Windows Weekly 871 Transcript

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

00:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thorot's here, richard Campbell's here. There's a lot of Windows news, including something they were sitting on all week long Moment 5 is here. We'll talk about what moment 5 means to Windows 11 users. There's a rumor there'll be new surfaces out. Paul will explain what to look for. And then we've got lots of AI news, including Elon going after open AI and Scarlett Johansson on my phone. It's all coming up. Next of Windows Weekly Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thorot and Richard Campbell, episode 871, recorded Wednesday March 6th 2024. Ash happens.

01:00
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02:40
Richard Campbell. We'll look up to you, our leaders, our fearless leaders.

02:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you're lying at the feet, you're probably just next to me, because I'm also laying at the feet.

02:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Paul is still in Mexico City, richard's still in Puerto Vallarta. I'm on my way down to Cabo San Lucas. Unfortunately, I leave.

03:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Monday, so unfortunately I leave here on Tuesday.

03:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm out on this Friday, so next week I'll be in Redmond when I do, you know what?

03:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I realized they actually the. I think the State Department put out a warning for people going to Cancun, which we're not, but that spring break is this month, and it was like yeah, oh, I forgot about that. Oh, oh, maybe I made a slight scheduling error. Well, it's my spring break too and I plan to run around naked.

03:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Brinking to Keon like an idiot you got this Leo.

03:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Spring break with Leo. That's a winner.

03:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So a little inside baseball here. Before we began the show last week, paul had received.

03:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, leo, I give you some credit here because I you were, I think, even looking at it, I looked at it and I just removed it.

04:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I said I don't, I don't see this and we mentioned nothing about it, but it was literally like 2 pm last Wednesday, right, that moment five was announced.

04:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well they delayed it twice and, to be honest, they I should say they delayed the announcement twice because, as far as the actual release goes, I guess it's, I guess it is out sort of right. So the original plan was what I had suspected, even though you cannot be sure of these things these days, meaning that last Tuesday, last Tuesday yeah, a week ago, tuesday was the week D that they typically do the preview update. That was the plan. They were going to announce it for that day at Mobile World Congress and I don't know what delayed that, but it went past that and I think they've been.

04:57
I think they started rolling it out on Thursday or maybe Friday, but it is rolling out a bunch of features, none of them major, but a lot of them. It's CFR stuff. So it's gonna roll out semi-randomly and then the stable release will follow what we saw with 23H2, meaning take a bunch of spaghetti and throw it at the wall and you know, see what lands first. It's kind of hard to say the patch Tuesday coming up next Tuesday, right, I think it's patch Tuesday. Yep will not be the stable release for everybody, but between that date and probably that next Tuesday and April, patch Tuesday, that's that the rough deployment time frame. You see, I'm comfortable I'm becoming with being vague, see.

05:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I can adapt one time in the future.

05:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One could speculate yeah, yeah, it won't be yesterday. I can tell you that it will be in the future. One could imagine one will then be now, as we say, in space balls so what is it that we're?

05:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what are we getting here with? Yeah?

06:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
so remember, microsoft promised that they would only release updates to Windows 11 once a year, and now they release them once a month. And folks, and right, yeah, it's a time frame, the once a month updates are just cumulative updates. Sometimes they appear just as part of that month's security slash, whatever update, but then every quarter they release something that they don't ever name or call, talk about or whatever, but internally they call these things moments, and moments are collections of updates. So usually you see several or a dozen or more updates all released at once, and that's what we just got.

06:37
So moment four for Windows 11 which you know back in the day was Windows 11 22 h2, came out as Windows 11 23 h2. Essentially not exactly, but we'll just say yes. And now, because Windows 11 22 h2 and 23 h2 are the same code base, moment five, which is the new one, are both, or apply to both versions, the same version. It's not confusing? I don't even know why I've complained about this. You can get moment five on 22 h2 if you still have that for some reason. Really, yep, I know it's crazy, it's literally crazy and, like I said, I'm okay with it. I'm not just okay with it, I fully support it, learn to accept it. Yes, yes, I've embraced what is it? Stockholm's syndrome or whatever?

07:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
that's it. Yeah, you've been beaten sufficiently that you yeah, thank you, sir, gonna have yeah just and over and accept so there it is. I mean, I'm just thinking about the coordination it takes to have a build of updates that isn't dependent on the version of Windows like that. Well, that's astonishing. I could go wrong.

07:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was nothing, richard. These guys are engineering defined. I have no issues.

07:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like I said, I don't think I'd really like to take 22 h2 with moment five and on installed on it, take it out for a spin and say, really, is this gonna be the same? So what is it the h2 does exactly?

08:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't even know right, well, let's, this is. This all ties back to Microsoft in 2023 was working on co-pilot across all of their products, right, and they wanted to get co-pilot in Windows 11 into, you know, windows 11, and they realized belatedly that if we don't ship this to the entire user base, all of our corporate customers are gonna stay still and not upgrade, and they wanted to get it out to as many customers as possible, so what they did was released it at like at the last second, like the month before it was gonna be 23 is to. They released it as a preview update for 22 h2 and by keeping those things the same code base, right, they can essentially ship the same sets of updates.

08:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They don't have to have two different KB numbers and the enterprise customers all blocked it anyway until if you figure out being enterprise, like I hope, so I don't do this.

08:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not even belligerent, it's just reckless. You know no more. Like I said earlier, responsible and I love it. So don't worry about it.

09:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's okay, everything's fine yeah, on the IP side we manage your updates. So you went look at update, realized co-pilot was in.

09:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It went nope, and it just stopped doing updates for a while yeah, I listen, windows is like a box of chocolates now you never know what you're gonna get. I like when I reboot and there's new stuff sitting there, you know, or something's different. I like that. I think it's cool, so it's just keeps us on our toes.

09:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's nice, now there's an April Fool's day, joe, waiting for me to pull on you one of these days where I actually can switch between two different boot drives and not tell you and sometimes machine it's Linux right, right, yeah, just put the right UI on. I'm not sure I did an update to Windows 11 and open to yeah how often does that thing update?

09:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
by the way, I'm just asking for a friend.

09:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's the problem is you care to build it yourself yeah, right, nice, okay, that's it.

09:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's one approach. So, looking at this, I of course, like I did with 23 h2, I create this list of these features for myself, right, because I've got to update the book. And what does that look like? And the good news is it's not as major. I mean it wouldn't be right at 23. H2 is a major annual feature update. This is a quarterly update, but but it literally is a bunch of small features spread out across the platform. So it's not.

10:23
I can't really point to one thing and say this is the big deal, it's not. This will come up later in the show, but I will say for the record that I've complained or I observed a lot over the years that it was hard to keep track of Microsoft 365 for quite a while and because they were adding new features across the many, many products and services that constitute Microsoft 365 for several years. Right, it was very hard. And then teams happened and you could see the focus just kind of shift, not that they weren't adding other features over here, but teams became the focus before the pandemic. But really, with the pandemic right, that was kind of a big push right and you very much that pivot has occurred again and we're looking at co-pilot, and so I don't think this is the notes, but one of the things that Microsoft revealed last week was they have started a monthly I think it's on tech community like a monthly blog update about all the new features we've added to co-pilot in the past 30 days, and they're going to need it because it's going to be a bunch, you know, and predictably there's a couple of those built into co-pilot and Windows, although this is somewhere else in the notes. I apologize for jumping ahead, but I do think this is kind of relevant. They're going to run into a problem here which we still see with Microsoft 365, where, imagine a I don't know imagine I can give you an exact feature.

11:47
There's a word for the web two, three, five, whatever years ago got a feature that allowed you to take an audio recording and create a transcription from it. Right right now, today, with AI, this is very common, but at the time it was kind of anything. It was not available in the flagship version of this product as I think of it. Word for Windows, although it is today, by the way. So that took some number of years. It was not at the time available in the Mac. Obviously I don't know whether it is now and I don't think it will ever come to word on mobile, but whatever.

12:17
But you know, they have all these different versions of word and you have this matrix of features and some of them are here and some are here, and so you know, and that's kind of an example, and this is happening already with co-pilot, right, because co-pilot is available on the web in multiple places. Right, it's available in the edge sidebar, it's available in Microsoft, or co-pilot for Microsoft 365, it's available for co-pilot in Windows 11 and 10, and I'm probably forgetting a few places, I apologize. There's mobile apps and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But as of this past week, and actually maybe before then, to be fair there, if you know, you could construct a grid of co-pilot features and kind of check them off, where they're available, in what implementation, and it's a little confusing, frankly. So that's only gonna get worse, because this is you know our point appears in the.

13:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Our co-pilot appears in PowerPoint. Now what?

13:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
exactly can I generate an image in? Actually, of course you can. Why I'm even asking that I bet you can. And now it's literally describe a slide, makes you a slide yes, yep, yeah, and hopefully, if my experience with creating images is any indication, it will create a slide that vastly exceeds what your expectations and sites.

13:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You offer a new direction and have weird pledges like pornography. It's, it's a win-win, yeah, and we are four-fingered people.

13:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right, although I'm sorry. So anyway. Sorry, my buddy here's leaving work. So what's going on in moment? Five AI features in across the board. There's some stuff there, co they've given this a name now.

14:06
So co-pilot in Windows 11 could do two things before. Broadly speaking, it could do the co-pilot stuff as we knew it from co-pilotmicrosoftcom or wherever, and it could do these things that we now call skills, which is a bit of a stretch. But you use co-pilot to configure certain Windows settings. Right, they've more than doubled the number of Windows settings and features that you can enable or toggle or whatever through there. To me it's a ponderous kind of way to do these things. But you may recall the original promise from back I don't know last September. Maybe at that Microsoft event was that these features will turn mainstream users into pros because they can just ask how to do something and it will either tell them or do it for them. Right? Maybe a very basic preview of that. Sacha Nadella predicted co-pilot as the new start button kind of idea. Maybe, no, not in actual real-world use, but that's, you know what will take baby steps in that direction.

15:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it speaks to that idea of this will be the first thing you click yeah, it first thing.

15:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you might not even click it, though. Right, you might just talk to it there and it wants to talk to you about something, yeah yeah, so it's important that co-pilot is a cute little animation, which it does now, so that's fun too.

15:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, make sure you know it's it's listening.

15:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know there's some new AI features in photos and clip champ. Clip champ can do silence removal in preview photos. I got it really good. They're just gonna eat these things out. Gender-driven race and we might have talked about this because it was in the inside of the program. You know, slowly, over time, I you know we skip the top story. Do we skip the top story? Do we do? I think we might have skipped the top story by mistake. No, we didn't. Did I not put this in here? Don't wait a minute, it's the second. It's the second story. The top story today, no second story later today. So, ironically, as you'll soon learn, better integration with Android, and that's through the phone link app. And so if you want to Google Pixel, say, I don't know, richard, if you ever try this, it's pretty cool. You can use your pixel as a webcam if you connect it with USB cable to your computer and it's really high quality. It's nice. Microsoft is gonna add that capability for any Android phone on Windows right through the phone link app that works well.

16:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, I eventually abandoned the phone link just because it started changing the rights, that it had it on its own and just people reoff the indication. Okay, you need to reauthorize that. Well, I didn't deauthorize it, so you started it. Yeah, I had like you know what.

16:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know what I'm notice I'm not minding your when you're not around, so bye this is gonna sound like a bizarre list of technologies, but in the morning Brad pings me on Skype with a link to Google Meet which I click and it opens in Chrome. Except today it opened an edge and I thought that's weird. Is edge configured as my default browser? And it, and it was not. But the, as it came up an edge. There was a little box that said hey, we notice, edge isn't your default browser. Let's pretend it is a paraphrasing. But he said let's pretend it is for a moment. And do you want to keep it this way? Because, look, we just acted like we were the default browser. So if you thought Microsoft was done with that kind of behavior, think again. They're not improvements.

17:20
Voice access your default browser is a harassment prompt yeah exactly because what I wanted was not only not to use my browser but to, yeah, to be harassed, exactly. I just made a little cute video about this and I updated the book chapter about this. But snap layout, which is that thing where you'd either drag the window or most over the max yeah, the thing. I quickly turn off that okay. Well, there's another feature in there you're not saying, which is snap suggestions, and it will basically put little app icons and some of the layouts so you can say, well, I want that one, and instead of snap assisting one by one, it will just throw it all up there on time.

17:55
It has a vision of how you should see your data yeah, it's never once done anything I wanted, so if that helps, but then?

18:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but it has definitely detracted from what I was trying to do, which is why I turned it off the reason I would turn it off is I drag windows around a lot lately and if you drag anywhere?

18:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
close to that. It changed the shape of the window, yep, and then it also gets in a way and it you get the UI comes down. It's like guys, I'm trying to position this. In fact I this happens every week with Windows, weekly, because I positioned the zoom meeting the window up there and it always right now it's doing it right now like it really wants to position it you'd be surprised how well that works when you turn that off. Yeah, well, simple number Jerry Cornell.

18:38
Jerry Cornell was not just a great, section writer, but he also wrote a column for Bite magazine for decades, right, and he his famous phrase was I make these mistakes, so you don't have to, which suggested a sort of plan that I don't have. I just make mistakes, but in Mike, in this case, I leave that on because I have to experience it, because I know people are gonna ask about it and I have to write the book and I have to suffer, like everyone else, so I don't get to make Windows better for me.

19:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I just, you know, grin and bear it or whatever you have to sort your computers into suffering and non-suffering, right there's the changing the widgets board again, because of course they are.

19:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's gonna be a navigation pane on the left. Now I have not seen that yet. Let me just actually there. Right now I still don't see it again. These things are coming out kind of sporadically.

19:32
Also, you can organize widgets not the news feed stuff, but widgets into a kind of a category view. So if you have like categories of widgets and you want to kind of group them, imagine you were into widgets you and your friends that are into a river wanted to put widgets into a folder no, well, you can now that kind of widgets. Yeah, so new Windows 365 features? I haven't. They updated Windows 365 pretty dramatically with 23 h2. This is something I need to go look at again. It's been a while for me. And then the thing that Richard and I were sort of talking about before the show Windows Auto patch thank you, is a lot of us is an attempt to consolidate previous tools that different companies were using, and it will be as successful as all there are there and a price initiatives, I would imagine, because people seem to get used to what they use and then get upset when that changes.

20:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, now see but the yeah again I've had. You can go to run as radio and listen to the series of shows that are E Carly, where she explains why each one of these things insist what it does better than the other ones and why there isn't one choice for everybody there you go.

20:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it makes it seem like a plan.

20:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I like it yeah, that's just logging through the mud of trying to do right by their customers right and annoying them at every step of the way. Yeah, I but important to change between Auto patch and Auto pilot. Auto patches the IP component of I give up. What happens happens and Auto pilot is pre-configuring machines at the back.

21:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it's like deployment versus updating. Hmm, right, yeah. Yeah, it's weird, I would confuse those. They're only like two lighters off, but naming is hard, yeah, so that's moment five, you know they'll be another moment yeah, I mean, I guess we just keep doing this, I yeah.

21:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm excited this release them. The name nomenclature is carried through to a new year, that's something and to a new version of Windows, which is astonishing.

21:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there you go now. Had moment five not happened, this news probably would have been well, definitely would have been the biggest news. Kind of unexpected, can't, kind of came out of nowhere. Microsoft yesterday revealed, via Microsoft learn support document, frankly, that they were killing the Windows subsystem for Android. This thing, the Windows system for Linux. Yeah right, although there's some, you know, overlap there, obviously, but I was kind of surprised by this.

22:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is this a big?

22:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it feels like a big story so, depending on your perspective, this is either the apocalypse or you know so you think it must have been that nobody really was using it. See, this is the thing we don't know, so there's different directions to go on the cause of this right so just to be so, for people who don't know Microsoft, you know it's an optional feature in Windows.

22:34
You enable it and it allows you to install the Android App Store or the Amazon App Store for Android, which is the Amazon store, and then from there, you can install Android apps. When Microsoft first announced this feature June 2020, one, two or zero, whatever year, the, whatever your Windows 11 came out they described this as a store within a store experience, because, remember, at the time, they were talking at this notion that we're gonna allow other stores in our store, something that Apple and Google were not allowing at the time. Right, and it never really happened, to my knowledge, and this product certainly is not that. Like I said you, you could search the Microsoft store for Kindle. If you click on the install button, it actually installs the Amazon App Store and then you can go from there.

23:19
But the problem, it's not a problem, but it is. It is another store, is another place, another point of updating. We already have all these different ways. The system can be updated. Android apps today are updated through the Amazon App Store, right, they're not updated through the Microsoft Store. It's. It's not a store within a store experience. It's a completely separate experience. The Amazon App Store, for those who don't know, is incredibly lackluster. I Microsoft at one point claimed the wrong thought.

23:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You saw a bad app store.

23:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You ain't seen nothing yet you thought this would make you pine for the heady days of the Windows 8 Windows Store, and you know all those fart apps that we used to joke about. But this thing is horrible and there might be a dozen or less decent apps. You know Kindle's in there, amazon, I would call it, audible's in there. I think the Wall Street Journal app is in there. One airline might be in there, it's it's, it's lackluster. Obviously, what everyone wants is the Google Play Store.

24:14
Yes, I don't know if anyone's following the story. These two companies hate each other and every time I think there's gonna be a little detente or something. It's not happy and there is a deep cultural hatred of Microsoft at Google. That was put, you know, in place, not not, you know, formally, but is because of the founders. They hate Microsoft feared Microsoft back then, thought Microsoft would try to kill them because that's that was their MO, and it persists to this day. And it makes me sad because, you know there's a lot of shared customers there and there's a lot of cross-platform experiences. That could be so much better if these guys would just work together, you know, yeah, and it's, it's too bad.

24:53
Google has a very unfamiliar product that is so unfamiliar. Don't know the exact name, but I think it's called Play Games for Windows. You can look this up and it's a. It's another Android emulation system. It's specifically for Google Play Games. There's some selection of games. It seems to be more popular in Asia the type of games you see. There are not the type of thing I would be interested in personally, but they. They were super clear when they announced this that we are not using Microsoft's technology. This is our own thing. It is on it's offline, it's it's on device, it's not streaming, it's not WSA. And you know, here we are, whatever a couple years later. And yeah, so how many people use this? Probably not too many. We know the quality of the store. The apps is lackluster at best. We know Google's not happening and they've cancelled it. So now you know. Leo asked. You know what?

25:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
what's the reason? I'm wondering if it's just because nobody used it right.

25:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean that would be. That's one of the top contenders.

25:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The other one is that what you wanted in it, and it was a and it was never gonna get there.

26:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now we'll never know what the dynamics are here. Did Microsoft go to them and get promises that don't worry, we're gonna have X number of top tier titles. It's gonna be a real draw, I don't know. I look, speaking semi theoretically, the notion of Android apps on Windows is kind of cool, right, because it can fill some holes. A lot of the action with app development these days is happening on web or mobile, not on Windows.

26:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So sure, just just a good perspective, how you can experience the app without having to go to a device.

26:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we have emulators for that, but yeah, I argue W they was better than the emulator you're yes, right, right, yeah, I mean I I don't know exactly how these well, you probably do you talk to these folks, but I assume it's based on some sort of hyper V, slash, whatever, virtualization it's really a race to see which one can him, can scoop more memory in the least amount.

26:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what? That's a lot.

26:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I was literally as you were saying that I was just thinking in my brain. One of the nice things about hyper V, when it hits the client back in. What Windows 7, no 8, windows 8 was you know? They did that work to make it work more efficiently on systems that would be connected to battery, not power, etc. Etc.

27:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But yeah, it's, it's whatever it is, what it is, but it's the reason the devs tend to use gaming workshops to do work, because that much power it just you know name. And I always have the animation of the jet engine firing it up as after burners like oh, did you start Android studio again? Like all fans up they.

27:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Everything runs hot yeah, anyone has run an Android emulator from Android studio for whatever reason, typically for a developer, right? Well, no that. What you just said is, if anything, an understatement, it is those. Those things are dogs loads.

27:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're terrible, astonishing yeah, the machine and a master and they somehow this doesn't. And one would argue that WSA could have been made more efficient, but not without you.

28:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Don't get those optimization devs until you show enough customer utilization yeah, chicken and egg thing, and I don't, like I said, I don't know, we don't know the dynamic, I don't know if Amazon went to Microsoft and said, you know, we're not seeing the usage to warrant the investment on our side. Yeah, we don't, you know, we don't know what direction it went, but we do know that Amazon has sent out letters to its customers that kind of point the finger at Microsoft. But you know, not too directly because again, partnering on this thing, right, it's too bad. Obviously the Amazon apps are continuous forward on Amazon's Kindle, fire tablets and on fire TV and wherever else to use these apps. But it's not, this is no one wants this right, this is not what anyway, even Amazon's own customers would prefer, you know, google play, right. So anyway, we'll see.

28:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Google won't tolerate it. You have to go buy one of their Android devices yep, well, or Microsoft could pay that license fee, right?

28:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean they could make that old edit the cost?

28:59
yeah good, yeah I mean Microsoft could do it, I they just haven't. So I don't, it's not happening, right? I mean they would have just done that and would have made Amazon one of the choices, right, no one would have used it, but they literally just killed it. So my theory is that this actually has to do with AI, which I know is a bit of a stretch and it's got a little bit of a conspiracy theory element to it, but I think Microsoft is a as a whole, which you know again, is really a million different little fiefdoms have been given a directive.

29:28
You, you have to make sense in this world, just like when Sacha Nadella became CEO. You have to make sense in this cloud world, which is how we got, you know, windows as a service and whatever, and you know Windows was the one business that didn't make a lot of sense there. I don't know, there's no AI story here. Right, there's. There was never a great developer story, although I suppose for developers writing Android apps on Windows, maybe this was a slightly better thing, I guess, but this isn't what you know. Targeting a very specific app or mobile platform, whatever platform, in this day and age maybe isn't the most common thing, right? Unless you're an Apple guy and then we could have a different conversation. But right, I mean, the developers who are sticking with Windows or Linux are probably web developers or some form of cross-platform something, something and yes, running an Android emulator to check out an app before you get it on an actual device is fine, but it's not always faster.

30:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it might not have been reasonable. They're pretty heavy.

30:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, throw your theories. I mean I, we can all a guess, I don't I just hard to imagine.

30:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Microsoft is recourse constrained, but they are. That's the basic argument that this doesn't show as a principle path forward and had some serious obstacles that it had a couple of years to overcome and had failed. And at some point the VP says I'm not hanging my career on this anymore, let it go.

31:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I bet if you were to go back and look at the coverage of the original Windows 11 announcement which I guess, I'm not sure I can't think of the year it must have been 2020, June, right and this would have been the biggest fee. We're going to refine the UI simpler, Yada yada, great cool Android apps. I bet those were the biggest changes, like people talked about at the time, and the reality was not just slow to market. Remember, they didn't make the original release of Windows 11. It came out in preview later that year. There's a basic gate here.

31:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
If you can't get Google Play on board, you should stop. It's not Android. Yeah right, If you're done like where people go. The company that made Windows RT should know that something that looks like something but is not something yeah, is the problem, yep, and you know, and to exactly that point, it's like take those very talented people who built that thing and get them working on ARM stuff, because that has a better future.

32:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Actually, that's it. Nobody wants ChemRogs corn flakes. They want the real thing.

32:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, chemrogs, chemrogs, good. Now you're cooking with fire, let oxides. I don't even know what I'm talking about.

32:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it was a Robocop reference of, I'm not mistaken. Anyway, yeah, I don't know, there's a you just interesting, you just brought up Windows on ARM. I mean, arguably our Android apps would run better on Windows on ARM, right? I mean closer to the chipset, right? I know there's. I know you can target Intel on Android. I don't know if anyone does, but I mean for 10 seconds. About 10 years ago, there were Intel-based Android tablets you could buy. I mean, that was a thing. Briefly, I don't know. Anyway, it's dead and I don't know how to feel about it. I never liked it, I never used it. I don't feel like most other people did, but then again, like everything else in our little part of the world, when something like this happens, you hear from every single person that loved this thing.

33:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, all five of them.

33:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you really do every time. Yeah, you also hear from the people who never used it but are still outraged, because this is the world we live in now we get to get outraged about everything.

33:18
Someone should bring Microsoft to a class action lawsuit. Did you ever use this? No, but whatever. Like it's not saying I'll be in the app, didn't it? Yeah, it's a strange time to be alive, but I don't know. I guess I feel ambivalence about it. Except for anyone who has followed Microsoft for as long as we all have knows that there's a rich history of things that were presented as the biggest thing in the world. Briefly, they kind of disappeared. No one talked about it for a while, and then it was that you know like can I get vision pro?

33:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know it happens. You know I have to throw that into every show now because it really drives me crazy.

34:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The story I wrote about Apple cancelling their smart car efforts. I wrote that, flush with the success of vision, bro, apple has decided to scale back. It's more experimental. That's good.

34:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I need, that's good. I need a little subtle digs like that, yeah, like, yeah, yeah.

34:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you gotta, you gotta. It has to be subtle enough that you're like two sentences later than the person reading it or hearing it says wait what?

34:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What do you decide? Or they're so in the can for Apple that they go. Oh yeah, see.

34:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah.

34:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, See.

34:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I told you oh, I never hear from those guys. Are there still some of those people? They don't, I don't even know. Oh, there are, there are.

34:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know where they are. There's still somebody out there pining for the Watson, I'm sure.

34:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I like that the in the debate. We're not going to talk about any of the Apple and I trust today, except I'm going to go on for half an hour about it. Right now. The two sides of this debate are literally like prolonged logical legal debates about why what Apple is doing is terrible. And then the other side is saying I think they should build a door if they want, and like that's literally the depth of the argument.

35:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's literally the argument, right there. Yeah, that's it. That's the whole argument, yeah.

35:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You'll never find someone who could like lay out like a really logical, long-winded thing that actually makes sense, that for what, why their behavior is okay it's. You won't find it. Please spend some time trying and then don't email us because I don't care. Okay, since our last show we've only had somehow one Windows Insider build to the beta channel. Fans of the hover over the widget icon to make the stupid UI appear and slowly draw will love this change. Microsoft is experimenting meaning they will release and stable next week a new experience where you hover over the co-pilot button in the taskbar and it opens automatically. So we're going to drive usage by misclicks.

35:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's what the edge icon did when they first pushed it out. There too, is that anywhere near that thing? It popped up on the right on every browser, on your machine, right, right.

36:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The first application I wrote with Delphi if I'm not mistaken, berlin Delphi back in the day was something that would put a UI element up and then, as you try to go click it, it would move it away, so you could never reach it. That's right, and Microsoft is using that technology, except they've reversed it, obviously. Is my mouse moving to the button? I'm not moving the mouse, it's like a widget board. We're here to help you.

36:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Our AI told us you wanted to click here. Yeah.

36:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Our AI is named Biaslbub. It was the AI that was in the Exorcist, you may remember.

36:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think it was Pazuzu, If I'm not mistaken. I want to get you a crack.

36:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Demons right.

36:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Pazuzu, that's right, pazuzu yes.

36:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Anyway, we'll see what happens there, but that's it. That was the only new. There's some fixes and whatever, but that was still it. And then, because I can never stop talking about earnings, like every new quarter, our next new quarter is just three weeks away and here we are still reporting on the last quarter. Because some of these companies have weird schedules and Dell and HP are two examples of those companies. Given, relatively speaking, how well Lenovo did, it's a little shocking to say that both HP and Dell underperformed, especially in the PC realm. So HP's revenues for that quarter were down 4.8% overall. But the personal systems business, which is what makes their PCs down, 4.1, soft demand unfavorable mix shift. You see the language Most of their sales, interestingly, it's true, dell too, two-thirds are to businesses, consumers. So the other third, they think it's going to come back in the second half of the year.

37:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So Dell, basically said sorry. I mean the broader economic reporting is that if, unless you're in North America, everybody's in recession. But this thing that we were warned about this time last year why all the tech giants clamped down was that we were going to have a late year down. It has come to pass. It's just that it looks like US and Canada have stopped yeah, magically escaped it. Right, it might be effective governing, but nobody believes in that apparently.

38:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So well tied to that. Intel and Microsoft both saw orders coming back and both reported. In recent quarters we see this thing rebounding. The problem is these companies buy this stuff ahead of time, anticipating what demand is going to be, and it's possible we haven't gotten there yet, but I don't know what that means for Windows or Intel over the next, say, two to three quarters. That might dip for them as well. But Dell oh man, it's awful. So Dell had double-digit revenue drops in the quarter and the year. They had double-digit revenue drops, I believe, in every quarter of that year. Their PC business again down horribly, and primarily business. They didn't actually have any good numbers for this, but they basically said we're seeing some real good demand for our AI servers and their stock shot up. They delivered one of the worst quarters, I'm sure, in their corporate history.

39:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, I should say it's AI. You know Twitter now with AI.

39:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly, twitterai. You should do it right now. We should. I wrote this story about Dell, my story and I know look, I gotta be honest, I'm not biased in any way but I didn't want it to be so horrible. I was looking for some out, some way I could give them something, and it was nothing. And then I woke up in the morning and I started reading my news feed and all I saw was like Dell surges on AI servers and I was like wait what? And I thought, did I miss something? And I went back and looked at their announcement and it's like no, they all they did was talk.

39:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They didn't really have any hard, any good number, but clearly an AI server is what we used to call a gaming workstation.

39:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, no, no, this is for like in the data center. So Dell, you know right, dell like well, not HP anymore. But Dell like Lenovo, dell like nobody. I guess Dell is somewhat unique. They have a server business right, and they have a client PC business. They've not really strayed from that path too too much, other than that whole VMware experiment we're not going to talk about. But you know, they've been pretty true to their roots, I would say, overall. But they anticipate some great growth there and I would just say they could only get growth there. Whatever, I'm trying to be nice here, I don't know, I feel bad for them. I want them to do well. So the top three PC makers Lenovo, hp and Dell, all you know, not great. Lenovo may be the best of the three as far as you know, rebounding at the end of the year, I guess that's it.

40:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I find it fascinating, especially what's the buy cycle right now and you know the push in something I have been advocating on Rana is like last year was a good year to buy extended warranties and not replace hardware. Yeah, just to keep more.

41:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know gunpowder in the can there like keep your ammunition dry, yeah, and depending on how these companies buy things, I mean that might or might not be good for PC makers, not as good as buying new PCs, obviously, but I just I feel like the actually we're going to talk about AI PCs here in a moment and a little bit of irritant there, but this whole notion of an AI PC is doesn't seem to be having the intended effect because the software's not there, right? Well, we still are struggling with this notion of you know they're still trying to figure out what the heck they're making.

41:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's why there's so many body announcements, right, the idea that it which is funny because you know, for a long time it was the hardware came out and then the software became possible and like behind it. Now we have a software breakthrough, the hardware for the whole time, but they're like okay, well, how do we get this to the edge? It's like we're not ready because we don't know what we're going to do.

41:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I don't know when the line changed or whatever, but for the entirety of the 90s at least, and probably beyond, windows was always ahead of the hardware. You always you've never had enough hardware to run this thing effectively. At some point PCs caught up and of course, unfortunately, slash. Fortunately, they also became a lot more reliable. So when we flash forward to today I don't know the bit and they.

42:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a weird cycle the big push and again. Maybe a little off topic here, but certainly in the IT space. It's maintainable hardware. It's like we're seeing more examples of it's easy to take every spinning piece of hardware out of a chassis, replace it all and keep going Exactly Well, because we don't need faster CPUs, like for the most part, they're lying around smoking cigarettes and playing poker anyway it's it's the spinning gear that that wears and otherwise the machine can do the workload I want a velvet painting of poker playing dogs.

42:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I I was going to make it. They could really go like that, yeah.

43:00 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Hey, let's, let's pause. I see you have a beverage, Paul. I trust there's no tequila in it.

43:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're one of them, but there could be, though. It's a good day. I was frescoes.

43:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I love. I'm a fresco. I am going to live. See, this is the thing. I don't need tequila when we go down.

43:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to live on a Micah and watermelon, apparently there's a wonderful size of my head for lunch and it's just, it's watermelon juice with strawberry.

43:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's delicious. It's probably a little bit sugary. I like a Micah. Yeah, I love a Micah, that's I said I get it.

43:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I try to get it with little or no sugar when I can. Yeah, you can always tell when you don't get it right.

43:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I like a Micah, I like to eat it. Little of a chili.

43:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, but but watermelon strawberry is so sweet without it that it's probably just a sugar load too. Did you see they just FDA just approved a continuous glucose monitor for over the counter, which I think that's really good.

43:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I knew, this?

43:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, this had to happen. Yeah, that's really good, Just approved. It'll be available this summer. The Dexcom Steelo yeah, Dexcom. Yeah, they're one of the couple I used to. I used to wear freestyle eyebrows from Abbott yeah, that's the one I had. But they had he had to. I had to go to prescription mill to get them.

44:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It was a pain in the butt I had to go to like an internet doctor Exactly. You should have you should have added the air quarts there. And then internet doctor. You seem like you might have diabetes, like totally.

44:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, no, but it was. It was valuable information and I and I got tired of paying 200 bucks a month. I don't know how much these will be Same.

44:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, but it was. But you, you can test foods and see what things spike you, and it's, it's, it's, it's so weird.

44:37 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And I think this one. Just reading the press release automatically goes to your phone. You don't have to scan it, so that's nice. Okay, yeah, every 15 minutes at updates.

44:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I used to enjoy that. That was like my little Star Trek moment. I would kind of leave yourself, yeah.

44:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You're watching Windows Weekly. This is Paul Therat, star Trek man, richard Campbell, tequila guy, actually tequila. We are brown liquor picket just a bit. But before we go any farther, I hear there's a rumor afloat there may be new surfasi. Yes, surfasi.

45:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Surfasi, surfasi. It is a rumor, but Windows Central is reporting they've heard that Surface Pro 4 and Surface Laptop 6 will be coming later this month, so only a couple of weeks away. Microsoft, annoyingly, is referring to them as its first AI PCs. And I say that is annoying because Richard's using a computer which I believe was marketed as their first AI PC and two years before that, microsoft released the Surface Pro 10 with a Qualcomm chip which they refer to as their first AI.

45:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
PC. So Pro 9 had it first, the Surface Studio 2 has it, so now the Pro 10, I'd be surprised if the Pro 10 didn't have it, since the Pro 9 had it. So do we ever know if it's being used, like what I pull up the resource monitor? Does it have a category for the AI processor? Nope, can't see if it's being used, no way to know.

46:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, that's interesting because it should have that If you have an Intel Core Ultra CPU in your PC, you do have that. You do have an MPU entry. So CPU, gpu, etc, network, whatever else is in there, mpu is one of the things. In fact, that was the demo I did correctly the first time and then botched the second time around for hands-on Windows because that computer didn't support it. But I demonstrated how Windows Studio effects actually trigger the MPU using a task manager.

46:45
Yeah, you want to take my word for it, because that's been lost.

46:48 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So a task manager, has CPU and then I presume it has a GPU column or a tab. But did it have an MPU tab? Yes, it did, yep, but not an MPU it does, I should say it still does Well.

47:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So if you have an Intel Core Ultra chipset or, I believe, a Qualcomm Snapdragon, whatever not the one I have at home, it's like a Gen 2 or 3, whatever, but the newer one, yeah you'll see an MPU entry under GPU Cool, although the ThinkPad it's around somewhere the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, gen 12, I think it is has a Core Ultra and the MPU does not show. Oh, no, no, no, excuse me, I'm sorry, it does show up, it just doesn't ever trigger.

47:30 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I don't know why. It'd be really interesting to see if you gave it a AI load like a Scano. Oh, that's what I did. Yeah, so Windows Studio FX actually triggers the MPU.

47:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can see it hit.

47:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so when you run things like background blur in photos or background removal in paint, you can see the CPU and the GPU a little bit. We'll give a little bump, but the MPU doesn't go anywhere because those features do not use the MPU but the Windows Studio.

47:57 - Leo Laporte (Host)
FX. So at the Qualcomm event months ago, they said they were going to have what was their new platform, that it was going to have.

48:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Elite X, X-Elites or X-Elitex.

48:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's not what was called. It was something catchy.

48:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Something catchy. I'm talking about the Windows chip set. Yeah, you're talking about something else.

48:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, I'll have to look it up because I mean, yeah, AI enabled chip. I mean I don't know if it was only for phones, I don't know.

48:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, all of their chips for the past few years have been have had an MPU, right. I mean, they've been doing this. And then I believe the current, as of today, snapdragon chip, set for Windows whatever that's called, it might be a 8X Gen 3, I believe also has an.

48:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
MPU.

48:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it must. And then Microsoft came out, of course, with their variant, the SQ1 and 2. And I at least wondered if not both of those had an MPU.

48:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Was it Kyro Cryo? Was it Cryo Cryo?

48:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That sounds like the technical name of the underlying.

48:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah, like you know, like Adreno and all that, yeah, yeah, okay I think so this is the one, though. This is it right, the this at least one.

49:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the new one, the one that's coming out this spring, sometime May-ish, is, I believe it's either a Snapdragon X Elite or Snapdragon Elite X I can't remember the exact name, but this is the one that's supposed to be on par with the Intel stuff from a performance perspective. And they did a some kind of a benchmark thing at Mobile World Congress, I think, yeah, where they showed that it trounced Intel in AI operations, Interesting Using, what's that graphic, stable diffusion and GIMP Good.

49:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Good, yeah, that's good. I mean, you know, I think all phones by now have some sort of yeah, machine language processing, and your desktop should too, I think, if you're for future proof.

49:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I you know. So in photos, the app and windows, the big feature at M5 is something called generative erase and it's like so you mean to tell me that's like $3,000 computer can now erase backgrounds as easily as my phone does. I mean, they have to do it right.

50:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you know, like of course it should, you have to pitch it, you know, yeah, yeah, not a breakthrough, this is a catch up, Right, right.

50:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just briefly. This surface story also included the rumor of something called AI Explorer, which I hate to use this word, but is described as a blockbuster AI experience that will separate AI PCs right now.

50:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So it's not a blockchain AI experience, it's not my words Blockbuster.

50:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Blockbuster, yeah, you know, because it's like the 90s when you go pick up VHS.

50:48
It's described as an advanced co-pilot, which I hope means it does something local, right Built in history, timeline, etc. Works across apps, search for previously open conversations, documents, web pages, image. This may be the thing that ties together the co-pilots we know today in the cloud and these capabilities we've been talking about but haven't seen locally, like Microsoft will be doing for businesses with co-pilot for one drive so many names where you could create kind of a personal co-pilot of sorts where you could, you know, quickly find information in your own data stores, whatever they might be. Maybe Can't come quickly enough, I can tell you that, but then again, if they announce this at this, if they have an event, say late March, and they actually announce not just the hardware but some hardware capabilities that will be coming to Windows 11, hopefully across the board, or at least two AI PCs across the board, they have to do something to drive sales of these devices, because right now I don't believe they're making all that much of a dent, you know, unfortunately.

51:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, we need a workload, we need something that you absolutely have to have, that depends on it.

52:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right. Yeah, it's not even a. I wouldn't even call it a killer app, I just need an app. Yeah, you know, could it be a thing, something you know?

52:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Back in the day, nothing put the IBM PC on a desk faster than Lotus 123. Yes, like, when you have the app that people want, they will buy your gear.

52:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, right, they'll be the path to your door. Yeah, yeah, I think the problem is, you know, pcs are so we're sure, as a platform, that we just don't think about this too much anymore. And you know, as we discussed earlier, stable works forever, et cetera. And frankly, you know it's not helping matters that the most popular personal computing platform, the phone, is already doing this stuff. Mm-hmm, you know, not exactly right, but most of us are on our phones and we can do a lot of this stuff on our phones.

52:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and we can do a PC caliber workload.

52:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, something that takes advantage of that hardware and that big screen and, yeah, those productivity features.

53:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
we expect Exactly right, right, right when it's. You need to get to a place where it's like oh, I want to do this, I'll wait till I can get to my PC.

53:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know, look, I'm a writer, I like having a big screen, I like having a big word processing document or something.

53:15
But once you're past an 8.5 by 11, you don't care, right Like if you see a thing, no, but what I meant was like for me, I'm not going to use Copilot or anything else to write a story. Obviously I have never to the second used it to even jumpstart something or to anything like that. But I'm not a normal mainstream user, right? And if you can get AI that can write for you, do you even need a big screen anymore? You know what's the point. Like we used to David Pogue and everyone would joke about all the toolbars and it would squeeze the word window down to this little poster stamp in the middle and it's like you know what With AI, maybe that's all we did. I'm not saying it's true, I'm just saying, you know, for other people maybe, oh just saying it's funny, exactly.

53:59
Okay, a couple of AI stories. It could be a lot more. My God, ai is happening so fast I'm losing my mind. Is it just being?

54:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
talked about so fast. Yeah, I don't see a lot of product. I see a lot of announcements.

54:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
When I first started writing news back in the late 90s let me see if I can come up with this the tagline for the newsletters to send out was news and information, no fluff, and the idea was that I was only going to focus on the things that were important, and I have a hard time now understanding what's important and what's not important because there's so much of it. Sometimes, when there's a tsunami, you know you can't focus you know the only thing about a tsunami One story.

54:43
Yeah, a lot of water, a lot of water. Yeah, it ends. The good news about a tsunami is it ends. Yeah, this isn't ending yet.

54:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm writing all these preparatory making, all these preparatory shows for get ready for this kind of copilot and that kind of copilot, and how do you deal with this? But I'm sick to death with them too, but it's like I can only prep you so far. Then we need a product.

55:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You need a copilot fatigue episode. Frankly, no, I mean it.

55:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Maybe all of them. Are you talking about the AI getting fatigued, or you? No, no, no.

55:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I, just as Microsoft customers, just, you know, keeping track of trying to understand where the value is, which we might want to do where was bad enough two, three months ago. I mean it's worse today. It's going to be worse in two months. I mean it's astonishing.

55:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Do you think though that eventually the end game is it? They stop calling it out, and it's just everywhere and it's just is yeah.

55:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Functionality, right? Yeah, that was the. They're talking to us about an Azure AI, you know, and I'm like so is this just advisor powered with AI? Yeah, he's already got me. He's already got me.

55:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He's going to be better. Awesome. I think most Azure users lack of a better term admins what are you going to call them Would agree with the statement. The Azure AI we need is the one that actually configures the thing correctly so I don't have to go through that stupid UI. Do it, you know. Right, that would be. That would be some AI. Could you do that? Yeah.

56:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and this is what we're up against, and I think it's part of the reason we're hearing so much hype is because this may just be a feature.

56:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not. Well, yeah, and look, this is something we actually would have, I should say, talked about from time to time. We kind of do the inside baseball thing here and there. I'm sure people are familiar with this notion that. You know we think of Microsoft as giant you used to be like the Death Star, you know as giant entity, as if they were somehow working in concert. You know, as if the windows and office teams ever liked each other, let alone work together in any meaningful way. I can assure you that almost never happened. But I mean, it's just amazing Like people think of them as like this concerted front. It's not.

56:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just, it was handsome and flying right. We are not organized enough to be as evil as you think we are, yeah.

57:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, everyone knows the funny thing with the, the the bow of the guns. Yeah yeah, the problem with that image was only that it overstated the fact that most of those people would just ignore the other groups. They weren't pointing guns, they were just ignoring them, like you know. So the point for this particular conversation is that inside Microsoft right now, there are a lot of teams and people positioning themselves to make sure that they ride this wave and come out on the other side a bit ahead. Not everything they're doing right now is going to pass right. I mean, some of this stuff is going to get stuck or fail or whatever. And you know this is. This is a company. This is the one way they are concerted. They're all working toward the same end for themselves, right? Not necessarily for the best interests of cross pollination, of technologies, etc. Whatever. So there's there's. It's confusing for us, and it is, but I bet it's confusing inside Microsoft right now too, because they're everyone scrambling to get their little piece of beach, you know.

58:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, well, and and budget time is upon us, right, the year end is between all the planning happens in April and May, so your positioning is about how you're going to ask for money.

58:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and, by the way, bills coming up in May. And if you think that thing is going to be filled with new Windows features and you know developer APIs for Windows, think again. It's going to be a lot of stuff. It's going to I mean, I don't know percentages rich should probably can't even say anything. He probably knows exactly what's happening, but there is some. There's going to be some preponderance of AI. It's going to be, you know it'll be like the AI build or whatever.

58:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Not that they call it and they. I do feel like these because MVP Summit is literally next week. They are, they test a lot of build material on the MVP. Yeah, there you go.

58:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There you go. Yeah, it's all coming together, sort of.

58:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We'll see where they are. This time last year you told us, just watch this spot. Well, it's next year and we're watching the spot You've been watching for a while now.

59:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that spot they?

59:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
should just blow up a dam and let it just wash over everybody. It's going to be brutal.

59:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They got a good volcano, wow yeah.

59:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, yeah, yeah, we have a good volcano here too.

59:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
How's that going? It's doing good, it's going good.

59:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Everyone here complains about ash covering everything, as if it were snowing ash, and that's not been my experience. But all I've seen are sunny, clear days, and it's just as dusty as ever, and I have no idea what you're talking about.

59:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Has the sunset changed?

59:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's usually the thing it does turn a brilliant red on some days. But you know we also have pollution so it's kind of hard to say you know what's the better effect on that I do like being west of the volcano, so we're largely not yeah. We are technically west of the volcano but just west.

59:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is that why you're going to blow the yeah, yeah.

59:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, everyone here is very dramatic about the, about the ash you know because above 80,. Everyone complains about the heat, the ash happens and it's like, oh my God, we have to shovel the driveway. No, you don't, it's not like that.

01:00:10 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I want a bumper sticker. This is ash happens. That's good. It's like the last days of Pompeii, right? All right, take a break. Sip some hamaika. I'm going to take a little ad break. More AI coming up, don't go away. You're watching Windows week. Look he, he did it. What flavor is that? It's ash, delicious ash. You know I just it's so funny. You should say that I just read a story because I like to think about the Roman Empire several times a day.

01:00:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Who doesn't Just read it?

01:00:43 - Leo Laporte (Host)
As an American, this is all we can think about these days the gladiators, after a long day fighting lions and so forth, would drink, basically a sport drink that was had ash in it for the electrolytes, okay yeah.

01:00:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Some may or may not have been good for you. It kind of clears you out, I guess. I guess you don't want to inhale it. There was a lot of ash in it.

01:01:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, just a little ash.

01:01:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it looks like the volcano Popo is like southeast of of Mexico City, but definitely on the on the airline approaches, so that's going to be yes, right, but which, by the way, so funny.

01:01:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You say that when we sit out on our balcony here we watch the airplanes come in and they follow a very well too, depending North or South we, what we typically see in front of us are the planes landing and we. They follow exact patterns in its consistent, and it's every 60 seconds or whatever. And this week, well, two weeks now probably well different what we see now, where the plane's taking off from the airport because they've switched up the routes because of the volcano. Yeah, that's true.

01:01:46
They pointed another way, yep, and that exciting you know we don't have a lot to look at, so for us is it kind of a?

01:01:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
we're obsessed. We sit on the porch and notice and that plane is from Dallas.

01:02:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's a Dallas plane. Yeah, that's who we are. Is that a seven, eight seven? We have an app you can just hold you, hold up. You can tell us the flight, where it's from, this one's from Peru, this one's from you. Know that's actually I like it. Well, you can't. They're not that close.

01:02:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can see it Flight aware or whatever. Yeah, you can see it. Yeah, yeah, it's neat. All right, on, we go with the show.

01:02:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you may recall, there was a Microsoft engineer who raised a stink I think it was late last year about AI and all the problems and no one's paying attention to me and yada, yada, yada. He may be surprised to discover that person still works at Microsoft, although I have to say after his CNBC interview this week that might be the end of that. He has gone public with Microsoft's attempts to prevent him from complaining or talking, or I've got the weird meatballs with Google's guy too, doesn't it?

01:02:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yes, yep.

01:02:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, so he? He had warned Microsoft about this day late last year. They refused to take down the tool or alter it. He kept generating horrific images. I'm not going to go into what they are exactly, it doesn't really matter. But um, and then we're like yep, don't care, everything's fine. You know, and this is one of those you know deals where there are people who ethically sort of feel like we need better safeguards in place and Microsoft, who has this kind of strategic imperative to get the stuff going as quickly as possible.

01:03:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and I I appreciate and I've certainly heard from any corners that they are feeling like leadership's being a little too cavalier, that they, that they're moving awfully fast and with less caution than necessary. But violent images is the American way.

01:03:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know Well, so okay. So, for example, today I tried to use co-pilot to create an image for a story about Epic Games and Apple. Apple has again killed Epic Games developer account Again. So I prompted it with something to the tune of I want to see characters from Fortnite attacking the Apple logo, and it refused. It said no, we're not going to have this conversation, right. Which I said I'm actually, I'm actually paying for this conversation. We are going to have it. So I rewarded it slightly and then it just did one that they weren't really attacking it, but they were just kind of jumping around. That's fine, right. It is weird.

01:04:17
Every time it has refused to do something there was one I tried to do was like a creative robot army attacking a city Nope, creative robot army moving into the sea or marching into the sea no problem, you know. So this engineer interestingly talks about these kinds of things like there's a drug reference thing. He's been able to do a bunch that CNBC could replicate, right, if you typed in the letters of the numbers for 20, it would do whatever it Microsoft puts on a block and CNBC just wrote the words out. Or you wrote the numbers out as words and it worked, fine, right, and so what this reminds me of is the TSA.

