Windows Weekly 873 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 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Coming up on Windows Weekly. I, micah Sargent, join Paul Therot and Richard Campbell and we kick off the show talking about the AI reorg at Microsoft. That's right, there's a new Microsoft AI organization within the company that reports directly to Satya Nadella. Then a very short section on what's new in Windows by way of Windows 10, what in the world? Then Microsoft 365, including some AI updates and some lack of AI updates, depending on what programs you are using. We also talk about Apple maybe partnering with Google on AI and where Microsoft plays into all of that Upcoming Surface event from Microsoft. And, of course, we've got Xbox Corner and the Tips and Picks of the Week as well. All of that coming up on Windows Weekly. Stay tuned.
00:51
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02:00
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03:10
Get started today with 1000 records cleaned for free at melissacom. That's melissacom. It's time for Windows Weekly. I am Micah Sargent, subbing in for Leo Laporte, who is currently on vacation, getting a tan and whatnot. But I am here to join the two veteran Windows washers of the world. It is first Paul Therrat joining us from Macungy. Is it lower Macungy, is it not? That's a conversation for not enough.
03:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We don't have enough time for this conversation.
03:46 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Exactly. How are you doing, Paul?
03:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am doing well, thank you how are you?
03:51 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I am doing well. Thank you for asking. Also, first see how we did that. Joining us from Madeira Park, bc, canada. It's Richard Campbell. Hello Richard.
04:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Hey, micah, I'm going to be great to be home for a change, because it won't be true next week.
04:06 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You're always all over the place it's an interesting life you lead.
04:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's funny how the audience has gotten into this. Instead of getting guests from all over the world, just send the hosts everywhere.
04:19 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
One of these days I'm going to have to get your tips on travel, because as much as you travel, I'm sure you've got plenty of how you make it happen where it's not a slog and a terrible time, on planes and whatnot.
04:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Maybe you just do that. Richard is like a hedgehog and he just rolls up into a little ball and then the plane lands and unrolls himself.
04:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I miss most flights. I fall asleep as we pull off the gate. I wake up as the tires touch the ground.
04:47 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I actually thought about that for my next flight.
04:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Making that happen, yeah Well you're see, micah, you're normally sized, so I think flying for you is not as hard as it would be, for me at least, and maybe for Richard. I just I we got, we got a dog five years ago. It was really big animal, really gangly, and I could tell very quickly like this dog is never comfortable, right, you could just tell she'd have to move around all the time, she could never be comfortable, and I was like I get it. This is how I am on a plane. You know I am six, three normal sitting, you know, yeah.
05:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You're taller than you look, yeah, I'm six three, so my legs end up being oh, you're really, you go it. Yeah, you have the problem, that's that's no, that's okay.
05:27 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I'm not a common thing again. Anytime I meet somebody in person, wow, you're taller than I thought you were and I thought what does that say about my presentation? It must be very small. Anyway, let's do this show, let's talk about windows, because there was kind of a big announcement Satya Nadella put forth and it is time to do a shakeup, reorganization at Microsoft. No one's throwing any CEOs to the curb or anything like that. It's not that level of shakeup, but certainly some of the structuring.
06:01
Well, I guess, yeah, then again tell us about it.
06:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yeah, I don't know what to think. Honestly, I'm. I think there's more story here than we know so far, because, when I look at this, this, this reorganization I should just say, for at a high level, involves Microsoft creating what they called a new organization which is kind of an interesting word called Microsoft AI that reports directly to Satya Nadella. It is led by former co-founders of an AI company called Inflection, and one of whom is the, I guess, the CEO of that business or whatever we're going to call this organization, the other one of whom is the other co-founders and former chief scientist. These are not, these are not people from Microsoft.
06:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I think this is an acquisition disguise of a reorg.
06:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so right, maybe a mini version of what could have happened with open AI, where Sam Altman had been deposed and everyone said we're leaving and Microsoft said, well, welcome to Microsoft. And that might have happened. Yeah, yeah, that could be. I just find it interesting that it isn't more of a mix of Microsoft people and these new people.
07:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I think I just think this is early days that they've managed to basically recruit out the leadership of Inflection, who are also drivers behind DeepMind, which I think is a fairly look open. Ai was the gutting of Google Brain. This feels like the gutting of DeepMind, and DeepMind well, we always think of it as the Go company. They're the guys who cracked Go. That's not the important thing they're working on. The important thing is Alpha Fold. They've largely solved protein folding for the medical industry and have open source it, by the way, and so we're in the midst of a medical transformation from the ability of the software to do protein folding calculations that, basically, were impossible any other way, to the point where we even have trouble validating what they've done.
08:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, but I mean okay, but I'm just I'm trying to understand how this works within Microsoft you know it's a very yeah. I think it was just a lucky grab.
08:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You got two incredible rock stars that want to come on board. Take them.
08:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, but so? But obviously there is a you know some set of employees and executives at Microsoft who are already were already leading the AI charge there. I just find this interesting. I'm curious how this kind of plays out. Plus, I feel like the description of who goes where is somewhat incomplete at this time. So, for example, everybody well, most people, hopefully probably know that Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott was, you know, personally responsible for bringing together open AI and Microsoft and starting that relationship. He's been rewarded for that by being named executive vice president of AI, in addition to his job, as you know, just being CTO generally of Microsoft, and has been, and it still is apparently responsible for Microsoft's overall AI strategy. But that itself creates a very strange dynamic, because the person who is directly responsible for Microsoft's AI strategy is not in charge of their AI business and the person who is does not report to him. He reports directly to Sacha Nadella, as is Kevin Scott. Well, no, I met the guy from Deep End. I apologize, suleiman, mustafa Suleiman. So you've got this. It's interesting.
09:57
Right Now we already know about things like co-pilot and where co-pilot is in Bing and Edge and elsewhere in Microsoft 365 and Windows, etc. That team is moving into Microsoft AI and will report to that new person. There is a Gen AI team that was separate that will also move into that business and report to Mr Suleiman. No word about Windows. Nothing there, although they mentioned that Rajesh Ja, who's responsible for the experiences and devices division or business or whatever we want to call that, which is overseas Microsoft 365 and Windows, he's continuing in his position and will partner closely with this new team on co-pilot for Microsoft 365. No word on Windows, although you know again, or as we've said in the past, I should say you know, co-pilot on Windows is just another front end for co-pilot that has some Windows specific stuff, but that's not particularly interesting. But I find it interesting that they did not mention Windows.
11:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I think you're hitting on the big part here, paul, that this isn't about front ends. This is about back ends. Yes, and so open AI is a back end, that Azure is wrapping, and now this could easily be a totally different back end. This could be derived from the defined generative models. Or yeah, or right I mean I look at the relationship they have with Mistral now as well as another back end option.
11:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I think, look, that kind of diversification is smart, right. I think a lot of people you could be all in on this be very excited for Microsoft's direction with AI, but you still should look at this open AI thing and say, wow, this is a big, a lot of eggs in one basket.
11:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you know the future. The company is getting more baskets now and they're keeping them separate from each other, which I think is probably right.
11:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and I should. I should note too they were very specific that we're considering this open AI relationship, which Nadella described as the most strategic and important partnership that Microsoft has. Right, I mean duh, but it's. It's always nice to have that spelled out. I don't know what to make of this.
12:14
I even, when Microsoft first announced what was then called Bing chat about a year ago February, I think it was February, january whenever that was, there was some description. I think it was. Probably it does better, I would say it, but there was some description that you know we have this open AI chat, gpt technology. That's kind of the foundation, but we're we're, you know, microsoft described like they were McDonald's, like they're adding some secret sauce on top of it, and that secret sauce included such things as a Bing search results for the internet stuff, and then they wouldn't talk about the rest of it. Right, okay, but we can debate whether pure open AI, chat, gpt or Microsoft's kind of flavor of it is better, whatever that means, et cetera, et cetera, more accurate, whatever it is. I guess we could just have that discussion, but I it was, I don't know. I, I I've always been a little nervous about that relationship with open AI and I wonder if this doesn't, isn't the? It's not the start, but a big step toward trying to diversify and make sure that nothing happens?
13:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it is, and I think there's lots of reasons for them to do it, yeah, not least of which is that they're being heavily scrutinized for their relationship with open AI. Yes, and so one of the ways you make it less threatening is say we have a lot of relationships. That's right, but even if it did end up being restricted, they have alternatives. Yeah, there you go.
13:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So I I mean, you know, we'll see. I, I I feel like there's always this weird thing that can happen with but not just Microsoft any big company, where one day there's a couple of people on stage and the next day things happen, and the next event there's different people on stage. You know. So, as soon as build in May, we might see some of these people maybe for the first time at a Microsoft event, representing Microsoft right, and and then, six months from then, we'll see. We'll see if it's the same. I'm, I'm very curious about this and you know they don't. They're not presenting it as a reorg. It's a reorg, right. I mean very much as a reorg when you especially when you consider that AI is the future of Microsoft explicitly stated, and now we have a new Microsoft AI business, that's organization is the call it.
14:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The opening line on the PR piece is they he's joining to to lead co-pilot, and I would argue that's a great way to solve a very intractable problem, which is that a year ago he told all these different product teams go make a co-pilot. Well, now they have, and it needs to be rationalized and and bringing in a effectively an external actor to do that. Rationalization is one way to defeat the political problem that is rationalized?
14:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and it's. It may be a way to trim back on some of the the co-pilot fat.
15:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
you know right, there's too much you know plenty of that is repetitive, like the good news about what he requested to do is everybody experimented and you're going to find some great experiments, but you're also going to find a lot of derivative work. And so you know, nobody wants 200 co-pilots even if 200 exists, really you want one and they keep making gestures like there's going to be one, while it can be doing to announce more. So right, maybe stuff is the guy that can actually line all this up.
15:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I we were going to find out. Well, I mean, there have been other acquisitions that have led to big executives coming in and not lasting a long time, necessarily, or not Sometimes people, yeah, people get put.
15:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I look at poor Miguel de Acasa and I have nothing. You know, miguel's crying all the way to bank. He's fine. But one of the first missions when he joined Microsoft was to rationalize ZAML and that was almost an impossible task, which I was going to say I did. They succeeded that. I well, they did, but I don't think it was Miguel in the end. But I would argue the rationalization of ZAML is Maui yeah.
16:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know. I you're probably right. It's just that, unfortunately, maui is, in the words of a fish, called one of the smallest freaking province of Microsoft, and you know.
16:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know. That wasn't going to change the fact that the it wasn't going to be better fragmented, so they have at least, at least got everybody working together more or less, so it's not as big as important to play. But I mean the other. The other side of this is this is also very much at gate C and playbook Keep shuffling the cards. Do not let empires be built, okay.
16:55 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Interesting. Yeah, sure, I mean, I, I, I, I 100% agree Some of the co-pilot creep needs to be reined in. I, there's a you don't have to follow this industry at all to kind of already have a feeling of almost AI fatigue, just this quickly, right, and that maybe this stuff needs to be corralled a little bit and and simplified and we'll see. But yeah, I do feel like we were on a path to a new co-pilot every week for 2024. And maybe that's too much.
17:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It is too much. It is already too many. Yeah, it is too much, and so whatever strategy you've got to take to find a way to make it easier for all of us to consume the thing we want to consume, I mean, what would be worse than to be typing into the wrong co-pilot? I don't know why I left, that's actually hilarious, but I think that's how the term the Terminator movie start that way. Exactly it. Yeah, yep, I meant the world. I meant my Minecraft world, not the whole world.
18:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like when you send an email to the wrong people and they're like you know, this is work, right, bob? I don't know what those sexy pictures were all about, but maybe you didn't mean to send it out to the group. Yeah, you could, yeah, you could do some real damage. Hmm, I mean, I, I can't help but think about the windows end of this for me, and I guess there is no windows end. I mean, we're still in that same holding pattern where the industry is trying to sell us on MPUs but there is nothing that takes advantage of MPUs that anybody cares about, right? In fact, there's almost nothing at all that takes advantage of it anyway, and we still haven't seen anything that you know changes that I mean, there's been some rumors around, blah, blah, blah, whatever happening later this year, but if all this does is make background blur and paint or photos slightly faster than it is now, that's not going to be good enough, right? Because actually that stuff works fine right now.
18:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the MPUs that work right now are in your phones. There's nothing happening in operating systems, near as I can tell, even on the max side, really.
19:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yeah, I mean. So, uh, I don't think that we've written about this on Theratcom, but there was a I think I don't know if it was German or someone else had a rumor or a report from sources inside, uh, apple, and we're going to talk about some Apple AI stuff later actually, but, um, about how this would impact like iOS in the future, I'd spread something like it knows a little bit about, like the um these room, like you know, we're here's the list of how we're going to use generative AI in the product and and there's nothing surprising Like it all makes sense. It's all very logical. It's the type of thing we see elsewhere. If you can look at what maybe Google is doing on the pixels or Samsung is doing on the latest phones, we're like, yeah, no, I mean, this makes sense.
19:49
But, then you look at Windows and you're like, um, so what are we doing?
19:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like what's the point? I still think Windows runs alongside every other product in Microsoft now, which is people still struggle with. It's not the flagship product anymore, Azure is, and so the Windows team has to get their own acting Well even on the client.
20:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's not that flagship product right. It's kind of it's Microsoft 365. I mean, I think, by virtue of the fact that this thing runs everywhere, not just desktop, but also mobile and the web, um and actually we'll touch on this later too, but it's, it's a way to reach more customers with co-pilot than is possible with Windows, right, even if most of them are Windows users. Um, the fact that you can get these capabilities in the web, mobile, mac, whatever it might be, um you know, that's a bigger, that's just a bigger audience.
20:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's, it's, you know, it's not that I want to drive the digression. But here let me drive the digression. Okay, if I had the firepower inside of the Windows team? This is where you build the ecosystem for all LLM interfaces. Right, this is your opportunity to reach out to all the product stacks. To say, windows will be your gateway. Here's how you hook up to it so that all these products can work together, and then you can easily port that to the Mac and other platforms. But first you build an ecosystem which, shockingly, is something Microsoft's actually good at. I just don't know that you. You know the. When I think about the firepower team for ecosystems inside of Microsoft, right now it's M365. Yep, oh, totally.
21:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and and and and, by the way, I mean new app development at Microsoft 365 such as it is, is a web based right. We're not talking about big new Microsoft uh, I'm sorry, our Windows apps right Native Windows.
21:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're talking about back end. Yeah, the innovations in the back end. The front end is power platform and other web derived heterogeneous client solutions.
21:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah. So, uh, let's do that. Anyway, I'd like to see an org chart. I'd like to see Microsoft be more transparent about who, what, where and how. I mean, we used to have this you could go to, you could look up senior leadership team at Microsoftcom and you get a black and white photos of the team and who they were and what they did, and you know and all that stuff, and that day is just over. You know, we don't really get that level of understanding and, and I know part of it is probably just because it changes so much.
22:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I would also say I don't gain me a tech giant that does that anymore.
22:17 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I think it's only um the information, the website, they, you, you have to pay for it. They are like the only folks out there I see you are keeping track of this kind of stuff and have quite literally just that set up.
22:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think this is tied to uh. There have been no changes in the way that the SEC or whatever requires these companies to report earnings, or whatever it might be, but all of them collectively have delivered less and less information over the years, with no repercussions whatsoever.
22:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Since the SEC has essentially allowed these companies to obfuscate their incomes and structures, they've no longer had declared members, that's right, yeah, so I think this might be tied to that.
22:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's a and even even this, or I pointed this out when I first said this you know, a Microsoft AI organization. What does that mean? You know Microsoft has three primary business units right and a set of whole under one of those.
23:09
Is it a fourth business unit? Does it have a big? Because there is no direct financial accounting of any kind? Does it just sort of exist on the outside? You can make a case that, uh, I in fact I bet Bill Gates would have made this case that there's. You don't have an AI division, everything's AI. Yeah.
23:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, and I think you're exactly right, I bet you this ends up being a wholly owned subsidiary, which up until now, has been acquisitions. They didn't want to rack Interesting Right. Linkedin, github like I, and Bethesda, like those are all being run as wholly owned subsidiaries. I wonder if this is the first time they're going to make one. You know why they would do this.
23:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
One of the reasons Well, regular I mean some anti-trust issues. I think that's part of it.
23:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, but also now you have an excuse for everybody who wants to work on AI instead of Microsoft go apply to the other group. Oh, there you go. I mean they do the same dynamic in the dev side between the dev div of Microsoft and GitHub, and folks float between them to some degree. Yeah, I wonder if this is like a chance to okay everybody's working on it. Now we need to calm things down. If you really care that much about AI, go apply to the wholly owned art.
24:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, I mean I look they're big and small versions of this throughout the history of Microsoft. Vermeer was handled this way a million years ago when they bought that, the company that makes front page, a guy from Microsoft, chris, but I can't think of his name but left a position on the office team to become the essentially the CEO of Vermeer, which was owned by Microsoft. You know, and, like you said, github, mojang, thomas. Demke well not really a Zen Zenimax, I guess.
24:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the game. The game is a little bit different, where you know certainly what happened with GitHub, with that freedman coming in and then now Thomas Demke, like you are seeing Microsoft people move there and all up and down the org.
24:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You know that should be the point right, that they go in and out, and that's fine. But this is, I would say, is by far the biggest because, like I said, Microsoft has made the explicit case this is the future of the company, and then they've kind of backed that up by AI and everything. Right, yeah.
25:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I think it's. I think they're creating an innovation center to deal with certain things. I'm excited.
25:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, it's like an AI, Microsoft research kind of a thing.
25:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I wonder, and the deep mind thing is what hit me the hardest, just because what they're working on, I would argue, is one of the very first examples of a machine learning model exceeding human capability in a massive way. Our ability to manipulate proteins with traditional software has been minor. We've barely been able to do it. And what I pulled off in 2022 at the CISP was profoundly important.
25:47 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It sounds like Paul might disagree. I actually agree with no.
25:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, I just don't To me, this is another planet, like I don't this.
25:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know that this is not a Microsoft world to me, but yeah, and this has got nothing to do with chat, gpt and LLM and so forth. This is a different caliber of generative AI and I mean I care about it because too much of these technologies are steeped in science fiction. You know Arthur C Clark didn't write about folding proteins. There's no MCU for folding proteins. This is astonishingly important and machine learning models.
26:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am sure one of those superheroes is based on folding proteins. That's got to be a thing.
26:29 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, what can you do? I can, I see. I mean, I mean, you know, oh dear, that's great. I mean, I mean, Okay, any. Anything else for AI reorg before we take a break.
26:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, that's the big one. I feel like I've been saying this a lot lately, but you know, the Microsoft security breach, for example. I just feel like there's more to the story and I think Richard it sounds like he completely agrees and maybe even knows more about it or has deeper suspicions than I guess. But I think this is. But I wanted to highlight that because I think I don't think we've heard the last of this. I think this becomes more. You know, I think this becomes more, I guess, if that makes sense, or it unravels.
27:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It could go either way, like.
27:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Joe.
27:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Chorosh when he came into the AI group at Microsoft and a lovely man and brilliant, but I think he slammed against the monolith that is Microsoft and couldn't move things the way he wanted to and eventually moved on and that might go that way and I hope it doesn't.
27:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It could also be like we call it. Oh boy, quantum computing. Right 3, 5, 10, whatever. Years ago there was a big Microsoft made a huge breakthrough in quantum computing. It was the focus of Ignite, I think it was, or Build, whatever the conference was.
27:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They did a piece on it, but they opened the show with it right. Yeah, they're very excited about it. Remember that was the one that was going to do the NASA thing that fell apart and whatever.
28:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But oh yeah.
28:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was also when everybody was having a run on quantum computing. But they've had a new set of walls?
28:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, there's definitely some. Yeah, there's some competitive stuff there. But the feeling was, okay, we're going to start hearing about quantum computing every year and I got to tell you they'd be pretty silent on that one.
28:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Whatever year that was, they smashed into hard bits. Yeah, you know, but you hit on an interesting point. Maybe what they're doing here is next gen, beyond what open AI has been able to do Interesting. So this is creating an You're not going to replace us.
28:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're going to allow animation. We're going to replace you. I guess we'll see. Yeah, I feel like open AI Microsoft ends badly and that's been kind of a background fear for me Because organizationally they're in conflict, yeah, fundamentally. Fundamentally trying to solve that problem.
28:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We will outgrow our need for you. Yeah, and I think and Sacha's already been caught unprepared once around open AI I don't think he's going to let it happen again. I suspect, after that little incident where we saw dark Sacha for the first time, that he went and went with his senior folks and said how are we going to make sure this never happened again, besides putting an observer on the board, which he did with open AI? But in general, and one of what obviously is, let's make sure we're not dependent on them.
29:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What was that observer's name again, grima Wormtongue Was that? In his Sing. He's not going to believe what they're saying about you, Sacha.
29:35 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yes. Well, let's ponder the Grima Wormtongue of it all Coming up. We'll be talking about Windows. Surprise, surprise, here on Windows Weekly in just a moment. Breathe in, breathe out and we are back. It is time to talk about what's going on with Windows specifically. We're at Microsoft, of course, joined us always by Paul Therrott and Richard Campbell. I am subbing in for Leo Laporte, who will be back with you all next week. What's going on in the Windows?
30:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
world, I am surprised to say there hasn't been much in the way of insider builds, although now I see it today.
30:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is that? See, this is the new thing. Wait till the show starts man.
30:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Just as the show starts Be past it, so we'll get to that one moment.
30:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We need to move to Thursdays.
30:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We should move to Thursdays. I barely remember this, but the show started on Thursdays. I think we moved to Wednesdays about 217 years ago. I can't remember. It was a long time ago. We, as a Windows community have a problem letting things go right. So everyone knows that Windows 10 was never going to be updated, and my God, is that the new sticking point, just like Windows 10 was going to be the last version of Windows. Remember that little chestnut People? Just man, they have a hard time with this stuff. Let's call it aspirational.
31:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, right until the mass just as it was.
31:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think making bold pronouncements is pretty much always a mistake. Maybe is the issue here. But yeah, windows 10 is getting new features right, so that's happening, didn't you say, yeah, but you said that was my favorite quote from a. It was a listener, reader or I guess a viewer was at a microsite just finished. Barry Joe and I had done something post keynote, got off the stage, talked to this group of people and this guy out of the blue said but you said, oh my, google would never buy YouTube. And he kind of went on. But I stopped listening because I'm like didn't Google buy YouTube, like 20 years ago? I'm like, what are you talking about? I don't remember that. I had to go look it up and I did. I guess I speculated at one point 22 years ago, whenever this was, that Google would never buy YouTube, and then they did. So I'm always wrong now, oh my gosh, and I don't. You know like people have that kind of memory like about the weirdest little details, like you see, it's like you say something, it kind of just crawls in there in the brain or whatever tied to this.
32:14
I have my own little insanity around the way that Microsoft updates Windows these days, right, because it is both illogical, sporadic and irrational and unpredictable and not transparent and blah, blah, blah, whatever. And what I mean by that is we have this insider program I went on at length last week about this, I think and they have different tiers, right? And you, you know, logically, you introduce a feature in Canary and then move it down to dev and then move it to beta and then, when it moved into release preview, you could say you know what? I think this feature might make it into the next version of Windows, but we don't have next versions of Windows and those things don't happen. And new features are introduced all over that scale, and sometimes new features are just introduced and stable and they've never been tested and it's hard to know what's going on. So now we have a new wrinkle, that that combines both the things I just discussed the Windows 10 thing, the inability of people to let go, and my insanity over how they introduce new features in Windows, because there's a new feature coming to Windows 10 that they've never tested in Windows 11. And you know it's coming to Windows 11, because it's so obvious. But it's just weird how they do things now, right? So sometime in the past two months, months, whatever it was.
