Windows Weekly 858 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

Leo Laporte (00:00:00):
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul OTTs here. Richard Campbell's here. I'm back baby. We're going to talk about lots of stuff, including the end of life of Windows 10. It's now been extended for three years, but it'll cost you co-pilot comes to Windows 10, a new co-pilot in Windows 11, and Richard bought a new pc. Can you guess which one? It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly podcasts you love

TWiT (00:00:27):
From people you trust. This is

Leo Laporte (00:00:38):
Windows Weekly with Paul Thora and Richard Campbell. Episode 858 recorded Wednesday, December 6th, 2023. Qua and Noosh Windows Weekly is brought to you by Lookout. Whether on a device or in the cloud, your business data is always on the move. Minimize risk, increase visibility, and ensure compliance with lookout's Unified platform. Visit lookout.com today and by our friends at IT pro TV now called ACI Learning. Keep your IT teams skills up with the speed of technology visit. Go dot ACI learning.com/twit. twit listeners, you'll get up to 65% off an IT Pro enterprise solution plan. Just complete the form. It's based on your team size. Once you complete the form, you'll get a properly quoted discount tailored to your needs.

(00:01:33):
It's time for Windows Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft and here they are, ladies and gentlemen, the stars of our show all the way from beautiful Orlando, Florida where he's inventing the new Windows 11 ride. Mr. Richard Campbell of EZ Radio, he's at an imaginary or now, ladies and gentlemen. Hi Richard. I'm having an experience. No two ways about it. And joining us from a beautiful lower Macey Valley. Oh, no, no, just Macey. Oh, you're Macey now. Okay. Oh wait, I'm sorry. No, he's done all the macess. You told me it's so confusing because you told me you were back. You're right. No, geographically. Sorry. Geographically, I am in lower Macun because Pennsylvania is so messed up. My postal code is for Macun. In fact, weirdly lower Macun is above upper Macee. So lower Macun is above. Yeah, in many ways it is. Yes. And I stand by that. Anyway, thank you to Micah Sargent who filled in for me last week and did, I'm sorry to say, too good a job, so never again. No, he's great. And I had a wonderful time on my digital detox. Now I shake when I pick up a phone and you know what I'm talking about, Paul, I would love just take this and throw it in a lake.

(00:03:06):
What happened this week? Actually, I need you. I was not paying attention. Did anything happen this

Paul Thurrott (00:03:11):
Week, right? Yeah, a bunch happened. You were good to miss last week. Not a lot happened last week. Okay,

Leo Laporte (00:03:16):
I'll

Paul Thurrott (00:03:16):
Take that because of Thanksgiving and whatever. But yeah, Microsoft pulled the pin on this grenade and they announced a lot earlier than I would've expected that they are going to indeed support Windows 10 as expected, not for 10 more years. What does that say? 10 more years? For three more years. But it'll cost you to an extent, but it'll cost

Leo Laporte (00:03:36):
You It sure will.

Paul Thurrott (00:03:37):
But here's the twist. They're going to offer this to consumers as well, not just businesses for the first time.

Leo Laporte (00:03:45):
Well, how much did they say? A price?

Paul Thurrott (00:03:48):
No, Leo, because that would be good information that people would want. No. Isn't it the case?

Leo Laporte (00:03:53):
They've always done this for enterprise at great expense,

Paul Thurrott (00:03:57):
Right? Well, they've done it for the big ones, right? So they did it for Windows seven, they did it for Windows xp. I think they did it for XP twice, or they at least extended it once. And yeah, we had a conversation on the show, I dunno, a month or so ago, where I went back and looked at stat counter usage share, I'll call it, relative to this time period in the Windows seven timeframe. And Windows seven was actually a lot lower than Windows 10 is today by percentage. But they did the ESU for that. And at the time it was like, obviously they're going to do this. I thought they'd wait until the last minute I, they'd been talking big about everyone should upgrade to Windows 11. It's going great. And yeah, no, a lot of people are just staying on Windows 10. So probably roughly two thirds.

Leo Laporte (00:04:43):
It is two years away, right? That gave us a lot of time. Yep. Surprised it did.

Paul Thurrott (00:04:49):
Well, this is the, yeah, I mean, there'll be a Windows 12 or whatever we're going to call the next thing. And a lot of people are going to skip 11. And I would just say, look, there's a lot of disgruntledness still in the world about Windows 11. I think Windows 11 is fine. It wasn't fine when it first shipped. I mean, there was a lot of regression there, but they fixed all that. And I think it's a better looking OSS site. We can quibble over the security stuff. I guess there's some convoluted language in this announcement where they kind of commingled the security benefits of Windows 11 with copilot, which doesn't have any security implication at all. Sure. Put

Leo Laporte (00:05:26):
AI on there. It'll be more secure. You

Paul Thurrott (00:05:28):
Bet. Yeah. I don't know if that was all, but not to mention the fact that copilot is in Windows 10 now. So anyhow,

Leo Laporte (00:05:37):
Phenomenally they said, as with all their versions, 10 years, which what? When? 2025, October, 2025.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:45):
2025. Exactly. 10 years.

Leo Laporte (00:05:47):
But you're going to be able to buy at some unnamed price, three more years, even as a consumer, not merely.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:54):
That's right. But they have not announced the pricing either audience. So can you speculate or you think it'd be a thousand dollars? I mean, what I'd like to see them do for consumers and say is say, Hey, if you're a Microsoft 365 subscriber, you get it. That'd be perfect. I think so. And that subscriptions, that's a good idea. Yeah, but we'll see. I mean, one of the big things that will happen between now and then is a lot more AI stuff in Windows. And we've discussed this notion of do they charge for this? I mean, at some point, does it become a problem? How do they recoup the costs? I don't know. And they're saying it's only security patches. Why would you ever deny anyone a security patch? This is the, right, so here's the dark side. The dark side of our community, Richard, in case you've never noticed this, is they complained about everything.

(00:06:49):
So for example, in my audience, people read my site when they were doing ESU for Windows seven, the big complaint was, how come I can't buy this? I mean, I'm not a business, but why can't they do this for everybody? And now they're like, okay, we're going to do it for everybody. Well, I want to pay for this. It's like, guys, seriously, it's so classic and predictable, but I think this kind of covers the bases. So within the context of yes, Microsoft artificially changed the hardware requirements of Windows 11, and we can all complain about that. We should, but I always do the math on the windows. No, I'm sorry, the Intel seventh Gen Core, what year did that come out and what's that computer? Yeah, a long time ago, right? Not that far back, but I think sixth gen was 2012. And I only remember that because of the Surface Gate stuff.

(00:07:43):
So it was probably the following year. So it's 10 years ago, almost. At least 10 probably. What will that computer look like in five years? Which is what we're looking at here, right? Two years to the end of support plus three more years. I mean, those aren't the only computers running Windows 10. I know that. But if you literally got cut out of Windows 11 because of the hardware requirements, that's the line. And I think that's reasonable, that timeframe, and I know a lot of people are going to disagree with that. This thing works perfectly fine. Why can't I keep using it? We've all been in the subway when the Windows XP screen comes up on there. Or I've been to my dentist, one of my doctors also Windows xp, windows seven. Now that's going to happen. It's not like Windows 10 is going to burst into flames if you don't buy the S, right? No, that's what macOS does.

(00:08:36):
Hey. Hey, I'm sorry. Was still there. So yeah, I don't know. To me this is fine. I mean, other than the fact that I don't know where the cost is going to be and who knows, that may surprise us. If you're on an unmanaged pc, maybe the right thing to do is let you have the security updates. Right? We'll see. But I feel like it's weird because in this case, look, I complain about everything. You know that, I mean, I'd like to think that my complaining is in some way righteous, but when I look at this, I'm like, no, this is fine. I mean, this is okay for all of the, it's weird to announce something and not say how much it's going to cost. That's bizarre. Yes. So on the one hand, I give them a little bit of credit for providing this clarity this far in advance.

(00:09:25):
This is really about businesses, and it gives them that timeframe. Now they need to plan, and they know what this might've cost in the past, and they can kind of figure, okay, it's going to be something similar to that for individuals. I mean, most individuals never even heard about this. It doesn't really impact them too much at all. I have to imagine a normal consumer, a mainstream non-technical person, one day they're going to get spread popup on their screen, says, Hey, we notice you're not upgrading to Windows 11. You can keep using this, but you have to start paying us now. And it's going to be like, wait, what? That's not going to go over too well, for sure. And what's that going to look like? What does that do to people? Will those guys go to a Mac or maybe even a Chromebook or something? I mean, I don't know. So I think part of it is they really don't know the right way to handle this, but they did know, and they were correct, I think in announcing this as soon as they did, because it's really about businesses and their planning schedules and their hardware cycles. And they'll upgrade to new hardware sometime between now and then, and they can plan accordingly. And they'll probably go to the next, whatever the current version Windows is at the time.

Richard Campbell (00:10:32):
Yeah. I mean, that's the usual thing that you end up doing. The question we'd give two years time horizon. So that means do you stop a migration project? You're not going to do it now. You don't need to, but you don't know how much it costs.

Paul Thurrott (00:10:44):
This is the balancing act, right? Do you want to like, oh God, we just got to reprieve, but you didn't really, because there are costs associated with it. So if you were planning on migrating or upgrading some whatever, it's you buy new computers, you're going to put Windows 11 on 'em. I mean, I think the only thing that could change now is you might want to wait, because what if there's some good AI stuff going on in Windows 12 or whatever, and the computers that come out a year or two from now, we're going to have better and whatever capabilities. That honestly is not a horrible strategic bet to make either, if you're going to spend the money anyway, it might make sense to wait. Can we get another year out of the hardware we have now?

Richard Campbell (00:11:23):
Almost certainly.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:27):
So there you go. Usually I could find something, but to me, this is just like, no, this is good.

Richard Campbell (00:11:35):
Kind of what you expected, maybe more.

Paul Thurrott (00:11:37):
It happened earlier than I expected. Yeah. I mean, based on simple math, there was no way this wasn't happening, but I just didn't expect to hear it Now that just came out of the blue. So good for them. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:11:52):
Huh?

Paul Thurrott (00:11:54):
Yeah. Microsoft doing the right thing for a change. Yeah. It's odd. It's odd. It's a little weird.

Leo Laporte (00:12:01):
It's a little unexpected, right? They've never done this before. Strangely

Paul Thurrott (00:12:06):
Content. Not this really.

Leo Laporte (00:12:07):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:12:09):
I mean, plus they've been talking such a big game on Windows 11, and it's so obviously not true when they talk about uptick. Oh, we are seeing better uptick than ever with businesses.

Leo Laporte (00:12:22):
24%

Paul Thurrott (00:12:22):
Can

Leo Laporte (00:12:23):
Of the total. Yeah. It's not a huge,

Paul Thurrott (00:12:25):
It's somewhere in, it's about a third

Leo Laporte (00:12:27):
Maybe

Paul Thurrott (00:12:29):
At best. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:12:31):
Well, I guess. Thank you. I'm already on 11, so I guess I don't care, right? Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (00:12:39):
Yeah, yeah. There was that moment where Microsoft said, we're going to just keep supporting Windows 10 with service update, with security updates and bug fixes, no new features. And I was like, man, that's going to be a compelling argument for a lot of people to stick on Windows 10. And then they started adding new features, and you're like, all right, it's Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know what to say anymore. I mean, I guess now after 2025, there'll be no features. That literally is what they're promising. I dunno.

Leo Laporte (00:13:13):
What are you going to do? Hey, I got a great gift though. I can show you my early Christmas gift from Microsoft. Well, really from GitHub. This is the badge from they do these last year they did this too. These badges from GitHub universe. This a Poni. Did you

Paul Thurrott (00:13:30):
Get that? It looks like it came off a rack next to the Apple iTunes cards at Best Buy. What is that?

Leo Laporte (00:13:36):
It's just the package that came in. It's called Badger 2040 GitHub Universe. So I guess it's one of those mini raspberry pies in the back. It's programmable. It's got A-U-S-B-C slot, not just for charging. I think you can program it. And then the buttons right now aren't doing anything, but I think you can make 'em do some other stuff. Right now it's just,

Paul Thurrott (00:14:01):
What's the name of this?

Leo Laporte (00:14:03):
So this was for GitHub Universe instead of regular normal badges. These were the badges, I think at GitHub Universe and maybe just for special people. They did this last year too. So it's a little mini computer with an E Ink screen. It says Leo LaPorte, chief Twit. He him. But I can program it and put other stuff in it too. And you see it's got the loops, so I can hang around my neck. Yeah, like a real dork, of course. And there's the GitHub kit CATT or whatever that is, whatever kind of animal that is. Octo Cat, what is it? Yeah, but it only has one arm, so

Paul Thurrott (00:14:39):
Only one's waving the rest are

Leo Laporte (00:14:40):
Holding him up.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:41):
Oh, right. Of

Leo Laporte (00:14:42):
Course. You've solved the case of the missing arms. Thank you, Richard.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:50):
I'm very clever.

Leo Laporte (00:14:52):
The

Paul Thurrott (00:14:52):
New Agatha Christie novel is us.

Leo Laporte (00:14:57):
I also saw a little birdie told me that they're going to expand a copilot in interesting ways. I think those,

Paul Thurrott (00:15:05):
Yeah, this is one of those kind of community things. People look, get really disgruntled about the no new feature thing. It was only one guy. It was taken as such Canon.

Leo Laporte (00:15:18):
I'm so disgruntled.

Paul Thurrott (00:15:20):
Yeah, no, I hear from these people. I literally heard from one of these people as recently as today, actually. I mean it's, it's funny. It's not funny. It's sad. But anyway, we're getting new features in Windows 10, and the big one, of course is copilot. No big surprise there either. Right? So they announced that probably last month sometime it came to the Windows Insider program and the release preview channel. But it's now available as an optional, actually, I would call it a preview update. It is optional on Windows 10. So if you going to Windows update and you can go get it if you want to. And if you don't, you'll take it. Oh, you're going to take it probably in January. I don't think they're doing a normal update sequence this month, which is something we're going to talk about in a second. Because if you thought my updating rants from earlier this year were crazy, this might be my favorite one ever coming up soon. But anyway, they're going out on a bang. I look with

Leo Laporte (00:16:16):
Anticipation. I cannot with, do you have to be a, you must I'm sure be a subscriber to the fabulous the rot.com.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:25):
No, no. I'm going to do it on the show. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:16:27):
You're going to do it right here in front

Paul Thurrott (00:16:28):
Of us. Yeah. I didn't write about this. I just want to enjoy the insanity with an audience.

