Windows Weekly 857 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.

Mikah Sargent (00:00:00):
Coming up on Windows Weekly. I am Micah Sargent subbing in for Leo LaPorte this week and we've got a great show. First we talk about Tiny 11 23 11. It's a smaller install of Windows 11 and what does that entail? And should you install the entire thing or pick and choose? It's a great conversation. Then we talk about Windows inside. Yes, let's take a look at the dev channel. First and foremost, Paul says that Android devices are now available in nearby sharing and sharing files between an Android device and a Windows PC is actually a little bit faster. In the Canary Build, we can see a new Energy Saver feature and Paul is pretty sure this is a hint at Windows 12. Richard Campbell, on the other hand, isn't so sure. After that, we talk about how Amazon announces its AI chatbot for the enterprise, which leaves us wondering what exactly is an Amazon enterprise customer and checking in on Paul's Call of Duty habit. Spoiler alert, he's still not really playing the game. All that and more coming up on Windows Weekly

TWiT (00:01:08):
Podcasts you love from people you trust this,

Mikah Sargent (00:01:20):
This is Windows Weekly with Richard Campbell, Paul THO Rotten this week, Micah Sergeant episode 857 recorded Wednesday, November 29th, 2023. SharePoint all the way down. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by our friends at IT pro TV now called ACI Learning. Keep your IT team skills up with the speed of technology. Visit go dot ACI learning.com/twit. twit listeners can receive up to 65% off an IT Pro enterprise solution plan After completing their form. Based on your team's size, you'll receive a properly quoted discount tailored to your needs and by trace route, the podcast for digital pioneers Trace Route offers a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of our digital world. Get keyed into the conversation today. Listen and subscribe to the new season of Trace Route on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out Tracer Out. Now it's time for Windows Weekly, the show where every week we take a deep dive into all things Microsoft with the absolute experts, Paul Throt and Richard Campbell. I am Micah Sergeant subbing in for Leo LaPorte this week as he finds him himself and reclaims new life happiness and perhaps his heart will grow three sizes, not because of the food he's eating, but because he will be changed. So upon his return, who knows what Leo LePort you might get. Until then, you've got me Mike as sergeant and I am joined by your two steadfast and true pals to my left. I have to look actually to see is Richard Campbell who is joining us, so I would look

Richard Campbell (00:02:59):
This way.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:01):
There you go. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, from, what was it, mad Town, what was it

Richard Campbell (00:03:05):
Again? We call it Mad Park, but it's Madeira

Mikah Sargent (00:03:08):
Park Mad Park. That's right. The Mad Park. How are you?

Richard Campbell (00:03:11):
I'm good. Excellent. It's good to be home. Next week will be in Orlando last trip of the year, so I a couple of weeks at home.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:19):
Alright. And to my right, joining us from Laura Macee is Paul Ello. Paul.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:27):
Hello Micah.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:29):
How are you?

Paul Thurrott (00:03:30):
I'm well, thank you. Good.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:32):
Does the move done now or are you still in process? Moving

Paul Thurrott (00:03:35):
Is never done. This is true, but yeah, we are in here like ticks now. So

Mikah Sargent (00:03:43):
You got some cool artwork behind you. Have you ever talked?

Paul Thurrott (00:03:45):
Yeah, that's going to eventually get hung up on the wall. Super

Richard Campbell (00:03:48):
Vintage,

Paul Thurrott (00:03:49):
Harry

Mikah Sargent (00:03:49):
Vintage Love

Paul Thurrott (00:03:50):
The July, 1997 by magazine cover featuring a train. Oh, nice. It's a little bit of everything I love in one picture. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:03:58):
Oh, I didn't know you were a train guy.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:00):
Oh yes,

Mikah Sargent (00:04:01):
We've got a lot of train guys on the network. Dick de Barolo falls asleep every night to train videos to train sets, yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:04:09):
Trains. So we used to live right next to the train tracks in Mckenjie and then we moved here and one of my concerns was, I'm never going to hear this again and you don't hear it as well, obviously we're not close to it, but three o'clock in the morning the other night there was some crazy big train thing going through and you could hear it and in the middle of the dark at three o'clock, I was like, thank you. My wife

Mikah Sargent (00:04:33):
Was like, nice.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:37):
She heard it too.

Mikah Sargent (00:04:38):
Yeah. I'm glad that you got to have some trains. Well, I don't have a segue that works for trains. I guess we're going down the tracks to move it. Talking about windows. It's terrible, terrible. Yeah, let's keep it on the rails. There we go. Thank you Kevin. As we talk about Tiny 11, what's that all about?

Paul Thurrott (00:04:57):
Yeah, I don't know if you heard of this project, there was a Tiny 10 project as well, and thank you sir. Might have another, this is a project, I don't know the person's name. It's N NT Dev. He's on Twitter and he's on the internet archive and whatever, but basically he's taking the Windows 11 installer and trying to strip it down to something much smaller and he just released the latest version. He's kind of renaming it so that it's clear which version it is. He's calling it 23 11 23 H two, which might've been a little clearer, but that's okay. So it lines up with the 23 H two release. Obviously it's 20% smaller than the original image he did for 23 H two a couple of months ago and is significantly smaller than the Microsoft version. So 3.5 gigabytes for the ISO file versus about 6.2 I think it is for the normal Windows 11 ISO. So the big change, and the reason discussing it now is he actually got servicing to work. And what that means is you can install this thing on a computer and just get Windows updates normally where just before you had to manually download those things. So that's a big step. And why would you do this?

(00:06:14):
Primary purpose of it is to allow Windows 11 to run on lower end hardware, this specifically hardware that isn't qualified to run Windows 11. But honestly, I think there's a side benefit to it as well, which is that you get a lot less of the crap, right? Always.

Richard Campbell (00:06:33):
The question is how much are you adding back in again? Obviously Edge is uninstalled, so

Paul Thurrott (00:06:39):
Edge is uninstalled. That's true. So you can install it if you want to. Of course that's all in Fluxx right now anyway. We know that Microsoft Edge will be Unis Installable in the EEA soon, but you can use when get to install anything, basically the Xbox components aren't installed by default was one of the things you called out. But if you install any game from the store that uses Xbox, that stuff will be enabled and it will work normally. Nice. So this one, I feel like it's crossed a threshold where it's starting to be viable. I wouldn't say for mainstream slash normal people, but for technical people. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (00:07:13):
No, this then becomes your logical starting point then, right? This is instead of having a Swiss Army knife with all the blades already in it, it's like just give me a couple and I'll get the others that I need.

Paul Thurrott (00:07:23):
Yes, go ahead. Sorry. Well, I was just going to say from a security

Mikah Sargent (00:07:26):
Perspective, is there concern about using an installer from a third

Paul Thurrott (00:07:30):
Party? Yeah, there is. We don't know who this person is and we shouldn't trust him, but people do. And again, this has been around for a while. I mean there was a tiny 10, like I said, and I looked at Tiny 11 back in, I don't know, February or March earlier this year and interesting, but not quite what I was looking for. I think with the serviceability functionality that is there now, it becomes a lot more interesting. And look, it's not, I've written and talked a lot about Win Get, which is the Windows package manager. It's a command line tool, but it's not super hard to use. So if you need a couple of things that aren't in that base install, you should be able to get up to speed. So I'm testing this now, I want to see if this is viable,

Richard Campbell (00:08:12):
See if it makes a good workflow going forward, because the real question is what

Paul Thurrott (00:08:16):
Are you? Yeah, what do you mean

Richard Campbell (00:08:17):
Installing by default in a regular install that you never use?

Paul Thurrott (00:08:22):
That's right. Yeah. And I don't know how other people do things, but for phones and computers with me, I will do a clean install and there's a couple of things that I know I need, so I install that stuff and then the rest of that computer's lifecycle is me occasionally saying, oh, red, I need this. Oh, red I need this. And so you kind of install as you go. And so I'm kind of following that path here just to see how it works and we'll see. It just happened this week. I need a bit more time with it. I don't want to give a glowing endorsement quite yet. But this is interesting, and I can't remember exactly what Richard said earlier, but it reminded me of Visual Studio Code where you start with this really stripped down thing and you can just add the components you want. And that's one of the things I really like about Visual Studio Code. In fact, I think that's a viable model for web browsers and for lots of different kinds of software in this sense, this is treating Windows in that same way, give you the most stripped down version of the OSS possible and then allow you the user to decide what gets installed, not just take everything.

Richard Campbell (00:09:26):
It just begged the question, why doesn't Microsoft do this?

Paul Thurrott (00:09:30):
So yeah, so Microsoft, oh dear. Their strategy, which is probably not unique in the platform OSS space I guess is that things work better together. And if you have everything there, you can ensure that it always works and there's a baseline of functionality and a lot of the bad behaviors in Windows 11, it's not always for bad behaviors, but a lot of the bad behaviors in Windows 11 are tied to this kind of way of doing things, which is we're going to ignore your browser choice because we are going to load edge, which you've said you don't want, so that we can go to some MSN website, which is terrible and serves ads and whatever, and we want to make sure you get that full experience because it benefits Microsoft in that case. I guess there are other example, there's

Richard Campbell (00:10:15):
A subtext that you're getting at there, which is that there are employees instead of Microsoft who are scorecarded based on the number of installs of their particular tool I was going to

Mikah Sargent (00:10:25):
That

Paul Thurrott (00:10:25):
Don't care what you

Richard Campbell (00:10:26):
Want, I care about what I get. Hey,

Mikah Sargent (00:10:28):
The thing that I made needs to make it into the system, right?

Richard Campbell (00:10:32):
Because that's where my

Paul Thurrott (00:10:33):
Bonus lives. So just to be fair, I will say there are instances where this does benefit people. So for example, not the Microsoft Edge stuff that doesn't benefit anybody, but you have a set of applications like the snipping tool and Paint and the Clip Champ that are standalone apps, but they also kind of work together. So if one of those things is not on the system and you have created a video clip of a screen recording and you want to edit it, it's just a seamless kind of integration by default. If Clip Champ wasn't installed on that computer, you would just get a, I don't know what you would get actually, I've never tried it, but I assume what you'd get is a Microsoft store installer request and then you could go from there. But just having it all there, the theory is we have infinite PC resources. I think

Mikah Sargent (00:11:21):
It's good for, as you said, the normal user because think about if you are out and about and you pull out that laptop and you try to do one of these and then you're not anywhere near an internet connection and suddenly you can't use this tool that you expect to be able to use. So yeah, I understand wanting to have as much of available as

Paul Thurrott (00:11:41):
Possible. It's true of data as well. I've complained a lot about Microsoft's behaviors with regard to OneDrive and forcing people to use folder backup and so forth. But I've also been on a plane double clicked on a file and it doesn't load. I don't have it sync locally and no, I can't do the thing I was going to do. Can we go back to that part where I didn't have an internet connection? I don't want to live in that world.

Mikah Sargent (00:12:01):
Exactly. Oh

Paul Thurrott (00:12:04):
Dear. I think of it as takeoff and landing. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (00:12:07):
Those are the only times I'm disconnected. Oh man. Well, yeah, I mean I like the idea for folks who are particular about their systems and maybe ultimately, okay, it reminds me of, it's a little bit like when you go through a traumatic experience and

Paul Thurrott (00:12:31):
That was not what I thought you were going to say, but go on

Mikah Sargent (00:12:33):
To reclaim control in your life. You decide to do something wild, oftentimes that results in someone like bleaching their hair blonde or shaving their head. I dunno why it's a lot of hair things or buying a new car when you go through your midlife crisis. And so with this, it's like I feel like I need to have the absolute control over this system, so I'm going to install this thin or not thin client. That's a different term, but I'm going to install this very tiny thing and build everything up from there because then I don't have to worry about them. It's a lot of management, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:13:05):
Well see that's the question in a way. Is it a lot of management? I mean that's what I'm trying to kind of figure out. So in the old days, and I mean the 1990s old days, if you installed something like Windows 98 or Windows 2000 was like this Windows setup would bring up these dialogue boxes that would have a list of applications, a little check boxes and through and say, yeah, yeah. And sometimes there'd be sub menus and all that. So there are these two extremes of you get to pick everything up front and it's really tedious and it takes a long time and you don't know what you're doing, so you're not really even sure what to pick or Microsoft just installs everything for you and you don't really think about it or worry about it. And my argument, I think probably always has been, we should just have that choice.

(00:13:51):
There will be people who will just click through and say, yep, give me everything. And there will be people say, no, I actually do want to go in and pick what I want. So I don't know Windows today, honestly, it's not engineered differently, but it's just that what the UI that it presents doesn't give you these choices. I think it depends on the apps and the services. There are certain things you could be really silly and go into startup apps and task manager or actually in the settings app or whatever and turn things off that you need. You reboot your computer and now you don't have sound and you think something's wrong. And what's wrong is you turn off the real tech thing or whatever the heck it was in the startup group. So it's a weird world we're in because it's not like configuring a CD player for a car. It's like configuring something in the engine for a car. Some people do know what that stuff is, but a lot of people don't.

