Windows Weekly 852, 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.

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott is in Mexico City, Richard Campbell's in Sofia, Bulgaria, but they're both here in spirit. We will talk about Microsoft's earnings. It was, shall we say, a good quarter. We'll also talk about Qualcomm's announcements yesterday how soon before we see a decent PC running Windows on ARM. And then a three-hour interview with Dave Cutler, xbox News and Pasky's and more, plus a little brown liquor all coming up next. Actually, it's a golden hue when we talk Windows Weekly.

00:34
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Therrat and Richard Campbell, episode 852. Recorded Wednesday, october 25th 2023. Carnival Barker lifestyle. Windows Weekly is brought to you by our friends at ITProTV, now called ACI Learning. Keep your IT team's skills up with the speed of technology. Visit goacillearningcom. Slash Twit To it listeners. You'll receive up to 65% off an ITPro Enterprise Solution Plan. Just complete the form and then, based on your team's size, you'll get the proper quote, a discount tailored to your needs. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we get together and talk about None other than Microsoft, with these two right here who have spread to the four corners of the world. Mr Richard Campbell is in Sofia, bulgaria. What brings you to Bulgaria? An airplane? It was too far to walk. Yeah, and I set him up for that. He's here all week, folks Right there. Paul Therrat, I'm not going to ask you to Mexico City. He is at his second home, which you now have a deed to. I see, yes, congratulations.

02:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean yeah, well, the deed gives us one legal right. That's very important. What's?

02:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
that.

02:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We can now sell it. Can't sell it without the deed. You have no intent of doing that. I don't know. No, no, no, but I mean that's the. You know we've been. We were told this was going to take three to six months. You know, bureaucracy in Mexico, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

02:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
18 months they were closed, is it what? So it's like the pink slip to a car. Basically, you can't.

02:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is except it's an inch thick yeah.

02:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's. It's not a piece of paper. No.

02:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's, it's, it's, it's the Lord of the Rings. That's a story. It's a very thick document. Yeah, and it's on giant-sized paper too.

02:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not a 8x11 or 8x1 or whatever Is it, with gold stamps and seals and yeah, there's all kinds of stuff all over. It's unbelievable.

02:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's why it takes so long they gotta print that up. I think we would employ half the country just to get this paperwork done.

02:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Anyway, congratulations to both of you. I don't know what for, but anyway, well done. How are you going to be in Bulgaria just for the week, Richard?

03:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I'm going home on Saturday.

03:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh good, so you're there for a conference or a speech or something.

03:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I am there for a conference, did my speech today. I got some press stuff. Tomorrow, nice, touring a wine region on Friday.

03:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice, Nice. So there's two things we have to talk about. We covered the Qualcomm at least. I'll start with the first two, I would cover the Qualcomm event yesterday. We'll talk about that in a bit, but Microsoft's earnings have appeared and they did okay. Okay, look at these numbers. Pc sales are even up, which surprised me.

03:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, not PC sales, windows licenses, which suggests PC sales will be on the rise, right, because PC makers buy those licenses.

03:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a leading indicator of PC sales. Okay.

03:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're in such a space now where, like a 4% bump in Windows license sales has caused for you know, confetti default from the selling. But that's where we're at. So I guess, yes, high level Microsoft made a lot of money, so no surprises there. 22.

04:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I play clearly has work. Yeah, yeah, that's the thing. Just as the cloud was slowing down, they went hard on this AI thing and here we are, two quarters later. They look shiny.

04:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yeah, 56 billion in revenues not bad. These figures are up 27 and 13% respectively. So it's not just that they're big, they're growing big too. Double digit growth at this level You're kidding me Like it's crazy. Intelligent cloud they have three business units Microsoft does. Intelligent cloud is the biggest it's been for a while. This is the part that has Azure and will be where a lot of that AI stuff goes 24.3 billion in revenues that's almost 50% folks. That's crazy. Also up 19% Productivity and business processes, but most people think of as Microsoft 365 and some other stuff Dynamics, etc. Second biggest business 18.6 billion in revenues, up 13%. Office Squarespace is going great, and then we're still.

05:13
Computing brings up the rare at 13.7 billion, which is a lot of money, but 3% growth. They've been stuck in the same area for a while now, unfortunately, and as I think Leo said, one of the little shining flowers there in the dung heap is Windows. Revenues from PC makers grew 4% year-of-a-year, which at the time I said maybe a positive sign for a future PC market growth. After Microsoft had their post earnings conference called, they confirmed that. So not well, okay, I was going to say not a lot of bad points. Actually, most of more personal computing is not great. Surface revenues decline 22%. Xbox content and services were up 13. Hardware was down. If it was seven, yeah, 7%. I don't think a lot's changed on the Xbox side.

06:08
Oh except for that acquisition.

06:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, that's going to change stuff quite a bit.

06:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So every quarter I look at, I look more deeply at the earnings. I look at mostly the consumer stuff because obviously you may recall, last quarter I looked at AI specifically. How is Microsoft going to pay for this? And the answer is with cash. And the reason for that is that Microsoft makes so much money. So, for example, this quarter, the figure, what was it? 20 something billion on 50 something billion, they have approximately $30 billion of extra cash. The run rate on AI for them right now is somewhere in the $10 billion per quarter, but rising, yeah. But that means they can mostly pay for this with cash, right, and I think that's very interesting.

06:56
So last quarter the big bang thing was AI. How are they going to pay for it? We just kind of went through that, although they discussed that again this quarter and not much has changed. Actually, they spent a little less on AI this quarter, but they were saying this is going to go up and down. It's going to go up over time. We might have quarters where it's a little bit of a bump. In whatever direction.

07:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Quarterly revenues from Activision Blizzard is in the $2 billion range. Presumably that's going to land under more personal computing and that's a good 10% spike yeah.

07:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Quarter. You are correct, sir. And so sometime over the summer, I wrote an analysis of what would last the four previous quarters from Microsoft had looked. What would they have looked like had they already owned Activision Blizzard? Right, and you're right, it's about $2 billion per quarter.

07:45
It would change more personal computing quarterly revenues by an average of about 13%, which is actually pretty significant. And since you brought it up, I'll just point out that part of every earnings report in the conference call afterwards is they look forward and say this is what we expect for the coming quarter, and they actually do break it down for business units, not just for the company as a whole, and they expect more personal computing to jump by an Activision when compared with the year ago quarter. So not exactly right. I mean there's other things going on in there. It's a holiday quarter, xbox, you see, something, something but honestly, the difference between last year and this year is Activision. Yeah.

08:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, I got to wonder like Activision has 10 major data centers to run World Warcraft and others. Yeah Right, I got to think all that stuff ends up being Azure eventually.

08:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, and so yeah, then that's part of it. They didn't get that specific, but basically there's going to be a period of time where those transitions occur. The other thing is, I guess, from an accounting perspective and it might just have to do with licensing cost or whatever it might be but there is a difference between a first party and a third party studio in terms of cost and revenue, and that's going to be changing over time. They also mentioned a total of 900 million in expenses related to this over the next two quarters.

09:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, it should be a lot of money for any other company.

09:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh yeah, so billions of wrap. A billion there.

09:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is to me. We were talking about the deed. So you buy a house and it costs I don't know. We'll say $68 billion. So over the next couple of quarters you don't have to stop spending money right Now. You got to heat the house, yeah, you got to do whatever. There are other costs and you have to go to Town Hall and there's licensing for this and things you have to fill out, and I think that's what the 900 million per quarter is. It's the other stuff, it's just acquisition related.

09:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think they're going to have to start rolling off that hardware as it expires out. You figure a minimum five-year migration for all that stuff. The IT guy may just do the numbers of like oh man, you need to hire an army to get moving on that.

10:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Or you're complicated.

10:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

10:02
Or you push a year and you're buying and you set a hardware and adding another year onto the five-year run, right so I was reading the transcript for the call and I noticed at one point they referred to Activision as Activision Blizzard King and I thought to myself what is this company called? So I counted the number of times that they referenced the company and the call. Where is this in here? I don't even see it. I wrote about this somewhere. They refer to it in turn as Activision that was the most common reference Activision Blizzard, I think, twice, and no, once, actually only once and Activision Blizzard King twice. And it's kind of a weird. Where does the King come from? King is King, like Blizzard is part of Activision, so King is the mobile division.

10:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
King is probably the biggest division. I bet with Candy Crush.

10:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sometimes they call it.

10:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
ABK. I've been seeing ABK a lot. Yeah, that's it.

10:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There you go, that's it, yeah. So I thought that was kind of interesting. These little things occur. I count the number of times they say AI, windows, microsoft, cloud, but you know, pick your term. So AI was still the biggest reference in this conference call, other than words like the. That's big. The actually happened more than AI, but I don't think they're strategically aligned around it, do you take a transcript and then do a concordance of all the words.

11:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that what you're doing?

11:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's why I take it. I do a lot of things Well, because I want to, because, well, no, hold on this reason, I'm not just insane. There's Microsoft, are you sure? No, but I'm not just insane.

11:40
So when Microsoft comes out publicly like this, especially to investors, right, they have to be careful about what they say. This is all planned in advance. And when you, I think it's important to see what they talk about most, right? So for a long time now, they have not uttered the word surface, not once in one of these conference calls. I think that's telling. They're just saying you know, windows comes up a certain number of times, etc. Etc. But Microsoft is sending a message to Wall Street, right. And when they talk about AI all the time, that's the message and I think that's one of those you know high-level takeaway. So AI was over 35 times. Azure was 21 times, office 17,. Windows 12. That's the big ones. By the way, they said co-pilot 29 times. So when you add those, wow, ai, right. So AI plus co-pilot 60. What is that? 64 or something like that.

12:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It looks for a large language model or machine learning.

12:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like you know, no, I did not let know, because it's a conference call with investors, right? They're not going to talk like that. They have to keep this we introduced. We don't have LLMs, richard, we have co-pilots. Come on, these are investors, right? So, anyway, to me these calls are always fascinating. And what they say and what they don't say, I think it's fascinating.

12:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So no, I think you're right. You got to read the tea leaves and yeah.

13:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you know, obviously I care about the consumer kind of client side and you know there's not a lot of talk there. Windows and surface, both Surface especially, my God. They never mentioned surface. Like I said, they talk about devices. Now 22% decline in revenues there, which was ahead of expectations, meaning we thought it was going to be worse, right, so yikes, and that's all they said about it.

13:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was the entire conversation on surface there's nothing more to it, but with an anticipated blip that the over buy of the last two years had to come, and they always threatened to come in third quarter. And here it is. It's just got completely overwhelmed by better news.

13:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And they had that kind of lackluster. It was very late in the quarter, but that late September, mid-september, launch of a couple of devices, what you know, was never really going to impact things too too much.

13:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, and they were. They're for sale in October, so they missed the quarter.

13:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But that's normal. They missed it entirely. Yeah, you should get hardware in.

13:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
October.

13:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the norm. Well, the good news is that business is only going to decline by single digits next quarter, so everything's going to be fine.

14:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm excited.

14:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so Windows. We already talked about the good news there and they did say very explicitly that this is a stronger than expected consumer channel inventory builds right. In other words, they're buying licenses with the computers in the channel so they can sell them over the holiday quarter. And stabilizing PC market demand, particularly in commercial Stabilizing, doesn't mean growing, by the way, but we'll take it right. It's been kind of tough lately.

14:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's nothing wrong with building the right number of things for the market that it needs, so that you're making money on the money that's available, you're right. But loading excess inventory or your strangling sale flow, that becomes a big deal. Yeah.

14:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. Well, they brought up a term I've not heard in a while which was and they qualified it a little bit but pre-pandemic levels, and what they were saying was PC market unit volumes, which is a tough term. Sales, right, pc sales. We're at roughly pre-pandemic levels in the quarter, right the numbers they got in 2019. Yeah, I mean, I guess that's okay.

15:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, We've been talking about this for two years that this was where it was going to land. Here it is.

15:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know it's just hard to get smacked in the face when you wake up. I'm just not used to.

15:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm not used to used corporations thinking quarter to quarter, much more than quarter to quarter, much less. A year a year, holy cow, did you think four years ago? Who are you?

15:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've said this a bunch of times I will never understand the mass insanity that occurred in big tech when the pandemic buying boom occurred, and they were, like you know, with no sense that this would ever come to an end.

15:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's going to be like this forever.

15:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The line only goes up. That was just the most unsophisticated miscalculation. I will never understand that. And then Xbox got a lot of press in this call Starfield off to a record start 11 million players, nearly half of the hours spent playing the game on PC not on console, by the way. They set a record. This is interesting. They set a single day record for the most ever game pass subscriptions added on the day that Starfield launched, right, which is that is fascinating to me. This was a.

16:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This was Now you're getting into the real play. This is the real play.

16:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, they just acquired Activision Blizzard. Activision Blizzard every year has a big bang October, november because of Call of Duty, billion, whatever it is, set records, all this kind of stuff. And the fear here is like, well, what if Microsoft puts Call of Duty next on Game Pass and then they don't have those records? Right, if they can make it up in I don't think it's a one-to-one, but if they can somehow make it up in Game Pass subscriptions, maybe this is a good thing. So we'll see how they handle that. But that was maybe the most interesting line in this whole thing to me. We already know about Minecraft 300 million copies sold cumulatively, one of the biggest games ever made. Not a lot, but not a lot of context here, I mean, aside from you know Microsoft had I'm sorry, there here's some context. Microsoft now has three game franchises that have over a billion in revenues each. Now that's cumulative right Over multiple versions in some cases, like Halo and Gears of War are in this list.

17:27
Both of those games have several major, you know, upgrade versions or like standalone versions, right. So it's kind of tough. You know they're not going to get too specific here, but a bunch of those came from Activision Blizzard right, candy Crush, diablo, Warcraft, et cetera. So that's cool, that's, and it's great for Game. You know Game Pass going forward. Office I don't have much to say here either. It's all good. You know the businesses are shifting from standalone on-prem copies of Office to Office slash Microsoft 365 subscriptions. That's the way it's been for a long, long time.

18:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you see this no on-prem version of co-pilot. You gotta be honest.

18:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's true, which, by the way, maybe a selling point. But you're right, let me see if I can find where this is because they talked about maybe it's in the A part Microsoft. You know you have to sift through what I would call the BS in these discussions because they Sacha Nadella gets up and talks about all the great milestones you know and he says something like oh, and we shipped this, the biggest you know upgrade ever for Windows 11 in the quarter and we delivered Microsoft co-pilot on Windows 11. And it's like did you? Because you shipped that thing a week before the quarter ended in preview form. It's still in preview form and not everybody has all the features, so I'm not sure we are celebrating here. But the next thing.

18:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now you remember, these are investors, they don't want technical detail.

18:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, but do they want facts? Because to me this is like. To me that was borderline, like oh, did you? I mean, I missed it? I think so. Microsoft is also, you will be surprised to know, excited for the delivery of Microsoft 365 co-pilot in general availability on November 1, which is what makes things weak, right? But also they revealed don't expect any big bumps from this. It says related revenue will grow gradually over time. That was their whole comment on that.

19:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So costs of it.

19:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, well, yes, okay. So I sort of, I mentioned the so there won't.

19:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There'll be revenue eventually, but there's also not going to be a lot of profit. It's going to be Microsoft will X box. They will never say no, and well?

19:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so, first of all, no one talks about profits anymore, Leo, that's hilarious. So we only talk about revenues? I mean, the profits are made by the company. We have no idea where they come from.

19:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, net income, net income, that's profit, right?

19:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but that's always in the company level. It's only at the company level. You're never going to get net income. Oh I see for individual things, yeah, you do not know what products are profitable.

20:07
Yeah, so the issue here is such things. So, for example, like Azure growth was amazing they did mention that amazing, you know, in context, right and that part of that had to do with third party AI adoption and they're using Azure services, so that's great but also they're doing a spend on AI infrastructure, which will also hit the Azure part of the business, and that was actually down a little bit at quarter of a quarter, but they expected to keep going up and up and up, and so where are these two things kind of balance each other out or don't? We're never going to find that, they're never going to give us that information, so it's kind of hard to say.

20:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is modern reporting. Right, Like everything's the amy hood and they're into a bucket of happy noises.

20:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly, that's exactly right. So I think that's most of it from my perspective. Yeah, I think the things to look forward to are going to be the rolling in of act activation into more personal computing from a revenue perspective, and then how they report, you know, game sales and whatever those things are. And then, of course, ai right, obviously, every quarter is going to be all about AI. Microsoft is looking forward to some future where this, what this wonderful set of circumstances converge where they have lots and lots of customers using and paying for AI, have developed or licensed chipsets that are much cheaper to deliver that infrastructure and that the growth in infrastructure need kind of slows down so they're not continually building on new infrastructure. But right now they're in the growth phase and you know you're putting up scaffolding here.

21:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, yeah, they have a well by all sides, like buying as much gear as they can get and stick it in the rack as fast as they can. Yeah, exactly, which is not a bad place to be, but it is a race.

21:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a. I guess it's technically risky. I think Microsoft is, you know this will work. I mean I feel, look they, they made nearly 30 billion in profits.

22:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know they can afford it. There's no choice about it. It's astonishing to think a year ago half of this wasn't even on the radar. Right, like there were.

22:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah was only GitHub pilot co-pilot this time last year, you know every quarter we enter into what I call earning season and I hate it because there are so many companies you have to kind of look at and I obviously look at Microsoft the most. Google was the other company that announced their big, their earnings yesterday and I have to say, from the perspective of whatever you want to call me, like a reporter, blog or whatever I would not want to cover Google from like a product services perspective because there's so much of it, but I would love to cover them from a financial perspective because it's so easy. There's nothing going on here. These guys have two basic businesses ads and Google cloud. Ads is 71% of the revenues.

22:58
Google cloud, honestly, is growing great but is disappointing investors because it's not growing great enough against Azure and AWS. This company makes up the ton of money. Not as profitable this quarter as Microsoft, but they made more in revenues. So 19.7 billion of net income profit and almost 77 billion in revenues Huge company. So I don't know what else to say there. I mean, like Michael from Google executives about products, in no matter. They're like oh, pixel, you know, blah, blah, blah, yeah, how many percentage points of revenues that thing generate for you this year? 0.00, whatever I mean. So it's a very simple company, honestly.

23:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's an ad company, yeah.

23:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's an ad company A little too simple yeah.

23:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
By the way, thank you, that's exactly right, and you know, Mike, we talk about this a lot, but when Microsoft was the Windows company, they made an effort to diversify Apple. When they were the iPhone, it is the iPhone company, but when they were only the iPhone company, they made an effort to diversify Google. I feel like Google Cloud has a chance to be a big business, but honestly, it's like the it's the also ran which in this, which is very strange given their capabilities.

24:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think part of this is they just haven't built enough. Yeah, what's the?

24:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
decision. I mean, obviously the people mostly use cloud or businesses, right, it's not AI generation, so there's two halves to that, right.

24:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I know AI is part of it, right? So yeah, but there's. There's what I would call the traditional office productivity mark, which is workspace, and then there's Google Cloud, literally, which is the cloud in the sky, aws type service, right, which developers could use and whatever. So both of these are very small compared to what they're competing with Microsoft 365 or AWS, which is strange. I mean, I, google, is born in the cloud, makes everything in the cloud. It seems like they would be pretty good at this stuff. They've got an incredible AI thing going on and, I'm sorry to your point, ai is a big part going for. There's a duet for a duet, sorry, for workspace as well as for Google Cloud, right? So this is their co-pilot right.

25:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just wondering what it? What is the differentiator? That whoever is buying cloud looks at AWS, microsoft or Azure and Google and Google's a laggard third on that, aws number one, right.

25:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know what I think? Here's the problem. So, technically, from a cloud perspective first party cloud they're huge, right, because they're all the services run on that search maps, you know whatever but fundamentally they're a consumer company and, honestly, this is not like you talk about, who buys GCP startups in the valley Right there you go and, by the way, that's smart. I would include startups and consumer, because if those startups take off, they become small businesses and become bigger businesses.

25:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I honestly think at that point maybe they fractional revenues on those. I mean, those are just.

26:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't disagree, but you would thought you you're targeting a market that doesn't have a lot of money, specifically because you hope they grow and they latch onto your marks. I mean, I use GCP.

26:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, I do too, and so they do grow. And then they switched AWS, yeah Well that's the true.

26:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you really want to scale, you probably do switch AWS.

26:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is where this is. The weakness of Google is. Their points of presence are limited compared to AWS and Azure. Okay, and so they.

26:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They tend to go to AWS because Azure is not on the radar for it's an expensive investment for them to make with little short term reward, and I but you know what Microsoft made it.

26:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I yeah, but Microsoft has to commit to it, right, Like they also had that time when they had the money.

26:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they had an enterprise backing.

26:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They had a cat market in the enterprise. It guaranteed work load.

26:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I look at Google as the mirror image of Microsoft, so Microsoft is. This is probably no longer accurate. We'll just call it two thirds business, one third consumer. It's probably worse than that for consumer, but Google's like the flip, flip it around, right, I mean, they're in. It's worse than that too, like most of their earnings come from what I would call consumer services or services ads delivered to it.

27:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You gotta say for some reason Microsoft is. It was really looking over at shoulder at Google. Did you see the article today, sean Hollister in the verge? Microsoft now thirstily injects a poll. I know when you download Chrome he actually counts the steps to try to go from edge to Chrome. How many?

27:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
we're going to be counting some steps later. By the way, I got some step counting myself.

27:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One Chrome download to browse, secure all the ways Microsoft says. Can you tell us why would you?

27:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
do so. I have some advice for people who run Windows and want to install Chrome and don't want to go through this Use Winn, get it's one line.

27:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, nice, yeah, yeah, nice. Well, there you go. And does it do that if you go to Firefox? Or is it just Google that they're?

28:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've never seen this screen yet, so I think this is something they're testing out in the world. You know I could run it. Let's everyone run edge right now and see what happens.

28:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it sends the wrong message because it really says is we're scared of Chrome.

28:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, exactly yeah. Or we scared of every browser, like that's the question. Is this just the response for you running anything other than Edge? Right, so I'm not seeing it.

28:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, oh, okay, so maybe something new, or maybe maybe test it.

28:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually throw up a different little thing. It's not a bunch of steps, but it threw up a little banner on top of the Google website actually. So yeah, they want to. I mean, they obviously they want you to use that.

28:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me download it. That's what bothers him, I think, is that it's doing this injection into the Google page.

28:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it should. That should bother them, this should bother everybody. Yeah, this behavior is terrible.

28:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but what it tells me is that Microsoft still is threatened by Google.

29:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Threatened. That's like saying a mouse is threatened by a dinosaur. It already won. Well, I don't know.

29:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Microsoft made more money than Google, according to yeah Well, do you think?

29:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it might be a good one. Right the Edge team threat Right.

29:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, okay. That's where that Google had more revenue, but less net income than Microsoft Right.

29:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There was a point in time where Microsoft had a really good story to tell and I would have been happy to parrot back to people where it's like you can get Google Chrome without any of the Google and that sounds like such a good idea. Yeah, this thin light browser that's going to performance improvements, battery life improvements. And then you learn, actually it's bogged down in crap. It's even more crap and nothing than it was in Chrome. And Microsoft tracks you too. That's great.

29:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they got hooked on the digital effluence so fast Like it must be some kind of crack. It's like instantly no.

29:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's too bad, it's good money.

29:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the problem. It's bad money, right, but profitable. Okay, I would have said that differently.

30:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would have said it's money. Yes, and that's what they. You know, that's what they're it's money that comes at a cost. Yeah Well to your soul, but they don't care about that. So we should talk about yesterday's event.

30:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know I really want to talk about that, but before we do, I want to take a break, because this is going to be a good one, because you saw you watch this. I'm curious.

30:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We did, we streamed it.

30:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and we saw the. We saw Penna's, penae's replacement.

30:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Needs a little polish Did you notice. He spoke eloquently and seemed like a normal human being On the plus side. He didn't say pumped once.

30:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was my favorite thing about him. I yeah.

30:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He wasn't so good at reading Q cards.

30:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But other than that he was.

30:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know what, though? I would never hold that against anyone no.

30:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know what You're right, you kind of still want to be good at that.

30:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah Right, that's a kind of untrustworthy skill, which I, by the way, have Well.

31:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean unfortunately because of your, because of my business, carnival Barker lifestyle.

31:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly there, you nailed it.

31:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm, yes, I only said that because I wrote about Penna's Penae today and I use that term to describe it. But I but anyway. Um, no, because you're a public, you know you're out you're because I'm on.

31:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was on TV and so I had to do that. Right, I had to read a prompter, didn't like it? Yeah, all right, let's take a break. Our show today, brought to you by, I'm glad to say, a brand new sponsor, hid Global, um. Reduce risk operating costs, reduce complexity by outsourcing your public key infrastructure operations to HID Global's cloud based PKI as a service model. Oh, I love this idea. It provides automated management of the complete certificate lifecycle and encryption. It's your one stop shop for simplifying private and public PKI management with one predictable price on one easy to use platform. And their simple subscription plan has no additional charges for additional certificates under your current plan.

32:13
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33:21
I knew they would talk about Snapdragon and mobile. They did. That's where Snapdragon, you know Qualcomm lives.

33:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know they're going to spend so much time on sound chips and other nonsense.

33:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I was a little surprised, although Qualcomm did create the aptX, yeah, and actually I should say, to be fair, it's quite good.

33:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We think of them as a kind of a microprocessor company. I mean, that's not really. Wasn't the initial point of the company. They make mobile chipsets right. They started out with CDMA mobile.

33:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, they started with radios.

33:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And in fact, it was still very big, in that it was the guy on stage, their CEO, who took them into the new realm of servers processors arm processors for PCs phones and that kind of problem though, Leo, and that is that their major non-mobile, what I'll call CPU it's not really the right term Efforts have all done horribly.

34:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, and that's what really stuff is done horribly.

34:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The IoT stuff has done horribly, I agree. The wearable stuff has done horribly. They just announced a replacing it with RISC-5.

34:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah Right, RISC-V, whatever the term is. Risc-5, yeah, it's an open source arm implementation RISC implementation.

34:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Interesting right.

34:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So last time, as you may remember from last time, they promised PC grade performance with their what it was, the CX chip they did with in conjunction with Microsoft One time, before the CX chips, they promised Core i5 level performance, to which I replied which generation?

34:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Because this thing it's not even close. It's like a processor from the early 2000s. It's not good.

35:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And so anything they say on stage. I'm a little suspect because they've misled us in the past, but they did show a graph. I think it was lucky article I wrote about this A very, very aptly graph with no axes, no reference points saying they're 30% faster than the M2. At what? At lower power, even At doing what? What does that mean, you know? We couldn't even define print, but I think somebody who was at the event said it was with the Geekbench single threaded.

35:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Geekbench. Okay, so let me, let me. Let me preface this by saying I was briefed about this ahead of time. Oh good, and I have all the information I have to provide and I got to tell you I need to see one of these things in the real world before I decided about this, and it's way too much. It's not going to be for six months, is it?

35:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean we're, this is we're talking.

35:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, here's the thing A lot of their comparison. So, first of all, they refuse to reveal who the competitors they were comparing with, although one of those slides does say against the major arm based competitor, which has to be Apple right, which I think is where you're getting that information.

36:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They mentioned M2. And they mentioned i7 and they mentioned i9. Oh, okay, so they actually did this on the slides, yeah.

36:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, I should mention.

36:13
And and it's interesting because you could see which blogs had the pre briefing slides and which ones had- the slides from the event Because on the solution, okay, they added labels in the event, yeah, everybody complained and they never changed anything. They were like yep, no, we hear you, and it's like I listen. I am routinely and I mean monthly briefed by companies like HB and Lenovo, and I am briefed by companies like AMD and Intel that make chips and they always identify the competitor that they're you know, we know who they're aimed at.

36:48
I mean, they've got to but here's but here but this is where marketing is tough because, remember, this is an arm based chip running on Windows. Right, so they have they're. In some cases they're comparing themselves to x64 chips sets and in some cases they're comparing themselves to Apple. Both of those are off a bit, because Apple is not running Windows, although it can in emulation, and x64 is not arm. So it's which one are you comparing to? When they say we offer x% of performance and double the battery life, they're not talking about M2, you know, but they don't say that, and this makes me very nervous. The weird qualification not even qualifications the weird vagueness here was my, I'll be sure that they're clenched.

37:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My interest I'm sure everybody listening interest is are we going to get Windows on arm running on a performance processor? It doesn't have to be the fastest right, it doesn't have to even be M2. It just has to be usable. Well, it has to be.

37:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The other angle of this whole thing is arm in the data center.

37:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, yeah, but they're not.

37:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
this is very but this thing right here we're clearly not there yet, but I think one of the things that we're waiting for these later chip sets that are going to not be Qualcomm is arm in the data center because it saves cycles Big time and we worry we can prove categorically like the NET devs build on Windows, deploy to Linux, They'll deploy to arm if it costs less, like in a second.

38:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, but but I mean okay, I mean today. Yesterday's announcement was very specifically just PC, right, I mean it is the first of a family, etc. Etc. You're right, I mean the data center is potentially a bigger market for them.

38:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think so too, and I think they're doing in the wrong order. You want to knock the bugs out of this. You want to make it properly, make it run in the data center, because those you only have a half a dozen customers and they're going to crucify those chip.

38:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So they had wrong now they had HP, Lenovo and the new, you know Panes, Panes replacement from Microsoft, on stage or on video saying yeah, we're excited, we can't wait to hit Windows and arm.

38:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Here's the problem. Those companies have all released a small handset of ARM based PCs already, so there's nothing new there, right, you know, look, I, I, leo. What Leo said up front is absolutely correct. In the PC space, what this thing needs to be is a you series competitor. Yes, something for thin and light machines, because if you can have a machine that, to the average user, is just about as good as any Intel chip, but the thing gets like 20 hours of battery life or 25 hours of battery life, you win, right, assuming everything else is equal, right, and I do think, when you think it's pretty, you know, aim it at the dev and the high end developer.

39:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
so far, yes, aim it at the regular productivities.

39:32
Now there's a little there, always has been in this market and a little Apple and V and I. I think that there's a little. There's always been this kind of thing. We can do Apple Silicon quality, and we should also point out that one of the reasons they're confident of this is they bought the company Nuvia. That was founded by Apple's former chief chip designer. Apple sued. They eventually dropped their lawsuit because he brought a lot of people over. He was on stage two, gerard Williams the third, and so I think that that's why they're kind of saying we can, we were better than Apple Silicon. I agree they don't need to be Boy.

40:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they don't. I don't think they are going to be really no, not in V1, but they don't need to be right, they don't need to be.

40:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is the thing. We'd be happy if they just worked well, exactly, but the Surface Pro X is terrible yeah.

40:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's, it's, it's so close. That's the problem. You can see it and you want and look I this is a an emotion versus logic thing for me. I want this thing to succeed emotionally. Logically I know it has not, it has not been there, it just isn't. And I've tested so many of these machines, I've tested every version of the chipsets they've made, often on multiple PCs, and it it's gotten closer, I mean, every time. There's no doubt about it. Step forward. The problem is next week Apple might release an OSM3 chips and then roll moves on.

40:54
Apple gets an event on Monday to top this right, yeah, and, by the way, an event that was not on the books until what happened yesterday.

41:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, interesting Right.

41:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They were. They were supposed to push that back and they're like no, let's just go now. Screw you, qualcomm, we got the M3.

41:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It might be the reason it's happening right, I don't think they cared about Qualcomm. Well, they sued them, remember. I mean, you know what you said, what you characterize Qualcomm as a a arm for you know work centers and radios and a lot of people qualify characterize them as a patent, patent troll, yeah.

41:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Troll? I don't even think it's not.

41:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't either. That term is not patent licensing operation because they they invented CDMA, and people have to use their chips, or at least license their technologies, to make smartphones.

41:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyone who believes. So that's true in one level.

41:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And they've been sued by everybody for charging too much.

41:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, but I look you, go, find their most recent quarterly earnings and tell me what percentage of the revenues are from patent licensing and how big that business is compared to the rest of the company, and I'll I'll spoil the surprise it's tiny.

42:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh interesting, it's not Okay, it's not.

42:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So where do they make most of their money? They literally on mobile chips.

42:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They literally sell products to companies that want them. It's not about ripping people off and all sorts, not the big ones, you know about everybody. All of those little IOT devices I think are with the Allgaq Qualcomm radio.

42:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, I can't. This is like the Sonos thing falls into this category. This is a company that makes products. They patent the technologies they make. We can sort of hate that on some level, I guess. But I do think that inventors should be rewarded, and in this case it's helping them. Look, one of the reasons they can sell 5G chipsets to Apple maybe is they own patents on that stuff and they don't let other people use them without licensing them. They have the best prices, yada, yada, yada. I mean, is that wrong?

42:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know, and that's basically if you kick up enough bus, you can get the FTC to force them to separate their licensing business from their hardware business. Yeah right, Show the collision. That is a crime and the FTC can mandate a split. Nobody's even come close.

43:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
In the last quarter, their licensing business was 5.4 billion, compared to their equipment and services of 27 billion. So you're right, it's a fifth.

43:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean I look at it every quarterly. I told you it's earning since, yeah, you have to look at it. One of the companies I look at.

43:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Billion dollars. None of us have five billion dollars.

43:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah Well, but you get to speak like that. So it's really two companies. I think it is two companies. It's a licensing company, it's a hardware company.

43:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
By the way, but like Sonos in a way not that Sonos is licensing there, Well, but they would. So Sonos makes hardware that they sell directly Right. And Sonos also licenses the technology so you can integrate your own products into it Right. This is a. This, to me, may be a natural process or a natural thing for a company like this to do.

43:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I do also think that they really want to be another Intel.

44:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's interesting because AMD and they might be bigger than Intel right now. Actually, that's another thing to look at. Nvidia is so, listen, if this, if this works out properly, this being this chipset, they could be Intel in the PC space. Right, and Intel actually, you know, much like Microsoft, made some bad bets and moved to slowly in a certain direction, and now the world is running and they're trying to catch up and so they have these.

44:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They are more like designs they're doing, and Nvidia in the sense that they're in automotive, they're in, you know, they're in the Quest headsets. They're in mixed reality, you know. They're in radios, they're in CPUs. They're much more diversified.

44:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is what Microsoft did with software. So when they used to have a Windows and then they had multiple Windows to address different markets as a Windows for IoT, there's a Windows for this. You know they do this different type of stuff and unfortunately, for Qualcomm, I don't know I've seen some high profile failures there. It's a good idea, it makes sense, right, the chipset you make? Well, there's a great example. I was going to say the chipset you make for a phone doesn't make sense in a watch. Right, the chipset you make in a phone also doesn't make sense in a PC. And the first one they made for a PC was a chipset from a phone. It was horrible.

45:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But they're in this process. Christiane Amman has kind of taken this company that really the bulk of its revenue were from mobile and said we should diversify. And we're going to diversify because Apple's no longer going to use our chips, google is no longer using our chips, samsung still uses Qualcomm chips, but they're looking at you.

45:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The problem, sorry, yeah, you definitely hint. They're running out of time. Everybody's coming.

45:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They got it.

45:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They shouldn't be out in the lead. Yeah, and they're not.

45:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I got to say, though, and listen begrudgingly or not, I think anyone at any of the chip chip makers on the other side of the fence or any of the software makers on the other side of the fence meaning Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, Herbie won a name has to both respect, to be envious of this thing that Apple has accomplished by making the chipsets and the software, yeah, and being so successful at it. It's got to be frustrating.

46:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They shouldn't be this good at all of those parts.

46:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, it's kind of insane. And then they did the transition to the Mac, which, of course, is what triggered Windows 11. And that happened after we were trying to move to ARM. But we'll accelerate this need to be able to meet them, not just on like rock capabilities, but does this thing stay alive for 24 hours or does it still offer the same performance as whatever preceded it? And Apple did it and we just have not done it anywhere else.

46:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, it's a pretty unique thing and I was impressed as they got to the second one, and I'm even more stunned to see they're going to make a third. So I think Silicon is hard.

46:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right and this is the thing with this is the Qualcomm. This is the problem for the lead X right. So there is no doubt that this thing, as well as their mobile thing, whatever they're C what's it called? C8c, what's the one called that? 8 gen 3 or something, whatever it is will in some ways outperform a comparable Apple Silicon chip set. There's no doubt about it. The question is and it's an impossibility, they will never outperform them across the board. They will never be better generally, right, that's the thing you could cherry pick this like. Here's a benchmark we got, we won.

47:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's what they're going to be able to do? Can they be better than Intel? Might be more relevant, right, because?

47:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So no, but again, that's no. I mean broadly, because Intel has a first of all Intel. I mean, they've been the core of this market for decades, but today they have a microprocessor family, different differentiated products, different wattages, different chip sets, architectures and so forth. So yes, could they Listen? The first Windows and RMPC, that little piece of junk running on the Snapdragon 850, I think it was called, or 830, whatever it was, had 24 hours of battery life. Real world it did. Is that better than Intel? Yeah, and battery life At everything else it was worse. So it has to be better at the things that matter and it can't just be one benchmark or one point. It has to be better. In other words, could the best thing that this thing could do, the best it could do, would be to be as good as, generally speaking, a U-series Intel processor. That's all this thing can do.

48:26
This processor is not aimed at gaming rigs, it's not aimed at workstations, it's not aimed at the very low end of the market. It's aimed at a very specific part of the market. I would call it the volume part of the market. Smart, like Richard said, non-technical. Don't worry about developers, don't worry about technical people, worry about people, and I think they're in the PC space. This is the right place to hit. The problem is like Apple came out of the gate with this thing. It was like. But it doesn't have dedicated GPU, nobody cares. It was kind of great across the board, it's like. But the RAM is tied to the CPU, but nobody cares. It's hard to find that level of success. It's impossible.

49:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean Apple also looked at what the market actually did, which is they buy a machine and they use it. They never upgrade it, they never tinker with it. If it's there, I'm happy with it. When they get another one right, no, they're there for that. So they went all system on a chip, integrated high as possible yeah battery life, because that's the thing that affects people we live we exist in a market.

49:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You and I and us everyone here listening right are in a community or an ecosystem, or whatever you want to call it, where we bitch and moan because the seventh gen Intel core processor won't run the latest version of the operating system but, by the way, none of you want anyway. What is this world we live in?

49:51
And then over on the Apple side there's a little conga line going on because it's M at a number to the end of it and everyone's excited about it and it meets their needs and they love it. And it's a different. I don't know how to, I don't know how you resolve this, but it's very much the case that these are just two completely different markets. I don't know what else to call it.

50:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know Well, and they've shaped that, and they've shaped that. Market is like listen, it comes one way. Do you want it or not?

50:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Well, and Apple? Somehow, magically, the answer is always like yeah, I want it. Yeah, I'll take two. Exactly.

50:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I'm going to listen.

50:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Hold on to my credit card. I will use it for nothing else.

50:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So scary, I'm so scared. The ultimate.

50:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Monday is going to be so expensive I'm so scared. Yes, I know, I know they announced a black iMac and everybody's losing their minds.

50:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, Monday, I think they're going to announce the iMacs, but also, apparently, a MacBook Pro M3.

50:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah Right, probably Pro Max.

50:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, would anyone have complained if they took another year? Does this thing really need a new processor?

50:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I'm very happy I haven't you know, but this is sad. I have an M2 MacBook Air and now I'm going on.

51:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, let me ask you a question, Leo, because you're so annoying. Let me ask you hold on, Is three higher than two? It's one better.

51:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it is.

51:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So right, it's, 50% better, right it is.

51:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, it is a three nanometer process, so what? What I've been thinking I may be wrong, we'll see what I've been thinking is that two was an incremental improvement on one, but three should be a new, because it's a new process will be a big jump.

51:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Or it's an incremental advance over ultra and whatever.

51:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, and if it's only incremental, well I can, I can live with it, but uh.

51:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, meanwhile we're waiting for one chip from one company. That we're like what's going on.

51:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you say something interesting at the end of your article that I didn't know was real was confirmed, which is the Qualcomm's exclusivity deal with Microsoft and next year. So is so there there was a deal.

51:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the Reuters let's move into the next related topic, because that's where this came from. Reuters came out with a report citing multiple sources that AMD and Nvidia are going to make our base chips as soon as this this contract runs out, which is meaning for them as the beginning of 2025. We already knew that Samsung had approached Microsoft to do this as well, and Microsoft and Samsung actually have a really good partnership. Kind of wonder, like, why wouldn't they let Samsung do this? It's because they have an exclusivity arrangement with Qualcomm, which Reuters also confirmed with multiple sources.

52:27
So, the end of 2024 is the end of that this chip set. This is do or die. Not for Windows and ARM, necessarily, although that might be on last legs too but definitely for Qualcomm and the PC space, because, let me tell you something if it's bad, this company did not do well when they were the only people here, the only company in this part of the market. When AMD and Samsung and Nvidia and maybe others are all doing this, this could be the kickstart that Windows and ARM needs, because, think about it, we basically have a duopoly now in the PC space for chips AMD and Intel, intel primarily right A wide, open market in which any of these companies could do this. What if we have five?

53:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I understand Nvidia's Tegra, which is an ARM processor, probably as a PC version. I mean, I have an old Tegra on my Android device. I was afraid when you got on my Windows RT. That is a hell of a processor and it will be very interesting to see them go after the PC market.

53:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think that that's a real threat to.

53:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Qualcomm yeah, that's a real threat. Now listen, in Qualcomm's overall you were looking at the earnings. I mean, if you look at where they make money, it is really in mobile chipsets. Their PC business is not amounted to anything financially unless they're being paid by Microsoft some amount of money to keep going. That is almost certainly the case. But as far as organic sales of chipsets to companies, they're doing great Like they're fine.

54:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, almost all the Android phones except. Google's are built on Qualcomm.

54:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there's an alternate future here, where Qualcomm becomes the intel of some space, which is a negative in this case, because they're known for only doing the one thing and they're only successful in the one thing. And yes to Richard's point earlier the data center is. I think it's a bigger market than general PCs, but it's going to be a big market, no matter how you measure it, and everyone's trying to do their own custom things. But if an NVIDIA or Qualcomm or whoever could figure that out and do it cheaply enough, the big cloud providers of the world would jump on this immediately.

54:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't know this exclusivity deal has been good for anybody. I know, I know they missed the window and I think you're basically hoping don't ship, don't, ship, don't ship. Let's just get over this and try something new, because it's never going to be good.

55:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It started out bad and it's been a slow evolution ever since. The thing is, this was true on the software side as well, but Microsoft has made big gains with Windows and ARM. In fact, aside from a minor argument to be made for users not being able to install, like, a driver package for a printer or scanner all in one kind of thing, right Aside from that, which, honestly, most people do not need, it's pretty much there. They've done everything they can for developers, not just through going to all 64 bits and the emulation stuff that's improved in the what's it called ARM64EC, I think is the name of it this ability to create, like a take a classic Win32 app and make it into a hybrid app that can run as effectively on ARM as it does on Intel and you're also seeing Windows position itself.

55:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you know what we're going to do. Printer drivers now. Yeah, exactly, actually, so that right here We'll hear for driver stuff, it's all positioning, for we're going to change the chip set. There's no way the vendors are going to jump on this, so we're going to have a problem.

56:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is a chicken egg problem, right? No one. Hp is not going to start making ARM drivers for every single one of their printers and there are a million of them because for a platform that may never take off right. And so how do you?

56:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but a window. A couple of Windows team members will make a universal driver Right. The ball of the printers. That's what you get Actually that almost you know.

56:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know there was a stated reason for doing this, but honestly you could argue that the real reason, or another major reason to do it, is that thing I just described. You can't pay it's how much money would you have to pay to go to HP, canon, whatever the other companies are to support ARM? We're going to pay for it. We know no one's using it. We're going to pay for it or we'll just take that over and we'll do it. I bet that was the cheaper choice. The other thing that happens is?

56:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
we've seen them do it, is they? The A team at those vendor companies works on the new product drivers? Yeah, right, the only team available to you to fix those older products are B teams, right, they're maintenance teams. Right, you're going to get poor results that you paid for. And what are you going to do? Ask for your money back? And let's face it, like the Microsoft driver riders, like that team of people, they're extraordinary. Yeah, I right, they have to deal with it every day. They write all kinds of drivers.

57:20
And honestly you're always getting a good mandate around. That is awesome.

57:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So people don't think about this stuff too much. But when you bring up a Windows computer for the first time, it's never connected to the internet. Well, it has, because you had to. You know Microsoft account. But it's. You plug in something with the USB cable. It could be a hard drive, a printer scan or whatever. It just kind of worked. It worked, no, it does kind of. It just works Right. Those are class drivers that do that. That's built into Windows. That's what enables that stuff to work in Windows and ARM, because it's the same thing and, honestly, for most people that is absolutely enough.

57:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sure, and I and then you have the invidious of the world in the SAS bar, in the SysTrade begging you. Please run our driver, run our driver?

57:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
please Not. It's not this. I have a computer here that I I spent the better part of two days trying to figure out how to remove AMD software. No, not not remove the software, but remove it from my right click menus. Let me tell you something. That's a hard computer science problem.

58:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They figured out a nice little way to inject themselves. They're staying in there one way or another. It's like a.

58:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like a tick on a dog, you know.

58:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And nobody's going to begrudge Microsoft writing printer drivers because the chances are that printer driver popping up and saying hey, I'm not going to print it to you, log in so I can sell you ink.

58:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is so HP, which I just familiar with. I use HP printers, for example, a variety of them, and HP has their own software. It's not actually very good, but they have something called HP Smart and, honestly, this is just something that sits on top of the driver. So if Microsoft does the drivers and they can innovate, if you will, on the UI and the functionality and all that stuff with a utility or whatever, like a scanning app or whatever you want to call it printing app, and all in one app, I mean that's great, that's fine, right, who cares? Why would that bother them? Yeah, you know, as long as the driver is exposing all the capabilities of the hardware.

59:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, they, they. There's exactly one reason about them it's a marketing channel to sell ink.

59:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And you took it out. So I would. The one thing I would whoever's listening to this, and I apologize, but I no, I really I mean it. The one thing that bugs me about Windows and ARM is is a recurring theme that pops up again and again in the Microsoft space and on this podcast, which is we think something's going to happen and it doesn't. And then we think, okay, so it's happening later than we thought. Well, when might it happen? And then we point to some future milestone, right? So, for example, we'll often say, well, build would be the obvious time for them to announce this thing, and let's see what happens. And we wait and the build comes and it never happens. You're like, okay, well, Ignite's coming, and you know Ignite would be the most obvious thing. And then it doesn't happen. And it's like we just find ourselves in this continual cycle of like it's going to get better someday, but we don't know when. And that is to me Windows on ARM, writ large, and it's always like the next chipset will do it, the next software update. We've gotten over the software, we have gotten by. I think the software is there, but it's always the next chipset. So, like last year when they did the CX3, whatever that was called Gen3 or something like just please, like minor performance improvements doesn't solve the problem. Newviusit, we're going to be there. Newviusit is going to happen.

01:00:20
They finally announced it. Here it comes, baby, Six months, Okay, six months. Six months from now, I'm telling you it's going to be amazing. And then six months is going to come and you'll see, like one Lenovo device and one, you know, HP device and they'll be okay, Maybe in something else, maybe they will get 20 hours of battery life and the performance will be like whatever. And have we arrived yet? No, Okay, but you know what? This is going to be a Gen2. They're going to announce in December, and you know, and no, no, no, no, we go. And I just don't like this never ending cycle of it's going to happen. Yeah, it's future FOMO. Here's my question. Terry Myerson announced, or Qualcomm announced, this platform with Terry Myerson 2016. That was seven years ago. Seven years is as long as the entire life cycle of Windows 10. So far, I think right, or I guess actually, it's always eight years.

01:01:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But Well, didn't it start with surface RT? I mean really Well it sort of did.

01:01:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was a different effort. They actually went with the Tag Red Chips, by the way, back then at the time. But yes, I mean that was the thing they have but you can't pretend that between RT and Windows 10 on ARM, that they were actively updating it, and you know. That gets to my real question.

01:01:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is Windows on ARM good enough? If, let's say, you had a good ARM processor that really was performant? Yep, is Windows on ARM good enough? Os?

01:01:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
to take over? I can answer that definitively because I've used it wait for it on a Mac and it works awesome in emulation on a Mac.

01:01:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So yes, it is good enough. It's very performant on a.

01:01:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Mac, which is hysterical but here. So actually, leo, you might know something, or maybe, richard, you might know more about this than I do. One of the secret sauce successes of the Apple Silicon Chips on the Mac the M series chips apparently was something about I don't know was register ordering or memory ordering or they had the, they had the instruction. Yeah, To make it work like Intel, which you could imagine, would in fact speed emulation especially right and aid developers in bringing their apps to the new.

01:02:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple's goal was to get Rosetta 2, which is their emulation layer, to run well enough so that you could run Intel based software. It will speed roughly, you know whatever. Okay, so, and they did something brilliant, which is they and this is not going to be well, I don't know if they patented it. I bet they did. Is probably not going to be in anybody else's arm chips. They had an instruction to specifically support an Intel instruction that was very commonly used and really impacts performance.

01:02:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, okay and doesn't emulate well.

01:03:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And by doing so they got this along a very high performance, if it's why Moa runs so well.

01:03:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what I was going to say. My suspicion is that's why Windows and ARM run so well on the Mac, and I'm wondering if Qualcomm, nuvia, whatever, didn't do something similar. And if they didn't, what does that mean to the platform? Because if we're waiting for developers to explicitly support ARM in some way, you know by and large, that's not going to happen. I mean, it will happen. Office will do it and, you know, maybe, maybe Adobe although why wasn't Adobe part of the yesterday's show? Right, you want to see some kind of support beyond just the platform maker itself. Okay, well, that's very interesting. So the Mac will always be our fall back plan.

01:03:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Next week I'll be running a Mac, because when I first used it there were a lot of even Microsoft apps that didn't run. But is the support now for ARM pretty strong in?

01:03:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
apps in applications especially third party applications. Don't they have to be?

01:04:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
rewritten to work on Windows and ARM.

01:04:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it depends on how you built it, right? So, broadstokes, we're relying on emulation. If you're actively developing apps, I mean, microsoft will tell you. It's as simple as flipping a switch in Visual Studio. Yeah, you can output to ARM, I mean you recompile? Yeah it will compile to ARM and spit out a.

01:04:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and if you're running in Git mode with compile and you have the latest bits installed, it'll simply, when you go to run it, it will recompile itself.

01:04:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah or it has to be a fairly modern app, I would think, for that to work. I mean, I think, for the older legacy it's gonna beNET 8.

01:04:40
Yeah, so it depends, right. So I guess the question would be then obviously, what you do is you don't think about that part of it because you're normal. So you go out and you buy one of these computers and you start loading Chrome on there, you start loading whatever apps you use, right? And so I think it's gonna depend. You know, unfortunately, but honestly, by and large, the compatibility is there in the sense that emulation slash, hybrid apps, whatever, or data apps if you have I don't know of any. Well, no, that's not fair. Firefox as a native ARM implementation, doesn't it? And I think Chrome, chrome 8.2, actually I'm not mistaken In the early days they would download the 32-bit version because that would run faster. These days they can't because 32-bit is gone, right? I don't remember. I don't remember which apps have native implementations, but there are a few. There aren't a lot.

01:05:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, my nice Door wrapper, but again in the market.

01:05:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
For normal people who are buying U-series Ultrabooks, right, this would be. What kind of apps do they run? I think it is kind of there right, so this won't be a professional.

01:05:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You start getting into the Lightroom Photoshop stuff. Yeah, this won't be a high-end professional operation. Not yet.

01:05:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, you got to hit the basics first.

01:05:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But maybe Microsoft. If it sees this growth of ARM and finally gets a decent desktop processor, maybe Microsoft will put more wood behind the arrow and make it.

01:06:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't feel like I honestly Listen. I criticize Microsoft more than most. I feel like they've done what they can and should do. Microsoft has created ARM-based computers. I mean Do?

01:06:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they want to see Windows on ARM have parity with Windows 11? Yes, oh yeah.

01:06:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's the point. Yes, of course, that's the entire point of Windows 11, right To do what Apple did with the M-series chipsets for the PC space, and a big part of that's the hardware. You can't get to 25 hours of battery life and have any level of performance in the kind of X64 space. Yeah, it's just a hard compromise. You have to lean in either direction. Intel leaned too far into what used to be called the Megahertz Megahertz WARS Myth or whatever. Remember it wasn't too long ago? 8th Gen chipsets came out. We saluted them for adding two more cores for free to the chipsets. But that's what they're good at, isn't it? We can do the performance stuff.

01:07:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And we had room on the die, so we stuck a couple more yeah.

01:07:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, we're heroes. What they needed to be doing a long time ago was hybrid cores. I guess AMD has a fascinating way of using cores where they can be high-performance or efficient and they can tune up and down. I don't know actually, how this works, but one of the things you probably did notice in the slides was that it's a 12-core system. There's no efficiency cores. There are no efficiency cores, Zero. That tells me something. Right, Without being a hardware expert, they have to have the ability to do one of two things Either tune those cores up and down or turn off cores either, which would have the same basic benefit of battery life.

01:07:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They are doing the speed step thing and it allowed them to kind of fool you with the numbers, because they can step up to like 4.3 GHz.

01:07:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's going to use a lot more power.

01:07:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They can, just as Intel does. If you're willing to sacrifice power in battery life, you can get higher performance.

01:08:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think some of those benchmark numbers were done that way.

01:08:07
Right. Here's the problem, though. Benchmarks are not real world. We're on the cusp of something very interesting. There's the AMD-based HP Dragonfly Pro. It has that processor. I was talking about the ability to step up and down what that does, and this is not the only HP computer that does this. I'm not as familiar if Lenovo does this, but they basically ignore the power management settings in Windows. You can play with that all day. It's not going to do anything. They do their own thing. You can go into there and turn it off if you want, but what they do is they turn the power up and down as needed on the fly. They're working with Microsoft. Sorry, I should add. This is going to change in the future. Some future version of Windows is going to know about this, and you could make those changes right in Windows.

01:08:55
I think that if this Qualcomm chipset can work in the same way and I think it must that Windows will know about it and it will be efficient. Yes, you're doing a photo shot or a premier video export For that few minutes or whatever it is. It's going to turn up the juice, spit that thing out as fast as possible, but then it's going to blow back down to something more akin to a mobile chipset. I think that's the point. You want the power when you need it, but for the rest of the time it should be laying low and being efficient. It's taking it easy on the battery. Yes, there are different ways to. I don't know anything about hardware, I'm just talking here. But there are different ways to architect the chipsets, I guess. But the net effect could be the same. Maybe that's what they're doing. I'm not really clear on this.

01:09:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, plus lobes typically are bursty. Right, you run some computation and you do a render and for five minutes you need the power. It needs 10 times the computer. The lights dim, you know the band spin up and you hook through the battery for a bit and then it winds back down.

01:09:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right. So we're already I mean listen with the current gen chips we already have in the X64 space, Intel, NAMD, we're right there. And this stuff would be so much better on ARM because of the inherent efficiencies If they could just get the performance in that boost, state, turbo, whatever you want to call it up to a level where we get today in in the x64. And of course they're starting with mainstream PC form factors. So those people aren't going to be hitting those bursts too much. But eventually I think they'll get there, and I do know Microsoft's working with the PC makers to allow that kind of pass-through power management stuff. So that is appearing that's going to happen someday. Is it courseable, happen on Qualcomm as well or ARM as well? Right, I don't know. It's an interesting thing, it's just that, again, this is yet another example of when will then be. No, you know soon.

01:10:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I mean these new chips have some gossip. We're not going to see hardware to the middle of next year, which means you probably won't see it until October. That's brutal, that's brutal.

01:11:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a brutal time for us. And they did this dance last year and it didn't live up to the promises.

01:11:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, not even close. It was terrible, and I'm sorry. It was not terrible, it was a minor step and the thing is, you know, cs is kind of like you're missing the holidays, congratulations. Why would they hold this event two months earlier than usual, or month and a half? You're thinking, man, they're going to ship this stuff quick, right, we're going to see these at CES, and damn it.

01:11:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Can I also point out that almost everybody who was there was there because Qualcomm paid for them to be there.

01:11:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah, everyone, that almost everyone, literally everyone.

01:11:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Even PC world. Here's the editor's note in the PC world article by the Qualcomm event To gain access to Qualcomm's new Orion and Snapdragon Elite platform, qualcomm offered to pay PC world for room board and airfare PC world accepted, but we maintain control.

01:11:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not in Oregon, it's in Hawaii. It's in oh yeah, it's not a tough decision.

01:11:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We're going to Maui. You want to go? We'll pay your way.

01:11:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I've done this. By the way, I did do it. I'm here, I'm in Mexico. I can't go there now, but yeah, who wouldn't want to go to Hawaii? Yeah, so I mean, sure, I mean that doesn't mean you can't be independent in your opinions.

01:12:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hope I don't do those. I never have done junkets because I just think it's compromising. But that's me. By the way, I'm the last guy standing in this regard.

01:12:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, I appreciate your editorial integrity. I used to work for a print publication that five people had to edit before it went anywhere. Yeah, Change.

01:12:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Times have changed. That was the world.

01:12:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now it looks Grammarly, looks at it with his stupid AI and it goes out the door.

01:12:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The only thing, the only reason I mention it even is just, people should know that and consider it yeah.

01:12:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And you can be a friend about it. Yeah, but I'm definitely toasting you from Hawaii for your integrity yeah.

01:12:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a nice trip, Richard. I'm going to stay here and pedal on my head.

01:12:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to think of your integrity. Let me get the umbrella out of my face.

01:12:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't ever go to any of these events. They don't even Apple. Yeah, Apple hates me so much they didn't even invite me to watch the video Friday. On Monday that's awesome, Like everybody got invitations. It's not an event that you go to.

01:13:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's awesome. Everybody got invitations. In fact, Leo, we're reaching out to you. We want to make sure you don't watch it.

01:13:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Basically, they might as well say that Please don't watch it.

01:13:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We want you to reply to this so we know what your IP is and we're not going to let you watch it.

01:13:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We have to cover these things on YouTube because Apple instantly pulls us down.

01:13:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we have to actually do this little dance where, when we make our shows, when it's an Apple event, we don't put it on YouTube live because it pulls us down People maybe don't believe that institutional memory is a thing, but let me tell you very much and you know this better than anybody, right, they should embrace you for what you are, and I don't understand doing otherwise. It makes no sense. Well, it's crazy.

01:13:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm not taking.

01:13:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They should embrace me for what I am. I bitch and want to buy them every year. And then I buy $2,000 worth of product every time I have spent so much money with Apple.

