Windows Weekly 851 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. Richard Campbell is in Portugal. Paul Thots in Mexico. I'm in Rhode Island, but we're going to talk about Microsoft lots to say, including Microsoft. Finalizing the Activision Blizzard acquisition. Final words about this, at least for some time. Microsoft finally reveals how many Windows 11 PCs there are. Can we call Windows 11 a success Plus? We'll talk about that. $29 billion bill for back taxes. How did Microsoft run up such a big tax bill? It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twitter. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thora and Richard Campbell. Episode 851 recorded Wednesday, October 18th, 2023 Between two Ferns. Windows Weekly is brought to you by Thinked Canary. Canary tokens are a quick, painless way to help defenders discover they've been breached by having attackers announce themselves for 10% off and a 60 day money back guarantee.

(00:01:21):
Go to Canary tools slash twit and enter the code TWI in the how did you hear about Us. Box and buy Miro, the online workspace for innovation where your team can dream design and build the future together From any location. Tap into a way to map processes, visualize content, run retrospectives, and keep all your documents and data in one place. Get your first three boards for free at miro.com/podcast. Podcast. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest news from Microsoft, of course, with our good friend to my are on my left or on you on my right. Anyway, this guy over

Richard Campbell (00:02:06):
Here, virtual, this

Leo Laporte (00:02:07):
Guy over here, Paul Thoro, who is in Mexico City tonight. He is poking us. Hi Paul from thout.com and lingo.com. Hello Leo and in Portugal, in Porto home of port. So it's kind of no, any port in a storm. Richard Campbell,

Richard Campbell (00:02:32):
You go

Leo Laporte (00:02:33):
And it's pretty

Richard Campbell (00:02:34):
Stormy here today actually.

Leo Laporte (00:02:35):
Is it really? Yeah. And you're in a conference, I think otherwise you've got people in your house walking around

Richard Campbell (00:02:41):
The conference center. It's after hours, so things are getting tidied up. But we're all done now, so we're ready.

Leo Laporte (00:02:47):
Nice. Richard, of course, from run as radio and from now on I'm going to call you the peripatetic Richard Campbell. I'm also, if you show the full shot, he's also today, ladies and gentlemen, between two Ferns. Yes.

Richard Campbell (00:03:00):
No, they were nice enough to put ferns in my room. The least I think I could do is put 'em in the shop.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:05):
I'm sure they saw you sitting against the wall and were like, you know what this thing needs, call it fern

Leo Laporte (00:03:09):
Fern ferns. I am as I was yesterday in Providence, Rhode Island at my mom's house visiting,

Paul Thurrott (00:03:18):
Which is really lovely. I'm a huge fan of plantation shutters. I've always wanted those in my mom. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:03:22):
These are great. They love

Paul Thurrott (00:03:23):
Them. I love them so much.

Leo Laporte (00:03:25):
She has a nice house. I have to say. You can leave

Paul Thurrott (00:03:28):
The top one open. Walk around naked. No one needs to know. It's all good. That's

Leo Laporte (00:03:31):
A good point. They just say maybe he's not wearing a shirt.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:34):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:03:35):
We don't know.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:36):
Sometimes the shirt nothing below, so it's

Leo Laporte (00:03:39):
Fine. There you go. You fool 'em all. I think if I open 'em up, it'll be a little too bright, so

Paul Thurrott (00:03:44):
I'm

Leo Laporte (00:03:44):
Going to them.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:44):
It looks nice. I think it looks nice.

Leo Laporte (00:03:46):
Closed against the typhoon, right? It's not a typhoon. It's quite nice out actually. Actually I'm glad I'm not back at our studios. It is weirdly in Northern for Northern California, 90 degrees in Petaluma and John Jamer B says it's going to be 96 tomorrow

Paul Thurrott (00:04:05):
In Petal. Yeah. I don't think weather can be predictable anymore.

Leo Laporte (00:04:08):
There's no global warming.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:10):
No warming was the wrong word. It was more like global chaos.

Leo Laporte (00:04:15):
I'll tell you where we went wrong by calling it global warming or climate change. It's pollution. Boys and girls.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:21):
Growing up as a young man, I had a friend who would call every time it was anything lower than 70 say, oh, I thought we were having global warming. And it's like, that's not,

Leo Laporte (00:04:31):
No, no, no. That's a bad name. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:04:33):
Not how it works.

Leo Laporte (00:04:34):
Yeah. Well, we're not having global warming, but what we are having, well maybe

Paul Thurrott (00:04:40):
We're having, we're

Leo Laporte (00:04:42):
Having, does it feel like I'm going to in a little seay kind of environment here. Oh, spirit spirits full

Paul Thurrott (00:04:49):
Hands. Open your minds.

Leo Laporte (00:04:51):
Spirit's wild. If you are here, please tap the table. Oh, it's scaring my daughter. I apologize, Abby.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:01):
See, she thinks it is a seance.

Leo Laporte (00:05:02):
She thinks it's a seance. Let us talk about the big news of the week. Microsoft did it. They pulled the string.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:11):
Yeah, version. Oh no, I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte (00:05:16):
Not that string. This string over here. Activision Blizzard deal is a feta accompli, as the French would say, except

Paul Thurrott (00:05:25):
As they should.

Leo Laporte (00:05:26):
The FTC says not so fast. Jimmy, which is their

Paul Thurrott (00:05:31):
Nickname for

Leo Laporte (00:05:32):
Such an

Paul Thurrott (00:05:32):
Adult surrounded by A to C I dunno what to tell you. This thing took over six months longer than it should have. The C M A and the F T C both had illogical and fantastical arguments against it, one of which was Protic aside in court, despite the 1 million pieces of evidence that they provided to the court, the court saw no evidence whatsoever

Leo Laporte (00:05:59):
To

Paul Thurrott (00:05:59):
Back their claims. And

Leo Laporte (00:06:00):
The issue for UK C M A, the Competitive Markets Association was, or whatever it is, was cloud computing. And Microsoft was able to get them to shut up giving the cloud computing business to Ubisoft a French company, French company.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:17):
So there's two things interesting about that. That deal is worldwide, right? So if you want to stream Activision Blizzard games, you can't do it through Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. You have to actually go through Ubisoft. So that's interesting. Also, the F T C, which you noted is still being a sore loser about this and is trying it internally after the fact. Guess what they're worried about? Leo? Can you guess?

Leo Laporte (00:06:42):
Cloud gaming.

Paul Thurrott (00:06:43):
Cloud gaming, yep. Despite this deal, which lasts for 15 years, not 10, it's other deals still this is still a concern for these people. So listen, after 15 years is over, we'll be two administrations away from them anyway, so who cares? But this to me is the story of the story, like the illogical nature of the regulatory actions that have occurred against Microsoft. Lemme

Leo Laporte (00:07:09):
Ask you this though, both of you. Is this a good deal for Microsoft?

Paul Thurrott (00:07:15):
Yeah, no, that's a good question because I saved an article I've not read in depth yet, but it was basically an analysis of what the return on investment might look like because Activision has a certain amount of revenues each year and there are different game franchises going in different directions. And what might this look like? Microsoft moving things into Game Pass changes the scenario dramatically for revenues. And it's kind of an open question, but the basic point of the article is it's going to be hard for them to get a financial win out of this. And that's probably a good point. I think Microsoft would call this an investment.

Richard Campbell (00:07:57):
This is a long-term play.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:59):
This

Richard Campbell (00:07:59):
Is recognition that there's only going to be so many entities that are going to be delivering games to consumers

Paul Thurrott (00:08:06):
And

Richard Campbell (00:08:09):
Whoever has the most studios is going to win the same way that Disney is dominating in the TV space. The

Paul Thurrott (00:08:17):
Movies, I would just call it entertainment space. I mean because it kind of transcends movies and just their in-person park stuff is a big part of it too.

Richard Campbell (00:08:26):
So

Leo Laporte (00:08:29):
Doesn't that kind of imply the Ft C was right that

Paul Thurrott (00:08:34):
No,

Leo Laporte (00:08:35):
This is a winner takes all market and if you want to compete to get big, the F's

Paul Thurrott (00:08:39):
Concern was that this market for game streaming might one day be a big deal. You won't find anyone in the gaming industry Actually, no,

Leo Laporte (00:08:46):
No, no. I mean I think we all agree cloud gaming is such a tiny market and is unproven and at this point really likely not to be an important

Paul Thurrott (00:08:55):
Well, but you can't unwind the things that have already occurred elsewhere in the industry. So we have Steam, which is very dominant on Windows. We have Sony, which is dominant in traditional, what we call traditional high performance consoles. Nintendo, which has its own special space,

Leo Laporte (00:09:11):
But look at Epic, which you might say is an equal of those that just laid off like

Paul Thurrott (00:09:17):
15% of their workforce. Yeah, and

Richard Campbell (00:09:20):
I wouldn't say equal of.

Paul Thurrott (00:09:22):
No, I wouldn't either. But here's the thing. I feel like we might've semi debated this at one point a month or two ago, but the problem is that the natural consolidation that's going to occur here is going to occur here anyway and denying Microsoft access to a market in

Leo Laporte (00:09:38):
Which

Paul Thurrott (00:09:40):
Honestly I have to say I don't often talk about Microsoft this way, but very good faith has made the concessions. I think that kind of settled the competition worries and honestly speak to the thing that this is a little naive in a way, but this notion that gaming should be open and everywhere and that exclusives are terrible and Microsoft can't change the market, but both Sach and Nadella and Phil Spencer, well I almost called Phil Collins there for a second,

Leo Laporte (00:10:09):
Boom, boom, boom. I dunno where

Paul Thurrott (00:10:13):
That came from.

Leo Laporte (00:10:14):
Have both

Paul Thurrott (00:10:15):
Spoken openly about their desire for that to be the case and people that are worried that this deal will somehow restrict gaming in general. There will definitely be exclusives that come out of this are kind of missing the point because in general, this will make gaming available, I should say games, more games available more places into more people than was the case before the acquisition.

Leo Laporte (00:10:37):
You say in your article, you call the F T C sore losers and you say the F T C can't stop obsessing over their stunning defeat at the hands of Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:50):
Unfortunately this is literally a political issue. That's all this is and that makes me sad because I don't want to go down that rabbit hole. But there is a mandate in the current presidential administration for regulators to go after Big tech and they're doing it not to existing companies that have things. They're just going after new deals. And that's what I think is the problem. I think this company or this regulatory party and also the US Department of Justice, which actually is doing this, by the way, should focus on the existing monopolies that are being abused. Not the

Richard Campbell (00:11:30):
Speculative ones that may appear

Paul Thurrott (00:11:32):
Some That's right. Not the Minority Report Future crimes. We made this up in our head during a fever Dream crimes that might or might not happen in the future. There are very real problems in big tech with regards to monopoly abuse, both of consumers and competitors. And this isn't one of 'em, I'm sorry, it just isn't.

Richard Campbell (00:11:51):
And market happen in lots of other entertainment media.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:55):
They're going to happen whether you want 'em to happen or not. That's the thing. We all would prefer a world of, I don't know, small game companies applying the way and making lots of money and being successful on all platforms, but

Richard Campbell (00:12:09):
It's that they can't do that. There's no way to build a game for the PSS five of the small team.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:16):
It's

Richard Campbell (00:12:16):
Just not a thing.

Leo Laporte (00:12:19):
I might argue with that the game that I really like called Heim is developed by an independent gaming company. I think only less than a dozen developers, they're distributed by Coffee Stain Studio. They're sold at 20 bucks on Steam. They're on the STEAM platform. That's nice. So that's their marketing platform and it is 20 bucks and they have sold, I think they said a hundred million copies now.

Richard Campbell (00:12:46):
Wow, that's

Leo Laporte (00:12:47):
Great. It's very successful.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:49):
They're

Leo Laporte (00:12:49):
Notable maybe as IND game developer.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:51):
No, some IND game developers are successful. But I think this is any other industry music industries, this movies are probably TV shows. The high profile successes are all well understood, but the million other

Leo Laporte (00:13:04):
Companies

Paul Thurrott (00:13:05):
That failed without a peep go unnoticed.

Leo Laporte (00:13:12):
I guess my counterpoint is that it doesn't require a massive company, massive marketing and billions of dollars to make a AAA title. But you're right, it's kind of like the music industry, which is that the platinum albums are few and far between and occasionally you get a Justin Bieber who made it on YouTube, but that's not the normal case.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:34):
A company like Activision Blizzard had to buy King to get into mobile just to get it. The most important gaming market in the world was unattainable by some of the biggest gaming companies. Isn't

Leo Laporte (00:13:46):
That interesting? Well, and that's why Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:13:51):
I think that speaks to, for a game like Val, it's kind of interesting, but say you're that developer by the

Leo Laporte (00:13:55):
Way. Val is on Xbox, not on PlayStation, but it is on Xbox.

Paul Thurrott (00:13:59):
But say you're okay, but actually that's okay. That speaks to my point. So I was going to say for them to actually create this game that works across three major platforms that type of game would work on, which is pc, PlayStation and Xbox. That's an enormous separator. It's hard enough for a mobile developer to create Get

Leo Laporte (00:14:16):
Ready.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:17):
They

Leo Laporte (00:14:17):
Started on Linux,

Paul Thurrott (00:14:18):
Amazon, I mean Android and

Leo Laporte (00:14:21):
It's the Linux native game.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:23):
Oh, Linux. Okay. Fair enough. But

Leo Laporte (00:14:25):
You know why they could do it by the way, in all seriousness is Unity. It's built on Unity. And honestly that's really, to me that's the choke point in gaming is Unreal Engine and Unity,

Paul Thurrott (00:14:37):
Isn't

Leo Laporte (00:14:37):
It? Those two companies epics

Paul Thurrott (00:14:39):
Unreal. I feel like. Well, but see to me that democratizes

Richard Campbell (00:14:43):
Cross-platform

Paul Thurrott (00:14:44):
Development, right? This is,

Leo Laporte (00:14:46):
Yeah, you and I could do a Unity game if we had skills and talent

Paul Thurrott (00:14:50):
And the time and

Leo Laporte (00:14:51):
Didn't need to make money. We were 20 years younger.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:54):
Yep. It's hard. Games have gotten so complex. The Call of Duty game is essentially a Hollywood blockbuster. And I mean that in the sense of terms of budget, the size of the team, the actors required the investment and

Richard Campbell (00:15:10):
You said the words Leo, you said AAA games, those top tier titles are nine digit numbers to produce.

Leo Laporte (00:15:21):
Are you ready for this Cyberpunk,

Paul Thurrott (00:15:23):
Which

Leo Laporte (00:15:24):
Was very highly hailed, but really I think is somewhat of a failure as a game. Well

Paul Thurrott (00:15:29):
It came

Leo Laporte (00:15:30):
Horrible. 400 million

Paul Thurrott (00:15:34):
Of what? Of to

Leo Laporte (00:15:35):
Develop it

Paul Thurrott (00:15:36):
Development.

Leo Laporte (00:15:36):
Yeah. A hundred something million for D L C. Very expensive to do these.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:43):
Yeah. So right that that's not an investment. It's an impossibility for most companies,

Leo Laporte (00:15:51):
But it didn't pay off.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:53):
No, but by the way, give 'em credit. They keep trying. I don't play this game, but apparently it's gotten a lot better since launch,

Leo Laporte (00:15:58):
Right? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:59):
Too late

Leo Laporte (00:16:00):
By the way. First impressions matter in gaming

Paul Thurrott (00:16:02):
For sure.

Leo Laporte (00:16:04):
I'll still think, I'll always think of Cyberpunk 27 7 as unplayable

Paul Thurrott (00:16:11):
Think

Leo Laporte (00:16:11):
A lot people, I always think it

Paul Thurrott (00:16:11):
As Canal res. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:16:13):
Canal Res and unplayable.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:16):
Anyway, so the debate about Activision de Blizzard will continue for years to come. Right? When Microsoft bought LinkedIn, I questioned whether that investment made sense. I questioned it today. I don't think they've ever, whatever it means to make money because there's a lot of soft revenue that's hard to, maybe I should call it indirect revenue. That's hard to directly attribute to that thing that you acquired. So in the case of Activision Blizzard, there'll be some upswing probably in Game Pass subscriptions. Does that justify what they did? We will find out. We'll

Leo Laporte (00:16:53):
See. Is it kind of like when Adobe bought Figma, which by the way they've lost, did they buy? They've kind of moved on, but they have, it was said they had to pay 2 billion for Figma because Figma was going to eat their lunch. So is it an offensive acquisition for Microsoft?

Richard Campbell (00:17:09):
No. I mean they're the third stringer and still are. Even with this deal in place, there isn't anybody else doing consolidation quite like this other than the original incumbent, which is Steam. But Steam's not doing a game pack, still sells games one at a time.

Paul Thurrott (00:17:28):
Was it you? I think someone was talking to me about, oh no, I think, I'm sorry. I talked to Brad Wardell recently from No, from Startup. I'm sorry. Was it you or him or somebody was talking to me about how successful Steam was. And Steam is successful doing something very old school, which is what you just described. They don't do advertising. They don't have advertising in the game or in the app. Rather they sell the games. Here's the game, here's the much you can pay it for. That's the whole thing they do. And it's the biggest game store in Windows.

Richard Campbell (00:17:57):
And to be clear, if Steam was publicly traded, it would be much worse, right? Than the Cory Dr. Row effect would take over.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:05):
That's right.

Richard Campbell (00:18:05):
It's owned by a small collection of people who are now extremely wealthy,

Paul Thurrott (00:18:10):
Gabe Noel and Valve. And it's interesting because at first Steam was just a place to valve for Valve to distribute their own games, their own

Richard Campbell (00:18:16):
Games.