Mikah Sargent (00:14:47):
I pulled this fuse and now suddenly my car is making a strange

Paul Thurrott (00:14:50):
Sound. Yeah, what's wrong with my car? Why is it my car's fault?

Mikah Sargent (00:14:53):
Yeah, exactly. Fair enough. So yeah, I guess install Tiny 11 at your own peril.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:02):
Yes. Yeah, right. Not to be dramatic about it, but I mean yeah, that's actually true. But it's interesting. I like this kind of effort. I talked about a tip probably a couple months ago. We're using the normal Windows 11 installer, the Windows setup program. You can turn off a lot of the promotional stuff and not have a bunch of crap we're installed. You come up with a really clean start menu. That's another approach. It's kind of in the middle. The start menu's clean, but you still, everything's still installed, right? It's not like it didn't cut anything off other than the crap, the Spotify, what else is in the start menu? But I follow, I don't even know anymore. I clean mine up, but all that's the junk that's kind of just there. LinkedIn is one of 'em. PC makers put their own stuff on there, et cetera, et cetera. So there's ways, there's different things you can do. This is on the more extreme side, I guess, but again, it's actually gotten interesting back in February. I wouldn't have recommended this to anybody, but today it's like, yeah, if you're listening to the show, you might want to look at this.

Mikah Sargent (00:16:09):
All right, I think it's time to talk about Windows Insider. We got some updates in the different channels.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:18):
So every week we talk about what Microsoft has done in the previous week or in the week since the show or whatever the six days or whatever it's been. And there's been three builds to the insider program since our last show, two of which landed today pretty soon, right before the show. But last week there was a beta channel build that include some changes we're starting to see in these bills that came out today as well. So there's a share feature that's been built into Windows since Windows eight in Windows 11, is that true? No. Probably Windows 10. They added something called nearby share. For example in Windows 11, now they're adding the ability to share content through Microsoft Teams using the share panel, I'll call it. It's only available to those who sign in with an enter id, which is what used to be Azure Active Directory or Microsoft Worker School account.

(00:17:14):
But that's kind of an interesting integrated bit for those people. Windows 1123 H two has a feature that's kind of loose. I don't think the official name is this, but it's called Inc Anywhere. And this is the ability to basically any control that you can select, you could just start writing in and it will work in place, which is kind of cool. This build adds that ability to a number of new languages, including Canadian English, Richard, which I didn't know. Well, thank goodness for that because you don't have enough use in your version. Exactly, and that's most of it. I mean, there's some other little fit and finish type things, process grouping and task managers, a little prettier or whatever. Not a big deal. But this is kind of this rolling effective change that we're starting to see. So for example, in the dev build that came out today, that share feature is in that as well.

(00:18:07):
The Ink Anywhere feature with additional language is in there. Last week we talked about some copilot changes where you can move copilot to different parts of the screen and if you have multiple screens, it'll remember what screen it was on, which is kind of neat. So that's rolling out to more people. But there are actually two new and unique features in this build that I think are quite interesting. One of them is that the copilot icon, which is that kind of colorful look and squiggle thing, is moving to the far right of the task bar over by the, what used to be called, I almost called it Arrow Peak, the show desktop little sliver there on the corner, which makes it a little bit more like, I don't know, the Longhorn sidebar in a way, right? Because it's kind of in place with where that thing will pop up on the right edge of the screen by default.

(00:18:55):
So that's interesting. And there's a new feature for nearby sharing, which adds Android devices to the list, right? So I keep talking about this, I confuse the names, but I think on Android it's called Nearby Share. This is a native hiin Google. You got my Android device right here? Lemme just, yeah, you can look it up. So I think it's called Nearby Share. Actually, why do I think, why don't I just look it up? I'm sorry. It's actually called Nearby Share in Windows. Excuse me. I think it might be called Nearby Sharing in Android. So nearby share in Windows is its own thing nearby. Google has Nearby Share. Yeah, nearby share. So Google released an app called Nearby Share for Windows. So you can share between an Android device and Windows. And at the time I was like, guys, there's already a nearby share interface of Windows.

(00:19:45):
Why wouldn't you just integrate it into that? Well, Microsoft's doing it now. So in this dev build there is the ability to share to available Android devices as well. If I could pull every Windows user on Earth bet, I am one of three people that uses this feature. I use it every single day. I love it. It just got a lot faster, by the way. Nice. But nearby Share is exactly what it sounds like. You bring up a list of the computers that have this feature enabled and allows you to send files arbitrarily over to that computer. I use it primarily for the book when I'm taking screenshots, I have a computer for that and I want to bring 'em over to the computer where I'm going to edit them and then put them into the folder where they belong. And nearby Share is the way I do that.

(00:20:27):
It's fantastic. So being able to do that with your Android device. Pretty cool. So that's good. And finally, sorry, go ahead. There's a Canary Bill today, which also has a new feature. Now remember that Canary is this part of the Insider program. We keep thinking maybe someday it's going to have some Windows 12. I could be wrong, but this seems like it's the first kind of major new feature to debut in the Canary Channel since they announced it earlier this year. But it is something called Energy Saver, which is an extension to Battery Saver, which is a system that's existed Windows for quite a while. I hope they don't keep them both there in their side by side. But NG Saver is Saver, sorry, is what it sounds like. It's a more efficient way to save the battery when power's running low. So you could actually just turn this on and leave it on all the time.

(00:21:25):
You could just have it come on at a certain percentage, which is what Battery Saver does today. It's not a hundred percent clear why it's different or how it's different. It might have something to do with the new processes we have now in PCs. And there are new methods for switching between efficiency and performance modes. And the other thing that comes to mind here is this came up, it might have been early this year, February, March, sometime in that timeframe, HP and A MD work together on a system to handle power management outside of the Windows Power management because the processor just the system couldn't handle how the processor worked. And they told me at the time that Microsoft was going to adapt Windows so that they could better handle this type of processor. And I wonder if this isn't the first step toward this kind of a system where it runs at a really idle state most of the time, but when you need to do something, you click on a menu, you run something in Excel, you edit an image, enough of the process, of course fire up just for that action and then they kind of die back down and it's supposed to provide this, well, it's not supposed to.

(00:22:34):
I reviewed the laptop and it's fantastic. So it actually does work, right? So the idea here is that you get the performance you expect from a kind of premium high-end laptop, but you also get really, really good battery life, which is in the Intel world is a myth or a dream or whatever. So I'm curious now if this isn't the first step toward that thing that they were talking about almost a year ago. We'll see,

Richard Campbell (00:23:04):
You're the only one I think who thinks is 12 at this point. I mean, I want

Paul Thurrott (00:23:07):
To believe it's I'm going to die,

Richard Campbell (00:23:10):
I want to believe. But this is very, it's a very Satchin feature too. He's been big on green. So the whole an extended energy saving mode is cool.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:23):
So into green that when you go into Windows update in the settings app, there's a little picture of a leaf and it says Windows Update is committed to helping reduce carbon emissions. And it's seriously, that's great. Definitely advertise that in Windows, which is where that doesn't happen, but that's fine. It's okay.

Richard Campbell (00:23:43):
Everything's fine.

Mikah Sargent (00:23:45):
And then lastly here in the Windows section, a little conversation about Samsung. This one's confusing

Paul Thurrott (00:23:50):
Samsung. So yeah, Samsung has their own browser. Why? If you have a Samsung phone, you might've seen it. It's called internet because duh. Anyway, but apparently they have a chromium based desktop browser as well. Version of this. I was not aware of this and maybe it's brand new, actually I have no idea, but it showed up in the Microsoft store of all places. It's a little curious when you first install it because the first screen is full of Korean characters and you think, okay, this maybe isn't for me, but then it goes full-blown English, at least in my case, it has built in ad blocker. It's modern enough looking, it looks like a lot of other chromium browsers. The tabs have kind of color rings around them. I would never sign into my Samsung account on anything, but you could do that. And I guess if you do, that's probably how you sync your settings and so forth and how Samsung will track your activities around the internet if you're into that kind of thing. I have no idea why this exists and maybe that is why. So they can track your activities around the internet. I have no

Mikah Sargent (00:24:55):
Idea. Almost certainly.

Paul Thurrott (00:24:57):
Yeah. It's a strange little, yeah, it's a strange thing. I don't know. They've not officially announced it, so I don't

Mikah Sargent (00:25:05):
Know. Oh wow. So it's a what? Soft launch.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:09):
It just appeared.

Mikah Sargent (00:25:10):
The telemetry tells us that any Samsung user who has a Windows machine is always looking for the Samsung browser and the Windows store.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:18):
I respect, no, that's too strong of a way. I get that some people are into Samsung and they buy Samsung things and they make high quality devices and that's fine. Actually their computers are really good or very good anyway. But

Richard Campbell (00:25:32):
To your point, it's an ecosystem you buy into as well.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:35):
Yeah, that's a weird choice to me. I feel like you go Apple or you go full blown, you get Pixel and you just stick with that stuff.

Richard Campbell (00:25:43):
Well, but if you're going pixel because you're going bare metal Android you're trying to say is

Mikah Sargent (00:25:49):
Yeah, it just Google Chrome and Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:25:51):
But Samsung is its own dressed up version of Android. Just like their browsers is dressed like version of chromium. But it's like, do you like the Samsung decoration? And I know folks that do they buy the latest ER phone? It's a

Mikah Sargent (00:26:04):
Space. Is there bookmark? Same?

Paul Thurrott (00:26:06):
My wife is a Samsung user. She's lost me forever. But I don't mind the one UI stuff I don't have a problem with. Honestly, I think it's attractive. The issue I have with Samsung is the 117 crapper apps that they install in, there's 37 of which you cannot even uninstall. And I will say one of the downsides to their PC products are that they are actually the same way. And to get around this, I had a Galaxy Book Pro probably I think was the name of it last year or two years ago, and I don't remember the exact item, but it was in the high double digits of superfluous Samsung apps. So I did a clean install using the downloadable is so that Microsoft has, and half those apps still came back later. There's something about the machine that just triggers this automatic store install of a bunch of these apps. And to me that's not, we just talked about tiny 11. This is like the opposite.

Mikah Sargent (00:27:03):
Yeah, exactly.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:05):
I'd like the crap, where could I get more of the crap? Where is there a place to go? Yeah, samsung.com. That's the place now with extra crap wear. Yeah, exactly.

Mikah Sargent (00:27:13):
It's as I coined the fo ification of the system, I will die. Having made that into a verb. I swear you it anyway. That

Paul Thurrott (00:27:28):
Sounds like a compliment.

Mikah Sargent (00:27:29):
Well it depends on who you are.

Paul Thurrott (00:27:31):
Yeah, right. Oh dear. It's great for everyone but the duck, you know what? The duck had a great life. Just the last 10 seconds were terrible, but before that there was a moment. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:27:45):
You know what? Anyway, so Samsung got its browser at the Microsoft store. Anything else you want to say about that before we take our first break, Paul?

Paul Thurrott (00:27:53):
No, this was a surprisingly light week for Windows, although to be fair, it was a holiday week, right? And post Ignite, it's a double whammy, right?

Mikah Sargent (00:28:05):
Yeah, it's been light all week trying to find different news stories to talk about. So I'm not surprised. But let's take a quick break so I can tell you about who's bringing you this episode of Windows Weekly. It's our friends at IT pro TV now called a CI Learning. A CI Learning covers all of your audit, cybersecurity and information technology training needs. You already know the name IT Pro TV from our network now a part of a CI Learning IT Pro has expanded its capabilities, providing more support for IT teams. A CI keeps all its courses current, including Microsoft Cloud, AWS, CompTIA and more IT teams significantly benefit from it. Pro A CI learning kept all the fun and the personality of IT pro tv, but they amplified it with their robust solutions for all your training needs. You can let your team be entertained while they train with short format content and more than 7,200 hours to choose from the audience asked.

(00:29:06):
And a CI delivered just in time. To wrap up your annual C-P-E-A-C-I is re-releasing its entire audit catalog in shorter, easier to digest versions. That means your CPE exams for each course will now be faster as well. You can check out the new audit courses and lab releases this month, including certified Information Systems auditor and CompTIA security plus get the full scoop on how ACI can help you navigate the audit world by visiting ACI learning.com/blog. Don't miss out on the upcoming audit webinar available to watch live or on demand. It's the All Things Cybersecurity with Bo Bullock on November 30th. IT Pro tv, which is now a CI Learning keeps your business from risking redundancy by the most up-to-date certifications and courses available. It provides you with a personal account manager to make sure you aren't wasting anyone's time. Your account manager is going to work with you to ensure your team only focuses on the skills that matter to help your organization so that you can leave unnecessary training behind.

