Windows Weekly Episode 841 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, A review of Patch Tuesday with Paul Throt and Richard Campbell. We'll also talk about Windows 365. Switch a look at Microsoft's revenues compared to, let's say, oh, I don't know, apple and Amazon. And we're gonna talk about the new developing online development tool from Google that uses something you <laugh>. You might be surprised to hear it's a little something from Microsoft. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly podcasts you love

TWIT Intro (00:00:31):
From people you trust. This is,

Leo Laporte (00:00:41):
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thora and Richard Campbell, episode 841, recorded Wednesday, August 9th, 2023. You've been ified. Windows Weekly is brought to you by Duo Protect Against Breaches with a leading access management suite, providing strong multi-layered defenses to only allow legitimate users in. For any organization concerned about being breached and in need of a solution, fast Duo quickly enables strong security and improves user productivity. Visit css.co/twit for a free trial. It's time for Windows Weekly. <Laugh>. It was a very nice one week opening. <Laugh>, that's Richie Campbell. That's junior high school going there, Leo. Yeah, it's great. Thanks Paul. That's Paul Ott. Hello. You two. You gamers you. How you doing? Hello, Leo. Windows and hello Leo dozers. Join us all. Did you have a good week? Yeah. I feel like some social grease must be exchanged at this point. It's, you're looking mighty fine, Paul.

(00:01:53):
So anyway, how's Windows <laugh>? Me too. What's up with 11? I just, that's enough Greece. That's enough grease. Can we just celebrate for a moment that the first line item on the notes today is Windows? It hasn't been that way. It's been a while in months. It's been a while. Try to mix it around, you know, we'll mix it around a little bit. No, Activision to eat up the first five minutes. No, it's a little bit, little bit of Activision. Later. Little later. We'll get to it. We'll get to it. Well, what's up? We, we passed an interesting milestone yesterday being Tuesday. Being patched Tuesday weekday, which is, this is, what's that weekday? No, is it Week B? Week B Oh, week. No. Week B, I'm sorry. Week B. Week B I said something something else. That was, we had a week E That was fun. Yes, we did have a week, a couple of week. Actually, technically we have four of those a year. Although Microsoft doesn't always observe them or whatever's <laugh>. Anyway so week B is past Tuesday, as we know. Week D of the previous month is the preview update for the patch. Tuesday we're celebrating this month and this week past Tuesday, marks the first time since the release of Windows 11, version 22 H two,

Paul Thurrott (00:02:59):
In which we received not even one new feature. First time. Yay. Huh? Yep. Just admitted me. Like, you know, change is good. You go first. I'm really excited. Are they saying Windows is done? No, I think what they finished, they're saying is August is the month in which they're gonna complete 23 H two. Yeah. Which is also moment four. And that's where we're gonna get several new features, I'll call it mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. so that will be finalized later this month. We don't know when, and they won't tell us when, so it doesn't matter. But we'll see it move into the release preview at some point. And you know that we'll, we'll, we'll have that idea that it's coming. Preview released in September, almost certainly, assuming that schedule is correct and doesn't change. And then final release, <laugh> final release in October, which is ludicrous because, you know, there'll be something in November too, because Microsoft.

(00:03:48):
Right. So don't worry about that stuff. There's reasons. Because reasons. Yeah. right before the show started, I was racing to write a blog post about a new Canary build and probably should have bothered because there's nothing going on. Canary as we know, or believe I should say, is the kind of preview of what we think Windows 12 will be. So far it has been nothing. The most dramatic updates to it so far have been adding features into it that already debuted previously in Dev or Beta. So, you know, whatever. This release was particularly uninteresting. Two features previously debuted in beta devs, excuse me, were added a new notification icon in the system tray Little, actually, what does it look like now? I think it is a bell. Anyway, a little bell thing. And the new color filter options, which are part of accessibility sittings settings. Nothing dramatic there. There is an update in it for the snipping tool app. So we could see that honestly at any time. And basically, if you're familiar with this tool, which has gotten bigger and more feature packed in recent months, you know that it now does screen recordings. And so they're adding buttons for editing. The screenshot you just took in paint or editing the screen recording you just took in clip. So not much there.

(00:05:06):
And then we finally have something interesting <laugh>. So I assume most listeners or viewers are at least somewhat familiar with I have lost Discord. Oh, here it goes. Are familiar with windows 365. Right? This is the cloud pc, the evolution of that Azure Virtual, what was it called? The other one? Window. whatever The Azure virtual machine feature was. Basically a managed way for businesses to have Windows 11 PCs up in the cloud. They have, I don't remember when this was announced, but at one point they were talking about the ability to switch between your local Windows 11 install and your cloud PC using the task view button that appears by default in your task bar. And this feature is now available in public preview. It is called Windows 365 Switch. Right. And if you're familiar with task task view, which I actually disabled the button for when you bring it up, it gives you a view of all of the open windows in your current desktop. It gives you the ability to go to a new desktop. So this is the virtual desktop functionality. And next to that, if you have Cloud PC installed and configured you will have the ability to switch to your cloud PC as well. So you can kind of click back and forth between the two environments.

Richard Campbell (00:06:23):
Interesting.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:24):
Yeah. It's, it looks like it's pretty well done, honestly.

Richard Campbell (00:06:27):
I'm just wondering how many people are actually using this.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:30):
Yeah. Well, this particular feature is zero because to <laugh>, to use this, you actually have to install the Windows Insider, preview beta channel version on your cloud PC and your local pc. Right? Then you wait a few hours because, you know, it's like a witches brew and it takes a little while.

Richard Campbell (00:06:45):
Yeah. Provisioning is the polite term. Oh. Which is BREW is another version

Paul Thurrott (00:06:48):
Of it. Sorry. my non-technical term for that. And it will disappear. You'll get a little popup. We'll say you can do this now, and then it's available and you can, you can make it happen. So that's a cool feature. Still kind of curious, like you, you in tandem, what you, with what you just said, you know, what's the use case here? What's the audience size? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I don't know.

Richard Campbell (00:07:12):
I mean, don't know. I kind of feel like I wanna set something like that, this up with my laptop so that I have, if I need more horsepower mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I've just tap to the cloud. Right. And the idea of having it integrated, so you're not going either or. Right. It just always have it available to you. That's interesting. This feels like you are trying to figure out how to make this a product people actually care about.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:32):
So what's the other, sorry, what is the, does anyone know the Azure feature? The Azure Virtual Machine feature? The, the thing that preceded this and is still available, it is called Azure

Richard Campbell (00:07:39):
Virtual Desktop.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:40):
Azure. So based on what you just said, it actually sounds like Azure Virtual Desktop would be a better solution to that problem because mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you're using a full featured Windows 11 PC of whatever, you know, age and power and, and so forth. But every once in a while for whatever reason, maybe a developer topic or a developer task or maybe a, a content creation task, you want the additional power that might be in this virtual machine. Right. With Windows 365, you pay a, a fee every month. It's just a steady monthly fee. But the Azure, sorry, Azure Virtual Desktop is a consumption model, if I'm not mistaken. Right. Yeah. So that actually kind of is more in line with what you're saying. In other words, every once in a while you might not even need it once in a given month, but then the next month you need it twice. So you kind of want to, what you want to do there, I would assume is just pay for the times you use

Richard Campbell (00:08:25):
It. Yeah. It doesn't work that well at the singleton level. Yeah. It works really well at the enterprise level where there's always a few running. 'cause You kind of, you need an instance in place to have the other instances launch reasonably, like from cold A V D's pretty brutal. Okay. So if, if I ran a b d by myself, I would be sad. But if I have a few enough friends to have one running, so the others are going, and you, you do vary cost as more instances launch, it's gonna go up. So you always have a little bit of burn and still be efficient. It go completely cold is kind of sucky, but yeah. It's just, it's too complicated for a consumer. Like it's not trivial to get an a V D set system set up properly, and you have it behaved correctly and so forth. It's just Okay. The folks that I know that the, the impetus on it is, is pandemic stuff, it's badly behaved apps. They just couldn't make work over the V P N. They're not prepared to really shift them into the cloud. Mm-Hmm. So it's like, let's put 'em in a virtual desktop Yeah. Set up. Well sandbox, in the past, I would've done this with terminal services. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Right? So a v d sort of an advanced version of terminal

Paul Thurrott (00:09:30):
Service. Even then, it seems like what you would want is potentially is an older version of Windows, right?

Richard Campbell (00:09:36):
O often, although, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:37):
I mean, not

Richard Campbell (00:09:38):
Always though.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:40):
Not always

Richard Campbell (00:09:40):
Chain inflection to Chris Jackson. You can tell Windows 10 to be whatever version of Windows you need in relation to any given application. It's like when this app asks your Windows seven and it's fine. Right? Like, that

Paul Thurrott (00:09:51):
Works. What happens when you do that to Windows 11? Does it just giggle

Richard Campbell (00:09:54):
<Laugh>? I think it actually just loads the Apple homepage

Paul Thurrott (00:09:59):
TV <laugh>. It's like, oh, did you want phone link? Can't, so it can't do that compatibility mode at all? No. It,

Richard Campbell (00:10:06):
It, it can, but, but it's, it's, it's probably working now. It was very broken at the beginning of Windows 11, but as they gradually ten five, eleven, ten, right. Yeah. And all the, the group policy stuff got wind up

Paul Thurrott (00:10:20):
Ified sounds like a, like a religious term. We're gonna 10 you

Richard Campbell (00:10:23):
Totally <laugh>. I, it, it took a A V D V version three to finally get the group policy stuff working well enough that you can reasonably move up migrate <laugh> Okay. Up till 11 with, if you're using group policy. Again, this is all <inaudible> stuff. Like normal people should not worry about this. But

Paul Thurrott (00:10:40):
Yeah, that's didn't see in the

Leo Laporte (00:10:42):
Discovery of the Activision trial, a memo from Microsoft, some executive some years ago saying this was the future of Windows. Was this Windows in the cloud?

Paul Thurrott (00:10:52):
Yeah. There was a throwaway line like that. Yeah. But you, I, you know, you gotta be careful with this kind of stuff. I, there's two sides to this, right? One is they would've said the same thing about Xbox Cloud gaming, right? Which now they're like, oh, it's just a, it's like a, it's like a trailer for a game. You know? That's all people ever used it for, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But on the other hand I think it was on live, you know, they started out as gaming service and went to streaming Windows desktops. Because as it turns out, if you can stream games badly to pretty good, you can actually stream desktops pretty good, like all the time. Or good, pretty good to good. And it's possible. Yeah. I mean, it's possible. I, I, we were just talking about that switch feature, which makes sense.

(00:11:34):
It's kind of a Windows 11 on Windows 11 scenario. But honestly, you could imagine someone with an iPad Pro, a Chromebook whatever device you choose, where you might have a sim that feel able to build it in this way. But in the same way that in Windows you can boot into that environment and that return on the device, what comes on is this Windows thing. Instead it's, you know, streaming over the cloud, and then you have a button where you go back to the na the native environment or whatever facility there is for that kinda switch. I think honestly, that type of thing makes more sense on a non Windows platform. Maybe, you know, no one on Windows ten's gonna wanna win, run Windows 11 in the cloud, right? I mean, it's, I could pitch the reverse. So I don't know. I, you know. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I really don't know.

Richard Campbell (00:12:19):
Yeah. I'm pretty sure they're busy solving a problem. Not a lot of people have. And the few that do don't know they have it.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:27):
This came this must have come up last week, I would imagine. 'cause I was someone I, yeah, I had responded to a it was a column in computer world, but it was really just the opinion of a guy who works for an Apple centric small business company. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And that Windows was a declining platform, which, you know, there's plenty of cases to be made for any desktop environment as they declining platform in some way. Right. You know, mobile has exploded, web has exploded, et cetera. Sure. but yeah. And I made the case, you know, that in this imagine future where Windows actually does decline, Microsoft can still potentially come out well ahead because of all of their cloud advances and so forth. Yeah. And their own device

Richard Campbell (00:13:04):
Management. So part of this is the hedge, by the way, what platform isn't a declining platform. I mean,

Paul Thurrott (00:13:10):
Actually, right. So <laugh> Yeah. We're not gonna talk, we, this isn't in the notes, but since you mentioned this, you know, one of the interesting things that's happened over the past couple weeks with all of the earnings announcements that have come out, and we'll talk about a couple of those in a minute is this notion that the markets for PCs, tablets, and smartphones are all declining the PC market. We're seeing many indications from the platform, the hardware of makers themselves. Intel a md mm-hmm. <Affirmative> also from the hardware makers, meaning the PC makers. And for Microsoft who are saying, actually, we see a light at the end of the tunnel. Now there's some debate on when this thing kinda levels out and maybe start growing again. But most people seem to think it's gonna happen in the second half of this year.

(00:13:48):
Right. And smartphone space, that is not the case at all. And the smartphone market is absolutely the biggest personal computer hardware market, but it has also suffered the biggest declines. And that is not gonna stop. We'll talk about actually Sony's earnings much later in the show as well. But they make the camera sensors that are used by most flagship smartphones mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, and they see no indication that this is gonna happen until 2024 at the earliest was the way they put it. And even Apple came out and said, actually, yeah, the smartphone market is in decline. Which is something that they don't usually say, and they're about to launch a new generation of smartphones.

Richard Campbell (00:14:25):
Sure, yeah. One would argue, does their cadence still make sense? But I, I keep looking back at what happened with iPad as an interesting example mm-hmm. <Affirmative> of when you get a device good enough, you just don't have an urge to replace it.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:38):
That's right. So I'm, I'm gonna get this number wrong, but it's plus or minus one year <laugh> to be incorrect, which is the PC market suffered a, a six or seven year-ish decline mm-hmm. <Affirmative> before the pandemic unit sales every year. The iPad did as well. In fact. Yeah. I think the iPad sales slump actually lasted longer. But yes, you run into an issue. Look, it's not like Apple doesn't have a lot of competition in tablets, unfortunately. Sure. good competition. So even when you have something like a cheap and or Amazon tablet, you can make a really compelling case, spend the money on the base iPad, give that to your kid or to yourself mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and forget about this toy that, you know, with this ridiculous Fisher-Price processor that's in it or whatever, and terrible screen resolution and non-compatible store and

Richard Campbell (00:15:28):
All. And that's what really ultimately happens to an iPad, is eventually Apple refuses to support it anymore. <Laugh>, it's not like it stops working, it's just that, you know, they're five versions ahead now and they don't want to go to the, they don't wanna do the regression testing anymore.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:41):
Yep. Yeah. So, but, but I, you know, again, I because now I'm apparently an Apple supporter, I'll just say they actually do a really good job of supporting the devices with the West versions and just No, they really do for a long time. Yeah. Do I just

Richard Campbell (00:15:52):
Wonder if they have enough nerve to acknowledge you? We don't need a new phone each year. Like you could go Oh, yeah. Every other year cadence. Well, no,

Leo Laporte (00:15:59):
They do enough. They acknow acknowledge that. I think they really are in every other year cadence. And they know that users keep

Paul Thurrott (00:16:04):
Even more each. Yeah. Well, they, they don't like to use the SS branding anymore, but there, it really is a big little cadence. And listen, they stopped reporting unit sales at some point. Mm-Hmm. I don't know, probably three years ago-ish now. Maybe this is the next step. Yeah. You know, and, and look, their, their processor, their processors are fantastic. They, this, they're, they are using last year's processor now and a lot of their new, so mm-hmm. <Affirmative> devices rather. And

Leo Laporte (00:16:31):
We were speculating that some of that's Benning just as Intel used to take the chips off the dye and say, okay, you're a slower one. You're a cell on, you're, you know, you're, you're Penem too, and, and Apple's probably doing the same thing. You

Paul Thurrott (00:16:46):
Know, what I love about that is how sloppy that is. Right. <laugh>, that this notion that the most highly refined manufacturing process known to man is so sloppy that you're making a very particular chip and it comes out, you're like, yeah, not quite, not quite <laugh>, it's not

Leo Laporte (00:17:01):
As sloppy, but it is a, I mean, think what they're doing, Paul, that's pretty

Paul Thurrott (00:17:05):
Amazing. I know, I know. But it's like you're, it's so like, it's no. So in the United States, we get these perfectly cut meat, you know, meat things. You see like a chicken breast, you have no idea. It came from an animal in Mexico. It's a guy with a machete. There's all kinds of crap in there. So you get like, the end of a bone, you get like, whatever. And like, this might, this process is more like that. It's like, alright, what do we got? We got a couple of I sevens it looks like we got a couple of I fives. It's like the choice making a thing between

Leo Laporte (00:17:30):
A chicken breast with a little bone in it and liquified processed chicken

Paul Thurrott (00:17:35):
<Laugh>. No, not debating it. I, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:17:37):
Yeah. I would probably have the breast. You know, it's interesting, we were talking about this yesterday on MAC Break weekly. Apple has such a good deal with T SS M C. Not only are they buying all their chips for the next year, but T S M C has agreed to pay for the defective chips. They normally

Paul Thurrott (00:17:52):
Would. But you should say too, just add you're talking about three nanometer chips, three nan dominate. Yeah. The market for the next gen, you know, best ever process. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:18:01):
So Intel, when it buys from T S M C, it's next. Once there's some chips next year, we'll pay for the 30% defective chips on, you know, they pay for the whole of course wafer. Yeah. And, and then if there are some bad dyes on the wafer, that's too bad for you Intel. But Apple only buys the known good chips. And, but this is the whole nature. You can eat. T

Paul Thurrott (00:18:24):
You know, it's amazing. This is how you benefit when you are one of the biggest or the biggest, right. This is why, you know, people in the Microsoft camp is so worried about surface, a lot of debate about Surface. Should they continue, what do they do is premium only the best approach, whatever. And it's like, guys, you know, one of the things you probably don't think too much about is that Microsoft is one of the big, is the second biggest company in the world. But as a PC maker, they're like number 200 and they just don't warrant any attention from chip makers before other companies are satisfied. Right. So when new chips come out, you know, Lenovo, hp, Dell have a lot more leverage. Yeah. than Microsoft does in this case. You know? So anyway, Apple's on the reverse end of that spectrum, obviously. So they're doing, you know, they're,

Leo Laporte (00:19:07):
They'll, it's pretty amazing. But nevertheless, apple, as you know, had a bad quarter. And the stock price went down. They lost $200 billion in value. Yeah. They made, by the way. And it is, I think Microsoft made more, but they made 20 billion in this bad quarter at Micro

Paul Thurrott (00:19:23):
Apple. Yeah. So let's, I was gonna quickly to recap. Yeah, right. Exactly. <laugh>, it was like, it, it'd be like I, I lost a penny and went back to find it and I couldn't, you know, it was a tough quarter.

Leo Laporte (00:19:33):
<Laugh> broke my heart.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:37):
Microsoft announced their earnings for the previous quarter. I wanna call it the second quarter. 'cause It's the second quarter. Financially, ev every company has a different

Leo Laporte (00:19:43):
Fiscal quarter, right? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:45):
But the finfin is this the quarter, you know, the quarter ending June 30 Microsoft earned a net income of $20 billion, 20.1 on revenues of 56.2 billion. Google announced their earnings the next day, I believe, or within a day or two very close 18.4 billion in net income. And actually half again, 74.6 billion in revenues. Right. remember that 79% of that money comes from advertising. So the two big companies that have announced since then are Amazon and Apple. And let's do Apple first. 'cause We were just talking about Apple. Apple, I would call their, so net income, I should say you're right, a little bit under Microsoft. 19.9 billion on revenues of 81.8 billion. Right. Sparked

Leo Laporte (00:20:30):
The hardware company with the

Paul Thurrott (00:20:31):
Awesome margins as opposed to the services company with spectacular

Leo Laporte (00:20:35):
Margins. Exactly. <laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (00:20:37):
I know. It's just Apple. Is that, yeah. You can't learn anything from Apple. You can just admire how different

Leo Laporte (00:20:43):
They are. What's the margin on the $15 billion a year that Google gives them just to be the default search on a phone?

