Call of Duty is gonna be all AI multiplayer levels. You're gonna love it. It's gonna be awesome. They're gonna be personalized to you.

Leo Laporte [01:19:56]:
Hey, I'm an AI lover and I'm a Linux user and I don't want AI built into the operating system. Let. I can handle it. Just let me do it. I don't need you to do it.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:07]:
So I don't think you're unique in that particular regard, other than most of those people probably actually are AI haters, you know, but other than necessarily.

Leo Laporte [01:20:17]:
I mean, Linux is really popular among the vibe coding crowd because we're mostly terminal. Anyway, I see no reason, you know, every time I use Google Docs now, I am so annoyed. I want to turn off all the AI features. So it's just intrusive.

Paul Thurrott [01:20:35]:
This is going to come up in the first gaming story. But like this, this, this is a very specific to Microsoft. But this happens everywhere. Like you're doing some work and something pops up in your face. Don't want it. And maybe you are typing and can't type anymore or what are you doing? Like, what are you doing?

Richard Campbell [01:20:53]:
Why are you interrupting me?

Paul Thurrott [01:20:55]:
And then the worst, the most offensive of those are. Hey, could you take a second to rate this app? Oh, yeah, yeah, I can, I can. You're not gonna like it, but I'm gonna do it.

Leo Laporte [01:21:04]:
I hate that. I hate that.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:06]:
I mean, so I. You want to. AI would be particularly offensive in this regard, I think, because there's already that kind of visceral thing. And God help these people if that happens. You know, some AI thing pops up like, hey, hey, buddy, I got some AI for you. What are you thinking? Click the button. Click it. I'll just click it for you.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:25]:
Don't worry.

Leo Laporte [01:21:25]:
I honestly think this, this is where Firefox has the right idea, you know, and Vivaldi too. No AI.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:33]:
Well, there is literally no AI. I mean, Firefox gives you the kill switch, which I think is smart.

Leo Laporte [01:21:38]:
You can turn it off. That's actually a good way to do it. Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:21:41]:
And yeah, but essentially what Ubuntu is doing, I mean it's very similar.

Leo Laporte [01:21:46]:
Well, I'm never going to install Ubuntu. I don't like Ubuntu, so I don't really care because I know every other Linux distro will do what Firefox or Vivaldi is doing, saying, hey, don't worry,

Paul Thurrott [01:21:57]:
we're not right back to Debian. I don't care. I don't need. And I don't, I don't even need access to an admin account. So I, I think there are a lot of. I think that's very common. I will be quoting that SNL Uber eats end of year wrap up skit for the rest of my life where it's like, oh no, I know what it is, I just do not want it, you know, and, and I think this applies to like AI and.

Leo Laporte [01:22:23]:
Absolutely.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:24]:
In Linux, you know. Absolutely.

Leo Laporte [01:22:26]:
Actually we talked a lot on security now yesterday because Google, without telling anybody, just started downloading a 4.7 gigabyte.

Paul Thurrott [01:22:34]:
So is that true though?

Leo Laporte [01:22:35]:
Like, yes, they're downloading Gemini in Chrome. So when you get Chrome now, you're going to get a Gemini Nano model

Paul Thurrott [01:22:43]:
and also a low disc warning because what, 4.7 gigs?

Richard Campbell [01:22:47]:
Yeah, that's, that's the Nano model.

Leo Laporte [01:22:49]:
It's nano. They wanted 22 gigs but they realized nobody would, nobody would do that. You know it's funny because our, in our discord, our AI loving Darren Oki said that's great because developers will use that all the time to help their code.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:04]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:23:05]:
You know, so he said, you know, I always have to figure out if somebody misspelled Dubai in my code. Well, now I can.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:10]:
This is, this is a prop. So this is the modern equivalent of we are going to design features for Office because we know you have all of the apps and before we had to do all these if then else's. Because maybe you don't have PowerPoint and maybe you don't have whatever it is.

Richard Campbell [01:23:25]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:26]:
So you can see the benefit to it. But it's also gross bundling and enormous.

Leo Laporte [01:23:31]:
I guess it's a huge land grab because if suddenly every website says, oh well, you have to have nano, that means you have to have Chrome.

Richard Campbell [01:23:39]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:23:40]:
That's not Chrome. That's not. But that's exactly Google's point by the way. They're establishing a standard.

Paul Thurrott [01:23:45]:
The Google search antitrust thing in the United States where one of the DOJ proposed penalties is not happening, was to strip Chrome away from Them because it's. Exactly. And then Google fought very hard on this one because yeah, you know, it's AI and search and not the same thing. And then, you know, but, but you use this as the distribution, distribution point for both. And this is how you just. I forget which of you said this, I'm sorry, but these companies are all maintaining their dominance in their respective areas into this new era. I think it was Richard. But whatever is, this is how they do it.

Paul Thurrott [01:24:17]:
I mean, of course.

Leo Laporte [01:24:19]:
So I wanted to bring up. We're going to talk about it next on Intelligent Machines. Oh, Malik, who I love, wrote a very interesting piece about how AI is changing Internet Internet consumption patterns. And Microsoft is one of the four hyperscalers he talks about. Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta, all of which are building their own proprietary interconnects network data centers. Because it turns out that we thought that traditionally in the past everybody said, well Internet bandwidth use is going to go up because people are going to be sending data to the cloud. That what they call north south data is not as important to these hyperscalers as the east west data. The interaction that interplay between GPUs in a single data center and multiple data centers.

Leo Laporte [01:25:08]:
And so Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Meta have all developed very sophisticated, completely incompatible, completely proprietary ways of having interconnects between data centers. Microsoft now has half a million miles of fiber and it's not single strand fiber. The standard now is 24 strand fiber. These, these giant cakes.

Paul Thurrott [01:25:31]:
Can I make a joke about how you need more fiber?

Leo Laporte [01:25:35]:
Well, you do if you're a data center. They also. He also talks about how it's changing geographies because companies are building data centers where power is cheap, where land is cheap. And so most of the bandwidth of the Internet is not coming from cities anymore. It's coming from, you know, Memphis because the land was cheap and the power is cheap. So it's a complete reworking of the economy thing, of the data center economy and Internet economy.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:02]:
This feels vaguely like the allegations that, you know, Google and some kind of industry group had made against Microsoft about expatriating, I guess exporting whatever code or user data out of Azure, in this case to other clouds was made difficult through licensing costs.

Leo Laporte [01:26:22]:
Right?

Paul Thurrott [01:26:22]:
And it was really just artificial. And at one point they were all doing it. I mean, Amazon, Google and Microsoft were all doing it. And then after Amazon and Google stopped doing it, they started complaining about Microsoft. And so Microsoft did it for a little while more, but they got in trouble and now they, they just let people migrate the data they, you know, but I, this, that could, I mean that could also be a, what do you call it, a competitive strength, right?

Leo Laporte [01:26:46]:
Oh, absolutely. Listen, listen to this.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:48]:
One of them figures it out, you know.

Leo Laporte [01:26:50]:
Well, they're all competing.

Paul Thurrott [01:26:52]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:26:52]:
Microsoft. And the only reason we talk about Microsoft is because Google doesn't disclose. But Microsoft does. For some reason they haven't figured this out in that November of last year.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:01]:
They tell them, don't tell them.

Leo Laporte [01:27:03]:
They told. They disclosed that they'd added 120,000 new fiber miles in the year 2025 to dedicate to extend their WAN, their AI WAN, which connects its Fairwater AI Super Factory campuses into a single system powered by Enron. Azure's overall wan capacity reached 18 petabits a second by late last year. That's tripled in one year. 18 petabits a second. And that's all interconnect. That's not inference, that's not talking to us, that's talking to itself. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:27:37]:
Internally, it's also one of the best arguments for why we can't do data centers in space.

Leo Laporte [01:27:43]:
Right, Right. Think of the interconnect issue.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:45]:
You think the latency is bad on mosquitoes, on your cable modem.

Richard Campbell [01:27:48]:
You know, it's not just the latency, it's the bandwidth. You can cram so much data down fiber and you can put bundles of fiber together and it just doesn't work that way in orbit.

Paul Thurrott [01:27:58]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:27:58]:
He Ohm writes, the hyperscalers are no longer just buying fiber, they're reinventing it. Microsoft has a new hollow core fiber technology that is 47% faster and 33% less latent than single single mode fiber.

Richard Campbell [01:28:12]:
So I never really short lengths though.

Leo Laporte [01:28:15]:
Ah, interesting. They also, they. Well, but if it's within a data center.

Richard Campbell [01:28:19]:
That's right, within a data center. Makes a huge difference. Yeah. I do the whole undersea cable infrastructure talk and it's like, what about hollow core? It's like, you don't get that under oceans. Yeah, we're not making.

Leo Laporte [01:28:29]:
That makes sense.

Richard Campbell [01:28:30]:
Thousand kilometer strands of hollow core.

Leo Laporte [01:28:33]:
Although the. They're buying, they're buying cable. Subsea cables. Crazy, right?

Richard Campbell [01:28:39]:
Oh yeah. No, mostly it's the hyperscalers putting the cables. They're still putting them in the overall network, but they're the ones building them now.

Paul Thurrott [01:28:45]:
You know the wires that are hanging around in Mexico City here, they'd have the biggest data center on Earth.

