Windows Weekly Episode 783 Transcript

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

Mikah Sargent (00:00:00):
Coming up on windows weekly. I, Mikah Sergeant am in for Leo Laport, but don't worry. We've got a great show ahead for you. Paul and Mary Jo are talking about windows 8.1 heading into that retirement stage. Yes. End of support. Date is right around the corner for windows 8.1, but we have a not so brief conversation about what from windows 8.1 is sticking around and I believe Paul calls it kind of a cancer. Then we talk about windows 11. There's a few new things to learn there, but mostly it's all about a dev channel build. Before we get into Microsoft edge, including some gaming updates that the browser is offering. Could that mean a future with edge OS? We talk about that. A little brief Xbox segment. We take some questions from the audience and round things out with a back of the book and an excellent beer for the 4th of July. Stay tuned. We've got a great show. Planned podcasts you love from people you trust. This is tweet.

Mikah Sargent (00:01:08):
This is windows weekly episode 783 recorded Wednesday, June 29th, 2022. We have nothing to share at this time. This episode of windows weekly is brought to you by Tanium Tanium, unites operations and security teams with a single platform that identifies where all your it data is patches. Every device you own in seconds and implements critical security controls all from a single pane of glass. Are you ready to protect your organization from cyber threats? Learn more at tanium.com/TWIT and by hacker rank, it's time to reboot your technical interviews with hacker ranks, easy to use tools with a premade question, library, code playback, and built in whiteboard. You'll be conducting better technical interviews and instantly identifying the right talent. Go to hacker rank.com/ww to start a better tech interview for free today and by it pro TV, give your team an engaging it development platform to level up their skills.

Mikah Sargent (00:02:16):
Volume discounts. Start at five seats, go to it. Pro.Tv/Windows. Make sure to mention WW 30 to your designated it pro TV account executive to get 30% off or more on a business plan. It's time for windows weekly eye mic Sergeant am in today for Leo Laport, but don't worry. He'll be back soon until then. We've got a regular show plan for you. This of course is the show where everybody wears red and plays tug of war. I, I didn't get the memo. No Mo no. <Laugh> I don't, I didn't either. Don't worry. <Laugh> no, we don't always play tug of war, but of course we are joined by the foremost windows Watchers in the world. It is Mary Jo Foley of of all about microsoft.com. The ZD net blog. Hello, Mary Jo.

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:07):
Hello, Mikah.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:09):
How are you today?

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:11):
I'm good. I'm not playing tug of war. I'm also not wearing red. So I feel a little UN themed

Mikah Sargent (00:03:17):
That's okay. That's okay. Little, let's see if Paul Thra ofra.com is wearing red or playing tug of war. No, not <laugh> there's a little

Paul Thurrott (00:03:25):
Bit of red into there either.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:27):
Yeah. You got some red in the frame. That's all the batters. How are you today, Paul?

Paul Thurrott (00:03:31):
I am. Well, thank you. How are you?

Mikah Sargent (00:03:33):
Good. I am doing all right. It's kind of hot here, but we're hanging in there. It's actually cooler back in my hometown of Missouri of St. Joseph, Missouri, which is a little weird to have it be warmer here than there in summer. Anyway, we, we're not here to talk about the weather, except whenever it comes up in windows 11 in the start bar doesn't but <laugh>, before we get to that, we gotta talk about some end of life things what's going on with windows eight.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:03):
Let's let's start with death.

Mikah Sargent (00:04:05):
Let's start with death before we go to life. <Laugh>

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:08):
Yeah, so this isn't horrible, and it probably doesn't affect that many people who listen to this show, but if you're running windows 8.1 end of life of that operating system is coming up in January 20, 23. Microsoft just made a big deal out of it because it's six months away and they want people to know that they're going to start sending reminders through the operating system saying, remind me where you can say, learn more, remind me later, or remind me after the end of support date. So like those kind of nag things that they do sometimes to get people off an older version will be happening. And here's the thing to know if you're, if you are running eight one and you are thinking, oh, you know what, they're gonna do extended support, extended security updates. Like they did. They're not, they're not going to do that. So you either need to get off 1 8 1, or you're gonna be running a very insecure operating system after next January. I don't know how many people are on eight one, but I know there are some because I hear from them occasionally. 

Paul Thurrott (00:05:12):
Yeah, there are some, it's not a very big number.

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:15):
There's no, no, but yeah, that's, that's like all you really need to know about the actual end of support. It's not the end of it. It is the end of mainstream support. I mean, sorry, extended support. So that means no more security updates, no more tech support, nothing like a after that date in January, you're you're done. That's the end.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:36):
So I would, I, I think windows eight, one or windows eight X, whatever we want to call this thing is a little bit like internet Explorer. You know, it's support is ending, but realistically speaking, most people have moved on a long time ago. I actually do know a couple people still running windows eight, one, me

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:55):
Too, myself.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:56):
Hear from people trying to bring up the, the share in a while. <Laugh> yeah. The share of windows eight one is, was 3% last month of I think of all versions. I dunno if that's just windows of windows. So, you know, at 1.4 billion, I think was the latest figure for windows overall, whatever 3% is of that. So it's, you know,

Mary Jo Foley (00:06:20):
Small,

Paul Thurrott (00:06:21):
Small, however I will say <laugh> that we can celebrate ourselves for having moved on from windows eight one, but the truth is this thing is sticking with us like cancer and we are never getting rid of it. And if you use windows 10, I mean, I mean that, and the, and I mean that as awful as that sounds, that is absolutely a fact. If you're running windows 10, are you running windows 11? You have the guts of windows, a 0.1 in there. And by that, I mean the app model and the store that Microsoft debut viewed with windows eight, which used to be called well, Metro and windows RT, or win RT it's gone through all kinds of names, UWP project, or well project reunion for one little bit. And then the windows app, SDK, whatever it is, that stuff still there, and it's never going away. And the biggest mistake that Microsoft ever made in the history of windows was windows eight. And that app model in the store a really immature new mobile platform, not based on.net, but based on new stuff. And we're stuck with it forever. It's never going away. Microsoft will never create another major app platform for windows ever. This is it we're stuck with it. <Laugh> so, yeah, windows eight, one's going away, but <laugh>, it left a little bit of nauseous terribleness injected in later versions of windows and we're stuck with it forever.

Mikah Sargent (00:07:43):
So why is it, so why is that? No noxious and toxic and bad and no good, et cetera.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:49):
All. So the show's only two hours and I don't want to get gone. So I'll try to be,

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:53):
Don't get 'em going. Do not

Mikah Sargent (00:07:55):
<Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:07:56):
No you have, there's a lot of history involved here, but basically there was a lot of political fighting at the time because of the group that was running windows. They wanted everything to come from them. They were viciously removing everything from windows that they had not created. They did not go forward with the programming model that Microsoft had created for win. Well originally for windows Vista, which was a substantial improvement of what over, what had come before was based on.net, had major new ways to write application user interfaces, but the declarative programming, Sam and C sharp, and it was wonderful and they just pretended it didn't exist. <Laugh> they just were like, we're just gonna do it over. And they saw a, a threat from the mobile world, which was primarily iPhone and iPad, and they wanted to get in on that.

Paul Thurrott (00:08:40):
And they decided to create something new rather than work with say the windows phone team, which had created their own.net based APIs through silver light to create applications. They could have just put windows, phone, app compatibility inside of windows eight, instead of just doing their own thing all over again. And it just set the company back forever. And because the world has changed so much, no one's writing native apps for windows, new native apps, right? No, one's no, no developer woke up this morning and said, I got it. I got this crazy idea for an excellent new app. It's only for windows. What's the windows app, a API today. What's it called? Oh, there isn't one. Okay. <laugh> you know, like no one is doing this. It doesn't matter. So it's over like, there's no, there's no reason for Microsoft to create a new windows app SDK or whatever you want to call a new programming model.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:29):
But the one we're stuck with is this piece of garbage that they created for windows eight. And so they've been kind of making these small improvements to it over time to try to make it better. So the latest one is, and you know, this is actually, this is a, a nice change. It would've been better if the underlying thing it was supporting was good, but they decoupled these SDKs from specific windows versions. So in the past, through almost all the way through windows 10, if a new feature came out in UWP at the time, it was tied to some version of windows 10. So if you didn't have that version of newer, you couldn't use that in an app cuz no one could, you know, people running older versions couldn't access it. The way it works today is these things will now appear in any supported version of windows.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:11):
So that could be any version of windows, 10 or 11, that's still supported. So it, they broadened the availability of this crap that they made. So it's whatever, but it's just, it's, it's a tragedy and it is over. There's nothing you can do about it. So if you look at Microsoft's developer website today, what you'll find is there's probably a dozen or more ways you could write apps that do run on windows. The notion of native apps is pretty much over. You, I, I, there is, there's absolutely not a, there's no human being on earth that would, like I said, whatever, wake up and say, I'm gonna write a 1 32 app today that run on the windows, desktop. It's not gonna happen. So yeah, that's what we got <laugh> so that's, that's why you see things in the store today. Like the ability to get apps that come from different sources, the ability to run Android apps, the ability to run web apps, the ability to package desktop apps, you know, they, that thing that they did in windows eight did not work. It was a mistake.

Mikah Sargent (00:11:09):
So then maybe this is stupid, stuck

Paul Thurrott (00:11:10):
With

Mikah Sargent (00:11:10):
It. Maybe this is a stupid question, but what is your note app written in, not in this window stuff, right? Is it written in some other, my

Paul Thurrott (00:11:21):
Note app? You mean notion?

Mikah Sargent (00:11:22):
No, no, no. The note did you make a note app notepad?

Paul Thurrott (00:11:26):
Oh, the note, oh, sorry, sorry. Sorry. Yeah. So the reason or, yeah, SOPA, I'm sorry. I wrote at least four different versions. Well, five technically now I've not published a newer version, but the reason I, but before I got stepped through what those are made in, the reason I did that was because I was writing a history of windows and I used to be a developer, but by the time.net happened in the early two thousands, I was no longer a developer. So I followed along as Microsoft improved.net and released these things, but I never wrote apps that targeted any of these platforms and I, so I wanted to go back later in life and, and experience that. So I decided to write a notepad app. I was thinking it would be a fairly simple app to write depending. So I've written it in windows, windows forms, which came up with the original version of.net in 2001 in both C sharp and visual basic.net.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:16):
I wrote a version for windows presentation foundation, which is the thing I was talking before about. That was excellent. That technically arrived with windows Vista in 2006 ish. That's my favorite version of the app. It's the most powerful version, not surprisingly, it's the thing Microsoft left behind. I wrote a version for UWP, which is the windows 10 thing, which is a piece of garbage. And of course it doesn't do as much as the WPF app. And then more recently I've not published this, but I've also written a version that targets the windows app SDK, which is that new version of UWP. That's sort of a desktop app and isn't really, but it has basically all the same limitations of UWP. So I, I don't think I'm ever gonna publish that. I don't really see a reason to it's, it's really just the same thing as UWP app, although I changed the UI.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:04):
And you know, I'm, I'm looking at like when UI three stuff, which is kind of a more modern user interface technology that Microsoft has, I've even thought about going back and writing a, like a 1 32 C plus plus version of this app just to do it, you know, which would be futile and stupid, but that's how my brain works. <Laugh> but yeah, you could do. I mean, I, I, you could probably write some kind of a web-based version of this app that Microsoft has something called Maui, which is a mobile app framework for apps that run across platform across windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. You might be able to do a really basic version of it in that. Although I, I have looked at that and it's kind of terrible from my kind of app. I mean, you know, it's for, you know, for mobile apps.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:49):
But yeah, you, you could do there a million different things you could do. You can, you can create apps and flutter today for the desktop or run on windows and Mac. I'm sure you could write a notepad app and that, in fact, I believe there's at least one out there. But that's the thing there's no, you know 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, if you said, I wanna write an app for windows, someone could point you to a book or a resource of some kind and say, that's how you do it. There's one way <laugh>, you know, or one best way to do that. One app we've always had a couple of different ways, but now we have no ways <laugh> so yeah, you don't really write native apps anymore. Right? You don't do that. That's dumb. Why would anyone write an app that only runs on windows?

Mikah Sargent (00:14:30):
So what is the sort of, if I go and get a mainstream app slack or I go and get a, or

Paul Thurrott (00:14:40):
Notion like I'm trying think of app using

Mikah Sargent (00:14:41):
Now. Yeah. Notion, notion are

Paul Thurrott (00:14:43):
Those. I don't know how they built notion, but it's clearly it's the web app. So clearly this is a packaged web app. They notion runs on the web@notion.com or notion.so, or whatever it is. If you sign into notion, you'll see this it's exactly the same. So there's no doubt in my mind that this is how they did it. So I don't know what they used exactly react native, but whatever. I have no idea, but it's clearly a web app teams is a web app.

Mikah Sargent (00:15:07):
What's the office suite written in.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:09):
So that's, that's <laugh> well, that's such a legacy team. Office stays back to the 1980s. So this is a weird, it depends on what platform you're talking about. The version of windows. It is a lot like windows itself. It's a bunch of different things, but that what they've done in recent years is they they've changed how you extend these apps. And that programming model has evolved over time to the point where now it's a web app I'm sorry. They use web technology to extend these native apps. So if you wanna write a plugin that works in outlook.com on the web or outlook on the web for Microsoft 365 outlook for windows or outlook for the map Mac, you do that with web technology and

Mikah Sargent (00:15:47):
You could write, so would you say

Paul Thurrott (00:15:48):
Most works everywhere?