Leo Laporte (00:16:36):
Hey John,

Paul Thurrott (00:16:37):
Can you

Leo Laporte (00:16:38):
Slide Paul over just a little, because just a little to the left kind maybe John wanted to show the Bite magazine, I think, which is cool, the cover there, but

Paul Thurrott (00:16:49):
I might be in a slightly

Leo Laporte (00:16:50):
Different

Paul Thurrott (00:16:50):
Position

Leo Laporte (00:16:50):
Myself, Richard, which is good. There we go. Look at that. I have the power.

Paul Thurrott (00:16:57):
It should be, I'm supposed to be centered on this thing, I guess I'm not really centered.

Leo Laporte (00:17:00):
I don't know if it's you or us, but it doesn't matter because we can move you. And if I had copilot on my TriCaster, I could have just said, Hey, copilot, could you set her up, Paul? And

Paul Thurrott (00:17:10):
It would've, she couldn't. It's not that smart. That would've been nice, but no

Leo Laporte (00:17:17):
TriCaster co-pilot. That would be cool, wouldn't it? A TriCaster copilot, I'd like that.

Paul Thurrott (00:17:21):
It's only a matter of time. It's

Leo Laporte (00:17:22):
Complicated. It'd be nice to be able to just, that's the thing, I really don't need an AI to go into dark mode, but I might need an AI to set up a DDR for the TriCaster with, I mean, that would be helpful.

Paul Thurrott (00:17:37):
I'm not going to get this statistic right. I saw the headline laughed and didn't read the story, but it basically amounted to something Microsoft has told me many times over the years, which is that most people don't know even the basics of multitasking or keyboard circuits. So for example, control C, control V, control

(00:17:55):
X are probably fairly common, but once you get past that, I mean almost nothing. But the headline I saw was, I swear to God, it was India or Japan or somewhere. It said something like 40% of PC users in whatever country do not understand any multitasking or copy paste shortcuts at all. Something like that. And I was like, what? So that's our world. So the idea behind the copilot and Windows is that we're going to turn people into power users somehow by, you know what you want, but you don't know where to look. Even though I actually think searching in Windows is pretty easy. Searching in the settings app is pretty easy, but apparently it's beyond a lot of people. So I dunno. But yeah, the current level of functionality is in copilot for Windows anyway is not great. But maybe it gets there. That's all I'm saying. You never

Leo Laporte (00:18:50):
Know. You never know. Alright, I think this would be a good place to do a little break in the action because we've completed our Windows 10 segment and

Paul Thurrott (00:19:04):
Next, when was the last time we did a Windows 10 segment? You're welcome. Just

Leo Laporte (00:19:09):
Pay us a hundred dollars a month and we can have it for three more years. That's all it takes. Windows 11 ai, Microsoft 365 antitrust, Xbox tips, picks and brown liquor still to come. Our son, Michael, lovely boy, turned 21 while I was gone. I had my 67th birthday and the next day he had his, or next couple of days later, he had his 21st birthday and his cousin gave him a bottle of Kraken rum.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:45):
Oh boy. I've had this. Yeah, with the thing. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:19:50):
So we're sitting spiced rum. Yeah, spiced. It's like Captain Morgan, I guess, right? I don't know.

Paul Thurrott (00:19:55):
I've had a pretty good kraken actually. Is it all spiced rum?

Leo Laporte (00:19:59):
I don't know. I don't know. I've had a good one of those. I just know he's got a bottle of it. Last night. I'm making a nice dinner. I made the wiener schnitzel and mashed potatoes and broccoli and very nice. Got dinner. I set it all up and set the table and all that stuff. And he sits down, then he gets up, he gets the bottle of Kraken out, gets a Coca-Cola out, pours himself a running a Coke, guy's, 21 in one week, and he's living it up.

Paul Thurrott (00:20:27):
We're going to get him Richard, some of my daughter's friends over for New Year's Eve one year, and we made cocktails because they had just all turned. Yeah, that's cute. It's cute. And my son came in, he had just brought the drinks in and he goes, I'm pretty sure these girls have had cocktails before.

Leo Laporte (00:20:42):
They seem like they know what they're doing.

(00:20:46):
Yeah, no, I think though, over time, I'm going to introduce him to some of the fine brown liquors that Richard has brought us and teach him. It will ruin his life too. Yeah, right. I'm not giving him the peanut butter stuff because that's trouble. No. Yeah. I don't know. That's a gateway drug. That's a gateway drug is right. That Kraken together might be pretty good. Don't tell them that. Oh golly. Gosh. Our show today brought to you by Lookout. Oh my goodness, the world has changed, has it not my friends. And of course, business has changed forever. Boundaries to where we work, disappear. People working at home, people working in Timbuktu, everywhere. Not only where we work, but how we work. A lot of Zoom calls, that kind of thing. But there's a consequence. It means your data is always on the move, whether on a device in the cloud across networks or down at the local coffee shop.

(00:21:50):
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It's a single unified platform that has everything you need, which reduces it. Complexity, patches up heals those gaps and gives you more time to focus on everything else coming at you. Good data protection. It shouldn't be a cage. It should be a springboard letting you and your organization bound toward a future of your making. Visit lookout.com today. Learn how to safeguard your data, secure hybrid work and reduce it complexity. Those are pretty good goals. lookout.com. We thank Lookout so much for their support of Windows Weekly. Been with us all year and we really appreciate it. Now let's get back to the drunks, I mean to Richard Campbell and Paul Throt, and I'm just teasing Windows Weekly. What else is going on here? Should we go to Windows 11? Should we go up one? Yeah, actually we're going to go all the way to Windows 12, potentially. Have they still haven't announced that, right? Have they?

Paul Thurrott (00:23:44):
No, no. Apparently. So Zach Bowden over at Windows Central, the guy I really trust, he's got good sources, has a report about a major Windows release coming next year that may or may not be called Windows 12. Apparently they're still debating that name internally. Oh, interesting. And if you think about it, they put all the AI stuff in Windows 11 to begin with. They're stretching out Windows 10 now, maybe stick with Windows 11, but whatever the name in some ways doesn't matter. But some interesting, just the big thing in here to me is that he lists a bunch of features that they're planning for this more advanced copilot. I was just complaining about how silly that is. AI powered window search, enhanced live captions, which is also already a great feature. AI powered wallpapers, AI powered video and games using nmps to approve the resolution of the perceived revolution of resolution of games.

(00:24:42):
That's all great. But here's the thing, this is the thing I'm actually really excited about. They are apparently moving away from these stupid moment updates. So they're thinking about going back just to annual feature updates again, which I would've to say the one thing that to me has, well, no, there's two, right? So the two things to me that have defined the past 12 months have been AI obviously. But in the window space, it's like we're going to update Windows randomly every seven days now, and I'd really like them to step back from that. And it's possible according to this report, that they might. So they're at least thinking about it. So good. So that's that. That's kind of interesting. So we'll see, this whole year has been a lot of Windows 12 speculation when or if they will announce it, what it's going to look like, when does it come out, yada, yada, yada.

(00:25:33):
But whatever this thing is called, it is coming next year. There was a rumor, I think it was Acer might've blurted out that Windows 12 was coming in July, which is impossible, but that's Microsoft. Nothing's impossible, but it's more likely that they would announce it midyear and ship in October timeframe like they usually do. But I expected to hear about this year, and I think looking at this report, the reason we didn't perhaps was that they were just so focused on getting out the door, the stuff they did ship that this stuff is now sort of up in the air and we'll see. So I'm kind of smitten with a Windows 11 se. Yeah, there you go. Yeah, R two maybe. There you go. Service pack one, I dunno. Anyway, that's good stuff. So this is my favorite story of the week though.

(00:26:35):
And the story I was telling I think before we were recording is that I woke up on Monday morning. Was it Monday morning? Was it yesterday morning? I guess it was Monday morning, yesterday morning. I'm losing track of days. One of those mornings. Anyway, and Lauren, the guy read S News on my site, had published a story about, I guess, yeah, it was Monday, not Tuesday, it was Monday, about a new preview, cumulative update for Windows 11 that adds a bunch of new copilot features except here's the thing. We spent this year talking about the changing schedule and how different things are, and we've talked about such terms as week D, right? At some point in 2023, they switched to a formal schedule where a preview updates ship on the Tuesday of week D, the fourth Tuesday of the month, and then two weeks later, roughly or three, depending on the month and how the dates are on Week B patch Tuesday, the date, everyone knows that's when that thing ships in stable for everybody.

(00:27:41):
So if you are a seeker, you can go into Windows update, turn on that, get updates as soon as they're available, and you can get these new features two to three weeks earlier than the public. You also probably remember that the schedule did not hold that. There were many, many times where month, two weeks to buy and they didn't release that thing out of preview. And 23 H two was one of those things. The moment for update for 22 H two was one of those things. But here's the thing. This is what's beautiful about this week. Week D update for November, shipped on a Monday in December because of Microsoft. Are you kidding me? And here's the reason. There was a holiday, right? So we had Thanksgiving the week before, it was actually two weeks before, or we'll call it 10 days before. So the 23rd was a Thursday, and I guess they were just off, and then maybe they were still off the next Tuesday.

(00:28:41):
So they're like, you know what? We'll just do it in December. Week D comes the first week of December, week D is, I guess it's week F, no, what is that? It's week, I guess it's technically week E, but it's not week. It's week A of December. So not complimentary, but alongside this announcement, Microsoft also said, Hey, we're not going to be doing any more of these this month because it's the end of the year. We need some time off. Apparently they didn't take enough time off over the holidays. So the non preview version, and there are a couple of behind anyway, right? What going to do now? I don't even know. You couldn't even speculate. When do you think this thing will just ship? I don't know who can say, so I'm just going to stop caring about it and whatever. So the copilot stuff is actually pretty good.

(00:29:30):
So you may remember that, or you may know that copilot does not work with alt tab, so they're going to fix that. Copilot is stuck on the right side of the screen. If you have one screen, two screens, 10 screens, it doesn't matter. It's just on that one screen. They're going to give you the ability to move it around, move it to different screens, we'll remember where it was, et cetera, et cetera. So it's a preview update, so not everyone's getting it, obviously, but it might, I'm going to guess January, honestly, at the earliest, by which I mean of course anytime, because I guess with 23 H two that it would come out. Well, I ended up being right actually, but in November, but they technically shipped it on the 31st, except that too was a preview update. Let's not get buried than that. Anyway, I just think it's beautiful. This is going to end the year on this. The weekday update for a week D update for Windows 11 is in November, is going out in December. And also

Richard Campbell (00:30:26):
They've got it all under control now.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:28):
Do they?

Richard Campbell (00:30:29):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:31):
It's not even drunk driving anymore. It's like blindfolded driving.

Richard Campbell (00:30:37):
Well, it does sound like it's going to be completely revised next year. So

Paul Thurrott (00:30:40):
There'll be a huge I, yeah, that's the, I don't have much to report from beta dev channel or anything like that. There was a beta channel release on, was it Monday or Tuesday? Something, some copilot stuff. I mean, there's nothing really new widget settings, blah, blah, blah. There's been some reports out that the long awaited ability to turn off the newsfeed in widgets is coming. I think this is one of those things that might be filtering out to people in the insider program randomly because they hate everybody, but that suggests that we'll get that in the next month or two as well. And that's going to be a nice thing, because honestly, if you go to the widgets board and it's just your widgets, that is pretty useful. Meanwhile, this newsfeed is yikes, not great. So in fact, lemme turn that off because it's a crime against humanity. So that's happening. The earnings reports for the previous quarter have been so stretched out this quarter that I will just start reporting on this quarter before they're over apparently. Because Dell just announced their quarterly earnings. Actually they're for last

Richard Campbell (00:31:52):
Quarter.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:53):
Yeah. Well, but they're year, their quarter ends on November 2nd because they, because calendars don't matter. Three days

Richard Campbell (00:32:02):
Is fair. That's fair.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:03):
Yeah. Dell is an interesting company. They have two major business units and it basically breaks down to PCs and things that are not PCs, which is business servers and services, et cetera. I would say their client group, which is PCs, was 12 billion in revenues compared to 8.5 billion for the other group. Both of these things are down year over year, double digits, et cetera. They see a broader recovery, particularly in the United States, particularly in corporate with businesses in the second half of next year. And I think, I don't know if I have this here, but I believe the way their business breaks down for PCs anyway is, oh, it's even worse than I thought. Their commercial business for PCs for businesses is almost three times as big as their consumer business. So they're primarily a business PC maker.

Richard Campbell (00:33:02):
Yeah, they have their own leasing systems and stuff. They're good at selling a lot of machines companies and locking them in to steadily replace it too.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:13):
Yeah. And so related to this, Richard, you bought a computer

Richard Campbell (00:33:17):
Finally. Finally,

Paul Thurrott (00:33:18):
Just so people know, as a background, Richard has been using a Surface Book two for the duration. I believe that machine dates back to at the latest 2014, but probably 2013.

Leo Laporte (00:33:29):
It's an antique

Richard Campbell (00:33:32):
That's

Paul Thurrott (00:33:32):
Not right now. Maybe that's not right.

Richard Campbell (00:33:33):
Book two's from 2018. So 18.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:36):
Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:33:36):
Computer years, five terms. That's pretty old. I always said computers dog use is seven years. I always say computers like 15 years. So a five-year old laptop is really 75 years old. I think that's

Paul Thurrott (00:33:51):
Oh, I see. It's

Leo Laporte (00:33:53):
Dog ears, laptop ears. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:33:56):
Double dog ears.

Leo Laporte (00:33:57):
Double dog ears. That's good. I like it.

Richard Campbell (00:34:00):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:34:01):
So what did you get?

Richard Campbell (00:34:02):
We went with the, and it's weak because the she who must be obeyed also

Paul Thurrott (00:34:05):
Needed

Richard Campbell (00:34:06):
Laptop, and she does cad, so she wanted lots of horsepower. You needed a big GPU. So

Leo Laporte (00:34:11):
You wait a minute, you get twin laptops.

Richard Campbell (00:34:14):
Oh yeah, we got M cheese. Yeah, definitely. It's, isn't it?

Leo Laporte (00:34:18):
You don't have to. You could get something different.

Richard Campbell (00:34:21):
I offered it like, no, let's just get to the same. So we both got surface.

