Windows Weekly 915 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

0:00:00 - Leo Laporte
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Theriot is in Mekunji, richard Campbell's in Puerto Vallarta, but we're going to do a show. Yes, we are. The first Patch Tuesday was yesterday. The biggest Patch Tuesday, the most patches since 2017, including some pretty serious flaws. I don't know why I'm laughing. It's better than crying. I guess we'll also do a lot of uh conversation about microsoft's ai models in microsoft 365 and and co-pilot. It's all kind of crazy. In fact, it's so crazy. Microsoft's doing a reorg all around ai, plus new surface hardware and more. It's all coming up next on windows weekly, on Windows Weekly Podcasts you love.

0:00:46 - Richard Campbell
From people you trust. This is Twit.

0:00:57 - Leo Laporte
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Theriot and Richard Campbell, episode 915. Recorded Wednesday, january 15th 2025. Magic tricks for cats. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Microsoft news with my good pals. To my right, mr Paul Thurott, thurottcom, leanpubcom. He is in McKungy, pa. To my further right, richard campbell. He is, of course, of run as radio fame and dot net rocks and he is in you're in puerto vallarta, puerto vallarta, nice I assume it's 75 degrees and never quit windows weekly.

0:01:39 - Richard Campbell
What can you do, oh?

0:01:40 - Leo Laporte
well, thank you, I'm sorry. The curtains are closed, though. Don't we want to see a beautiful?

0:01:44 - Richard Campbell
it would be absolutely blinding out there, oh okay, yeah, it is sunny. I'm sure it's a contrast thing. I really was trying to make this work on the patio, but it's quite noisy out there yeah, well, the good news is, paul will be joining you next week that's right.

0:01:59 - Leo Laporte
You got another bedroom over here, all set for the couple fun and then, paul, are you going on to mexico city or is it just a little tv?

0:02:06 - Paul Thurrott
we're actually going to fly to mexico city on saturday and when we come there, I think monday probably monday yeah, yeah, and you're using one of their local discount airlines.

0:02:14 - Richard Campbell
I can't wait to hear what that experience is like oh, which one.

0:02:17 - Paul Thurrott
I've been flapping my arms in anticipation of the uh here hold this rope.

0:02:22 - Leo Laporte
what? What is the airline Sol El?

0:02:25 - Paul Thurrott
Avion no, it's a Valaris, it's a Sol Valaris, yeah, Valaris okay, now when I see this, I'm like who is that?

0:02:32 - Richard Campbell
I'm like, oh wow, it's the EasyJet of Mexico. This would be awesome.

0:02:35 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so we've taken. What's the other big one? There is Aeromexico.

0:02:39 - Leo Laporte
Just Aeromexico go which is great, actually they're at least.

0:02:42 - Paul Thurrott
Oh yeah, I've been on air. I like your mexican.

0:02:43 - Richard Campbell
They're top tier airlines.

0:02:45 - Paul Thurrott
No yeah, yeah, but you know I listen. I've helped push a bus in the snow. I got this.

0:02:50 - Leo Laporte
It's fine ultra, it's their. Their tagline is ultra low cost right, that's a little scary spanish ultra means crap, but you bring the duct tape you have fun. I'm so jealous of you guys.

0:03:07 - Paul Thurrott
We'll have some fun up here. It should be good.

0:03:09 - Leo Laporte
Second largest airline in Mexico. Tantalizingly low prices. Tantalizing, but according to the San Diego Consumer Action Network, it's no way to run an airline Palaciously bad Monday or Tuesday, I guess. Wow, this is going to be interesting. When is this? Oh, this article's from four years ago. You know what? In fact, it's not even for not just four years ago.

It's march 2020, in the height of the pandemic oh yeah, really, the launch of the pandemic, the launch, the launch. Uh, you may be subjecting yourself to hellaciously bad customer service and scheduling tricks that simply wouldn't be tolerated under US law.

0:03:51 - Richard Campbell
Okay, March 2020, I was at Paul's place debating whether I was going to fly home or not.

0:03:56 - Leo Laporte
May never go home again.

0:03:57 - Richard Campbell
Yeah.

0:03:58 - Paul Thurrott
Yikes, all right. Yeah, you had like an Uber not show up at like 3 o'clock in the morning or something.

0:04:03 - Richard Campbell
Something like that yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I managed to get home in time for the very first day of two-week quarantine too I remember that, uh, because it was saint patrick's day that we shut down.

0:04:14 - Leo Laporte
March 17th 2020, okay, and uh, boy, you know, it's funny how this recedes. I remember when this was all happening, I looked back at the reminiscences and I talked to people who were around in 1918, and they didn't really remember Did you wear masks? How many were there? Not many, there were a handful. They don't remember it and I thought that's really weird, because that must have been devastating Huge anti-mask outcry.

0:04:41 - Richard Campbell
Same thing happened Exactly ask oh, crying.

0:04:48 - Paul Thurrott
Same thing happened exactly. Yeah, um, and so now I understand one of the last planes to come back to the united states. They were in jamaica or near jamaica and we didn't think they were going to get back.

0:04:53 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, my son was in asia and he was kind of hanging out in bali for some time. They had a, they had a villa, a bunch of uh, young people, and I think they were having a ball. Eventually, though, the balinese he said they they're kind of looking at yeah, giving us a side.

0:05:11 - Paul Thurrott
You guys, uh, you eat a lot, you know, compared to the other ones normally, yeah, they really want us to get out of here, so let's just get you out of here, and we quarantined him.

0:05:19 - Leo Laporte
I put him in quarantine for two weeks to make sure he didn't bring anything back. Those were the days five years ago. It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah? And and I could see now you really do blank it out. It's like you know, let's not I'm firmly.

0:05:34 - Richard Campbell
I'm firmly of the opinion that we will have grandchildren that will look at us the same way we looked at our depression era grandparents like, oh yeah, survive the depression oh, by the way, I hope it's like that, because the alternative is this just keeps happening.

0:05:48 - Leo Laporte
Mommy, why does Pop Pop still wear a mask everywhere he goes?

0:05:52 - Paul Thurrott
Why does he look like the Intel Bunny man? And also what's Intel?

0:05:58 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, really. Oh, now I remember. All right, let's start talking about Windows. Now I remember. All right, let's start talking about Windows. Yesterday, microsoft released on Patch Tuesday the largest patch bundle they'd ever. They haven't since 2017.

0:06:13 - Paul Thurrott
I forgot to check. Let me see if the biggest bug of all has been fixed.

0:06:17 - Leo Laporte
Three zero days, it has not.

0:06:19 - Paul Thurrott
That's amazing. All right, so File Explorer in Windows 11 has a bug where if you click the whatever it's called the dot dot dot menu, it goes up off the top of the screen. Still happens. Uh, so yeah, I don't know what they's all.

0:06:32 - Leo Laporte
security updates, bug fixes, but not that bug fix 11 critical flaws the largest CVEs addressed in any single month since at least 2017.

0:06:58 - Paul Thurrott
I'm fascinated that this is a thing because there's nothing new in these updates, which is like the first time in three years there are. There's nothing new in these updates which is like the first time in three years. Like the thing that's most interesting about this month to me is that they did not add any new features to windows well, it was december, right?

0:07:13 - Richard Campbell
they weren't working on anything, they weren't.

0:07:15 - Paul Thurrott
There's holidays, yeah no, I know, I know it was a nice little. It was a nice break um but they were saving them up, so that's good, yeah, I got up early, like you do on Christmas Day, waiting for that download to appear in Windows Update, even though I know it doesn't happen until about 1 pm my time. And yeah, not much going on there is from a functional perspective.

0:07:37 - Leo Laporte
Yeah so.

0:07:40 - Paul Thurrott
Scroll down a little bit if this is the right page. Yeah, see this video.

0:07:50 - Leo Laporte
You can tell there's nothing in it because the the video is productivity tips for the new year. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. This is kb 505 0009. The the patch tuesday release right and with it a video of productivity tips for the new well, because usually that video talks about some of the stuff that's new you know, oh, I see these are all security patches. So this would be the video that would say all the new features, but there weren't any.

0:08:12 - Paul Thurrott
There weren't any, that's right. Listen, I consider this to be a resounding success. What's?

0:08:19 - Richard Campbell
tip one. With Windows 11, you can customize every touchpad.

0:08:23 - Paul Thurrott
You can buy a Mac at applecom.

0:08:29 - Leo Laporte
Oh, my, my, my, I don't know so.

0:08:34 - Paul Thurrott
There's nothing to say about this, except it came and it went and we're all. Nobody's been hurt.

0:08:39 - Richard Campbell
That's a good sign.

0:08:40 - Paul Thurrott
Well, it is 24H2. So plenty of people have been hurt. Well, it is 24H2, so plenty of people have been hurt. I think since the last time we did the show last week, I've heard about three new 24H2 problems, one of which is literally being resolved as we speak, kind of a Dolby audio issue that Microsoft actually did issue a fix for. But yeah, so there's that terribleness and we get some really good AI terribleness to talk about later in the show. But I'll save that little surprise for then. And yeah, I mean, this is. This is like windows update patch Tuesday used to be right.

0:09:18 - Richard Campbell
Boring yeah, just uneventful, nothing to talk about.

0:09:22 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, so no reason to talk about it.

0:09:24 - Richard Campbell
It feels so weird.

0:09:28 - Paul Thurrott
Actually, if anything, the big news we have this week, windows wise, is actually windows 10 related. But real quick um windows insider program. I believe there's only been one build since last week. It was a canary build. We don't know why they do this anymore. There's nothing new in it. I I I'm struggling to understand what they're working on with Canary, but yeah, there's that. But so last every Friday I do a column called ask Paul and I let readers, you know, write in with their questions and I answer them. It usually ends up being this three to 6,000 word Iliad and the Odyssey type thing. But one of the questions last week was and this is an interesting little poser, I guess for everyone in the community is do you think that is Microsoft serious about this October end of support date for Windows 10? I get that question on the run-ass side.

Yeah, I mean this is going to be one of the biggest topics of the year, unless we have another CrowdStrike. And the issue here is twofold, right, so they've done this before. We've had Windows XP, windows 7, where they've had to extend the lifecycle, and they've offered extended security, paid security. But it's also unprecedented in the sense that they're offering it to consumers for the first time just for one year. You know it's a per PC cost. I think it's $60 for the first year and then it doubles $35. Okay, whatever the price, I actually don't know. Yeah, it goes up, it goes up, it doubles every year. I know that. And the other unprecedented bit and we talked about this last week is that at this time in its life cycle, as it was about to expire in support, windows 7 had dramatically lower usage share out in the world than Windows 10 does today.

And my response to that question was that there were a lot of factors that would go into this. I don't really don't have a read on, or I should say now I do. I didn't have a read on it on Friday per se, but I felt that that number was important. You know, 60, 65% of the user base still on windows 10, actually kind of a big deal, um, but also, I think which customers are still on windows 10 and where they are in the migration makes a difference too, if that makes sense. So, in other words, some customers are more important than others. Some customers might have enough weight that they could go to Microsoft and say, yeah, you're not doing this, you know, and they might have to make a change, you know.

0:11:52 - Richard Campbell
Well, and one of the options would be that Microsoft cuts them a deal on extended support, just to stick to their guns.

0:11:57 - Paul Thurrott
That's right, yes, I mean, and there are a lot of backroom deals like that that occur that we don't hear a lot about. The one I heard that was sort of similar to this was that time when the uh uk hospital system was packed. They were all still running. I think it was xp, yeah, and it was long out of support and I think it was. It was terry myers at the time. So you know what am I going to do?

not not patch the bug for the uk hospital system it's like, obviously we're going to fix that, so we'll'll see. But I've had a tough read on this. But then yesterday Microsoft published a couple of well one's a blog post. One was just a support document where they reiterated the October date and then announced that they will not support Office on Windows 10 after that date, which is kind of interesting. Very unclear about whether Office would be supported if you were paying for the security updates.

0:12:48 - Richard Campbell
I, logically, my brain says this just feels like a random threat, they're gonna back away from yes, I mean, I mean.

0:12:56 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, this is just so. I I appreciate the effort, um, I appreciate what they're trying to do. I get it.

Yeah, I mean, you know well, like, in a vague sense, like I, windows 11, you know, uh, for all the criticism, when I came out of the gate, you know, one of my my things was like you know I, simplifying something as complex as windows is hard. I appreciate they took on the effort. I wish they had let some adults, you know, tackle the problem. But, you know, whatever it would they, they, they gave it a shot. Um, so I don't know. I feel like they are going to stick to this date.

0:13:28 - Richard Campbell
I think it is January, and then we're talking about October and a whole fiscal year rolls over. You know, I think when Amy hoods folks start focusing on the next fiscal and look at the situation and pressure may be on.

0:13:42 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but you know I I feel like for every pressure. In that sense there's kind of the opposing pressure, which is that the pc market hasn't rebounded like they thought it would for maybe the second or third year in a row now?