Mikah Sargent (00:15:49):
Most developers are, if they're writing for windows, they're probably doing sort of a web app or web extension as you,

Paul Thurrott (00:15:56):
You, well, I don't think there are any people targeting windows for starters. So what I would say is most people who consider themselves to be windows, developers are probably supporting older code bases of whatever kind, you know, in other words, their company or their yeah, their company typically, or they have an app that has been around for a long time, was built on whatever set of technologies and they're maintaining it and maybe updating it. But they're, you know, they're not gonna rewrite it from scratch. And if you were gonna start today from scratch, you might wanna reach multiple platforms and that might limit your choice. You might say, well, I'll use flutter or react native or whatever it might be 

Mikah Sargent (00:16:32):
Electron or is that just Mac? Yep.

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:34):
Electron is what notion is written in. I just looked at,

Paul Thurrott (00:16:37):
Oh, it is. There you go. It's

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:38):
Also,

Paul Thurrott (00:16:39):
What's

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:39):
Web teams. Also a teams is written in, but that's gonna change. 

Paul Thurrott (00:16:44):
Hopefully yeah. Electron is a bad reputation for being kind of heavy and resource heavy. But 

Mikah Sargent (00:16:49):
So, so then forgive me, Mary Jo, but Paul, what about all of the games that work on windows that don't work on? Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:16:57):
Those are, so those are native apps. Those are native apps. I mean, those are written in some,

Mikah Sargent (00:17:01):
The engines are written in the native and so then they can build a game on top of it. Okay. That makes sense. So

Paul Thurrott (00:17:07):
That's why it's hard to bring a game to Mac or Lennox from windows. Right, right. They're

Mary Jo Foley (00:17:11):
Right.

Mikah Sargent (00:17:11):
Completely.

Mary Jo Foley (00:17:12):
So in the old days, in the old days when Paul and I were young Cub reporters, <laugh> people used to talk about people used to talk about killer apps for windows all the time. Like what's the next killer app for windows. What's gonna be the next killer app for windows. No one ever says that anymore. Right? Like there's not, that's not a thought, right? Like

Paul Thurrott (00:17:33):
I could find this, I, in my Onaga on again, off again, days with Steven Sinofsky, we had kind of a hate, hate relationship. He revealed to me at one point, and I think this was windows seven, timeframe that the top 10 apps for windows in order were Chrome iTunes <laugh> and then a bunch of things that were utilities that made windows work differently. <Laugh> and like, that was the whole thing. Like there was nothing else going on and Chrome, and the problem that they saw and he saw certainly was that Chrome and iTunes were both other platforms. <Laugh> that, that would get you out of the sphere of Microsoft, you know? And and that's just the, this is just in whatever MI that came up, what 2009. So it was like right after the iPhone. And in the years, since we've seen a lot of push toward mobile app development, of course, and then web app development and, you know, Microsoft they've done what they can do to bring those technologies to windows. So you can create, you can create web apps around windows. There are a lot of them. I probably trying, I don't know what all these things are built in that I use, but I bet half the apps I use are kind of web based in some way mm-hmm, <affirmative>, mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know,

Mary Jo Foley (00:18:44):
For me, I bet it's even more than half. I, I use a lot of web apps. Right. And I often prefer the web apps. Like I, I always, when people say they're yeah, they're taking away the native window app and they're saying use the web app. Yeah. I'm like, you know what? Sometimes the web app is better. Here's an example, New York times, New York times. Yeah. Actual app that's true. Is terrible. Horrible, New York times on the web is amazing. They're not the same. Yeah. And they are, it's a completely different experience. And anybody who says, oh, I I'm mad. They're taking away X app for windows. I'm like, try the web version, like tweet, deck, and TWITtter. Right. Like tweet deck mm-hmm <affirmative>, mm-hmm, <affirmative> it's,

Paul Thurrott (00:19:23):
You know, I don't think most people care. And I have to say, I probably don't care either, honestly. I mean, in the sense that if I run, you know, Microsoft word is some combination of crazy things. I'm sure. Notion, like he says, electron, I might have you, a notepad used to be a pure 1 32 app today. It's kind of a weird bastardized thing that has when I three and

Mary Jo Foley (00:19:41):
Hey, watch it. You're talking about my app.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:43):
Well, it is, no, it is it's, you know, its not, it's not the same. It looks, it looks a little different, but it it's actually very different. Spotify

Mary Jo Foley (00:19:51):
Probably electron

Paul Thurrott (00:19:52):
Almost certainly. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, yeah. <Laugh> yeah. I bet the windows, Spotify app looks virtually identical to the web app. Right. You know, I bet they're

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:01):
I feel like when, when Microsoft first talked about UWP back with windows eight, I feel like the reason they were doing it was Sinofsky and his crew thought they actually could get people to start writing natively for windows again. Right. And they, they even thought they could get 1 30, 2 developers to take to really basically rewrite their apps in UWP. Right. And all the 1 32 developers are like, we're not doing that. Kind

Paul Thurrott (00:20:29):
Of getting PTSD PTSD to

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:31):
Study by this. Sorry. Sorry. I know.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:32):
No, I'm sorry. My, my brain is like flashing with all kinds of things. Couple things to what you just said. You're right. They knew that they had lost developers. So one of the things they did was that one windows thing and they would thought we, we have all these people supporting legacy code bases. What if they could bring their apps to the Xbox and the HoloLens and the surface hub and whatever else was coming when's phone briefly. Right. That, I mean, yeah. Now, now we have this body of devices that is over a billion, large it's as big as what apple and Google have roughly where we're in the game and okay. You know, that makes some sense. They did a lot of work to bring code base from other places into windows. With those bridges. Remember they had ways to bring iOS code Android apps, web apps like classic desktop apps into the store. They did that kind of work and that, you know, kind of went nowhere. But I don't think, you know, I, I don't get I'm sorry. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:25):
And it's because the idea of one windows never made sense. Right. Like every time they talked about this, like, okay, so some people might wanna run, write an app that will run on windows, desktop phones and HoloLens. Right. And Xbox I'm like, okay, show me an example of an app. That would be that app because I used to kidding you say, oh, like a CRM app. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:46):
<Laugh> exactly like, right. I, no, that's that's, that is the problem. And I, you Mike had asked me about like the Nopa app I wrote, I mean, yeah. I, I could probably use Maui to write some kind of strip down version of this app that would run sort of on windows, Mac Android and iOS, but why <laugh> like,

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:06):
You know, why,

Paul Thurrott (00:22:07):
Who would want to use such a, I would

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:08):
Want

Paul Thurrott (00:22:09):
Me, you would want a notepad app on

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:11):
Android. There's no notepad for Android. Right. I've been using keep on Android. Right. So it's,

Paul Thurrott (00:22:18):
It's good,

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:18):
But it's not notepad.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:20):
So I think the, I think the, the, the apps that kind of solve that problem are things like notion where right. You write into something and then you open it up later in your computer and it's there. Yeah. Like a notepad app is just a standalone app that you'd have to, I don't you say it to one drive or something. I, you know,

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:37):
I know I don't really need it, but it's just every time I, I am like, oh, let me just use my phone to look at that notepad file that I just put on my desktop. And I'm like, oh, well,

Paul Thurrott (00:22:47):
Anyway, the point of this 30 minute discussion was cancer and we're all

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:51):
Stuck with it, stuck with it, but nobody's using it. So it just kind of sits,

Paul Thurrott (00:22:57):
I guess. Well, everyone is actually everyone is using it in some way. You may not realize it, but like those apps are all over windows. Right. they're still there. You know, I mean, notepad is tur. Like I said, I called notepad the kind of a bastardized, you know, I don't know what you call that thing anymore. That has a win UI three front end. I don't know. I know it has the office version of the what do you call it? The the rich text editor, which is not what used to it used to be the plain text editor that was in there. They've completely changed it. Right. it works fine. It's a simple app. <Laugh>, you know, and there used to be apps. I, that I thought were good apps for, that showed off the strength of this mobile platform, which was, you know, like I said, pretty bare bones, but like an, like when groove music was an ongoing concern and they had groove music pass that app as it was in probably windows 10, I guess at the time was great.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:54):
You know, and it's not, it's not complex like Microsoft word or any of the office applications. But it, it fit well within what was possible with that kind of a, an app model. The new outlook that's coming down, the pike, the people who are freaking out about that are the people who are used to the powerful desktop version of the app. And they're looking at this thing, like, what is this? This is like a Fisher price toy. I don't, if I wanted to use the web version of this app, I'd be on the web, you know, but that's kind of the way the world's going. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. Yeah. So

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:27):
Yeah. I, I think an ex I think somebody who said, who's saying this Rob bought in the discord saying, what kind of an app do people even need these days? And why does it have to be on a windows, computer? You know what it doesn't because I' lately have been using a lot on my phone and on my windows, computer office.com you know, the office app, which is a strip down version. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:24:48):
A great little app,

Mary Jo Foley (00:24:49):
Right? Yep. Stripped down version of the core office products, not for everybody, if you're a power user, you're gonna see things you don't have that you want. But on my phone, when I need to do a signature on something, I can do that. You wanna

Paul Thurrott (00:25:01):
Open a word doc or a, a spreadsheet like it works. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And you know, Microsoft people five years ago were manually installing all of the office apps, office lens, one, drive, all these different things, you know? And and I'm sure some of you still do, but you know, for the core office, stuff like that one app, which is kind of, if you think about, it goes back to that office hub that we got in the original version of windows phone, which I thought was thought was a good idea. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> is that kind of thing, like an all in one app that has the core office apps kind of built into it. It's a good, it's a good mobile app.

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:36):
Yeah. I think that the kind of the, the theoretical or bigger picture part of all this is why do you have to work the way you always worked? Right. Like just cuz I'm used to notepad, do I really need notepad? No, I do not. Right. Like there's other ways to do the job, but it's hard to change the way you do things because

Paul Thurrott (00:25:53):
You get oh, changing. Yeah. Changing workflow is horrific. Yep. Absolutely.

Mikah Sargent (00:25:59):
As long as we can keep it going, we should, because if enough people are doing it, I mean, I, that calculation,

Paul Thurrott (00:26:06):
We what's that,

Mikah Sargent (00:26:08):
Go ahead. I was just gonna say, you said was it 3% or 4% of

Paul Thurrott (00:26:12):
Six or something? Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:26:13):
Yeah. It's 42 million people who are still on windows eight it's lot. Yeah. 42 million.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:19):
Yeah. But you know,

Mikah Sargent (00:26:20):
In the, not many but

Paul Thurrott (00:26:22):
300 million computers sold in a year, all running the latest version of windows, this thing is X number of years old. This is, these are people who don't care about anything. <Laugh>, you know, they're not, they don't care that they parallel ports on their computer. They, they don't care. You know that they still have a CRT screen. Like they're just not, they're not engaged, you know? So like maybe they're running a, I'm sure they ever go to like a dentist office or something

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:49):
Software. That's what I just that's why Mary Jo's. Right, right. They're all, they're all dentist that's there.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:55):
<Laugh> yep. Always. Cause, cause their job is not computer maintenance and support. They they're pulling teeth. No. You know, don't care about this thing. This is a tool. 

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:03):
Yeah, my dentist, my old dentist, not my current dentist was running XP like way past the end of life of XP. And I'm like, so I think I should switch dentist because I know he's not a computer guy, but still, this is where he,

Paul Thurrott (00:27:14):
You don't know enough about windows. I'm your

Mikah Sargent (00:27:16):
Health records. Yeah. You're dental

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:18):
Record. It's not a joy. Great

Mikah Sargent (00:27:20):
Ending up on Reddit.

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:22):
No, you did not. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:27:26):
Yeah. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:27:27):
I dunno. So then what, what I found interesting is that in the show notes, you've tied the end of windows 8.1 to the end of an individual working at Microsoft. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:41):
I, I, I always almost made a comment. I thought that was Mary Jo, who did that? I thought that was kind of funny. Of

Mary Jo Foley (00:27:44):
Course it was <laugh> right. So this week started off with a big announcement on TWITtter, by somebody who's been at Microsoft for a really long time and is beloved by the community. Jeffrey Snower is leaving. And this guy's been at Microsoft 22 years. He he's been in the computer industry much longer than that. Started out at digital, worked at Tivoli. IBM. he he's best known for creating PowerShell, but he's done a lot since then. I, I got to interview him a couple years ago about what he was working on most recently. And he was working on the substrate that's in Microsoft 365. So that's like the graph and all of the underlying database stuff that keeps track of all your chat records or your emails and such so that you can have contextual, contextual awareness when you're using different apps. He's, he's been a technical fellow for a while. He's the foil of Markovich. They that's right. Are often, they always

Paul Thurrott (00:28:45):
Have a nice competition for speaking engagement and so forth. They

Mary Jo Foley (00:28:49):
Do. They do. Yeah. I was surprised cuz you know, I mean everybody wants to try new things. Well but

Paul Thurrott (00:28:55):
I have a theory I wanna throw by you about this because like you said, he was around for every created power shell power shell. For those who don't know as a.net based scripting environment and command line environment built into windows. Now it started out something called project Mo ad. It was something that he created and Microsoft did not want, he spent many years trying to convince them that they needed this. And you gonna, you're gonna kind of put this in the context of when this was, this is like probably very early two thousands. Yeah. NT was taking over the world in the form of windows 2000 HP, etcetera. Microsoft was still fighting against Unix sort of, but really Linux right at the time. And yeah, you know, we all know how that went, but, but there was a real anti Linux Unix thing at Microsoft at the time.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:37):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and so PowerShell came up out of this thing.net era, anti Unix command line environment that would do that would take everything that was wrong about Unix command lines and make it better and more consistent and logical, et cetera. Yeah. I looked at it and I thought, you know, this is a programming environment and this is something I don't think a lot of administrators are necessarily gonna be able to handle, but went on to create success and and whatever, but the world changed. Right? So all those on-premises servers running windows server or Linux or whatever are now in the cloud. And in Microsoft's case, those things are not, they're not really windows servers anymore. Although some of them exist they're Azure data centers. Right. And that, I think that that transition might have impacted snow and PowerShell that not that that stuff kind of went away, but the management of this stuff in many cases is in Microsoft's hands now, not in the hands of admins, working at individual companies, you know, like I think the shift in the world kind of deemphasize the need for something like PowerShell, you know?