Leo Laporte (00:34:26):
What'd you

Richard Campbell (00:34:26):
Get? Surface studio shoes. Oh, good. The Surface, the new laptop with 40, 60 zone. So they got lots of

Leo Laporte (00:34:33):
Horsepower. Oh, that 40, 60. Nice. No battery life,

Richard Campbell (00:34:38):
Not compared to a Mac. Goodness knows. But

Paul Thurrott (00:34:42):
It has an MPU.

Richard Campbell (00:34:44):
It does.

Leo Laporte (00:34:45):
Oh, nice. That's important. Remember,

Paul Thurrott (00:34:47):
This was kind of, it will end the year as being the only, I believe I'm positive. The only 13th gen mobile chipsa from Intel, I'm sorry, PC based on a 13th Gen Mobile chipsa from Intel that has an MPU. It's an ADD-on part. It's not integrated into the processor. It's actually something they added to the microphone. I am

Leo Laporte (00:35:07):
Of the opinion, and I put my money where my opinion was, which is a little uncomfortable, but really at this point, you really shouldn't buy a computer without AI processor of some kind in it, because even

Richard Campbell (00:35:24):
Not that we have a lot of software that's utilizing it.

Leo Laporte (00:35:26):
No, no, I know, but it will is what I think. I downloaded a local Lambda model onto my MacBook and playing with it and doing some stuff, and I think ultimately, you may well do a lot of local ML stuff, and furthermore, that means you should probably get pretty big hard drives because these things, the models are pretty huge

Richard Campbell (00:35:51):
Space. And we did go terabyte, and part of what betas pushed pull the trigger was Black Friday. The discounts were 10 plus 10, 15%. They were substantial.

Leo Laporte (00:36:03):
Oh, that's

Richard Campbell (00:36:03):
Good. And that was just a forcing function to say, we need to decide it's time. So we decided,

Paul Thurrott (00:36:10):
Good. Seems like a good choice. Was it 14? Was it 14 inch? What's the screen size S? Is it three by two still on the

Richard Campbell (00:36:17):
Yeah, it's a funny, it's an odd resolution.

Leo Laporte (00:36:19):
I actually love the three by two. That's actually to me, the best reason to get a surface. I think that's a really nice aspect

Richard Campbell (00:36:26):
Ratio for desktop. This screen was a little different.

Leo Laporte (00:36:30):
Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:32):
They used to always be 3000 by 2000, but it's probably higher risk

Leo Laporte (00:36:35):
Than This is the surface. The

Richard Campbell (00:36:37):
Desktop, this is 2,400 by 1600.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:40):
Oh, I'm sorry, 2,400 by 16. Okay.

Leo Laporte (00:36:42):
Oh, I don't know what that is.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:44):
I don't know what that is either. They have invent terms for these things.

Richard Campbell (00:36:48):
It's just a weird resolution. I've got a 4K external monitor sitting beside it, so

Leo Laporte (00:36:52):
It doesn't matter. Then it's got the new tilty thing. It doesn't detach anymore though, right? No,

Paul Thurrott (00:37:00):
Which is good. Wanted that.

Leo Laporte (00:37:01):
Yeah, but that thing,

Richard Campbell (00:37:02):
It's not that he ever did that, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:37:04):
You did it once as a parr, and then you did it again by mistake, because sometimes they'd come loose, but

Leo Laporte (00:37:11):
No one ever uses it.

Richard Campbell (00:37:13):
I would occasionally do it to taunt iPad Pro users. I'd take the screen up, turn it around and put it down, and then hang the keyboard off the back of the airline seat in front of me. So it would just

Leo Laporte (00:37:24):
Stay in place. That's a nice trick, actually. I love doing that. Yeah. Have you used the tent mode where it covers up the keyboard yet? You have,

Richard Campbell (00:37:32):
Yeah. Yeah. I set that up watching. I'm going through all the MCU in chronological order because I'm a sadist. I watched, I don't

Leo Laporte (00:37:40):
Care if it's a bad movie, it's third in a series and I'm watching it.

Richard Campbell (00:37:44):
Yeah. Well, it's fun to mix the TV shows in with,

Leo Laporte (00:37:46):
Oh, you're even doing the Wanda Visions and all of that. Wow.

Richard Campbell (00:37:50):
Agents of Shield. There's a ton of them. That's great. Yeah. I knocked at a few episodes of agents of SEAL intent mode.

Leo Laporte (00:37:56):
So let me just build this so we could see kind of the spec here. So 13 gen with this is a 40 50, so let's go to 40 60. Does it say where you add the NPU or it's just

Paul Thurrott (00:38:11):
Oh, no, it's there.

Leo Laporte (00:38:14):
So all of them have the NPU or no? Yes. Okay. Because that's Microsoft. They want you to have neural processs. That was

Paul Thurrott (00:38:22):
The only meaningful hardware announcement I thought at that show is this. We're shipping a high-end laptop with an MP

Leo Laporte (00:38:29):
32 gigs or 64 gigs rim. How much Rim?

Richard Campbell (00:38:33):
64.

Leo Laporte (00:38:34):
Yeah. Of, and again, that we went

Richard Campbell (00:38:36):
Back and forth on whether to go ADA versus the GForce, but I think the GForce just has more generalized support.

Leo Laporte (00:38:43):
What's the ada? It's an RTX 2000.

Richard Campbell (00:38:47):
Yeah. It's more of a workstation. GPU. Arguably that's

Leo Laporte (00:38:51):
What your wife needs for AutoCAD, right?

Richard Campbell (00:38:54):
Yeah. She's using the 40 60 is well supported by the CAD program

Leo Laporte (00:38:58):
She uses. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Remember that used to, had to have a Quadra to do this AutoCAD stuff and so forth, and they really were the same thing, but the same chip. But

Paul Thurrott (00:39:10):
This is a big thing. I don't know a lot about this market, but when I talked to HP and Lenovo about their workstation stuff, getting these machines certified for those products is a big deal, obviously. So I don't know what Microsoft did along those lines, but these chip sets are all, they're all designed for this, so I'm sure it's great for her stuff.

Leo Laporte (00:39:32):
Well, congratulations. Have they arrived? They've arrived, yeah. You're using them?

Richard Campbell (00:39:36):
Yeah. I've got mine just before we left and hers arrived after we left.

Leo Laporte (00:39:40):
So, nice. Nice feeling to get a new laptop. That's so

Richard Campbell (00:39:42):
Fun. And the day before, you're going to fly out for a week and go, I am going to go fly close

Paul Thurrott (00:39:47):
To the sun. This is going to take a while. Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (00:39:50):
Work. What do you do, Richard? To build your new Windows machine? Do you have a script or use chocolatey or wind get? What do you do?

Richard Campbell (00:40:00):
Yeah. I'm a C chocolaty inbox starter guy, but I ended up tearing a bunch of it apart just because more M 365 now. So it ended up being a pretty manual process.

Leo Laporte (00:40:10):
Oh, I would to

Paul Thurrott (00:40:11):
Do that every once in a while. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:40:13):
Start from scratch. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:40:15):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:40:15):
It's painful.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:17):
I do it all the time. That's my whole life.

Richard Campbell (00:40:19):
Yeah. I'm starting to understand why Paul's angry all the time now. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:40:23):
When I got the, I

Paul Thurrott (00:40:24):
Spent 30 minutes configuring something so I could take one screenshot yesterday. No, I mean, that's my life. That's what it's like. Oh, Paul. No, I mean, it's all I

Leo Laporte (00:40:34):
Got to say is don't ever do this retreat, this Hoffman process thing I did. You will never go back to that. You will say, what was I doing that for?

Paul Thurrott (00:40:43):
Right. I don't need to be confronted by the futility of my life. Let just keep going. It's important to have forward momentum. You should not get

Leo Laporte (00:40:50):
Enlightened, my friend, because you may have regrets. Let's just put it that way.

Paul Thurrott (00:40:58):
Yeah, I dunno.

Leo Laporte (00:41:01):
And you see,

Paul Thurrott (00:41:01):
Can you feel this? I help people occasionally. I don't feel that I've wasted my You're

Leo Laporte (00:41:05):
Making a difference. No, that's good. You're sacrificing.

Richard Campbell (00:41:08):
You got that screenshot because nobody else was going to get it by all that. It needed to exist.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:12):
Nobody's even going to see it. It's the most pointless thing in the world. It's a feature no one can use. Ladies.

Leo Laporte (00:41:18):
Ladies and gentlemen. Paul Theat is doing this for you. He's sacrificing himself. That's his happiness.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:23):
I'm not saying I'm Jesus, but you could say it. No, I don't know. You just want to get it right.

Richard Campbell (00:41:32):
Yeah, no, it's definitely dealing with your own compulsions there. Oh, that's so funny. I didn't take that screenshot for any of you. I took it for me. For

Leo Laporte (00:41:39):
Me.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:40):
No, it's like I'm going to make this happen. I don't care how long it takes be. You have

Leo Laporte (00:41:43):
To be complete. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:41:44):
It's completion

Leo Laporte (00:41:45):
Thing. Yeah. Yeah. I feel your pain, Paul. That's all I'm saying.

Paul Thurrott (00:41:53):
It's hard being this OCD. I don't know.

Leo Laporte (00:41:56):
We all are. I think that that's something we all have in common. Oh yeah. Yeah, sure. Let's take a little break. Well, lemme see. We got ai. Yeah, well, you can do, let's do the AI segment. I feel like that's going to be deep, rich and full of goodness.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:11):
Okay. I don't know. Or maybe I'm wrong. I could be wrong. Yeah, we'll see. So one of the big,

Richard Campbell (00:42:16):
We've got to talk about the board seat and got, got, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:19):
And this was one of the, when all that stuff was happening and we were all saying before it kind of wound down, Microsoft's going to win here. Either way, they're either going to, he's going to go back. Sam Altman is we're going to get a seat on the board, or those guys are all coming to Microsoft and whatever. And that's not what happened. Not exactly. So Microsoft is getting a seat on the board, but it's a non-voting representation. So they don't That's interesting. So don't actually get to decide any of the direct. Right. So I don't know what to say about that. Is it purely

Leo Laporte (00:42:48):
Advisory? What is a non-voting seat? I don't

Paul Thurrott (00:42:50):
Even know what that means. When you're an older person and you go to college and you go to classes, you're audit for the classes. They're

Leo Laporte (00:42:56):
Auditing the board meetings.

Paul Thurrott (00:42:58):
That's right. That's what it's like.

Richard Campbell (00:43:00):
I think the seat is there just so the next time they fire Sam Alta and before the press knows.

Leo Laporte (00:43:05):
That's probably a good thing.

Paul Thurrott (00:43:08):
Also, I like to think that the Microsoft representative will be sitting in the dark and when they say things, they'll make a decision and the guy will go and then they'll say, actually, why don't we go the other direction on that one?

Leo Laporte (00:43:20):
They've got to have some input. I mean, I know don't, the

Richard Campbell (00:43:24):
Question you've got to ask is, when they gave him a billion dollars, that was probably worth a board seat. Then they gave him 2 billion more. We should have gotten a board seat. But earlier this year, they gave them 10 billion. When do you get the board seat?

Paul Thurrott (00:43:39):
This is the unique and bizarre structure. This company is so weirdly organized. It makes Google look like a normal company.

Leo Laporte (00:43:49):
There have been two. Go ahead.

Richard Campbell (00:43:53):
And it's broken, right? Listen, these systems are designed with financial incentives for reason. It's how you make a rational company. That's why Altman shouldn't be touting that. He doesn't have any options in the company. What are you talking about?

Paul Thurrott (00:44:07):
I know. So that's not, well, it's a nonprofit culture. I don't quite, it's well, it is, but they also,

Richard Campbell (00:44:13):
There's a profit section of this nonprofit company that's part of the reason they didn't have anybody on this, by

Paul Thurrott (00:44:17):
The way, is the biggest. That's the thing that they share with alphabet. Alphabet is basically a nonprofit. It's just that Google makes all the money. I don't dunno, is set it

Leo Laporte (00:44:28):
The same way. Philanthropic is a public benefit corporation. I mean, I think the really good article in the New York Times long piece about how this all started and the fight, it's weirdest

Paul Thurrott (00:44:41):
Between Elon Musk and El Sam, Altman El, and

Leo Laporte (00:44:44):
I think they're up here at Calistoga Ranch in Napa where Lisa and I got married. It sure sounded like that. Where Elon and Larry Page are at this kind of conference and they get into this heated all night debate around the campfire in which I believe

Paul Thurrott (00:44:59):
They have not talked since this fight.

Leo Laporte (00:45:01):
That's right. That was the big breach. And by the way, there's more he, Sam Altman and Elon aren't talking either. Elon apparently does that a lot, but Larry Page says, no, we got to plan for the new species, the ai,

Paul Thurrott (00:45:17):
Which is like, okay, settle down. I can't even fix your voice. Problem. Nuts. We

Leo Laporte (00:45:23):
Got to protect humanity.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:25):
And

Leo Laporte (00:45:25):
Larry Page, and this apparently was the final straw, calls Elon a spec, like a racist only he's a specious. And Elon stalks off and they never talk again. And then both start their AI

Paul Thurrott (00:45:40):
Efforts. That's why. And that's how Open AI was born, was born. Literally is.

Leo Laporte (00:45:44):
That's how the bagel got its whole. And then there's a new piece in the New Yorker, which is quite good by Charles Duhig. Let me read you the lead around 11:30 AM on the Friday before Thanksgiving. Microsoft's chief executive, Satya Nadela was having his weekly meeting was senior leaders when a panicked colleague told him pick up the phone, an executive from OpenAI, a company in which Microsoft invested $13 billion, was calling to explain that within the next 20 minutes, the company's board would announce it had fired Sam Altman OpenAI, CEO. And, and this is the line I love, it was the start of a five day crisis that some people in Microsoft began calling the Turkey shoot cluster frack. Well,

Paul Thurrott (00:46:31):
Except, yeah, I'm sure that's what they called it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:46:34):
Close. Anyway, you get the idea. I don't want to say the F1, the Turkey shoot cluster frack.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:40):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (00:46:41):
It's a great piece. You should read it. It's really good. I'm loving both that times piece in this piece because we're kind of, I knew this would happen. I didn't think it happened this fast finding out what happened, right?