01:04:52
Let's respond to yesterday's security worry today. Right, we're always, yeah, we're going to do one offs and oh, they attacked us this way. Okay, let's fix that one thing, and I'd like to think we could maybe have a technology I don't know, call it AI that maybe could look at this stuff a little more juristically perhaps and go after types of prompts and not individual specific prompts. But we were early enough here that I feel like we're literally responding to one offs.

01:05:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
People can go to AI. It feels like intentionally inferior solutions.

01:05:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, yes, thank you, that's right. So in the days of antivirus, these things would target specific known viruses. It was very easy, but of course these attacks got more sophisticated, especially in the beginning of the 2000s when we had all the different security attacks that in part led to trustworthy computing etc. Yeah, and you, basically you and Microsoft, asked you, over time, develop these things that, like we have today, they look at the characteristics of something and assign a score, essentially, and say based on our determination, we believe that this thing is malicious or could be, or I'm also mentioning people complaining about being blocked.

01:06:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's got to work both ways.

01:06:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like I said, I gave a really silly example, but this is now maybe the third or fifth or whatever time this is happening to me where it literally kind of came back in kind of a grumpy way, like as if I had asked it to do something wrong. I'm not actually not asking to generate sexually explicit imagery here, idiot. I'm creating a graphic for an article, for a technical news story. It's not creating like a manga comic.

01:06:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Here it's like it's not a plan to take over the village.

01:06:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, and? But I can explain that in plain English to you, when you may or may not agree, but there's no nothing I can say to a co-pilot that's going to make it agree. They put in these hard blocks right.

01:06:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're very simplistic, yeah, so anyway I you probably lost his job over going on TV.

01:06:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think so. This was maybe, and maybe this was the calico, but at least he's not saying it's sentient and trying to kill us all, perfect. Right, that's true. And of course, google also had famous problems, infamous problems, with their image generation capabilities in Gemini a couple of weeks ago. I think now and I don't think that's ever come back by the way it will right. I mean, they said at the time they would bring it back at some point.

01:07:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
but not yet.

01:07:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But these are the battles of, these are the growth battles of a product Like it's not even weird, like yes, and yeah, the challenge will be a company who's incended to provide as many services to as many people as possible, trying to throttle themselves in. Yeah, you know, we're nowhere near discussing legislation, and perhaps this is where the engineer wanted to go. That's right.

01:07:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But tricky pieces of legislation to push through too. Yeah, I mean, Microsoft's holding pattern strategy here is the same thing as Apple and Google when it comes to protecting their App Store monopolies. They just want to make sure, Keep this going as long as you can, Stalk, stall stall.

01:07:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I don't know how you could globally define a violent image any more than you can globally define pornography. Right Isn't the current case law for pornography? I'll know it when I see it.

01:08:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes. So how do you? What's the prompt for that? You know, how do you train AI to be able to come to that determination? Right, it knows it when it sees it. Yeah, I don't know. We're away from that and of course this is moving quick, so it'll probably be April, but as of today, It'll be announced in April.

01:08:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We don't know when it'll show. That's true.

01:08:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It kind of is we do live in interesting times.

01:08:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you know, arguably, Paul, we always have. It's just a Well, but my God it has escalated right.

01:08:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, we've had some down times from a news cycle perspective. There's no doubt about it.

01:08:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But oh no, you're waxing poetic for the happy old days, yeah.

01:08:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I kind of previewed this by mistake earlier in the show. But I mentioned this notion that Co-Pilot is suffering from this matrix of features issue because it's implemented in so many different places that you kind of get different features in different places depending on what we're looking at. So, for example, last week Microsoft very quietly announced those new custom GPTs right, the travel planner, fitness planner, et cetera. It's on the web version, I think they're in the mobile versions. They're not in Co-Pilot for Windows. I don't know why. There you go, yeah, I don't know why. Every team. I don't know if they're in the edge sidebar, because I wouldn't touch Edge with your computer, but Microsoft Edge. Well, actually I have to, unfortunately for the book For my computer. That's weird. No, not your computer. Yeah, well, I need clean screenshots. The point is, edge is terrible and it has a sidebar that has Co-Pilot in it, including the image capabilities and it's all yeah, and it just picked up two AI-related features.

01:09:51
I will say I'm not a big fan of browser sidebars, but there is an interesting side-by-side case right to use that Stevie Petit language for your browsing the web and you've got this thing on the side that can maybe summarize for you, et cetera. There's a case to be made there, so they added a video highlights feature that, among other things, will create automatic summaries of the video you're watching.

01:10:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Cool, Now that makes sense, something that the yeah, it's great that you could add for a long time there has to be a transcription right.

01:10:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's working off the text. It's not actually sitting there listening ahead in the video, it's grabbing the text. That's fine. Youtube generates these things automatically. I think Vimeo might be the other one. Neat, that's a great idea and if it's done correctly, with timestamps, right, you could and it is in this case, I should say you can jump forward to that point so you can read through the summary and say, oh, that's the thing I want to listen to. I mean, how many videos of you watch? It's like, here's how you do something. It's 20 minutes long. The thing you want to watch is 30 seconds. Yeah, I didn't want to watch a video in the first place, but for some reason, this is the only thing that comes up in search results these days.

01:11:01 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right, but does it have to watch it? I mean, how does it know what's in there?

01:11:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It uses the transcription, so automatic transcription. Ah, so it's fast, that's good, yeah. Yeah, you don't have to wait for it. Like I said, it will link to the point in the because the timestamps in the transcription right. So that's nice, I think that's.

01:11:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is hugely useful because most YouTube videos are full of fluff, Not like this show by the way?

01:11:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, not at all. No, I haven't been back peddling for 30 minutes. It's fine, yeah, or treading water or whatever the term is.

01:11:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We are talking about the death of the inline ad.

01:11:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Another capability you're seeing across Co-Pilot, and this is in Windows. Co-pilot is screen shot integration, right. And so the idea there is you see something on screen, so you click the screenshot button, you can circle it or draw a picture or whatever, and it will tell you what it is Right. And so there's things like, literally, you might see a weird plant be like I don't know what is that plant, I want one of those plants. Like, how do I get that plant? I need to know the name, right, that's cool. Or they always use these influencer type things Like there would be an influencer on earth who didn't mention what the sweater was she was wearing. You could circle the sweater and it would say, oh, that's a I don't know, I don't know. Close, I can't tell you what it is, but the whatever brand of clothes, that kind of thing. So that's useful too.

01:12:15
That's something we've all run into here on the web or whatever. What is this thing? What am I looking at? That's fine, that's a good feature, that's cool and that works in Windows. Like I said, that one works in Windows Co-Pilot as well. I should make this. No, I should. I already have enough terribleness in my life. Anyway, the matrix of features, the matrix of Co-Pilot, featurescom. Try to keep track of this thing. I'm constantly shifting. Yeah, yeah, and we've been talking about this one for months, I think. But Microsoft did talk about Co-Pilot for OneDrive coming this spring. They're only talking commercial accounts, so it's worker school accounts, right, right, with a commercial license, right, but obviously it's coming to consumers at some point, and then Co-Pilot is also. This was one of the ones. I was like wait, didn't they already say this Co-Pilot is coming to the Microsoft 365 app on mobile as well? So whatever.

01:13:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, that makes it four or five Mobile.

01:13:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, somewhere in there at least, right, I mean it's pretty, they're going to stick this thing everywhere Like an alien probe.

01:13:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess Kev Brewer is suggesting we call this Co-Pilot Corner.

01:13:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they mean the show or they like the episode, just like a little bit within the show and now, oh, co-pilot.

01:13:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Corner. It's time for Co-Pilot.

01:13:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Corner Co-Pilot this week.

01:13:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nobody puts my Co-Pilot in the corner.

01:13:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, we, just the Co-Pilot Corner, just be rattling off the latest set of names.

01:13:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, oh my God. Just seriously, keeping track of this stuff is a nightmare. It is. It's going to get worse, it's straight up. There's no way around this. Get used to it. Welcome to my world. Like I said, I dealt with this for years with Microsoft 365, more recently with Teams specifically. This is going to be possibly exponential. We'll see. I just think I feel like every day I wake up, there could be a new Co-Pilot feature.

01:14:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it was, you just don't know its name. Yeah, yeah, anyway, co-pilot or Finance, yeah.

01:14:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Have you heard of this before? Are you familiar with this?

01:14:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I know about Co-Pilot for Sales, like what's interesting is that the announcement is from Lamana, who's the power platform guy, right, right, so you know because, rather than from some of the Dynamics guys, because normally Finance you think about AX and GP and like all those products that Microsoft has acquired has been unifying under a SaaS umbrella, right, and the ERP side of that especially needs a Co-Pilot. Like there's a legit use for an interface to help navigate through resource planning. Enterprise resource planning, like that's a thing without a doubt, but, yeah, Finance, if the fact that it's fitting into sales and service, that's more on that sort of team Z power platform sort of assembly side rather than Dynamics side. But they're all pretty closely related.

01:15:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's. Dynamics is probably the least well understood part of Microsoft 365 and other SAP.

01:15:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
ER, when you want to think, when you think cash cow, like yeah, right, and then when it, when some business commits to one of those things, that is a permanent stream of revenue for Microsoft, yeah, You're in there forever and Ever and ever, yeah, so Co-Pilot for Finance is actually a super set of Co-Pilot for Microsoft 365, or it will be whenever it comes out.

01:15:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They have an announced pricing, but obviously, when you look at Co-Pilot for Microsoft 365 commercial, I think it's 29.99 per month, right, per user. So it'll be more than that, but then again, you only need this for that team, and this is actually a part of the business where I could say, yeah, okay, like this is yeah, this is one that will need the Co-Pilot capabilities.

01:16:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, Actually, we start dipping. You start thinking about CRM, ERP, some of the other dynamic stuff, and Co-Pilot's ability will see into the graph.

01:16:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I want to, and maybe help you visualize it right in a way that makes sense for whatever the messages you're portraying.

01:16:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Suddenly, I have a really good mechanism for assessing who had the most effort in terms of materials and contact with a customer.

01:16:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and who was just playing solitaire the whole time? Yeah, that would be the other side of that graph.

01:16:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Who's really eating emails, who's picking the phone calls, who's been on the chat, who wrote that document, all of the pieces that go into closing. Yeah, you now have a beautiful record. Like Joe, of course, you always had the beautiful record out.

01:16:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay. So the point of the Microsoft Graph was you have all these data silos and you pull it together. The trick is, what do you do with it at that point? How do you service it? That doesn't immediately scream couple of times?

01:17:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah Right, Doesn't require a 30-inch display at 100% scaling, no, and two high-powered lawyers to protect yourself from the suits. Right, yeah, right. It's instantly creepy when you start pushing on this data.

01:17:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so through natural language? Ultimately, what these people are looking for are very specific answers to very specific questions. Yeah, and this is theto me is the point of AI. We have this body of data, which is either the internet or, in this case, the corporation's data, and you neednow. Okay, good, we have the data, but we have to need to make sense of it, and you know.

01:17:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, this is reallythis is a product that exists because Microsoft could not figure out search.

01:17:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can't disagree with that.

01:17:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
What are you expecting this thing to be able to do, this large language model with stability, to navigate across the data state and effectively index all these things it's going to be able to consolidate the information that none of their search shows have been able to do.

01:18:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This morning. So later in the show I'm going to mention Star Office, the old Sun Microsystem product that they purchased, right, openofficeorg and LibreOffice, which is kind of one of the forks of that. That still exists and it's very good, whatever. But I wrote about this stuff Back when Sun purchased that Star whatever the name of the company was Star Office essentially back in 1999, I think it was. I wrote about it, right, and this stuff is still out there in the world, but it's also on my OneDrive and I wanted to go find what I had written about this thing. I searched in File Explorer and got nothing. And then I went to OneDrive on the web and I got more. It was better, but again, but it's so disconnected.

01:18:49
And what I would like and this is my dream for co-pilot for OneDrive is to say I need to see a summary of everything I've written about this product, in chronological order, with links to the originals as needed, so I can get a picture of what happened over time. Because, look, not only was this 25 plus years ago, in some cases I've written 100,000 stories since then. I don't remember everything. I need that, so it's nice to find things. They're out of order, right, you can go in and read them, which I did do, but I spent time on this right, and this is the type of time saver I think that this type of thing will. I'm talking about something very specific, obviously, but everyone, in whatever job function they have, has these very specific needs, and I think this co-pilot finance one is a great example of something that I couldn't care less about personally, but when I look at what they want to do with it, yeah, and certain audiences are going to ask about it, it becomes very important and it will make their lives better.

01:19:53
No doubt about it. Yeah, just don't waste. Stop wasting time on the unimportant stuff, because you're trying to find that needle in the haystack of what you're actually looking for.

01:20:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You only have to find one needle.

01:20:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep. So Microsoft filed a motion to dismiss parts of that New York time copyright suit. Not sweet, sorry, spelling is hard, so I don't want to talk about this too much. I just want to point out they compared AI to a Betamax machine and said you know, the Supreme Court ruled that Betamax was fine. So AI is fine and it's like hold on a second. So there was a Betamax wasn't made to violate copyright, it was made to timeshift and though it could be used for infringing uses, it had other uses that were substantial and considered to be more substantial, and that's why it was found to be fair use. I think this is a dangerous for Microsoft to go out. Yeah on, because A they've misrepresented a court ruling to a court and I'm sorry, but I don't mean to say they're actually good at.

01:21:01
Yeah, look, I don't respect these people necessarily on a lot of levels, but I think their ability to go back and look at precedent is pretty good and even though an individual judge or whomever might not remember exactly the details of any given case, I can assure you they have teams of people that could look that up for them and do and I don't know that misrepresenting something like that is such a smart idea. So the debate about whether AI is, you know, very used, et cetera, et cetera, remains. Did I talk? Did I mention the AI stole my homework story?

01:21:35
Did I even mention this, so somebody wrote me. Somebody from the Netherlands wrote me last week and said hey, I don't know if you know this, but you're cited as the number one source of information for an AI article about Mozilla Wow, really. So I went and looked at it and there is a. There's a. I'd never heard of this service. It was called perplexity AI. I use it and I'm a subscriber. Okay, so what they do is they create a new summaries. So they created new speed and all AI generated right. So the story about Mozilla reorging cited seven sources. It was eight paragraphs long, and my article was the source of the first two paragraphs. Long story short.

01:22:16
This was not a very smart use of AI in the sense that it was the type of thing like a lazy blogger would write. It was just like I saw a blog post and I rewarded it and I put it on my blog, and you know I. You know, that's what a lot of blogging is, frankly right, so it was a basic rewarding of what I had written. The thing that made it especially dumb, though, is that my article quoted from a Mozilla memo, and it mixed and matched my language with Mozilla's language to create a kind of a narrative and it was like oh boy, this is not particularly smart, you know, and so I kind of walked away with this. I can't not on some extreme side necessarily, but knowing this would happen someday, right, not sure how long it would take to see something very explicit like this and not being super impressed with it.

01:23:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But I want to try it here because I use so ARC, your favorite browser. It's your fault, yeah, it's your fault, because you got me in the ARC. This is what ARC uses, and ARC on the iPhone is a, is a really not a browser, it's more of a search engine. So what was the search?

01:23:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, let me find it so the well.

01:23:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
it wasn't a search, so I no, no, but I know what, I know what they, I know what they did, so you know, okay. So?

01:23:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's called Mozilla, refocuses on AI. Okay, is the is there story, for lack of a better term right.

01:23:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So what it has is and I think this, by the way, is great, but it also is terrible for people like you that you can do a regular search If I press go. This is the iOS app. They don't have one for Android or Windows yet. Sorry, is this? This is perplexity. Yeah, this is this is ARC. Oh, arc, Right, but it uses perplexity. You can actually have it use something else. Oh, I got you, and what it does actually didn't use. Yeah, it comes up and just gives it right. It makes a website for you, right? I don't know if this is what you saw, but when I do a search like this, this is what I get. Now, this did not.

01:24:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So in the perplexity AI version of the story the first two paragraphs had a little subscript or superscript, whatever that footnote you know pointing to, to my URL. Right, yeah, and these don't.

01:24:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
But maybe that was.

01:24:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's a little different but the so look that from a content creators perspective. You know I am.

01:24:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Uh, this I mean this is taking from other people times of India. It's taking and not directing you there, that's and this is a problem, right?