Leo Laporte [01:28:51]:
Before 2012, the four hyperscalers collectively accounted for less than 10% of the total subsea cable usage as of 2024. They now have 59 cable systems. Google has 33, Meta 16, Microsoft 6, Amazon 4. 71% of global subsea fiber capacity capacity.

Richard Campbell [01:29:13]:
Yeah. There's about 1700 cables total.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:15]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:29:15]:
So they don't have that many cables, but the cables they're laying now individually are terabit cables.

Leo Laporte [01:29:20]:
Right? Exactly.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:22]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [01:29:23]:
It's a cable Google laid about four years ago that represented more bandwidth than we was laid in total before 1999.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:30]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [01:29:31]:
This and this. You know all about this, Richard, but it's something I don't think people think about that often. It was a really good article by. By Ohm about how really this is going to change network topology.

Richard Campbell [01:29:40]:
I do a whole. I did a whole hour on it. I should probably make the podcast too.

Leo Laporte [01:29:44]:
I wish you would. Yeah, I wish you would.

Paul Thurrott [01:29:47]:
Is it basically token ring technology?

Leo Laporte [01:29:50]:
Right, of course. Actually they have something called. Called Sonic, I think that they're using as their fabric interconnect. Also proprietary. He says. I love this, he says. He. He first pointed out Netflix was the first killer app of broadband many years ago.

Leo Laporte [01:30:08]:
He says now it's just a matter of time when AI will be the new Netflix.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:11]:
Oh, boy. Yeah, I'm looking for something like. And then it just comes on.

Leo Laporte [01:30:18]:
Yeah, we are. We are in the future, folks, in some really interesting ways. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway,

Richard Campbell [01:30:29]:
so the granddaughter's just going to make her own stories, right? There's going to be devices.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:33]:
Oh, 100%.

Leo Laporte [01:30:34]:
Yeah. But I thought it was interesting. It's not. Inference is not really the driving force here. That, that north south traffic, it is really the fabric of the east west traffic between data centers because there's so many. There's hundreds, hundreds of. They're saying they're going to get to million GPU data centers soon. I mean, it's mind blowing.

Paul Thurrott [01:30:53]:
I'm gonna go back and use an Amiga 1200 for the rest of my life and store everything on floppy disks, which I guess you cannot buy anymore.

Leo Laporte [01:31:05]:
I think zip disks are the things in the future I love. Zip this Xbox coming up in just a little bit. You're watching Windows 1 weekly. Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. But first, this word from some guy in Petaluma. Actually say with confidence that I miss my Helix mattress here in Hawaii. I sleep okay because I'm exhausted, but because we. We're doing a lot.

Leo Laporte [01:31:30]:
We're doing a lot.

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

Richard Campbell [01:31:32]:
But

Leo Laporte [01:31:34]:
yeah, we have. We've made a lot of plans, which I'm glad. Yeah, this is coffee country too. I'm really excited about getting A bunch of Kona coffee in my veins. Here's something that'll pep you up. The world famous Xbox segment when you establish expectations.

Paul Thurrott [01:31:58]:
So it's not as good as a lot of Xbox news this week, actually. So Xbox CEO Ash as Sharma has been in the news a lot. CNBC role for a month. I know. Very vocal. I like it. This is not something they announced publicly. I feel like at some point they probably will.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:15]:
But CNBC has obtained an internal menu men memo. Sorry, that's a difficult world word. Geez. Okay. Anyhow, big shake up in the organization

Leo Laporte [01:32:28]:
and is when you called Firefox Fire Farts, but that's okay. Yes, you did. And I wasn't going to say anything,

Paul Thurrott [01:32:35]:
but did I did that today?

Leo Laporte [01:32:38]:
Yes.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:39]:
Okay, well, I need sleep more. What was the name of the mattress?

Leo Laporte [01:32:42]:
Felix. Felix, go get one.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:44]:
All right. I did not sleep well last night.

Leo Laporte [01:32:47]:
Honestly, Fire Farts is not a bad name for a browser.

Paul Thurrott [01:32:50]:
It might just be my accent, you know, maybe firefights. Okay, so two senior executives, Kevin Gammell and Rowan Sones, are leaving. The latter is taking a leave of absence and will be an advisor in a future meeting. She's gone. And then Shimer picked four senior executives out of core AI, which is where she was at Microsoft previously to form part of a new leadership team in Xbox. One of them's named Tim Allen. I assume that's not the comedian Jared Palmer, Jonathan McKay, and Evan Chackey, none of whom I'm familiar with, unfortunately. That's interesting.

Paul Thurrott [01:33:36]:
And look, you could. It's reasonable to question someone coming in running Xbox who's never been involved in this part of the business. It's like, okay. And then I like what I've seen so far. But then you poach executives from Core AI. Mm.

Richard Campbell [01:33:55]:
Where you came from. And they also don't know. Seem to know much about gaming and in the process seem to be forcing out a bunch of gaming leaders from Xbox.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:05]:
Right. I'm not sure what to say about this.

Richard Campbell [01:34:08]:
I'm concerned. I'm concerned that you're crafting a bubble around yourself that doesn't know anything about gaming.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:14]:
Yeah. Yep. Yeah. So, okay. And I guess part of this too, is. I think it came out of this same memo. No, I'm sorry she said this. Actually, I'm sorry.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:29]:
Since then, she has tweeted about this a little bit, but she's also said that they're getting rid of the gaming copilot that Microsoft announced for the console, but I don't think ever released or if they did they're retiring it. And then the similar. The gaming copilot that is on mobile for some reason is. Is being retired and. Okay. And then the thing we have on PC, this is kind of. It's. It's a little strange, but there's a.

Paul Thurrott [01:34:56]:
There's an AI assistant built into the game bar experience, right? Or the game. Yeah, the game bar experience. And that's still going to be there. This is the thing where you can bring up kind of like a mini web browser. And, you know, because you're stuck in a game and it's very common for people, you don't want to switch to a different app or whatever, I guess that's still going to stick around. So I think this is another example of that thing where it's like you're in the middle of something, you're playing a game in this case, and this little freaking clippy thing pops up.

Richard Campbell [01:35:26]:
It's like it yanks you out of your experience.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:28]:
Yep. It looks like you're having trouble getting by the goblin there, big guy. You want some help with that? And you're like, who are you and what are you doing on my screen? Even within games where this is part of the UI, there are UIs that pop up that I found confounding. Like in Call of Duty, you know, typically you. You be, you know, X or B, the red button out of something, whatever it might be. So you go up and you look at the. Whatever the scoreboard is or something, and then you go back. But there are.

Paul Thurrott [01:35:57]:
There are a couple UIs that pop up that. That does not work with, and you have to hit a different button. And it's like, guys, get off of my screen. And that's part of the game. Like, I don't want that. I don't think many people want that from outside the game. So that's a little.

Richard Campbell [01:36:12]:
They all don't interrupt me while I'm playing.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:14]:
Like, don't interrupt me when I'm doing anything.

Richard Campbell [01:36:16]:
I. Yeah, don't interrupt me.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:18]:
Yeah, respect my time or my. Whatever, my ability to concentrate and mispronounce. Firefox. One of the simplest words on the planet. Anyway, so this is tied. I don't know why these are separated, actually, but yeah. So Forza Horizon 6 is coming out this month. It's going to be one of the games they release to Xbox Game Pass, along with several others.

Paul Thurrott [01:36:45]:
And. Yeah, a couple of things in here. Well, May 19th is for Horizon 6. So Game Pass, ultimate and PC Game Pass are in fact going to get that. That Must be day one, right? Doom, the Dark Ages, which is from last year, I think. May 14th. Coming to game Pass Premium call the Elder Gods. Some good stuff in here.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:07]:
This is. This is a pretty good Final Fantasy 5, you know, some good stuff so you know, across whatever the platforms are. So this get. You're going to be hearing a lot about this Forza Horizon game. This just a pr.

Richard Campbell [01:37:19]:
It's a great series of games.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:20]:
Yeah, yeah, that's good. This must have happened right after the show last week too. But they released the April update for Xbox and this time there's something for everybody. Like literally so on the console you get that up to 10 groups feature. We've been talking about the ability to turn off quick resume on a game by game basis. Super important that stuff's happening there. The Xbox app on Windows 11 is going to let you manually add any game or app to your Xbox library and then customize the name, how it looks, the icon, etc. Etc.

Paul Thurrott [01:37:54]:
You can pin games, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Bunch of stuff there. There are wish list alerts on mobile. There are some really cool updates coming to Xbox LA Gaming handheld. Although since I wrote this, I'm hearing that some of these aren't so great. But including things like automatic resolution, you know, when you dock, et cetera. The game gamepad cursor, which is actually in the Xbox app on Windows 11 as well. Support for Bluetooth, LE Audio and enhanced vibration, you know, lots of stuff there.

Paul Thurrott [01:38:25]:
So. And then some changes or not some changes. There's a promotion now in the Microsoft Rewards program where there's a total prize drop for a chance to win a million dollars like Dr. Evil, a Mercedes Benz, I swear to God. Xbox gift cards or something, whatever, you're not going to win any of that. But anyway, it's all happening. Activision has tweeted, announced, I guess, that the next Call of Duty is not coming to PlayStation 4, which is the previous gen console or Xbox One. So.

Richard Campbell [01:39:00]:
Okay. Also previous gen console, so access and PS5 only.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:04]:
That's right. NPC. Yep, yep.

