Windows Weekly Episode 787 Transcript

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

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for windows weekly. Paul Thau and I are back. Mary Joe Foley is here. There's lots to talk about, including. Yes, Microsoft's quarterly earnings. Why won't they tell us how many people use teams is windows 11 for enthusiasts. Paul says no way the details behind Pluto Pluton and why it might be the explanation for why windows 11 is so limited. And finally the Xbox boot time cut by five whole seconds saw coming up next windows weekly, stay here. Podcasts you love

Mary Jo Foley (00:00:35):
From people you trust.

Leo Laporte (00:00:38):
This is it.

Leo Laporte (00:00:45):
This is windows weekly with Paul Thra and Mary Jo Foley episode 787 recorded Wednesday, July 27th, 2022, no code fo code windows weekly is brought to you. 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 class. Are you ready to protect your organization from cyber threats? Learn more at tanium.com/TWiT and by new Relic use the data platform made for the curious, right now you can get access to the whole new Relic platform and 100 gigabytes of data per month. Free forever. No credit card required. Sign up at new relic.com/windows and by it pro TV, give your team an engaging it development platform to level up their skills. Volume discounts. Start at five seats, go to it. Pro.Tv/Windows, and 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. Hello, dozers. The show where we come. Sorry. Didn't mean to wake you up. Show that covers the latest news from windows Paul tht, Mary Jo Foley. Mary Jo. Thank you for, well, I guess I should thank you for doing such a good job last week. Maybe I shouldn't

Mary Jo Foley (00:02:20):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:02:21):
He did a wonderful job. Quit. Steve jobs was that sick and Tim cook did a great job.

Mary Jo Foley (00:02:26):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:02:26):
Yo Wally pipped us.

Mary Jo Foley (00:02:28):
Hey, you know, I had some good guests, Zach Boden and rich woods were fantastic. They

Leo Laporte (00:02:34):
Thank them. Yeah. And, and we heard we're on the boat right on this Cruz. And we heard from fans who were downloading the podcast as we were sailing. I said, oh, windows weekly was great yesterday. So

Mary Jo Foley (00:02:48):
Nice.

Leo Laporte (00:02:49):
I couldn't watch it. I tried to stream it and I couldn't get it to work though. The internet on a boat is the worst. I, I thought I warned everybody.

Mary Jo Foley (00:02:56):
The plan, the evil plan,

Leo Laporte (00:02:58):
Apparently TWiTg was a laugh riot. Micah Sergeant was brilliant on the tech guy. Wow. I like thought I'm done. I don't want to come home off with their heads. Yeah. They're all history. <Laugh> no, anyway, I'm glad. I'm very glad that Zach and rich could, could help you Mary. Me too, Joe

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:18):
Agree. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:03:19):
That's nice. You mice did play while the cats were away.

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:24):
We did,

Leo Laporte (00:03:25):
But now we're back and it was not a great quarter for Microsoft time for earnings learnings. <Laugh> what I like about this. If you don't mind, just me jumping in real quick is Mary Jo's story literally focuses on teams and how they gave us 17 different numbers. None of which were users. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. That's telling isn't it when they don't give you

Mary Jo Foley (00:03:50):
That sums up earnings in a nutshell. Yeah. Right. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:03:53):
It's it's yeah. It's the, the encapsulation of everything you need to know about how Microsoft reports earnings. Yeah. Cherry pick, it's getting

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:00):
Worse data. It's getting worse.

Leo Laporte (00:04:03):
It is absolutely getting worse. Yep. It is.

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:05):
Yep. We're getting fewer and fewer hard numbers. We're getting more and more percentages. But what good is the percentage when you dunno the base that it's based on <laugh> right.

Leo Laporte (00:04:15):
No, it's crazy.

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:16):
Like your group

Leo Laporte (00:04:17):
40%, nobody calls them on this. You know, you can always queue is Q and a at the end, nobody says, guys, what's going on. We have no idea how you're doing.

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:26):
<Laugh> no, you know what? The analysts like

Leo Laporte (00:04:28):
It, you have tens of billions of dollars. They like it.

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:29):
The analysts actually like it, they think, they think they're giving the correct metrics from people I've talked to and that they think, you know, I don't really care if I don't know the exact number. I like that. They give us the cloud number, the cloud margin number, their bookings numbers. I'm like, yeah, but they're not really giving you numbers like that.

Leo Laporte (00:04:46):
What, what, what is that? Would it hurt them if they did give the numbers?

Mary Jo Foley (00:04:50):
Yes. Would that be, you know why it would hurt them? Yes. Because if Microsoft gives you the Azure number, the first thing every reporter will do is compare it to the AWS number.

Leo Laporte (00:05:00):
Right? Oh, well, let's compare something to the AWS number. Cuz they give us a Microsoft cloud number, which is nonsense. Yeah. And by the way, the thing that I took away from that, this is the former commercial cloud is yeah. That's only 50% of Microsoft revenues. In fact, it's not even 50%. Right. So where's all the other money coming from guys. Where's you have the money coming from, this is all you want to talk about. But more than this is coming from elsewhere at the company, I mean, you don't have to, I'm not that smart. I figured that out. Do you think they're fooling investors? I mean the market responded with a 5% gain in stock credit. The court card was a plus

Mary Jo Foley (00:05:35):
Plus they gave a very rosy outlook for next year. Right. Which

Leo Laporte (00:05:39):
But are they, so the whole point of quarterly results and, and 10 Ks and all of that is 10 QS is mm-hmm <affirmative> to tell investors whether this is a worthwhile stock, how the company's doing. That's why we pay attention because that's a it's it's supposed to tell us how the company's doing. But if, if you're mm-hmm <affirmative>, if you're fudging those numbers, what? Well <laugh> here, here's the metric you might wanna pay attention to. If you want to know how well the company's doing, they issue financial guidance every quarter for the, the current quarter they did that. You know, yesterday for this quarter, last quarter, they said, it's gonna come in at some number. And then halfway through the quarter, they said, just kidding. It's gonna be worse. They revise their guidance. And then they still miss that target. That's how this company's doing well.

Leo Laporte (00:06:23):
But everybody gets 5%. This is, this is apple did the same thing. Yeah. Everybody gets to do that now because of recession, supply chain, you gotta understand when companies report their expectations for the current quarter, it's conservative. <Laugh> right, right. They're not blowing the roof out. They want to beat that number. So the fact that they came in low TWiTce, so to speak. Yeah. I actually, you know, yes. I mean, it, it's an indication that our economy, isn't a free fall that there's a, almost a recession sort of type situation happening, obviously inflation's really high. Yeah. The high value of the dollar. One of, so one of the interesting things, but next quarter's gonna be great. Yeah. Right. Cause this can't last forever. Right. <laugh>

Mary Jo Foley (00:07:05):
<Laugh> kind of <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:07:08):
I did a, I, I often translate euros into dollars when I report companies from Europe, like the finances, like Spotify when you convert their net income, their revenue, et cetera, there's nothing to convert. <Laugh>, it's the same number. Like that's how bad the Euro is doing that hasn't been true for, I don't know, 20 years, something like that. Yeah, this is it's the holy grail of financial problems, you know, it's all the stuff we had inflation and then the high value of the dollar, you know, and then, you know, the, the first item is COVID pandemic work from home war, with Russia, you know, China supply storage. It's, it's just thing that the markets normally hate, which is uncertainty. Yeah. There you go. And yet they reward Microsoft with the five. Well look they're gonna survive the quarter, right? This is a big company that makes survive. Whew. That's I think they're

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:06):
Gonna be okay. Wow.

Leo Laporte (00:08:07):
You can take that one off the table. No, look, this is a huge company that're doing great. And you know, they're diversified company too. Like I just, and in fact, in my own way, I kind of pointed that out. You know, Microsoft only wants to talk about cloud cloud cloud cloud cloud, but more than 50% of Microsoft's revenues don't come from the cloud. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> mm-hmm <affirmative> so do you wanna break it down by division? Like you know, a gaming was bad, right? How was that? Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:31):
Gaming was bad.

Leo Laporte (00:08:32):
Yeah. Well let's by division, there were three primary business units in Microsoft, right? Yeah. Intelligent cloud productivity and business services, I think. And then more personal computing. Right. So let me find my surface did well, right?

Mary Jo Foley (00:08:47):
Yeah. Surface was up 10% for the quarter because of commercial. So

Leo Laporte (00:08:51):
Business, they sold a lot of sparks this quarter <laugh> yeah. I mean, yeah. They're, they're the smallest part of the empire. Like what? Yeah, I guess. Okay. But for the purposes of our audience, assuming they're not investors, windows and PCs were down, Xbox was down. Yep. Surface curiously was up. They never mentioned it. Nobody asks. And so all I can venture is that you, you talk about things like a year over year comparables. Right? Right. They had a strong product lineup last fall. It's kind of weird cuz we're kind of at the tail end of that. But they must have a year ago, not have had as, I don't remember as strong of a lineup. So mm-hmm <affirmative> yeah. I, I think it, they never said it that way, but there nothing happened to make surface revenues be higher. You know, there

Mary Jo Foley (00:09:39):
Was, come on the do oh two was a killing it Paul

Leo Laporte (00:09:43):
<Laugh> there was a

Mary Jo Foley (00:09:45):
Do oh two flying out the door,

Leo Laporte (00:09:47):
Flying out the door maybe. No, so, but okay. So I guess my, I mean really Microsoft's business is cloud. Yes. I mean all of is sports <laugh> no, not every not everything else is

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:04):
No. Okay. I'll tell, I'll tell you what surprised me in these earnings

Leo Laporte (00:10:07):
Sparks all the way down. Paul, when you

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:10):
Talking about it is

Leo Laporte (00:10:10):
Cloud and sports. <Laugh>

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:12):
Gaming being down surprised me actually, because me too, I feel like it's been pretty up all the most recent quarters. And I had a chance to ask the head of investor relations. I'm like, so why is gaming down? And he is like, well, you know the pandemic, it's kind of like, not over, but like people are going back to work. So they're playing less games. I'm like, okay, are they though? What? Right. Like

Leo Laporte (00:10:34):
What they, yeah. They said lower engagement hours and monetization, which is that partying first party

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:39):
Content, lower engagement hours. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:10:41):
Fewer. So they actually do, they have numbers on how many hours people are playing. Of course. And they do not show that Paul throwout went in a cruise and it just killed the call of duty numbers.

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:48):
Right. Exactly. Mark fall

Leo Laporte (00:10:50):
Party play a single game for 10 days. That's wow. How did you, how did you live?

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:54):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:10:55):
You know, I don't, that doesn't bother me for some reason. When I go on a home swap or a trip, I

Mary Jo Foley (00:10:58):
Don't, you were busy.

Leo Laporte (00:11:00):
Yeah. I do other things, you know, I right. The thing that did bother, I didn't watch a single video while I was gone. That was weird.

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:06):
You didn't wow.

Leo Laporte (00:11:07):
You couldn't not a single one. Couldn't no TikTok. Right. Instagram was back to still photos <laugh> it was a very,

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:15):
Which is what we want anyone.

Leo Laporte (00:11:17):
Oh Lord. What is this? The 1980s. Come on. Oh my gosh.

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:20):
<Laugh> no, the other number that I was surprised at was advertising was down. Right. And so you could say, okay, companies are advertising less because the market's uncertain. We've got like, you know, recession, inflation, blah, blah, blah. But I said to the investor relations guy, I'm like, wait, Microsoft's just putting ads in like every single product and service you own. How could ad advertising be down? And he is like, right. Mary Jo, that's not really the same thing. I I'm like, I know I'm just making a point. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:11:47):
You know what advertising was up for Microsoft was what they call news advertising. Right. And I think this is that stuff. This is why they put stuff in windows to force you to go to their

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:56):
That's right.

Leo Laporte (00:11:56):
Properties. Right. I think that's what that is.

Mary Jo Foley (00:11:58):
Right. MSN. Yeah. MSN, the thing called start now start experience. Yeah. That, that that's all advertising driven. Right. They wanna sell ads. So yeah, those two numbers surprise me. I thought they were gonna give us a new teams number, like number of users of teams, but they didn't, which to means

Leo Laporte (00:12:17):
Says this stop, but how long has it been since we got a new teams number?

Mary Jo Foley (00:12:20):
January? Oh January. No. Yeah. But I, they gave us like, I, like I wrote in my story, they gave us all these numbers around the number of users, like, you know, percentage of engagement around teams rooms, and you know how many people are doing chat. And then they're like, we're taking, share with teams. I'm like, who are you taking, share from? Say it, are you taking, share from zoom? Are you taking, share from Salesforce? Like say it,

Leo Laporte (00:12:44):
I need you to be like Sam, Kenon on the call. Like it's not really germane, but Google's a revenues were up. Yeah. Oh great. <Laugh> jump a jump in advertising related to a search business cloud business was up 36%.

Mary Jo Foley (00:13:03):
They, we know their number,

Leo Laporte (00:13:05):
Their cloud

Mary Jo Foley (00:13:05):
Business, their number is small

Leo Laporte (00:13:06):
6.3,

Mary Jo Foley (00:13:07):
6 billion for the quarter compared to 25 billion for Microsoft.

Leo Laporte (00:13:11):
So they a long way to go. They're gonna waste to go. They do. Yeah. They've always had a ways to go it's they have I mean, it's interesting cuz you know snap tanked the market last week when the, yeah. When they said, oh our ad sales are really, really off.

Mary Jo Foley (00:13:28):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:13:28):
Right. You know, and I don't, I don't really know what's going on. Chaos did no one write the headline. Oh snap Googled a sales. Fine. <Laugh> nobody wrote that. No, maybe they did. I could find it. Some someone should have. Yeah. I should find it. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:13:42):
Okay. The best number in all of earnings, the most important number that many people missed. I think I'm the only one who even cares about this number maybe is Microsoft did say what percentage of the Microsoft 365 bases now on E five E five is the highest end skew. The most expensive, the most fully featured the one with all the security features. So in 2021, that number was only 8%. So that means everybody else was on E one and E three. Right. Yesterday, 12%. So their pitch of getting people to move up the stack and spend more. Yep. And get the higher price. Skews is working right. 8% 20 now 12%.

Leo Laporte (00:14:21):
I'm curious what you think about this? Mary Jo. I think every

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:24):
Like why do you even care about this number?