33:28
If you boot into your Windows 11 computer, you might have noticed what looks like a live tile in the middle bottom of the screen. For some reason. That is the weather. It's the weather. They probably call it a card now because we can't use the term tile anymore. You don't want to give people PTSD, and why it looks different than everything else on the screen is kind of unclear. But there it is, and so that just appeared, and now they're testing new sports, traffic and finance cards on the lock screen as well, but in Windows 10, not in what I love it.
34:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I still have Windows 10 machines, so I'm going to get to see this right. I just don't although they make this a constantly to upgrade them to 11. But now I'm now I've got a reason to hold out, because more bad sources of news on my lock screen really excites me.
34:16 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So there's still a lot of 10 users out there. Is that the reason?
34:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh yes, there are at least 500 million of them. I mean, there's probably more.
34:24 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, mostly on 10, not 11.
34:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right but yeah especially in the business side of things.
34:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This figure is probably not accurate anymore, but for quite a while it was. It was kind of a two thirds. One third split between sportive versions of Windows were two thirds of Windows 10. I think that's finally starting to come down. But yeah, the majority of people running Windows today were running Windows 10. So why are they doing more?
34:48 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
testing then on Windows 10? That's kind of surprising.
34:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, because, remember, they weren't going to introduce the two features.
34:54 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
There was a right right.
34:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Once they introduced the end of support date, they kind of said Look, we're, we're going to just keep supporting this version of Windows 10 now and we're not going to add any new for that one. They actually came out and said publicly like this wasn't just a random guy saying it, microsoft, this was policy, yeah.
35:10 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And I look they're playing chicken with their users. This happens a lot.
35:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It is a game. If there are no winners, it's a weird game. It's a. They should win. There's only winners, yeah, yeah.
35:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And the cash cow is still the enterprise and if the right enterprise customer says oh, we'll be staying on 10.
35:30 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
We'll be staying on 10. We expect sports traffic and finance cars on the lock screen. Be ashamed of something happened to all this business you're getting.
35:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, it is that kind of a relationship it's. It's. I feel like we always find out in the end why things happen, but they're always confusing at the time. One of the things that changed between Windows 10 and 11 is that Microsoft stopped syncing your desktop wallpaper when you signed in with a Microsoft account or a corporate account, and on the face of things, that doesn't make a lot of sense that that was probably the number one request for sync. You know that as a user, when you go to a new device, you have this familiar experience because there's your wallpaper and your color scheme and all that stuff. And then what I learned years later was that there was a big corporate customer who switched between Dell and PCs and went to HP, and when they synced everyone up, they had Dell wallpapers and HP called Microsoft and said turn that off.
36:33
Yeah, good, yeah I mean, but you know, so that's you know, interactively.
36:37
You can kind of look at something and say, okay, I don't agree with it necessarily, but I, okay, that makes sense. Maybe that's a, that's kind of a blunt way of, you know, fixing a problem, I guess. I mean, it seems like you could put a little policy there or something, but whatever, okay, but yeah. So Windows 10 is is now an ongoing concern again, and I think it's tied to co-pilot. I think the. I think Microsoft really did for 10 seconds and 10 not to update Windows 10 ever again. But then they realized, hey, wait a minute, we got to get co-pilot out in the world and if we tie it to Windows 11 version, whatever, no one's going to upgrade. And oh, by the way, what about Windows 10? We got to get it over there too, and that was the end of that policy.
37:16
I think they just said we're just gonna, we're gonna get this out to everybody and that's how we're gonna do it. So now we're testing minor features, but but you know not to dredge up, speaking of PTSD, windows phone, but I mean Windows our live tiles made sense on a phone. This at a glance thing made sense. We were always looking at our phone. We can find out things without having to dive in apps. That made sense. They brought live tiles to Windows and it never made sense, right? We don't use our PCs that same way, and putting these types of things on a lock screen is very similar. You know, I don't think that people walk up to their computer, wake it up, look at the lock screen and go yeah, no, I don't need to use it anymore. I know what the weather is, you know, I just don't. I just don't see the value in this personally.
38:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I love the ADD effect. You know that started back at win a. It's like click me, no, click me. Look, I'm twitching the most, click me. Well, this is like but yes, there was.
38:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
there was a lot of bumping and bobbing and that kind of stuff, animations and whatever. But, you know, then they move it to a back, to a start menu, and now we have live tiles on an interface that's never on screen all the time and it's like guys, you know, think about it. No, what are you going to do? I want to know what the weather is. So I'm going to do Windows key plus L to lock the computer, look at the lock screen and say now I know what the weather is, and then I'm going to type in my pinter password. However I sign in. You know, I just don't this is. I don't know what this is. Is it was a college intern week at Microsoft last week or so? I have no idea.
38:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was my first thought when I saw. This is like well, the intern got loose, they wouldn't let him work on 11. So they let him work on 10.
38:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so at the time I wrote these notes, which was about 10 minutes ago, there were no new builds, but now there are and there was a you know they're doing things on Wednesdays, like I said. So canary and dev, again on the same build, and there are two changes and one of them has to do with low vision users, so that's just a temporary setback. There was a pointer indicator accessibility setting for low vision users that they've disabled temporarily because it's too buggy. And then there's some in the same vein. In some ways, there are assistive, there are Bluetooth based assistive hearing device capabilities that are now available. So I guess we've gone from one accessibility feature to the other. And then some other bugs related to shutdown, carbonation, etc. Etc. In other words, the problems that have dog windows ever since there's been something called windows. I'm pretty sure that the phrase hot bagging exists solely because windows is a thing. But yeah, so I guess we're still dealing with that kind of stuff and that's it.
40:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
This is.
40:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
that's the quickest windows section I think we've had in a while, no, we will dive in and out of windows a little bit as we go forward.
40:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But yeah, that's it really is the case, we move into Thursday. If they're going to keep releasing on Wednesday, richard's like listen Thursday.
40:17 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It'll have to be before my show, because I've got tech news weekly on Thursdays already.
40:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can. You can move to Wednesday. Micah will swap.
40:26 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
We can swap. We can swap.
40:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't. I have I mentioned how much I hate change.
40:32 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You don't have to mention it, paul, you exude.
40:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Why have I actually have a tattoo? Yeah, I was gonna say might as well. It's your aura.
40:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Most people change with a circle.
40:44 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, yours is just like your aura just says don't change.
40:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know how I feel about this. The it. The it saying is change is good, you go first.
40:55 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, exactly I like that. Well then, let's move into Microsoft 365. Given that, yeah, that's the new hotness anyway.
41:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's. Well, it is the. Yeah, it's the. I mean it's like our windows is technically within Microsoft 365. Now right.
41:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's a great point, right, that right Windows had to grow, join another group to be relatively yeah yeah.
41:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean eventually they'll just hand off windows to the part of the company that makes like furbies or whatever little you know. What do you call those things? Plush mallows or whatever.
41:33 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh my gosh, he has squish mallows.
41:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Kevin knew it'll be. It'll be the intern center Right, the intern Right. It's like you're only going to be here three months, so we're going to make you work on windows.
41:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This isn't the Microsoft campus. This is the college campus. Shut up. You're working on windows. Okay, everybody has to pay their dues.
41:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You will deploy something into windows, yeah right, the bar is low.
42:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So one of the big controversies, I guess, is Microsoft moved from kind of perpetual office to the subscriptions with Office 365 and now Microsoft 365 is that there are obviously customers that don't want any part of that, and so Microsoft has. They've been pretty consistent about this. We're going to have this, what they call the perpetual versions of offices, the versions that you buy outright. You own them. They you know they have a support life cycle. You can install them on multiple computers. In recent years they've made them less desirable, but not by not updating them with new features over time, although I you know some people might argue that's a benefit.
42:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think some customers demanded that yeah, stop moving things.
42:47 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, because they change yeah because they change.
42:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, I get it when you're an IT guy. Every one of those changes it's turned into support tickets.
42:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right.
42:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, right, so it's just. It's money, right. You know what your average cost per ticket is, and so you know how many you get in. It's like you just cost me 20 grand.
43:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I feel it, but I hear you, I mean, you're right, I'm not disagreeing, but on the other hand, I one of the things that Microsoft did that sort of infamously was this was probably post office 95, office 2000, no 97, maybe whatever year it was was they?
43:23
They work to make all the toolbars on each office app be as familiar or similar as possible, the idea being that somehow, if you are a like a word user, you could pick up Excel and because most of the toolbars were the same, you'd like I can use this product, you know. And what they really found and there was no, there was no actual user testing or any research that really it just sounded right, you know. And what we found is that you know people adapt, you know you can use this kind of complicated UI and Windows and then use an Android phone or an iPhone or an iPad or something, and they don't work in a similar way at all and you just you just it's fine, you know, it just works fine. So I don't know what the real training costs are moving between office 2019 or whatever it is in office 2024, which is the next version, or whatever.
44:09
I don't know. Are they really that?
44:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know, I really don't know, but and you use that support ticket number to figure out how much you're going to spend on trading? Yeah, right.
44:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So, mike, look, whatever the reason Microsoft's customers have demanded, these perpetual things persist, and they do right. And so I think we've all suspiciously wondered when you know, when are they going to cut it off? You know it's coming, you know this is the last one, but they've sort of sold it along like 2019 came and went, 20 with 2021 is the current version they announced this past week. There will be a 2024 right and there will in fact be a long term servicing channel version of office 2024. So how long is long now? Yeah, five minutes. No, I don't, I think. Then I think they're both.
44:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think they're both five years, okay, well, they used to be 10 years and in Dev now you can't get anything over three yeah.
45:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I five. Yep, yeah, I mean it's. It's welcome to 2024. I don't know. So the big change this year or for this version of the product is that Microsoft now has co pilot right. So they have these co pilot capabilities is not so much that they're adding new features every single month although yes they are but rather that those, a lot of those new features are now part of co pilot, which is this added subscription thing. And in the case of co pilot pro and co pilot for Microsoft 365, you get these capabilities in the Microsoft desktop apps, web apps, probably mobile apps. Eventually, that you just you don't get if you don't pay for that subscription, regardless of the fact you might have a Microsoft 365 subscription. So these perpetual versions of the product will not support that.
45:51
You couldn't just buy office 2024 and then pay for a co pilot pro subscription, let's say, and get the additional functionality from co pilot. Now I know what some people are thinking. They're smiling and saying good, I don't want co pilot, I love that there's a version of office that doesn't have co pilot. And actually I got to be honest. I hear you because in the same way that office I use word primarily like word on Windows kind of badgers you with these little pop up banners if you don't use one drive or save things in a certain way, or blah, blah, blah. Whatever Office on the Mac, michael you may have seen, this has it will. Actually may not, because you probably don't pay for it, I guess. But if you pay for co pilot, co pilot appears in the middle of the screen every time you start a document. You can't turn this off.
46:36 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's frustrating.
46:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You've got to be kidding me. So the is every. I've configured this app how I want it. It doesn't go to some template thing. It goes right into a new document I can save to the desktop. Does not badger me about that. But it does put up a co pilot thing right in the middle of the screen that I have to look and I think you can hit escape probably and get rid of it.
46:56 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
But you can not, there is right, you can't. There is no feature.
47:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's no way to check yeah all modal dialogues are evil, right Like the bottom.
47:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think part of it is honestly just the newness of it. I think they wanted to rush it out, get it out there and that as people provide feedback to make it.
47:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, we'll call it Dell wallpaper, right Like that's the Dell wallpaper.
47:18 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
There's a argument to be made to. People will complain about discoverability of new features in the opposite sense that you know you, you didn't know they were there and you go find them. So, yeah, hopefully, like you're saying, paul, it's a temporary thing where eventually, well, but it'll- get.
47:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So you've just described a problem that's already been solved, which is, yes, I. I respect Microsoft's, microsoft's desire and need to allow people to discover this feature, but it also should have a button that says don't ever show me this again.
47:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I discovered it and I have found it wanting.
47:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I got it. Yes, I see what you're doing.
47:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Thank you, don't ever show me that again no, they don't do it.
47:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
and they don't do it on Windows either.
48:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you can always tell when the assistive men's in the room and they're announcing a new feature is the very first question I've ever been in men's mouth. How do I turn it off?