Richard Campbell [01:39:07]:
And okay, I mean, draw a line somewhere.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:11]:
Yeah, several years. You know, it's been a while, right? PlayStation 5 is getting close to 100 million users, which is amazing.

Richard Campbell [01:39:19]:
The customer base is big enough now and it'll save the them coding costs and possibly make the game look better too.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:25]:
Exactly. And people tend to upgrade within the platform. So if you were on PS4, chances are you've moved to PS5. Yeah, that one's understandable. This one is not Quite understandable. What's that? Sorry.

Richard Campbell [01:39:38]:
Okay. But it's not understandable.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:42]:
Microsoft announced that age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition is going to be released on the Mac.

Richard Campbell [01:39:48]:
Yay.

Leo Laporte [01:39:50]:
They're doing it for me, Paul. They're doing it for me.

Paul Thurrott [01:39:52]:
And they said, oh, what? Okay.

Richard Campbell [01:39:57]:
Third version of Age of Empires is four. Why are they doing two to them?

Paul Thurrott [01:40:00]:
Oh, wait. Oh, I see. Because. Oh, they.

Leo Laporte [01:40:02]:
The Definitive Edition.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:03]:
Yeah, they remastered on the iPad. So this is over the past year or so like this? Probably.

Leo Laporte [01:40:09]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:09]:
Oh, that's interesting. Maybe that's how they're doing it actually then. Right. It's probably just the iPad app, essentially. So. Okay.

Richard Campbell [01:40:16]:
I mean, it does say Mac OS specifically.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:19]:
Yep, yep. It requires an M1 chip or newer. Not an M0. Well, you know, it's Apple, Silicon Map, whatever. Yeah, I don't know. Whatever. As Laurent, who wrote this article, points out, Mac Gamers account for 2% of the user base on Steam. So

Leo Laporte [01:40:38]:
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:40]:
Whatever.

Richard Campbell [01:40:41]:
I know. Presumably Claude did all the work.

Paul Thurrott [01:40:43]:
This weird stuff with Mac gaming, like I've been trying, you know, there are. There are a handful of AAA games and they're okay. Right. But on. I have a MacBook Air M3, so it's not completely up to date, but it's also not completely ancient. And a game like Control, which is probably like Ultimate Edition, whatever, runs horribly on this laptop, but they just made it available on the iPad. So I had bought it because it was like six bucks or something. And I'm like, okay, fine, I'll just try it.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:10]:
And I was kind of surprised. It doesn't run well. Like the Resident Evil games. I have those run great. But then I put it on the iPad and I didn't have to pay extra. It's like a. What have you called, like a universal purchase or something. And it runs awesome on the iPad.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:23]:
It's like the iPad. The iPad is not as powerful as the.

Richard Campbell [01:41:27]:
Yeah, probably. I.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:29]:
Although I guess it's an M3 too.

Richard Campbell [01:41:30]:
But come down to the dev work, how they coded anyway.

Paul Thurrott [01:41:37]:
And then my favorite news of the week. The Supreme Court has declined to hear Apple's or to grant Apple's emergency stay of its order in Epic v. Apple, which is the US antitrust case where Apple won most of this case and then belligerently just didn't comply with the order. Two executives were found to have lied under oath.

Richard Campbell [01:41:59]:
And she angry.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:01]:
Yep. Imposed all these restrict new restrictions and new whatever. And the thing that's amazing about this is there's been an appeals process, of course that's going on and they've lost it every step of the way.

Leo Laporte [01:42:12]:
They've already been to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court threw it back down the nice district.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:16]:
Yep. They said no before. They said no to Google. Same thing.

Richard Campbell [01:42:19]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:19]:
And yeah, actually, let me reload.

Leo Laporte [01:42:21]:
This was fast because Apple appealed yesterday.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:25]:
Well, because they almost immediately said they were due to, to they had to legally comply otherwise.

Leo Laporte [01:42:29]:
Right, right, right.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:30]:
So just as you. As that last ad was playing, I looked at my email and I got an email from Epic and they were like, hey, we, we have a quote about this now up on Twitter or whatever. So that was not available at the time. There was really little information about this. I tried to find the Supreme Court anything like even if it was like, we just declined. I couldn't find anything. So what they're saying now is great news. The Supreme Court denied Apple's delay tactics.

Paul Thurrott [01:42:54]:
Now we head back to the district court to determine what Apple can charge for only the necessary costs of implementing external purchase links. In other words, what Apple was doing before was they had a 15, 30% fee for all app, you know, in app purchases, et cetera. And they, because of this ruling and other rulings elsewhere, they imposed this new system where, yeah, it would go down to like 27% but then you'd have to pick up the fee structure from whatever third party payment thing you were using. And it, you know, the point of it was to make it more expensive to go a third party party route. And what Epic wants, and not just for them, but for everybody, is for this to be lowered because it should, Apple, you know, Apple should be paid. If they're incurring a cost, of course, yes, but they're just re, you know, they're just sucking in money for doing nothing. And so I, it's going to be interesting to see how we can figure out like what, what, what does this actually cost Apple? I'm, I've seen a lot of commentary on this, including from some information came out in one of these court, probably this court case business. And he was like, oh, we lose something.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:03]:
Okay, okay, deal. Where he said, oh no, this thing is hugely profitable. We don't even, this is, we don't. You don't even need these revenues. Like they, there's nothing about this business that requires this kind of payment. Like, it's ridiculous. I mention this not only because it makes me smile, but because, you know, Microsoft last week, I think it was, or two weeks ago, was talking about how like we're still. Still want to do this mobile, Xbox, game store thing.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:29]:
And this happening is what's going to make that possible. Right. Because they can't. Apple denied them this. Right. They. They wanted. Well, not this story.

Paul Thurrott [01:44:42]:
I'm sorry. Apple denied them the ability to do Xbox game pass cloud gaming, which is the game streaming service, because they wanted a per game payment for someone streaming a game that they get through the subscription. And it's like, what, you don't charge that to Netflix for streaming movies? What are you talking about? Like, so this is. It's kind of a big deal if you want to see the Xbox stuff.

Leo Laporte [01:45:04]:
Fun little footnote in this. The judge who spanked Apple.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:08]:
Yeah, I know what you're gonna say.

Leo Laporte [01:45:09]:
She was really angry at them.

Richard Campbell [01:45:11]:
Yeah, really angry.

Leo Laporte [01:45:12]:
Basically said, you lied to me.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:14]:
Oh, I thought I. By the way, I think this isn't the same woman who's overseeing the.

Leo Laporte [01:45:18]:
I'm going with this judge. Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:21]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:45:22]:
She is now equally pissed off.

Richard Campbell [01:45:24]:
Yep.

Leo Laporte [01:45:25]:
In the Altman vs Musk case, she's

Paul Thurrott [01:45:27]:
like, I don't want anything to do with Big Tech after this. Like, no, no.

Leo Laporte [01:45:30]:
You know, she's great. You know what she said? Look, she's not gonna let you guys talk about AI doomerism in this trial. That's not on. That's not on the table.

Richard Campbell [01:45:37]:
That's not the top.

Leo Laporte [01:45:39]:
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:39]:
She.

Leo Laporte [01:45:40]:
Look, she has tight control of her control room and control room, her courtroom. And I think that good on her. She's not taking any guff from Big Tech.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:50]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:45:50]:
Good for them. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:45:52]:
I mean, like, these people are. Yeah. They're behaving like babies. Treat them like babies. Yeah, yeah. It's beautiful.

Leo Laporte [01:45:58]:
And one of the things we Learned in Apple vs Epic and Google vs Epic is that these trials are always bad for the companies involved because of. Of, you know, these court discovery and testimony always ends up, you know, being embarrassing emails and so forth. And the same thing's happening in Altman versus Musk.

Richard Campbell [01:46:19]:
It's.

Leo Laporte [01:46:19]:
It's embarrassing. These, these people.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:21]:
You don't want this to go to

Leo Laporte [01:46:22]:
court and Dirty laundry.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:24]:
Listen, if. If my experience over three plus decades covering Microsoft has taught me anything, it's subtle. Have some say over your future. Do not allow a judge or a jury or whatever to tell you what you have to do now because you were so belligerent about your 30.

Richard Campbell [01:46:43]:
The line I've always used is nobody wins a court case. It's like winning an earthquake.

Leo Laporte [01:46:50]:
Here's my line. Discovery's a. Yeah. Just you really, you really don't want them going through your old emails. You really don't.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:58]:
Right.

Richard Campbell [01:46:58]:
Yep.

Paul Thurrott [01:46:59]:
100. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:47:00]:
And Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI just embarrassed himself yesterday on the stand. And I mean, it's just apparently this

Paul Thurrott [01:47:08]:
guy keeps a dream journal that he, for some reason.

Leo Laporte [01:47:11]:
How come everybody, how come this journal that he's been keeping is, is in the court record? I don't.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:16]:
I can actually tell you why. I mean like legally, why it's there. But I, I still want to understand the decision behind letting this happen. OpenAI's lawyers introduced it as evidence. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:47:26]:
Dear Diary, today I'm going to steal money from Elon. I hope that's okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:30]:
What do I have to do to get to a billion dollar valuation from me? What? What?