Leo Laporte (00:14:26):
<Laugh> no, no, I, I, no I noticed this. No, no. I, I think you'll, I think you'll be interested in this. I think every quarter they look at their earnings, they think, all right, look, we're gonna, we're gonna pull stuff here. We're gonna, yeah. We have to have a narrative every quarter. There's gonna be a narrative. Right? Yeah. So like this quarter Azure growth was only, you know, which is crazy 40%, which is amazing actually, but

Mary Jo Foley (00:14:44):
Only no. And every analyst was mad about that now.

Leo Laporte (00:14:46):
And everyone's freaking out about that and it's like guys, mature business it's been around. Okay. But my theory is they of all the things they saw, someone said this quarter is gonna be the E five quarter. This is what we're gonna highlight. Yeah. No, I really feel like they were like, every quarter has to have a, like a hero of the quarter and we're gonna make an E five this quarter. Cause they talked about E five a lot.

Mary Jo Foley (00:15:06):
They did. I, I feel like people, I wanted to yell like guys that number's important. Look at that number right there. It means they're selling more expensive skews to more people that's because people always say what's Microsoft secret weapon after Microsoft 365 in teams. Right? Like, are they gonna have some new suite, some new thing? And I'm like, no, they're gonna get more people to spend more on what they have. Right. So the I, over time they wanna grow E five,

Leo Laporte (00:15:30):
Right? Yeah. The potential market for Microsoft 365 is almost infinite. I mean,

Mary Jo Foley (00:15:35):
It is kind of,

Leo Laporte (00:15:37):
This's still a huge base of people out there who are not on it. I mean, exactly. Or are on lower end skews or whatever. Yeah, absolutely. Mm-Hmm

Mary Jo Foley (00:15:44):
<Affirmative> yep. Teams though. I wanted a number I kept waiting and like they're gonna drop a team number. Right. They kind draft one. They're giving us so many teams numbers

Leo Laporte (00:15:53):
On. I also, yeah. I, I, I called I did something similar to you where I, I, I listed every single number. They said it's like, that's great. But how many users was that again? <Laugh> you know, I mean, like that's all, you know, it's all good. I think you said was fantastic. What numbers they give you? Like what, like what

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:07):
They gave you things like teams phone now has more than 12 million PSTN users. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:16:15):
That's workplace who cares? They've added 450 new features in the past year along. Oh God, I get, I

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:20):
Get what you're 60% of the fortune 500 have chosen teams rooms to connect hybrid workplaces. I'm like,

Leo Laporte (00:16:25):
And 25% of the M Viva.

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:28):
Yeah. One of my

Leo Laporte (00:16:29):
Chosen companies deployed custom line absentee

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:31):
Users are there? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:16:33):
Lots. Lots of numbers. Yep. That they're really, I mean, that's like a red flag the way they talk around

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:38):
That it kind of is. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:16:40):
See, I, it

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:41):
Means you

Leo Laporte (00:16:41):
Don't wanna give that flag. That's exactly what I think as well. Exactly. Me too. You make it too obvious that you are avoiding when you talk around the truth, people, I mean, don't they don't you just, I mean, how do you not react to that? The way we both reacted? Like you're hiding so right. Why bother?

Mary Jo Foley (00:16:58):
Yep. Another weird thing or interesting thing. Anyway. for me, I always, I always do this on earning's calls. I look for words that they repeat and words that come up a lot. So one of the words that came up a lot during this earning's call was consumption. I don't know if you heard that talking about this right. Consumption kept coming up. Blake, Amy Hood starts out by saying, you know, Azure consumption was a little soft and Q4 and I'm like, immediately my ears perk up. I'm like, what does that mean? Right. Like you sold people's stuff and they didn't deploy it. Does that, is that what that means? Right. <laugh> and then later in the call, two different analysts, ask them about the consumption thing. They're like, so what are you saying about the consumption thing? And basically what they're saying is, you know, we talk about all these giant Azure contracts we sell.

Mary Jo Foley (00:17:43):
They said they have a record number of over $1 billion Azure contracts that they have sold in this past year. A record number of over a hundred million dollar Azure contracts they've sold. But when you sell contracts that big people, can't just like, turn it on and just be like, okay, now we're deploying Azure everywhere. It's like on who's off now it's on it doesn't really work like that. It takes time. Right. It takes time to roll out these things, migrate things set up your whole new way of working to accommodate the different Azure services you bought. So it's almost like when the channel has too many PCs and they need to sell through, this is like Azure. They sold a lot of Azure and now they need to get people to actually use all the licenses that they sold. Right. Right. So that, that was a kind of an little I've. I've never heard them actually talk about that on a call. It was cool. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:18:32):
From my perspective, the two things I'm always, you know, I care about the most, the PC stuff. I, I keep looking for evidence that this kind of post or yeah. Or COVID era boom is kind of ending. Right. I think, I think we're seeing a little bit of that, you know, and I think we've seen that from PC makers, et cetera. But there's also, you know, why would anyone react negatively to these numbers? You know, if you look at the year ago, quarter, same, you know? Yeah. When we're after one year of the pandemic, Microsoft yeah. Grew revenue by 40%. That's insane. Right? It is. But the problem is people expect that to continue, even though that's illogical, it could never happen. Right. So, right. I think their growth this quarter was probably 20 or 18%. Something like that. Yeah. 18% overall. So and that's for the quarter that's for the year. I'm sorry. What was the quarter? The quarter was actually, it was 12%. So, you know, these are normal. Well, those are still blockbuster numbers, honestly, for company the size of Microsoft, but because it's soared so high during the pandemic, I think, you know, you look at it a little more negatively, just like you look at Azure, like 40% come on. You guys used to grow at 70%. Yeah. Yeah. This business has been around for a long time,

Mary Jo Foley (00:19:40):
You know? And it's much bigger. Yeah. Right. That's the problem with these percentages? Like people like, well, you know, two quarters ago they were growing over 50%. Yeah. It was a smaller base. Right, right. I'm like, yeah. It was a smaller base <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:19:54):
Yep. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:19:55):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:19:56):
Which is, yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:19:58):
I know people never seem to note that the whole law of large numbers saying, I'm like, yeah, they are growing. It's gonna go down over time. Because the number that they're growing, the, the base number they're growing is gonna be bigger and bigger and bigger. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:20:12):
<Laugh> this is like a glass half full versus glass, half kind of conversation. Right. So it is windows revenues, and PC makers declined 2% year over year. Like, and they described the PC market as deteriorating. That sounds terrible. Right. But then such it all came up and said, yeah, but you know, the, the volume of the unit sales, I think is what he meant is still better than it was before the pandemic.

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:35):
Yep. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:20:36):
Yep. Okay. Yeah, though, that that's what the other side of the curve could look like. Yeah. Right after the peak, the, the question is where does it land at? You know, does it keep going down or is this like the new, you know, baseline mm-hmm and I hope that's, I hope this is the new baseline. That's great.

Mary Jo Foley (00:20:52):
Yeah. Right.

Leo Laporte (00:20:53):
We'll see. Okay. We'll see. I guess that's, what's the story of the learning earnings. Have you

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:02):
That's all my learnings dunno.

Leo Laporte (00:21:04):
Learned a lot. I have to say, well, if you were looking for hard numbers, you didn't learn anything. Yeah. Right. 

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:12):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:21:12):
But if you were looking for like platitudes, my God, it was full of that. My SA Della's opening quote in the press release was so devoid of contact. I, for, of content, I forgot stuff.

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:26):
Like, it

Leo Laporte (00:21:26):
Was pretty funny. Say anything <laugh> it's it's it's he has no, granted this was supplied to him by some PR person, but exactly. But it reads like something he would say it's it's it's, it's nothing. It's just nothing,

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:38):
Lots of buzzword strung together.

Leo Laporte (00:21:40):
Yeah. We're positioned, we're delivering on digital, you know, it's like, oh, okay. And more with less, just

Mary Jo Foley (00:21:47):
Like a growth. Yeah. More with less, more with less is gonna be the phrase of the year. I think, because it's, it came up at inspire at the partner show. Yeah. It came up several times yesterday. I'm like, oh, so this is their new catch phrase. Like we're helping customers do more with less. Right. It's gonna, Hey,

Leo Laporte (00:22:02):
Here's an idea. Microsoft could have an incredible bit of growth just by helping customers use the stuff they're already paying for. Like you said, I think one of the more interesting things about office back in the day, and I would say this probably applies to Microsoft. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> 365. Today is you as a customer at Microsoft has this incredible well of capabilities and you're probably only using a tiny percentage of it.

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:22):
Right,

Leo Laporte (00:22:24):
Right. Mm-Hmm

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:25):
<Affirmative> mm-hmm <affirmative>

Leo Laporte (00:22:27):
All right. I'm gonna call it.

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:30):
It's we learned, we had earnings and letters,

Leo Laporte (00:22:33):
1137. We've learned and we've earned.

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:35):
Oh, wait, one, one last debt one last debt. I'm not dead

Leo Laporte (00:22:39):
Yet.

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:40):
One last debt. This was very interesting. This was Microsoft's first time missing on earnings since 2016.

Leo Laporte (00:22:46):
Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:47):
That's pretty astounding. Right? Well

Leo Laporte (00:22:49):
That's only six years ago. Come on. I mean, but come on.

Mary Jo Foley (00:22:53):
They haven't missed a single time. Yeah. They haven't missed a single time. Well, this

Leo Laporte (00:22:57):
Is company's only how old are they? 35 years old now.

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:00):
Yeah. <Laugh> yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:23:02):
45. So a miss means missing their predictions or the analyst predictions.

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:07):
Analyst predictions. Yeah. Analyst predictions.

Leo Laporte (00:23:09):
So isn't that kinda up to the, the analysts. I mean, isn't that Microsoft? Well, but they base it on what Microsoft says, you know, Microsoft missed their own numbers as well, right? Yeah. Right. Twitce. How, how close are the analysts to the, to Microsoft?

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:22):
What do you mean? Like,

Leo Laporte (00:23:23):
Well, I guess they must, so this, this came up yesterday after the apple earnings on Mac break weekly. Yeah. Apple used to sandbag the analysts in order to get a nice stock bump. They would, they would lowball the analysts. Right. That would be a conservative. Exactly. And the analysts would come in. I

Mary Jo Foley (00:23:38):
Think every company does that well,

Leo Laporte (00:23:40):
Don't they apple used to do it. The, the consensus among the panel was, I think Jason said this, it seems that in the last few quarters, somebody in the federal government might have said something like, you know, you guys give us, has to be in the same universe, accurate predictions. Yes. So in the last few quarters Apple's numbers and have been pretty right on compared to what mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, the past by much apple used to report hard numbers for all of their product lines. Right. Do that either they stopped doing right. So I, I wonder if those two things aren't related in some way. Yeah. It's a easier to hide things. The, the, the thing is supposed to be an informative for investors and it's supposed to be accurate. That's always been my argument. Right? Yeah. You're not giving me the information I need to know.

Leo Laporte (00:24:32):
And it's up to the wanna be a it's up to the S E C to enforce that, to say, you know, you guys aren't doing it. Right. you know, but non gap accounting and all this stuff is kind of crept into the forecast now. And nobody seems to care. So there you go. Yeah, there you go. But at least the I don't. Right. I don't think the reporting rules have changed. I think no, like PE companies have just pushed the boundaries, push the boundaries. Boundaries is lacking perhaps. And there's been nothing. Yeah. 10 years later, it's like, look, we don't have to report anything. Perhaps that's the I'm surprised shareholders. Don't revolt a little bit about this. You know, I I'm, I don't understand why this isn't concerning to people. Yeah. I don't either. It would be to me, if I was, if I wanted to invest in these companies, maybe shareholders ultimately realize it has nothing to do with this stock price that it's just, you know, this stock price

Mary Jo Foley (00:25:25):
And kind of doesn't right.

Leo Laporte (00:25:26):
No, I mean, well, look, we went up 5%. Great. Yeah. Right. Paint. A happy picture. We don't care about the numbers. Look, just take it. Yeah. You know? Yeah. All right. Let's take a little tiny weeny break, cuz there's lots more to talk about. Paul Thra thera.com. Did you work at the book on the book at all? On the trip? It did. Yep. Wow. I'm impressed. So the lean pub.com will soon have a field guide for windows 11. I wanted to get it done while we were there, but the connectivity was so terrible. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I really wanted to get that thing up. I tried to tell everybody, you know, unless you're in a port you're you might as well. I had to enjoy yourself. I, when I was in my room, I couldn't get connected. But if I opened the door to my room, into the hall, I could get connectivity. So I actually spent one afternoon laying on the floor with my laptop, up to the door and right there I could get, oh, that's hysterical. Yeah. See the, the lengths, he goes to ladies and gentlemen, to get those books into your hot little hands. I, it was like a, a caveman trying to get on the internet. You know, my advice always is when you're going on a cruise, that's an excuse to get off the internet and enjoy. Yes.

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:32):
Yeah. Take a vacation. Yes. He doesn't know how he

Leo Laporte (00:26:35):
Does not know how. No, at least it was the same way. I, you know, writing, it makes me feel good about myself that I can enjoy myself. Okay.

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:44):
All right. That's sad. That's nice.

Leo Laporte (00:26:46):
Mary Jo Foley, she doesn't have that problem. Solve my pictures. I didn't

Mary Jo Foley (00:26:49):
Do nothing. I do not have that problem. I do not have that

Leo Laporte (00:26:52):
Problem. She is@allaboutmicrosoft.com where she does file at least several times a day. Her Z blog try. Yes. Yes. Our show today brought to you by Tanium, breaking down those silos between operations and security, the industry's approach to cyber security. I think if you listen to security now, you know, this is, I guess, fundamentally flawed. Wouldn't be saying, saying it too strongly. It's broke it. Management and security point tools are really just a small piece of the solution that you need to protect your environment. A lot of them over promise and undeliver under deliver, talking about over promising. They, they CA they say we can stop all breaches. They just can't. They simply can't. And some of the problem is that you're getting stale data. You cannot make decisions on stale data. You cannot defend your critical assets from cyber attack, with tools that don't communicate with one another.

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Leo Laporte (00:29:43):
Sounds like he speaks from experience with real time. Data comes realtime impact. If you're ready to unite operations and security teams with a single source of truth and confidently protect your organization from cyber threats, it's time to meet Tanium, to learn more, visit tanium.com/TWiTt T a N I U M. We thank Tanium so much for supporting windows weekly. And we thank you for supporting windows weekly. When you go to that address, it tells him, Hey, I saw it here. Tanium T a N I U m.com/TWiTt. Thank you, Tanium. Thank you. Now back to Paul, Mary Jo, and windows 11. Woo.