Paul Thurrott (00:18:17):
But really they have become an Ingram Micro of gaming. They,

(00:18:21):
They're a store that's really what I'm sure their money at. And no one has had that level of success and a lot of the game publishers that emulated them in the beginning with their own stupid front ends and all, we've all seen this stuff in the PC space have often moved on to sort of subscription services now, right? It's not just a front end to sell them your stuff or to launch your games or whatever, get you going on a subscription. You have to be of a certain size and have a game catalog of a certain length or a subscription service to make any sense. EA can do it. And does Ubisoft does it and are we hitting the end there? I mean as far as independent publishers, I mean

Richard Campbell (00:19:01):
Know, we know an EA had how many false starts, 10 or 12? It turns out it's not simple software to write

Paul Thurrott (00:19:08):
BA is to sports what Nintendo is to the sort of Disney crowd. It's this unique kind of market and it's probably going nowhere. And I don't mean that in a negative way. I mean their market is sustainable and they're kind of unique, so you almost have to take them out of the equation too, right? No one is subscribing to ea play for their non-sports games, and I put that with an obviously something

Richard Campbell (00:19:33):
Even though they try, but I would also argue if you take away Sony's disingenuous complaints,

Paul Thurrott (00:19:42):
They later disavowed.

Richard Campbell (00:19:44):
Yes. And the psychosis of certain regulatory bodies. This was kind of a non-event. Yeah, it's a lot of money

Paul Thurrott (00:19:53):
Because of its size, but it

Richard Campbell (00:19:55):
Didn't actually move the needle massively for anything. And the real value play I see for Microsoft is strictly long-term that consolidating these studios and continuing to allow them to make games so that you have a larger representation in the market so that you don't have no representation.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:12):
I don't know, someday we're going to hear this story explicitly, but when Satya Nadella took over as c e O of Microsoft, he very quickly got rid of Windows phone and there was this kind of an edict that, look, you parts of Microsoft need to justify your existence. You need to make money. And it's interesting to me that businesses like Surface and Xbox survived this because frankly, I think you could have made a compelling case in 2014,

Richard Campbell (00:20:40):
Let it all go.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:41):
You let him go and they didn't. And so again, I don't know the explicit story, but Phil Spencer, most likely someone

Richard Campbell (00:20:48):
That was exactly my thought. Spencer

Paul Thurrott (00:20:50):
Talked to him and said, listen, this is what's required and this is what could happen.

Richard Campbell (00:20:56):
And

Paul Thurrott (00:20:57):
They went from zero external game studios basically to something that rivals Sony and went on an acquisition spree, which is a huge investment, not just Activision Blizzard, but of course Bethesda slash Z Max or whatever, which was in its own right, huge

Richard Campbell (00:21:18):
And lot less, by the way.

Paul Thurrott (00:21:20):
Yeah, well yeah. I mean they bought, honestly, no, that's not true. I was going to say it's kind of a toss up between Activision and Bethesda, which games I'd like more. I guess it's actually kind of a toss up, but now they have an Xbox that can make sense going forward. And Xbox Today and going forward is not the Xbox that was in 2014. It's not a console with one subscription that lets you play multiplayer gaming, which is always stupid to me. It's a suite of subscriptions, it's game streaming. We'll see. And yet another renewed push from them on pc except this time it's been sustained. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (00:22:01):
The big difference between the phone and the Xbox play is that the Xbox play moves to the cloud.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:06):
Yes, exactly. Which you couldn't do with the phone, right?

Richard Campbell (00:22:08):
Exactly. And so in the end, the best argument Phil Spencer had to sta is I'll consume your cloud. And that's why every month's doing it,

Paul Thurrott (00:22:16):
This has been the story of Microsoft, I would say, up until the AI era, not that it necessarily changes, but you have these traditional software businesses and in some cases I guess hardware and how can you make sense in this new Microsoft, this new cloud focused Microsoft, Microsoft 365, no problem, server business, no problem. Xbox. Okay, there's your argument. They made that switch windows could not make this shift surface. Obviously this is a pure hardware business and you just kind of take it from there that X

Richard Campbell (00:22:47):
Xbox was able to do that. The counter argument is true also, if they weren't doing game pass, then you should shut down Xbox because

Paul Thurrott (00:22:55):
They're, they're out out to lunch. So this

Richard Campbell (00:22:58):
Pivot and all of this push is about keeping Xbox relevant to new Microsoft. The Microsoft that cares about selling compute,

Paul Thurrott (00:23:05):
Honestly, maybe someone knows off the top of their head, what year did the Xbox One debut? It was probably 2011. Does that sound about right? 2013? I don't remember, but whatever year that was, that thing failed so hard. It enabled what's happening today, 2013. If that product had been in any way competitive with PlayStation, I bet Nella would've gotten rid of it, would've spun it up because if that thing being successful in the console market would've kept Xbox in the console market

Richard Campbell (00:23:37):
And kept it into selling games. And that's not the business that Microsoft wants to be in. And there's a side effect of this, which is it also parallels Netflix, Disney than the entertainment consolidation, which does seem like more modern thinking, but I don't think it was done for that reason. I think it was done to consult compute and then these other things.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:56):
Sure, in 1980s people were ringing their hands over the consolidation that was occurring in the movie industry where Paramount was bought or I can't think of the names of these old companies.

Richard Campbell (00:24:06):
Studios merging together.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:08):
The old studios merge and now we're seeing kind of a different era where Netflix comes along as a disruptor, creates this incredible thing where now Hollywood's Alist actors all want to act in TV series. It's an incredible thing. Basically new

Richard Campbell (00:24:22):
Mini.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:23):
Yeah, it took the HP model and really ran with it and now that market's going to be consolidated and that's how quick life moves these days. You can't stop it. We can kind of hate it. We can not want it to happen, but I just feel like it's unnecessary but not unnecessary. It's too bad, but it's inevitable.

Richard Campbell (00:24:42):
And I still firmly believe this space for the indie and game developers.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:46):
I do too.

Richard Campbell (00:24:47):
And I have friends that are in that space and it's like, you know what my business model is, my business model is coming up with a really great game idea that my small team can build, but then the big player buys me

Paul Thurrott (00:24:58):
I, Sony and Microsoft both, and I don't know Nintendo, I don't know what they're doing and I don't know what Steam does if anything, but they have big independent game efforts that I don't feel are done as a face saving gesture. I think they're real. I think those people that love games understand some of the best games do come out of those kinds of studios, just like some of the best movies, which no longer have any access to movie theaters whatsoever used to come out of small studios as well. So who knows, maybe this whole subscription thing, maybe the upside to it, the Netflix effect will be to again democratize not the creation of the games, but rather the distribution of the games. So maybe it's not a negative, the negative effects are real, but I don't think this crushes the small guys.

Richard Campbell (00:25:50):
No, I think there's still room for the small guys that has actually changed. This was the same game that was being played all along where the big players do not build innovative games. They build the retread of the previous game that made the billion dollars.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:05):
Exactly. As I call of duty fan, I recognize it's a resemblance to the Marvel universe.

Richard Campbell (00:26:11):
If you're spending $400 million on a game, you want to win, right? You've got to be a pretty safe bet. You understand the conservatism that exists in that. The innovation happens in the indie layer, and when they come up with a winner,

Paul Thurrott (00:26:23):
Oh my God, they

Richard Campbell (00:26:23):
Compassion

Paul Thurrott (00:26:25):
Super Meat Boy or a Fire Watch or any of those games that come out of nowhere, it's like wonderful, these beautiful small stories. The Inside was an example too. No big studio would ever bother with that stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:26:40):
It's a close analogy between the movie industry and the gaming isn't there. I mean,

Richard Campbell (00:26:44):
It's entertainment.

Leo Laporte (00:26:49):
I mean the argument against regulating tech in any way is that, well, market forces moved so fast in tech that you're always going to be behind the eight ball. If you try to regulate it, you're going to be regulating a problem that was 10 years ago.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:01):
The downsides that are too big, big tech is the big is in the name. These are businesses that are bigger than countries. They impact billions of users every day. You have to regulate this, and

Richard Campbell (00:27:15):
I wouldn't begrudge the FTC for scrutinizing this, but only if you scrutinize matter is this hurting consumer.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:21):
We got to go back to the Marguerite Vestiture there from the you and her speech about the point of antitrust regulation and how the cma, and by indirect comparison also the FTC just kind of got it wrong it. You're not here to say no, you're here to do the right thing for competition and or consumers. And if you can get concessions out of a company that's trying to acquire another company as Microsoft did with Activision Blizzard that solve the issues that the concerns you have, then why wouldn't you say yes?

Richard Campbell (00:27:57):
Yeah, there has to be a path to Yes,

Paul Thurrott (00:28:00):
Yes. Right. Otherwise you're just there to prevent forward progress. I mean, I guess if the world is just, we just don't like big things anti-American, frankly,

Richard Campbell (00:28:13):
Give it a mission to put your thumb on the big guys

Leo Laporte (00:28:17):
Guy

Richard Campbell (00:28:17):
Want. We don't want

Leo Laporte (00:28:18):
Understand. The reason we don't like big things is because market incumbents can become just as you just said, so big, they can't fail

Paul Thurrott (00:28:26):
And

Leo Laporte (00:28:26):
There's no one who can compete with them. And so we've got to keep them from dominating

Paul Thurrott (00:28:30):
Abuse, from abusing, they're dominating.

Leo Laporte (00:28:32):
That's literally antitrust. That's the point of antitrust. There is an

Paul Thurrott (00:28:35):
Example of a company that achieves a monopoly at scale and does not abuse the market in some way. It's the natural nature of that thing because once you achieve dominance, your next step is to maintain that dominance and extend it. And it's impossible not to do anti-competitive acts to make that happen. It's just if you

Leo Laporte (00:28:53):
Want a free market economy, there are some limits you have to place on it. And we learned very early on, one of them is monopoly and you have to have antitrust. Otherwise, a free market does not work in the long run,

Paul Thurrott (00:29:08):
Right?

Leo Laporte (00:29:09):
So you could be a free market capital, you have to put

Paul Thurrott (00:29:11):
A thumb on the scale,

Leo Laporte (00:29:12):
But there are a couple of areas where you have to regulate. Otherwise, capital unfettered capitalism has ill effects.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:21):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:29:22):
I mean I feel that. Is that right?

Richard Campbell (00:29:24):
Sure.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:25):
No, it's a hundred percent right. Sorry Richard,

Leo Laporte (00:29:30):
But this is not one of those cases.

Paul Thurrott (00:29:33):
No, but that's the point. So in other words, literally going back to last December when the FTC first said that, Hey, we're going to block this thing. You look at the arguments, you look at what Microsoft is doing, you look at all the concessions they've made, you look at all of the partnerships they've made for 10 years on games, getting them on other platforms. You look at how they went to Sony with this and Sony said, go screw yourself. Actually, Sony said nothing which was even worse and then made up stuff to get regulatory bodies to back them in opposing this acquisition. But if you actually look at it without emotion and you look at it logically, barring any, again fantasy you could invent in your mind, there is no logical reason, no legal reason maybe is the best way to put it. There are no competitive concerns. Like Richard said that whatever amount of money this was, 68, 60 $9 billion, whatever, they're still number three. They didn't move up. They just made their platform stronger. They are going to expand the availability of the games from the company they purchased to more people than that company ever would've done. Activision Blizzard was never going to make subscription services and put these things on other platforms. This is something Microsoft will do.

(00:30:53):
Is

Leo Laporte (00:30:53):
It the case? I guess it's the case that you have to be number one in the market to be prosecuted on antitrust. I mean, you can't prosecute somebody who's number

Paul Thurrott (00:31:03):
Three, not necessarily, right? You have to sort of invent a scenario here. Say you're Burger King is number two and it's pretty close with McDonald's and they're doing some anti-competitive act, perhaps in their case

Leo Laporte (00:31:15):
Get

Paul Thurrott (00:31:15):
Ahead.

Leo Laporte (00:31:16):
You

Paul Thurrott (00:31:16):
Could still bring them up on Monopoly.

Richard Campbell (00:31:17):
They're

Leo Laporte (00:31:18):
Buying all these producers in Northern North America

Richard Campbell (00:31:22):
Mean. You also see regulators scrutinizing Boeing and Airbus together because they should

Paul Thurrott (00:31:28):
Ize Apple and Google together for their app store policies, which graph and apply to their own platform. They may not be working in concert explicitly. They're absolutely working in concert and the existence of the other is the thing they can use to justify their own behavior. They're roughly 50 50 split in the us. It's a little different international, but still they can simply say, yeah, but Apple's doing it and they're the biggest, so why don't you go after them?

Leo Laporte (00:31:55):
Yeah, I think people are seeing through that. That's

Paul Thurrott (00:31:58):
How it works. I mean, this is a very Japanese business model except I think in this case, I don't think they actually do talk about it internally together, but I think they recognize it and I think they both explicitly understand it

Richard Campbell (00:32:11):
And they all both have mutual benefit for it. I bring up the Boeing Airbus scenario because they were pretty hostile to the other airline entities that were out there, and a couple of times the regulator said, Hey, we can't see if you guys are explicitly coud, but it sure looks like it. So back

Paul Thurrott (00:32:28):
Off. It's a little too close. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (00:32:30):
Yeah. You both benefit from keeping others out. But the market,

Paul Thurrott (00:32:35):
I mean, we spent the past year or more talking about Activision Blizzard, we're going to spend the next year or more.

Leo Laporte (00:32:41):
It feels like a year, but it's only been half an hour.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:46):
No, but I mean, because things are going to happen, right? Look, I'll just shortcut the Chicken Littles of the world right now. Yes. I'm sorry. Microsoft slash Activision Blizzard will announce that some game that might have been cross-platform before will only be on Xbox as a platform, and that will be like C, that will be the most C, C C to which I'll just point to the list of Sony exclusives and say, tell me when these get close. Because when those lists are a little different, you can have your little debate. But until that happens, they're just playing in a market that exists that they did not create and do not want, frankly. But whatever. It was a really Motley Fool, which is kind of a financial publication, I guess we'll call it an investing publication or whatever, did a little analysis of this deal and I had to stop reading it. They were so stupid. According to them, Microsoft was forced by regulators to keep Call of Duty on

Leo Laporte (00:33:40):
PlayStation

Paul Thurrott (00:33:41):
When in fact they were always going to keep it on PlayStation. That franchise would've died without PlayStation. Call of Duty is bigger on PlayStation than it is on Xbox. So there's a lot of, look, it's kind of a stay in your lane kind of a thing. Because Microsoft was involved with antitrust. We had to, on our side of the fence, learn a little bit about the law. It's not our world. I'm not an antitrust expert today. I'm not, but 20 something years in, certainly have my little I I've certainly played around with it. These guys don't know anything about video games or technology from what I can tell. And that's just, it's not uninformed. It's just wrong. And these are the kind of opinions we're going to be hearing about this stuff. They're the emotional ones from people. I just don't like the big getting bigger. And they're like, yeah, I completely get that. I don't either, but we don't really have laws against that unless they abuse their bigness and then they're going to be the people that just don't understand this market at all. And we'll say, well, they're screwing the little guy, or they're going to stop putting games on their platforms. These guys are going to put Call of Duty on Nintendo.

Leo Laporte (00:34:51):
The thing that's been interesting about this is I don't think there was ever a grassroots movement against it that it was always Sony. It was always the competitors who didn't like it. There was always the sense of disingenuous about this. So

Paul Thurrott (00:35:03):
What happens is, yeah, there were, by the way back in the beginning, I'm not going to remember one of these companies, but Google and was it one other company sort of came out and said, we don't like this, and then you never heard from them again. But what happens is behind the scenes, they lobby regulators, and I'm sure that the Ft C especially, I can't speak to the C M A, but the T c, their documentation looked like it was written by Sony. It was the same, insane. And even Sony and Jim Ryan, right? The guy who's leaving soon, who read PlayStation the past several years, came out afterwards and said, we were just kidding.

Leo Laporte (00:35:42):
We never believed that that was that.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:44):
We just didn't want it to happen. Their answer was literally, we just didn't want it to happen. We just

Leo Laporte (00:35:47):
Didn't want it to happen.

Paul Thurrott (00:35:48):
But it's on the regulators, the people who have to make these decisions to actually understand that they can't just listen to a competitor.

Leo Laporte (00:35:56):
That's

Paul Thurrott (00:35:57):
What they used for.

Leo Laporte (00:36:00):
Anyway. Alright. What else? I want to get through

Paul Thurrott (00:36:02):
This. Let's just wrap this one up. I'm sorry. So a couple of points related to this, for this to happen, the UK C M a had to accept their concessions, which they did a couple of days before they announced the acquisition. Those concessions, as we discussed earlier, involved putting the game streaming stuff from all the Activision Blizzard games will be streamed through Ubisoft, who will pay Microsoft. By the way, this isn't a giveaway. Microsoft's not going to lose money on this. And the irony here, I think is that I don't think game streaming for Microsoft was ever going to be a moneymaking business. And by offloading this to another company that we'll see, they'll make a run of it. Games streaming will become profitable for Microsoft. They're just going to get paid for it, and they don't have to manage the

Richard Campbell (00:36:43):
Infrastructure at a lower risk.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:45):
It, it's such a stupid thing, but the CMA is stupid, so that's fine. Like we said, the FTC came up later, we're still, oh yeah, we're still doing it. And then unfortunately, because this deal was delayed so long, Microsoft's not going to be able to put any Activision ER games on Game Pass until next year. In an ideal scenario, we would've seen right now what happened with Bethesda three-ish years ago, I think it was, and we would've seen the back catalog appear probably, or at least some of it. But this gets into this debate. This is going to be a huge discussion we have over time, which is that what's the right strategy for these games? Consider something like Call of Duty. Call of Duty's, got a brand new game coming out any second now it's a big deal for the company. This is their big event every year where they make billions of dollars.

(00:37:34):
What if the same month that new game was coming out, Microsoft slash Activision Blizzards, Hey, good news, we're going to put every bat catalog game in the Call of Duty series on Game Pass, and then some number of people go to Game Pass. How many of them don't buy the new Call of Duty because they have this incredible wealth of content that they could either revisit or visit for the first time? I don't know. There's no answer to this, right? I am sure there are experts at Microsoft and Activision of Blizzard who sort of have ideas, but until they actually do it, there's no way to know. But they could tank a Call of Duty title and that hundreds of millions of dollars investment by putting other games on Game Pass. So you have to really think

Leo Laporte (00:38:19):
About this stuff, put that in their minds, and that's not,

Paul Thurrott (00:38:22):
You have to think about it. Give

Leo Laporte (00:38:24):
'em the idea.

Paul Thurrott (00:38:26):
I'm just saying it's out there.