Paul Thurrott (00:20:50):
Yeah. What's the margin

Leo Laporte (00:20:51):
On that? I believe that would be a hundred

Paul Thurrott (00:20:53):
Percent. I think it's a hundred percent. Yeah. I'm not a, not a financial expert, but I can say, I dunno if that's

Leo Laporte (00:20:56):
Gap or non-gaap, but

Paul Thurrott (00:20:58):
I think it's a lot. Let's put it that way. The, yeah. The interesting thing to look in a, in a year in which the smartphone market is cratering for them to essentially have flat net income and I would say, I'm sorry, not, and flat revenues, revenues actually declined by 1%, but 1%. Yeah. Relatively flat. This is routing out. I mean, you, you could, you could, and this is

Leo Laporte (00:21:20):
A slow quarter

Paul Thurrott (00:21:21):
Next quarter financial just to next quarters are bigger quarter

Leo Laporte (00:21:24):
'Cause they got a new iPhone and all that. But this is always the slowest quarter of the year.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:28):
The thing you look at, at Apple, which was the thing we used to look at with Microsoft, and the thing we literally do look at with Google is they used, they are kind of a one product company. Yeah. So they're trying to shake out of that. Google's doing that very slowly. And

Richard Campbell (00:21:40):
It isn't working <laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:21:42):
Well, it's, it's, okay. So the iPhone used to be in the 70 something percent range

Richard Campbell (00:21:46):
Of Apple revenues. Yeah. Now it's in the

Paul Thurrott (00:21:47):
Sixties, it's, no, it's, it's 44.8%. Oh,

Richard Campbell (00:21:50):
Wow. Okay. That is impressive.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:51):
That is impressive.

Richard Campbell (00:21:52):
Less than half is says something.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:54):
There is a, there's an asterisk to this, but, but still that's important.

Richard Campbell (00:21:57):
So the smartphone market is declining.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:59):
And the thing, it's weird because, you know, the iPad came, the Apple Watch came, whatever devices they have come kind of come and you think, well, what is this gonna be? The next iPod, the next iPhone? And they, they, they never really are mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. but the next big thing for them is services. Right. And 21.2 billion in revenues. That is about two-thirds the size of the iPhone by revenue and a gain of 8.2% year over year. That's, that's amazing. Now, the asterisk is those two product lines, those two businesses are completely <laugh> related to each other, right? Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:22:36):
Neither would you buy an iPhone. You buy services with

Paul Thurrott (00:22:38):
It. That's right. Neither would it exist without the other, yeah. Yeah. So, but you know what, that's, this to me is smart. I, I don't wanna call it bundling. It's, it's like a value added service. Some of it reeks the bundling. Like you have to have a certain amount of iCloud surge if you have a certain number of devices. You know, that's how they get you. Yep. they obviously have the Apple one plans where you can get a bunch of services, some of which you might not want for kind of a lower cost. It hurts competitors like Spotify, et cetera, et cetera, whatever. But it's for Apple, this is a great business. I mean, just to, when you look at things like the Mac and the iPad, 6.8 and 5.8 billion, those are both roughly one third to one quarter of the size of services right now. Yeah. By revenue. Now they're gonna have, they'll have up quarters because of, you know, new releases and so forth. But it, that's, it's very interesting. I mean, so this, as is always the case with Apple, whether you love 'em or hate 'em financially, <laugh>, I don't know

Richard Campbell (00:23:29):
What wanna to say. These guys know how to make money.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:31):
They're the largest company, the world by complain. Like

Richard Campbell (00:23:34):
Yep. You're talking about the highest market cap company in the world. Are you really gonna tell 'em how they're doing it wrong?

Paul Thurrott (00:23:39):
Exactly. Are you sure? Yeah, exactly. And to, to Leo's point there was a lot of doom and gloom. About a week ago, apple came out and said, yeah, you know, we're in the middle of a smartphone slump, blah, blah, blah. Everyone's screwed. <Laugh>, and then <inaudible>, we just got a 100% guarantee. We're getting all the three animated shapes. Suck it <laugh>. You know? And that's, that's Apple. I mean, that's,

Leo Laporte (00:23:59):
It's pretty

Paul Thurrott (00:24:00):
Amazing. You're amazing like that. It is, it is just astonish. Astonishing.

Leo Laporte (00:24:02):
Yeah. Yeah. It's also an argument that they're a monopoly. But we won't, we won't.

Richard Campbell (00:24:07):
Well, how many of those services customers don't have any Apple devices? Right. Like right at, at least when you look at even Google, there are people selecting their services's.

Leo Laporte (00:24:17):
Yeah, no, it's a pure, it's a pure eco system play, and it's the lock in play. There's no one better at it than Apple. And that

Richard Campbell (00:24:23):
They are the definitive walled garden. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:26):
You can't begrudge them wanting to leverage their very money happy user base, <laugh>. I mean, they're always happy to spend money on the side mean, of

Richard Campbell (00:24:35):
Course. Yes. Our customers are desperate to spend money with us, us the least. We do help them. We

Paul Thurrott (00:24:39):
Are trying as hard as we can to find new ways. Mm-Hmm. <laugh> you know, we're, we're running out of ideas. Yeah. So

Richard Campbell (00:24:44):
Do you

Leo Laporte (00:24:44):
Think Apple actually targeted affluent users? I guess they probably did. I mean, they didn't, they did nothing to

Richard Campbell (00:24:50):
Look at the marketing of their products. Yeah. They don't, they're not looking for a down market. Right. I mean, that's what made the SS so weird, really. Right. You're gonna make a budget version of your product. Right. Like, what are doing?

Leo Laporte (00:25:00):
They've never done that. They

Paul Thurrott (00:25:02):
Yeah. So there was a time when Apple looked at doing netbooks. Right. And they could've, and you know, there's lots of stories, many apocryphal about how they got off of that and went to tablets, you know, Johnny ipo, I don't even know where, where we did a keyword, you know, whatever. But <laugh> they went the direction they went. I, and I have to say, I don't believe

Leo Laporte (00:25:20):
That's his then, but Okay. <Laugh>, Homer Simpson, I believe, but, okay. <Laugh>.

Richard Campbell (00:25:27):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:28):
What do we need a keyboard

Richard Campbell (00:25:29):
For? Sorry. That was

Paul Thurrott (00:25:30):
Actually silly. Right? So

(00:25:35):
but you know what, it's an interesting thing because the iPad has been a tremendous business for them. It's still a, an upscale thing. It, but it's also mainstream, which is amazing. They continue to find new ways to have more expensive iPads. And they're doing great with that. And had they gone down the Netflix the Netflix, the Epic route, I think honestly they would've tarnished the brand. It would've been bad for the Mac. You know, they would've been supporting these lower end computers. We, you, it's, it was the right decision in their case. You know, in fact, you could make an argument that the PC makers rushing after netbooks, like they did 10 or even whatever years ago, 20 years ago, was maybe the dumbest thing they ever did to harm themselves in the history of PCs. They lowered the expectations of users on price and quality. Yep. And it was just the wrong thing to do. But, you know, they're going after the quick buck. Yeah. Plus they went with Linux. 'cause They didn't wanna pay that Windows licensing fee. Microsoft showed them, we'll give you a piece of crap version of Windows too. <Laugh>. You know, so <laugh>, it's just crazy. It was just <crosstalk>.

Richard Campbell (00:26:33):
Well, and what would argue that Apple also saved the laptop market, right? Yeah. Between the air and the iPad, there was no ability to sell a sub thousand dollars laptop. If you wanna spend less than a thousand bucks, you'd buy an iPad. And if the sub thousand dollars laptop was a terrible piece of plastic and they were trying to get that $500, I

Paul Thurrott (00:26:51):
I seek out, actively seek out articles that claim to find the best laptops you can buy for $500. Because I know that's a lie. Yeah. And even the wire cutter, which I actually do trust and like quite a bit mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, which is now part of the New York Times, does their annual kind of back to school thing. And it's like, you know, you really can get a pretty good laptop running 500, you know, 500 bucks. It's like, yeah, no, you really can't. Yeah. <laugh> that's, that is no, especially not for a kid who's gonna buy is about to go through four years of school. Yeah. You'd be lucky to get four months of use out of that thing before they get really aggravated with

Richard Campbell (00:27:22):
It. The big part is they're fragile 'cause they're so cheaply made. Right. And that's the thing kills you in the end. Yeah. It will, it will break.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:28):
Yep.

Richard Campbell (00:27:29):
But yeah, once the, once those devices came out, the laptop price bounced up. Right. It's the only thing that made sense and everybody got a better product for that. The problem.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:39):
The problem is, yeah. So PCs today are much better than they've ever been. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which is kind of a weird problem because people don't need to upgrade 'em very often, which

Richard Campbell (00:27:46):
Is <crosstalk>. Well, that was gonna happen anyway, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:27:48):
Yeah, I know. But it's just, you know, it's like, be careful what you wish for. It's like, okay, we went down the wrong path and

Richard Campbell (00:27:53):
Net book. Well, I don't think it did. I think you're, you're recognizing the maturation of an industry. Yeah. You know, and I, I used to work with organizations that replacing the workstations in the office every other year. Now it's easily four years. And we're talking about do the extended warranties make to go, to make sense to go out to six years? Because the, when they replace the machine, the, the user's reaction is not, oh my goodness. A nice fast machine. The user's reaction is, where's my stuff?

Paul Thurrott (00:28:21):
Right. Why does everything look different?

Richard Campbell (00:28:23):
Yeah. Why would you do this to me? Like, I'm just, it's just an impediment of productivity where it used to be a benefit to productivity. That's not how they're perceiving it anymore. So. Yeah, that's true. But you know, now I, you know, my experiments in my server closet, which is finally being retired in the next two weeks, but I'm not unhappy about that, was I built a para asymmetrical servers that I actually changed out fans and drives twice.

Paul Thurrott (00:28:47):
Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:28:47):
'Cause the processors, the motherboards were fine. So those now eight year old servers. And in my instinct is those things are bombs. Like, they're gonna kill you. They'll tip over at any time. And I'm just not gonna refit 'em again. I'm, I'm going to dispose of 'em once

Paul Thurrott (00:29:00):
It's wrong. It's like when a a headlight goes out in a car, you just do the both. 'cause <Laugh>, you know, the next one, soon you get home with the new light. You, you the other one's gonna just,

Richard Campbell (00:29:08):
It's absolutely the case. And then, and it literally, what's the last time

Paul Thurrott (00:29:10):
You had a headlight go out in a car? Just outta

Richard Campbell (00:29:12):
Curiosity. It's been a while. Yeah. They don't go out anymore. Come to think of it.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:16):
That's true. I guess it's LEDs.

Richard Campbell (00:29:18):
But this is the same thing that's happened to PCs, right? Is the quality of manufacturing and, and architecture's gone up. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and the power has been sufficient. Right. Right. That's right. By the way, if you get your hands on a Rolls-Royce brochure, <laugh>. 'cause When you get to the specs on a Rolls Royce, they don't give you the horsepower. They literally say sufficient. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:37):
Just like Apple. We

Richard Campbell (00:29:38):
<Laugh>. Yeah. Apple. We don't, we don't know mega, we, you know, we used to all

Leo Laporte (00:29:42):
Day battery life market

Richard Campbell (00:29:43):
Megahertz. That's all you know. Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:45):
Right. No bezel screen. Wait, what? I

Leo Laporte (00:29:47):
Got aero brochure in the mail yesterday. They didn't mention the horsepower either.

Richard Campbell (00:29:52):
Not so much. No. But we used to market PCs

Paul Thurrott (00:29:56):
On there, megahertz

Richard Campbell (00:29:57):
Worse. And we don't do that anymore because it's irrelevant.

Leo Laporte (00:30:00):
We also, we also used to get frequent blue screens of deaths. When's the last time you got a B S O D? So I

Paul Thurrott (00:30:05):
<Laugh>, I write a lot of laptop reviews and infrequently I will cover other things like a desktop, computers very infrequently, that kind of thing. But I'm, I'm getting a couple of small form factor computers in. And one arrived the other day and I did a little writeup about it today. I wasn't gonna talk about this, but, you know, I'm very familiar with the various microprocessor families, especially Intel has. And this one was an, it's a 12th gen, so it's not the current gen, but it's a 12th gen. I'm gonna get the model exactly wrong, but it's like 17 dash 12, 4 0 some number T And I'm like, huh, T <laugh>. What? I've never heard of this. You know, I've heard of, okay, so I gotta look this up. Right? There's you, this thing. So there's t

Leo Laporte (00:30:44):
Never heard of a t. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:30:46):
H t for for throt. K

Paul Thurrott (00:30:47):
<Laugh>. Yeah. So, well, I thought it's a, so like an intel knuck, a typical one, a mainstream Knuck would've a use search chip. 'cause It's really just a laptop, but in a small form factor body. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> a desktop body. This one though is like a business class machine. I'm like, this has gotta be something related to, it's a desktop chip. I bet. And it's a small form factor. I bet that's what it's for. And that is what it's for. I'd never heard of it, but there is a T series 12 and 13 gen lease where it is a, I don't know what it's based on

Leo Laporte (00:31:16):
Power optimized lifestyle computer

Paul Thurrott (00:31:19):
<Laugh>. Yeah. So the idea is it's, it's, it's, look

Leo Laporte (00:31:22):
All the letters, did you see it? E F G H, H K, H Q, K Ss, t u y

Paul Thurrott (00:31:28):
P. So it's designed for a case that has a, a minimal cooling and minimal venting. It's a

Leo Laporte (00:31:34):
Lifestyle

Paul Thurrott (00:31:35):
Computer. It's it's small, small, small form factor. The type of thing you're gonna plug in a mesa behind your road. So it's

Richard Campbell (00:31:40):
Quiet is the

Paul Thurrott (00:31:40):
Thing. I, I haven't run. I haven't even turned it on. It's quiet. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:31:43):
The, the, for your quiet

Paul Thurrott (00:31:44):
Lifestyle. We'll, it's, but it's a 35 watt part, right. So versus 15 or 28 for u n P series. So it's, you know, more powerful in that sense it's eight, eight cores. And by the way no, I think it's 12, 12 cores or eight core, let's say it's eight cores. But there were more performance cores than efficient cores, which is I think is the opposite mix on the mobile side. I could be wrong off the top of my head, but anyway, I thought it was really interesting. So there's all kind

Richard Campbell (00:32:09):
Simply typically it's been on my radar as I'm provisioning the networking up on the coast place Yeah. And realizing, Hey, I don't have a server closet anymore. Right. So the fans in, in switches not popular. Not, not a good thing.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:20):
Right.

Leo Laporte (00:32:21):
You need a lifestyle processor.

Richard Campbell (00:32:23):
I sure do. I I am selecting lifestyle switches,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:27):
<Laugh>. I bet it's cold up there in the lake in the winter. I'm thinking maybe you gotta have some small form factor computers just running full speed, you know?

Richard Campbell (00:32:33):
There you go. And all I gotta do is do a little steady at home and heat the house up. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:37):
That's right. Exactly.

Richard Campbell (00:32:39):
<Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:32:39):
That's funny too. So

Paul Thurrott (00:32:41):
Anyway, I I'd never heard it. When

Leo Laporte (00:32:42):
Are you gonna review these? What, what do you mean? Like, like the intel smart form factor, Lenovo nano, that kind of thing,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:48):
Or? Yeah, it's like that I'm not, it's not a Lenovo. I've got one coming from hp and the one I wrote about today is from Acer. Ah, but they're, you know, business class computers. You know, they, they look exactly like that little Lenovo that people are talking Yeah. Discord. Yeah. Nice. Yeah. Well, you know, the Knuck is doing what Knucks do, so we'll see, I was <crosstalk> soon.

Richard Campbell (00:33:07):
Soon there'll be the ACEs Knuck, and I don't, I think that's a bad thing. I don't know. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:11):
I don't know. I'm glad they're doing it. I don't know. I'm

Richard Campbell (00:33:13):
Glad to. And I'm, I've always been in admirer ACEs. I have a bunch of their stuff. They serve me well.

Leo Laporte (00:33:18):
Oh yeah. I love Aus routers are great. I don't, yeah. I

Paul Thurrott (00:33:21):
Don't review them very much, but they're, yeah, they're always pretty good. The other big tech revenue report was from Amazon. Of course, they always come in at the high end <laugh>, right. With revenues. But interestingly net income of only 6.7 billion on 134.4 billion. So not double apple, but you're getting close to there. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:33:44):
Margins, man,

Leo Laporte (00:33:46):
Look at the margins.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:47):
They're warehouse, you know, yada, yada, yada. But here's

Richard Campbell (00:33:51):
Warehouse there. You learn lower margins than even retail,

Paul Thurrott (00:33:55):
Right? Yeah. Right. And all the, and all the transportation they have to do and logistics. Oh, oh yeah. Lose money on exploitation

Richard Campbell (00:34:01):
Of workers implementation of robots, you

Leo Laporte (00:34:04):
Know? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:06):
Yeah. So <laugh>, so but Amazon's quarterly reports are very interesting because all they do is talk about milestones that they achieve, like more customers than ever are using fire tablet. They never have any like hard numbers for the most part. But one thing they do talk about explicitly is a w s and a w s actually revenues went up almost 11% to 22.1 billion in a quarter. But that's the slowest growth since 2015. It's also a lot slower than Microsoft's current growth rate with Azure, which in the last quarter was 26%, which granted down from the 70% it was at for a long, long time. But these are both maturing business is, and this is what you see. And so Amazon is starting to talk about a w s in the same way that Microsoft is with Azure as the platform for ai. And unfortunately for Microsoft, they're pretty well positioned for this, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and they li I'm not gonna list these, but they list all of the new a W Ss technologies and capabilities related to AI that they released or improved in just the past quarter. And it is a long list. So

Richard Campbell (00:35:14):
Well, and it, and it needs to be because they are not in the news for their AI

Paul Thurrott (00:35:18):
Efforts. That's right. That's right. But you know what? Amazon accepts the thing that I think Microsoft is having trouble with, and I really think Microsoft's perception issue dates back to decades ago, and their never ending desire to be like this Apple type consumer product companys, in addition to all the enterprise stuff that they did, where Amazon's like, know what, we're a backend service. We don't care if you use our first party services, our first party services, a w s and all of the things that are in a w s, and we want you to use those. Yeah. And if you look at all the most successful, well, a lot of the most successful services in the world, they're using a w s. Right? Right. And they just accepting their electricity, you know? Yeah. and their revenue. Well,

Richard Campbell (00:35:58):
I mean, they're one of their biggest am Amazon is one of the biggest customers of a w s Like, yes, they did make this product by accident. Right. They were trying to solve their own problem.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:06):
Right. But that's always the, but that's, I, I feel like Microsoft has done this. Google has done this. This is in an engineering focus company, creating something for yourself that solves problems and saves money. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, right? Amazon, Microsoft's trying to do this right now with the data center processes for ai. Oh, sure. Is. And then saying

Leo Laporte (00:36:24):
<Laugh>, that's how comper started, could sell this h and r block had excess capacity every month, but April.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:31):
Sure. But April, that's right.

Leo Laporte (00:36:33):
So they said, that's funny. What can we do with that? Completely

Paul Thurrott (00:36:35):
Forgot about that. Yeah, that's right.

Leo Laporte (00:36:36):
It's a longstanding tradition.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:38):
Yeah,

Richard Campbell (00:36:39):
It's a great point.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:40):
It's a good, it's a good business model. Absolutely. And they've been great with it anyway. So 70% of Amazon's overall operating profits, profits come from a w s So this is the thing that keeps the company afloat, right? When there were bad months with retail and trucking and employees and all the other junk that goes wrong at Amazon unionization. Yeah. Yeah. A w s isn't gonna unionized, I can tell you that. Yeah. Well, unless the A AI does it actually, that could happen <laugh>. But

Leo Laporte (00:37:06):
I thought you were gonna talk about Amazon's willingness to be infrastructure without, you know, like trumpeting their successes and stuff, like just sitting in the back seat. Right. You don't

Paul Thurrott (00:37:17):
Have to, their successes, we just earned, we just

Leo Laporte (00:37:20):
Share

Paul Thurrott (00:37:20):
$134.4 billion in revenues. And Apple, you know, the biggest company in the world, they only earned 82, so fuck you all <laugh>. You know, like that's their whole thing. They're just, you know, like whatever, we don't care. There's

Leo Laporte (00:37:32):
So much ego in the C-suites that I think it's challenging for them. But I think about, you know, though, there's a lot of companies, I have a friend who has made a very large fortune by being the No, no, by being the cell phone, the phone booth king. Because what happened was at and t was getting outta the phone booth business, right? He said, I'll, I'll buy 'em. And he, so he bought all the phone booths, put cell phones in them instead, so he didn't have to run infrastructure. And now he just goes around collecting quarters. It's not,

Paul Thurrott (00:38:05):
Does it actually make, so, makes money.