Paul Thurrott (00:46:51):
We're also kind of mythologizing what's happening in real time, which I think is the first for the tech industry anyway. And there were these periods of time that were richly documented. Obviously the Microsoft Apple early days, the Microsoft antitrust stuff, there was lots of books about that. These days you see profiles in all the famous, rich, billionaire tech people, whatever. But I mean, I, I don't remember what we talked about this anymore, but this is not just unique in business history, but I think is one of the craziest things that's ever happened, not just in the tech industry, I mean just in business. And people are going to study this for a long time. And the problem with it is, it's a lot like saying, I want to be just like Steve Jobs. No one can be like that really. And in this case, there is no other company that will ever be structured this way because it makes no sense. So there's not a lot of learnings here other than maybe don't structure your company. That was just common sense. Anyone could have

Richard Campbell (00:47:49):
No, it's documentation of a train wreck. It's

Paul Thurrott (00:47:51):
That. Yeah. It's fascinating. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:47:54):
Yeah. There's a paragraph about, so Nadella next, after talking to the Adam Angelo at the board called Kevin Scott and Scott had already heard the news. They set up a video call with other Microsoft executives, was Altman's firing the result of tensions over speed versus safety? Some employees at OpenAI and Microsoft were worried about that.

Paul Thurrott (00:48:17):
Well, for good reason. Yeah. Right? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:48:21):
Should we risk?

Richard Campbell (00:48:22):
Go ahead. It's never been revealed. What actually made them decide it's time to fire

Paul Thurrott (00:48:27):
Him? Yeah. There's been all this innuendo, this notion that someone, some engineer Renan said, we did it. This thing is sentient or whatever, and it's like that's not, I actually

Leo Laporte (00:48:39):
Like Kevin Scott's point of view. He says, and this is again from Charles Duhig writing in the New Yorker, Kevin Scott respected these concerns To a point, the discourse around ai, he believed had been strangely focused on science fiction scenarios, computers destroying humanity, and had largely ignored the technology's potential to quote level the playing field as Scott put it, for people who knew it or knew what they wanted computers to do, but lacked the training to make it happen. He felt AI with his ability to converse with users, explain language could be transformative.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:13):
Kevin Scott is a guy who was a shadow on the wall that no one could tell you his name or what he did, and he may emerge as kind of like this new Ray Ozzy type person. Now, he saw this very early on. He had this relationship. He brought him to, I believe, to Satya Nadella got that thing going. He was so central to this, and he's a guy at Microsoft who I think most people, even Microsoft followers are like who? Former

Richard Campbell (00:49:42):
CTO of LinkedIn.

Leo Laporte (00:49:43):
So in this call, they decided they had three options. This is really fly on the wall stuff. And knowing the New Yorker, I think it's got to be pretty accurate, very careful with fact checking and so forth.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:57):
This is not the New York Post, you mean New York, something else?

Leo Laporte (00:50:00):
New York. New York. New York,

Paul Thurrott (00:50:01):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:50:01):
It's

Paul Thurrott (00:50:01):
Not the Post. Yeah. Okay,

Leo Laporte (00:50:03):
Gotcha. So on the video call, they began outlining possible responses, plan A, stabilize the situation, support the new CEO Mirati, and then working to C with her to see, which

Paul Thurrott (00:50:15):
They did do publicly by the way, very quickly

Leo Laporte (00:50:18):
Working with her to see if the startups board might reverse its decision, or at least explain its rash move.

Paul Thurrott (00:50:24):
They also did,

Leo Laporte (00:50:24):
If the board refused to do either plan B, use the leverage that the company had to get Altman reappointed as CEO and change the governance structure, which was clearly

Paul Thurrott (00:50:36):
Problematic. They sort of did that, but not really. Right. That's the thing. That's weird. Okay. They're on the board, but they don't have any decision-making capabilities. They don't really, I guess it gives them an early warning. I think Richard said that about, or someone said that about any potential weird stuff that might happen down the road. But I mean, honestly, I don't know. Duhig surprising how little they got, how little new they got out

Leo Laporte (00:51:03):
Dogg's source. Well, plan C was, by the way, to hire Altman and his entire team. That's the thing that didn't

Paul Thurrott (00:51:10):
Happen. You understand? They actually implemented everything you just said at one point or another. They literally did all of that. They did it

Leo Laporte (00:51:17):
All. Yeah. And that's in fact what it said, that everybody agreed, all three choices were strong, wrong. We just wanted to get back to normal that he had an insider, I think, on the call and the insider, let's see. We just want to get back to normal. The insider told me,

Paul Thurrott (00:51:37):
We're really getting bogged down here.

Leo Laporte (00:51:39):
Okay, sorry. Let's put some adults in charge and get back to what we had,

Paul Thurrott (00:51:45):
Which is comical coming from Microsoft. But yeah, no, fair enough.

Leo Laporte (00:51:49):
Anyway, read the article. Great stuff. I'm sorry.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:51):
Definitely. Yeah, definitely. Go

Leo Laporte (00:51:52):
Ahead.

Paul Thurrott (00:51:53):
Yeah, this is the high drama of our industry. I mean,

Leo Laporte (00:51:58):
This is really almost a profile of Kevin Scott, which is interesting.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:02):
Right? Again, and that's amazing because I don't think anyone, especially the people who read The New Yorker, that's just a name. So I think that's fantastic. I like the guy. I think he's just like Satya Nadella here. Is cementing a legacy. I mean, I think Kevin Scott is too. It's great. Good for him.

Leo Laporte (00:52:23):
Really good story. And there's a lot of other Microsoft deets including some GitHub stuff, so recommend. Yeah, right.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:33):
We mentioned earlier that,

Leo Laporte (00:52:35):
Oh, I'm sorry, one more thing.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:37):
It's okay.

Leo Laporte (00:52:37):
A really good picture of Kevin Scott.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:42):
Where is this? I'm sorry. This is a New York article. They

Leo Laporte (00:52:45):
Obviously sent out a photographer. Maybe this is his corporate photo, and I can't pull it up here, unfortunately. But he's standing out in this field looking pensive.

Paul Thurrott (00:52:58):
Is he standing with Steven elo? Because if he is run, run, run away.

Leo Laporte (00:53:03):
I'm sorry. I didn't mean to hijack, but thought it

Paul Thurrott (00:53:07):
Was really, that's okay. This is

Leo Laporte (00:53:09):
There. Mr. Scott looking pensive out in the field.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:15):
Yes. Yep. Oh, man.

Leo Laporte (00:53:18):
You know what? I've never seen a picture of him. It's not how I imagined him. I'll be honest.

Paul Thurrott (00:53:22):
Yeah, I know. He's got the

Leo Laporte (00:53:24):
Hipster little,

Paul Thurrott (00:53:26):
Yeah, the little under the lip thing on there. Yep, yep. This is what I mean. Nobody knows this guy. Who is

Leo Laporte (00:53:32):
This guy? He's their CTO, right?

Richard Campbell (00:53:35):
Yeah. No, he's in the AI CTOs, but there's a bunch of CTOs at Microsoft. It's complicated. He does run the office of CTO O. We had him on Donnet Rock years ago when he was first at Microsoft. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:53:49):
They talk about copilot and releasing binging and all that stuff. So it's a good article for Microsoft. Ease on. We go. I will get out of your way. Go ahead, do your thing. Let me stop

Paul Thurrott (00:54:03):
You. You're not in the way.

Leo Laporte (00:54:04):
I'm in the way. I know

Paul Thurrott (00:54:06):
I'm So, back in February, Microsoft had that Big Bang event, which was the coming out party for all the AI stuff. Since then, they've announced, what was it? I think it was Donna or someone said 117 different copilots. They've rebranded twice. The thing that was Bing Chat and also later, Bing Chat Enterprise is now called Microsoft Copilot. This is the foundational layer of their copilot services, the base layer of such things as copilot in Microsoft 365, copilot Windows 11, et cetera, et cetera. That thing became generally available last week. It's free. Interestingly, it's free. That part of it's free. So you can get that through the copilot in Windows 11. You can get it through Bing now.

(00:54:54):
So what's interesting here, this is sort of like the ESU story from earlier where they have this kind of commercial product and they're giving it, or in this case, giving it to consumers as well. So they're actually going to provide paying Microsoft 365 business customers on certain SKUs, E three, E five, A three, A five, et cetera, et cetera. They're going to give them what's called commercial data protection as part of the offering. And it's just designed to basically indemnify you. If it does anything that people say you've stolen from them, Microsoft will handle that for you. They're offering it to consumers as well for free, which is kind of interesting. And it's coming to copilot on commercial. I'm sorry, for commercial customers who just have enterra IDs, what used to be called Azure Active Directory. So they're just trying to get it out the world and say, Hey, it's safe. Don't worry. Everything's fine.

Richard Campbell (00:55:51):
And if it's not, we'll, we'll make it up to you.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:54):
Yeah.

Richard Campbell (00:55:56):
One, you make a rendering with Dolly three of something,

Paul Thurrott (00:56:00):
And it's the mono.

Richard Campbell (00:56:00):
Somebody claims that it had copyrighted material in it. Microsoft's going to be there with you for it.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:06):
Yeah, right. So that's cool. I mean, I guess, although if you bring up the copilot, so the interesting thing about this is if you bring up copilot in Windows, it still says preview. And that's because technically the stuff that's Windows is still in preview. So the underlying copilot is actually final, not finalized, but generally available, supported, et cetera. But that actual product is still in preview. It's confusing. But anyway, it's a lot less confusing than it would've been if they had stuck with the original names. I can say for sure, and I don't know a lot about this chat, GPT-4 turbo, or I guess it says GPT-4 Turbo, which is the latest open AI model, is now supported in, well copilot. I almost said bang. It's going to take a while to get over that one. It's available in copilot. So this includes new models or a new model for Dolly three, which is the text to image model that OpenAI has, but also Microsoft has as part of Binging Creator, which is probably not the name anymore. There's an experimental new Bing feature related to, it's called Deep Search, which is sort Microsoft's version of the, I think it's called the Search Generative experience that Google has where you're doing kind of search and AI in the same set of results and they kind of commingle them together. It's not going to replace standard binging search anytime soon, but it's something you can test out for yourself.

(00:57:42):
I'm sure we're going to talk about this. Yeah, there's a coming Google announcement that's very similar to this, so it's all very similar. It's like multimodal search stuff. There's code interpretation, there's lots of kind of features in here that maps very, very closely to what Google is doing with what they call Gemini, which is their kind of, I guess we'll call it a chat GPT alternative I guess. Yeah. Anyway, so that's all coming. Yeah, I didn't know what it meant. I was very curious what that all was about. Yeah, so Google was not expected to announce this now that all the news was they're going to wait until next year and then I don't know if it's because of GPT for Turbo or whatever, but they came out with this today concurrently with a pixel feature update because there's a version of Gemini, which is an AI model that it's built that will run on the Pixel eight Pro that they just released from.

(00:58:36):
You might remember they made a promise about doing on-device, AI model on the pixel at some point. So that's available starting today. I guess it's rolling out now. But Gemini comes in three different sizes Ultra, which is not available yet. Pro which is and Nano, which is or will be soon locally on devices or at least one device and they're like, we know you like Open AI and what they're doing, but this is our stuff. And they have some side-by-side benchmark results that show that they usually beat Chat GPT-4, I don't know if that includes the GPT-4 turbo stuff or whatever.

(00:59:16):
They're just going for this. So in real world terms, unless you're a developer, because you can get going on this as a developer, this stuff is rolling out behind the scenes to a variety of Google products and services starting with Bard, which we'll use for reasoning, planning, understanding and other things. It's only in English, but it's worldwide search generative experience, which I just mentioned. A 40% improvement in latency reduction also only in English, but that will happen over time. And then Gemini Nano is coming to the Pixel eight Pro starting today, and the real world impact of that is a new summarize feature in the recorder app. By the way, summarize is a feature I'm starting to see everywhere when feature I scroll through my feature feature. It is a great feature and the only thing I don't like about it is I trigger it by mistake a lot.

(01:00:02):
I almost want don't ruin the story. No, I want the whole thing. I actually think that's pretty cool. So you're going to see that in a bunch of different places in the future, but also Smart Reply and Gboard starting with WhatsApp, but they're going to bring this to search ads, Chrome Duet and probably a bunch of other things early next year so developers can get going on this. Now, this is a very Apple name, but there's an AI core, API that's an early preview for Android. 14 developers can get started on today if they want to work with on-device ai or they can work with Gemini Pro through a g ai, Gemini ai, I'm sorry, a Gemini, API in Google AI Studio, which is I believe is, I think it's a web-based software development environment I believe. I think that's what that is. Probably not exactly a visual studio code, but something like that. So yeah, Google just kind of exploded out of nowhere today with this stuff. I got a lot of criticism this year for Lagging Behind and really in their words, trying to be safe, right? They were like this stuff, we don't feel like it's ready for the world, but I guess it is because everyone else is doing it and so they're making the case. The world

Leo Laporte (01:01:20):
Was ready for it. They were happily

Paul Thurrott (01:01:21):
Jumping on

Leo Laporte (01:01:22):
Board, so well, that's what right, Google said, oh my God, they're using GPT and they don't seem to care. So hallucinate away.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:30):
By the way, I think the world

Leo Laporte (01:01:32):
Is, I could speak for everybody when I say thank you Google for bringing back the turbo button

Paul Thurrott (01:01:36):
To our VCs. Right? Exactly. Definitely. And also the Megahertz Wars, so great. Actually it was open AI that did that. Oh, okay. With the GPT-4 turbo. Yeah. Yeah. Put the turbo and watch the lights dim in your neighborhood as the AI kicks on. So yeah, I think the world right now is divided between the AI naysayers. The AI proponents are like, yeah, and then the people in the middle are like, what's happening? Are the robots taking over? Is that what's happening? I don't think anyone, I think most people don't even understand what's happening. All they know is AI is going to be the man of the year or something. And

Leo Laporte (01:02:19):
Actually it was right. Oh, are you serious? Oh yeah, I was

Paul Thurrott (01:02:21):
Just kidding. Oh, that's funny. Okay. Maybe I heard that and it was in the back of my

Leo Laporte (01:02:25):
Head. Unless I'm hallucinating, remember, I am Couldn not have touch like

Paul Thurrott (01:02:29):
Ai. Yeah, probably.

Leo Laporte (01:02:30):
I mean, yeah, right. Like ai. Somebody said that's funny. Pretty sure Times person of the year is Taylor Swift for obvious

Paul Thurrott (01:02:38):
Reasons. Oh, I think we can all agree is probably ai, so that makes sense.