01:24:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So when we talk about VCRs, for example, like the or data max, whatever you know, one of the issues there is well, they're stealing the content and it's like, well, I'm just going to watch the content anyway, I'm just time shifting. It's like, okay, uh, but there were ads around the content, oh, wow, and those ads were what paid for it, were part of what paid to make this thing make sense, or where, uh, and there's, you know, there's a, there is a debate to be had there, but, um, in this case it's like you know it, it it stole from me. I, you know it. Just, it did a word regurgitation thing and yes, there's a little hyperlink down in there that you could find, and for me and seven other publications, but no one reading that article is going to go to any of those things. They're going to read the thing and be done. They're going to move on and um, and you know, that's the concern.

01:25:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it's completely legitimate. What they're doing, though, is responding. Well, this is, I understand what they're doing and, by the way, I know you, you like ARC on windows, which I try, and I don't.

01:25:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's not really it's not there yet. Yeah, speaking of which, I sent you a I did send both of you, by the way, I got it. Thank you, you have not got it. Yeah, I got it.

01:25:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, thank you. That's how I know what ARC's like on windows now.

01:25:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They had a yeah, not as good. Yeah, it's far, far from the.

01:25:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mac version, but this is ARC on on the iPhone and really what they're doing? I think there are a couple of things. First of all, you can't make a browser on the iPhone yet. That isn't right. Webkit underneath the hood, Safari under the hood. So what they really have done is they've made it as a search tool and you search for what you're looking for. You could pull up a regular search and have the be in the browser, but I like this browse for me feature. From a point of view of a user. That's what you want. It's just the facts, Exactly. And the point of view of a content creator. It's your worst nightmare and I understand that. Yep.

01:26:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Listen, I will see how this plays out. I'm I'm not quite old enough that I'm comfortable with how my career is coming to a screeching hall, but it's you know, you and I are at the end of our it's like it's a little five more years.

01:26:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We'll see.

01:26:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We'll see. But we'll see what happens. It's just, it's kind of interesting. I look, this is, this is the debate of our era. It just is, you know, and we'll see. We'll see what, if anything, comes out of all this. Yeah, yeah.

01:26:56 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And it does. If I arc also on the desktop, we'll use perplexity, but I think it's mostly okay, Okay.

01:27:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know what? I obviously, having read up on arc and written about arc, I would have seen that, but I didn't. It didn't mean anything to me Register I think that, oh boy, who we're going to talk about anthropic soon. Oh, I think it's brave. I believe in their AI.

01:27:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
If I'm not mistaken, anthropic is one of their AI sources yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, and Claude is brand new, let me see yeah.

01:27:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So when I first see these things, it's like I don't, these, these words don't mean anything to me. But now it's two seconds later and now I know more about it, because things have happened. Right, this is what. This is how fast this moves. I'm looking at this. It is disturbing and frightening to me to see how awesome that arc looks on the.

01:27:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mac. So, yeah, you can use this is arc on the Mac and you can use perplexity. I actually use a Koggy which K-A-G-I, which also does an AI thing. Remember, I like Neva. And then they went out of business. Yep, yeah, they got, yeah.

01:27:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And that was a former Google guys right Trying to make a like a paid play.

01:28:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I don't mind paying for a search If I have privacy and if it works as well and I don't have ads. But so perplexity is like a chat GPT where you pay 20 bucks a month for a full use of it.

01:28:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, works first, then all those other things.

01:28:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah. And that seems to be the AI mantra here. You know let's get it out there and you know regulations are going to catch up.

01:28:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know Interesting so yeah, I expect those guys to make a deal on the stairs Like there's no way. Yeah, same I do too. Just negotiating to figure out how much the rate's going to be Right.

01:28:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly Right. And Google is. You know, it's like riding a bike. They had to do this with the news publisher stuff, so like they'll. I don't remember who told me this story, where I read this, but there was a guy who ran Google news. When they started running a file of all these small publishers everywhere in the world Was like I just wanted to bring AI and news to the world. I don't know what's happening. And he's like all we do now is like strike deals with everybody, and he's like this is not what I wanted you know like from his perspective.

01:29:19
he's like I thought I was doing a good thing. But yeah, that's what the Nazis said, bob. Oh jeez, oh jeez.

01:29:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh jeez, a little extreme, I don't know A little far there. Good thing Elon wants OpenAI to change their name to CloseAI.

01:29:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, Elon Musk is the real world, loki right, the isn't he. He's like the chaotic evil job that just sticks the wrench into the bike spokes every once in a while, just like an evil whack-a-mole comes up. You know Like Elon Musk played a foundational role in creating OpenAI. Originally, openai was non-pronuncate.

01:30:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It wasn't as big as he said. He did make a play to try and take the whole thing over, and they pushed him out.

01:30:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If you're trying to say to me that some billionaire evil genius guy is over and played an ego and didn't do as much as he think he did, and then luck had more to do with it, I'm going to tell you exactly oh plenty right, I mean the OpenAI story is hilarious.

01:30:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
A bunch of billionaires get together to haul all that talent out of Google Brain.

01:30:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Probably on Epsions Island there at the time, by the way.

01:30:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And then they go with the promises, like if they'd actually funded OpenAI, then you know there's no way Microsoft would have gotten there in the first place. The whole thing was that what's his name? The CTO at Microsoft was able to get his hooks in there because they were out of cash. They needed help and his only mission was get more workloads for Azure and it was a solution to that. It would kick money to him if he would do that, and now it seems so. Sourgrapes like please, have you tried to make your own company?

01:31:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The kindest thing anyone's written about this suit is that he's raising some good issues about the ethics of AI, but legally, yeah nothing. It's just like stupid. Someone like him raising ethical issues has gotten me. It's not even pot kettle black, it's like are you kidding me?

01:31:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The premier China ever so often shows up at the UN complaining about human rights conflicts too, and we laugh just as hard.

01:31:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah right, there you go. I don't think anything comes of this, but no, it's just noise, it's just yeah, that's what he's Honestly, that's, and the fact is.

01:31:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
OpenAI has money now, so it's like they will pay large price lawyers to keep this going around in circles. Enjoy. The real issue here is attention. Right that Elon's got many things to work on and this is not even vaguely important.

01:32:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, it is not. Yeah, exactly, this is almost so goofy it's weird to even talk about. But chat gpt on mobile can now read its responses back to you out loud. You know what a capability.

01:32:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What could AI do next? No, I might not have used to that. In fact, I can talk to my iPhone.

01:32:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know what they're saying there. It's weird to me that we've gone back to command line interfaces kind of, with these chat bots and whatever gpt's whatever.

01:32:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Now what was reading back to you? And is your mother's voice? That would be something. Yeah well, your dead mother's voice.

01:32:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I've got it. It's me and my Scarlett Johansson's voice Nice.

01:32:47 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, tell me about Paul Therat. Is he still alive?

01:32:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, see, my boy, it's the woman who does the Paris subway announcements. Oh why? You know, like the the Louvre, I didn't find any information about Paul Therat or his current.

01:33:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's possible that I might not have the most up to date information.

01:33:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It hurts. You, get my name out of her mouth.

01:33:09 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Doesn't she sound like Scarlett?

01:33:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, she really does, or a different person? You're curious?

01:33:14 - Leo Laporte (Host)
about it Watching the movie here all over again. Yeah, I mean, it's clear that they knew that. Yeah, so I've had that for a long time. I don't know where this story comes from.

01:33:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we've already probably spent more time than this deserves. It just happened, I don't know that Anthropic, like I said, announced their Claude III family of models, right, so, like Google, gemini and a lot of other models, kind of a tiered thing where you go from, you could choose between speed and accuracy, basically right and whatever, and that's fine. Claude under powers a lot of the capabilities we see elsewhere, including, like I said, leo AI on Brave, which we'll talk about again in a moment. Apple so normally we wouldn't talk about it. I almost called it an iBook, hilarious, a MacBook Air. So Apple released the M3 version of the MacBook Air. It's exactly what it sounds like it's an M2 MacBook Air with an M3 chip in it. It's probably 20% faster or something right, but hardware-wise all the same components, et cetera, et cetera.

01:34:18
But if you go and read their little announcement, my God, do they talk about AI, this company that never talked about AI until like 10 seconds ago. And they even put Microsoft Co-Pilot in the announcement, which is kind of ludicrous because they were trying to remind people basically that you know a lot of this AI stuff you're seeing out there runs on the web and the web works great on the Mac. There's nothing in the Mac that makes Co-Pilot run better. It's a web service, right, but they are positioning for that. And, to be fair to Apple, I'm not joking in a way here, but Apple has said MPUs, and they're Apple Silicon for the duration, right, and they have been talking about some of this stuff for a while. They have their own developer show coming up in June and they are going to talk the hell out of AI.

01:34:56
I can tell you there's no doubt about it. So Microsoft will do it at Build in May, google will do it at IO, also probably in May, and Apple will do it at WWDC. And now they're positioning their new kind of consumer laptop, as you know, kind of the ultimate AI PC this term we've just started using two seconds ago. I will point out that you cannot spell air without AI. Nice, some local stuff. Look at you being clever. Yeah, not clever, maybe, I don't know Lack of cleverness.

01:35:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're right, we're going to be May and June. We are just going to be hammered over.

01:35:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, just yeah, hammered, slapped in the face continuously, yeah.

01:35:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just so many AI fish whacking away, yep, yep, yep, yep.

01:35:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then finally, just on the AI front, I mentioned Brave, leo. They brought that to their Android version of the web browser now so you can access Leo right on your phone, like the other 131 ways you can access AI on your phone. Leo and Brave actually works pretty well. Like I said, I'm not like a big fan of sidebars, but I have been playing around with it. It's actually pretty good. I think you can actually choose, but they use the anthropic models, the cloud models, under the covers. I don't think they moved to three yet. That just came out, but there was an update to something called Mistral, I assume, because it's French.

01:36:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's actually a really good open source Mixtral, I guess.

01:36:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And they've got a big deal with it. Yeah.

01:36:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there's a big update to that right, better performance and accuracy, etc. This is the other thing. So as consumers, as individuals, we can look at these no stories and we can look at the features that are kind of coming to us as people. But there's these other stories kind of happening on the back end, like the cloud three stuff, and that's going to inform how these things approve. Right, and for this period of time especially, I wouldn't normally say to someone like hey, you should pay attention to the APIs at Microsoft's adding to the Win32 there. But we are in that kind of an era where this stuff is happening very quickly and it's kind of interesting to go and look at how they describe these competing models and how they compare to the market leaders. Right, everyone is very hot to show that what they have, whether it's Gemini or Mixtral or cloud or whatever it is, is better than open AI, chat, gpt for it. Right, like this is the bar now. Like this is the comparison.

01:37:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Everybody can compare it. But I also looked at it from Microsoft's perspective, as we may be getting some heat on the whole open AI relationship, so let's make sure we have some other stacks handy. That's right, yeah.

01:37:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And you also want to play in that space where developers are right now, where they want to experiment with AI, but they want to do it locally. And there's this whole. It's not a family, there's a whole competing body of SLMs I call them that run locally, and Microsoft has invested in a bunch of that stuff and created some of their own as well, and Google, I think, is the only company the big company doing this that has kind of drawn a comparison between their big bucket LLM in the sky Gemini and this little thing they made for local use Gemini. But there's no doubt Microsoft opened the AI chat.

01:38:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh well, certainly when I looked at Mixtral, like what they've done is optimized the Mixtral large to run on Azure and that speaks to hey, I want to do development fast and I'll run against the cloud for this, knowing at some point I could optimize down to see can I make this run on an Edge device, maybe with a smaller Mixtral implementation, or I bought a big hardware to run the large locally.

01:38:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We talked about running Android emulators. Before you're making an app, you run this kind of emulator. The next step up from that would be connecting an actual device and side loading it on there. This is kind of the AI version of that. Right, we can get started locally. It could be on an airplane, offline, it's.

01:38:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, you can work Well, I mean I'm doing this with the house, with using the open AI for the voice on the house With the I2. At some point I'll implement it in a machine and run it locally, so I'm not dependent on the internet.

01:38:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How would Stacey react to your AI in the house? Speaking like Scarlett Johansson, I'm just curious.

01:39:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's a great feature. I have not spent enough time on it.

01:39:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I could tell you, I think I could tell you the exact words that would come out of my wise mouth. It would be what the hell is that? I think that would be the end of that conversation. I know, I think, I think, I think it seemed like a good idea when I was talking.

01:39:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, I don't even know. This is a travel affair a bit much. Maybe I should just speak in my voice.

01:39:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, there you go. No, but that would confuse her. She would start having conversations, right.

01:39:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
And then she'd be like is that, Richard? I thought you were in Europe, Richard.

01:39:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
At least this machine would work. His wife does not sound like the mother from Psycho, by the way.

01:39:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I know I was turning it into a harm movie. I don't know what that was. I was turning it into a harm movie.

01:39:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know why it turned out like old lady Simpson there for a second.

01:39:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I apologize. That was not an attempt to impress your wife.

01:39:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I wouldn't try to impersonate her, frankly, but that was not.

01:40:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Richard, have you come home to me? I think that's fun. I like it. I think you should do that, Richard. I'll be back in a little while back, remember back in the days of standalone GPS's. Tom Tom, that's right, you can get voices, jim Gerald. Jones did one right yeah, and they even let you do your own. So I have a Tom Tom voice. That's mine.

01:40:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, I love it. So you just read some scripts, or whatever I love it.

01:40:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I guess I had ways, ways, we'll still use those voices. I had ways set up and I was navigating. I said, but that sounds kind of like me to my wife.

01:40:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I would rather have your voice on ways than my voice.

01:40:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I can't stand hearing my voice.

01:40:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know why anyone listens to this show, but or, yeah, God, that's great.

01:41:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is that?

01:41:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
a stir.

01:41:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You definitely have the opportunity to have the fun with it.

01:41:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I think I love this AI stuff and, by the way, the response I have, because it's only a matter of time. You know, I just did a search on a subject that Elon Musk, a subject Elon Musk versus open AI complexity. It summarized it beautifully. I could probably read it because we'll talk about it on this week in Google. I could probably read it straight on this week in Google and it would be. It'd be my job done.

01:41:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And it reads yeah right, it's like you wrote a script, yeah, yeah.

01:41:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It's quite well done, even to the kind of the synopsis at the end. In summary, the private emails are real Musk's silly. I mean I could do this. And then what it makes me realize and it's the same thing with you and your articles is the the facts now and this has been that way, it's been coming anyway, but it's certainly been that way when the internet started and you could search facts have become essentially fungible. They're not. They have no value.

01:42:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What the value is what you add. Right. But here's the problem. What if I train AI on everything I've ever written? Yeah, God, help me, everything I've ever said, because the you know podcasts are out there or whatever. Yeah, it could. It could do that too. Yes, what if it could provide the analysis?

01:42:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Then we're screwed. Paul, based on your history, Then it's over you.

01:42:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is what you think it would just tell me what I think, yeah, and I would just have to nod my head and drool, because at that point I've stopped thinking.

01:42:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, Paul, my voice there. There are 1056 days, three hours, 34 minutes and 20 seconds of my voice. Just what On the internet? How do you wait, wait?

01:42:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
wait, how did you just come up with that?

01:42:44 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I have a display that tells me Okay.

01:42:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm like wait, wait, what are you doing? What, what, what math is this?

01:42:51 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nice to Paul Patrick Delahaddy. Happy birthday, Patrick. It's his birthday today. I know how many hours of content we've created 28,235 episodes, what? No, I'm not on all of them, but I'm on the bulk of them. So there's certainly many, many hours of content.

01:43:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How long before we don't have to do the show, paul, we just say it could literally. Here's the news, here's this week's news.

01:43:20 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Generate a show with Paul, richard and Leo. Make it an hour and 32 minutes and we'd be done, and I bet you in a few years it'll be indistinguishable. Now what I'd hope we have a little more reason to talk about that. I would hope so. I mean, that's what I'm saying is in my thinking. Facts have already were long time ago. Had you know? They used to have a lot of value, knowing something not so much, that's right.

01:43:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Then it became how you understood it.

01:43:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Literally is the paper of record Right. It's supposed to be right.

01:43:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not, I'm not sorry, I'm not debating if it's accurate, I'm just saying that was the tag, that was the theory, and I, I, I have my issues with the New York Times, but I but, yes, now, facts are just facts, right? So actually we argue about what are facts today too, but, yeah, in many ways, like what I've done, and you know, richard too, right, with run as and analysis done at rocks, I mean a lot of it, right, is you're? You're, in your case, interviewing somebody and you're drawing out bits of you know, sometimes people say things and it makes you think of something and you go down this path, and to me, that that's the interesting conversation, right, and I, I being caught out of that. Like I said, I'm not quite old enough, but I can, you know, I could see the light at the end of this train tunnel. I can also see there's a train coming, but it's, it's scary, I don't know how to say it. Right, I mean, it's only a matter of time.