Leo Laporte (00:38:06):
He's multi, multi multimillionaire. He <laugh> has houses all over. The other thing he did was he, so as he's driving around collecting quarters, he realized, oh, this is a logistics business. Right? Right. The, you make more money if you figure out how to do this more efficiently. Just

Paul Thurrott (00:38:24):
Read the book about Amazon to figure this one. Yeah. You know,

Leo Laporte (00:38:26):
So then he said, you know, what else is, and then he, so now he also sells, if you go to any bodega in America, there's a freezer in there with ice cream in it. You've seen those, right. You get your drumsticks, you open it up, you get your drumstick, you buy it. He's, that's him. At the same time he's dev sending, picking up with quarters on the cell phones. He stops off and delivers ice cream. But the really insight he got was he put little scales in these freezer things. 'cause You don't wanna visit 'em if they don't need to be stocked. So they, they phone home and say, I'm low. 'cause Their weight is low. And then you, and then the truck stops on the way to pick up the quarters, it stops and drops off some ice cream. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:39:06):
Amazing. That's amazing.

Leo Laporte (00:39:07):
But my main point is, I think there are a lot of covert billionaires in this country Sure. Who don't blow their own horn. They're, they're running cement companies. Well, <laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (00:39:18):
So gravel

Leo Laporte (00:39:19):
Companies they're willing to be infrastructure without the glory.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:24):
The one thing that, okay, but the one thing Amazon has going forward as far as publicity goes, is the billions of boxes that are delivered every day with their logo on it in trucks with their logo on it that we all see on the road. Oh yeah. We all wait. You know, so it's not like Amazon's not in, you know, our, in our brain. But

Leo Laporte (00:39:40):
Do you ever, it's just, and I and, and in Silicon Valley we see ads for a w s too. I don't know, do you see ads for a w s in the country? <Laugh>, I

Paul Thurrott (00:39:47):
See ads for the Cracker Barrel. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:39:49):
<Laugh>

Paul Thurrott (00:39:50):
It's a slightly different,

Richard Campbell (00:39:51):
We are still talking about a company with single digit margin.

Leo Laporte (00:39:55):
Yeah. Isn't that amazing? Like, that

Richard Campbell (00:39:56):
Is a tricky, and it's only because they have a high margin, a small high margin business wrapped in a massive, incredibly low

Paul Thurrott (00:40:04):
Margin business. Yeah. Going back, if <laugh>, you go back to the origins of Amazon and Jeff Bezos is gonna sell something and they make a list of those some things. And the thing that comes out on top is books is the stupidest business plan of all time. <Laugh>, you know? Well, and he lost

Richard Campbell (00:40:18):
Money at it for a decade.

Leo Laporte (00:40:19):
Oh. But he's, you know what? Stupid, this guy was not stupid. He was a hedge fund guy. He had an analyzed it carefully. And don't, don't forget that at least for the first 20 years, he was able to decide how much profit they made. And often <laugh>. Right. Often wouldn't, you know, you know, we're gonna take all this money we made and invest in fulfillment centers. Okay? Mm-hmm. <Affirmative> it, he was, I think he managed the profit very. And I think for all we know, they still are doing that. Which is the, which I is the low margin is, is the cloud the low margin business or the high margin business? It's the high margin business. It's the books

Paul Thurrott (00:40:55):
Ultimately marketing. The, the building of that infrastructure is very expensive, but the payoff is

Leo Laporte (00:41:00):
Huge. You continue, the

Paul Thurrott (00:41:01):
Problem is you have to keep refreshing it. Right. Well, but

Leo Laporte (00:41:04):
Also you have electricity and cooling costs. I mean, it's not a cheap, A network center is not a cheap thing to run. Well that's,

Paul Thurrott (00:41:09):
But that's why we're everyone, you heard, you must've heard the statistic, right? Who owns 50% of all the arm-based servers in the world, can you guess? Yeah, Amazon.

Leo Laporte (00:41:18):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:19):
Right? Yeah. 'cause they're the most energy efficient. This here's another

Leo Laporte (00:41:21):
Stat

Paul Thurrott (00:41:22):
For you in passing, but who

Leo Laporte (00:41:23):
Makes 43% of all those servers Foxconn

Paul Thurrott (00:41:28):
<Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:41:28):
Right. Is that interesting? I, you know, I, because the

Paul Thurrott (00:41:32):
Story, you don't get into that part of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:41:33):
The story was that Apple was buying all these servers for AI from Foxcon and then like a lot buried in this, you know, the Bloomberg story, the three quarters of the way down. Yeah. Yeah. Foxconn makes 43% of all the servers used in the world, <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:47):
And we're a far cry from the days when Amazon workers were using doors as desks. Yes. And Google employees are going to that giant electronic store, what was it called?

Leo Laporte (00:41:56):
Oh God. I loved

Paul Thurrott (00:41:57):
That store in the Valley Prize. God Damnit Prize and buying components for their own homemade servers. Yep. You know? Yep. And it's, things have matured

Leo Laporte (00:42:05):
<Laugh> Yeah. Since those days. Yeah. Yep. It's a fa I think it's fascinating mean for, for me, that's one of the things I love about covering this business is, is really kind of trying to put this whole story together. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> in a, in a coherent way. It's fa it's really fascinating.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:22):
Yeah. You can kind of you can look at things as they happen. There's a, there's a fog of war element to it, but you don't really know, you know, how it's gonna come out. It's fascinating in retrospect to look back and see what did happen Exactly. And kind of ponder those things that maybe should have happened or could have

Leo Laporte (00:42:37):
Happened. That's why that Window's everywhere book by that guy is so good. So good. Yeah. Highly recommended. Lean pump.com. Look for Paul Thoro Windows everywhere. Well,

Paul Thurrott (00:42:46):
That was an unasked for but highly paid Plug <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:42:51):
No, Paul pays me nothing. I just want you to know <laugh>. We're gonna take a little break, if you don't mind. So we can get paid a little bit. Paul ott ott.com, lean pub.com for the books. Don't forget, Richard Campbell run his radio.com and.net rocks.

(00:43:11):
It does. Yes, it does. Did you look at, I'm curious if you looked at the thing Google announced yesterday, the IDX dev. We're gonna, we're talking about it. I want to talk about that. Yep. I'm, I signed, I got on the wait list. I don't know when I'll get in, but very interesting. Yeah. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, well, we'll talk about that in a whole lot more when Windows Weekly continues. Our show today brought to you by Duo. Oh, you know duo. You know Duo, right? You've heard of Duo. Duo protects against breaches with the leading access management suite. Strong, multi-layered, defensive and innovative capabilities only allow legitimate users in. They keep bad actors out. That's Duo in a nutshell. And for any organization concerned about being breached, and that should be every organization, we know that these days. And if you need protection and you need it fast, that's another nice feature of Duo.

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Paul Thurrott (00:45:35):
Shire, Mastodon retweets, or whatever you call it on Mastodon about the cop showing up at the protest as it like dressed excuse for me. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (00:45:44):
Yeah, I just saw that and I thought, oh's. That's funny's. How can, how you could tell the undercover cop provocateur, it's the outline of the handcuffs in his pocket.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:53):
Like the vest under his shirt, vest

Leo Laporte (00:45:55):
Under his shirt. He's got the backward Yankees cap that you, the

Paul Thurrott (00:45:57):
Everybody blues better. Nothing on his wrist. And,

Leo Laporte (00:46:00):
And the the police issue boots. That would be also a giveaway. These is not like the other <laugh>. We just got a little political there, but everybody should know these very useful tools. Okay. What else? What else? Where do we go from here? You want to talk about Microsoft 365, maybe a little thrown ai.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:23):
Oh yeah. Forgot. I was ready to skip ahead there. Yes,

Leo Laporte (00:46:25):
You, I got you excited with I D X, didn't I? But No, let's, they

Paul Thurrott (00:46:28):
Did. Yeah, I jumped right ahead to that. Let's pull people

Leo Laporte (00:46:30):
Off. Scroll down. Slow

Paul Thurrott (00:46:31):
Down. Yeah, just a couple things this week. So I think it was last week or possibly the week before Microsoft announced they were supporting Binging Chat in Chrome and Firefox on desktop. And then this past week they announced that they're also now gonna support it in Chrome and Safari actually, yeah. No, sorry. Chrome and Safari on mobile as well. Right. So this is sort of the opening up of this service to people who use other browsers. I noticed one of them is not brave, so thank you for that <laugh>. But I have, you know, I don't understand what, if it works in one chromium browser, why it wouldn't work in every chromium browser.

Leo Laporte (00:47:09):
Now, is this, 'cause I'm on the beta that I have at the bottom of my right next to the search pill. A mm-hmm. <Affirmative> A Bing chat button. It says p r e copilot preview.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:19):
Oh, that's, that's,

Leo Laporte (00:47:21):
That's because Copilot not that's

Paul Thurrott (00:47:23):
Co-Pilot. Yeah, that's right. That's the preview version of

Leo Laporte (00:47:25):
Co-Pilot. So I don't even need it in my browser. 'cause Here I'm in Firefox and they just slid it over.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:30):
Yeah. Except it slid it over so it could run Edge over there. That's the problem with

Leo Laporte (00:47:33):
It. <Laugh>, is that what's running here is Edge. Yeah. Okay. Yep. Okay. So if I took Edge Off, but you can't

Paul Thurrott (00:47:41):
Screw you Microsoft. I can, I can use Firefox. Yeah, you can.

Leo Laporte (00:47:45):
Yeah. So I haven't played much with it. It's funny, I don't, I wonder if we've tired of this. 'cause When it first came out, I did all sorts of stuff with AI and then Mid Journey. Now it's like, yeah, I don't really need it.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:58):
I didn't do this as a strategy, but when this stuff first started coming out, I, I created a lot of, I have to create or make or use graphics or photos mm-hmm. <Affirmative> or whatever mm-hmm. For articles right at the top. So you have like a kind of a hero image Yeah. That might think of it. And I generated several of those early on with some of the, you know Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:48:15):
Everybody was doing that. Yeah. Dolly and Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:19):
And yeah. You know, okay. They're interesting. And then I, I just like came to this realization. It's, I think it might've been yesterday, but for the past many weeks, if you go back and look at my articles, the ones I wrote, I've gone to Unsplash and I've gone to Pixa Bay, and I use images that creators have made, and I linked to them under the image as if in some kind of form of weird, silent protest, I didn't realize I was doing against AI generated content and how they're stealing from content creators and how they're stealing from everybody really. Right. To build this AI infrastructure that they're doing. And I, I literally did not do this explicitly with the aim I just described, but I did wonder about myself as I looked at the latest one I put up. I was like, we're doing a lot of this lately that's kind of interesting. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So yeah, I don't know. Maybe, I don't know if it's just I'm tired of it or I'm maybe becoming a little more political about it, or, I don't know. No,

Leo Laporte (00:49:12):
I think we've all tired of it. It was like the, it was like really cool. And I think we could just kind, you know, this is,

Richard Campbell (00:49:17):
This is what a hype cycle looks

Leo Laporte (00:49:19):
Like. It's a hype cycle. You always said that we got

Richard Campbell (00:49:20):
New, we got new stories a month ago

Paul Thurrott (00:49:23):
About Richard, numbers. Richard need to be wearing a robe, holding a staff <laugh> and be standing in front of a burning bush. Yeah. Every time you talk about the, Hey, no, what's engine <laugh>? Yeah. The 2010 Commandments <laugh>, you know, that kind of

Richard Campbell (00:49:38):
Thing. Yes. But but I think more may, you know, I worry about hype cycles because it just distorts your perception of things. Right. But at the same time, it's like, this is good news because when the hype dies down, you can get to work.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:49):
So, okay. That's beautiful because I, this is I've gone through, I think of it as the X number, you know, five or seven stages of you know, guilt or whatever, or sadness or whatever it is. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> grief or whatever. Yep. and I, you know, it's, at first it's like, oh, it's so exciting. And then it's like, oh, it's not that great. And, you know, you kind of go back and forth and you try to mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and, and because we're in this industry, we try to, you know, we, new evidence comes in or new information, we're constantly evolving our, our view of what this thing is and what the impact's gonna be and all that kinda stuff. But yeah, what you just said really resonates with me because I've always felt that one of the excellent byproducts of Windows and PCs not being at the center of personal computing, right.

(00:50:29):
Where things have shifted to the cloud and more, I would say to mobile devices. So people are doing fun things on phones and tablets, and they're getting work done on computers. I know there are exceptions to that, but obviously people play games and whatever. But I, to me, that's, that is how I use computers. I like that focus. I like that thing personally. You know, if I fly, I have a device with its own battery that I use for productivity, and I have this other device with its own battery that I use for entertainment, and I don't have to worry about using battery for entertainment and feeling guilt 'cause I can't get work done Right. On that level. But also just from kind of a broader perspective that this sort of forces Microsoft to optimize windows for the use case that I think was always the most important one which is productivity, right. Dating back to the earliest, you know, spreadsheets and word processors mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and whatever else. Mm-Hmm. So yeah, the AI falls into the same Yeah, same category. A hundred

Richard Campbell (00:51:20):
Percent. And, and it's exactly right. Like, we gotta get past that hype of throwing it everywhere and, and, and start improving it for the things that it is making a difference on. Right. And so you know, and I'm, I'm excited to see GitHub talking about they've got more than a million people using GitHub copilot. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, like those are members that are sustainable for a product. I hope

Paul Thurrott (00:51:41):
That's an audience that w is apparently now paying for something that they find to be valuable. Yes. Whereas someone making cute pictures of pink unicorns flying in space is probably not gonna be paying 20 bucks a month for that privilege. Yeah. So that's, but that's a nice level set on where this type of thing makes the most sense. Right. And, and, you know, for companies like Microsoft and Amazon and Google maybe there will be a slackening of the crazy demand. I, Brad last week, I think brought up a screenshot he, maybe he saw on Twitter, but it was someone who couldn't get into Xbox Cloud gaming. Right. And we both came to the same conclusion, like, you know what, you know why? Like, it's not like the, sorry, we can't meet the demand. It's that we've lowered the level of demand that we will accept. 'cause We need those resources for this more important AI infrastructure that we're building out that's very expensive, you know? Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:52:33):
Yeah. Without a doubt. And, and that's always been my concern with this, is that, you know, knowing the numbers from Mark Russinovich, just like how much money you gotta, you do the math and you're like, you guys are spending a lot of money, how many customers are you gonna need to make this make sense?

Paul Thurrott (00:52:48):
Right. Right. Microsoft doesn't get to benefit from the benefits of cloud computing that the rest of us do, which is that they have to have that infrastructure all the time. <Laugh>. Yeah. You know so yeah, it's expensive.

Richard Campbell (00:53:00):
Yeah. And then, and then I, I also think that while you're still growing things rapidly like that, you're not actually refining, you're in the land grab phase. And so the qual the product quality is questionable. And, and it will, product quality goes up when you get to that refinement phase when it's no longer a land grab. Now it's serve people better.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:22):
It's also, but see, I, I alio briefly brought up that Windows copilot feature that's coming in 23 H two. There is also that I already have also, because I am a lucky guy. Well, you're on beta channel, I believe, right? Yes, I am. Thanks to you. I, again, I <laugh>, it's No, I'm kidding. <Laugh>, I don't remember it that way, but <laugh>, we have recordings. <Laugh>. Well, you know Microsoft is rushing to embrace a Ai AI everywhere. Right. there, I, I've not seen it. I, I'm curious what Microsoft 365 co-pilot's gonna look like. It's gonna be a little different for everybody depending on which apps you use, I suspect. And, you know, you know, it's not hard to imagine where AI would be beneficial in an app Word or Excel. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I completely get it. Okay, fine. But the, when you push out something like the Windows copilot and what a piece of junk that is, and how most of it is, first of all, it's the, it's the stuff you already get in edge or it going to Bing.

(00:54:18):
Alright. So it's, I get, you could argue it's a little easier. It's in the side there. Okay, fine. But the stuff that's specific to Windows, you know, put things in dark mode or, you know, turn up the screen brightness or whatever, whatever, whatever features are available, it's just nonsense. It's just nonsense. And the, the, it suffers from the same problem that, like Cortana and Live Tile suffered from when they added them to Windows 10, which was, we have this idea and, and the notion of communicating with a chat bot and having a sort of conversation where you're fine tuning the result of something, I think makes a lot of sense with voice, and it makes a lot less sense with typing and which is what this interface is. I know there'll be voice, but, and

Richard Campbell (00:54:58):
There's one other element here, Paul, that I think is important, which, especially when you talk about a product like Visual Studio or even any of the office products, which is every feature you've ever wanted is in there, you just can't find it.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:09):
Right? Yep. Right. And so the question is, how, how do, how do you surface that? Yeah. Do and does a

Richard Campbell (00:55:13):
Chat interface make that easier?

Paul Thurrott (00:55:16):
I don't, I don't think it does. I mean, I, I, we, we live in a world where teams will, you'll start a meeting and it will interrupt you with a pop down that explains some feature Yeah. At a time that you don't care about. You're literally engaging in a meeting, which is the absolute wrong way to do that. We live in a world in which Excel and whatever else puts up little, those little banner things at the top. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I specifically configured word to say by default to the desktop, which is not backed up to OneDrive because it's a scratch base. I then push things where they belong inside OneDrive, but it will not stop warning me, Hey, this thing isn't being backed up. Do you want back this up? You should back this up. Do you wanna back this up? I mean, I, I made, but in each case,

Richard Campbell (00:55:57):
You already have intent. You're going somewhere to do something where this is a, this is a point of exploration where you're trying to find something or you're still trying to establish

Paul Thurrott (00:56:06):
The goal. And that's where AI, I think could be help. Very helpful. Right. Here's a, this is a goofy example. This is, this a stupid little, this is not ai, but this is a good example of anticipation, right? Windows 10 had a had a feature called <laugh>, what was it called? I've already forgot the name of it. Well, the new version's I've already forgotten because I don't use Windows 10. The new version's called Sound recorder. Voice recorder. So if you type in voice recorder in Windows 11 mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, start search, it will result in sound recorder. There you go. That's a smart anticipation of what people might do. Right. But the other thing that ai, the thing that AI would actually help with is you incorrectly try to, you, you do something and keep failing. And that's when it could come up. This is the clippy model, unfortunately.

(00:56:51):
Yeah. It looks like you're trying to make your screen darker or whatever it might be. I that needs to, this is the whole, we keep talking about this mm-hmm. The Stevie Patis thing, this is, it doesn't need, it shouldn't be on the side. It should be integrated into the thing. Yeah. So maybe there's some future version of set. Like, you, you, you found settings and you're like, I, I don't know. Maybe it senses that you're sitting there and not doing anything else, haven't clicked on anything, a minute's gone by. It's like, Hey, do you need some help? Yeah. Or Microsoft Word. And some of the office apps have this kind of a neat search feature at the top where you can just type something in, like, I bold, you know, and it will tell you how to bold <laugh>. You know, sometimes,

Richard Campbell (00:57:36):
Sometimes it'll show you the etymology of the word. Yeah. and that's less helpful. Like, you search still a tough problem, but you see different categories here of, I want to navigate this product better, or figure out a feature, or, I love the idea of asking PowerPoint, make this power deck, this deck not suck. <Laugh>. Right. Now, this answer might be just to delete all the slides, but that's a separate thing. Right?

Paul Thurrott (00:57:58):
That's right.