Leo Laporte (00:30:27):
So you weren't even able to, to update your windows while you were on the on the boat? No, in fact, one of the things I realized I had brought a second laptop to take screenshots of the book and it, I had used it to do that rufuss install before. So it wasn't really a super clean version of windows. I was 11, like I needed. So I actually wasn't able to take screenshots while I was cause you couldn't get any of the updates you needed to, to clean it up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that was on me. <Laugh> I also, I also wanted to test Android 13 on my pixel and I didn't didn't dare, you know, install that until I got home. No, I did. Yeah, no, actually I did that from the hotel in Seattle. When we got back to Seattle, there you go. And, and, and wiped out the lab. In fact, I did both there. Okay. Yeah, you get back to civilization and everything just works fine. It's it was nice. You know, it was interesting hitting a website and having it actually load. It was a question. So, so you wrote the review of 22 H two before you left.

Leo Laporte (00:31:29):
I don't remember when I wrote this, I might have written it while I was there. The Dateline is I had the 22nd. So I'm thinking you filed, it might have been while I was there on the trip. Yeah. Yeah. So, well, so I had written a series of articles about all of the new features, and then I decided to kind of collate this into a review. And you know, as Mary Jo has pointed out many times not a lot of big stuff going on in here. I think the only feature that edges a little bit into major feature territory is the new snap functionality, which I think is fantastic. And you could make an argument, I guess, for live captions and maybe some of the accessibility stuff, but yeah, most of it is a drip, drip, drip of very small functional additions.

Leo Laporte (00:32:15):
And, you know, if we're being honest with ourselves just an abject ignoring ignoring, sorry of the many complaints, windows, 10 users have made about windows 11. And in some cases not ignoring, just coming out and saying, yeah, we're not doing that. You know? Yeah. We heard your feedback. Thank you. No, thank you for that. We hear you. We know you want the task bar to be better. It's not gonna be better. No, it's kinda like Instagram saying, yeah, we know, know we don't like it, but too bad. That's fine. That's fine. We don't like it either. We don't like it either, but you know, I would just, I would've cited MTV and said, you know, things change <laugh> that's the way the world works. Yeah, so, you know, windows, I, so windows 11 is interesting because there's some pros and cons and that hasn't changed.

Leo Laporte (00:32:55):
I, I used it on all of my computers. I prefer it. I like the look and feel. I really do like it. I, I, I, you know, I have to agree with some of the complaint they're negatives. I mean, they've, they've made it very hard for people to not sign in with a Microsoft account. And there are good reasons for Microsoft wanting you to do that. There are good reasons for you wanting to do that as a user. But I feel like very strongly that people should have that choice. And I, you know, they're just not interested in choice. Yeah. And I think that's kind of what windows 11 is all about. They're they have wanted windows to be simple, like a mobile operating system for a long time. And mm-hmm, <affirmative>, they're taking steps. They're not doing a one release where they just get there.

Leo Laporte (00:33:37):
I think they, at one time dreamed that they could do that, but they are taking steps and moving that direction. It they're just removing choice by the way, just this isn't in my review. But, and I, I I've been meaning to write this up tied to the Microsoft account requirement. There's another weird little change in windows set up that no one has really noticed or talked about. And that's with regards to one drive. So when you, when you sign in with a Microsoft account, one of the subsequent steps will say, Hey, do you wanna back up some folders with one drive? Or at least it used to say that in windows 10 and you got a choice, you could say, yeah, the desktop documents and pictures or any combination of those. Yes. I'll back those up to one drive. And the idea is that if you do that across multiple PCs, say with your pictures folder, you'll have the same pictures on each PC in the pictures folder, right?

Leo Laporte (00:34:22):
Because it's backing up to the cloud and syncing to all of your devices. And again, some people may find that very valuable. I don't actually use those folders, but it it's a useful thing, but it's something they're taking away the choice on. And so in windows 1122 H two at least in the home edition, I'm, I'm having a, there's a matrix somewhere I've written down, but I don't remember it exactly. But in 22 H two, I wanna say, if you have pro you have the choice, but you can't choose folders anymore. That was in the previous version. And then with home, you don't even get the choice. Those folders are backed up, whether you want 'em to be or not. And so you can change it after the fact. But again, they're, they're kind of slowly drip, drip dripping away choices. And some of them are high profile at like the Microsoft account thing.

Leo Laporte (00:35:07):
Some of them are a little less well known. Like the thing I just mentioned, but this is, this is kind of the windows 11 vibe. Like they're, they're getting rid of choice. You, your conclusion is it's not for enthusiasts. It's not for it's for just getting things done. Crowd. Yeah. Well it's for normal people, right? So mainstream people, non-technical people, but for, for years, and certainly the people who listen to this show windows has been a good choice for enthusiasts mm-hmm <affirmative> because Microsoft has always had to try have it both ways. There were always multiple ways to do things. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> this is the difference between Microsoft and apple or the windows and the Mac back in the day. If you could do it on the Mac, there was one way to do it. If you could do it on windows, there might've been 13 ways to do it.

Leo Laporte (00:35:47):
<Laugh> there are still examples of that in windows, you know, windows search, there are at least seven entry points I can think of yeah. Off the top of my head, but the I, by and large, that kind of thing's going away. There's another example I'm gonna use in the tips part at the, in the back of the book, that is another example of how windows 11 makes doesn't take things away always, but sometimes they just make them a lot harder to find there are many more steps. There's a lot of that going on as well. So the good news for enthusiasts is Lenox exists. No <laugh> is that yes, I knew,

Mary Jo Foley (00:36:20):
Oh, he just said it. He said it,

Leo Laporte (00:36:22):
No, I've always felt this way. When you think technical non-technical, you know, I always felt like you should, if you're gonna disadvantage someone developer or audience, you disadvantage the develop, rank it hard on the developer, their technical, they can fix it. <Laugh> in this case, you know, make it hard on technical users. You know, you can, you can figure out another. So you're saying with star and a variety of other ways you can make, or just because you're smarting, you can know how to it like you can't right. Click the task bar and get to the task manager. But you know what, there were five other ways to get there. So I noticed that myself, I want all tab to show all the windows and all the workspaces. It doesn't, but it's easy to fix. And I noticed that you just, you work around, fix it, you work and play with the you know, the settings until you get it to, to behave the way my, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:37:04):
My only complaint at the end of that conversation would just be that one of the other things Microsoft is taking away is sync and, and they never did this fully anyway, in a properly constructed system, you would fine tune windows exactly the way you wanted it. And then you would set it up on a new computer and it would say, Hey, do you want that exact setup? You'd say, yep. And every single little setting would come back, but you, you have to do it manually every single time. Yeah. So as someone who, you know, reviews a lot of laptops, that's tedious. I realize that's not everybody, but you, the, the, even like something simple, like the syncing of wallpaper, it's a nice, it's a nice thing. You know, mm-hmm <affirmative> and that's gone. They, they got rid of that. That's not a feature anymore in windows a lot.

Leo Laporte (00:37:44):
I read a really interesting article. We've talked about Pluton before, and Microsoft is very vague about Pluton, but a lot of Linux users are saying, oh, Pluto's problematic because it requires, you know, it's harder to install Linux, but again, it's a case that you can turn it off. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, you can disable it just as you would disable secure boot and still install Linux. This is the TPM conversation from 2003 all over again. It's, it's the same conversation, although they, and I should I should have sent you a link to this article ahead of time. Cause I found an article. I don't know how credible this guy is Gabriel Seban I think S oh, he's an idiot. No, I don't know who he is. Yeah. Can you send it, is there a chat thing in yeah, I'll send it to you.

Leo Laporte (00:38:28):
The dangers of Pluton, which is overstated headline, but he does go into he has two kind of parts to the article. One is speculation, cuz there's still a lot of vagueness, but then there's also some, some incredible, I think, incredible detail from Microsoft documents and so forth. And one of the reasons is cuz it's an AMD co-venture with Microsoft. Yes. And AMD has now started shipping mobile, Verizon 6,000 chips with Pluton. So he was able to kind of analyze it. One of the things most interesting though, in this article, I will send you a link to it is it explains a little bit better Microsoft's requirements for windows 11, that he has a theory and it's a theory, but it kind of makes sense when you read this article, that really what Microsoft was saying with Haswell or later and TPM or later is it's ultimately got to kind of support Pluton.

Leo Laporte (00:39:27):
And so it's a very interesting long article I'll send you, I'll send you a link to it. You know what, see that, that itself is, is artificial. Is there anything else though, because you could make this thing argument, we say, well, Pluton is gonna happen. It's starting to happen now two years ago, they announced this, I think, starting to see the first PCs and maybe it only runs in windows 11. Right. And actually probably does run in windows 10. I don't even know for sure. Does he mention whether it runs on 10 as well as 11? I think it must. I don't, I think it must too, but then again, you could, you could make the case. Well, you know, windows 11 is more secure. Yeah. We're only doing it on windows 11. It's a way people to move forward. The, the, the clear and, and, and accurate argument for Bhuton is it makes it more secure, just like secure boot does.

Leo Laporte (00:40:09):
His point is though is though that there are people who can use it, like game, you know, it came from Xbox and it was originally kind of an anti sheet DRM solution. And so he says, you're gonna see applications of this that are less than I think this is, you know, this is just an evolution of TPM, really. I mean, so, you know, TP TPM was a separate chip that, that, you know, was probably a bus between it and the microprocessor. I'm sure there were tax on that bus. And so said, well, what if we integrated it into the microprocessor and make the attack, service, smaller, that kind of thing. The problem is AMD. Co-Worked on it with Microsoft, which means Intel despite their early enthusiasm. They're saying now we don't need this because our chips already have functionality like this.

Leo Laporte (00:40:51):
And of course the real reason is, is, you know, comes from AMD. We don't want that concession. Yeah. <Laugh> I will let me read you the one paragraph that does talk about why he thinks windows 11 requires what it does windows 11 by, and he put this as in parenthesis, almost requiring these Pluton technologies, M B E C TPM 2.0, secure boot and so forth is in every way, trying to get people used to a Pluton light experience as Pluto as possible without actually having Pluton. Yet, he says windows 11 is a stepping stone to Pluton with security requirements to match. He says with windows 12, and if it's a three year cadence in 2024, and with Microsoft clearly being less afraid of cutting off large swaths of old PCs, it would not shock me if windows 12 makes Pluto's system requirement.

Leo Laporte (00:41:48):
So I don't think they get to do that every three years. <Laugh> so, you know, we'll see. But yeah, you know, I, I, I could be wrong, but I don't think any Pluton hardware shipped until this past spring. No, I don't think there's anything you're right. I think it's it's yeah. It's but just started to show it. Definitely. There is some now in the market. Yeah. Because he's saying ships up because of these rising 6,000 mobile chips, he can now kind of write this article. So it's very, it's interesting. Don't this is the don't. I don't think Microsoft's customer base would respond in a good fashion. Well, there's, there's that and Microsoft is very sensitive. Just look at the back and forth over you know, VBA in word documents. Yeah. And the Mac we're gonna get to that, that wasn't as back and forth as I thought it was, by the way. So we're, we're gonna

Mary Jo Foley (00:42:34):
Talk about that. Yeah. Same. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:42:36):
But I think pressure from users did impact Microsoft in that case. Yes. The part guess it's particular users. No, it's not, it's not, it's not as bad as you think it's

Mary Jo Foley (00:42:46):
It was them miscommunicating. Oh. As a

Leo Laporte (00:42:49):
More than anything. All they wanted do is change the UI. Yeah. We'll get to it. We'll we'll get to that. So, well, anyway, the, the Pluto thing is interesting. I, I, I think he kind of says what I was in my head was that this is like next gent in a sense. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Precisely. And thus, I, you know, this conversation because, you know, from a OSS Linux perspective, you would read this and think, yeah, I know why they're doing this. You know, they don't want me putting Linux on that expensive new Lenovo or HP or whatever it is I'm buying. And you know, with TPM and that insecure boot, actually, there's a, there's a period of time where that's not possible or it's not easy, but it seems like, you know, it's it's happened. Right. I mean, they've, mm-hmm, <affirmative>, I don't think we really have any issues getting Linux on PCs anymore. I don't know if you're in the discord. I pasted it in the discord. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> Paul I'll also paste it, paste it in the chat and maybe get it from one of those two yep. Places. I don't, I don't know who Gabriel's Sabin is se I don't either it's it seemed on upon what was the publication? His own blog. Oh, his own blog. Yeah. Yeah. It seemed upon reading it to be fairly

Mary Jo Foley (00:44:02):
Not crazy,

Leo Laporte (00:44:03):
No, and fairly well informed. And he has a section at the end, which is for the crazy part, but <laugh>, you know, I, you know look, I security is not something that you finish and are done with. Right. What's the better are you reading it now? Mary Jo is that

Mary Jo Foley (00:44:19):
Gabriel Saban. Hi, I'm 20 years old. Wow. I love projects every time with technology. Wow. I'm in my engineering club at my local community college,

Leo Laporte (00:44:28):
But you know what nice we who cares, who cares?

Mary Jo Foley (00:44:32):
Good for you?

Leo Laporte (00:44:33):
We travel to Rafael Rivera. E was it right?

Mary Jo Foley (00:44:36):
No I don't think it's bad. Those are the kids stunned. Those are the kids I'm stunned. Like how, how much he knows at 20 <laugh>. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:44:43):
Yeah, yeah. That's awesome. That's

Mary Jo Foley (00:44:45):
That'ss awesome. That's the

Leo Laporte (00:44:46):
People, when I was 20, I was riding into a Migo world magazine with a scathing readed about dear

Leo Laporte (00:44:51):
You, you never seem to understand that the is just about games. If you would just wake up

Mary Jo Foley (00:44:56):
<Laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:44:56):
You know, it was similar, similar level of discourse.

Mary Jo Foley (00:44:59):
Yeah, pretty much

Leo Laporte (00:45:00):
You tell me, Paul and Mary Jo, when you read it, I, I, I was impressed. I did not know he was 20 when I read it, but yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (00:45:07):
It's great. I just, I clicked on the about, and I'm like, wait, what? <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:45:12):
It's good, but he's done. It's I think a fairly thorough look at it. And maybe because he's 20, he's more concerned about, you know, DRM and, and the

Mary Jo Foley (00:45:20):
Future, right?