(00:30:10):
It holds ISO certification. So you're receiving the world class training your team deserves. Keep your IT team up with the speed of technology visit. Go dot ACI learning.com/twit twit listeners receive a free trial and up to 65% off an IT Pro enterprise solution plan. The discount is based on the size of your team when you fill out the form. And that's go dot ACI learning.com/twit and we thank ACI learning for sponsoring this week's episode of Windows Weekly. All right folks, we are back from the break. I am Micah Sargent summing in for Leo LaPorte this week on Windows Weekly. Joined as always by the Windows crew, Paul Throt and Richard Campbell, and it's time to head into Microsoft 3 6 5 and ai. What's up there?

Paul Thurrott (00:31:05):
Yeah, so one of the big stories with, well one of the big stories that isn't Sam Altman with AI is that there's only a handful of companies on earth that have the infrastructure to deliver these capabilities at scale. And of course they're all kind of fighting with each other to get ahead and so forth. Microsoft cracked it open this year. It's been really interesting. To their credit, they've actually come out with a bunch of products, so it's not just talk. And I think it's fair to say that Amazon, Google and call a little flatfooted. So interesting. So it's been an interesting turnaround for Microsoft, but there's a report that Amazon, I'm sorry, Microsoft and Meta are on track to receive three times the number of Nvidia tens core GPUs by the end of the year that Amazon, Google and Oracle will get. And that's fascinating because that's the choke point right now. It's one thing to have the capacity, but if you don't have, well, it's one thing to have the capacity, you actually have to have these GPUs. We talked about Nvidia earnings last week I think, and they had tripled year over year. Tripled is a number or is a phrase, a word you don't hear a lot when you talk about earnings announcements.

(00:32:29):
That's not a thing, but it is for Nvidia. And the reason is they've just stumbled into this market because they were making GPUs that just happened to work really well for this use case and it happens to be the most important use case on earth. And so all these companies are scrambling to get as many as they can. We'll see how this works out in the real world. And I don't know the company that issued this report, I've never heard of oia, which the register reported on it, but this is really, really interesting. It could be another bit of good news for Microsoft, right? It's kind of like Sony versus Microsoft in the console space, in the post pandemic world where no one could get components and Sony for whatever reason, had a much easier job getting components than Microsoft did. That made a big difference because you can't buy a console if it's not on the store shelf. And Sony was able to get more of 'em out there than Microsoft was.

Richard Campbell (00:33:25):
I don't think the surprise here that Microsoft got the bulk because they've clearly put the shot in place with, Hey, we're going to build our own hardware, and so if you're going to sell us stuff, you better do it right now. And the one that surprises me is meta.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:39):
Yeah. I don't quite understand how that's the case. In Microsoft's case, I suppose it's a little bit like Apple and component makers where they'll go to some hardware companies say, look, we need a million or whatever it is of these things and they get the priority. Apple and Microsoft may have just listen, there was a reason the CEO of Nvidia was on stage with such and Adela for what felt like three hours a couple of weeks ago. They might have hooked up early on in this process knowing that Microsoft would need these things and said, look, we want to make sure we have a channel where we're getting this stuff.

Richard Campbell (00:34:19):
Can we get back to the weird part here is meta, why

Paul Thurrott (00:34:23):
Can't explain Meta?

Richard Campbell (00:34:24):
Yeah, that one gets me. I totally understand

Paul Thurrott (00:34:27):
Why Microsoft, the company that renamed itself after the thing, we hate the most about it or care the least about maybe is the friendlier way to say

Richard Campbell (00:34:36):
That. Well and clearly what I like is admittedly Horizon world hasn't done well, but he hasn't given up the upside. Zuck having control of everything is that he's going to keep slugging away. There's nothing anybody can do about it. There will be no shareholder revolt. There is no way out. It is Zucks vision and that's all there is just why did he commit to 150,000 and get the deal early? Because where are the meta AI product announcements or is this all going into Horizon World in some way?

Paul Thurrott (00:35:11):
Well, okay, do you think that's what it is? I mean, I

Mikah Sargent (00:35:15):
Could see that because if the biggest, so they release this thing that lets you create these worlds, but people upon doing it realize that it takes as much time as it takes, what a 10th of the time that it would take to actually build something, but it still takes a long time. That's a lot involved. If instead you could describe the world you wanted to create and then it goes and makes that for you, I could see that being something, and we still have yet to see a company truly nail it when it comes to generative 3D content. So if Meta wants to end up being the company that does that, that's where they could stand out. It's still at the forefront in terms of what I've seen out there at all is really messy. You have to do a lot of work afterwards.

Richard Campbell (00:36:02):
And Zuck was definitely on record saying, Hey, the only way we're going to make these virtual worlds work is with AI technology. That's a happy noise. That is CEO makes. This is a big spend. Did anybody get the price on an H 100? How much money did they just drop here?

Paul Thurrott (00:36:21):
Well, I mean they don't quite have infinite money, but they sort of do pretty close. Richard, do you remember the name? There was a company that was coming up with a generative AI kind, a world builder thing for game developers, which kind of falls into this category a little bit. Yeah, I don't remember this notion of you basically are just creating things on the fly, right? It doesn't have to be the same SAT environment every single time. Generate something. Yeah, maybe that is what it

Richard Campbell (00:36:51):
Is. Apparently these are 30,000 a crack.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:54):
There you go. It's 30,000 times 150,000

Mikah Sargent (00:36:59):
A lot.

Richard Campbell (00:37:00):
That's a couple of bucks. Is that four and a half billion dollars with a B?

Paul Thurrott (00:37:05):
You're better math than I'm, yeah, four and a half. Sorry. Four and a half's. What it sounds like with

Richard Campbell (00:37:09):
A B pretty soon you're talking about real money. That's two B two bombers,

Paul Thurrott (00:37:18):
Right?

Mikah Sargent (00:37:18):
Yeah. And the other part of it too, I'm thinking about there's for a long time been this ongoing conversation that the biggest problem with the meta quest market is that there aren't enough games out there. I

Paul Thurrott (00:37:34):
Was going to say is that there isn't one.

Mikah Sargent (00:37:36):
Yeah, exactly. Yes. It's that there isn't one.

Richard Campbell (00:37:39):
They have the network effect problem. Nobody will make a game for because there's not enough headsets. There's not enough headsets, there's no game for, yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:37:44):
What if Meta decides to be its own? I can't think of the guy's name now, Tim from, not Tim Apple, but the other Tim that makes the, from where that makes the game, the systems that actually make games. I don't know why I can't think of his name. Tim Swee, is that his name?

Paul Thurrott (00:38:04):
No, from Epic. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:38:05):
Epic Games. Thank you. There are two major companies that make, I guess Epic doesn't quite apply. I'm thinking of a different one. But anyway, they are behind the software that make a lot of the games that we have now.

Paul Thurrott (00:38:22):
Yeah, unity. Unity. What's the other one? Unity and the other one. Yeah, the

Mikah Sargent (00:38:28):
Other one. That's what I can't think of. Unreal. Unreal. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:38:31):
Unreal. Which is epic, by the way. That's Epic. Okay,

Mikah Sargent (00:38:33):
So that is Epic. Thank you. I was doubting myself. Myself. You were there.

Richard Campbell (00:38:37):
You had it.

Mikah Sargent (00:38:38):
What if Meta makes its own epic or Unity as well

Paul Thurrott (00:38:43):
With this? Yeah, it's not a bad time by the way, given Unity's lack of love in the community right now. Yeah, that's true.

Richard Campbell (00:38:50):
And everybody going, I'll just go to Unreal and then meeting c plus plus in the dark and going, oh wait,

Mikah Sargent (00:38:56):
Back away slowly.

Richard Campbell (00:38:58):
Oh, I forgot. Alright. Well, I mean it is exciting times. There's no two about it. And again, weird to see Microsoft in the lead. I'm unhappy. Just it feels strange.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:15):
Not just in the lead, but just being really aggressive too, right? Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:39:19):
Well, where's Amazon in? This is a workload for the cloud. Amazon should be all over this. What a perfect segue.

Paul Thurrott (00:39:28):
Yeah, so Amazon's had kind of an interesting year. That's been a big, like where is Amazon, right? This year? They've had announcements over time, but it's been very vague. So this past week they have their own custom chip sets. They announced some of that. I didn't really write that one up, but they announced an AI chat bot for the enterprise of their own called Q, which to me reminds me of Star Trek, the next generation. But I should have thought of James Fond as well.

(00:39:58):
I think of Q and also just the word question or query or whatever. So Amazon says all three of those things are an inspiration, but this is very much like what Google is doing with duet AI for workspace customers and also for Google Cloud customers. What Microsoft is doing with copilot for Microsoft 365. Two big differences though, they're going to be language model agnostic. So they had announced their bedrock technology probably midyear or something whenever that was earlier this year. And that you can just plug in different models. So that's interesting. In theory, it's running on top of AWS of course, which is great. They're going to integrate with Slack and Google right up front, but there'll be all kinds of connectors and it's going to be everywhere. It's also cheaper. So where duet AI and copilot for Microsoft 365 are both $30 per user per month on top of whatever else the Amazon queue chatbot will be $20 per user per month enterprise only. It's not a consumer service.

Richard Campbell (00:41:09):
You know how I read this access to multiple language models thing is, well, we don't have any good language models, support as many as we can. There you go.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:19):
Yes, Amazon's marketing will say open system, but yeah, no, that too. That's a different way to describe the same condition for sure.

Richard Campbell (00:41:28):
Microsoft made ODBC back in the day because they were like the seventh database. And so let's make a standard. That's the way you do this. And then I read this exactly this way. Hey, we haven't got any of the primary LLMs available to us, or at least we're not willing to pay for them, so we're going to let you choose.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:47):
So to me, the thing that's a little odd here and with Amazon in general is that from a developer's perspective with the AWS, I mean the stuff they're doing on the backend makes tons of sense. There's going to be all kinds of AI workloads running on Amazon, whether or not any of this stuff takes on, but this is more of a direct play for enterprises, which they're not really a force in that market, right? There aren't a lot of end or company-wide end user Amazon services out in the world. There's no Amazon Zoom that is a big deal. No, Amazon office suite, no Amazon email system, no chat-based collaboration, nothing. They don't really play in this space. And so I think the tie-in with Slack and gmail slash workspace is probably good positioning for them because there is a large market of smaller companies that pick and choose pieces from everywhere. They'll use Workspace and Slack obviously, so they could plug it. They could be the copilot for those guys or whatever. That's an interesting idea. I'm surprised Salesforce slash Slack haven't thought of that. And of course Google did think of it. That's what DUET is, but maybe it's an interesting idea. I just don't think they have a good presence with this particular market.

Richard Campbell (00:43:16):
They got to get a product, and this is one of the upsides I would say to Amazon in general is that they kind of don't sell air. That's not their thing. Microsoft will often, when you talk about Microsoft and Apple athlete, even Google, these are the FUD factories. They do come out with ideas of things they might make that don't exist. You rarely ever see that from Amazon. Amazon's a product company and one of the reasons you're not seeing a whole lot, lot about 'em in this space don't have a product.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:45):
Yeah, right. That's true. I mean, Amazon for consumers every September releases approximately a thousand new products. Hardware products usually is some software services as well, but it seems like a lucrative market for them. I mean obviously AWS is gangbusters. I am surprised they haven't done more in this space or tried to do more, but so far they've been kind of a non-event. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (00:44:12):
I know some Microsoft Softies that are over there working on this stuff and they won't talk to me about it, so I'm sure they've got some ideas. It's like I also take your silence as still trying to figure out what to do.

Paul Thurrott (00:44:24):
Yeah, it's worth mentioning that something that was come up by a Microsoft executive who was rebuffed at his company and went to Amazon and did it there. And also we've talked about this, but the notion of AI services, certain AI services being sort of a logical extension of that personal assistant world, it makes sense to me. I mean, there probably isn't for business service out there. I got a little chill at my back.

Richard Campbell (00:44:54):
I don't think there, I mean, let's sort not forget that both Alexa and the Google Voice products both had their companies announced that, hey, these things never did what we want to. We've spent too much money on 'em, like the cutbacks are coming. And I just got pinged by another friend who just got let go from the elect team, and that was before chatt PT burst onto the scene. So we were already in this interesting lull with voice products. The Cortana product never went anywhere, and both the Google and the Amazon product were like, this isn't working out for us, so get ready.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:29):
I think that AI could inject some life into that. Sure.