Richard Campbell (00:57:59):
Then there's also the resource gathering from this context. Find me a picture that mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know, that kind of thing, which I think is a different mechanism and also useful, especially when you get into the M 365 side. And by the way, I just put the show in the can where it's, has my company already worked on this? Like, this idea that the copilot could become the institutional memory. Do you, that's interesting.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:22):
So I can't believe you just said that word, that phrase. 'cause I literally just, I, this is, I was literally just gonna ask you, do you think that that product or any of these other things will ever have the se a sense of memory? I was literally just gonna use that word. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Because if I go to a, a, like an online search, it's not ai. If I go to Unsplash, you, and like I said, I'm looking for some image for whatever it's an article I'm writing, and I, I do this repeatedly. I come back, I've signed in, it knows it's me. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I, I keep selecting the same kinds of images. Yeah. AI should be smart enough to surface that stuff to the top. Yeah. It should have a memory

Richard Campbell (00:58:58):
Machine. A a machine learning model should be observing your routine behavior. It should be learning. So to generate automation paths for

Paul Thurrott (00:59:05):
You. Yes. Right. And that's, that's the type of thing that these co-pilots or some future embedded version of this technology in Windows, in Word, and whatever product I think need to do. And, and this is what, what's lacking today, this notion of like, I've explicitly configured this app to work a certain way, and you're telling me I should do something else. Screw you.

Richard Campbell (00:59:26):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:27):
You should understand how long I've been using this

Richard Campbell (00:59:29):
<Laugh>. Yeah. And that, that sense of context should matter. And, and I think that's a very interesting additional aspect to this space, which is machine learning, observing your behavior. Yeah. And, and then, and helping to simplify that. I don't have any specific knowledge about what Microsoft is doing in this space, but when I hear M 365 copilot, one of the areas I think about is stuff that I had talked about in the past Okay. Around the Microsoft graph. Right. Or once was called the intelligence substrate and talked to snow about it back in the day. That was

Paul Thurrott (00:59:59):
Good. The snow thing. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:00:00):
Yeah. Yeah. It gets back to the same old corporate surveillance issue of M 365 knows every email, every chat, every document who's touched it, it knows a lot about what your company does. The problem is that every way that they surface, that falls into the uncanny valley, the immediately becomes creepy. And perhaps the copilot approach where I express a goal, and now instead of telling you, instead of creeping you out, I help you get closer to your goal by utilizing corporate

Paul Thurrott (01:00:33):
Surveillance. See, I would, I would, or by not. Right. In my example where I've gone in and I very explicitly configured word, I'll keep using this one example mm-hmm. <Affirmative> in a, in a very unique way, that is just my workflow, the way I like to do things. Have the intelligence to know, my God, he made a lot of clicks in there. Let's not bug him about this stuff. <Laugh>. Right. Like he, he went in and did how, how the document saves, where it saves what to display when you're saving, et cetera. There's a bunch of settings. I do, I'm gonna leave you alone about the, you seem to know what you're doing. Yeah. Or you seem to be go moving down this particular path.

Richard Campbell (01:01:06):
Wait, when I think about institutional memory, I think about, you know, you used to go to the water cooler and bump into Gladys there and you said, Hey, have you ever seen anybody work on X, Y, Z? And because she'd been there for 30 years, she'd know, you know, there was a guy who worked on that once. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you might wanna look over there. Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:24):
So Gladys is the, is that the code name for the Microsoft guy? I like

Richard Campbell (01:01:27):
It. Gladys. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. But you know, think of the power of being able to turn on a bot that goes and observes that graph and, and can speed that flow. And I, you know, I wouldn't call it an Oracle 'cause it shouldn't predict any future. No. But, but it certainly could call it a historian. Actually.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:46):
It should be on device predict should be part of it. People

Leo Laporte (01:01:48):
Are nervous about anything from Microsoft observing their behavior and sending it back to the home office.

Richard Campbell (01:01:53):
Well, let's be clear. And that's Viva. They are.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:56):
Yeah. But that's a managed environment, and it's not Microsoft, it's your, your boss organization. Right. It's, it's, we gotta, we sort of, well, Microsoft gets it too. Just,

Leo Laporte (01:02:05):
Just a nice benefit

Paul Thurrott (01:02:07):
Cycle. Oh yeah. Of course they do. But that's for advertising. Right. The point is <laugh>,

Richard Campbell (01:02:11):
But if you spend your life as assistant admin routinely, you run into this problem. Yep. Right. Corporate, if corporate email is used for harassment, the company is liable. And so part of your job as a mail administrator is that you do have mechanisms to search for key phrases and so forth across all of the email and like, sorry, you don't get privacy on company mail where the company has

Paul Thurrott (01:02:32):
Liability. That's right. And that's reality in a small company like the one I just left you know, Brad and I, just to use one example, would communicate privately over teams, and we'd have our own little thing going on. And the whole time it's like, you know, the owner of this company, other people with admin access could very easily come and look at what we're doing and Yep. Maybe see if that we're talking about them. If we were, which we kind of didn't really. But, you know and the whole time it was like, yeah, you know, we just sort of understand this is the system and we're not doing anything horrible. We're not planning a revolt or anything, or we're not no. Working in the worst interest of the company or anything like that. So we weren't really worried about it. But I should you do have that kind of, I should

Leo Laporte (01:03:08):
Point out that a number of big banks in the US are in big trouble because they allow their employees to use Signal and other private messaging. Right? Right. They were fined $549 million over the use of WhatsApp and other messaging apps. So don't, so you're, you're lucky. Penton didn't get get in trouble

Paul Thurrott (01:03:27):
For that, for that. I was talking about my, the small company.

Leo Laporte (01:03:29):
Oh, the small company. Okay. Yeah. Ww Well, Fargo

Richard Campbell (01:03:31):
Also talking about a regulated industry. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:03:34):
And the reason the SS e c hit them is because what they were doing is communicating about illegal transactions.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:41):
I spent my entire career at Penton not using their messaging system. So <laugh>, all of their stuff is in my private email somewhere. But, so now that we

Richard Campbell (01:03:49):
Know there's a set of liabilities around this kind of communication, it needs to be captured and managed. Could we turn it into an asset?

Leo Laporte (01:03:55):
Ah, yeah. That's,

Paul Thurrott (01:03:56):
There

Leo Laporte (01:03:56):
You go. There you go. There you go.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:59):
Yeah. A AI more broadly is to the Microsoft graph. You know, what, or is to the internet, what the Microsoft graph or Microsoft 365 copilot is to the Microsoft graph, right? You're working with this bigger set of data. The, the beauty of it, if it works right now, it's like, we're gonna pick out all these little disparate things from the internet, and here's your thing. And it's a great theory, but when it comes out and it's, you know, it says, actually this guy was an ax murderer, and actually he's an upstanding citizen, or it makes these other hallucinations, it's bad when that thing works, that's magic. And that, that's the, you know, that's the value of ai. So we will, we'll see, we'll see.

Richard Campbell (01:04:33):
Well, and they, and they want a dollar a day per person. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, and, but it doesn't take that much to get that kind of return on that. But it's not yeah. You know, it's still, I don't know what they're building. Right. We, we really haven't seen it yet. Right. you know, the, the conversations I'm having about it is how am I gonna get ready to use this where it's not immediately gonna turn into a disaster? Right. You know, things like, we should start marketing some of this stuff as sensitive so that it doesn't get immediately indexed by this mechanism. Right. Like, we, we gonna plan in some training, like the things that we're gonna need to be successful

Paul Thurrott (01:05:05):
2.0, it looks like you're talking about corporate secrets. Did you wanna mark this as you know?

Richard Campbell (01:05:10):
Exactly. Right. But, and, but also, again, I talk to assistant admins all the time. I'm trying to arm them with, when the boss comes running at them saying, Hey, we gotta put copilot in everything. Right? It's that they have more of a plan than, okay, I'll hit the big red button. It's like, what's, what's our data governance scenario gonna look like? How are we gonna manage the HR issues around this? What, what's our training plan around this? Like, push back on. I'm happy to do that. Are you willing to commit the time and money to be successful at it?

Paul Thurrott (01:05:38):
Right.

Richard Campbell (01:05:39):
There's, because there's another angle on this, which is, you know, change is good. You go first, <laugh>. Like, let's let another group of people, another group of pioneers get arrows in the back, and maybe we'll get the benefit of their experience if we just wait a little, which by, in the IT world, serves extremely well.

Paul Thurrott (01:05:58):
Yeah. I think it's the, the go-to strategy, really, right?

Richard Campbell (01:06:01):
Yeah. Until being a first mover is a huge benefit. Right. And that's the debate right now is this got such a big first mover benefit that we're willing to take the arrows in the back, or should we wait, let somebody else take 'em and use that as governance.

Leo Laporte (01:06:14):
That's what Apple's doing. Mm-Hmm.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:15):
<Affirmative>. Yeah. Well, that by the way, that works great for Apple. Yeah. That's another thing. Do very well. Yeah. Because this is all they do is compliment Apple. Now what have I become anyway? Yeah. Where, what,

Leo Laporte (01:06:26):
What's wrong with you,

Paul Thurrott (01:06:26):
Paul? No, but they do that. Well, they really do. People are, oh, so it's like yeah. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, but they tend to, you know, they're not all home runs, but they, they're often pretty strong heads.

Leo Laporte (01:06:37):
One of the people reason people use, like us, use Slack to change the subject. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> is because it has that history. In fact, you pay for Slack to get that infinite history in every conversation. Yeah. Because then you've got in writing, you know, what the boss asked you to do and so forth and so on.

Paul Thurrott (01:06:55):
So I have two dirty little secrets that I'm gonna reveal during this podcast. And one is that I am a Slack user. And the reason I'm a Slack user is because so am I, we're all three

Leo Laporte (01:07:07):
Slack users.

Richard Campbell (01:07:08):
We're all Slack users.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:08):
Yeah, yeah. Partners together, partners that use Slack and I, this is how I have to communicate with them. Right. And it's fine. So it's given me an interesting opportunity to try this thing that I've been kind of not dumping on, but ambivalent about, you know, for many years, tweet uses

Leo Laporte (01:07:22):
Slack. Yeah. This is, you know, some of this is, maybe there's better solutions. There probably are, including teams, but, you know, there's so

Paul Thurrott (01:07:29):
Much change is good, good enough. Yeah. Exactly. Once you're good enough to get you off the thing.

Leo Laporte (01:07:33):
Exactly. Once you're in it, that's hard. It's very hard to change.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:36):
I will say, coming from the teams world as I do, and teams is a product I'm frustrated with almost on a daily basis, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's, it, it is astonishing to me how many times it changes the microphone and you know speakers I'm using. I don't understand why there isn't a setting. This should be an all communications app. If this device is present, always use this device. Yeah. I don't care what the system's doing. Yeah. You use this. Yep. Yep. And the thing is, like good apps like Zoom are actually doing that without showing you that ui. Zoom doesn't care what you've configured as your default, anything. It will just use the thing you used last time. And that's the Right, thank you. Like, that's what I, zoom is never wrong. Zoom always works that way. So I don't have as many voice video call things in Slack.

(01:08:23):
I'm not even sure if I ever have one. Anyway, but we used it mostly for chat-based messaging, and it works. Yeah. It's fine for that. I'd like ironic compared because of my conversation from a week or two ago when I was arguing that Slack and Teams, in many ways don't compete in the same market because their audiences are so different. Fortune 500 on the Microsoft side versus small business who are looking for all these little ad hoc solutions like Google Workspace and Notion and and Slack, you know, whatever. But I have to say, I, I, I as a person also seek out those lightweight solutions. I use Google Workspace for email. I use Notion for notes and note taking and whatever. I use actually Notion very heavily. And I gotta say Slack fits into that model pretty well. So it's, it's, you know, it works fine.

(01:09:11):
It's fine. It's not bad. It, it's not as it's a, it's like a little yacht instead of a giant battleship or whatever. Mm-Hmm. <laugh> teams, I guess. So anyway, but Slack, so Slack just announced their first UI refresh in three years. It's the first one that will impact me. I, there's a huge blog post describing all of it, but I will just tell you one thing that does impact me on a regular basis, and this is actually gonna make Slack better for me, which is this, I have multiple workspaces. I have one for just thout.com that I share with a coworker, and then also with a a partner who does like our web development. And there's actually several guys. And that's one. And then I have a separate workspace because I partner with JR. Rafael thinks she wife, Leo, and good.

(01:09:58):
You guys are working together. Yeah, he's a great guy. I always knew he would be Love Jr. He's one of those. Yeah. Yeah. I've, I never knew him or anything like that, but I've, he's one of those guys I've read his stuff for. Yeah. Everybody knows, I dunno, if's 20 years or 15 years, but been a long, long time. Great guy. Very different for me. He's upbeat and friendly and nice <laugh>. So that's true. Great guy. Very positive. It's just completely different. <Laugh> he has a different, is a different writing style, which I also enjoy. It's not it's just not, not the way I write, but it's, I like it a lot. I've always liked it. So anyway, these guys, we have different workspaces, I think they call them. And one of the big changes coming in this refresh is you'll be able to have a single view called home.

(01:10:37):
Actually, that's the default view where you can actually see content from multiple workspaces without having to switch between them, which is something I now do all the time. So that's kind of cool. I, I would say, again, you guys probably know it a lot better than I do, but I think that Slack is suffering from a similar problem to Microsoft teams. It's probably not as aggravated, but it beca it started as something very simple as become more complex over time. Because they're features, of course they are. Right. Every piece of software. Doesn't that happen everywhere? Yes. Oh, yes. I mean, so, so I think part of what they're doing is, is part of you, like Microsoft does with the Xbox dashboard or whatever, they kind of sit like, how can we make this simpler? How could we get people to go from this to this with it fewer steps? Less visual clutter. So you can focus on what you're doing. There are people who spend their day in Slack. And I, I don't, I say this like, it's some kind of revelation. I'm sorry. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, everyone knows this, but there are people who spend their day in Slack, just like there are people who spent their day for 25 years in Microsoft Outlook. Mm-Hmm. Or people today who spend their day in Microsoft Teams. This app is their workday. Yep. Yeah. And I, any wor any work like this, I think is smart. So

Leo Laporte (01:11:43):
People get mad at me if I don't respond immediately to Slack. Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:11:47):
That's the point. That's, that's the expectation, right? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:11:50):
Yeah. So, by the way parenthetically, we have the same problem with our Discord. I don't know if you've noticed The Club to Discord, but the, the topics are like growing like topsy.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:01):
I know we're gonna, I, discord is a hard, I I, we're gonna fix it. That interface to me is, is, it's not you, it's app. Like, it's,

Leo Laporte (01:12:08):
Well, but they've added a new feature, like a forum like feature mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, which will I think allow us to fix this. We're gonna do this in consultation with our club members. But Anthony proposed this yesterday and we looked at it and I think this is the right way to go. So

Paul Thurrott (01:12:22):
Watch for that. I have, there's all these, what do you call the things on this? Are they workspaces or channels or

Leo Laporte (01:12:26):
Whatever? The channels, I guess. Yeah. Channels.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:28):
Yeah. And like I have all, and then they do

Leo Laporte (01:12:30):
Tend to propagate. They

Paul Thurrott (01:12:31):
Do. Oh my God. It's like rabbits. I have channels for games that I beta tested like a year ago that I don't even, like what is this thing? It's kind of, they're still people.

Leo Laporte (01:12:40):
Yeah. It's kind of our fault too, because within our own channel, the club to a channel, we keep adding new topics. Yeah, sure. Anyway, we're gonna, I think there's a way to fix that. And I think that that's one of the things Slack's also trying to do, which is kind of organize <laugh> what we're gonna start, whats up, growing start using the what end? Growing outta control. Right. I should make a little mention this. You end up with

Paul Thurrott (01:12:59):
The retirement collection that sort of moves

Leo Laporte (01:13:01):
Down. Yeah, yeah. Channels that they're no longer out. Look at all these you know, we've got the shows of course, but then con we call 'em conversations and they're just, it's almost an infinite.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:12):
There should be like any your basic decluttering strategy. Yeah. If you haven't looked at it in three months, it's slides

Leo Laporte (01:13:17):
Down the bottom disappears.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:18):
Yeah. And yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:13:19):
It's really, it's really outta control. But it is part of the fun of being a member of Club Twit. So, lemme give a little, little plug. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> <laugh>. 'cause That is our chief monetization strategy these days, is our club. What do you get ad free versions of all of our shows. Shows we don't put out in public otherwise. Like Paul RA's Hands on Windows. Micah does a hands on Macintosh. We're working on an AI show with Jason Howell and Jeff Jarvis. We also do, I'm gonna do my unboxing of the Galaxy flip five right after this show for the club, things like that. We also have special events. We've got a photo walk coming up at the end of the month. I can go on and on 'cause there's so much. We try to really jam it full of benefits for just $7 a month.

(01:14:08):
And really that $7 makes a big difference to us. And we got 8,000 members I'd love to get to. That's just 1%, frankly, a little more than 1% of our total audience. I'd love to get to five or even 10%. It would make such a difference. It gives us a chance to launch new shows, et cetera. We have we have family plans, we have corporate plans as well. Check it out. You can also buy each show individually. You can buy this show by itself. That's 2 99 a month, I think for seven bucks a month. It's worth, it's worth going for the whole kit and caboodle, but you can find out more at twit tv slash club twit. Thanks. In advance. It moving right along. What is we we're done with Slack, aren't we? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Paul Thurrott (01:14:56):
<Laugh>. I was, I mean, I dunno if you guys have, sorry, I gotta, you really

Leo Laporte (01:14:59):
Wanted to talk about this these developer things. So let's do that. Yeah. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:04):
<Laugh>. So we, we touched on this last week, I think because of the T net conf, but Microsoft back in probably February announced the first preview version of T net eight, they have released on a very regular cadence. I think they're on T net eight preview seven right now. Just came out yesterday. The next release will be a release candidate. We know that the thing is shipping in November. So you know, it's moving, moving right along. I haven't really reported on dotnet eight, like all the milestones because, you know, this is really, it's kind hard to incremental to communicate. Yeah. It's, it's hard to communicate. There's not much, yeah. It's hard to write about anything. This one is kind of, I I've been, but one of the things I've been following along with is Dotnet Maui, which is Microsoft's cross platform dot net based developer environment or whatever.

(01:15:51):
And client solution. Yeah. Yeah. And they added support for keyboard accelerators, which is a feature that came up recently. Remember with the new file manager. And there are other apps in, in Windows 11, not all of 'em 'cause you know, Microsoft, but there are other apps that support keyboard accelerators. And one of the things coming in the dotnet eight version of Dotnet Maui which you can now use in preview, is the ability to create keyboard shortcuts that are for accelerators through a match. A mix and match of XML and C sharp code, just like you do in, in what Paul the Windows app, s d k today. Right. It's the same, same mechanism. So that's kind of cool. And they're gonna be targeting X Code 15, which is the coming version of X code that will ship alongside the new versions of iOS, iPad, oss, et cetera. That will happen in September. So their expectation is X code 15 will be the default and available fully by the Tom Native ship. So they're gonna target that on the iOS side. So, cool.

Richard Campbell (01:16:48):
And that's, and you know, it's something that Zarin always had nailed that within the week of the release from Apple, it would be running in Zamar. And I think it's basically the same team just working in the Maui context now.

Leo Laporte (01:16:58):
That was the point of Zain really was cross-platform. Yeah. And

Richard Campbell (01:17:02):
That's what Maui sort of subsumed is all of the cross-platform stories as well as providing a

Paul Thurrott (01:17:08):
Place. Yeah. I I I feel like they need a I know they have a, the Blazer stuff for the web and there's some blazer.net Maui interaction, which is very interesting. Yeah. Which is basically web views and a native app kind of a thing. I I I'm curious.

Richard Campbell (01:17:23):
Yeah. The relationship between Blazer and Maui is still complicated.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:26):
It's complicated. There you go. Go's the right

Richard Campbell (01:17:27):
Word. Well, because then they came from separate paths, right? So I mean, clearly there and Maui, to be clear, was not intended to be a web product. It's intended to be a client side tech product. So this is how you put code onto Windows and Mac and presumably Linux. Yep. And Android and iOS. Like that was the point of it. So the Blazer Association's kind of wacky. It's like the whole point was you already have a browser solution. Why do you want this to be a browser solution too?

Leo Laporte (01:17:59):
It's funny, since Sun created

Paul Thurrott (01:18:00):
You that rhetorically <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:18:03):
Since Sun created Java, this cross-platform has always been kind of a holy grail.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:07):
This is not, this is the dream, but

Leo Laporte (01:18:08):
It's always been you always sacrifice a little bit, don't you? Is that still

Richard Campbell (01:18:12):
The case? Inevitably be clear, the customer does not want cross-platform. Right. The customer just wants to work on their device. Right? That's right. It's the developer who doesn't want

Paul Thurrott (01:18:21):
Maintain multiple, can fool them that they think this thing is native. They don't think about it is how they think it's native. Don't

Richard Campbell (01:18:26):
Think about it's all point.