Paul Thurrott (00:30:41):
And I don't mean to say that, like I don't mean, I know people out there, like what are you talking about? I use it every day. Of course you do. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> some people do of course, but if you, if you look at windows server today compared to what it was five and then 15, 20 years ago, the number of workloads and this thing is going, it's like done nothing. And you know, basically what you have is Federation services. So you can do that hybrid environment where it works with Azure certificate services and probably directory services for those people that need that kind of thing. And there just isn't as much need to automate on premises servers as it was, you know, 20 years ago.

Mary Jo Foley (00:31:19):
Yeah. I

Paul Thurrott (00:31:19):
Wonder if that didn't play a role, you know, with him moving on from that part of the company,

Mary Jo Foley (00:31:23):
Maybe I think he's, he's a guy who's always reinventing himself. Right? like if you look at the talks he did, when he came over to work on Microsoft 365, he, I think is one of the best people at Microsoft to explain really difficult concepts. Right? Yeah. Like I, and I've seen people on TWITtter who work at Microsoft saying this guy can take the most complicated thing and make it understandable by anybody. And just, I think that's skill can be applied everywhere. Right? Like that's they needed it because they were in the midst of doing a lot of different things with the graph. And I remember when we first heard about the graph, we're like, what is the graph? Right. Like what,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:02):
And he is exactly the kind of person that could've brought this and yeah. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:32:06):
And just run with it. Right. I know I'm gonna miss his ties myself. I, I don't know anyone who's ever seen him speak <laugh> he has the most crazy, insane, beautiful ties. Right. <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:32:18):
Do you know, did you ever know ward Roston and he used to work at Microsoft as well. He's long gone, but he, he was like snow in the sense that he could take, he, he was on server, actually. He, in fact his last job was sat Nadela speech writer before mm-hmm <affirmative> Saha became CEO. But he was another guy, like people who can take complex topics and then present it in plain English and make, have it make sense to people. Yeah. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> are a, a treasure <laugh> it is so hard to find people like that. And 

Mary Jo Foley (00:32:50):
So that will

Paul Thurrott (00:32:50):
Be missed.

Mary Jo Foley (00:32:51):
I mean, I know. Oh, you gonna tell reason, do you know? Yeah. So I asked him, of course being me. I'm like all now where you gotta tell us where you going next. And he's like, I'm taking the summer off and I'll tell you guys all in the fall. So he is going

Paul Thurrott (00:33:04):
And he's going to meta. Oh.

Mary Jo Foley (00:33:07):
So I, so let's guess where he's gonna go because my, I don't think he's gonna be one of these Microsoft execs who becomes a venture capitalist. Like so many of them do that. I don't think he's gonna do that. I think he's gonna go to another tech company. And maybe I would say maybe AWS, I, I wouldn't be surprised to see him show up there.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:24):
What about VMware?

Mary Jo Foley (00:33:26):
Vmware just got taken private right recently. Mm-Hmm

Paul Thurrott (00:33:29):
<Affirmative> Broadcom. Well, Broadcom's gonna buy them I think. Right? Oh, right.

Mary Jo Foley (00:33:33):
Broadcom. You're right. Broadcom's gonna buy him. I don't know. I wouldn't wanna go work for Broadcom. They're kinda like the old comp they're like computer associates. Wasn't

Paul Thurrott (00:33:40):
You know, who could release his help a lot. You know, where he's, where he is most needed. And I would least like to see him go is Oracle,

Mary Jo Foley (00:33:49):
Oracle, most Oracle. If he, if he goes to Oracle, I'm never talking to him again. That's it done? Well,

Paul Thurrott (00:33:55):
I mean,

Mary Jo Foley (00:33:56):
And you're taking all his,

Paul Thurrott (00:33:58):
That's the clarity that he could provide

Mary Jo Foley (00:33:59):
This way. I'm gonna cut his tie with a pair scissor <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:34:04):
He might not be tech related. I what, you know, I,

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:08):
I know it might not be, but I better,

Paul Thurrott (00:34:09):
What if it's not a straight up tech company?

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:11):
No, he's I don't know. Come on. You could,

Paul Thurrott (00:34:14):
There no words that are kinda companies like Tesla that are, that are technology, but not in

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:19):
Parts of technology. No, that's the worst than Oracle. Oh

Paul Thurrott (00:34:21):
No, I don't mean, I don't mean Tesla. I mean, no companies like Tesla, like, like maybe there are food companies that are doing like least someone joked about soil earlier or whatever. Like maybe there are things that are

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:33):
Ordering service Wolf or

Paul Thurrott (00:34:35):
What is that

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:36):
One called? No, you guys, you guys, this guy he's, he's done. Like he's got patents on technology. And so he's staying in big tech. He's gonna be a big tech really? Okay. Come on. Yeah, come on. He's gonna end up being something big. I guess

Paul Thurrott (00:34:49):
Maybe he could be like a, he could consult for people that need to understand tech better in government

Mary Jo Foley (00:34:56):
Or I, that would be really neat. Actually. That would be very interesting. Yeah. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:02):
I don't know why we're speculating that we should

Mary Jo Foley (00:35:04):
Look you not listen. This Irid Esen accent discord said, I hope he gets MJ Foley's permission before taking his next job. And he was it <laugh> you, if you wanna run it by me, I'm here for you.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:19):
He's a great, he is a great guy. I hope whatever.

Mary Jo Foley (00:35:23):
We never had him on windows weekly. Didn't we? We should have, I don't. He would've been really

Paul Thurrott (00:35:28):
Good. Maybe not. Yeah. Maybe not. Yeah. He's a great guy. I was hoping, as you know, I was hoping this year ignite would happen in person. I could see him. I haven't seen him. Yeah. Last time I saw Jeffrey Snow in person, he was walking around like a homeless person in the Washington convention center. <Laugh> and he, and I said, what are you doing? And he's like, I can't find the Microsoft booth. So I took him by the hand. I said, Jeffrey I'll lead you. Aw.

Mikah Sargent (00:35:49):
<Laugh> I was,

Paul Thurrott (00:35:50):
I was with you. We ran into him together. Yeah. Is that they're they're like, where have you I'm like he was wandering around over there. Like he didn't know where he was. <Laugh>

Mikah Sargent (00:36:00):
Yeah. Now that he's gonna go work for TikTok, you won't be able to have him on

Paul Thurrott (00:36:04):
Well, it's that be? That might not be a great move at this point.

Mikah Sargent (00:36:07):
Let me, let me take a quick break and we'll come back with the next segment of the show. Perhaps you can all think about some other jobs that he's jumping into <laugh> but I'll tell you about Tanium while you process the industry's approach to cybersecurity is fundamentally flawed. And that is where Tanium steps in as a sponsor of this week's episode of windows, weekly, it management and security point tools offer only a small piece of the full solution needed to protect your environment. And many of them promise they can stop all breaches when they simply can't making decisions based on stale data and trying to defend your critical assets from cyber attacks, with tools that don't talk to each other is no way for it. Teams to navigate today's attack surface it's time for a different approach. Tanium says it's time for a convergence of tools of endpoints and it operations and security.

Mikah Sargent (00:37:01):
They've got solutions for government entities, education, financial services, retail, and healthcare. You can trust their solutions for every workflow that relies on end point data there's asset discovery and inventory. So you can track down every it asset you own instantaneously. They've got risk and compliance management so that you can find and fix vulnerabilities at scale in mere seconds, threat hunting to hunt for sophisticated adversaries. In real time, clients management to automate operations from discovery to management and sensitive data monitoring. You can index and monitor sensitive data globally. In seconds. Tanium protects organizations where other end point management and security providers have failed with a single platform. Tanium identifies where all your data is across your entire it estate. It patches every device you own in seconds. And it implements critical security controls all from a single pane of glass. You're wondering what people think about it.

Mikah Sargent (00:38:00):
Well, Kevin Bush, the vice president of it at ring power Corp says Tanium brings visibility to one screen for our whole team. If you don't have that kind of visibility, you're not going to be able to sleep at night. With real time. Data comes real time impact. I like that. If you're ready to unite operations and security teams with a single source of truth and confidently protect your organization from cyber threats. Well, it's time you met Tanium to learn more, visit tanium.com/TWIT that's tanium.com/TWIT. All right. Back to the show. It's time to talk about windows 11.

Mary Jo Foley (00:38:41):
All right. Before you do, though, what if he goes to Tanium?

Mikah Sargent (00:38:45):
<Laugh> I mean, Hey, there you go. Oh,

Mary Jo Foley (00:38:47):
Seriously. A bunch of Microsoft people, including Michael Nehouse went to Tanium, right?

Mikah Sargent (00:38:52):
Oh really? Okay. So it's appropriate.

Mary Jo Foley (00:38:55):
Great.

Paul Thurrott (00:38:56):
What if he was hardware maker? Like a Qualcomm or a

Mikah Sargent (00:39:00):
<Laugh>? Has he not updated his bio yet?

Mary Jo Foley (00:39:03):
No, he's taking the summer off.

Mikah Sargent (00:39:06):
Oh, that includes bio updates. I forgot. Yeah. If you're on break, you can't update your TWITtter bio <laugh>. So, so

Mary Jo Foley (00:39:13):
Microsoft, his last day, tomorrow was his last day at

Mikah Sargent (00:39:15):
Microsoft. Oh, okay. Gotcha. Okay. So he's still coincidental

Paul Thurrott (00:39:18):
To the Microsoft fiscal year or not.

Mary Jo Foley (00:39:21):
Yep. Probably not.

Mikah Sargent (00:39:23):
<Laugh> some someone in the IRC chat chicken head 21 says he's going to Foxcon so you know what? Oh boy, I think, I think he's going to Hewlett Packard.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:38):
Wow.

Mary Jo Foley (00:39:39):
Interesting. That's not a bad guess either Mike Nash.

Mikah Sargent (00:39:41):
Oh, darn. I was <laugh> I was hoping

Paul Thurrott (00:39:43):
It was Hewlett Packard. The the, the enterprise company or Hewlett Packard,

Mary Jo Foley (00:39:48):
HP company, HP. Right?

Mikah Sargent (00:39:49):
Sorry. HP. The computer company was what I was, what I was going for. Or he's gonna, oh, I know dominoes pizza. They're super techy. That's it?

Mary Jo Foley (00:40:01):
That's it. That's

Mikah Sargent (00:40:02):
The one. I think he's gonna start it.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:04):
You're gonna be able to order a pizza on your computer and Jeffrey Snow would be the reason why.

Mikah Sargent (00:40:09):
Yeah. And you're gonna do it with an electron app. Not with a windows.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:13):
Definitely not, not be a native app. No, that much we can guarantee.

Mikah Sargent (00:40:20):
Okay. Let's let's talk about windows 11.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:23):
This will last a lot less time than the last thing, because

Mikah Sargent (00:40:26):
I will see we'll see,

Paul Thurrott (00:40:28):
Paul. No, no, we will. Well, all. So just today, Microsoft released a new build of windows 11 to the dev channel. So this is the channel that targets no particular version of windows. This is the future. They seem to be kind of winding down on the version that's coming out in the fall. Although there's been some movement on that file Explorer tabs thing, but we'll see what goes on there. This new dev channel build doesn't have any new features. So there's nothing interesting to talk about, but it does fix a bunch of bugs, including some serious bugs with that tabs feature in <laugh> in file Explorer. But that's pretty much the end of it. So yeah, not much to say that's

Mary Jo Foley (00:41:06):
No.

Mikah Sargent (00:41:07):
Hmm. You were not lying,

Paul Thurrott (00:41:09):
But we'll be stuck with that cancer for the rest of it. No, wait,

Mikah Sargent (00:41:12):
There we go. <Laugh> all

Mary Jo Foley (00:41:16):
Right. Well, it is kind of quiet windows 11, just kind of chugging along at this point. Nothing too crazy. Although we should mention speaking windows 11, our friend, Rafael Rivera just took a job at star dock this week, right. Working with Brad Sams. So this, the reason this is related is Rafael's great at finding all the hidden stuff and builds like he is amazing at that. Right?

Paul Thurrott (00:41:38):
So he's the new Markovich is what he is. I mean, as mark has moved on to the cloud, I mean, he's that kind of windows, internals guy, you know?

Mary Jo Foley (00:41:45):
Yeah. You ask him to find something, he'll find it. I, I said to him, I want all the undocumented APIs listed in a file and he said, haha, wink. Okay. So he's gonna do it anyways.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:57):
<Laugh> so first of all, star was smart to hire him. He was smart to go to star. It's a great company. Yeah. Brad Bordell is a great guy. Microsoft is

Mary Jo Foley (00:42:07):
In Brad. Sams. Is there even though Brad, Sam.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:09):
Yeah. No, but's no accounting for taste. I mean, nobody nobody's perfect, but, but <laugh> Microsoft should have hired Rafael years ago and it is to their detriment that they did not. So there you go.