Leo Laporte (01:02:44):
They made enough deep models of it. I'll see over there. They may not have named you the person of the year yet. Oh, here's, here's the short list. Let's see. This is from Time Magazine. Oh, I'm sorry, I have to accept cookies. Excuse me. The shortlist, Hollywood strikers, Xi Jinping, I mean every year, right. Taylor Swift, Sam Altman, Trump. I thought he was CEO of the year. Trump. Trump prosecutors. Not Trump. Trump prosecutors. I was going to say, whatcha talking about? Yeah, Barbie. Oh no, please Lord, do not make Barbie person of the year please. I beg of you. Vladimir Putin. King Charles iii Jerome Powell. Okay. Now just a little poll. How many of you know who the hell Jerome Powell is?

Paul Thurrott (01:03:43):
I mean, I don't mean to be ignorant, I don't know who

Leo Laporte (01:03:45):
That is. He's the chairman of the Federal Reserve, but no one need his name. I know. Time has announced that Taylor Swift is, they announced it person of the year.

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

Leo Laporte (01:03:58):
I guess Altman is Oh, they announced it today. They announced it today. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well I guess I understand that.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:08):
Well someday in a Terminator movie will look back on this year as the time when everything changed and it'll

Leo Laporte (01:04:13):
Be okay. Yeah. They were all worried about Taylor Swift when I was taking over the world.

Paul Thurrott (01:04:19):
Yeah. Now they're going to send back the Terminator to kill Sam Altman or whatever and it'll be a completely

Leo Laporte (01:04:23):
Different story. Yeah, yeah. Person of the year, Taylor and her cat, apparently your cat

Paul Thurrott (01:04:30):
Cat probably demanded to be

Leo Laporte (01:04:31):
In this picture by Yaling. Well, alright, can I take a break now that we've had our cultural moment, our moment in the culture? Yes. And then Xbox still to come and more good stuff with Paul Throt throt.com. Mr. Richard Campbell from Run His Radio, our show today brought to you by our studio sponsors for the year 2023. They're our sponsor of the year in some respects. Well, we love all our sponsors, but thank you. A CI Learning for Buying the Studio, naming rights. You may remember them as IT pro tv. We're at a great company. We've been fans and friends since they were founded. A CI learning covers all your audit, cybersecurity and information technology training needs. Of course you already know the name IT Pro TV from many years of advertising. Well they're now part of a CI Learning IT Pro has been able to take advantage of that to expand its capabilities, providing more support for IT teams.

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Plus, get the completely updated, get the full scoop on how ACI I can help you navigate the audit world by visiting ACI learning.com/blog it prot and a CI learning. Keep your business from risking redundancy by giving you the most up-to-date certifications and courses possible. Provide you with a personal account manager so they can ensure that you are not wasting anyone's time. Your account manager will work with you to ensure your team focuses on exactly the skills that matter your organization leaving unnecessary training behind. Bottom line, keep your IT team up to date with the speed of technology visit. Go dot ACI learning.com/twit listeners, you're going to get a free trial and the discounts are amazing up to 65% off, 65% off an IT Pro enterprise solution plan. Now the discount's based on the size of your team. So here's the deal, fill out the form, they'll tell you exactly how much you save. Visit go dot aci learning.com/twi. We thank them so much for a great year. They've really made a big difference in keeping this show and all of our shows on go dot aci learning.com/twit 'em your thanks. Now back to the boys. Whoa, one of the boys is now a, what do they call that in the biz? That's weird. You can see him. It might be us. I can see him in the Yeah, those are the, remember the old days, Paul? You're old enough to remember when this tv, I'm old enough that I have been

Paul Thurrott (01:08:14):
Watching night with David Letterman or whatever and it went to the playing of the national anthem with a flag blowing in the ring

Leo Laporte (01:08:24):
Or a test pattern. That's what that's called. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (01:08:26):
Yeah, test pattern, right?

Leo Laporte (01:08:29):
Yeah. It's kind of funny now kids, they don't even watch tv. It's not

Paul Thurrott (01:08:35):
Even, it's good and bad. So one of the things I think my kids have missed out on is this shared cultural experience thing that was common to our generation. Well that's true. Where you'd come into work or school or whatever on a Monday morning and everyone saw the same exact show

Leo Laporte (01:08:51):
Over the weekend. What did Johnny say last night? Oh my God, did you see

Paul Thurrott (01:08:53):
That? It's not like everything was better in the past. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:08:58):
Yeah, it was. No Paul. It was

Paul Thurrott (01:09:00):
But it wasn't my past, that's for sure. I wish, well one time I showed them, I used to wake up on Saturday mornings and watch cartoons and it was a Saturday morning was cartoons. It was all morning. It was great. In the afternoon where I live, we had Creature double feature in the afternoon. It was all these awesome old Japanese horror movies or whatever or monster movies. And this was something we just had and I played some Warner Brother cartoons for my kids a couple of years ago. I don't think they'd ever even seen them. The Wiley Coyote and the Roadrunner and Bugs Bunny and all that stuff. And I dunno, to me these are just like I learned about opera music from this or whatever. I mean I feel bad they didn't have that. That's all. It's too bad.

Leo Laporte (01:09:41):
I learned about opera from

Paul Thurrott (01:09:42):
Three Stooges

Leo Laporte (01:09:43):
Island, either bar or nor to be. This much is true. Anyway,

Paul Thurrott (01:09:50):
My favorite Gilligan's Island scene is the one where Gilligan is wearing a garlic necklace and he says, skipper says, why are you wearing that? Well

Leo Laporte (01:09:58):
Bonnie, why are you wearing a garlic

Paul Thurrott (01:10:00):
Necklace? He says to keep away the crocodiles. He's like, what? Don't be crocodiles. And his island is like, see it works

Leo Laporte (01:10:07):
GaN brilliant genius. Microsoft three six fiverr slash Cloud.

Paul Thurrott (01:10:18):
Yeah, this was originally, I was mixing in some AI stuff before and I kind of separated a little differently. So these are kind of Microsoft 365 adjacent, but back in 2000, I thought it was 2016, but 2017 Microsoft says they released an app called Seeing AI on the iPhone. And this was a really cool, this is the scene in Oly where the star of the movie grabs a blind guy and walks him around Paris and describes everything that's happening to him. And he kind of lights up because it's like this thing he doesn't get to experience and it provides verbal descriptions of things for people who are blind or have low vision and they just released it on Android. Android. It took them that at least six years

Richard Campbell (01:10:58):
They did it with a keynote with an employee of Microsoft

Paul Thurrott (01:11:02):
And it was a great moment. Integrated

Richard Campbell (01:11:04):
In the glasses. Yeah, it was a great keynote moment, actually got known for these huge heartstring closers.

Paul Thurrott (01:11:12):
Yes. And then it kind of went silent for a while, but it appears that this thing is back in really active development. They're going to be adding a bunch of new features to both sides of the mobile fence there. And they've added new features with this release too. So it's a lot more languages. They're going to double the number of languages to 2024. But this thing could identify people everyday, objects, faces, and expressions. It can describe what those are like Bob is smiling or whatever, provide description to photos. It could read mails, scan barcodes kind of goes on and on and it's a really long list of stuff. And of course the guy who runs this, the guy who is the CEO of seeing AI at Microsoft is of course someone with serious vision issues. So it's just one of those heartwarming great things. It's kind of hard to, it's just neat. That's excellent. So if you have that kind of, I guess we're not really calling these disabilities anymore, but if you have this kind of an issue, you might want to check into this if you're running on. Well, and also, I

Richard Campbell (01:12:14):
Mean it's the ability for software to see and recognize what it's seeing and there's a bunch of applications

Paul Thurrott (01:12:19):
For that and this is a really good one. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, nice. And then this one's super adjacent in that it's not really Microsoft, but Evernote, which was kind of a pioneer in the note take. Well, not really. I mean OneNote was out before Evernote, but whatever. OneNote, Evernote was a big deal for a long time and they've made a lot of mistakes over the years, but they have indeed decided to restrict their free users to one notebook and 50 notes because they want people to pay, which is reasonable, but

Leo Laporte (01:12:49):
That's basically unusable. I mean 50 notes come on.

Paul Thurrott (01:12:53):
So the problem is there are really good solutions like OneNote and Notion and probably many others that

Leo Laporte (01:13:00):
How

Paul Thurrott (01:13:00):
About Luke for free? I stand by what I said earlier, Leo. No, so Loop is still progressing. It's also not available for free to anybody. You have to have Microsoft 365 subscription.

Leo Laporte (01:13:16):
I use a weirdo of course, because I am a weirdo.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:20):
Yeah, I can't wait to hear this

Leo Laporte (01:13:23):
Open source.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:24):
I wrote it myself in lists. It's a command line application. I did. In fact, it's great. No,

Leo Laporte (01:13:28):
It's open source, it's cross platform including Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS and Android. It's called Loge, L-O-G-S-E-Q.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:37):
Is this I recommended something or I didn't recommend it. I sent Richard something. Do you remember what that was? It was something that was also open source.

Leo Laporte (01:13:48):
I bet you sent him, which is more popular and I'm trying to remember the name. I used it for a long time. Obsidian?

Paul Thurrott (01:13:54):
No, obsidian I'm familiar with. No, it's not obsidian. It was one I had never heard of. This

Leo Laporte (01:13:58):
Is a successor loge in many ways to both Rome. In fact, it's kind of like local Rome because it's

Paul Thurrott (01:14:06):
Called App flowy.

Leo Laporte (01:14:07):
Oh, flowy is cool too. Yeah. I like Loge more and more. I like Loge, but a lot of this depends on how it presents to you and how you're going to use it. Loge is very much

Paul Thurrott (01:14:18):
Like

Leo Laporte (01:14:19):
A searchable daily journal. But anyway, all of these are better than Evernote and that's the point, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:14:24):
Yeah. That's the problem. They, Evernote should have been the company doing this stuff and there's a lot of apps that look the same now, like Loop Notion, app, flowy, whatever. I will say the problem for any of these companies or these products is that in my case it's notion, but I use this thing that just works and it works great and it's like Wells, the bar for switching is pretty hard. Not because it's hard to do so, but because why would I switch it? Everything works great. I stuck with OneNote for so many years and we had so many problems doing the show notes. It was hard to switch off of that and that thing didn't work properly. When I have something like this that works, I don, I don't really want to screw with it.

Richard Campbell (01:15:10):
The reflex is hard to build and difficult to give up once you've got the request to look somewhere. Although you don't want to move

Paul Thurrott (01:15:16):
Away through the tears, you will feel better when it's over. I was just saying I

Richard Campbell (01:15:22):
Have been pulling more stuff to loop by bit.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:25):
Okay, and how's that experience been?

Richard Campbell (01:15:27):
It's been pretty good, but I've got a good E 365 set up. We're both synced on it now, so the interface is immature still. The mobile products a bit clumsy. It's there and I tried to use notes getting weird, getting more unstable. I noticed

Paul Thurrott (01:15:48):
The mobile app kept not crashing, but it would literally say, it would say something like something's wrong or something. Instead of loading my notes. It's like guys, seriously,

Richard Campbell (01:15:55):
Really, really worthless messages, just continuously throbbing. Eventually a page will come down maybe. I don't know for sure. It's like, listen, I needed to make a note, that's why I opened you.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:05):
Oh, in my case, my needs were even less. I just need to look at a note. I'm at the gym, I want to know how much weight to put on this thing. It's simple.

Richard Campbell (01:16:13):
Just was busy doing something that wasn't what I needed so that you're gone, you're out. Bye.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:20):
Yep. Yeah, you have enough of those experiences and you're like, eh. Well that's why when I switched back to the Pixel, you go through the apps again, install. I'm like, I'm just going to put Notion on here. It works. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (01:16:30):
Well I've been using Loop as I document the new smart home bit by bit, adding new features into home assistant and things and adding more. You need all your Z-Wave codes and stuff and so I've just from the very beginning been putting those into Loop so that I have them all. Don't have to go look 'em up again. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:16:52):
Well I don't know what to say. I guess if you were

Richard Campbell (01:16:57):
Sorry, I saw Activision Blizzard and Alyssa, I was delighted. Delight.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:02):
You

Leo Laporte (01:17:03):
Are the only one, Richard. I just

Richard Campbell (01:17:05):
Want to say good one. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:17:06):
I'm glad you enjoyed

Paul Thurrott (01:17:07):
This. It's actually some more recent news about that from today, but we'll get to that. Okay, so that's all I got for, I guess I should have called that productivity or something.

Leo Laporte (01:17:17):
Yeah, by the way, I mean the Pixel is getting just to call back because we're getting now this AI summary thing in the pixel feature drop any minute now. I think more and more this is a fantastic device.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:35):
So lemme see if I can bring it up something where, see if I can make this happen. It usually happens when I don't. Yeah, so if you just look at a story in the Google Discover feed, a little pain pops up at the bottom, it says Related insights and it says generative ai, blah blah blah, but it's like this article reports in a new feature called blah blah that's doing this. This feature comes to you. It's a nice little summary simple. And then after that you can find more stories that are similar I guess, which I guess is useful, but this is going to be everything. It's going to be everything. I agree.

Leo Laporte (01:18:06):
This is the real use of ai, simple stuff like this.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:10):
Every email you get is going to have a summary over on the side. Every search result you do is going to have a more

Leo Laporte (01:18:14):
Than a summary. For instance, you might say, Hey, scan my emails from today and give me a to-do list.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:21):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (01:18:21):
Oh, for sure there can be some really, I mean wouldn't that be great?

Paul Thurrott (01:18:24):
Here's an idea, how about not having me to go to Gmail and say this thing is spam. How about you just figure it out? They do this on my phone very effectively with text messages. By the way, another pixel feature, right? They do this pretty effectively with phone calls, meaning that they do call screening. They don't do so much. The automatic this the spam thing, although I guess that happens sometimes more often than not, my screen pops up says, Hey, this unknown number's calling you, what do you want to do? It's like screen it and I would say 99% of the time they hang up and that's the end of that. They were a spammer. That stuff is helpful. It's very helpful. So yeah, it's going to be a bunch of this stuff. It's

Richard Campbell (01:19:05):
Really, I've done that the complicated way through Teams' phone on E 365. I've set up the press one for Richard Press two, that kind of thing, and that just knocks out all the software. The software isn't capable of person is. But I realized that's not a normal thing to set up, to set up a voice interactive module. It's not trivial. It's a bunch of steps to make that happen, but boy, there goes your spam calls.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:33):
Yeah. Anyway, that's good stuff and I trust it's been a great year for trust, love, antitrust. Google and Epic have gone to court just like Apple and Epic went and things are going a little differently this time. A lot of evidence against Google, which is really interesting. But two big things happened in the past week, both on the same day. I think it was the end, it was probably Friday last week. The judges really fed up with Google and he basically, Google has purposefully and has a policy of purposefully destroying chats between employees so that information cannot be used later in court against them. That is illegal. And the judge is going to launch a separate investigation of Google for this, which is crazy. Don't put it in writing. Don't put it in writing. And if you, no, literally the CEO of the company was one of the people who admitted to this. This is crazy bad behavior. So that's fascinating. Kent Walker, he's their chief console. I had probably made a comment about him maybe two, three months ago because Google was talking about fighting all their antitrust stuff and it sounds like Microsoft from 1997, this is the wrong language, it's the wrong stance. These guys

Richard Campbell (01:20:51):
Need a Brad Smith in the worst way

Paul Thurrott (01:20:54):
And he made this guy get on the stand to explain the behavior and then he just cut him off and said, stop it. You're tapped dancing around the question. He says, it is deeply troubling to me as a judicial officer of the United States that Google did this. This is the most serious and disturbing evidence I've ever seen in my decade on the bench with respect to a party intentionally suppressing relevant evidence. So we'll see what comes out of that, but that's fascinating, whatever happens in this case. But the other thing he did on Friday was, I don't have the exact exchange in front of me, but there was an exchange between Epic and Google and the judge said, hold on a second. Have you guys never even tried to settle this case privately? And they've never even talked to each other about it. And he says, so lemme get this straight.