Leo Laporte (01:18:28):
And can you that this is, can you get there?

Paul Thurrott (01:18:29):
Yeah. yeah. You can do it in different ways. Right? So I keep talking about Clip Champ. I talked last week. I re I did record three of what will be four episodes about Clip Champ for I think three, no, two of what will be three, sorry. For hands on Windows last week. And that app is a web app. I is it identifiable as a web app? I mean, honestly in this world of kind of what Modern App ui, it just looks like a modern app. Yeah. I mean, I don't think most people would notice. There are a little indications. It's a web app for example, when you actually export your <laugh> your final video, it downloads to the downloads folder and pops up a little browser. Your download is done kind of a dial. Mm-Hmm. It's not a dial, like a little pop down, whatever.

(01:19:13):
Which is identical to the one in edge because it is edge. And that's kind of funny, but it's possible. The problem with cross platform, like back in the Java days, this was a problem is they didn't have to come out with these UI front ends. That would always be a little outta date. You know, we want this to look natural on a Mac. We want this to look natural on Windows back in the day. Today. It's the mobile platforms and whatever else they're targeting. And you know, you just complimented Zain for always being good about that. You know, you, you have to be, 'cause otherwise you're creating UIs that run a mobile where it's like, what is this? It looks like something from iOS six. Yeah. You know, it has to, it has to be up to date. So they do have a good, they do a good job with that. I would say. Dot Mo does today.

Richard Campbell (01:19:55):
Yeah. And, and, and we are expecting eight to be the really, the 2.0 release of Maui, which, yeah, there you go. Which will be the third version. 'cause Numbers are hard <laugh>. Right. and so we expect it to be quite good. Right. They had a, they had a one and a 1.1 sort of release in different periods over the past year and a half.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:17):
Yeah. This has been

Richard Campbell (01:20:17):
On a, so you do start getting squared away.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:20):
Yeah. This is kind of the new Microsoft approach to rolling out a product. You know, it's gonna, it won't quite be there. It'll be there on and Okay, now it's there. <Laugh>, you know, I see it. I hope, I hope it happens to you.

Richard Campbell (01:20:29):
I mean, I did a, I ended up doing a whole talk on, you know, from Zarin to Maui just because mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, it was supposed to come in in six, but in order to come in six, it could only run in studio 19 and or 22. And they hadn't wouldn't finished it. So these guys literally couldn't build their code. Like they, they were just in a trap. And so it took longer to get that stuff done. It's, it's, you know, these are moving parts, but the big change for T net is they were this new version T net ever November full stop. Yep. And feature slip. And Maui was one of them. Maui was supposed to be in six and it really didn't ship in six. It stayed in preview, it shipped the following spring mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And then it got cleaned up by the, by the fall. Yeah. And, and then became pretty solid for seven. And now we're getting to the big version for eight.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:18):
Yep. That's accurate. And yeah. We'll see, I I I still feel like it's kind of immature, but you know, we'll

Richard Campbell (01:21:25):
See. Well it is, it's young. There's no two ways about it. Right. You've gotta have a few customers really run with it. You've gotta beat it up. You know, the big thing you look for Paul, the, the thing I always look for mm-hmm. <Affirmative> show me the Microsoft product using it. That's when you know, right? Yeah. Calm became real when office implemented. That's, you know, W P F wasn't a product until studio implemented it. Until a Microsoft product takes a bet on a stack. How real is it? Oh,

Paul Thurrott (01:21:51):
I Do you think you'll ever see that though with Maui?

Richard Campbell (01:21:54):
It's entirely possible. Really? And, and the logical thing would be Right. A cross platform product, which is anything that's gotta support Azure in a meaningful way sooner or later. Like look at the office app on the phone. Like those are the kinds of things that could be consolidated under a Maui app. There's plenty of dotnet inside of Microsoft. If you wanna get inspired, you go back and read that.net blog about the various teams upgrade getting off of the Yeah. Four, 4.8 onto seven. And the performance improvements they get.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:24):
This is pre, I think pre AI announcement, but there was a post several months ago from them talking about how binging by upgrading probably to done at seven to at the time Yeah. Major efficiencies across the board and Yeah. So,

Richard Campbell (01:22:38):
And that's exactly the sort of thing. It's exci I think it's always good news to have the Microsoft teams talking about using their own products. Yeah, I agree. And I think that you generally see product

Paul Thurrott (01:22:48):
Than more more than dark food, but actually shipping. Yeah. But yeah. Right. Exactly right. The problems with W P F was for all of its power, you didn't see an office version using wps.

Richard Campbell (01:22:58):
No. It should, office should have taken it. And they never did. They were on

Paul Thurrott (01:23:01):
Day one. I Yeah. But

Richard Campbell (01:23:02):
They were going in another direction. They were worried about Google Docs. I understand that. In the end, it was Visual Studio that implemented W P F, which is for, for version four. Yeah. But that was also a long time. Right? Yep. That was Studio 2010 for a product ship in 2006, like I would argue if not for Studio W P F would have been relegated to the dustbin. And they effectively saved it by making that commit. It also, by the way, got dramatically better because the studio guys literally

Paul Thurrott (01:23:30):
Sat, I'm sorry. Yes. Right.

Richard Campbell (01:23:32):
Yeah. The studio guy sat outside the office of WPF guys and they would knock 'em down to the ground and it's like, you will fix this <laugh>. Or I was, you'll set fire to your car.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:40):
There is one <laugh>. There was one major way and got it in which it got worse. However, we actually, I mean Visual Studio in this case, which is, if you're developing a client side application and you want icon sets there's a new version that Microsoft puts out every year mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And they are literally the icons in Visual Studio. It's, it's like, do we have any icons? Oh, the Visual Studio guys made icons, let's use those. And it's like, that's all <laugh>, that's all you get. It's like a giant collection of visual studio style icons. Which, you know, you may or may not like.

Richard Campbell (01:24:08):
Yeah. Yeah. And it, and what it really means is they didn't get in there and turn to make a new set of icons again. So they just used to grab the last ones that were made somewhere.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:15):
Yeah. Alright. So I, I gotta ask you mm-hmm. Did you read this Google Project I D X announcement? Yes. Are you privy to? Okay. Absolutely. So I, I have a number of things I gotta get to with this topic that I, I just blows my mind. But I, as I do so often throughout the day, I saw this story, I control tab, you know, control clicked it over to a different tab to look at it later. Right. And I thought what this was gonna be was yet another Google development and environment, which you could argue it is, by the way. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. 'cause They have so many, I, it, it, my, they make Microsoft look like they have a strategy and they have a small number of things for developers. And, and Google is just like, they're all over the map. Yep. And if you wanna make Android apps, I think there's like 18 different ways you can do it.

Richard Campbell (01:24:58):
This one seems to have a little more gravity.

Paul Thurrott (01:25:00):
Yeah. Those one. Yes, it does. And and we're definitely gonna get to this, but I also kind of read through it quickly. Or, and I, it's built on this thing. It does this, it, there's no pictures of it. There's no way to know what this thing is. And I'm like, okay, you know, whatever. But then I actually went back and looked at it and I, and clicked on the link where it said, it's built on something called Code o s s. Right. Which is Visual Studio. What code? You're kidding.

Richard Campbell (01:25:24):
Sorry. But Code o s s is what Visual Studio Code is called. It's the open source version of it is, it's all open

Paul Thurrott (01:25:31):
Source. It's all open source. But yeah. Well, no, no,

Richard Campbell (01:25:34):
I don't, there's Microsoft extensions that

Paul Thurrott (01:25:37):
Oh.

Richard Campbell (01:25:37):
That are notary.

Paul Thurrott (01:25:38):
They're not the product itself.

Richard Campbell (01:25:40):
Code itself isn't, but Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:25:41):
So, but the thing is, I, listen, I keep waiting for this wonderful naive moment that I believe can happen with these two companies. <Laugh> Merge, just get together. Start, you know, not right

Richard Campbell (01:25:52):
Now, friend. Here's not after the little poke ding game's. I didn't realize it was code o s s,

Paul Thurrott (01:25:58):
It's, this is Visual Studio Code is what this thing is. Yes. So now it gets more interesting. So from my perspective, well, you

Leo Laporte (01:26:03):
Can do that yourself. It's easy to run Visual Studio Code as a server.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:07):
Yeah. Okay. But I, I don't understand not calling that out explicitly. Thanks to our friends at Microsoft for all the hard work they've created the greatest editor in the world. We've been trying to get past this Intelli j piece of crap we've been using forever for Andrew's studio. Thank you. We're gonna do what you are doing with your own things and moving past the legacy code base. Love it. Wow. They could have done that and they didn't. And I hate that. So, okay. That's me. Yeah. I mean,

Richard Campbell (01:26:30):
It literally is the name. It's arguably, it's a more accurate name code o s s than Bele Studio Visual Studio Code implementation of Code o sss that's, that's right.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:39):
Right's Chrome. If your facts

Leo Laporte (01:26:41):
Okay, fine. Well, it's like chromium Chrome, right? Yeah. The chromium is Project.

Richard Campbell (01:26:44):
If you said Edge is using Chrome, you'd be making the same mistake.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:47):
Yeah. And that's right.

Richard Campbell (01:26:48):
Because Edge is using Chrome.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:49):
People do say that. Okay. Yeah. So, alright, fine. Anyway, this, this thing is going to be a web-based implementation of a developer environment, which is itself very interesting. The rationale being that you'll always be able to get to your projects and write code no matter what device you're on, no matter where you're in the world. And I, okay, I like that. Yeah, that sounds

Richard Campbell (01:27:07):
Good. This is going after Deb Box. This is, I would argue what I, when I first saw Project ID X is like, wow, Microsoft just punched Google where it lives in Search <laugh>. And so Google is now punching Microsoft. They

Leo Laporte (01:27:18):
Interesting. In Dev. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (01:27:19):
It's like the one open source thing they're doing that everybody loves.

Leo Laporte (01:27:22):
But Google has always had the code engine. Google's always had CoLab. Oh yeah. They've always been cloud-based development tools. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:29):
Yeah. But here, but, but here's, this is this, but this is me. This is conspiracy theory for me now because you can, you're gonna be able to import GitHub projects into it. Good. It's gonna support popular frameworks, like frameworks like Angular, flutter, flutter. Interesting. Next Jss, let me do, sorry. All of these are JavaScript except for Flutter. Right? Okay. So Flutters

Leo Laporte (01:27:50):
Goes in there too though. So you go

Paul Thurrott (01:27:52):
Yeah. It will be,

Richard Campbell (01:27:53):
By the way, angular is written in TypeScript.

Leo Laporte (01:27:56):
Mm. Okay. Another

Paul Thurrott (01:27:57):
Microsoft product. It's gonna support mm-hmm. Javascript and Dart only at the beginning. And Yes. Python go in other languages in the future. Okay. Fine. It is going to support a built-in WebView for web and solutions. It's going to have a fully configured Android emulator and an embedded iOS simulator. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> all directly from the browser. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So this, now, now I'm thinking, okay, hold on a second. Talking about

Leo Laporte (01:28:19):
Cross platform.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:20):
Thank you. Web and mobile full stack. Okay. Interesting. Tim Sne, right. Former Microsoft executive left Google about two months ago. He was previously in charge of Flutter. Yep. And I was like, why would, why, why would he leave? And I'm thinking now, 'cause again, conspiracy theory, I think this might've had something to do with it.

Richard Campbell (01:28:39):
I think I I don't think you're wrong. And I think it's because they decided this is more important than snes little corner. And so Yeah. I think this is, it's been hijacked by

Paul Thurrott (01:28:48):
More seniors. Exactly. I think that's, I mean, I'm just guessing 'cause I don't know anything about inside of Google, but I will say Google is a company, like if you wanted to write Android apps, you have the native Android stuff. You've got the jet pack stuff, you've got all these, you know, Lin and they advance all this stuff. And then there's, there's flutter for cross platform and, and it supports desktop and web. Now it, it's its own thing

Richard Campbell (01:29:08):
Sort of. It try It was trying and it's trying. Flutter comes from iOS, Android, right? Once run both. Yep. Last year in 22, we did a show with CSLs who was also working on Flutter at the time about Interesting. Okay. Now we're expanding into Windows and Mac oss. That's cool. And I really, to me, I D X looks like the rethink of

Paul Thurrott (01:29:28):
I think so too. Okay.

Richard Campbell (01:29:29):
Exactly. Okay. We need a bigger cross-platform play. And I don't know that there was room, I don't that Tim got to role he would want in the reorg, so he moved on.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:38):
That's right. I think so too. We're just guessing by the way. But I think you're right. Yeah. And I, I, but I also, I just from a high level and I've kind of followed this stuff. I'm not as intimately involved with it. Maybe as I, well not even in intimately involved in Microsoft side, but I know, I know less about the Google stuff, but it just seems like they have a lot of con like things that do the same thing. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So creating this, this environment kind of makes sense to me. It's gonna be integrated with ai. Right. So this is their version.

Richard Campbell (01:30:05):
Cody, this is their version of copilot. Right? It's Cody exact of Of GitHub copilot. Github

Paul Thurrott (01:30:09):
Copilot. That's right. And the POM two models that today po powers a strong word. Studio Bot, I don't believe is actually out in a non preview form, but it is in Visual Studio. If you have one of the advanced previews, I believe and duet, which is part of Google Cloud, it's gonna run on online Linux VMs in Google Cloud. It, it has the basics today. It doesn't have advanced ai, but code completion, assistive chat bot, contextual code actions, et cetera. I, oh, and integration firebase for hosting, which is Firebase another Google s set of services, actually a big set of services for app developers, mobile app developers, typically. Isn't that the big

Richard Campbell (01:30:47):
Play here is to get your app on Firebase and I

Paul Thurrott (01:30:51):
Think the big play here is And

Richard Campbell (01:30:52):
GCP.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:52):
And gcp. Yeah. It's lit. It's literally it, it is to Google what the Azure chat GT P stuff. I, I'm sorry. Github copilot stuff is to Microsoft. It, it's, we have these things, let's, let's give developers a way to do everything on us. Use all of our stuff.

Richard Campbell (01:31:10):
And by the way, this is what Oracle should be doing with Java <laugh>. If you wanna rake a cloud, because this, it ties into all the things that matter, right. A unified client experience. 'cause We're living in a heterogeneous client world. Yeah. A diversity of languages. 'cause We live in a diversity of languages. Right. And, but in the end, feeding back end services that make those high profit margins that all of them are chasing after.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:31):
Yeah. I mean of course Oracle would have to admit that the cloud is real first. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:31:36):
Well they definitely have a cloud that just looks like a database. It's weird that way. But, you know

Paul Thurrott (01:31:40):
Yes. And, and I also, you know, we, we, because Richard and I kind of, well, Richard is in this world literally, and I'm super interested in it. And this is the type of stuff we talk about. We've talked a lot over the past couple of months about this kind of, I don't wanna call it a chasm or a, a schism or what, or chi, what do you call it? Or a, A schism. A schism thank you. Between a visual studio and full and visual studio Code code. But there is this interesting worldview change that occurs with Visual Studio Code, which I think Google is seeing. And, and this is attractive to their developer base. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, a lot of whom are using Visual Studio Code. I don't know what the numbers are, maybe they do, but flutter, you know, your choices with flutter are basically Android Studio. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> or Visual Studio Code. Lemme tell you which one is the much bigger, you know, pile of junk than the other is that Android studio thing. And so this is

Richard Campbell (01:32:33):
The usual meme when you talk about Android Studio is the picture of the F 16 jet engine being tested in full afterburner. It's like, look, I just started the Android studio.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:42):
Yeah, exactly. You know? Yeah. The lights in my house dimmed and yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:32:45):
And all the fans in my machine cranked up to full bore.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:48):
Yeah. It's a piece of junk. And I I I I welcome this change. Like, I, this is, to me, this is very interesting. I I just wish, you know, Microsoft made such a big point with the chromium based edge about how they, about what they were doing. Right. And I wish these two it's, it's all coming from the Google side. But I wish these guys could get their acts together and just say, look, Microsoft is an important partner. It's not 20 years ago. We don't fear them in everywhere imaginable. But I do think the timing stuff, 'cause I think someone else

Richard Campbell (01:33:16):
Said that, but they did just punch you in the nads. So maybe you're a little growly.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:22):
Fair enough. Yeah, <laugh> fair enough. Okay. Well, I mean the, the, the, the promise of, so, I mean, it's all, if I was a

Richard Campbell (01:33:32):
Google after search,

Paul Thurrott (01:33:32):
If I was a Google guy, I would turn this on its head. Because when Microsoft came up with the chromium based edge, I, I sort of said the notion of a version of Chrome that is stripped of all the Google crap Yeah. Is so appealing to me. And now on the developer side, micro Google or some Google guy could make the case that the notion of a vi version of Visual Studio Code that is loaded up with all the Google crap <laugh> is of huge, you know, importance to me. Like I, you could almost make that case. Yeah. Because I think there is an audience for this

Richard Campbell (01:34:03):
And without a, and not a doubt. And it's fun to talk in the subtext of all of this, you know, regardless of how they talk about it on, on the surface. Right. And in the end, it makes the products better. But, and I'm also gonna, you know, fight the characterization of the I D E versus the compose your own stack mindset, because there's advantages to both, right? I DSS are older because before the I d E, we composed our own dev stack. Then we thought, you know what would be nice? Not wasting your time having to pull all these tools together, let's put 'em into a package. And that was Visual Studio and Eclipse and IntelliJ and so forth. Intellij being the youngest of the bunch, which is why it's still new and shiny and people like it. The older a pro, any, every piece of software with every version, I mean, collects a little more plaque on their arteries. And it's, it's hard to get in angioplasty for

Paul Thurrott (01:34:54):
Software. The tagline is, it's better than Eclipse, <laugh>. <Laugh>, I mean, to kind of, kind of a low bar

Richard Campbell (01:34:59):
There. But again, you know, we mock all the IDs because generations of developers worked on them. And there are consequences to that. That's a lot of fatty food in the ecosystem of that software. Yep. And they, the push on on all these IDs is lighten up, get more efficient. You know, the, the challenge that the studio guys have, 'cause we've interviewed them on this, is there are layers of calm, there are layers of W P F. Like, it's hard to leave the old frameworks behind, right. And modernize everything when all the customer sees is stuff that used to work breaks or just is the same.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:37):
I the I from the Microsoft point of view, the beauty of Visual Studio Code is that for the people who aren't stuck in that legacy crap, they, they have this more modern fast

Richard Campbell (01:35:46):
Yeah. And, and modular

Paul Thurrott (01:35:48):
Wonderful editor,

Richard Campbell (01:35:49):
You know, except that it's an editor. And actually what I needed was a project management tool and a debugger and you know, co-management. I mean, all all of the other things that I otherwise have to pull together myself. Right now, I'm, and I'm an old developer. I've done it both ways. I do it both ways. And I, whatever tool makes you happy, right? I'd rather build a web, manage a website in Azure against Studio than I would against code.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:16):
Oh, okay. I mean, I, I, for me, I, I don't, I mean, the thing I like about it is yeah, you, you have to build it. You, you build, you pick your extensions. Yeah. You pick the stuff you put in it, you the

Richard Campbell (01:36:28):
Corollary. That is, that means that studio is the nicest way to train a new developer. Like, that's weird to me because it's not what anybody thinks. But the reality

Paul Thurrott (01:36:36):
Is, studio beeps when it backs up <laugh>. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's, but at the

Richard Campbell (01:36:40):
Same time, it has all the pieces in you. Like the, the point here is, if I'm trying to get somebody new, productive and, and being excited about development, right. Studio is the sh is actually a shorter time to Hello world than come.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:53):
I know, but I, it's, I dunno, <laugh>.