Mary Jo Foley (00:42:24):
So we're gonna, now he's gonna

Paul Thurrott (00:42:25):
Fix fix windows from, without

Mary Jo Foley (00:42:27):
He will like, there'll be all these new, crazy startup products. Now that'll fix all the things everybody's crying about. And Rafael will be like, okay, you wanted this here it is here, guys. Here you go. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:42:38):
Yeah, I think it's gonna be really interesting.

Mary Jo Foley (00:42:40):
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:42:41):
Mary Jo, I forgot. Did you say your mom has installed windows 11 now?

Mary Jo Foley (00:42:46):
No, she has not. No. I advised still

Paul Thurrott (00:42:48):
On. She had windows eight one <laugh>

Mary Jo Foley (00:42:51):
She? Not? No. Well, although, you know, what's funny when my mom was on windows seven, a long time and every time I would say, you know, it might be time to move past windows seven. I'm not, I'm not putting that thing that you have on your computer. I, and it was windows 10. It looks so different. I can't even deal with it. Really? No. I'm like, mom. Wow. It's gonna be okay. So one day I just upgraded her and it was fine. <Laugh> wow. It's it'll be okay. <Laugh> yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:14):
Hmm. Was it because she wanted to run the windows

Mary Jo Foley (00:43:17):
Eight <laugh> I just allow windows eight in the house. Sorry. Fair

Mikah Sargent (00:43:21):
Enough. Heavy.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:23):
I had multiple people who were friends of mine in my family who contacted me after they got a new PC when windows eight was new and said, what is this thing? And how do I get rid of, can I just go back? And it's like, no, you bought a new computer. That's what you, that's what you get. And they're like, I can't use this like this. Like they hated it. <Laugh> I don't see that reaction with windows. Ten's a little strange, but I guess it was, if you were coming from windows eight, you would've loved windows.

Mary Jo Foley (00:43:50):
You were creatures of habit. People are creatures of habit. Yeah. Like, look, when the, when the, when the task bar menu moved to the center with windows 11 people, I, I didn't think anybody would care. People were like crazy. People were like, why is it in the middle now? I'm like, it's the same? Like guys, like it's there's

Mikah Sargent (00:44:04):
It works the same. It's just in the middle

Mary Jo Foley (00:44:07):
<Laugh> I'm like, ah,

Paul Thurrott (00:44:09):
Okay. See, I like, I, I thought that was a nice change. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:44:12):
Yeah. I

Paul Thurrott (00:44:13):
Kinda like what was freaked out because the start menu news actually detached from this task bar for the first time

Mary Jo Foley (00:44:17):
Ever. No, you know, the, the thing that was worth freaking out was the right click thing on the task bar and how it took away a behavior that people who are power users were very used to. That was a legitimate complaint. But the look of it, like just moving and people who are like, I don't like these rounded corners or I don't like the new icons. I'm like, they're icons. They're fine. Just they're icons boy. Like, let's go. Right. <laugh> people object to anything. It's crazy. <Laugh>

Mikah Sargent (00:44:42):
That's true. I mean, yeah, yeah. Again, we are creatures of habit at our root and it goes against every, like every, anytime someone ever tells me, oh, I love change. I live or change. I'm like, you're a lying liar. Liar

Mary Jo Foley (00:44:54):
Talking about liars. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:44:58):
That's the cha change is the greatest cause of stress. Oh. After money <laugh>

Mikah Sargent (00:45:03):
Wait, change is money. Get

Paul Thurrott (00:45:05):
It. Oh, see, I made a funny, I didn't

Mikah Sargent (00:45:08):
<Laugh> all right. Let's move out of windows 11. Since there wasn't much to talk about and talk about Microsoft edge, where there, where there's quite a bit to talk about.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:17):
I know, I don't know what happened this week.

Mary Jo Foley (00:45:20):
Well, let's start with me talking about gaming because that's a predictable thing. Right? So

Mikah Sargent (00:45:26):
Always except

Mary Jo Foley (00:45:27):
Is <laugh>. Microsoft is adding a bunch of gaming features to windows sorry to edge. As Paul says in the notes, we're not really sure why. I mean the obvious why is they are searching for and in with consumers and they have a good acceptance level with gaming. So let's okay. Let's put some gaming features in the browser and see if we can get more people to use edge. So the good thing about these features that I'm gonna discuss briefly is all of them are off by default except one. So you have to turn them on if you want them, which a lot of it, people were like, these better be off. These better not be on by default. Right? <laugh> right. So there's a gaming homepage. That's gonna be personalized with news on newly released games live streams and all that kind of stuff.

Mary Jo Foley (00:46:12):
If you sign in with your Microsoft account, you also can see your Xbox. I can never say this word easily. Xbox cloud gaming library right inside the browser, new games menu for edge, with a lot of free to play casual games, solitaire and all that kind of stuff are right, right there in this games menu on the side clarity boost gives you clearer graphics when you're gaming. It improves the visual experience of console games and Xbox cloud gaming. The one thing that is not off by default is efficiency mode. It reduces edge resources when a game is launched.

Mikah Sargent (00:46:53):
I just don't believe in any of that. I like the, so the Elvis laptop, I have, sorry, when I say any of that, I don't mean the whole thing you just said. I mean, the clarity boost non I

Paul Thurrott (00:47:05):
Don't blame in anything in the English language.

Mikah Sargent (00:47:07):
<Laugh> <laugh> so on my my Elvis windows, what is it? A surface laptop three there's quote unquote HDR settings in the, the settings, but it's like faked R and basically just

Paul Thurrott (00:47:28):
Faked

Mikah Sargent (00:47:28):
<Laugh> okay. It basically just ups the saturation on the, the thing. Right. And it makes it to make it

Mary Jo Foley (00:47:33):
Look like, Ooh.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:34):
Right. Well that, okay. So that's probably display dependent, right? My particular display does not support HDR, so I can't even access, I can't even turn that on.

Mary Jo Foley (00:47:46):
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:47:47):
Oh, interesting. So mine, I, I didn't think that the surface laptop three had an HDR display, but maybe I was wrong about that.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:56):
So go to setting open or windows key plus I to open settings. Okay.

Mikah Sargent (00:48:02):
So I

Paul Thurrott (00:48:02):
Gotta let it, it's probably system display, I think. Yeah. Windows

Mikah Sargent (00:48:07):
Key. I okay. And then system display. Okay. And go

Paul Thurrott (00:48:13):
Down to actually, the second thing is HDR. So if you, if you're in HDR under display capabilities, does it say HDR, video streaming or use HDR supported? What does it say

Mikah Sargent (00:48:23):
To it says play streaming, HDR, video supported, use HDR, not supported. How can it play HDR video, but not actually support HDR?

Paul Thurrott (00:48:32):
Oh, I can tell you how cuz they turn up the saturation. <Laugh>

Mikah Sargent (00:48:34):
That's what I'm saying. It's fake. It's a fake <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:48:38):
That's funny. My mine is unsupported for both. That's interesting.

Mikah Sargent (00:48:41):
Oh wow. They don't even want to fake it with yours. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:48:44):
Yep. I can't even fake it.

Mikah Sargent (00:48:46):
<Laugh> yeah. So that's what I was saying. I wonder about that clarity mode. What that really means that they just bump the contrast temporarily or what's the deal there?

Mary Jo Foley (00:48:54):
Hey, it looks good in the demo picture. That's all I'm gonna tell you. So

Paul Thurrott (00:48:57):
Actually I, I, I question this a little. I see. I, I, I found the differences to be very subtle. You talk about the plane flying over Paris. I think it is. Yeah. I thought I, I found those differences to be hard to discern.

Mary Jo Foley (00:49:08):
You're a guy who sees fluent design and you're telling me that's a subtle thing. Really? I

Paul Thurrott (00:49:14):
Okay. Okay. Well, alright. So I guess what I'm questioning here is the reasoning. Why would Microsoft add gaming features to a web browser, right? Yeah. And just to step back on this for one second, I mean, how many people are using edge on a non-Microsoft platform? Meaning a mobile like Android or iOS or on a Mac or Linux, right? Zero,

Mikah Sargent (00:49:39):
0.01%. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:39):
Probably fewer people that are using windows eight one. Right? So if you're already running windows or Microsoft edge on windows 10 or windows 11, you're running, you're running, you can <laugh> the operating system has gaming features built into it. Like why mm-hmm <affirmative> why would you add features like this to a browser? I'm wondering,

Mary Jo Foley (00:49:59):
So I know what you're gonna say. And I agree with,

Paul Thurrott (00:50:02):
Yes. Go ahead. Go,

Mikah Sargent (00:50:03):
Go ahead.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:04):
<Laugh> no, I want, okay. Nastro Domus go ahead.

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:08):
OS

Paul Thurrott (00:50:09):
OS.

Mikah Sargent (00:50:09):
Right. All right. Well, I was gonna guess I swear. I was gonna guess that too. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:14):
Because by the way, there's like a task manager thing built into this now. Right? That, that efficiency mode, that thing that you just mentioned. Yeah. If you go to the, where is I, I even have this browser open. If you go to edge and go to the menu, there's a thing. Where did I just see it called? There's an entry called performance. And it's the efficiency mode is this is like a, this is like power management just for the browser. Yep. I what <laugh> like, this is that's interesting. Right?

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:40):
So I, this is, I asked them, I asked them if this was why I, I actually sent an email and I'm, you're never gonna, can I, you questions? Is this, are you guys adding all this? I didn't say crap. I think I said

Paul Thurrott (00:50:52):
These. You probably did say

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:53):
Crap. Sure. I said it, I might have okay. To the browser because you're gonna turn the browser into an OS, like Chrome OS equals edge OS. And they said, we'll get back to you. And they haven't.

Mikah Sargent (00:51:04):
They said, we'll get back to you.

Mary Jo Foley (00:51:06):
They're not gonna that's actually say

Mikah Sargent (00:51:09):
No, but

Mary Jo Foley (00:51:10):
In the middle <laugh> we've

Paul Thurrott (00:51:11):
Yeah. That's awesome. Often reconsiders, how they deliver. Send you

Mikah Sargent (00:51:15):
Think about what they're gonna say next, as opposed to just saying straight

Paul Thurrott (00:51:18):
Up here, here's the, here's the PR friendly way to answer that question. You would just say something like our telemetry data shows us that every single person who uses windows uses a browser and of the people who use windows 80% of them or something use their browser. Primarily they, they just use the browser. That's me. So it's, I'm an example. It's important to add those features to the browser because that's where they're

Mary Jo Foley (00:51:40):
Needed discoverability, right? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:42):
Well, and the browser has a, a certain set of, you know, performance profiles and, and usage patterns that are just unique to browsers. And mm-hmm, <affirmative> the way, you know, that that's, you can answer it that way, but, but I still wonder, like, is this, are they,

Mary Jo Foley (00:51:58):
I wonder too,

Paul Thurrott (00:51:59):
Are they moving in the direction?

Mary Jo Foley (00:52:01):
I wonder, you know, that's

Paul Thurrott (00:52:03):
A weird thing

Mary Jo Foley (00:52:03):
To add, trying to figure out. They keep trying to figure out how to compete with Chrome. They even have an internal initiative called Chrome compete. Right. Like they, right. They know they need to compete with Chrome OS and Chrome, even though they're chromium based browser. Yeah. They still need to compete with them. Right. But how do you do that? If you're Microsoft, they have 10 X as the idea for a while, then they kill 10 X. Right. And now,

Paul Thurrott (00:52:24):
Well, that's what I'm wondering if it isn't like the, the next 10 X, like the, you know, Chrome OS compete kind of thing. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> like in windows 10, when that first came out, remember there was like candy crush and these terrible other little game things that were built kind of built into it. Yeah. So now you're saying, you know, well, you're saying, I mean, now it is happening. They have this games menu, and there are little Webby games built into it. And maybe this, maybe it's like what I said, most people using the browser all the time. Anyway. So you put this in front of them and now they'll play these games and oh God, they're web games. So that's fun. We can put B ads and whatever nonsense exactly out there. Maybe that's all it is. But maybe I just, it seems like an odd thing to bog down a web browser with, to me.

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:04):
Yeah. I mean, they've also got a ton of shopping stuff in edge. Right. And I guess you could say maybe they have telemetry data saying how often when someone goes into a browser, are they actually looking to buy products? Right. 

Paul Thurrott (00:53:17):
Right, right.