Richard Campbell (00:45:33):
But one would argue that's a complete retooling.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:36):
Yeah,

Richard Campbell (00:45:37):
Probably. And not the least of which being all that computes in the cloud, there's still a bunch that's done on the edge in these devices and now you're going to have to redesign all of that. You want to talk another opportunity for Microsoft to lead. It's like get out the door with an appliance that could live in a home.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:56):
So I think Google Assistant has a natural deployment via Android, billions and billions of users. Siri, as terrible as it is, goes out on billions of Apple devices. So it's a thing

Richard Campbell (00:46:10):
I told you about my misadventure with Google Home. What's that? When I was in the Netherlands, my buddy took a cue from what I did in my place and put Google all through it and controlled all the lights. So you'd walk, there literally is no light switches on the wall. It uses motion sensors, but if that doesn't work, you can use the tablet in the room or you can use your voice. And so I would ask it to turn on the lights in the bedroom and my phone would overhear me and turn on every light in my vacant house.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:36):
Oh yeah. One of the big, every time you give this thing a command commander, ask it a question. You get a lot of feedback. Is this the right device? Which they all ask

Richard Campbell (00:46:47):
Or they do just turn on the wrong device, but you're calling out the fact that it works in Android and so it automatically works with the phone. And that's a feature. It's like it's got side effects too. No, no.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:58):
It's a feature for achieving mass usage. That's all. In other words, for Amazon, because they don't have a phone and they don't have popular devices, really, they need these echo devices and whatever else to sell. I'm sure they probably do use the model where they sell a lot of metal loss just to get these things out in the world to get people hopefully addicted to them or whatever. But I think Cortana failed because Windows phone failed and that was the natural

Richard Campbell (00:47:30):
Natural's goal was to get you to buy stuff on Amazon via voice. And it largely didn't happen and Google didn't have a goal. Does Google ever have a goal? I don't know what Google's goal was there. They keep buying smart home stuff up and killing it, but I don't know what their goal, does. Anybody know what their goal is?

Paul Thurrott (00:47:50):
Google is like a cat. They get distracted really easily and then they forget what they were doing

Richard Campbell (00:47:55):
And every so often vomit stuff all over the floor.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:58):
Exactly.

Mikah Sargent (00:47:59):
Just like a cat. Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:03):
Yeah. Anyway, it's

Mikah Sargent (00:48:04):
Interesting that they're focused on the enterprise though, ultimately, based on what you were just pointing out.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:09):
Yeah, look, Amazon will make an AI play with consumers. They will, I mean, I don't want to call it infrastructure, but there is a world of these devices out there. I mean,

Mikah Sargent (00:48:20):
They've already started. I've got a preview on all of the echoes that I have of the new system that is using transformer models as a response. And so it makes it a better conversation back and forth, which I don't want to do.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:36):
It makes it a conversation. In other words, you're not asking discreet questions. It it lends itself to more of a back and forth, which I also don't like. I'll just say, we talked about Amazon not being on the bad end of getting Nvidia GPUs. AI is expensive and one of the ways you can afford to pay for it's by charging people for it. You can't do that in the echo space with, but you can't do it with enterprise customers. So this might make more sense. It's less of a risk, although like I said, because it's Amazon, I'm not sure what kind of a name they have in that space.

Mikah Sargent (00:49:13):
Do you think they're targeting their AWS customers, the folks that are already kind of

Paul Thurrott (00:49:17):
Plug? What does that mean? What are AWS customers? So some of them are individual developers or companies of developers or they're, I don't know what it means to be an AWS customer in the sense that there are probably hundreds of different types of AWS customers. Right. That's

Richard Campbell (00:49:33):
Fair. I mean, I really appreciate you bringing up this idea of what is the Amazon enterprise customer? You know what? I know that

Paul Thurrott (00:49:40):
That

Richard Campbell (00:49:40):
Exists. Enterprise customer

Paul Thurrott (00:49:41):
Is exists. You could look it up. They've tried various services. They have tried to do things. You don't hear about it a lot. I don't think anyone really uses it that much.

Richard Campbell (00:49:51):
Yeah, I mean, on the other hand, it's like, look, AWS is the largest cloud providers still to this day. And there are major enterprises that rely on AWS products and they buy them like an enterprise. I hope that they're facilitating that in a meaningful way.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:05):
There

Richard Campbell (00:50:05):
Is a console that enterprises look to that understands their commit into the AWS space.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:12):
The big advantage of copilot on Microsoft 365 is that Microsoft has this thing called the Microsoft graph. And so if you're in this world, that's the data. That's the data set that it's working against and it makes sense. It's your email, your OneDrive slash SharePoint files. It's all the people and all the information we have about everyone and everything in this organization, there's a natural virtuous cycle there. Makes sense for Amazon. They don't have this, right? And so they're going to offer plugin support for different things. They're already working out of the gate with Slack and with Google. So you've got that part of it, and it's sort of like a mini partial Microsoft graph, if you will, for the non-Microsoft world. It makes sense. It's running on the biggest cloud infrastructure that there is. I mean, presumably, I mean, I was going to say, there's going to be some kind of uptime guarantee that will be something like 19%, not 99.9 9, 9 9 something. Dang. No, I'm just kidding. I don't know what. But I mean presumably though, one of the reasons you might go with Amazon is because of its open nature, I guess, in this case, but also because it's on AWS and they own AWS. And I would hope as an enterprise customer, I would think that they would give me a little more preference than third parties. But we'll see.

Mikah Sargent (00:51:33):
I want a case study. I want to figure out who's using this thing.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:38):
I don't think anyone is well yet. I mean, that's the thing I don't know yet. It's an unknown, but it's Amazon. You have to take it seriously. I mean, we'll see. Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (00:51:49):
Alright, let's talk about the Microsoft 365 B browser extension that's going

Paul Thurrott (00:51:53):
On. Yeah, so the rest of this is sort of Microsoft 365 adjacent. I guess I could have made these two different sections. So Microsoft, I don't know if you're out there and use this browser extension, raise your hand and no one does. So I think in Microsoft's transition to the cloud, this was one of the things they offered as a way to, as a sort of a front end. So now we have office.com, we have the Microsoft 365 app that's on Windows and on mobile, which is that front end. You don't really need this thing anymore. In fact, one of the weird problems with the Microsoft 365 app and with the new Outlook is that they both have links to all of the Microsoft Office apps, but they seem to open the web versions of these apps, even if you have the local apps installed. So I think that's going to change over time. But the idea here is just that we want to meet people where they are and so forth. And I think the office.com site just kind of handles this and there's no need for a separate extension. So it's not like anything's going away, it's just the extension. But all the capabilities are going to continue forward. So not a big deal, but just something to note.

(00:53:09):
Speaking of sideways, see, nice, nice. Very good. Look at you. Yeah, no, not really. That was just a mistake. But it's funny, Michael will appreciate this because Micah's kind of an Apple guy. There's an interesting difference to me in the managed formal long lived office productivity world on the Windows side, and then this kind of ad hoc, often markdown based notetaking app world that exists, especially on the Mac, right? Its, it's a curious thing to me, but whatever. Evernote came up a long time ago actually after OneNote, but came up and was going gangbusters. And these days you don't really hear a lot about Evernote. Things like Notion and obsidian and whatever million other kind of markdown or markdown adjacent note taking slash I don't know what they call these things. Workplace organizational tools, whatever. They're everywhere. They're everywhere. I mean, there's lots of free versions, lot of free apps rather, et cetera.

(00:54:13):
So Evernote I think has fallen on some hard times. There's sort of the Skype of this space, if you will. Oh, that's a good news. When the pandemic happened, they should have taken off, but something else did. In Skype's case it was Zoom, and in Evernote's case, it was like notion, right? They just got left behind. So anyway, the latest news with Evernote is that their free plan is maybe a little too generous. And so they're going to cap this at, I think it's 50 notes was the number in a bid to try to get people to pay for this service. But I feel like I never noticed just a missed opportunity.

Richard Campbell (00:54:51):
It should have been acquired years ago. They actually got acquired last year, the beginning of this year by bending spoons. Yeah, that's great. And then maybe that's part of the reason they're restructuring this now, is this like, okay, let's try and get your house in order. It's been about a year, which is the normal sort of rule set, especially for European acquisitions. They kind of leave stuff alone for a while, but that's right.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:11):
I'd forgotten about that. We talked about this over the summer. There was some layoffs there and some talk about maybe them consolidating their headquarters back to Europe.

Richard Campbell (00:55:20):
Yeah. I mean, yada, yada, yada. They've got a niche, but the problem is that you've got OneNote, you've got Apple's free product, now you've got Loop, and there's notion like there's more modern tools than theirs, and they were just early to the market and they never adapt. There was probably an acquisition offering early on that they didn't take see Slack and then they didn't get the follow-up option.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:49):
Yeah, I mean, Microsoft, this kind of slow moving aircraft carryover company is certainly taking its time with Loop, but it is in fact making something called Loop, which is very interesting. They have all these legacy applications that everybody uses and loves, but they also understand that they can't really go forward with this stuff forever and they need something more modern. And I mean, granted they took out the XX Machine and Photocopied Tohin for the front end ui, but the back end of it is actually Microsoft Graph based again, and very powerful and componentized, right? This is kind of the, no, no, not Olay db. Sorry, the, what was this? The

Richard Campbell (00:56:26):
ODBC,

Paul Thurrott (00:56:27):
Olay, the Olay of the internet kind of a thing where

Richard Campbell (00:56:31):
Object linking, embedding,

Paul Thurrott (00:56:33):
Yeah. So yeah, Evernote, I don't know, maybe it was just too small of a company to make that kind of a shift. I'm not really sure.

Richard Campbell (00:56:44):
Revenue, they

Mikah Sargent (00:56:45):
Did a lot of early, they upset their customer base two or three times before they even came to this point. And I think that really does, it grinds away at trust. And so then people just go, you know what? And maybe now it's time to jump ship and yeah, you're right about also these other tools cropping up and if you have this customer base, I want to stay here, but you keep doing me dirty and now there's this cool shiny called notion or loop or whatever it happens to be. So yeah, I just think they did not expect their

Richard Campbell (00:57:19):
Customers. It's exactly how I ended up on OneNote was I was the Evernote user. The first round of We need to charge You came in, it's like, Hey, don't I already own OneNote already for this? And it was kind of a nuisance to make work on multiple devices. I had to set it up in SkyDrive, but you spend the afternoon banging your head against the keyboard and eventually it works. I'm like Teda now I can put something in on my phone and it appears on my PC and all is well. Right? But at that point you're like, okay, bye Evernote, which was encouraged me to look elsewhere.

Paul Thurrott (00:57:59):
Yeah, I feel bad about Evernote is one of many apps I looked at at it early. I mean probably 12, 15 years ago, whatever it was. And I used it for a while and I was thinking maybe I could use this for writing. Maybe this is where I will do everything. And at that time I had been using OneNote since it was in beta and I went back to OneNote and then I've been using Notions since, I don't know, last year, two years ago, I don't know, year and a half.

Richard Campbell (00:58:23):
Well, I finally got Loop to actually appear in the office apps, which was all this stupid policy configuration stuff because she who must be Abeta is starting to use Loop and now that's where I started firing to you privately, but her Angry Tech support messages are coming to me, so I pass 'em on to you.

Paul Thurrott (00:58:40):
No, I appreciate that.

Richard Campbell (00:58:41):
She wants to remodel a bathroom, so she takes a bunch of pictures of the bathroom. Very reasonable thing to do with your phone right now. She wants to load them into Loop to organize 'em and so forth. Well, guess what

Paul Thurrott (00:58:51):
I was going to say, how does that work?

Richard Campbell (00:58:53):
They haven't implemented Share feature, the share capability at all. You have to go into Loop, say import a picture one at a time. Oh

Mikah Sargent (00:59:02):
Lord.

Richard Campbell (00:59:03):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:04):
My guess on that, I'm not excusing that. That's ridiculous. But when you as an outsider, you would look at an app like this and you say, well, what are the basics? And that would be one of those things you would do pretty early on. I think from Microsoft's perspective, because of the architecture of the backend, they were more concerned about getting the componentization thing and having it work with all those important Microsoft apps. Outlook. Outlook and teams and Word and Excel. And

Richard Campbell (00:59:29):
To be clear, under the hood, all of this is SharePoint.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:33):
Yep. Did I ever say that again? That is the ugliest worthy English language.

Richard Campbell (00:59:38):
That is the truth. When you ever wonder why is this hard? Why is it taking so long? It's SharePoint,

Paul Thurrott (00:59:44):
Listen, they're going to keep renaming it and calling it different stuff until we are all using it. That's SharePoint

Richard Campbell (00:59:51):
Is a wrapper over SharePoint. OneDrive is a wrapper over share. It's all SharePoint all the way down,

Paul Thurrott (00:59:58):
All the

Mikah Sargent (00:59:59):
Way

Paul Thurrott (01:00:02):
To its Nuity Center just made of SharePoint.