(01:21:41):
He went to Epic. He said, well, what is it you want? And Epic said, we want these three things. He said, the third one's stupid, we're not doing that. But the other two, Google is already giving these terms to other companies like Spotify. So I don't see any reason why they can't give 'em to you. So why don't you guys get in a room and figure out a settlement and you have to do that before the jury comes back with a verdict because it's not going to go very well for Google. He didn't say that. That wasn't my, that's basic, but

Richard Campbell (01:22:07):
This is totally self-inflicted by Google. Then they just mishandled this. I'm sure Epic reached out to them saying we should make a deal. And they were just stonewalling ignoring,

Paul Thurrott (01:22:19):
I'm not sure about the Epic is the underdog in system? Epic

Richard Campbell (01:22:23):
Got own crazy too.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:24):
They are on a different crazy level. Yes, they are the poking the bear company here, right? They're doing that. So I don't know. No one we don't know. But yeah, this is a lot like Google Sonos in a way. We don't really know what discussions have occurred, if any. And we see the accusations and I think we understand,

Richard Campbell (01:22:47):
But it's astonishing the 21st century to be this tone deaf, to do legal in a tech giant. This when Microsoft was screwing us up in the nineties, they were the first really, they couldn't even really

Paul Thurrott (01:23:00):
Compare IBM seventies one since then. But

Richard Campbell (01:23:02):
It's not true today.

Paul Thurrott (01:23:04):
When Intel faced similar charges in Europe in the mid two thousands, they just said, yeah, we'll just do whatever you want. The interesting thing about what Intel did was aside from not being Microsoft, what did Microsoft do? We're going to do the opposite. So they ended up paying several billion fees. I don't remember what it was. They actually later got that money back. What they did was just agree to whatever the settlement was and they did it and then they appealed and they won. But rather than be belligerent upfront and just look like jerks, they did the right thing and it worked out well for them. So it's interesting now, most of big tech is finding themselves under some kind of an antitrust shade right now and Google more than all of them and maybe more than all of them combined. I'm not even sure, but Google's got a lot of stuff going on right now and this is not going to go well for

Richard Campbell (01:23:54):
Them. I put Google and Facebook out front on those and then Apple's been pretty slick. Microsoft is now the kinder, gentler tech giant and Amazon, I don't know how they keep dodging the bullets. It's astonishing.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:10):
Yeah, it is actually. Well, so yeah, I just wonder if

Richard Campbell (01:24:14):
They slow down delivery to their judges.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:17):
Yes. Right, exactly. Or speed 'em up. He's like, I did the one where it's going to come next Tuesday, but that's good because I'm saving environment. He's like, no, you're getting it today. Yeah, you're getting it today. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know, but I feel like they're all going to have their day. So it it's happening. The C today was in a court with Microsoft complaining about Activision Blizzard. Literally today they're still trying to unwind this thing, and Microsoft back in September had gotten a group of venture capital firms, I think it was seven, lemme make sure I'm right about that. Yeah, seven. That petition. The FTC to stop the Stupidness. You are literally so blindly going after big companies that you don't understand. The harm this is have is how money is generated by this kind of thing. This is how these companies make money. And so this week Microsoft had another 30 venture capital firms, rather. How is

Richard Campbell (01:25:23):
This happening? Are they reaching out to them, what's

Paul Thurrott (01:25:26):
Going on? Yeah, problem, I'm sure this has got to be, is Brad

Richard Campbell (01:25:29):
Smith calling in favors then? Right. Just

Paul Thurrott (01:25:31):
Right now. So these guys are managing money. They have a collected asset level of 130 billion, just the new 30, not including the old seven, going to the FTC and saying, I don't know if you know anything about business, but this is how business works and please stop trying to stop that. So that's interesting to me. But yeah, they're trying to do their little internal court process and convince the judge that ruled against them to reconsider. It's like some weird mulligan thing they're looking for. I, I dunno, I'm not sure this part of it, I don't know the FTC that well, but this is not how this goes Usually, generally speaking, not generally speaking, every single time until this time when the FTC has lost in federal court, they drop the case internally, I believe is the only time in history where they have in fact brought the case back internally after losing in court in a federal court.

(01:26:29):
So it's just, I don't know what's going on with these people. But yeah, whatever Microsoft, speaking of antitrust is in trouble with the UK CMA, not for Activision Blizzard anymore. They're all buddies over that. But rather about the cloud licensing terms, which their competitors are saying makes it harder for companies to use the cloud in many ways the way it's supposed to be used, which is multicloud, right? You kind of spread things out over to multiple, so Google and Amazon and many other companies too. But these are the two big ones have weighed in and written letters to the CMA in support of bringing Microsoft to terms to try to make them changes because they make it very hard and very expensive for customers to either leave them entirely and go to a different cloud or do the multi-cloud thing. Well, that seems fair. Really. It does. Yeah. There's some good ideas.

Richard Campbell (01:27:27):
I don't know, what are they doing that they think

Paul Thurrott (01:27:32):
This is, there's a history to this. Microsoft in 2019, and then again in 2022, has actually changed their cloud licensing terms to address concerns in the EU that they were anti-competitive. I might be misremembering, but I believe it was the 20 19 1 where Microsoft actually came out and said, you know what? You're right. We didn't do this to harm customers or competitors, but we looked at it and we said, yep, you're right. We're going to do it. And then they made whatever changes they made and everyone fix, you didn't fix anything. What are you doing? I remember that. Yeah. Yeah. So in 2022, let's see if I can find out the description of this. They made it ably expensive for customers to run Windows and office workloads on non Azure cloud platforms like AWS and Google Cloud triggering inquiries from EU regulators. Oh yeah, that was 2019.

(01:28:23):
I'm sorry. That's when they said, no, the complaints were valid. You're right, and we're going to fix it. And then whatever they changed didn't fix it in the slightest. And so in 2022, they came up with a plan to make it expensive for customers to run Windows software like Windows, windows Server Office and SQL Server on non-Microsoft Cloud platforms in the eu. And it's like, guys, this is the exact opposite of what we were asking you to do. And so it was some, I think it's called Ops something. What's the name of this company? There's a European cloud vendor, maybe it's my Amazon story ware or somewhat was basically the company said, is anyone looking at this the way the cloud's supposed to work is the exact opposite of what Microsoft is doing. And Microsoft

Richard Campbell (01:29:11):
Talks, I don't really talk about product in here, but it seems to me like this is the virtual desktop stuff, which gets very favorable licensing terms for office and things where if you're going to go run another vdi, I stack over on Oracle or Google's vdi, I stack, you got to pay full licenses for all those products.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:31):
And I guess they punish customers who try to go multi-cloud or they punish customers to try to go off their cloud. I dunno. So Google kind of argued that if we don't fix this through regulation, then the barrier to entry just gets so high, no one's going to be able to compete. Microsoft will just keep their workloads on Microsoft. And from the customer's perspective, they're like, look, I'm paying for Windows. Who cares where I run it? I mean, if I run it on Azure or AWS or whatever. Yeah. I mean, I guess that company gets that part of it, but we're still licensing it from you. I mean, what's the difference? But I guess they have completely different licensing terms depending on how,

Richard Campbell (01:30:10):
Yeah, I think that's the bigger thing here is that you're paying full license when you're running on the other cloud, but there's steep discounts when you're running an Azure.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:17):
Yes, exactly. Yep. Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

Leo Laporte (01:30:21):
If it was cheaper to run Windows on a Surface laptop than it is on a Dell, that

Paul Thurrott (01:30:27):
Would be wrong. Well, I mean technically probably is, I guess. But you don't really see that as an end user. In other words, you don't see the number of that cost when you buy a computer

Richard Campbell (01:30:37):
Quite as clearly as you can see it in this scenario. Microsoft One is trying to get rid of on-Prem SQL Server 2012, but there's always some maps that can't upgrade. So they've offered a special deal on VMs running 2012 that'll continue to get patched and so forth. But you're not going to get that offer on any other cloud stack. It's actually

Leo Laporte (01:30:59):
Them in Microsoft's head. That might be what justifies

Richard Campbell (01:31:01):
It. Okay. Is that any competitive, I guess,

Leo Laporte (01:31:03):
In Microsoft's head? They don't in fact charge as much for Windows running on Surface, right?

Paul Thurrott (01:31:10):
Yeah, probably. I mean, probably. So.

Leo Laporte (01:31:12):
It's kind of the same.

Richard Campbell (01:31:14):
It's just that surface is so expensive you,

Paul Thurrott (01:31:17):
You don't really see it. It's not like a Surface, it's a hidden charge.

Leo Laporte (01:31:19):
But in their minds, we make $5 per unit sold on Surface in the Windows division, and we make $30 per unit sold for Dell.

Paul Thurrott (01:31:27):
There's a big change happening right now in the world though, because what we're kind of talking about here is, I hate to use this term, it's almost like legacy workloads in a way. This notion of these cloud native apps. Microsoft talked a lot about this at Ignite. They talked about this a little bit before actually, and there's a dotnet implementation of this idea. They came out with, here's your stack, here's the tools you need, here's all the stuff. It's all set up. That thing is, that's multicloud. It's any cloud. It's a cloud agnostic, and I think that's the way the world's going. But the issue here, of course, is that Microsoft was able to leverage their dominance in what was once work group computing and then on-prem server, data center computing and bring those customers with them into the cloud. So you kind of get the Fortune, whatever, 100, 500, whatever it is, kind of marching along with Microsoft. I think what these companies are looking for is them not to have that leverage over the future because it's going to be, it is already, but it's going to be heterogeneous. And these kind of cloud native apps are going to be, they're not going to be tied to Azure or AWS are going to work everywhere. That's the future. But we're in the now. So I think they're trying to prevent Microsoft from eking out their last measure of dominance. Well, this world still exists or whatever. I don't know. Interesting. Last

Leo Laporte (01:32:53):
Chance. Last chance to be a monopoly.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:56):
You got to ring that sponge as much as you can, right?

Richard Campbell (01:33:00):
Yeah. And it's funny that they're taking the old monopolies of windows in the office, leverage supposedly new

Paul Thurrott (01:33:06):
Monopolies, but it is the biggest companies in the world that will have some random line of business app or some server, like you said, an on-prem server now running in a VM and some cloud thing. That's probably big business, right? Again, it's not the future, but it's going to be in place for a long time and it's money. So Microsoft's making it hard to move that stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:33:30):
Hey, when it comes to money, it's money.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:34):
Don't mess with money. As I said to my daughter, privilege has its privileges.

Leo Laporte (01:33:43):
Very profound. You're deep. Yep. Let's speak in a deep, let's talk Xbox baby.

Paul Thurrott (01:33:49):
Yeah. So Microsoft confirmed that they are working on an Xbox gaming store for mobile. It is not telling us who it's working with, but it is working with partners. They didn't say this either, but they're clearly betting on some opening up of app stores because of the DMA and the eu, the Digital Markets Act that is going to force these companies to open up their platforms. And of course, this is what came out of Apple blocking Xbox. Nope, Xbox Cloud Gaming, which used to be X Cloud on their platforms because they wanted that per game. Vig and Microsoft argued, I think effectively that this is where Netflix, no one's downloading or buying games. You're streaming them like they do with movies. Our TV shows on Netflix, and that's Apple. And that's what happens when you have a company that's kind of secretly as terrible as Apple is.

(01:34:47):
So we will see what comes out of this. But there's also this, I don't know where this came out, some kind of a regulatory filing where the firm, Microsoft was seen as creating something they call the Xbox Mobile platform, which is the next generation game store that operates across a range of devices including mobile. So this seems to me like it's going to be something like Xbox Game Pass or Game or Cloud gaming where it's a subscription service, it will work across platforms, et cetera, et cetera. So we don't know have all the details, but Phil Spencer admitted they're doing it. So we shall see. It's a new month, December, and we have some new games. And actually I recognize some of these games like such an old person now when I do the Game Pass stuff, I never know any of the games, but this is Far Cry six renan, tomb Raider, I should say Rise, I think it is. Rise of the Tomb Raider was a reasonably recent game. And then World War Z aftermath, and then a bunch of other games too, including Goat Simulator three, because that one apparently won two

Leo Laporte (01:35:53):
Was so good. I think three, I'm sorry if you have not played Goat Simulator, you do not know how funny that is. You do have to

Paul Thurrott (01:35:59):
Play it

Leo Laporte (01:36:01):
Cool. You play a Angry Goat and you get to go around and screw things up. And it's not really

Paul Thurrott (01:36:07):
Leo. I am in real life. I am an Angry Goat, and so why would I want to do that again? It could be a

Leo Laporte (01:36:12):
Paul Thora simulator.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:13):
Really. It's like creating a video game called Drive to the Gym, where you just get mad at the other drivers, which I do that in real life. I don't need to do that in a game.

Leo Laporte (01:36:24):
It is a great game. So funny. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:36:28):
So this is, like I said, this is the first time in a long time I've looked at this list of games like, oh, I know some of these games. Oh good. And then of course, it probably won't happen right in January, but we're counting on next year for the big Activision Bonanza to occur. And we'll see what happens there. I didn't write about this yet. I probably will put something up on the site, but this just came out today right before the show started, but Microsoft actually made a post where they said, Hey, you might've noticed when you play games on Xbox that a license agreement pop up kind of appears and people are freaking out. And it's like, what's going on here? And it's just like, look, we have this commitment with the European Union to do certain things with our games that we've now acquired with Activision Blizzard. We're legally required to show you this information. You'll only see it once. You'll never see it again. It'll never happen again. And so they basically said, we know this is a minor inconvenience, but we have to honor our commitments, and we're just

Leo Laporte (01:37:28):
Another cookie banner. What is it? What does it say?

