Windows Weekly 853, 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 Thorot's here, Richard Campbell's here, so is Windows 11 23H2. We'll talk about that. Copilot comes to commercial customers today and it's the end of the line of Fawn. Farewell to one of our favorite Microsoft executives. All that coming up next, on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twiqt. This is Windows Weekly, with Paul Thorot and Richard Campbell, Episode 853, recorded Wednesday November 1st 2023. 10 out of 10 for the 404.

00:46
Windows Weekly is brought to you by Nareva. It's a first. Nareva's new Pro Series the HDL 310 for large rooms and the HDL 410 for extra large rooms give you uncompromised audio and systems that are incredibly simple to set up, manage and deploy at scale. Learn more at Narevacom. Slash, Twiqt and by Lookout, Whether on a device or in the cloud, your business data is always on the move. Minimize risk, increase visibility and ensure compliance with Lookout's unified platform. Visit Lookoutcom today. Happy November. It is time for Windows Weekly on this November 1st 2023. The last Windows Weekly in saving daylight, saving time will be reverting to standard time next. Are you Paul Thorotts in Mexico City? Are you your? You're? You never change. Time never changes.

01:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They do not not anymore, so they don't observe it. So when things change, on Sunday we'll enjoy one and a half days of being one hour off instead of two.

01:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Better than two days of one and a half hour off On the right, richard Campbell from Rennins Radio and, of course, season British Columbia. Welcome home.

02:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Thanks, good to be home, and we've coupled our time zone to whatever you guys do, so you kind of have to. We passed a law that said if, if the US decides to stop changing in the Pacific time zone, we'll stop changing.

02:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh really yeah literally Wow, love it. Well, we had a. We had a referendum in California a couple of years ago saying we want to stay on daylight saving time, but that's not legal because that's changing our time zone, so we'd have to have federal approval for that. So it accomplished nothing, psy.

02:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well you know, the federal is no functional. I'm sure you get a bill.

02:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, no problem, run that right through.

02:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh right.

02:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Which federal government, who, who, what, when, where? Hey, at least you don't have Argentina's new, soon to be president Right, let us talk about. Forget politics, forget time, because there is no time in Windows world. Let us talk. Should we talk about your tweet? Should we start with your tweet? The top on the top of the list, paul Therod's, I have.

03:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have ideas and then I have them at the wrong time and then I say screw it, I'm going to do it anyway. So three minutes before we started the podcast, I was like you know what I'm going to do, what I'm going to bring a laptop oh no, I'm going to set it up next to my existing laptop. Oh no, I'm going to configure it to work as a remote display and then I'm going to connect to it wirelessly using my laptop. And that took about 25 minutes not three.

03:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I did it. You got it working.

03:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, cause it's hard. At home. I have two, of course. I have a 28 inch display or whatever, right, so I have lots of space. But I also have a second display for notes and the discord and all that, and, and you know it's a 16 inch laptop. It's not tiny, but I still find it. You know, I find it to be very constrictive. So of course, I waited three weeks into this trip to finally fix it at the last second before the last show. So that's the way I do things Often times Well, let's work in, I think, talk about it and then I do it. It seems to be working great, yeah, yeah.

04:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't know why you bother drawing together, just having one machine that does the stream part and the other machine that does all your notes and things like that, like yeah, that is the smartest thing I've ever heard.

04:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is a. I am, like I said, an idiot. I you're right, that would have worked fine. There was no reason to tie these two things together. I don't know what to tell you. That would have actually worked If you get an idea in your head.

04:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You just do it and you don't think about it. You just do it. You just do it.

04:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Listen, I the simplicity and brilliance of that is so beautiful. Yep, that would have worked fine, thanks, thanks.

04:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you know, you should have asked Co-Pilot, it probably would have. It was like a like a verbal knee capping. Oh wow, you know the Tanya Harding of tech.

04:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, deserved, no. No, that's good, he's right.

05:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Didn't. Isn't this the day that Co-Pilot was supposed to arrive for all of us? Yeah, we're going to get to that.

05:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, happy day.

05:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not for all of us, For the lucky rich and few of us in gigantic corporations. We're going to get to this. How many seats? Of every 365 do you have? Also, it depends on which Co-Pilot you're talking about, because, as you know, there are about 117 of them right now.

05:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And Mike challenge poking around at different teams over 140.

05:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Here you go, I'm joking, but kidding, Sorry.

05:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, you remember. Lord Satya literally said everybody should go forth and make a Co-Pilot and admittedly, most of these will never see the light of day and that'll be a good thing. That's fine. Wow, they followed, they have followed the policy and they're all experimenting.

05:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But that's that. Yeah, I mean from a I don't know if it's genealogical perspective or just from a marketing perspective. Never the twain shall meet. You know, microsoft Co-Pilot is considered may or may not be really technically true, but kind of the base level of most of the or many of the Co-Pilots, not all the Co-Pilots and so you see the same base capabilities across Bing Chat. You know the stuff that's integrated into Microsoft Edge, the Windows Co-Pilot, as I'll keep calling it because seriously and also Microsoft 365 Co-Pilot right.

06:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I have to wonder if, at some point, these all alters don't become APIs over top of them. Microsoft Co-Pilot yeah, exactly Same way, and every product had to implement a PowerShell interface. But there was only one PowerShell. I think we're heading over. Yeah, right.

06:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was like only one XAML, you know the dream, that's not true, I didn't want to get ahead of the, ahead of the.

06:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, I can go back to 22H2. No, no, this is part. This is all part of it.

06:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a I don't know if this is technically true, but there are going to be extensions I guess we'll call them or add-ons written to these Co-Pilots, many of which will be common across the Co-Pilots, at least some subset of them. And if this thing was engineered correctly and based on your comments about Lloyd Sacha, I suspect they weren't, they were thrown together rather hastily then that same base layer should be where that extensibility model plugs in. And you know, what you see depends on which Co-Pilot you're using. But I bet it doesn't work like that.

07:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So we will find out. We'll see how they clean it up. Remember back in the day when, when Gates put out his internet title wave letter, every team had to do something that was internet related. Even SQL server now, and to this day, still has it.

07:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can do a query that says as HTML, as a table there was a shining moment of time where you could go into Word and save as HTML, and there was a little wizard you could publish it to a I don't know what you would use back then a blogger, a front page. There you go, of course. Front page, yes.

07:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, the best thing about that HTML, too, is that it was a great example of what not to do in HTML. Yeah, so here's your Contrary Tail. We call it Word Document.

08:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So in the theme of what not to do, let's talk about 23H2. I'm going to try not to fly off the handle on this one, but I do have a little bit of a back pat, a back padding moment coming up here. You may recall that in September Microsoft had that event and they announced a bunch of nothing really. But one of the things they announced was that they were going to have the biggest Windows 11 update of all time was coming out next week, the next week after the show 150 new features.

08:33
And I looked around confusedly because all year long we've been testing that update. It was called Windows 11 version 23H2. What happened, you know? And we found out over time, thanks to Zach Bowden at Windows Central, that they needed to get this stuff out early to force it on customers, because if they put it in 23H2, some could just say no and wait till the next version. And that makes sense. Except what happened since then doesn't make any sense, just like the rest of this stupid year when it comes to Windows 11 updates. So one week later they did ship that update that they promised, but it was a preview update, right. And two weeks later, patch Tuesday came and we thought well, this is going to be the stable version. And nope, they just put out a normal monthly CU, nothing special. I don't think there were any new features or anything. It was nothing, it was bug fixes. Two weeks after that they put out a second preview update, this one for October. That was exactly the same as the September preview update, except this time all of the new features were enabled by default.

09:29
But still, this is not a release right. A preview update is like a beta. Normal customers don't see it. You will not get it automatically. You have to go, look and find it. Your organization could prevent you from getting it. Of course my wife any normal person, my wife as this example would never even know it existed if I didn't babble about it endlessly for the past 35 days. But she never saw it right. And then last week Microsoft contacted me and others and said hey, guess what? Next week we're going to release Windows 11 version 23H2, which at that time our understanding of this thing was that it was kind of truncated because all the great new stuff already happened in that fall update. That never really was released and I kind of guessed and I came to Mexico with the plan of updating the book for 23H2 as much as I could while I was here and thinking I had until at least November late November maybe, like before 23H2 would come out, maybe in preview form, right, let alone final form. So this is just all off schedule.

10:33
But the thing is again, I want to go back to this September event. We talked to Mary Jo and I and Chris Hoffman and others. We talked to multiple people from Microsoft, trying to understand at that time what they were doing, and we got 100 different answers and everyone. You know we're looking to each other for something, some clarity, some idea, something. You know what's happening. And I said guys, this is just 23H2. They can call it whatever they want, but it's just 23H2. And you know, microsoft said no, no, no, no, no. The fall update it's blah, blah, blah, whatever.

11:04
Well, now that 23H2 is out, I wanted to think about something here. They never released the fall update, right, right, they released it in preview form. That is not releasing it. You know that to this day, they have still not released that thing, but they have released 23H2. Sort of I actually, to be honest, I don't really see it anywhere, but it's out, they announced it's out, so it's okay. So I think that's kind of interesting. And 23H2 will likely be the first and maybe only place where most of the population sees all of those new features, right, copilot, the new teams, windows backup app, etc. Etc. Whatever those things are. So I just think that's kind of for all of this screwing around with the schedule and the naming and what things are and what they are, and blah, blah, blah, in the end 23H2 just came out on Halloween, perfect, and you know, okay. So here we are. It's the day after. I actually have never seen 23H2 on a stable PC or VM, and of course I went up to the Microsoft website to download the media creation tool and to see if I could just kind of force it that way. And I've done this now. I did this yesterday, I did it again today before the show on physical computer, by the way, not a VM and that thing still is still 22H2. So I it's kind of unbelievable.

12:26
I'll also point out there are these things you sort of forget about because they were two years ago and they never happened again, right? One was this notion of blockers. On the Windows 10 to Windows 11 upgrade, microsoft said that they would put up what's called a safeguard hold on PCs that had maybe a hardware device or whatever it might be, that was incompatible with Windows 11. And that, over time, as those safeguard holds came out, came out yeah, as the safeguard holds were fixed I guess is the best way to say it the locks would come off and those people could upgrade to Windows 11. That was two years ago, you know, and when I updated the book recently with that upgrade chapter, I was looking into this, I actually researched this. I couldn't find any examples of safeguard holds still existing, and so I actually took that part of the book out. And then they came out with their little blog post on Monday and said hey, by the way, if you're not getting it, you might have a safeguard hold. We still have those. And okay, and apparently they have them between Windows 11, 22h2 and Windows 11, 23h2, which should be impossible because it's the same code base and I thought there were no compatibility issues this time, so great. Anyway, the work around as of this recording and hopefully by the time you listen to this or by the time we reconvene next week, this will not be the case Is you can go to that same website.

13:43
If you just Google download Windows 11,. You'll go to the Microsoft site. There is something called the Windows 11 installation assistant. From the web it will download an app. You can upgrade from Windows 11 to the new version of Windows 11. It's a little ponderous. You have to download the PC health check.

14:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is different from the Windows 11 creation tool. Yeah, all right.

14:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So let me step through the three choices. Right, download an ISO. Right, that's easy. Of course, you don't know what you're getting there. I even tried downloading the raw ISO, but it's got to be 22H2 because the media installation tool, media creation tool, uses it right. If you have that file, you can double click it, mount it, run, setup. You could upgrade that way, assuming it was 23H2. I assumed it wasn't, so I went to and I had done the second thing. First, the media creation tool. That's the wizard. You plug in a USB key. It not only downloads the ISO, but it plants it onto the USB key in bootable format, so you can use that. That's what I tried the first time.

14:40
The third attempt honestly, this is the most straightforward, it just takes a long time is the Windows 11 installation assistant. This is a separate EXE. It runs a little wizard. Again. It actually requires you and this is true in Windows 11 too to run the PC health check app before it will proceed. That app, contrary to its name, has nothing to do with health. It has to do with making sure you meet the hardware requirements. This is their soft block, and if you don't, you can't. And there were workarounds. Obviously, nothing I have here. Is that problem? No problem. So I used that. It took a long time, but it does upgrade the computer to 23H2. So you can. There's your workaround.

15:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What am I getting right here? I'm on the Insider thing. I can't see it, but what does it say?

15:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Windows Insider.

15:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Prevert 23580.1. You have a new build from the Windows Insider program, that's all. We don't know what it is. It'll be 23580.1000. And I underscore pre-release. What are you? What am I? Tell me? The one you put me on, leo, I don't know. Don't tell me that. It's the release preview. I believe that shouldn't be a 23 number, though. Well, anyway, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to derail it, no, no, no, no, it's, I'm considering. I'm getting preview builds. I have 22631. Okay, I have 23580.

16:15
Yeah, anyway, I don't care, I was trying to help, but obviously I did not help.

16:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, I know that feeling.

16:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just trying to help here, but I think some percentage, maybe a large, maybe the majority of our audience is probably on some Insider ring yeah.

16:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so one of the things I don't want to transfer all of my PCs over to the kind of stable public release of 23H2. Quiet, and it's for that reason, because I've been telling people, and again, it's hard with Microsoft these days because the old common knowledge is not, they don't adhere to tradition, but the way it works, the way it describes itself in the UI, is that if you had signed up for the release preview, yeah, and then you went back into that interface and I got to put this thing back where it was, if you went back into that interface and said, look, I want to make sure that this thing disenrolls when this version of Windows is released, yes, the window closing as we've called it.

17:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

17:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's kind of a tough one because they don't really release things the same way anymore, right, and so in other words, the version of Windows that you're testing doesn't exist. It's no such thing. We're not testing a version of Windows that should still it should still work. So I've been waiting to see if it happens. I was hoping in time for this show. It was a stupid desire in my part because it's only been one day, but I was hoping I would see on some computer that it had disenrolled from the Insider program that has the time I got.

17:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is my fifth Insider preview in a month, yeah Well right, it's been busy. It's been busy, busy, busy, because this has been happening.

18:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's not that strange to get stranded in Insider builds with it, like you got to pave to get to the full version too. They don't always give you a path out.

18:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, that's true. But release preview right, that one there should be a path right out of there. It should just be a right out, yeah, yeah. So years ago Leo and I would have had a conversation where I sort of Well, no, where I sort of explained how important it was for me as a Not just for writing and what I do as a living, but for the books especially.

18:28
Right, you want to document something and say this is how you do it. Right, and it's gotten really squishy with the Windows stuff. I can't really say that a lot anymore. There are so many things now where I have to say well, you may say this, you may say this. You know, it's become very difficult. This auto-unenrollment from the release preview was on that list. I want to make sure that still works because, honestly, I've been able to say that kind of thing. But as they screwed around with the Insider program over the past year or two, it's become untrue of certain channels and I mean release preview should always be tied to a version when there's the one that should. Yeah, and we'll see. We're looking for evidence there.

19:10
Well as soon as it's done.

19:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll tell you what version I'm on.

19:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, see what it says. Okay, it's 23 numbers confusing to me, but I guess we'll see. Actually, this computer was a release preview. That might be why I'm seeing a different version number. I don't want to. The computer on my left I'm using as a display is actually the one I did the clean install on. I should look at the build number over there. Yeah, let me do a Windows X, and yeah, we'll do a Windows R and just type Winver.

19:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, I can see, that's the easy way. That's the easy way. Yeah Well, it's already even written for me before 22H2. So I'm a year behind.

19:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm last year. Yeah, see, well, see what happens. And you've got that button clicked for get updates as soon as possible, obviously.

19:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, something happened.

19:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All right, we'll see. We'll see what happens. Yep, last night I was writing an article because someone from Microsoft had documented a new community feature. That's in the free version of Teams. That's part of Windows 11. And in reading it I realized I need to write an editorial about this, not an article about what happened, because nobody cares about this app, no one's ever going to use it.

20:14
But Microsoft has now referred to the free version of Teams, by my account, by five different names. They made it seem in September like this was going to be a brand new app and it was going to behave completely differently. And it is the same app and it behaves almost identically. It's just that it's not an item pinned to the taskbar by default, it's just a shortcut, a normal app shortcut. Now and Copilot has taken its place to that little special list of item icons, for lack of a better term I went to their website last night.

20:45
I went, I looked back at their press releases and blog posts and what I found was the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life, which is this Microsoft has multiple versions of Teams and if you're using the commercial version of Teams which I think we would all agree is the real version of Teams, like Teams, actual Teams. I mean you look at Teams just like literally Teams, teams and the not. Yeah, the name of that app in Windows is Microsoft Teams Work or School, it's not Teams. The app that is named Teams in Windows is the one that comes with Windows, the one no one's ever going to use, and if you've upgraded to the new version of Teams, you could have your classic version of Teams and your new version of Teams, the consumer version of Teams. It's hilarious, and so I like, I like that the Teams team has followed Windows 11 down this lack of clarity sinkhole, so that's been kind of fun.