0:13:53 - Richard Campbell
oh wait, didn't you hear it?

0:13:54 - Paul Thurrott
ces, this is the year of the pc, yeah, but like that has to actually come true for it to be true. Um, you know, and people actually have to upgrade. I there's a, microsoft is fighting what is now a decades-long problem, with a lack of enthusiasm on the part of anybody who uses a PC to upgrade, you know, for all kinds of good reasons honestly, because it ain't broke.

Yeah, and it's just a new era. So you know, when they I don't remember when this was it must have been. Actually it was probably tied to trustworthy computing, but whenever it was roughly 20 years years ago when they announced the maybe it was older than that whatever it was the 10-year support life cycle. You know that felt really aggressive at the time, um, but in the 20 years since, or whatever it's been, you know, pcs have obviously gotten a lot more reliable, which is feels still.

0:14:41 - Richard Campbell
Feels like a weird thing to say, but but they have but the rate of hardware change tapered off after 2000. Yes, really.

0:14:47 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, Yep, yeah, that too, I mean there's lots of factors, right. There's the reality that most people use other devices for things they used to use a PC for. So the PC is a very laser-focused kind of a thing for most people and most of the time it's traditional PC-based productivity work which most people, and most of the time it's, you know, traditional pc-based productivity work um which, and it doesn't work, you go back to your ipad.

Yeah, exactly, um. So yeah, there's a lot of things kind of arrayed against it. But they, you know they, they're not just trying to help themselves. I mean presumably the majority well, I don't know this for a fact but yeah, I mean certainly over 50% of their revenues come from these enterprise agreements that it doesn't actually matter what version of Windows they're on. There's no bump, you know. So in many ways the bump here is for the rest of the industry, like a healthy PC industry helps Microsoft, obviously, because you don't want to see any problems there.

0:15:43 - Richard Campbell
But I just don't see a lot of the motivation here, right, like, are you wanting to get everyone to windows 11 so you don't have to support two versions of an os, because logically there should be a windows 12 on the horizon and you don't want to support three? Okay, so maybe drag out a proposal for a 12 to make 10 seem really yeah. Or are you really trying to move the pc market, because I just don't think you care that much if you're Microsoft I mean the hardware vendors certainly care, but is Microsoft Well?

0:16:11 - Paul Thurrott
yeah. So from a unit perspective I feel like we've kind of plateaued or bottomed out. However you want to say that, I feel like we're in the same kind of area for the most part, other than cyclical upgrade, business type things. But I mean from the PC, the pc makers perspective, you could say well, we're really hoping that if someone does upgrade, but the idea that this thing's going to last x number of years, that maybe they get a more premium computer, maybe higher margins, etc like well, and we've been a while there, like last june, we were talking about what you're going to need an mpu.

It's just that I've yet to see a justification for needing an mpu, and I see microsoft distinctly not motivated to do this, because I know how do you consume, the better offer them yep, it's, uh, yeah, yep, I, yeah, we're gonna be, we have been and will continue to be so laser focused on the ai stuff that it's hard to almost see the rest of the world now.

Yes, but it's irrational, yeah One of the many big stories with Microsoft and AI, is this, I mean, almost insane, maybe literally insane focus on AI and just how off it is, you know, from their customers' expectations. You know they're just in a completely different space and it's bizarre and we'll get into this because there's a lot again there.

0:17:30 - Richard Campbell
It's right to be clear again. Yeah well, you know every so often they're aligned with their micro, with their customer needs, and things are pretty good. And then somebody comes along who wants a promotion and has a vision and is going to manifest it against the will of the customer until the customer finally pulls back yep, I had this, uh, in the sort of in certification space I uh, which is not in the notes or anything, but you've reminded me of this.

0:17:55 - Paul Thurrott
I I had this idea sometime in the past week or 10 days where you bring up a computer, maybe after installing an update, or it's a new computer, whatever it is is, and there's a screen. Well, there, I should say, there may be a screen that has something to do with one drive, folder backup, and they, they really aggressively want you to use this feature. If you do see the screen, the language has changed and I don't actually remember what it used to say, but they want you to say yes. But then it said opt out. It actually said opt out, which is a curious turn of phrase, and I thought what if this means something? What if this indicates that they're backing off from this policy of auto-enabling folder backup for people like they do to me all the time? And I thought, oh, that's interesting. So I'm going to pay attention to that. I'm wondering if it's an MVP.

0:18:45 - Richard Campbell
Let's see how many people click on this. Whether it does, yeah, it turns out it's.

0:18:49 - Paul Thurrott
You're closer to the truth than I am because, um, I I've upgraded my surface laptop seven to pro from home, a windows 11 home. Um, you're supposed to see that screen on pro during setup it it honestly, it doesn't appear every single time, but, unlike home you, you could see it and I did choose, opt out on it and I did decline the offer three different times after I got into the operating system and it's still still installed, yeah, still auto enabled.

0:19:17 - Richard Campbell
We now have that little data point that you did select opt out.

0:19:21 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, so opt out is as meaningless as any language when it comes to Microsoft. So I was kind of hoping that was that meant something, but it doesn't mean anything.

0:19:29 - Richard Campbell
Now you're just talking. Crazy talk, mr Throb, I know.

0:19:33 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, okay, so office not supported officially after October.

0:19:39 - Richard Campbell
But I don't know what that really means.

0:19:41 - Paul Thurrott
I know nobody does that's and and, by the way, I say that, having read and reread that announcement post, I don't know what it means, because one of the things you're looking for in that language is okay, I'm going to pay for additional updates, security updates for windows 10. That means my system is supported. That tells me that.

0:19:59 - Richard Campbell
A valid office license I don't know how you don't support office like what does that even mean? Only when I do a PSS request and they say, oh, you're running Windows 10, you have to open 11 before we'll talk to you.

0:20:09 - Paul Thurrott
If you don't read this thing carefully, it looks like Windows 10 right now is in the same space as Windows 7, 8, and 8.1. They literally commingle these things together, like these are all things that are unsupported. You know, um, it's, it's not great. So this uh blog post or whatever, was community post. Um, yeah, I, I I always look for clarity and I so rarely get it, and this is a great example of that. Um, but they are going to give you the new outlook in windows 10. So for those people, whether you want it or not, I mean, they did just get rid of mail and calendar, right? So those things went out of support at the end of December and I guess it makes sense on that level. It's the replacement for those apps on in Windows, right? It's not just this thing that will come into office eventually by the time we're all retired, but is also a constituent part of Windows.

So I am I think I said this last show I am getting comfortable with the new Outlook on one machine I have a comparison later in the show to this because, as I think I said last week, you said something like oh, I wanted to talk to you about this Outlook thing that you told me I had to install on my computer and I was like, here we go, and anyway it worked.

0:21:26 - Richard Campbell
I may have done that.

0:21:28 - Paul Thurrott
It worked out better than those things usually do Um and for my, for me, no, I'm, I'm.

0:21:33 - Richard Campbell
It's disturbing to me that I hadn't turned it off, as I usually did. Right there you go and now knew where to click on things, like it was actually a smooth workflow, that was, it wasn't interrupting, right that moment where I turned to it, I got what I wanted from it, I moved on, and then the back of my head went wait, you just had a good experience in the outlook. That's not right.

0:21:51 - Paul Thurrott
This is how I rate touchpads on laptops, because when they're unreliable, I disable three and four finger gestures so that I'm not by mistake using this feature that does you know?

task view or whatever. And sometimes I'll review a laptop. I'll use it for six weeks, you know, and then I go to write the review and I'm looking at my notes and I don't have anything about the touchpad and I'm like wait a minute. And I go look at settings and I never changed it, which means this thing's been working great, because I noticed that immediately, you know has been working great because I noticed that immediately.

0:22:28 - Richard Campbell
you know so it happens. Sometimes the challenge of being critical is the things that work just don't pop up Like you need that checklist to say here are the things that normally annoy you. The fact that it didn't is extraordinary.

0:22:37 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, this is the truism, I think, of life in general that you could have this thing that is annoying you and you're really not you, I mean anyone but you can't stand it. It's making you crazy. And then it goes away and you're like, yeah, you know, it doesn't, it's not met with like the uh opposite, you know kind of enthusiasm you should have for something that doesn't stink anymore.

0:22:57 - Richard Campbell
But yeah, yeah but I I also deeply appreciate the god, that old, the old outlook. Like they, it's an orphan in a lot of ways, right like it's so odd it's its own, always has been really. I mean, I know, I know we're getting in, we're going to get into this later, but clearly, if you're not walking on a, if you're a developer not working on a microsoft, your days are numb.

0:23:18 - Paul Thurrott
Oh my god, I know I want to talk to you about this everything out. We're going to get to this because this right and then yeah that's what it seems to be.

0:23:26 - Richard Campbell
So every product, you know you're allowed one of. Each product that isn't an ai product, you're not allowed yeah, yeah, yep, there you go.

0:23:35 - Paul Thurrott
Um, I don't know what the call is for this, but one of the things that occurred as apple switched over to apple silicon on the Mac is that Parallels came out with a new version of their virtual machine software, parallels Desktop, but it doesn't didn't support x86 VMs, right. So you had to have an ARM VM, which makes sense if you understand the architecture for these things. Of course, there aren't a lot of ARM OSs that run on Apple Silicon. So Windows 11 now is actually fully supported, so that's nice. And then there's some Linux distributions that work, but they're not as well supported, but they are there. But this past week they enabled running x86 Windows VMs only. So Windows client or server. So this is an emulation then. Yeah, it's very slow. There's literally, I think they ship you a gerbil. It runs in a wheel and it kind of powers. It's. It's not, you know, it's not really ready for prime time, but I guess a lot of people have asked for this and maybe this is something that will um this is kind of virtual machine in a virtual machine.

0:24:37 - Richard Campbell
So you know the inception problem exists that's right.

0:24:40 - Paul Thurrott
it's like why are you holding a mirror up to a camera? You know, yeah, so that's there. I mean, I, you know it's, they're working on it. That's kind of cool. I think kind of implied they were heading toward this.

0:24:50 - Richard Campbell
Just in time for it not to be relevant.

0:24:52 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah.

0:24:52 - Richard Campbell
Right, yeah, like if windows for arm starts running well, why would you run an X86 instance?

0:24:57 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, well there may, maybe I'm just devil's advocate advocate advocating this. Uh, you may have a legacy app from, maybe in a business that only runs on x86, and this is the one thing that keeps you from doing this. Or maybe, maybe, but this feels like a small use case to me.

0:25:15 - Richard Campbell
But um yeah, now we can think about the fun of the windows in arm instance. Doing uh interpolation of an x86 app across to arm into an arm. Instance doing uh interpolation of an x86 app across to arm into an arm. I mean, I'm not sure if the prism emulator.

0:25:30 - Paul Thurrott
Is that good, but it's a you know, but you know they speak to.

0:25:35 - Richard Campbell
What parallels really needs to do when you have one of those good hardware based interpreters is can you do a pass-through through a VM?

0:25:42 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah right.

0:25:45 - Richard Campbell
But that's. We've had that kind of interop between virtual machines before, but it takes special work to do it.

0:25:50 - Paul Thurrott
This reminds me of back in the very early days of virtual PC, which at the time was what we think of as sort of a software-based virtualization engine, like not a hypervisor-based one, and it was miraculous that you could run Windows on a mac. You know, back in the early power pc days it was terrible too right. I mean it was just awful, like the performance was really bad, yeah, but at least it worked.

0:26:14 - Richard Campbell
Now we were. We were using that virtual pc for testing. Right, it was about we. We had some machines running a 311 implementation, some machines running a 95 implementation and we just had to test everything. And you didn't want to have one of each hardware, and so the fact that we could get one Torquey box and run virtual PC and test each of them, it worked.

0:26:33 - Paul Thurrott
Microsoft bought that company, didn't they? And they brought out eventually something called the whole server that later was replaced by Hyper-V, which was a software based but I guess 7, there was an XP mode thing. Briefly, that technology running Windows XP for those customers that needed that, and this kind of thing forever. For some reason we can't let go of the old stuff. I don't know what a world.

0:27:03 - Richard Campbell
Something All right. Well, apparently we're taking a break.

0:27:16 - Paul Thurrott
All right or not All right, let's move on. Yeah, all right. Well, apparently we're taking a break. All right, or not all right? Yeah, so I I've written so much about this. I'm going to try not to babble through this, because this is so big. The more you get into it, the more it kind of expands out. But, uh, the ai era, such as it is that we live in now, if we just kind of boil it down to the microsoft thing and and try not to pay too much attention to everything else that's going on around us, uh, has been sheer chaos, right.