Leo Laporte [01:47:35]:
And then Brockman, the, the, the open AI, the. I'm sorry. Musk's attorney is saying, well, you know what this suit's about. And he says, no, I have no idea. And he said, well, let me read you the suit. I still have no idea. And he's just making an idiot of himself. It's really.

Leo Laporte [01:47:51]:
So.

Paul Thurrott [01:47:51]:
I think it's an earthquake. Every once in a while in companies you'll find a. A person that just keeps really detailed notes about things. Right. And so I think part of it is to show timelines and whatever. But the problem is you don't get to pick. You. You don't put it in the writing.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:07]:
This guy is like, he's probably writing stuff about his relationship with his wife and like what it's like, dude, what are you doing?

Leo Laporte [01:48:12]:
Just don't put it in writing.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:14]:
Yep. It's really stupid.

Leo Laporte [01:48:16]:
Or you know, if you do get one of those diaries that has a little lock on it so that the

Paul Thurrott [01:48:20]:
lawyer like a TSA approved like locker in 1970s.

Richard Campbell [01:48:25]:
Yes. And if you are going to write it down, don't litigate with it.

Leo Laporte [01:48:31]:
Well, I, I'm still puzzled. I have to really look into this. Why his diary? How that.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:36]:
I think it's because it. They so Open AI introduced it into evidence that was on that. Oh, that's their mistake.

Leo Laporte [01:48:42]:
Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:48:42]:
Yep. Well, there you go. But I think it's because there is other things in there. Like you. You know, there's going to be. You know, you're going to be embarrassed by this. You know it.

Richard Campbell [01:48:51]:
But yeah, but you can't have my diary so angry. Actually don't care. Right. This is a curse fight. Right.

Leo Laporte [01:48:58]:
Open AI already does have my diary. The agent is reading it every day comes.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:01]:
So here's the thing. Look, we. We already know these people are all terrible. Every one of them. They're all. They're all. They are borderline Antichrist. Yeah, but now we just have the details.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:10]:
I didn't. We didn't need the details. We already knew you were horrible and robotic.

Leo Laporte [01:49:15]:
Embarrassing.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:17]:
It's terrible.

Richard Campbell [01:49:18]:
But I also have the documentation that you're terrible.

Paul Thurrott [01:49:21]:
Oh, yeah. No, you have no idea how terrible I am. Look at my diary.

Leo Laporte [01:49:25]:
Like, diary, why today I stole another billion from the people. So good to be rich. All right, let's pause the. Pause that refreshes. Because, you know what's next? The back of the book. And we got some whiskey. Actually, you did. I think a piece about a Hawaiian whiskey distillery.

Richard Campbell [01:49:48]:
I did.

Leo Laporte [01:49:49]:
And we are gonna go visit that this week.

Richard Campbell [01:49:51]:
That's fantastic.

Leo Laporte [01:49:52]:
Because of you. They make it out of honey or the honey's in it.

Richard Campbell [01:49:54]:
They do the honey. The honey meat distillery. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:49:56]:
Yeah. So we're gonna do that. And coffee. I'm trying to decide which order is the best.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:00]:
A lot of, like, former sugar refinery stuff in Hawaii, which you wouldn't expect until you go and see it. Like, it's like. It's out there, like, rotting away. Like the. Oh, the refinery, steel works, you know, like.

Leo Laporte [01:50:11]:
Yeah, yeah, they're all gone. There's still some sugar cane. You can buy it on roadside stands. But no. Yeah, that business is. Is. Is long.

Paul Thurrott [01:50:19]:
You got any teeth left? This will take care of it.

Leo Laporte [01:50:21]:
Somebody really? Just so they should shoe sugar.

Richard Campbell [01:50:24]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [01:50:24]:
Good idea. We'll be back with more exciting, gripping, thrilling information on Windows Weekly with Paul Thurot and Richard Campbell right after this. This would be the time that we go to Mr. Paul Thorat for his tip of the week. It's the back of the book we

Paul Thurrott [01:50:41]:
all look forward to. Paul. You know, this is an amazing coincidence. I. I got an email recently from Netflix that told me that my subscription price was changing, which was the word they used. It's not going down. I just, you know, in case that was a mystery. It's not going down.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:02]:
So now I'm paying this company 27 bucks a month for Netflix, right? So here's the thing. If I paid them what I actually technically should be paying them, meaning I have kids who are my kids, but they live in different households now. They're different outside of the house. They would charge me 10 bucks a month for each. Psych. I could be paying them $47 a month if I wanted to.

Richard Campbell [01:51:25]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:25]:
And I am not doing that.

Richard Campbell [01:51:27]:
So it's like a cable Company subscription. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [01:51:29]:
Yep. So Leo went into the ad there and I went over and looked at my email and I swear to God I got an email from Google Workplace Space. This is the same thing. Price changes, your upcoming Google workspace renewal. Yeah, price change. I bet it's not going down. Guess what? It's not going down. And so look, the notion that we all have too many subscription services, we're paying too much, most of us don't know.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:00]:
You know, built into this business model literally is the notion that people will pay for a service they never use. Those are the best customers. I am an excellent customer because I do this for a lot of things. Now some of the stuff that I pay for every month is ostensibly work related, but. And I've been taking these steps to kind of wean myself off of this stuff. Like, you know, with the NAS, I can use Synology Drive instead of OneDrive or Google Drive or whatever it is. But when you, when I start listing out the sheer number of things that I pay for, I think to myself, a, this number is too big, it's too much money and there's too many of these things. And B, isn't there some happy medium balance, whatever you want to call it this somewhere? So I in also just a weird coincidence, I was literally start.

Paul Thurrott [01:52:46]:
I had written the beginning of this thing and I got an email, PR email from. It doesn't matter from whom, but from a book publisher. And I get these things sometimes and I usually, I don't even know why I get some of them. But this one was about a book that's coming out late this year that's about convenience and how we. The. The. The price of convenience is actually much higher than we understand. And I was like, you know what? Yeah, send me the book I want.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:13]:
I'm going to read this, I'm going to review this. This is really interesting to me. Now I've not really looked at the book yet, but that's what this sort of is. And I mentioned this to my wife and she said, you know, they have a term for this now. And I'm like, I'm not going to like it. Don't tell me the term. And she goes, it's called inconvenience maxing.

Richard Campbell [01:53:30]:
Nice.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:30]:
And I'm like, I will punch anyone in the face who says those that terms.

Leo Laporte [01:53:35]:
That is with two X's by the way, you're gonna have two X's when you do it.

Paul Thurrott [01:53:39]:
No, I'm not doing this. This is up there with my disdain for terms like daily Carry or like it's like what were we stupid? Like we, we have to have like. So obviously there are influences out there. You can like, there's like looks maxing and I guess inconvenience maxing. And this is not about inconvenience for inconvenience sake. It's not about just being annoying inconvenient. But I do think, you know, there should be like a little bit of a bar for certain things and that maybe some inconvenience is an okay alternative to the hyper convenience of just paying so much money for all these subscription services. So I didn't intend this, but I think this is going to turn into like a series of things.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:18]:
But like one of the. I'll just throw out one example and I, because I use this in the article, but I'm currently paying for three music subscription services because I'm an idiot. And, and part of it is because two of them are tied into other subscriptions where you just kind of get it as part of it or whatever. But one of them is because my wife and my, one of my kids still use Spotify. So there's that. But if you add this, I don't know, you know, I'm not going to add it up. It doesn't matter. It's a lot of money.

Paul Thurrott [01:54:43]:
So it's like, is there some? So I'll be out in the world, like I do, even though I'm almost 60 years old, like I'll go out in the world, I could be in an Uber, a bar, restaurant, whatever it is, I hear music, I open my phone, I Shazam it. Or I, if I'm on a pixel, I use the Google, yeah, the Google built in thing. And I found out what the song is. I'm like, cool. And it creates this list of those things. And then, you know, every couple of months or whatever, I go through that list and I listen to it for a little while. I'm like, yep, and I'll put it into my playlist, right? Which is super easy because I'm paying every month. I have access to all of the world's information.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:14]:
You know, if I added up like even just the cost of one of these subscriptions and instead of instantly just getting it for free as part of the thing I'm paying for, I went to some service and paid for the song. Would I pay more or less doing that? Because that's how I discover music and I would pay less. It would be a little less convenient. I would, wouldn't happen instantaneously, but I Think I'm gonna go there. I think I'm doing this. Like, I think my goal is gonna be to call this stuff. So this is gonna be something that comes up again, and I. I'm going to look at this across all kinds of things.

Paul Thurrott [01:55:51]:
And then, of course, my wife, because, you know, God help me, smarter than me, but also not in my industry and does not care about tech. When I say this to her, the first thing that comes out of her mouth is like, well, you know, it's not just digital, right? And I'm like, what does that mean? And she goes, well, everyone pays for gym memberships. They never used to. And I'm like, please don't. Please, please, dear God, this has to. This has to stop somewhere. You know, even in Mexico, which is not a rich country by some measures, right? Or at least the people here don't make a lot of money. It's astonishing how many food delivery services there are here, including some.

Paul Thurrott [01:56:24]:
Some we do not have in the United States, right? And people are delivering, like people are on a bike or a motorbike or a moped or whatever, driving to a restaurant, paying with some kind of a barcode thing, putting it in the back in some kind of, you know, heated bag thing, driving it across the city, delivering it to some person that makes 28 pesos a day or something. And somehow that's makes sense to these people, you know? Right? And we have. I think convenience is a disease. I mean, and this is something it really, I mean, you know, so I. I invented this definition of hipster. A hipster in my definition is someone who is nostalgic about something they never experienced, right? This is someone my kid's age who's like, I want an ipod or I want a record player, I want a cassette player, I want a CD player. And they. They're doing stuff like I used to do.