48:07 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
What happens if you ask it how do I make you go away?
48:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, what I?
48:13 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
do, is I ask?
48:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Google and, as it turns out, there is no way to turn this off. So, and I've looked through the UI and you know, on the flip side, by the way just word Windows or Mac there is a very prominent co-pilot button that appears now, and in Windows at least there's a pane that can appear. I like to turn off the ribbon, right, but there's something called I think it's called the quick access toolbar, from that mistaken and you can add your little buttons to it. There's no way to add the co-pilot button to that right. So I would want to turn off the ribbon, basically hide the ribbon, but I would put the co-pilot button up there because actually sometimes I would like to use it.
48:47 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's a good place for it.
48:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, and they don't offer that. And again, I think these are tied to the same bit of immaturity. It's just this thing just arrived. They wanted to get it out quickly. They haven't maybe thought, thought through all the use cases and hopefully both those things will occur. I want to add it here and I want to take it away here. You know, I want this thing to work the way I want it to work, which I guess was what I spent an hour on last week, so I'll move on Anywho. So Office Perpetual 2024, you're not getting AI.
49:19
I'd sort of mentioned this in passing, but I guess this is oh, this is the web. That's why I'm sorry. So Microsoft 365 has supported a co-pilot right for some time. If you have those apps desktop apps, windows or Mac, I guess, because I have co-pilot pro you also get those capabilities. But now they they work on the web apps as well. So, in other words, you're paying for a Microsoft 365 subscription of any kind or not. Actually right, because you can use those for free. No, you have to, but you have to have one to get the other subscription. Sorry, I'm forgetting things there, but anyway, the point is, you can now access the co-pilot capabilities in the primary Office web apps, as we used to call them, if you have a co-pilot pro subscription as well, right? So in the past you did a co-pilot for Microsoft 365, I guess, but now it also works with co-pilot pro.
50:09
And if that doesn't make sense, what I just said, that's because you speak English and I don't know what to tell you. It's confusing. But this is that matrix of features, things I was talking about. Right, it's hard enough in an app like Word, which is available in multiple places, right? Mobile, different mobile apps, different iPad apps and Word, I'm sorry. Windows and Mac and the web, and and one day, randomly, they add some fee. I use the transcription example two, three years ago, added it to the web version. That thing didn't come to Windows for at least two years, you know, and you can create a matrix of like here are all the features in this one product, where do they appear? And this is an example of that with AI and co-pilot, because I believe that the web apps for Microsoft 365 supported co-pilot If you paid for co-pilot for Microsoft 365, and now they support co-pilot pro as well. So you can check that little box off in the matrix and maybe you sunk my battleship, I don't know.
51:12
It's complicated, right, and on the free side, this one's confusing because they didn't really announce it, although a guy who works on the team did on Twitter or X or whatever. We're calling it the century Microsoft when they end. I think it was when they released co-pilot pro made a slider available in co-pilot for chat GPT4 and chat GPT4 turbo. Now that chat GPT4 turbo is available for non-PAN users. So if you just go to co-pilotmicrosoftcom or co-pilot Windows 10 presumably, or co-pilot in the edge sidebar presumably I have to say presumably, because no one's ever announced these things and there's no way to actually know, but there is, they're just using chat GPT4 turbo by default. So it's a little. It's more up to date, which is important for certain types of queries, as I think of them are prompts or whatever.
52:13
This guy said there would be a switch, which I actually haven't. Well, I see, because I'm, you know, paying for it, right, but I don't believe people have seen yet and then I guess it only appears in certain cases. You know they have they don't use this term but personalities or whatever, where it can be creative or balanced or precise, right, if you want it balanced. I think it's balanced and creative, or probably GPT4 turbo and precise as GPT4 or something like that or you know, it will switch between the models based on various conditions and then sometimes probably switch back to one of the other, based on usage maybe. But I think the primary advantage of GPT4 for Microsoft, turbo rather for Microsoft, is that it's less expensive to run. So I think that was a big part of moving it down to the non paying customers.
53:08 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, that's interesting.
53:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and you're also seeing they're getting some new computational efficiencies. So, yeah, I think they they're. You hit it on the head. It's all a cost control thing, like I've already collected your money now, so I want to spend as little as I can on that while still staying ahead. So it's that balancing act.
53:27 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
There was talk early on to about complaints, I remember, surrounding chat GPT4 becoming lazy, which at the time was an suggestion that it was not answering prompts as often, sometimes just outright saying that it wouldn't answer them and that turbo was supposed to help correct that. So it certainly gives it gives a better understanding of why maybe they chose that name along with, as you're saying that, the performance, yeah, nature, of chat GPT4 turbo.
53:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'll see that sometimes you type in something and says yeah, I'm sorry, we can't do that. I'm like yeah, you can.
54:03 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Totally can, you can. Let's try it again.
54:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I believe in you.
54:07 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
There you go.
54:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's gonna be all right, you can do it.
54:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I assume, richard, this has been a big thing in your world and I have to say I have not been. I have not been pushed hard on something like this in the enterprise side of things in a long time. I have to go back to my days at Windows IT Pro, but I Google hasn't reached out to me multiple times about this Amazon did recently where there's this other battleground occurring in the EU around big tech aside from all the stuff we know about, like Apple app stores and the gatekeeper stuff and all that and it really is just a long, a long term issue in Europe around data sovereignty and sovereignty, sovereign, sovereign, sovereignty, sovereignty, thank you. And sovereignty. There you go, there we go I don't understand English either and data privacy and all that kind of stuff. And you know these cloud vendors over the years of work to make sure that people can keep their data within their region or within their country, yada, yada.
55:09
So the new, the new battle is well, it's two. Twofold is the licensing practice by which Microsoft makes it difficult, allegedly, to move customers between different clouds. Right, they want to keep you in Azure, and a big part of this is thing called egress fees. The idea is that I'm ready to leave, or at least I want to leave partially. I want to move some of my data to one of the other clouds and I think, really because of regulatory pressure, google and AWS over time agreed to end those fees right and they've been calling on Microsoft very vocally to do the same, and Microsoft has resisted. Actually, google, amazon resisted for a while. To my memory serves, google did this in January, aws did it about 10 seconds ago, so Microsoft just did it too.
55:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So it was. That's the rough timing, and it's because they were headed towards legislation and they didn't want them. They were gonna yes, they were going to be slapped down. Yep, it's not just moving between clouds, it's also what they're calling repatriation.
56:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so it's people in other ways. Yeah, make sure the data comes out of a particular locale and gets back to.
56:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm going to put it. I want to move it back on prem because it's costing me too much in the cloud, which may be, you know, your fault or their fault. Like there's a whole debate here of this lift and shift that happened over the pandemic, which has now turned into a bunch of monthly bills that continue to grow, and so CFOs are sort of pushing back and and one of the solutions, rather than rearchitecting your software to be more efficient in the cloud, is your ship at home. But then you look at the egress fees and say this is a barrier to that and it's like, well, that's just wrong, let's see if we can get legislation to knock it out, and which clearly was happening. So you know it's not a bad. The there is no excuse for egress fees, really, Right, 100%?
56:52
Yeah, predatory I mean, I think, unless you're going to put in ingress fees, at least make it cost to go in cost to go out.
57:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's interesting in recipes. Yeah, yeah, this is the. Everyone else is doing it. Defense is pretty common in big tech.
57:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think that explains AppStorphy's actually but it's it also explains charging for luggage right, Like this had fuel surcharges and like it's a kind of pseudo monopolistic practice. Well, everybody else is doing it, so we get to do it too.
57:25 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I mean that was also. There was an economist who argued that it wasn't any lack of profit on big tech's side that resulted in the mass layoffs that took place, but more it was shaped by that herd mentality that you saw one company do it, so you did it too. And it was two things One, that herd mentality, but also then it brought those companies up in terms of the investors who were going ooh, you're costing less money. So this is great.
57:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, it's a cheap way to get a share a stock bump at a time when you didn't have a lot new product to talk about.
58:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I mean, I can't prove the second half of it, but the notion that these guys were not suffering from a profit or revenue perspective is easily proven.
58:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One banner quarter after another One banner quarter, just one right after the other, yep.
58:23 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah Well, let's take another quick pause as we come back with AI next. All right, we are back with Windows Weekly, the show where we talk to of the foremost Windows veterans. It is Paul Therot, richard Campbell and I joined the two of them, micah Sargent, as we continue on in the coverage of what's Up at Microsoft and, well, the surrounding companies as well, because I believe we start by talking about Apple.
59:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, well, you know I'm trying to shift the focus of the show a little bit to Apple, so this is just testing the waters, oh no everybody just stopped listening.
59:08
No, there's a Microsoft angle to this, but honestly, there's also a common sense angle to this, because I think it was Mark Irman broke the story of. The New York Times has since, I guess, confirmed it. But Apple looked at partnering with OpenAI and now are very deep in the talks with Google to partner with them to bring Gemini to the iPhone and use that to power a lot of their generative AI experiences that will come in that next version of iOS this fall. So we're probably gonna learn about whatever they do at WWDC whenever that is in June, and then they'll start releasing new products and the new versions of the OS in the fall.
59:46
And look, I'm not. I don't exactly have two feet in the Apple ecosystem, but you don't have to be paying too much attention to hear the outrage and shock that these two companies, which allegedly hate each other, would partner on this kind of a thing. And I had a different reaction to this, which was I don't think you guys are paying attention. You know Apple has actually a very rich history of partnering for this kind of a product launch. They have a rich history of getting rid of their partners as quickly as possible too. But this. We've seen this story before, right? I mean this notion that you would partner with like an enemy, essentially right, that they would betray you, you know, and then you would sue them and or sue somebody.
01:00:37
I guess this public bitterness you know, you talk about destroying each other and then there's a reunion at the end is what happened with Apple and Microsoft, when Microsoft helped Apple create part of the original Mac UI and then created Windows and they sued and blah, blah, blah, whatever. And then Apple needed Microsoft to get in 1997 to keep making office and help rescue the company financially and blah. We all know that story, right. But the other thing is with Google and Apple specifically. I don't think people understand the dynamic there. I mean, everyone remembers the Steve Jobs, I'm gonna go thermonuclear war and destroy this company because Android is a stolen product, right. But I hope we also remember that they never actually sued Google, right? I mean, no, they went after, you know, samsung, which is a crappy company that absolutely copied the design of various iPhones and that went its way down.
01:01:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean they didn't work out well either, you know.
01:01:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But they didn't get much out of it. But the real story there is that we're all the posturing For all of the. We made Apple Maps and now we're coming after search kind of stuff that we hear about. These guys have the most lucrative partnership in big tech today. Right, google paid Apple as much as 20 something billion dollars last year to keep search on the iPhone as the default, and that's only 36% of the revenues that they made from it. This is a partnership that benefits both of them. Of course these two guys are gonna partner on this. It's the same exact thing.
01:02:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and Tim Cook's no dummy Somebody's done the numbers on what they were gonna have to build on infrastructure to run their own large language models, and he went let's let Google do that.
01:02:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
How does that sound? Well?
01:02:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
and Google needs the data, which is why the search thing works too, like it's all mutually beneficial.
01:02:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, there are other ways that Apple and Google kind of co-benefit each other that are a little less direct. You know, for example, I mentioned in passing this App Store thing. You know, google, apple arbitrarily does whatever they do with the App Store, but then Google just copies them like 100% and it gives them both that well, the other guy's doing it. You know, like they, I mean they must be doing it for a reason. I, you know it's the same reason we're doing it. You know, like I think there's a strategy there and, yes, I mean Apple, you know, promotes itself on privacy and blah, blah, blah, whatever, but the fact remains. I mean Google searches the default and it's not staying on your iPhone, sorry, like, unless you're, I'm sorry, it's just not, like that's the biggest marketing nonsense of all time.