Leo Laporte (00:38:28):
Sony could tank it by saying, we don't want Call of Duty, right? Doesn't Sony get to say

Paul Thurrott (00:38:32):
They can't say that. They can't

Leo Laporte (00:38:33):
Say that

Paul Thurrott (00:38:33):
There's a huge percentage, the user base that the reason they're on PlayStation is because of Call of Duty. Okay. Can't do that. Can't do that. Also, by the way, speaking across platform and do we put it on Sony or do we take it away from Sony? That kind of stupid stuff that people still want to debate. I as an Xbox gamer, it was hard for me several years ago when the exclusivity deal that Activision used to have with Microsoft and Xbox went to Sony. And what that meant for several years was that you would get things first on PlayStation. So new maps would come out and they'd come out on PlayStation and we wouldn't get 'em until 1, 2, 3 months later in some cases on Xbox. So you kind of felt like a second class citizen. That's evened out a little bit in recent years, which is kind of nice.

(00:39:18):
Typically now, I'd say the D L C is kind of universal. It heads out all platforms at the same time. But the really neat thing about Cross-Platform is if I'm playing games against people on Xbox, and that's my only audience, that's a subset of the full Call of Duty audience. What they do now is cross-platform play. So I actually play against PC gamers and I don't play against anybody. I don't play any games, but you know what I'm saying. But generally speaking, an Xbox gamer, an Xbox fan on Call of Duty when they play online plays against gamers who are on PlayStation and PC as well as Xbox, that it's not exponential, but it grows the audience dramatically. The audience on PlayStation is bigger. The audience on PC is probably bigger. Actually, I have no idea on that one, but I bet it is bigger. So you're playing with at least three times as many people as you would otherwise. That's maybe the easiest way to say it. That benefits me as an Xbox user on the smallest platform, basically. So if they weren't serious about cross platform, Xbox would actually be less viable to me as an Xbox fan. That's the actual logic behind what Microsoft is doing. Not the, oh, they're going to take it away from soda. No, they're not.

Richard Campbell (00:40:27):
They're never doing that. And all multiplayer games have a cloud backend,

Paul Thurrott (00:40:31):
Which notably who, I mean, God, if only we could think of a company that had a cloud.

Richard Campbell (00:40:37):
Anyway,

Paul Thurrott (00:40:38):
We can't, so it doesn't matter. But that's theoretical. Anyway, so there's all that. So that's basically most of what's happening here. I don't know that we're going to hear much before the holidays. We're in that crucial selling season. I don't think Microsoft wants to rock the boat at a time when people may or may not be baking their own little investments in a new console or buying a game or whatever it might be. But next year's going to be super interesting on the Activision front, and I think that's true whether you're on Game Pass or

Richard Campbell (00:41:07):
I'm going to be interested to see how the massive multiplayer games like World of Warcraft evolve. My experience watching them work with these gaming studios is it takes them a couple of years to really get their hands around, well, these

Paul Thurrott (00:41:23):
Are big properties. You can't just

Richard Campbell (00:41:25):
Turn massive, I think, and you're going to have a bunch of turnover.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:28):
Yep. Oh yeah. Yep. There are going to be people who disagree with this strategy

Richard Campbell (00:41:32):
For sure. And they're moving on, and the headhunters are all around. Speaking of Rich didn't take a while,

Leo Laporte (00:41:39):
Pete Hines.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:41):
Yeah. So this is a key executive at Bethesda. He's been actually pretty vocal about the exclusive thing and what was the big be? Was it Starfields Bethesda, right?

Leo Laporte (00:41:50):
Starfield. He left after completing Starfield,

Paul Thurrott (00:41:53):
Basically. Yeah. And I think he might've been upset about some of that stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:41:56):
He might also have been exhausted

Paul Thurrott (00:41:58):
Be, yeah, he was there for over 20 years, wasn't he? And Starfield felt like it took 20 years to come.

Leo Laporte (00:42:03):
Yeah, this is the Skyrim company that,

Paul Thurrott (00:42:06):
Yeah, but you know what? These guys always pop up at some other publisher. They always do. He's not an old guy. I'm sure he still has. Maybe he just wants to do something completely different.

Leo Laporte (00:42:16):
I just read it as thank God Starfields, done. See you. I'm exhausted.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:22):
A lot of people, I'm going to go

Leo Laporte (00:42:23):
Fishing.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:23):
But a lot of people read this as, oh, great, they bought Activision Players said, now we're going to tify the entire gaming industry. And it's like, I don't think that's what this was.

Leo Laporte (00:42:32):
Well, but they didn't buy Bethesda?

Paul Thurrott (00:42:35):
No, they owned Bethesda. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:42:37):
Bethesda's part of ab. Oh

Paul Thurrott (00:42:39):
No, they're part of Microsoft.

Leo Laporte (00:42:41):
I'm sorry. Yeah. I don't know. I don't think so.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:46):
No, I don't think so either. But I've heard that discussion and it's like, guys, come on.

Leo Laporte (00:42:50):
And by the way, to your point, Microsoft has been a very good steward.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:54):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:42:54):
You mentioned LinkedIn, but for GitHub, for Minecraft and actually Fratti Max.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:59):
Yes. And here's one of those things actually people maybe don't think about too much and they should, but in that same custodial role, if you look at a lot of the Microsoft first party games, especially the Microsoft studio games, halo, here's a war. Sea of Thieves is a great example. Flight Simulator. They do an incredible job of just supporting that thing for a long period of time with extra content. And it's not like we need another 60 bucks. It's like, you bought this thing, or you subscribed to the game, whatever it is, you get this stuff for years. And this is the type of thinking I would like to see applied to games from these other studios as well, including Bethesda's, by the way, this business model where it's like, look, we do the right thing and it rises all ships. Let's do the right thing. CVE should have been a non-event, even Red Fall, for example, a game that came out of the gate and fell on its face and then hit itself with a rake. They've kept updating that and sort of like cyberpunk, supposedly it's like Apple Max people tell me it's better. And I'm like, yeah, I don't care. I don't care. I'm sure it is. It could only be better, but supposedly they're doing the right thing there as well. So I think that's one thing Microsoft's good at. I think that's part of the Microsoft culture. You really

Richard Campbell (00:44:11):
Haven't heard much about the mobile side of the deal anymore, and I've always had a sense that it was a red herring. I just don't see any way that the tech giants can play in mobile gaming. Mobile gaming is a free to play pay to win business. It is.

Leo Laporte (00:44:30):
It's a crappy business. It's awful.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:34):
Here's the problem. We could all name that game. That was the biggest thing in the world at some time, like Flappy Bird or Angry Birds or Candy Crush, or go down the whole list,

Leo Laporte (00:44:46):
Which Microsoft now owns. By the way,

Paul Thurrott (00:44:49):
The problem with those games is they're not sustainable. So Ro had great success with the first couple of Angry Bird games, less success.

Leo Laporte (00:44:56):
Oh, man. They made movies they thought they were going to, that was a franchise

Paul Thurrott (00:44:59):
Forever. They Forever, they were Nintendo. And it's like, guys, you made one game. Literally,

Leo Laporte (00:45:03):
They mined the hell out of it. But

Paul Thurrott (00:45:05):
That's a problem for Mobil too, right? So they owned King, but King is Candy Rush.

Leo Laporte (00:45:10):
Microsoft has never managed to make Minecraft mobile work. They've tried and tried. That's a perfect

Paul Thurrott (00:45:16):
Example. Yeah. Minecraft is a weird game because on a PC it looks old fashioned and kind of eight bit. But for a mobile device, it's actually kind hard. And it's not because of the graphics, it's the nature of the game. It's just

Leo Laporte (00:45:28):
Controls. It's too open world maybe, or I don't

Paul Thurrott (00:45:30):
Controls,

Leo Laporte (00:45:31):
Right? Controls are part of the problem.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:33):
I think so,

Leo Laporte (00:45:33):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:34):
Minecraft, the mobile thing is tough. That's a tough one to crack.

Richard Campbell (00:45:38):
And I just don't, any company capable of suffering a class action lawsuit should stay out of mobile.

Leo Laporte (00:45:47):
Nice.

Richard Campbell (00:45:48):
Is this just sort of the reality of it, the way you make money in those games is grubby

Paul Thurrott (00:45:54):
Not a good

Richard Campbell (00:45:56):
Business

Paul Thurrott (00:45:57):
Argued? Well, I've argued for a little while I guess that what Microsoft should have done was years ago, think about native mobile versions of some of their top franchise games. I think what happened, I'm just guessing here, but Microsoft went down this thing and said, let's play to our strengths. We've got this cloud thing. That's why Xbox is still around. We'll do cloud streaming. And I think that the feeling there was like all technology was all the problems that are here now, whether the cost or performance or in this case like streaming, lagging, latency related, whatever it might be, those will disappear because technology always gets better. And I think they did that to the detriment of native mobile game development. And I think that was a mistake because what we're finding is, yeah, maybe you might be right eventually, but we're going to be dead when that happens. And I don't care if mobile gaming is good in the 3000, so I want it to work now. And I think that was maybe a strategy mistake that was necessitated by the mandate that got from Nadela, right? It's got to work with the cloud. I think that's just my guess. I mean, I don't actually know what they did,

Richard Campbell (00:47:03):
And it makes a lot of sense.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:06):
They really dabbled. They made those silly little Xbox or Halo mobile games, the Halo, Spartan, whatever those things were called, and they were fine. They weren't Halo games. People wanted Halo. Why did you give us something named Halo? It was like the Windows RT of Halo.

Leo Laporte (00:47:24):
I don't know.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:25):
Anyway, okay, so that's Activision Blizzard, I guess.

Leo Laporte (00:47:29):
Good,

Paul Thurrott (00:47:29):
Let's take a break.

Leo Laporte (00:47:30):
Stop. Stop talking. I know.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:33):
No, I was going to say for all of the time we waited, it's like now it's here. It's like, I don't even know what to say anymore. It's

Leo Laporte (00:47:38):
Over. You'll never hear another

Paul Thurrott (00:47:40):
Activist story. I can't promise that

Leo Laporte (00:47:42):
It's over.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:43):
Actually.

Leo Laporte (00:47:44):
I was going to say, Minecraft is celebrating its 50th anniversary in the announced that it sold 300 million copies, bestselling game of

Paul Thurrott (00:47:51):
All time. And

Leo Laporte (00:47:52):
I think you can make a strong argument that would not have happened under Mojang, that really Mojang took it as far as it could. And by selling out

Paul Thurrott (00:47:59):
To Microsoft.

Leo Laporte (00:48:00):
That's right.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:01):
When they handed this thing off to Microsoft, it was a Java game, right? It still

Leo Laporte (00:48:07):
Is online.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:08):
It still is. It's still a can be. I mean, no, but there's two versions now.

Leo Laporte (00:48:11):
Yeah. There's Bedrock and

Paul Thurrott (00:48:12):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:48:13):
Yeah. I want to talk about a new sponsor, if you don't mind, and then we will be right back with lots more. Paul Thora in Mexico City. This is great. I love this Richard Campbell in Portugal, and between two Ferns, and I'm in Rhode Island,

(00:48:30):
So we're all over the place. Our show today brought to you by Wix Web agencies, you're going to love this one. Lemme tell you about Wix Studio, the platform that gives agencies total creative freedom to deliver complex client sites while still smashing deadlines. How? Well, first, let's talk about the advanced design capabilities. With Wix Studio, you could build unique layouts with a revolutionary grid experience and watch all elements scale proportionally by default. That is by itself a great feature, but you'll also love the no-code animations, which add little twinkles of delight. Custom c s s gives you total design control. And there's more being, I mean, Wix is great for bringing ambitious client projects to life and to do so in any industry with a fully integrated suite of business solutions from e-comm. So that means you can do events, you can do bookings, you can do more all built in, and you can extend the capabilities even further because Wix supports hundreds of APIs and integrations. And you know what else? The workflows just make sense. There's the built-in AI tools, the centralized workspace, the on canvas collaborating, the reuse of assets across sites, the seamless client handover. And that's not all, find out more@wixwx.com slash studio. Thank you, Wix, for supporting Windows Weekly. You support us by going to that address wix.com/studio. On we go with the show Paul Richard Campbell, as we must. As we must. And you've been waiting for it. You've wanted it. You've asked it. Windows 11.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:15):
I heard of that.

Leo Laporte (00:50:16):
Has this been, I have to say, I just saw an article that say Windows 11 adoption has really been underwhelming and that it has not been a huge success.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:24):
Is that fair?

Leo Laporte (00:50:25):
Yep.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:26):
But everything else in life, you have to kind of asterisk exit, right? The thing that we are literally two years into Windows 11 this month. So this is a nice comparison. How long did it take Microsoft to sell? 400 million? The user base? Four oh million, right? Is that four? Is that the number? Yeah, 400 million. So how long did it take Microsoft to get to 400 million active devices on Windows 10? About a year. A year and three months? I think. So less time. How long did it take Microsoft to have 400 million Windows, seven PCs out in the world? I'd have to do some math on that, but according to them, they were doing 20 million a month. So extrapolate that out to, what is that, 10, 20 months? That's less than two years. So there you go. Actually, that number was almost certainly higher too, because Microsoft was cooking the books with Windows seven, which will come up later in a future topic today too.

(00:51:24):
So yes. But the caveats include such things as, okay, so is Windows 11 terrible or whatever? Well, let's think about some of this stuff. First of all, windows 10 came out after Windows eight, so it had the same benefit. Windows seven had its predecessor was terrible, and everybody hated it. So people were eager to move on to that thing. Microsoft made Windows 10 free for everybody. Windows seven Windows eight Windows phone something, whatever that was with Windows 11. They artificially, but they contracted the available body of machines to be upgraded with their hardware requirements. I mean, that was something they decided to do. That's on Microsoft, but

Richard Campbell (00:52:02):
It was T P M too. I mean, I thought it was a pretty reasonable assumption.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:06):
I did too. But people still, maybe it's just people in our little enthusiast community. But that was taken very badly. It was also, we'll call it eighth Gen Intel CPUs and newer that were accepted. So there was a line there with the sixth and seventh Gen core chip sets where you could make that argument. Maybe they should have been allowed in. So there were caveats.

Richard Campbell (00:52:32):
The other thing I would think on this is they didn't do a big push to sell WIN 11. They never did. They just kind of limped it out.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:39):
So again, part, I think this had to do with one of those other caveats, which is that Windows 11 arrived right at the end of the pandemic PC buying boom, following two straight quarters in which p c tails fell off a cliff, and it was nothing they were going to do to change that. Windows 11, they clearly wanted to make some, they're not architectural, I don't want to call 'em that, but they made some low level changes that required them or not, but it caused them, or it allowed them to make some UI changes in some cases that created this system that was missing features from Windows 10. And they knew that they would get to that over the next year or two, which I think they pretty much have by now. And just the natural business refresh cycle, which I know is different for all businesses, but there were better years than others. And I don't know what it was for Windows 10, but it was very clear heading out of the pandemic that no one was spending money.

Richard Campbell (00:53:40):
It was not of time to buy new machines.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:42):
Windows 11 may ultimately end up being a weird outlier in the history of Windows, in the sense that if they do replace it with Windows 12, it may never become the most used version of Windows in its

Richard Campbell (00:53:55):
Sometimes it'll fall neatly into the same category, just an eight.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:59):
As

Richard Campbell (00:54:00):
Between version, we do it every other version thing for 20 something years.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:07):
That's right. Yeah. So it's like what Apple would call an S year race. Right? So whose fault is this? I don't know, but I looked this up. The numbers thing is interesting to me. You have in the Terry Myerson years at Microsoft, when he ran Windows and they did Windows 10, he came up out of Windows phone, very transparent. They announced Windows 10 usage milestones, possibly a dozen times or more over three years. 200 million, two 70 million, 3 million, 4 million, 600, 700, 800, 8 25, 9 billion, billion. It kept going like that, right? If you look at Panos Pane and Windows 11 and how many times they announced sales or usage milestones for that product, the enter is zero, not even once. And is that a personality thing between him and Morrison? May be. I mean, the only number we associate with Panos Pane is 900 million that you write down for Surface rt. Right? But I don't actually think that's it.

Richard Campbell (00:55:09):
You lay that at the feet of Panos. As much as somebody

Paul Thurrott (00:55:12):
Convinced him that RT was going to be the big seller, Microsoft with its history of,

Richard Campbell (00:55:18):
They also needed to take a swing at Intel, was a less expensive way to take a swing at Intel. But Intel did pony up with the atom at that point.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:31):
It was a swing and a miss.

Richard Campbell (00:55:34):
What I, but it was at least an answer to, I need a lower power consumer compared to the P four or the core two.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:40):
But that was Terry Myers's big thing. And that's why Windows and Arm exists. He was very upset about,

Richard Campbell (00:55:47):
You need to negotiate in a position, and it's like, I can go without you. Don't make me. It was a good play.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:57):
Yeah,

Richard Campbell (00:55:58):
It's a job.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:01):
Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. I just dunno. This is a story as you have to be written, I guess. But Windows 11, is it successful? No, it's a tough one. Well, on what level, right? I mean, so Windows 11 as the baseline for what Windows will be in the future. It is a more modern looking system. There have been improvements under the covers that aren't coming to Windows 10 again artificially, but whatever, they just aren't.

Richard Campbell (00:56:32):
And plus they pulled a whole lot of features that we intend that we needed up.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:36):
So

Richard Campbell (00:56:37):
You're coming to a consolidation point. I just think you're taking long enough.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:40):
Yes.

Richard Campbell (00:56:41):
And now you throw in the large language model disruption that 12 is going to appear before 11 adoption becomes important.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:49):
So the one piece I'd really like, and Leo mentioned Figma on the show, and the thing that's interesting about Adobe trying to buy Figma was that it was challenged by regulators. They were going to face a big fight, very similar to what Microsoft did with Activision Blizzard. And then AI happened and they were like, you know what? Let's do this instead.

Leo Laporte (00:57:09):
By the way, we should say, they've not publicly said we're abandoning it, but

Paul Thurrott (00:57:13):
They haven't talked. But

Leo Laporte (00:57:14):
They just had Adobe, their big Adobe Max conference, not they didn't mention it,

Paul Thurrott (00:57:19):
Not even once, but what did they talk about a lot?