Leo Laporte (00:45:21):
Yeah. And, and the future speak of the future. Paul, let's talk about windows 12 rumors. Well, actually I wanted to ask about windows 12 rumors, because I know that this is something that you folks talked about in our absence. We did.

Mary Jo Foley (00:45:35):
Oh, we spent a lot of time on that.

Leo Laporte (00:45:38):
I'm, I'm interested in the possibility of a return to a three year release cadence as mm-hmm our friend SS has pointed out this is a good timeframe for new releases of windows. I think that new features appear too often in windows. And so, you know, three years, whatever the windows 12 thing though, like really we're just gonna start ratcheting the, I mean, that part seems a little more roomy to me. Yeah. So I'm just curious where you guys landed on it. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:46:02):
Yeah. So on last week's windows weekly, the person who originated this report Z Bowden from windows central was on the show. And we talked about his, his reporting and his, what his sources had told him. So he's hearing that yes, we're gonna go back to a, every three year for a major update. Right. So the next major update of windows will happen in 2024. It was originally gonna happen in 2023. He had heard. Right. So we're gonna wait till 20, 24. It's it may or may not be christened windows 12. We're not sure mm-hmm <affirmative> yet. It could be the code name of it is next valley. N V 

Leo Laporte (00:46:44):
Next valley. Not understanding

Mary Jo Foley (00:46:45):
It. I, I had heard that name too. I, yeah, I had, I had heard that code name too, and I wasn't sure exactly if it was gonna be like windows 1122 H something or if it was gonna be a whole new version. Yep. But in between, this is the concerning part in between this every three year thing, Microsoft is going to be rolling out new features of some kind to windows up to quarterly. So at least four times a year, no, as many as four times a year, they could roll out new features for the operating system and things that are known internally as moments that's such a PR term. Right. Like

Leo Laporte (00:47:21):
I'm gonna have a moment. All right. <Laugh> yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (00:47:23):
That I can, we don't know, like Zach was saying, he thinks it it's more likely to, to be something like a UI type, update, something more minor, something that with the, like

Leo Laporte (00:47:34):
The tabs feature and file Explorer.

Mary Jo Foley (00:47:36):
Yeah. Something like it won't flip out. Right. Like, and just be like, wait, what are you guys doing? Right. we speculated, could it be a case of these features will be off by default and, and then people can turn them on and it can turn them on. He still hears that 22 H two is definitely obviously gonna happen next year. He doesn't know if there'll be a 23 H two, but he's thinking, no, he's like, he's hearing

Leo Laporte (00:48:03):
That. I'd be shocked if they

Mary Jo Foley (00:48:04):
He's hearing that. H

Leo Laporte (00:48:05):
They just called that.

Mary Jo Foley (00:48:06):
Yeah. He's hearing that, that whole H two thing is over, like,

Leo Laporte (00:48:09):
So

Mary Jo Foley (00:48:10):
Lemme jump in last year, we talked,

Leo Laporte (00:48:11):
Do that. Let ask you about this, cuz I'm sorry. Cuz if I was part of this side, this is definitely what, what it went through my mind. Yeah. One of the things that we, you and I both have been weirded up by with the insider program is how they've moved away from anything being tied to any version of windows. Right. That's, it's weird. Right? Because we're just so used to this kind of milestone based, you know, system where the, you know, eventually the thing RCS and RTMS and we have this thing and it never changes. Yep. Maybe that's what they've been building up to. Right. In other words, mm-hmm <affirmative> you get rid of versions and then you, you introduce like we've tested these features in the insider program. They went from to about beta to release preview, and now they're out in the world. Yeah. And then you, you do it again and again, maybe that maybe this is the system and if it is, I want nothing to do with this <laugh> this is, so this is so weird to me.

Mary Jo Foley (00:49:01):
I don't know if you remember in February when Panos stood a blog post saying, you know, in the future, we're just gonna be rolling out. Windows features in a variety of ways of, of various times. And people are like, wait a minute, like you just said, you were gonna update this once a year. And now you're saying we can just introduce anything we want any, anytime we want in any way we want. And when I asked Microsoft about Zach's story, they pointed me to that blog post and said, we already said all this, right? Like we told you guys, we were gonna be rolling out windows features at multiple points in the year and blah, blah, blah. But I, as far as I know this year, the only time they have done that so far is around February, March when they rolled out a whole bunch of features together in cumulative update, they came out with Android subsystem for windows, the first iteration of that, they added like the weather widget on the task bar at that time. Right. And since then, I don't think they've done.

Leo Laporte (00:49:57):
So there, there were others that were smaller. There were there were, yeah. So remember there were, there were people and companies like Mozilla did this, who were defeating the default apps interface. They shifted an update to prevent that. Right. Right. Whether you would call that a feature obtain or whatever,

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:12):
Or a fix, right? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:50:13):
A fix. But I, I think that the, maybe this was part of that February update you were talking about, but there was also a, they made that change where there's actually a make default button though. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, mm-hmm <affirmative> for browsers and it, all it does is change two of the file associations and the protocol associations.

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:28):
Yeah. That may have been later. That may have been,

Leo Laporte (00:50:30):
It may have been, I think that might have been a different one. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> a different time, but yeah. But yeah. Look, I mean, we talk about this all the time. They can literally and do literally change or upgrade the operating system at any time. So actually the, the thing that's, well, the, I guess the thing that ties this to the past today is we are gonna get a 22 H two.

Mary Jo Foley (00:50:53):
We are

Leo Laporte (00:50:53):
Right. And maybe what they're saying, and I just, we just talked about it. There's really not much going on there. Could they not break those updates into four different segments and deliver them at different time sort a year? And we just keep calling this thing windows 11 or whatever. Right, right. And don't worry about the version. I mean, yeah. I mm-hmm <affirmative> yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (00:51:12):
They could. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:51:13):
It makes it hard to, to talk about it. That's

Mary Jo Foley (00:51:15):
The problem. It does. Yes, it does. And also if you're a developer and you happen to be targeting a certain version of windows, 11, some things are turned on, things are off. Right. <laugh>

Leo Laporte (00:51:27):
Technically, that shouldn't be an issue anymore, although yeah. But for sure people do do that. Right. that's something they're trying to, the other thing from too.

Mary Jo Foley (00:51:36):
Right? The other thing we have no, nothing about, because they won't even acknowledge this story. Has any merit is what does it mean in terms of how long versions are supported of windows? Right. So you would assume yes. If they're gonna come out with a new version of windows in twenty, twenty four and call it windows 12, let's just say, if they do that, mm-hmm <affirmative> that the support timeframe will start ticking. Then if it, if that's what's gonna happen, that would mean they would, they would service and support a version of windows for three years instead of like 18 months or however many months. Right. Like that they do now. Yeah. But we don't know. We don't know that.

Leo Laporte (00:52:12):
Yeah. Yep. This precedent for that, I, I could say with relative certainty that what you will not see is A1 year support, timeframe split into five year blocks of no mainstream and extended support, you know, windows 11, 1.0 or windows 11, whatever will not be supported for 10 years. Although windows 10 was I know,

Mary Jo Foley (00:52:33):
Right. I, I think, and we also Don know, I think then there's the, LTSC the long term servicing channel versions of windows. We don't know what this new schedule would do to that or how that would look going forward. We there's a lot, a lot of questions, especially for it. People who are like, wait a minute, I just thought we were doing the one year update thing. And now like suddenly we're adding features whenever we want, plus going to a three year update thing now <laugh>, you know, it's like, what are we doing here? <Laugh> and so far there's been absolutely no communication from the windows team about any changes, any of this at all. Maybe they're saving that for a future event or maybe they just will never announce it and just put it in some random blood post at the end and people stumble onto it.

Leo Laporte (00:53:14):
Hmm.

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:15):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:53:15):
Well, yeah. Okay. Yeah. A lot of questions for sure. It it's

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:19):
Yeah. Tons of questions. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:53:22):
Yeah. That's interesting.

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:23):
Okay. That's where we left it. Yeah. So I, I, I mean, they haven't denied Zach's story. They haven't confirmed it. All they said is we did say we were gonna be rolling out features at any time we wanted, we said that in February,

Leo Laporte (00:53:34):
But you still have to, you know, one of the points behind windows, there's 11 just using that brand was yeah. We wanted to get people excited about upgrading and buying new computers, that kind of thing. Right. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so you, you lose that way. If you don't have a windows 12 and you stop revving windows 11 and it's just windows 11, but with all these new features, it's a harder marketing message for Microsoft. Right. It is right. PC makers. I would think mm-hmm <affirmative>

Mary Jo Foley (00:53:58):
Yeah. Right. Like say you get a new PC, say you get a new PC next year. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> right. And it's running windows 11, but it's running a different windows 11 than we all are running right now because it'll have a whole bunch of new features that are not reflected in the brand, like, or,

Leo Laporte (00:54:14):
Or we won't. And then you'll have to get those features by running windows update, which you know, honestly, but you could is kind of the experience anyway. I,

Mary Jo Foley (00:54:21):
It is right. Yeah. So

Leo Laporte (00:54:23):
Apple is, I think Apple's instructional in this cuz they did OS 10 for a long time. Yep. And they finally said, okay, now it's 11. Now it's 12. Now it's 13. Yep. But they did 10.1, two, three, you know, they cheated. Yeah. I mean, and windows would always have, there'd be some internal version number that developers could check. I mean, there's gonna be a way it's about consumers. It's about messaging. And and I think that apple decided no, no, we need to have a OS 10 OS 11 OS 12. We need to every, and now they're doing it every year. And I think that that probably is a marketing. I mean, obviously it's a marketing. Yeah, absolutely. But you need, yeah. You need you something need something to show people and explained it very quickly, not, Hey, look at all the stuff we did to windows 11 since last year. So whether they at, at this point, I mean, they may not, they really may not know. Now at

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:16):
Some point they may

Leo Laporte (00:55:17):
Not marketing pressures are gonna, somebody's gonna, Chris Capel is gonna come in the room, throw up in the door and say, we need windows 12.

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:25):
Yeah. Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:55:26):
Well, I mean, you know, we lived in a world where, sorry.

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:30):
No, I was just gonna say Panos takes his cues from apple pretty much. So yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:55:33):
We know that apple does.

Mary Jo Foley (00:55:34):
Yep. Whatever apple does, he's gonna do it. Like that's, that's where we're gonna go.

Leo Laporte (00:55:38):
Do web browsers are in the one hundreds now one version numbers, right? There's no reason windows. Couldn't just, you know, we're gonna do one every four, you know, four months or every one year. That's that's different. That's because browsers wanna hide that browsers. You, they wanna always be up to date and they want a way for you to reasonably see whether you're up to date, but they don't want to announce there's a new version all the time. They kind of want it to be just happened. It just happened. Right. But you do notice, you know, there's a little yellow. I got too excited. My watch says you have you taken a hard fall? No, <laugh> I did not fall.

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:13):
You're like, we're talking about windows 12. That's what I'm falling,

Leo Laporte (00:56:15):
But it's waving my arms around and it, it got all excited. Sorry. <laugh> it's funny. <Laugh> so I, I do think that it may completely be possible just as it was back when Microsoft said this is the last version of windows. No more numbers, right. That they're gonna change their mind due to market Jerry next will never live down.

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:39):
I know. I feel that version,

Leo Laporte (00:56:41):
Jerry. This is yeah. Yeah. Remember when Microsoft said, and I, I wanna clear, I'm not saying that they're copying apple. I'm just saying that apple has seen, I think, oh no. I wanna be really clear.

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:53):
I'm saying definitely are.

Leo Laporte (00:56:54):
I have seen. Okay. All right. Nevermind. They are. They're definitely copying apple.

Mary Jo Foley (00:56:59):
They definitely are copying apple.

Leo Laporte (00:57:01):
<Laugh> well, there's no, there's no industry best practices for stuff like this anymore. No,

Mary Jo Foley (00:57:05):
That's right. I love the dot thing. That's an apple thing. Right? 11 dot blah, blah,

Leo Laporte (00:57:10):
Blah. They did that for a long time, but they stopped. I mean, they still do. I liked that they, those are interim updates now, and then they do a big number update and I think it's gonna be yearly. Although again, this always right. Oh wow. It changes. Yeah. That's been, it just changes, right? It's well, right today let's do it this way. Yeah. It took a one year mall again, remember the iPhone came out and they were like, oh, we, you too busy with the iPhone. Let, skip the iPhone. Then this gonna skip this year. They just <laugh>. Yeah, we are on version back OS version 12 with Monterey. Yeah. And I think Ventura is 13. I'm pretty sure it's 13. Yeah. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I'm sure it is. So that's fine. Yeah. I'm shrugging for those of you only listening. If you can only hear the shuffling of material, that's just shoulder

Mary Jo Foley (00:57:56):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:58:00):
Let's see. You wanna talk about, since we started the browser conversation, do you want to or do you wanna, yeah, just a quick one. I haven't even written this up. I just saw that they announced this, you know, Microsoft edge, that team has been on a real program of trying to reduce resources and improved performance and you know, less disc footprint and all this, you know, because it's based on chromium, which is, you know, kind of a, a pig of a thing. And they've done a pretty good job with it. <Laugh> it sounds like a Disney song. I don't know why it's a pig of a thing. Yeah. And a pig of it. <Laugh> I don't agree with everything they've done. I don't like the tab sleeping functionality. I'm sure some people love it. I, to me, that just adds a delay.

Leo Laporte (00:58:45):
And so I'm sure it reduces resource like Ram resources, but it also slows performance to me. So the, the thing that they just announced was yet another feature along these lines, this is coming in edge 1 0 2, which actually might have just been released or is about to be released. And they're automatically compressing disc cash, which they say will both improve performance and reduce the disc for footprint. By the way. Speaking of browser cash. I don't know if you guys follow our contemporaries over at CNET, but aside from reviewing movies site is, is, has now turned into the browser cash tip site of the world. Every other article they right now is, Hey, have we reminded you? You gonna clear your browser cash. You have to do it on your iPhone. You have to do it on your Android to do it. Really. This is all they write about.

Leo Laporte (00:59:38):
I have to post to do this. I have never this. I seen my browser cash. I know I, this is in my feed every day. Now I don't want to get rid of CNET, but I do want to get rid of this tip. And it, it, it's almost like every day and it's a different article. It will say, Hey, Android user, here's the one tip that will speed up the performance of your phone. And I look at it, it's like, yep. Browser cash, browser cash. <Laugh> browser cash. Wow. Anyway, Microsoft's addressing it. So maybe this is something you won't need to deal with manually. Huh? Although I've never once <laugh>, I don't think every once in a while, like a, like a, the tech person at work will say something like, I'll be like, Hey, the size not working. And they're like, have you cleared your cash?