01:03:11
So these are two big, horrible companies, like Microsoft, like Amazon, like all these other guys. They're all horrible and I think you know we need to get past these kind of mythological, immature ideals that we think they see, you know that somehow one of these companies is like better than the other. You know, and I felt for that I listen, I'm human too Like I thought that Microsoft then to Sachin Adele, was some kind of ethical higher ground, something, something, and that is not the case. It just isn't you know. So I this is maybe a growth moment for all of us, but these guys partnering on Gemini for the iPhone to me makes sense and, apple being Apple, we'll market it appropriately and we'll probably take very real steps to contort it in some way that it makes sense for iPhone and for iPhone users, right.
01:03:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, sure, and a few They'll Apple-fy it. That's it, definitely They'll Apple-fy it. Yeah, but it also doesn't preclude them making a deal with Microsoft sometime in the future. Yes, I can't blame Microsoft for not wanting to be in on this one. That's the angle.
01:04:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That kind of bugs me when I look at big tech companies. I made this case about Apple. I'm sorry about Google and Microsoft, you know hating each other and when they should be in fact standing with each other against Apple. I mean, you can make that case with Apple and Microsoft too. Apple relies on Microsoft Office still to some degree. It's still an important part of their marketing, right? You know it runs on the Mac. You know, by the way, it runs on the iPhone.
01:04:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I they can build these things these things happen, right. To stand up against Google. Yeah, Microsoft and Google partnered to push Safari to be compliant with the WebAssembly standards Like this does happen. They all play this dance, yeah, Protecting each other, various markets, well, and you know, trying to limit the other guy and making sure they get to play in certain other spaces. I wouldn't want to take on Apple's LLM workload right now. Right.
01:05:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, because you know, by the way they control their customers, they're going to get nailed. And there is an example from history of that. Think back to Singular. I guess it was AT&T by that point. Yeah, look what happened to AT&T, the iPhone. Even the small number of iPhone users that were there that first year brought that network to its knees and they were just on 2G, you know, or 2.5, what was it called? Edge or whatever? Yeah, that was a huge problem and a lot of those companies Microsoft is onboarding.
01:05:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know, m365 co-pallet people as fast as they can. They're consuming enough of their own resources. This is not the time to introduce an network load.
01:05:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It raises the specter that maybe they did ask Microsoft and they're just like yeah, we can't do that Like.
01:05:41 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, we have a lot to have Call us in a couple of years.
01:05:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, we're done. But I do like the idea of Apple or any other company but Apple especially, I think, because of the way they kind of market their stuff is taking the best from whatever's out there and making this thing for iPhone users. That is more bespoke, you know, or whatever we call it. That would be bespoke AI. Yeah especially-. And if I'm a real go ahead.
01:06:04 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Dr, I was just gonna say, especially from my understanding of how they're kind of partnering with Google and forgive me if you did mention this part it is they're doing as much of the stuff that they can do, or that I should say that it can do that Apple can do on device.
01:06:24
On device exactly If it's only AI stuff, and then what it can't do it's far away to get out to Google. Well, according to all of this and I find that interesting you know what's going to be done locally versus what they will use.
01:06:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Google potentially for. So this hasn't come up recently, but and maybe this wasn't something we discussed while you were on the show but I have raised this idea in the past. I mean, honestly, Apple's biggest contribution to the AI space to date has been this notion of doing as much as you can on the device, and that thing has been that's been copied by other companies. I know the platforms and I do think, because of the expense of this cloud-based AI that we generate to AI, that some combination of on device and in the cloud is, in some ways, this optimal kind of hybrid configuration, and I think I don't thank Apple for that or whatever. I mean Apple did it for its own reasons, Right, exactly.
01:07:21
You know, and to address its own limitations or whatever but some insight came out of that and I think that's the thing we all accept. We're trying to figure out what AI looks like with an MPU on a PC right now. We just mentioned this briefly. You know we're trying to make that model make sense, you know, in the PC we just don't. It's easy on a phone, I think, because you have these use cases where you're like, yes, I would like to remove that person from the back of the photo or whatever it might be. Or you know some speech translation thing or whatever it might be. Like there are certain things that, just because your phone is in your pocket all the time, you always have, like it makes sense to you know, have stuff that works on the device. Right, it's not always a good idea to go to the cloud for everything, because you don't always have good connectivity. Like you want that experience to be consistently good or whatever. So I like whatever.
01:08:09
I think we should credit Apple for that. So we'll see. Can I see? Yeah, so we know that build is in May. We know now that Google IO is also in May, may 14. And we know Apple WWC is always in June. They haven't announced the show yet, but they will soon and this is the same every spring as developer show season. Right, you know, IO, build or WWC back to back, and you could expect all of these shows to be all AI all the time.
01:08:38 - Richard Campbell (Host)
There's no doubt about it. It has over, it has overwhelmed the conversation, for better or worse. Yes, it has, yep.
01:08:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I hit some. So you know Apple for you know, several years probably has been marketing what we now think of as AI capabilities on its phones, as they would talk about machine learning right, that was kind of the way they would describe it and today the conversation has shifted to generative AI or just. Like you know, people say AI or whatever, and you know Apple's on board, right? I mean, they announced that new I what do you call it? Backbook Air, and it is the AI PC. It's like yikes guys, seriously like but, but you know what, whatever that's the language you're using, it's fine, and I do think that this stuff these developer shows there will be other AI capabilities, obviously, but I think for end user benefit, the thing that people kind of understand is what we would call generative AI, right, I think this is the biggest. This is what chatGPT is, right?
01:09:35 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, generative AI over the the stuff that is so far in the background. You know we talk about at the chip level, some of the decisions, so to speak, that the chip is making. There's AI packed in there. There's the AI, the technical AI that helps sort a dog.
01:09:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Is AI in spell checking? Yeah, there's AI in spell checking. Exactly, it's all of that.
01:09:56 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
But yeah, the AI that they're trying to market now, as you say, is Gen AI or Generative AI.
01:10:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
for sure, yeah yep, yeah, that's the big push this year, so I think we're gonna see a lot of that. I mean, there will be obviously there always is. I mean, how long has Apple had something that I'm sure is called AI kit? Right, they have this. I assume they do right, ai kit. That must be it.
01:10:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No it shouldn't be, it will be if it is, then it will be Like VR kit, only different.
01:10:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you know they're gonna have it, if they don't already right, I think it's ML that's why, because the oh ML, that's why they're gonna change it, because that's a terrible name, so but yeah, anyway. And then tomorrow, speaking of bad timing, Microsoft is hosting an AI in-surface event, and then now we know they're hosting another one in May, right before it builds. So our best guess for now is that the one that's happening tomorrow is kind of business focus, and we've heard rumors of Qualcomm-based computers coming, the new ones right based on the Elite X chipset, and that must be May, and I guess that's how we're splitting things up, so we'll see what happens. There's something happening tomorrow.
01:11:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I can see doing this ahead of Google IO to try and be messaging on Google IO, yeah, but it's-. But if you're doing it after Google IO, like, do it at build, Like what is this?
01:11:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The event tomorrow? You mean no, no, the event in May, in May. So that is what build is after. Io isn't it.
01:11:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It is no, it's after. It is the week of May 20th, so maybe this is actually gonna be a build.
01:11:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think it's right before. I think it's right on the. I'm sure what it is is. There's like a private event before build, I think, and then yeah maybe that's it.
01:11:34 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It'll probably be part of the keynote. Yeah, so there'll probably be some overlap on the two, but they'll do some of those.
01:11:40 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, the rumors are that we're gonna get business surface devices tomorrow and then consumer devices in May. And it's weird, yeah, and they've talked about Intel on one side and Qualcomm on the other right. And is it possible that the year of the ARM PC will happen before the year of desktop Linux? We're gonna find out.
01:12:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, if they announce ARM hardware just before build, then build needs to be about ARM hardware. Yeah, because there's gonna be devs that are gonna make that work.
01:12:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's my guess. I mean, that's based on rumors, right? I mean, that's what it sounds like. Yeah, so we shall see. So we got those to look forward to, and then, you know, six days later, when it's not even fresh anymore, we'll talk about it on Windows Weekly. No, no, because fantastic. All right, what else we got here? So apparently, nvidia now has a developer show every year. I don't know if you saw already the clips from this, but it was.
01:12:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
White the Rock show, wasn't it? Yep, Well, that's what he said. He goes.
01:12:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't know if you guys thought you were at a like a Taylor Swift concert or something, but this is a developer show. Yeah, jeff.
01:12:49 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Dervis and I covered the event live.
01:12:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Okay, yeah.
01:12:52 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And yes, it was. Yeah, exactly what you said. It was a what it was in its own it's in the Rock show vibes. Very jargon heavy, very in-depth, very much Getting into the nitty gritty, and I found that interesting as someone who's used to more consumer-facing keynote presentations.
01:13:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is pretty hard to-. You know what I was gonna win. Heck, feel right. Like once upon a time, Microsoft did events specifically for the driver and hardware builders. That's exactly what I was gonna say, and their keynotes were geeky and this had that buzz about it. It's like you need to be in the space to be in this room. I just gave Apple-.
01:13:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just gave Apple some credit for doing whatever they did, but I think we can blame Apple for this effect, because Microsoft's developer shows, microsoft's Ignite show for IT pros, et cetera. The keynote has turned into a marketing event on day one because of the success Apple's had doing the same thing. My wife could watch a WWC keynote and think nothing of it, other than oh my God, do these guys love Apple too much? What's happening? But I mean, she wouldn't feel out of place, like it's not a, it doesn't feel like a developer show. That show is a developer show and there's lots of developer stuff that happens there. But yeah, I think that we might be looking at the Well, this isn't, you know, nvidia flexing their muscles on the one hand, but also, I mean, I kind of like the old school days for what they're doing.
01:14:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right, I mean.
01:14:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I kind of miss this.
01:14:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah.
01:14:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think it's cool I also think.
01:14:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think they're a little panic struck to stay in front Like these big water cooled units they're building that's. I don't have time to build a refined thing, so let's just force it.
01:14:34 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Well, I thought it was a good reminder. The company took the time to do its, I think, a bit of a stage bow, saying y'all been talking about all of this gen AI stuff and you're so excited about what Microsoft is doing and what we are making so much of the hardware that's already running that stuff and we are at the root of all of that. Don't forget us and I was. I did find it very inspirational to see the CEO of a company clearly knows so much about what the company is making.
01:15:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
He is. That was cool. He's very technical.
01:15:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He's a cool guy, he's a proper engineer. Ceo.
01:15:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There is still an element of. They waltzed into this and he tried to make the case like, oh no, this is the strategy all along and it's like you were making video computer Like you know, not really.
01:15:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But disappointed he didn't go with the liquid nitrogen additions. You're gonna go for it.
01:15:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Look, I, god, love them. And the harsh reality today and to keep bringing up the MPU thing is that all of the local AI I forget about the cloud for a moment I mean all of the local AI workloads that exist today are tuned for GPUs. So I mean, maybe one day MPUs will be better at this and maybe it won't matter.
01:15:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I mean, maybe they're also just not that different right, Like really, Okay, Both scalar processors is not that big of a deal. Well, you know, we we've already been hard to see GPUs, through CUDA and the like, to do other kind of scalar workloads like image recognition and things Like this is not that weird. So you know the joke has been. So what is your MPU Like? Why is that different from my GPU? Why do I need to buy something else? Because architecture is just not that far apart.
01:16:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think we can blame Apple for that again, because obviously you need another device, you need something to sell. That's the strategy.
01:16:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I think is a hardware guy. Arguably the MPU is simpler, right. Yes, scalar pipelines for ray tracing are complicated bit of kit and what? What Nvidia has done is incredibly innovative. It's very, very powerful. You don't really need it if you're simply doing neural network work, right.
01:16:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean Microsoft is doing everything they can to remove their dependency on Nvidia right now, right, oh yeah, I know they think with the cobalt processors and so forth.
01:16:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, everybody's building their own hardware, yeah, which makes a lot of sense. Don't create a dependency where you don't need to. And don't you know that trillion dollar valuation is cost for you? Like, you don't keep that money. Whether or not they can keep up is another question entirely. Like, I don't know how long code will stay around.