Leo Laporte (00:57:21):
Ai. Ai.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:22):
So I wonder with Windows 11 if the plan wasn't originally a little different because remember this was two years ago, but 18 months ago, all of a sudden everyone got new marching orders, Microsoft around ai, and I think the windows we're going to get now in the future is going to be a little different, not a little different, a lot different than maybe what that original plan was. I don't know. I think the original plans for Windows 11 going forward through time were quite subdued and uninteresting and that I think this AI thing is supercharged that a little bit and we're going to get more interesting discussions out of this. That's for sure. I mean, some of these features will be stupid, but we're going to get an ai, we already have, there's background removable in paint. It supports transparencies now it's going to support layers.

(00:58:10):
I used a background blur in the photos app the other day. I mean, I shouldn't be impressed that an app on a computer could work as well as a tiny app on a phone, but honestly it's pretty good. Right? That's great. I mean, these are apps and systems that we're not going to get a lot of attention otherwise. And so AI has infused windows with a new sense of urgency. So yeah, I mean Windows 11 ultimately might be a little bit of a lame duck. You got to remember too, windows was leaderless for like two years.

(00:58:47):
Microsoft was walking Windows did not have representation on the senior leadership team at Microsoft for almost two years. Actually, no, excuse me, for almost three years because Panos didn't get on until almost a year later. So this situation has shifted. And Windows 11, you know what, I hate to make this a comparison because people incorrectly often describe Windows Millennium Edition as the worst version of Windows ever made. That's not fair and it's not true. But one of the reasons it's not true was it's the system where Microsoft actually first released a lot of the technologies that we later associated with Windows xp. This was a system that could recover from a driver failure before then if you installed a bad driver, you were reinstalling the operating system. You couldn't get out of that driver, I forget what they call it, a driver or failover, A driver, whatever.

(00:59:38):
It's that debuted in Windows Millennium Edition, right? And so in some ways these little dribs and drabs of AI that we see now in Windows 11 should be viewed maybe like that. But when we later look back at the pre AI world for Windows, that world's going to be Windows 10, not Windows 11. Windows eleven's going to be where it started. And honestly, I think the modern UI is pleasant and nice and less dated than this UI that they created for Windows phone and put on a PC desktop. It's all sharp and angular with live tiles. It doesn't make any sense. And I don't think that thing aged well at all. I know there's a billion people still using it, so sorry if you disagree, but I think Windows 11 will be, I hope Windows 11 will be better regarded in the future than it is now. I know a lot of people kind of resent it in our little community

Richard Campbell (01:00:34):
And we still get back to the why does this operating system exist? They told us and would be the last version. We know how important 11 is to 'em because it is 10.1, right.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:46):
There you go. That's right. And maybe Windows 12 is really ten one one, and that's where we know that's going to be the big one.

Richard Campbell (01:00:53):
But it always felt to me like, oh, Mac OSS released a new version of the oss, so now we need to,

Paul Thurrott (01:00:59):
Yeah, right, right. So Apple used Macs 10 for however, 15 years

Leo Laporte (01:01:05):
Or whatever. They literally released a new version every year.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:08):
No, but they called it Mac OSS 10 forever. And then in recent years it's been 1112.

Leo Laporte (01:01:14):
It's not comparable to Windows 10 and 11, I don't think.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:18):
No, but the timing was the same. And it's possible

Leo Laporte (01:01:22):
Microsoft, they're technical enough to know that's not comparable,

Paul Thurrott (01:01:26):
But they're also bad marketers.

Leo Laporte (01:01:27):
Oh, they're 11. We got to be at 11.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:29):
We got to go to 11 too. Let's go to 12.

Leo Laporte (01:01:32):
You're surprised it is.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:33):
Well, that's what they did with 10. Remember they

Leo Laporte (01:01:35):
Skipped nine? They skipped 9, 8, 9, 7, 8, 9. Yeah, so all you had was 10.

Richard Campbell (01:01:42):
I dunno, there was a lot of reasons to skip nine. It needed to be skipped.

Leo Laporte (01:01:46):
Was there a nine? Was there a Windows nine?

Richard Campbell (01:01:49):
No, but there was 95 and 98, and so

Paul Thurrott (01:01:53):
You don't want to get into those weird version

Richard Campbell (01:01:54):
Number if you got into version never checking. It got

Leo Laporte (01:01:57):
Sometimes it's also because the number is unlucky in China. I don't know if nine the number, but eight's a lucky,

Paul Thurrott (01:02:02):
You're going to put the Windows logo under a lion and that didn't work out.

Richard Campbell (01:02:06):
I also wonder what happened with the volume license agreement things. One of the drivers for when Vista was released was the five-year requirement for the volume license agreement, and 10 came out in 2015, and so by 2020 they were there and we got 11 in 2021. It may have just cleaned up a bunch of contractual problems.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:30):
Yeah, I mean I sort of hope they go back to this three year plan and it seems like we'll find out next year, I guess. Right? Well,

Richard Campbell (01:02:41):
There's not going to be a Windows 13. I'll get you that much. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:02:44):
Boy. Right, right.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:46):
Of course. Although there was a macOS 13 wasn't there. I think they went right to 13. I think they went

Leo Laporte (01:02:52):
11, 12, 13. I can't

Paul Thurrott (01:02:54):
Remember. I bet they did.

Leo Laporte (01:02:57):
Well, we're right now we're at Mac OS 11.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:59):
Oh no. I thought No, no. Aren't we on 14 or something? I thought we're 14

Richard Campbell (01:03:03):
Or 15.

Leo Laporte (01:03:05):
You got me. We're in Sonoma 14.0. Yeah, but it's not called Mac Os. Maybe it is called macOS.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:12):
It's just macco West. Right. But the version used to be ten one ten two, ten three. Right now it's 11, 12, 13, 4.

Leo Laporte (01:03:19):
Yeah. I mean clearly they want everybody to be confused and they don't want to look like Microsoft.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:25):
This was when Microsoft was talking about this was the last version. It's like, well, why you call it 10? Let's call it Windows. It's call Windows.

Leo Laporte (01:03:35):
The problem is also though that software and people both want to know what version you're on.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:41):
I know. Well, you still have

Leo Laporte (01:03:42):
To have, apple did that with iPad and it's very confusing. We have to say things like it's the 10th generation iPad.

Paul Thurrott (01:03:48):
Leo, listen, you understand my mania well enough to know that we can have versions all you want, but it doesn't matter. That doesn't tell me what's on your pc. That's the

Leo Laporte (01:03:57):
Problem

Paul Thurrott (01:03:57):
Today.

(01:03:59):
I wrote an article today, actually, I don't think I linked to it about this thing that's happening with system components and Windows 11 and it's in 23 H two, and I was going to use another computer to take screenshots of it set up for that, and that pc, which is on 23 H two, does not have that interface and settings. It's only on one of the two computers I have here, and that's what my life is like today. So versioning, I mean, this is almost like a passive aggressive response to the people who want everything clear and versioned correctly. It's like, well screw you. We'll do the versioning, but then we're just going to screw around with what's in it. You'll never know. We're going to do AB testing to everybody basically. So yeah, that's our world. But anyway, I can't speak of everybody. I like Windows 11. I was shocked by some of the regressions they made in the first version. I was surprised by how little they moved the needle in the second version, and then I've been shocked over the past year to watch them change it again and again and again and again every month. It's been a rollercoaster. Well,

Richard Campbell (01:05:08):
The press towards making it acceptable for enterprise has driven a bunch of that, but most enterprise people I'm talking to are looking at it. Why would I do this? This is going to cost me so much money and support,

Paul Thurrott (01:05:23):
By the way,

Richard Campbell (01:05:24):
And for what?

Paul Thurrott (01:05:26):
Well, so enterprises will not accept the uncertainty and chaos that I've been talking about. Once

Richard Campbell (01:05:34):
The interface,

Paul Thurrott (01:05:35):
They'll not accept this. They will have policy to mold this thing in some degree. Well,

Richard Campbell (01:05:41):
And one would expect that there will be a Windows 11 enterprise and that this Tom Foolery won't exist. There

Paul Thurrott (01:05:47):
Will be a Windows 11 long-term servicing branch,

Richard Campbell (01:05:50):
Which

Paul Thurrott (01:05:51):
They don't have right now. Yes, yep. Yeah, no, that stuff will happen or should happen if there really, okay. Right. I'm sorry It will because Microsoft, like we discussed last week, is very responsive to feedback and no more responsive to their enterprise customers.

Richard Campbell (01:06:07):
But if they're going to be responsive to feedback, their feedback is, I don't want this. I'm going to keep using 10 until you show me a feature actually

Paul Thurrott (01:06:13):
Want actually, right. So that's something else we should have talked about. So one thing I looked at was the Windows version usage charts for these systems at relative positions in their life cycles. So we're two years into Windows 11. Windows 11, obviously two years ago started at zero and then went up to 400 million or whatever. Or in the words of start counter, some percentage 23.6 or something percent of the market, the other 78 or whatever percent is all Windows 10 basically. So if there are 400 million people on Windows 11, that means there are a billion on Windows 10. The thing that's interesting about Windows 10 over the past two years is that their usage is pretty flat. It has gone down a little bit over two years, but less like 8%. It's a very small number, so that's very interesting. If you go and look at Windows 10, when it was two years in, it was on a sharp usage spike, but Windows seven was the most dominant system at that time, and Windows seven was on a sharp downward spike.

Richard Campbell (01:07:13):
So

Paul Thurrott (01:07:14):
I didn't look ahead to see when they crossed paths. I didn't want to,

Richard Campbell (01:07:19):
She didn't even mention eight in that.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:21):
No, because eight did not factor to that. Right.

Richard Campbell (01:07:25):
My thought is that the 400 million Windows 11 are consumer machines because the average won't buy a new machine with an old oss. It comes with 1111. The enterprise is holding steady because they are still installing 10 on as they replace our

Paul Thurrott (01:07:42):
Yeah. So among the differences between Windows 10 and Windows 11 at two years in is enterprises were adopting Windows 10. They could not wait to get off of or not use Windows eight. So that helped. Right. So you saw that in the usage share of Windows seven going downhill very quickly. The Windows 10 usage not going down quickly today, I think reflects the situation you just described for sure. But this creates an interesting problem because remember, despite the fact that Windows seven and Windows 10 were doing this at two years in, by the time Windows seven support ended in whatever year, does anyone remember thousand 2019? I guess there were still enough people, enough businesses on Windows seven that Microsoft created a three-year program where you could pay them for extended support.

Richard Campbell (01:08:26):
Right?

Paul Thurrott (01:08:27):
Now the question we have is Windows 10 support's going to in two years

Richard Campbell (01:08:32):
Supposedly.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:33):
Well, that's right. So when Windows 10 was released, windows seven still had four years left on its lifecycle. When Windows 11 was released, windows 10 had four years left on its schedule. Windows 10 is a percentage is not just higher today than it was for Windows seven back at that same time period. It's way higher. Way higher.

Richard Campbell (01:08:55):
And holding.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:56):
And holding. Exactly. It's inconceivable. I would've said before I sort of looked at that and thought about it, I would've said, we'll see what they do. History shows us they typically extend support for businesses for xp they did for seven. I think the situation for Windows 10 is going to be even worse. Now I do. I don't see how they can't. In fact, it's so bad they should just announce it now. They should just announce it now.

Richard Campbell (01:09:22):
Yeah, no, and I think they're thinking harder on exactly that problem. Then you throw in what's happening in the V-neck stack.

Paul Thurrott (01:09:30):
I know

Richard Campbell (01:09:32):
Because we're coming into a crush where it's says like realism, we can't change fast enough, and even if we pushed hard to do it, it's two or three years down the road and 12 will be coming.

Paul Thurrott (01:09:43):
I think they have to do it, and if there had been something, I think last week we talked about this notion of an AI killer app for Windows

(01:09:51):
And the lack of one, the fact that they had a special event that was about AI and didn't have a single killer app from them or a third party one year from now. If that's still the case and we've done all the processor Revs and Nmps are everywhere, and they've got no one buying new PCs because nobody caress and there's no reason to do it. I don't know what the story becomes because at that point you have to support window. There's no reason for people or companies to upgrade to some new system. They're just not going to do

Richard Campbell (01:10:20):
It, and the TPM two isn't going to do it. That's not a good enough reason. But copilot is

Paul Thurrott (01:10:31):
If it's That's the problem, that's the problem.

Richard Campbell (01:10:36):
This is where you see the maneuvering going on now where they're trying to say there's just copilot.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:42):
Yes,

Richard Campbell (01:10:45):
This is a game playing with the brand to be able to do that without necessarily knowing exactly what you're buying.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:52):
The weird thing is, I bet we're going to see more compelling cases for NPUs from Microsoft 365 than we're going to see from Windows, and that gets into a kind of a squirrely issue because we usually think of New PCs as either just being necessitated by some passage of time or there's some exciting new features and Windows, right? And it will support an mpu and there'll be AI features that require or work better with it. I don't think they're going to be that exciting on Windows. Maybe it'll be third party stuff, who knows? But

Richard Campbell (01:11:23):
That was always presumption is the ecosystem. But part of the Ubering you're seeing with Microsoft Copilot is to make it not clear whether you were getting 365 copilot or Windows copilot, you don't care because ultimately the office team doesn't mind if you buy new hardware either. That's all of that is fine.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:43):
Well then they become a selling point. I mean, if you have a Microsoft 365 subscription and you're paying for the AI vig there,

Richard Campbell (01:11:52):
Whose price will likely go up, so it's like, hey, if you're using old hardware, it's 50 bucks a seat or 60 bucks a seat, but if you're using this new hardware with the N P U mode, it's 30 bucks a seat.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:03):
I don't

Richard Campbell (01:12:04):
Boy

Paul Thurrott (01:12:04):
Paying more per month for a Microsoft license of some kind than I do for my smartphone. It gets into a weird territory

Richard Campbell (01:12:13):
And now you get into the value proposition. How much does this have to help me before that money is trivial and at the same time it's like, Hey, we got to get new hardware anyway. Let's get the new hardware with the M P U and the new oss and we offset those costs over a few months with the price decrease in the cost of the AI tools. See,

Leo Laporte (01:12:31):
This is the difference between a corporate environment and a sole proprietor like you and me, Paul.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:37):
Yes, yes.

Leo Laporte (01:12:38):
There's no way to justify that spend in a corporation's different. You got data analysts, you got a lot of mediocre middle management people doing course. You've got teams

Paul Thurrott (01:12:47):
Of people that can use it and teams of people that can't,

Leo Laporte (01:12:51):
But it's sole proprietors. We can't use this crap. Remember,

Paul Thurrott (01:12:54):
This is an example, Richard, we'll appreciate. When Microsoft came out the gate with Longhorn, they were promoting this new app model and.net and Avalon and all that stuff, and it was all going to be Longhorn only. And through a combination of delays and their customers and developers complaining, they later announced that actually we're going to bring this stuff back to XP as well. We're going to make this. It's not just going to be for Longhorn. And I wonder when you think about it, if there's nothing in Windows 11 that makes a compelling case for ai, but we are going to be selling these computers with NPUs and most the of the benefit you're going to get out out of it are going to come out of apps, which may be in Windows, maybe not maybe in Microsoft 365 may be from Adobe or third parties. Why not just bring that stuff backward to Windows 10?

(01:13:41):
I mean, why not Microsoft 365 on Windows 10 with your extended support agreement for three or five years or whatever it is on Windows 10, you have an N P U in the computer, you've down graded to that Windows 10 operating system, maybe the built-in apps in Windows. There's no reason they can't run on Windows 10 if they don't already. The transparency nonsense I talked about in paint or the background blur and photos or whatever else they're adding, right? Why not bring it to Windows 10? Isn't it really just about that stuff and not an arbitrary version of Windows. It's the that matters who Caress. Right?

Richard Campbell (01:14:13):
And one could argue they could just stick with Windows 10 enterprise because

Paul Thurrott (01:14:19):
There you go

Richard Campbell (01:14:20):
There and win 11 is a consumer only addition.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:24):
Yeah. Yeah. I actually kind of like that idea,

Richard Campbell (01:14:27):
But well, I could also see they're going to have to put a new version out sooner or later, probably 2026 looking at the five-year time cycle against win 11.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:37):
And

Richard Campbell (01:14:38):
So you're going to need it anyway. You optimize. I mean

Paul Thurrott (01:14:41):
Windows work groups and Windows non-work groups. 3 1 1 was Windows 95, but without the new ui, right? You had all the technical underpinnings in there. There's no reason they couldn't do the same with AI and Windows time. Right? There's no reason.

Richard Campbell (01:14:55):
Yeah, they could, but they haven't, right? We're already 11.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:58):
Well, to our knowledge,

Richard Campbell (01:15:00):
11 exclusive features.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:01):
Yep. Okay. Well, we'll see. That's all. I don't know what to say except for the thing I say all the time. We'll see, we have had several Windows Insider program builds over the past week, some of which are kind of interesting. There was a beta build last Friday, and I don't know that this was called out in our article per se, but this is another one of those interesting examples of Microsoft bowing silently to the new EU laws and in the eu, Microsoft will require some consent things that's related to privacy one thing, but then they're going to do that thing where this came out earlier, that those underlying system components aren't going to automatically launch edge. They're going to launch your browser of choice. They're going to respect your choice in the EU because the EU is demanding that same kind of thing. They're also going to change the way the start menu works there if you don't agree to do certain things that it's not going to make recommendations to you, which is ads basically in the start menu.

(01:16:08):
So that's kind of interesting. We're seeing them starting to test this stuff in the insider program, so that's kind of neat. Oh, I did put it in the notes. Good. So last week I guess there was a release preview channel bill. Remember this is the one we sort of believe is this is 23 H two, right? Oh, and this is the feature I just mentioned where I saw it on one computer, but not another because a controlled feature release, which is actually kind of uncontrolled feature release when you think about it, but whatever they're separating in the ui, this notion of things that are system components from things that are apps, they're doing it arbitrarily. But the idea here is that a system component is something like Game bar or the Microsoft store that it comes with Windows. So it's like an inbox app but cannot be uninstalled.