21:35
I just, I, just I wrote like a thousand words about this last time. I'm going to bear everyone with it here, but that's part of Windows 11. 23 is two. In fact, it's one of the sort of new features that, depending on how you got it earlier, if you did, may or may not have rolled out to your PC, but it will now, so you'll get that. There's not much else that's new in 23H2 that you couldn't have gotten, I'd say, over the last month, I guess since the end of September. So it's out supposedly. I don't know.

22:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And do we miss chat? Are we sad that chat is now?

22:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, well, you know, here's the irony of chat. Which was that item, right? So chat was a front end to the consumer version of Microsoft Teams, right, and which no one uses and no one should use. It's silly, except for one thing, actually the consumer version of Teams is pretty nice. It's a kind of a clean, lightweight version of Teams. I think the name throws people off. They think it's not for families and friends and things. They had Skype. Was that brand not excellent or something? I don't know what they're doing there, but it's squad. Yeah, skype pro or something I don't know. But so chat was a front.

22:51
So this goes back to the pandemic. Remember, in 20, it would have been 2020, the end of 2020, microsoft introduced a feature to Windows 10, which was current at that time, called Meet Now, and Meet Now was a response to both the pandemic and also to competitors like Zoom that were opening up everything for free to everybody, right? And so with Meet Now, you could click on this little icon near the tray there and a little panel would pop up and you could start a text, audio or video chat with anyone in the world. They didn't even have to have Skype, it would just work with anyone. All you needed was some way to reach them Email or text message, whatever, not an email, an email or not a text message, I'm sorry Email, or you could send them a link or whatever it was. And they didn't have to have a Skype account, they didn't have to have a Microsoft account. I don't remember the numbers anymore, but I think it was 30 hours of free video chats a month or something. They were responding to the pandemic. It was nice. And when Windows 11 came around, of course, by that point, teams is huge and they're trying to bank on that, and that's when the consumer version of Teams came up and chat was the consumer Teams version of Meet Now, right, same thing. You didn't have to have an account. A simple little UI. Let you do the free calling, everything. It was honestly a nice little feature.

24:08
So in 23H2, as we get rid of chat, that item icon that was in the task bar, and we replaced that with co-pilot, we just have a standard Teams consumer, as I'll call it icon shortcut sitting there. Interestingly, it offers two modes, right, there's a mini mode, which is the default, and it looks like chat. It's a cute little front end to the rest of the app and if you need more than that, you can click the little button up in the title bar and it switches in. Well, doesn't switch, actually it was a different window, but you can switch into the normal app mode so you can go back and forth between the two modes if you want. So it's honestly, it's kind of the same thing. It's just a. It's just not a weird hard-coded Item that's pinned to the taskbar to by default anymore. I think co-pilot is more important now. So Hope that makes sense. If it doesn't, don't worry about it. Right click and uninstall it, because no one's ever gonna use it.

25:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay so we've always the problem right. It's like this is a great app, except for nobody using it, so I can't talk to anybody.

25:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know exactly and, like I need another messaging app.

25:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know it's hard to actually late now. The time to get this right was 20, was March of 20, yeah they should have. This could have been soon.

25:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like they should have kept it as Skype. I think Skype was a good brand, think it still is, and they could have called it, you know, like they did with the Windows 2000 Skype powered by Microsoft Teams. You know, even if it wasn't true and just would have been much clearer.

25:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you know, the reality of this is straight political, like yeah, I know it's that technology, it's, it's almost. If you're on a team, you must have made somebody angry.

25:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, sometimes the branding or the positioning works. Teams is tough because its name invokes a work related. You know team situation, right, I mean, and it's.

25:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're exactly right, it's like it's okay. You know that's wrong with. Yeah, this is the work stuff, here's the consumer stuff. The fact that you keep trying to tie them together just hurts both. Yep, it's too bad. Yeah, I think it's too bad. It's a second a day with the podcasting. What we did a lot via Skype and, and that was, though it was, the evil path leads your distance and then eventually, over time, is I'm saying to a guest hey, just I'll connect with you in Skype.

26:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're like what's going well, wow, I know well, used for 15 years.

26:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I haven't heard of that app in a year. Let me update it. Yeah, you said.

26:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I bet it parallels like the people who still get print newspapers, like they're just kind of old and they're not changing anything. You know, like there there.

26:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just Often you open Skype again, like you should do that. Well, you know, actually, I see what's there, I still use it regularly, and it's been heavily exploited too, so you'll be saturated. All kinds of nastiness, right.

26:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like co-pilots in there, you can chat with a bot if you want. Honestly, it's not a bad app. No.

26:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If a team gave it some love and cleaned it up, it really could be a great consumer product. I yep and I do, and everybody already has it right, like you.

27:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I see a new computer with Windows 11, right, because this is the first one. It doesn't come with it filter which is so stupid.

27:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I get an email once a year from Skype reminding me that I have site credit.

27:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes. I know and that's the time you use it, and then you, your Skype credit is good for another year.

27:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, exactly, I send a text message to my site. This is sad, and then I present. I preserve my $12 and 57. That's funny.

27:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do exactly the same thing, oh, except that I also I do use Skype. I just don't use that. That was when you get the credit, so you could call phone numbers. Right, right, exactly, yeah, no, I still have a couple of friends who use Skype, so I keep it around, but they've been. Those people have been dropping off. There was a guy who I hadn't heard from on a few months and he finally contacted me. He's like how do you feel about Instagram messaging?

27:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
and I'm like I sure, okay you know Very much with certain I'm, you know, trying to phase out certain messages like what else do you use? Let me find you there. Let's find the matrix of messaging apps.

28:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Don't go to Instagram messaging, please. No, I know why would anybody, although you live on Instagram? So maybe it's good for you, you. You post on.

28:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Instagram. I don't, but I don't actually use Instagram messaging, and so what happens is every once in a while, just like this. Yeah, well, the Skype credit thing he was talking about. I'll see the little Notification thing and I'll look at it and it'll be like oh boy, like I don't. I don't think of Instagram as a messaging app, I guess. Yeah, yeah, I think of it as an ad delivery app with occasional photos.

28:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Exactly. You know, I, a couple of weeks ago, rejoined Facebook Mostly because I wanted to see what was going on.

28:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I alerted you when I saw that I know, I know, I know I can hear it a lot of people.

28:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And and when I and I did when I my first post was link back to mask it on so you can see that's me on the Twitter social and you know I can verify it. But uh, it was mostly just to see what's going on with this information as we lead up To the election and during the Israeli Hamas war. Yeah, and it is, it is. It is actually much worse than I thought it was. I use it every day. It's got a lay down hill.

29:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I hate what has become and listen, Metta is horrible.

29:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
they're evil.

29:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
but Threads isn't bad, ironically, but Threads is not bad, but here's the problem. Well, there's two problems. There's no API, so I can't post the threads automatically from my site when I publish articles, and I would do that right now. I'd be willing to make that transition right now. I know it's coming, but it's not there yet. But the other one, and this is inexcusable there are threads blocks built into my Instagram feed and I think now on Facebook too.

29:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That you cannot say no to.

29:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am not an Instagram to read text. I am there to see photos. That is inexcusable.

29:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, an Instagram has ads every three pictures. Now I mean I know every three. I think it's worse than that, maybe even more. Yeah, it looks like it's every other picture actually.

30:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't ever want to see anything sponsored. I don't care about basketball dunk contests or dogs being funny or whatever nonsense is in there. I certainly the ads are just Dear. God, stop yeah it's awful hot.

30:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It feels like the ad populist has certainly hit us in podcasting. His sponsorship is harder and harder, but I think it's hitting everything.

30:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.

30:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
All of us are.

30:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I had this conversation with the guys who do our newsletter about the web ads. Stuff has gone down the tubes the past couple of months.

30:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know what I really think is it's all gone to Facebook and Google. I think 90% has gone to Google, actually, right.

30:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So maybe I'm complaining about the wrong thing. Maybe what I should be doing is hailing our Facebook overlords and embracing them more and bringing them into my life.

30:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're now in charge and, incidentally, if you'd like a little box you can blow up your tires with, I got one right here on Instagram.

30:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like what it was? A tiny Tim. It's like thank you sir, we have another.

31:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's every other picture, or every? Yeah, I think so it's crazy.

31:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I also, I the other. This didn't happen today, I think yesterday or the day before. I opened it first thing in the morning and it said right at the top of the feed you have already seen all of your new posts. Here's some.

31:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Here's some of the stuff.

31:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just woke up.

31:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We wouldn't want you to be postless, so here yeah, here's some.

31:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You haven't looked at 12 hours and they couldn't look at it. They could just say, yeah, nobody loves you.

31:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's actually and I almost hate to admit this, but it's brought home how much I miss Twitter, because you could actually go to Twitter If you were in. You know you needed a hit. Yes, A little dopamine fix.

31:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I love the baller Okay.

31:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could go to Twitter.

31:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let me make it a little more uh uh, business centric. I would say from my perspective, before the Elon Musk thing, people would complain about Twitter sometimes. They would talk about the toxicity. They would talk about famous people getting on there and spreading misinformation.

32:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
To which Elon's at home on beer.

32:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly so. So, and my, my, my experience at that time was nothing like that. In my own little world on Twitter, and whatever little group I was in, I found Twitter to be very useful as a direct way to communicate with two people who maybe watch this podcast or read what I write and or who were my, you know, colleagues in the industry or whatever was, and I never saw any of that stuff ever. It wasn't until Elon Musk took over that this thing started going. We can't link to Twitter from my website anymore. We used to have a Twitter feed on the side. Um, it's gotten really bad, and now I see a lot of Twitter is horrible, though, and it was not like that before. So I this is not so much the introduction of terribleness as it is the loosening of controls that prevented that terribleness before is how I do it.

32:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It turns out the old Twitter was doing stuff that was useful. Yeah, exactly.

33:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And now there's really nothing. I mean, it's just, everything is gone to hell.

33:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I guess I'm sounding like an old man, but uh, you know but what do you do now, when you wake up at three in the morning?

33:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
and you wake up at three in the morning and you're just looking for a little dopamine to get back to sleep.

33:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Well, I go to, I go to truth social. That's what I do.

33:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it depends. Try that.

33:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Somebody's posting in real time.

33:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right about then too, ironically, yeah, all right, exactly.

33:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Um, okay, we've got to track there, that's okay.

33:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You, you still, uh, just a few. You did the ISO and you got 22 H two.

33:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We should mention that, although I know uh, sorry, I should say I did not explicitly download the, so I downloaded the media creation tool which downloaded the ice to, and it got 22 H two. It's possible and, by the way, like I said, by the time you hear this, or next week it's, it's going to switch over eventually. I mean, even Microsoft will figure that one out.

33:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
One of our disc orders said she got 22 H three.

33:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I thought so too. Yeah, so I don't, I can't, I don't want to say that that's not the case. I just haven't tried it explicitly. So that's, that's one of the three ways to do it.

34:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sarah, Sarah says she got, and she's even put put up the proof installed on 10, 31. 23.

34:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Good Cause, she's a liar.

34:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We believe that screenshot was edited.

34:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I believe you. Yeah, no, that's good. Good, that's good. That's, that's an habit. I'm really so. It will happen across the board. Okay, so, uh, just some insider stuff. Microsoft is killing the Windows Insider MVP program, which I think, of course, triggers the natural question there was an MVP program for the Windows Insider. I mean, like what, what, what exactly do you do to qualify to that? Like I, you know you, you install a lot of bills or something that doesn't make sense. So I look, personally, I don't feel that.

34:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, and nobody has like nobody, nobody's losing their MVP, they're being shifted to other categories. Okay, there we go. I mean, here's the joke, right? And MVP? The MVP program is really built around an individual products, in the sense that somebody's relationship with the product means that they engage so copiously inside of the community that Microsoft awards them something. Right. We actually look at the MVP categories like if you go to now the other direction, so you understand, you become an MVP because you engage with a product, you share it in the community and you get an award. But then you're told you're in that category and those categories have nothing to do with the product per se. They're sort of centralized groupings. That's right, I would argue. Even admitting there was a Windows Insider MVP program kind of breaks that concept, because really they weren't called that, they were in a different grouping. So you may have just actually revealed a budget line item.

35:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think you might be right, actually, because it is a cost center.

35:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Every you know sort of the reality of this is all these product teams spend a certain amount of money to support a certain number of MVPs, and so I think, if you hold that around and so you know why you say it, Things have changed so much.

36:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, back in the day Microsoft had RDP and TAP programs for corporate customers which was a way to get them inside early products early on, new products early on and new versions early on and test things out, make changes based on feedback. You know, the MVP program was sort of like is sort of like that for individuals. These are for people who are either enthusiasts or industry insiders who you know maybe implement SharePoint and thus RA SharePoint MVP, because they're super useful in that community. They help other people with their problems and so forth.

36:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They write a great blog or they make a podcast or something.

36:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It sounds good on the surface. Unfortunately, you know, the MVP program also has that kind of dark side where it is kind of about freebies and insider access and these little briefings you have from time to time. And they have an MVP summit every year in Redmond, still to this day, right, which is a big deal, you know. Yeah, you have to pay to go, I guess, but it's kind of a fun thing to do to get together with your fellow nerds. But it's always kind of rub me the wrong way and this has never been a popular opinion. I don't, I've never. It's always kind of bothered me. I, I it's just because you're not an MVP, Paul. Is that what we're?

37:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
really talking about. I was an MVP.

37:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was an MVP and I left for ethical reasons. One was that I ran into issues where they would have briefings about coming products, which I did not attend but people would suspect I did secretly, you know, to learn about stuff. And also the free gifts from Microsoft stuff I can't. I can't take gifts you know like and it just didn't make sense, paul, you're sold fashioned. I think the word you're looking for is credible.

37:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, integrity honest, you know one would argue you can't sign the MVP and DA and do your job. Yeah, yeah, I think that's correct. That's right. That would be a reasonable reason. I've been an MVP now coming on 20 years and you know if it's an interesting line to run along. I do turn a blind eye to things I could see for exactly that reason. There are times you can only talk when you don't know.

38:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not that you need me to say this, I guess, but I've known you for many years and you've never you don't violate any NDAs or anything like that ever Like you're very.

38:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're an MVP because that's your business, right? I mean, is that yeah?

38:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, because I've been a community person for a really long time. Yeah, yeah, this is.

38:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, it's sort of a you know back in the day. It would have been people on Outlook news, as I think we used to call it, or whatever that was called in news groups, right.

38:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Actually before then it would have been Original MVP's were on top.

38:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly, I'm sorry.

38:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh wow, you know back. Yeah, I did that those days yeah.

38:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, because that was the community you were in, there helping other people to products right. These days it's on public news groups, it's on blogs.

38:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I see that. I even go to Microsoft support pages and it'll say MVP or MVP Gold or whatever.

38:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, that's where they hang out.

38:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They'll hang out on techcommunitymicrosoftcom or whatever, and those are people you can trust. They don't work for Microsoft, but they have.

39:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh wow, You've said so many things wrong there. No, they're not people. I can trust they are people. That part was great. They are.

39:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
MVPs Most valuable professionals yeah.

39:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Everybody comes with some baggage of how they look at that. That's right.

39:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is somewhere related to this or very related to this. I've often tried to explain to various groups at Microsoft If you just brief me about something, I can't write about it until you say it's okay, right. But if you don't, I can and I do. And if you don't want me, well, not divulging something at a time, brief me, tell me on the record, right, and then it's over.

39:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And the joke, of course, is that your speculation because you've been doing it longer than most of those folks is pretty accurate, just because you know how things go down.

39:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, it wasn't until this year, richard. That's the problem. This year has been the roulette wheel. Let's see what They've been called 23H2. Right, so this year has been a. I'm going to be in therapy for years because of 23H2.

40:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I kind of like 23H2 not being, not being for sure.

40:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I said this Okay.

40:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm pretty sure that I was right about there's multiple teams working here. They're not necessarily speaking to each other, and that's what's making this blurry, right, but Okay, and you saw that paper come out and that was okay. Dad showed up and told us all we had to play nice to each other, and so that's what's going to be.

40:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, with the copilates. Yes, it's not just copilates, it's also with the insider release. Oh, okay, yes, but with the Windows 11 update schedule and the kind of cadence of all that man, I don't know what's going on, but I Would you if you were an MVP?

40:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, okay, so there you go.

40:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Do you think those people have more?

40:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
clarity than we do no way. Well, I mean, once upon a time you got insider briefings and things, but these days, with so much of it being done in open source anyway, it's like listen, you want to read the it's on GitHub, you want to read the code?

41:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'll read the, I'll read me or whatever. Yeah, there's the only thing in the history of Windows that is even sort of close to this probably was Windows 8. Now, windows 8 was so insane it made no sense, and there are, every time you ask questions, like the sort of flat face answer you got where it's like. You know, you could tell they had no idea they were winging it. You know, you could just tell. And there was a point there, as Windows 8 was kind of colliding down that path, it was just going to happen.

41:34
It was too late to stop it, where I just sort of thought you know what? I'm just going to enjoy the kernel of the ride for what it is. This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life, but let's just have fun with it. And I'm having trouble with doing that now. I don't know if it's because I'm older or whatever, but I just feel like there's some good stuff going on here. I mean, I wish they would communicate clearly and provide some clarity on the schedule, especially for businesses, and I just don't see that. I don't quite. I don't understand it.

42:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I do think you're struggling. I think you know team focus has shifted. There's been a number of. You know Windows 10 was the proving ground of what does like when it's not the center of the company. How do we move forward? And they've tried a bunch of things. Some have gone better than others. Right 11 is its own weird you know story all by itself, but you know we're getting a new future.

42:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel Paul's pain because I think Paul considers it his solemn duty this is his job is to explain what the hell is going on.

42:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I, yeah, I mean, and I I'd like to be able to accurately, you know, but I look. I don't want to lose track of the fact that there are some good things happening. You know, for all of the weirdness around updating Windows that also came, that was the proving ground on Windows 10 and they made a lot of mistakes with Windows as a service. But on the other end of it, you know guess what? They can update this operating system at the drop of a hat if they have to. They have so many ways to update almost any component of Windows when and where they need to. That stuff has actually got a lot more reliable. It is better. They do it too much. You know they're a little spastic about it.

43:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I just got five insider updates this month.

43:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, but they, but the process has gotten better, so they did prove that out in Windows 10. That's good, and just from the perspective of someone who cares about Windows more than anything else at Microsoft this AI thing I love that it has lifted the Windows vote along with the rest of the company, because Windows was kind of being left by the wayside on a lot of stuff.

43:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And we're definitely in a path where it's not like another operating system is going to be more relevant. Operating systems are on their way to becoming irrelevant. Yeah, the same way that microcode and CPUs is irrelevant, or BIOS is irrelevant. How dare you? I'm being blunt.

43:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I use Linux because it's irrelevant.

43:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Let me take a little break Out of the box, already irrelevant.

43:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want to when we come back. It's irrelevant. So use what you want. Use what you want. Okay, please go to my page right.

44:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're going to take a little break. Come back.

44:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There is. The insider program does have some updates. In fact I'm in the middle of one right now. We'll talk about that. Yeah, I'm going to start with you, but first a word from our sponsor, new rava Doraiva meeting room, audio technology and it. You know, you've heard me talk about it for some time now. It really has a history of wowing it.

44:32
Professionals like at Duquesne, duquesne University has this is kind of amazing A hundred 100, nureva devices installed. You know, I imagine they tried one. They said, wow, this is great. We have lots of lecture halls, lots of meeting rooms, let's put them everywhere. One of Duquesne senior technologists said, quote I cannot say enough about how impressed I am. Audio has been my life's work for 30 years and I'm amazed at what an Auraiva mic and speaker bar will do. Nureva is easy to install. If you could, instead of saw us install a sound bar, you can install a Nureva sound speaker and microphone. Nureva's patent microphone missed technology puts a thousand microphones in the room so everybody everywhere in the room can be heard clearly, no matter where they're facing. This is so important for your huddle room, your all hands room, your lecture hall, because you've got people who are not in person anymore. Right, they're at home and they're on a conference call and you know, bad audio just kills it. Nureva solves it.

45:36
Nureva just made another leap forward with the introduction of their pro series featuring the HDL 310, that's for large rooms, and the HDL 410 for extra large rooms. For the first time, you can get pro audio performance and plug and play simplicity in the same system. You know, in the old days, multi component pro AV systems were the only way to do this at great expense, highly technical. You had to have technicians to tune it. It was just tough to get performance in large and extra large rooms. This is suddenly. It's very, very easy. Just try the online demo. On the online demo you'll hear the Nureva expert being heard and he gets under a table behind a pillar. It doesn't matter what the obstructions are, it doesn't matter where the speaker is facing.

46:27
The HDL 410, that's for the big rooms covers 35 by 55, 35 feet by 55 feet and it's just two mics and speaker bars. And one of the cool things is, if it's a divisible room, you know you've got the device divider open, you've got the two, but you close it, it senses that and it can automatically now be two independent systems. That's super cool. The HDL 410 also features a unified coverage map which processes mic pickup from the two devices at the same time. So when they're unified it creates a giant single mic array. Close the divider, now you've got two. It's really, really smart. The HDL 310, that's still pretty big, 30 feet by 30 feet, and that's just one mic and speaker bar for 900 square feet.

47:16
Nureva's all about simplicity. The HDL 310 takes about 30 minutes to install With two of them. The 410 takes twice that 60 minutes. 60 minutes. And calibration, forget it. It's continuous, it's automatic. It continuously adapts to changes. Close the divider, it knows it. Put up tables, chairs, it knows. Fill it with a thousand people or just five, it knows. And with the Nureva console, which is their cloud-based management platform, you can do it all without leaving your seat. It loves this. They don't have to go to each room and calibrate it. You can update firmware, you can check device status, you can change settings all from the console, wherever you are. Bottom line with the Pro Series, nureva makes it simple to quickly and cost-effectively equip more of your spaces for remote collaboration. The time has come to take a look at Nureva N-U-R-E-V-A, nurevacom slash Twit, t-w-i-t, nureva Pro-A-V Performance and Plug and Play Simplicity together. At last, nurevacom slash Twit. We thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly and the mighty and the confused Paul Therrat.

48:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Speaking of confused, I thought I muted myself when I left, but I didn't.

48:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sorry, I have a button here. I can press it and there's no sound. Try that. No, I didn't even try it. I didn't hear it because I muted you right away.

48:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I've worked at home for 30 years. I talk to myself a lot.

48:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As soon as I saw you get up, my finger reaches over here, see this button. Boom and you're silent.

48:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, I usually mute when I leave. Yeah, it's fine, I don't know I have the power.

49:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, so much power. I have so much power. So I'm getting my insider bill Boy. This is taking forever by the way?

49:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So during the ad I checked the Windows Insider blog and I was expecting maybe there was a new bill today. There wasn't for the release preview, but there was for Canary and Dev.

49:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I believe. Well, this might be an old I might not have, although it says I got one on the 29th, so I don't, it's not that old.

49:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There have been a lot lately, that that is true. But this the release notes for the Canary bill has an interesting thing in here. Starting with this bill, the maps and movies and TV apps will no longer be installed by default when using a clean install, and I don't know if that means they're being deprecated in the future or going away entirely. I think we can all agree Windows Maps has sort of outlived its usefulness now that we don't have phones, right, the idea before was you could start doing directions, a look up on your PC and send it to your phone. It was kind of a cool idea. Movies and TV is their app for DRM protected content that you buy through the Microsoft Store and or get through movies anywhere, that service where you can link all your services. Perhaps they're going to add that functionality to the new media player app. It is an old school, almost Windows 8 looking at. Well, that's not fair. It's probably a Windows 10 looking app, I guess, but it's. It looks out of place in Windows 11 for sure. So I wonder if that means they're getting rid of it. I didn't know, yep, at first, I've heard of anything like that Also, since we're on that bill they announced this earlier, possibly because they put it in a different channel.

50:44
But during the out of box experience of Windows setup. So you buy a new PC, you open up that white screen, comes the blue you know Windows logo tells you have to sign into an account, et cetera, et cetera. You have to be connected to a network for that to work. And if you this wouldn't happen on a new PC I guess. But if you built your own PC, perhaps, or if you were rolling out well, you wouldn't go through the OOB. Actually I guess it's only for white box guys. Anyway, it's going to give you an option to install drivers during setup so you can get online Eliminating that complaint. If you do have the Windows 11 field guide and I remember this only because I just updated this chapter there are ways around that stuff. You don't have to be connected to the internet to install Windows 11, but we'll have to test in the future if that's going to change. I can't imagine I'll completely get rid of it, but that is kind of interesting.

51:35
And then on the dev channel builds not much there they're going to let local accounts access co-pilot Windows for limited number of queries. That's kind of interesting. I just wrote about co-pilot for the book. I have to say there's a lot of a Microsoft account integration there. If you use it to create an image, for example, it saves it to the Bing image creator backend which is tied to your Microsoft accounts. You can always access it from the web. I could see it being less useful with a local account. That's about it, not too much else.

52:07
The two builds today are not profound, and even less profound were the two we got last week. We're adding a recently added folder to the top half of the start menu for new apps. Typically those have been recommended not in a folder, but they're screwing around with it. I guess that's in the dev channel. Not a big deal. Then the beta channel build from last Thursday were two new features we've seen elsewhere, which is that system component thing I've been talking about new interface and settings. Then the game bar rebranding used to be Xbox game bar, actually, I think if you're in 23H2, it's called game bar. We've already done that. Obviously they're testing it in the side of the screen Because it is November 1, as we record this, we looked at stat counter today. They're the only analysts. I don't know market. What do we call these people, market researchers, whatever Left standing for this kind of information. Windows 11 actually saw a little bump in the past month. It's been pretty flat this year, but now Windows 11 is about 26% of all Windows versions. It's almost entirely consumer.

53:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I do I do I think? It's on the enterprise. Folks have no interest, not a thing.

53:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, actually, that's an interesting way to look at it, because these numbers match the way I look at Microsoft's revenues consumer versus commercial one to three. Windows 10 still accounts for almost 70% of all Windows usage, compared to 26% for Windows 11. If we do a little math and this is not accurate I don't want anyone to hold me to this because this does not translate exactly but if there are 1.4 billion Windows users overall, that means it's just under a billion still on Windows 10, about 970 million and about 366 million on Windows 11. So three to one, roughly Right.

54:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I've got to say on that it's your thought, that it's business people primarily that are not moving over.

54:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, yeah, and that's definitely in the energy. Yeah, there's no reason to move off of 10. 11 doesn't bring anything. It breaks a bunch of things. Group policy is not symmetrical. Although it's close now, the only now, and maybe 23H2 will be the one where for an enterprise person, it's like okay, this is not a big shift, other than the training overhead for the stuff that's moving to random. Yeah.

54:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think they have addressed enough of the concerns that that can start happening.

54:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, we'll see you next time and that's why they were they were. They've been after that for a year with the hate 25 is it for 10, which nobody believes, at least in on the end, yeah, yeah.

54:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, by the way, I Don't. We don't talk about this too much, but every once in a while Microsoft does add something to what is 10. Yeah, I guess we could technically say it's. It's not really a feature, but but they had little things right. The start menu changes a little bit there, things of the task, for sometimes it's Um do you understand how happy the enterprise is with the operating system not changing?

55:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
because, yes, we've got other stuff to do, like this is not important.

55:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, even as an individual and I considered just maybe I should just use Windows 10, you know, but as a person and not just because I have to know what's happening and what does love and etc. But I find Windows 11 to be kind of antiquated from a UI perspective. I think, yeah, it's, it seemed fresh Windows 10. Sorry, it seemed fresh, you know at the time and but it's, you can tell looking at it Now. It's like this is phone.

55:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They've made this look like fun, I think you know and I'm keeping one workstation on 10, moved another one to 11, like I'm definitely trying to live in the mix, but I'm, yeah, plus I'm decorporizing them, all of my machines now as I live becoming in five fan boy. I gotta see that article and they the. The piece you were talking about about the market share piece, the biggest that whole thing is Mac OS going from 15% to 20% in a year. Yeah, that's a huge?

56:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, right, because the, the, the gain of Windows 11, roughly matches the, the decline of Windows 10. Although, by the way, what does 20 over a year? Pretty solid, right. 72, 71% to 69%, that was all it dropped in one year. This, this is a conversation. We're gonna have a lot. This is got something standing right. Big enterprise, you're right. Yeah, comparing it to the alternative OS alternative OS is, yeah, yeah, this is, and I think I talked about this last week. You know, windows 11 Was a response to Microsoft sphere of this happening that the combination of Apple Silicon and all the performance and battery life gains there, yeah, and that's kind of device like nature of it, taking away the complexity of the horribleness of the PC and the fan noise and all. So it is a serious competitive threat to them.

56:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They. Since the M series started, they've simply been the. If you have a choice of computer, this is what you buy. Yeah, especially the air variants are reasonably priced right. Unbelievable performance, stunning battery life, like if you are open to choice, why would you consider?

57:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
anything. Well, I, I mean I hate myself. I can't speak for everyone.

57:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I Know, we know this much.

57:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, we're both doing our best. Impersonation for us. Thompson here, right, but Paul has.

57:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul has max. Do you have any max, richard? Yeah, I do. I always have a man. Yeah, you don't have any max at all, richard. No, do you? Do you look over with some interest in envy? Well, you just described a pretty nice machine.

57:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so again, I'm a hardware guy. So when I look at the hardware, I'm like, yeah, oh, this is gorgeous in every and not just visually. And and although tactile, beautiful too From an engineer's perspective. It is the most beautiful machine made and has it so Years in a row. So macOS is what holds you back, or well, yes, and, and Apple's ecosystem in general doesn't fill the joy. Right Now, there is an iPad floating around this house. It is owned by she, who must be obeyed, and I do covet it, because all the other tablet options are horrible.

58:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, right, I've gone the there's no reason not to use that. You can use an iPad. This is a standalone device.

58:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I do that. It works fine, and I think I'm and she's got the magic keyboard too, which is obscenely expensive for what it is. But you know what? That is a gorgeous machine and it is it's her morning routine.

58:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, so she, I'm sorry, she is an iPad pro. You're talking about an actual productivity machine here, oh yeah.

58:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now, mentally she works in the CAD world, so she has all. She also has a think-pad of sorus right Like she has one of the things Pads because she needs so much horsepower for the CAD right side of of clothing engineering and that and that. There's nothing elegant about a t-series Lenovo like that's the dining skills, our supply right like that's nice.

59:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's elegant in a way and it's if in a form follows function. Yeah, in a way, right, I mean it's a tool.

59:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's elegant Stacey has. Is not that machine that this is like a workstation class?

59:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I have a t-series. I love my t-series, yeah elegant like a sledgehammer yeah. Well, it gets a job very good. So if somebody were from another planet and never used anything and listen to show, I think their initial reaction would be are you guys, nuts? Why, why do you put up with this?

59:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But that's like say but if a, an alien came to earth now, they would think the cats were in charge. I mean, I can't explain. Well, that's true too you know why everything works the way it works, but um no I excellent point we I don't like this, that, but we, yeah, because you're wrong.

59:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not the cats are in charge, corn is in charge. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, biologically, yeah, remember that.

01:00:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it was the Aztecs of the Mayans. They were genetically some huge, they were the people of the court and literally physically, yeah, we are now those people because of corn syrup and yeah, um, we're worse than that actually, I believe, genetically, I think there's more corn in us than there were in them. Uh, that's also another different topic, but um, no, I mean, why do we so? Look, when it comes to Um productivity work, what I would call traditional productivity work, we're still in a world where you're gonna need the big screen, full-size keyboard pointer of some kind. Um, you know, windows still get nails, that stuff for me, and I still have a larger diversity utilization than back when you're in the apple wild garden.

01:00:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You got to stay in the garden and so yeah, this is a device.

01:00:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He has a device focus over there and I'm not saying it's bad, I there. Obviously there are younger people coming up out of school Especially, who grow up on apple devices and google services, and they're kind of into that world. Um, we talked sometimes about this weird Markdown, uh world of, like, light editors and note takers and things, and those tend to be bigger on the, the mac, than they are on the PC. You know, we kind of in many ways the pc, by which I mean the windows pc, is sort of settling into almost a workstation role, yeah, um, whereas the mac is for, uh, general users, um, I mean, you know, who are comfortable in the apple ecosystem. And then, of course, creative types we're using, you know, video editors or whatever that might be, not that you can't do that on windows, right, but that's stuff that I think those people, creative people, I think still tingling and there are classes of development.

01:01:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're done well on the mac and they're class development. They're done better windows yeah yeah, right, that's right.

01:01:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Very hard. This stuff is going to change. I mean, um, I was talking to somebody yesterday about this, my percent, the percent if you look at my apps, so I kind of pinned to the task for now, the percentage of apps that a cross platform and or web based has grown Dramatically over the years. You know, 10, 20 years ago especially, it would have been all native windows apps. That was the advantage, that was the point. And, um, we, we, great new apps like a notion or a clip champ, which Microsoft bought and includes the windows, our web apps, and they're very, I mean, they're not elegant. You know they're powerful.

01:02:18
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, microsoft had trouble solving the Command density problem in Microsoft office. They did the ribbon, but it's still difficult because these apps are so big and complex.

01:02:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and if they and loading talking to me about visual studio like the Well same, yeah, same thing, and it's, it's.

01:02:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's in photoshop is like this too. You know, if you use photoshop a lot, even photoshop elements, depending on what you do you can launch a window like this happens when you say for web, the safer web, web window is an application I think was written by some other company. It's a little different than the rest of photoshop. Um, and it's. It's just different because that that app is so big and complex and UIs you see, an office can be like this, uis you see in visual studio application With a version number.

01:03:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's a teenager, that is like this right, right, right it's so.

01:03:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's just of being around. That. It's the. The biggest benefit of windows is. It's a killie's heel, uh, and this is true of any platform, probably, but just because we're talking about windows, it's this backwards compatibility. Yeah, no api will be left behind. You know mentality that microsoft has, which has served it well in some ways and and it is, and is this distinctive aspect.