Um, this past week I wrote it's exploration it's, it's the way I think of this is that we we often throw out these numbers like they mean anything but two-thirds of Microsoft's revenues from Windows in this case come from businesses, not from consumers. It's probably closer to 90%, by the way, but whatever that number is, You're not talking about two-thirds of Microsoft's overall income.

0:28:05 - Richard Campbell
You're meaning their Windows income comes from enterprise companies?

0:28:08 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, because no one's buying Windows. I mean, well, there are a couple hundred million a year in Windows licenses, but compared to all the enterprise agreements that are ongoing, the amount of money that they make from business is just, I think, astronomically higher. Sure, and yet that is the audience, the majority of their customers, who do not want this constant churn of change. That is what AI brings to everything that it touches. Right, and Microsoft has not just embraced this thing. They've lit the fire and they're running from building to building fanning the flames, and it's, you know, since the beginning of 2023, it's been this kind of, like I said, constant churn. You see it in things small, like here's this new product, oh wait, we're going to rebrand it to Copilot within the span of months, something that the old Microsoft would have taken several years to make that change, right To the sheer number of products they release. And now this year, we're seeing this major change in business model, which, in Microsoft's case, is actually a set of changes, because of course, it is. Nothing can be simple, so it's complicated.

So the other day, I wrote a story about the 15 months it's been since we got co-pilot and windows and just the the sheer chaos of that, the number of times they just move the icon on the taskbar, the number of times they change the app to be something completely different, right, I mean it's just, it just goes on and on and on. It's kind of crazy. But the one thing we sort of saw coming because they started talking about this I guess in September and then a lot more in November at Ignite is this people try to define these things in different ways. I think I've called this like co-pilot 2.0 or 3.0, whatever the number is. But moving to this kind of agentic model, right, which does have that feel of eventually something's going to stick, let's just keep throwing things out and seeing how it goes, yeah, but from a business model perspective, the way that Microsoft has done this is we're going to give away some stuff for free on the web, and then we're going to do the same stuff in Windows, and then some other stuff in Windows, and then we're going to have some other stuff in Windows.

It'll be free, but only if you have a co-pilot plus pc, which really confuses people. Um, and then we're going to have these paid services that are really expensive, you know, and without again getting into the nitty-gritty details. It doesn't matter what skew you're on consumer or commercial, but you pay some amount of money per user, per mother, per year for co or for microsoft 365, and then you pay 300 to 500 X or five X sorry, three to five X for copilot, for Microsoft 365 or copilot pro, if you're a consumer and it just doesn't feel commensurate with clear I think that's so obvious now how to do this.

0:30:45 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, well, well, okay, so I it's it so, and I'm sorry, three to five times as much. I want 20 bucks for Copilot. It depends on what SKU. Yeah, so well, copilot If you're running an E5, you're paying $150 a month for that.

0:30:59 - Paul Thurrott
No, copilot Pro is consumer. So Copilot, or we'll say Microsoft 365 families 120 bucks a year. Six users, one terabyte, all the apps, multiple devices 20 bucks per user per month. If you want to do Copilot Pro so one user if you just had one of the six pay for that, your price for Microsoft 365 would go up 3X that year. It's insane.

0:31:21 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, again, you're looking at it from a consumer point of view.

0:31:23 - Paul Thurrott
Well, no, no, that's just one example. But if you look at it from the business point of view, yes, it depends on what SKU you're using.

0:31:29 - Richard Campbell
but yeah, because it, because a half a dozen e5s is nearly 10 grand a year.

0:31:33 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah but that's not the only skew that can use this like I mean. It's not based on the price of the base skew, it's the same price, no matter. You know, that's part of the problem.

0:31:42 - Richard Campbell
No, matter what. I think this is mostly a conway's law problem that the structure of the organization reflects the way they make products oh, god, god.

0:31:51 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, by the way, that is one of Microsoft's core problems forever. I mean the hierarchy of the business showing through in the product that comes out. You know that kind of thing.

0:32:01 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, they will not allocate developers to a project that isn't making money, and so they have to attach this new product with a price tag to justify the existence of the developers well okay, camera's not focusing, I'm sorry, so if I feel a little blurry to you, it's because you know I'm trying to understand this is just is.

0:32:22 - Leo Laporte
Isn't ai a competitive marketplace, though, or is there something that co-pilot?

0:32:26 - Richard Campbell
does. Yes, it's only competitive marketplace if somebody's making money. No, but I understand what I mean from the point of view of the purchaser there are many different ais you could choose from.

0:32:35 - Leo Laporte
Does co-pilot have an advantage because of its integration?

0:32:38 - Paul Thurrott
because it's you get one bill right, it's if you. One of the main advantage you're already paying reasons a company would stick with microsoft 365 is you get it. All you know it's. It's easy, it's and it's. It's not like it's and it's. It's not like it's it's. It's like it's not like it's uncompetitive. It's probably one of the best of this type of thing that there is right, there's only a couple, but I mean it's probably one of the better ones.

That's not really the concern. It's just that there are different models. Like, if you look at the way subscription services are like in the consumer space, you have like ad supported and then paid is one typical one. It's not standard across everything, but that's one of the ways you could do it. And Microsoft, you know sort of right.

But the the one thing that they indicated and are now starting to roll out is that if you pay for a Microsoft three 65 subscription, they're actually going to give you AI credits every month and you can use those previously exclusive to Microsoft three 65 features up until you you know you you can use those previously exclusive to Microsoft 365 features up until those credits are used up. Like everything you do uses some credits, right. So a certain number of tokens kind of thing, and to me that's fair right, because regardless of the actual price of the paid subscription, at least this gives anyone the opportunity to try it, and those people that use it the most heavily and are actually running out of credits could say okay, you know what? Actually, it makes sense for me to pay 20 bucks a month.

0:33:55 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, If you ran out of credits, clearly because you were using it and so you, you and you're going to run out of the moment where you really want an answer to something and you're going to be much more likely to say, okay, I'll pay.

0:34:04 - Paul Thurrott
This. This to me, is the is an acceptable I don't know compromise. You kind of have to accept it. Look, this ai stuff is happening, whether you want it or not. Um, I had written that thing back in august where I was like, look, I'm not paying for ai and I and I mean that like I will pay for a word processor but I'm not paying for spell checking separately. Like I will pay for a photo editor, but I'm not going to pay for this thing that removes the background, like that. That needs to be part of the thing these are features features or uh, like enhancements.

0:34:35 - Richard Campbell
Aren't we seeing that now with github copilot?

0:34:37 - Paul Thurrott
don't, don't, don't, don't, you dare. No, we're going to talk about this, don't you dare.

0:34:42 - Leo Laporte
Does microsoft, uh copilot, have anything comparable to chat gpt 4.0? Yes, it does it is.

0:34:50 - Richard Campbell
It's the same thing. How is it labeled?

0:34:54 - Paul Thurrott
well, they, leo. I'm glad you asked. They've changed it five times the most. I'm not kidding. They just today announced the latest name change.

Um, so, under the terms of this new model, that thing that started as bing enterprise chat and eventually became microsoft 365, 365 Chat is now available for free with this token. No, it's a different system. But if you want to use agents, they have a pay-as-you-go thing which is completely separate from everything I just talked about. But you get some amount of functionality. And if you pay for Microsoft 365 Copilot, it's wide open. You get pretty much everything, by the way, except for some agentic capabilities, which are still pay as you go. But still, I would argue I am arguing, I guess literally it's better than it was, because before it was like the haves and the have-nots you pay a lot and you get stuff, you pay nothing, you get basically nothing, at least in the Microsoft 365 Copilot sense. But now you do, or now it's starting to happen. So to me this makes a lot of sense.

But then Google today announced and I saw this announcement and I thought I know exactly what they're doing they're going to copy Microsoft again. When Microsoft did the co-pilot stuff, they came out with the same thing with Gemini same price. Same price for consumers, same price for businesses. Just different name Google thing instead. But that's not what they did.

Interestingly, they came out with a different approach. They are raising the prices of workstation across all of the tiers by less than 20% and they're not going to sell what they call Gemini advanced or Gemini add-ons anymore, which were $20 to $30 a month each per user. So now everyone just gets everything. You pay a little bit more and you get more. Now I actually think that's even better, and part of the calculus there is that Microsoft is also raising the price of Microsoft 365. They haven't done it in the Americas and they haven't done it in Western Europe yet, but they have started doing it in parts of Asia and, I think, australia, new zealand, and those prices are going up like 45 percent, like they're not. Yeah. So we'll see what they do here, but we'll just ask for, except for now, data center thing too.

0:37:03 - Richard Campbell
Right, like I know, they tend to test on smaller markets, but at the same time it's like the data center resources in the south pacific are far more constrained.

0:37:12 - Paul Thurrott
Well, and there are less. Well, there aren't less users in asia, obviously, but there may be less users of the fewer users of this stuff. I don't know. I don't actually know that, but yes, so they're, they're, it's happening. I mean, I think it's fair to say by the end of this year we will all be paying more for microsoft 365. We'll see how that happens and how that goes, but for now, microsoft has made a step forward as far as meeting the needs of its customers, I think in a way that is meaningful.

0:37:37 - Richard Campbell
Google's made an even bigger- I just don't see why they don't roll this into the price of the product and stop breaking it down as long as it doesn't double the price of the product or whatever it is.

0:37:47 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, that's the Well and again for the consumer edition. That's the problem. Again for the consumer edition. That's the worry, you know.

0:37:52 - Richard Campbell
That's the worry, but so we'll see. It seems unwise, when you're spending 130 a month on an e5, that you really want 20 more dollars. Like just better to make it 150 e5 and it comes, yeah do you think. But you know, here's me being the the enterprise guy and you being the consumer guy and the pricing, and they're using the same pricing strategy.

0:38:08 - Leo Laporte
It's insane like what do you think? I can see why enterprise isn't gonna. This is this, this is more enterprise. But as a consumer, I feel like my, my, my, ai dollars are better spent somewhere else, right I? I know? That's why I say isn't it a competitive market, can't consumers? It is a competitive market so I am.

0:38:27 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, this is anecdotal, obviously. I'm just. You know, I know some people who do what they do, like who cares? But it surprises me how many people I know who are not technical people, who pay for chat GBT, for example. This came up twice over the last weekend and it's like I'm sorry, what do you do? And one of these guys who's like the just part of the family's not related to me by blood or anything, but a couple of bloodlines removed or whatever he said. I use this thing all day, every day. I use it all the time. I use it way more than I ever thought I would use it and I that kind of blows my mind. But there you go.

0:39:04 - Richard Campbell
So I, but also at 20 bucks a month, like it's coffee money. What do you care?

0:39:18 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, but that's what I'm saying is that Microsoft has to be sensitive to the fact that there is also Anthropic and OpenAI and Mistral, and also that I am, as an individual, paying them 120 bucks a year for this already. That's the thing. To me, a lot of this stuff feels like things that you would have added to this product for free three, five, ten years ago, because these are just features of the product so on one hand, we have this pitch of well, you're already paying me, so paying me more is easy.

0:39:40 - Richard Campbell
On the other hand, it's like, really, you're gonna ding me 20, like if I gotta spend 20, I'll go spend on something now it's yes, and, and this is literally like the, the difference between an enterprise slash commercial customer and an individual.

0:39:54 - Paul Thurrott
Like, as an individual, you could almost act in a way that you're seeking revenge on Microsoft and to punish them for their ills, I'm going to use chat GPT, which is hilarious because, by the way, they make 21% of that revenue. But whatever, you don't know that and you're trying to hurt them for some reason. Whatever it is.

0:40:11 - Richard Campbell
But to Leo's point, though, and if they just discounted the consumer version?

0:40:17 - Paul Thurrott
Well, but this is OK. But this is part of the age old clash within Microsoft, where the people representing the side of the house don't ever want to see that happen because they don't want enterprise to come to them and say, uh excuse me, this thing's free over there. We give you a lot more money than those people do, what's up, so there's a. There's a weird balance there.

0:40:39 - Richard Campbell
You know they can't be yeah, but then I would argue that the feature set, the functionality of co-pilot for the m365 in the enterprise, is dramatically different from copilot.

0:40:48 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, and it's, it's a lot of it's related not just to manageability, but although that's important but also to security and data data governance and the ability to determine what data that your users can access while they're using the copilot services, et cetera. So there's a lot of kind of over management, overhead or just a safety rails, however you want to say it. I mean, there are some obviously in the consumer product too, but enterprises will demand that this is a non-starter unless you offer all of that stuff. And is that worth part of that chunk of change per user? Yeah, that's up to individual.

0:41:27 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I guess that was my question.

0:41:28 - Paul Thurrott
I can see, why enterprise might it might be sticky for the enterprise, but less so for consumers between that and the paid version is that you cannot limit the data set to your company's data unless you pay for it, right? You can't do that for free. Oh, interesting, huh, yeah, that's one of them. You know there's only a couple, but that's and they're big ones, right? Most of the stuff and there's only a couple of, really when I say most, I mean like the other two are related to. In fact, I think that's one of them, actually, that is one of them. So there's only a couple, and one of them is, or the others, or all of them are related to these agentic capabilities.