Leo Laporte (01:00:14):
And I'm like, no, I'm normal. What are you talking about? <Laugh> clear my cash. Why would I claim my cash? <Laugh> anyway, I oh, flush your DNS cash if you haven't done that. Yeah, exactly. Oh yeah. Lemme know when the flushings done, come on back. <Laugh> I think it, people have tapes to the wall, a list of things to tell response, like a foreign charter responses. Have you tried turning it on and off again? And you browsed the flush cash or flush the bra, whatever everyone, every time I've done it, I've had to look out, look up how to do it. <Laugh> like, I, this is something I just don't do. Yeah. I don't, I, you shouldn't have to do it, but I, I do think it is not unusual for the browser cash to become corrupted in cause problems. So, but I think it's, I had to look up how to, you can flush, well, not flush.

Leo Laporte (01:01:06):
You can delete your windows, update cash. And sometimes that C problem that helps windows update. Actually that helps do that recently. But again, you have to kind of look that thing up, cuz it's not something you do regularly. And you think, God, you think there'd be a little button right there in the UI, but there isn't PS CA chops in our IRC says clearing the, the cash is a reflexive suggestion when no real solution exists. <Laugh> there you go. <Laugh> yeah. And you're like, I, it feels faster. I <laugh>. Yeah, exactly. It's remember you used to say, oh, have you defragged you gotta DEFRA. Yeah, exactly. You gotta, oh, actually don't just DEFRA but move that application to the front of the space. Exactly. Exactly. Oh, good. That will do it. Thank God. Have to, this. Doesn't have to travel the head.

Leo Laporte (01:01:50):
Doesn't have to travel as far. You'll notice a massive improvement. And by the way, every time I get my car washed it's about five miles an hour faster. I don't understand that must it works well. The radio's laed too. It's nice. All right. Time to take a break and tell you about something that really will make a difference in your day to day operations. Especially if you're the person who gets woken up in the middle of the night, new Relic, new Relic. I know lots of devs. I've met many on the cruise. I know you're the most curious people, the people who wanna explore the newest tech, those are the kind of people who love new Relic. Engineers love new Relic because it gives you the data you need about the things you build. It shows what's really happening in your software life cycle.

Leo Laporte (01:02:42):
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Leo Laporte (01:03:35):
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Leo Laporte (01:04:32):
I think it's time for a bigger number. Microsoft 3, 6, 5. Yeah. What is there to say? So we, we, we kind of alluded to the VBA thing. You know, this is like so much else in life where you kind of look into it and it's not as dramatic as it sounds, but you know, Microsoft announced maybe back in February earlier this year that they were gonna start blocking internet acquired VBA macros by default and office, this sounds perfectly reasonable. And then you heard that the customers complained and they said, oh, now we're not gonna do it again. The GU the Google threat analysis group leader, Shane Huntley exploded in outrage. When Microsoft said they were not gonna do this as did Steve Gibson. Yes. Except that's not what Microsoft said, dual outrage. That's not what he said. That's not what they said. Okay. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:05:23):
What the problem was the, the user experience they had come up with for the blocking macros was not great. So they said, we're still gonna do this. We just need a little bit of time to fix the UX and they fixed it. And now, as of actually I think as of today, VBAs VBA, macros are blocked by default. Yeah. As they should, should be. But it wasn't the flip flop that, you know, it sort of sounded like no, they delay it. They delayed it. They, they started rolling it out and late June, they halted the rollout cause people for UI. Yeah. And then this re then it's back the way. But the point is, and Steve Gibson made this point yesterday. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> if you care there's group policy edit there's. I mean, there's all sorts of ways for you to change this default behavior.

Leo Laporte (01:06:09):
That's right. This is, or to, before it was the default behavior to make it the default behavior fault. Yes. Your organization. If this was outrageous to you, you could have fixed this two years ago. Yeah. It's, it's not. And Steve's other point, which I think is really well taken is the best way to avoid this starts signing your documents. Whoever's creating your spreadsheets with the vertical, not vertical blank application with the visual basic application macros vertical blanket. I know. I sorry. Have you heard of brain fog? With the, with the V VB for me, I know for some reason, VBI vertical blank, blank interval is in my brain. Okay. No, that's good. Then. It's cuz years ago that was something that happened with CRT monitors. And I wrote a that's Aari program. Sprite. Exactly. They took advantage of the VBI. Exactly. And I wrote a, the first multitasking program for the Mac using the VBI, but anyway, oh nice.

Leo Laporte (01:07:01):
VBA, which is much more modern. <Laugh> surprisingly, is it <laugh> maybe if you sign, if you look at that ridiculous flow chart, they published, if you sign the document and you sign the macro mm-hmm <affirmative>, then it will run well and you should, it was, there was, you know, there would be a person out in the world or your organization who ne found a macro out on the internet, downloaded it to the computer. Don't do that. Yeah. Yeah. I think that was the issue not being signed there and there. And Steve talked about this, but there was a, there many, there have been one of the very first viruses used as technique and there are modern viruses. Was it FOMO light or something that uses VBA macros. So, and people thought, VB, wasn't that powerful? Come on, guys, wake up. Don't <laugh> if you're gonna use them and I understand businesses need to, you can either enable them in in group policy at I wouldn't, I wouldn't insist they be signed, then, you know, they're legit and it'll run flawlessly without effort without a click of a button or anything. And that's how, you know, anyway, sorry, news story just came in just over the transom. All right. Now that I've had C I can go to ignite.

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:17):
Not really

Leo Laporte (01:08:19):
Well sort of, it's gonna be a live event. I hear. Oh, but no press <laugh> right.

Mary Jo Foley (01:08:24):
No press. Oh yeah. Yeah. You know, it's very odd. This whole thing is odd. So today they posted on the ignite website my ignite.microsoft.com the dates. So we know the dates of ignite, which is their it pro conference every year is October 12th to 14th. There's also a section in the FAQ about a, a big Inca in Seattle in person experience. Yeah. Yeah. Like highly interactive immersive at the Seattle convention center. Come

Leo Laporte (01:08:58):
On, Paul. Let's go. What could possibly go wrong? Highly

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:01):
Innovators, influencers, executives, partners. Yeah. All invited. And then I ping Microsoft. I'm like, what about press? And they said, press virtual only. Oh, so it's because

Leo Laporte (01:09:13):
We're, we're sick. We're sick. We

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:15):
People a hybrid event, dirty

Leo Laporte (01:09:16):
Monkeys. We

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:16):
Don't yeah. Hybrid event, but press cannot attend.

Leo Laporte (01:09:20):
We've been watching you guys during the COVID thing. And I gotta tell you, yeah, not super impressed, not,

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:25):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:09:27):
Super dirty. The dirty press is not allowed. Oh's throwing fingers at the wall. I don't know.

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:34):
But it's all the topics we know and love. They have a topic list, productivity, collaboration, business

Leo Laporte (01:09:40):
Know isn't it?

Mary Jo Foley (01:09:41):
Yeah. AI automation, IOT mixed reality. So we'll probably hear more about what they're doing with the live mesh stuff. Teams, mesh stuff, industry clouds, like the whole gamut of stuff is gonna be in the Seattle. I wonder

Leo Laporte (01:09:56):
If that conference center was booked in November when they typically do it. Hmm.

Mary Jo Foley (01:10:03):
Oh yeah. I wonder also I,

Leo Laporte (01:10:06):
So this is an early date. This is not the normal. Yeah. This is about

Mary Jo Foley (01:10:09):
Month earlier than it has been typically.

Leo Laporte (01:10:12):
Oh, be easier for travel for most people, you know? I mean, true.

Mary Jo Foley (01:10:15):
There's gonna be in-person events in other cities, not just Seattle. So they did, they've done this with build and they did this with inspire. They had some smaller in-person events in global cities. But the Seattle ones, one we want and we can't go.

Leo Laporte (01:10:29):
So I love this live from Seattle, immerse yourself in our flagship, in person tech event, where you can interact with experts and peers and experience portions of the global broadcast space will be limited. No press allow. Yeah. You don't have to beat the dirty press. Oh man. You don't want those guys mill it around with their pencils and their ears and little notebooks. It

Mary Jo Foley (01:10:51):
Lives little, you know what I said? We could go. Yeah, we could pay,

Leo Laporte (01:10:55):
Say, yeah, just pay. Yeah. Be a develop developer. Go to pay to go to ignite. What?

Mary Jo Foley (01:11:01):
No, I mean the in person part's gonna be paid for sure. Right?

Leo Laporte (01:11:05):
Ignite is a, a partner event, right? It's not a developer event. No, no, no. It's a, it's an it pro

Mary Jo Foley (01:11:10):
Developer. It pro it, but Al also developer. Yeah. Some. Oh, it is content. Okay. Yeah, there is. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:11:16):
All right. Yeah, we'll see what develops here. I, I was, I was hoping I'd be going back to Seattle in October, but then again, do I want to be in a conference center? Which

Mary Jo Foley (01:11:25):
I know

Leo Laporte (01:11:27):
Like a non-moving boat. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah. There's no clean air going in there. I can tell you that. No. Yeah. Didn't they used to do ignite in Florida every year. Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley (01:11:35):
They have, they've done it in a lot of different cities.

Leo Laporte (01:11:37):
Oh, okay. It's been all

Mary Jo Foley (01:11:38):
Over. Well, we were supposed to go to new Orleans in 2020 for

Leo Laporte (01:11:42):
<Laugh>. I remember that didn't happen. Yeah. I don't remember what happened that year, but that, that didn't go down

Mary Jo Foley (01:11:47):
Me. Neither saw a blur.

Leo Laporte (01:11:48):
Something happened. I feel like I'm owed a trip to new Orleans, you know, frankly,

Mary Jo Foley (01:11:53):
Me too. I know. Yeah. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:11:56):
Yeah. okay. Okay. I, you know, I'm, now that I've had COVID I'm throwing away the mask and I'm going to as many in-person events as I can. <Laugh>

Mary Jo Foley (01:12:09):
Nice.

Leo Laporte (01:12:10):
Hi. Okay. My name, this is maybe this is a weird thing to say, but in our little group thing that we did on the boat you know, it's been two and a half. It's been almost three years since I've been to an in person event and Mary Jo and I in New York and then on work trips to different cities. I mean, we did this in London. One time have had meetups, you know, and I love could be dozens of people. There could be hundreds of people. I love them. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I, you kind of forget. I, I, the concerns I would've had about an in-person event like that a few years ago, would've been more just, you know, dealing with the crowd and, and whatever. Yeah. But you kind of forget tear my clothing off. And yeah, there was a moment early on in the thing where we had, I don't have many people in the room, 50 or a hundred or whatever it was and you know, it kind of concluded.

Leo Laporte (01:12:58):
And then people come up and they want to talk to you and you know, they get really close to you. There are some close talkers. There were some close talkers. I remember there was one person. I, I, I remember I could, I could feel their breath on my face. Yes. And I was like, I felt spit drops on one, one conversation. It's like only back it up. You're like, oh, oh, oh God, oh, help me. I be one, no, it's just something we're gonna have to ease into this. It's like will be okay. This was the meetup I most enjoyed. This was the one we did in Seattle. Oh, I have to press a button hallmark. Ugh. And this was, it was a bunch, it was Microsoft's came out to visit us. And there's Alex gum.

Mary Jo Foley (01:13:45):
That's nice. There's

Leo Laporte (01:13:46):
Paul. Oh, this is the one we just did. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is I'm like, I recognize all those guys. Oh yeah. This was a really nice, yeah. Small little group. Lot of fun. That was yeah. Before the cruise, I don't, let me see if I don't think I have any pictures of any of the big events. Let me see if somebody's posted some. Cause we, I, I really didn't think to take too many pictures. I, I know, I wish I had at that group dinner, I, I finally walked around with a camera, but then I got, got distracted and I stopped taking pictures. I'm just, well, there was so much love in the room and that was, yeah, it was nice. It was really nice part of the problem. This was this was pretty much my status. Most of the time. <Laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> Donald duck talking to, talking to the, by the way, by the, got this couple got engaged on the Menon hall glacier, he got down on his, his knees and gave a, and gave Jo a ring and all that.

Leo Laporte (01:14:40):
So, wow. Yeah. They had to do it. I think they were supposed to do it on the glacier, but they weren't able to go, oh, they couldn't do it. Oh, they did it near glacier's so here's a picture of the crowd. Yeah. Paul and me. Nice, nice little auditorium. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> lot of nice. John S. Booth is up there on the top, right? Ready to summer windows 12. Yeah. Yeah. That was a lot of fun. Yeah, it was good. Yeah. This is no, that wasn't us. That was when I worked. That was a slightly different event. Wait, we, we, I didn't know. We did a dance performance. That's great. <Laugh> it was a lot of fun, lots of pictures. This is the shared album that we invited people to submit to some great, this one guy brought a very nice Nikon Z seven, I think.

Leo Laporte (01:15:36):
And got some amazing animal of photos marked that's good. Phillips. I think his name is, let me see if I can Mark Mitchell. I'm sorry. Yeah. Look at those otters right there. Yeah. Just some amazing sea lions. Yep. Pictures. There's some otters. He had a very, very nice camera. These animals always remind me that how superfluous human beings are. Like if we just disappeared. There's Paul before his coffee. Yeah. That was me taking a bath. <Laugh> some really amazing photos. Oh, look at this. This is one of my favorites. It's incredible. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. That, that again is with the Nikon C seven Mark Mitchell. Good job. I knew mark had a camera cuz he came up to me and said, what camera did you bring? Leo? <Laugh>. I said in case you thought you were gonna come out on top of this one.

Leo Laporte (01:16:27):
Yeah. Look at, look at this one. Oh my gosh. This is amazing. That is wow. Right. Looked me in the eye buddy. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> yeah. Thank you. Everybody who came for that trip. It was an amazing, the wildlife stuff up there is it's beautiful. Refreshing. Yeah. Did you get up at 7:00 AM for the lumberjack show? No, I got up at 7:00 AM for the well wildlife thing. And then we did like a seafood feast. <Laugh> kind of a deal. I think, I think Lisa, if she had known might have gone, I don't know. <Laugh> sure. It looks like the set of a Friday. The 13th movie <laugh> oh, look at the axes and the chainsaw. This was Ketchikan, which I, it was my favorite town. Beautiful. Really loved Kenika yeah. I loved all of it. I thought it was, I loved it up there. Yay. You get to go next time. Mary Jo.