Richard Campbell (01:36:56):
I know. I don't I know. You don't want it to be true. It just happens

Paul Thurrott (01:36:59):
To be true. No, no, I agree with it. It's just what I'm thinking. I resisted Visual Studio Code for so many years because I, that Visual Studio was my background. It's, you know, it's I, I watched the transition from Visual Basic to Vegas to having one, you know, a bunch of editors in one environment and then one editor. And I, to me, it made sense. And and Visual Studio Code was like, I don't understand this. You, you're working in a folder, you know? But actually there are efficiencies to that as well. Oh, no, it's very there's

Richard Campbell (01:37:29):
Nothing dumber than needing to edit a JSS file and Visual Studio starts. Yeah, exactly.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:34):
<Laugh>, that's

Richard Campbell (01:37:34):
Dumb. Done dumb.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:36):
Yeah. Oh, you missed the semi, you missed the curly brace. Oh, a little

Richard Campbell (01:37:40):
Work, but visual. But hey, I have a project that I'm working on, and it isn't a file in a folder. It's a bunch of stuff. Yes. And Studio is a project management

Paul Thurrott (01:37:50):
Tool. Listen, I, this is God, this is a, this is, I'm pretty sure we're in violent agreement. Yeah, no, I think so too. It, it, there's a, there's an argument in the devices space about whether you can take something complicated like Windows that's been around for a long time and make it simpler and make it run on smaller hardware. Or is it better to take something that's, I know it's not completely, you know, clean room, new, but iOS or something simple, simple only for phones evolved over many years, and then they start pushing it up to things like iPads and to things that are like computers and which of those approaches is better? And the truth is, is it pros and cons, pros and cons to each and, sure. But, but the modern approach, even though I don't like it in devices, and I do now like it in the developer stuff, is honestly this smaller, lighter thing that you can add on the things you need only when you need them. And the people that don't have this smaller, lighter thing, you're

Leo Laporte (01:38:43):
Coming at

Paul Thurrott (01:38:44):
Perspective.

Leo Laporte (01:38:44):
<Laugh>, I knew you'd get to Eemax eventually. <Laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:49):
Well, I mean, I've gone in and out of EMAX as the,

Leo Laporte (01:38:52):
I love emax. Everything you described can be dirt on an emax. That's the beauty of, you can even, even run EMAX

Paul Thurrott (01:38:58):
Across server came up out of a, out of a kind of a sublime model. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's like this. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it was emax is Adam

Leo Laporte (01:39:06):
Sublime and via code where all the

Paul Thurrott (01:39:08):
Same, the extensibility of EMAX is kind of based on like a network age. And I think the extensibility of those code editors, and I would say today's Visual studio code really is

Leo Laporte (01:39:17):
L S P this new thing. The

Paul Thurrott (01:39:19):
Modern the modern word. Yeah. The modern world. Yeah. That's

Leo Laporte (01:39:23):
All. You can even use L S P and emax. There's, there's an L S P emax.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:26):
No, I'm not, I mean, I'm not surprised. It, it's obviously emax, traditional EMAX is very heavily you know, shortcuts and code. It's

Leo Laporte (01:39:35):
Tuned for coders. I mean, mean, it really is. It's too completely tuned for coding. And and it's very elegant, but the learning curve is ridiculous.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:43):
There is nothing that creates words that I have not tried to use to write Right. <Laugh> with, you know? Right. I mean, I've looked

Leo Laporte (01:39:49):
Into everything you legitimately have to spend probably three to five years before emax is even slightly comfortable. Yeah. And it's taken me about 10 years before I feel like, oh yeah, that's my go-to.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:00):
Yeah. It's hard in this, you know, in, in this <laugh> it's weird thing to say in this kind of era of DUIs <laugh>, right? Oh yeah. To go back to that kind of a tool. But coding is start

Leo Laporte (01:40:10):
With that kind tool today, but essentially a textual thing. Right? True. And that's the Yeah, that's the point is what do you have a gooey for when you're want to keep your hand on the keyboard? Right.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:18):
This is I go to a gym 3, 4, 4 times a week, I'd say. And there's a parking lot up back as there would be. And not every day, but every other day at least, there's a guy parked in the yellow stripe blind thing near the door. That's not a spot. And it's like, you, you're going to the gym, <laugh>, but you, you walk,

Leo Laporte (01:40:34):
Walk a little bit 10 extra feet

Paul Thurrott (01:40:36):
From a actual spot. And you know, and that's kind of the same mentality. It's like you're learning to code. You should, you should, you need little

Leo Laporte (01:40:43):
Time.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:44):
Yeah. You need to spend some time with the command line.

Leo Laporte (01:40:47):
I feel that people should be, you know, you should start about in fifth grade using emax. And by the time you're an adult, you will so comfortable, you'll

Richard Campbell (01:40:54):
Probably have it figured out.

Leo Laporte (01:40:55):
Proficient. Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:40:56):
It's the the real

Richard Campbell (01:40:56):
Push back to the command line was repeatability. Right. The real, the, the danger of the gooey was you ended up having to make a Word doc saying click here. Right. And what you really wanted was,

Paul Thurrott (01:41:07):
And then you had to print it out. 'cause You can't access it when you're using Eex. Can you wanted

Leo Laporte (01:41:11):
Infrastructure, you the mouse, but it's not easy or fun.

Richard Campbell (01:41:13):
Yeah. And it's, and it's not what you want. And so, I mean, the good news is Studio has grown up enough now that it's spitting the scripts out for you.

Leo Laporte (01:41:20):
Yeah. Yeah. We a couple of things I wanna mention Yeah. Before we move, you have other things to talk about, and we're, we'll get to that in Dev. Yep. But I do wanna mention that next week with your permission, we wanna try taking questions from the Discord. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I'm just, my theory is this August is really not a good month for tech news.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:43):
Now, next week we'll be when the Activision Blizzard thing is decided. So, crap, that will throw a whole loop into that. But there's

Richard Campbell (01:41:49):
The first hour <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:41:51):
Of course. I picked the bad months to give up a smoke. That's right. Anyway, we'll try it. We, we will see. Anyway, I want people who are in our club to prepare their discord questions. We, we did it in the past, but there was kind of not only a little bit interest. So if there's enough interest, I'd like to do it from time to time. So ask your questions of Paul and Richard can be about anything. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> next week on the show. Cool. I think that's gonna be that's gonna be kind of fun. Alright, continue on.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:23):
Yeah. Just one more quick topic. It seems like GitHub is adding new features daily. I keep getting, I got email, an email announce from, from them yesterday. I got one from them today during the show. So security something, something, whatever. But sometime in the past week they added a code referencing tool in beta to GitHub copilot. Yeah. So if you had to identify, and speaking very broadly, what's the number one problem with AI today? It's the stealing. So we

Richard Campbell (01:42:54):
Call it training. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:55):
Sorry, <laugh>. Right? I'm not up on all the technical lingo with AI yet. <Laugh> yeah, hallucinations. We used to call those bugs, but I guess now we just ship 'em into, we call

Richard Campbell (01:43:03):
'Em heal hallucinations. Yeah. They still

Paul Thurrott (01:43:05):
Bugs. Still bugs. So one of the issues with GitHub copilot is that it's trained on, you know, billions of lines of public code out in the world. Mm-Hmm. It's probably stuff from Stack Overflow and whatever else. Github repositories, obviously public GitHub repositories. We're not Google, it's public. But this tool will alert you when code it has suggested matches code from public repositories. Right. Which is that kind of after the fact responsibility that AI will be known <laugh> for, you know, the hey, you know, you're doing something wrong. You're like, yeah, you're right. We're gonna fix that. You know, but we didn't do anything about it when we were training it. So that's probably what people want. Right. it's, it's only gonna be a matter of time before somebody writes a book of some kind and someone's like, Hey, this code sample you created over 17 chapters is in a public GitHub repository that you stole from. You know,

Richard Campbell (01:44:01):
I mean, but this is also, I mean, a normal part of the process of code being professionally built, right? Yeah. You do run it through a EO or a Moss to see are we, you know, did somebody cut and paste from somewhere? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:17):
It's almost like a form of documentation if you think about it. Depending on the, the work, it may not be an issue that this comes from. I mean, we all learn from these public sources ourselves. Right? I mean, every one of us has stack overflowed. Something found an answer at in the 17th response. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> cut and paste the code and been like, yep, this works. And never really thought about it again. I try to, in my own code, actually make a note to where I got that from. Not because of any sense of responsibility, because later I'm gonna look at it and be like, what the heck is this? You know, this is not something I could've come up with

Richard Campbell (01:44:52):
Myself. I think at one point I talked to some folks at Microsoft, they were using a product called Black Duck that was composition analysis. And literally it was detecting, are you open source libraries and inappropriately or is this open source library containing copyrighted code? Like Yep. That's, it's just part of the, if a duck

Paul Thurrott (01:45:08):
Quacks to this, does it call the lawyer if it

Richard Campbell (01:45:10):
Looks like a duck and it quacks like a

Paul Thurrott (01:45:12):
Duck <laugh>. Yeah. Guess what? If the duck quacks, you're a troubled buddy.

Richard Campbell (01:45:18):
So it's, it, I mean, this is not an un unusual problem. I appreciate that co-pilot's expanding. It's, it's surface area that way because a lot more people are gonna be using a lot more code from a lot more sources as a byproduct of these machine learning models.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:33):
When, when they announced, you gotta remember how far back this was when they announced GitHub co-pilot What way ahead of this current wave of AI nonsense we were living in, in a, an era that I sort of miss a naive era where Microsoft was redefining everything from the past as ai. Remember? Like Yeah. Spell checking in the first version of Microsoft Word was an early form of ai. Really? Yeah. Okay. You know, that kind of thing. So AI was cute back then, so Oh,

Richard Campbell (01:46:00):
Eliza in 1966, right? A little or cherry in therapy, you know?

Paul Thurrott (01:46:04):
Yeah. But this notion that you were going to be in Visual Studio Code or whatever using, you know, a GitHub repository and it was gonna say, you know, you had a problem, you're gonna ask it a question, it was gonna find a solution. And it was, it bas to me it seemed like web scraping. Yeah. And it just seemed unsophisticated. And we

Richard Campbell (01:46:22):
Call that training. Training, sorry, <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:26):
Yeah. I mean, look, we all have our little workflows. Like I said, stack Overflow is probably a big part of a lot of developers' workflows, but Yeah. But it's very clear now. It's more sophisticated than I gave it credit for at the time. And it's interesting, and I think, Richard, you kind of alluded to this, it's almost emerging as the poster child at Microsoft for AI done. Right. And, and what I mean by that is AI that actually has a business model and a purpose to exist and an audience, the

Richard Campbell (01:46:52):
Customers are willing to pay for it because they're getting a benefit from Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not, it's not a tenfold productivity increase, but let's face it, if you've got a 10% productivity increase, you're talking an extra day a month. Right. Like it's, this is not a trivial thing.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:07):
Yeah. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:47:08):
So, so yes, they, and, and I think there's a reason why, there's a few reasons why GitHub copilot is working well. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> a, it's older, right? October 21, it's been Yeah. Almost two years. Almost two years. B developers come with a certain set of skills and are already doing a lot of the work. This is simplify a workflow they already understand. Right. See, the compiler gets a say. Yeah. Right. That you're not just checking it out there. You've gotta feed it to a compiler and the compiler gonna things that's

Paul Thurrott (01:47:38):
Actually work. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:47:39):
There you go. You know, so that, that combination, and you think about now, you know, I, what I find interesting is now I go look at other large language models and other governance around IT implementation to say, how are we educating the user mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, how are we doing post facto testing on it? Like, these are all the things that are happening in GitHub copilot that are part of what's making it successful, in my opinion. Right. And so maybe we need to put a few of those things into

Paul Thurrott (01:48:04):
Play. Took about 18 months <laugh> to get it to a point where it's,

Richard Campbell (01:48:07):
Yeah. I mean, it's, it hasn't really changed that much. They've gone on to other features. It was always like that. But I think it's taken 18 months for us to figure out that these are the things that are important.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:15):
Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:48:16):
Okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:19):
Alright, well it's that time of the show folks. <Laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:48:24):
Xbox Time.

Richard Campbell (01:48:26):
I know, I'm excited.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:27):
Woohoo. it's,

Leo Laporte (01:48:29):
First of all, <laugh> <laugh>. How is that Activision thing going? Is it, is it still the

Paul Thurrott (01:48:34):
Approval we've all been waiting for? Oh, finally come in. It's here. New Zealand, my

Leo Laporte (01:48:39):
Homeland <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:42):
I, I think it's cute that they thought they had to do this

Leo Laporte (01:48:46):
Last they falls

Richard Campbell (01:48:48):
Because when the C M A lit up, it was the, it was New Zealand said, maybe we should go back and look at this. And they were like, really? And okay, now they're doing the same thing, the in reverse.

Leo Laporte (01:48:59):
So they were prompted by UK and their investigation New Zealand said, oh, but now they've said, forget it. It's okay. They were fine.

Richard Campbell (01:49:08):
It's sort of like the way the C M A did.

Leo Laporte (01:49:10):
They don't care. Did the C M A give up? Have they given up

Richard Campbell (01:49:14):
Basically?

Paul Thurrott (01:49:15):
No, no, no. Well, that's, it's still a going. So Microsoft has filed their You're wrong and here's why. Documents and they can take two weeks to write up a

Richard Campbell (01:49:25):
Report. Something. Yeah. Somebody in the C M A is still figuring out how to read, so they'll get their <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:49:29):
Oh,

Paul Thurrott (01:49:30):
Does anyone else, does anyone have a P D F reader? I, I don't.

Leo Laporte (01:49:33):
Spoken as a true Scotsman <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:38):
Yes. in more important news Activision revealed that the next installment of Call of Duty, which was going to be an add-on pack for the current Call of Duty, will now be called Call of Duty Modern Warfare three. And the only thing you really need to know about this is that the, the Modern Warfare Games, the original trilogy and the new one came out about three years apart each year, each time. And this one's actually coming out the year following the last one, which tells you a couple of things. Money grab, right? It's very probable they would've lost out on their billion dollar October or whatever November if they hadn't done this. So they can sell a standalone game. And this will probably be the last one, you know, created without Microsoft's fingers on the subscription till. So we'll see how things change going forward. But this will be a just a straightforward follow up to the previous game. And this leads me to my second dirty little secret, which is, I not bragged, but mentioned that I hadn't played Call of Duty since no March 2nd. That's still true on my console, N P C, but I did re recently play Call of Duty Mobile on a, what? I guess it's an Android tablet. And pretty good <laugh> pretty good, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:50:56):
To a man dying of thirst in the desert. Even a sip of water

Paul Thurrott (01:51:01):
Is, it's a nice thing. Couple of nice things about Call of Duty mobile, it's free. You if you know, call of Duty, the multiplayer levels, they've recreated them on mobile and, and because the graphics are stupendous, they're beautiful. So they're very faithful reproductions of classic, huh? Call of Duty maps of the past. So, you know, your way around I actually played it with a control, like an Xbox controller on the tablet. And one of the weird, if you think, I mean, probably don't think about this stuff too much, but if you think about Call of Duty or any shooter, you, you're shooting like, you point at something and you shoot a gun. And the way you do that is with the right trigger. And in Call of Duty mobile, because it's, you know, that first day or from the beginning was a touch base game.

(01:51:40):
You, you don't, you know, you don't fire on the thing. So the way it works is you just point your gun, and if the gun is facing a bad guy, it will shoot. And you have to really get used to that <laugh>. It's, it's, it, it is actually something you do get used to. I only play a couple levels, but it's weird. Like, you run around and, you know, everything's normal, crotch, jump, whatever. And then the shooting thing, there's no shooting. Shooting is automatic. So no twitching. Yeah. Just it's okay. Does that take the fun out of

Leo Laporte (01:52:05):
It, or is that For me, it would

Paul Thurrott (01:52:07):
Be great. No, it's okay. It's easy. I mean, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not gonna run to it tonight, like as soon as we're done here or anything like that. Like it's it, but it's, it's pretty good. You know, it's pretty good. And then a couple of 'cause you know, it's that time of the year, one of the four times of the year couple of revenue earnings report type things. So Sony revenues soared 33% in the previous quarter. Playstation five sales up 38% year over year. Right. 3.3 million units. They still expect to sell 25 million consoles in their current fiscal year, which ends at the end of March. But Activision Blizzard, I know <laugh>, yeah. They're still doing okay. The funny thing about Sony is that Sony, like Samsung, I guess, and unlike most big tech giants or whatever has all these other businesses, and some of them are related to our business and some of them aren't.

(01:52:54):
Right? So their biggest business is gaming. That particular part of the ga the business was responsible for over 25% of the revenues, $5.4 billion, 28% up year over year. They're doing great. <Laugh>, but their second biggest business, we always, I always like to joke about this, my revenue is life insurance. That business contributed $4.7 billion up 215%. So, wow. Hilarious. they have an entertainment tech and services business, which is everything from digital cameras to smartphones and TVs $4 billion. And then music 2.5 billion and some other things. Right. Hmm. The little side point I wanna make here is that be Sony doesn't ha sell a lot of smartphones, but Sony smell, did we already talk about this? I feel like we just talked about this. Sony sells. Yeah, we did. I'm sorry. We talked about this a little bit, but just to reiterate, this, Sony sells most of the camera sensors are going into high-end smartphones.

(01:53:49):
They dominate completely. Yeah. They, they had previously said, we expected the smartphone market to recover in late 2023, and now they say it's gonna be next year at the earliest mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Right? And that's tied to the Apple thing, where Apple's been cutting back on orders based on expectations and so forth. So they're one of the suppliers who's like, yeah, we're not gonna make as much money for the second half of this year. PSS five is killing it. It is killing it. Yep. It's, yep. That's interesting. What else we got? Oh, take two. I've, you know, I, I hadn't done this historically, but now with Activision blizzards getting sucked into Microsoft. I've been looking at companies like Activision and Take Two and not Activision, I'm sorry, EA Electronic Arts. I think I, I probably talked about that last week. Take two is responsible for Grand Theft Auto primarily, but b a still cash down.

(01:54:37):
Yep. they have a new version of that game coming sometime this fiscal year. Their fiscal year, I believe also ends next March. They will not talk about it, but they will hint about it a lot, <laugh>. And as a result, their stock went up a lot. They had a good fiscal year, or a good fiscal quarter, sorry $1.28 billion in revenues. They actually lost money, by the way, but that's a cyclical thing. They'll make big profits in the coming holiday quarter. So oh, and I, I should say, by the way, take two acquired Zynga in 2022 for $12 billion. This is the mobile gaming company. So a lot of their biggest franchises now are mobile games that I've never heard. Well, word with Words With Friends is one of them. That's one I actually have heard of. And the c e o of that company was asked about the Microsoft thing.

(01:55:23):
He expects that to go through, and he says it's gonna trigger another round of industry consolidation. Oh, yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. And then finally <laugh>, Sonny, they're so cute. <Laugh> all the time they were complaining about Xbox Cloud gaming. They were working on their own version of it. Sort of, this is actually cloud, this is cloud streaming. So they're cloud streaming thing. So they have a PSS five cloud streaming service. It's gonna be made available to PlayStation plus premium subscribers. This is kind of like their version of, well, I used, I would've called it Xbox Live Gold to pass, but I guess it kind of a Game Pass subscription, really. And soon they're gonna basically have the same capabilities we see on the Xbox side, which is the avail. You know, you can download some selection of games, including legacy games, and then stream some if you're paying for the most expensive service. Some selection of PS 1, 2, 3, and not four ly PSS P games or at least today. But they're gonna add PlayStation five game streaming to it soon. Some people are already seeing it, most people aren't. It will support up to four K resolution at some point. Xbox Cloud gaming is 10 a d p, assuming you can get it to start <laugh>, but, Hmm. That's the quality

Leo Laporte (01:56:37):
Level. Hey, there's one other gaming story that isn't really for this show, but it broke this morning, which is that the Supreme Court refused. Oh, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:56:46):
To refuse, actually. Well, okay. So the, the Supreme Court issued, so just so people understand what the deal is there. So Epic in their case, against Apple at one on one point, which was the ability to communicate to their customers that they could pay for this stuff somewhere else and save money. Apple, they both appealed <laugh>, right? Part of Apple's appeal was they didn't want to well, they, it doesn't matter. They both appealed. And then Apple asked the district court that was in responsible for this case, probably in California to stay that part of the ruling until their appeal was complete. They were not going to do that, but they said, if you want, we'll let you appeal to the US Supreme Court. And they said, yep, we'll do that. And they did. And the Supreme Court just basically said, we're not doing anything. And so the this thing will, the, the enforcement of them having to allow developers to communicate with their own customers is basically stayed so they don't have to, or it's delayed. So until this appeal is resolved, or both appeals are resolved, nothing's changing. So Apple temporarily at least, does not have to allow developers to be able to communicate with their own customers.