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:18):
And that's how they, I mean, Microsoft lives and buy dies by telemetry, right? Like this is how they make decisions all the time. If they see X number of people go into a browser and start doing comparative price shopping, they'll like, you know what? We should add shopping to the browser. Right. They do this. This is how they make

Paul Thurrott (00:53:33):
Decision. I honestly,

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:35):
<Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:53:35):
Shopping is defensible. I, it's not something I necessarily want personally, but I acknowledge that that's how people shop. Right. They're in a web browser. Yeah. So, and we both experience that thing where we're looking at whatever website and mm-hmm, <affirmative> a coupon comes down and you save 10% or 15%, whatever it is. Like that's actually worked. Sometimes it doesn't work all the time, but

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:56):
I shut it off. Cuz I get too bogging down

Paul Thurrott (00:53:58):
Too spammy. Yeah, yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (00:54:01):
Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:02):
No, but like I said, I, I, it's not for me, but I, I understand it. Some people would like that I'm coming up short on who would like this? The people who are casual gamers, which meaning non-gamers where people, just people. Yeah. You're standing in line at the check out Connor and you get a few minutes to kill. You play a little yeah. Game on your phone. That's where you're doing that. You're doing that on the phone right now. If you're playing games in your web browser and your computer at work or whatever during the day, you're just wasting time. Like you're not even, <laugh> like you just, that's stuff. That's not work. It's like that search highlights thing where you go to search for something explicit and it's like, Hey, we know you're searching for something that you want to know about, but here's some other crap over here. Why do you look at this instead? It's like, that's just a distraction. That's a, that's a really weird thing to do to people. Yeah. I just, I'm curious about this. Like I don't quite understand the rationale behind it, I guess. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:54:53):
I mean, couldn't it be that on, so right now when, well I get, okay. I was gonna say right now, if you wanna play Xbox live stream, live game streaming, live game cloud on an iPhone or an iPad, you can do that from the browser. Right. But you have to use sari

Paul Thurrott (00:55:13):
Safari, right?

Mikah Sargent (00:55:13):
Yeah. So that, that, this doesn't quite up. And

Paul Thurrott (00:55:16):
By the way, if you had, if you wanted to do that from your PC, you could do it from edge, but there's an Xbox app it's built into windows and it's better than edge. Like I, I don't know, like what I don't, that's what I mean, like, I don't understand

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:30):
What it might be a way to try to get more people into gaming. Right. Like, so you just said there's an Xbox app built into windows. I don't think most non-gamers know that is there. Right. <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:55:43):
Well more to the point, like why would they, in other words, like casual gamer, which again, I, yeah, I, I don't, don't see

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:51):
Somebody casual gamer, you know, like you, you, you know what Xbox is, you've heard of it, but

Mikah Sargent (00:55:57):
It's hard for Paul to think of himself as a casual gamer.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:02):
No, no, no question. No. I mean, I, I, I don't, I do not play games on my phone for sure. But I mean, I do like a crossword puzzle <laugh>, you know, from time to time or something, but I guess what I'm saying is, yes, I agree with you a, a typical consumer who doesn't consider themselves to be a gamer, could open the windows 11, start menu and see an Xbox icon. And what they would think is that's not, for me, that's not for me. Yeah. Right. That's for people who play call of duty or whatever. Exactly. I completely agree with that. Yeah. I, I think that might be why candy crush and whatever else was in the windows 10 start menu solitaire. Is there again in the windows 11 star menu. Yeah. right. I, I don't, but, but are you telling me that like, like it's not in your face when you go to edge. So the, the edge menu already has like a 127 items

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:49):
Has so many things. I know it's hard to even find what's in. There. It is.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:52):
<Laugh>. Yep. And it's so far it cascades off the side of the screen and it's like, I don't, it's just one of many things that's there. I don't

Mary Jo Foley (00:57:01):
Mm-Hmm

Paul Thurrott (00:57:01):
<Affirmative> I don't see the need for it, basically. I

Mary Jo Foley (00:57:04):
Don't. I wonder if they'll, I wonder if they'll do some kind of a prompt or add, like what, what do they call those things that we think are ads? They don't think are ads,

Paul Thurrott (00:57:11):
Suggestion,

Mary Jo Foley (00:57:13):
By the way. Yeah. Suggestion, by the way, did you know, you can play a game right. In your browser and then show you the steps, something like that. Right. Not saying they,

Paul Thurrott (00:57:22):
Well, I just, as we were talking, I just started a game of solitaire in the browser and, and by the way, well, I have a ad blocker actually. I don't see any ads <laugh> so yeah, that might be because of something I'm doing. I don't know. Yeah. But it looks like a pretty faithful version of like the, you know, the windows version basically. Yeah. Right. I don't know.

Mikah Sargent (00:57:43):
Does this make sense maybe for those what's, there's the one kind of surface device that you to constantly joke about being terrible. And I can't think of what it's called surface.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:55):
So many, the one that's terrible

Mary Jo Foley (00:57:56):
Duo

Mikah Sargent (00:57:57):
The duo surface, maybe the

Paul Thurrott (00:57:59):
Dual screen thing.

Mikah Sargent (00:58:00):
No, no, not that one. It's it's like a laptop tap. It's like a laptop. That one, the go, the go. 

Paul Thurrott (00:58:06):
Oh, that's

Mikah Sargent (00:58:07):
The browser

Paul Thurrott (00:58:08):
Powered.

Mikah Sargent (00:58:09):
So what about browser gaming and for that?

Paul Thurrott (00:58:11):
Yeah. Yeah. So anything, anything cloud- is kind of a kind of levels the playing field. Pardon the pun, because it's, you know, the, the power that's driving it is coming from the cloud. So that's actually one of the nice things about Xbox cloud gaming. This game streaming service of Microsoft has you could use an, a service go with that. You plug in new controller. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> it doesn't matter that your computer is not very powerful because this thing's coming down from the cloud. That, I mean, I don't know. I, I guess like, I'm trying to, I'm trying to understand

Mikah Sargent (00:58:44):
Gaming client.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:46):
Yeah. Would it be better to play web based games on that device than like native games? I mean, casual games maybe. Yeah. Maybe. I don't know.

Mary Jo Foley (00:58:56):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:57):
I don't know. Cuz I'm a, a fully grown adult and I use real computers. <Laugh> no, I, I,

Mary Jo Foley (00:59:08):
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:59:10):
<Laugh> all right. What other updates are coming to Microsoft

Mary Jo Foley (00:59:12):
Image? Oh, soles. Yeah. Let's talk about this other one, which is another one. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> like one that you say, why are they doing this? Right. <laugh> right. I always forget the name of this feature collections, collections, collections, which I I've used a couple times. Like when you're in edge, there's a little I, I don't even know what that icon is supposed to be. Right. I guess like little, it looks like little plus sign on a little piece of paper, but that's collections. When you click on that, you can save things from your web browser right there in groups. So that if you wanna go back and look for everything you saved, like looking, you know, say you're gonna have a birthday party, all the things pertaining to the party in a, in a collection now they're adding stuff to it though, that I'm like, so what does this have to do with collections? Right. right. It's almost like turning collections into Pinterest.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:05):
It's totally. And by the way we call that Pinterest around here. 

Mary Jo Foley (01:00:08):
Pinterest, P oh, we do. Sorry. I said I misspoke. I misspoke Pinterest.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:13):
I've

Mary Jo Foley (01:00:17):
Right. So you can follow people like on TikTok or YouTube or I here's what I never heard of Billy, Billy. Okay. Whatever

Paul Thurrott (01:00:24):
That is. That's gotta be Indian or Chinese thing or something.

Mary Jo Foley (01:00:28):
I don't so you can add like, try a link there and have the content content automatically updating, but again, why is this in collections? Right. I don't know.

Mikah Sargent (01:00:40):
So it, so I

Paul Thurrott (01:00:41):
Suppose,

Mikah Sargent (01:00:42):
Can I clarify something? Was it that collections before were kind of like folders and inside were webpages that you stored now collections can also store images, parts

Paul Thurrott (01:00:51):
And web videos. Pages. Yeah. Yeah. Well not. So they just added images and videos. But yeah, it, it was basically the theory here is you're researching something. You might be looking at cars to like, you wanna buy a car and you wanna collect information from different sources and have 'em all in one place. It syncs to all your devices. So if you're using a edge on the on your phone, like one of the one percenters you'll get it there too, I guess. Yeah. I, to me, I, I never understood this being built into the browser. I, like I say, things like that a lot. I, I see this as more of an extension. I also would've argued that they have something called OneNote that they could just integrate with that. And why not just expose a OneNote page of some kind right. As you know. Right. But they didn't do that. So I, you know, cause it's Microsoft, but yeah. So now they're, I, I would I, the way I think of what they just, what they're enabling is like social features, right. Where people might wanna make their collections public

Mary Jo Foley (01:01:48):
Collections.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:49):
Yeah. Like maybe I, I wouldn't, I would not do this, but maybe I'm looking to buy a new smartphone. I create a collection of good resources for smartphones. And then I share it with the world and maybe someone would wanna see that 

Mikah Sargent (01:02:00):
If you could create a collection to go along with your, your YouTube series on buying a house in another country, you could

Paul Thurrott (01:02:06):
A collection. Yeah. Things I wanna buy for the apartment. God, how tedious would that be? I don't. So I don't know. 

Mikah Sargent (01:02:12):
Or even collection of re restaurants,

Mary Jo Foley (01:02:13):
Restaurants, restaurants that you love. Right. Something. Got it. Okay. Even though you hate food, as we know <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:02:19):
No, no, I, I love food out in the world's restaurant. That's like restaurant food is great. <Laugh> yeah, I mean, there it's fair to actually restaurants is an interesting example because yeah. If I, you know, if I wanted to create like a, a Google map that had my favorite restaurants in a certain city or area, whatever, how would I do that? And how would I share that with anyone? <Laugh> like, I don't even know. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I, I suspect it's possible. Right. You can create a custom map of some kind or whatever, but mm-hmm, <affirmative> that's very difficult. So yeah. I mean maybe, but the, again, I would just point to this is in Microsoft edge, the browser, no one really uses. So what <laugh> like, what's the a of what's

Mikah Sargent (01:02:58):
It's like

Paul Thurrott (01:02:58):
Having a zoom player and it's like, I wanna have a, find someone else with a zoom so I can squirt music to 'em or something like,

Mary Jo Foley (01:03:03):
No, don't say squirt, come on. That's word band.

Mikah Sargent (01:03:06):
<Laugh> I had to re I had to re kind of calibrate who I, because I always thought like windows experience, blog, all those kinds of things refer mm-hmm <affirmative> or for people who were seekers. But this text leads me to believe that this is something that they think that normal people are going to read, because it's, I should say average people are gonna read. Yeah. It says, remember if you're running a windows PC, you already have Microsoft edge installed. <Laugh> it's so cond that's who they're talking,

Paul Thurrott (01:03:31):
The people who would read this are like, are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Right. Remember, but they think that often end a sentence with a period <laugh>

Mikah Sargent (01:03:40):
Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (01:03:40):
No, you know what? You gotta, you gotta look at these as aspirational, right? Like as ways that you say maybe this is how they think people will start using it on their phone, because they'll have a collection on their PC that they wanna share with themselves or others on their phone. Right. Like I they've gotta be aspirational. Right? Yeah. They, this is what they have to be thinking. Like maybe if we do this, we'll get more people to try edge, especially on mobile.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:03):
I, I also, I, we should to be fair point out that we often complain that Microsoft has pretty much given up on consumers, but here is this little spark of light someone or someones at Microsoft believe there are consumers out there. They can reach, this is very much a consumer feature. I, well, maybe it's a creative feature, but kind of a consumer feature. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> maybe <laugh> I don't know. I just don't.

Mary Jo Foley (01:04:27):
I don't know. No, you know what new Newman says in the discord? I don't even think these arguments are that interesting. Like, are they useful or not? The question is, should these be baked into the browser or be extensions? Yes. That is the real question, right? Yep. That is

Paul Thurrott (01:04:39):
The perfect. Yeah. And I, so my solution for this would be, was solved by the EU, which is that instead of an like a browser ballot screen, there should be a browser feature ballot screen. The first time you run edge and you can check off the things you want and uncheck the ones you don't. And and although I kinda

Mikah Sargent (01:04:57):
World hate those that set up. No,

Paul Thurrott (01:04:59):
I there's. No, there is no perfect way to do this, but right. Fair. My, my, my broader issue, this is kind of a technical person, and this is kind of specific to me because I use so many different computers. I would like that information synced to my account. So when I go sign into a new computer, those things I don't want on, or just off, just want 'em off, you know? Yep.

Mikah Sargent (01:05:18):
Yep. Right. Well, the screen

Paul Thurrott (01:05:19):
Comes up and it's like, here's the selections you made before. Just want to continue from here. Do you wanna think about it? Mm-Hmm

Mikah Sargent (01:05:24):
<Affirmative>, you know, yeah. Apple does that with the setup process, and they've just recently brought that to the brow, their safari browser with the extensions that you choose to have enabled across devices. Yeah. Yep. That's good. That's such a good idea. I missed Mary Jo, the computer vision stuff that they're doing with collections that actually kind of creeps me out. You talk

Paul Thurrott (01:05:41):
About the visual search.

Mikah Sargent (01:05:43):
Yeah. So basically, as you're adding photos and stuff to your collections, then it will look at your collections and use computer vision to show you other things out there that are compared to what you have. I don't really want it doing that.

Mary Jo Foley (01:05:58):
Yeah. Same.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:59):
Well, you might. I mean, I'm, I'm not defending your, the invasion of your privacy, but I

Mikah Sargent (01:06:03):
Was gonna say in and of itself, that would be nice, but to be nice. Yeah. Where else is that doing it going? That's

Mary Jo Foley (01:06:08):
What I wanna, right. Do you want this feature on or off? Yes or no? Like here's what we,

Paul Thurrott (01:06:13):
You, everything we just discussed is the difference between convenience and choice. And it is choice is one of those things that's good in kind of a vague sense, but when confronted by choice, it becomes tedious. <Laugh> right. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I vaguely, I sort of think it would be nice. Like I said, to have this screen where you can, you know, check things off, whatever, but the reality is anytime you set something up, whatever it is, window is a browser, whatever. There's so many things you have to step through. It's like, I just want, I, I installed a so I could run it not so I could, yeah. Like take a quiz. I'm not like, you know, it's like a survey. Like you only take five minutes for your time. You know?