01:13:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's all negative outflow. There's no inflow.

01:14:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you know many, many years ago. When does this AI investment pay off?

01:14:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's take a little break. I think we've got advertisers, because otherwise, you know I'd be doing this pro bono. I kind of am anyway. But we thank our advertisers and we especially thank ACI learning. They were our, they are our studio sponsors this year, which is a big deal, you know, and you may say maybe when you saw that signage well, who is that? Who's ACI learning when they're at home? Well, their IT Pro TV. It Pro TV is now called ACI learning and we have always loved IT Pro. We've been friends with them since they started the company 10 years ago.

01:14:41
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01:18:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think we brought this up last week, A YouTube channel from a former Microsoft executive or an employee was publishing little clips of a Dave Kuller interview. He has since and there was a lot of great information that came out of that, but since then he has published the full three-hour interview. This is required watching for everyone watching or listening to this podcast. It's hard. I'm on a weird schedule when I'm away like this and I've been watching it a little first. It is amazing.

01:18:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Any one-year-old, no filter.

01:18:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No Amazing, and it's such neat stuff that came out of this already. Just based on the bits, I've heard Lot of I don't know corrective history, if you will. I mean, obviously chief architect of Windows NT, right for starters, some of the things people might not be as familiar with is that he also was the person personally responsible for making the AMD X64 chipset the standard, such that Intel had to adopt it, which is quite an about fit, or in your face for them, I guess.

01:19:19
He also created the architecture for the Xbox One and now the Xbox Series XS, which is Hyper V based, and he's working on XCloud, our project. What do you call it? Project XCloud, xbox Cloud Gaming, trying to make sense of that, and we must have talked about this. I know Richard and I have, at least privately, like, in fact, this guy is what? 81, 82, whatever it is, 81. Yeah, he is sharp, I think I he is.

01:19:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So on point, famously as Cervic, like he, yes.

01:19:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Red, he doesn't give a crap.

01:19:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Nothing to prove.

01:19:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But you know, it is astonishing and by the way that comes out in very interesting ways. He doesn't know and by so this interview is pretty good. I had two hour long conversations nearly our long conversation with former Microsoft executives because of this video and, yes, and and they're all watching it right.

01:20:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:20:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're adding color to this right. So one of the interesting things in the clips is you get this idea that maybe Dave Cutler didn't like Jim Alchin, and you know. And to put Jim Alchin in perspective, this was the guy who ran Windows during the XP through end of Vista days, right, he in the in the era of the in the nineties when, when NT was advancing right From 3.1 to 3.5, 3.5, 1.4, and then it went on to Windows 2000. In that era Jim Alchin ran an alternate version of the NT team that was making something called Cairo. Right, and I get it. I suspect he wasn't super happy about that. But the thing is he Cairo reached too far, he'd just come to the company right Like he'd been.

01:21:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Microsoft had bought Banyan Bynes. He was a CEO of Banyan and I think he drank the Gates he and Kool-Aid. Yeah, gates loved.

01:21:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Big vision. You know, big vision guy. Like you know, I love Jim Alchin. I don't want anyone to take anything I'm going to say here critically, but but from Cutler's perspective I'm sure he thought that was cute. But his explanation of this is so beautiful he was like fine, we'll build NT and we'll build Cairo. You guys go do what you want. But what I'm saying is I think we need to proceed slowly and methodically. And the story is basically that those guys didn't hit a single milestone, didn't deliver, they never built successfully once and NT kept improving. And then he at the end he was like I have an idea, why don't we just use NT? How does that sound? And they were like, okay, you know, and.

01:21:42
And then XP happened or was going to happen. And the server guys were like we need three years. And the client guys were like no, we got to do this in like one year. And they split the code and the client guys never took on any, any of the security improvements that server added. And then when they released it, it was a cluster and they had to recap your camp and do trustworthy computing and all that stuff.

01:22:03
And so Longhorn was all based on the client code originally, dave Collier referred to that as the worst software code he had ever seen in his entire life and it was XP based, but what would have been Longhorn? And so he again, after this all happened, he said he's like guys, I have an idea, Just throw it up something there. Why don't we use the server code base for Longhorn instead of this piece of crap, xp stuff? And they were like yeah, okay, that's probably a good idea. And he's like and then he did the X64 right in the middle of it. And he's like that's literally still the code base we're running on today. It's never changed. And he's like he is a I was going to say genius. He is a God Legendary, like he is, he is unbelievable Technical fellows not enough.

01:22:48
No, I know that's what I mean. Like you can't right, there are no words to describe the other. He told this has nothing to do with him, but it was such a great story. The guy had asked why Microsoft had Xenix right, xenix being a version of Unix that they licensed from AT&T. I mean Microsoft could have had Unix in 1990. Why didn't run with that? And he says we never. He goes, we hated the Unix. We bought that at volume and then at low price they went to Microsoft, went to AT&T and said look what, if we bought like a million licenses, would you give us like a great deal on it? And they said, yeah, sure, so they did. And then they just resold it at higher prices and they made a huge profit on it. They sold like eight copies of a product called Xenix, but the money they made off this thing was just licensing. It was just beautiful, beautiful. But why didn't?

01:23:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
they. There's so many good stories.

01:23:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They didn't want it. They wanted something better than so remember that.

01:23:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do they got something better? Did they get something better?

01:23:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is debatable, but the, the, the. In that era you got to remember what was going on. He tells his story. He says you know, Unix used to be a thing was created by a place and then it splintered and there were different versions of that thing, Many, many different versions. They were incompatible. Oh, so it's a huge problem. Yeah, they didn't want that. So the solution in the early nineties was something called POSIX. Right, we're going to have a POSIX standard. If your Unix writes to the standard, then everything will be compatible. We don't really talk about that anymore because, although I imagine Linux originally was POSIX compatible, I've no idea.

01:24:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, linux was the. The technical term that Linus used was aims to be POSIX compliant. There you go. Okay, but isn't it lower your sites and deliver something like two or not?

01:24:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So to your question, I mean I, the thing that Unix had going for it at that time was it ran on risk processors right, which Microsoft did see to be the future, which is why they did NT. I think if they had gotten if they hadn't gotten David Cutler, there's a pretty good chance they would have gone for Unix right, but David Cutler was Cutler is the ultimate manifestation of the non-pedidier syndrome.

01:24:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He would rather I was going to say anti-Unix.

01:24:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, that's exactly right, he wants to write it all, that's right. So you will understand in what listening to him speak that he can write it all and did. And you NT. Look we, if you haven't read showstoppers, right, we talk about this. You know, read this book.

01:25:09
Nt was an answer to Unix. It was Microsoft. Well, it was a NT, the NT teams response to Unix. And what I mean by that is they looked at Unix and they picked the things they liked and used those or implemented things like that. And there were a lot of things they didn't like and they did things differently.

01:25:24
Unfortunately, some of those things like I think we can look back and say you know, honestly, using plain text files for configuration is an horrible idea and you know whatever. But you know, richard knows Jeffrey Snow over very well. I mean, this came much later. But Monad or sorry, powershell, as a kind of response to a like a bash shell or whatever. We like a lot of what you're doing here, but we want to shoot for some sort of NET style object oriented consistency or whatever and make something that's a superior product. So both of those things to me were like responses and they tried to improve and you can. I guess we could debate whether they ultimately succeeded. But I mean, the Windows code base has done pretty well, I mean, and it's all. It's been all NT based since 2001,. Right, it's in Xbox. Now it's in the cloud, it's in Azure, it's doing it. So okay, I mean I don't know. I don't know what they're going to do when he leaves. I don't know, it's like I don't know.

01:26:27
We'll see he's actively coding still I mean he's actively, he is literally actively coding yeah.

01:26:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a that's. I know it doesn't make any sense.

01:26:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It makes no sense. He can call up memories of architectures from the past that haven't existed for three decades and explain why they did or did not go with this design. And you got to listen to this talk. It's crazy His, he has no memory at all, none for products. He couldn't tell you the name of Windows XP service back to you if you tortured him. But he can tell you the exact op codes and you know, like he, his disdain for some product that's marketed to users is so wonderful and hilarious. He referred the only time he referred to XP service back to that I've seen so far, which was part of that trustworthy computing thing. Right, well, he referred to it as a 235 megabyte code dump and or whatever the it was, it was under 256, whatever the number was, and that's how that in his brain. That's all that was.

01:27:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was all. It was all Chin's distraction. Right, that's where I was focused while long arm was going off the rails under Valentine.

01:27:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But they had to because I, because I screwed the push with security. Yep, so they did, and that's when the server code base took over and that that's one of the. I don't remember. I was using the Richard, I was just talking to somebody about this, the this, this notion that's gone up and down over the years whether the Windows code base should be sort of controlled by the server, the client group, and tied to that, whether the development part of Microsoft back in the day, dived, dived, dived should be part of which of those groups, or separate right, which is the other approach. And honestly, it was all politics driven, like whoever had the most power at the time. You know, server took it from all, chin Snofsky took it from server, and who knows what's happened. That's a different world. Yeah, yep, yeah, and actually that's a good point. Actually it is cloud and it's like Jason, the guy in Azure Jason I can't think of his last name, I'm sorry. It came up out of the server group and I think is in, is in Azure and he brought over the for a time.

01:28:34
The development of Windows is in like a cloud group which you know if you approached it without knowing the history of like, wait, what, like. That doesn't make any sense and it's like now let the, let the develop, let the adults handle the core of the operating system, please. They got. They got this, jason. What the hell? It was a Xander Xander, thank you. Yes, jason Xander. I get stuck on things like. I know a guy named Jason Boberg he used to work with and I that his name was in my head and then I couldn't get the Xander. So there you go, yep.

01:29:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yep, I'm sure that's a psychosis. Some names don't lead to the last name. Like Jason, could be so many things you say leticia and you know who you're talking about, right. Okay, Jason what could that be? It could be a minute, a minute. I know five Jason's at least as hysterical, because she'll say oh, jason said this and I said okay, but which Jason? There's many.

01:29:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We had my son brought over a friend who had just moved in the cross the street and I said what's your name? And he said Connor and I said no, that's not going to work. These three friends, I'm Connor, you were going to be called Frank.

01:29:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We named Henry when he was a kid. We named him Henry because he thought, oh, he'll be the only Henry. There were seven Henry's in his class alone in elementary school, so he became Hank which is actually a pretty good name.

01:29:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, okay, well, like I joke with, my son's name is Mark and I wanted a simple name because our last name is horrible to pronounce and spell. And so people are like, oh, that's great. And then I'll say, of course I spell it M-A-R-Q-U-E. You know, just to, just to screw around.

01:30:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I went to school with a guy who spelled Mark M-A-R-C-Q-K. Oh, come on no really yeah, that's.

01:30:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's no good. We're not. What are your parents do everything phonetically. What is that?

01:30:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They really wanted a hard ending, mark.

01:30:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, that's a hard ending. All right, mark. Yeah, it's like what's the last time I'm talking to you, buddy, that's tough.

01:30:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's see. Do we have some beta builds here? We do.

01:30:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, not too many. Oddly, there was a beta build to the insider preview channel last week. A couple of changes. We talked about this slide, I think we did. Yeah, the system component thing yeah, so in the start menu I guess they're going to put a little system badge next to system components for some reason. Yeah, I don't understand why they're bothering with this. Nobody sees or cares about this stuff. But anyway, microsoft is hot on something here, so they're doing that. The Xbox game bar is being renamed to the game bar. I actually already see this. So in my I guess I'm on release preview. I see that You're on the early rotation for this.

01:31:07
Yeah, they don't do anything in order, so that's happening there. Same thing with the casting. They do casting experience, which I've not actually experienced yet. That has come to the beta channel and I guess actually that's it, so not too much, right? There was a new canary build right before we started the show. I know we're all so excited and don't be because nothing new is happening.

01:31:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We always think this is going to be Windows 12.

01:31:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's going to be, it's going to be nothing yet. So they just got co-pilot in the latest build of the canary. Oh, interesting, okay, I know it's so weird. Speaking of which, if you, I didn't.

01:31:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I should have written about this Same thing. Right Copilot software like what I don't know I don't.

01:31:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I was. I don't know why I was doing this. I was using Microsoft Edge. There had to have been a reason I don't usually and I noticed there was an update, so I updated it and in that update the co-pilot icon has occurred, right, remember, they showed it at the September event, but it hasn't been in the browser. So if you have Edge, try this. It's not on every computer because Microsoft, but I've seen it on two computers.

01:32:13
Now Let me look on this one to see if it's there. It is, yep, so it's on this computer. And, interestingly, if you run co-pilot in any version of Windows 11, now, if you have it and can run it, I believe it. No, I know it does. It says it's a preview, right, okay, and the version that's in I mentioned now is not. It doesn't announce itself as a preview, it's just co-pilot with Bing Chat. So I don't know what that means, but the icon's different and it happened and there was no announcement and I don't know. Things have just changed again. Yep, so that's that. You don't have to talk about it. I'm updating the book. Nobody cares.

01:32:52
One drive, yeah, one drive. We got to talk about this, so I'm going to throw a retort. You're throwing so far off the rails. I have moaned about this over the past few weeks or whatever. I'm sure you're all tired of it. I am here to let you know.

01:33:10
It just got worse and I'm not going to recap the whole thing, but the last development was that Microsoft was silently enabling folder sharing in one drive after I had said no to it during setup and had gone into the product and turned it off, depending on the computer, and or I should say, not that. So what happens is I'll delete a file from my desktop is the usual way I find this out. I says hey, did you know? When you delete stuff from one drive, something, something happens and I'm like hey, did you know that my desktop is not a one drive? What the hell's going on and what they've done is they've silently you were wrong, they, yeah, they silently turn and folder back. I can't stand this. So, okay, that's bad, right, everything I talked about before stands. It's all happening. Still, it's terrible. I don't like what's happening. This is all. So I think of this as the coming 23 H2 problem. Okay, cause most of you are going to hit this when you upgrade to this version of the OS.

01:34:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's when you're going to see the problem, but you'd hope that they'll have this fixed by then.

01:34:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Fixed. That's funny, cause that year's suggesting this is a problem, so so here's the thing.

01:34:22
So the way this has worked to date whether you, whether it was doing this maliciously or not or whatever is that you go into one drive, you go into settings, one drive, settings, you navigate to sink and backup, click on manage backup and you see what it's doing and from this interface you can turn on or turn off folder backup for five folders, right Documents, pictures, desktop, music and videos. And why those are not alphabetized, I don't know, I have ADD so that bugs me. But anyway, when it turns this on for you automatically, it's only three of the folders, it's documents, pictures and desktops, like the important one, uh, desktop, the important ones. Okay, all right. So in the past when I clicked on the toggle to turn off one of those things, you'll be surprised to know it turned off those things. That's how it worked. So you went click, click and okay and you were out.