So if you want something an agent that's going to work on your behalf without you interacting with it, you actually have to pay for that, and it's a consumption-based thing. So it's a pay-as-you-go deal, and that's true whether you're paying for Copilot 365 or not. So I don't know what the justification is there, because they're never going to say this? Is this somehow more expensive for Microsoft? Or is it because this thing always runs in the background and is there doing stuff on your behalf? I don't really know. Maybe they perceive it as such a valuable service. It's something they can charge for. They're just calculating that people will pay for this capability.

0:43:01 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, but they started on charging that long before it was valuable at anything. Yes, exactly.

0:43:08 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but you're telling me, if it tells me there's an ipad for 17 cents off, that's not valuable.

0:43:12 - Richard Campbell
Come on, rich geez I know it's, it's, yeah, but I'm pretty sure I can do that on a large line.

0:43:20 - Leo Laporte
I can do rag, which is right. That's rag, right.

0:43:24 - Paul Thurrott
Uh, I could do rag for free in a lot of these yes, but but that, and this is going to be the push and pull, so um, I maybe they don't guarantee privacy, or people trust microsoft and, yeah, trust the brand I like that you said that without laughing a lot. But um, I mean, some people do, I, I, I do too. I mean to us too. Well, yeah, you.

0:43:44 - Leo Laporte
You know, because they have more um. Look at open ai is not worried about its reputation or perplexity or clout or any of this stuff as much as Microsoft is. They have a lot more to lose. Same with Apple. I think people go with those big brands for that reason. But I have to. I mean I'm I get a lot more out of, for instance, perplexity AI. That's worth 20 bucks Interesting and it does a lot more. And I'm in chat gpt using a 4.0, the new um reasoning model. So you say I could do that in copilot, but how about? Do what? Sorry, use chat gpt, the reasoning version, whatever it is.

0:44:20 - Paul Thurrott
401 yeah, so they literally. That's what came out today so, so it does it.

0:44:24 - Leo Laporte
What does it call it? How do I know that I'm doing? No, don't make me look this up. It's called. I should sorry, it just came out. Ask the ai, because I I like to use uh, oh, one right, yeah, and that's, but when I'm on chat, that's what they say, right? Yeah, I can use 4040 with scheduled tasks, which is new. I can have 101 mini. I have a lot of models I can use.

0:44:45 - Paul Thurrott
Uh, this is chat gpt's interface this thing is called microsoft 365 co-pilot chat. That's the new name. This is the one that, for the first time, is available in a free tier as well as a paid tier, so before it was only paid um I feel like they're missing the boat by calling it chat, because that sounds like it's about chat well, it isn't well that's just how you interact with the ai is you type a question and it gives you an answer.

That's not to me a chat bot something you converse with okay, but think about, think, just keep to microsoft word, just to make it simple, right? So you've got this application that you write things with. Copilot is something that you could summon to do something specific summarize this document, rewrite this paragraph, whatever it is. It's also something that could happen automatically. You're doing, like right, this is, this is something we'll talk about with the co-pilot stuff.

0:45:38 - Leo Laporte
Uh for um yeah, apple intelligence does that forget.

0:45:41 - Paul Thurrott
You have some features that are built into the editor yeah, so the chat interface, which is the thing you know, we have one. We have it in windows, it's on the web, it's just the thing you bring up when you want to ask questions and talk about yeah, so it, it's, it's. For some it's bizarre, but it's a fact of you know, it's a it's and you're saying when I use that, that's not four, that's not four.

0:46:02 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that's 401.

0:46:04 - Paul Thurrott
Oh, for it is four. Oh, let me look it up.

0:46:09 - Leo Laporte
It's complicated I think there's more granularity in the chat GPT world, even though I know we're using the same tools.

0:46:16 - Paul Thurrott
I think the reason it's the free one is chat.

0:46:19 - Leo Laporte
GPT for oh yeah, that's not the same for okay, 401 is the reasoning one. So you must have access to that I don't know, so I'm looking at it right now. Yeah, so.

0:46:28 - Paul Thurrott
I, I, I.

0:46:28 - Leo Laporte
It seems to me that the reason people do this is, it's from Microsoft, it's trusted, it's integrated in, so I don't have to have a separate window. Low friction.

0:46:38 - Paul Thurrott
Well, the big use case, though, to me, is going to be enterprises that want to limit the data set to the what do you call it? Ground the data in their corporate data, because that's where it can be helpful. There's a lot of Microsoft products that have kind of come and gone in the past where the net result is you're in a big organization and you have to find someone who's an expert on whatever the topic is, so you can ask them a question or whatever. So you want to find someone who was involved in a previous initiative and find out what happened, because now someone's asking about it again or whatever it is. You're looking for kind of corporate memory. So, yeah, I I think one of the big benefits, the thing I've been looking for the most honestly with copilot.

When they first announced copilot, the first thing that went into my brain was I want to point this thing at my one drive where I have my document archive, and I want to be able to search and then find things, because right now I can tell you when I search for things, I don't find half of it, and that was really interesting to me kind of ground the AI, and I could ask you questions like, when did Microsoft release dot dot dot or whatever the thing is? Because that stuff's in there, the information's there, you just have to pull it out, and I think AI would be good at that. So I think that's part of the appeal grounding the data in the corporate knowledge base, whatever that means across their many data silos and the Microsoft graph and all that I don't know. So, yeah, that's why you would go with Microsoft plus open AI. My God, from the outside does it look like, I mean, you think, microsoft's chaos?

0:48:04 - Leo Laporte
open AI. You can literally do that in every other AI that's out there. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so well right, so and you can do it privately because all of them have the checkbox or something. Yeah.

0:48:15 - Paul Thurrott
So let's say you stop paying for Microsoft 365, but you still have Word in your computer, or you might have Word because you bought Office 2019 one time and you're like I'm never buying this thing again or whatever it is. So there's all these add-ons you can get for AI, if you want you, grammarly or whatever, for just you know, helping you rewrite things and all that. There's a million of these things. So is that big enough competition for microsoft or copilot or whatever right now? Uh, probably not. I mean, microsoft has withstood far bigger threats to office than any of that stuff, but I think apathy is a big problem for them and also just people just sticking with the old version and never paying them again. So it's like great, we have this huge user base of office, but what are they using? They're using a million different versions and a lot of it's not even supported anymore.

0:48:59 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, and, oddly enough, it still works.

0:49:02 - Paul Thurrott
I know which is the, which is the rub right, this is the tough I mean you've got this.

0:49:08 - Richard Campbell
somebody said in the chat that you know what you know. It works fine, office 2003.

0:49:13 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, and Office 2003 was the first version where, like I say, outlook was worth a damn and you know, it started to get really interesting and before they did the ribbon right, which I want to say I think worked out tremendously in the long run. But AI is just going to be everywhere.

0:49:30 - Richard Campbell
That's the way to manage a ridiculous amount of complexity in an application.

0:49:32 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, and let alone a suite of applications. I think that the big problem for Microsoft here is going to be the same as it is for office, which is just that AI will be is already basically everywhere, and it's not much of a value add because you just get it everywhere. You know you might have it on your Apple iPhone and you'll look at office and be like why are you charging me for this? I get this for free right here. Why? Why would I? What am I doing? I don't care about that stuff, so it's a problem.

0:50:01 - Richard Campbell
Well, and they and they are getting more efficient, right Like the. The cost of Microsoft per user is also going.

0:50:09 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, I mean it should right.

0:50:13 - Richard Campbell
Well, but then their investment.

0:50:15 - Paul Thurrott
Go ahead. Yeah, just real quick. I mean, we know they're spending 20, no, sorry, $80 billion on the fiscal year, but I would argue that's the little tip of the iceberg, because when you look at all the acqui-hires and partnerships and all the other stuff and the reorgs and bringing in, we'll talk about the organizational changes that are coming. Um, I think the real cost of this is dramatically higher and I'm just curious if Microsoft can afford it. They're one of the richest companies on earth.

0:50:41 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, I mean, I was going to make exactly that point. It's not like they're borrowing the money. They would have otherwise used that cash for more stock buybacks.

0:50:49 - Paul Thurrott
instead, they're investing in infrastructure, so is there a point where shareholders kind of say, uh, we'd like to get some of that back directly if we could or, you know, maybe there might be right or is there some point with the board of directors?

0:51:02 - Richard Campbell
this is where the energy of the hype comes from is how do you keep the shareholders calm by making this a worldwide hype, I mean?

0:51:09 - Paul Thurrott
they could have created another zoom windows phone and and kill them again, and they still would have cost less than what they're spending on ais less money, it's kind of weird, like I mean.

0:51:17 - Richard Campbell
Admittedly a lot of this money is in infrastructure, like it has an on-term asset value.

0:51:22 - Paul Thurrott
It is buildings and 19 or 20 billion dollars a quarter. It costs them 7.5 billion to get rid of Windows Phone and Nokia. Yeah, I mean, that's like six. What is that? Eight or nine Nokias in a year? We thought that was a big deal when they did it the one time. Now they're just encouraging up this much money all the time. It's crazy.

0:51:45 - Leo Laporte
It's an interesting space because, on the one hand, it feels like the Wild West and you would want to be in a more experimental mode, maybe feeling like the incumbents Google, apple, microsoft are probably too conservative with this stuff and all the interesting stuff is going to be happening outside of them. On the other hand, it's so expensive that only Google. Apple and Microsoft can afford to do it.

0:52:08 - Paul Thurrott
This was kind of my point at the very top of this, which is just that, from the perspective of Microsoft's biggest and most important customers, they expect to conserve a slow-moving, change-averse organization. This has turned into a clown car of stupidity, just like chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain, chain. I mean it's crazy. We're only two, doesn't it feel like it's been 20 years?

0:52:31 - Leo Laporte
It's been going on for two years oh, it's happening, really fast it's and that's why I just don't feel like the incumbents are going to be as as uh, nimble and as interesting as these little, and yet they've outrun everybody yeah, I mean microsoft is trying their damnness to uh break out of that trap. Well, they were smart because they did partner with a newbie. They partnered with open ai and, I think, arguably still the forerunner in all of this right and I think they got lucky.

0:52:58 - Richard Campbell
They got real lucky. They you know kevin scott saw an easy uh opportunity to get more azure consumption, which was his mission. There was no expectation it was going to work until they presented him gpt2. And then he wrote that email where he's like okay, this looks like a thing it is a thing I think we'll agree.

0:53:17 - Leo Laporte
I think we can all agree.

0:53:19 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's a thing I don't know what it is, but it's a thing that's maybe the best way that's ever been put, because literally I mean something. It's like the. You know the screaming teacher in back to school. He's like I. He's because this guy's really passionate. Do you remember?

0:53:34 - Leo Laporte
I'll never know in the early days of the internet, I, it seems to me, I had the same notion, kind of sense that something here, yeah, there's something huge here. I remember the first time I encountered it. I was on the well, which was a text based message system running on servers that were on top of Unix, which were had access to the internet, and there, and I found out, there's a command you can drop out of the well software into a command line and you can use Archie and go. For there was I mean, it was really early days, but I was blown away because I got this sense of there's a lot of people here, there's a lot of stuff here, there's a lot of stuff here. There's a global thing here. It's kind of hidden and this is what, probably 92, something like that, 91, so that was, but. But but at the same time, you, you didn't. I don't know what it's going to be right when it grows up, but it's definitely a thing that.

0:54:27 - Paul Thurrott
Um. So all of us, because we're in the industry, have experienced this moment where this thing that's kind of constrained to our stupid little lives, it gets out, breaks out somehow, and normal people come to you and say things and you're like, wait a minute, what? So I remember with the internet, one of the big things was just that everybody wanted it. You know, yeah, and it was.

0:54:45 - Leo Laporte
It wasn't this is 94 and 95. Yes, in the mid 90s it was just everybody got online and then you kind of forget.

0:54:52 - Paul Thurrott
It doesn't take long A couple of years. You're like I used to spend a lot of time on computers before they were online. I don't remember what the hell I was doing.

0:54:59 - Leo Laporte
It was just a big calculator yeah.

0:55:02 - Paul Thurrott
And the iPod was like that. I had a friend, non-technical, he said he goes, I want to get an iPod. Does that make sense? And I was like how do you even know this exists?

0:55:15 - Leo Laporte
It was a big thing. But I have to say there is, in the same sense, like when the iPhone came out, we knew it was not only a thing, but we knew it was a big thing and we had a pretty good idea of what it meant and what it was going to be. I mean, it ended up being even more huge, but there wasn't a surprise. The internet yeah, kind of a surprise. I think AI is going to be the biggest surprise of all.