Mikah Sargent (01:00:05):
I'm really excited for you to talk about this next one because earlier when I said thin client, it is because of this that I said Thin client, I had read about this and I wanted to hear, I was like, oh, I'm actually going to be on Windows Weekly. I get to hear what they think about this. I know that's been a Microsoft

Paul Thurrott (01:00:18):
Thing. So as a Microsoft guy, I saw this thing announced, this thing being a workspaces thin client that Amazon's coming out with that looks exactly like a fire TV cube, the living room set up box, that cube shaped little thing because that's what it is. And my first thought is, okay, what are the Microsoft workloads here, right? I mean I know run, it's going to connect up to AWS I'm sure, of course that makes sense. But Windows runs in AWS, right? Virtualized instances and so forth. It is really hard to find this information out, but from what I can tell, you basically have, I think it's three choices. You can get a full-blown Windows VM essentially, right? Windows desktop. So streaming the environment down to whatever your client is, it should work almost anywhere. It's going to work on their tablets, it's going to work on PCs, whatever.

(01:01:13):
You can get an app streaming service, and this is the thing when people talk to me or ask me about things like the Windows app that Microsoft just announced this year, which is a front end to a bunch of their kind of backend Windows virtualization slash cloud-based streaming solutions or Windows 365, what's the end game here? What's the point of this? I actually don't think that streaming entire Windows desktops to a place is going to be the norm. It will be for some things. Microsoft has some backend developer stuff that does that, which is kind of a neat way to handle the occasional need when you can work on a laptop most of the time, but needed powerful GPUs and whatnot. You can hit a cloud-based instance of Windows. That's okay, but I think most people, they're using a Chromebook, they're using a Mac, they're using an iPad, they're using their phone, whatever it might be, and there's this one app that their business relies on. It runs on SharePoint probably, but it definitely runs on Windows, probably does run on SharePoint. It's

Richard Campbell (01:02:14):
Usually worse behaved than that. We saw a ton of this during the pandemic crisis.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:20):
Yes,

Richard Campbell (01:02:20):
Right. As you were shoving everybody working from home, you had an app from the nineties depending on SQL Server 2000.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:28):
Exactly. It's running

Richard Campbell (01:02:30):
And it just wouldn't work over. It

Paul Thurrott (01:02:31):
Was an on-prem server at one point. They put it in a VM in the cloud. They did that migration thing. It's just sitting there. It's running on one core, three people use it, but it's super important and no one is ever going to update it. It's just what it is

Richard Campbell (01:02:45):
Used to call grade off of it.

Paul Thurrott (01:02:47):
It's the right, exactly. There's no right. Yeah, it's life and death. There's nothing in between. So we used to call these things line of business apps in some ways, but I think that's the holy grail, if you will, of this kind of cloud-based delivery of whatever computing platform you choose to talk about. And then there's also a web interface of some kind where you can basically run web workloads, which I assume are not so much. Well, they're probably web apps. I actually don't know. It's probably web apps and web whatever. They're like web apps basically. It doesn't seem too expensive. It's not coming out until, oh, it's in the United States now, so it's not hitting the rest of the world until next year. But it's interesting. It's interesting in the way that the network has been the computer since the 1990s or whatever. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (01:03:36):
I mean there's another side of the market of this, which I worked at at times where you're using low cost data entry in developing nations, and so you don't put the compute in the nation. You just put these endpoints there and you use a major VDI service typically Citrix or VMware Horizon. Those are the big players in this space, and the main thing is containment of data. They never get the data on their machines at all. They're just thin clients. Everything they're plugging in is going into a machine that's offshore.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:09):
Yeah, okay. I mean, again, with Amazon's infrastructure, I mean, they're one of those companies, they're already doing this. They can do this,

Richard Campbell (01:04:17):
But there's a weird recurring Amazon enterprise conversation going on

Paul Thurrott (01:04:22):
Here. Yeah, there is.

Richard Campbell (01:04:23):
Right. That's what we're really talking about is another element of that kind of, Amazon owns a bunch of stuff that could be an enterprise offering. I just don't know that they know how to talk about

Paul Thurrott (01:04:33):
It. And AI is the biggest thing in the world right now, and Amazon is one of those few companies that could do this, and why are we not at this Nexus? Exactly. So I think they're

Richard Campbell (01:04:42):
Trying to, why didn't they get 150,000 H one? Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:46):
Right? Why did we get three units and not 150,000?

Richard Campbell (01:04:51):
I don't know. Yeah. Are they missing it, I guess is the implication here? Are they missing the next, there's a generational shift happening in enterprise right now. Are you going to miss it?

Paul Thurrott (01:05:02):
So I would make the argument for Amazon that I have made for Microsoft as well, which is that if they don't succeed in directly interacting with customers, they're still going to succeed because so much of this will run on their infrastructure. Yes.

Richard Campbell (01:05:15):
And this is always the

Paul Thurrott (01:05:16):
Bet. You already own AWS, so why wouldn't you use our BDI solution? That kind of, which is Microsoft's play every time, right? You're already in Office 365. Okay. I'll tell you why. Because when my ISP comes to me and says, Hey, we sell home security stuff, and I'd be like, who are you? You're a pipe. I don't want other stuff from you. I want the internet. And that might be why, right? I don't ask the water company for Coca-Cola. Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. Yeah. Put a soda stream into the sink and we can talk. There you go. Yeah. Okay. So that's pretty much what I got from Microsoft 365.

Mikah Sargent (01:05:57):
Okay. Before we get to antitrust, then let's take a quick break and then we'll come back with that. I think we're what a little under? We're about an hour and 15 minutes out from the controlled burn. We got this. Let's take,

Paul Thurrott (01:06:13):
We're in Houston. We have a solution before the flames start. We'll get there. We're good. This

Mikah Sargent (01:06:18):
Is fine. This is fine. Alright. Lemme tell you about our next spot, sir, which is Trace Route. We're bringing you this episode of Windows Weekly. With the rise of ai, technology is starting to seem more human and that's causing some mixed feelings in the humans who actually use it. That's why you're going to love season three of the Trace Route Podcast. It's a podcast that explores the people who shape our digital world and how technology is changing society. The new season of Trace Route is already tackling questions like, why do we talk to AI but not to our toasters and our cars? And how long does it take to become besties with ai? I think that's what's really good about Trace Route is that it doesn't let you forget the humanity and all of this. It doesn't let you forget that there are people who are making these tools that we're using.

(01:07:06):
We we're not able to forget the humans behind all of it. In every episode of Trace Route, expert technologists peel back the layers of the stack to reveal that humanity in the hardware. Season three has explored our love hate relationship with ai, and there's so much more to come, like the episode on the intersectional roles of tech evangelists, developer advocates, and tech influencers who really influences what technology gets made. You can get keyed into the conversation today. Listen and subscribe to the new season of Trace Route on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out Trace Route now and thank you Trace Route for sponsoring this week's episode of Windows Weekly. Alrighty, let us get back into it this time. Talking about antitrust.

Paul Thurrott (01:07:54):
Yeah. This has become a weekly segment, has to be, there's a lot of pending kind of big tech regulatory action, especially with Google, but this week we got two European regulators finally woke up and decided to opine on acquisitions that were announced last year. I don't know what's taken so long, but whatever Adobe announced their acquisition of Figma, I want to say it was August. Let me check on that one. It was somewhere around that 2020, September, 2022, sorry, 20 billion acquisition. They've been waiting on regulatory approval. 14 months have gone by and now the CMA, which is in the uk of course said, yeah, I dunno, this is a provisional ruling. It's not the final ruling. They're looking for feedback. Presumably Adobe's going to have a chance to kind of meet their needs, although that doesn't always go well for people as we know all too well in the Microsoft space and they'll issue a final ruling by the end of February.

(01:09:01):
I don't know what to say to this. I mean, Figma was the biggest thing in the world, and then AI happened this year and Adobe was like, whoop, forget Figma, and they just talked about AI all year. They've done some awesome AI stuff, but there is apparently evidence that Adobe was working on, so I should say Figma and Adobe XD are the products that compete with each other. These are basically user interface design tools for web, mobile, et cetera. And apparently Adobe was going to work on something a little closer to Figma and then said, you know what? Let's just buy, it'll be cheaper, which doesn't make sense. Or we'll buy 'em and get rid of 'em. I think this is kind of a standard monopolist play. Both can be true, right? That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll see. Honestly, if it was anybody other than the UK CMA, I would take this seriously.

(01:09:52):
I know that's soon. As you say UK, CMA, I just sort of get the giggles. Those guys really, those guys. I'm with you, but this next one is ridiculous. So this one makes the CMA look like they're making sense. Last August it was Amazon announced that they were going to acquire iRobot and yeah, they make robotic the Roomba guys. Yeah, they drive around on you. I was in Sweden maybe eight years ago, seven years ago, and the house next to the house we were staying in had a Roomba for the lawn, and we would sit out on the porch and watch the thing bump into trees and drive around the yard. And I thought, this is the future, right? This is what the world's going to be like, and I've never seen one since, but this is a much smaller acquisition than the Figma acquisition, 1.7 billion this past July. The European Commission kind of said, Hey, I dunno if we want Amazon monopolizing the market for robot vacuum cleaners and they do not. So they're going to try to block this one who caress, like, seriously, are you kidding me? Why is this a thing? I agree. Why is this even a concern? But it's not a big enough market.

Richard Campbell (01:11:12):
I mean, Roomba is the big player in it, right? The iRobot is the bigger player, but there's still less than half.

Mikah Sargent (01:11:22):
I almost feel like this is because of Amazon's other stuff, and so they're like, let's not give these guys who already created a bunch of small companies that compete with the other people.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:34):
But here's the thing. Here's my issue with this. Yeah, I'm all about big tech regulation and all that kind of thing, but in the smart home space, we actually finally have established a standard for this stuff. We don't have to go to Best or Home Depot, wherever, look at a box and say, oh, does it work with the thing I have anymore? Generally speaking, things should just work with everything going forward. So if you're in HomeKit with Apple or the Google stuff or what else is there? Samsung has their own stupid smart things thing that nobody uses. As long as it's all kind of matter connected, doesn't matter anymore. It doesn't matter anymore. Who cares who owns this? Even in the smart home market, this has to be a small, if you think about the things that you might want to do in a smart home, this would not be in the top 10. The people who are putting in smart blinds and smart lights everywhere and smart locks and all that kind of stuff, they're paying a human being to clean their house. Those people are rich. This is just not a thing. I'm not saying it's not a thing at all, but it'd be comparatively speaking, this is not a big deal, I don't think.

Richard Campbell (01:12:44):
Well, you said the magic number, 1.7 billion, right? Come on. You've got bigger fish to fry paying attention to

Paul Thurrott (01:12:52):
This. Exactly.

Richard Campbell (01:12:53):
There are more important things.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:55):
And by the way, thanks for taking 15 months to get to this. Seriously.

Mikah Sargent (01:13:00):
That's why it's crazy. It feels very passive aggressive. I guess it's, look, we're mad at you for something else, so we're going to hold off this

Paul Thurrott (01:13:07):
Position. Oh, I'm sorry. You were actually still looking at this topic.

Mikah Sargent (01:13:10):
You

Paul Thurrott (01:13:10):
Talking

Mikah Sargent (01:13:11):
About, oh wait, we've already done all of that. What? What's going on? Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:13:17):
It's just crazy. Anyway, I don't know. I just think it's funny, not funny. It's stupid. It's stupid. It's stupid. The UK's concerns about Microsoft and cloud gaming were stupid, and like Richard said, there are serious problems in the world you could be looking at, should be looking at, and this is what we're doing. Yeah, any

Richard Campbell (01:13:38):
Sub 2 billion robotic vacuum cleaner project is not one

Paul Thurrott (01:13:43):
Of them. Yeah, nope. No. Right? We get app stores out there with 30% fees and you're worried about an iRobot thing driving around like seriously. Oh well. So anyway, it's out there. That's happening.

Richard Campbell (01:13:57):
That being said, somebody dropped a link for the Yabo in the chat there, and now I want one combination snowblower lawnmower and leaf blower. Are you kidding? With traer blades?

Paul Thurrott (01:14:10):
That is pretty sure that, what was that guy's name? The guy who played Magnum pi? Tom Selleck was in a sci-fi movie in the eighties about this exact robot. That

Mikah Sargent (01:14:17):
Is a recipe for you being chased through your yard by a terrifying

Paul Thurrott (01:14:21):
Robot. Yeah, exactly right. I love everything about this. There's nothing of blades. What's happening here?