01:03:29
Right, I mean apple very aggressively is chopped off Old versions of things as they went, and that also has pros and cons, right? So I know, I don't remember. I don't know the mac as well, but uh, two, three versions go, mac did their or apple did their ui refresh, whatever version it was. And uh, and you know, when you come from the windows world you look at that, it's a little heartbreaking because they already had done all the hard work Of getting rid of legacy craft. So when they changed their ui, it actually changed everywhere. What a concept. In windows it's an archaeological dig of different strata of uis and technologies and you know it comes with overhead and it's just the way.

01:04:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And the architecture of the intel processor is the same thing. Right, exactly the same thing. Yeah, you're carrying the same legacy around. Those original 63 instructions that were in the 8086 Are still in there.

01:04:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so Backwards compatibility is great, but it's also becomes a problem, you know, yeah, anyway uh that's so and it's an answer to this question.

01:04:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's why you know you know, neither is Ruthlessly killing your grandparents, which is the apple attitude.

01:04:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess you just certainly know they did some some really amazing things though, for instance, when they went to apple silica and their rosetta to compatibility layer really worked. In fact, it works so well that most people don't even know that they're not running.

01:04:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
See that itself. That's maybe that's an ideal example of good decision making, and but also like decisively choosing the right place to make a difference, right, people disagree with this, but I often tell you people talk about oh, there's only one web at wendering, I'm sorry, web rendering engine, sort of there isn't really, but chromium is the big thing. Oh, too bad, microsoft couldn't have kept doing their own thing. It's important to have variety and diversity and blah, blah, blah and there is, but maybe not at that level. And uh, if go, if apple had taken that heart of a stance on their chipset, they wouldn't have done what you just described and those old apps would have run poorly for some number of years until developers caught up. And uh, that's the problem we see on the microsoft side with harm, because no one is adopting this platform, because no one's using it. And on the apple side, they can just say we're switching, so you're using it and it's, it's a different world.

01:05:44
But apple, in that case, I think it made an incredibly right decision. Um, and just, you know, I think and I know this doesn't it's not as profound, but I think when, when microsoft just gave up on the never-ending treadmill of trying to keep up with web standards and making websites all like the same and just went with chromium. That was the right decision. I mean, they screwed everything else up since then. But the idea that you should be competing on ui, security and privacy and whatever the you know and features, uh, is maybe the right one. You know it's. I think that battles over, but of course, apple actually disagrees on that one too, because they have safari. So so, yeah, who can say and it's?

01:06:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
doing pretty good, so it's interesting. I didn't know they had a five percent increase. That's really interesting.

01:06:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And that's a staggering number when that is 25 more.

01:06:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, apples Market share used to be like microsoft stock price singles single flat line. Yeah, forever, you know forever, and there's been little bumps. But you know the. The apple silicon story to me for the first couple years was it didn't move the needle that much. But uh, what's happening now? You know it's starting to move, so We'll see. I can't use I still. I kind of hate the mac. I, like richard, I love the, the hardware. What do you hate?

01:07:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm just curious. It's an interesting. Every time I pick it up I'm noise it takes me you could put.

01:07:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You could put a timer on it Half soon before he throws it back down and says no, it's usually less than a minute, it's just some it. I find them very difficult to use, and and I use I actually. I mean, I always have one at least, and I sometimes more than one. Um, I do use them from time to time. They're around. It's not like I, it's not like. Uh, it's been five years or something. I I haven't used one since I came to Mexico, but I was using one right before I came to Mexico. Uh, I just don't like it. I don't know how to explain it I. That's completely very happy. Yeah, even chromo s to me is a little more familiar. Uh, maybe because it's a little more like windows.

01:07:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When my you are, you are five thousand dollar. M3 max Notebook comes, I will do to get one really yeah 16. Uh, no, only 14. I don't, I don't like a 16. I decided, I thought I did.

01:08:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I want one, I can you. I want a laptop I can use as a portable patient device. If the plan goes down, if um. Or tray table.

01:08:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't want.

01:08:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't want to be like that guy at the end of uh titanic heat. There wasn't room for him on there.

01:08:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know there's always room on a 16. No, I got the 14 because I can run, you know, three, six k monograms if I want off of it. So if I need more screen real estate, but I wanted real portability. But. But the only reason I mention it, uh, is to say that I will be Trying windows on arm, on parallels on it and I think you will find it is wonderful.

01:08:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I think it's kind of interesting.

01:08:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I mean. Yeah, this is, you know, a 40 core gpu. Uh, I mean, this thing is a beast. Yeah, yeah, they, they were claiming uh, 11 times faster than the intel iMac. Whenever you see, something is 11 times faster, that's what was the?

01:08:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what generation processor? Was that running? Though? That's not. I mean, obviously that's not fair. People who, like apple, will say they're only comparing that because that's who they know is gonna.

01:09:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Apple says and then you know you take this with a grain of salt if you want, but apple says it's because so many people still have intel max. Yeah, and really that that's a sweet spot of the market for them is to get these people finally To be there in the business selling hard.

01:09:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's what they wanted. To buy the new hardware.

01:09:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and a lot of people are still running those intel max. We just got rid of Lisa, just got rid of her intel.

01:09:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, imac pro 5k Did she notice how quiet her office was.

01:09:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, you know this, these new iMacs are dead silent. They really are. Yeah, that's another interesting little thing that apple threw in and I don't know if I got a lot of attention is that their performance benchmarks are identical whether the machine's plugged in or not. Yeah, and I don't think that's the case on any windows machine right you, it's intel slows down. I mean it can, it can be it can be you don't want you more. Don't wait for you know our battery life right.

01:09:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You like quick run the benchmark that battery drink? Yeah, yeah, right, I mean it could be, I can. I can run the benchmark the same performance on this laptop on battery.

01:10:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It just can't it's quite a flight on a say yeah, you can. You know you're gonna get 11 hour or 22 hour battery life, 22 on the 16, uh, and it'll run the same whether you're playing. It's quite a flex. I don't, I can't speak.

01:10:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sorry.

01:10:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I do think you'll. It'll shorten the battery life like you're gonna if you stay at full, at full, bore the battery yeah yeah, okay, so actually this was.

01:10:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was just gonna comment to something related to this, which is I I have spoken to people from PC makers Intel, amd, qualcomm, right and there is this shift occurring in the industry about how these processes work with cores and how things come on and shut off Automatically and these things are going to more dynamically handle power management chores is needed, right, and apple has given all the cores they have and everything they have and the prowess they have just in this field. They must be doing the same thing, right? You would know that the way this battery life and performance thing works is that They've had to completely rearchitect the underlying system that can you know, for handling the power mansion of those cores and what they do and how they go on and off, etc. So that's become very sophisticated and I um, let's hold on if we do.

01:11:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Of efficiency cores and performance cores comes from the arms side right, but even that Intel's doing it now they are.

01:11:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But ultimately that sounds unsophisticated compared to what AMD is starting to do and what I, I believe qualcomm is doing on their new pc chips, that's and I assume, apple is doing on their stuff, which is well I know apple does have power and efficiency cores. Now they yeah, I, I, you know who doesn't core instead of well, amd doesn't qualcomm?

01:11:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
has no efficiency cores, they have all our performance.

01:11:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, amd did that on a HP. Whatever that chip is, the HP dragonfly pro they have a single type of core that can scale between power and efficiency and turn off entirely, and they override the windows power management system Do they call it speed step. No, it's, I think, a turbo. No, I don't.

01:12:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is there a turbo button?

01:12:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's a dx processor, I think. Of course I don't remember, I don't know.

01:12:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We want, you know. I mean obviously we want until we get.

01:12:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can do this all day. Oh, thank you for setting me up.

01:12:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
When we get these apple laptops, I'll do benchmarks on them and we'll get a better idea.

01:12:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this stuff's just getting better across the board and I honestly I think apple look as much as people may resent it in the PC space. This was exactly the kick in the pants that everyone in the industry needed, from the operating system vendors to the app writers, to the most important leadership vendors. Right, and you know, we'll see.

01:12:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We'll see what happens with that apple did this, the when they did made the air the first time back in the day, right with our highly integrated chip. No, you know, no Modularity at all. It's like which get is what you get, you order it and you can zone memory expansion or anything like that. Yeah, and it forced the PC makers actually, intel Financed the PC makers of the world to make the ultra book. Ultra book, yeah, exactly, that's exactly so. I mean, in that sense, apple drove the industry. For they said hey, bill, fully integrated machine, you get better about a life thinner, a machine, thin enough you can julien fries with it. And they've done it again with the m series process. Well, like what did? Put everything on the same die.

01:13:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I guess, uh, if I wanted to defend Microsoft, I would say, well, that's because they have a smaller market, and they have it's a smaller risk and most of all revenue is from the iphone anyway. So you know what I can experiment apple is a hardware company, a microcube.

01:13:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, that's I got. We're going way off. Yeah, it's ceo is a hardware guy. Right, right, like yeah, him worked for steve. He was the guy who.

01:13:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, he had come from. Well, does anyone remember where he came from? The company name?

01:13:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
his name was del as I remember, no compact compact.

01:14:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, what it should be. Del, yeah, yeah, uh, which? Well, hp bought compact, I think, at some point, I don't remember, but, um, anyway. So just a couple things.

01:14:10
You know, a million years ago, when microsoft was personal computing and Apple was tiny Comparatively, and google was nothing yet and amazon was nothing yet, the big argument in the windows space about the stuff we were just talking about the alien comes to earth or Whatever, and why are you running this thing? You know, the argument back then is we have to keep all this stuff in there because our user base is so big and diverse. If we take out one little feature, there's going to be a group over here that really needs it. But Android and iOS are right up there with windows now, or not, if not bigger, and they don't have this problem. You know, so you can make these decisions. Like a lot of companies would not have done what apple did by saying what rich who was talking about putting everything on the same die, which restricts certain things that we as pc users love the ability to upgrade ram after the fact, for example, right, that kind of thing. The ability to add a new or better gpu. So, but apple to sit down.

01:15:05 - Scott Wilkinson (Other)
We're gonna do it all for you, we'll do it all for you. No, but it's interesting that it can loosely upgrade those things on an apple device.

01:15:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You just set the buy a new app.

01:15:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, okay right, that's the upgrade path. Um, but yeah, but. But you see, that's a step the pc industry wouldn't have taken Ever, because that was not the the plan, that was not how things worked and, uh, I bet now we're going to start to see things like that.

01:15:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Happening made a great, great rant years ago about how the ipad saved the laptop. Because before the ipad the race for the laptop was to get to the $500 laptop. Yeah, 300 million, yeah, it should have thick all plastic like just the worst. Never network, this is the never terrible machines. And then in came this $800. It was so beautiful and it's. You couldn't sell a laptop In that price range because you'll buy an ipad like why would you do it? And so the, in that sense, the I, so the laptop recalibrated as at least $1,200 device, yeah right.

01:16:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Build a nice one yeah.

01:16:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so I. I didn't mean to turn this into all praise apple. They don't do everything right, but I but there's some, there's all kinds of things, there's all kinds of ways, the company that brought you the new Okay well, except it's not that company Is it like no, that was john scully's company.

01:16:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We've come along.

01:16:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's a different company.

01:16:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Um, so I you could probably say that Remember that the newton inspired apple to invest in start a little thing Acorn, risk machines, which became arm and uh. And you could probably say that the iphone was is a direct like great, great, great, great grandchild of Of the new.

01:16:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So as much as we might Deprecate, it's more like one of thomas jefferson's slave, charles, and but, it's, it's, uh, oh, when I do the futurist conversation.

01:17:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I always use that line. It's like is it a newton or is it an iphone? Right, right like newton is a good uh, it was a lot of respect.

01:17:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was ahead of the technology. They released it, and that happens right now. We get the microsoft used to us all the time. It's been a long time since they've done that. Well, no, ai, is that, isn't it? I mean it's uh, you know, maybe they're doing it again.

01:17:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, it's a. It's a fair question to say are these co-pilots all newtons?

01:17:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, no, I've been saying that about uh, vision, pro and quest, and all that too is the Wait no, just the newton.

01:17:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We've been walking around that point. Which, like Does vision pro going to be the ar device? Or is it a newtons?

01:17:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's a newtons, I think it'll flip our game yeah.

01:17:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't think it's that clear. Give me the killer app, and I think there's a bunch of developers working right now trying to find it. You know Like I and I hope they succeed I'd like to get on with the ar world. That'd be awesome. I don't even mind if it's apple's device, but you'll release the device without the software. You're punted. Yeah yeah, right, right, right, right. Should we talk about windows 12, because that'll be fun.

01:18:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let me do a break. And then the windows 12. Windows 12 really, but they aren't even in 11 yet, are we?

01:18:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, I'm doing the apple thing. Well, the iphone just came out. We're looking at the next iphone.

01:18:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, boy, that's true in the apple journalism space, before they even announced it, practically they were doing a reverse for the iphone 15. Uh, it's. It's incredible, our show today brought to you by look out. Look out, business has changed forever. Boundaries to where we work or even how we work have changed, disappeared. No more boundaries. That means your data Is always on the move, whether it's on a device, in the cloud, across networks or even at the local coffee shop. Now that's great for your workforce. They love that.

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01:20:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like the. I like the term springboard from the end.

01:20:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Isn't that good springboard.

01:20:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My gosh. I used to have a springboard program.

01:20:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, yeah, what was that?

01:20:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was to get people to move to windows 7. Oh, um, you know, they didn't really need it. Everyone wanted to move to windows 7. So that worked out fine, yeah.

01:20:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is it you? Know, so that brings up the uh Specter of the every other Microsoft version. Yeah, the thumb.

01:21:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The star trek movie rule.

01:21:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Every other one is garbage and every other one is good. So let me think seven was good, eight was bad, 10 was good. Was 11 bad? And what will 12? 11 was bad at release. It's it's there. I think 11 is as good as 10. 11 is 10.

01:21:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, with game well, there's a lot, a little day-to-day workflows that were Removed in the initial version of windows 11. That screwed people up. Um, and there's still someone there, you know they had to be put back.

01:21:38
Yeah, yeah, they responded. I just remember we talked about this a few weeks ago. Complain I, microsoft, I tied to there. No, uh, api left behind. If enough people complain, we'll, we'll change things right, put them back. So they're pretty good at that. I mean, I give them a little credit for that. Um, yeah, so I, because everything is going on with a windows 11, 23 h2 and all the ai stuff. And I started looking back. You know, uh, we forget this because this year happened in such a blur.

01:22:07
I think for a lot of people, this year began in February when Microsoft announced being chat and uh, and then, yeah, rifle through the rest of the year with Microsoft 365, co-pilot and build and all the announcements there and windows co-pilot and, and we raced into the fall with all this stuff. But actually there were hints of this coming before then, you know. So, back in, uh, january, um, sasha did Ella talked about adding chat gpt capabilities. This is the open ai technology that we knew Microsoft was investing in but didn't know they were getting ready to Kind of integrate into everything, right? Um, he talked about putting it in every Microsoft product and I started writing about ai at that time before when, you know, being in all that stuff and I, I, uh, I talked about how ai might be the next wave, that thing terry mireson used to talk about.

01:22:59
Microsoft had missed the smartphone wave. They wanted to make sure they didn't miss the next wave. There was a brief period of time where that could have been Uh, digital assistants, like they had cortana. That didn't happen. It's not that late.

01:23:13
Yeah, and they got there late too. And now the theory may, maybe a theory. Actually, I came over this area. I'm sure others have to. It's not just me, but you know, maybe ai, and now increasingly obvious ai probably is the next wave. And so a months ago, or not months ago, I, right around the time microsoft announced um, bing chat. I wrote this is windows 10, predicting that microsoft would release an ai focused version of windows that they would call what does this say? Windows 10? Uh, windows, I'm sorry, windows 12, right, and um, and.

01:23:48
And we were talking live on this show and I sort of blurted out Maybe they would require an npu, maybe they just tested this hardware compatibility block on 11? What if they did the same thing for 12, but for an npu? Now, logically, of course, you scale that back in your brain. You think there's no way there's gonna do something like that. And the delta between the release of tpm 2.0 and its requirement in windows 11 is several years at least. It might be over 10 years. Yeah, a lot of years. So that's rapid. But the thing that's interesting is, microsoft has never once uttered the term windows 12 this year, ever, not once. But there have been multiple times where they appear to be talking about exactly that. They refer to these things as like some future windows.

01:24:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But then in turn. Normally they will always talk about be next. They never know what.

01:24:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. I find it fascinating, almost a year later now, that we still have never heard anyone say windows 12, even though we all out here in the community you're like it's, you know it's happening, you know it's happening.

01:24:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know that's also because they're really they are late getting people moving to 11. Oh, it's specifically enterprise, yeah, but you know what you know, Anybody said the word 12. A lot of enterprise are going to go. We're waiting for 12.