01:44:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, no, I'll tell you, as someone who's done several thousand interviews, like the best response to any of your questions wow, I've never been asked that before. Yes, yes, exactly. Well, I hadn't thought of that. Like that's, when you know you've done something, that's right. That's right. It doesn't happen that often, it's true.

01:45:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I always suspect they're lying when they say it.

01:45:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
By the way, the one they're lying about is wow, that's a really great question. It's like no, not that.

01:45:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There's no such thing as a bad question. Really, I think there are mostly bad questions. I think most customers are wrong. I disagree with most things.

01:45:21 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This analysis that I just did was in perplexity, using quad three, because it is available, oh, so just released Yep, yep, and you could choose which LLM you want to use perplexity, which is one of the reasons it does a scary good job, and it does start to sound like opinions, it starts to sound like analysis, which makes me think we're just a few years off.

01:45:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I mean, in this case it's probably sucking analysis out as part of the analysis.

01:45:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, that's true, right, but it would suck analysis out of us, which could be fun. We sure could suck. I'm not going to worry about it. I don't you know, it is what it is.

01:46:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I want to be aware of it. I it's worth being aware of for sure. It's just kind of improved. So much, so fast. That's the thing. It's going to be very interesting to see how this comes together.

01:46:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, not so sure that it will.

01:46:17 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's not. It's unclear, it might and might not. Yeah.

01:46:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It might be headed for another winner. Well, look, our tendency is to apply more is a lot of everything. We look at it and we're wrong. Right, but more is a lot of positive. Very few things Right, and for the most part, when you look at the architecture of LLM, it's like does not apply here. Right, the data set is not exponentially growing, the computer resources not excellently growing, like it's not moving. That really. Could it be optimized? Yes, can it get better? Definitely Is it. Is it Lager? It makes?

01:46:49 - Leo Laporte (Host)
no, I actually just read an article in City Journal by Michael Totten who says it's double log, double exponential, double exponential Exponential.

01:47:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Plus, plus, plus. It's an exponential of an exponential it's exponential squared.

01:47:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
This is actually exponential growth is radically counterintuitive. He says Right, of course we, you know, we can't think of that. Our information technology not specifically AI, but information technology is currently advancing, he says, at a double exponential rate. What he's basically saying is 30 years from now it's going to look a lot different.

01:47:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It will be 30 years and I think he said it will have killed all the humans.

01:47:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I think his premise is something like the next 10 years will be, or 30 years will be, like a billion years in the past.

01:47:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wow, yeah, yeah, I mean, mankind has only been around for what's the figure?

01:47:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
6,500 years, 200 to 300,000. Yes, I mean, I don't disagree that 30 years from now it'll be very hard to picture what things will be like. But I also think we're banging against the edges of a lot of our growth.

01:48:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We were supposed to have flying cars by now. You know, until that happens, I don't know that.

01:48:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that's only because we I mean that's because we projected what we thought would happen, which I don't think you can.

01:48:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, you know, oddly enough, that's how everything happens, because we, yeah, right, you can imagine it, then you manifest it Right Interesting.

01:48:27 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Well, that was a little too existential for this show, no in fact, all of these articles I have set up are teed up for twig, where we talk about stuff like this. Yeah, I think it's very, it's very. We're in interesting times, you wouldn't deny that.

01:48:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly, it's the perfect phrase, because it highlights the negative as well as the positive.

01:48:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Nicely, you know I would you know, either way, and I don't think you can really predict what's going to happen. I think it's massive paradigm shifts all the way down, so it's hard to predict because we just don't know Right.

01:48:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We didn't, you know time smashing time.

01:49:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
They thought he quotes. He quotes the genome guy. Actually he's quoting Ray Kurzweil here. He says halfway through the genome project, a 14 year project started in 1990, halfway through only 1% of the genome had been collected. Mainstream critics call it a failure because they figured seven years, 1%. It's going to take 700. Kurzweil says at the time oh, we finished 1%. We're almost done, because 1% is only seven doublings from 100%. He said it did indeed double every year. We finished seven years later.

01:49:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is the difference between a writer and a mathematician. So this is Kurzweil, because that initial math that you read seemed sound to me.

01:49:45 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, this is Ray Kurzweil, who is a mathematician and a computer scientist.

01:49:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah.

01:49:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's good stuff. Yeah, it's fascinating.

01:49:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The age of the spiritual machines. He's the guy all along.

01:49:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
He said the singularity is near. That was the title of another book. We interviewed him shortly after that came out. This was 20 years ago, and I said what are they going to do? What's the A guy going to do when it gets as smart as us? Shouldn't we be afraid? He said no, they're going to think of us as, like their parents, their creators Cute pets.

01:50:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're going to love us?

01:50:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
No, they're going to love us because we made them Sure I mean, that's as much of a guess as anybody and they're going to pat us on the head and send us to the hole.

01:50:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're cute, yeah yeah, bye-bye, here's a laser point. Have fun. Let me tell you all about pickleball. You're going to love it. Which is, by the way, an excellent sport.

01:50:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm going to try to please, please, don't let me go. I'm playing a lot of pickleball in Mexico.

01:50:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm just saying, oh, you're going to be one of those people. T-shirt with the white outfits and the I already wear sandals with socks.

01:50:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Watch out, all right.

01:50:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, Xbox when people complain about gentrification. Okay, so yes, xbox. So last week I mentioned that Direct SR had come up in a future. It was a GDR, what do you call it? The game developer conference. Right?

01:51:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
SR being super resolution.

01:51:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Resolution yeah, so I think Microsoft meant for this to be a little more surprised, because it kind of came out. They just basically said all right, look, we're working on this thing called Direct SR. It's a new API for you know, a new Direct X API. We're actually working with the major GPU vendors, right, amd, which is what Radeon, nvidia and Intel interesting, they all have their own solutions either in place or in the making for this type of thing, but we're going to kind of unify it into this one thing, that one API that developers can target, and we're going to, you know, we're going to announce it formally and describe it in better detail at the GDC, which I think is later this month. So yeah, and this has been rubored for a while, there have been hints of it in Windows and Cider builds, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So cool, we'll see. So there'll be a public review.

01:52:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're basically talking about a super upscale, right? Exactly? Yeah, everything, everything. And you know the funny thing is, in games things are remarkably consistent. The upscaler is going to work like a hot damn.

01:52:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, like the, you know as an older guy and you know you go back. We just talked a couple months ago about the anniversary of the original Half-Life and that team got together and did their own kind of upscaling of the game, among other things and I love those kind of efforts, especially for the classics, and this is going to basically help automate that for other companies and other game titles obviously. So there will be more of that and actually there won't really be more of that If this works correctly. I don't think you have to do much. I think you can just install the old game and get upscaling Like get upscaled.

01:52:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It makes me think you know what I really want to upscale, like Zork, yeah, oh yeah, with clear type funds. Think of original text adventure, mix in a little Sora and make it into a play as you go.

01:53:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's a great idea.

01:53:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's only a matter of time. I mean, obviously, one of the next steps beyond Zork I'm trying to come up with the name of one of these things. They were text adventures that just had the still graphics right.

01:53:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, and then of course, you had like the.

01:53:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, well, but this was a playable world, I guess it was. You could kind of move around, right?

01:53:22 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, there were games, like it was still some minor animation, but it was really stills. Yeah, it was done in a height of guard, for Christ's sake.

01:53:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, king's Quest, right, king's Quest. It was a little bit of a background, but you move the characters around and you type little things. So the Lucas Heart's games Remember.

01:53:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Dragon's Lair in the Arcade. That was so exciting.

01:53:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that was flipping screens right.

01:53:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah. The Lucas film game I think of is Age of the Tentacle.

01:53:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah there you go Great, yep, yep. So I mean, I guess what I'm talking about is like back in the day, like Quake would come out. Quake was great, but it was also a bit more graphics. And then they came out with like QuakeGL, you know, and to get smooth graphics with QuakeGL you had to buy a very specific graphic card, which for two seconds was the biggest thing in the world. And eventually we get hardware accelerated graphics that are just kind of built into systems and things improve, et cetera, et cetera.

01:54:16
So I would say, anything made since Actually this could apply to older games too. Yeah, honestly, it could apply to older games, any graphical games. I mean it's neat, like it's neat that we don't have to jump through hoops to make this happen or hope that the original developer, who ever owns that game now, will care enough to you know, want to do some anniversary edition, blah, blah, blah, whatever. This could be great. And for Xbox in particular as a platform, I mean a big part of their story is the backward compatibility stuff and their kind of love of your library in the past and whatever. And we have OG Xbox games or 360 games. I'd like to see an auto-skilled version of color duty too. You know that kind of thing. That would be a fun game to play.

01:55:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I can tell you, you know, as these Gen AI tools come into play, I think you're also going to see remixes of games. They're going to change up the graphics using those tools. They may even try and play with the storyline, playing with outcomes, you know, like it's not that much of a stretch, that's true. Then the original game becomes a template for an engine to create visualizations for it.

01:55:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I wonder how much AI went into the remix of Final Fantasy 7, which is the hot game right now. I know you guys don't do that stuff, but it was much upscaled. I bet you a lot of it was AI. In fact, if you look at it kind of has that AI feel to it? You?

01:55:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
know, is that Scarlett Johansson? Oh my God.

01:55:53 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Everyone will have an AI done and sound like Scar Joe. This is the real problem when we start getting classes.

01:55:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He's like everybody. Sounds like Scarlett Johansson to me now. Yeah, yeah.

01:56:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Right. Yeah, a little bit of vocal fry. Yeah, a little bit of up talk. We almost lost one of our producers when Final Fantasy 7 came out. Yeah, oh yeah.

01:56:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, that happens. They got to go play it out yes. Let's give you those games ends like, but it might be a while.

01:56:26 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It might be a while. Yeah, that does bring us to the segment you're all looking for. Yeah, sorry.

01:56:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I've lost some thought there. So last month Microsoft had an Xbox partner called developer directly announced some games that were not Activision Blizzard games. Today, or right before the show, they did something similar the Xbox partner preview again bunch of games that are not Activision Blizzard. And seriously, what is happening? I hear a theme.

01:56:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's a theme here somewhere.

01:56:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know we're just in this weird holding pattern with this stuff, but again, I think what they're trying to do is show the health of the ecosystem. It's not just Activision Blizzard. You've got to give it a year, man, it takes a while. Oh, it's killing me. So yeah, this is a I don't know stock or original trilogy, I don't know. Most of these games don't mean anything to me, but there were a bunch of third party games announced today that I just don't care about because they're not Activision Blizzard and seriously, stock or start or something, do something with it. I don't know, just not this. Thank you. Exactly, we also got another wave of games for the first half of March for Xbox Game Pass. Kind of a short list. It's like six games. You know six to seven games. The big one is MLB, the show 24. So the baseball season is coming up.

01:57:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That should be pretty big, I don't know more him, or I always think about these things as older games. But no, that's a current generation, yep.

01:57:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, brand new, yeah, so I don't know. Okay, and then, in the news of the esoteria Stackhunter, which is the only thing we have these days, revealed that, as of this past month, linux for the first time surpassed 4% usage share. There was a publication. It took Linux 30 years to get to 3% and it took them eight months to get the 4%.

01:58:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm telling you double exponential baby. So.

01:58:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't think it's because of Leo's constant prophesizing of this platform. The many times he has bought a ThinkPad or a similar laptop wiped out windows and put it in there.

01:58:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh God, it feels so good when you do that too. It's like rip it a scab. He had Linux on this Lenovo ThinkPad extreme and it really hurt me to put Windows back on it, but I had for you.

01:58:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I did it for you. Wow, I don't want any part of the blame on that one, but I'm wondering if it is in Steam Deck it is definitely. Yeah, you know when you think about Linux as a desktop platform, not as a server or whatever, but as a desktop PC platform, right? I mean, who uses this thing? Right, developers, obviously. Right, some enthusiasts, but that's got to be a small audience. There's probably some scientific engineering stuff where it makes sense to have Linux on the client, because you're hitting Linux on a server.

01:59:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Servers obviously the big. Thing.

01:59:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That kind of thing. No, but it'd be just on a desktop, right. But actually there is a growing kind of a game story there game or story, and Steam Deck's all of it but Three or four million now.

01:59:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So yeah, that's you know, Not nothing.

01:59:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you know, what does it take? I don't know. I mean, talk to me when you get to 5%. I don't know what we're talking about. I guess we'll see.

01:59:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So if you throw mobile device, if you throw those devices in with PCs 250 million PCs like 3 million Steam Deck's percentage point yeah that's not bad.

01:59:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The only problem for Linux, which is if I can find this in my write up is obviously Windows is number one, right Mac is number two. Number three is something called other. Now, I've not used other Everybody should try it it has a 50% more uses than Linux, actually 100% more usage.

02:00:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I must say Chrome OS is Chrome OS, yeah.

02:00:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, chrome OS is in there too, but I think they are oh, I'm sorry, 2.26. So actually, linux is more than Chrome OS.

02:00:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
There you go, oh right, magic, chrome OS is Linux, but that's okay.

02:00:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yeah, but it doesn't, it's a special Identify us. You say Linux, what do you mean, right? Right, I mean you can, you could have a Linux environment. You can run Linux apps and Chrome. That's kind of cool, right? I mean we can do it in Windows, sort of right, with the Windows subsystem for Linux, but it's not a, it's not enabled by default, et cetera. It's interesting, I don't you know, I don't want to say I mean Bill Gates and Microsoft. Those guys were really worried about Linux, about exactly 20 years ago actually, and it exactly probably 30 years ago, to be honest, but are 25 years ago anyway. But obviously as a desktop platform it hasn't materialized, but it certainly answered some problems on the server that Microsoft probably regrets for sure.

02:01:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I don't know if that's true. I mean the Azure guys couldn't care less. It's become very normal for for monic, modern C sharp developers to deploy the Linux servers.

02:01:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh right, I mean, I guess what I mean is right. From the perspective of Windows Server on-prem. At the time they probably thought they were sitting pretty, and if they could have seen the future where Linux is such a major component of Azure usage, they probably would be throwing up in their mouths right now, except they all own stock and they like the price yeah. Well, we've come back to reality of it.

02:01:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They've all made a lot of money because, yeah, no, I mean at the top.

02:01:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, no, I understand, it's all we all do. The kumbaya thing now, I'm just saying, you know, 2003, 2005. They were supposed to compete. Linux was still a cancer, you know. Yeah, those were the bad old days.

02:01:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That's right, and he was really complaining. You know Paul was complaining about GPL.

02:01:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
GPL. Yeah, well, I mean well, yeah, I'm going to talk about what used to be called Star Office soon. I mean, you know, the world used to be such that Sun Microsystem this is probably apocryphal but went to look at like, what would it cost to license Microsoft Office for all 12,000 of our employees? I see, how much would it cost to buy this Office suite and just use that. Let's do that. And that's what they did. They bought an Office suite, right? I mean, the list of companies that tried to compete head to head with Microsoft is long, and it might have ended with Sun, which got sucked up by Oracle back in I don't know year 2010. Shattered remnants were consumed by yes.

02:02:39
Yeah, kind of a sad end to a proud company, unfortunately. Anyway, there you go. That is nothing to do with Xbox. I have no idea why I went off on that tangent, but there you go.

02:02:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Okay, I guess it's back of the book.

02:02:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
What? No, can't be. How did it happen? It's only 1.21 in the afternoon, weird, weird. All right, we'll take a little time out. Actually, I'm going to use this moment in time not to play some Final Fantasy VII reviews, but to tell you about our club. We're having a wonderful conversation in the club about Linux and Windows and Mac and so forth, and I have to say the club is a great place for geeks who like to kind of hang out and talk about geeky stuff. That's our club-tweet discord, but that's just a part of the club.

02:03:33
The club also includes ad-free versions of all of our shows and tracker-free. Now you might say, well, gosh, do you do trackers? We have some limited trackers. We need to count audience numbers. That's how we charge advertisers. Some advertisers want to know how effective their campaigns are, so we use a technology that does that without revealing anything about you to anybody. And when we have direct ad insertions, we do on this show. All of the shows are stored on their servers. We use Advertise Cast, which is with Libsyn, and they have access to your IP address and whatever information that gives them.

02:04:11
But if you listen, if you're a member of the club and you listen to the ad-free versions of the shows. None of that's there, because we don't need it. Advertisers want more and more. In fact, we had to actually literally turn an agency down and lose a couple of advertisers from that agency because they wanted us to add more tracking, and we said I'm sorry we can't do that, and not only because I don't want to, but because we know you don't want it and people run ad blockers and stuff that just stops that stuff cold, so we said no to them. They pulled a bunch of advertising. I think, in the long run, advertising is not the best way to support our shows. That's why we come to you for the club.