01:17:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
As a long-term Microsoft follower, I can tell you from experience that inertia is a wonderful thing from a business perspective, and right now, nvidia is in a sweet spot. We don't know if this is the Apex and they're on the way down, or if this is still on the way up somehow, but the reality is, regardless of what happens, going forward, with whatever chipsets people or companies choose, whatever it is, they've built up enough capital and influence.
01:17:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You need to execute on it now. I would point out that, clearly, jensen's paid for a stylist once, but he's been using the same keynote outfit now for multiple shows. Oh really, it's time to get another set. Oh yeah, black T-shirt, black leather jacket thing that's the same look from Build last year. That's funny. Yeah, you should update.
01:18:10
If you actually want to level this up, like if you talk about in this land of rock star CEOs, you should use the same look twice, like there should be a stylus on call. It should be a point.
01:18:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I mean, we have to blame Steve Jobs for this.
01:18:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, the black turtleneck and baggy and dead pant and bed jeans. Like dad jeez, I would call them mum jeans.
01:18:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But yeah, whatever they were, yeah, it's a look, you get a look, you know I don't know.
01:18:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
No, no, and I think this is very tech thing. It's like you paid for it once to create a look, you hung it up and that you ordered seven of them, exactly You're right, right.
01:18:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And, like me, what I want our customers to do is upgrade all the time.
01:18:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm gonna stick with the same Me. I've got 15 of these jackets.
01:18:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you just yeah. You open the closet and it's just love the black leather yeah.
01:18:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's his black t-shirts. What am I? What is this?
01:18:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, this is your closet, oh dear.
01:19:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, Guthrie only wears a red polo shirt, Right?
01:19:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm not saying to say anything special to Jensen which is funny, because if you see him out in the world and he's not wearing that, he's like he's camouflage you don't even notice. He's almost unrecognizable.
01:19:17 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, that's, that's the tech. There's a digression.
01:19:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I do enjoy that we spent more time on his clothing than we did on the products.
01:19:25 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
But anyway, that's okay. Well, they spent plenty of time on on the products, so yeah.
01:19:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And the products are kicking it Like go two ways about it. I hope they can keep up the rate of innovation. We will be better for it, because what's happening in CPUs is not that exciting. We need to go to dedicated processing units for different workloads, like that's what makes sense in the evolution of the silicon at this point. So it is a good news.
01:19:52 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
All right.
01:19:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What's next? Alrighty, and then just random other generative AI things. You know, I saw this headline and I thought to myself I don't know if I want this, but Google is adding generative AI to Fitbit. And I actually looked into it, by which I mean I actually watched the event that made this reference and I said you know what actually this makes sense.
01:20:11 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So well, if you just make sense of a lot of other things, this is where the way most gen A I should be used, which is to make existing products better.
01:20:18 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, but of course, see, this is health and fitness, right. So you want to be careful there, like you don't want an AI recommending like a recipe thing could kill you, right If you do it wrong. Right If they recommend the wrong things. But actually, if you think about how Fitbit works today, which is by measuring a lot of data and presenting charts and graphs and trends and things using generative AI to summarize that, maybe graph it or present it graphically and allowing you to ask questions of it, is very interesting. And actually there was a line. The woman who presented this at the Google event used a line that gave me an immediate flashback to the Microsoft band, which people watching the show might remember the original.
01:21:01
The original yep, the original promise of this device, which arrived at a time when these wearables and the Apple watch, I think it maybe had just come out or something didn't have a lot in the way of sensors, and the idea of the Microsoft band was we're going to collect as much data as we can. It was like it looked like the probe joint, not the what do you call it the little interrogator bot thing from the first hour's movie kind of comes in on Princess Lee and it's got all these little needles and whatever. And the idea was we're going to grab as much as we can. At the time it was a crazy amount of sensors. Now today it's common, but back then it was a big deal. And we're going to collect all this data and we're going to present you with this, you know, information based on all the data. But the central, the promise and they never fulfilled this was we, as Microsoft, have your all of your work related info. So we have this stuff about your productivity and your kind of work day, and now we're collecting this data about your health, and you know health well, we'll call health data through a band and we can actually put that together and say hey, you have this Monday morning meeting every every week and you, your your heart rate, resting heart rate goes to the roof 30 minutes before that meeting. So we're going to recommend that you, you know, do meditation or do something to calm down, maybe stop drinking so much coffee, whatever it might be.
01:22:21
And I was like you know, that sounds, that sounds like a really neat idea. Now, they never did this. That never happened. They did almost nothing with any of that data and Microsoft band came and went right. They made a second version, they started making a third version. They got canceled. It's gone.
01:22:35
So, whatever, we have Apple watches and Fitbits now, but they basically were saying the same thing in the Google health event, where you know that Fitbit, could you know, by collecting this information and based on Gemini and yada, yada, all that stuff, that they could offer you some prescriptive kind of was it holistic or heterogeneous data analysis and say you know, you've got the same. Google today has all that information too, right, your Windows weekly, starting in 15 minutes, and your heart rate. It's almost like you fall asleep, paul. Like you, you're the opposite of a heart attack. You, you know, or whatever it is, you might want to jog in place for a few minutes, you know, get become a little lively or something, whatever it is.
01:23:16
So I thought that was kind of interesting and I, I and I, yeah it always, yeah, that seems like a good idea. They're very careful to say, look, we're not prescribing anything, we're not, you know, but they're already really doing this kind of thing in Fitbit. This is just kind of taking it to the next level, and I think it is a good use for generative eh, because this is one of the things that does well summarize data right or pull out key points from exactly a big body of data I'm tracking.
01:23:41 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I track a bunch of this stuff that I a bunch of my health stuff, and that is something that I would like to see more of, more use of all of that information, because I've got, you know, my body temperature, how it changes, plus my activity, plus my heart. I mean, this is so much data and it only gives me right now I only have, like, trends oh, you've walked up more flights of stairs this week than you normally do, or your respiration rate is down. I would love to have a more holistic understanding that I prepared to get.
01:24:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, I think there's a where there's going to be an explosion, a good kind of explosion of data related to things like glucose and blood pressure. And, combined with you know you have an iPhone and you're taking a picture of every meal and it can use AI to analyze it and figure out basically what it is and then kind of say hey, you know you eat this meal every Wednesday for some reason. Stop doing that, it's really bad.
01:24:39 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You're like you know how much salt is in this, yeah.
01:24:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, because you can. We can see it in the data Like it takes you days to recover from this meal. Don't do that, right? And then you try that for a couple of weeks and they can say all right, we got new data and you did it. You know, like we're already seeing, the trends are better for you, right?
01:24:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I think this is going to be a huge thing, and the other side of this is to do the PII safe. Cross comparisons people in your age range and your lifestyle and so forth. You sit in this location. You can improve this way. Here's who's had the most six. These are the most successful.
01:25:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Wonder if I can find this quickly. Probably not, but there's a thing somewhere in Fitbit that compares you to other people your age and in my case, I think it says it's like you most people your age are actually dead.
01:25:25 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Something like that Good job. You're still alive.
01:25:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're still alive, you're still upright today. It's amazing. Yeah, I don't know how you did it. In fact, we'd like to study you. So it's kind of happening already. And then, less excitedly to me, amazon is, of course, using generative AI now for product page creation for sellers, right, so people sell things to the Amazon website can use generative AI to.
01:25:56 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That annoys me. I don't know what to do.
01:25:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know.
01:25:59 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Because yeah, basically they say, okay, I want to sell this thing and you can put in a little bit of information and then the thing does the rest. Because what I don't, what I'm not annoyed by, is the flip side of that. I have actually very much enjoyed the AI generated summary.
01:26:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The summary Like the reviews. Yes, exactly, I think this is one of the greatest uses of AS. Yes, yep, you see that in Google Maps, I think, for reviews of places and things. It's like people said dot dot dot and it gives you, like the top five, whatever comments or whatever. I love that. I think it's good. I think it's good, but these are sort of recommendation engine type things right.
01:26:34 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, this feels like it's just going to be AI on both ends and it's almost like this is maybe not a great it's almost like an English as a second language thing, which is maybe not the best way to say this thing but it feels like something.
01:26:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, it doesn't, it's off.
01:26:49 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Like it just feels like when you read it it feels off yeah.
01:26:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And you really show it. So you're like, does this read as English to you? Like does it make sense. I see the words, but do they go together in that order, or whatever Does it?
01:26:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
look like it's been put together by a language model.
01:27:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's uncanny valley.
01:27:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah.
01:27:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah.
01:27:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, maybe that's. I'll tell you a story, that where the names will be left out because they will kill me, but literally a bitter, an ongoing bitter divorce where they've been using chat, tpgpt to not speak.
01:27:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I told you not to tell anyone about this. Yeah, that's not you.
01:27:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
To the point now where it both seems super uncanny valley, but at least one of them is now using chat GPT to depritify it. Let's say what's actually being said.
01:27:32 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
No way.
01:27:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So one of them is escalating it, the other one's DS.
01:27:37 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That is fascinating to me.
01:27:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Isn't that something? What I like is that they're going to spend all this money on this and then at the end the AI is going to say like this is split at 50, 50.
01:27:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
In this case it's really the judge, but the whole trick here is that every judge is going to read, has been prettified and, you know, dehostilized Wow, that's a word by chat.
01:27:57 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That is interesting. I want this to be like.
01:28:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You write something like I think you are the biggest idiot I've ever met in an AI is like you have some interesting ideas, or like you. You have a unique way of looking at this, by which I mean you have the brain of an animal, you know whatever, but you have the brain of a bucket of stones.
01:28:20 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, I've never thought of it that way, because I'm educated.
01:28:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we just leave out the leave out the end of that and then it's polite.
01:28:27 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I've never thought of it that way.
01:28:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, exactly, but then I have a brain in my head, so of course I would.
01:28:33 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, wow, interesting. Yeah, now I just want to know everything there's to know about that. All right, let us head to Xbox corner. That I still think should have a jingle, but you know, that's just only on Xbox.
01:28:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We go this way.
01:28:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We're hoping to turn that one around.
01:28:58 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Give us an Activision Blizzard in a second here I could have co-pilot created jingle for Xbox corner.
01:29:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
There you go. Yeah, it would be the alien defeat sound and all your base are belong to us. There you go. So usually twice a month Microsoft releases some list of game pass titles to coming for those two weeks. You know, across console, pc and cloud right.
01:29:26
And we've been waiting and waiting and waiting for the first Activision Blizzard games, and they've already pre-announced this. Remember they had that special event I think it was in February, yeah, february for the Xbox February. I remember it was a while ago, who cares and they pre-announced or announced that the first of those games would be Diablo. But now we're finally getting a doubt, sorry, diablo four. That's finally about to happen. So on March 28th, which is about a week from tomorrow, I guess we will finally finally get the first Activision Blizzard game via Xbox game pass. And then, of course, we know that, going forward, they've promised to do that day and date for all the first party games. So it was something they had said before. But now that you know Activision Blizzard is part of Microsoft, they're reiterating that. So as big new titles, or any new titles come out through those studios, we will.
01:30:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And it's a great game. It was only released last year, so yeah, yeah, no right, they're not doing the back catalog.
01:30:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, I mean they will, and honestly I'm kind of looking forward to it, but yeah, but yeah, they're starting with Diablo four, so that's cool. There's some other good stuff in here. This isn't always the case. Ark survival ascended. It's supposed to be a big game I've not actually played it Super hot Isn't wasn't that one of the first like kind of big modern era VR games? The original version Was that. Am I thinking the right thing, that kind of raster graphic shooter kind of a thing? But anyway, I'm hoping this is the start of something big. Well, it is the start of something big. I'm just hoping it happens quickly. So, now that we're finally in Activision Blizzard game past season, let's see, we'll see what happens. So no promises, but it's starting finally there. I don't know if anyone follows this. I'm sure there are some people out there who use Microsoft rewards, right, and so this is the way that Microsoft rewards people for using their products and services right. I mean, it's a I don't know what do you call this kind of a thing, like a?
01:31:23 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
reward program. It's like a loyalty card sort of situation.
01:31:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, the idea is, like you know, use Bing and like you do, like every day. There's like little challenges. You do them and you get some points and you can turn this points into gifts right, they turn into money, right. So you know, you spend 17 hours using Bing and you get like a $5 Microsoft store gift card or something, or whatever it is They've.