01:25:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the um, I think, the push that they need, even if it's fairly arbitrary when you're resetting a support cycle. They're going to be upgrading hardware anyway. It's fully compatible. It's going to be another entitlement package, right, it's going to be on the same build chain. Whatever. This has been proven over multiple years now. It's stable, the hardware compatible is there. I think that's what we'll do it and honestly, it doesn't have to be too much more than windows 11 version. I guess four Um, it'll be 10.2 to be clear. Yeah, there you go. Um, yeah, that is actually pretty accurate, but I keep waiting for someone to slip up. They've come so close. There are so many times. The qualcomm event was another one another.

01:25:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And they just like they sort of you know pretty sure they don't know. I mean, here's the, here's the essential problem with that. What's the npu going to do? Right, that's that the killer app. Exactly this is the problem in large language models, which is the current excitement in the artificial intelligence space, and I loathe to use a term because it's a terrible term. Yep, but large language models are massive. They have to run in the cloud.

01:26:10
They're checking right and so they're not going to fit in your mpu. But unless your mpu is going to be more powerful, the rest of the computer, combined by miles, it's to be able to run in the lll locally. It's just like it's math. So I mean here and I agree with you in the sense of the next version of windows, could be hugely. You want to make it OS relevant again. Put an LLM as its principal interface. What do you need to do today? Yeah, and let it die.

01:26:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Did you either of you I mean, I know both of you probably are, you know know that Google a month ago would ever launched a new generation Pixel phones and one of the things they sort of previewed mentioned anyway was that this would be the first phone that would have a reduced LLM, that would fit on the device. Right, and we don't know, but we've heard rumors that Microsoft because you know, things like Bing Chat and Bing Image Create and Windows Copilot are free, ad supported doesn't really pay the bills and AI is expensive, that they too are looking at what was, I think the information had a report on this. These mini AI is right, that would kind of reduce, I know, help reduce the load a bit. Right, the problem with an LLM on the internet is the internet is essentially infinite. You know, the nice thing about something like Microsoft 365 Copilot if you're sticking within your organization, is that you have a nice concrete set of data.

01:27:43
Right, it may be coming from a bunch of different places, but it's still. It's not the internet. Now, it does, in fact, bring in the internet too, but if you could make this thing make sense for specific tasks. The stupid version of that is this does not involve an LLM, but like the Windows Studio effects stuff that they have on the RMPC's background blur etc. Etc. I think what they want to do is look at specific features I guess I'll call it just like some of the AI features that are in photos and the paint out now and accelerate those things and do so, in a way, you know, and you're reminding me of the 1970s version of artificial intelligence with expert system.

01:28:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah right, so I'm going to ask you this dumb question again, because I ask you every time the model that you train. You train in the cloud because you need lots of data and you need an infinite amount of data, but you can create a model. Stable diffusion models are 1.6 gigabytes. I can run stable diffusion on a phone.

01:28:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's what I'm saying, Like.

01:28:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
in other words, you have, google has even said this at W whatever it is Google IO how they've really gotten good at compressing these models that you know you create in the cloud so that they can run on the phone, but then you can kind of port a smaller version of it to a device of whatever kind. Because we're going to have these. But, richard, you said you need a lot. I mean, you don't want to run AI on a phone.

01:29:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The reason we're talking about how expensive LLFs are and so forth is because they are terabyte sized model Right, yeah, yeah, well they're stable diffusion works with a 1.6 gigabyte model.

01:29:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Here's a actually here's a historical example I think that everyone will understand and super simplifies this conversation, which is that when Microsoft was moving to when it became Windows Vista, the big talk at that time was hardware accelerated graphics. Right, apple had done it on the Mac and embarrassed Windows. Windows XP had a bit mapped UI that was fixed size. It looked like something you would have created as a child in Microsoft Paint by comparison, right? So this is a big thing. They have to do hardware resolution, independent graphics, hardware accelerated graphics, all this kind of stuff.

01:29:49
If you have a GPU, an early GPU, on a computer that could run Windows Vista and you could display arrow glass, which was that see through kind of transparent UI, you could actually have better performance and battery life because you were taking the load off of the CPU, right? Right, and I look at MPUs in the same way. There are going to be these specific tasks that you're going to take the load processing load off of the GPU, in this case, or the CPU, depending on what you might have otherwise, and that the MPU is just specifically designed to handle those types of computations or whatever. Right, and that's the result.

01:30:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the goal. Right, microsoft should be all over this because, yeah, it's how you charge less.

01:30:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there's processing and P you, but there's also the data sets. Right Does, for instance, chat GP before do we know how big that data set is, that it's used they?

01:30:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
kept it a secret because it's multiple.

01:30:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's a private company with a very Google like investing scheme.

01:30:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So when I use chat GPT on my phone. It's slower because it's connecting to the server and then and then I can talk to it, and then it's a few seconds later it comes back with an answer, and I would also argue that GPT four, especially, was a brute force approach to well, if three was good, making it seven times bigger will be better.

01:31:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, even when they built three. At the time, you know, mark Pracenovic was on record is saying we built the fifth largest supercomputer in the world inside of Azure to build this thing.

01:31:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but that was training. Then there's a trained data set which, by the way, is frozen in time, and that, that frozen in time data set thing, gets moved onto another server. But that could itself be terabytes.

01:31:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I would also argue that this is a generalized model, because they're experimenting.

01:31:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Most of the AI that we do right now, though, is things and I know I can do it on phone like text, speech to text, or removing an object from a photo, moving an object or moving sound in the background.

01:31:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
All of those things that pixel eight can do, yeah, but the stuff that we kind of, I think, requires the bigger models, even dumb things like tell me a joke, right, which I technically could be as stupid as a table of jokes, right, right, but the assumption is that it's not that it's literally generating something based on its topic. That would have to be a chat.

01:32:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Gpt three or four sized model right have to be.

01:32:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, does it? Yeah, I mean. The question is and I think this is what's the experiments that are going on right now is when you start working on a specific data set, whether it's a particular role, like manipulating an image, or a specific data set like your company data, can you use a simpler language model, a smaller one?

01:32:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And that's the maybe, that's the. You know that's, by the way. That's a great point. So, uh, like a Microsoft 365 co-pilot implementation that uses an MPU, you could almost have MPUs that would be sized to different enterprise sizes, or something.

01:32:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Also, ironically, the things that the productivity things you want to do probably do work fine with a smaller model. It's that very general AGI where you want to tell a joke or tell me a story or something.

01:32:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And that's not a GI, but it's not even close to AGI. Okay. What would be Come on?

01:33:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you're right, but that's the point In other words. The more general and the less useful, the bigger the model.

01:33:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The future of AI is hybrid right. So here's the parents that can run local.

01:33:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Will the things that don't will go to the cloud. Yeah, the parallel I see from work I've done in the past is data warehousing and OLAP cubes, where we always initially built, like the mother of all cubes, this gigantic thing because we weren't sure exactly what we wanted and it cost a fortune to build. It took years to put together and out of that you learned enough about your data to then carve off these smaller, incredibly useful cubes that were cheaper to run and could run more locally, Like everything was better. And GPT-4 feels like one of those mother of all cubes approaches and now we're looking around it saying, well, what pieces can we hack off? And do you?

01:33:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, it'd be great. It becomes about making it efficient, right?

01:33:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, or maybe efficient to specific implementations or specific, Well, and when you say efficient, that's what you're talking about.

01:34:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like I need all of this already Smaller and faster right and less expensive.

01:34:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, and it's part of the reason you really don't hear about a GPT-5. It's like from what to where? Where would it exist? What's the next order of magnitude? They're building it in space. Really, I don't know. So I'm excited about all of this because also a point of maturity is when you say, hey, we don't need to get bigger. In fact, there's places for us to get smaller. Yeah, as long as you're still on the race to just I bet we've cracked.

01:34:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think you're right. I think maybe they've crested that hill.

01:34:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, that's what it feels like to me. Yeah, I think you're right. That's good news, but I do feel like the problem with these MPUs is you're still struggling for the workload to know what the MPU needs to look like, and that may only be a few months away.

01:34:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the problem for people that want to adopt this stuff early. You'll get a first gen MPU-based PC and you're going to want another one in a year or two.

01:34:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you know you're my favorite customer. Yeah, right, right, and it's one of the ways you can go. And let's face it, if mid-journey or dowlly will run well locally on that machine, that should be enough.

01:35:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what Qualcomm showed off, by the way, at their event. I started a pre-briefing, but the oh no wait, I started this. It's not been earlier in the year, it doesn't matter, but I saw a demo where they did that locally on a ARM-based PC. That's a nice step.

01:35:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And it is speaking to the right size.

01:35:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then the next step is can you run Crysis on it? I mean, it's pretty much. Those are the two steps. Well, I looked for this during the commercial break. It's November 1st, as we record Microsoft is supposed to release when is my Co-Pilot, paul? Yeah, and if you go to the Microsoft 365 blog, maybe it changed since I looked, but there is an announcement post. It's from September, so I have questions about this thing. I will say, of the Microsoft Co-Pilots, from a productivity standpoint, this is the one that's the most exciting, for all the obvious reasons. Right, there is this chat experience that built into it, called Microsoft 365 Chat Five chat. That works across all the apps. It allows you to prompt the AI as you do with Bing Chat, except to find out information from your organization internally. Right, email meeting chats, documents, whatever. I think that's. That's cool. There are very specific features for all of the core Office apps Outlook, word, powerpoint, excel. Some goofy apps too, like, I think, loop.

01:36:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, loop is very exciting. I've been living more in Loop.

01:36:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, that's interesting. I want to get there and I have not been able to.

01:36:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One note stream.

01:36:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Incredibly difficult. Yeah, so there's all stuff Everyone talks about. The expense. It's a legit thing to talk about. I mean, this initial version targets enterprises for the most part. There is actually a system where small businesses could get involved with this. But yeah, I thought there was a minimum number of seats. That's the question I had, because I can't get a clear answer on this one.

01:37:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, the number I could fly around was a minimum of 300 seats. 300 seats Get that from a data size perspective, like if you're really going to do this thing, where you're going to analyze the graph, becomes a variant of your company If you're good at math, do this for me.

01:37:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Then 300 times 30, that's easy, it's without 9000 times 36 is about 90, probably 100 something thousand. That's your minimum cost per month because you need a Microsoft every user. It has to be on E3 at least. That's $36 per user per month. The co-pilot upsell is $30 per user per month and then you need 300 of them, so that's the minimum 20 grand a month. We're talking a lot about a lot of money.

01:37:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Listen, you were already paying the 36,. Right, because that's how people do the work. The adding, doubling the price, essentially, with the additional $30. The always the question is are you getting the productivity boost? And that's you know, right? And if you look at the list, it seems to be coming out of the GitHub co-pilot space, like when I'm now. We're seeing more and more developers working routinely is a 30% improvement in productivity, yeah this is something I, I, I, I, a lot of.

01:38:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Most of my audience is not developers and I kind of I live in a space a little bit I'm I. It's a weird slant that I have. But even in the goofy software development that I have done, I have I don't want to say wasted, but I but I've spent so much time googling something going to stack overflow, whatever the one of the other top five sites are reading the answers, reading the answers, the answers, and reading and realizing that one wasn't doing it. And looking at the ones that are top rated, trying and really no, that doesn't work either. And the idea of not just not having to go somewhere else and find this and spend that time, but to have it happen in line. Yeah, like everything else AI related of this type and this would include productivity, work, right, software development is sort of like that, right, as long you have to always kind of asterisk it, as long as it's right.

01:39:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, right or accurate, and something like 25% of the time it is wildly wrong. Yeah, so I.

01:39:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think we all agree it's probably going to get there.

01:39:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We may disagree on how fast that happens, whatever, but but my argument has been a software developer is already good at criticizing code from other sources full stop. So that's the compiler always gets, gets a say.

01:39:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was going to say between compiling and actually running the app and using it. I mean you can figure out if code doesn't work.

01:39:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know wildly the least of your problems because you can see that, or the compiler will see that it's the subtly wrong that introduces a security flaw that nobody discovers for five years that you really should be worried about.

01:39:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Even though you wrote the prompt to say it, and make sure my code is yeah, it makes you you did that.

01:39:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You did your dual diligence.

01:39:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
there we had a great episode last week on, I'm sorry, yesterday on security, now looking at a long standing bug in Citrix and and which had been zero data and widely used, and it was simply because the guy assumed that SN printf would return a string. Well, it does return a string of a proper length because it's it's safe, right, but the value it returns is the length that it parsed, which may be longer than the string. And then this guy foolishly, instead of testing the length that it parsed, use the length that it parsed to allocate a buffer and put the string in, and so classic.

01:40:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a classic old school subtle error, easy to make.

01:40:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could probably get that on stack overflow pretty quick and you might. And the thing is it, the code works just fine until somebody tries to, you know break it. You know intentionally. So.

01:40:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I. I think this is in the notes, I assume it is. Here's the product to. Yeah, so it's a little further down. But let me just jump to this right now, cause there's a. There's an example of what you just described that will impact a lot more people directly. A programming error like that will actually impact a lot of people indirectly, right when they run the software. But my wife and I are professional writers and we both rely on Microsoft Word and whatever correction technologies it has built in to help us find grammar spelling tone. Whatever type errors I publish almost universally to the web, and so I use something called Grammarly, which is a plugin for a web browser, to give it, give it love.

01:41:36
Yes, they're fantastic. Well, we'll get to that. They're fantastic. They're better than word, I put it that way. So they do a second pass and I'll tell you. The article I wrote about this topic probably a couple of two, three thousand words, maybe Grammarly as it always does found between 12 and 15 errors that Microsoft Word did not catch. Microsoft Word, which celebrated a fourth anniversary last week that is, the inarguably the most powerful word processor on the planet has really ensured if I had, when it comes to this kind of thing. Now I am that person that everyone talks about with AI, that person that stands behind between sorry, what AI says and what goes out to the world. I know enough about writing to know.

01:42:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're the human.

01:42:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know how often it's wrong. The problem is most people aren't professional writers Right. In this case I'm just talking about word. You could apply this to Excel anything else. Imagine the writing that could occur that could start wars, that could kill people, literally kill people. The bad writing, the wrong writing right. That could give bad medical advice. That could invent a legal defense that doesn't exist. That could issue a ruling. That would cause criminals to get out of jail. You could go on and on and on. Why do you need?

01:42:51
effort, right. This is why you need that. So this is the problem and, seriously, it's simply stated. Everyone knows this is the problem, but we also have to acknowledge we know that most people aren't going to do it. They're not going to stand between the AI and the output, right? I?

01:43:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
think they're going to copy and paste, but they're already doing that from Stack Overflow, I mean of course, yes, Of course I mean.

01:43:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The nice thing about code in a way although your exception proves this point to be false is that at least as a developer you can run code and sort of see it, and hopefully you're doing that due diligence on the other end, At least when it comes to security.

01:43:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Most of these flaws are so subtle. For instance, one of the big bugs was in I think it was a heart bleed in OpenSSH was because they used reference code from Intel and Intel wrote the reference code it's good code and wrote it without any safety.

01:43:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So they said there is no security to it.

01:43:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, this is reference code.

01:43:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You see this all the time in sample code. It's like look, I'm trying to make a point here in the book, I'm not trying to write the full app that will be secure and will support all the different ones.

01:44:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is reference code. You should rewrite this. You should not use it. No one does.

01:44:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's my point no one does.

01:44:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everybody just uses it.

01:44:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nobody does it, and that's what's awful. So Grammarly is better than Word. Microsoft has a static cut distance.

01:44:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was very smart. I saw these.

01:44:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean it's crazy Some of it. My wife and I, because we're writers and because we are not particularly entertaining, will yell word mistakes to each other down the hall from our respective offices you never get like as if we're trying to grade each other.

01:44:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what I'm talking about.

01:44:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm already at your place. Yeah oh yeah, we're fascinating. It's gotten worse. The problem is, it's gotten worse and it's weird that this is happening just as Microsoft is pushing AI and it's a little simplistic. But I always sort of say to myself the same thing I don't understand how I'm going to trust your AI if you can't spell check properly. You know it doesn't make any sense.

01:45:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, Well, in a way, isn't spell checking kind of? That's what I'm saying, ai yeah.

01:45:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Think about go back in time 20 years. Grammar checking is 30 years ago. 30 years ago, right? So Microsoft Word spelled check back in the day in the early days of Windows 3 and 3.1, right, you know, it was just a table of words.

01:45:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it would check it against a word List and say well, that's not a word list, but once you move, into something like Right, but once you move into grammar you get into some actual hard computer science.

01:45:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you need to understand tense and purpose and context. It's hard to and you know word is honestly has always done a pretty good job of it, you know I wouldn't even expect word to get this distant distance right.

01:45:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm impressed that it really did. Frankly, it's astonishing how much it gets wrong.

01:45:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like it's astonishing, and that's probably because Grammar and Texts.

01:45:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Grammarly knows that phrase in the distant past, and so but.

01:45:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was worried, not. Are you telling me that this thing's been around for 40 years? Is it not better with this than this brand new thing?

01:45:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it wants to put the in front of lockstep. Hey, it's announced when it's a definitive article.

01:46:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't do this anymore, but there was a long period of time where, especially books, like printed books, I would read out loud because you catch things in the reading. Yeah, you know, yeah, and I I think that's absolutely true.