Paul Thurrott (01:37:30):
Yeah. Well, so there's been some stuff recently with popups on Xbox and also on Windows, by the way. So Starfield has been advertised on the Windows 11 lock screen, which is kind of crappy because that's Windows Spotlight is beautiful photography from Bing, and yeah, there's a little Addy type things in there, but it's not like a full screen ad for a game. So there's stuff like that. Every

Richard Campbell (01:37:55):
Time the companies remind you your stuff is not yours.

Paul Thurrott (01:37:58):
Yeah, right. Yeah. So actually, since you said that, let me jump forward to the last story, which is that Sony started alerting PlayStation users that if they purchased any content from Discovery, it's going away.

Leo Laporte (01:38:15):
Oh my God.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:17):
They

Richard Campbell (01:38:17):
Never owned it. They just gave money.

Leo Laporte (01:38:18):
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:19):
This has happened from time to time. If

Leo Laporte (01:38:21):
You thought you were buying it, you weren't buying it.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:23):
No. Yeah, this can happen, right? This one could be big. I mean, the percentage of people who buy a bunch of discovery shows we're talking like MythBusters, and people don't

Leo Laporte (01:38:34):
Usually buy discovery shows. They just,

Paul Thurrott (01:38:36):
I hope not. But I'm trying to figure out that Venn diagram of you like these shows and you have a PlayStation and for some reason you buy them and you're in that little slice in the middle. But I don't know. It must be

Leo Laporte (01:38:49):
A small group. It must be.

Paul Thurrott (01:38:51):
I hope so. But it is that reminder, if you buy content digitally, you don't really own it. And it's tough. Every once in a while there's a story like this where it gets taken away. So Microsoft still sells TV shows and movies and rents movies through their store and on Xbox and on Windows. But I guess Sony stopped selling movies and TV shows about two years ago. And the promise at the time was obviously your content's there, you can still access it, you keep playing it back. But I guess, I don't know, they have to pay some ongoing license fee or something. Or they were like, yeah, we're not doing that. I have no idea. But that kind of sucks. But

Richard Campbell (01:39:36):
Yeah, it's begging for regulation. It's like, listen, if you're offering an in perpetuity license, there be imp perpetuity.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:42):
Yeah. Yeah. I feel like this is something that needs to be fixed. Oh, it

Leo Laporte (01:39:45):
Always says though, in the fine print, you don't own this, this you can't.

Paul Thurrott (01:39:51):
Who reads that stuff?

Leo Laporte (01:39:52):
Right. But I

Paul Thurrott (01:39:53):
Mean that's not,

Richard Campbell (01:39:54):
It's designed not to be

Leo Laporte (01:39:55):
Read. Right. But people ought to know by now, you're not buying anything. You're rent it. If it's streaming, you're renting

Paul Thurrott (01:40:02):
It. Plus who's perpetuity we talking about here? And then I'm not interested in this in the slightest, but Grand Theft Auto Six, they've dropped their first trailer. It's caused quite a, quite a, it looks good out in the world. Yeah, it

Leo Laporte (01:40:20):
Looks good. Have you watched, it looks like its TV show. Well, I'm going to make you watch it right now. It looks just like a TV show. It's quite beautiful using, we were talking about it on a Mac Break weekly. I was curious if they're using Unreal or Unity or what? And they do their own, they have their own rockstar engine, which has been getting

Paul Thurrott (01:40:40):
Better. I mean, this thing used to be so antiquated looking. Oh

Leo Laporte (01:40:44):
Yeah. People used to make fun of how people walked in the game and stuff. But it looks a little bit more, I'm going to cut away now because it's going to get a little racy.

Paul Thurrott (01:40:55):
Well, that's all right. I'll keep it racy here. So

Leo Laporte (01:40:59):
Can you twerk Paul? Because

Paul Thurrott (01:41:01):
I cannot, I can do my imitation to the Doom guy though, which is pretty funny. But it's impossible with the little lens we have in the camera here. But my friend used to say, walk in a wall and then you moves sideways, you like walk in a wall and you move

Leo Laporte (01:41:11):
Side with, that's what people use it with, GDA, GT A. They'd show these weird walks and Oh my God, watching the trailers getting weirder and weirder, it goes off the rails. Yeah. Really? Wow.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:27):
Well that's what those people want, right? I think there's an audience for this game. And I'm not that audience. It's not you,

Leo Laporte (01:41:36):
But I mean, it's so well done. It really does look like a TV show, I have to say. Yeah. Anyway, it's coming soon.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:44):
Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:41:44):
Is it an Xbox title?

Paul Thurrott (01:41:47):
I think it's going to be everywhere. Isn't it? Everywhere. I refuse to pay any attention to it, but I thought I'd mention it. I know some people. I'm not

Leo Laporte (01:41:54):
Alone.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:55):
Don't care.

Leo Laporte (01:41:55):
And you're also alone. You're both

Paul Thurrott (01:42:00):
Simultaneously. My wife just sent me a text message to that effect. I'm not here anymore.

Leo Laporte (01:42:05):
Goodbye.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:06):
Okay. In general, or just like right now.

Leo Laporte (01:42:10):
Good. That's

Paul Thurrott (01:42:10):
It. Alright. Wow. That's going to be one of the two. Yeah, either way

Leo Laporte (01:42:16):
I'll persist. You guys own a home in Mexico? I think you're You're going to be fine tied for life. I don't think they'll allow you to not do it.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:26):
Be able to sell that thing because of Mexico.

Leo Laporte (01:42:28):
Never. Never. When are you going back? You going back for Christmas? You should go back for Christmas. Phillies.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:35):
No, I don't want, no. I like the holidays here. We're going to go back beginning of February, I think through the middle of March, something like

Leo Laporte (01:42:42):
That. Nice. That's a good time. It's February is so rim.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:47):
We have to deal with January, but then we're going to miss most of the

Leo Laporte (01:42:51):
Rest of the February is just like winter will never end. It's just never going to end. Now

Paul Thurrott (01:42:56):
Here March is the same. It's February, March. It's like seriously just end. So

Leo Laporte (01:43:00):
That's a good time to be a snowbird. Yeah.

(01:43:04):
Our show today, we're get to get to the back of the book in just a bit. Tips, tricks, apps, runner's, radio. And ladies and gentlemen, you're a brown Looker pick of the week. First a word from HID Global. They're our sponsor. Leave the stress of tedious PKI management behind in 2023 and entered 2024 with less stress and complete certificate lifecycle automation from HID Global's, PKI as a service model with Google moving toward 90 day SSL certificates, you could get caught in a tough place here. You got to have automation. I mean every three months it's going to be hard to remember i's model of automation doesn't require any additional hardware. No software investment, no installs in order to fully automate the life cycles of your organization's certificates, that's sweet for Google and Mac Systems i's connector model of PKI uses open source certificate utilities. So your organization can use multiple operating systems.

(01:44:04):
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Paul Thurrott (01:45:14):
Sorry, I muted me. Sorry. This one comes actually from a couple of readers. I had written and talked about this notion of you're on 22 H two, you want to get to 23 H two. Here are the tools you can use. They're all on the download Windows 11 website, right? There's the installation assistant, the installation media that you can create with the media creation tool. And then you can just download the ISO and those, actually, those all should work. They're all upgraded now to 23 H two. Remember, the media creation tool was not for a while, but then someone chimed in with, well, what about arm? None of those tools work on arm. And I was like, oh gosh, I don't know. So I checked that to be sure. And as it turns out, if you're on Windows on an arm, and especially if you're on a Mac, which is probably most people, at least

Leo Laporte (01:45:58):
That's how I use it.

Paul Thurrott (01:46:00):
Parallel Parallels desktop. If you are stuck on 20 H 2, 22 H two, which I was as well actually on parallels on the Mac, what you can download is the kb, the enablement package, the EKB that upgrades you to 23 H two. It just slips the switch. You already have all the code in there. It's just not enabled. This thing's a really small download. It's a quick reboot. The number you're looking for is KB 5 0 2 7 3 9 7. I have a link to it in the article. You can just click direct download, run it, reboot, and you're on 23 H two. That's all it takes. So it works great actually. So at this point in time, even if you're unarm, you should be able to upgrade, assuming everything is compatible, et cetera. So there you go. And then I have a couple of have one app pick and then another kind of a mobile app pick.

(01:46:52):
I think, I can't remember the timeframe this, I've been using an app called Image Glass as an image viewer. I love it. I love how configurable it is. I run it full screen with no UI at all, and it brings up an image. You hit escape, it disappears, that kind of thing. I've been using the free version off the website. You can buy it in the Microsoft store, but they just upgraded to a new version called Image Class nine. And if you go to the web now, you get Image Class classic. And it's not the image class I was using before. It's kind of this weird app that I don't really like and what's going on here. And I thought, you know what? I use this thing every single day. I should just buy this. It is $10, but it's fantastic. Is this the newer fin view?

(01:47:31):
This is the one that will become the default. That's a good way to say it. It is for me. I love it. The thing I like the most about it is it's compatible with everything. So now if I download, say I'm writing a story about Google and Microsoft or whatever the company is, and they have an image on their webpage, I download it and I want to use that as the hero graphic. If it's in a format like Web P, the version of, actually, I think every version of Adobe Photoshop elements cannot work with those kind of newer web formats. But I loaded up, I just open it in image glass controls to save it, saves it a ping to the desktop goes into, it's awesome for that as well. But honestly, mostly it's for image viewing, but it is 10 bucks. But it's such a fantastic app, and if you use it, I feel like you should support the person.

(01:48:16):
In this case, it is a person who makes it. It's a great app. You said something earlier, Leo, that reminded me of this, and when you did one of the ad breaks, I ran out to go look for it. And one of the things that is a huge pet peeve for me, and I know it's surprising I would have a pet peeve, is I've gone through over the years, many different, I'll call them newsfeed. It's like a newsfeed reader like Google News or MSN News back in the day, or there's all kinds of these things. Was it Insta Paper was one or pockets? These things are, yeah, well pocket. I actually do use that for a different thing. But as far as reading the actual news for me specifically, tech Feed, the Google thing is, it was better than whatever Microsoft was at the time, but it's gotten so much worse over time.

(01:49:06):
It's driving me crazy. And I found something called Artifact, which is available on iOS and Android and iPad and iPhone. And I read my news in the morning on an iPad. So I read a couple of newspapers and I usually go to Google News, but today I skipped Google News and I went to this thing instead. You can customize it, obviously. That's part of the point. And we'll see. It's early days. This has been a couple of days, but this might be it. I might've finally found, what do you call this? A newsfeed reader or a newsfeed news reader. News. News consolidator, yeah. So far it's been fantastic. And I didn't think I was ever going to find that was any good.

Leo Laporte (01:49:49):
You've used this. I like it.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:51):
Yeah, I like it a lot. And I went, in the beginning you kind of tell these are the things I care about. And when there are the GTA stuff, there was a bunch of that yesterday, and probably today as well, you can press and hold and say, I'm really not interested in this topic. And the idea is that you'll see less about that over time, which is a very basic feature. But I can tell you, Google ignores everything I've ever sent it. I've sent Google approximately 8,000 pieces, never learn feedback.

Leo Laporte (01:50:16):
And neither Apple News. Neither does SN News. It's clear they have their own agenda, right? They're just

Paul Thurrott (01:50:24):
Like, yeah, personalized suggestions in Windows is the biggest lie in the history of lies. Because if it was personalized, you would know that I'm already paying for Microsoft 365 subscription. Exactly. So why did I give you permission to track me around the internet when you're not even sending me personalized anything?

Leo Laporte (01:50:41):
And this was created by, I'm trying to remember, was it Kevin's sister, the founder of Instagram? I mean, it's a big shot.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:49):
Oh, you're right, you're right. It was two guys from Instagram. That's right. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:50:52):
That's true. So as a result, they have enough money that they don't have to charge you for this.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:59):
Maybe that changes, but it's got to change as of today. I think

Leo Laporte (01:51:02):
It's great. Oh, I know. I use it. I love it. It's a really good choice. And unlike, I don't know how it is with some of these other ones, but unlike Apple's news, I can actually share. I can bookmark an article. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:51:19):
Right, right. So when I want to read things later, that's when I go to Pocket. That's what I use. Pocket.

Leo Laporte (01:51:26):
Yeah. I'm sorry, when you said Instapaper, that's kind of more like Pocket. This is

Paul Thurrott (01:51:30):
The one that flipped. It was flipped something. Flipboard.

Leo Laporte (01:51:32):
You're talking about this Flipboard actually very, oh look, I just moved up to Learner. They've gamified this to get you to, I don't know what Do more, I don't, yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:51:44):
Sure. Get you to read.

Leo Laporte (01:51:45):
Actually I was way past learner. This must be, oh, there's a newer phone. That's right. Yeah. Not Instapaper. Flipboard. Yeah, Flipboard ISS still around by the way. And still it's Mike McCune does that and he's a

Paul Thurrott (01:51:59):
Listener. My big Flipboard memory was that the version of Flipboard on Windows phone did not flip. That's right. That was the remember. It

Leo Laporte (01:52:07):
Was It would imagine.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:10):
But does it flip? People would be like, well, yeah, it's a new version on it. I'm like, does it flip? I don't care. If it doesn't flip. I'm not even going to look. It's too hard

Leo Laporte (01:52:16):
To flip. So we're not going to flip. We won't be flipping artifact. A-R-T-I-F-A CT on iOS and Android. Yes,

Paul Thurrott (01:52:27):
An iPad.

Leo Laporte (01:52:30):
I think Mr. Richard Campbell should tell us about some great podcast listening coming up.

Richard Campbell (01:52:36):
Yeah. This week I talked to Sharon Weaver, who's an M 365 consultant, and we called the show Modernizing using M 365. The conversation really got into how work has changed post pandemic or in the later stages of the pandemic and how the tools that are available in M 365 can facilitate some work from home, some work in the office, some remote, and just making all of that easier, more possible so that you have more ways to be able to work, to be able to find the data you need to find, to be able to show that you've delivered what you need to deliver without having to be present all the time.

Leo Laporte (01:53:13):
Cool.

Richard Campbell (01:53:14):
Yeah, great conversation. Sharon's awesome.