Paul Thurrott [01:57:19]:
And there's a reason we move past all that stuff, right? But there's also this kind of misplaced nostalgia where we have. If you did experience something, you remember the good things, but you kind of forget the downside, right? And so when you go from, like, physical media to digital, and you're buying digital and you own this thing, you have a file, you can move it around devices, it's not super convenient. I actually do feel that that level of inconvenience, it's still better than physical media in many ways. And I know, I know vinyl is warm, whatever, but the subscription service streaming thing is, like, it's too far. Like, so, yeah, I'm doing the thing I complain about, which is I do think this thing that we had before is better than the thing we have now. And mostly it's about my soul in my pocketbook or whatever you want to call it. But anyway, I'm gonna, I mean, the

Richard Campbell [01:58:14]:
problem is canceling a gym membership is a nightmare. Canceling Netflix is a breeze. And, you know, it's even easier than canceling Netflix. Signing up again.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:24]:
Yeah, so, right. So this is a very, I, I came to this independently, but I, I see that many, many people have as well, which is like one strategy for streaming video. And by the way, thank God I don't have a need for like a live TV service. Talk about a hundred dollar a month outlay. Unless you can throw an antenna on your roof or whatever. I would just go like, this month we're going to use Netflix, you know, and then we're going to quit. And maybe this month we're going to use. Yeah, just queue them up, you know,

Richard Campbell [01:58:54]:
use them up, put them down.

Paul Thurrott [01:58:56]:
This is something that I feel very strongly is an excellent idea. I've never done it.

Richard Campbell [01:59:01]:
Well, we, we sign up for live sports when curling is on. That's when we have live sports in the house. Right. As soon as the curling season is over, we shut that account down.

Leo Laporte [01:59:12]:
Is it live though? It feels a little.

Richard Campbell [01:59:14]:
It is really live. Yeah. Okay.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:17]:
A snail is alive. No, like I, we run into this problem on New Year's Eve because we have like you know, 10 to 20 people over depending, and we want to watch the ball drop on, you know, tv. And I do not have live tv, so usually my brother in law will bring over like his fire TV stick or something and we just use it for that night or something. But, or maybe, you know, the kids will come home over the holidays. Mark's like, I want to watch basketball on, you know, NBA on Christmas Day. I'm like, well, enjoy driving over to your cousin's house because we don't have that here, sorry, you know, or whatever. And so it's not convenient. But you know what? I'm also not paying YouTube Music 100 bucks a month for a service I never use.

Paul Thurrott [01:59:56]:
So it's okay. Anyhow, anyway, I'm going to, like I said, I. This could turn into something really ugly and big. I'm kind of nervous about it.

Richard Campbell [02:00:04]:
But there's Prof. G. Who Scott Galloway's, you know, unsubscribe thing, which he did, I think back in February, which is more of a protest, but it was also just a reminder. You have Way too many subscriptions. You just pay attention to this. Like sometimes people find out they don't have a Netflix subscription, they have three of them.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:22]:
I had a. So what? This is a little. This is borderline unethical maybe, but like one of the things you can do is subscribe to a publication like the New York Times or Bloomberg or whatever and with a new email address because you get some entry price and it's not something they offer to exist. Existing subscribers, you can save money that way, right? So a year ago, literally a year ago, I dropped my Bloomberg subscription and I bought one under a new address and saved money, right? So I have a. I had an email reminder, cancel Bloomberg and do this again. And I. I'm like, look, I'm smart. I'm not gonna do this the wrong date.

Paul Thurrott [02:00:58]:
I probably gave. Built a week to 10 days of wiggle room into this thing. So I let the day go by and the next day, Stephen. And he's like, hey, you got a bill from Bloomberg. I thought you were getting rid of this thing. And I'm like. So I was thinking I must have paid too much because it renewed, right? So I looked it up and actually the price I paid for a year. You pay for a year was less than what I paid last year.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:17]:
And it's less than the nor. And I was like, yeah, I'm just going to keep it, you know, because I'm going to get this wrong off the top of my head. But I want to say it was 120 bucks and it would normally be 2 or $300 a year, whatever the price. And I was like, yeah, no, I think last year I paid 140 bucks. So I guess I did okay. I don't know why, but. So I screwed that one up.

Richard Campbell [02:01:35]:
But did you talk about trying to make a useful agent? Have a subscription management agent, man, that's.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:40]:
By the way, nice. That's a. That's a really good idea.

Richard Campbell [02:01:45]:
Yeah. Anyway, and the double whammy of monitoring the output of your. Or the. The feeds of your house to say these are the services that uses how much your years use. The ones that are not use. I'll unsubscribe to these, you know, off we go.

Paul Thurrott [02:01:59]:
Yep. I gotta find. Yeah, no, that's an. That's an excellent idea. I'm gonna. It might work on that.

Richard Campbell [02:02:05]:
I'm gonna make a useful agent. If you're gonna tie up an icon on my taskbar, at least do that for me.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:10]:
I'm gonna. I mean, you have to. It has to have access to what you're subscribed to. Right. So one easy way would be like, here's my checkbook. You know, and I guess I want to be careful with that. But. Yeah, still no, but that's still an excellent idea.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:22]:
That's an excellent.

Richard Campbell [02:02:23]:
Sorry, what's a checkbook?

Paul Thurrott [02:02:25]:
I don't know why I keep using these terms. I think I've established that I'm old.

Leo Laporte [02:02:30]:
There actually are. I know one of our sponsors does something like that. There are a number of apps.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:36]:
Yeah, I know.

Leo Laporte [02:02:37]:
Because they have access to your checkbook.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:39]:
So they'll see. Yep.

Leo Laporte [02:02:40]:
Oh, you keep paying this every month. Do you want to keep doing it? And there are even some that will cancel it for you, so.

Richard Campbell [02:02:46]:
Right.

Leo Laporte [02:02:47]:
But you're right. This would be a better. I think an AI agent. This would be.

Paul Thurrott [02:02:50]:
I like this. I like that. I'm going to see if I probably gonna have difficulty with this, but I'm gonna look into that. That's a good idea.

Richard Campbell [02:02:55]:
You can ask an LLM about building it.

Leo Laporte [02:02:58]:
My current recommendation, Paul, if you're curious, is there's something from News Research. We've interviewed their founder, Jeffrey Cannell called Hermes. It's a really good agent model. You can use anthropic with it, but you'd have to use API keys. But ChatGPT lets you use a subscription with it. And Chat GPT 55 with Hermes could do almost anything. Lisa was saying.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:21]:
So Hermes, like, this is like Herbie's

Leo Laporte [02:03:23]:
Hermes, like the mercury, like the winged messenger?

Richard Campbell [02:03:26]:
No, no.

Paul Thurrott [02:03:26]:
I mean, but. I mean, but it's like a fight, essentially.

Leo Laporte [02:03:28]:
It's like Claude code. It's a. It's a harness. Okay. So it runs in the terminal, but you then set it up and it will run actions in the background. It's kind of like open claw. And so for. I'll give you an example.

Leo Laporte [02:03:40]:
Lisa said, you know, I keep seeing this rumor that. What was it? Some celebrities dating? Some other celebrity Tom Cruise is dating. I can't remember who it was. And she said, but I don't know if that's true. I said, well, I. And so I had Hermes. Every six hours it was checking, are they dating yet? Are they dating? It. I finally turned it off because they weren't.

Leo Laporte [02:04:03]:
But. But this is.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:05]:
That. This is that message protocol joke from last week. It's like, is anyone there? Yeah, is anybody there? Hello? Anybody there?

Leo Laporte [02:04:11]:
But you could easily. The problem is, you're right. You'd have to give it access to your bank. Bank account. And you might not want to do that.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:16]:
But the road to hell will now be paved by the services I make available to some AI agent. You know?

Leo Laporte [02:04:23]:
Exactly.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:24]:
Then running up.

Leo Laporte [02:04:25]:
I'm actually in the process of setting up access to my cameras, my unit ubiquity cameras. It turns out it can do that and it can see the video and it can process the video and it can say it could tell me stuff like, you just got a package or there's some guy lurking around the backyard. Or.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:42]:
So I have a blink camera on my balcony. It points west, Right. So when the sun sets, you see the sunset. Right. So it has motion detection, it has a microphone, it does all this stuff. And. And yeah, let's just say not a lot happens out there.

Leo Laporte [02:04:57]:
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:04:59]:
But every once in a while I get like a, like an alert. Like, hey, start a vehicle. Like, really? I gotta. I gotta see what that looks like. Or it'll be like motion detected. Like, nice. And so sometimes it'll be like a bumblebee flying around in front of the camera. Twice it's been like a bird.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:16]:
You can see it's like feathers and it's like scratching itself or something.

Leo Laporte [02:05:19]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:20]:
But the, the one that was a vehicle was my hand because I slightly. I changed the direction just a little like up by a hair, but I guess. And it's like, yeah, it's not a truck. It's my hand. Also, we're six stories up. It's probably not.