01:46:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Pogue, david Pogue does that. John C Dvorak said he does that. I think it's very important you have to write, and for big.

01:46:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I don't do it for like a 300 word news post or whatever, no, but back of the day, important writing. You would kind of do this kind of thing and I feel like AI could. Again, if it works. There's always the asterisk, there was the asterisk right. If it worked could serve this purpose right?

01:46:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, like your reader over your shoulder, kind of thing, yeah.

01:46:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like that should be the point of it. In fact, my wife told me that the way she uses Grammarly in this case is Grammarly actually has a thing that will read it to you, does that? And she has some. She has it read to her instead of her reading it out loud. That's, that might even be better. I'm not really sure.

01:46:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I would point out that built into word is a lorem, if some generator.

01:47:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So One more could you possibly ask?

01:47:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And every other feature. That's true, that is true, I love it.

01:47:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Actually, to prove that no one reads my articles, I use that sometimes as the body of the article and nobody. Even so, I get compliments sometimes. So, like that, you made some good points, your Latin is excellent. Yeah, you're right.

01:47:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know I want to do more AI coding. I mean, since I write in Lisp all the time. There's a lot of Right, there's a lot of material about AI coding in Lisp Of course, probably not modern, but still, I think the general ideas are probably the same. I'm thinking when Richard you talk that's the original expert, yeah right. When you talk about big data sets, that seems to be a little different than what a model is. I think of a model as less as the actual data and more as the connections.

01:47:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's literally, because it's in the name right Large language model. It's like an MMO to a single player game or something I mean to be super simple.

01:48:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel like it's more than just a data set that there's. I don't know, I don't know, I have to do. That's why I mentioned I want to do more of this, because I want to understand it better. I'll limit my point.

01:48:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know GPT-3 was substantially smaller and also did some useful work, but it was huge for its day.

01:48:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean in its day was not long ago, I mean last year, Last year, yeah right, I mean this is moving quick.

01:48:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and part of this was they changed the training design and that made a huge difference for them as well, and they changed it in three and then they redid it again in four.

01:48:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
The good news is all of the technology being used for all of these LLMs is out there. It's open, it's public, it's, in fact, it's a handful of papers you can read, and if you can understand it, which I cannot, that's my biggest problem.

01:48:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Sure, you could understand what they're doing. The content of competing to this is going to get exponentially worse. We can get errors faster than lightning.

01:49:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's really an interesting world. It's a fascinating world. Yeah, it's crazy and it's going to be. It's coming soon in Windows 12.

01:49:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, it's doing a Windows 12.

01:49:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're in Windows 12. Well, yeah, it's coming today in Microsoft 365 Copilot, sort of right. Some very specific features.

01:49:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is not for and this is not for me. It's for commercial users, Is that right?

01:49:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is I was saying during your last ad break. I actually looked this up again because I've been checking all day. To that moment they have not yet officially announced it. They did previously announce what happened today. Okay, I'm expecting and it would be surprised if there weren't some new features discussed and also, having followed Microsoft 365 very closely as an organization for the past several years, if they don't spend every single month from here on out piling on new features all the time, like again and again and again. Yeah, this is something they perfected is not the right word, but they piled it on with Microsoft 365. Teams is maybe the poster child for this incredible, probably three-ish year run. Right, new feature, new feature, new feature. It's incredible. Yeah, I think you're going to see that in Microsoft 365 Copilot. But tied to that is going to be its expansion to different customers, including consumers, right, which they kind of previewed at that September event.

01:50:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, so probably possibly as Microsoft Copilot.

01:50:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, right, there you go. So there's that, the original version of Teams. If you someone had to point this out to me, I actually do keep a Microsoft commercial account on hand for testing purposes, and if you go into the admin, god, you would think the messaging, what's it called Admin messaging center, or whatever, would be the simplest thing in the world to find a start. It's 13 levels deep. I'll give you a clue. I think it's under help, and then you go it's way down.

01:50:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Why nobody can find it? Because whoever looks at help.

01:50:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. And when I looked today to find it, I encountered the same thing I always do when I go to this admin center, which is like come on, how is this not like a star thing up at the corner? Some obvious you know? Whatever it's not, anyway, you can find it, it's in there. But there were four announcements yesterday and one of them is that now that the new version of Teams is out, the OG version, the old version, the electron version, will be officially retired in the 31st. So anyone who is not switched over by then will be switched over. This is a mostly good news thing. It's not like the new outlook where you can complain for hours on end about all the stuff it doesn't do because, honestly, god, that app is not there. But the new teams actually solved a lot of problems, actually solved every problem I had with Teams, and it's half the resources, yeah, twice as fast, half as much space, half RAM, rather yeah.

01:51:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and they really did move away from electron, a stack that phenomenally, they own. Yeah. Yeah, there's an interesting dynamic going on in there too. Yeah, so that's cool.

01:51:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, or good, I should say it's. It's not bad news, I don't. I'd be surprised if any of us heard from anyone who was upset about that.

01:51:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I think the new teams kind of is just a little bit of software to work, and preferably not eating up all your resources in the Yep, which is why they don't like the new outlook. Um, this is so right it's all your resources and it doesn't do what you're exactly.

01:52:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is kind of the opposite of what I was looking for to do. We, did you look at this in a mirror or something? Or would be for the reds, none of them for you. Yeah, exactly, nice, uh, yeah, oh no, that's file explorer, richard. Uh, that's None of them for none. None of them for file copy. Um, and then I talked about the, the whole word thing.

01:52:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Do you want to talk about earnings? Because I can make fun of earning.

01:52:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I only have two companies in here, and it's because they relate in some way to what we talked about previously with microsoft, right? So amazon just announced their q3 earnings. Um, obviously well, maybe not obviously, if you don't know this Um, even though they aren't the biggest company in big tech, they always have the most revenues, right? So they always pays apple, for example.

01:52:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, because they're a warehousing company.

01:52:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, no, they're very different from every other company. They, they, they have a gigantic physical presence, or tight. I believe they have. I've been. I only know this because I think Brad looked this up. They actually have over a million employees. Most of them are driving trucks and working in warehouses and stuff, but big right, um 143 billion dollars, blah, blah, blah, whatever.

01:53:16
So the the problem for microsoft Is that amazon has this little thing called aws and aws has been kicking ass, frankly, for a long time. They are, they are dead, yep. And so, as microsoft kind of came up with windows, azure and then azure and Exploded out the number of services and things you can do with azure, uh, obviously they've got their eye on this one thing. And that one thing is aws and amazon has done a comparable job expanding the capabilities of aws and they, whatever reason they, they they have a very loyal Uh user base out in the world of developers and, um, it's very popular. So microsoft, because they couldn't really compete, invented something that they used to call them the commercial cloud, and I think now they call the microsoft cloud.

01:53:59
Microsoft cloud or commercial cloud, or whatever they're calling it these days is not a real thing. How was it cloud. No, that's a real thing. That's an actual business. This is a made-up thing and what it is is they cherry pick. They never tell you what right you know what comprises it, but they cherry pick the best businesses across microsoft. Most of them are an intelligent cloud and in productivity and online services, I think that's a name of it. Um, to present a thing that, like I said, is made up, is an aggregate of things that they don't tell you what they are. That competes with aws and Okay, but microsoft cloud is never really. I'm not sure that they've ever surpassed the revenues for aws.

01:54:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They did this quarter so, based on the current set of measures, which are still somewhat opaque, Well, let's put it this way.

01:54:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So let's look at. So the way what I did was I looked at some actual real numbers. So, for example, aws Uh, came in at 31.8 billion dollars. Revenues, okay, uh. Intelligent cloud, that thing that you just mentioned, which is basically the azure right, and some a few other things, uh, including some server things, by the way Uh, 24.3 billion. Okay, so just that one part of microsoft. Actually. It's pretty close, I mean 24 versus 31. Oh I'm sorry, so I don't. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry I.

01:55:18
Uh aws was 23. Yeah, the invented business that microsoft has microsoft cloud was 31.8, but the actual business that microsoft has intelligent cloud was 24.3, which is more than aws, and I think that is the first time I think. So, yeah, if it's, oh, that is notable, uh, so I, you know, I I'm speculating there in a way. I didn't bother to look it up, I'm lazy, but I believe that is the first time and I, my memory is obviously fantastic, so why wouldn't you tell me interesting?

01:55:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Also something we should expect, like the yeah, I think they have punted on their platform play. They largely do this. The third party, meaning amazon, where microsoft is all in on the platform and he's also driving business. Yes, right, so Revenues are revenues. Conversation on run as you will save money getting off of ias and moving to path.

01:56:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah um, we would have talked about this last week. But microsoft has a roughly uh, 10 billion, you know, per quarter spend on ai infrastructure build out. That's only going to go up over time, etc. Etc. We all kind of understand that. But they also had an unexpectedly strong quarter with regards to ai adoption, ai services, adoption running on azure from third parties, and this is the thing.

01:56:37
This is like um in gaming. We would compare this to, uh, game streaming, where microsoft has this business that they sell it to consumers and it makes some money or not. But they can also sell it to companies like sony that can use it in their own services. And if sony beats microsoft in that game, so to speak, microsoft still sort of wins, right, because they're getting, you know, revenue and so microsoft's kind of doing the same thing.

01:56:58
They're going to have first party well, they do already now have first party ai services that are paid, that run on their own infrastructure. But they're also going to have a lot of third party and, uh, I bet the third party well, I should say it. I think both are going to be very good businesses all the same. You know, open air runs on azure, right? Do you like their? There are right. That's a great example. So there's, as ai becomes more and more of a thing, as everyone Uh adopts ai as table stakes, that needs to implement ai. Only a couple of companies you're going to turn to, and one of them, microsoft, and I think they realize they're a shovel.

01:57:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
am I where you're both the gold panner and the guy selling the shovels?

01:57:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly, right, right and right, I don't, and that's an interesting, that's a good way to put it. It's uh, it's an interesting business model. I think it's working out for them. Yeah, um, yeah, or, and I think it will, long term too. I think, you know, microsoft is all one of the few companies that can make this kind of Investment, and I think it's gonna. I think that investment is going to pay off, yeah, but today it's just revenues. I mean, we're not no one's saying it's profitable. We did it, you know it's. We're not there yet.

01:57:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, it's just it's. You know, what's funny is like I spent a whole bunch of money on the front end. I kept a bunch of it and I'm going to show it as revenue. In the meantime, I don't know if the thing I spent the money on actually made money.

01:58:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah right, we didn't suspect it probably didn't, but you know. But you know we'll get that's, that's, that's an investment, right? It's not the. The idea is you don't get paid back right away. Um, and then the other one is intel, for obvious reasons, right. So intel is kind of the bellwether, or is a bellwether of the pc industry. Remember last uh week, I guess it was microsoft said hey, we throw a little upswing in windows license sales to pc makers. That indicates that things are probably going to start getting better. Intel confirmed that. Uh, and so they had, you know, 14, 14.2 billion in revenues in the same quarter. That's a decline of 8 percent year of a year. But Looking to the future, they see the same trends that microsoft spoke of and, uh, they're and they were profitable.

01:58:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They were profitable.

01:58:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, and the, the part of the business that is responsible for pc's, the client computing group, did see a decline. All of my, all of their major businesses did, but it was the smallest decline. At intel, actually, it was only 3%. And, uh, and you know they they're starting to do the ai mpu stuff and blah, blah, blah, whatever. Um, they believe that the pc buying slump is coming to a close. So, uh, they expect to see growth in the pc market in this quarter.

01:59:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The one we're in right now.

01:59:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so the shock waves of the pandemic are are finally the yeah, the tsunami that disrupted everything has you know We've hit the other side of it, or?

01:59:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so we can get back. Whatever the metaphor is Really, ed, your old decline of civilization.

01:59:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, over the pc we don't exactly the plateauing of the pc market. You know I would, I would embrace a plateau at this point I do.

01:59:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Uh, it's a neighborhood of 250 million machines per year. Could that could be replacement? I mean, yeah, but I'm sort of telegraphing, like this week's run, as we should talk about keeping your pc's for longer right, like they turn. Oh, oh, oh nice.

01:59:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I should look ahead and see what that is. Uh cool, that's great.

01:59:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, um and this speaks to your next story right, I was.

01:59:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was literally just like, paused on the, on the segue that I Try not to be snarky, um, and speaking of pc's, you're not going to hold on to any longer. Yeah, uh, microservice, no, um, so Uh, surface as a business like apple right, has kind of gone kicking and screaming in some ways into the, that whole repairable, right to repair, right to repair thing. Right, uh, that's it. Uh, you know, whatever the motivation is, I guess we can just kind of overlook that because it has gotten so much better. And uh, microsoft, I think back I don't know may timeframe Maybe we're.

02:00:30
We're talking about this and the latest Microsoft surface devices have, generally speaking, incredible Uh, numbers of parts that could be repaired or placed. Um, they partnered with iFixit, so there's another outlet for getting this stuff. They have everything that surface has that you can get to be replaced, uh can be bought from iFixit, which may be a little more convenient for a lot of people, right, here's the thing I think is most interesting about this the earliest surface that can be repaired in any way, shape or form as a surface, pro 7. Um, that device has one repairable part kickstand. That's it. You can replace the kickstand. Everything else you screwed, and I think most people will sort of remember Microsoft at some point on surface pro probably the next one moved to a little ssd module type thing, right, so you could kind of swap that out.

02:01:18
If you flash forward to the latest surface pro, which is the five of the nine, sorry, 5g, which is the qualcomm one, there are 13 parts that can be replaced in that and that includes the entire motherboard. It's basically everything. Um, yeah, as as it should be. Yep, exactly, but again, this is something I don't think they wanted to do, necessarily I. I think we're at the point now where we're gonna say you know, I don't care why but the eu's been pushing on this For the ability.

02:01:45
Right like we, they want replaceable batteries and smartphones, and so, and it's not just like a part in the bag Right, you have to also have guides that explain exactly how this works, videos. You know, facts that explain, you know common questions, etc. So it's all out there.

02:01:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not just on the mic. Well, not that it's easy. Like you're still gonna need some.

02:02:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And, by the way, not that it's necessarily inexpensive, right? If you had to replace, I don't know, I don't know exactly, but I bet a service pro 9 Motherboard probably costs more than a surface pro 9, you know, or something.

02:02:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So, um, that's that way in the Apple world. Don't, uh, don't, screw up your motherboard. You'll be sorry, yeah, but you know what?

02:02:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Again I nothing's ever gonna be perfect. It's not like everything's gonna turn into a framework laptop, but I still think that's I. This is laudable.

02:02:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just. I also see this as this is the next thing you market. Right, you can't market faster chips. That has been true for a while. Yeah, you know, there's the why would you buy a new machine? This is you'll be able to keep her longer because you can change the battery and honestly what you just.

02:02:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That mirrors the way Microsoft sort of marketed surface in the beginning. The idea was we are a trusted brand At the time. You could go to a store and swap things out and get things fixed. They had whatever their version of GD was and they were very generous with that too. Yes, they were, and honestly it is Microsoft. I mean I will hear now from everyone who's been screwed by them on surface. But they've done, honestly, I think they do do a good job. But the reality is they're also an unknown in the PC space. They don't sell very many computers and you are taking it's like buying a pixel. Google makes the platform, just like Microsoft makes the platform. But Pixel is still a little bit iffy for some people. It's not a known brand, right? They don't sell very many of them, so they're in the same place. So I think this will help with some people's fears that this thing may be a dead end or something's going to go wrong and I can't get it fixed. I mean you'll be able to get it fixed. I think that's good.

02:03:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Let's do some Xbox kids.

02:03:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just love that we're three quarters away through the show before we talk about Xbox. What a good day.

02:03:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's hour three. That means it's Xbox time.

02:03:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, there's some Xbox news, so there's actually got big segment.

02:04:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm looking at what you got here.

02:04:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have an exciting announcement to make.

02:04:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's the big one.

02:04:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So big You're going to go nuts, but you're going to love it, all right. So Microsoft announced its acquisition of Activision Blizzard. I think we covered that story. We did, we did, we touched on it briefly. So not long thereafter, sachin and Della contacted everybody and talked about this big reorg and I think for most people this doesn't mean too too much. There's a whole group of people under Phil Spencer. Here's my key takeaway to this and honestly, I think it was tied to this. What do you call it? Bethesda has remained its own sort of separate company. They treat it like I don't know what you call this. Only on the studio. Yeah, okay, I'm sorry, I meant in the terms of like studios. So Microsoft has first party studios. These are the studios they own, and they do own Bethesda and then there are third party studios, like Activision used to be out in the world. There are different rules and different accountings and different things that go on in there. But, yes, you can, they do this with Mojang, right, I think, and with LinkedIn, right?

02:05:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And LinkedIn and GitHub and GitHub Okay, good.

02:05:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, yeah, bethesda is treated like that, activision Blizzard is not going to be treated like that, but they're coming into Microsoft Like they will be part of Microsoft Well, rather, xbox Studios, like they're actually going to be. They're going to be I'm sorry, including Bobby Kotick yeah, and till the end of the year when he leaves. Yeah, so for a brief period of time, that little cancer will spread around Microsoft.