Mary Jo Foley (01:17:18):
We'll see. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:17:21):
We have, we have successfully talked her out of it.

Mary Jo Foley (01:17:24):
I'm a little scared of the COVID event.

Leo Laporte (01:17:27):
Well, you know, we're not doing it again till the COVID is, is,

Mary Jo Foley (01:17:31):
Is yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:17:33):
Of course. That's what we said about this one, but yeah, probably. Well, I, you know, look at that, look at that. Look at that. That is a bear having

Mary Jo Foley (01:17:40):
Lunch. It looked, it looked like a blast and it looked amazing. The food looked great. All your food pictures.

Leo Laporte (01:17:46):
Yeah. I, you know, I'm, I'm looking at all the drink and food that Paul and Stephanie and Richard Campbell are consuming

Mary Jo Foley (01:17:54):
Mm-Hmm <affirmative> <laugh> if Richard Campbell's there there's drinks <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:17:59):
Wow. What a party you guys had, man. Alright. Let's talk developers. We talked about ignite, but there is a.net conference coming up. Yeah. So this is a virtual conference. They do these throughout the year.net, conf they call it it's a virtual conference one day. The next one is August 9th. It's gonna focus on net Maui, which is that cross-platform developer framework that targets windows, Mac OS iOS and Android. So it's all day it's free. You can just sign up for that at any time. And the other one, this Mary Jo might know this. I, there was some power platform. There was a, there was an interview.

Mary Jo Foley (01:18:35):
I

Leo Laporte (01:18:36):
Read it. The corporate vice president from power

Mary Jo Foley (01:18:38):
Platform. Charles LA. Yep. Mm-Hmm

Leo Laporte (01:18:40):
<Affirmative> yeah. He said that this business was now a 2 billion business annually, which I don't think was new. I think they might have said this early in the year mm-hmm <affirmative> but anyway, over a 7 million monthly active users and 72% growth year over year by revenue.

Mary Jo Foley (01:18:55):
So, so, you know, what's the craziest thing about that 7 million number? I don't think he gave the right number for his own business. <Laugh> interesting. Okay. What, oops. I know I'm like, I, I did a search on it cause I'm like only 7 million and I see Q 20, 22, 20 million monthly active users of power platform. Oops. So I'm like, what,

Leo Laporte (01:19:16):
What, so I'm wondering if you didn't mean a particular, maybe he was actually me talking about a particular

Mary Jo Foley (01:19:21):
Part. One of the parts of it. I agree. Yeah. Probably power apps or something. That's what I

Leo Laporte (01:19:25):
Was thinking was probably power apps. Yeah. Maybe that power, but that was my, yeah. Okay. That's

Mary Jo Foley (01:19:30):
Interesting. Yeah, because when I saw that number, I'm like, this number seems wrong <laugh> but he's the head of power of the power platforms. He would assume he would give you the right number.

Leo Laporte (01:19:38):
<Laugh> yeah. Yeah. The other thing I kinda like, you know, Microsoft of course is built on developer stuff. Right? So the low code, no code thing as something they've been part of, but they kind of expand that because they have visual studio, right. Professional programming languages, like C sharp and so forth. So they refer to this market as no code, low code and pro code. Oh Lord. That's great. No, that's sure you low no. Or pro I'm a foe code.

Mary Jo Foley (01:20:04):
That's my code. Nice.

Leo Laporte (01:20:06):
It's my oo. I thought that was kind of interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Did

Mary Jo Foley (01:20:10):
That was a good interview.

Leo Laporte (01:20:12):
Yeah. Yeah. Did rich Campbell finish his.net book? I'm just curious. I did. Do you think I did I brand him little too much about there were fingers flying. Let's put it that way. I took a two year hiatus on my programming windows series to wait for him to finish writing the book and then he didn't. And so I said, screw it. I'm just gonna keep going. <Laugh> and that was cute. That was funny little back and forth there. <Laugh> I told about help. You know, I, I wanna see it. I wanna read it. He talked to everybody, he talked to all of the major players. So is it still in progress or he did flip you off and you asked him about it. <Laugh> <laugh> well, but okay. But as, okay, so as Richard and I discussed actually before that day, cuz I had this interaction with Rafael as well.

Leo Laporte (01:20:56):
I said, you know, one way to define a friend is they tell you to go F yourself and you just laugh <laugh> yes, yes. And when you have that kind of interaction, it's not meant in an antagonistic way or if it is it, is that kind? No, we took it that way. That way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually I wasn't there. I was, it was reported back to me. Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was, I was by then I said, I don't think I should be hanging out with you guys. <Laugh> yeah, yeah. Yep. Is there any asking for a friend? Is there any Xbox news

Mary Jo Foley (01:21:29):
Is only one. So guys, guys, last week we had Xbox news on the show show. I just want you to

Leo Laporte (01:21:33):
Know oh my God. Yeah. Yeah. But who introduced it? Was it you or

Mary Jo Foley (01:21:37):
Someone? Not me obviously. No,

Leo Laporte (01:21:39):
Zach

Mary Jo Foley (01:21:40):
Did it. I think Zach and rich both had some Xbox

Leo Laporte (01:21:43):
Stuff think they, so that's nice. Tell me which of these sounds better. Microsoft has made a change to the Xbox series and S consoles, the new ones and they have reduced boot time by 25%. Amazing. Right? That's amazing.

Mary Jo Foley (01:22:00):
It is.

Leo Laporte (01:22:00):
Or Microsoft has quietly made a change to the Xbox series, excess consoles that reduces boot time by five seconds.

Mary Jo Foley (01:22:08):
<Laugh> there we

Leo Laporte (01:22:09):
Go. Oh boy. Who? Cause that's like wait five seconds. That doesn't sound very good. Except five seconds is 25%

Mary Jo Foley (01:22:15):
Is 25%. That's what? So they've actually, that's

Leo Laporte (01:22:18):
What I figured out. Yeah. To 15 seconds. So actually that's pretty big deal. It's lame the way they did it. They created a shorter boot animation. Oh, so it isn't boot faster. They just, the animation, no short, no, it literally still boots faster. But the a, because the animation was actually yeah, taking too much time. We were waiting for the animation to complete before we could play a game. That's dopey. Yep. That is so dopey. Oh my God. Now the other caveat to this is the Xbox consoles, including the Xbox one, I believe can operate in one of two modes. So the default is something called energy saver where when you're done, it actually does shut down and you have to boot it up. And that, you know, takes a little while the other mode, which honestly I think most people probably use is called standby and that works like a PC.

Leo Laporte (01:23:01):
You don't actually turn it off. You just, it, it goes to sleep. And while it's asleep, it can kind of dribble down updates and everything. And the advantage of that, it sounds like it's obvious, but just in case it's not is if you don't do that, you'll turn on your piece or your Xbox and we'll say, Hey, we have a two gig download or update. We have to install. You can do it now. Or you can just play offline. How does that sound? Oh, so you have to do it, you know? Yeah. So what you ideal, what happens is you hit that once and then you say, yeah, I think I'm gonna switch this to low or standby mode. So don't you ever have to deal with, I want the dribble, I want this thing in the background. Yeah. So if you're doing that, which is what I do, you'll never actually notice this because you don't really boot the console almost ever.

Leo Laporte (01:23:40):
It's not like a windows PC, like windows does PCs. You actually reboot those pretty often every month. Xboxs. I, the only I did it because when I left my office to go on that, on that trip with the boat, I unplug the, the power strip, which, you know, has everything here. So my Xbox actually did turn off. So I have Paul. We don't recommend that method for rebooting your machines anymore. You know? Well, I'll tell you I rebooted it. And I had install a damn update <laugh> before I could play video games. So that's why I did the same thing though. That's the only time I've ever shut down my computers. I was gonna be gone for a week. I shut everything, including the Xbox. Yeah. You know, like a house get hit by lightning or something. Yeah. That's actually good idea. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:24:19):
Take it off the, off the power space. Take it off completely off the mm-hmm. <Affirmative> good. That's all I got. That's it? Five seconds. Five seconds. Okay. Yep. Well, if that's all you're gonna give us, I think I think we're gonna go to the back of the book. We've got a tip of the week, an app pick of the week, an enterprise pick of the week, couple of them. And our beer of the week brain fog is a Seattle <laugh> no, <laugh>, it's a Seattle tree. I, I feel like I've seen that. <Laugh> our show today is brought to you by those good folks at it. Pro TV, longtime friends of the network. I personal friends Tim and Don are fantastic. They started as it trainers in a, in a classroom, but they realized they could do so much a better job.

Leo Laporte (01:25:12):
Kind of like we do TWiTt online video, online tests online configuration of windows servers in the browsers. So you can really practice with this stuff. It pro TV is the place to get the it knowledge you need, whether it's to get your first job in it, to keep your job in it, to certify or re-certify. And let me tell you, we talk all the time about the individuals going to it, pro TV. They have a team platform that is fantastic. You know, you know, if you've got a business that you're, you're kind of reliant on your it team, they've gotta be up to date on security on every, on networking on everything to keep your business a success. So, but you wanna give 'em it training they're actually gonna use, right? You don't want to, it's not like socks at Christmas where they go, oh, thanks.

Leo Laporte (01:26:05):
Great. No, you want 'em to get excited about this and I can promise you they will because it pro TV's content is so engaging. So binge worthy, in fact, 80% of people who watch videos on it, pro TV actually finish them. There's a very, very low drop off rate because they're, they're, you're learning and you're having fun doing it. The tech industry's constantly changing. You wanna make sure this is really important that you're getting it training. That's up to date. This is more up to date than any school, more up to date than any book because they're, they have seven studios they're running all day, Monday through Friday, creating new content, updating software, updating exams, updating threats. So that you're getting the latest content. In fact, 5,800 hours of binge worthy content, technical skills to compliance, to even soft business skills, you'll get the training and certifications for your team.

Leo Laporte (01:27:08):
Done all in one place. Everything they need, every vendor, every skill, Microsoft, Cisco Linux, apple security cloud, and on and on and on. They the interface for the, the it pro TV business plan is the, the, the dashboard's great. You can track team results, manage seats. You can assign and unassign team members. You can create new groups, small groups assign a specific group. You don't even have to assign a full course. You can assign individual episodes, all the episodes about 20 to 30 minutes. So you can say, Hey, this is an area I really want you all to focus on. You know, or you Smithers, you need to, you need to watch this. That happens sometimes till you'll get because of their advanced reporting, immediate insights into your team's viewing patterns, you can see their progress over any period of time. You get visual reports, so you can justify the spend to the higher ups.

Leo Laporte (01:27:58):
So whether it's for individuals learning to get into, to get into it or learning about it, or, or getting that better job or it's for your business, where you've got a whole team, you want to train, you need it pro TV, give your team the it development platform. They need to level up their skills and enjoy the journey. They will. They'll love it. They'll thank you for it. It's not socks on Christmas for teams of two to 1000 of volume discount started five seats go to it. Pro.Tv/Windows. And yes, there's an offer code. This is a great one too. WW, 30 WW three zero. Make sure you mention it to your it pro TV account executive. You'll get 30% off or more on a business plan. And, and for individuals too, WW 30 applies to you, two it pro.tv/windows. Thank you. It pro TV for supporting windows weekly and the work we do here.

Leo Laporte (01:28:55):
And thank you. You windows weekly doers for supporting us by going to that address. Cuz if you go, go there, they know. Oh yeah. Paul and Mary Jo sent us it pro.tv/windows. Gotta put Pauly on the spot. It's time for your tip of the week. Mr. Throt sir. Let me unmute. Sorry. Oh, okay. <Laugh> he was so quiet, you know, it's hard when you're in any industry, because then you see how other people report or write about it or do anything with it and you know, it's off. So I used to work in banking for example, and you would see like bank robbery, movies, you'd be like, yeah, no, it doesn't work like that. That's not how that works. <Laugh> it would just kind of ruin it for you, you know? Yeah. So I was reading the New York times this morning, like an idiot, and there's an article about the default tech settings.

Leo Laporte (01:29:47):
You should turn off right away. So, okay. That sounds interesting. And it was a super high level thing. It kind of, you know, iPhone, Android, Facebook, Amazon, and I think they meant ring. They said nest, which maybe should have been the first thing, you know, to <laugh> make, made me wonder about the quality of what I was reading. And then I noticed they had windows and I thought, okay, what do they got for windows? And it, it is just, just the language they use. And, and just the, the, the, the bareness of this information windows comes with a host of data sharing settings that are turned on by default that help Microsoft advertises and websites learn more about us. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. The switches to toggle those settings can be found by opening the settings menu and clicking on privacy and security and then general.

Leo Laporte (01:30:33):
Hmm. First of all, there's nothing called the settings menu and windows. Okay. I, the settings app, I think is what you mean. I don't know how someone would find it based on the way you wrote this. It's clearly a Mac user. <Laugh>, that's what its right. But if you go, if you go to this thing and you actually, and there's no general anymore, well, actually there's a general, but oh, it's Brian shin. Yeah. There were, there are approximately 1100 privacy settings in this section of settings and God help you figuring that out. So this is such a complicated topic that there's an entire chapter about it in my book about windows. Yeah. It's, it's complicated. And I feel like there's some kind of a, a basic level of like, well, here are the top 10 things that you should immediately change. You know, that kind of something like that.

Leo Laporte (01:31:18):
So, okay. But that's only one of two paragraphs. The second one was incredible. Wait a minute, this one says, <laugh> wait a minute. I'm reading it right now. Are you kidding me? Listen. Yeah, but this classic, what folks, if you're listening in your windows, dozer, what would you say is the worst default setting on windows? What, what, what would you say? Yeah. Sounds <laugh> what, that's what they said the worst. So Kimber streams, wire cutter editor testing laptops says one of the first steps is to open the sounds menu. Again, there is no sounds menu and select no sounds to mute many of the annoying chimes to play. Whenever something goes wrong with windows. So here's the thing really I actually do. This is one of the first things I do in windows as well. And I will tell you if when you go from windows 10 to windows 11, this isn't another example of something that takes a lot more steps.