Richard Campbell (01:14:25):
Yeah, no, there's no grace. There's no kinder, gentler way to snow blow. Right? It's

Paul Thurrott (01:14:31):
Violence.

Mikah Sargent (01:14:33):
This is true. Oh dear. I just watched you get heated

Paul Thurrott (01:14:36):
Driveway, which by the way, these same people aren't going to have, they don't need it.

Mikah Sargent (01:14:40):
That's true. Yeah. People who can afford this,

Paul Thurrott (01:14:44):
The people are fully automating their houses. They have money. They're not looking for this disc thing. What are you buying? It's a thing to put a cat your cat will sit on. That's all. It's, it's a cat

Richard Campbell (01:14:55):
Toy. Now I have a buddy who's not that well to do, but has two dogs and the Roomba is out every day just to manage dog hair.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:04):
Yeah, it is good for dogs. Oh, there you okay. That's why I have one actually.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:09):
But does aroma get up on the couch or the beds? That's where the real problems are. Listen,

Mikah Sargent (01:15:12):
None of your business, just kidding.

Richard Campbell (01:15:15):
Where my dogs go,

Paul Thurrott (01:15:17):
Do they ever get off the couch of the bed, I think is what you're really asking. I

Mikah Sargent (01:15:20):
Have my all over my house,

Paul Thurrott (01:15:22):
By the way. My cats are getting old. We're talking about putting steps in next to couches and stuff because they're having a

Richard Campbell (01:15:27):
Hard time. That's where you are? Yeah.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:29):
Okay, good. I have steps for my one dog.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:31):
He's, what I need is a catapult that will just

Richard Campbell (01:15:35):
Sling the cat where he

Paul Thurrott (01:15:36):
Needs it up on Cat.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:37):
Oh Lord. Oh

Paul Thurrott (01:15:42):
Dear. Cat's on the couch.

Mikah Sargent (01:15:44):
Oh boy. Let's move an Xbox corner.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:47):
Yeah, so unfortunately this first story is no longer valid. It was when I wrote the notes originally, but yeah, so Black Friday obviously was Friday. Cyber Monday was Monday, and then this week is sort of cyber week and everything's always on sale. But actually the two good Xbox deals, actually there were more than two, but the two big console ones, which were Xbox Series X for $400 I think was the deal, and Xbox Series S was under 300. Those are gone. You can still get the Xbox Series X at Amazon for 4 49, which is better than 500, but not as best ever price. But there was a great sale on Xbox series X and S storage, like third party storage. Seagate, I think wd. I actually almost pulled the trigger on that and then I was like, all right, I never used my Xbox. Why am I spending this money? But I thought about it, it was such a good deal, but I'm like, it's such a good deal. Anyway, that deal's over too. Oh, sorry about that.

Richard Campbell (01:16:45):
Aren't they due for a new Xbox? I mean the X is how old?

Paul Thurrott (01:16:49):
Yeah, they're both. This is 2020. So three years old. Yeah, Sony just revved their did a cost reduce, they call it slim. It's slightly slimmer, I guess. I think the big deal with the new PSS five is that the optical drive is optional. I think that's the way they should have done it from the beginning.

Richard Campbell (01:17:08):
Dun dun like, geez, optical drive.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:11):
A lot of people don't need it, right? Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:17:13):
Who's got spinning media anymore? I don't

Paul Thurrott (01:17:15):
Know. Not me. Unless they're multi

Richard Campbell (01:17:16):
Care. My drives.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:18):
I don't have an optical drive in this house, like anything in a computer.

Richard Campbell (01:17:22):
It's not whether you have a drive. It's like, do you have anything you could put in it?

Paul Thurrott (01:17:26):
You know what, I have a DVD of my son and probably one of my daughter when they were in grade school, and they, it's like when you buy a new car and the first thing they do is sell you all the extra protection. Or when you get a new computer and they try to upsell you on virus protection. It's like when my kids go to school and the first thing they do is take photos and fingerprint them, and just in case they get kidnapped, here's the DVD you can give to the police guys. Come on. It's the first day of school. Can we pretend everything's okay? So I have those because you don't throw that away, right? That must be a creepy little basement

Richard Campbell (01:17:59):
You to move them over to USB keys. Right?

Paul Thurrott (01:18:02):
Exactly. But they're on disc. I don't know what to do with 'em. So anyway, there are services, but you asked. Yeah, aren't they do they are due, and I think as soon as next year we're going to see at least one of those consoles, rev, if not both, but these will be cost reduced, not bumps. Right.

Richard Campbell (01:18:17):
But that's one of the ways you cost reduce is a more efficient piece of hardware, consumes less power,

Paul Thurrott (01:18:21):
But it has, yeah, you reduce the chips and all that kind of stuff. Mean

Richard Campbell (01:18:24):
Four years, that's a lot of toing, right? For the chips?

Paul Thurrott (01:18:28):
Well, lifecycles are getting longer and longer,

Richard Campbell (01:18:31):
But they're back to PC spec machines basically. Right? They're no longer exotic hardware, so it shouldn't be that difficult to pick a line.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:39):
I like what they did with the Xbox One. The first one was a tank. The Xbox Series S was one of the most beautiful consoles I think ever made. The series S is very similar, and they did the X, which

Richard Campbell (01:18:52):
You just did

Paul Thurrott (01:18:52):
A nice bump. I thought that was a good little strategy and I'm sure they're going to do something similar this time.

Richard Campbell (01:19:00):
I mean, what I like about the cube is at least it fits places, right? Because the PS five fits nowhere,

Paul Thurrott (01:19:06):
Right? Right. It's shaped like some kind of a tulip or something. You

Richard Campbell (01:19:10):
Need to put it on a plinth. It's not going to go anywhere else.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:15):
Oh my God.

Richard Campbell (01:19:17):
With lighting pth.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:18):
Yeah, with backlighting, of course. That's funny. Yeah, I think we're going to see that next year. But yeah, I dunno if anyone's paying attention to this, but Xbox has been a little distracted this past year, and aside from all the obvious stuff with Activision Blizz and all that, the leaks, they had component issues for a long time. They're doing horribly compared to the PSS five. I think they're just trying to ride this one out a little bit. But yeah, I think next year will be the time

Richard Campbell (01:19:51):
Or they start spinning all the gaming stuff off and winding down. Right? One of the other,

Paul Thurrott (01:19:55):
Yeah, there's

Richard Campbell (01:19:56):
A strategy here. Isn't there a strategy

Paul Thurrott (01:19:58):
Here? I don't think winding down by exhibition. Not yet. Not yet too soon. No. Xbox. Come on. Well, Xbox will exist as a fever dream of services and software. There

Mikah Sargent (01:20:10):
You go. That's true. Xbox Cloud antitrust, sorry.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:15):
Yeah, just the EU spirit came. The member update for Xbox arrived today. This is for both Xbox consoles and also the Xbox app on the PC speaking, which I need to install that and look at this. This one is kind of interesting because there, actually, I'll just combine the next two stories. So there was a report that Microsoft was deprecating. The Microsoft Rewards app on Xbox, Microsoft Rewards is not going away. It's actually being integrated into the system software. So we see that in the November update. This is the last major update for Xbox for the year. They don't do one in December. And so the next one won't be, I think it's actually February until we're going to see another one. And on the pc, this sounds like a small thing, but if you've ever used the Xbox app, you'll appreciate this. They're going to have a compact mode, and I don't mean compact like makeup, I mean like a MIDI player kind of thing, which is so necessary.

(01:21:13):
This app has become really big and bloated and anyway, it's overdue, so that's good. Lots of changes under the hood on both performance, blah, blah, blah, whatever. There is an Xbox Wireless controller firmware update rolling out as part of the update as well. So you can have that, get that separately. I should say it's not the app. You have to go to the Xbox accessories app if you're on Windows, and that should be deprecated soon because that's like a Windows eight app, but there it is kind of still kicking around for some reason. So there's that. This just happened while we were recording the show, or at least on my side. It did. Netflix inexplicably has a gaming service, and even more inexplicably, they surface it inside of their video streaming app, which drives me insane. I can't turn it off and I do not want to see that. But they are bringing a trilogy of Grand Theft Auto Games to the service, which I

Mikah Sargent (01:22:07):
Saw that. Well, it's such a weird, they're so weird. They're so weird. I don't understand. There's a strategy I don't understand.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:15):
Well, because their games, to me, the thing they remind me the most of is either what Amazon does on their Kindle fire or hd, whatever they're called, the tablet things, or what Apple does with Apple Arcade, they're kind of usually cutesy games and stuff, and it's like, we're in Nintendo also. We're going to have Grand Theft Auto. For some reason. It's like, really? So they're being updated for mobile. They played

Richard Campbell (01:22:38):
The game

Paul Thurrott (01:22:39):
On mobile,

Richard Campbell (01:22:41):
But this is also the original game where you hired a hooker and then killed her to save money. Right?

Paul Thurrott (01:22:47):
Well, allegedly, Richard, you didn't have to do that. That's a feature of the game. I mean, it's an optional thing.

Richard Campbell (01:22:57):
I'm just wondering, the choice. Bullied a rockstar for finding more ways to sell games that are a decade plus old, but I'm just, what is Reed Hastings thinking?

Paul Thurrott (01:23:09):
You're talking to someone who spent an afternoon trying to fly a plane under the Eiffel Tower in Flight Simulator. So I don't know. I guess we can all go on our own little side quests. I don't know. But yeah's, look, mobile is, what was the figure? 50% of gaming. I buy revenue. I mean, I understand why they want to be part of this market. I feel like they have a strong enough brand. They could just have a separate app for it, for crying out loud Netflix games. Seriously, you get it for free with your subscription. You could advertise the app in Netflix. I don't like that it's in Netflix, but I dunno. Pretty soon we're going to be watching people play games in Netflix like we do on Twitch or YouTube or whatever. I mean, that's got to be a thing if it isn't already. That's why people are there, right? To watch stuff.

Richard Campbell (01:23:54):
And are these streamed games? What's the compute resource?

Paul Thurrott (01:23:59):
I refuse to look at this service, Richard. I don't know the answer to that question. I assume they are downloaded actually, but I don't know that I think they're downloading. So

Richard Campbell (01:24:07):
Then they're just PC games or console?

Paul Thurrott (01:24:10):
Well, they're mobile consoles. I mean, these are mobile games. And actually that's kind of interesting about this. I don't know. I don't believe these games were, I could be wrong. I don't believe these games were ever on mobile before. Maybe that's kind of the big deal. Mobile devices are powerful enough. I mean, they're older games in a way, right? GTA three Vice City in San Andreas, but no, I guess they did. I'm sorry. They were on mobile, excuse me, I'm sorry. They have been released on mobile, but they were older games and they came to Mobile a couple of years ago. Now they're coming through Amazon. Amazon, their video streaming service back when their primary business was delivering DVDs was like this place where? Oh, Amazon.

Richard Campbell (01:24:49):
You meant Amazon? I said Netflix.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:51):
Amazon, I'm sorry. Yeah, Netflix, sorry. When they were their original business, right, was the DVD thing. Oh, yous, their original video collection was horrible. If you go to Amazon today, you'll see a lot of crap, but Netflix at that time was worse than that. It was only that B and C level movies and stuff like that. Obviously today it's a different animal. Although now there's so much stuff you can't find anything. This feels like that. But for games, it's like, let's take remember these are popular, let's do this now. And it's like

Richard Campbell (01:25:25):
Really? I mean, their problem now is Disney. You've clearly proven to the world that online cheap movie watching is the way to go. So now the folks that own the studios are taking the space. And so you're diversifying. You tried to make your own product, found out it was hard, and now you're looking for other markets like Netflix has got everything to lose here you were the market leader and now the big boys came to play and you've gotten problems. So you diversify. Still reminded of the old demolition man line. The every restaurant is Taco Bell after the restaurant wars, it's like soon every streaming service will be Disney.

Paul Thurrott (01:26:11):
Yeah, there's something to that. Yeah. And that's what we need. The ification, the disneyfication of all media. Yeah. That's not what we need anyway. I don't know. I don't know what to say about Netflix. All I know is I will never, ever launch one of these games ever.

Richard Campbell (01:26:30):
Not through that mechanism anyway,

Paul Thurrott (01:26:32):
But Steam, that's a different thing. That's a different, that's different. It's different. I'm pretty sure. And then a quick update on my lack of Call of Duty playing this year. I think I last put down the console on March two or three, I don't remember. It was a long time ago. I did buy the latest Call of Duty game. I did install it. I then installed it again and installed it a third time. Because what the is going on with Call of Duty is these hundreds of gigabyte updates. What's the point of pre-install something when on day one you have to install 200 gigabytes of updates? You might as well just wait. You're going to install it again. Anyway. And so before I went to Seattle, I think, yeah, I installed, I did what I thought was going to be the final install. I didn't play the single player campaign.