(01:16:56):
I think they have a documented this, so I'm guessing here, but I think there's another differentiator in there that has something to do with that. Last thing I just talked about this, these are parts of the system that operate under the covers interoperability between different apps or systems and they can't be removed for that reason. If you cut out part of this, it would be like cutting IE. Out of Windows 95 OSR two artificially or not, it breaks the system and things don't work anymore. And I think that might be what this means. So it looks like they're moving at least six of them and we'll say it could be more later system components out of that installed apps, UI and settings and putting them in their own place where people will never find them because honestly, you can't do anything with 'em anyway. Who Caress

Richard Campbell (01:17:42):
Speaking of apps appearing on your machines. So Patch Tuesday last week, Microsoft pushed the Azure ARC install to all Windows server boxes,

Paul Thurrott (01:17:54):
But as we communicated privately, that didn't impact anybody and it didn't make anyone mad. So no big deal.

Leo Laporte (01:18:01):
Next it's a U two album. That's

Richard Campbell (01:18:03):
Exciting right up until the toast popped up,

Paul Thurrott (01:18:07):
Right? Why do we hear guitars?

Leo Laporte (01:18:11):
Well, didn't they put that Wilco song with the happy days on Windows 95?

Paul Thurrott (01:18:16):
It was on the cd. You had a, it

Leo Laporte (01:18:19):
Wasn't installed

Paul Thurrott (01:18:20):
Hard drive. They didn't force. But what happens, Richard explained this, the Azure arc,

Leo Laporte (01:18:25):
Yeah, I don't even know what Azure ARC is. What is that?

Richard Campbell (01:18:27):
Azure ARC is their monitoring tool so that you can use basically a cloud dashboard not only to manage all of your virtual machines and so forth in Azure, but also in other clouds like a W s and Google Cloud and on on-premises. And so some brightstar inside of Microsoft decided everybody should have ARC ready to go on any machine. And so included in the security patch Tuesday update for servers, they positioned the installer for arc. Now, they didn't install it, they just put the file on the machine. And again, I could live with that.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:06):
This is a managed environment.

Richard Campbell (01:19:09):
You went in and you R dpd into your server, your server, and like you were running a regular version of Windows 11 with all the stuff a toast would pop up to tell you ARC's ready to install. The MVPs went nuts and go read the Reddit on this. They're all delighted. Toast popped on by server. I'm really,

Paul Thurrott (01:19:37):
I'm glad this is finally impacted in an audience that cares and that they'll listen to because the behavior on the consumer versions of Windows is so insidious and is even worse than I described with that OneDrive stuff. It's actually escalated since then, if you can believe that. But yes, they, someone who they will listen to needs to tell them, this is unacceptable behavior.

Richard Campbell (01:19:59):
Yeah, what are you doing? I'm fascinated by if they just installed it and didn't say anything, would that have been better or worse? Are they

Paul Thurrott (01:20:10):
That would've been worse. It would've been

Richard Campbell (01:20:13):
In generally installing things on my machine and not telling me is bad, but pop and toast on my servers is bad, period.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:23):
So in OneDrive, I'm not going to reiterate my OneDrive issues, but on some machine, and again, I'm on 23 H two because I'm writing the book and whatever, and I noticed again it silently turned on folder backup, which I don't want. So when you turn it off, now you go to, there's a UI with the little on off switches for each of the folders. So you go to the first, this says desktop on, you're like off, a popup comes up, it's like, Hey, why did you turn this off? Do you mind taking a survey? And it's a bunch of questions and I'm like, what is this? And I'm like, okay, maybe they actually heard some feedback that people don't like this. Okay, good for them. So I canceled out the box and then I went to the second one. Second one was documents, click documents off. Same survey thing came up. Are you kidding me? So I dispensed with that. I went to the third one, turn it off. Survey comes up, I'm like, oh, dear God, what is wrong with you? So I finally got it all off, close the window toast pops up for the side, says, Hey, would you like to turn on folder backup? It's a cool new feature of Wonder Drive. It is a miracle. I did not hum this thing off of the balcony of this apartment. Are you kidding me?

Richard Campbell (01:21:26):
A computer?

Paul Thurrott (01:21:27):
Yeah. Don't tell me that's not malicious.

Richard Campbell (01:21:32):
I still think it's indifference. They're just doing,

Paul Thurrott (01:21:34):
Oh God,

Richard Campbell (01:21:36):
There's this whole thing, this idea of negative option billing where you're a local monopoly of choice just gives you something or push something on you and you have to call 'em to make it go away. It's they're done with the software. It's like, oh yeah, you can it. You can delete the file. You can't stop the toast. That's not a thing.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:56):
No, we're not selling, we don't have that. That's going to be in Windows 12. We don't even know how to do that in Windows 11. It's like if you had a cable company Monopoly and they keep contacting you to feedback, Hey, how are we doing? What does it matter? I can't stop you from doing what you're doing. What's the difference? Anyway, okay, sorry.

Richard Campbell (01:22:16):
Oh yeah. All of my life is suffering and I blame you.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:20):
Right.

Leo Laporte (01:22:21):
Let me take a break right here before you move on. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (01:22:23):
Okay. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:22:23):
If you don't mind.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:24):
No, I don't mind.

Leo Laporte (01:22:25):
I got nothing else to do. I'm sitting here.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:27):
No, that's all you're doing. Your

Leo Laporte (01:22:28):
Breaks and stuff. Yeah, I'm trying to revive this plan over here. Nothing's happening.

Richard Campbell (01:22:34):
My ferns have inspired you. I like that.

Leo Laporte (01:22:36):
Yeah. Ferns make me jealous. They're so green. Too much. I

Paul Thurrott (01:22:38):
Would like every time that you came back on camera, there were more plants that has happened. We could.

Leo Laporte (01:22:45):
That has actually happened. We did a twit like that where we slowly gathered all the plants in the studios and every time we came back it was different, more. And then finally I took off my clothes. So it, I dunno, you remember that watching?

Paul Thurrott (01:22:56):
Anyway,

Leo Laporte (01:22:57):
It was a day that lived in infamy. Let's

Richard Campbell (01:22:58):
Suddenly the palm leaves became way more important.

Leo Laporte (01:23:01):
This a Stephen King story. Yes, strategically placed. It's a big deal. But before we do that, and that's a good idea. I'll see if we can get some more. You know what it might be in this case it might not be plants, it might be bricka. Brack. I'll be small

Paul Thurrott (01:23:16):
By Bricka. Yeah, love doesn't last cooking and does

Leo Laporte (01:23:22):
No mom is not that. She doesn't have the live love, laugh stuff

Paul Thurrott (01:23:26):
Anywhere. That's fine. There's no

Leo Laporte (01:23:27):
Slogans anywhere in the house.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:28):
Okay,

Leo Laporte (01:23:29):
Good. No, she's a little more than

Paul Thurrott (01:23:31):
That.

Leo Laporte (01:23:32):
But there are a lot of cookbooks, which fortunately have become very handy for propping up microphones and cameras and all that stuff. I didn't bring

Paul Thurrott (01:23:41):
Enough tripods. We've all been there.

Leo Laporte (01:23:43):
Our show today brought to you by ladies and gentlemen, the great folks, actually I'm really thrilled to have them on Windows Weekly. They've been sponsoring security now for years. Thinked Canary. We use the Thinked Canary. We have one in the studio. I don't have one here. Mom didn't really need the security, but this is why I thinks canary is important. We all work on perimeter defenses, right? Keeping the bad guys out of our network and for some reason somehow they keep getting in like cockroaches. So how do you know if you have an intruder? Because what they do these days, on average, they're wandering around in your network 91 days before they actually are spotted. And what are they doing? They're exfiltrating data so they can blackmail you. They're looking for all the places you back up. So when they trigger their ransomware, you're in deep trouble.

(01:24:34):
There's lots of things they do. They love to hang around in your network like cockroaches, the thinked canary, that's the canary in the coal mine. Get it? That will let you know that somebody's snooping inside your network. You can also use the thinks canary to make canary tokens. These are little trip wires. You can drop into hundreds of places every corner of your network. They are documents, they're word docs or spreadsheet. They look like I should say word docs or spreadsheets or PDFs or any variety of files. And you can name them something juicy like employee social security numbers probably wouldn't do that. Don't make it too obvious. Just payroll information. That's a good one, xls. It's not. Of course what it is is it's a little trip wire When the bad guy tries to open it, you get a notification and this is what the think scenario does so well.

(01:25:29):
No false positives, just real information when it matters, the most trivial, this is the thanks to Canary philosophy, thinks is the company, Canary is the device. They're trivial to deploy with a ridiculously high quality of signal thanks to Canary's. Founding team has a background in offense. I'll let you imagine what that means. But they have, as is often the case, the people who are good at breaking into systems and they've trained governments and companies and all kinds of people in how to do this are also very good at defense, right? So they've prioritized defensive thinking in developing these hardware devices. Canary's team is uber conscious of your trust in their product. They take extensive measures to ensure the devices do not add to the risk. They are merely in a way of knowing if you're under attack. They're designed to be secure. They use, I mean actually we rarely talk about this, but they're using memory safe languages.

(01:26:29):
The firmware is hardcoded to be robust, reliable, it's sandboxed. No critical network secrets are ever stored on the canary. So even if somebody somehow figured out how to penetrate it, there's nothing in there for them to use and to maintain security. Canaries cannot be dual homed. You might want to, but this is part of the security. They don't want to bridge into another network. You can't have dual VLANs or Span VLANs because that could give attackers ability to jump across networks. I only mentioned this so that you understand. These are really well-designed devices that do one thing and do one thing perfectly, thanks to Canary has put immense effort into assuring they don't introduce new vulnerabilities to a customer network. And frankly, all it has to do if one of those birds can let off just one warning before it's owned, it's done. What it needs to do, it's earned.

(01:27:23):
Its keep. Customers have the option to break the backend authentication link. So you can even prevent staff from accessing their console. You do get a console with your things to Canary, but you also get, there's a p i. It uses web hooks, it will work with Slack, it works with anything. Email of course, texts to give you just the alerts that matter. By the way, a third party assessment commends the secure design of the platform and software stack implemented by Think hardware Canaries like the ones we have at the studio, VM based and cloud-based canaries. They're deployed and loved on all seven continents. That's a little hint as to who might be using them. Go to Canary Tools slash love. And you could see there are surprisingly, I honestly it'd be better if you didn't mention you used them, but CISOs and CIOs love their canary so much.

(01:28:17):
They often have posted messages about how great they are. And if you want to see a lot of those messages, Canary tool slash love, genuine customer love for the thanks to Canary. So in short, it's a little honeypot you can put on your network. You can create additional Canary tokens throughout your network, as many as you want. You can run in a cloud, you can run it in vm. It will let you know if there's an intruder with a high signal, high value signal that really tells you what you need to know and nothing more and no false positives If you don't hear from your canary, that's good. And I don't hear from our canary. One time we did that was bad and we used it. It was great. If you go to Canary Tools slash twit, just $7,500 a year will get you five of 'em. I want to give you the pricing. So upfront, many big companies will have hundreds. Small company like ours might just have a half dozen, five $7,500 a year. You get five Canaries your own hosted console, you get upgrades, you get support, you get maintenance. They're not big. They're like an external hard drive and they have two connections, one to plug into the wall for the power and one for the ethernet and that's it. And they're on your network.

(01:29:34):
If you use the code twit in the how did you hear About Us Box, you get 10% off the price of your Canaries forever. For as long as you use 'em. Make sure you use T W I T and the how did you hear about this box? And if you need any reassurance at all, this is a great thing to know. If you are unhappy for any reason, you can return your Canaries. You have a 60 day, two month money back guarantee. Full refund. Now I have to tell you, we've offered this for years. We've been talking about the canary.

(01:30:05):
They tell me they have not once has that refund ever been asked for. Nobody who gets a canary wants to get their money back. They think this is the best thing ever. You will love your things Canaries. And if you don't full refund for two months. Visit Canary. Do tools slash twit very important and please use the offer code, T W I T and the how did you hear about Us Box for 10% off for life. We love these guys. I think they've advertised once or twice before in Windows Weekly. But if you're in charge of the security in your office, in your network at your company or somebody who is, tell 'em about the thanks. Canary. Canary. Alright, Canary tools slash Twitter offer code TWI t. Alright, thank you for letting me interrupt. I mean it's your show don't, it's actually nice to have something to interrupt with. You're

Paul Thurrott (01:30:58):
Welcome. I'm just

Leo Laporte (01:30:59):
Saying that's one of the reasons we really tell people about Club Twit. We're doing so many great things. You do that great hands-on windows for club twit because even though we do have three ads in this show, which is great, that's the max. We're having a hard time selling ads. The thing is, the people who love it, like Wix, thanks to Canary, our advertisers, the next break will be for a company called Miro. They get it, they understand what we're doing. But there are a lot of agencies and advertisers who just think podcasts don't work and they're industry is low balling everything. It's horrible. It's terrible. And that's why two years ago, Lisa said, we need a club. We want to have a way for listeners to support us with or add advertising. $7 a month. If you're not a member, twit tv slash club twit, lots of benefits including Paul's hands-on windows. You do the same thing@theat.com. You have the premium. And I always tell everybody, get premium. That's really the stuff you do there. Think

Paul Thurrott (01:31:59):
It's important to support the content makers

Leo Laporte (01:32:02):
Well, you're smart. You do. It's similar to us. The fact, I think we kind of took a page from your book, a lot of free content ads, support free content, but then you do some really extra above and beyond stuff. And it is worth, what is it, 40 bucks a year? It's not expensive. It's really worth it.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:19):
Well, yeah, it depends. But yeah, 52 maybe.

Leo Laporte (01:32:22):
Yeah. I mean not buy it every year

Paul Thurrott (01:32:24):
And stuff

Leo Laporte (01:32:25):
Like the Windows everywhere, stuff you do.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:26):
That was

Leo Laporte (01:32:27):
So great. I really enjoy the, it's a little bit more thoughtful. It's not so news focused, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:32:33):
Yeah. None of it is news focus, the premium stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:32:37):
Yeah, I love that.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:38):
Unless it's an analysis of something that happened,

Leo Laporte (01:32:41):
Oh, you're a big thinker. So it's nice to a big thinker perspective.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:44):
I'm a small man, but a big thinker.

Leo Laporte (01:32:46):
A big thinker.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:46):
I was a big man too, unfortunately. Anyway. Yeah, God, I don't even, what happened there?

Leo Laporte (01:32:53):
Okay, so you know what? I'm just going to say, if I were in Mexico City, I'd be bigger than you.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:00):
That's know actually, honestly. Well, okay. You could eat poorly here. That's true.

Leo Laporte (01:33:05):
We eat really? I mean living on street tacos. What are you talking about?

Paul Thurrott (01:33:07):
Yeah, I don't eat tortillas or anything like that.

Leo Laporte (01:33:11):
Oh, you're smart. That's smart. That's my

Paul Thurrott (01:33:13):
Down. Well, I eat well here and I mean that in a nutritional,

Leo Laporte (01:33:16):
It's good on we go.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:20):
Yes. So there were two Windows Insider builds that landed just as we started the podcast. The first was for the dev channel. Just a couple of things. File Explorer fixes. Again, I keep saying this, we're going to see those for a long time to come. The new file explorer is terrible. And then this is an interesting one I hadn't considered, which is copilot support for multi-monitor. So they're going to let you move the copilot pane, which actually they're calling a sidebar, by the way. Sidebar two words. I hope they change that because the Windows Vista sidebar was one word, but they're going to let you move it to a different monitor and it will remember where it was. So you can do that kind of stuff. So nothing huge, but that's good. And then the Canary Build, which we sort of feel maybe will one day turn into Windows 12 mail and calendar are no longer installed. When you do a clean install the operating system, we know those are going away. So that makes some sense. And when I'm updating the book, for example, I'm going to actually delete my me and calendar chapters and replace those with an Outlook chapter and everyone can complain because no one likes Outlook, the new outlook that is, and then Bluetooth support for hearing aids, which is fun and some updates. That's

Leo Laporte (01:34:29):
Interesting. So my hearing aids, I compare with my phone and there's really a lot of reason for that.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:35):
Yeah, my son has cochlear implants, but it's a similar technology. And

Leo Laporte (01:34:40):
Do they have Bluetooth, cochlear implants?

Paul Thurrott (01:34:41):
Yeah. Well it's Bluetooth capabilities. So what you can do is connect to devices obviously and here directly into the device. And when you go to concerts and things, you can connect to a system in the arena.

Leo Laporte (01:34:50):
It's so awesome.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:51):
Yeah, there's some really neat things happening with that stuff. So that's great. This is one of examples of accessibility. People think accessibility features are for people with handicaps or whatever. And honestly, a lot of these are for everybody. So we all benefit for Cap everything. If we're lucky, we're

Leo Laporte (01:35:09):
Going to be hearing aids eventually. That's right. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:35:11):
Yeah, exactly. Including my wife. But don't tell her I said that. As I say, spouse

Leo Laporte (01:35:19):
Is always the first to know.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:19):
So I don't speak Spanish very well, but they always hear me clearly when I tell them the percentage number of the tip. No one's ever gotten that one wrong. My wife can hear me clearly if she wants to. So anyway, a couple of weeks ago we were talking about Windows seven and eight keys and how they would no longer going to work for activating Windows 11. That has happened. So Microsoft has confirmed they've actually cut it off. So we weren't sure at the time, would it be some future version of Windows or some milestone, whatever. Nope. They just turned it off. So

Richard Campbell (01:35:49):
Now I wonder if I could use seven and eight keys to upgraded 10 and then upgrade to 11 with that.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:55):
Yep. I wonder the same.

Richard Campbell (01:35:57):
And

Paul Thurrott (01:35:58):
Now I'm going to think about that because I'll find out. It'll be easy. Too

Leo Laporte (01:36:01):
Bad. There's no way to know. No way in the world. You could

Paul Thurrott (01:36:04):
Figure, you

Leo Laporte (01:36:05):
Could.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:05):
Yeah. I'm going to find out. That's a good idea. I had a guy who wrote me in a panic because he had upgraded his, I dunno if it was a hard drive or some component in his pc, he had used a Windows seven license to install Windows 11 and then it inactivated and he thought this was wide and this has nothing to do with it. Once you have activated Windows 11, it is nothing to do with the product key. It's due to a matrix of your hardware features of the pc. It's just

Richard Campbell (01:36:33):
Something changed on the machine. That's right. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:37):
That was the historic problem with activation. So I just told 'em, you can just contact Microsoft Support. You won't have any issues there. And this just happened. I haven't had a chance to watch but five minutes of one of these videos. But there are now three new Dave Cutler interviews on YouTube. I have to tell you how rare it is for there to be any Dave Cutler interviews anywhere.