Leo Laporte (01:32:04):
They don't. First of all, there's no such thing as a sounds menu, there are sound menu. There is a sound control panel. Maybe that's has a sounds tab, but they don't, they don't tell you how to get to it. So if you're running windows 10, you can right. Click the volume button in the system. Tray. I just did this. Yes. The sounds the sounds, sounds, sound settings. Okay. Yes. No not sound setting. Oh, no, not. Oh, see, that's what Kimber does. Mm-Hmm what, what? Hold on a second. You know, you're running. Windows is 11. You can't do it. I'm about to describe oh, the hell with you, Paul. No, but no, but you're next. I'm gonna get to windows. I'm gonna show you how many different steps are. Okay. So in windows 10, yes. It's two steps, right? Click the volume choose sounds. And not only does the right control panel open, but it goes to the right tab in that control panel.

Leo Laporte (01:32:50):
Right? Ah, nice. Now here's how windows 11 adds extra steps. Yeah. You right. Click on that thing and you choose sound settings, which is what you did. Yeah. You scroll down to the bottom. Yeah. And I already know where it is, so it's easy for me. Yeah. But there's something called more sound settings. It's like that. And then the sound I know you have to find it. There it is there. Okay. All right. Click that. And the sound. Oh Lord control panel. Is this from, is this a control panel from 1972? Holy cow. But then you have to open the sounds tab. Yes. And then you have to choose the sound scheme. No sounds is what they're saying. And then you click. Okay. All right. So I use, there's only two. This used to be in the old days, you could have all these different sound schemes.

Leo Laporte (01:33:27):
Remember? I know. Yep. I used to have the Tokyo subway system sound scheme. Yeah. You have like a, you could get like a plus pack and add sound schemes. This is just a vestige kind of bar of windows. So this says, so you do, you do no sounds. I, I kind of want to hear sounds. Here's why? Why? Well, here's the, I got a couple, a couple of commentaries here about this. So the first one is their advice is nonsense. The second one is I do this all the time. The third one is windows 10 and 11. Both have a bug where you can change this to no sounds. And it goes back to sounds. There's nothing you can do about it. There's no work around. It just does not work. So you can change this. I assure you, it will go back to windows defense.

Leo Laporte (01:34:04):
<Laugh> it start making, making sounds again. It's broken. The reason I do this is because I'm a sloppy typist. And if I'm typing, like yeah, you get the Don, I get that all the time. The bong, bong. That, yeah. That's yeah. That's my little, I feel like, I feel like I've stubbed my toe when I hear that sense. It, yeah. It's it's it's oh, it's awful. Ugh. So, but here's the, here's the tip. Here's the real tip. Yeah. There's a super fast way to do this. Yeah. Just use, start search and type type sounds. Yes, of course. When you that's how I've done it, change system sounds is the first choice and it goes to that exact tab. So it's faster sound that works. I think that works in 10 and 11 change system sounds. There it is, is very simple and I guess start menus a menu.

Leo Laporte (01:34:46):
And, but that would be a good thing to teach people. And by the way, yeah, that is definitely not the first thing you change on windows. Everyone knows the first thing you change on windows is the default browser. <Laugh> right. Well, I, again, I have a whole chapter about the first things to change. So it's it's list the worst. Honestly, one of the first, the first thing you should do is turn down the volume because for some reason, for this PCs, when they first yells it, 65% is super, super low. But, but, but for, for the New York times, Brian X channel Kimber streams to say the worst default setting on windows is the sounds, here's my problem with this. This is not specific. It doesn't tell you how to do it. It's it incorrectly names. The elements that they're telling you, you have to go to right?

Leo Laporte (01:35:29):
This I, I have correctly identified what all of these things are. It's a settings app. It's a sound control panel. It's a sounds tab. These things all have names. <Laugh>, you know, and that's how you get someone to go to the right place to windows. You tell them the right names. I also think that this is, and this is a problem that inexperienced journalists have. This is probably the first thing they do in an office. For sure. Right? You don't wanna annoy people in the office. Yeah. This is not by, I assure you the first thing home users care about. Most of them want sounds, Hey, Bob, what's the most annoying thing in windows sounds okay. Like seriously. That was the whole conversation. I mean, that's crazy. Yeah. It's not the, the anti

Mary Jo Foley (01:36:11):
I, I can say is no. All I can say is it's lucky. There's a guy around, who's doing a podcast with chips and trips about windows 11.

Leo Laporte (01:36:20):
Sure. This is though that one is I, listen, I'm re I'm drinking coffee. I'm reading the paper. And I'm like, what freaking nonsense is this? Like, this is the level of discourse we're gonna have. I'm gonna fix all of your devices in one whack and gonna give each of these six know sentences.

Mary Jo Foley (01:36:37):
We know this from going to events in the before times, 99% of the journalists who go to events use max, right?

Leo Laporte (01:36:44):
Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:36:44):
Oh, even the windows channel,

Leo Laporte (01:36:46):
Brian X. Chan uses. Even the, I know he does

Mary Jo Foley (01:36:47):
Even the windows journalists, right? Like when we're sitting there with our CFI and our little HP laptop, we're like, we should have our own little section because there's so few of us,

Leo Laporte (01:36:57):
My way ironic, ironically, this whole article, no default settings on the Mac, they talk iOS, right? That's Android. And they talk Leo. No, cause the Mac is perfect. Oh yeah. We know that everyone knows honestly, the discussion about settings, you should change that moment. You set up any device is a 5,000 word article. There there's so much to say there, even this is even on apple, which is, you know, very good about privacy and all that thing, all that stuff. There is important settings to do right away. That will prevent apps from tracking you. That's just job one. Like you gotta do this right away. And man, this, what a, what a superficial article. I, I, I was just blown away by how just how terrible it was. You probably the editor came to him, said, Ken, I want a thousand words on settings and I want it by 5:00 AM.

Leo Laporte (01:37:53):
Okay. But if I was gonna write this article and I was gonna include the Mac, you know, one thing I would do is turn on a Mac and actually look at it and say, well, this is how you get there, you know? Yeah. yeah, actually, yeah. Try your, your text before you publish it. Yeah. I don't know. Just are there can I get new sound schemes? Can I go back, get back my Tokyo subway theme. Yeah. I don't know that. There's a sort like, for example, in windows 11, if you go to settings, personalized themes, there's you can download themes from the Microsoft store that actually probably do include, I think they do have some sounds. Yeah. That sound schemes are part of themes. Yeah. But as far as like just downloading sound schemes, you probably have to go to a third party site and use a VBA America.

Leo Laporte (01:38:40):
So why would you do that? No. I I'm sure they're available on the web, but I don't. Yeah. I'm not familiar with that. I'm looking at an article where you can, you, you can download them and then zip them and put 'em in a format that folder you put 'em in a folder. And then, so I think you can, by hand create your own sound. This is a leftover from windows 95. This is literally, it is, you have windows 95 in 98 had those plus packs and yeah. You'd have birds chirping or little gizmos whining. I think that's exactly. You have to create a raw file of all things. A rough of course. Yeah. Yeah, of course you do. Yeah. That's crazy. Yeah. also I I'm looking at my screenshot now. I'm so I'm reminded, there's also an option in there called play windows, startup sound.

Leo Laporte (01:39:25):
It's that sound is actually a lot more pleasant in windows 11 than it used to be. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> but you, you know, one of the, when you turn off sounds and reboot your computer and you hear that startup sound, you think, oh, I must have done something wrong, actually. Yeah. It's because it's a separate option. So, well, I want to thank Brian NextGen because I don't actually want this windows machine to make any noises, cuz it's horrible on a podcast when you're listening and you hear an alert and you think it's your alert and you check your phone and say, well, no that yep. And you realize, oh it's the idiot. Oh, it's like in a room full of iPhone users. And you hear a chime and every single one of 'em <laugh> it could be any of us. Like we all have the same stupid sound.

Leo Laporte (01:40:01):
Marba yeah. Alright. I'm gonna make this my quest for next week. I'm gonna get the Tokyo subway. Okay. On my windows 11 machine sound scheme. All right. That's your app pick of the week, sir? Actually, I think this is a magic Mac app originally. I know this is definitely an apple oriented developer. So I have been on a quest. Wait what's it works in windows window. It's windows. It works in windows. No, don't relax. It's a windows app. Okay. Actually I listen, Mary Jo. I, I gotta tell you mark down is something you, I picture you use. She should be, I you told me I should. This, you have told me this. Yeah. There's no point down. So unless ZD, net supports markdown in your CMS this is okay, so this is the trick, right? I don't the trick is you find a markdown editor that generates clean enough code.

Leo Laporte (01:40:50):
Oh. That you paste it into WordPress. Ooh. And it doesn't have any superfluous, extra code. No that's gonna do with notepad. Right? Isn't that it is what you do with notepad. That's true. And by the way, because most people use word it's automatically configured to accept word, you know, copy and paste from word just comes in very cleanly. There's no nice. If you look at the code, it doesn't say, you know, font attributes and all this baloney, it's just the, the clean text with really clean attributes, you know, for headings and paragraphs and so forth. My, my issue is, so I use markdown for the book. I write the book and marked down. Yeah. See that makes sense. Cuz, cuz I'm sure that's a format supported by your publisher, right? It's it's explicitly sweet. Yeah. It's the, the preferred form. Yeah. My blog blog.

Leo Laporte (01:41:35):
I do markdown mm-hmm <affirmative> yeah, the, yeah, the problem is, you know, well, two years ago, ish, somewhere in the past few years I switched because using two different tools, doesn't always make sense. I was like, well, I'll switch to markdown for writing articles for the web. And I use this legacy tool called markdown pad two, which is available for windows. I love it. I'm so used to the way it works, but this is like a real old tool. It's not supported. It's not updated anymore. It requires a very specific version of a Microsoft programming library, which is also outta date from 2010. But it creates the cleanest code and it's perfect for the book. And, but of course I've been trying to get rid of it. So there are kind of friendly apps for end users like typo, which are great.

Leo Laporte (01:42:20):
But the back end code they create, if you paste into WordPress or whatever is not as good. I also like the side by side view because you can write in like typo is a rich text view where you're writing, you know, you're seeing the output, but I like to write in code and you can do a side by side view where you see the, the code on one side and then the output on the other side. That's what I use typo. It's funny that you should mention that. I like typo, but I don't have this issue of exporting. It's very clean, but I do like the way you're you have chosen that's a class. Yeah. So the reason, yeah, so the reason I went to this and I I'm, I haven't purchased it. I actually tried this, excuse me, on the trip on trial.

Leo Laporte (01:43:01):
And then I just redownloaded it on a different PC since I got home, I think I'm probably gonna get it is called IA writer. So IA is like you said, a kind of a Mac oriented develop, right? This might, in fact, this product might have appeared on the iPad first for all. I know it's, it's a, it's a markdown editor. It does side by side editing. If that's what you want. In fact, the default view is actually just code. It's not the rich text view. It's the code view. It has all the keyboard shortcuts you would expect. They're all correct. The code it creates is very clean. It's the reason you might, someone might not want it is a, you have to pay for it. It's $29. B it's super minimalistic, which actually I like, but you can't use any font you want in the editor.

Leo Laporte (01:43:41):
They only have three fonts. They're what I would call typewriter style fonts. Mm. I happen to like them. It won't be for everybody for sure. That's on purpose. It's kind of the way the app is. It it's an interesting choice. I, I just haven't found, I have to store all of the files I need for markdown pad, excuse me, in the cloud. So I never lose them. You know, cuz this stuff doesn't exist anymore. Like it's, it's, this is not supported anymore. And I know at some point, you know, I have to replace it. So I keep trying I can't use typo for the book. I could use it for the website. What I wanna do is find one tool I can use for everywhere. I wanna, I am gonna make a weird suggestion. Yep. And it comes from I'm sorry, Linux and Emax that's alright.

Leo Laporte (01:44:30):
Yep. But there's typo supports something called Panoc, which is a Swiss army knife of export formats. So you can install, you can install typo, install Panoc and then you can export into a huge number. Oh yeah. So of formats this, when you say export, so this app does export to HTML and PDF and I think to word. Yeah, but Panoc holy cow. Does it? Well, no, but I, so I should say I'm not actually looking for export. What I'm looking for is you copy and paste. Oh, so, oh, so I write an article. I see. And word okay. Or I write it in some tech markdown editor. Yeah. I select all of the text and I pasted into WordPress. Yeah. And then I look at the code and if the code has all those extra fond attributes, which I can't, you want the word perfect.

Leo Laporte (01:45:20):
Gremlin. Zapper. Yeah. That's exactly what I want. Actually I do want that. Remember that I wish there was a, there maybe there's a key, like a, maybe there's a way to do this. I, because look, when it comes down to it, I'm talking about a couple of level of headings, bold and italic and hyperlinks. This is it. Yeah. I don't, oh, I'm sorry. Bolded list maybe or a number simple, but you want simple it's super simple format. Yeah. most markdowns. So this is, this is the difference between notepad and plain text and markdown. Right? So you get basic formatting, it's basically rich text, but it's formatted in an XML type syntax. It's super simple. Actually notion does a sort of markdown style thing, you know, when, when you do a heading you type a code, you type slash H two to do a, a, a, a heading two in markdown, you would just type two hashtags.

Leo Laporte (01:46:20):
And then the thing, and depending on the app you're using, it would either format it right there. Or if you're doing a side by side view, you would see the code. And then the formatted view over on the side, it's super simple. It's if you can handle control B for, you know, bold and control, I, for italic, the other things are just as easy, the headings and you know, I hyperlinks, you know, control K is typically the, the hyperlink for that. So it, it, it does all that stuff. It's it, it, I, I might be getting this. I, I just wanted to throw it out for anyone who is interested in in markdown. This seems like a, I writer, no it's widely loved in the Mac world is the, it's been a long time choice for markdown. Yeah. Yeah. It's probably web based.

Leo Laporte (01:47:04):
That's probably how they got it on windows. Kinda like notion is right. It's it's fine. I mean, it's fine. There's not wrong. No, it's funny. Ironically notion just updated their iOS and Android apps to use native components instead of a, a webinar face. Oh. So hopefully that means you can zoom in on the it's much faster. One, one of the problems with big improvement notion is yeah, you can't doesn't do the poll by the way. Rec let me recommend your article. You gotta be a premium member, but of course you are of thera.com. Yeah. Your Alaska cruise articles. Really good. Not just for cruising, although you have a lot of information about that. And I agree with you, the Honda America app is the most useless app ever cruising Jesus. Oh my God. Horrible. Horrific, horrible. But I'm gonna have a second.