(01:27:25):
And then I got back from Seattle and I turned it on and I looked at one of the levels. It looks great, and then I never played it again. So I don't know if I'm going to, I don't know if I'm going to, I think I might be done. I did pay $70 on it. So I feel like I got my value there, but apparently this game is not doing well in a review sense. It's one of the most poorly reviewed Call of Duty games. I will say from a multiplayer perspective, it's probably pretty damn good. These is a classic modern warfare, two levels, remastered, remade or whatever. And that was a high point for the series to clarify,

Mikah Sargent (01:27:55):
Did you say you turned it on, you looked at the level and that was worth your $70? Is that what you were

Paul Thurrott (01:28:01):
Saying? Yeah, I was being sarcastic. Okay. Must have been

Mikah Sargent (01:28:07):
Really

Paul Thurrott (01:28:07):
Pretty spent. I spent less, listen, I spent probably a total of two hours installing the game and two minutes playing it. I dunno how that works out on a,

Mikah Sargent (01:28:16):
It's hard, Paul, because you talk in sarcasm a lot. And so to know when you're not is a little

Paul Thurrott (01:28:20):
Difficult. You got to understand, I had a serious Call of duty addiction and I played Call of Duty pretty much straight through from the time that Call of Duty came out. Call of Duty two came out in 2005 on the Xbox 360 as a launch title until March. Pretty much all I did, and he

Richard Campbell (01:28:39):
Had the cold Turkey. He literally put it down, has it, picked it back up. And he knows what happens if he does.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:45):
Well, except that I picked it up. But I was like, eh, I think I'm done. And we'll see. I don't want to make any promises. I like what they did with a multiplayer. I am still kind of curious about it. But you know what, halo, we talked about this last week, not Halo. Half-Life came out in a 25th anniversary edition. I think it was last week we talked. And that solves the problem nicely. That's a great game. And I don't feel like I have any violent tendencies toward other human beings when I play that game. So I think I'll just stick with that for a little while. It's fun. Was

Mikah Sargent (01:29:15):
That sarcasm or was that truth?

Paul Thurrott (01:29:17):
No, that's real. When I played Call of Duty, I only play multiplayer. I play a very specific kind of hardcore version of Team Death Match, and I want to reach through the screen and strangle people. Got it. I can't stand the human beings that play the skin. They're terrible. And I'm one of them. That's the problem. So I think I'm trying to move past this. So you

Mikah Sargent (01:29:36):
Used still play games, just you have

Paul Thurrott (01:29:39):
Not been. Yeah, but a lot less frequently. And this is not a, I know this in the video game world, this is almost like a political slash religious statement. I don't mean it that way at all. Primarily on the PC this year. And I don't take that to mean I am now switching to become a PC gamer like Richard. But that's what I've been doing and I welcome to the Master Race. Oh dear. So I know, but I don't, it's not coincidental. It is what it is. I mean, if I could play, I could and have played games on an iPad, I played those, what do they call The Walking Dead Games, those kind of interactive, those are fun. I played through a couple of those on the iPad at one point, and I've played games through on mobile. I played Wanted one of those driving games.

(01:30:31):
I actually completed on a phone at one point. But I could do other things is my point. But I'm trying to get out of the, there's an addict kill. There's an attic phrase here that's just like, I could quit if I wanted to. I could quit anytime I want. Anytime I wanted to. Yeah. Well I did. It was in March. So I dunno. It's like you go off a diet and you're like, eh, it just made me feel sick. So it's okay. Anyway, speaking, call of Duty. So a wash as it is in bad reviews. There are rumors now about the next game, and I could be wrong, but I don't think we've ever had rumors this early about Call of Duty. And it kind of makes me wonder if this isn't a little bit of damage control on Activision's part because one of the big questions is they only have had, well, the World War II games were popular in their day, but the times they've gone back to that, well, call of Duty five was one, and then Call of Duty World at war was one.

(01:31:23):
They were like, eh, it's okay. We've kind of moved on. The problem is once you played Modern Warfare, going back to Stupid Guns is not that fun. So to date, they've tried different things. They've tried three different times to have different franchises, startup, and they all failed. But the two that have succeeded are Modern Warfare and Black Ops. So modern warfare, they rebooted three, four or five years ago, whatever it was. So we've had a new, now we've completed the trilogy. We've had the three Modern Warfare games. They're not really banks, but a new Modern Warfare games. So we've had six of those, totally. And we've had five, I think it was Five Call of Duty, black Ops games. I believe the most recent one was Cold War, which was, okay, it was based on the rebate, modern warfare one, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But apparently they're going right back to Black Ops for the next one.

(01:32:18):
So Black Ops six will take place in the Gulf in the early nineties, a Gulf. I mean like the Middle East, Iraq, that area, and we'll see. So I don't know. I don't think that's going to excite me enough to go back. So whatever, but interesting that they're going to the, well again, I guess they need to figure something out a little more long-term than doing the same game over and over again. But it's worked so far. This is a billion dollar franchise, right? Every time. I know, I know. But you know what we haven't heard is how quickly they made a billion dollars this time. I don't think they have. I think you're going to have to wait for quarterlies on that one. But now going to, it's a Microsoft company, so how well they're going to bury it, there's no way you're going to know they don't need sell. I mean, we'll see, but I've always, this game was originally not going to be a full title. It's going to be a DLC for the last game. And again, I've only spent two minutes in, it is 70 bucks for it. I did spend 70. I spend money wisely. I will have a course on how to spend money. I don't understand why we're even criticizing this.

Mikah Sargent (01:33:29):
I'm not.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:29):
I don't know it.

Mikah Sargent (01:33:30):
I'm only, I'm not criticizing. Only inquiring. Oh

Paul Thurrott (01:33:36):
Boy.

Mikah Sargent (01:33:36):
All righty, doof, we wash away the Call of Duty badness, and up next, we've got our tips and picks of the week. Always. Leo calls them the back of the book,

Ad (01:33:51):
Wells Fargo presents one of the surest ways to grow your money. A Wells Fargo CD account where you can earn a 5.0% annual percentage yield on an 11 month term with a minimum opening deposit of $5,000. Visit a Wells Fargo branch or Wells fargo.com/cd rates to open a CD account and start growing your savings with us.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:17):
Wells Fargo Bank, NA

Paul Thurrott (01:34:18):
Member FDIC.

Mikah Sargent (01:34:21):
Alrighty, folks, it's time for the tip send picks of the week, and it starts out with the tip of the week

Paul Thurrott (01:34:28):
Starts out poorly because this has also run out. So when I put this in, it was still available, but now Microsoft's annual ugly Christmas sweater, which this year has a Windows XP Bliss theme has in fact just sold out. So I have seen one of these in person at Ignite. Oh, nice. Yeah, it's fantastic. This one, I will say, of the ugly sweaters Microsoft has done over the past several years is the least ugly, honestly. It's almost not ugly enough. It's great, actually. I think I like it. Yeah,

Mikah Sargent (01:34:58):
Interesting. It's my least favorite one they've done. Oh,

Paul Thurrott (01:35:01):
That's, well, okay. But I mean, you're probably enjoying them on a kind of a kitschy level. Well,

Mikah Sargent (01:35:07):
I bought one the

Paul Thurrott (01:35:07):
Last I'm year, I'm going to To a party where we're having a contest. So you can have the ugliest sweater, right, exactly. And I'm going to win buying

Mikah Sargent (01:35:13):
A sweater. Exactly. That's what it is, right, Paul? This one feels more fashionable. And so because of that.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:18):
No, it's fine. I mean, honestly, it's not bad.

Mikah Sargent (01:35:19):
It's not as ugly. I like that sort of, yeah, going over the top, but

Paul Thurrott (01:35:25):
I apologize for my lack of a tip. So there's that. Look,

Mikah Sargent (01:35:29):
News moves quick, that's all. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:35:32):
It's tough to do this during the sale week, right? Yeah. Well, this one didn't sell out immediately. And I think in part because it wasn't so dramatic, and I thought, well, here we go. Maybe this will, no,

Mikah Sargent (01:35:45):
They're pretty pricey. I thought about getting it again and starting to become a, they're pretty pricey.

Paul Thurrott (01:35:52):
So just as a bit of background on this next thing, as part of what I do for a living, but also just part of the way that I am, I test things constantly. And I mean apps and services, I mean workflows. And one of the magical things that can happen for someone like me anyway, who has a DHD or whatever is you actually find something that works better than the thing you were doing before. It doesn't happen all that much. I think last year I did write up a little thing. I think there were three apps last year that were kind of changed things for me. One, which was Notion actually. So it happens. So as part of this, and this is something I'd been doing this year on and off, because Microsoft was making so many waves with binging at the time, what we call Binging Chat, which is now the copilot and binging Bing is something I've gone back to again and again, and every time I use it, it takes about 10 seconds and I'm like, Nope, I don't like the way this looks.

(01:36:50):
I don't like the results. It's not the same. I always go running back to Google. So I thought it was a couple of weeks ago, I was like, I'm going to try DuckDuckGo. And then when that fails, because it will, I'm going to try Brave Search. And then when that fails, because it, I will move again onto Bing. And when that fails, I'll just go back to Google search. And at least I tried and I try to this every so often, whatever. And the thing is I use my browser is brave, and of course I sync all my settings across all my devices. And so if I change the search engine in Brave, it changes it everywhere. I don't have to go and make that change everywhere, which is kind of neat. So I experienced something I could say I've never experienced with an alternate search engine, which is I started using it and then two weeks went by and I was like, wait a minute.

(01:37:34):
I literally at one point searched and saw the logo and I was like, wait a minute, I'm still using this. I actually had to go back and think about it. And look, I know a lot of this is kind of anecdotal. I can't stand when someone says to me, oh yeah, sure, Paul, I've been using it four years, no big deal. But you haven't been testing Google every day against it, right? It's okay if you go and use something and it works for you, that's fine, but you can't come back to me and say, well, I know it's better than Google. I use it. It's like, yeah, that's not how it works. So it's actually kind of amazing to me to fall into this kind of trap, if you will. This has never happened with a search engine ever. Invariably the first or second search will be like, Nope.

(01:38:24):
And I go running back. And so I don't know what to attribute it to. In fact, I looked into it, I was like, I followed Duck DuckDuckGo. I mean, they have other products. They have a browser that's still in a very early state. They have browser extensions, they have other products, but I was like, was there something going on here I wasn't aware of? Did they make some advance this year that I didn't know about it? Not really. I mean, nothing stands out. So I don't know what happened, but I've tried this in the past and found it lacking. And I tried it two weeks ago and never stopped using it. So we'll see what this looks like in two weeks and then in two months or whatever. But similar to when I switched to Brave whenever that was a couple of years ago, same thing. I never went back and highly recommend that, and I don't know what to tell you.

Mikah Sargent (01:39:14):
Yeah, it sounds like you're still kind of coming to terms with it.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:16):
Honestly, I'm confused by it. Someone said something, talked about confirmation bias, and I was like, no, this is the opposite of confirmation bias. I was positive this wasn't going to work. I went into this expecting it to fail because that's what always happens. I try this stuff all the time. Every time a new version of a browser comes out, which these days is like every 10 seconds or these search engines get improved, now they're adding AI things to everything or whatever. It's, I always go in and look at these things and you're like, eh, whatever. I don't care. And somehow this one's stuck. And I'm just throwing it out there because I know there's a kind of a big antigo sentiment out there, which I totally understand. We are in a tough spot with Google because we rely on them for so much. But I think we all understand that this company can't be trusted on one level because they're selling your personal information and your online activities to advertisers. And some people are cool with that. I'm not, and this I should say like Brave Search, same thing, completely private. They don't use your information for anything. It's just a private search engine. So that shouldn't work well, frankly, but it has for me. So your mileage may vary, but

Richard Campbell (01:40:29):
Worth taking a look.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:30):
Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:40:31):
Awesome.

Mikah Sargent (01:40:33):
Alrighty. Let's talk about run as radio for this week.

Richard Campbell (01:40:36):
Ah, published this week. In fact, today my conversation with Nicholas Blank, which from a few weeks ago where we talked about zero trust guidance. So I mean, zero trust comes up a lot. We're all using it. If you're using any cloud products, they work in a zero trust model. It's just a strategy around authenticating. But what I appreciated with Nicholas's conversation has really got into this broader conversation about security for your organization and recognizing that you can utilize your zero trust practices more heavily in certain areas, additional levels, authentication, tighter rules for what can access, where we got into some of the Azure features that are around that with conditional access. But in the end, it was pointing to there is a guidebook now that they very prepared this framework to walk you through all the conversations you need to have often with business leaders around the security infrastructure that it's not simple. You can't apply the same practices everywhere. You've got to kind of zero in on where you want to make things more challenging and where it's okay to be a bit more relaxed. So I'm always appreciative when we get away from a product conversation into sort of a people and practices conversation. And that's where we went with this.