Leo Laporte (01:57:59):
Oh, nice. And this is all about the link to, if you're on the Kindle app, for instance, on iOS saying you can buy books here mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, right? Or if you're on the Fortnite app, you can buy, you know, whatever Fortnite currency is here instead of buying it through the app store

Richard Campbell (01:58:17):
Outfits and things like that. But that's what the original case was about, was, yeah. Yeah. Fortnite wanted to sell their swag to their Fortnite players

Leo Laporte (01:58:24):
Directly. 30%

Paul Thurrott (01:58:26):
Pay 30%.

Leo Laporte (01:58:26):
Exactly. Exactly. Yep. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:29):
Yeah. So that's just a, this has been

Richard Campbell (01:58:31):
Billion dollar company argue with other gigantic billion dollar company. About how many, who keep, how many

Paul Thurrott (01:58:36):
Billions. Well, I mean, <laugh>, yes. But this is a, the most powerful company on earth arguing with a billion dollar company, which is Right. Compared to it is very small <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:58:44):
Yes. Actually, as it turns out. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So the Supreme Court did not

Richard Campbell (01:58:49):
Turn, declined,

Leo Laporte (01:58:50):
Declined, declined,

Paul Thurrott (01:58:51):
Declined. Yeah. They, they basically false declined to hear the Yeah. Appeal and sent it back to the appellate court.

Leo Laporte (01:58:59):
So this, the, which appellant works

Paul Thurrott (01:59:01):
Because of the two appeals, it's basically epic filed an emergency motion to get this thing to just go through and say, look, if you're gonna please let they appeal it and win, we can take it back later. Yeah. Right. And they were like, no, let's just resolve it. But of course, you know, courts move slow, so I don't know, I don't know when

Richard Campbell (01:59:17):
This tend to move even slower.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:18):
Right. Of course. They're gonna, they're gonna push us back as long as they can, right?

Leo Laporte (01:59:21):
Yeah. Yeah. Because they can continue to do business

Paul Thurrott (01:59:24):
As usual. The notable thing though, about the ruling is it didn't say anything <laugh>.

Richard Campbell (01:59:27):
No. It just, it's just a decline.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:28):
It's literally a sentence. It says application, application number denied by Justice Kagan. Right, right. That was the,

Richard Campbell (01:59:36):
Was Well, I know what I wanted to say about Zynga Zynga's original hit app was Farmville.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:40):
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:59:41):
Back in the day. And Don Matric, who used to run the Xbox business left Microsoft. That's

Paul Thurrott (01:59:48):
Right. Did he run that business into the ground too?

Richard Campbell (01:59:51):
That's two years before the board encouraged him to go somewhere else. And before that he was at a yay. Right. I

Paul Thurrott (01:59:57):
Mean, did he say something like, if you wanna play Farmville and you're on like a submarine, it's not gonna work. <Laugh>, or,

Leo Laporte (02:00:06):
Alright, timeout, little timeout, brief timeout. And then we are gonna go to the back of the book, Paul Thro and Richard Campbell on Windows Weekly. Why don't why don't you kick it off, Paul, with the tip of the week.

Paul Thurrott (02:00:21):
I have three tips of the week. I got into kind of a weird area today. You could be, instead of, instead of an app. The first is I, I'm revisiting my digital decluttering stuff. I have 21 gigabytes.

Leo Laporte (02:00:35):
Your picture <laugh>, by the way, that is something

Paul Thurrott (02:00:39):
That's a typical Unsplash photo. Oh, yeah. You'll see I credited the content creator, Amanda. Love it. I, I, I two years ago-ish scanned all of my photos in using a high speeded photo scanner log. And it was an tremendous amount of, tremendous amount of work. I, I put the right metadata in this, the dates and were all correct and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But there's this other huge collection of stuff that still needs to be done. And I've scanned in a bunch of stuff, and there's like loose scans and kids drawings and all kinds of junk, but it's about 21 gigabytes worth of stuff. So since I wrote this article, I actually, I've gone through about half of it. I'm down to 10. It's, but it takes a while. How are you

Leo Laporte (02:01:16):
Just doing it? It's by

Paul Thurrott (02:01:17):
Hand. Well, it's in the article. I explained it. It's it, yeah. So actually I, it's in the article, I'll tell you how I did it. So <laugh>, it depends on what it is, right? So, best case scenario I've scan, because I do this, I'll scan things and I will take pictures of the notations in the photo album that say when things were taken or whatever it might be, or there might be a date on it or something like that. I ensure that the date metadata is correct 'cause that's the key. And then I, I, I basically have the pile of crap that's not organized into my very organized thing in OneDrive. And I copy it into the organized part of OneDrive and also up to Google photos, right. For photos and things like that. 'cause I want it in at least two different places.

(02:01:57):
There's a third piece of this, by the way, which is my na, which I'm going to get to later. But there, there are really three things and you can't see it. But over there, there's some bins and at least one of them is just full of things. I need to scan the pa the u ss a today from the day my son was born. The, oh, you know, the what did that kind of stuff. Yeah. And and so, you know, you want to, basically, you wanna get rid of the physical clutter, but then you have to also organize it when it's on the computer and make sure it goes up to whatever cloud services and or NASA or whatever you might have. So the big thing, the, the big push for me is the first of the three is this, the digital photos. It's about 21.

(02:02:33):
Like I said, well now it's down 10 gigabytes of stuff. So it's, it's first, it's like losing weight. The first ten's easy, the next 10 is awful. <Laugh>, you know, it's gonna take a while. So this will be kind of a process. The second, I'm actually not sure which I'm gonna do second, but the second one is unfortunately 10 x that it's about 200 and I don't remember the exact number, but 230 ish gigabytes of work related data, a lot of which is misfiled and disorganized and whatever. So one strategy for this, the tip is if you, if you're doing this and you've put stuff up in the cloud and it's not organized find a computer where you can sync that thing down to the local computer and work with it locally. A as it's sinking to the cloud. And then it's just because it's impossible to do this stuff. Can't do it in the cloud. It's not impossible. It's possible. The third thing, so I've got the, is that three actually I guess it's four. Sorry, there's four things. So photos, documents, documents is huge. It's gonna be awful. A lot of it I'll throw out. Right? A lot of it'll be duplicate, you know? Can I make, can I

Leo Laporte (02:03:35):
Just a one recommendation, we have a new sponsor and I would be interested if you tried it. Okay. My Leo m y l io.com/twi. And the reason I mention it is it's a photo digital asset management tools. By the way, do it for free on a single computer. It does de-duping, but it will also pull photos from all the other services down. Oh. But it also, I will look at it, it does documents. You can add your

Paul Thurrott (02:04:00):
Documents. My Leo, by the way,

Leo Laporte (02:04:02):
<Laugh> and Yeah, my Leo. Yeah. It does documents. And it has O C R built in. So if, oh yeah, that stuff's good. Yeah, it's very interesting. I don't, I haven't tried it to do de-duping on documents, but it does de-duping on photos very well. So it might be worth just looking at. I, I just, I mentioned it's a sponsor, but they just got a free plug. M y L io.com/twit.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:24):
Yeah. So photos, documents the scans I still have to get through. Right. Can't help you

Leo Laporte (02:04:30):
With that

Paul Thurrott (02:04:30):
Drawer full of No, of course. But the last, the last thing is the NAS and I, I don't think there's a lot on my na that is not in other places, but I actually, you don't wanna

Leo Laporte (02:04:41):
Erase it. Sure. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:04:42):
Yeah. I gotta be, you wanna be careful with this stuff? Yeah.

Richard Campbell (02:04:45):
This is me too. Retiring a file server Yeah. Here in the house and making sure everything's made it up to OneDrive.

Leo Laporte (02:04:51):
I just say the NASA has so much storage. I don't care if it's got dups and excess and Yeah. Like that's my, that's my message. Or just throw everything on the nasa. At least you'll

Paul Thurrott (02:04:59):
Have it. Yeah, I, it is. But this NASA is old and outta support and I, I, I also want to do something new. So part of part of what I want to do with it is, it's gonna take a long time just copying over the network. It's gonna take a long time. Right. But I want to bring stuff down from it in chunks and just do a compare. Oh god. You know. No, I know, but this,

Leo Laporte (02:05:18):
What a nightmare. Oh yeah. I can see

Richard Campbell (02:05:21):
A little 10 gig

Paul Thurrott (02:05:23):
Sonology in your future.

Leo Laporte (02:05:24):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> smarter, faster. And by the way, most NASAs you can connect hard wired. Yeah. Even to another NAS and just copy it over. I mean Yep.

Paul Thurrott (02:05:34):
You don't, but I wanna clean it up first. 'cause I, I am going to copy You

Leo Laporte (02:05:37):
Really do want to clean it up. All right.

Richard Campbell (02:05:39):
Well, propagating messes. You know what we do,

Leo Laporte (02:05:41):
<Laugh>? Well, okay. As long as you can search, I would put my in boxes. Yeah. I don't

Paul Thurrott (02:05:46):
Care if I'm, I'm trying not to do that. So I'm trying the, the, the, I will say, look, the, the, for this kind of work it will, you'll be inspired from time to time to do it. You will be uninspired to do it 90% of the time. So the last time I did this kind of work was probably two years ago-ish. I don't remember. But you know, this came out of us moving and decluttering and downsizing and we still have some physical stuff that you can't see. I'm, I'm putting over here. Like you can see it, but it's over there <laugh>. And you know, that we still have to go through. We did a lot of it in the process of moving and you know, you get tired of it after a while. And I want to, I'm just inspired to do this right now, so I'm gonna strike. Well that hired as hot. I will not finish it. But I hope to get through a big chunk of it. I've already made more progress with the photos than I thought I was going to. So that's kind of nice. But it's it's worth doing. And, and just, God, please make sure your stuff is the important stuff. Photos especially, but if you have important documents as well make sure that they're in at least two different places and geographically diverse to survive whatever might happen. Right.

Richard Campbell (02:06:50):
My, my commitment to this, and I think I said this on to you before, is keeping everything in OneDrive and then sinking copy down to the local synology. 'cause Some, it's synology. Hass got a good built in Azure backup tool.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:00):
Yeah. It'll pull all that stuff first. I, I also for local nass, like I obviously could get a hard drive, but the reason I like a na is because I wanna have two drives for redundancy purposes. Yeah. yeah. And

Leo Laporte (02:07:11):
Yeah, you don't wanna put it all on a single drive.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:14):
Hard drives are like the car light thing. 'cause You know, when one goes south, the next one's

Leo Laporte (02:07:18):
Coming. <Laugh>. That's true.

Paul Thurrott (02:07:19):
But despite twos by two drives, it won't be long.

Leo Laporte (02:07:21):
Yeah. Oh man. I, my own, my analog are five drive base. Oh, nice. And used, I used two drives for

Paul Thurrott (02:07:28):
Redundancy. Mine's a I have a baby nest. It's just like a WD prosumer kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. But it's just two drives and it, you know,

Leo Laporte (02:07:33):
Doesn't work. Synology is so

Paul Thurrott (02:07:34):
Nice. I, these synology are great. It's worth the money. Okay, well that's okay. That's good to know. Okay. So that's fine. And just real quickly, Microsoft is having a back to school sale, which it has every year. This one is very heavily focused on surface hardware. So if you would like to buy a soon to be obsolete surface pc, this is the way to go because there is the other side of this, which is October is like the part, right? So Surface Studio laptop, 500 bucks off surface Pro nine, up to $300 off select configurations, surface laptop five, 13.5, and five inch version service laptop go et cetera there. So I didn't know this, but Microsoft also sells certified refurbished PCs. You can save a lot of money there just like you can at Apple. If you're not on Game Pass Ultimate and have never been, you can sample that for $1 again.

(02:08:22):
Although, by the way, they just switched the timeframe on that for 30 days down to 14. Because why Starfields coming out? That's why they don't want you playing that thing for free. Right. and we probably, I'm sure we talked about this whenever they announced it, but there's something called Microsoft Personal, I'm sorry, Microsoft 365 personal for students, which is only 2 99 a month. And you don't get no, you do, I'm sorry. You get all the core office apps you get a terabyte of cloud storage. So if you're a student, you can say big on that kind of a thing. So that's good. That's cool. The third tip is sort of <laugh> sort of, is not sort of, is self-serving. But I, I, I realized I never mentioned this on the show, which is that back in March, but I didn't announce it until July.

(02:09:10):
I have stopped being an employee of another company and I now run my company. So I own th.com for the first time. Yay. Congratulations. And I mentioned this. Yeah, I mentioned this because, you know, people see something called thout.com and they think it's me, you know, and in the past it was sort of me. I mean, I create most of the content on it, of course, but I don't, I was only like a minority partner in the business, and I didn't really have, I could easily be on voted on decisions and whatnot. So it is my own site now. People would ask me in the pass, like, oh, you know, I'd really like your work. I'd like to help you out in some way. The only thing I could do, you have like a Patreon or like a tip chart. And it's like, I can't do that.

(02:09:47):
Like I, and like I could buy Thout Premium and it's like, yeah, that helps me keep my job. It's not like I get a $5 check or something every time someone joins Thout Premium, you know? But now I own the company, so I do get a $5, no, I'm just kidding. <Laugh>, I don't get a check <laugh>. But but now there are more ways that people can kind of help me. Right? So the most obvious one is to subscribe to throughout premium, right? That's the most obvious one that helps keep the business going. If you know anything about advertising revenue versus subscription revenue, as I'm sure Leo does even a small number of subscribers makes a much bigger difference than a huge number of free, I don't, not freeloaders, but people are ad supported. So that makes, that's the biggest thing you could possibly do for me.

(02:10:28):
You could also subscribe to the new newsletter we have with Jr. I mentioned that earlier. The windows Intelligence. This is a partnership. They're creating almost all the content actually. But I, at some level, I will start sharing in the revenue generated from that newsletter. That can help me out a lot as well. And they are our official newsletters, so that's good. Please buy my books. Both of these books, the Windows 11 Field Guide and Windows everywhere are over 900 pages long each. You can buy them for as little as 9 99, I think. I mean, I would think this, I wrote them, but I think they both are an incredible value of whatever sort windows anywhere, everywhere in particular, I don't think a lot of people even know about. And I think would be interested in, 'cause it really is the history of Windows pulled in a slightly different fashion.

(02:11:13):
The final thing you can do, by the way, Lee already mentioned this today, which was kind of interesting, is subscribe to Club Twit because I don't get a No, I do, I'm sorry. Club Twit is what helps keep my other podcast hands on. Windows going. And I was gonna say, don't get it. Just like I get paid every month. This we pay, but I do get paid. Right? You no, I, I know I almost said it's, it's like, it's not like you subscribe and I get paid. And I was like, actually, it's kind of, it's exactly like that. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:11:39):
Well, you don you don't get a, you don't get a percentage, although No, no. You do get a percentage of Windows Weekly. It kind of works out that way. But yeah. I don't know how how we figure it, but yeah, you

Paul Thurrott (02:11:48):
Get, no, but I do get paid and it's great and I love doing it. And I especially.

Leo Laporte (02:11:53):
But give him money directly by Thout Premium. Absolutely. Yeah. Newsletter by the books. 'cause That is directly in your pocket. This is a, it's a little more indirect too.

Paul Thurrott (02:12:03):
It's indirect, but you get paid, I get paid every month for doing it, right? Yeah. So if, if people weren't subscribing, if people stop watching or aren't watching it will go away. <Laugh> and I won't get paid. So I, you know, I, I think it's a fun little podcast. It's meant to be easily digestible. We've done some fun topics. I've been working through a lot of the topics in the book, obviously. But I've also gone off on these little tangents. And like I said, I, I'm in the middle of a multi-part series on Clip Champ, which I think is particularly cool. So anyway, those are all the things you can do. So now it's a, it's a different story now that I own the company. You can't actually help me directly <laugh>. So those are the ways

Leo Laporte (02:12:38):
What the new, tell me about the newsletters. Are you doing that with jr?

Paul Thurrott (02:12:42):
Yeah. Yeah. So JR is, so this is, this is like one of those best case scenario things. So I talked to your wife Lisa, when I was taking over the business, right? Because I don't know if you know this, but your, your wife is kind of an incredible business person. Yes, she is. She know that a matter, I came to her, I came to her, was, you know, looking for advice and she's great and she really helped me a lot. But one of the things I really needed help with, I couldn't figure out the newsletter thing. The news newsletters are incredibly expensive. The thing that my old company was doing was horrifically expensive, and there was absolutely no way. Like, I can't, I cannot spend money to put, just to put stuff in people's inboxes, most of which will probably be ignored.

(02:13:22):
Right? Like, it's so expensive, right? So he had, he, he created his own newsletter some time ago and called Android Intelligence, and he discovered that there's like a business model here that can actually work. And so he has one primary newsletter a week, and then he does two other newsletters, which you can optionally subscribe to. So it's kinda like a Monday, Wednesday, Friday thing. And I, I've always liked his writing. Like I said, I subscribed to it Look great. And he seemed to think he could make a go of this. And, you know, maybe in the future, turn this into like a business where they're doing other newsletters as well. And so that newsletter is called Windows Intelligence. The content is mostly created by, or almost solely created by Chris Hoffman Chris, I'm sorry. Chris Hoffman. Chris Hoffman. There's a name from my past <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:14:07):
It says Chris Hoffman on the on he

Paul Thurrott (02:14:09):
Chris Hoffman. Oh yeah, it was Chris. I'm sorry. I I I used to, I you may, I you don't understand. I knew someone named Chris Hoffman in the nineties, and his name always screws me. I'm sorry, this is

Leo Laporte (02:14:17):
The other Chris Hoffman, but he's the editor.

Paul Thurrott (02:14:19):
Chris. No, I've had two Chris Hoffman's in my life. Sorry. Sorry. As I said that, I, I, the other, Chris Hoffman is the guy who screwed me over the bachelor party, and I still hate him anyway, but <laugh>

Leo Laporte (02:14:28):
Never

Paul Thurrott (02:14:29):
Forget him. Chris Hoffman. Yeah. Chris Hoffman of, it's a different Chris Hoffman of how to geek Fame, right? So I, he's another guy. So like Jr. I didn't know him personally. I never met him anywhere or anything like that. But I actually followed his stuff and always agree with him. And I always really liked him. And I would see things, you know, we, we, I have actually talked to him once or twice over the years, but I would, you know, this type of thing, we retreat stuff and I make fun of headlines and, and news stories all day long on Twitter. And he was one of those guys where I'm like, I, there's nothing to make fun of here. He is great. You know. So when he, when I found out that JR was got him to do this, I thought this is, you know, this is perfect. This is like a best case scenario. So it's a great newsletter. It's different. It's very different from what I would, what I did. And frankly, the newsletter we put out at great Expense was terrible. It was

Leo Laporte (02:15:13):
A terrible, yeah. That's too bad.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:14):
That's, it was just a daily wise what was on the site. Have

Leo Laporte (02:15:17):
Your own thing I think. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:20):
And I'm really, this just a, a huge improvement. How do

Leo Laporte (02:15:22):
I subscribe to the newsletter? Is that on throt.com? Where, where can I,

Paul Thurrott (02:15:25):
Yeah, if you scroll all the way to the bottom there'll be a blue box. There you Oh, at the very bottom. Sorry. Yep. Oh. I thought it was at the very bottom. <Laugh>. I it should be there.

Leo Laporte (02:15:36):
I don't see it.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:38):
Why isn't it there, Leo? Let me look.

Leo Laporte (02:15:40):
Maybe I have version.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:41):
Lemme Oh, I see. No, I see it. I, I mean, I see it on mine. Maybe you're doing some kind of a, if you load load, if you load an article

Leo Laporte (02:15:48):
Okay. That

Paul Thurrott (02:15:49):
You'll see it somewhere.

Leo Laporte (02:15:51):
Okay.