Leo Laporte [02:05:33]:
There's no vehicles up there.

Richard Campbell [02:05:34]:
Unlikely.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:34]:
There better not be. Something's gone horribly wrong.

Leo Laporte [02:05:36]:
Like it's a vtol.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:38]:
Yeah,

Leo Laporte [02:05:40]:
sorry, that was just the pick. You got a tip.

Paul Thurrott [02:05:43]:
I know these. I'll make these quicker. So I'm look. You guys do this. I bet that doesn't apply to feed use. You see news headlines and things. My case, every morning I'm looking at tech news and, you know, figure out what's going on in the world. And you know, sometimes I see this headlines where I'm like, oh, I don't like it, I don't like it, I don't like it.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:04]:
I'm like, ignore it, ignore it. Don't look at this. And then it appeared the next day again. And I was like, I'm gonna just. I'm gonna look at this. And it was PC Mag probably, and it was a guy I actually respect. He's been around for a long time, but he, he was like, you cannot trust the antivirus built into Windows. You get a.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:19]:
But you have to have third party antivirus. I was like, yeah, no, you don't So I was like. So I read this thing and God help me, I read the whole thing. And I'm like, I. There was not a single salient point to. In this entire. And I'm like, oh, don't. I'm like, I gotta write about this.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:35]:
I gotta write about it. God damn it.

Richard Campbell [02:06:37]:
I hate me.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:38]:
I don't want to go after a person. And that's not my point. I wanted to be super clear. I do respect this person and. But I'm like, no, you do not need this. And God damn. I went through this line by line and I quoted him everywhere. And it was like, nope, nope, nope.

Paul Thurrott [02:06:53]:
No, no, no, guys, a security expert. I. Listen, whatever. I will say I was vaguely excited to see the next day. I think it was Jared Newman or one of these guys. I get this new email newsletter and he wrote an article about this exact thing. And he was like, no, absolutely not. And I was like, thank you.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:18]:
Thank you. So there's that. You don't need anything else. The thing you have built in is fine. G. Please, dear God, do not pay for one of these things. And all that extra nonsense that they give you, most of which you don't need, either because it's just in there already, or you're getting it through your password manager. Like, you know, I have advice about security involving.

Paul Thurrott [02:07:36]:
You should have a third party password manager which does pass keys. You should have a third party authenticator app for 2fa. That's separate from that thing, by the way. And I have whatever set of advice I have, but, you know, you run it using a computer. No. You're fine. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:07:53]:
Enterprise, however.

Richard Campbell [02:07:56]:
Yeah, well, there's some. To some degree, we.

Leo Laporte [02:08:00]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:08:01]:
Security monitor.

Leo Laporte [02:08:02]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe you wouldn't call it an antivirus.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:04]:
No, look, I'm very explicitly malware on it. I'm coming at this from the perspective of an individual speaking. When I review laptops, you know, whether it's marked down a commercial class PC that were, you know, HPs, like HP Wolf, which I'm sure is fantastic and is a, you know, manage service, whatever. I mean, I. I get rid of that immediately. And, you know, McAfee, which is basically a virus, which, by the way, has two installers and they cannot be uninstalled from the same place in Windows. Dear God, this is malware. Stop.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:34]:
I remove that stuff immediately. Like, it was ridiculous. Look, if you're. I almost want to say, like, just using Windows as configured, with some common sense. You don't even need common sense. Just don't touch anything it's fine. Like you're fine. The only thing in Defender that I turn off is that stupid weekly announcement.

Paul Thurrott [02:08:53]:
It's like, hey, week went by, nothing happened. Yeah, thanks. Turn that thing off. Which by the way triggers a UAC control, which is unbelievable. But it's just an informational notification. I don't need that. I know what it is and I

Richard Campbell [02:09:05]:
do not want administrator to find out. Nothing happened.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:07]:
Exactly. It's unbelievable. So there's that and just the other one real quick is there is. There was an. So the guys that made Adam, which is the developer, one of the developer editors.

Richard Campbell [02:09:20]:
Right.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:20]:
I think it was Adam, decided they were going to start from scratch and make a completely new software coding editor written entirely in Rust. And they just released 1.0. It's cross platform. This thing is faster than. It's unbelievably fast. I don't have a problem with Visual Studio code. I just don't. But this thing is notably fast.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:40]:
It's awesome.

Richard Campbell [02:09:42]:
Well, it doesn't have all the plugins either, I imagine.

Paul Thurrott [02:09:45]:
No, it doesn't. But it does have plugins and it supports the number. It's got some number of whatever. But it's free for personal use. It's worth looking at. It's called Zed and it is. What's the website? It's a z dot dev. Look, if you use this kind of product with Visual Studio code, whatever it is, you should look at this.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:08]:
I think you could be like if you. Especially if you're in this thing all day long, if this thing had like a nice. It does edit Markdown. Like it's fine with Markdown, but if it was like a good Markdown editor, I could see using this thing. It's awesome. Like it's super, super fast. Yeah. Worth knowing about.

Richard Campbell [02:10:24]:
All right.

Leo Laporte [02:10:27]:
You saw that. Jon Gruber, the creator of Markdown, mentioned you wrote a little piece saying, oh, I see. Paul Thurrott, whose career has paralleled mine in many ways.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:36]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:10:37]:
Is about to write a Markdown book or is considering it.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:40]:
Yeah, I think I'm gonna talk to him.

Leo Laporte [02:10:42]:
You should. I mean, he created it. I mean, Markdown has its life of its own at this point. And there are many flavors of Markdown, as you well know.

Paul Thurrott [02:10:51]:
No, but I did first the thing he wanted to say. Yeah, I mean his. It's interesting. If you go back to his original announcement post, Markdown was two different things. It's the syntax of the styling and the plaintext document. But it's also this parser, which in his case he wrote in Perl, I think at the time, to take the Markdown document he was creating and transfer it into HTML so he could publish it to the web, which is excellent. But today we have these markdown editors, some of which work like word processors. We actually just use Control B and it does the bold formatting, whatever.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:23]:
Then you could use something like IA Writer that is a mix of and actual code, or you can use those shortcuts, whatever. It's a little different. But in the same way that it met the need he had, which was probably what, 10, 15 years ago, a long time ago. It absolutely meets my needs for writing. And look, 20 years ago I said, this Microsoft Word is amazing. It's a battleship. When I need a sailboat and I'm a professional writer, I'm only using some tiny percentage of what's in there. I don't need it, I know what it is and I do not want it.

Paul Thurrott [02:11:57]:
And you know, to me, markdown is, is perfect. It's perfect. Human and machine readable.

Richard Campbell [02:12:02]:
Perfect.

Leo Laporte [02:12:03]:
Yeah, I mean, I, I laugh, I mock all of these things said. And, and the markdown, because I use Emacs, which invented, I mean, org mode predates Markdown by several years.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:16]:
And, and I think Emacs is probably an excellent markdown editor if you want it to be like it absolutely is.

Leo Laporte [02:12:21]:
And it will convert it to H HTML. And it's a. It's not written in Rust, it's written in Lisp. But the problem is, you know, for

Paul Thurrott [02:12:29]:
me, Emacs on Windows is a big heavy thing.

Leo Laporte [02:12:31]:
Oh, I wouldn't use it on Windows.

Paul Thurrott [02:12:33]:
No, it's not. It doesn't make as much sense on Windows for whatever reason. It's too bad. Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:12:38]:
And by the way, Aaron Schwartz also worked with, with John Gruber on Markdown. Yeah, yeah. Should get a lot of credit. Mr. Richard Campbell's next Radio.

Richard Campbell [02:12:51]:
This week's episode is the one that excellent at Zero Trust World where I talk to Spencer Alessi about securing Active Directory, an ongoing theme and Spencer's particular approach, and he is the tooling side of the equation. So actually this is borrowing from Troy Hunt's you should hack yourself kind of mindset. You know, the Active directory is not particularly exploitable from the outside of the network, but it is a lateral vector. So when a phishing attack is successful, it's very common for the black hats once inside the network to immediately try to get to an active directory server because your goal is always to get off the workstation you exploited. You're trying to get into. In your ideal case, you'll get into one of the servers that's always on that's not managed the same way, that kind of thing. And Active Directory has some challenges now. It can be made secure, but most people that are operating AD are kind of doing it in the default mode with not a lot of security put in place and so forth.

Richard Campbell [02:13:54]:
And so we talked through a bunch of the various enhanced security tools that you can use and tests you can do inside your network as if you were the black hat to show you have these lateral vectors you're vulnerable to. And now it's well worth locking things down. He has his own Active Directory security resource kit if you want to get further into it. But there's lots to learn there. And just a reminder that, you know, we do defense in depth. We're not just talking about don't get through the perimeter, don't count on people not being phished. Count on the fact that after they get fished, because it does happen, nothing happens from there that they can't get off that machine. That your cleanup of that computer is sufficient, that they, they got nowhere after that.

Richard Campbell [02:14:34]:
Like, that's really your go.

Leo Laporte [02:14:40]:
All right. I think if my calculations are correct, it would be time to talk about brown liquor.

Paul Thurrott [02:14:48]:
Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:14:48]:
And then that, that 12th Hawaii Distillers Reserve, which was the mead. Yeah, whiskey. Yeah, it's on the. On the Big Island. And that was about a year ago. That was show 928. And it's obvious because it was. Came to me for the MVP summit.