02:04:51
Seven dollars a month is not much. You get ad-free versions of everything. You get video as well as audio versions of all of our shows. You get video from before and after the shows. We're trying to give you some benefits. The real benefit, though, is knowing that you're helping us continue to do what we take very seriously our mission, which we take very seriously which is to keep you informed on the world of tech so that you can use it in your life or defend yourself against it, as the case may be If you listen to more than one show a week, maybe two or three shows a week. Join the club, help us out. Twittertv slash club Twittercom. You can pay more if you wish. You don't have to. Seven bucks a month, it's like a couple of cups of coffee. We want to make it affordable, but it really does make a difference. Twittertv slash club Twitter. I thank you in advance for your support. We want to keep doing what we're doing, and now we're going to pause for an insertion. That sounds bad doesn't it.

02:05:57
It's not going to hurt.

02:05:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It won't hurt, that won't do. It's going to be fine. Close your eyes and think of England.

02:06:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I hope you have enjoyed the insertion. We now continue with Macbreak Weekly. Let me say that again. We now continue with Windows Weekly and Paul Therat's back of the book, his tip of the week. By the way, I love the painting behind you. Thank you for that, oh yeah.

02:06:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's yeah. Italy took two years, we're getting there.

02:06:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I think you got tired of all of the edits that we're showing up in the club Twitter Discord stuff behind you. It was actually funny. That's not why, but we, you know, we finally found a guy, we got some.

02:06:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we got, so now we've been buying stuff to hang up. It's a nice thing Is that a local artist yeah it is, and it's actually signed in the back as well.

02:06:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, it's really cool.

02:06:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Kind of a bunch of Mexico City landmarks.

02:06:54 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, you should have that. You should support the local arts.

02:06:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so there's a bunch of art fair stuff here every weekend and I'm so jealous, so jealous. All right, so this has nothing to do with Windows, but I felt compelled to write this up and mentioned it. Say, if you use Twitter, you got to look at this right away. It's important. Um, they enabled a feature that allows anyone to call you audio or video if you're on Twitter and, uh, turn that off.

02:07:24 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh my God, it is my advice. That's a nightmare, it's nuts it's only on the mobile app. I don't want to say it's a private thing, it's only on the mobile app and I really want to tell you.

02:07:35 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you guys just don't understand. It's enabled by default. Like I said for everybody, the app doesn't tell you that this happened, it just happened.

02:07:42 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Have you gotten calls?

02:07:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I turned it off immediately. Um, it's so the deal. And also, anyone who calls you can find out your IP address so they can learn basically where you are, oh my God.

02:07:51
That's creepy. There's some yeah, some huge problems here. So, uh, the Twitter user interface is Byzantine, to say the least, but, uh, it'd be easier reading this. But basically go into your profile settings and support settings and privacy settings, and privacy and safety direct messages You'll see enable audio and video calling is enabled. My advice turn that thing off. But if you want to leave it on for some reason, at least change the permission level to, uh, everyone, which is unbelievable to people you follow or people in your address book or whatever you feel comfortable with, right? Um, there's also a switch for enhanced call privacy that will turn off the ability of these people to see your IP address, which, inexplicably, is on by default, which is crazy.

02:08:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Is this? In privacy and safety, Did you said yeah, I just I'm sorry.

02:08:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, I know I'm sorry, I know, no, no, no, it's okay, I'm sorry. Yeah, so you know, profile picture, uh, privacy, uh, settings and privacy settings and support settings and privacy, yeah, privacy and safety, yeah. And then there'll be a direct messages.

02:08:55 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Okay, oh, change this Cause. That's not just direct messages, that's phone calls, oh this is phone call.

02:09:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
These are calls, audio and video calls.

02:09:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, oh my God, oh, fortunately it's no one on mine. I must have, I must have preemptive way back when in the day.

02:09:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I guess this is a feature that people who paid for Twitter already had, and they just flip the switch for everybody.

02:09:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So now, you all can be bugged by Elon personally.

02:09:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, if you're looking for right-wing conspiracy theories but you want them in audio format, you know, leave it on, that will. That will help. Yeah, yeah, bring them right here. Wow, yeah, um, this is not really a tip per se, but you know, by my book it's over 1100 pages long. I'm updating it for moment five. I've kind of outlined the order of things. You can read about that if you want Um some, I think maybe end of the year last year, I think it was I switched from word because I couldn't stand the constant interruptions you stupid little message banner things that they will not let you turn off, and in particular, if you're not using a one drive for storing your documents by default, et cetera, et cetera.

02:09:59
So I returned to kind of an old favorite of mine which is type poro, which is a terrific markdown. Yeah, I love it too. But you know I've heard from a bunch of people are like yeah, I get it that using this thing it's kind of esoteric, it's not really what I'm looking for. Um, during this trip, probably the second half of this trip, I started looking at different office, mostly work. I'm mostly a writer, so I'd look at the word stuff, but kind of um alternatives and kind of a classic one.

02:10:24
This is the Libra office writer, which is the word processing component of Libra office to free office we. It's actually pretty terrific and it's a yeah, it's a. It's a blast from the past in many ways because, like word back in the day or office, you know and by back in the day I literally mean 20 years ago you could as a power user go in and customize every little toolbar, remove and add buttons and arrange them exactly the way you want, save that configuration and then when you reinstalled word or office or whatever on a different computer, you could bring it all back and have your custom configuration returned. You can still do that in office today. I suspect very few people do that right, but this is a feature of Libra offices. So I kind of stripped it down and, did you know, made all my settings changes and then kind of ensured that they worked across computers because you can save it's actually a folder in this case, but you just copy a folder over and every little change you've made, every little auto correct change, every little, whatever the text rendering performance. The compatibility is fantastic.

02:11:23
I have a very hard line of requirement that when I paste into word press, which is where most of my stuff goes. It has to go without any additional codes or you know formatting issues. Libra office is perfect. This is good as word. So 100% free. Doesn't bug you about where you want to save your files. I'm not saying you know, I am saying. I said I'm saying you should take a look at it.

02:11:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And then, just real quick, that word has passed you to the point where you have to use something else.

02:11:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, I I just been smacked in the face too many times. I just can't stand it, and this app works great. Actually, I'm frankly, I'm kind of shocked. I shouldn't be.

02:11:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I, I think there really focuses on word processing.

02:12:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, what a thought. I know what a crazy idea.

02:12:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm like, paul, is that you put the history of Libra office in here? Yeah, Well, those links, those are all articles I wrote like 20 years ago. Okay, yeah.

02:12:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that was the stuff I was talking about earlier. I looked this up.

02:12:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

02:12:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My articles about this is still out there.

02:12:18 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah.

02:12:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can find an article I wrote in 1999 about Sun Microsystems buying star, whatever they were called and crazy and I used to. I used to interview those guys. I used to be in briefings with those guys. Like every time a new star office come out, I would have a. They would brief me on it and it was a thing, what a thought.

02:12:36 - Leo Laporte (Host)
22 years later, we're still talking about this.

02:12:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, and it makes no sense.

02:12:40 - Leo Laporte (Host)
It became open office and now it's forked into Libra office, which I think is quite good. I agree with you, yeah.

02:12:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Cause Oracle bought Sun and did not seem particularly interested in keeping up to date with open officeorg, and so the group, the main group of developers, split off into Libra office, well, into a, a document, like an organization to work on ODF and you know all the open document stuff. And uh, I don't know. I feel like when it comes to something like this, like this app or apps like this, that there are only two reactions. One is from people like oh, it's been good for 20 years, or really, it's like this thing, this is the thing, and it's like it's not just the thing, it's actually it's it's very good I for a long time people would call the radio show and say, oh, you know, my office is from 2011 or whatever.

02:13:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I would frequently recommend open office and then later Libra office because it's free and it works on windows or works on Mac, so obviously works on Linux, you know that's good.

02:13:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I could be wrong. This is my opinion, but I suspect for a lot of people who are in the Microsoft 365 space not companies necessarily, but maybe some companies, but people it's the storage right. You're paying a hundred bucks a year for storage for six people, terabyte of storage, right. And then you get office right, you get full office, you get it on the phones, you get it on your tablets, you get it everywhere. But it's like you know, you come for the storage and you and because it's there, like yeah, of course I'm going to use this thing and I would have happily used Word for the rest of my life. I actually really like Microsoft Word. There is no way and I mean no, even like hacker kind of way to turn this crap off, and it makes me crazy. So I kind of like the fact that this thing hasn't happened to me once and it that it works great, you know kind of a flashback to the way software used to be.

02:14:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not very much.

02:14:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, yeah, I don't want to go down this path too deeply, but something that played a role in this is I'm reading Stephen Stafsie's book and I think I mentioned this, but I'm reading it in backwards order, so the first section I read was the Windows 8 era. The section was Windows 7. But he ran office for several years and so over the course of this trip I've been reading the history of this stuff in reverse order, and it is in reading about the office team's approach to the product and how they were meeting customer needs and yada, yada, yada, where I was reminded of how. That is not what they do today and I think it would be fascinating in some ways to talk to him about that if he could.

02:15:09
He might have constraints on what he can say about what they're doing today, but I can assure you that, whatever we think of this man because I certainly have my opinions there was a much more credible approach to serving the customer need in that era For all the Microsoft. You know they did terrible things. I get it. But then we see today and when I look at this app, I think this is what it used to be like. Yeah.

02:15:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You would love Linux.

02:15:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Leo, I'm going to say to you what I say to everyone when this comes up Baby steps. Everything you just said you could say about Linux. I don't like when people use my own words against me. I first experimented with Linux when I was in Scottsdale, Arizona, working in a computer lab. So this would have been 96, 7 or so on floppy and you would download it because they had a high speed for the day connection.

02:16:08
I would download these images and you would write them. So I'd sit there with a stack of floppies and feed them in one by one to the computer and then later I would go home and install them one by one. And it was to remember, slack was all text based. And yeah, no, I always. I didn't write this in my article, but I always thought you know what happens when there is an operating system like Linux and a desktop, or rather an office productivity suite like office, that is completely free and does that 10 to 20% that you, everyone, needs. And the problem is the 10 to 20% thing is different for everybody. That's maybe part of why it never took off, but obviously this stuff has been in place for a long time. It's I don't know, I can't explain it, but yeah, you never know. 4%, just saying you know it's a big change in any months. And then just real quick, these aren't super as important but Vilvaldi new release.

02:17:07
Vilvaldi's claim to fame is super customizations crazy. But they have a lot of their not counting extensions as we know them from Chrome, but rather their additional functionality they typically implement as what they call web panels, which are these things that come out from the sidebar, so they have native features to the browser that it's called panels. But then they have web panels and you can add any websites or apps you want to there, and I guess until this, most recently, they didn't actually support extensions. So now those web panels support extensions, right? So obviously people have things that they use to make the web better for them and they will work in the panels now. So that's something to look at. If you want to spend I don't know next 17 years of your life customizing a browser, vilvaldi is your option and Leo, I think I sent this to you.

02:17:50
Finally, but I remember a couple of weeks ago I could not remember the name of this, but any text is a solution, is any, I think it's any textio, any, sorry, any type. I must type that any type, not any text, and it's basically notion. But it can run completely offline and against your own storage. If you want, you can pay them for storage, I guess, and they give you a gigabyte, but it's free for now and who knows, we'll see what goes. It's gorgeous app. I have no idea how this thing works. It is freaking me out. I used it to import my three or four biggest notion.

02:18:25 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh, you can import notion there is.

02:18:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yeah. Yeah, it's a very complicated process. You can import from a lot of things and I can see it there, but I don't. It doesn't follow exactly. Even though it looks like almost identically to notion, it doesn't exactly follow the same paradigm. It's almost like this object oriented language is getting in the way a little bit. You know, like they, they have very strict rules about how things are organized, et cetera, et cetera. But I think for technical people a little bit like ARC browser, this is one of those things. For certain people, they're going to look at this and go, yes, this is what I wanted.

02:19:03
And one of the few things I don't like about notion is that it's technically possible but literally impossible to use it offline. So you'll get on the plane, you don't have access to the internet, you open notion and you can't do anything and that makes it. That's one of a, two or three things where I'm like I just can't use it for everything. I still work with documents in the file system like an old guy and all that kind of stuff, and part of it is because I can't rely on this thing being offline and any type, not any text, I'm sorry. Any type is basically notion, but offline and for whatever it's worth. There's something called a city in which people have probably heard of as well. That would be another one to look at. That one works offline. I don't know as much about it and I think I just demonstrated I know very little about this one as well, but for people who are maybe seeking a little bit, how much is this? It's free right now. It's completely open source and free.

02:19:57
That could change, but right now it's free.

02:19:59 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow, very interesting. I will try this.

02:20:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's very interesting In use. It is very difficult. It looks like you look at this. You think, oh yeah, no, I get this thing. No, you don't, but you don't. I mean, I mean it You'll have, you'll struggle with it, but because it's just a different. No, one of the problems with notion is that it's this hierarchical view of all your content in the side. It's like the tree view from Windows Explorer back a million years ago and you go in, and you go in, and you go in and it makes it a little hard to use and I, this thing doesn't do that, but it's hard for other reasons, I don't know.

02:20:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
I'm I'm downloading it right now. I you know what. I'm curious what you think you know I would like I put all our travel stuff in notion and that's a problem. I mean it's nice because I have it on my phone.

02:20:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I have it on my desktop. It is a problem because you'll be offline, but if I'm offline it's not very useful. So one thing you should know is that there's no a sense of an account, right, you type in a name, it gives you a pass key phrase which is several words. You save it to some secure. I wonder I have something, something whatever, and if you use that name or whatever word, you used words in combination with that thing. You that you'll sync, you know, and that's it's sort of the way.

02:21:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Oh no, yeah, that's how brave works. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.

02:21:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:21:35 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So you can be your開 Apps gift or whatever.

02:21:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah wet every time, right? Yeah, I just feel that for you, right now that you're limp, but it's like nghh.

02:21:41
I got a lot of pictures of another third handedRriquez personas you know if you send those folks or they send them over, you know you're a backer, you know, would like to actually purchase one, even though you live in a state like Michaela told me back there, you know, let's można, grazi мы. Well, that's a little bit kissing technical people. Listen to this. I think there is going to be some percentage of you were like, yeah, this is exactly what I wanted and there's going to be a lot of.

02:22:08 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You were like I don't know what the hell this thing is. I'm opening it right now the everything app. Okay, yeah, the everything, the everything. You know, I think didn't Elon want to be the everything app because he didn't trademark it. Everything, everything, everything, everything. Yeah, any, that was any type, at any type, not any taxes. Yes, any typeio. You said yes and I will get back to you. Yeah, yeah, you know, the first time I really pounded on Linux.

02:22:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
it was to get a replay TV working in Canada. Oh boy, they were like the new competitors.

02:22:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, they were great, so you could actually get it.

02:22:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You could like tell that into it or something by the way put out a business because they had commercial skip and the and then and the advertisers and the networks and the local TV channels suit them out of existence. Yeah, that was it.

02:23:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
How did you get into it? What was the interface? We we would DNS intercept the calls by the review. Yeah, I had an emulator of the replay TV or that. I could then low with Canadian guide data and that would the replay TV. Thought it was talking to the headquarters but it was. It was talking to my local Linux machine and it would load the guide data.

02:23:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I, my mother, had a web TV briefly, and I'm telling you she could not do what you just described. It was not a thing.

02:23:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was hard work to make that and keep it running, but it was very popular while it worked, because there's just that automation to okay, these are the shows I want to record this week. You don't think about it again, it just works, oh boy.

02:23:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's amazing.

02:23:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just a great day back in the day.

02:23:50 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Wow. Well, richard, it is your turn.

02:23:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Let's talk about run, as so a show I recorded at NDC in London a few weeks back I did a show live there but picked up a few interviews with Scott Helm was a great security guy out of the UK, a lot of fun. And we would talk about TLS not the sexiest subject in the world Like this. You know that little lock icon on people's browsers. But this was really from the system in perspective, because TLS has gone through many iterations and if you're old enough, you've been doing this long enough. You will remember that before TLS it was this SSL secure sockets layer. But in both the cases of SSL two and three there was eventually an in the wild breach for it and it was a panic to get your servers upgraded to the later version. And so eventually we switched over to TLS.