02:05:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just wondering Like does the media ejected for HR violations? Like, isn't that how?

02:05:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Microsoft absorbed Mark West for a period of time. Right, was that the guy? Yeah, the campaign manager guy, that guy who would like to disappear? Mark West was the center for the Phoenix Suns back then. It doesn't matter.

02:05:56
The point is they do things differently for different people at different companies, whatever. So that was very interesting. So the bad news, the blue badge, that's interesting, yep. So he's going to always have that. He'll probably have it like pinned up on his little cork board when he does zoom calls in the future. You know, you'll see that. So he's, he's getting it. He's also getting the biggest golden parachute Parachute the history of mankind, if I'm not mistaken.

02:06:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, he was there for decades. I mean, he's one of the founders, he's one of the founders.

02:06:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So no, no, he was one of the founders. He was well, he dates, came in early, he was like for the early 90s. Yeah, we remember Activision came out of Atari, right, right, dave Crane and those guys, but he has been there for 30 years. He's run the company for a long time. He is almost certainly the guy there the longest right now. You know, I bet I don't know if for a fact that makes sense. Right, it's been around forever.

02:06:48
As part of this reorg, though, they're also reorging marketing and there's a there's a bunch and there's a bunch of marketing occurring under the Xbox org. And unexpectedly, chris Capicella who I not from a technical perspective, but from a communications perspective remember, this is my primary issue with this company was one of the most credible human beings and nicest people I've ever known in my entire life. Don't tell, oh, it was leaving we love. Now we don't know. Yes, we do. So we don't know what this means, and they may never know what it means, although I'm going to try to find out privately, but this is a weird comparison.

02:07:26
But I think his leaving was similar to Panos Panes, in the sense that there were reorgs and changes, money was shifting in different directions, and I'm going to say one of two things here. Either he was offered a position that either he may be perceived, or was a demotion like instead of CMO, but he might have been CMO of some other part of Microsoft or as a credible human being, and I'd like I'm leaning in this direction. I don't you know, I don't have any, just knowing him so well that he was not interested in you know, he could always defend Microsoft's behavior somewhat. I don't. I think there's some indefensible things that maybe need to happen when it comes to marketing and AI and whatever else is going coming down the pike. And maybe this was just the ethical break. He couldn't do it. I don't know. I don't know.

02:08:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I want to be clear the acquisition of Activision Blizzard. The end of the break.

02:08:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Not just no, no, but this, no, no, not necessarily Activision Blizzard, but rather the AI stuff that this is actually tied to a bigger thing, Cause I think that this is not the only reorg we're going to see. I think that there's going to be more of this, and it's going to have a lot to do with it.

02:08:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't disagree with you. I suspect he was being squeezed on roll.

02:08:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And yeah, that's the obvious, that's the Panos-Penet comparison.

02:08:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and I and not like he doesn't. He needs any more money, right Like what.

02:08:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So like any of these people, any more money?

02:08:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I mean, you know Well, he would be hired, if he wants to do this instantly, by any of a dozen red, you know, blue chip companies. I mean, he was really good at his job, you have a, you have a count.

02:08:55 - Scott Wilkinson (Other)
You said he's been on Windows six times at the year end.

02:08:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
episodes Six at least six 2021. Okay, 2020, 2019, 2017, 2016.

02:09:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'll do some searching, at least six.

02:09:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
At least six. I'd say at least six. So here's the thing. I just I could, I could just say two sentences side by side. I'm going to let it hang there in the air. Chris Cappicella has left the bill. That's a good three things. Yes, has left the building. He's leaving Microsoft. Yes, we have had Chris Cappicella on several times to do a year end show on Windows, weekly Most notably this year, Not last year Right.

02:09:27
And we don't know why. But okay, this year we are going to have a special guest on the holiday show at the end of the year. That's all I'm going to say. It's going to be a surprise for everybody. It's going to be amazing, oh, okay. No, I don't want to see any speculation in discreet yourself, Captain. Obvious over there you know who you are.

02:09:47 - Scott Wilkinson (Other)
So we'll see you did kind of a special guest Put the two things in juxtaposition?

02:09:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I sure did.

02:09:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'd put them right there, next to each other, it's true. So you can draw your conclusions as you will, you know.

02:09:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Live in large. Chris has been on. I have the official score here. I've been on this show for a year, Many, many times One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight Windows weekly appearances starting December 23rd 2015. Okay, it was the last show of the year for many, many years.

02:10:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, I cannot promise the same number of years going forward, but we are going to have a guest.

02:10:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And you want to tell the. You email Kevin King and give him whatever he needs to know.

02:10:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Kevin's not finding out to the last minute because that guy, that guy, he's going to, he's going to stress over this for two more years.

02:10:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He's a stress case and I don't want him to know I don't.

02:10:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's no need to stress the last.

02:10:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Windows weekly of the year is December 20th. I just want you to know the 27th will be the best stuff. Okay, okay.

02:10:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I wanted to be back again. I can't. I have to beg you not to guess. No guessing, I understand why you're guessing.

02:11:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No guessing, but a special guest will join us Santa Claus. I think it's Santa Claus. Is it Santa Claus you emailed?

02:11:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
me. Is it Santa Claus? No, I could tell you it's not Santa Claus, but anyway it will be special and you will love it. I bet this like December 20th. Okay, all right, which one? All right, there you go. I'll leave him be home. I will tell Richard in case something happens to me, but that will be the only person until we get close, okay.

02:11:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think we're just talking about how well I keep secret. There you go Right, it is going to be Bobby Kodak, isn't it? Okay yeah.

02:11:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, that would be hysterical. You know what? That's my guess.

02:11:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You've been cast as Satan in the general press, but surely you have some positive qualities. What do you, perhaps? How? About April 1st. Let's see the blue badge.

02:11:53
It was a list of your hidden gems, bobby, for you. Yeah, so we'll see that and then, okay, so this is more Xbox, so there's an Xbox October. Update out this one. This is interesting because we have keyboard mapping now coming to controllers and they've added this now for the series I'm sorry for the elite series two. And what's the accessibility control, the adaptive controller, right, and this is another one of those things you know as we do game streaming and different games on different platforms, the ability to play with a keyboard, most right, like we did on the Dreamcast. Oh.

02:12:26
I like that. Yeah, I liked it too. I used to play Quake 3, sorry Arena on the Dreamcast using a keyboard. Most it was great.

02:12:34 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And the Dreamcast was running in Windows Mobile, windows CE.

02:12:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was one of the operating environments, but not by default. But yeah, it could. And then there's also a tie to Xbox's ability to backup screenshots and videos to OneDrive. You can use ClipChamp to import them directly from the app and edit them in ClipChamp and then publish them that way, which is not a bad way to do it. Clipchamp, as we know, is a great app. Talk about that a lot and that's pretty much the big news in that update. What else we got here? Yeah, so new month, new month of Xbox Game Pass. Back in the day, this would also be a new month of Xbox games with gold, but that is gone. So for the first half of the month, several new games. We're getting into that weird territory until Activision comes on board. It's like what are these things? I don't recognize any of these games you need to like. I haven't heard of any, I know.

02:13:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I feel so out of touch.

02:13:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wild.

02:13:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hearts was pretty popular, wild Hearts OK, that one. Yeah, yeah, yeah 30. Shooters and the man who erased his name Wow, that's too bad. That's too bad. I can tell you his name, but we can't. I can't because he erased it. And Spirit and Coral Island Wow, these are just weird, I know. Yeah, I think the bottom of the barrel officially.

02:14:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, we're about to be at the top of the barrel because Activision Blizzard is coming on board. There's going to be some good stuff in there A lot of titles there. Yep, this one is not an official report, although I guess there's a support page out there that kind of suggests it's true. But Microsoft is going to crack down on the use of unofficial Xbox controllers. People were upset about this.

02:14:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It took me a second.

02:14:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm trying to understand what the market is here because I believe these. Typically, there's two reasons you would buy an unofficial Xbox, actually three. One, you didn't know it was unofficial. Two, it's cheap. Right, they're not paying for the license. That could be why. But the big reason, I think, is they have controllers that let you cheat Cheat device. Oh, I remember, I remember, yeah, my son, who is to this day the best Call of Duty player that's ever existed and could blow anyone out of the water. The guy who got two nukes in one online game of I think it was Call of Duty 4, wanted so badly one Christmas as a kid to get one of those controllers. And I'm like what are you talking about? You're already better than everybody. What do you need this for? Like, you don't even need it. I need it just to play with you. So those are our thing, and I think they're trying to crack down on. I think that's probably the motivation here, right?

02:15:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Interesting. So that would be the only reasonable approach. And why would they bother otherwise, except for damaging play for others?

02:15:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If there was some knockoff selling $20 Xbox controllers and the official ones were 60 bucks, like maybe that would be a problem too, but I do think it's.

02:15:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it's cheating pretty much Interesting. Okay, so there weren't like some devices, there's better controllers, right, you know they do more.

02:15:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, oh no, you can. You're right, you could. You might specifically go to buy an expensive controller. That's better, Absolutely.

02:15:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But anti cheat. I understand that's different. Yeah, and I linked to the wrong thing here, so I'm going to fix that.

02:15:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So Atari the company we all think we know but I think we need to acknowledge that the Atari that exists today is not the Atari that existed when I was a kid I completely screwed up this link, sorry, let me just I'll just paste it in, rather than trying to be cute with it Is buying digital eclipse. Now, if there's anyone out there who is an Amiga fan from back in the day, you might understand that when I heard that name, I thought of the company that made the pinball game. It was so fantastic on the Amiga that would scroll up and down with the screen. You know, it was amazing.

02:16:13
And that company I thought was called digitally clips, but it wasn't, because digitally clips started in the early nineties. They created this incredible emulator technology that they could actually read the source code in from an original arcade game and then spit it out native code on a new machine and whatever. So you might be thinking, okay, I mean, I, we know what ties into retro games now and all that kind of stuff. But here you know this company. This company just published that Kara Tekka international interactive documentary. That's the technology that they used to do it and they work with the guy who created the original game.

02:16:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So there might be more of these. No, there will be more of these.

02:16:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They've already announced one that's supposed to happen in December, I think, yeah. But yeah, re Rans, stop Yep. And it's going to be coming through Atari now. Yeah, that's neat, so yeah, I like I, I they're docu games.

02:17:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They're both documentaries and games Place.

02:17:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there are actual games in there. You can play different versions of the game and then there are interactive documentaries about the making of the games and whatever. It's a big package of stuff.

02:17:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If you're into this stuff, it's amazing. It's really clever.

02:17:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that Kara Kara Tekka thing is a masterpiece. It's unbelievable. So that's really actually really neat. And I really have to say this this Atari, as we'll call it, the post-infogrames Atari, whatever they are, has tried, you know, modern, semi-modern consoles. We've tried a few different things, but they're just embracing what they are, which is their Atari and their Centipede and Pac-Man, and we're going to do retro gaming. And they have been on a little buying spree, buying up the rights to, or existing companies that are actually still doing things to, these games that have been sitting dormant for decades. Thanks, micro pros I think it was one of them. They own now a lot of this stuff and they're going to the fan base and saying, hey, what do you want to see?

02:17:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean a bunch of micro pro stuff showed up on Steam, Like that used to be where old games went.

02:18:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Old games went to die, or a good old game, what's it called.

02:18:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I got good old games, god. Yeah, old games, god God.

02:18:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so yeah, anyway, that's nothing but good news. So that's neat, nice, yeah, okay.

02:18:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then, yeah, I'm sorry you can rest, you don't have to. Is there anything else? Do a few, do some push-ups.

02:18:25
Do some push-ups. We're going to do your tips and picks of the week and an app of the week and a brown liquor of the week. But before we do all that, I do want to make a plea. You mentioned earlier that your ad sales on Theratcom are down. That's why everybody should join Therat premium to support what you read on Theratcom and this is true across the board. And I don't know why many podcast networks have gone under. Gimlet's gone. Wnyc is returning, which was a big studio. It's going back to the radio. If it can't be a radio show, we don't want to do it, which certainly is future forward. I don't want to go back to the radio. I'm making a plea to you. I would like to keep doing what we do, but we need your help to do it.

02:19:21
I always thought the tweet could be a listener-supported network. It turned out it really couldn't and all of our growth has occurred with the help of advertising. But that era is gone from podcasting, from blogs for a lot of things, which means we got to turn back to you, and I don't mind that at all. I think that's really exciting. That's why we created ClubTwits. Two years old now, lisa was prescient. She had a feeling. She also did a lot of research and said you know, we're not going to make this expensive, we want to make it available to the largest number of people possible.

02:19:50
$7 a month and that price hasn't changed. $84 a year there's not a discount for a year, it's just a convenience. So you get billed once a year instead of 12 times. There are discounts for family memberships and corporate memberships. You can go to the website twittv slash, club twit and read all about it. Pick what you want. You can even buy individuals. But let me tell you what the $7 membership gets you. It gets you ad-free versions of this show. No ads. You wouldn't even hear this. Clubtwit members don't even know I'm begging, which is probably a good thing. You get shows we don't put out anywhere else, like Paul's Hands on Windows we put out little sample versions, but he does that every week. Hands on Macintosh with Micah Sargeant, the untitled Linux show with Jonathan Bennett, the GizFiz with Dick D Bartol, scott Wilkinson's Home Theater Geeks.

02:20:40
The plan is to bring these shows out in the club with club members are paying for them, and then, as they grow, perhaps release them into the public. That's what happened this week in space. But we want to make sure you get your $7 worth. You also get access to the Discord, which is, I think we were talking about, how social networks seem to be dying. Discord is growing. Discord is growing. Discord is amazing and because our Discord is just people who are members of ClubTwit, it's a pretty darn good group.

02:21:13
We are now at 7,985 paid members. If 15 more of you join, I will. I will. I don't know what should I do? I will stand on my head and fall over immediately.

02:21:28
We would love to get to 8,000 members today. You want to help out. Twitter is amazing. You can help out Twittertv slash ClubTwit. 8,000 sounds like a lot. We have approximately 700,000 unique listeners every month. That means you know about a little more than 1% of you are members. I'd like to get that higher.

02:21:50
Honestly, if we got it to 5 or even, we were hoping, 10% 70,000 members who are the future would be assured. We'd be able to launch new shows. We'd be able to do a whole lot more, and we'd like to. What we don't want to do is have to cut shows, cut hosts, but you know we don't have venture capital, so without absent your funding, we might have to Twittertv slash ClubTwit. This is not a threat. I don't want to blackmail you. I just want to be clear about the situation we are in and a lot of, actually a lot of companies are in. So many podcast networks have disappeared this year because of this. We don't want to be one of them. Twittertv slash ClubTwit All right Back of the book coming up. Paul Therrat, kick us off with the back of the book, if you will. Well, this is a threat.

02:22:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You better buy my damn book. I don't remember when, sometime ago, I mentioned I would be updating the book for 23H2. I've been working on that diligently here in Mexico. Based on the schedule nonsense we talked about early in the show, I thought I would have until November. I had until yesterday, so I actually got to the minimum of what I wanted to get done. I got done, so I've.

02:23:11
Two of the new chapters are in there for co-pilot and Windows backup. It's 160 pages of new slash updated content. Most of it is updated right, obviously, with rare exceptions. Every single screenshot is brand new. I retested everything, especially all the work around stuff for the set up nonsense and all that kind of stuff. 950 pages Actually it's 951 is the official page length.

02:23:33
Right now it's about 150,000 words. It's a lot of stuff. It's going to get bigger because there's a lot more new content to come. I'm going to update the whole thing for the book, but the first I bet it's the first 12 chapters ish are updated. Also, I'm cherry picking at the ones where it makes the most sense, like OneDrive. I updated because that's changing in this release. So if you have already purchased the book, go to Lean Pub. You can get the update for free and I'll be updating chapter by chapter going forward, not in one big batch like this. If you don't have it, please do consider buying it. It's $9.99 and up. You could pay more if you'd like. I think it's a good reference, but I would. I wrote it, so maybe that's not fair.

02:24:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He even used it himself.

02:24:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He actually has to go to the book. I literally looked up something today. I was like I know you can do this. I can't hold everything in my head.

02:24:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's a lot of pages as big as it is.

02:24:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If this book were in print, how many pages would it be?

02:24:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's it. It's 950 in PDF form. So that's how big it is. That's amazing. Yeah, you can't buy it. I told the story today, but I still love this so much. The second to last print book I wrote was the Windows 7 secrets, and I was out in Netherlands. I appeared at the Windows 7 launch there and we had little table of people who are and get the book signed or whatever in the sky. The Dutch has written this very well. I was so blunt, we were so copacetic, like immediately on each other's same page, and this guy said can I ask you a question? I said sure he goes. If Windows 7 is so easy to use, why did you need 750 pages to describe it? Good question, yeah, and I said well, I patted it with screenshots.