0:55:34 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, but for the same reason as the internet, it's just going to be everywhere. It's going to become a fact of life. We're going to forget what it was like before we had it. Yeah, and look, we all grew up in Star Trek movies, our TV shows and movies and those scenarios we always talk about that. He and those scenarios we always talk about that. You know he's sitting in the chair with this tablet and doing whatever he's doing and you know, when are we going to have flying cars? Like this is kind of realizing a lot of it.

0:55:57 - Leo Laporte
I am now experimenting with always on AI. I'm wearing this thing that came at CES, the BEE, and I showed you the brilliant glasses that make you look like you're a dork. I'm going to talk more about these next show on Twig, but I'm really interested in the idea of an AI assistant that is always on, always listening, and then this B comes up with a to-do list for you I mean, you know, Bill Gates was talking about this like 25 years ago. Yeah, yeah, we've always thought there would be something like this.

0:56:29 - Paul Thurrott
This has been promised for so long.

0:56:37 - Leo Laporte
I've got a to-do list.

0:56:38 - Richard Campbell
That was created because this thing is always listening to all my conversations and now some of it I'm going to, and that's where the AR equation kind of comes in. Is you kind of need that dash cam on your face?

0:56:45 - Leo Laporte
So there is another one I ordered. That is a little glowing light you glue to your temple. Oh, geez Like a Borg.

0:56:50 - Paul Thurrott
That's a little glowing light you glue to your temple. Oh jeez, like a Borg, that's a look.

0:56:54 - Leo Laporte
But look, but Slaker. So this is all generated, I'll read it to you from conversations Practice playing jingle bells on the piano, incorporating both hands and chords. That is like a checklist on my to-do. I didn't put it in. It heard me? Yeah, I think, and this is early, early days.

0:57:12 - Paul Thurrott
I like the transition here, by the way. Uh, we've spent the past five years being freaked out that everything we say in front of our phones is recorded and used to service ads and blah, blah, blah. And now you're like oh, it made it for me, it's listening to me awesome, you know.

0:57:24 - Leo Laporte
Oh I am. I don't have no idea where this is going. It's probably going to china. I don't know. Who cares. It's working and it's doing something. For instance, yesterday lisa said she told me like verbally I'm at breakfast, oh, don't forget to upload your tax documents. And she told me where to upload them. And then you were like no, it put it in here as a to-do. There you go, okay, because I would have forgotten. So it's very early days. This is, you know, there's a lot.

0:57:49 - Paul Thurrott
I will say is uh, make sure you put the password for that account into this list. Well, that's the problem. So you'll never lose it.

0:57:55 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's the problem. I just I think that there's something here, and what I'm saying, I guess, is probably this is using open AI. I don't even know, they don't even tell you, but that's not the point. Yeah, it's the feature set, as you said. It's the feature set. It's how you use it. That becomes interesting.

0:58:12 - Paul Thurrott
But that is the relationship or agreement we've implicitly made with Google. Already Everyone who uses Google Maps or whatever it is, uses it in part because God, this thing is so helpful I could never, I can't believe I ever drove between states or whatever without it, and you kind of know it's tracking you.

0:58:44 - Leo Laporte
Of course it's tracking you.

0:58:45 - Paul Thurrott
Google has come to. So these are the two things that happened to me recently with Google Maps. I got in the car on a Friday, I put the phone up on the dashboard not to do anything with this, to put it up there and this thing pops up and it says it will take you eight minutes to get to notch which is the restaurant we go to.

0:59:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it knows that it's time to go to notch. I did not tell you I was going to notch.

0:59:05 - Paul Thurrott
I know how to get to notch that. That was a little weird, but the other one is done. I think I mentioned this on a previous show. It's like boop boop. So it's hey, paul, we have a 17-minute gap on the 11th. Could you just fill it in and let us know what we were doing?

0:59:18 - Leo Laporte
then I hate that I turned that stuff off. Wait a minute, what? I don't want nobody to schedule me. Yeah, that's the one where you're a ceo, a really busy person no, no, what I mean is it's an assistant tracking.

0:59:30 - Paul Thurrott
It has. It has a gap, it knows in understanding of what I did that day and it would like me to still let it go right, I could it said well, can we connect to gmail and google calendar and google contacts?

0:59:40 - Leo Laporte
I said yeah, yeah, sure, just take it all every. But now remember, I'm a I'm a perfect guinea pig for this because I live in. I mean I'm on youtube telling you everything about it my life all the time anyway. So I mean, obviously I don't have anything to hide.

0:59:53 - Paul Thurrott
But um, my life is nothing but many reaction video. Reaction videos of people watching the Van Halen unchained video, which is just amazing.

1:00:02 - Richard Campbell
That's all I get on YouTube Different people watching the same video over and over again.

1:00:06 - Paul Thurrott
It's fantastic. They know what you like ball.

1:00:09 - Leo Laporte
They know what you like ball.

1:00:10 - Paul Thurrott
They know, this is you know, I guess. Just yeah, that's what you want friday.

1:00:13 - Leo Laporte
uh, let me, let me take a little break because we're, because they're, uh, it's time, um and then. But we've got more to talk about with ai and there are some things going on at microsoft. I see some layoffs happening and so forth. So let's, let's talk, uh, more about that in just a little bit. You're watching, uh, windows Weekly with Paul Theriot, richard Campbell, and for many years now, windows Weekly in fact you've heard me say it, probably for many years has been brought to you literally by CacheFly. Remember bandwidth for Windows Weekly provided by CacheFly at C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com. I just did an interview. He interviewed me. Matt Levine, the founder of CacheFly, just interviewed me. We did a great hour and a half conversation. I think that podcast is coming out in a month.

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1:06:04 - Paul Thurrott
So sometime in the first half of last year, remember, microsoft announced something called microsoft ai, which was a new, not a division, right, I think they called it a, an organization. It was a home for suleiman under, uh, mustafa suleiman, who was coming from inflection, and then they basically hired almost everyone from inflection, including their chief scientist, right, and it was confusing because at the time, uh, we had just come out of that period where sam altman had been kind of ousted at open eye ai. A month went by, then he came back. They got rid of half the.

1:06:39 - Richard Campbell
You know, there was a whole churn not a month, it was a week it felt like a million years and it was yeah, it was a week of dark, satya angry you know.

1:06:46 - Paul Thurrott
so in the wake of that, they did this microsoft ai organization. I think the conventional wisdom was that this was a response to that, that they needed to not have all their eggs in one basket, or whatever You're like. Okay, well, it was weird that they hired people from outside the company. I think there were a lot of people inside Microsoft who were like what's going on here? I know at least some people left. Remember there was that engineer who said, yeah, I don't want anything to do with this, I've been working on Copilot, whatever. In fact, I think it was the lead on Copilot left when this happened. It just felt out of step. So it's almost a year later and they're doing it again.

So there's two things that have happened this past week or so that may or may not be related, right? So the first is that Microsoft announced the creation of something called Core AI Platform and Tools Division, which has similarities to that old Platform and Tools Division. I remember from the old server Visual Studio days, early 2000s who is, or which is led by someone who is not from Microsoft. Again, what's going on here and what is this thing, Right? And then there are separate reports. In fact there are multiple reports. My phone was buzzing off the hook last night.

I was getting texts from three different people about layoffs at Microsoft, including from one who's a former employee who had some kind of interesting details about that and I don't know that these are completely related, and I've read through this announcement about this core AI platform and tools division several times. This is going to come up a lot on the show this year me trying to figure out what Microsoft is saying and failing completely. Year me trying to figure out what microsoft is saying and failing completely. I'm not 100 sure, richard. I'm curious if you know anything about this or have any thoughts on this, because I just don't.

1:08:38 - Richard Campbell
I don't quite get what I think they were due for a refocus on ai. I do certainly heard from various sources that if you're working on something, if you're a dev inside of microsoft and you don't have ai related in your pipeline somewhere, you are trouble. So make sure you're associated with all of that. Uh, the subtext of this particular announcement that was interesting to me was scott right, right I thank you.

1:09:03 - Paul Thurrott
I I literally my heart skipped a beat for a second when I saw his name and I thought, oh no, oh no, but he's an interesting he. He's a survivor, obviously, and he's been around for a long time and I was nervous that this would be the beginning of some kind of a wind down for him, even though he is not an old man.

1:09:20 - Richard Campbell
You know? No, I know, but he's not, although he's been an EVP for a long time. But he was cloud. And then he was cloud and AI. And then you said Mustafa showed up and then there was another AI entity. So at that point you're like what's going on? And there was a schism that maybe it's enterprise versus consumer, but they never really made that clear. Now the meta guy shows up and they're like, okay, we're going to consolidate the AI group around that. I don't, they didn't really say you know, his cloud AI group is going to just be a cloud group. But clearly, when you see him writing about anything, right now he's writing about class, right, like he is responsible for growing Azure at the highest levels, right, like he's at the thought, he's at EVPs, top of the stack. So the I think the growth pain in Azure and there's pain's pain right, there's been some weird outages there's been. It's not what they're doing, it's a crazy hard.

1:10:18 - Paul Thurrott
Uh, they're rented three mile island, which is just a headline from the onion that never should have happened.

1:10:24 - Leo Laporte
I like, I like I like it when you say renting that's a good instead of, you know, recommissioning like it's a weekend birthday party or something you know.

1:10:34 - Paul Thurrott
It's like I got a bouncy house but you're getting three miles. It's the same thing, it's nuclear power by owner.

1:10:39 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, I understand yeah and I'd like to buy eight gigawatts of electricity, please, every 10 years.

1:10:45 - Paul Thurrott
Can you hook me up? I know a guy well, but when you think about, like the, the constituent parts of this new actually division right, I think they call it a division. So it's not a nebulous organization, it's a division and they're going to combine what used to be DevDiv AI platform and then some parts of Office oh, sorry, not Office Office of the CTO, which is Kevin Turner right, he was doing Kevin Scott which uh, which is kevin turner right he was doing.

1:11:12 - Richard Campbell
Uh, kevin scott, sorry, oh geez. Kevin turner speaking of the early 2000s, uh, ai supercomputer, agentic runtimes and engineering thrive.

1:11:18 - Paul Thurrott
God did care. God work on the brands um. And then the mission is to build end-to-end co-pilot and ai stack for both. This is the fascinating part for both first and third party customers to build and run on with ai apps and agents. Uh, I see, I hear, I read that and I think to myself okay, what about dot net? What about visual studio, which, by the way, has not gotten a major upgrade since the 18th century or whenever it was a long time ago?

1:11:49 - Richard Campbell
no, yeah, well, and you notice julia lucens in that loop, but that ultimately she's the head of dev div. So and I think there's a quote from amanda silver, who's really her her right hand, uh, and really in charge of studio. But you're right, like studio still sells annual licenses, right, like they haven't really switched over to the new model. Um, they've certainly got a co-pilot product, they're in there, but I don't know that Julia Lucens had a new person to report to than Scott Guthrie in a decade. That's incredible.

1:12:21 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah.

1:12:21 - Richard Campbell
When you talk about that conservative slow-moving.

1:12:25 - Paul Thurrott
whatever Microsoft, that part of the company was that Predictable, reliable. I don't mean that in a negative way.

1:12:33 - Richard Campbell
The vast majority of Visual Studio customers are last year's Visual Studio customers, right Like they. It's a subscription model. For a reason, Big enterprises use it. I don't know that they have much of a plan to acquire new customers.

1:12:45 - Paul Thurrott
I mean somebody just asked me when is there going to be a next major rev of Visual Studio? And it's like I don't know. I'm not sure there will be they are due?

1:12:57 - Richard Campbell
Oh, they're overdue, like it was 2019. There was a 2022. So, logically, there should be a 2025. And I'm saying that because I know.

1:13:05 - Paul Thurrott
No and I want to be. If I knew, I would say I guess what I mean by a major rev is not just calling it something different which is yes is due no.

1:13:15 - Richard Campbell
Studio gets a quarterly update. There's lots of features being added. It's not like it's a dead product.

1:13:19 - Paul Thurrott
No, no, not at all. It's steady work. I don't know If we're moving to this kind of AI agentic future. Are there better tools, different tools for that kind of stuff, and does this stuff just go forward as almost a legacy something, something like I?

1:13:35 - Richard Campbell
I would argue that's already true with Visual Studio Code. Yeah, I mean.

1:13:39 - Paul Thurrott
So one of the well, one of the many things this past year go back to build, microsoft announced something called the Windows Copilot runtime, which is hilarious because it's no runtime runtime, which is hilarious because it's no runtime, and the core part of that, which I think of it as that is the Windows Copilot library, which is a set of APIs or will be, because none of them have been released, not one of them, and that is amazing to me. If you look at NET or just at Azure, right, there are many APIs related to cloud and, I'm sorry, to AI capabilities. Most of those run against the cloud. Right, the Windows Copilot runtime stuff is supposed to run against the MPU, which hasn't turned into a big market, frankly, and those things haven't appeared. So NET plays a role in AI and hopefully it's a role Actually. You would know this, so I assume.