Mikah Sargent (01:41:51):
Nice and what's next, but our brown liquor

Richard Campbell (01:41:57):
Pick of the week, oh, I got to catch you up a little, Micah, you've been off doing your normal job, not hanging around with us. But a few weeks back, Paul and I were together. We had this dinner on a Monday that led to a couple of very unusual bourbons that I ended up putting on the show. And the problem with them is they were both the kind of bourbons where it's like, you're probably not going to be able to buy this. And so I said, I promise you I'm going to go get a much more conventional booze. And so I went shopping like I have the bottle. And then this was a find for me going to one of the local liquor store in the city, the kind of fancy one where I can usually get more unusual things. This is the Pendleton Rye, the 12-year-old, and it was a surprise.

(01:42:44):
Now it's a super conventional whiskey. From the point of view, it's exactly 40%. It's about a $50 bottle, which I would put in the bottom of the premium range. It's not a bar whiskey, it's a you want to drink this, but I wouldn't be upset about putting it in a cocktail. What it's unusual is it's a hundred percent rye. And we'll talk about why that's unusual. And it's also a 12-year-old, which is weird because normally what we like rye is usually what we call the middle grain or the flavor grain. In a bourbon, if you're making American bourbon, it's got to be at least 51% corn because that's the biz. You always include a little bit of barley, five, 10 or 15% because that provides the amylase. That helps make more ethanol, less methanol, so nobody goes blind or more relevant. You don't have to throw away a certain amount of your product.

(01:43:33):
And then in between is this flavor grain. And in both the whiskeys we had in the previous weeks, both the willett and the mark, though, that middle grain was wheat, but most American bourbons, the majority of them, that middle grain is rye because it's kind of spice to it. It's kind of hit to, it's a quirky flavor. And so you would think that a hundred percent rye, a pure rye whiskey would be very spicy, would be quite sharp, like a scotch, almost like a really harsh, except that it isn't because it's been in a barrel for 12 years and a lot of that character diminishes over 12 years. So that's weird. The other point is, in general, why does this exist? What is this about? Why is it called Pendleton? And Pendleton is actually a town in the northeastern corner of Oregon where they have a rodeo.

(01:44:26):
The Pendleton Roundup, it's been going since 1910, and you'll notice it on the bottle, it says 1910. And by the way, they are still selling tickets. It's like the hundred and 23rd year of this. It's in September. You can start buying tickets in early January. They run about, you can do the 1910 room, the sort of the founder's room for 300 bucks a day. Pricey. So Pendleton's out of Oregon, and you'll notice it if you look at the bottle, it says Canadian whiskey on it, but bottled by the Hood River Distillers out of Oregon. So this is a split relationship that the a hundred percent rye thing is your cue because it's a hundred percent rye. Normally it would produce a lot of methanol. When it's fermented, you don't sprout or malt rye the way you do with barley. You don't have that initial sugar conversion.

(01:45:23):
You just grind the grain to flour. And if you attempt to ferment off of that, you're going to produce a lot of methanol. But there is a company out of Alberta specific at Calgary called Alberta Distillers. And by the way, Calgary also has a very old rodeo. This stampede started in 1912. So there's a rodeo thing going on between these two locations, but Alberta still has been going since the 1940s, and they're famous for making Canadian whiskey out of rye. The way they do it is they literally created their own enzyme. So instead of using amylase, which you'd normally get from barley, they have a microbiologist and their microbiologist has a custom enzyme that they use to properly digest the rye grain so that they produce ethanol instead of methanol. And this has been the problem with R. Most of the time when you see a rye from an American bourbon, if it's still bourbon, of course there's still a lot of corn in it, but if it's a pure rye, it'll usually have five or 10% barley in it to get that amylase to do the digestion properly.

(01:46:30):
But this is a hundred percent rye. And it's because they do, they have their own digestion mechanism on it to solve that particular problem. And by far, the most famous whiskey or the most common whiskey that Alberta Distillers makes is a whiskey called Alberta Premium, which is much more of a bar whiskey. It's a $20 bottle and it's a hundred percent rye. It's considered the number one bestselling rye whiskey in the world. It's fairly inexpensively priced. And Alberta Distillers, by the way, ended up in the same storm in the 1980s with American brands. And over to then that had to get spun off. And now it's owned by Suntory. The same things that happened to Maker's Mark. So the whiskey's actually made in Calgary, used to be on the outskirts of Calgary, but that was the 1940s. Now it's kind of in the middle of town still there.

(01:47:22):
They actually have huge warehouses that are heated because Calgary gets very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter, and that's not actually good for making whiskey. So they have these great big managed barrel houses, and then those barrels are shipped to the Hood Rivers distiller, which is on the Columbia River just east of Portland. It's closer in than Pendleton is, which is far much further down the river. Mount Hood's only about 30 miles away, and Mount Hood is a dormant strata volcano. If it ever did go off the hood, rivers or solar would not exist anymore. They make a point about the fact that they use water from the Hood watershed to cut this down to the 40%. So it's their sort of Oregonian claim to fame. Hood Rivers Distillers is the original, very first distillation license legal one in Oregon back in the 1930s post-prohibition.

(01:48:16):
Their original business was Brandy. That part of the world grows a lot of fruit, and so the excess fruit was then being distilled into brandy. They still make those brandies today under the Clear Creek brand, but they do the bottling. And one of the things I got to say about this bottle is it is gorgeous. It has embossed inlays on the whole bottle. It's for a $50 bottle of whiskey. This is a lovely bottle. I'm really shocked at how nice it's, but yeah, a hundred percent rye ground to flower by a hammer mill added with hot water and this custom enzyme to do the fermentation, and then it's distilled like you distilled bourbon. So it's run up in a column, still turn around 60%, then finished in a pot still around 67, 68, and then barreled for 12 years. And that's in American Oak. So it's just like bourbon is in toasted American Oak when then it shipped down to Oregon, where it is bottled into this nice bottle. This is one of the most drinkable rise, you'll encounter. It is a lightweight, smooth drinking, not a big punch in the face. You're not going to be looking for water for it. It's already at 40%. You don't need even really an ice cube unless you want a cold drink. But I wouldn't hesitate to throw this into an old fashioned or in Manhattan. You'd be happy with the results. And it is, like I said, one of the very rare, true a hundred percent rise that exists today. Wow. I

Mikah Sargent (01:49:46):
Love that they made their own. That's the coolest part for me.

Richard Campbell (01:49:49):
It's crazy, right? And it's sort of Alberta distillers claim to fame that they are the ones who can make a hundred percent rye because they get good yields from it. Where anybody else who does that, it just costs them money. It's not worthwhile or so they always add. And the simple solution is just to add a little malt to it. If you add 10% barley, you're fine. Does anybody really care about the Ashville? Does it make a difference that it's a hundred percent? The question you're about to ask is does it taste good? And you know what? This tastes good. It happens to be a hundred percent rye, but I wanted to bring something a little more approachable after the crazy whiskeys we've had the past couple of weeks, and it felt like a Canadian would be fun. And then I found it was bottled organs. So I'm like, well, what's going on? And it's like, oh, it's a rodeo thing. They made this whiskey. They actually made four different variations of this whiskey, what they call the Pendleton's in 2003 in relation to the rodeo. And I think by far this is the best of the four.

Mikah Sargent (01:50:43):
Cool. Alrighty folks. Well that is going to bring us to the end of this episode of Windows Weekly. You can tune in if you are a actually on YouTube or if you're a Club Twit member every Wednesday, roundabout 11:00 AM Pacific. If you head to twit tv slash live, you'll see a link to go watch it on YouTube. If you are a member of Club Twit, which I'll talk about in just a moment, then it will be there for you as well. Of course, it is always helpful and wonderful if you go and subscribe to the show, which you can do by going to twit tv slash WW. When you head to that link, you will see the option to subscribe to either audio or video formats, and you click on one of those buttons and you will see many different providers that you can choose from.

(01:51:31):
So PocketCasts, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you happen to be listening to your podcasts, we try to be in all of those places and available for you to subscribe or follow the show from there. Again, that's at twit tv slash ww. I also want to mention Club Twit, which you can find by going to twit tv slash club twit. When you head there, you will be able to join the club for $7 a month, $84 a year. When you join the club, you get access to some great stuff. First and foremost is a complete ad free experience. Yes, all of our shows completely ad free because you are the supporter of the show. You also gain access to the Twit plus bonus feed that as extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show, after the show. Special Club TWIT events get published there, and so new people joining all the time, they get access to this huge back catalog of great stuff in our Twit Plus bonus feed.

(01:52:27):
You also gain access to the Club Twit Discord. It's a fun place to go to chat with your fellow club TWIT members and also those of us here at twit. And it lets you see more of our live stream so you can kind of watch as the show's getting set up after the show is over a little bit of time, which you won't get if you are not a subscriber. And then you also get to hang out with some great folks where there are lots of fun images being posted all the time, conversation chatter during the show, that kind of thing. All of that you can find at twit tv slash club twit. And the fun doesn't stop there. By joining the club, you get access to some special exclusive shows. There's the Untitled Linux Show. For those of you who love Linux, you can check out that show, which has some great conversations about Linux.

(01:53:14):
There's also Hands-on Windows from Paul Ott, which is a show that covers windows, tips and tricks. There's hands on Mac from me, Micah Sergeant, that covers Apple tips and tricks, and there is Home Theater Geeks a great show from Scott Wilkinson that has everything you need to know about the home theater. There are interviews, reviews, questions answered, all sorts of great stuff. And Jason Howell's own AI Inside, which is a show that is all about artificial intelligence. Those shows are club twi exclusives. So you got to join the club if you want to check 'em out. Now is the time where I say thank you to our wonderful guests, Richard Campbell, thank you so much for your time today. Anything you want to plug before we say goodbye

Richard Campbell (01:54:03):
Next week is Dev intersection. So if you haven't already got your ticket, boy that flight's going to be expensive. We're going to be in Orlando at the Swan Hotel. But yeah, it looks like it's going to be a great group of folks. We're going to have some fun there. And other than that, the podcast is the podcast.

Mikah Sargent (01:54:18):
Awesome, awesome. And paul thra thora.com. What about you?

Paul Thurrott (01:54:23):
I dunno, I've been updating the book a lot, so if you haven't downloaded that recently this week, I'm going to update it again before the end of the week. There's a bunch of stuff happening

Mikah Sargent (01:54:36):
There. Sounds like a Call of Duty sort of way of doing things.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:39):
It is my calling I guess. There

Mikah Sargent (01:54:42):
You go. There it is. It's your call. So yes, check that out. What's the website? Lean

Paul Thurrott (01:54:49):
Pub com

Mikah Sargent (01:54:50):
Slash lean Pub.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:50):
Windows 11 Field guide, all one word. We'll get you right to the book.

Mikah Sargent (01:54:53):
Beautiful. Alright, well Paul Throt, Richard Campbell, thank you so much for having me join you today. I appreciate hanging out. Thanks Micah. Always a great time. And those of you out there, thank you so much for tuning in. Leah will be back next week, but until then, go about your merry way. I don't have anything else to say, but it rhymed. Bye everybody.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:18):
Nice.

Lou Maresca (01:55:19):
Come join us on this weekend, enterprise tech expert Co and I talk about the enterprise world, and we're joined by industry professionals and trailblazers like CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, CSOs, every acronym, role Plus IT pros and marketeers when we talk about technology, software plus services, security, you name it. Everything under the sun. You know what? I learn something each and every week and I be you will too. So definitely join us. And of course, check out the twit TV website and click on this weekend. Enterprise tech subscribe. Today

Ad (01:55:58):
Fargo, the new virtual assistant from Wells Fargo makes banking faster and easier like this.

(01:56:04):
Fargo, what's my checking account? Routing number,

(01:56:06):
And this

(01:56:07):
Fargo turn off my debit card.

(01:56:09):
And this

(01:56:10):
Fargo, what did I spend on groceries last month?

(01:56:13):
And that's just the beginning. Do you Fargo? You can in the Wells Fargo mobile app. Learn more@wellsfargo.com slash get Fargo

(01:56:21):
Terms and conditions. Apply your mobile carrier's availability and message and data rates may apply. Wells Fargo Bank and a member of DIC.

(01:56:28):
Level up your road safety and fuel efficiency with a fresh set of tires. For a limited time at your local Toyota dealer. Buy three new tires and get the fourth tire for only a dollar. Toyota. Let's go places. Click the banner or visit toyota ca.com for details.