Mary Jo Foley (01:06:50):
Now the reason they might not be turning these into extensions is normal. People don't even know about extensions. Right? Like true normal users. Don't right. By the way, I just got an email from Microsoft about the edge OS question. The answer is we have nothing to share. Look at me, <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:07:07):
Claire

Mikah Sargent (01:07:07):
Lloyd, you guessed it. You predicted

Paul Thurrott (01:07:09):
It to share, you know, I, I, I, because I'm so well versed in Microsoft speak. I, I find it interesting that they did not say at this time <laugh> right.

Mary Jo Foley (01:07:22):
Cause they, let me double check if they said that.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:23):
Yeah. Cuz they often will add that at the end where you like, they

Mary Jo Foley (01:07:27):
Did not. <Laugh> just know.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:28):
Does this mean you will have something to say about it later? That's

Mary Jo Foley (01:07:31):
Say later. Great.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:33):
Hmm.

Mikah Sargent (01:07:35):
All right. There's still a lot more to talk about with Microsoft edge. Yeah, sure. But I do wanna take a quick break and then we'll get back to that. So I can tell you about hacker rank, who are bringing you this episode of windows weekly between those deadlines and frustrating interview tools that aren't set up for technical interviews, conducting a tech interview might be the last thing you have time for. You've got too much on your plate. You have to spend the first 10 minutes of your interview. Just trying to set up an environment to share code from a dozen documents. This wastes your time and your candidate's time. Fortunately hacker rank has developed an IDE. That is an integrated development environment. Just for the tech interview process with a set of easy to use interview tools, you'll quickly find the best developers for your technical projects.

Mikah Sargent (01:08:19):
The developer interview tools include a pre-made question library with more than 2,500 questions. So you'll quickly find the right questions for your coding needs a code playback feature. So you can review the candidates, coding approach and score their skill levels and a built in whiteboard. So you can collaborate in real time to see how problems are solved. Look it is time to reboot your technical interview process with hacker rank click interview done start using hacker rank for free today and see how much better a technical interview can be. It's time to reboot your technical interviews with hacker ranks, easy to use tools with a pre-made question, library, code playback, and built in whiteboard. You will be conducting better technical interviews and instantly identifying the right talent. Go to hacker rank.com/ww to start a better tech interview for free today. That's hacker rank.com/ww. Thanks so much to hacker rank for sponsoring this week's episode of windows weekly. And now we're back to the show and back on the edge.

Paul Thurrott (01:09:25):
Wow.

Mikah Sargent (01:09:26):
Thank you. Thank you. Wow. <laugh> that's what you're feeling about WebView two, right? That's your response to WebView two is wow.

Paul Thurrott (01:09:37):
<Laugh> no, actually WebView two. I don't have a problem with oh, okay. So WebView two is the I embedable version of the edge rendering engine that developers can add to their application. So and I mentioned earlier how Microsoft extends outlook with web components. This is actually how they do that and on edge anyway. No, that's not true and no, that's not true at all. I'm sorry. <Laugh> this is how they do that. They use the, the web view two component. So the original web view ran on the non chromium version of edge that debuted in 2015, it used the old IE tri style engine. This is the version that's built based on chromium. It has been available for not quite two years, but developers who used it would have to ship the add in with their code, you know, with their app. Windows 11 includes it out of the box, so to speak. So this is the first version of windows that has it, but now they're bringing it to windows 10 PCs as well, starting with home and pro for consumers. So the idea here is that developers will no longer need to bundle the web two web view to runtime with their apps. It will just be part of the PC. So just, you know, making it more broadly available, basically see simple.

Mikah Sargent (01:10:55):
Yeah, simple. K I S S

Paul Thurrott (01:10:57):
Non controversial

Mikah Sargent (01:10:59):
<Laugh> yes. And now taking a step out of the Microsoft ecosystem, let's talk about Mozilla and one of my favorite browsers Firefox.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:10):
Yeah, just a couple of quick non-Microsoft browser updates in tandem, you know edge 1 0 3 just came out. That's the version that includes that new gaming functionality Mozilla just released fire fors version 1 0 2. And this just has a couple of new features, nothing serious. They've enhanced subtitles and captions to work with more services. They have improved anti tracking capabilities and now the downloads panel which I actually don't like in Firefox, but now it won't, I'm sorry, it will open by default, but you can actually just have it not open if you want. Cause if you're downloading a lot, it's kind of annoying. You just turn that off. So nothing major this time around, which makes sense is a new version of Firefox every month. So why, why should we expect anything major every single month,

Mikah Sargent (01:11:55):
No new in browser gaming in fire

Paul Thurrott (01:11:59):
Stuff. No, if you don't like that kind of stuff, by the way, Firefox is not a horrible choice. <Laugh> and even better choice though possibly would be brave. And I'll be talking about this one actually later as well, but a year ago brave launched, brave search in beta they've had 2.5 billion inquiries against it. This is actually built from scratch. It's not based on other search engines, which is wow. I would've said was impossible. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's truly independent. They're taking an interesting stance on the privacy freedom of speech kind of stuff too. So they, so brave search is like GA it's generally available. So it's, it's built into their browser. This is, you know Brandon IAC, who's the guy who created JavaScript while at Netscape, right? Yeah. At the time is the CEO.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:53):
And I think the founder of this company and he has he's taken it's, it's a really interesting stance. Like they, they perceive they being brave that there is a real bias in search engines and what we see online and that it has to do with just whatever biases are present in tech companies and so forth. And so one of the interesting things they're adding to brave search is this feature called goggles, which yes is hilarious. <Laugh> as a name. But the idea here is that you, as the user can go through a list, it's a pretty big list and say, I want my search results to include things like whatever, you know, for whatever sources. And I want to exclude these sources. So if you are a heavily leaning in one way politically or the other, you can be like, yep. I only wanna see that kind of stuff.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:40):
I don't wanna see this kind of stuff. And I don't know what to say about that. <Laugh> like, I, I, there's a part of me. I don't know what you call this kind of person, what I am, which is that I feel like we need to be exposed to opposing views at all times. And I think that's really important. And I think one of the terrible side effects that no one saw coming out of this ability to filter all the content on the web and only see the things you care about is that we are no longer shown these opposing viewpoints and we find them offensive. And this is, I think part of the reason we all don't get along right now is I think we're like, everything is like black and white, you know, and a little too black and white mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so they're, they're kind of enabling that.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:18):
And I don't know how I feel about that, but on the other hand, I do sort of appreciate the notion that big tech could be inherently biased in all kinds of things. We talked about the biases that Microsoft inadvertently built into AI. For example, they've been very upfront about that. It's not hard to imagine that Google either purposely or not might bias their search results in some ways, for various reasons, like they might wanna promote their own services or whatever they might wanna pur highlight a political viewpoint that furthers their aims as a business. You know, this is stuff that does happen and could happen for sure. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so it's, it's interesting. So I'm on the, the fence about this kind of stuff, but I do find it fascinating that brave is creating their own or has created now their own search engine. I, I don't know <laugh> so I don't know, but it's, it's further fascinating in a way that they have a feature called goggles, which I still think is funny, but which will allow you to essentially filter the type of information you might see as you search for things. If that makes sense, essentially creating your own personalized search results engine <laugh> I guess I'll call it. I don't know what else to call that. So, yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:34):
Absolutely. And now for something interesting to some and not into others, Mary Jo put on your goggles and put in your earplugs. Yeah. It's time for Xbox corner.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:49):
Oh, this is nothing. This is the lightest Xbox segment in the history of Xbox segments. I can't believe this is all that we have. I know, I don't know.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:02):
Microsoft has revealed the four games that are coming to games with gold month. This is the program where you get free games. If you're an active subscriber to Xbox live gold or Xbox game pass ultimate they are X. Well, they are the Xbox one. I think I was gonna say Xbox one, but I'm not a hundred percent sure that's what they are, but I believe they're Xbox. Yeah. Xbox one and Xbox 360 titles beasts, Relic, Relic, Relic thrill bill off the rails and Torchlight. I have never heard of any of these games. However, they are worth $55. So if you like free stuff and you're, well, you're paying for the subscription, but if you like to get these kind of perks they will all become available sometime in July. You know, they, they do some it's different for the Xbox when the Xbox is screwed to even explain. But basically some of it happens, let's call it the first half of the month, the second half of the month. It's I wish it was that simple, but anyway, this stuff is all coming next month and that is all that I have for gaming. Wow.

Mikah Sargent (01:16:59):
Wow. Woo.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:00):
I mean, I could talk about some of my recent call of duty matches. I did have a particularly good game to

Mary Jo Foley (01:17:05):
<Laugh>. We had a lot of gaming talk in the browser section, so I think we can, that

Paul Thurrott (01:17:09):
Was all from you though. <Laugh> but it's okay when you're doing it.

Mikah Sargent (01:17:14):
<Laugh> so this is actually where we'll take some time to chat with folks from the discord, perhaps from the IRC. If you have questions in either of those places, feel free to type 'em in and we may take some live questions if folks are available to do so. Just what I would like if you want to ask a question on air then type into the windows weekly chat and say, I want to talk on air <laugh>. Otherwise we'll do, we'll do the questions as text. And it looks like we've got one already. 

Paul Thurrott (01:17:55):
I would like to talk on air <laugh>. Oh, who

Mikah Sargent (01:17:58):
Do I? Well, good, good. You, you can. So this says, this is from Lowell and low writes any news on direct storage on the PC. I think it's up to game developers to implement that per game currently.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:15):
I believe I, now I have to look this up. Thank you for stumping me also. Thank you for continuing the gaming stuff when I was unable to earlier. <Laugh> so it is, yeah, it, okay. I was gonna say, I, I, in my head, I was like, I believe this is available now in PC. And it is so back in March M yeah, Microsoft made it available on PC's running windows 10 or windows 11. So yeah, I don't direct storage is the technology they brought over from the Xbox series X and S it requires a specifically designed SSD with specific performance characteristics, et cetera. It's not something that most people are actually probably ever gonna see, at least not in the next few years, but yeah, I, I don't, I haven't, I don't recall hearing anything about this since March. We've had GDC we've had not E three, but we've had a bunch of announcements around what would've been E three and I don't, I don't recall. I don't recall hearing almost anything about direct storage for PC. It's kind of automatic on Xbox, obviously. I don't know. I haven't, I don't, I don't recall hearing anything about that. Hmm. I'm sorry to say.

Mikah Sargent (01:19:30):
All right. Here's one that I like from Newman. Have Mary Jo or Paul been following Steven OV Sinski's memoir slash blog postings. Have you been keeping up with Steven Sinski's memoir and blog postings?

Mary Jo Foley (01:19:47):
No,

Mikah Sargent (01:19:48):
<Laugh> I love thes just absolute silence from Paul and a simple, no for Mary Jo. So,

Paul Thurrott (01:19:54):
No, I have not, but

Mary Jo Foley (01:19:56):
No today somebody tweeted me and they said one of his latest posts mentions me and,

Mikah Sargent (01:20:03):
Oh,

Mary Jo Foley (01:20:03):
I just, I just,

Paul Thurrott (01:20:04):
Did it mention the time he hid in the closet when you were walking down the hall or was it some story about

Mary Jo Foley (01:20:08):
You? I don't know what it was. I, I didn't, I just, I, I'm not a big person for reading industry books, or even listening to industry podcasts. And also just because I had a bad history with him, I'm just not interested.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:24):
Yeah. So I'll just, I have not read it either, although I have read small parts of it. But the asterisks there is I was writing my own history of windows and I did not want to two things. I didn't wanna be influenced by anything he wrote, cuz he's a liar and I didn't want to be confronted with something that frankly gives me my version of PTSD and which I already went through. Like the windows seven and eight years for me were really tough because of Sinofsky. And when I was writing that part of the history, it was, it was terrible. Like it was really hard and I tried to leave as much of that out of it as possible that said, I, I do read those kinds of books and I do care very much about this history. I know he's going to color it, to make him look more favorable, which I find disturbing. So I probably will. But I haven't yet. And I just, I just know it's gonna be traumatic for me to read because I, I know too much about what happened and I know that he's not gonna tell the truth.

Mikah Sargent (01:21:29):
I have to tell you, I, I must admit known who Stevenson Osky is for a while, knew the name familiar, but I've never knew what he looked like. And so I just looked him up and I was like, so

Paul Thurrott (01:21:40):
Look at the picture of Oswald holding the rifle before he killed Kennedy. That's what he looks like.

Mikah Sargent (01:21:44):
I was gonna say, I thought Google was really pictures of Jeff Bezos.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:49):
Oh, now look, look up me of Jeff, look up. 

Mikah Sargent (01:21:51):
Okay. Let's see. What did you say? Look, Oswald holding the rifle. Kidding.

Mary Jo Foley (01:21:56):
I thought that was a joke. <Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (01:21:58):
No, that's exactly what he looks like or looked like at the time. I mean,

Mary Jo Foley (01:22:02):
If you really wanna picture, look up the skateboard and Sinofsky, and you'll see another picture he used to skateboard, turn the surface into a skateboard. He actually attached wheels to the surface to show it was strong enough to skateboard on

Mikah Sargent (01:22:17):
What in the world. Oh my he's like his legs are up in the air.

Mary Jo Foley (01:22:24):
That's no, he, I guess he really is a very good skateboarder. But yeah, it was weird. We were all kind of weirded out by it. He

Paul Thurrott (01:22:31):
Did a lot of skating that's for sure.