Richard Campbell (01:36:56):
81. 81.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:59):
I know. So one of them is called What successful programmers do that does. Who cares? One of them is priceless. I got to find this thing. It's called Windows Longhorn was the worst code I've ever seen, so I cannot wait to watch these. Dave Co is a character. He's a genius. He's a seminal

Richard Campbell (01:37:24):
Persona. Has been for decades and yeah, decades

Paul Thurrott (01:37:26):
And decades.

Richard Campbell (01:37:27):
He still roams those halls. I think

Paul Thurrott (01:37:29):
It's striking

Richard Campbell (01:37:30):
Fear to everyone around him when he does it.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:32):
Yeah, he is. Yeah. The aged lion that's never been taken down by anybody and never will be. He'll leave of his own accord.

Richard Campbell (01:37:40):
He'll will fade into this good night.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:43):
Yep. So that's just, you got to go look at that stuff.

Richard Campbell (01:37:46):
Gold. Gold. It's solid gold. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:48):
He's amazing. Amazing. And then there's a beautiful little story. The US Internal Revenue Service actually investigated Microsoft's taxes over a several year period from 2004 to 2013. So 10 year period. And it's important to note those years, 2004 to 2013. Think about that for a second because I'm going to get back to it. And what they discovered was that they owed 29 billion in taxes, not including penalties. Don't happens.

Leo Laporte (01:38:17):
We broke that last week. So what's the result? That's outrageous. Well,

Paul Thurrott (01:38:22):
This will take many years. They're going to appeal. Yeah. They'll probably end up paying a fine and not the full amount is my guess, but it's going to take many, many years,

Leo Laporte (01:38:30):
As we've said last week. Is the Dutch sandwich or the

Paul Thurrott (01:38:34):
Irish? No, the Irish

Leo Laporte (01:38:36):
Reach around or whatever.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:40):
I don't think that's the official term

Leo Laporte (01:38:42):
They have have a funny name for it. But

Paul Thurrott (01:38:43):
It is fair for to say the Irish do offer tax breaks to corporations, individuals.

Leo Laporte (01:38:48):
So Apple did this. I don't know what Microsoft did, but Apple did this. They set up a

Paul Thurrott (01:38:51):
Headquarters

Leo Laporte (01:38:51):
In Ireland and made sure that all the revenues outside the US went through the Irish

Paul Thurrott (01:38:57):
Branch. This is exactly what Microsoft did. They did it in Puerto Rico, which is not another country. But it's

Leo Laporte (01:39:03):
Tax free though. It's a tax free.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:04):
Okay. They funneled. What they did was they had a business in Puerto Rico that would, and again, the years 24 to 2013 are important for two reasons. This is one of 'em. They were making,

Leo Laporte (01:39:15):
I just want to to announce Twit is moving to Puerto Rico.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:19):
Yes, right

Leo Laporte (01:39:20):
Stat.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:21):
Right.

Leo Laporte (01:39:22):
I'd love to be in Puerto

Paul Thurrott (01:39:23):
Rico. I would actually, I'll move my address there and I'll live here and I'll, same thing. I'll play no taxes and I'll live in a

Leo Laporte (01:39:28):
Place. That's the problem. That's the problem is that they really weren't doing business in Puerto Rico. Exactly

Paul Thurrott (01:39:32):
Right. Well no, they were So they had a little subsidiary, a little, I dunno if it was an independent company, whatever it was, that was manufacturing DVDs. That was what they did. So what Microsoft did was assign all of the licensing rights for Windows to them and they pour all the money through that. Yeah, there's the problem. This is exactly what Apple was doing.

Leo Laporte (01:39:52):
Well

Paul Thurrott (01:39:52):
That's the

Leo Laporte (01:39:52):
DVT

Paul Thurrott (01:39:53):
Is

Leo Laporte (01:39:54):
Windows.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:55):
Alright, so why is this state range also interesting? I mentioned before that Microsoft very suspiciously made Windows, windows seven license sales and even 20 million a month for the entire duration of Windows seven, which you'll remember went on sale in 2009, right at the tail end of this. These years were a period of time where Amy Hood was not the C F O of Microsoft. It was someone named Peter Klein. And I'm not saying Peter Klein is to blame per se, but I am saying that it is coincidental that he was around for a lot of these little financial shenanigans and that there are things you can get away with and things you can't. And that I think Amy Hood, we might credit her current era with the lack of transparency during the quarterly earnings reports. Right. With hard numbers. All the things I complain about every quarter. But if you look back at Peter Klein, I think we're going to remember him for this stuff. He was clearly played, you think Excel, this guy was playing with money.

Leo Laporte (01:40:55):
We got to come up with a name for the Puerto Rican tax runaround. I'm going,

Paul Thurrott (01:41:01):
Is it possible to make this not offensive?

Leo Laporte (01:41:03):
Yeah, no, they're famous. Puerto Rican sandwich is wonderful. Smashed Oh, go contain Sandwich is called the heto. So they did the Puerto Rican Hato.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:11):
The Burrito.

Leo Laporte (01:41:12):
Burrito,

Paul Thurrott (01:41:13):
Yeah. It's a new way of doing taxes

Leo Laporte (01:41:17):
Or the TTA is another delicious. You know what, my son is the sandwich king and he teaches me all, everything

Paul Thurrott (01:41:24):
I do like about

Leo Laporte (01:41:25):
Sandwiches. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:27):
What's the mofongo? I would've called it the

Leo Laporte (01:41:30):
Mta. Not the Mungo

Paul Thurrott (01:41:34):
Mung. Our

Leo Laporte (01:41:34):
Taxes. Honey, I get bad news. It's the Italian Puerto Rican version. No, I think you're talking about the Muta, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:41:41):
No Mofongo. It's a

Leo Laporte (01:41:43):
Mofongo. What's a mugo?

Paul Thurrott (01:41:44):
It's a plantain based mashed potato. We thing with meat inside of it.

Leo Laporte (01:41:48):
Oh yeah. My daughter's weighing in. So you've had a mofongo. Abby

Paul Thurrott (01:41:52):
Mofongo could be fantastic.

Leo Laporte (01:41:53):
She loves it. She loves the Mofongo

Paul Thurrott (01:41:56):
In Puerto Rico.

Leo Laporte (01:41:57):
She lived in Mexico for quite a while.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:58):
I'm talking about Puerto Rico. I don't know Mexico.

Leo Laporte (01:42:00):
Oh, have you lived in Puerto Rico?

Paul Thurrott (01:42:02):
No, we visited, but that was my,

Leo Laporte (01:42:03):
I love Puerto Rico. The

Paul Thurrott (01:42:04):
Food item I love. Yeah, I did too. No, actually

Leo Laporte (01:42:07):
So good. If

Paul Thurrott (01:42:07):
It wasn't for the hurricane that wipes out the island every three years on schedule, I'd probably be,

Leo Laporte (01:42:12):
It's hard to do podcast network with inconsistent electricity.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:16):
Yeah, it's hard to do anything if you don't have electricity.

Leo Laporte (01:42:18):
I mean,

Paul Thurrott (01:42:20):
That's the problem. I love it there. But, and US dollar, I mean, what could be, it's

Leo Laporte (01:42:25):
Incidentally, it's not just Microsoft that used it as a tax haven. It's the big,

Richard Campbell (01:42:30):
All the big American monk nationals use what they call the double Irish.

Leo Laporte (01:42:34):
The double

Paul Thurrott (01:42:35):
Irish there. So that's the

Leo Laporte (01:42:36):
Term. But sometimes they start in Ireland and they route it through

Paul Thurrott (01:42:41):
I,

Leo Laporte (01:42:42):
Of

Paul Thurrott (01:42:42):
Course

Leo Laporte (01:42:43):
I should. This is got to talk to my accountant, Vinny, and he's going to tell you I to

Paul Thurrott (01:42:49):
Do this. This is the accounting that Thomas Crown used to

Leo Laporte (01:42:54):
Me. Leo, it's easy. It's no problem.

Richard Campbell (01:42:57):
He's going to be fine.

Leo Laporte (01:42:58):
Everything's going to be fine. Fine. The guy in the

Paul Thurrott (01:43:00):
Suit that doesn't fit is on TV one night and you're like, we're in trouble.

Leo Laporte (01:43:03):
And then you get the bill for 29 billion.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:07):
This will take several years to, we're not going to find out the answer to this next year.

Richard Campbell (01:43:12):
You can pay for a lot of legal fees with 29 billion. No rush here.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:18):
Microsoft says it hopes to reach a mutual resolution with the I R Ss, which I assume means not paying any taxes. So we'll see.

Leo Laporte (01:43:25):
I also hope to reach a mutual resolution with the I R S. It's my fervent hope.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:31):
It was a comedian. I don't remember. I was like, what do you mean pay my taxes? I paid my taxes last year.

Leo Laporte (01:43:38):
Oh gosh.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:39):
That was the days.

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

Paul Thurrott (01:43:41):
Alright, I'm going to get rid this thing.

Richard Campbell (01:43:47):
AI stuff.

Paul Thurrott (01:43:48):
No, just the first. I don't want to rant about some topics.

Leo Laporte (01:43:51):
Actually. I want to ask you a couple of things. So

Paul Thurrott (01:43:53):
We

Leo Laporte (01:43:53):
Are looking at some events that are coming up in the next quarter. We want to do some events. There's a big snapdragon event next week. We are going to live stream that keynote as we've talked about last week. I think Snapdragon has some interesting, Qualcomm, I should say has some interesting announcements. So that event is, I think next

Paul Thurrott (01:44:13):
Tuesday we know they're going to announce the new compute chip, which is the one for PCs. Right. So that's going to be, there'll a new mobile

Leo Laporte (01:44:20):
Chip

Paul Thurrott (01:44:20):
Chip. We're doing it Tuesday.

Leo Laporte (01:44:21):
If you guys wanted to join us, I'll set you a note offline. I

Paul Thurrott (01:44:25):
Can't on Tuesday. What do I have? I know I have something now.

Leo Laporte (01:44:27):
It's the 26th I think. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:29):
Oh, the 26th. Oh, you're right. It's in two weeks. No, that is next week.

Leo Laporte (01:44:32):
That's believe it or

Paul Thurrott (01:44:33):
Not. What's Tuesday?

Leo Laporte (01:44:34):
That's what I said too.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:34):
I actually, I have a meeting with Google,

Leo Laporte (01:44:39):
Which is then the other thing we're going to do is open ai. We're hoping their keynote will be streamed live. That's going to be interesting as

Paul Thurrott (01:44:46):
Well. Richard. We might have a third idea

Richard Campbell (01:44:49):
For him. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:44:51):
And Ignites coming up.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:52):
That's it.

Leo Laporte (01:44:53):
I wanted to ask you about Ignite. Is there going to be a key? What can we say

Paul Thurrott (01:44:56):
About Ignite?

Richard Campbell (01:44:57):
What we can say is that Paul and I will both be there and there may be some recording spaces available for us.

Leo Laporte (01:45:08):
So yeah, I think those we don't want to kind of taper off at the end of the year. And I think that that Qualcomm Snapdragon event's going to be big next week. The open AI events coming up and yeah, we saw Ignite, is it

Paul Thurrott (01:45:20):
November?

Richard Campbell (01:45:21):
Yeah, 13th or the 17th. Mainstreaming days are the 15th and the 16th. So the keynote on the 15th will thing we want to see and

Leo Laporte (01:45:32):
Make a note of that

Richard Campbell (01:45:33):
Wednesday

Leo Laporte (01:45:33):
Keynote on the 15th.

Richard Campbell (01:45:35):
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:45:36):
So that's a thought also. Yeah. I'm embarrassed, I forgot to mention this yet. We have the opportunity to interview a Qualcomm executive about the windows and arm stuff on next week's show if you're interested. So

Leo Laporte (01:45:48):
Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:45:49):
Wow.

Leo Laporte (01:45:49):
That'd be a great follow-up to the event

Paul Thurrott (01:45:51):
The day before. Okay.

Leo Laporte (01:45:53):
I will have a production associate if we have it. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:57):
I'll have my people talk to your people and we'll keep busy.

Richard Campbell (01:46:00):
We can do lunch. The people

Leo Laporte (01:46:01):
Will be in touch.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:04):
Okay. Yeah. So yeah, the thing that's particularly interesting to me, because they have not invited the press, so I'm kind of a sneaking in gorilla style with Richard, which I like, and

Richard Campbell (01:46:18):
I get opportunities, so we take advantage of it.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:22):
So that's going to be fun.

Richard Campbell (01:46:24):
Yeah, we will. We'll take one of the recording booths. We'll watch the keynote from there. Stream back to the studio and do our thing. Batchy should be in the hotel. I mean, if we've got to do hotels, we'll do hotels. But one way or the other, these announcements are going to be important. Where

Leo Laporte (01:46:42):
Is Ignite? Is it in Florida this year? It's in Seattle.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:45):
In

Leo Laporte (01:46:45):
Seattle, okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:47):
It's a much smaller event than usual. They did Bill this year. They're going to have sessions and keynotes.

Richard Campbell (01:46:52):
Same venue as the bill,

Paul Thurrott (01:46:54):
But not a show floor and no press onsite and no immediate

Richard Campbell (01:46:59):
And it very much two days. Two days of streaming. But there's days on either side of that in person and they immediately sold out the in-person.

Leo Laporte (01:47:07):
Wow.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:07):
Yeah. Which is IGN actually pretty impressive. It's

Leo Laporte (01:47:09):
A partner event,

Paul Thurrott (01:47:10):
Right? What is it? I can't, no, no. This is their IT slash internal it. Okay. This, it used to be called tech ed, right?

Richard Campbell (01:47:19):
Yeah. I mean they've always had some dev content, but not as much now, especially,

Paul Thurrott (01:47:26):
And they almost don't have to because, well, they've always said they build obviously, but they also have separate net events and they're starting to

Richard Campbell (01:47:32):
Separate

Paul Thurrott (01:47:33):
That small vote again.

Richard Campbell (01:47:34):
And just for fun.net comp is the same week because that doesn't

Paul Thurrott (01:47:37):
Anybody, I'm sure it has something to do with, I don't know. Who cares? It's just so stupid. It's so typical of Microsoft, but that's DON eight. Eight is happening that week. It'll be fun.

Richard Campbell (01:47:49):
Yeah. 88 releases to engineering on the Tuesday and they

Paul Thurrott (01:47:53):
Don't. But for the people interested in this stuff, there's going to be a lot of ai, right? Obviously.

Richard Campbell (01:47:59):
Yeah. Huge focus on, a huge focus on data.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:02):
And it's going to be all virtual, so you can stream it later.

Richard Campbell (01:48:07):
You don't have to watch it live. Everything's online. Lots of M 365. Lots of teams.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:11):
Yep.

Richard Campbell (01:48:13):
Dynamics. Yeah. So I've been helping bring podcasters to the event. And so those, I'm

Paul Thurrott (01:48:19):
A podcaster, so what the heck?

Richard Campbell (01:48:21):
Yeah, me too.

Leo Laporte (01:48:24):
I'm a podcaster.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:26):
That's something you

Richard Campbell (01:48:26):
Don't say, I've got a microphone. Let's go get a bar.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:29):
I listen to a podcast where they make fun of anyone with a title like that. They'll be like blogger. He's a blogger. It's even worse. He's a podcaster.

Richard Campbell (01:48:42):
Like a blogger. Only noisier.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:44):
It took me 10 years to warm up to the term blogger, and I'm still a little queasy about it, but it's okay.

Richard Campbell (01:48:50):
Look, you're a writer and some of it ends up online

Paul Thurrott (01:48:53):
And we have to have a word for it. So we're using that word.

Richard Campbell (01:48:57):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:58):
Okay. I can deal with it. New versions of browsers are coming out. I didn't look at this too closely. This is a new version of Chrome that came out today, something blah blah. The address bar, I don't really care, but Microsoft Edge one 18 came out the other day, and of course it does. It includes a little AI feature and it's related to find. And for you people that kind of fumble finger every time you type anything, I think this is going to make a lot of sense, which is you're on a page, you're reading the article, and you want to find a reference to something you just read that was elsewhere in the article and you can't find it. And you do control F find and you mistype it and then it says no results. And they're going to use AI to look at that thing you mistyped potentially. And if they think there are words you might have meant, they'll give you a list of those words. You click on it and we'll find on that term. So

Richard Campbell (01:49:43):
Last year I would've called that, but Okay,

Paul Thurrott (01:49:46):
Thank you for accepting that blindly. Yeah, I was going to know. I was going to say like spell checking. I can tell AI has gotten its way into spell checking now because it doesn't work anymore, which is beautiful. Grammar checking

Richard Campbell (01:49:59):
Just creates whole new words out of whole cloth, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:50:02):
Everyone was worried that AI was going to put people out of jobs and that no one was going to be that person that sat between AI and the publishing of something. But I got to tell you, as a writer in Word, and then again when I published two WordPress and I used Grammarly, I'm the one watching the watcher here. You have to know enough about writing to know that no, this thing you suggested is not just wrong, it's ridiculous. And this is happening more and more. It's really strange.

Richard Campbell (01:50:30):
It's getting better,

Paul Thurrott (01:50:31):
It's getting worse. So anyway, there's that minor points, but Adobe first and then Microsoft and now Google have announced they will indemnify their users against any intellectual property claims against their use of their ai. Did I say that right? Not intellectual property copyrights. Liability. Liability, whatever. Yeah. So this applies to their paying workspace customers and also Google Cloud customers. So this isn't for individuals. You can't just go nuts and make naked pictures of celebrities with it. This is for people using a

Richard Campbell (01:51:04):
Content. I mean, you can,

Paul Thurrott (01:51:06):
I'm not saying you should, whatever,

Richard Campbell (01:51:08):
But you definitely shouldn't. They're not going to pay. If you do

Paul Thurrott (01:51:13):
24 hours isn't going to pass on its own. That's all I'm saying. The days are long. And then speaking of Google, so Google is, because of Microsoft and binging and all the stuff that's happening, Google has had to put everything in overdrive. These things they weren't going to do. Google is testing a lot of their AI capabilities for consumers in search through something called the search generative experience. It's a separate Google search UI basically, where they do a bunch of AI stuff and they keep adding to this. Honestly, they add a lot to this over time.