Let me just ask you what is the biggest audience space, for lack of a better term, the biggest use case or whatever for dot net in the world? Like what, what's, what's most of what's dot net used for? Mostly corporate, internal, corporate, like?

1:14:45 - Richard Campbell
apps like actual apps yeah, interesting, and usually back in parts, although with blazer being ascendant, they you're seeing more and more like old web forms apps being replaced as blazer apps.

1:14:56 - Paul Thurrott
But the vast majority of dot net apps are behind corporate firewalls to millions so I guess there is an audience out there of customers who may want to either modernize existing apps or create new apps in dot net. It's a constant pressure and it's also you know, the folks I know inside dev div like of customers who may want to either modernize existing apps or create new apps in NET.

1:15:12 - Richard Campbell
It's a constant pressure and it's also, you know, the folks I know inside DevDiv like. These are the conversations they're having every week how do I move you off these older tech? How do I get you into mobile in a useful way? How do I open LLMs as a door? Like NET Rocks how many of these shows have we already done? A ton of them. But right, like the donna rocks, how many of these shows have we already done? Uh, a ton of them. But you know. And, by the way, like the windows, co-pilot runtime is funny.

1:15:36 - Paul Thurrott
It's just a grab I was gonna say I hope you mean funny in the right sense, because and you do, it is funny. It's, yeah, it's ludicrous.

1:15:42 - Richard Campbell
They had to put a wrapper over top where it is five silica live right and where does recall live like like that. And that's what it really is. It's a, it's just a wrapper over a bunch of stuff, so there's some sense of overall product management on it which they should have called it the AI grab bag.

1:15:58 - Paul Thurrott
That would have been a more appropriate name.

1:16:00 - Richard Campbell
It's because it's fairer Right. And, by the way, not everything MLnet is not in this list, right, right, so it's not like they've got everything.

1:16:07 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I, I, I'd have to go look at it, but I assume nothing from dot net is in this list, but maybe that's not true.

1:16:12 - Richard Campbell
I don't know. I feel like it would just be separate, right like in the end. You know, imaging apis are part of app sdk, which has always been associated with dotnet, like there's plenty of stuff that's in there in that in there, but it's um, yeah, it's an extension really of the win app ap sdks, adding more of these newer technologies, but it's you definitely see this again conways applies, what teams played ball, what teams did interesting uh, when they sort of package this thing up and that's still going on. Um, like I said, I'm very interested to see how someone like julia has a new boss and how that rolls down to the rest of the organization, because and I'm not and I'm not saying that in a good or bad way in any respect some respect I I have worried about studio for a long time. I feel like it's not, doesn't get enough attention I think focus on the future?

yep, well, to just not, maybe the right attention is the way to say it. Yeah, well, you know what I like about a month when you look at these products that have switched over to these monthly models and on office three and m65 is a great example of this it's that they can keep adding new features and watch people use them routinely and then, and and then they can associate revenue with those things. Like you're starting to see github enterprise have more subscription options for things that people want, and there's no better bet than people buy it. So, but there's no, you know, as long as you're selling studio on an annual subscription license, how do you ever know if the customer is affected in any way?

1:17:40 - Paul Thurrott
yeah, that's a good point. Well, this is.

1:17:41 - Richard Campbell
I mean anyway, these, these are, you know, is the don and rocks guy.

1:17:45 - Paul Thurrott
I care about this stuff a lot, you should, and that's why I wanted to ask you about it because Because I mean, I care about it too. I don't have as much of a presence in this game or whatever, but I yeah, I mean I use Visual Studio every single day.

1:17:57 - Richard Campbell
Well, and two summers ago I shot a video series with the Microsoft Studio team talking about all of the things in Studio, right, like talking about the best debugger in the world, like the people we forget.

1:18:10 - Paul Thurrott
I felt like all I was doing was reminding people of things they have well, that's, uh, truly, that was the the problem for microsoft office for 20 years. You know the top 90 of feature requests were things that were already in the product yeah, yeah and it's a.

1:18:24 - Richard Campbell
It's a client. You know, kathleen dollard does this talk where she's showing features in studio and people like oh my, oh, my God, when did that come in? It's like 10 years ago. You just didn't know it was there, that's funny.

1:18:36 - Paul Thurrott
We're going to talk a little bit more about visual studio. Yeah, visual studio later. But yeah, this has been top of mind for me.

1:18:44 - Richard Campbell
So it's a big reorg, it's important. I'm excited to see what comes next, like, yeah, there's going to be some layoffs, but I think that's. I also believe that Microsoft's now in a pattern, like most tech companies, where it's like keeping your employees vaguely afraid of their jobs stops them from organizing.

1:19:01 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I mean the text messages that I was exchanging last night were very alarmist and there was this indication that a lot of it was at sort of the PM level of each organization. It wasn't like the layoffs, that is, it wasn't about specific parts of the company, it was kind of like everywhere, but relatively small from a total headcount perspective, it's a two or three percenter right.

1:19:24 - Richard Campbell
They're just sort of taking a little raft through, and it's typical of Microsoft. I haven't checked this. I'd have to go see.

1:19:34 - Paul Thurrott
They're probably being 90 dayed.

1:19:35 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, which basically says you haven't you're figuring out. Yeah, you've got 90 days to go find a new role inside the company, so, and if you don't, then geekwire has written about this.

1:19:42 - Paul Thurrott
Business insider has written about it. I think it was. Business insider got a quote from a company so spokesperson who said we focus on high performance talent. We're always trying to help people learn and grow. When they're not performing, we take appropriate action.

1:19:56 - Richard Campbell
Yay, hello I mean, and there's a very specific, you know, sort of course of action when you have someone who's underperforming significantly, when they keep scoring fives, um, but it's a long path to getting fired for cause, oh my god, yeah I would hope so. I mean yeah, but I indeed, but these layoffs are not that right.

1:20:17 - Paul Thurrott
That's, this is a workaround, yeah I mean again I I would never downplay any layoffs. I don't want to. I'm not making light of anyone losing their job.

1:20:24 - Richard Campbell
It's a big deal to the people that are being affected. But you know, there's another side of this which I've been abundantly, where I where I've since this new behavior in the past five years, which is the labor lawyers are sir, yeah, well, but, and they're looking for bad, made the point earlier, which I think is I think it is is related to this very, very precisely, which is we're doing ai.

1:20:47 - Paul Thurrott
Okay, everyone on board. No, then you can leave. Yeah, anyone else. Oh, everyone's good, good. And then every once in a while, they come back and say hey, we're serious about doing AI, we're so serious we're actually reordering around it now. So I want to make sure everyone on board. Oh, you're not Bob. Okay, bob, you can leave anyone else.

1:21:07 - Richard Campbell
We forget how often Gates reorganized when he was leading the company. It was almost a joke. You could rarely get through a year, but it was his approach to not allowing empires to be built. It was impossible. One of the reasons this reorganized such a big deal is because it's been a long time.

1:21:28 - Paul Thurrott
I think they've been a little hyper-focused on other things I don't think it's any strategy or whatever.

1:21:32 - Richard Campbell
but yeah, but do you feel like in the past two, three years, as as the as Satcha jumped on the AI train, he's been gathering assets? This is the first time he's trying to put them into a box.

1:21:44 - Paul Thurrott
Okay, it makes me a little nervous. I'm changing verse myself, so I got to get that, but it makes me a little nervous, I don't know and, believe me, I you like you.

1:21:55 - Richard Campbell
I got a few calls and uh, I'm like look, look, you're working on the right thing.

1:21:59 - Paul Thurrott
You're gonna be okay yeah right, you hear this is happening. You look at your job title or whatever, and you're like no, I got a in there, I'm good.

1:22:07 - Richard Campbell
Um, and then just to yeah, yeah, co-pilot is the word you're looking for.

1:22:11 - Paul Thurrott
This is co-pilot and you're the something, something of co-pilot, something, something. Yeah, no, you're good. Um, just two really quick things. Uh, open, ai last night announced a new tasks feature for chat gpt. That is sort of bringing it to this. Uh, I don't know, sir, siri style, you know, personal assistant kind of functionality. It's beta, it's the features a little different depending on what client you're using. You're limited to 10 tasks active at one time. But this is that kind of agentic capability where you kind of wind the thing up and say, go forth into the world and act on my behalf.

And their examples are silly. My daughter would like to hear a story when she goes to bed about whatever. Please remind me to come up with a stupid story every night, something like that. Okay, that's cute, but they're trying to turn this thing into more of a general purpose tool for the normies, I guess. And then the other one and there's only one appropriate response to this headline, which is Microsoft Excel in Windows now supports dark mode. I, I, I just didn't already. What, like? What are you talking about? Uh, I should say in beta they're testing it. It's in the insider program, but it was coming to the app soon. Um, I don't use Excel you know I use. Well, I don't use most of office these days, but word would be the big one for me.

1:23:47 - Richard Campbell
And obviously word has supported dark mode for I don't know several years, to some degree I don't know.

1:23:49 - Paul Thurrott
My, my, my, uh. I'm looking at my excel right now. It's a dark mode. So, yeah, I don't know. Uh, I don't know what's happening there.

1:23:52 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what this, but uh yeah, that's.

1:23:55 - Paul Thurrott
It reads like another onion headline, you know, like seizing the day. Excel has finally decided to. I guess we're calling it proper dark mode support, uh so there's an improper dark mode um. There's been office themes for 15 years, right so okay, like I said, I did someone script the date on this thing. It was this actually from 2005, I don't know.

1:24:21 - Richard Campbell
But it's a little bizarre.

1:24:26 - Leo Laporte
Well, I don't want to be dark or anything, but maybe we should just stop for a moment, take a breath because I want to plug something.

It won't be long and just a brief mention that we are doing our yearly survey.

We'd like to know more about you. Uh, it's a easy few minutes. Uh, we just basically are asking questions about you, but we aren't going to ever use them as individuals. We want to know our audience in aggregate. Twittv slash survey. We've done this every year. We usually get around 10,000 responses and that's very helpful for us because we know then it's at least somewhat statistically valuable, if you can.

Twittv slash survey. We do it for two reasons One, to get to know you better helps us tailor our programming towards your interests. But two and I'll be absolutely forthright about this we also use it with advertisers. They often want to know well, do IT decision makers listen to the show? And it's really helpful when we can say, yeah, you know well, do IT decision makers listen to the show? And it's really helpful when we can say yeah. According to our survey, 10,000 people 75% of them said yes, we're IT decision makers. That's the kind of thing that really helps us. So if you want to help us, of course join the club. But the second free way to do it is take the survey once a year. Twittv slash survey. Thank you in advance. Uh, we're done with ai and dark mode excel, right, okay, let's move on then to hardware. There's going to be an announcement at the end of the month.

1:25:58 - Paul Thurrott
You're muted, paul all right, I did that out of respect for you thank you for all the respect. I really appreciate. Uh, yeah, and then I have short-term memory loss. So those two things combined um bring you what you see and hear today.

1:26:13 - Leo Laporte
Nothing like that alzheimer's respect. Yeah, so uh, hardware, young man, you look interesting, are you? You, my son? Yeah, exactly, wilson.

1:26:27 - Paul Thurrott
So Surface teased an announcement for businesses on January 30th. I mean, last year was kind of weird for Surface because in March they announced the new. It was the new Surface Pro and laptop for business running Meteor Lake chips, right. And then they did the qualcomm snapdragon x versions in. They announced in may, released in june. Lunar lake has come out since, so yeah, I guess that could be part of it, even though it's been you know, nine, ten months, whatever. But actually there is one machine that I can think of that is a current concern for surface that maybe needs to be updated and that's Richards computer, the surface laptop studio, right, mmm, yeah, maybe that's. Maybe it's time to turn that into a proper copilot plus PC, a kind of portable, almost workstation class machine, right with dedicated graphics and so forth and by by turn into you mean.

Yeah, that's what I meant, but no, I mean I assume you'll probably use it for a while, but it's. But yeah, I mean, the timing on that was kind of interesting because if I remember correctly it must've been October, november 2023 ish. And then Microsoft and Intel did the AI. Oh no, I guess it would have technically AI PC. It was an AI PC. Obviously it is an MPU. It's unique because it's technically I think a desktop chip.

If it isn't, whatever, it doesn't matter, but it has an external MPU. And then they did Meteor Lake, which integrates it into the chip but it's not Copilot plus PC class. And now they have Lunar Lake, which is, and a bunch of other chips that are not so Intel's fun. Maybe it will be AMD based. That might even be better.

1:28:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that would be kind of interesting.