01:35:13
So you call it, I guess, four steps. I don't know how you want to count. Here's what it does now. How many steps do you think it is now, richard, if you had to guess how many steps I'm sure they've increased it just to up the front they have absolutely increased it.

01:35:26
So here's what happens you click toggle off on any one of the folders and it says are you sure? You want to stop backing up. This is important. We like to back up and you're like, yeah, yeah, I'm sure he helped you.

01:35:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is one extra step, one, extra step.

01:35:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Then it says okay, but here's the deal. You have files in that folder. What do you want us to do with them? This is actually kind of interesting, right? Because you anyone who's done this in the past knows it puts us to date it has put a shortcut in the folder that says this is where your files are, because, if you think about it, your, your files are in one drive. You've said I want to use the local folders. It didn't move anything around, it just went to the local folder, right? So in a local folder it would say hey, do you want to know what your files are? Here's where they are. Now they're actually giving you a choice. So the first choice is don't do what you're doing. Stop this madness. Let us back up. What do you want you to do? Yep, or you could put it in one drive, or you can put it in the computer. So actually I appreciate this choice, although it's a nice thing that comes out of them doing something terrible.

01:36:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But it also feels like they put phrase in a way where you're going to be unsure enough that you're going to say, okay, it's super confusing, yep, so you can make you uncertain.

01:36:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, it's yes, it's definitely socially engineered. But this is the second step. We're not done yet. So you make a choice. I don't care what you chose, you continue, right? Well, actually you could cancel, but I'm going to say you continue. Then it pops up a thing that says hey, we stopped backing up this folder. Okay, I hope you're happy, right, I mean, that's the toggle. I told me that. But okay, so there's three steps. Yeah, now multiply that by all. Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Then this is beautiful. It pops up a feedback screen. It's a big one and it says hey, why are you doing this? And it gives you all these reasons. You can choose and you can write a little thing in there. No, so this four, this four steps, this is just for one of the three choices.

01:37:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So we're going to ask you about Chrome next. Yes, you know what I do.

01:37:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I uninstall one drive completely. Yeah Well, that's the thing. So, look, if you encounter this and you don't like this, like I don't, please do take the time to provide the feedback. I mean I, they need to hear this, but they're not listening to me, that's for sure. So I've just described four steps, time series 12. We're not done. The second you, no, we're not done. The second you disable any folder from backing up to one drive. Two other things happen. So the total is what I say 14 steps, 14 extra steps. The first one is their one drive icon gets a little bing. A little bing, a little bang icon a little overlay.

01:37:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh no, something bad is happening, You've made a choice.

01:37:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What is this? You're just doing all your one drive folder backup configuration. You close it all down. Now you're like what's, what's with one drive? And it pulls up this little window and it actually it's a little overlay inside of the one drive and thing it says you know, there are some ways that Microsoft OneDrive can make you more efficient. Click here to get started. Guess what it does.

01:38:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, it turns all the way back.

01:38:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's not it. It also, simultaneously to this, pops up a banner notification at the bottom of the thing, and this is what it says Get to know one drive. Learn how to protect your files using wait for it folder backup. You know what this?

01:38:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
is a family show and.

01:38:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not going to say what I'm thinking, but are you kidding me? Are you kidding me Like I, you? If you thought I was exaggerating before, let me tell you something. Microsoft called my bluff and they leveled up. They're going to town. So the only caveat to all this I will say is and Richard sort of suggested this earlier on maybe they'll fix it, Maybe they will have enough bad feedback for this, Maybe how many bags of flaming dog poop do we need to put on store steps?

01:39:02
It is comical to me that if you had said to me last week, after I've written all the stuff I'd written about this, that fall you're just wait, it's going to get way worse than this, oh, it's going to get way worse than this next week, I would have been like there's no way they've been planning for it.

01:39:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's in a milestone. This is malicious.

01:39:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This makes me crazy. This is that makes no sense. So, yeah, I mean and Leo said it, you know, yeah, I mean, this is the type of thing that drives people to be like I give up, I can't do this, I'm going to box. You know, I can't do this anymore and I maybe. To be fair to Microsoft people.

01:39:39
In the drama here, people lose sight of something, which is that I do know and believe that one drive folder backup is the best solution for a lot of people, normal people. It's like a helmet, a helmet law for motorcycles. It's a saving people from their own stupidity that you might reset a computer or something bad happens and you know what, don't worry about it. All your important stuff is up in the cloud and I 100%. But the flip side of that is it's that's not true for everybody and there are technical reasons why someone they wouldn't know why but there are reasons why you wouldn't want this doing this.

01:40:11
If I look at my, this is different on this computer. When I wrote this article, I looked at my documents folder, which is a local folder. I don't use the documents folder, but there are several folders in here from Adobe, Microsoft, something called new blue FX, Obsidian vaults, scan documents, zoom, all kinds of stuff and on this computer that takes up 1.25. I don't want that stuff sinking to the cloud and, by the way, those applications don't respect that. They'll overwrite it on every computer because they don't recognize the whatever. The thing that brought up came over from a different computer and I like, if I'm not paying for this, that's 1.25, what I already said of 5 gigabytes of storage that I get from Microsoft for a year.

01:40:52
You're sucking up my storage with stuff I don't need.

01:40:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the stuff I didn't ask for.

01:40:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But it's not just that. The bigger issue for me and this is for me, but it really is for anybody who has decisions to make and wants their decisions to be respected by a thing that is a tool. I explicitly went into this and turned this off In this case twice, and you keep turning it on. You're not respecting my decision. This is what they did with Edge right when they at first did not allow you to configure a default browser in Windows 11, they got so much complaints. They put a little default thing that only did some defaults and then you do certain things like search highlights or widgets or whatever, and it's still launches Edge.

01:41:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what this is.

01:41:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is in notification. It's nonsense.

01:41:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you said backup, you didn't mean backup.

01:41:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean jeez, it's insane. So I'm sorry, I didn't mean to go off and go right there, but I never in my wildest dreams would have thought a week ago that this could have gotten worse, worse again. Kind of impressive really. No, even given my entire 30-year history of Microsoft, I never saw this coming.

01:41:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I can't wait for next week. Next week.

01:41:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, that's maliciousness at scale. It's astonishing. Good for them. Can you retire, Paul?

01:42:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Are you going to take all your Windows PCs and throw them out the window?

01:42:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, here's the truth. I get people will ping me on Twitter email and they'll be like, tell the truth, if you weren't doing what you do, like you'd use a Mac or a Chromebook or something. No, actually I wouldn't. I really do prefer Windows for all kinds of reasons and God knows Microsoft's doing everything they can to undermine that. But yeah, no, I mean as of today still, I mean 30 years, in whatever. No, I very much prefer Windows. I use Macs fairly regularly. I mean I keep you know, I test it and I do stuff and I never once after a few minutes, like man, this is, you know, I really want to go to this. I don't know why I'm wasting my time.

01:42:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I got to live here, man.

01:42:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, never, that never happens to me.

01:42:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So no, Bring me to the wall garden. I want to live happily.

01:42:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But I'm also. Despite all the years, it still bugs me so much when things don't work and I don't understand how did?

01:42:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you astonishing.

01:42:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It could be anything I like. I'm like you're on your phone and this thing pops up. You're like no, and you're like why isn't it what you know it's like? Is this design not to tap? It's not just Windows, right, it's everything. But I, this is my life. I mean, this is what I cover, this is what I write about, this is where I live and I you know this. Google and Apple they do terrible things. Yeah, I'm sure they do. I don't care. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about Windows.

01:43:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice, paul Therat's Microsoft Cloud Show Corner. Join us next week as Paul finds something else that's driving him nuts Right.

01:43:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Also I would just it, just I mean, I would like things to work and I and I, I would like there to be a show or a day or whatever where I can show up and be like, yeah, everything's great.

01:43:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What a show that would be. It's wonderful yeah.

01:43:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Everything's working. Great Microsoft stuff. I can just recommend it heartily because it's awesome, it's work. I'd love to be able to do that. You know I want that. That's my, that's my goal. Yeah, the passive aggressive stuff is not working. I guess I don't know how I escalate this, but anyway, all I can do is respond. I mean, I'm not inventing this stuff, it's just happening, so not my fault. Okay, we're going to keep this particular sticker around Joe Esposito.

01:44:15
Yeah, you're getting it. Well, you're going to need a sticker wizard. So over a period of a month or so, we've learned that Microsoft was cutting off the use of Windows seven and eight one product keys right For activating Windows 11. They finally did it. They did it. It was kind of blew me away. The Verge had the big story we could. Microsoft confirmed it. These keys no longer work in Windows 11. I'm like neat. So I read the article and I was like what about Windows 10? You know, actually I think this came up last week in the show. Someone said what about Windows 10? No, the Verge never bothered to try it in Windows 10. They only tried it at Windows 11. So I tried it when it was done and, yeah, it doesn't work anymore. So it's over. That's over. I can confirm that it is over.

01:44:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So whatever kind of key you have.

01:44:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It does not matter if it was for Windows seven or eight one. It will not work. There is one little I'm not going to call it a controversy, but more of a question, which is what about those people who have what do they call them? When you activate, you did activate and now you have a digital license. I guess that's associated with the Microsoft account. Microsoft is very clear on this. That will not change. It's not like this rule now retroactively eliminates your activation. However, I have heard from two people now who have said, actually I reinstalled Windows and it didn't come up and didn't activate and wouldn't, and that I cannot explain. So I can't say that this is a universal problem yet I have not experienced it and I can't. I can't base anything on two people out in the world. I mean these people or people or whatever. They may not know what they're talking about. So if this does happen to you A I would like to hear from you and B, you should just call Microsoft support and explain this, because they will.

01:45:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They will activate this my experience and every time you will go after and they're willing to explain the go. Here's a key. Yep.

01:46:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I need to know more, but yeah, like I said, if it happens let me know, because this shouldn't happen ever, but twice. So who knows? Oh boy, yeah.

01:46:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Start up turn 30.

01:46:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sorry 30. 30 years old, 30 years old, yeah.

01:46:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What.

01:46:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So start up. Yeah, brad Wardell started this company in 1993. Holy cow Interesting. The same year I moved to Phoenix, started my own little career here and he was an OS2 guy, right. So him and I have often reminisced about those days.

01:46:37
I have what I think is a great interview with him, not because I wrote it but because he's interesting, and I recommend reading it. Just a couple of points, though. They started off as kind of a business or enterprise company right, os2 customers. They figured out how to skin windows and window blinds was the biggest thing in the world for a little while. And now they're kind of back on the enterprise bent because they're most successful. Products like Star 11 and fences and I think they're KBM software, kbm switcher are mostly through volume licenses for businesses right. So they've kind of come full circle.

01:47:11
But the conversation that came out of that is why is the skinning stuff not so interesting anymore? And there are two big things that come out of this. One is that, first of all, windows is now architected in such a way that this is much harder. But the other thing is phone. Right, the iPhone happened in 2007 and Android and iPhone took off since then, and that's where people spend that. This is where we do those things. We sit there, we customize the phone. Nobody gives a crap about the PC. They turn it on, they leave all the defaults and they get work done and they leave.

01:47:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And he was saying that that personal anymore.

01:47:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they don't care anymore. And people don't care. Yeah, they don't, they're not going to stick around to personalize it. He says you know, he has all these products that they sell that don't really sell anymore. They are still kind of fantastic, including somebody I've never heard of like an icon. I caught like an icon thing with themes which is part of that whole object desktop thing and he's like you know, he's like this product is sitting there, it's fantastic, it still works great and nobody wants it. You know, because we've all moved on to the phone.

01:48:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's your personal device now.

01:48:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep. So anyway I thought I think I love that guy. I always have. I've known him for 25 years.

01:48:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Easy, I've always loved him, and he's still the CEO. That's such a good story.

01:48:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's the only. He's the Solary. It's a small business basically. I mean he's actually hundreds of customers and contractors, so he started with.

01:48:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
OS2 Essentials. Yeah, and actually you say in the interview he says he started doing what Michael Dell did building PCs in a college store room. So you know he's like oh, I love it.

01:48:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's like you read the story about how he named the, how we named the thing. He panicked and named it. Yeah, yeah, he panicked and named it. He looked at a book that was open. It was a Raymond Feist book, I believe it was a Spanish novel, and he just saw the word and he said Star Doc, you know, and systems, because everything IBM did was systems back then. Remember personal systems and OS2, personal systems? Yeah, os2 actually was operating systems too.

01:49:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right Everything at Apple. That was their branding. Yeah, yeah, okay.

01:49:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One more little mini controversy. This is one I will not get excited about, but I read this yeah, so of course you did, because everyone in the world was like, oh my God, sachin Adele just said that his biggest regret was killing Windows Phone.

01:49:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

01:49:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I was like, really, yeah, so a little bit of background on this. His two successors, co Microsoft, steve Ballmer and Bill Gates, both said exactly the same thing at one point Separately, and I wrote articles saying, no, this was not your biggest mistake. This is the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life. And so when he did this, the third, like the three of three are you kidding me? For the next CEO to do this, they'd have to bring it back and then kill it, like everyone who was around says this was their biggest mistake. So this interview, which is 7,300 words long, he never says that. That's not what he said. In fact, what happened was the guy said what's your biggest regret? And he told the story about oh, he said my biggest mistakes were all about people. He said I made many biggest mistakes, it's not just one, I made mistakes about people. And then he said do you mean by not picking the right people or keeping the wrong people? And he said, yes, yeah, which I think he meant both. Right, that was the biggest thing.

01:50:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.

01:50:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So then the guy he pressed them again, he said but okay, but what about your biggest mistake, like as a decision or whatever? And this is what he said, the decision I think a lot of people talk about. He didn't say it was what it was, his biggest mistake, it was the one people talk about. It was a difficult decision.

01:50:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I did say I do get the sense that he regrets not having a mobile platform today.

01:50:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Of course, but here's the problem. So I and look, I wrote a whole big piece on this. I'm not going to reiterate the whole thing, but here's the thing to remember by the time he came to be CEO in 2014 and Microsoft had just acquired Nokia, this platform had already failed. It was it failed? He actually killed it about a year later, Didn't tell anybody in the outside world.

01:51:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The client was we're not going to chase markets anymore.

01:51:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Right. One of the other things he did when he came in as CEO of Microsoft was to be very pragmatic about the various businesses and products that Microsoft had. He went to all the different product teams and the basic deal was like look and this is why Windows Phone got killed you need to be profitable on your own. You have to make sense as a business when that's subsidizing anything here, or you have to have some plan and some short, pretty years to get to that point, and Windows Phone did not have the answer for this. There was no, there was nothing there, so he killed it. But this makes me wonder about a couple of things.

01:51:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He didn't really just kill it. He got rid of ELOP and the entire group all the way down. Yeah, I'm sorry, right he?