Richard Campbell (01:51:44):
This their Canary Insiders build. Is that what this is?

Paul Thurrott (01:51:47):
Yeah, yeah. That's a good way to put it. Well, yes. I mean, so for example, on if you think about binging and how binging is a lot like Google Binging Chat is its own thing. Bing image creation is its own thing. And the question is, do we roll those into being proper? Right? And so at some point, if it gets good enough, does it just become part of the experience? And if so, what does that look like? You have different little UIs. Google faces the same problem. It's even a bigger deal for them. Right? Because Google search is so big. So Google search, sorry. Yeah, Google search generative experience is a way for them to experiment with this stuff. But they just added their version of binging image creation, which is the ability to create image from a text prompt using this experience. I don't want to say they're catching up, that's probably not fair, but they are doing what OpenAI is doing, the Dali, what binging is doing with image creator, because of course they're table stakes. We talked about that.

Richard Campbell (01:52:43):
Yeah. These are all table stakes.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:45):
Yep. They have to do it. So that's good. And then we have some Xbox stuff. I mean, aside from the biggest news of the century, which we talked about at the top of the show, a couple of other,

Leo Laporte (01:52:57):
Let's do another half hour on it though. I don't think we really,

Paul Thurrott (01:52:59):
I could do another hour, honestly, really? I will remind you or I will tell you, one of the interesting things about being in Mexico now that they've gone to a two hour time change especially, is by not adopting the,

Leo Laporte (01:53:15):
They're not going to go to a saving time or they're going to stay summertime.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:18):
This is the first year they haven't done it. So it went from one hour difference for me to two. So when I'm back at home on the east coast and we end the show these days close to 5:00 PM I'm ready for dinner. We're heading out the door. But in Mexico, I have the whole day in front of me. So I could just,

Leo Laporte (01:53:34):
We can just keep on going. I could

Paul Thurrott (01:53:35):
Just go.

Leo Laporte (01:53:36):
Well, conversely, I'm here in the East coast, so it's getting

Paul Thurrott (01:53:41):
A little late. Oh, you understand. Mind wrapping. Okay. Maybe we'll get a little empathy out of this then.

Leo Laporte (01:53:46):
Okay. And in Portugal, what is it now? Midnight

Paul Thurrott (01:53:50):
Clock. It just looks like midnight.

Richard Campbell (01:53:52):
Which in Portugal is dinner time. Dinner time. They eat late around here.

Leo Laporte (01:53:57):
Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:53:57):
As they do here.

Richard Campbell (01:53:58):
I wouldn't worried about getting a meal later on. It's easy to do.

Leo Laporte (01:54:01):
Do they have fado in Porto? I know it's a big thing in Lisbon.

Richard Campbell (01:54:06):
Yeah, I

Paul Thurrott (01:54:06):
Know. They must.

Leo Laporte (01:54:07):
Fado is so much

Richard Campbell (01:54:08):
Fun. They do. And good paella and phenomenal seafood.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:12):
I love just for the wine. My God. It would be enough.

Richard Campbell (01:54:15):
We were drinking dude wine. We went to a nice fish place and they brought out the fish to introduce him. I named him Anthony.

Leo Laporte (01:54:22):
Anthony was just, oh, when you look somebody in the eye, you really want

Paul Thurrott (01:54:24):
To get,

Richard Campbell (01:54:26):
And by the way, they cut those eyes and brought 'em back to the table too. So Anthony's cheeks were excellent

Leo Laporte (01:54:32):
Fish.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:32):
Oh geez. That's man, that was Hannibal Lecter level.

Leo Laporte (01:54:37):
Did you have an nice keani and a Yeah, exactly. Fama beans on the

Paul Thurrott (01:54:40):
Side. Nice. I'm going to have your cheeks with a nice Porto in a seemy.

Richard Campbell (01:54:47):
We were drinking the Portuguese and one.

Leo Laporte (01:54:50):
They're

Paul Thurrott (01:54:51):
Very nice,

Leo Laporte (01:54:51):
Very nice. Portugal's. Wonderful. I love the

Richard Campbell (01:54:53):
Portugal beef.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:54):
So actually

Richard Campbell (01:54:55):
They knew how to eat here.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:57):
Yeah. So we will end the show in the middle of the afternoon here. And usually, like I said, usually five to six we would eat. But same thing, they don't eat till late. So we have restaurants we can't even get into. The sushi place we go to doesn't open until seven.

Leo Laporte (01:55:10):
Wow.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:11):
Until seven. Can you imagine? That's the early bird special. We're the only people at the sushi bar at seven. We're literally the only

Richard Campbell (01:55:17):
People there.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:20):
Yeah. So the Spanish, the Dunno, Hispanic culture I guess we call it or whatever this is, is the lateness of these meals in Spain and Portugal. I

Leo Laporte (01:55:29):
Just call 'em Mediterranean culture, even though

Paul Thurrott (01:55:31):
Puerto, but it's also the whole South America and Central America too. True. I don't know what

Leo Laporte (01:55:36):
You

Paul Thurrott (01:55:36):
Call it.

Leo Laporte (01:55:37):
The Latinx culture. Latin. Latin culture.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:39):
Latinx.

Leo Laporte (01:55:39):
I think you call it the Latin culture. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:55:41):
I think Latin works. Yeah. Anyway, for us Americans we're like, can I just get a snack?

Leo Laporte (01:55:49):
It's tough. I'm

Richard Campbell (01:55:50):
Hungry now.

Leo Laporte (01:55:51):
Do you got Ritz Crackers and

Paul Thurrott (01:55:52):
Yes. Anything cheese,

Leo Laporte (01:55:54):
Whizz, anything? It's okay. What about Xbox Paul, what about it?

Paul Thurrott (01:55:59):
So it's about the middle of the month. So we have a new slate of Xbox Game Pass titles across platforms. This is about to get much more interesting with Activision Blizzard coming on board next year. But for now, it remains what it's been, which is not that great. The original Dead space is available. In fact, I think it might be the, it must be they remade it, right? It doesn't say Game. There was a remake of Dead Space. Yeah, it might be the remade version, but Dead Space was a great game regardless. Actually that's the game I finished back in the day, the first one. That was a great game and they made two more, I believe I started and never finished. The second one, I don't think I ever saw that Microsoft and Google separately. But Microsoft for this case announced a bunch of new accessibility features in this case to Xbox.

(01:56:44):
This is an area in which they've done really well, right? With all the accessibility controls and everything, they're going to have a new channel in the Xbox store for games that are especially good with accessibility features. So you can kind of filter the search and just find those games that makes sense for whatever. If you're using a specific controller or have certain needs, you'll be able to filter by that and find the games that you want. So that's kind of cool. Also, not really related to this, but on Xbox consoles, the September update introduced the ability to pair and configure controllers from the Xbox directly without having to use a separate app, I guess. So on PCs, we used to use this Xbox, well, we still do an Xbox accessories app, which is kind of whatever, but so I guess they're kind of revamping that stuff.

(01:57:36):
But anyway, the point is it supports the Xbox adaptive controller now as well. So you're going to configure that to your heart's content as well. Cool. And then Microsoft introduced a new Xbox series, SS starter bundle. It's the same price as an Xbox Series ss. So you get the console and a controller, which you get in the normal thing, but you get three months of Xbox game Pass. So I guess it's worth, I don't know what that is actually, I should say it's Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. So that's worth about 45 bucks if you don't already have it for

Richard Campbell (01:58:09):
Three

Paul Thurrott (01:58:09):
Months.

Richard Campbell (01:58:09):
I thought it was 45 bucks. Is it 15 bucks a month?

Paul Thurrott (01:58:12):
15 bucks a month? Yep.

Richard Campbell (01:58:14):
Okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:14):
Yeah, for the ultimate version, right? The other two are 10 bucks, so there you go.

Richard Campbell (01:58:20):
Awesome.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:21):
The Activision thing too. Did we mention that? Because honestly,

Leo Laporte (01:58:24):
Oh, shut up. Stop it. I mean, the sun is still writing. Want dearly bird sushi special? Don't chip Paul.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:31):
It's right high in the sky right now.

Richard Campbell (01:58:34):
You wouldn't believe what happened next.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:36):
Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (01:58:37):
We're going to take a little break when we come back, back of the book, we got apps, we've got tips, we've got picks, we've got brown liquor, maybe even some port. I don't know. Yeah, actually maybe I just checked. Maybe it could be.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:50):
Maybe.

Leo Laporte (01:58:52):
Maybe. But before we, it's Aish

Paul Thurrott (01:58:54):
Liquid. I guess right. Before we do,

Leo Laporte (01:58:57):
Let me talk a little bit about our sponsor. The wonderful Miro you probably saw when Google announced that they were going to kill the Jamboard, that $5,000 board, like Microsoft's thing that you can write on and you can collaborate on, they said, but don't worry, you still have Miro. Miro is not a Google product. I think it's fascinating. Google said there's this Miro thing, it's not $5,000. In fact, you can get your first three boards for free. What is Miro? Miro is the online workspace for innovation. Simply put, what does that mean? Oh, questions. Questions. And how can I help you? Okay, let me explain. Miro, M I r o is one incredible visual place that brings all your innovative work together, no matter where you're located. And this is important these days with hybrid work, people working at home, people at the office, people all around the world in different time zones.

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It is kind of what it sounds like. It's a video recording feature. So if let's say you're in that time zone that's different from the main time zone, right? You pre-record a video with your thoughts and leave it on the board. You don't have to schedule another meeting, work out a time. You can both be available. Put it on the board. People can see your comments. They can even leave theirs. M I R o, Miro, Miro, go on, try it for yourself. As I said at the top, the first three boards are free. So there's no reason not to see what this can do for you. And while you're by the way at Miro, check out the Miro verse for a lot of more ideas about how you can use it. Your first three boards for free, start working better. Miro, m i r o.com/podcast, miro.com/podcast. Thank you Miro, so much for support and Windows Weekly. And remember, you got to use that address to support us back, if you want to try miro miro.com/podcast. Alright, I am done talking and now we have a little app of the week, I believe with Mr. Paul Thora.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:48):
Yeah, I don't have a tip this week, but I do have two apps, so hopefully that will

Leo Laporte (02:02:53):
Placate you. Consider me placated.

Paul Thurrott (02:02:57):
There you go. The first is the DuckDuckGo browser, which is not as advanced on Windows as it is on the Mac. And that doesn't bother me at all, but it has improved a lot since June when I last looked at it. And those improvements include such things as password, auto lock with windows, hello support, which is nice, improved bookmark, importing, and also now bookmark and password exporting. When you import from another browser, you can basically just import bookmarks and passwords. That has not changed, but whatever we're getting there, I'll do some light, what I would call light new tab page customization. They have two sections you can play around with favorites or faves and recent activity, nothing really serious there. Improved support for multiple languages, for password autofill, for people who are using multiple languages. And then there's an actual settings interface. Before it was like this tiny little page with nothing on it.

(02:03:50):
Now it's like a traditional browser interface with multiple pages, et cetera. So that's all good. And I really like the idea of DuckDuckGo. Obviously I'm a brave user and fan, but I'm paying attention to this one and it's still not there. I would say for mainstream users, it doesn't have extension support, it doesn't have a setting sync between devices, it doesn't have tab pinning and a lot of other smaller features that you might expect. So I would say those features are all coming by the way. They promised that, but we're probably what, three, four or five months, whatever in, it's not, it's still in beta, but if you care about privacy and security and all that stuff, obviously it integrates with the duck deco browser. There have been some improvements to Duck Deco search, which I don't really care about myself, but you might be interested in the whole ENC intro out of there.

(02:04:38):
So it's worth looking at for sure. I'm not ready to give up brave yet, but keep trying. So that's good. And then I've been working on this digital decluttering project, massive. It's not really a project, it's several separate projects, but one of the things I brought with me here to Mexico was my Google Photos takeout of dump, which is 500, or actually it might be 700 something, whatever, it's 570 gigabytes of photos. I have my OneDrive camera roll, which is I think maybe that one is a 700 gigabyte and never the twain sell meet. I want to compare these things and where there are not duplicates, copy them over. I want to make sure everything's everywhere. So how do I do this? I looked around for some file duplicate solutions, finding file duplicates. I found this thing called All du, it's A L L D U P, I assume I'm pronouncing that correctly.

(02:05:34):
It's free and open source. And the thing I love, I just described, I mean I'm working across hundreds of thousands of photos. This thing was really fast and it found 167,000 duplicates across those two collections. And I haven't done this part yet. It's very advanced. You can go in and out and give it instructions on what to do with those things. So when there are duplicate, I even found duplicates in the same collection in some cases. So I can de-dupe that and then I can, but also work with the files that are not duplicates and do whatever I want to do there, copy the files in any other direction. So that's the next step. But I was really surprised by how well this worked. I've run into so many problems with File Explorer, obviously, but also any other utility that has to hit the file system. When you deal with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of files, this usually drags it down to a crawl and this app is done.

Leo Laporte (02:06:28):
Great. I have to check this out. It also works with music, Andes and zip files. Yes,

Paul Thurrott (02:06:33):
It's really neat. I'm

Leo Laporte (02:06:34):
Surprised by businesses. Does it? I hope it does, and I'm sure it does. You wouldn't use it if it doesn't. It doesn't. Just use the file date and name. It looks into the context, right? This is what's interesting

Paul Thurrott (02:06:44):
About this because okay, I didn't describe in full how I was doing this. You can do it different ways and for photos, you might want to do exif data or whatever that might be. I've done some of that stuff, but I actually to date, have not downloaded my camera roll to a device. The only thing that's local is, and this is part of the reason I haven't done anything with the data yet. The only thing that's local is the Google takeout download. So I'm literally just doing file name compare in this case and exact file name compare. I'm not doing anything else. You can compare other things. You can compare what if you have files of the same name and you uploaded them using a service that truncates them or something and it's a smaller version of it, you'd want to know that, right? And so I'm not done with it.

(02:07:29):
I've just done that first step, but I was so blown away by how fast this worked, knowing how slow other things can with files of this nature of this number that this thing blows my mind. And then if you're looking at it, you'll see it does so much more. So I'm going to do this in stages and try to figure this out in a way that makes sense because you run into a hard drive or a storage limitation problem locally, especially with laptops. So we'll see. I'm hoping by the time I get home from Mexico, I will have consolidated these collections. So this thing is playing a big role already. It's already gotten me to the next step. So it's worth looking at. Yeah, and those only all dup. Oh, is it windows only? Well, that's fine of, well, we're Windows only. Of course it is because this is Windows weekly. A L L DP info is, oh, I forgot the link to it. I'm sorry. That's alright. That's what I'm here for. To keep you honest. Yeah, run as radio baby. I love Seth and miss him so much.

Richard Campbell (02:08:36):
So this week's show, episode 9 0 2, I brought in Seth Juarez who works at Microsoft. He was the Channel nine guy for a long time, but he actually

(02:08:45):
Has

(02:08:46):
A master's degree in mathematics.

Paul Thurrott (02:08:47):
He is a genius,

Richard Campbell (02:08:49):
Brilliant in machine learning and the old school machine learning, not the fun, new, shiny. And I had been made aware by certain contacts within Microsoft, he was doing briefings all through Microsoft about the right ways to talk about large models.

Paul Thurrott (02:09:04):
Will we see him at Ignite?

Richard Campbell (02:09:06):
We will indeed, yes. Oh

Paul Thurrott (02:09:08):
God, I'm glad to hear that.

Richard Campbell (02:09:09):
And I said, give that talk to me.

Paul Thurrott (02:09:13):
Yes, yes.

Richard Campbell (02:09:14):
Let's put it on the show. And so we got a version of it on run ads where he really talked about the idea that a large language model is a language calculator and like a numbers calculator, the numbers you get out are directly related to the numbers you put in,

Paul Thurrott (02:09:29):
But can you put it upside down? And it says boob

Richard Campbell (02:09:32):
If only if you do it right thing. And so really this idea that there's no understanding going on, this is a probability matrix being generated. And so you just have to keep manipulating the input set of language to get an output set that's useful to you.

Paul Thurrott (02:09:51):
I love this. I'm definitely listening to this.

Richard Campbell (02:09:54):
And then we know this is a CI admin show, so it's like, listen, if you've got an organization that's thinking about using this or perhaps they're already using it, what do you do? And so he started digging into the various products that are more company safe and are better approaches to taking advantage of the LLMs so that you can introduce it into your company in a way where people can learn and can avoid leaking company data in the process and use the products appropriately. So very sensible conversation. Seth is,

Paul Thurrott (02:10:29):
Sounds really good at Microsoft like this who I find to be so valuable. And Steven Rose was like this too. Someone who can kind of cut through the messaging and just say, look, this is

Richard Campbell (02:10:41):
What this really is this,

Paul Thurrott (02:10:42):
I love

Richard Campbell (02:10:42):
That, how it really works. He's fantastic that what do you do next? And that's totally Seth and with such kindness too.

Paul Thurrott (02:10:50):
Yeah, he's a good

Richard Campbell (02:10:50):
Guy's. Not a growly person in any way. It's like, I know, I get it. You why? It can be confusing and it's being over hyped, but here's what it's really all about.

Paul Thurrott (02:11:00):
Nice. And he went all the way to Portugal to bring us our brown liquor of the week.