01:31:44
There's been weird things going on with Microsoft rewards over the past few months where people are who are very heavy users of it are complaining like the rewards are going down, it's starting to disappear from certain places. It looks like it's about to go away, and then Microsoft's going no, no, we're still doing it, you know. So there is today a standalone Microsoft rewards app on Xbox. They are getting rid of that. In fact, it's happening very quickly. In April they're going to get rid of it, but that's because there's a new rewards tab.
01:32:11
If you, if you go like on the Xbox at the white button, the Xbox button, go up to your profile, you'll see there's some tabs there. You know your games or whatever your activity, but one of them is now rewards, right, and this is where your Microsoft rewards are and they're promising. They've actually taken away a few ways that you can earn Microsoft rewards points by doing certain activities. That was like a feature of the app, but they promised they're going to bring at least some of those back and there's more coming and you know. Whatever we'll see. But I don't know what the cross section is a people who are active Microsoft rewards users, I guess, and Xbox fans, but there must be some right. I mean, I I could imagine them basically paying you as Bing, but I think a lot of Xbox guys just use Xbox, right, they don't. They don't do it for the rewards, necessarily, but normally wouldn't mention LinkedIn at all, let alone in the game section. But because everything is terrible now LinkedIn is experimenting with casual games.
01:33:04 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I saw this. Why are you?
01:33:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
looking for a job and then you get distracted by a game and actually, honestly, this might be good data for a potential employer because they can see how easily right.
01:33:14 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, look at how long we played this stupid game.
01:33:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's like, oh look, they applied for a job and then they spent 15 minutes playing this stupid title game. No, not that guy. So that's awful. I don't know what to say. I look even something like net. Yeah, it's awful. Like, well, what I mean is we live. Gamification is a thing, is whatever you know, like I'm using Duolingo to try to learn Spanish and the gamification of that app is, you know, working or whatever it's like. I get it Netflix adding games. I sort of get it's vaguely another kind of entertainment and I guess that's sort of the business they're in sort of. I don't like that. It's in the app. I feel like there should be a Netflix games app, I agree, and it should be separate, but of course they Netflix doesn't care what I want. They don't even let me make folders of different types of shows, so they have their own strategy and has nothing to do with what I want, but it's sort of in the same area. This thing I. What are you doing?
01:34:16 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
What is? I don't get it at all whatsoever. I don't know why other than like this should be. I wanted to check if it was April 1st.
01:34:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This should have waited until I know it's yep, it doesn't make an it, right, it's like an onion headline. Linkedin is adding games like, yeah, because you're you're unemployed and you have free time, right. It's kind of depressing, isn't it? It's sad, is what? Yeah, it's not good. So I don't, I don't, I, I, I have to use LinkedIn because I have, like, this stupid little business now and I hate it, and not the business that LinkedIn I hate is stupid. It's awful, so, like the notion that I would go there and be. They already send me as as messages.
01:34:55
I guess, what is you know? So what am I going to get? Like a little notification. Oh, a max has something. I want to tell you in this that what they want to tell me is let's play chess.
01:35:07 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
No, you haven't tried out this new game yet. Why don't you try out the new game, Paul?
01:35:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Easy, anyway, okay, and then finally Sony, interestingly was did a, was fairly successful at VR with the, with the PlayStation four, with the original PS VR, which is about $350. And then they came up with the VR two for the PS five, which I think started at $600, but is not today anyway $550, which is more expensive than the console. And you will be shocked to discover they haven't sold any and it's not doing very well. So apparently they've halted production. They previously announced that they would look, they were looking at and I think we'll be bringing it to the PC, which is interesting on some level, but I think the big problem here is the cost, like that's.
01:35:56 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I honestly didn't know. They had a second version of it.
01:35:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh yeah, and how do you compete with the quest three on that? Yeah, trying to go to the PC like good luck.
01:36:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I, they have a, they, you know they have this audience. Right, there is a. There's a PlayStation fan base. Yeah, absolutely I, I've not they bought.
01:36:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
PS five. I can't speak to the quality.
01:36:17 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
For it to be more than the cost of the stinking console.
01:36:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I know that was true with the PlayStation four and the original VR headset. Right the PlayStation four was.
01:36:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, but it was still a couple hundred bucks less.
01:36:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
A couple hundred bucks less, like I think there's a threshold.
01:36:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
PS five is also more expensive than this.
01:36:31 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You're right, that's it. That's exactly right. There's a threshold and it's definitely a pass.
01:36:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was like 250 for a PS four and 350 for the headset. Right Now, it's this is the PS five file.
01:36:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This was the, the, the co-pilot for Microsoft 365, disconnect for me, especially for consumers where it's like. So I pay a hundred bucks a year for six people to get a terabyte of storage through Microsoft 365, all the apps, blah, blah, blah. And now you want me to pay 20 bucks per month per user, like for like that's a, that, like that jump is incommensurate, you know to me. But actually, like I said, not today but in the past, you know, using that service, actually I'm like okay, actually there's some, there's some value here.
01:37:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But I don't it's funny, even bring that up. I just had a lunch with a couple of business leaders and their IT person who brought me in talking about incorporating it. You know what? What they did be concerned about lighting up M365 co-pilot and the CFO was the one saying you know, I I had to do this survey thing and I knew it was going to take me an hour and a half and I ran it through co-pilot and it was done in 10 minutes and that paid for the month, right there.
01:37:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Nice, yeah, there you go. Yeah, I mean, I think I had a similar experience. Well, I use it mostly for graphics, but in my case it wasn't so much that it was costing me less to do the thing I was already doing, it's that I couldn't have done the thing I'm doing now. Right, there was no amount of money that would make it make sense for me to go to a friend who's a graphic artist and say I would like four images of this ridiculous scene I just described, but don't ask.
01:38:08
And then come back with us four and I'll say one of these is pretty good, but could you change this? And then, by the time we've arrived at the image, it's two weeks later and I don't know what I'm doing anymore, because this is just a news story.
01:38:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's that moment. On one hand it's embarrassing art, On the other hand, it's instantaneous embarrassing art, so you're okay with it.
01:38:26 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes.
01:38:28 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Look I don't ask why I need a picture of.
01:38:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Ronald McDonald in space.
01:38:31 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
The point is, I need exactly the picture and I need it now. Mostly, you're paying to not be shamed, yeah exactly.
01:38:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're paying right by the shame I would like to bring $20, but not to be shamed. Not to be shamed publicly, but then of course, I put the picture on an article and I am shamed. So. But the PSVR too, I don't feel like there's any similar advantage to it. I just don't.
01:38:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm almost feeling like we've run our course with gaming VR, like it was going to take off at Wood of Buy now If Gabe Newell and the co at Steam that made Alex, who was a total loss leader, because those guys can afford it. So they pulled together the ringer team. They made the best VR came they could make and it is a beautiful work of art. All accounts is amazing. A beautiful, beautiful work of art and it still isn't enough, right, right. So if that's not going to do it, that's four years old. Four years old, I know. I don't know what it tastes like.
01:39:37 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I want to play it so bad, but I just don't have a the means to.
01:39:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know it's right.
01:39:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Same Yep, Cause I love Half-Life, but Well, it's one of the things that's interesting about it is how much time Alex spends trying to get you to look in the right direction. Like you, you also see the problem with storytelling in VR, which is you're so busy looking at the world. The story can take a hike. I'm busy exploring this world.
01:40:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, that's uh. It's funny you use that example because some months, a couple of months ago, was some I guess the 20th, 25th anniversary, probably for the original Half-Life 20th, 30th, whatever it was and there was a documentary they made which was fantastic and one of the the great stories that's told in that documentary is how because that the story is an it's an interactive story right, it's a, it's a game and they're shooter elements and all that, but really it's just it's the unfolding of a story and sometimes you walk into a big room and stuff's happening and they need you to see the little crack and the thing and they that part of the game design is they have to make sure you don't miss stuff, cause you could walk through a game and be like dude, dude, dude, like I do in real life, and you can't be like that. When you're playing this game You're like, yeah, it is.
01:40:47 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The thing is not just be paying attention, but see stuff you know and uh, and this is a huge part of you know a big part of that game design and making sure they got that stuff right.
01:40:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And, yeah, I could imagine VR.
01:40:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's worse because it's way worse, like we're going to. You know, a good game has a good cinematographer. Right, it's always how to get your eye in place.
01:41:06 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I have not listened to this, but, as I promised, I wanted to generate a uh jingle for for Xbox corners. Okay, here's, here's what copilot came up with. Kevin, you ready?
01:41:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, when we're in Mexico, one of the many things that's kind of unique and different about that place is that certain things are just like two decades behind the United States. And I don't mean infrastructure, I mean like music videos, and they are it's like literally the 1990s there from, and that song is every Mexican music.
01:41:56 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It is.
01:41:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's what music is like there now, and it is like we go certain restaurants just have like a TV on, they play music videos and I sit there and I'm like I what what is happening? Like it's like literally, like it's Debbie Gibson back like our Britney spares or whatever.
01:42:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Like what is this, oh dear. Yeah, I think crazy and it's a lot of that stuff. You know, an electro synth version of the Xbox startup noise would be fine. It's a jingle, it should be.
01:42:24 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
It should be. Yeah, exactly that's what I said. I even said to it make a very short jingle, and it was still way too long.
01:42:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
No, this was like a girl in a tracksuit dancing and singing at the same time, somehow on stage with a bunch of other people.
01:42:38 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, you know, synchronous. Maybe some of them are on skates, yeah.
01:42:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Exactly Like people are moving in between and you know, yeah, that's every video.
01:42:47 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, man, that's interesting.
01:42:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that's weird.
01:42:50 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Well, we will be back in just a moment, after that horrible song, with the tips and picks of the week. In just a sec. Welcome back to Windows Weekly, this week hosted by me, micah Sargent, as well as your tried and true panelists, paul Therot and Richard Campbell. It's time for the back of the book, otherwise known as the tips and picks of the week.
01:43:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And I just realized that PTSD from that music.
01:43:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It is not okay, it's not okay.
01:43:23 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Richard just brought up Alex. Alex is one of the many games that are on sale right now and you got to be quick, unfortunately, because if you listen to the show, like as late as Friday or Saturday, it's over. But through the 21st, which, as we record this, is tomorrow, steam is having a big sale and it is a big sale Like almost every not everything, but almost everything is on sale. Some really really good prices on stuff, and I don't just mean like older stuff, like you can buy all the old, like you know, the doom and quake type games. Like that stuff is always like a couple of bucks when it's on sale, but it's you know newer titles. You can get the Halo, master Chief collection, all those games, like for 10 bucks. Yeah, sargent, I fall in order for 399. Sid Meyers, civilization 6, 699, that kind of thing.
01:44:06
And there's a lot of good stuff there, yeah.
01:44:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You may never get around to playing them all, but at least you'll own them, but you'll save a lot of them and that's how I am when I get.
01:44:13 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You know if I get, because I actually am not a gamer at all, but I get these stupid little games.
01:44:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Your Steam collection is awesome, yeah, it is Movies Like if a movie like I like hits like 499, it'll just buy it and it's like am I going to watch this again Still?
01:44:26 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
in shrink wrap, but you know it's there if I need it.
01:44:28 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, we'll see. Maybe someday the world will end. I'll just have this collection, it'll be fun and then. So that's my tip. And then I have three outpicks. I'm going to blow through these really quickly.
01:44:39
But StarDoc, object doc three, came out today. It's 999 or 399 to upgrade. It's now part of object desktop, if you have that suite. This adds a Mac macOS 10 style doc to Windows and you can, you know, either augment the taskbar or replace it. You can have multiple docs on every side of the screen If you're into that kind of thing. They can be folders and tabs and whatever. So it's pretty cool. It works really nicely. It's 64 bit, works on Windows 10, 11. Good stuff.