1:28:13 - Paul Thurrott
They have done AMD Surface models here and there. The Surface laptop was available in AMD for a while, for example, and I don't think it's going to be a Snapdragon or anything. I mean just based on where they are in the product cycle. It's not like they have some exciting new design. If they came up with, like a base model, snapdragon something, something you know, like whatever, okay, I mean, that's not particularly exciting. So we'll see, but I don't know anything about what they're going to announce. And then, speaking of AMD, so AMD and Intel both announced hundreds, it seems, of chip models at CES. One of the companies got a lot of really good press and the other one we just kind of feel sad about and we're kind of tired of talking about. And there was some really interesting language, like PC World referred to the Arrow Lake chips that Intel put out as and I'm quoting crappy you know, whereas AMD cannot.

1:29:13 - Richard Campbell
Is that a technical term?

1:29:14 - Paul Thurrott
It has to do with the speed of the MPU. But AMD can't make enough of the chips that they just announced. Amd can't make enough of the chips that they just announced. Like they, they're literally going to have to ramp up production by some order of magnitude that they did not anticipate, which they should have.

Because when in December I got to see HP and some other things, but HP was using the same chip technically a mobile chip in a laptop, which is essentially a thin and light kind of workstation, portable workstation, but also in a modular, gorgeous desktop workstation. That's how powerful these things are. Obviously, the desktop version you can pair with discrete graphics, but the integrated graphics in these X3D class chips, as they call them, the kind of higher-end version of the Zen 5 chips, are astonishingly good. And there's some nexus or kind of wonderful coincidence of things happening at once, where Intel is kind of hobbled right now, amd is hitting on all cylinders and PC makers are finally looking at and implementing AMD versions of devices where they hadn't before, like Dell is doing commercial PCs with AMD for the first time.

1:30:27 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, and as their flagship machines, oh yeah.

1:30:30 - Paul Thurrott
No, these are the good ones. This is the fastest workstation.

And you know, like one of the kind of non-scientific tests I've been doing because you know, but for science, is testing Call of Duty on all these different laptops with integrated graphics right?

And yeah, I mean, someone has a gig, and by far the best one that I have is that AMD 9 series it's not 3D or X3D, obviously, those just came up, but whatever the highest end version was they had before is so much better than everything else with integrated graphics that it's almost no it, I would say it literally isn't a class by itself. So, for example, with a lunar lake laptop running at you know, 2.8 K, like 2,800, by whatever the resolution is so much higher than full HD, um, you know, 40 frames a second, pretty much all the graphics, that's a low, very low. But with the same D chip 2800, you know 28K roughly, or whatever the resolution is full res and all the graphics settings set to high or very high, 120 frames a second. I mean it's not even close, it's astonishing, wow. So it's nice to see a company like this be rewarded for doing something right. And uh, of course, um, they, you know, and he's trying to be nice, you know they don't cause a lot of waves, frankly, and he's. In fact, if anything, I wish AMD would be more aggressive, but they've, you know, come out and said, yeah, you know we're here so nice, you know, have you actually what he said

was. Um, we did know that what we made was awesome. What we didn't know was that this competitor built a horrible chip, so the delta between those two things was greater than they anticipated. They sort of expected that that Intel would show up to some degree so kind of interesting, so I'd like to see that happen.

On the opposite side of the spectrum I don't understand this one, but the former designer from Surface, ralph I'm probably going to pronounce his name wrong but Ralph Groen I guess I always think of Matt Groening from the Simpsons when I see his name, but a super nice guy I. My understanding is he did a lot of the product design, like the actual form factor stuff. Like Stevie Batiste would have worked on more tech, you know, hinge designs and more technical things related to screens and AI, eventually actually Panels. Yeah Well, so yeah. So he's joined panels at Amazon the whole thing. Yeah Well, so yeah, so he's joined Panos Panay at Amazon devices and services, right. So I have some questions here, because this is not a business that has a lot of resources and doesn't make anything that doesn't look like cheap plastic crap.

1:33:15 - Leo Laporte
So I'm kind of curious.

1:33:17 - Paul Thurrott
Maybe they want to look better but someone on some social networks said what you just said which is the Panos is getting the band back together and I said, yeah, except they're playing bat mitzvahs and elementary school recitals.

1:33:35 - Richard Campbell
You're not going to have the same budget and you're not going to have the same premium device kind of vibe. You know Amazon's got the money if they want to experiment with a new product, but that's the thing I mean.

1:33:40 - Paul Thurrott
This is the part of the company that a year ago last fall like a fall a year ago said yeah, we've been losing billions on this business. It doesn't make any money. So I just don't know. I don't know. I mean I'm curious why he went. I'm curious what they're doing.

obviously, I think he went for the right amount of money, but the most likely thing is that Panos is making something cool. I hope that's true, I guess, but I don't know, we'll see. Look, they need to revamp that line. I just bought a fire hd8 tablet just to kind of re acquaint myself with this little piece of crap, which I instantly returned. Um, it's terrible and it's, and you know, people will say things like well, you know, cheap though it's, not as yeah, it's it sucks, but it's cheap, you know, and I get that um it's now.

1:34:28 - Richard Campbell
I use them uh on the wall with home assistant because I run kiosk on them. So you don't use any of their software. You block them from updating themselves so they don't get screwed up.

1:34:38 - Paul Thurrott
Uh, I find it to be borderline, insulting this device like it's just, I don't know, I, I, I don't mind it. I mean, look, I, I want to embrace the whole lacrosse thing. I'm not.

1:34:47 - Richard Campbell
I'm not like an elitist or anything yeah, but ecosystems are not for the weak, right? Yeah, it's hard for most people to understand how to make the ecosystem so we've talked a lot about arm and qualcomm and that whole legal battle.

1:34:59 - Paul Thurrott
There's more and more information coming out. This past week there was a report from reuters that shed a bit more light on rms plans, which were divulged during the trial but redacted in the documentation that came out afterwards. Um, to do things like create their own chip uh, manufacture they don't. I don't mean manufacture directly, like obviously tsmc or whatever would do this, but um, design chips that would actually be sold to end user companies like Samsung or whomever, instead of selling them to other companies that will then design chips off of that design, like Apple. Well, apple doesn't sell them, but Apple does that, qualcomm does that, samsung probably does that. Okay, I mean, that's interesting. And there's some internal stuff where you know it's just like during the Microsoft trial in the late 90s, early 2000s. They came off poorly, but I don't really view that kind of stuff as whatever. You know, companies compete. People talk plainly when they're speaking privately in this case not email, but over Teams, because it's 20 years later but whatever, but whatever.

So when the CEO of Arm Holdings says of Qualcomm they are hosed, I just smile and think that's cute, but I feel like Arm was in the wrong for what they did with Qualcomm. I know that Qualcomm came out ahead in the legal battle, but I feel, literally, that in that relationship Arm miscalculated. It was a mistake. But I'm going to defend ARM a little bit here, because one of their plans, which we already kind of knew, right, is that they're raising the prices on the chip design licenses that they sell to licensees.

Companies like Apple and Qualcomm, which are off doing their own thing, have stopped licensing new things, so they're not paying higher license fees, which is one of the problems, right, that was one of the reasons they were trying to get Qualcomm to pay more. They just don't pay a lot. So, according to Reuters, there is a plan to grow their revenues from chip design licenses by 300% over 10 years, and this has unleashed an incredible tirade of criticism in my side anyway, against this company. And I got to say the one thing that's come up a bunch with, especially since ARM has gone public, is that arm runs every computing device on the planet. It is the architecture behind everything, from the smallest IOT devices to all the mobile devices smartphones, tablets, whatever, now in PCs, but also data center, ai, whatever. Somehow the company that designs the underlying chip is the smallest part of this entire thing by far.

Sure, yeah, but a great profit margin, but it's understandable that their parent company, essentially SoftBank, owns I don't know 90 or 95% of them. Whatever it is, wants them to grow revenues right, and so there are different ways to do that, but one of them is like just charge more for these things. You should get more for this work you're doing. I got to say. I think there's a compelling evidence that that's true. You just like they. I don't remember the exact number, but I know that Qualcomm earns 10 times as many revenues as ARM does, I think, apple, if I'm getting this. This is a Reuters number, but I think they said 90 times. I mean, look, I'm not saying they should make as much, but but there's a difference the design and implementation.

But if you don't like it, use a different well, people are like well, I guess we're just switching, I'll switch it now.

1:38:32 - Richard Campbell
And it's like settle down, just settle down there you go, like hold on we're fine, it's okay I mean there is a point where it's too expensive and it's worth pricing an alternative. No, not at that point.

1:38:45 - Paul Thurrott
I mean, I don't know, look, there's some crappy stuff that this company did. They lied to Samsung about Qualcomm's license for their chip designs, which caused Samsung to actually cut back their contract with Qualcomm because they thought it was going to disappear with Qualcomm, because they thought it was going to disappear, and then the CEO of Qualcomm get up on the stand during the trial and said no, we have a license through 2033. This isn't expiring in a year or two. We have a license for a while. So there's stuff like that, and certainly I would be critical of Arm for that. But as far as this being the architecture of the president's last future and it being, like I said, one of the smaller players in the market that it supposedly created and or controls, yeah, I mean I think maybe they should get more money. I'm not saying that. I mean I feel like the right thing happened in the Qualcomm trial, but maybe they deserve to, or whatever, or can charge more for their own designs and maybe they do start selling chips directly. That could happen.

That's okay and not a big deal, but there is a 16 gigabyte Raspberry Pi 5 now. So this was the device that got delayed because of the pandemic and then was finally released. I'm not going to get this exactly right, but I want to say probably four and eight gigabyte versions at first, and then this past fall summer they released a two gigabyte for the low end and now they have a 16 gigabyte, which you know stepping on low end PC territory here Not even low end really. With 16 gigs it's pretty good, actually Pretty good, right, yeah. But here's the thing no-transcript, it's only like two to three hundred dollars and once you add the storage, the case and whatever else you would need for a raspberry pi, these things are kind of the same price yeah, comparable, I know they serve slightly different markets, but I think a lot of people look at this thing and think this would be a really cool entry-level computer you know, if microsoft would just bring full windows 11 to this, that would.

That would be kind of interesting they used to.

1:41:00 - Leo Laporte
They used to ship with windows, windows 11, but it wasn't full. It wasn't full, it was like a special, a special it was almost like an iot version.

1:41:06 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah so what you could do. You had a dashboard and you could run one app and, and the idea was the thing, it was going to be like a kiosk type thing. So you have this little raspberry pi and it runs a I had it because it ran.

1:41:16 - Leo Laporte
First of all, I ran, uh, my minecraft server on it, yeah, but also ran a version, uh, modified version, of minecraft that you could code with python. Yeah, uh, that was really cool.

1:41:27 - Paul Thurrott
I love that this exists. The raspberry pi to me is what computing was like back when personal computers used to be called home computers and it was 8-bit, it was atari, apple, ti, commodore, whatever, and there was a whole enthusiast movement, um, and people were. Every one of them came with basic and people were writing their own programs. A lot of kids didn't have a way to save those, so they put them on paper and then type them in again.

1:41:50 - Richard Campbell
The next day, that kind of thing and I.

1:41:52 - Paul Thurrott
I feel like this is the closest we can get to that era now, you know yeah, it's just, you could write an app in swift playgrounds and an ipad, publish it to the store and be out in the world with a product. No one people are building little enthusiast piece, except they are because the raspberry pi, it's kind of awesome, like I think it's that's what it is?

1:42:15 - Richard Campbell
yeah, and it does have that around it and they go in all kinds of directions.

1:42:20 - Paul Thurrott
All the hardware like cheap ai accelerators you know again not quite co-pilot pc class, but up to like meteor lake class for sure, like probably 50 bucks or something like this is this knuck that you mentioned here?

that's, yeah, it's pretty amazing for 229, that's not that old like I. Just this past week alone, because I've been kind of winding down here with whatever computers I have, I brought up a bunch of 12th gen laptops, uh, with very similar specs by the way 16 gigs around, very standard for that. Um, whatever size uh drive ssd like that's. That is not a horrible computer, not horrible, I mean no, for 299.

1:42:57 - Leo Laporte
it's amazing, I know it's crazy. That pretty good, I might even just go out and buy one. Yeah, just, I mean at least compare it.

1:43:07 - Paul Thurrott
No, sorry, sorry, I should say the one caveat to that this is N200. So this is not Core, I something right. This is Celeron. It's like an Atom kind of thing. Yeah, it's in that class. But still for $ for 229 as far like little enthusiast kind of if you think of it as a kind of a raspberry pi like computer.

1:43:32 - Leo Laporte
Not not bad, not bad you can get it for 189 yeah, well, that's and 100 right, so that's the.

1:43:39 - Paul Thurrott
That's the previous gen.

1:43:40 - Richard Campbell
When you're looking at was the chips that were released in 2023 but it's the old, it's old, it's, it's a crap, it's the.

1:43:48 - Leo Laporte
That's what you're saying it's the low end. It's not. It's. How about the n5105? Is that 11th gen?