01:51:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
laid off Right. So I I've told the story many times, but when Terry Myers left Microsoft I finally got to. I asked him a bunch of questions. But what are the questions? I asked? Because, remember, that guy had gone from being what I would call a normal middle-aged man in shape and size to a very skinny. We used to joke that he looked like a kid from a boy band, you know. So I said, terry, how did you lose so much weight? He says, well, I took her over the Windows division and Sasha and Della told me and I was going to fly out to greet every all the new Nokia guys and Sasha said, between you and me, we're going to be laying off all those people and so you have to go. But you know they're all going to be gone. And he went over there like sick to his stomach. So he spent the next year to just full on stress, freaking out because he had to do this horrible thing. And I was like Terry, I can't fire Nokia. How do I lose weight?

01:52:45
And he said oh just eat less and walk and I'm like useless just like useless.

01:52:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So nobody who hasn't had to fire people has any idea.

01:52:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, he lost weight. How horrible is around how? Yeah, that's exactly what. Yeah.

01:53:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It is the worst, especially a lot of people.

01:53:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, here's the thing If you want to put a blame on mobile, what you have to do is go back to 2012, which is years before he came on board a CEO and the decision that Snofsy's team made, where they were doing this great work over a Windows phone and, instead of making those things compatible, he just made them similar and he made two separate platforms. And it was a lot of. I know there was a lot of hardware rev going on in the Windows phone space. Windows C back end.

01:53:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He did the devs twice. Seven wasn't compatible.

01:53:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think about three times. I, ultimately because 10 is the same thing, so a different platform, I mean. But with Windows 10, they finally had the right idea, which was the idea they should have had and actually, honestly, as long as it goes, 2009, when the planning first started, which was to make that one Windows platform, they had yeah.

01:53:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, that was the thing. After they'd done it a few times, they were like, hey, developers really hate it when we deprecate their stack. Maybe we shouldn't do that anymore. We'll make one good personal platform.

01:53:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that was the inflection point, or whatever you want to call it where they screwed it. That was where they lost mobile. If they had made a single platform that worked across a tablet, pc and phone in 2012, they would have had something by the time. But the problem was, not only did they not do that in way three years, but they revved everything and they forced developers to start over and by the time they switched it to Windows 10 mobile and they had Windows 10.

01:54:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was also the abrupt Sinovsky departure, the sort of unraveling of that whole team. You can't blame anyone for having no good strategies in 2012. The place was on fire.

01:54:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, that was right when I say 2012,. That was when it was announced. It really should have happened. It was 2009, 2010. And what should have happened is that the Windows and phone team should have gotten together, done this thing together, had the same UI and the Windows version of this API SDK. Whatever that is on phone would have been a superset of what was on phone, and if you had a phone app, it would have run on Windows as a little phone-shaped thing and people would have made hybrid apps. This was eventually the strategy. This was Universal App, the one Windows, whatever you want to call it. Our office we talked about this fairly recently was going to move to this platform and if you ran it on a phone, you got the office app we still have, and if you ran it on Windows, you get the full app and it would stretch out.

01:55:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Those were the promises that kept Office Ryle on the shelf for years.

01:55:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the part of the quote where he actually says this. Again in retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps inventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets and phones. Maybe what I just described exactly what they did do belatedly in Windows 10. And exactly what the thing that they had done in 2009 to 2012 might have been successful. This was not on him. He didn't say it was his biggest regret. It is absolutely not his biggest mistake and everyone I mean.

01:56:03
The problem is we've got this community of people who are still like, oh my God, I still miss Windows phone so much. And it's like, yeah, no, they were onto something. There was no doubt about it. I stuck with it longer than I should have, but whatever. And you have people to this day and I mean literally, you're like, oh, I could still take better pictures on my Lumia 1020 than I can from whatever. It's like no, you can't, no, you can't. And to prove that, I will walk slowly across the room and you take a picture of me and it will be blurry, because if anything moved, it couldn't do it. It was that slow. Even in 2013, when it was brand new, it was slow. Pictures are beautiful, I mean, no doubt about it, but let's not let nostalgia get in the way of reality here. Yeah, it is nostalgia, yeah.

01:56:46
So anyway, my only point here is everyone reported this story and I'm like, wow, I'm really surprised he thinks that. And then I read it and he's like I'm like he didn't. He didn't say that and this thing is like it's 7000 words long. This incredible. Someone asked the same guy, sorry, same guy. The interviewer asked him at one point how he felt about being the anti-Bulmer. You know and meaning like they're completely different personalities and the types of people who would have loved Steve Bulmer were not super enamored of this guy right in the beginning, especially so there's a lot of stuff in there. It gets into all the cricket nonsense no one actually cares about that. He always talks about or you know, whatever it gets into consciousness and AI, of course, and deep topics and this phone thing. Why?

01:57:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
is that the headline?

01:57:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is what our community is all about. It's all about dredging up this crap and pretending that you know. If only if you just kept it going.

01:57:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But if I rephrase it to being Nadella, wishes they had a mobile platform today. You wouldn't.

01:57:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we all do. I do too, but they could have done it. I'm not saying you would have dominated, or yeah.

01:57:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because we, you know, we didn't really talk about it, but they killed Duo, right? I mean, they didn't announce the death of Duo, but they.

01:58:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the way they kill things. So that's the way they killed Windows Phone. By the way, that might be the way they're killing Surface right now, and this is something that came up in this article. Actually, and I think in the year, some of the earning stuff when they killed Windows Phone internally. They didn't announce it to the world, but here's what they did announce we're refocusing Windows Phone and Windows Phone, people might forget, started as actually a consumer platform which a lot of Microsoft guys were a little confused by. Like what are you doing? Like why wouldn't this be all exchange and you know that kind of stuff. And they added that over time. Obviously, at the very end they supposedly were refocusing on the enterprise and they did it first party a little bit.

01:58:40
But remember the last, maybe last ever Windows Phone was that HP Elite X3, which had the docking station and the keyboard and the laptop dock and sort of ubiquitous computing. It'll work anywhere. It's this idea that Sachin Adele was talking about in the interview. It's a great idea three years too late, but you know, a really good idea. And so the refocusing announcement we just got from Surface was not announced. Remember it was more of a leak. I don't spend any left because of this and we're not going to let you do the crazy devices anymore, which includes Duo right, which they did not announce. We focus on the basics and I think that might be. It might be I'm not saying it is but it might be the first step toward okay, we're getting rid of the same.

01:59:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
When I hear refocusing, I think refocusing on the horizon as you fade away Right now.

01:59:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah right, exactly, we're going to focus on a horizon where you aren't. You know that kind of thing, so we'll see what happens there. I hope not. I love, look, I the equivalent of.

01:59:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I love Surface. I mean it takes the pet upstate, it's over.

01:59:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yikes, they're our rabbits. It won't be, you know, it'll be okay, it'll be fine. Yeah, anyway, that's it. So I was just surprised how many people wrote about it, how many people were tweeting about it. Some of the old Windows Fun guys came back. So like see, I told you so and it's like I. You clearly did not read this interview. This is not what he said. There was a few and you asked if they could do it again. Duo was, I think, was I feel very strongly that Microsoft, they're gonna make devices. They should make Android devices that run Microsoft 365.

02:00:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think that's a great idea.

02:00:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Duo conceptually. I mean, forget the dual screen a bit of it. But the notion of a Duo device is not quite a phone, but it opens up and it is as big a screen as you can do stuff. It's not a horrible one and it the problem, you know, because it's not gonna be the same platform you have to figure out. Microsoft has to figure out some way to have those apps that make sense on wherever you are. And you know web and mobile are the ways and there are different ways to handle this. It's not gonna be a Windows device. I guess Could they be successful, whatever that means in mobile. And I don't know, it's getting harder and harder.

02:00:50
I, when they announced Duo in Neo, which never came out, I remember Frank Shaw came up from Microsoft, came up to me and said let me ask you a rhetorical question If Microsoft could make this device and not lose money, would that be okay with you? You know, in other words, would that satisfy my complaint that it doesn't just sit there and lose money? And I said yeah, of course. And then I was like, can it do that? And he's like I'm not saying you know, I mean it's a rhetorical question, but but yeah, I mean, that's the goal with hardware, right? You, you're making money somewhere else, maybe through a Microsoft 365 subscription or a razor blade or whatever your business is.

02:01:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I was always making, I'm making an M365 phone made a lot of sense.

02:01:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think a Microsoft 365 device does make sense, and I don't think it should matter what it runs, as long as that you have access to your data and the apps that you want to use, right? That's who cares what it runs.

02:01:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And then you have a company device separate from your personal device, which makes life easier. They have total control of it, because they should, it's their device.

02:01:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and also anyone who's used phone link knows the complexity potentially of marrying those devices that we have today through your PC and especially on an iPhone, where it's very limited and Intel has something called it might be called Unity, I might say something like Unison maybe which they bought the company this is something Dell used to put on their computers, which actually does a little bit of a better job of integrating with an iPhone right. Then PC link or PC phone link does. The problem is you can't just go get it, you can't buy it, you have to buy a computer that happens to have it on there. So I have it on some select HP computers is where I've seen it and it is a little better, but it's hard. I mean, I think everyone wants that little unification piece. I'd love to be able to type text messages on my computer because I type better there right, yeah, absolutely.

02:02:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I definitely save work for the big screen and the good keyboard.

02:02:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, by the way, if you use Google messages, there's a web app which works great. You can use that just for messages. It only works for messages, it doesn't do phone calls. I'd like to hear it. Yeah, yeah, okay. So there's that little bit of myth buffs thing and we had a bunch of Xbox stuff up front. But there's one more which is just. I wouldn't normally talk about an ad campaign, but Microsoft is reviving one of their better received ad campaigns called Parry Dreams for the holidays. It starts tomorrow night. As we record this one, nfl has the Thursday night football. You're going to start seeing them there, and the reason I mentioned it is because now it has Activision Blizzards stuff going on in it, right, so it's commingling the different studios all in one. There'll be a series of them, I think, but in one ad you'll see all of the games together. Microsoft kind of doing their first big marketing push for the Activision Blizzards.

02:03:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We own Activision. Yeah, we are the champions. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:03:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So anyway, the ads are pretty cool, nice, nice.

02:04:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, by the way, I didn't mention this, but Sachin Adela was on screen in an interview at the Snapdragon event with the CEO of a Snapdragon. What I found interesting is he managed to avoid completely mention of surface based on Qualcomm or anything. Right, and it was the same AI the whole time and it was the same AI speech you'd always heard, right?

02:04:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That Windows Phone thing we just talked about. He also never used the term Windows Phone there, which is very interesting and, like I said, they'd never mentioned surface once in their earnings announcements during or after.

02:04:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow interesting.

02:04:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know this is not the first time, by the way, this is not new, so it doesn't necessarily mean anything new, but yeah, I always look for this stuff and it's concerning All right.

02:04:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that was the shortest Xbox segment ever. You took me completely.

02:04:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah Well, remember, we did a bunch of wrong. We did.

02:04:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So let us take a break, because the back of the book is coming up next, but right now a word from our sponsor, the great folks at Wix Studio Web Agencies. Oh, you're going to like this one. Let me tell you about Wix Studio, the platform that gives agencies total creative freedom to deliver complex client sites while still smashing deadlines. How Well, let's start with advanced design capabilities. With Wix Studio, you can build unique layouts. With this revolutionary grid experience, you can watch as elements scale proportionally by default, no code animations at sparks of delight, while custom CSS gives total design control.

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02:06:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Mr Paul Therade, I don't expect anyone to celebrate me, but I did turn off my mute, so woo, woo, now we're at number one this time. I can learn new tricks. Leo, let me ask you a question. Yes, sir, before I get into the tip, what's your feeling on pass keys? I've gotten some weird feedback from people who don't seem to trust pass keys or not sure that they're secure. No, no, it's fully trustworthy?

02:06:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the Fido net alliance is trustworthy. It's an open source consortium. It's safe, I think, as implemented by Google and Apple, and I think it's safe. So, for instance, when I do a pass key on my phone, the pass key secret well, yeah, in fact, you can use Ubiqui as your pass key, but the pass key secrets on the iPhone are stored in a secure hardware enclave.

02:07:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the best one, very safe.

02:07:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Very safe.

02:07:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Convenience. It surprises me. That's another issue. It depends on the implementation. So that's the thing. Like you cited Google, I would say actually Google's implementation is not one of the better ones because it requires so many steps.

02:07:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and I think often, because the fallback is password, people are just going to stick with the password. Yeah, they just right.

02:07:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, but, as you, after your last week when you were doing the thing on the phone, I went and looked at it again Because I keep looking at this and I have to keep typing in my password. I don't understand, right, but you can go through this convoluted series of steps where you don't have to. I like the idea that I could be on a device and say I want to sign in with my pass key and it says okay, there's no pass key on this device. Do you want to use another device? And you can hold up your phone and do your QR code. That's great. I mean, it's better than having to remember and type in a password and go through TFA web.

02:08:10
So Amazon the other day announced they have added pass key to support to the web version of their service and also the iPhone app version, and so I installed it on both and tried it, and not an Android, although it's coming in. To be clear, on mobile, what they're referring to is like the app, because you can use pass key support. If you use Amazon on the web and mobile, that works fine. Actually, you can do it there too, and I would say this is one of the better ones. Actually, I think this works pretty well.

02:08:38
In fact, it does the thing I just mentioned, where I set it up, first on the web, of course, because I want to be able to see it and whatever and then, when I went to set it up on, I guess, my iPhone, it said hey, you already have this thing in the cloud. You want to use a? You know, get it from there. It's like, yeah, and it worked great, like it was really nice. I could just kind of jump forward. So, listen, amazon is tied to your credit card. I assume most of the people think this is a question.

02:09:06
Yeah, this is exactly where you look your identity accounts Microsoft account, google account, et cetera. Yes, I mean, put it everywhere. But if you have to start somewhere, I would go right to. If you're an Amazon customer, prime customer, whatever, be sure to do this right. Follow the money. Yeah, yeah, and it's in there. They did a really nice. I don't really like Amazon UI too much. This is well done, like this was. This was done properly. It's very good.

02:09:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I haven't used it yet. Yeah, but Richard held up his YubiKey and honestly I think you know and I always have one on me. Always have one on me too.

02:09:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And now that?

02:09:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
every type C, I don't have to have that weird type.

02:09:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
C slash lightning one.

02:09:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, the one with the like this yeah, that was crazy and expensive, right, but often when you I know with Google when it gets when you get offered a PASCII, you can use this. If you've got this registered, the YubiKey register, yeah, clearly I would love to use a YubiKey with Amazon as well. I used to fast.

02:10:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
PASCII support is in 23H2 and Windows 11. Right.

02:10:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So that's where it works. The same thing, Once it's everywhere. Once it's everywhere, maybe it'll take off.