Paul Thurrott (02:15:51):
If you haven't been to the site in a while, you'll, that will actually be a popup for it. Oh,

Leo Laporte (02:15:56):
You know what? I have all of these things. I don't why you

Paul Thurrott (02:15:59):
Turn

Leo Laporte (02:15:59):
On tracking protection. Let me let me turn off. You block Origin <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (02:16:07):
Well, I mean, okay,

Leo Laporte (02:16:08):
Let me turn off all there it is. There. It's, you see it Now's, sorry. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it was being blocked by probably. There you go. Thought it was a popup. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:16:16):
Or something. You can also go to jr's web, I think it's probably android intelligence.com/windows or something

Leo Laporte (02:16:22):
Like that. It's, it's Android intel.net/windows would be the direct link. Okay. And you're like are you editor of this? And Chris writes No,

Paul Thurrott (02:16:33):
I, I mean, I, they pull content from the site, but most I of it's written by Chris. Oh, I see. And it's, it follows the model of Android intelligence. And there's some stuff up in the air. Like we, we, we need to talk soon about, you know, I used to have like a peer premium newsletter that went out on I'm so sorry, Chris that I, I always Chris Hoffman and kills me. 'cause The other guy <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (02:16:54):
He's, he, clearly you have traumatic memories of this bachelor's.

Paul Thurrott (02:16:58):
I, I still, you don't understand that this just came up with this guy again, this No, it was last year. He's still,

Leo Laporte (02:17:05):
This guy

Paul Thurrott (02:17:06):
Like a, like a Freddie Krueger has come back into all of our nightmares and screwed over the same group of friends in exactly the same way. Like literally 30 years later, it's man, unbelievable. And I'm like, traumatized by this person. Anyway, can I

Leo Laporte (02:17:19):
Add this Android intel.net/windows link to your lower third, that way people can find it quickly. How about that?

Paul Thurrott (02:17:26):
I mean, I would Oh, sure. If you want it. Yeah. Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:17:29):
Well, just a plug. I mean, it's up to you. Yep,

Paul Thurrott (02:17:32):
Yep. Sorry, I didn't mean to turn this into a 30 minute advertisement from me. No, but I

Leo Laporte (02:17:35):
No, we wanna support you and I'm thrilled that you're on your, you know, you're doing your own thing. That was, it's a big, brave thing to do. And we know a lot of people like Richard, like me like Renee, Richie, and a lot of other people who's just took, took the chance and said, I'm gonna do it my own. Well,

Paul Thurrott (02:17:51):
I should, I, I, I wrote about this at the time and it's worth looking up, but I, I should really give credit to the guy I worked for, George Cole who, when I joined him, it seems impossible, but it was the end of 2014. So a million years ago, I explained how I got screwed over by Penton and I would've done for Penton what I had been doing for them all along, which was keep driving traffic to Windows it Pro and if they just let me keep the super safe for Windows. And they were like, no, you have to pay us a million dollars. That's not happening. Ugh. And so I had to start over from scratch and I just said, look, I can't go through that again. And he says, you know, and George is just, he's just so honest and excellent. He just said, look, we'll, we will, no matter what happens, we will make you whole. And also the the whole notion of like using my name, which I did not wanna use for this site, it's really hard to find a domain name. I'm like, I can't just give you my name, <laugh>. And he says, no, you're gonna own the name. You can have it. Oh, okay. This is, everything's said and done. You can leave and you'll always have

Leo Laporte (02:18:44):
It. Good,

Paul Thurrott (02:18:44):
Good, good, good. And so that was always the thing. So it's, it he, you know, he did everything he said he was gonna do and people just don't do that. And it was nice. Good.

Leo Laporte (02:18:52):
So, and,

Paul Thurrott (02:18:53):
And

Leo Laporte (02:18:54):
Anti Hoffman <laugh>,

Paul Thurrott (02:18:56):
Well, anti First Hoffman <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:19:00):
Well, I'm the

Paul Thurrott (02:19:01):
First Hopman I'm, we're referring to here today is a, is a, is a very nice person and an excellent writer. And yeah. Good. You should, you should definitely subscribe. Good.

Leo Laporte (02:19:08):
I'm very happy to hear about all of that. Finally, I'm

Paul Thurrott (02:19:12):
Sorry. I don't know why I waited

Leo Laporte (02:19:13):
So long. Yeah, you've been keeping it a secret.

Paul Thurrott (02:19:16):
I didn't mean to It's okay.

Leo Laporte (02:19:17):
You don't, do not hide your light under a bushel, whatever that means. Yeah. speaking of bushels, you finally did the, published the Markovich interview, Richard Campbell. Yeah. Yeah. Quite

Richard Campbell (02:19:32):
Excited back in May at Build. It's been a, wow. I held on it to a little too long, I suspect. Not that it's not completely free,

Leo Laporte (02:19:38):
It's dated fresh, not dated,

Richard Campbell (02:19:39):
No of it all. Yeah. it's all, all the more relevant

Leo Laporte (02:19:42):
We've been waiting with bated breath for this thing.

Richard Campbell (02:19:44):
Yeah. We certainly dug into LLMs. I had a great chat with 'em about Project Natick, which was the underwater data center experiments they did

Leo Laporte (02:19:54):
Named after the whaling port of Natick Mass, I presume. Indeed. I was gonna say, which is completely landlocked, by the way. Oh, is it? Oh, nevermind. Yeah, nevermind. Yeah, <laugh>.

Richard Campbell (02:20:03):
But, you know, it's, it's Mark Sinnovi. He's amazing. It was such a fun conversation. Yeah. And hero, you know, he hero

Leo Laporte (02:20:10):
Of mine, his

Richard Campbell (02:20:11):
Real job, I mean the title is of c t o of Azure is one thing, but his real job is running this innovation center, like all of the experiments they're doing to figure out what the future of Azure needs to look like, respond to the causes, all of that sort of stuff. That's what we really dug into. And so Natick ended up falling under that. So I just mentioned it. 'cause I'd done a couple of shows on it and you know, there was so many things that made sense about the underwater data center except for that part where it's like, hey, you know, you can't actually secure it.

(02:20:40):
<Laugh>. Right. It's underwater. So, and in the land and in, you know, re the reality for Microsoft these days is they live with dealing with state actors and the kinds that have submarines that can go after you incident. So, so much for that. Yeah. But we did talk about billing G P T three 'cause he did a set of blog posts back in the day and just, it was the, as he described it, the fifth largest computer in the world at the time running inside of Azure in order to build G P T three they've held. And then he was quite quick. He's like, I can't talk about G P T four, which, you know, it's not hard to do the numbers and go, oh, you mean the biggest supercomputer in the world? Yeah, <laugh>.

Leo Laporte (02:21:21):
Nice.

Richard Campbell (02:21:22):
So great conversation. I thought it'd be great to publish it the summertime. A little easy listening from, I mean, one of the smartest people I'll ever meet in your life.

Leo Laporte (02:21:30):
Awesome. And I'm sure it's too short even at 38 minutes, but I would, but I can't wait. He's, he's, I can't wait. He's easy to listen to. He's so well-spoken. Yeah, he's very well spoken. Super smart. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (02:21:40):
Enjoyable

Leo Laporte (02:21:40):
Novelist. It's, he's super smart and well-spoken. It's very it's a unique set of skills. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (02:21:45):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:21:47):
I guess that that means all that's left is some brown liquor.

Richard Campbell (02:21:51):
And I got a story this week, and it's because of the Club Twi Discord. One of our listeners, Tom pinged me on Discord and said, Hey, would you mind explaining the difference between proof and a B V?

Leo Laporte (02:22:04):
Oh,

Richard Campbell (02:22:05):
Now, today we don't think much about that because it's basically, you know, proof goes to 200 A B V, it goes to 100, it's just one half of the other. Right. That's not how it started. Oh. And so I actually had to ass, I assembled the whole story together because I thought, I, I thought I knew just often the thing, I generally know some stuff about this already, but then I, I really dug into it and you'll be happy to know that like most things related to alcohol, this starts with taxes. So back in the day when England wanted to start taxing alcohol, they came up with, they decided that that above a certain level of alcohol, that they would be an additional tax on it. This is essentially a liquor tax as opposed to beer and wine. And so in the 15 hundreds, the strategy was you would take a sample of the product that was made and you'd soak gunpowder with it, and then you'd attempt to light it.

(02:23:03):
And if the gunpowder burned, then it was proof that it was a high alcohol, that it had been distilled. And so was able to burn the gunpowder where if you did, there was something that was a low alcohol like wine, it wouldn't burn. So that's why we had proof. That's almost disappointing. It'ss not that exciting. So you mean proof means proof? Yes. And so they literally, they only ever talked about 100 proof. If it burns, it's a hundred proof. That's it. The problem is, this is a very sketchy scale, but look, it's the 15 hundreds. What'd you expect? You know, you think gunpowder is consistent in 1500. They, they had no temperature controls. They had no soaky level of control. So there's, there's really not a lot of control. And you know, the idea that a hundred today we think a hundred proof is 50% alcohol, which also wasn't accurate.

(02:23:52):
And we know perfectly well you can take a 40% alcohol brandy and flame it on a crepe Suzette all day long. Right. and to that point, you know, there was never alcohol measures on beer and wine because you couldn't prove it. So there was really no way to know. Now that's not how we do things anymore. In fact, that's not even how they really did things shortly after that, because the, you enter the hydrometer. Right. And, and the silly part of course about this, you think about this is what they were doing proof in 1500 hydrometer has been around since ar since Archimedes. Right, right. Even the whole story of Archimedes and like the, is this crown really gold? Which gets into displacement theory and so forth. Well, that's a hydrometer a is essentially a gradated displacement meter. And so although it wasn't called a hydrometer back then, and it was actually Robert Boyle, the scientist, as in boy's laws that named it a hydrometer.

(02:24:52):
And there are different kinds of hydrometers. The, the usual type of hydrometer the, the one you'll encounter first is what they call a triple scale hydrometer or a brewer's hydrometer because you're measuring the density of a liquid. And there's a bunch of reasons you might wanna do that. And it's usually to say like, what's in this liquid? And it's never simple, but some of the, you know, they use hydrometers to measure the concentration of cream and milk. They use hydrometers to measure and they use it measures of sugar. And so a brewer's hydrometer is used before you make beer, after once you've made the wash. So you now have sugar concentrate in water, you have other stuff as well. And you're measuring the specific gravity of that water to see if it's got enough sugar in it to actually be worthwhile expending your yeast on it to try and make beer.

(02:25:44):
Although they call it a triple scale because there's actually three different scales on it. There is specific gravity and there is a B v or, you know, estimate alcohol. This is the projected amount of alcohol you would get 'cause you haven't done it yet. Then is a scale called the bricks scale, which are degrees, bricks, which is a measure of the amount of sugar relative to it, the water that's in it. The point being that when you have sugar dissolved in water, the water's actually denser. And so this glass tube with a weight in it to make it float, float upright and a certain amount of air in it will float at different heights based on the density of the water. The variation's very small, but it's enough that you can consistently say, Hey, you know, you want to get to a 10% concentration of potential alcohol before you make your beer.

(02:26:34):
Or you haven't had a good enough wash, you haven't been successful. Atracting sugars from your barley. Now this is different from measuring after you've made alcohol, which is typically done with a kind of hydrometer called an alcohol meter, because alcohol is less dense than water. Right. And different alcohol's actually run a different density, which is why we can make layered cocktails. I was gonna say, we can make a dark and tan <laugh>. Exactly. And, and so you, if you wanna measure the alcohol content, you need a different scale because the alcohol is less dense. And so you can tell what the level of spirit is inside of the city. It's just to think about how hard this was to figure out before you had a scale yet really you needed to make nearly pure alcohol in the first place and figure out what its density was compared to water. And then you could go through the gradations from zero to a hundred percent.

(02:27:28):
So by the 17, so in the 15 hundreds they're doing the proof thing. And then by the 17 hundreds they're finally reliable. The glassworks have gotten good enough and low expen, less cost enough that the excise department in the, in the Eng England now wants to buy hydrometers 'cause they're more accurate. But they're now matching against the proof scale. And so they finally settle on that. A hundred proof is 12 13th, the gravity of water, which is not, it's a nice number, but 12 13th. But what that actually comes out to is 57.06% alcohol by volume A B V. That's a hundred proof when actually measured off. And so in 1816, they actually passed a law called the Sykes Hydrometer Act of 1816, named for Bartholomew Sykes who was making the, he was the excise a who was making these things. And that was the standardized measurement for alcohol content. So now they had a scale from 1816 going forward in, in 1848, the US says, you know, a hundred proof being 57% is stupid. Let's make it 50%. And the French Day, nah, a hundred proof is a hundred percent alcohol done. It's all one scale. And so by 1980, everybody got together and said, let's just use a B V. Everything about proof is dumb.

Leo Laporte (02:28:51):
That's

Richard Campbell (02:28:51):
Fair. And and that's the, the regression. And that brings us to today's alcohol, which is a, a port ask egg.

Leo Laporte (02:29:00):
And I'm gonna put it on the screen 'cause I don't know how the hell to spell that. There we go. Ask,

Richard Campbell (02:29:05):
So Port Ask Egg Port. Ask Egg is a location, it's actually a ferry terminal. Oh. and it is on, it's the gateway

Leo Laporte (02:29:13):
To isle.

Richard Campbell (02:29:15):
There you go. <Laugh>. It's on, it's on the aisle of iy. Iy

Leo Laporte (02:29:19):
Is that you pronounce.

Richard Campbell (02:29:19):
Okay. On the, in the Northeastern side. Right across from from Jura. It's a little village. It has almost none. The body of water between the two is called the Sound of iy or Cow iy. And in fact, cow iy, the distillery is about a half a kilometer north of Parque.

Leo Laporte (02:29:38):
I'm gonna bet you've been there, Richard Campbell. I

Richard Campbell (02:29:40):
Have not.

Leo Laporte (02:29:41):
Oh,

Richard Campbell (02:29:43):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (02:29:43):
Well good. There's somewhere left for you to go.

Richard Campbell (02:29:45):
There's almost nothing there. Yeah. Including, there's no distillery

Leo Laporte (02:29:49):
There. Caribou. Oh, Scotland. Yeah. Oh.

Richard Campbell (02:29:52):
This is actually a whiskey that is made by an organization called Specialty Drinks. And so they're buying, they don't disclose which distillers to buy from. They're clearly connected with Iley. This is a single malt edition that they call 100 Proof.

Leo Laporte (02:30:09):
Oh.

Richard Campbell (02:30:10):
But the 100 proof is a brand label, not the concentration of alcohol <laugh>, because the concentration of alcohol is

Leo Laporte (02:30:17):
57.1 <laugh> 57 1.

Richard Campbell (02:30:19):
Exactly.

Leo Laporte (02:30:20):
That's what it's really 114.2 proof,

Richard Campbell (02:30:24):
A call back to the original, original measure of a hundred Proof Uhhuh, which in the 79 hundreds was determined to be 57.1%.

Leo Laporte (02:30:31):
Oh, isn't that interesting? Isn't that interesting? It's

Richard Campbell (02:30:33):
About a $75 bottle of whiskey. It is a strongly peed ile. It's probably from Kyle Eila. It's spooky. Yeah. Yeah, that's too. But such a unique whiskey. And there's three different fairies that run out of that, that location there. You can go across to Jura, which is the short run. You can go up to Collin Sea, which is another island just north of there. Or you can take the long ferry ride to Kenneth Craig, which is back to the mainland of Scotland. And you're just north of Campbellton at that point, and can pop down to Spring Bank.

Leo Laporte (02:31:06):
<Laugh>. The good news is, if you're there now, it's the dead of summer and it's a full 16 degrees Celsius <laugh> and reasonably sure. Those locations are all in middle earth and not Yeah, it does look that way. And

Richard Campbell (02:31:17):
Yeah, 16 degrees and raining and

Leo Laporte (02:31:20):
Raining looks by certainty.

Richard Campbell (02:31:21):
Yeah. Without a doubt.

Leo Laporte (02:31:23):
But it's a wet heat <laugh>. Yeah, yeah, exactly. But

Richard Campbell (02:31:27):
It's, I

Leo Laporte (02:31:28):
Know it's a wet cold. Wet cold. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (02:31:31):
On the other hand, there's plenty of good whiskey. So how's that gonna be? And Pete burning in the, in the fireplace.

Leo Laporte (02:31:35):
Now you know why they, you know, that's a whole excuse for it is the climate. I

Richard Campbell (02:31:39):
Enjoy the how scales evolves, you know, just

Leo Laporte (02:31:43):
As <crosstalk>. Yeah, no, that's interesting. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (02:31:45):
Just like the barrel sizes where they used to have different size of barrels for wine, whiskey and grain and, you know, named for different things and then they came up with the imperial gallon, like, it's very funny. But same thing here. It's proof went through a bunch of different iterations. A B V is the far more literal measurement, and it really comes from having a real set of science around you to be able to make pure product and be able to measure against it to create useful

Leo Laporte (02:32:09):
Scales. And you pronounce I s l A Y E Elay Ley

Richard Campbell (02:32:15):
Eley

Leo Laporte (02:32:16):
Eley Iley. Yeah. Okay. Like an aisle without,

Richard Campbell (02:32:19):
Without the brogue. So I don't, I can't do the brogue

Leo Laporte (02:32:23):
<Laugh>. It's, it's Ailey oily. Yeah, that's it. Just think I oily and then you're close. Yeah. And you're there. Oily. Wow.

Richard Campbell (02:32:31):
So yeah, A very odd whiskey because it is a, a custom bottler. So they're buying their own barrels and doing their own bottlings. It is still a single malt. It does not have an age declaration on it, which she generally tells you it's not that old. 'cause They would use it if it was Right. But that's a sturdy alcohol is 57%. That's sort of stuff a book your eye out. I would not recommend drinking this while recording a show. Not that anybody would do that. Nobody does that. Well,

Leo Laporte (02:32:54):
Here's the good news. If you want the less alcohol version, get the 110 proof, which is only 55%. 55%, because numbers are hard <laugh>. Wow. I think that's hysterical. But, but

Richard Campbell (02:33:09):
Tom, there's your story that I yelled at you about. We,

Leo Laporte (02:33:12):
Right? Yeah. But if you, if we hadn't heard that prologue, we wouldn't understand why a hundred proof is 57.1 and 110 is 55. It's

Richard Campbell (02:33:20):
It's like

Leo Laporte (02:33:20):
A Simpson's joke. You mean who knew? And Flammable means Flammable. Yeah. Or Inflammable Flamm. Oh man. What a great story. Thank you. That's funny. Richard Campbell

Richard Campbell (02:33:31):
And thanks to Club Twit, you know, like with That's Tom that asked me to do that. Oh yeah. As I, as I came together, I'm like, well, this is funny. I'm gonna do it. It's

Leo Laporte (02:33:38):
A good story. It's great.

Richard Campbell (02:33:40):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:33:41):
We I think are ready to wrap this up. Richard Campbell is@runasradio.com. That's where both run as radio and.net rocks live. And that's where the Mark Russinovich interview will be. Paul Ott is@ott.com. Now fully owned and operated by the Throt family Trust, T H u r r o t t.com. His books lean pub.com, including Windows Everywhere. And let's add the newsletter also available@thout.com. And I notice if you subscribe, you get a free copy of the Field Guide to Windows 11. So that's a pretty good deal. There is all. And Richard, join us every Wednesday about 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern 1800 U T C. I mentioned that 'cause you can watch us do it live if you really, you gotta hankerin, you gotta have the latest, freshest version. We stream live all day, all night at twit tv slash live, watching live chat live in our IRC that's open all you can just use a browser, point it to IRC TWIT tv.

(02:34:47):
Of course, if you're in the club, you also have access to the, we like to think of as the Champagne Room of Podcasts, <laugh> <laugh> and that is our Club Twit Discord after the fact on demand versions of the show at TWIT tv slash ww. When you get there, you'll also see a link to the YouTube channel. It's dedicated to Windows Weekly. There's audio and video on that page, and you can subscribe to the audio or the video and your favorite podcast player, which is probably the best way to do it, because that way you get it. You don't have to think about it. And you'll have it the minute it's it's ready. Don't forget, next week we're gonna open the Discord. So get your que questions ready. Comments are welcome to, and it, and it can be brown, brown liquor as much as anything else. So next week we'll do the Discord with Paul and Richard coming up. We're gonna do that unboxing for the Flip five. And then of course, this week in Google is our Live Day Continues. Paul and Richard, have a great week and we'll see you next Wednesday on Windows Weekly. Bye-Bye guys.