Richard Campbell [02:15:01]:
John White brought it to me. Yeah, it makes sense that it was the onbody.

Leo Laporte [02:15:04]:
Was it good? I can't remember.

Richard Campbell [02:15:05]:
Yeah, it was great. It was a. It was a really cool. You know, it was interesting. Different right. To have distilled honey rather than to be distilled grain.

Leo Laporte [02:15:17]:
Lisa really wants to visit that and I really want to visit one of the Kona coffee plantations, so. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:15:21]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:15:22]:
Well, I'm just trying to decide should I do coffee then whiskey or whiskey then coffee? I don't know.

Richard Campbell [02:15:25]:
Whiskey then coffee.

Leo Laporte [02:15:26]:
Okay, coffee.

Paul Thurrott [02:15:28]:
You could do both at the same time.

Leo Laporte [02:15:30]:
It's a speedball.

Richard Campbell [02:15:33]:
So last week while I was at home, we talked about rifle rye, which comes out of Alberta Distiller, so one of the biggest manufacturers of whiskey in the entire planet. All this was a specialty edition they did and we got into the whole prohibition, so forth. So being in Ontario, I thought, I'm going to go find an Ontario craft whiskey. And I lucked into this stock and barrel and stock and Barrel was created by, it was the first micro distillery in all of Ontario actually. And Ontario has not been easy on the Micro Distilleries. Not the, they haven't done the same kind of excise tax breaks and so forth that the places like British Columbia and elsewhere in the, in Canada and the US have done. So this is, the two Barrys invented this. This is Barry Steen and Barry Bernstein.

Richard Campbell [02:16:19]:
Barry Steen had a background in logistics, Barry Bernstein in software. So he had, he, he'd made some money in the software industry. And so back in, they're both fans of whiskey. And back in 2005 they decided to found a company to start figuring out how they could make whiskey. The 2005 is way back there. You know, this is again very much before the craft whiskey movement had taken off. So they were, they were a bit ahead of the curve. They, they set up another entity that in 2007 they called premium Bottlers.

Richard Campbell [02:16:49]:
And that was because they wanted, they realized how long it was going to take to get into production. They were getting through the licensing process. They wanted to build out this distillery which takes a, a few years and so. But being a bottler is much simpler where you buy your whiskey from elsewhere, make your own blends, make your own label and bottling and then sell it. And so that's what they did with Premium Bottlers was they started to do their own branded whiskey which they also called Stalk and Barrel. The actual distillery that got built in 2009 and into operation. It was called the Stillwater Distillery. And of course again, challenges of building whiskey is it's easy to do the distillation and so forth, but then you got to lay up those barrels and store them for a while to age.

Richard Campbell [02:17:29]:
So in addition to starting to lay up whiskey, they also start to produce a vodka. So they get some income going. Plus they have these blends they're doing through premium bottlers. And it's not until 2013, so good, you know, eight years after they first started going that they made their first single malt and they actually did a two row barley single malt that they sold through the. Here in Ontario, liquor distribution is fairly strictly controlled. So the LCBO or the Liquid Control Board of Ontario is in charge of all alcohol. So the government controls alcohol distribution in, in this province and they're quite powerful. They're also the reason that there's exactly no bourbon in Ontario at this particular moment.

Richard Campbell [02:18:10]:
It's all in storage. And then when I go down to the local bar here and want to get an old fashioned it's going to be made with Canadian whiskey. It's after they're in operation that Ontario finally gets a small distillery program in 2017. So the county came to it late. And it's not excise tax breaks, it's actually cash grants for small producers. So as a small producer you report into the service run by Ggricorp and they look at how you're doing and the size of things and they'll actually grant you some costs, cash to ease things off. So stock and barrels claim to fame was always to be totally law. You know, start from the stock all the way to the barrel is to buy barley, rye and corn from local Ontario farmers.

Richard Campbell [02:18:54]:
Of course, barley is what goes into their single malt. They did all of their own maltings, of course, no peat. That's not a thing around here. Typical fermentation 48 to 72 hours depending on the types, using column and pot stills. Although apparently their single malt was only distilled in the pot still. So double pot, still aging there. And as they note specifically, they age in ex bourbon cask, both from Tennessee and Kentucky. And Tennessee of course would mean jackass.

Richard Campbell [02:19:22]:
Their warehousing technique is a hybridized rack house. So on the horizontal stack, three to five high, aging three to five years. And traditionally in their production they were doing both cast Strengths and a 46% which is your typical high cut. And that is not this whiskey. This is a different whiskey entirely. So we got to talk about the changes that are happening. This is a 40% whiskey. This is the only one that's on the shelves, the LCBO now.

Richard Campbell [02:19:50]:
So I had to start digging into their background more because and I and in many ways they were pretty hush hush. A lot of stuff on the website. I ended up spending a lot of time on archive.org and looking at the old versions of their sites. And so up until August 2021, they actually had four different editions from the on the still water distillery side, they had their red and blue labels. These were the blends they made through premium bottlers. And we don't know anything about what they were combining, but that was their original products. And then they had both a single malt and 100% rye. Great.

Richard Campbell [02:20:24]:
But in the fall of 21, shortly after that, this website goes to be back soon and it'll be that way for like 18 months, so it appears. And now I found additional evidence of this that the berries decide they're going to sell the company. Now it's the pandemic times, right. So it's challenging time to be operational. They also stand up a new website called PureTrack, which is software site. And remember that Barry Bernstein is actually got a background in software and apparently had written all of the software to operate the entire operation of both the distillery and the bottling facilities. And so now he was offering a complete distillery management solution in this whole time. They also own the domain called stockandbarrel.com, which is the link I provided in the notes.

Richard Campbell [02:21:15]:
And that up until 22 always pointed back to the Stillwater distillery. So there was no Stock and Barrel separately. But In May of 22, it suddenly points to this whiskey and only this whiskey, this particular version of Stock and Barrel. And weirder yet, if you dug in a bit, it actually says that the parent company of Stock and Barrel is Iceberg Vodka Corporation out of Newfoundland. What? So and then in December of 22, so this, this, the site for this whiskey goes up in May of 22, and in December 22, the Stillwater site comes back up with a different list of whiskey. All the blends are gone. Now they just have the single malt and the 100% rye, both in regular strengths and cast strengths. And then this year the site changed again, and now it's really changed because now there's a whole conversation on that site about these two fellows named Kelly and Lucas Wood.

Richard Campbell [02:22:17]:
And Kelly and Lucas Wood had talk about how the berries have retired and we've taken over and they're selling their own Whiskey. They're called 3 buck and 8 buck. They've got a whole other branding going on there, but if you dig into their site a bit, you find out they still have the old stock and barrels, which they'll sell only online. They're not in the lcbo. The only thing in the LCBO is this one sold by Iceberg Vodka. So what the heck is going on here? I thought I had a nice little craft whiskey story, and apparently if I had picked this whiskey in 2022 or so, that would have been fine, right? But I picked it in 2026 where everything had changed. I went and found Stock and Barrel in the LCBO in the liquor store and I bought a bottle. And, you know, I've already had a few tastes of this because it's pretty good.

Richard Campbell [02:23:10]:
But it's also very inexpensive. The original single malt, the 46% and the rye, they were about 65 Canadian dollars. So somewhere around 45American. This was is 35 Canadian. So like 20 bucks American. That is very, very cheap. Doesn't smell too Threatening on the nose. But it's only a 40%, right? So like a very mild Canadian whiskey.

Richard Campbell [02:23:40]:
And that's exactly how it drinks at $35. I mean this is a bargain, right? You kind of can't go wrong. It's just a question of what's really going on.

Leo Laporte [02:23:51]:
So we have a lot of liquors in general as these big companies come

Richard Campbell [02:23:56]:
along and well, yes, this, this would be a very normal craft distillery story that the old guys wanted to retire out. They sold to the younger generation who are now making their own whiskey and selling off the old lot. The weird part is the Iceberg vodka. And here's the thinking. The when you get into the lcbo, which is a big deal, right, this is the main liquor seller in Ontario and you have to sign agreements with this. You're under contract to produce a certain quantity of whiskey. Right. Again, Ontario is fairly hostile to craft distillers today.

Richard Campbell [02:24:29]:
There's more room for you to sell online and so forth. But to be in the LCBO you have to produce minimum quantities of things. So I think when, when these guys wanted to sell in the early 2000s and they got these two guys on board who wanted to buy it, they realized they didn't, did not want the LCBO requirement. It was too much baggage, it was too costly to them. And so they turned to a very large experienced producer because vodka, iceberg vodka has been around since the 90s and said, hey, do you, this has got position in the lcbo, do you want to finish out the contract, maybe make some money? And since premium bottlers does contract production, I suspect they just made an inexpensive version of their whiskey produced by premium bottlers. Throw sold through Iceberg to fulfill the LCBO contract and got it away from the new owners. Not that they've talked about any of that. It's all sort of hush hush and probably under NDA.

Richard Campbell [02:25:24]:
And this is the sad part and what I should, maybe I should have done if I was really going to finish the research is go hunt down a bottle of their single malt, which I may not be able to do, they may be all gone. Because this is a very inexpensive basic whiskey. There's nothing wrong with it, it's just nothing special about it either. And at 35 bucks Canadian, that's a bargain. Like don't worry about it, you're drinking local whiskey, right? Presumably they're not lying on their bottle that this is locally made, which premium bottles could do it. It's made from local grain, totally reasonable, just a low price point. Probably a column distilled whiskey that's likely to fulfill an LCBO contract. And when that contract's done, maybe they'll continue production, maybe they don't.