02:10:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think I think this is going to do it. I think 2FA, though, very effective, and I mean like app based 2FA, not, you know, text messaging is fine. It works great. Most people have their phone all the time, so it's not a big deal, but I feel like most consumer type mainstream people probably haven't implemented it. I think this is when people can wrap their heads around because it's like oh wait, I don't have to enter my password. Yes, please, you know, I think this is. I think this is going to do it. It's nice. Yeah, because, again, if you set up something on your phone at one point and don't have your phone right as long as you have, you're fine. You're fine on every device you use. It's nice.

02:10:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
All right, so I'm going to go to my Amazon account and and figure out how to turn this on.

02:10:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I have the instructions. It's super easy. You'll see security and logging in.

02:10:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You'll see it. That's right. It's super easy.

02:10:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Cool. Thank you, yep. And then Epic of the week Adobe, you know, a week or two ago, had their big max event where they added AI to everything. I mean, my God, it was an explosion of firefly based AI across all of your products. I don't know if you guys have ever looked at how much Adobe charges for these products. It's kind of expensive. I don't know how. I mean, if you're not a creative professional, it doesn't make sense to pay for any of those subscriptions, right? They're just too expensive. Yeah, it's crazy, but they do offer these elements versions and for Photoshop and Premiere, and Premiere and Photoshop elements 2024 just debuted and they have a bunch of those AI features that were, you know, earlier available in the more expensive stuff. So also, I will just tell you I am an Adobe elements, I should say an Adobe Photoshop elements user. I usually go every other year because you know there aren't that many big updates.

02:11:53
And this one, one of my biggest pet peeves with these products for the past I don't know three, four years has been dark boat is not dark, it's like light gray and it doesn't scale well on different resolution or I guess scale displays. They fix this on both and it is it actually looks like dark mode. It's wonderful and, honestly, when you're working with photographs and Photoshop or videos you want, you know you want the dark screen. It's using a light screen. Obviously. It's crazy. So that's not an AI feature, but my God. So the AI stuff is kind of neat. They have a new like a pain at the bottom and one of the things they have is like a it's basically like an AI effects pain and it has all this stuff. And I've gone back to some of my old photographs, like including someone I was a baby with my dad and stuff and it's it's. It's awesome, like it's. This stuff is really awesome. They also and then there are just some random ones that happen to be things that I need Like there's something called stylized photo text and the idea here is you have text and the letters are each it transparent and what you're seeing is like a picture coming through it right, which is kind of a.

02:13:00
It's a common effect. I use it on the eternal springs logo for the YouTube channel, but it's actually very hard to do. In Photoshop elements you can do it. It's very hard. I had been using affinity photo for that one thing. Super easy now in the new version of elements. So there's a ton of stuff there. I've only kind of touched on the surface myself in here, obviously, but those things are available. The pricing is the same as always a hundred bucks a piece, 150 for both, but they're always on sale. Don't ever buy a full price. And premier elements has never come to the store. But the Photoshop elements has been in the Microsoft store since 2017, 2018, something like that, and they promised premier was coming because that's the way I would acquire it, but it hasn't yet. But anyway, like I said, look for sales. You can find it everywhere. Good stuff, okay.

02:13:52
You're able to get your pass keys going there.

02:13:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I don't see it, it's not offering it to me. All right, let me all right.

02:13:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I went to the security settings.

02:14:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I can do, I can I disabled just to see if it would have work. My two step, just to see if that then would offer me pass keys.

02:14:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just did something insane and you're both going to think this is the dumbest thing I've ever said. But I went to go to the browser and open a new tab, so I hit control T, but I did it with notion, and a notion supports tabs, and I know. See, that's the exact right response. Yikes, are you sure you should be doing a podcast?

02:14:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, I don't know. I do that all the time by the way, and frankly, I think it's a mistake to put a browser shortcut because control T is a browser shortcut into your app browser app because then it's confusing. Yeah, focus is the problem. Yeah, all I can tell you is All right, I will. I will don't worry, I'm in log in a security. I don't see pass keys, but at some point maybe it's just slowly rolling out or something like that.

02:14:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, oh, I'm going to look right now. I actually actually I can't, because I hadn't signed in with a pass in his computer, so I just use my phone.

02:15:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe you have to do it on a phone. Actually, I bet you that's what it is no, you don't the first time.

02:15:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I did it on the web first. Yeah.

02:15:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe that's a roll in it. It's a rolling out kind of a thing.

02:15:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, so a lot. If you're on the login and security screen between primary mobile number and password, it says pass key.

02:15:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't see that login and security between primary mobile number password, two step no.

02:15:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Really I wonder if you need to have. Do you have two step turned on?

02:15:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

02:15:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I tried turning it off. Right, I don't. You shouldn't have to. I don't know why it wouldn't.

02:15:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know, I don't see. By the way, I know people say oh, I'm seeing, your phone number Doesn't matter because that's not my phone number. Yeah.

02:15:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're not after that number. That number is useless. Someone's been resetting my Facebook account all the way. It's not going to work.

02:15:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a phone I don't really use, but it is, you know. I mean, if I forgot my password, I guess.

02:16:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I could use that. Okay, I don't know why.

02:16:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean they just must be rolling it out, it's okay.

02:16:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're not.

02:16:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Google. They usually do things right away, all at once. No, I saw that story too and I thought, oh how exciting. But I didn't Right how exciting. Not for me, not for me that's all right, Because you know I'm not all in on pass keys. There you go.

02:16:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There you go, there you go, there you go.

02:16:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Ladies and gentlemen, this is a good time to talk to Richard Campbell because he's got a very exciting run as radio coming up.

02:16:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, Released earlier today. I might chat with Nicole Stevens about all of the data storage solutions available in Azure. This really comes down to the fact that a lot of folks, because they're paying for SQL Server less on-prem, they put all their data in SQL Server, whether it needs to be relational or not, and so as you shift that over to Azure SQL, it becomes very expensive, and so you know Nicole's big on creating a landing site, sort of evaluating the data. Look at the different data stores that are available to you, maybe save some money and gain some speed. We talked through a bunch of the different elements and what their advantages and disadvantages are, and it also pointed to some great architecture guides and landing zone guides for doing data better when you get them up to the cloud.

02:17:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice, lovely yeah.

02:17:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I thought it was a useful bit of information for folks.

02:17:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now I need a drink. Where would I go now?

02:17:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
to get a nice liquor. Well, when you're in Bulgaria, you drink Akiya.

02:17:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Rakya. Say it again Rakya, I'm drinking Rakya, bulgaria's Pisco. Yeah, I actually got a bottle of Rakya and I didn't know what the hell it was, so tell me about it. Yeah.

02:17:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And you're not too. Pisco's done generally with the skins. But really Rakya is a general name for a fruit brandy, whether that's grapes or pear or plum. That could be pretty good. It needs a lot of different. In Bulgaria they call it Slivovista if it's made with plum, or Slivovitz Slivovitz, yeah, slivovitz, the Polish version of it. The Bulgarians claim to have done it first. There's plenty of evidence to show Rakya appearing in the 14th century. But now archaeologists have dug around and said, oh, we've got some evidence for 11th century, so we're first. It's a big thing around here, it's a star. This whole western side of the Black Sea, from Ukraine all the way down into the Adriatic, and with Greece and so forth, they've all got variants on Well and wine was invented in Georgia.

02:18:39
Yeah, now you're over in the Caucasus, but look they have this.

02:18:42
This is really old wine growing region. This is different. It's been around a long time. It's been around a long time Neolithic evidence of Neolithic wine making Like that's been going on in this area. This particular version of the thing with Rakya is in Bulgaria everybody has an uncle who makes them, because every uncle has a plum tree and you can modify a coffee maker into a still and make a version of Rakya. That doesn't mean you should drink it. Life will find a way.

02:19:12
Oh yeah, and then and it's typically put in old spitt of bottles my general gauge, as I have experimented with many of these, is if it's got a sort of straw color to it, that's probably okay. If it's clear white, it's. Yeah, it's moonshine and you could be dead. Very careful, I have changed colors from a sip of this stuff. It's a big deal, but this is a very premium. Rakya, this is much more of a brandy. This is from the Burgest distillery. It's called Burgest 63 barrel and if you go to the website that includes the link, it's actually all in Bulgarian. You'll have to translate it.

02:19:46
And these, this is white wine grapes that come from the Pamori region, which is right on the Baltic Sea, not a place you should go right now, by the way. Yeah, so this region. There's been some version of a village or a city on it for 2,500 to 3,000 years. It was known as Enshalos, or by the sea in ancient Greek, with records going back to 500 BC. Of course, it was controlled by the Romans, when they called this whole area Thrace, as in the province of Thrace, and primarily made wine with it. Without a doubt, it changed hands into the Byzantium Empire and then back to the Bulgars and over to the Ottomans until it lands the way it is today.

02:20:29
But there's a very nice wine going. Drink the wine, it's beautiful and this is a simple distill. They simply do an Iambic distillation, much more like a hermeneact, but they call it a brandy. 40%. That color is from five years in oak barrels, so it's a clear liquor when distilled. But they do age in barrels and it doesn't pick up a ton of color. Very French oak, although over here there's a few other variants. Never really sure which you're going to get, but it's typically still in the 500 ml bottle. If you can find one, it's about 89 Bulgarian, which is about 30 bucks. You're not going to find it in the US, but I'm going to drink it.

02:21:12
Very grappa-ish, big broody. I've got a big load on it, strong finish. This is much smoother and nicer. Well, in every respect it's made like a brandy. It tastes nothing like brandy. It's got its own character to it and a really kind of cool, heady, perfumey finish to it from on a high end Rockia. So it is very rude to turn down Rockia. If you're in someone's home, at least taste a little bit. It's okay to cough if they feed you the jet fuel. Don't drink it quickly. It's a zipper. But if you're going to buy some, buy the nice stuff. It's not expensive and you'll enjoy it.

02:21:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He just reminded me of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. And they're being served monkey brains and the woman or the kid says, oh my God, I can't eat that. And he's like don't be rude, this is their culture, you have to do this. And it's like I was as a kid sitting in the audience. I was like, wait a minute, how come they can't respect my culture? Like why is this a one-way street? It was a mess. It was a child, is what I'm trying to say.

02:22:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I was in the hotel bar earlier today and going through tasting a few different berries. This is by far my favorite of the bunch. Nice, a big rich nice bottle.

02:22:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's not harsh, it's not a.

02:22:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So is there anything of this style that is in the United States? I mean, I know you can't get this Exactly.

02:22:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you're going to go look for it, what you're looking for is slivovits, which is typically a plum brandy version, a polish from plum brandy. Those are the ones you're going to find, and the Canadians make a variant and the Hungarians make a variant, and they're all very sure theirs is the best. The vast majority of Rocky I've drank was somebody's grandfathers or uncles. There was a time when I was working closely with Telerik and I would be in Sofia three or four times a year. We would end up at one person or another's home and every single one of them had home made. That's great, and you should have at least one. And I learned that the only way to stop drinking Rocky was to bring really good whiskey with me. So we'd all have a round at a toast on the Rocky and then, boom, I'd pull out a you know a bottle of Darmor 12 and that's what everyone wanted to drink. Hmm, hmm.

02:23:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

02:23:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, it's coming on midnight around here. I think I'm going to finish off a bottle of a glass of Rocky and call it a night.

02:23:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice, nice, good job, my friend Good job. And that concludes this thrilling, gripping edition of Windows Weekly. That there's Richard Campbell run his radiocom. He's in Sofia, bulgaria, but coming home to Canada next week.

02:23:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Next week at Madeira Park, the new locale.

02:24:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, have a good flight.

02:24:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Paul.

02:24:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Therat. He's now an official homeowner in Mexico City. I finally own something. He is at Theratcom T-H-U-R-O-T-T-2-R-S-2-T's. Oh and by the way, well, three T's. If you can't the first one, If you're not a premium member, you're missing out. Get that premium sub. Lots of good stuff here, yeah yeah. His books Windows Everywhere and the Field Guide to Windows 11 and Windows 10 are available at leanpubcom. We do this show right here every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern time. This will be at 1800 next week, 1900 a week after, because we are still on daylight saving time, but we will be on standard time the first Sunday in November.

02:25:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We don't. In Mexico, it doesn't do this anymore. So we're two hours off, when I normally am, and we'll fly home before they switch back.

02:25:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, okay, I'm just going to say it will confuse you because we will no longer be at the same time where you are, because we're going to move but you aren't.

02:25:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like the one o'clock start time. 12 is right, lunch, it's lunch.

02:25:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't want to boy, we impeding on your lunch. That's terrible, I'm sorry. No, it's okay. Well, it'll be one o'clock next time you're in Mexico. Yeah, the reason I mentioned the live times. You don't have to watch live, it's a podcast. You can listen whenever you want. But if you do want to watch us do it live, there is a live stream audio and video at livetwittv.

02:25:47
And if you're watching live, chat with us live in our IRC or our club Twit discord, the club is probably the best way to join us. They've had a little sliv of it and now they're dancing in the club. Because you get ad free versions of all the shows, you get the discord, which it doesn't just limit itself to the shows. I mean there's conversations about all sorts of stuff, plus events that we put on in the club, like our escape room, which is coming up tomorrow 3pm Pacific, our AI show, which is also tomorrow 1pm Pacific, the book club, the fireside chat, our Christmas show will be taping that club members can watch us do it live December 7th, and on and on and on. Anyway, the point is, if you're joined the club, you get this, you get Paul, you get, you get dancing, you get Paul's hands on.

02:26:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was just looking at the disc right.

02:26:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hands on windows, which is the show he does exclusively for the club. There's hands on Macintosh with Michael Sargent. There's Linux, there's the GizFizz. There's lots of stuff. You want to make the club fun and we want your money. I'll be frank, that's what we want. We want your seven bucks a month. Now. I think that's a fair price for all that we give you. And the reason is, frankly, advertising is dwindling for podcasts, a lot of podcast networks going under. We don't want to go under. I don't have any plans to go under but your help really does make a difference. So if you're not a member yet not one of the 8,000 members, 7,946 paid members of a club to it. I know because I can see the number up here. We would love to have you. It's worth it and it's a great group. Twittertv slash club to it their family plans and corporate plans as well, and we're all going to have fun in the club.

02:27:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Thank you. You wanted it or not, buddy.

02:27:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You tab after the fact, club member or not, you can get a copy of the show at twittv, slash w w. That's the webpage that's shown. It's also be there. Uh, you can subscribe in your favorite podcast client. We have a feed and there's a YouTube channel dedicated to it as well. Thank you everybody for being here. We really appreciate it. If you have a great week and we will see you both back home, where you belong, next week.

02:28:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
On Windows, it's midweek and you really want to know even more about the world of technology. So you should check out tech news weekly, the show where we talk to and about the people making and breaking the tech news. It's the biggest news. We talk with the people writing the stories that you're probably reading. We also talk between ourselves about the stories that are getting us even more excited about tech news this week. So if you're excited, well then join us. Head to twittv. Slash T N W to subscribe.