02:25:09
But I was. That's good. I like cutting to the chase. And then the, the app pick is related right to Windows 11 and 23 is two, although it doesn't require 23 is two, which is at. Startup, has released a major new version of star 11, which they're calling start 11 v2. This is not an expensive product, on the best today, so the next, the normal price is 699. It was I don't know if it's still is right now, but at launch was on sale for 599. If you bought it again I don't know what the time for me is, but if you already own the first one, you could get it for as little as I think two or $3 on upgrade. Like seriously, guys, throw them your money.

02:25:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is what I want my start menu to look like.

02:25:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is fantastic Start 11 is amazing and it is a huge disappointed in my life, just like I can't use a Mac or Chrome OS or Windows 10 because I have to write about stock of Windows 11. I'm writing a book. You know. I want to use this thing so bad and I can't. Yeah, oh right, because I have that. I can't, but you should and definitely look at this.

02:26:06 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I my particular. I particularly enjoy the fact that this screenshot of it is on a MacBook.

02:26:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So well done, well done.

02:26:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, sure, sure. Is that not a MacBook, that indentation? Looks very familiar there.

02:26:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That is definitely a.

02:26:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
MacBook. I hate to tell you it's hard to say. I know.

02:26:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I know exactly what the it could be a Surface Lapse. It might be a Surface Lapse. It's a MacBook.

02:26:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Because people do graphics, use Mac. All right, very nice pick of the week. Now it's turn time to turn to Richard Campbell for the Run as Radio.

02:26:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Pick of the week. This week's show coincidentally with all the conversations we were having about things was with Mike Halsey, who has written a book all called the green IT. Oh, I don't know.

02:26:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I was wondering if I had noticed. By the way, I love your 404 page.

02:27:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's great. So we we are having a problem with the website to turned up to pay. It looks like the underlying API has changed. This is freaking awesome. I'd you like that. There it is. Our whole website is filled with IT gags. Like you notice those underscores. Those are all keys that.

02:27:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, sure, that's menu, menu Sure.

02:27:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You gotta love a website that's made out of basically ASCII art.

02:27:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know this is we were. You had it down that path.

02:27:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a gorgeous website and all those colors. Those are the Metro colors. Yeah, nice. And then we have some, you know, winning. Yeah so, but yeah, something happening on the API layer and bad things sites a little busted right now, but if you are subscribed to the show, it downloaded normally. The RSS feed is fine. It's just the front. The front end is a little mangled at the moment. Anyway, we were talking green IT, so a part of this conversation was about keeping PCs for longer and then also repurposing them when you've got to move them on and or going through better recycling process and trying to keep the model landfills. And we talked more broadly than that, because there's lots of different bits and pieces of hardware. We did talk about right to repair, maintainability of equipment, battery replacements, that kind of thing.

02:28:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mike Halsey looks just like you, richard, yeah.

02:28:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You could be twins. Part of that broken website thing.

02:28:23 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but at least it fails well. I mean that's a good. That's a good, it failed in an interesting way.

02:28:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not actually, is it actually? It is five. That's the 500th episode.

02:28:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The 500th episode is my has my head shot, but that is from the episode 905.

02:28:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, the real. Okay, I was guys. I thought you were passing Okay.

02:28:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, yeah, the real problem here is that it is showing the ad from the 500 show. Oh, forget that. So, yeah, that's going to be a problem, but yeah, no, this is the you're looking at.

02:28:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
My afternoon is fixing that green IT with Mike Halsey. It is available now. If you subscribe, you don't have to worry about the website.

02:29:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, everything. I don't worry about the website, although if you go click on listen you would hear 905. Okay, it's got, mike. Okay.

02:29:11 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now let's liquor, liquor up. Oh, he froze. You see that? Oh, no, he froze. I don't know what to think about this, right? Oh, thank God, there we go.

02:29:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And all that after two and a half hours, almost three hours working, perfect, just do it. I had to talk about.

02:29:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was vaguely hoping I'd have to do that tap dance thing. That happens when, like, a speaker doesn't show up and then the guy who's there has to talk about it, even though he has no idea.

02:29:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, let me talk about that yeah.

02:29:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like are we done? Oh, no, 58 minutes left. Okay, you know great.

02:29:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I have. I've done a fill in for a keynote like that once, where we didn't know when he was going to arrive, and so I did a 15 minutes story than a 10 minutes story.

02:29:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I did a long horn server keynote.

02:30:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
exactly like that and I yes, that's just anyway, I have great confidence and riches ability to fill. However, I do too.

02:30:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It comes to be a professional alcoholic. You want to talk about American rye whiskey? Oh, right, whiskey, right Whiskey. It is a category. American rye whiskey has specific guidelines around it.

02:30:24
Its main thing is 51% rye, so this is a different kind of grain. It's been around a long time. It's not as popular as it used to be, for a variety of reasons. Most American rye is going to also have corn and barley in it as well. Again, the barley provides some anilase which decreases the methanol bounce. Corn is an inexpensive grain, similar to American bourbon. It must be distilled no higher than 80% ABV and barreled it no more than 62.5%. So that part is similar. It needs to be aged in American oak. It's a minimum aging. If you age it for at least two years, you're allowed to call it straight rye whiskey as long as it has no blending in it. But it's not particularly popular.

02:31:07
It's having a resurgence now, but the original rye whiskeys weren't from Kentucky. They were from the Northeast New York, maryland, pennsylvania, the areas where they grow, or at least grow a lot of rye. What took out rye whisky for the most part was prohibition. So during prohibition most distilleries in the Northeast closed down and rye consumption went down and a lot of farmers planted wheat. They switched to modern grains. I remember it's the 20s, it's in the 30s that all of this goes down. That's also when the engineering of grain started to change. One of the things that we discovered as we explored our ability to modify crops and increase yields is that rye didn't increase in yield, but wheat and corn did, and so if you're a farmer, the opportunity to grow more per acre meant more money, and so rye became simply a less popular grain, and it also didn't make as nice, you know, bread wheat makes nicer bread. That's why they call it bread wheat. It's got a higher gluten content. It's an effective product for that. So while the booze wasn't around for a few years, a lot of those things changed, and so, coming out of the prohibition, you just don't have a lot of rye anymore. Now, again, that's a specifically American rye. The few distilleries that sort of were still around at the end of prohibition and being bought up by the Kentuckians, who were doing very well, and so we'll talk about a couple of those brands.

02:32:32
There are other kinds of rye whiskeys. Specifically, most people think of rye whiskeys, canadian rye whisky, which is essentially no standard at all Back in the pre-prohibition era the Canadians grew rye extremely well, so a lot of their whiskeys had a lot of rye in them. But there was no standard to that and there still isn't. So today you can buy something called Canadian rye whiskeys kind of rye in it, although in time there are also Canadian rye whiskeys that are almost 100% rye. But again, no standards. A lot of existing well-known brands are now making a rye. Angel Samby's got one, dickle has one, dom Creek makes a rye, rittenhouse makes a rye. But if you talk about the original rye whiskeys, the pre-prohibition rye whiskeys, almost all those brands are gone. One of the very few you can still find is Old Overholst, which was literally from the early 1800s in Pennsylvania, and they did not survive prohibition. Their assets were sold off and bought by Jim Beam, which now produces that product in their style with a high rye amount.

02:33:39
And that is not the whisky I wanted to talk about. The specific whisky I wanted to talk about was from Leopold Brothers. So Leopold Brothers is a modern distillery. So these are two brothers. Todd studied brewing in the 90s. He wanted to be a brewmaster. He actually apprenticed in Europe, came back home. His brother Scott was an industrial engineering, manufacturing and so forth, and they made beer for a while with Michigan and then got into distilling, found it way more fun. In the early 2000s they quit on brewing, built a facility in Colorado specifically to make whiskeys. Scott was more of the historian too and he found some of these old recipes from the 1800s for rye whiskies and they started experimenting with it. They opened their facility in 2014, and they're pretty old school in some respects, so they still do for malting.

02:34:34
We talked about this in the Scottish series talking about malting. They malt their own barley, which takes about a week They've done, while they're sticking to the old style. I've noticed I've seen some videos of some of their facilities. They've got these ultra smooth concrete floors so they can do a little bit more mechanical handling of the malt, but they use European drying kilns. They're following a lot of standards, so they've got their own barley. But their big thing we're making their rye is that they use a super old school rye called a brusy rye.

02:35:07
This is out of the abruza region in Italy, which again been growing rye for centuries. It's a very low starch rye, so it doesn't make bread. They've managed to be abruza rye. It's pretty popular these days in sort of eclectic areas. But because it's a low starch rye it has very little gluten, so it's good for brewing but not for much else. It's yield is low. While it was popular pre-prohibition, again you get back to farmer-switched crops. Because it wasn't good for bread, they went to other things and so it kind of died out.

02:35:46
You don't malt rye, you just grind it, and they do all of that. They have their own mashing techniques. They use fairly high temperature mashing, about 140 degrees Fahrenheit. They use Cypress tank for fermentation, which is super old school. These are open top. They're actually encouraging lambic yeast as well, while they use a blend of brewer's yeast what you both reacted so possibly to as yeast creams. You remember they're a normal fermentation.

02:36:20
With a yeast cream like that it's pretty quick. Within 48 hours or so yeast is already dying off because it consumed all the sugar. But they actually hold it in the tank for another 48 hours to allow the slower yeast and the slower bacteria, that lack of cellulose and so forth, to sour the mash. Those are actually bacteria that sustain themselves in the wood. Otherwise it's not as fast acting as these yeast creams. They do create their own flavors. There's a bunch of ways to approach sour that different distilleries approach, but this is super old school. Now there's two different rye that they make, neither of which I can find in Canada, which is very frustrating. The one I'm going with first is their Maryland style rye 100 proof, which is 50% ABV, if you can find it. Apparently it's available in total wine for about 70 US. The mash bill on this is 65% rye, 15% or 20%.

02:37:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Can I ask you a question about this? It seems to me that as craft distillery activity grows and grows and grows, this is maybe the next extension, because rye usually to me has much more of a bite to it than bourbon, which is very smooth.

02:37:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Normally when we make bourbon we use rye as the flavor grain, the middle grain, and it has that spiciness to it.

02:37:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's sharp. A sharp like a Scotch could be sharp. Right, the flavor from bourbon comes from the wood, is that?

02:37:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
the same with, but the sweetness comes from the corn. Like bourbon, actually has a strong sweet flavor, especially when we get weeded bourbons think plantains, or.

02:38:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wonder if rye doesn't, I'm sorry. I wonder if it doesn't appeal to a growing base of whiskey enthusiasts who want the more complex.

02:38:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and I would argue especially when you talk about, like dickle making rye on the side, that they are taking. Dickle making rye on the side is a beautiful exercise Because they normally make bourbon Right. They are trying to make a rye that they are trying to appeal to a different audience. This is a very different product because of the brucee rye it has a. It's not as spicy, it's more floral, it has a different character to it.

02:38:45
Floral like a gin is floral or yeah, not botanical, but more complex flavor notes. That's what it's known for. It just doesn't get high yield, so it makes it expensive. I mean it's a $70 ball.

02:38:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think I've ever run into anything like this. I think that's the issue.

02:39:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the appeal to me, and it was my friend Eric that put me onto this and I started reading and I'm like huh, like now. I got to go find one of these. Right, I haven't been able to find one. There's another version they make that I'm trying to hunt down because they bought a three chamber still. This is super old school.

02:39:21
A normal column still, which is what they're making their Maryland style with, is a continuous operation where you're preparing your Warped on one side and you're able to continuously feed it in still, so you crank a lot of yield out. A three chamber still is a very primitive version of a column still where, rather than having lots of thin plates, it has three large plates, and it's not efficient. Its production rate is really low. Ever since the 1800s, when we got the coffee still running Like, there was no reason to run a still like this anymore, except that it has really interesting flavor characteristics and so what they call the three chambers rye, which is much more expensive. It's like a $250 bottle of whiskey.

02:40:09
They're using this old-fashioned still and with a thumper, which is a great term.

02:40:16
It's quite a large, bulky column or still with three distinct layers into it and so, as it's heated, the vapors come up and then they land in the second chamber where they cool a bit and they get hotter and they'll go up to the next chamber.

02:40:29
So it's kind of a slow process. It's maybe 10% or even 5% of the production rate of a regular still and it needs routine cleaning because you're putting the mash in the wort in and then the thumper actually comes off the lye arm. And they call the thumper because stills don't run continuously. Really they sort of build up heat in a certain amount of the distillate comes down the lye arm and when it lands in this pot still it thumps, it makes a sort of a bang, which is why it gets called a thumper. But it's a second stage or a separate stage of pot distillation that then rises up and goes through the condenser. It's just that these guys have really hybridized a modern operation with some really old-school technique. Like I really want to sit down with both of these bottles and drink them side by side and I would like to watch you do it, because then I could have some too.

02:41:27
Well, and I mean, I've been thinking about talking about rye for a while, just because it has its own character, there's no choice about it, and it does seem to be making resurgence, although most of the time it's bourbon makers who are like oh, you want to rye? Well, here's a rye. We just tinkered with the mash, but these guys are approaching rye like it's 1820. Like it's way back. It's pre-coffee, still, it's pre-any of this.

02:41:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that speaks to this whole movement of craft distillery in a way. Right, I mean, I know it's not the same as the modern pop store, but I mean going back to thought this is a great way to differentiate, yeah.

02:42:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And just to make it, it's like hey, really like whiskey, why don't you try it? Like I think about Glyvitz-Nedura and Shacklepit and so did these throwback whiskies to get rid of the processes that they worked about in the 1970s with whiskey wasn't proper. It's like make sure it doesn't get cloudy and make sure it works well with ice and these things. And they're like oh no, I like whiskey for whiskey. So let's go drink more whiskey. That's my whiskey, amazing. And the folks seem to have fallen into this in Colorado, of all places. So I'm delighted. And it's like I don't get many missions these days for whiskey. I generally know what I'm drinking. I'm excited. You know you saw me find that Perth 23 and how delighted I was with that. But this is something I had and had a chance to explore. It's old school rise and I want some.

02:42:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think this is in. I think a lot of people are afraid of rise. They just a little too harsh.

02:42:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I suspect this isn't because they switched up the grain. Yeah, okay, that's my story this week. I said you know, now you actually, I'll find one and you'll see me drink it.

02:43:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But here in the States we can find it readily, which is interesting yeah.

02:43:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's. It looks like it's around, so I would certainly recommend the Maryland, just because that's an old school approach to arrive with.

02:43:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You are going to Seattle soon. The three chambers sounds more appealing to me. It sounds a little bit like for less of a hardcore.

02:43:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just right, right Right, that's a $300. If you it's like.

02:43:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like whiskey for adults.

02:43:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So when they say three chambers, they mean three Franklins, 300.

02:43:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, well it's three chambers because it uses that different still and it's expensive. Yeah, but I like about this is not like. It's not like you have a Zaki 12 or one a bunch of wards and suddenly went from 40 bucks to 400. Right, yeah. This is the way it's, actually it's actually difficult to make To make, and so they charge, yeah, fair enough.

02:43:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I guess I'm off to Bevmo and you guys are off to bed. It's a time to say good night to our fabulous hosts. Windows Weekly for this week. First Windows Weekly of November 23. Paul Therat is at Theratcom. Become a premier member, a premium member, and you'll get access to some really great extra stuff that Paul writes Grammar checked and ready to go. Haha, the Grammar Check twice, twice and ready by AI, loud by AI.

02:44:28
He also his book, the Field Guide to Windows 11, is at, as you just heard, leanpubcom. You'll get the field guide for Windows 10 inside the sweet cherry filling. He also has Windows everywhere. His newest book, which is about great kind of the history of Windows, all at leanpubcom. Richard Campbell is at runasradiocom. That's where his podcasts run as radio and dot net rocks Live, as does his image and his incredible, you know, perpetuity. Frankly, the 404 screens are great. I think I'm glad I saw the error screens Trying to make it Got a lot of fun, right, trying to make it error out.

02:45:07
See what. See what happens. We do this show every Wednesday, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern. As you might know, we are going to Standard Time this Sunday because Halloween's over and the kids have all the candy, so we can now shift the clock fall back. That means we will be now at 1900 UTC. Oh yeah, you keep track of this. I just do some math in my head and hope it's right. You can, I only and, frankly, you don't need to do the math. You can watch it live, yes, at livetwittv, but you can also get on-demand versions of the show anytime you want and listen whenever you feel like it. I don't care what UTC you are. The show is at twittv. There's a dedicated YouTube channel to Windows Weekly. Best thing to do, though, subscribe in your favorite podcast client, because that way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available, and you'll have it, and you just listen at your leisure. Thank you, paul. Thank you, richard. Have a great week. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye-bye.

02:46:09 - Scott Wilkinson (Other)
Hey there, scott Wilkinson here. In case you hadn't heard, Home Theater Geeks is back. Each week I bring you the latest audio video news, tips and tricks to get the most out of your AV system, product reviews and more. You can enjoy Home Theater Geeks only if you're a member of Club Twit, which costs $7 a month, or you can subscribe to Home Theater Geeks by itself for only $2.99 a month. I hope you'll join me for a weekly dose of Home Theater Geek-a-toot.