Leo Laporte (01:53:17):
Run his radio.com. Richard's fine show. And now the moment you've all been waiting for the moment, the reason you sit through this entire show. Yes. Thank you for putting up with the rest of the show. It's time for Brown Liquor.

Richard Campbell (01:53:33):
I'm going to a super classic because we're all going to be visiting family and things, and many folks that don't buy a lot of whiskey often have this particular whiskey. Arguably the original, the very first modern single malt is Glen Fiig 12. So Glen Fiig is not the oldest distillery in the books. They started in the late 1880s. First reduction was 1887 by William Grant. They are still family owned. They've not been bought by any of the big conglomerates. They're on their fifth generation. They do their own barrel work, they do their own water handling. In the 1960s was when they really did this whole move towards very contemporary whiskey. They were the first to start advertising single malts, and so a designer named Han Schlager, very famous designer in the 1960s, came up with that triangular bottle that is sort of what Glen Fiig is known for, and they did that marketing and sort of spread the idea of the single malt whiskey around the world, which I think is part of the reason that people aren't that wildly excited about Glen Fitt because it's almost like Tommy Hilfiger. It's over put out there. Too many folks. My camera just quit.

Leo Laporte (01:54:49):
You're dark, but that's okay because we're looking at whiskey.

Richard Campbell (01:54:55):
Electricity

Leo Laporte (01:54:56):
Is a,

Richard Campbell (01:54:57):
It's an audio show anyway. It's

Leo Laporte (01:54:59):
Tough isn't. It's very dark in Florida. Okay, go ahead.

Richard Campbell (01:55:02):
So they're also one of the very first places to ever build a visitor center and they have a phenomenal tour. I absolutely recommend it. The one interesting thing about their tour is that they do hire pretty girls to do the tour. The lady that took us around was from Estonia, but it's considered, it's like one third of all single malts sold around the world of Scottish single malts. Glen Fit 12, it's unbelievably popular, and the Glen Fit Distillery is massive, 16 wash stills, 27 spirit stills. Their stills are relatively small. They have their own coppersmith on the Browns that maintains the stills and does all of their own work on that. One of the tricks they learned in the sixties to make a consistent whiskey before anybody else was really making consistent whiskey is that they split any given distillate into,

Leo Laporte (01:55:58):
Oh, we lost them. We've split Richard Campbell into two. There we go. He's back. He's back. We lost you. You said one thing they did was split.

Richard Campbell (01:56:07):
They split the distillation into two different types of barrels. They'll put about 90% of it into bourbon casks, 10% into Sherry casks, and then go their age range, 12, 15, 18, and then they'll vat them. They'll combine them all in a wooden vat, which it'll probably spend a year in that vat as well. And then they're working to the flavor profile. So they learned to do this in the sixties, well before other distilleries were doing it, and so they were able to make the same whiskey every year before almost anybody else did that. That being said, they also pioneered things that people aren't big fans of these days. Like they color the whiskey, they use chill filtration, all of those tricks to make a very consistent product. It's imminently drinkable. It's comes in at 40%, which is the old fashioned kind of way to do spirits these days. We mostly see 40 fives and 40 sevens that are not shell filtered because then they won't cloud because you're a little bit higher, but it's only $40. You kind of can't go wrong.

Leo Laporte (01:57:08):
We have to at some point, it would be fun to have you Richard, do a gift guide because certainly some families, if you brought Glen Fitch, they'd say, oh, great, we love that. Or Oh, fancy, if they've been drinking, I don't know, old Johnny Walker or something. But then there's some people who consider themselves connoisseurs and it'd be nice to know what a good gift bottle would be for somebody who's a little more serious and that kind of thing. So maybe before, as we get closer to the holidays,

Richard Campbell (01:57:38):
It's a very normal thing for me to get a message from someone saying, Hey, I want to buy a bottle of whiskey for this guy. I got a hundred to spend. What do you think?

Leo Laporte (01:57:45):
Who would you bring Glen Fitch to? Whose house would you bring that to?

Richard Campbell (01:57:50):
I mean, and the way I described it was, you're going to encounter this. You go into a place that has only one single malt, it'll probably be fit. I wouldn't tend to buy it unless you have really a novice drinker. That being said, if you're an experienced drinker of whiskey, go back and try it again. It's better than you remember.

Leo Laporte (01:58:11):
So it's not bad. It's good.

Richard Campbell (01:58:13):
It's nothing bad about it. It's lovely, but it is the classic definition of the light spay. And so often as we mature as whiskey drinkers, you look for stronger flavors and more range, more wood, and all of that is kind of muted in fit. It's very, because they were working towards that consistent product that it doesn't shine as brightly as some other whiskeys you could try.

Leo Laporte (01:58:37):
It's generic. It's a generic perfectly fine whiskey.

Richard Campbell (01:58:41):
It's the price you pay for defining the class of single malt that you become the fundamental,

Paul Thurrott (01:58:47):
The liquor you recommended last week, the Pendleton Rye 12, the

Richard Campbell (01:58:51):
Pend Rye

Paul Thurrott (01:58:52):
Not gotten yet, but they do have it in Pennsylvania, just not at the store we go to.

Richard Campbell (01:58:56):
Oh, I

Paul Thurrott (01:58:57):
See. So the next time we venture further afield, we're going to go grab that one.

Richard Campbell (01:59:01):
I'm finding more and more field folks sending me pictures of the bottles I talk about, so that's cool. Folks out there picking them up. But I pulled this one because we don't normally talk about it. It's easy to go off into a LA line of crazy whiskey and we are going to be visiting uncles and things that they probably have one. I have been given many bottles of this over the years. I don't have them anymore. Well,

Leo Laporte (01:59:24):
That's a good sign. Yes.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:26):
Yeah. Yep. That is good.

Leo Laporte (01:59:29):
It's a good solid, drinkable, consistent whiskey.

Paul Thurrott (01:59:33):
Would you call it profitable?

Richard Campbell (01:59:35):
Yeah, but it's super old school. They've been basically making it the same way for 60

Paul Thurrott (01:59:39):
Would like ache.

Leo Laporte (01:59:40):
It's a let's cache. I hate those words so much.

Richard Campbell (01:59:46):
You realize before the 1960s you didn't drink single malts unless you were in Scotland, and even then it was pretty rare. Isn't

Leo Laporte (01:59:52):
That interesting? Isn't that interesting? That's what you drank like a Crown Royal or something.

Richard Campbell (01:59:57):
Well, like Johnny Walker,

Leo Laporte (01:59:59):
Johnny Walker or a

Richard Campbell (02:00:00):
Shivas.

Leo Laporte (02:00:03):
Those were the big brands. I mean, Shivas was like the fancy brand when I was a kid. Yeah,

Richard Campbell (02:00:07):
Absolutely. And so then Granton's Sons started this whole movement with the single malt. That whole idea created a prestige brand around it that's arguably outgrown them while they're crying all the way to the bank, selling more of that than anybody else.

Leo Laporte (02:00:27):
I know the answer to this, but wo Jo's asking in our discord, the fact it's called single malt implies there's a double malt. Is that right? Or what does single malt mean?

Richard Campbell (02:00:37):
The single malt is supposed to be, it means a single malting of the barley. We talked about this back in the day when we did the Scottish

Leo Laporte (02:00:45):
Series. We have a whole series of these on YouTube,

Richard Campbell (02:00:48):
And today it really means it comes from one distillery. They really messed with the idea of single mal these days.

Leo Laporte (02:00:56):
I know in wines you get blends a lot, especially here in Napa where they want consistency and so they'll do these blends.

Paul Thurrott (02:01:04):
We get blends here that are just, they bring in the grapes somewhere else, right? It doesn't need enough to be from the area

Leo Laporte (02:01:10):
And the winemaker's aiming at a certain consistency and cooking it up by putting in different grapes. And

Richard Campbell (02:01:16):
That's part of the trick of the vatting I was describing the in a bottle of Glen Fiig 12 is not only 12-year-old whiskey, there's older in it. They're trying to get to that consistent flavor profile. So which

Paul Thurrott (02:01:27):
Is get an old barrel, which is the thing that escapes a lot of winemakers, frankly, where they are also shooting for this kind of consistency. But it seems hard in the wine world. Yeah,

Leo Laporte (02:01:39):
No, it's true. There are very few varietals that are year to year very,

Paul Thurrott (02:01:46):
They're so impacted by the weather that year or higher or lower than normal temperatures, lots of fog, whatever it might be.

Leo Laporte (02:01:53):
Depending

Paul Thurrott (02:01:53):
On grape, some are more resilient.

Leo Laporte (02:01:55):
We find Coat Doones, especially Chate Chateau N to pop is very consistent year after year. A lot of Bordeauxs are pretty consistent. You never know what you're going to get year to year. Yeah, it could

Paul Thurrott (02:02:05):
Be anything. French fries are horrible for that. You have no idea what they are. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (02:02:10):
Our table wine is Chateau N to pop because it is very consistent year over year. It's not expensive, but I think it's a good wine.

Richard Campbell (02:02:19):
Represent a common customer. Well, I want know what I'm going to get, so when I pick up a bottle, I know what to expect.

Leo Laporte (02:02:25):
Yeah. I'm not here to travel. I just want Yeah, exactly.

Richard Campbell (02:02:31):
I'm not looking to be surprised by my drink.

Leo Laporte (02:02:34):
No surprises, no surprise. Richard Campbell is our Brown Liquor guru. You'll find him@runasradio.com and he's in Orlando right now. What are you in Orlando for?

Richard Campbell (02:02:46):
I'm at the dev intersection conference and it's getting later in the day, so I think people are coming back from the Disneys and gradually the internet is dying.

Leo Laporte (02:02:57):
We'll let you go find something else to do. Something more gainful to do. Thank you, Richard. Run his radio.com.net. Rocks is his other show and he's available for talks. He's great and great demand too, by the way. Paul Throt writes@throt.com. If you become a premium member, you'll get some really extra good content. He just does some great stuff. And of course, his book, actually two books

Paul Thurrott (02:03:24):
Wouldn't challenge anyone listening to this to download the latest version of the Windows 11 field guy and find that screenshot I was talking about, the one that is going to be relevant to absolutely nobody.

Leo Laporte (02:03:36):
The new screenshot is here. The new screenshot is here. Lean pub.com has the field guide Windows 11, which includes Windows 10 in it and Windows everywhere. His Windows history, which is really great. Lean pub.com. That's where you'll find Paul's books, and you'll find both Paul and Richard right here every Wednesday. Now we do Windows Weekly at 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern, 1900 UTC. And contrary to what you have been told earlier, we are going to continue live streaming it for all. We were hoping we could make that a club benefit, the behind the scenes and all that stuff. But Discords Live video isn't ready yet. It's not that good. So we're going to continue to live stream shows individually the minute the show begins on YouTube at youtube.com/twi youtube.com/twit. If you click the bell, you'll get a notification when we go live, but it will be for the shows.

(02:04:28):
There won't be reruns. The Rerun Machine was expensive. There won't be interstitial content. We're going to save that for the Club. But the show itself, you'll be able to watch live 11:00 AM Pacific every Wednesday. But of course, because it's a podcast, you don't have to do that. Easiest way is just to download an episode. You can get them from our website, twi tv slash ww. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly that has all the videos from past shows, all 858 of them. Actually, we were audio and the whiskey collection too. Oh, and we did, and we put together all of Richard's whiskey bits into one giant bottle of goodness and I sounded weird, but Whiskey Bits, is there a better way to say that? Whiskey bit called the channel that Who or Whiskey Bits.

(02:05:17):
And if you subscribe in your favorite podcast player, you can also make sure that you get it the minute it's available every Wednesday. We like Pocket Casts only because at least with Apple Podcasts, and I think others, if you don't listen to an episode, you stop getting 'em. They go, oh, you mustn't like this anymore. And we know that your schedule varies. Some days, some weeks you hear every show, sometimes not. So PocketCasts will continue if you set it up this way and there's settings continue to download it so you don't miss an episode. That's my only point. We do invite you to join the club. It's becoming more and more significant. We have 8,460 paid members. Thank you. Bless you. And that goes a long way to helping us keep the shows going. There has been, in general, in the podcast industry, a real collapse.

(02:06:09):
Spotify laid off 1700 people yesterday. It's just because the advertisers, frankly, they're going to people like my son. They're doing influencers, which is, I dunno how that happens, but if you like our content, the best way forward for us is to get support from our audience. I always wanted to do it that way. We will probably be ad supported for a while, but you're helping make up the difference and that could be a big, big deal. So if you're not a member of Club Twit, let me tell you what the benefits are besides that glow you get from helping us keep these shows on the air. If you love the shows, seven bucks a month is not a lot, but you do get ad free versions of everything, including shows we only put out for the club, quite a few. You also get access to the Discord, which is a wonderful place to chat full of animated gif.

(02:07:03):
Well, I know what you're laughing at. I think Hank sponsoring Twit. Yeah, that's a good idea. There's a good idea. I like that. Maybe Hank will someday join the club we now have. Thanks to Joe, I'm sure a club twit. Glad to have you aboard Poster. Nice. And I'm apparently Captain Stooping on this one. Join us today, seven bucks a month. You also get some specials, stuff that we don't put out anywhere else, but mostly you get that feeling that you know that you're paying for the stuff you love. And thanks to our 8,460 paid members, honestly, by the end of next year, we got to get to at least 10,000 to keep the lights on. If we get to 20,000, then I will never ask you again, but that's still a tiny fraction of the total audience. If we got 10% of the audience, that'd be 70,000. So right now it's a little more than 2%. We could do better. Actually, it's not even that. It's one point a half percent twit TV slash club twit. Please give us a oh, and if you're already a member, great holiday gift to the geek in your life. We have annual packages too. Paul, Richard, thank you so much. I'm glad to be back and I will see you next week right here on Windows Weekly. Bye-Bye.

Club TWiT (02:08:28):
Hey, we should talk Linux. See the operating system that runs the internet, but your game console, cell phones, and maybe even the machine on your desk, but you already knew all that. What you may not know is that TWIT now is a show dedicated to it. The Untitled Linux Show. Whether you're a Linux Pro, a burgeoning CISs man, or just curious what the big deal is, you should join us on the Club Twit Discord every Saturday afternoon for news analysis and tips to sharpen your Linux skills. And then make sure you subscribe to the Club TWIT exclusive Untitled Linux Show. Wait, you're not a Club Twit member yet. We'll go to twit tv slash club twit and sign up. Hope to see you there

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