Mikah Sargent (01:22:35):
All right. Let's see. What's next? Moving off of snaky. You gotta

Paul Thurrott (01:22:42):
Understand. We told this story recently, but Mary Jo and I both had the experience where people from Microsoft PR reached out to us after he was fired and apologized and said, we just wanna let you know, we didn't agree with what happened. It's gonna stop <laugh> and I, he was just a horrible human being. That's all. Hmm.

Mikah Sargent (01:23:03):
That's that's too bad. Yep. Oh really bad. Next, next question is from professor Panda bear who asks me, how is Elvis for people, for people who are watching and don't know, Elvis is my surface laptop three with my, the sticker that Mary Jo brought

Paul Thurrott (01:23:20):
Blue. Is that the, the color mm-hmm

Mikah Sargent (01:23:22):
<Affirmative> I can't remember what it was called at the time. But it has the blue Quintara which is nice. And I have to

Paul Thurrott (01:23:32):
Notice you didn't crush any Cheetos into the Quintara series.

Mikah Sargent (01:23:35):
<Laugh> I didn't give it its full christening. No <laugh> but I do so I like this low machine for multiple reasons. One mm-hmm <affirmative> is that it is lightweight, which is kind of nice. It is a windows machine, which is something that I need from time to time. In fact, the interface, all those

Paul Thurrott (01:23:56):
Native apps that we love. <Laugh>

Mikah Sargent (01:23:58):
Exactly the, the interface that I use for my microphone. For some reason, the firm more updating process works better on a windows machine, so I could plug it in there and use it there. But also obviously to just keep up with what's going on in windows is

Paul Thurrott (01:24:11):
An Intel version of the surface ring.

Mikah Sargent (01:24:14):
Oh, that's a good question. I bet you know where I can find that. I think you

Paul Thurrott (01:24:18):
Windows got windows key at the same time I did.

Mikah Sargent (01:24:21):
Yeah. Windows key X

Paul Thurrott (01:24:23):
System

Mikah Sargent (01:24:23):
System.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:25):
And it will tell you what you have

Mikah Sargent (01:24:26):
And then it'll tell me right there. Let's see. Yeah, Intel I five. Yeah, good. That version. So

Paul Thurrott (01:24:33):
Hot D chip was, was out of, out of out

Mikah Sargent (01:24:37):
Wax. That's the only thing I don't like about it is how hot it gets. It's hot. Ooh, it gets, but I have to tell you whatever Microsoft is doing to have this thing go to sleep when it's not in use is pretty impressive because I can't do that with my Mac. My Mac will, the battery will still die. Even whenever the clam shell is down. After a period,

Paul Thurrott (01:24:57):
I dunno if you got the memo on apple, but max are perfect. So I'm not sure what you're talking about, but

Mikah Sargent (01:25:01):
No, no, they aren't. <Laugh> so I've, that's, I've always been impressed by that because you know, I don't use a windows machine very often, but when I do go to grab it, even though I hadn't have it plugged in and charging, I can lift it up and it starts shortly and I'm good to go. And the battery's still pretty good. So I like that.

Paul Thurrott (01:25:17):
Interesting. Interesting.

Mikah Sargent (01:25:20):
Oh, there is someone. Okay. We've got somebody who does want to ask a question live. So let's go to JT on the open mic.

JT (01:25:29):
Hello? Can you hear me?

Mikah Sargent (01:25:32):
Yes. Can you hear us

JT (01:25:33):
Awesome? Yes. so my question now you got the video too. My question is you, I use one password and one password a is finally out for Mac and it's, it's kind of featuring complete, but it is an electron version that they, they want to sync fully back and forth with, with their Mac J you need to mute your mic. You're gonna pause that echo is finally out for Mac and it's it's complete, but its,

Mikah Sargent (01:25:59):
There we

JT (01:25:59):
Go. However, mute him. Do server mute mic that or John that's you gotta server mute server special kind. That worked too.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:08):
Yeah,

JT (01:26:08):
They were so I, I, I use one password eight and they went recently went to electron version. So I have it on Mac and windows. I trust my max touch ID for authentication. I don't know how I feel about using face ID or whatever. The, the, the visual ID on my surface.

Mikah Sargent (01:26:27):
How secure windows?

JT (01:26:28):
Hello that really? Windows. Hello? Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:31):
Windows hello? Facial

JT (01:26:32):
Condition. So that is that like a 3d death perception where it can't be fake with a photograph. It is, yes. It has like laser dots and everything. That's

Paul Thurrott (01:26:40):
Right. Yep. It's safe. I, the only thing I don't like about it is that it's implicit. So the problem is if you're anywhere in front of the computer, you just sign in. I kind of prefer to get up to the computer. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> type in a pin, although arguably a pin is probably more easily bypassed or whatever, but but no it is. Yeah, no it's, it's safe. I don't think we, we have not really heard anything along the lines of windows.

Mary Jo Foley (01:27:03):
There's some people who've had trouble getting it to work. Right. Mm-hmm <affirmative> we've had that. I, I actually shut hello off on my service laptop, cuz it was

Paul Thurrott (01:27:13):
No, I don't use it either, but not, not because of any security concerns just because like I said, I

Mary Jo Foley (01:27:17):
Like to no same and just for me it

Paul Thurrott (01:27:20):
Reader great.

Mary Jo Foley (01:27:21):
You know, it didn't recognize me a lot and I trained it in light, different conditions, glasses on glasses, off light, dark. I tried everything. And about the fourth of the time, I couldn't get it to recognize me. And I'm like, you know what? I'm going back to the pen. Sorry. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (01:27:35):
That's really interesting. Actually I go ahead.

JT (01:27:38):
It's actually pretty reliable for me. In fact, that was the reason for my questions. So quick to recognize me, it logs me in very quick. <Laugh> that? I thought there's no way doing a 3d depth mapping. Like the, the face ID on the iPhone does. So I was concerned that oh no,

Paul Thurrott (01:27:52):
It absolutely is. Yeah.

JT (01:27:53):
Yeah. It's based place.

Mikah Sargent (01:27:55):
I'll post a link in the windows weekly discord that gives you more information about how windows hello. Face authentication works.

JT (01:28:03):
Excellent. Thank

Paul Thurrott (01:28:03):
You. So when you use, let

JT (01:28:04):
Me ask my question.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:06):
Yeah, I don't use, so like I said, I usually use a pin, but when I need to access like a password and password manager I'll have to enter my pin. Right. But if I'm on a computer that has a fingerprint reader or I don't like, I don't use face, but use that instead. So I, because I don't use it. Does, is this something like, in other words, you just kind of, you bypass any, you don't even aware that it's doing it right? Doesn't it just, does it throw up something and say, oh, you're good. Or does it like, what happens when you

Mikah Sargent (01:28:32):
Oh, for one password? I can, yeah. If he's not here with, or if they're not still with us oh, you're still,

JT (01:28:38):
Oh, I'm I'm still here. So that's I was, I had installed it yet on windows. One password agile bit say just recently released eight for the Mac and I'm like, okay, fine. We're in electron, still

Paul Thurrott (01:28:48):
The Mac. It works with touch

JT (01:28:49):
ID and, and I, I, I, I was, I was asking the experts before I trusted it on my window. My surface

Paul Thurrott (01:28:57):
Lap. No, you can trust it. I, I right. I see I'm

Mikah Sargent (01:29:02):
To, cause I do have it

Paul Thurrott (01:29:03):
Install on something like that.

Mikah Sargent (01:29:05):
Oh, crud. I don't have it installed anymore because I had to completely, I was on the dev build pole and I had to completely wipe this machine and start over. So I used to have it to don't remember. Now if it prompts you first or, or what happens there? Yeah, it's been a while.

JT (01:29:21):
I will try it out and put my experience in the discord and share it with Mary Jo there. Okay. <Laugh> and Mikah and John. Yeah, please. Everyone there.

Mikah Sargent (01:29:30):
Thank you. Thank you for asking a question. And now let's see, was there somebody else who was wanting to hop on and ask a question? Before we had an echo going with two people, if not Mary Jo, I saw you ask a or answer a question in the, the chat. You wanna address that one?

Mary Jo Foley (01:29:50):
Yes. So Lowell was asking about Viva sales that we talked about last week, the CRM companion app <laugh> he said, is it gonna work with anything besides Salesforce? Because they made a big deal out of it, working with things other than dynamics. They said it could work with any CRM. So the way that actually works is it'll automatically be integrated with dynamics, no surprise. It'll also automatically have in the box integration with Salesforce and then through the Dataverse APIs, Microsoft says Viva sales will support additional CRM systems in the future.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:24):
So no, <laugh>

Mary Jo Foley (01:30:27):
Now. No, but the, but they're saying it's possible. It's a do like it, like, I guess just the third party vendors would have to do it, or if you wanted to do a custom integration, I guess you could do that too.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:41):
Okay. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:30:43):
And one last question before we take a break and then come back with our back of the book they're asking both you and I, Paul cuz you're coming from the, the window side of things. How like this is from Joe, how likely do you think it is that we'll see native game pass support on iOS and tvOS in the near future? I assume it's down to the two companies agreeing on a revenue split.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:07):
It's actually probably down to an antitrust regulator of some kind forcing apple, not to do what they're doing right now. Right? So I, I just wrote something about this. And boy, I'm trying to remember where this came out of, but the real reason that apple is not allowing Xbox cloud streaming on iOS or whatever any of their platforms is that gaming revenue through their app store is like 80% of the revenues in particular in app purchases. And if they, Microsoft is able to bypass that because it's a streaming service, they're not gonna get anything from it. And they're, they're trying to make sure that they get those revenues. So my, I think my understanding, well maybe it'll be years from now, but at some point I think we'll find it. You know, we'll hear the details, but Microsoft, I believed in everything they could to make concessions to apple to make this happen. But apple basically wanted them to submit every single game as an individual app, which is not what the, you know, cloud stream experience is all about. And kind of have control over those in-app purchases, frankly. So I don't see apple ever agreeing to make those changes. I think it would, it's gonna require some antitrust regulator or some government basically to force them to do it. So we'll see. But yeah, I don't, I don't have a lot of hope for that, frankly.

Mikah Sargent (01:32:28):
Yeah. I feel the same way. I don't, I don't know when or if that's ever going to happen other than outside of an antitrust kind of thing. I think that it would be nice. If you could be what you wanted to be on every platform, I can't remember who it was, but there was somebody on Mac break weekly who was talking about how it kind of, oh no, I think it was actually, it wasn't. I think it was you Paul. When you mentioned that it kind of flies in the face of what apple is doing when it comes to its own, you know, the iPhone has this powerful chip in it and can do all these things. That's

Paul Thurrott (01:33:04):
That was, that was, that was one of the other reasons that's right. Yeah. In other words like apple is sell, this is, we talked about this with the surface go just a little while ago. This notion that when you stream games from the cloud, the power has to be in the cloud that any device becomes a gaming PC, apple sells premium expensive phones. Part of their power is through these ship sets. They make that have often, often I'm sorry. Awesome graphics capabilities. All of that is subverted by cloud streaming and that's, it, it kind of goes against the model of what they're doing that came up out of a, it was part of the it was part of a court case where someone at apple had emailed Craig FA Reini and said, you, we should buy a, a cloud streaming cloud game. Hello, <laugh> a cloud, a game streaming company. And he says, no, that's against our that's against what we're selling. We sell powerful hardware. We want games that appear on the device, not games history and from the cloud. So there, there were a couple of reasons, but basically what it boiled down to was this that's against Apple's business model. So they're gonna do everything they can to prevent it. Mm-Hmm

Mikah Sargent (01:34:05):
<Affirmative> all right. Well, what's not against our business model is taking a break to talk about a sponsor. So we're gonna do that now, before we come back with the back of the book, I just wanna tell you about it pro TV, who are bringing you this episode of windows weekly. You've heard about it pro TV, but you, if you haven't checked them out, you need to, your it team needs the skills and the knowledge to ensure your business is a success. And with it pro TV, more than 80% of users who start a video, actually finish it. It pro TV is engaging and your team will enjoy learning on their platform. You can give your team the tools they need to make your business thrive. They're courses that are super entertaining, they're binge worthy, and they keep your team interested and invested in the learning.