Richard Campbell (02:11:13):
Yep, man. A little

Paul Thurrott (02:11:14):
Port. So I

Richard Campbell (02:11:15):
Mean, being in port, I did do research yesterday, which is to say that I took a tour all the way up into the high river Valley of the Doro Valley. So Port is an Appalachian, it's a particular name for fortified wine. It's for this region. And since 1756 is one of the very first Appalachians that were filed anywhere in the world, this is the area that makes this kind of fortified wine. It's based on a bunch of different local grapes that have distinctly Portuguese names. And it all port starts with wine making. So if you go up the Dora Valley and the Dora River runs all the way into Spain. And in those upper parts, especially in the higher areas, it's very Mediterranean there. It's olive oil and it's grapevines and very little else. Tough soils dry, but it makes for a remarkable wine and lots of little microclimate. So the different grapes grow in different regions, and so the farms have never consolidated because you need such knowledge of the hill or even the individual field that you're on to get results from it. But it all starts with winemakers and aging in oak barrels, there's an apocryphal story that the beginning of the whole fortified wine idea came from Englishmen who were importing Portuguese wine to England because England can't grow wine grapes, at least not good ones. And so they always, well,

Paul Thurrott (02:12:53):
Global warming will fix that,

Richard Campbell (02:12:55):
But things are changing. So for a long time, of course English get it from the nearest place they can, which was France. But every so often they go to war with France and that became a problem because you can't really buy from when you war. So they'd go a little further south. It might be Spain, might be Portugal and so forth. And so there were English brothers in the 16 hundreds that added alcohol to the wine to keep it from spoiling. The local wines tend to be a sweeter wine and they are susceptible to bacteria. And so then they would ship it back to England. And the addition of that alcohol pulled some nice flavors out of the oak barrel in the process. And so it became a popular idea. Now if you present this idea to a Portuguese person, you are running serious risk of injury, so be careful with who you talk to about it.

(02:13:43):
But this whole process has continued for quite some time. And so if you normally allow the grapes to ferment in their yeast, they become quite as strong. These grapes here have a lot of sugars in them, and so they will come up at about a 14, 15% wine. It'll poke you in the eye, drink carefully, but if you stop it with the alcohol and they would typically stop at 20%. Now the alcohol in question here is actually a kind of grappa. This is all wine-based, so you don't waste things when you're making wine and after you've made your wine, you have some leftover peel and stems and things like that and you can distill that into a higher alcohol. And in fact, there's a standard process that's used for, or that creates a distillate of about 77% alcohol, and that's what's added to the port to raise it to that 20%.

(02:14:36):
But they typically will stop the fermentation early. So they want the sugars that are still in the grape to be left there to make the wine. The port sweeter though. That's the approach. Now the weird part, of course is this English relationship because if you think about a lot of names of port, you think of names like Dao and Taylors and Graham and Cockburn. These are very English names. And that was because while the winemakers were high up the Duro Valley, the warehouses are down in the port in Porto. And so it was actually the English companies that own those storage facilities. So the winemakers would make their initial wine, and typically if they only make port in used barrels, so they would initially make wine in the barrels and then later use those barrels to make port where they'd add that alcohol to it.

(02:15:30):
They'd keep it at the winery for about a year to marry the spirits properly. The environment's obviously different up in the high Valley. So it's dryer, it's hotter, and then after that year it would be moved by punt by these boats down to the cooler, more humid environment that are the storage warehouses right across from where I'm sitting here right now on the town of Gaia, which is on the other side from Porto, they don't use the boats anymore. They have put in hydroelectric dams up most of the way up the Duro. And so it's all moved by truck today.

(02:16:07):
In the end, this idea is only allowing a slight fermentation to preserve the sugars and then using the alcohol to stop the yeast in its action but's a bunch of different ways you can go about it. So let's talk about the different kinds of port that are available. We'll start with white port only because most port aficionados do not even consider it port. It's made with white grapes. It is aged in oak. They often do different cooling off, so depending on how long they let it for met, they'll either make a sweet dry or a very dry version of whiteboard. It is popular with the younger crowd who mostly use it to mix in cocktails. And nobody's upset when you mix whiteboard into cocktails because they don't think it's pork,

Leo Laporte (02:16:50):
White pork and lemon juice. Baby W P L J, usually you add something sweet to the alcohol, but in this case you're stir out potentially. Yeah, it's sweet. And

Richard Campbell (02:16:59):
If you take a sweeter white port and mix it with tonic, that's a pretty popular cocktail as

Leo Laporte (02:17:03):
Well.

Richard Campbell (02:17:04):
Now if you do any of that to any of the red ports, again, you are risking serious injury, so don't

Leo Laporte (02:17:09):
Do rightly so, especially if they age them. It's interesting because the story of Sherry, we were in Kade Spain earlier this year is very similar because the English also fell in love with Sherry and the folks in Spain looked over at the Portuguese and said, Hey, they're putting brandy in that wine. I wonder how that would work over here.

Richard Campbell (02:17:30):
Well, and without a doubt it's a stabilizing force, right? Putting the alcohol level up even a bit. And you realize they're not going above 20%. So we were talking about making whiskey and they were going to the barrel at 60%. You're pulling very different flavors out of the wood and they use their barrels over and over and over again. But they also use a larger variety of barrels. So the red ports are the ruby port and the Tawny port and a ruby port is much more wine. It's got that deep ruby color. And that's because they use, well, they make it like wine with red grapes. They age it in massive barrels. I mean genuinely gigantic. I saw 33,000 liter barrel yesterday, swimming pool, 8,000 gallons. These are big barrels.

Leo Laporte (02:18:22):
Is that as big as a room? Yeah,

Richard Campbell (02:18:24):
Typically

Leo Laporte (02:18:24):
The

Richard Campbell (02:18:24):
Size of a room size barrels, the biggest are over 60,000 liters. And the reason for that is that they don't actually want to have it contact a lot of wood.

Leo Laporte (02:18:34):
They don't care about the flavor of the barrel. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (02:18:35):
Well, yeah. They're just letting the wine itself mature primarily.

Leo Laporte (02:18:41):
It must oxidize a little bit because

Richard Campbell (02:18:43):
It does, but not very much. It only typically in no less than three years, that's about the limit of it. When you talk about a ruby and then they add, and that's after they've already added the spirit to it. So it's already at 20% and then it'll be bottled off. And there are specialty rubies, like you will see vintages occasionally. Most of the time they're blending and so they don't really declare a vintage, but every so often you have a very good wine year. They will make a vintage ruby port because it's more wine. You can't treat it like a spirit in the sense that once you open the bottle, you kind of need to finish it. So they always say that ruby ports are for celebrations where you have lots of people around where you could take a 20% spirit bottle, open it and have it drank that day, or at least within a couple of days, and typically drink at a coolish room temperature 10, 15 degrees centigrade.

(02:19:38):
So 60, 70 degrees no more. Now the more whiskey or more traditional brown liquor are the tawney's, and these are the ones that you find with the much more substantial aging. So a tawny port is aged in smaller barrels, 250 to 500 liters or about 60 to 120 gallons barrels. You would recognize barrels, you would have a chance of moving. You're not moving at 60,000 liter bottle in barrel anywhere. So a lot more wood contact, a lot more flavor because it's red wine. And let me pour a little of this. All of the color came from it being wallet. How dare

Paul Thurrott (02:20:15):
You? This is terrible. Oh my god.

Richard Campbell (02:20:18):
But as it oxidized, it actually gets paler and hence the Tawny color. Now this is a 20, but as it gets older, it gets lighter and it is oxidation, so it gets a sort of rusty, it

Paul Thurrott (02:20:29):
Starts off squid ink, and then it

Richard Campbell (02:20:31):
Turns into, it starts as a dark red one and it gets lighter. And I was shown a glass bottle of some 90 year old and clear it was very pale, almost a pale raw color.

Paul Thurrott (02:20:45):
Wow, that's interesting. Wow.

Richard Campbell (02:20:46):
If you find tawney that don't have a year on them like this 20, typically six to eight years old, and after that it goes up in increments of decades.

Paul Thurrott (02:20:54):
How does that oxidization paling affect the taste?

Richard Campbell (02:20:59):
And that's a great question because it also is exchanged with wood and so forth. So what's happening is in that exchange process, those reddish compounds are going into the wood and they're breaking down, and instead we're pulling out the vanillas and those esters from the whi, but really gently, remember only at 20% we're not doing,

Paul Thurrott (02:21:18):
It never gets to a whiskey

Richard Campbell (02:21:20):
Per se.

Paul Thurrott (02:21:21):
No,

Richard Campbell (02:21:21):
Not at all. Also, the number, the 20, it's not like it's a vague suggestion, but it's not like that's the youngest thing in the bottle. It's the average of the age of things that are in the bottle. On the other hand, it is

Paul Thurrott (02:21:35):
Honestly more reasonable,

Richard Campbell (02:21:37):
Frankly, it's a little more balanced like that. And you can easily, tens are super common, drinkable. That's your every day, and these bottles will last a year if you don't hurry.

Paul Thurrott (02:21:46):
20 seems like the most common port rate for,

Richard Campbell (02:21:49):
And especially here in Porto, this is 40 euros.

Paul Thurrott (02:21:53):
Yeah,

Richard Campbell (02:21:54):
Thirties, forties, and fifties can be found. They just get progressively more expensive. And I'm just going to have to have a taste of this. It's not with

Paul Thurrott (02:22:04):
The scene in three Amigos where the guys dump the water over his head. The other two are thirsty,

Richard Campbell (02:22:09):
Dying there. No, I'm liking this new version where I travel and get the local bottle and get a drink. So this is one of the wineries that I went to yesterday. I love the bottle, went to the portal, well high in the Coral Valley, and they only crush their grapes with feet. They don't use machines. The reason

Leo Laporte (02:22:33):
I didn't know anybody still did that.

Richard Campbell (02:22:35):
They do this traditional method because they're concerned that crushing seeds, which machines will do, makes their port more bitter. Bitter feed against stone means no crushed seeds and allows it to sort it that way, and then it's barreled for a certain number of years. They make combinations to make their 20 year old edition, and this is sold in the us If you can find a bottle to about $55 us. That's great.

Paul Thurrott (02:23:03):
Nice.

Richard Campbell (02:23:04):
So port, it's not quite, this is in the brandy line. This is fruit-based grapes specifically, but it does use oak in a deeper way and it makes for an excellent drink.

Leo Laporte (02:23:17):
It definitely has its

Paul Thurrott (02:23:18):
Place. I love a good port

Leo Laporte (02:23:19):
It. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (02:23:22):
Definitely a food. Alcohol,

Leo Laporte (02:23:25):
Great with chocolate cheese. Yeah, chocolate

Paul Thurrott (02:23:29):
After a meal.

Richard Campbell (02:23:31):
Yeah, post meal drinks. So I was in Porto. We got a taco before.

Leo Laporte (02:23:37):
Love it. Very nice. Thank you. Mr. Richard Campbell run as radio.com and net rocks at the same place. Appreciate it. Have a great time in Porto. And since it's round about dinnertime now, I think maybe there's a glass of port in your future.

Richard Campbell (02:23:55):
Well, I kind of got this one. I got to do

Leo Laporte (02:23:57):
Something. Yeah, that's true. Somebody's, it's a tough job. It's always got to do it. Paul Ott is@throt.com and of course become a premium member. You'll get the best of throt.com and lean pub.com for his books. Really? The Windows everywhere book. The latest is there as is the field guide to Windows 11 slash 10 all there. And you'll be in Mexico next week. Richard, where will you be next week?

Richard Campbell (02:24:23):
I will be in Bulgaria.

Leo Laporte (02:24:26):
Okay. Look forward to some Bulgarian whiskey. I have a vague understanding of your schedule and even I would not have guessed Bulgaria.

Richard Campbell (02:24:35):
Now, the local drinking in Bulgaria, the spirit is color rocky and it is made with plums and it will take the lining out of your mouth.

Leo Laporte (02:24:45):
R A k I is

Richard Campbell (02:24:47):
Business R A K I. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:24:48):
Yeah. Wow.

Richard Campbell (02:24:50):
I don't know if we're going to go there. I've been there before. It's from

Leo Laporte (02:24:54):
The

Paul Thurrott (02:24:54):
Dracula family

Leo Laporte (02:24:55):
Vineyard.

Richard Campbell (02:24:56):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:24:57):
It's the SL of, its a zos. That's what

Richard Campbell (02:24:59):
It's

Leo Laporte (02:25:00):
SL

Richard Campbell (02:25:00):
Of. Its is the Polish name or the plum brandy

Leo Laporte (02:25:03):
Ish. How long are you in

Paul Thurrott (02:25:05):
Porto for?

Leo Laporte (02:25:06):
When do you live?

Richard Campbell (02:25:06):
We're here for the week. We'll go up to Poland for a few days. I've got a keynote there, and then I'm hopping down to Sophia for another keynote. And then we've got a couple of fun things to do, and then we'll head home.

Paul Thurrott (02:25:16):
God, I don't even want to walk around the city

Leo Laporte (02:25:19):
As much

Paul Thurrott (02:25:20):
As you're

Leo Laporte (02:25:20):
Traveling. Does Southwest even fly to those cities? I understand. How do you,

Richard Campbell (02:25:26):
This was a multis split ticket with some Air Canada, some Lufthansa tap, which is the Portuguese airline lot, which is the Polish airline. And then, yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:25:36):
I'll tell you something I'm never going to do again, which is Fly Southwest to Providence's TF Green Airport.

Paul Thurrott (02:25:42):
Oh, I like TF Green, but I hear you on TF

Leo Laporte (02:25:44):
Green. I got to fly by Baltimore and on the way out, I got a middle seat. I only checked in 12 hours at a time. People are waiting on the button 24 hours to get in there to get that A or B seat. I got a C and that means I was in the middle

Paul Thurrott (02:25:59):
Seat. You got to not do the cattle call airline.

Leo Laporte (02:26:02):
I'm not going to do it anymore. It's not your way to fly. I'm going to fly to Boston on JetBlue and live it up. But I had a big, big guy in shorts and

Richard Campbell (02:26:12):
Part of him was in your seat,

Leo Laporte (02:26:14):
Man, spreading into my seat. He was on my left. And then the funny thing is, I had a little old lady on my right who really

Paul Thurrott (02:26:20):
Was, so you're leading into her because they,

Leo Laporte (02:26:22):
Well, she was convinced that that armrest was hers, and

Richard Campbell (02:26:25):
As

Leo Laporte (02:26:26):
Everybody knows,

Richard Campbell (02:26:27):
Middle seat etiquette is simple.

Leo Laporte (02:26:29):
Middle seat gets both armrests. You got nothing else. I got neither. I got a big ham on my left and she had a very sharp elbow and she kept saying, move over, move over. Bony.

Paul Thurrott (02:26:41):
I would imagine

Leo Laporte (02:26:41):
I'm sitting like this and I'm not that slender and I was never, again. I've learned my lesson.

Paul Thurrott (02:26:50):
That's usually what, but that's what does it, you have that one experience. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:26:54):
I saw you.

Richard Campbell (02:26:56):
If you cough repeatedly, everybody seems to lean away from you these days.

Paul Thurrott (02:26:59):
One time I just started crying. That worked.

Leo Laporte (02:27:02):
I felt like crying. All I could do is just say, well, it could be worse. I don't know how, and I only have to do this for four or five

Richard Campbell (02:27:10):
Hours onto to a rope. Well,

Paul Thurrott (02:27:12):
The only lady could

Leo Laporte (02:27:12):
Switch these

Paul Thurrott (02:27:13):
With another huge fat guy. That's one way it could

Leo Laporte (02:27:15):
Get worse. That would've been worse.

Richard Campbell (02:27:17):
There I was between two sumo wrestlers.

Leo Laporte (02:27:19):
I was trying to be good though. I did not want to lean into her. I wanted her to have her space and I don't know, it was, anyway, yeah,

Paul Thurrott (02:27:28):
I'm sorry.

Leo Laporte (02:27:29):
It's okay. I survived. I said I could do this. It's only

Paul Thurrott (02:27:32):
Four hours. You're going home on that same airline, I guess.

Leo Laporte (02:27:35):
Yeah. This time though,

Paul Thurrott (02:27:36):
On check the

Leo Laporte (02:27:37):
Minute I can, the reason, I mean the whole thing is to say, or for $30, you could be comfortable

Paul Thurrott (02:27:44):
Go, I have $30. I paid 20.

Richard Campbell (02:27:46):
Know

Paul Thurrott (02:27:47):
To be comfortable.

Leo Laporte (02:27:48):
Kidding. Next time I'm buying the A seats a list,

Richard Campbell (02:27:53):
Buying yourself an A seat, you're worth it.

Leo Laporte (02:27:56):
I mean, you still have somebody in the seat next to you, but at least you can lean against the

Paul Thurrott (02:28:00):
Yeah, but you could have an aisle seat. I mean,

Leo Laporte (02:28:02):
Yeah, more an aisle.

Richard Campbell (02:28:03):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (02:28:03):
Yeah.

Richard Campbell (02:28:04):
Lose an elbow to a cart,

Leo Laporte (02:28:06):
Right?

Paul Thurrott (02:28:07):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (02:28:08):
Yeah. I don't know, but it feels like they're more crowded than they used to be. It seems like we're really jammed in there. Yeah. I'm sorry, Paul. Richard, I will see you all next Wednesday for Windows Weekly to be home

Paul Thurrott (02:28:23):
Or you'll be there.

Leo Laporte (02:28:24):
I'll be back in the studio. Okay. And maybe I'll see you for the Snapdragon event the day before, or that's at noon. I go

Paul Thurrott (02:28:34):
What time is the Snapdragon event?

Leo Laporte (02:28:35):
It's noon Pacific. That's exactly, it's one

Paul Thurrott (02:28:38):
O'clock for me,

Leo Laporte (02:28:39):
So I think

Paul Thurrott (02:28:40):
That's exactly when my,

Leo Laporte (02:28:42):
Yeah, I just, that's okay. I can do it all by myself. 1230. Just think about it, consider it. But I will see you next Wednesday. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday around 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern Time. That's 1800 utc. You can watch us do it live. Live. Twit TV has audio and video streams. If you're watching Live Club TWIT members, you can chat with us as well. We're in the Discord with Alia G and Kev Brewer and B Jones and Sarah and Epic, Jim, and just a good bunch, but not me.

Paul Thurrott (02:29:18):
I forgot to get into Discord today,

Leo Laporte (02:29:20):
But not somebody named Pauly Ott. Just a bunch of winners and dozers. That's all schedule. Join us in the jokes. We'll see you there after the fact. You can always get a copy of the show at our website, twit tv slash ww. You can watch it on YouTube. There's a live, not Live. There's a After the Fact on Demand YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly, and of course, subscribing is the easiest way to do it in your favorite podcast player. That way you'll get it automatically the minute we've got it all edited together. Thank you everybody for being here. Thanks to our sponsors. We'll see you next time. Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.

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