Richard Campbell [02:26:02]:
Well, there's no way to know. All of this has largely gone down in just the past couple of years, so it's probably got a ways to go. But it's just one of those wacky stories that I spent several hours on trying to untangle. And a bunch of this is speculation on my part, but I think I probably got it right.

Leo Laporte [02:26:17]:
Yeah,

Richard Campbell [02:26:23]:
The handcrafted part bugs me. It says handcrafted on the bottle. I'm betting that's not true. But, you know, there's no particular requirement for handcrafted. Like, there's that. That's not a legal term.

Leo Laporte [02:26:33]:
So for those of us not in Canada, the LCBO is what?

Richard Campbell [02:26:40]:
The LCBO is the Ontario government's Liquor Distribution Board.

Leo Laporte [02:26:44]:
You can't. There aren't liquor stores in Toronto.

Richard Campbell [02:26:47]:
There are liquor stores. They're just run by the government, right?

Paul Thurrott [02:26:50]:
Yes. They're not independent like God in Pennsylvania intended.

Leo Laporte [02:26:55]:
So it's a big, I imagine, bureaucratic nightmare then, to get into the lcbo.

Richard Campbell [02:27:01]:
It's a fairly hefty job to do that. And like I said, there's legal, minimal or crush requirements because there's a bunch of stores. You have to be able to stock those stores.

Leo Laporte [02:27:08]:
Okay.

Richard Campbell [02:27:09]:
And so that's not good.

Leo Laporte [02:27:10]:
That means you don't go to an LCBO and buy some small batch. You can't get something really, really good there. Is that. Right?

Richard Campbell [02:27:18]:
Well, really rare, anyway. Now, since the Craft Distillers act came in in 2017, those craft distillers that don't have to be in the LCBO to sell, they can sell directly on their websites. So there is a way for a small distiller to do that. Okay. But normally you would not find these guys in the lcbo, but when these guys started, you know, when. When Barry and Barry set up, that didn't exist. They got up and running in 2009. So they broke themselves, arguably, to produce enough to get into the LCBO because it was the only way to sell.

Richard Campbell [02:27:49]:
And now I think that contract probably was too heavy for the woods, the new owners, to deal with. And so this was the workaround.

Leo Laporte [02:27:56]:
It's like if you wanted to get into Walmart, you have to make enough whiskey to get in every Walmart or they're not going to look at you.

Richard Campbell [02:28:05]:
They're not going to do it. Right. Right. So. And what if the only Way to sell was through Walmart, like in 2009. That's the problem. Whiskey in Ontario. Yeah.

Richard Campbell [02:28:13]:
So in some ways, I wonder about. So, yeah, the Berrys got out of this because they were under these things. Now, the funny thing is they're still sort of adjacent to the business because they have Pure Track. They sell services to Canadian distillers. And on their site you can see their pictures and they're still talking about, yeah, we used to be in a distilling business and we can help you be better with yours.

Leo Laporte [02:28:33]:
We figured out how to get around these government. This is socialism at work, ladies and gentlemen. And this is exactly why we're glad we are not Canadian.

Richard Campbell [02:28:43]:
I don't think any of that is true.

Paul Thurrott [02:28:47]:
You know, where do I start?

Richard Campbell [02:28:51]:
You know, we're just like. Yeah, we're just like you. Just no guns and a health plan, right?

Leo Laporte [02:28:55]:
Yeah. Oh, that. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott [02:28:57]:
This is apropos of nothing, but I just saw the word Pennsylvania written in the discord. And I have to tell you this story, which you will love, which is nobody here knows anything about Pennsylvania or anything, is whatever. So everyone. It's always like, so where are you? It's like when you're New York, you know, so, you know, that's. Yeah. So my wife got her. Gets her fingernails done every so often. Her rate costs like 2 cents or something.

Paul Thurrott [02:29:19]:
And the woman says, you know, where are you from? And she says, pennsylvania. She goes, so you have. You must have a lot of vampires there. She's like, no, not so much. Oh, that's amazing.

Richard Campbell [02:29:36]:
There's a lot to like Transylvania, only different.

Paul Thurrott [02:29:39]:
Yeah, if you think about it, they're the two venias or whatever. Yeah, Sylvanias.

Leo Laporte [02:29:48]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mr. Paul Thurrott. He is at thurrott.com that's where you'll find all of his good stuff. And of course, even more good stuff

Paul Thurrott [02:29:57]:
if you're a premium member.

Leo Laporte [02:29:59]:
In fact, one of the good things you get as a premium member is copies of all of his books. Windows Everywhere, the Field guide to Windows 11, the new Enshittified Windows, all of that, also available at leanpub.com that's where his books are published and maybe soon a markdown book as well.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:16]:
It will be short, I can tell

Leo Laporte [02:30:18]:
you that if it happens, it'll have lots of asterisks. And Richard Campbell does run as radio and Net rocks. Two great podcasts on one great site, RunAsRadio. Together they are the dynamic duo of windows journalism. They join us every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 8am Hawaii time, as I have learned.

Paul Thurrott [02:30:45]:
There you go. Which is also, I think, a breakfast Mai Tai.

Leo Laporte [02:30:51]:
Yeah. You know, I. I leapt out of bed just to do this show. Did you?

Richard Campbell [02:30:57]:
You're having more of my experience now, Leo. Right. Like the farming, you Zealand and doing the show at 6am I don't think

Paul Thurrott [02:31:03]:
I've ever leapt out of bed.

Leo Laporte [02:31:07]:
You do if it's 7:30 and you got a show at 8, I think.

Paul Thurrott [02:31:10]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:31:12]:
We will be back next Wednesday. I will be back home. Paul will be in Mexico. Where will you be, Richard?

Richard Campbell [02:31:18]:
I will be in Antwerp, Belgium.

Leo Laporte [02:31:21]:
I don't know how he keeps track. I don't know how he does it. You can find this show online. I mentioned the live times because you can actually watch it live if you're in the member of the great club Twit. Which I think we really ought to thank the Club Twit members for making this show possible. It's their support of independent podcasting like this that makes such a difference to us. We really appreciate your membership. If you're not a member, Club Twit is at twit.tv/clubtwit.

Leo Laporte [02:31:47]:
And you get also access to the Discord. That's where you can watch in the club after the fact. Oh, I should mention you can also watch live. Everybody can on YouTube, Twitch, X dot com, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kickstarter. We stream on all those platforms to make it easy to watch live. But after the fact, you can get on demand versions of the show at twit.tv/ww. You can also watch it on YouTube.

Leo Laporte [02:32:10]:
There's a video on YouTube from every show. And of course the Whiskey segments have their own YouTube playlist, which you can easily get to by going to something weird from my closet.com and it's a podcast, so you can get in your favorite podcast client audio or video. Subscribe to Windows Weekly. You'll get it automatically. You won't have to think about it. Make sure you have a copy every week for your enjoyment. If you want to talk about the shows and you're not in the club, we do have, of course, forums, the best place to comment on any show@twit.community all TWiT listeners are more than welcome to join. We'd love to have you.

Leo Laporte [02:32:45]:
There's also Mastodon instance just for Twit listeners. Twit social. So twit.social for Mastodon. twit.community for our discourse forums. I don't mention them enough. And I and I. And they're really a Great place to hang out. Club members also get to comment on the shows in the club.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:01]:
Twit Discord.

Leo Laporte [02:33:03]:
All right, that's enough. As I mentioned, Troy Hunt is coming up in Intelligent Machines in just a little bit. If you're watching live, we're going to talk about Have I Been Pwned? And his new AI agent, which he calls Bruce.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:18]:
After the shark.

Leo Laporte [02:33:20]:
Yeah, I guess.

Richard Campbell [02:33:21]:
Yes.

Leo Laporte [02:33:21]:
You know, it's funny, when we were swimming for the manta rays, there are sharks in the harbor here.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:27]:
I was hoping. God, that was like a callback. I.

Leo Laporte [02:33:30]:
Quite a few sharks.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:31]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:33:31]:
But they said, don't. Don't yell shark if you see a shark. We don't want to scare anybody. Just say Bruce. Is that from Finding Nemo? Where is that? I think that must be.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:43]:
Oh, well, no. Bruce was the name of the shark in Jaws.

Leo Laporte [02:33:46]:
Jaws.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:47]:
Oh, okay. Yeah. I mean, not in the movie, but behind the scenes.

Leo Laporte [02:33:52]:
Mechanical shark.

Paul Thurrott [02:33:53]:
Yeah.

Leo Laporte [02:33:53]:
Hey, Bruce. All right.

Richard Campbell [02:33:55]:
This is also a sort of classic Australian hick name, right?

Leo Laporte [02:33:59]:
It was a Monty Python sketch where they were all drinking fine Australian wine and they were all named Bruce.

Paul Thurrott [02:34:05]:
That's great.

Leo Laporte [02:34:07]:
All right, everybody, thank you so much for joining us on Windows Weekly. We will see you next week.

Paul Thurrott [02:34:12]:
Next week.

Leo Laporte [02:34:14]:
Thanks, Paul. Thanks, Richard.