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Paul Thurrott (01:36:59):
<Laugh>. So last week I mentioned, I had written a series of articles called new and 22 H two, which details the major new features in windows 11, version 22 H two, but in the process of writing the windows 11 field guide, which requires an astronomical amount of research around like doing the same thing over and over and over again in different configurations, I was going through the windows set up routine, and actually there are some changes in windows set up between the first version of windows 11 and the new version. And of course, one of them is infamous which is that Microsoft is now requiring that individuals who install windows 11 pro it used to just be home sign in with the Microsoft account. You can't use a local account on what Microsoft now calls an offline account. So I wrote an article about that.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:48):
I so I, and most of it's not super interesting. It's just little graphical changes. They've added a couple screens, you know, whatever. And they took away that one feature, however, you can get around that. And so the tip this week is about how you get around that. And actually there are different approaches and actually with windows 11, the initial version, there were other ways to bypass this requirement for windows 11 home, some of which still work and some of which don't, but I just wanted to publish one that basically works all the time. There is a chance that this will not work in the future. <Laugh> because Microsoft, but and I, I hope by publicizing this, I am not <laugh> triggering that happening. But basically when you get to the point in windows setup, which for most people will be, you turn on your, your computer for the first time you just bought it or you reset it.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:34):
And you're like, are you, you know, whatever country, yes. Do you want this kinda keyboard? Yep. Do you want to, you know, connect to the network? One of, some of the tips say, oh, don't do that. You know, but actually Microsoft is enforcing this. They, they make you connect to the internet and then they make you use a Microsoft account. And basically to get around this at any point, you just hello, I lost it. You get to the screen where it's asking for your Microsoft account and you type in a very specific Microsoft account, which is no@thankyou.com, which someone out there created and then entered the wrong password. So many times that that account is now locked, which means, oh my goodness, you can't sign in with it. So in that instance, they will let you sign in with the local account.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:20):
<Laugh> now this particular account Microsoft could get rid of it. They could fix it for some, you know, they could, they could get rid, you know, there are other, any account that's locked. This will work. So there are probably other examples, but I thought, no at thank you. Dot com was kind of a cute one. So once you enter that password that username or email address enter, it can enter any password. It doesn't matter. The account's locked. It's gonna say, oops, something went wrong. And then you get a screen. The screen says, who's gonna use this device and you can enter, you know, Paul, I would enter like a, an offline account. So that that's right now, the 100% way you can bypass this windows 10, sorry, windows 11, home or pro 22 H two I'm I assume it works with 21 H two, but I'm not really testing that anymore.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:09):
So that works a hundred percent of the time. So if you're freaking out, there's always gonna be a way to bypass it. Those ways are gonna change in the book. I actually have a second way to do this which is a little more involved. But this is the way that right now, anyway, next week, maybe this stuff's working, I guess we'll see what happens. But right now it works 100% of the time. So that's good. And then the pick of this week, I, I, I had said to Leo some time ago, like, I feel like I've been moving in this direction for a long time and I kind of dive into it. And then I, I, I kind of go back out and I, I kind of dive in and go back out in this past, you know, few months you, if you've been paying attention to my app picks, I've been recommending various web browsers, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:40:47):
So I've gone back and forth and I still go back and forth in some ways not just on windows, but on my mobile devices, which brow, you know, which browsers I use. I use safari a lot on my iPhone and my iPad. I've gone in and out of Firefox a lot Microsoft edge, which I've actually been using a lot recently Chrome of course, Vivaldi, but I always feel like I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm heading to brave, like I'm, I'm gonna end up at brave, you know, and because of that announcement that I mentioned earlier about brave search, I went and looked at braved again, and that, and this time it kind of clicked. Like I, I realized like, this is what I'm looking for. It's a chromium based browser. It does all the anti tracking, all the anti popups, all the stuff that, you know, you, you want that you need extensions for and other browsers.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:31):
And they've made it easier to do things like syncing your data. So most people are gonna get this thing, install it, it will say, Hey, do you want to import your stuff? You know, your passwords, whatever data from other browsers. Yes. You choose the browser, it just kind of works and that's fine, but if you want to use it on mobile, they, they used to have a really strange system for setting that up, but actually works pretty well now. So you basically have a barcode or a, a QR code, scan it with your phone and you can just basically put a bunch of computers or devices I should say, into the same system. So if you add a password on your phone, it will add it on your desktop as well, like you would expect. Right? I mean like, like every browser works.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:11):
But I think that, I, I think that part of it is really interesting. I think the, the, the, one of the reasons I like it just usability is performance. I've had issues with Firefox, especially, but also with edge where, and it's not just tab sleeping. There's some weird stuff with edge where I'll go to like a tab and it's like the first time I ever loaded it and it takes a moment or things seem to take a little while. And it's one of the reasons I kept going back to Chrome, but brave actually has that performance characteristic. I like it's super minimalistic looking, which I like it doesn't have all that crap that like edge is adding to the menus and all that, which I really like, obviously the tracker stuff I talked about. But I actually, I, I, I, this is a weird thing to say, but I, I kind of like the way they've rethought how sync works, and I know that's kind of goofy if you use Firefox or edge or browser, really what you're doing is you're signing in with an account.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:03):
It's looking at some cloud thing and it's bringing down your stuff and that takes summer time or not much time at all. Like if you sign into Chrome for the first time, all of your extensions kind of blow down pretty quick. If you do this on edge, that takes a long time actually. So the way they do it on brave is very different, but I'm actually sort of starting to appreciate it. And it's basically, they're not storing that stuff in the cloud anywhere. You have a, a, a version of brave out there in the world somewhere, and you have, now you have another device, like one of use brave on this one too. And now what you're doing is you're connecting those two things. And so it will, it will make a connection to that other device, grab your brave data. And then that's it.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:37):
There's no, Brave's not involved up in the cloud. Your data's not out there somewhere. I'm actually, I'm, I'm starting to wonder if this thing that they did, which they designed specifically not to be hosting your data. Right. I'm actually kind of wondering if this isn't the best way to do this kind of thing. Yeah. So I've been using this on different, I've kind of moved into it cause I used a lot of different computers, but just a day or two ago, I put it up on this computer I'm using here, but the laptops I use it's on my iPhone now. I I've really, like I said, like a year ago, I would've been like, I feel like I'm gonna end up there and I'm not, I'll still have to test other things and we'll see how it goes. But I think it's finally clicked with me. And I think I could picture, I could picture sticking with pray for the duration.

Mikah Sargent (01:44:22):
Awesome. That's a

Paul Thurrott (01:44:23):
Good one. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:44:25):
All right. Mary Jo Foley, tell us about your enterprise pick the week.

Mary Jo Foley (01:44:30):
Right? So in July coming up, coming up soon, very soon Microsoft is going to hold their annual partner conference that is called inspire. I N S P I R E July 19th, 20 perspire. They should. <Laugh> it. You know, so in the past, when it was, when it was not virtual, it was for partners, Microsoft partners, hardware partners, software partners, resellers system integrator. They let a few press come in. They let me come in almost every year, one year they let Paul, I think, come in, maybe just one. And that was it.

Mikah Sargent (01:45:07):
I went for a, they said, ah, no, no, no,

Paul Thurrott (01:45:09):
That guy,

Mary Jo Foley (01:45:10):
That guy here he is,

Paul Thurrott (01:45:12):
I was one of my favorite shows. It was great.

Mary Jo Foley (01:45:13):
Me too. It

Paul Thurrott (01:45:14):
Was it always newsworthy.

Mary Jo Foley (01:45:16):
Yep. Always. There's always news at the show, not just for partners, not like partner program only. There's usually a lot of product news and there's usually a very strong indication of strategy, like where they're gonna go in the coming year, because they need to tell the partners this, since the partners are their sales force. So the good news for everyone at home and listening to the show is you can attend, inspire because it is virtual. You can register now on Microsoft site, inspire.microsoft.com if you register or even if you don't, I believe you can see the session list that just went up yesterday, the session catalog there are 200 sessions up there so far. What's interesting. I, I scanned through all the sessions yesterday and a lot of them look like they're kind of repeating some of the information they shared at build, but there are a few things.

Mary Jo Foley (01:46:07):
If you're interested in these topics that you might especially want to attend for. There is quite a bit about industry clouds and where Microsoft's going in the vertical space. It looks like that's gonna be a big emphasis at this show. So, you know, they have these cloud for healthcare cloud, for retail cloud, for manufacturing, all these kinds of things. I think they're gonna be more clouds like this, maybe automotive, agriculture, other things like that. These are just bundles of all the Microsoft cloud products with various integrations specific to vertical markets. There's also very surprisingly a session on here by Scott Manchester, who is the Microsoft 365, no, sorry. Windows 365 cloud PC guy. Talking about something that Panos announced a few months ago the ability to integrate your local windows desktop with windows 365 in the cloud. So I'm wondering if they're finally gonna start sharing details of what that looks like and how you can get in on the test pool for that, because Panos announced it and they didn't really have anything more to say, it's like, yeah, coming in the future, you're gonna be able to do this, you know, work wherever you want some on the desktop, some in the cloud, but they didn't really tell us how, when, where all those things that people wanna know how much.

Mary Jo Foley (01:47:25):
So maybe they're going to start talking about that at inspire. Also I saw a few sessions on nuance, you know, the company they just bought in the healthcare space that does a lot of AI stuff. AI seems to be unsurprisingly a big theme. So yeah, if you, if you're interested in just kind of knowing where Microsoft's going on a lot of different fronts across the company, I would say you should watch inspire which is coming up pretty soon.

Mikah Sargent (01:47:51):
All right. And then the code name pick of,

Paul Thurrott (01:47:55):
Did I screw this up earlier by

Mary Jo Foley (01:47:56):
Mistake? Yeah. You, but I, I have more to say about it, so I didn't see it. No, I know you didn't. I put it, I put this in late. So the code name is Moad. We were talking about Jeffrey, snow and PowerShell code name for power PowerShell was Moad. What does that mean? Jeffrey mean snow. Yeah. So Jeffrey Snow wrote a long, this is 16 page document. This is actually the version two of this document which is he calls the Mo ad manifesto. This version two is from 2002. So he explains what Mo ADSS are. I did not know Mo ADSS are lead. I don't know who that is. Either term. He's a philosopher term for the fundamental unit of existence, the aggregates into compounds to implement a purpose. See what we mean? This guy's a

Mikah Sargent (01:48:43):
Heady. Oh my God. He's not like some

Paul Thurrott (01:48:44):
Lightweight, right? So not, I thought it was a character from star Trek. No little, it is not a little deeper than that.

Mary Jo Foley (01:48:50):
<Laugh> a little deeper in this philosophy. Everything is a composition of Mo ADSS. Right? so you, if you're interested at all, where, where a PowerShell came from this, this white paper is pretty interesting. He talks about the application model, the shell management models, the scripting model all you need to do to find it is just search for Mona manifesto and you'll find it. He joked on TWITtter this week. He said, I've been at Microsoft for 22 years. 18 of them were good. The ones that weren't was were when he got demoted for trying to push Mo ad and parashell and he said he spent it the rest of his time at Microsoft trying to climb the ladder again. I bet part of that's in jest, but I bet part of it is not <laugh>. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:49:37):
Wow. So yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:49:39):
Monet manifesto.

Mikah Sargent (01:49:40):
She got some reading to do moan. Yeah. Who knew?

Mary Jo Foley (01:49:43):
Yeah. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:49:46):
All right. Well say I wanna sit down with a heady. <Laugh> a heady book on moan ads. But I need to just give my brain a break. What can I do, Mary Jo?

Mary Jo Foley (01:49:58):
I have some thoughts to share. In fact, I have a beer that I think will be good for anyone who's celebrating the 4th of July weekend in the United States, which is this weekend. The beer is called beer for beaches, not what you think. B E a C H E S beer for drink.

Mikah Sargent (01:50:16):
Oh, I wasn't even thinking that <laugh>

Mary Jo Foley (01:50:18):
<Laugh> beer for drinking on the beach. Off color brewing in Chicago has a whole series of beers that they've created to try to take the pain and worry out, pairing your craft beer with different foods and different experiences. They have all kinds of crazy ones. Like they have beer for ball games. I think that was one of my picks last year. Beer for lightweights beer for fantasy that you can you drink when you're playing fantasy games, beer for brunch. There's so many options. Beer for beaches though, is fun because they did a riff on the sex on the beach cocktail, in the beer form, right? So they took a farmhouse style, beer, they added cranberry juice, peach juice, lemon juice to it. And so what you get is something that looks like a light pinkish color. You get all the fruity flavors in there and it's very light. They say it's best to it's best to be enjoyed on the beach with immature jokes because of sex on the beach. <Laugh> <laugh> so, yeah. Perfect beer food. The 4th of July, I would say. And all, all of those beers are pretty fun. I gave my neighbor downstairs, was really into baseball beer for baseball, and he thought it was great. So yeah, if you ever see those from off color, they're all worth a try.

Mikah Sargent (01:51:33):
Hmm. All right. Beer for beaches, beaches, folks, beaches. Sandy fourth is it's Monday, right? 4Th of July. I believe it is. It

Mary Jo Foley (01:51:42):
Is. It is.

Mikah Sargent (01:51:43):
Can't believe it's already here. I also can't believe the end of this episode of windows weekly is already here. Of course, good thing. This is, oh, yes, exactly. This is the time where I tell you that if you want to be a part of the discord where we took a live question from the audience, or to be able to ask some questions and chat with Mary Jo and, and ask about Sorachi all that kind of stuff. Well, you can join the club at TWIT.tv/club TWIT for seven bucks a month. You two can be a part of the fun that includes access to ad free versions of all of our shows on the TWITt network. You also get access to the TWITt plus bonus feed that has extra content. You won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show, after the show, that kind of magic and access to, as I said, the club TWITt discord server.

Mikah Sargent (01:52:34):
That's a place where you can go and chat with your fellow club, TWIT members, but also those of us here at TWITt this show records live every Wednesday around 11:00 AM Pacific, which you can watch live by going to TWIT.tv/live. Or you can get the show on your own time by going to TWIT.tv/ww. There you'll find links to subscribe to both audio and video versions of the show. So you just find the little button that corresponds to the version you want click to subscribe, and you are good to go. Mary Jo Foley of all about microsoft.com. Thank you for your time this week. Yeah. Thank you, Mikah. Always fun having you do the show with us. Thank you. And Paul thera of thera.com coming to us from lower MCE township. Is that it?

Paul Thurrott (01:53:24):
That's it.

Mikah Sargent (01:53:25):
Ah, yes. All right. Thank you for your time.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:28):
Yeah, absolutely. Thank you.

Mikah Sargent (01:53:30):
Yes. And Leo Laporte, we will be back next week until then. You will have to wait for him. <Laugh> goodbye, everybody. Goodbye. <Laugh>