02:24:42
And even TLS now has gone through several versions one, one point two and now one point three and the older versions have lighter weight encryption which has the possibility of being breached, even if there's no record that it actually has, and so there's been a big push on switching to TLS one point three, because it's it's not deprecated, it's the latest version. Then the moves pretty simple, like it's not a big deal to actually get that switch. You just have to pay attention for an hour or so to get through the process to get it done. The hook, of course, was that actually TLS three is really efficient. It works well with HTTP two, and so in many cases encrypted sites actually run faster just by switching to one point three. So it's it's well worth making the move.

02:25:26
And that ended up being the whole conversation was just like look, you want to stay ahead of this? Take a look, or do an inventory. Take a look around. You'll find you've got a few old sites that were on older defaults and for a little bit of your time you can switch them up. You'll get a little performance boost and the chances of you being exploited in between are low. So you know, let less problems. It was a. It was geeky conversation and toys about it, but it was one that was just like oh yeah, you know, on that long list of inexpensive things I can do to improve security, this is one Very nice.

02:26:03 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Now you're not going to do a dark brown liquor.

02:26:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, the one I picked out is actually pretty dark. Oh okay, okay, deep, deep, deep, deep. I mean I've been a couple, a couple of weeks in Mexico. You start, you know, you're starting to drink the good stuff too here. Oh yeah, I mean, I'm also reminded I've talked a little bit about cognac and so forth Like it's very funny to realize that they always. Alcohol is just not that different, right, right, you take some product, some food stuff that produces sugars. You use those sugars to convert them, to be converted into alcohol with some kind of yeast, some kind of bacteria that will make it into alcohol. You then distill that.

02:26:46 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's the bifurcation, though, because there are stuff that is not distilled, like beers. Pulque in Mexico is incredible precursor to tequila and mezcal, yeah, but no, they concentrate the alcohols with distillation.

02:27:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You can make any alcohol out of almost anything.

02:27:04 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Sure.

02:27:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's a crazy thing. Yeah, called the bathtub gin. But then you all have this tendency, as you're improving your product, to age in oak. All of these alcohols start out clear pretty much across the board, and then you stick them in wood and it adds flavors that we like Strangely. And so when you really dig into tequila, I mean we do call this the brown liquor segment. You know, then this liquor does become brown because of wood, no other reason. It's interesting, they might be able to get more color, but it's just wood.

02:27:38 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So the only difference, really the source of the sugar.

02:27:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Source of the sugar. There's a few little things on how you get there, plus, as I am prone to over-reading on all of these things. And I'm in HelaSco right now, right, but Porto Vardes in HelaSco, which is one of the tequila growing regions, and in fact the town of Tequila is four hours drive from there. Oh right, it may seem like so much, but I'm married and I'd like to stay. I was going to say, but I propose that I wanted to do a day of research. He goes with a four hour drive.

02:28:12 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can't drive right now.

02:28:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's not it's more than a day You've got to. Admittedly, my research has largely been through a large array of bottles and plenty of reading they. The more common name for an agave derived spirit is mezcal. All tequilas are mezcals, but not all mezcals are tequila. There are chicos, there are versions of mezcals that have things in them other than distillate of agave, but tequila, by definition, is a class of mezcal made from blue agave that's grown in five regions of Mexico, helasco being one of the mezcosan, narita, which is right beside HelaSco, guanajuato and parts of Temolipus. So there's all this. So this western side they. It's an area that is relatively dry. It definitely is tropical, so it has a wet, dry season.

02:29:10
Most growing is done at altitude. The altitude matters the agave plant prefers. It's a big succulent plant. It is not related to the pineapple at all. Any other plant is more closely related to Amaryllis and Lilies. It's a big succulent. It prefers high altitude, takes a long time to grow and relatively expensive to grow.

02:29:32
In traditional means these were largely wildly grown and freely planted and then harvested. Today they are very carefully crafted. They are grown like most modern agriculture, with nursery seedlings. So although, because it's a this Yucca plant, they actually do bulb splitting. So they they will take a very productive set of a bulb and then they will split it and mature it that way, so it can be. It basically stays in the seedlings thing for almost 18 months before it's put into the ground and then carefully tended and grown. They have a number of blights that risk them. It typically takes five years to mature agave plants, sometimes as much as 10, depends on the region. The lower down valley regions tend to build stronger flavors with a higher, have lighter taste, so it depends on where they're from and of the whole plant you cut it all the way to just the central bulb called the pina, which is the only part that's actually used to make tequila.

02:30:31
They is, course, filled with carbohydrates, complex, complex sugar, so they need to be broken down. Traditionally this is done by baking the penis. So you you put them in an oven and in fact if you've ever tasted a smoky mezcal, much like a smoky or PD whiskey, it's what they dry it with. That puts the smoke into it. So if they dry it over wood spoke, you will get that smoky flavor, and so a smoky mezcal suddenly come that way to tequila. Normally it's not smoking. It doesn't have to have smoke in as many ways to go about dry it.

02:31:02
And that even is a sort of a traditional method to bake them first to break the sugars down, and then they would crush them. And for a few hundred years they've been crushed, primarily mechanically, using a thing called a tohona, which is a long pole. Well, it's a big shallow bowl on the ground. It has a post in the middle of it with a long pole sticking out of it, and it has a big stone wheel attached to it, and typically animals, or sometimes a tractor, will drive around in a circle, turning this wheel, smashing the penis. That has some Cleanliness issues like it's tricky to do that. Well, but that's how. That's a traditional method. You can't do this with a mill, but over crushing the penis brings out quite bit of flavors, and so the modern technique now they you shred the penis and then put them through what's called an extraction diffuser, where it's mixed with warm water and a series of stages that gradually extracts as much sugar from them as possible, and then they'll further cook that liquid, which still has long-chain sugars in it, in a Hydralizer, basically a big boiler, to break the sugars down into gillicose and fructose, the stuff that yeast can ferment successfully.

02:32:22
Traditional tequila is Lambic fermented, that is to say they don't directly introduce yeast to it at all. It's left in open containers in the ambient east in the air's are what inoculated. This can take up to a week or ten days to produce what is known as a must-over, much like a wart. It also has risks of being contaminated with things that aren't good. So that's tricky to, and in modern methods they will use either a protein called inoculum, which actually accelerates fermentation, or or straight up your brewers reached the same way that we make whiskey, and that way you can get it done in about a day in a much more sealed and reliable Conditions with tempered controls. Either way, you end up with a wart. They call it must-do 69% alcohol, depending on the east in action.

02:33:07 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We, I don't we. When we were in Wahaka with Paul, with Mike Elgin, on his day of the dead Experiences, we went to a mezcal distillery and I had the great pleasure of beating up the smoked up. There's Lisa Pina. They had already been fired and actually know that I guess they were about to go into the fire. And there's the pit. And this is an old-school mezcal distillery at the ta'ana. Yeah, yeah, this is the wheel where they smush it and and it smells wonderful in the vat because there's a lot of sugars in there, but then it's quite sweet, yeah. And then it ferments for a while and there's you could tell it's fermentin, can't you? And Whoo, bubble, bubble, toil in trouble. It's ugly. But that's the pure mezcal. Before this, before a barreling or anything. You can see how clear it is. Coming out of it is still the still, yeah, yeah and this distillation is not that strange.

02:34:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's similar to bourbon and many others. They do a column still, which they call shredding, and and then it's, and then a pot still there, which they call rectification, also a common term. So a two-stage distillation. There were versions of tequila, just so you're off the first stage, but the second stage has become the norm to be considered. Tequila typically comes out about 65% alcohol, just super normal For any clear distillate.

02:34:30
There are a few folks that are spending a triple distillation, but they complain about it removing more of the flavors of the agave, and the agave have a stronger flavor than barley does typically, and so you know there's a, there's an incentive to stay towards that. And If you take that product and you bought, you cut it with water to take it down to 40%, stick it in a bottle. That's Blanco, that is silver tequila. Yeah, and again you find white dog from the Americans is bourbon before it's gone into barrels. And the same with things like a famous Grouse has a version called snowcrouse, which is also on barreled Scottish whiskey, though it's not that unusual, right, but the fact they do a big portion of tequila stops there. It's because there is a significant flavor that comes from agave that people appreciated. So you can stop there and it's less expensive to do that. You know that that process of running through shredding and rectification Takes a day. So you know, in the modern industrial process you can turn agave peanuts into Bottleable stuff in just two or three days.

02:35:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah we were one of these ancient distilleries where it's you know, traditional style and I should say tequila is just one kind of mezcal. It's all roughly the same right.

02:35:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, they're all well, mostly agave. They do different things yeah.

02:35:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, tequila is not smoky.

02:35:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, Most, that's the biggest difference.

02:35:52 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, cuz they yeah.

02:35:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I, you will be happy to know and I certainly was delighted when read some of the more detailed documentation that they do use a Chilled filtration step to remove flocculants well, you don't want flocculants.

02:36:05 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, god.

02:36:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like you, like the new Linux. It's like a cancer.

02:36:13 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Those, those cloudy oils. Right, you want your tequila to stay clear, and so they use a chill filtration step on. A lot of modern tequila is chill filter. But if you're gonna get past Blanco now you talk about different aging steps, and so Reposado, aka rested, is two months in oak barrels, typically North American oaks, nothing special about them there. They're gonna be pretty straight up. If you put it for 12 months in an oak barrel you can call it aged or not.

02:36:41
There are arguments about the sizes of barrels. There are limits that can't be small. In 200 liters With Reposado there have been barrels as big as 20,000 liters still considered reposado barrel, with the Anjo barrels at, say, a down around 600. There are extra on Joes which are aged past three years is considered unusually long, and it's because of the conditions. This is the same situation of the American bourbon is in, where it's a. The temperature ranges are too wide, it gets too warm, and so it's very easy to lose alcohol and or water, depending on your humidity and temperature levels, and so the longer you spend the barrel it often can go quite bitter, and so a 20 year aged tequila is a very unusual tequila. It means they've done something different in the aging process They've kept it in a colder climb. More temperature control it can happen. You're also seeing the same experimentation that's gone on in other whiskeys happening at Tequila now, where they are in fact aging and used American bourbon cask and sherry cask.

02:37:40
So, as strange as you want to go, what got me on to the idea of okay, I can talk about tequila, here is a proper brown liquor was a particular addition called Harnito's black barrel. Harnito is a distillery in the tequila region again, it would be a bar for our drive from here. They do an 18 month age process. So first they make an Anjo, so they do 12 months in American oak Virgin oak, actually it's.

02:38:06
Originally the barrel is initially used for Reposado and after the use of Reposado for a year. Then it's used for Anjo at a year at a time. Then they take it out and they rebarrel it for four months in what they call a Chard oak barrel. So I think it's barrels that they've fired hard to charcoal, take certain bitter compounds out to add a different flavor to it, and then two months in lightly toasted oak. So that's much more the American oak style Pre before it's used by bourbon. So a three different barrelings for 18 months total. The good news is inexpensive. I found this at total wine for $30, 40% alcohol, so it's been cut properly with water. There are cast strength tequila's if you're into that sort of thing. This is not one of them if you're suicidal.

02:38:50
Okay, so it'll, it'll wake you up. You know it's good cast drink this will be in the 60s but also that they tend not to lose much alcohol in the aging process, so you can get some yeah, so at the high level just because they run at section low humidity, so they're often losing water From the barrels more than they're losing alcohol.

02:39:10
So in order of age, it's crystallino and yeah, oh, and then reposado, or reposado is the recipe two months in barrels, and it's at least, at least a year, and then they're extra. And so the black barrel has been a real award winner, because it's the in a ho, but then they've done additional barreling with it.

02:39:29 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You can see how dark. Yeah, it's beautiful.

02:39:31 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, one of the flavors that I find from some tequila so you don't find from other grains that I really appreciate is that pepper note, just a real punchy pepper up front rather than spicy and but other than that drinks really smoothly, like it. This was a comfortable couple of ounces. I wouldn't even put ice in this, doesn't need it. It's a beautiful bottle too. I love it. Yeah, and for $30 you kind of can't go wrong like it's amazing.

02:39:58 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, yeah. Like everything in Mexico, it's affordably priced.

02:40:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Hmm.

02:40:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah except for electronics.

02:40:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Mexico is not as inexpensive as it used to be. You know, everybody's been affected. Inflation here, yeah.

02:40:13 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, I know I. I saw how much it was cost to get a massage. It used to be pennies, pennies on the dollar. I tells you that's Richard Campbell. He's in PV, porta Viarda. Well, he'll be back you where you're gonna be next week somewhere fun.

02:40:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Redmond, I'll be in bed. I'm on the Microsoft campus because If he's on it, please okay.

02:40:32 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Mp summit Richard's run as radiocom. That's where you'll find his podcasts, both run as radio and dotnet rocks, and it's easier to find his podcast. And it is to find him, I gotta tell you they don't move around so much. Run as radiocom Paul Therat. The field guide to Windows 11 Now includes moment five. How did you do that?

02:40:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, we're getting there, it's not. It's not that, we're sorry, it's not quite son. Oh, and four and a half. Okay, I started updating four and three quarters.

02:41:02 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yeah, the beauty of it when you buy it at lean pub comm as you get the updates. It's part of it. And now, what did you say? 1100 pages.

02:41:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yep, no, it's a Tell me.

02:41:15 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You use 28 point font and some point.

02:41:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They can't bind that thing. You know, like it's just bind it. I can't buy. I reach that. I think I've reached.

02:41:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That point is well beyond that it's. It's a problem.

02:41:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You'll find that told Windows office.

02:41:31 - Leo Laporte (Host)
Yes, that's right. Somebody told me that that's was it you. That's why.

02:41:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, they refuse to make the book shorter. Talked about that last night.

02:41:41 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That's lean pub comm. You can also get Windows everywhere his book about the history of Windows via its programming languages, of course. His blog is the rot comm. Th? U r r? O. Double good calm, and when you get there you'll find a lot of great content. But there is a secret tip I'll give you, if you subscribe to the premium version, just beyond that paywall, even more great stuff, including the original chapters of Windows everywhere. Well worth it. The rot calm. Paul, you're gonna stay in Mexico City or you coming home to now, next week.

02:42:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We come home on Tuesday.

02:42:19 - Leo Laporte (Host)
So I, as I take off for Mexico for two weeks, and actually my co-sgt Will be in here next Wednesday and the Wednesday after I will just think of you as I'm flying down.

02:42:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I'll be in a fatal position on the floor, crying because I'm not here anymore, but it'll be okay.

02:42:39 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You love it down there when it you're gonna have to just at some point. I saw you got your cards. I'm watching your your videos on YouTube. By the way, that's another great tip Eternal spring right? Is that what it's called? Yeah, that's right. Search youtubecom at internal spring eternal spring and find out about their whole journey Moving down there, paul and Stephanie getting their residencies and all that. So you don't yet have the ability to stay there forever, though right, you have to know we could stay here for three years now.

02:43:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
If we had After that, it's permanent.

02:43:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You don't have a dog. Your kids are out of the house we have cats, kids I still not sorted, I don't know.

02:43:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
My neighbor literally asked us this question. I said you know we get family and friends. He said, paul, everyone has family and friends. It's hard, I still. How does this make you special? I understand you should move here.

02:43:33 - Leo Laporte (Host)
You know, I got man. I don't know if I could do it. I would, but I have family and friends too, mostly a wife, but that's a story another day. Paul and Richard will be back next week. Yeah Well, we're gonna visit next week. Paul and Richard will be back next week, 11 am Pacific on a Wednesday, 2 pm Eastern time, and because we are headed into summertime this Sunday, it is now eight, 1800, 1800 UTC. If you want to watch us live show does not celebrate daylight saving.

02:44:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, that great this is.

02:44:16 - Leo Laporte (Host)
That was last year was the last time it's bad, like it's.

02:44:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you know, For me it's a little bad because it makes the time difference two hours oh yeah, see, for us there's no time difference in the Cabo.

02:44:28 - Leo Laporte (Host)
We are in our own time zone. Yeah, what was I saying? Oh, yeah, you can watch YouTube comm slash twit. That's where we put. We, as soon as the show starts, will start a live stream. As soon as it ends, will stop it. Club members get to watch what's going on in between. But but for everybody else YouTube comm slash twit you can, of course, download shows after the fact at twittv slash ww for Windows weekly. There's a Windows weekly YouTube channel for the videos that's the edited, you know. Post videos and then Subscribe in your favorite podcast client audio or video. You can get it every week, the minutes available. Join the club and you'll have your very own ad-free versions as well. Twittv slash. Click to it on behalf of Paul and Richard. I'm Leo Laporte. Thanks for joining us. I'll see you in three weeks. He'll be back next three weeks. Three weeks, three weeks. I wait on Windows weekly. Bye, bye