Leo Laporte (01:47:46):
I've been doing a second article at the lots of good pictures in this too. Yeah. Yeah. So well worth reading. And then you talk about some of the hardware that you, you took with you, and I presume you're gonna do software as well. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> yeah. I'm gonna have a second art that made it, that made it work. It's part of the, what I, I just wanted to get something out while I was there. Yeah. You know? Yeah. Really, really awesome. I'm sorry about that. That was a great experience. I thought you had a nice room. This is terrible. What did we not? Did we not give you? It's fine. It was fine. Teasing. It was fine. Yeah. I love the view. It was good. I like to have the balcony. My wife sits out. She sat out there a lot.

Leo Laporte (01:48:20):
I mean, I went and oh, me too pictures and yeah. You know, but she would sit up. I on our balcony. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Breathing in into the Alaskan air every, oh my God. The cleanest. It smells so good. Oh. And as you get CLO, you're sailing in the ocean and as you get close to Ireland, you could smell pine. It smells so good. It's like, that's what pine smells like. That's fantastic. Like, this is what the earth was like before the humans destroy it. You know? Exactly. Wow. Pine smells great. Mary Jo Foley. Guess what? It's your turn enterprise pick of the week? Part one.

Mary Jo Foley (01:48:57):
Yes. part one is all about Microsoft. Getting more serious about trying to get business users and enterprises to go with windows 11. So this week they announced two different tools that are aimed at it. Admins to help them ease the transition from windows 10 to windows 11. One of these is called the windows 11 and office 365 deployment lab kit. So this is something for admins to help them plan, test validate modern desktops, running windows 11 enterprise and Microsoft 365 enterprise apps. And the way it works is it uses a hyper V dependent lab environment so that you can test out things like domain, join clients, a domain controller, your internal gateway, and show you how a fully configured configuration management instance will work with your systems. There's also a thing called the windows 11 onboarding kit. So this is a set of office files that have templates and documents to help it communicate with users.

Mary Jo Foley (01:50:05):
<Laugh>, you know, it teeth, they're not the best at communicating with users. So this is gonna help you do that better, I guess the content can be customized as needed. It says so if you are interested in these kinds of tools or I guess a week ago, Microsoft announced something, what do they call this guided simulations for windows 11? They've now got another tool that shows you how similar windows 11 is to windows 10. So for people who have heard and maybe personally experienced things that traumatize them about going from 10 to 11 <laugh>, this is meant to calm your fears and tell you it's really not that different. Let us show you how it's not that different. So I think it's really interesting. It's, it's a little late for them to start doing some of this stuff. I feel like they could have done this a year ago, but maybe it's because they think 22 H two, which is coming this fall is really the version of windows 11. That will be the right one for companies to start thinking about upgrading to, especially since we think windows 12 is waiting in the wings for 2024. So yeah, there's, there's lots of tools like this. You can find them by going to the tech community blogs on Microsoft and, and look for some of these names of things I mentioned, and you'll get lots of details and other posts about all kinds of things you can do to try to make windows 11 migration a better and easier experience. You're gonna

Leo Laporte (01:51:33):
Get a big button that says don't panic that you can wear.

Mary Jo Foley (01:51:36):
Exactly. Yes. <Laugh> nobody panic. Do not panic. You can do more with less. I've heard that somewhere on the show today.

Leo Laporte (01:51:44):
<Laugh> who is this? Less and where can I find it? <Laugh> enterprise picked Nuro duo.

Mary Jo Foley (01:51:50):
Yeah. So this is a little concerning. I didn't realize this until like I saw Microsoft talk about this in a couple blog posts this week, but if you're still running office 2016 and office 2019 and many people are, I think I'm still, I, I think I'm still running office 2019 locally. In fact Microsoft has decided that next October, October 20, 23, you will no longer be able to connect to Microsoft 365 backend services with these programs. Oh starting then. So I'm telling you over a year in advance because you may think, oh, that's a year away. Well, this is a pretty major problem. Right? And what makes us, what makes some, it, people maybe lulled into a false sense of security is neither of these products is going to be out of support by next year. Oh. Both of them are in support until 2025. So you may think, oh, I'll be fine. I can run these until 20, 25. Not if you intend to connect to things like exchange and online SharePoint, online OneDrive on the back end, you only have until next fall that so just word to the Wises, mark your counter.

Leo Laporte (01:53:04):
I see you running a typo, which I like. So <laugh> why that you're looking at my icons down there. Are you <laugh> people are gonna complain about that. Not the typo. I mean about the <laugh> about the two years of not being supported there.

Mary Jo Foley (01:53:18):
Yeah. They're not gonna care. They've done this before, before.

Leo Laporte (01:53:21):
Oh, that's crazy. They've

Mary Jo Foley (01:53:22):
Done this before.

Leo Laporte (01:53:22):
That's that's a tough one.

Mary Jo Foley (01:53:24):
Yep. They're like, you know, guys, we know the, the products are supported, but if you wanna run 'em you can, you can just use 'em locally and not connect to anything on the back end.

Leo Laporte (01:53:32):
Enjoy. <laugh> okay. But wow. Wow.

Mary Jo Foley (01:53:37):
I'm not saying this is good. I'm just saying they've done it before and people were mad and they didn't really care. They they're gonna do it again.

Leo Laporte (01:53:44):
Yikes. I will. This is another one where the radio show is, is Sue's gonna take the, the brunt of this one.

Mary Jo Foley (01:53:51):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:53:51):
So I have to read this in detail. <Laugh> indeed. So I know what to say. Oh God. I just tell 'em to get on the Microsoft enterprise channel and they'll be fine. Don't you have the the LTS version. You don't have the yeah. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley (01:54:08):
Once LTC, come on,

Leo Laporte (01:54:09):
Come on, man. You even want five? If you're on need five, everything's fine. Oh God. Yeah. Oh, oh, help me. Help me. All right. So those are important. Yes. Important details by the way. Thank you to JT who is apparently found in downloaded and posted in our discord. All the Tokyo subway sounds. I think these are nice. Nice sounds for actually they, they have that same pleasant vibe. Yeah. As the windows 11 sound, you know sounds. Yeah. You could use those instead of the stub, your toe sound. Just little that you're a jerk monk, Mon monk. You're you're stupid BA you know, it's just, it's just so awful. Thank you, JT. He found them and I, maybe this is where I was thinking of. There was an OS micro Mac OS instant messaging program called ADM. And they, they had a sound theme that was the Tokyo train stations, but there were, this is the way I think of that. But there, the one I was using I'm sure was on windows and I think it had a lot more sounds including some longer announcements and so forth. So anyway, but thank you, JT. I will, that starts my collection. I want that Paris subway, you know? Oh, I love that. Oh, that's better. Isn't it? The SSCF sound.

Leo Laporte (01:55:34):
And then some better. I always like the, the woman on the Paris subway, she like Mosa de Lura M de it's the perfect voice. You know, it's like you on the, like the New York subway, it's like, get off mean

Mary Jo Foley (01:55:54):
Jump for the hole between the train and the platform you,

Leo Laporte (01:55:58):
Right. That's what they say in the UK. Find the cap that or Moe delver, M delver Mary Jo, do you have a beer for us?

Mary Jo Foley (01:56:08):
I do. And it's a very surprising beer. It's surprising because it's so I, I know I recommend a lot of high, a B beers. I think I've done some 17 eighteens. Okay. I'm not perfect. I've done it. But this is a beer that is only 1.7%. But the good news is it tastes amazing. It tastes like a regular beer. The beer is from hill farmstead. One of the most famous craft breweries in the United States, they have a beer called Charlie. Charlie is, or was, I think Charlie is deceased now, but it was their brewery golden retriever. So they named a beer for him. And this beer I had, I had a, the bartender Porter for me and didn't tell me the ABB and just said, what do you think of this? And I was like, wow, that's a really great farmhouse ale. It's really lemony. It's super bright and a little bit of hops, not too much hops. And he said, yeah, it's 1.7%. Ooh. And I was like, wow, that's it. I love it. And like, it actually tastes like a beer.

Leo Laporte (01:57:10):
That's more than sessionable that's

Mary Jo Foley (01:57:13):
Oh yeah. Drink it all day. You drink this all day and you'd be okay. Yeah. Yeah, but what's great is a lot of breweries now are making these lighter beers. And when you drink 'em you're like, eh, it's just not very tasty or it's taste kinda watered down or weak. This one, if you didn't know, it was 1.7, it tastes like a full fledge, like six, seven, 8% beer. It's it's got all the flavor, all the hops delicious. So if you can find it it's bottled. I think maybe even in cans on draft hill farmstead, Charlie is your beer.

Leo Laporte (01:57:43):
That's the, that, that beer has a jingle.

Song (01:57:46):
There's a B that's here today and they called

Mary Jo Foley (01:57:52):
B

Leo Laporte (01:57:53):
You thank you, Mary Jo Foley. You remember that? You probably don't. You have to be pretty. Yeah, I do. No. You remember beer? That's here to stay and they call it Charlie, Mary Jo Foley is a girl that hears it's here to say, was it, what was it? It it's a it's Charlie perfume. And it was Bobby Short singer

Song (01:58:24):
And a young kind of now Charlie kinda, kinda Charlie.

Leo Laporte (01:58:32):
Okay. That's gonna guarantee that we get taken down by the Charlie perfume, Conor conglomerate. Soon if they're still in business and maybe we're in luck and content ID, you know, it's so funny cuz this, the ad is on YouTube. I'm playing it from YouTube. Should I play it in a podcast? Youtube will take it down. Right. And I get it. I don't understand the process is not good. It's not good. If, if you heard, if you, if you heard us talking about it, but you heard nothing. It's because the editors are protecting me for myself. <Laugh> I, you know, I'm the one that says leave it in, leave it in. I don't care. Leave it in. Yeah. And then we get taken down. Sure. Everybody's mad at me. Thank you very much. Mary Jo Foley all about microsoft.com. That's her ZD net blog. Thank you for doing such a great job last week. Yeah, you're welcome. It gives us permission to have another lost weekend. Sometimes soon <laugh> actually have jury duty this week, next week.

Leo Laporte (01:59:36):
So I'm start around this year. Isn't I may not tell everybody tell you're you know, under the weather. Well, I will test and if I test positive on Sunday, I'll say, yeah, I can't do it, but I put it off. It was supposed to be during the cruise. So I've already put it off once. You know what I, I believe in doing it because if, if the only people who serve on juries, the people who can't think of a way to get out of it <laugh> yeah, that's not good. No's not good. That's not good. So as my civic duty, I'm looking forward to it. I'll get that $5 a day and I'm excited about that. Yep. So it may, it's unknown, right? I call Sunday and if they need me, I'll be there. It's unknown. I think by Wednesday I should be here. But if I'm not, that's why even if you have to go in, if not, I I've only served on one jury. It was great fun. I highly recommend it. I've never had to do it. You probably put on a, a, you know, a wig. No, I got called recently for the first time in my life and they canceled it. Yeah. I know. That's I'm sure what

Mary Jo Foley (02:00:37):
I've been called many times, but I've never served. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:00:41):
Yeah. I was on a federal jury. That was a fascinating oh, wow. Yeah. Wow. Thank you, Mary Jo Paul Thra thera.com become a premium member. So you get all the good juicy stuff. It's worth it. Juicy. I pay no it's worth it. I'm telling you T but there's a lot of free content too. Thra T H U R R O double. Good.Com. Paul's field guide to windows 10 is available@leanpub.com. Soon the field guide to windows 11, the manuscript will be slightly stained by seawater and tears of melting glaciers, but it will be very fresh. Smell the Piney scent of the field guide to windows 11, lean pub.com. We do windows weekly on Wednesdays 11:00 AM Pacific 2:00 PM. Eastern time, 1800 UTC. You can watch us do it. Live, live.Twit.tv. There's audio and video feeds. So I guess you could watch or listen live if you're watching and, and listening and or listening live chat live in our IRC chat, irc.Twit.tv.

Leo Laporte (02:01:46):
You can use a browser to go there, but you can also if you're an old school IRC user use your IRC client. It's actually great. All the information that you need to log in is available at IRC. Do TWiT do TV club members can use our discord, always fun in there. Lots of animated gifts and fun and games. And we've got some great stuff coming up in the club in our discord coming soon, we're gonna do a members, ask me anything or a member's meet and greet. It's put that together. I think that's gonna be a lot of fun. We pull that up here. I have to push some buttons to get it going. Here we go. There it is. There's the subway things. Let's see what, what is coming up? Three events members, fireside chat that's tomorrow. 9:00 AM, early morning fire August 18th, the rescheduled Alex Lindsay AMA that I know a lot of people want that.

Leo Laporte (02:02:45):
And Stacy's book club this month coming up, August 25th, Clara and the sun really good novel. I'll be there. And it'll be a lot of fun. The club has not just discussions about all of our shows, but all kinds of geeky conversations, including travel. We have a cruise channel. We have ham radio, coding, comics, beer, wine, and cocktails, data science. It's a, it's a great community, highly recommended. You also get for your $7 a month, not only access to the discord, you also get ad free versions of all the shows, including the brand new hands on windows, Paul thera hosts. That's just launching now and that's thanks to club members who made that possible. Thank you club members. You also get the TWiT plus feed, which has material that we don't put out as podcast. There's lots of good stuff in there.

Leo Laporte (02:03:39):
You can subscribe to individual shows like hands on windows for 2 99 a month. All of that at TWiT.tv/club TWiT. I think that that hands on windows, correct me if I'm wrong. Paul is club only at this point, right? Mm-Hmm <affirmative> that's right. And we do that. Not because we wanna leave anybody out, but because when shows are brand new, like this weekend in space was no advertising, no audience, they go hand in hand. So the club members basically are financing. And so we give them access, but if all goes well and I'm sure it will, that will eventually become a an advertising supported show available to all. But for now I think seven bucks a month, it's not a lot to pay for all that goodness. Episode one, a hands on windows comes out this week. Yes. This should be tomorrow, tomorrow.

Leo Laporte (02:04:28):
Every mm-hmm gonna be every Thursday. And you're doing like, you know, the stuff, you know, you do, you know, on your tips. Yeah. I mean, well, the first few will be be, you know, the basics top. Yeah. 10 new features, top 10, terrible new changes, you know, that kind of stuff. And then we'll yeah, we'll settle into yeah, no TWiTtter is not turning into a paywall P <laugh>. We give you so much free content, including this show do, do available at TWiT that TV slash WW download it for free, add supported, but free. You also can see it on YouTube. That's free, free and if you want, you can even subscribe in your favorite podcast player and get it every Wednesday. The minute it's available for windows weekly. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Mary Jo. Have a wonderful week. Let's see you next time right here on windows weekly.