01:45:05
Proton mail the native app is available now on Mac and Windows and on Linux and beta. Interestingly, they've had a web app for, I want to say, 10 or 12 years a long, long time. But this is the privacy focused service that has a bunch of proton, dot, dot dot services. Proton mail is supposed to be one of the better ones and I am considering this right now. I got to say they also have a like a password manager, or no. No, I'm sorry, they have a. What do you call it? A like an authenticator app as well. Oh, gotcha, yeah, they're worth looking at. Um, and then, uh, there's a new version of Firefox out, because it's been four weeks and there's some improvements kind of across the board, but they improve the performance of jump lists on Windows. So if you're that guy, you use fireworks Firefox and actually know what a jump list is and use one. Uh, god love you, it's, it's, they're. Both are better. Uh, on Windows anyway.
01:46:01 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
All right, uh, then let's see what is next. Ah, it's time, oh wait, yeah, did you mention the Firefox thing Did?
01:46:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I miss one I did.
01:46:11 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Okay, sorry, um, I was reading. It'll be a quiz later.
01:46:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
At the same time, Like it can tell us. Like it can tell us what he thinks the jump list is.
01:46:18 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
but it's okay, I didn't realize somebody uh proton, uh products these days, so I was yeah, this is a bunch. Um, tell us about run as radio Richard Campbell.
01:46:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, this week's episodes with a past guest coming back against Steve Buchanan. Uh, known on Twitter as Bukatec. Uh, good to good, it was always been a platform guy. I've talked about Kubernetes and things like that, but we ended up in this sort of meta conversation about how every sys admin these days is a platform engineer to some degree. It's just a question of how seriously you take it, and so that ended up being the title from sys admin to platform engineer, just recognizing that our job, when we do it well, is to provide platforms for places for work to be done for our organization.
01:47:00
You know, whether you're the administrator of the M 365, uh tenant, or if you are managing a set of servers to run applications, it's all the same issue. It's, it does. The is the platform. It will respond to the needs of the organization and how do we get better at that? So you know it's on the and products facilitate that, but it's more a mindset than it is products, and Steve really pulled all of the together really well for us to to really get our head around and go yeah, don't, you don't do Kubernetes because it's fun. You do it because it allows you to provide a platform that serves the applications your organization counts on.
01:47:35 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Nice. Well, you can find that at runasradiocom. And the Brown liquor pick of the week. Interestingly, I was just chatting with the person who brought you that, bush Mills, uh, recent.
01:47:50 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Oh, were you? Yeah, that was from last week.
01:47:52 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, from last week. So what is the Brown liquor pick of the week?
01:47:56 - Richard Campbell (Host)
this week. This week is a story Um, the. The whiskey that is listed in the sheet is not how the story is going to begin. The story is going to begin with a listener, barry Wallace, who, while on a cruise, tweeted to me the menu of whiskies available on his cruise and said like which one should I try? And I ran down a bunch of them that I recognized, but there was one on the list I hadn't seen, and this doesn't happen very often anymore. For better or worse, I'm pretty good at remembering things and so if I had seen it before I would have I would have recognized it. But one of them on the list was called Maclo and which is called an American single malt whiskey, which is interesting because the U? S has no concept of a single malt whiskey.
01:48:43
Really, um, single malt is an invention of Smith's and son's, glenn Livet, back in the 1960s when they wanted to show that their product was more premium. They never really meant anything, although it was later cut a fight initially to be the idea that it was from a malting of barley, but in reality now really means a given distillery has produced and distilled all of the products that are in the bottle. So single malts don't mean as much as it is said. There's lots of pretentious folks that say, well, only drink single malts. Um, when I can make fun of them all day long. And in fact, here's one I'm going to make fun of.
01:49:21
The lady's name is Julie Maclo. Now, julie come, uh, originally from Aspen, but joined JP Morgan as a hedge fund manager, got bitten by the whiskey bug doing her work, but ultimately married an extremely wealthy person, uh, billy Maclo, who is the son of, uh, one of the largest real estate tycoons in the in New York. So they get married back in 2004 and apparently she goes all in on being a socialite. In fact, there is an article in Vogue about her in 2009, called the hedge funder in thigh, high boots, anyway and she likes whiskey, which is not a sin. You can be a socialite and like whiskey, like all of that is fine. But apparently, during the pandemic she got, she had been buying up rare whiskies because it was a great. A lot of folks were unloading their collection because they needed money during the pandemic, when everything was disrupted, and so, um, there's a. There's a whole conversation to be had about the dusty bottle movement that, as the demand for whiskey skyrocketed during the pandemic, a lot of folks that had forgotten about their collections sort of dug into them and sold really rare whiskies, and so she decided she should make whiskey.
01:50:35
And uh, went, found a guy named Ian McMillan. Now Ian McMillan is a proper master distiller. This is a guy who's pushing 50 years working in the whiskey industry, but all the way back to Glenn, going in the in the 1970s. He's actually well known for rehabilitating older distilleries, so he helped get Deenston back on Ryan and tobermory I'm going to have in it down in ILE and famously he's best known at the moment for the Blad knock distillery back in 2017, which is one of the very few lowland distilleries that exists like. Ian McMillan is the guy and uh, and actually the moment he's working for a group called Wolf Craig distilleries. They're making weird new things, but in between doing Blad knock and this, he was recruited by Julie Macklo and they went out.
01:51:22
She had an idea to make whiskey, but didn't actually want to make it, so instead she found some that she could brand, and she found it from a distillery called Bull Run, which is out of Portland, oregon, and so she bought literally a barrel one barrel um pure barley whiskey, which is relatively unusual in the United States. We should normally use this corn, but this was a hundred percent barley aged in American oak. Uh, it had been barreled in 2014. She then removed that barrel from the storage in Oregon and put it for a couple of years in somewhere in Kentucky I haven't been able to find out where, but one of the Rick houses there, there's plenty and then bottled it in 2021, an entire 271 bottles, which is typical for a single barrel more in there, somewhere between 200 up to 300 depends which she probably priced at $1,500 US each.
01:52:18
Yeah, now, being a socialite, this is somebody who eats dinner out in New York at a top tier restaurant, five, six times a week. So she had a pretty and was, you know, sociable with everyone around there. She's a socialite, so she pretty much sold the whiskey herself, going from fancy restaurant to fasty restaurant, getting this, um, uh, this $1,500 edition, which they call the black edition, out all over the place. She also you can also find it, like I said, is only a handful of bottles, without, apparently, the making additional dishes. Uh, outside of New York, in some places in Texas, los Angeles, vegas, uh, and uh, aspen, of course. Um, jean, george apparently was an early background. This so definitely got this strong restaurant bar tie for it.
01:53:07
The professional whiskey. People have tasted it. They have declared it a wood bomb, which is to say it has spent too long in wood, which is normal for anything, has gone seven, eight years in this part of the world. Uh, tannock and bitter, oh Lord, so not good. I would point out that most photos related to this particular whiskey showed in a cocktail. In fact, apparently, today, if you would like to, in New York, you can go to a very swanky club called Gabriel's. Well, they will sell you a $45 cocktail called the gold factor. Sorry, what $45. Yeah, so made with the black edition. Yes, they recently have announced, as of last year, um, a new edition called the Kentucky gold edition. Uh, they've only been taking um pre-order, so nobody's actually tasted it, although the description of it is lovely, which you know, they call it tasting notes except for the part where nobody's actually tasted it and they're going to want $260 for this. That would be, by the way, more money than the retail price on a Pappy man Winkle 23.
01:54:19
No way, yes, which is why I did not want to talk about this whiskey. You know like when, when Barry led me to it I hadn't seen before. Of course. I did the research and I only got angrier and angrier and angrier reading this, until I went back to the root of this, which was bull run. Right that our friend Julie went and bought a barrel for bull run, and bull run is out of Portland, oregon. It's been around since 2010.
01:54:47
Uh Lee made off, who worked his way through different breweries and different distilleries and so forth, set this up himself. He makes a variety of different whiskies, but he makes a whiskey that very likely was the starting point of the black edition, called the bull rung single malt, and he's also been part of the American Single Malt Whiskey Commission, which is trying to be establishing standards for what we would call an American single malt. By the way, that model 50 bucks, which is more in line with the price of a whiskey should be, you'll find it up to a hundred is a few different editions of it. He makes a bourbon as well. He does a Pinot noir aged whiskey which I might just want to try, as well as some vodka and things like that. It spends five years in oak, which is more appropriate for that climate.
01:55:35
Uh and it, uh, yeah, it's more and you can find it. It's viable, it's at that mo, you know, not a big deal. You're you're gonna have a tough time finding any of the maclows and I would recommend that you don't Right Bunch of drink the origin product, you'll be happier. And the current specification for what? An American single malt whiskey. So the American single malt whiskey commission is in the process of ratifying this standard. So the single malt whiskey means a hundred percent multi barley from the U S. So U S barley is still at a single distillery, same as they do in Scotland. Uh also aged in the U S and barrels no larger than 700 liters. And uh distilled no higher than 80% and bottled no less than 40%. They's very similar to what's got. A single malt would represent us Uh and that's a bad, far better story than anything to talk about from a New York social light. Amen, bull Run. Oregon. Single malt whiskey Portland is fun. Go get some. Yes.
01:56:39 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Portland's great yeah.
01:56:42 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, not like.
01:56:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
New York.
01:56:45 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You're like I, just I, you know what.
01:56:48 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I maybe I should apologize. I went on this ride and now I've made you go on it too.
01:56:54 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And we're all angry. That's why the lights are red.
01:56:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Kind of the feel of the whole show really.
01:56:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We went on this ride and now you're going on it and now you're going on it. You know I started talking. I was going to write about them, do the story about the Mack Lowe and I was working my three through it. I finally got to a point where I was like I'm going to throw this away until I figured out where she got the whiskey from. And then, when I read about Lee, I'm like this guy's awesome. This is what whiskey is about there we go Well, folks.
01:57:19 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
that just about brings us to the end of this episode of Windows Weekly. If you want to subscribe to the show, get the show notes, see all the fun stuff head to twittv slash w w. That's where you will find links to subscribe to the audio versions and video versions of the show. I should also mention that you should consider joining club twit at twittv slash club twit. When you join the club, first and foremost, you get that warm, fuzzy feeling knowing that you are helping support what we do here at twit. Help us keep doing what we do.
01:57:50
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01:58:41
I should also mention, quite literally, tickets are almost out. Head to ticketstwittv. If you're a member of club twit to sign up to join us in April for a couple of recordings of this week in tech, and it's only again available to you if you are a club twit member, so you'll have to provide your email that's linked to your club twit account so we can confirm and invite you in the for one of those days. But yes, those seats are running out. So if you've been thinking about it, now's the time to hop on that. Twittv slash club twit $7 a month, $84 a year. All right, it is time to say thank you, richard Campbell, for your work this week. Anything you'd like to plug, any places folks should head to keep up with what you're doing.
01:59:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, thank you, micah, for doing the show with us. We always have a great time with you, thank you. And yeah, next week I'll be at the Fabric Conference. You'll see me coming from probably a sky loft at the MGM grand. No big deal, no, it turns out, if you could bring 4,000 of your closest friends to the MGM grand, they give you a nice room, nice, nice.
01:59:49 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's exciting.
01:59:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But you know, runassradio andnet rocks still making the shows and having a good time doing it Beautiful.
01:59:58 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And, of course, paul Therat at Theratcom. What's for your plug this week?
02:00:03 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh boy, I hate to unplug, I just he comes to Theratcom. I'm on Twitter and stuff.
02:00:11 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Every time I'm online. I don't know.
02:00:14 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just find me, I do stuff, I write stuff every day.
02:00:19 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You know, you could ask a co-pilot to figure out what to say.
02:00:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
What do I do? What do I say to this? What should I say?
02:00:26 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
In any case, thank you for tuning in. Watch this week of Google later today as well, as you can watch on Sunday. Leo Laporte will be back, so he and I will be doing Ask the Tech Guys on Sunday, and you can catch the rest of my shows, including Tech News Weekly, tomorrow. But until then, it is time to say goodbye, because this episode of Windows Weekly has come to a close. We're closing the window. Oh, it's down. Yeah, now's the time to play that.