1:43:54 - Paul Thurrott
I bet that's close. That's a core processor. Yeah, yeah, it's so it's 11th. Yeah, 11th is you know, it's fine, arguably because of the shift to the Core Ultra platform. I mean the 11th, 12th, I think there was a 13th, if I remember?

1:44:13 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, I think so.

1:44:14 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, there would have been. That's kind of the apex, if you will, for the old stuff I know pre-NPU stuff.

1:44:21 - Leo Laporte
I guess that's wild. Yeah, I didn't realize there was such inexpensive knucks out there. Yeah, I think people buy raspberry pies for other reasons.

1:44:31 - Paul Thurrott
honestly, you're right you can put a fun little case on it, give it as a gift.

1:44:34 - Richard Campbell
You know, there's all these little things you can do with it I bet a lot of them are just asked for a pie hole actually oh, that's a perfect use for it yeah, she was. Are you going to configure it for her and how things?

1:44:44 - Leo Laporte
were working, that's like get it all set up and and like that yeah, just give me a pie hole, daddy yeah, just plug it into the network this is a router sentence that would never come out of my daughter's for many reasons she doesn't have iMessage on it. But you don't, but so, and so you connect. So your route you connect this inside or outside the router it's an outside device, but it's just your.

1:45:09 - Paul Thurrott
It's basically you connect, it just sits between the router and the the rest of the world so you connect the you know Comcast to this and the router comes out, or no, I guess it would sit. Does this sit, no?

1:45:18 - Leo Laporte
it must be before the inside okay from the, so the router goes into this yeah, okay, interesting and but there's only one ethernet, uh jack, it's just a network device on the network.

1:45:31 - Paul Thurrott
Oh, that is, that is it's not a physical chain, although I guess it could.

1:45:35 - Richard Campbell
Be no, it is because it effectively is, because, when you now tell your router to whatever it says, hey, hey, when I say DNS, use the internal DNS, the internal DNS.

1:45:47 - Leo Laporte
This becomes your DNS server. That's right, got it and it's pretty fast.

1:45:51 - Richard Campbell
Fast enough. Yeah, it's all local networks, not that much traffic on it. But the thing that's great about the Pi hole solution is when your television goes to go grab ads you can't run ad block on it.

1:46:01 - Paul Thurrott
one thing I don't just yeah, I don't do that here I I put next dns on my portable device, which is roughly the same I think you're using them, as, yeah, I mean it's a external dns, whatever, but it's yeah, it's fine. I I don't put it on my computers. Part of it is just. I kind of need to see what terrible things.

1:46:18 - Leo Laporte
But you can run next dns as your routers, dns provider, and then it's the whole network, same as it would be for a real account. I could, but I don't.

1:46:25 - Paul Thurrott
But I don't on purpose. There's enough on the mobile devices that doesn't work where it's like. I don't think I want to introduce this to the house exactly, although I do like the idea of it.

1:46:34 - Leo Laporte
I don't do it because Lisa says what are you blocking ads for? You know we're an ad-supported network, right, the ones going out through the thing. I knock it off she says I want to see the ads. I want to hear the ads.

1:46:46 - Richard Campbell
Don't block the ads, that's fine well, and that's the upside of the pie hole is I can configure for these domains, for these things, right, yeah?

1:46:54 - Leo Laporte
you could do that with next dns as well. You can even do it granularly by.

1:46:57 - Paul Thurrott
I have to put my uh comment system on the white list for example.

1:47:00 - Richard Campbell
Then I come out, I come out into mexico and I get inundated with conventional ad on websites. It's like how do you use these web pages like they're on? They're not functional.

1:47:09 - Leo Laporte
It's amazing, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, that's same thing with youtube once you're used to an ad version, oh my god, you can never stop paying for youtube once you've used it.

1:47:18 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, youtube's the maybe the best example of that.

1:47:21 - Leo Laporte
Yeah. So actually that segues very nicely into a discussion of our plan to eliminate all advertising on the Twit Podcast Network. It's not going that well yet, but maybe with your help it could. We've created as many podcasts have a membership club, right, we call it Club Twit, and the idea is we can replace ads with subscription fees. Now, I don't ever want to do a paywall. I really think it's important that all our content is available for free to anybody who wants it. So we're going to keep doing ad supported shows, but I also think it would be really nice for the support to come from our audience. Right now, it's about one and a half, almost 2%, of our audience that has joined Club Twit. I'd like to get that to 5% and honestly that could replace all the ad revenue. Even if one in 20 subscribe, it's not expensive. We keep the price low so that, because we want everybody to be in the club seven dollars a month, uh. You get ad free versions of all the shows, obviously, because you know you, you don't have to because you're paying, uh. But you also get additional content that we don't put out in public. For instance, paul's hands on windows is available to the public as an audio show. It's a great show. If you want video, join the club, you'll get video as well. Same with Hands on Macintosh. Hands on Tech is going that way. We're going to do iOS today. I think that way. So that's one thing.

We also do stuff like the book club. Stacey's Book Club's coming up. There are two days left to vote. It is really close. It's neck and neck between Orbital, which a number of people have said. Please don't let it be. Please don't let it be Orbital. Apparently it's a little slow moving Right now. Orbital's winning, but it's only winning by two votes. So if you're a club member, get into Stacey's book club section and cast your vote. There's also Micah's Crafting Corner coming up tonight at six. It's just a chill. Hang with Micah as he does his craft, which I think lately is building these little tiny rooms. But you can do anything you want alongside of it. Maybe I'll practice oh you know, maybe I'll join practice my piano. I can play a little piano music for the crafting corner.

Home theater geeks. It's coming up photo time with Chris Marquardt. The new adjective is luminous.

There's just a lot of stuff going on in the club. Then, of course, there's a club to a discord, which is a place for all the club members to hang out and talk about the things that interest geeks during the shows, but also not during the shows. So there's always yes, that's you, patrick. So there's always fun stuff going on. Actually, that's us. Join the club everybody. Steve Ballmer says club members. Club members. Club members Twittv slash club twit. We will be very happy to have you and welcome you into the club. Twittv, slash club twit.

I just want to find the Stacy's Book Club thing. See all these other discussions that are going on. I can never find, though, the one I want. Anyway, somewhere in here there's the Stacy's Book Club. Look in the announcements channel to see how the book club is going. Says Wojo, thank you Wojo, but I don't see it here. That's why I'm confused.

Look in the announcements channel to see how the book club is going. Says wojo, thank you wojo, but I don't see it here. That's why I'm confused. Maybe I'm in the wrong spot. Oh, announcements, thank you. There we go. It's really close 31 votes for those beyond the wall by mikaya johnson and 35 votes for orbital by samantha harvey, and the other two are lagging behind, but if you like, hum or the Practice, the Horizon and the Chain. Vote for those. And then in three more days, three more days we're going to know, and we'll do that in the Stacey's Book Club. So just as an example, there's some fun stuff going on. Twittv slash club twit. Don't you want to be in the club? I know you want to be in the club.

1:51:48 - Richard Campbell
Join the club.

1:51:49 - Leo Laporte
We would love to have you On the Vigo with the show. What is next? I have lost.

1:51:59 - Richard Campbell
Travis.

1:52:00 - Paul Thurrott
Dot net 9.01.

1:52:03 - Leo Laporte
Of course it's. Dot net is next. I'm gonna just fade away into the fade out then no um.

1:52:13 - Paul Thurrott
So I spent a big chunk of last year working on this uh update to my dot net pad app. Uh, for dot net nine, wasted a good better part of a month thinking I was making a mistake and then found out actually there is a bug in NET 9 that causes apps to crash if you use an expander control and try to change the theme.

1:52:34 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, you mentioned that last week yeah.

1:52:36 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, this was infuriating to me because, like I said, I spent. I wasted time on this and it was my code was fine, it was Microsoft's code that was broken. So in the end I decided just to knowing they would fix it, because they said they did internally but not sure when they would fix it. I kind of just I put my app up on github and said, look, just don't do this thing, that crashes it you know, and then it will be fixed and so, uh, last night I saw they announced NET 9.0.1 and I thought oh, this must be the fix.

And I scoured all of their documentation. It's not a single mention of this. But I said, screw it, I'll just install it. And sure enough, it does fix it. So I updated the app. Yay, Got rid of the workaround I had in there and yeah, it only took two months bastards. But yeah, that's fine. Unrelated to that, but sort of related.

1:53:28 - Leo Laporte
By the way, this is why you have to code, paul, so you can live in the world that developers live in, where you've got to tear your hair out, bug and it's not your fault.

1:53:38 - Paul Thurrott
That's a good thing. I was looking for something that was even more aggravating than being an IT pro, and I think I found it. You found it and less fulfilling no, it's actually pretty fulfilling. So ever since well, not ever since they announced it, but for the past year sort of a code review, code quality review like a point, like a method at it and say could this thing be more efficient or written in a cleaner fashion or whatever Not ever having used it, so I've not written this up yet.

I just experienced this. I think it was yesterday, maybe the day before, but I think it was yesterday. Back in December, they made a free tier of GitHub Copilot, so you can actually use this for free. It works a lot like that thing we were talking earlier, where you get a certain amount of credits every month and then you know you can do a certain number of code completions, a certain number of chat interactions, et cetera, and if you keep using it and you find you're running into the limits, you can just pay for GitHub Copilot. So I was like, okay, this is not going to hurt me to try this, so I should try this. I want to be super clear about this, because it's going to sound like an exaggeration. This might be literally black magic. I have never especially in the scope of AI, which we all know about hallucinations and all the problems, and in the world in which it's the most mature product it is the most mature product.

Yes, and part of it is that thing I sort of always suspected and I do still think it's true which is when you ground the thing in just a subset of, you know it's not going out to MSN for the latest news. It's like look, we need to know how C sharp works, we need to know how these programming frameworks work, et cetera. It's building on a very finite database, if you will, so yeah, it's got a scope.

1:55:32 - Richard Campbell
that makes sense.

1:55:33 - Paul Thurrott
Now, look, I'm not a professional programmer, but that was the point I thought. The first thing I did with it was I selected a, a method that did a thing and had whatever code and I thought I can't remember how I worded it, but I just said make this more efficient or faster or better or whatever it was. I forgot to check a box that would have deselected or had it ignore the rest of the document, so it actually ran against the entire thing, which is the main C sharp file in this project, and it came up with a bunch of stuff and some of them were like curious and subtle, and some of them were stuff I kind of knew, like you know, getting rid of redundancies, I. I went through a big effort to make the code more modular, but it had more suggestions along those lines, all very good, and I was like okay, I like just for this, like this. And I was like okay, I like just for this, like this is amazing.

There was a really I can't even explain this. It was like a. There's a list, a construct I'm using in c-sharp to collect all of the state management stuff that I'm working on for the app, and it suggested this other thing which is really subtly different but in fact will work better with WPF controls, which I will be doing in the future when I add tabs and I was was like, yep, genius, okay. So I was like this is nice, this is good. Like I was like already. I was like, okay, I a hundred percent get this.

But then I started just working on new stuff. I wasn't thinking about copilot, and here's the thing like I'm trying to imagine what this would be like in word if you were writing like a document, but in I'm writing code and I am writing what's going to be a block of code that's going to do a thing. It's going to iterate through this object and reach into parts of it and pull whatever bit out. I know what I'm going to write roughly, and what I mean by that is I don't know the exact code as I write it, but I know as I do it, I'll do it.

1:57:19 - Richard Campbell
It's a shape of things right.

1:57:21 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I have the idea. So I start right. I, I, I swear to God, I I don't want to exaggerate. Like I said, I typed I want to say two characters and it didn't just auto complete the line, it auto completed the code block that it could not have known I was going for. Like it literally read my mind and I was like yep, that's exact.

1:57:43 - Richard Campbell
I was like that's it.

1:57:44 - Paul Thurrott
It wrote it and I was like holy, I mean, are you kidding me? And then, over the course of the next hour or two, I was so excited about this, I told my wife who, I gotta be honest, could not care less. She puts up with it. I'm trying, I'm so excited, I'm like a little kid and the only thing I can equate this to is I watch a lot. I think I said this earlier in the show. I watch a lot of these kind of animal videos on like YouTube and Instagram, whatever One video I saw recently. This is exactly the reaction, the interaction. It was a video of cats being shown magic and the cats react exactly as they should. Their reality has been destroyed and it scares the living daylights out of them. So when in many cases, it's just a trick like the the court is gone or the whatever, like a normal magic trick, and the cats like jump and run out of the room and they freak out and they lose their minds. And that was literally the reaction I had to this because, look, I'm a skeptic.

I'm a cynic and I was like look, all I could hope from this is that it will improve the quality of the code, which it absolutely needs.

1:58:52 - Leo Laporte
And it is like it was reading my mind.

1:58:55 - Paul Thurrott
I couldn't believe it. How do you?

1:58:57 - Leo Laporte
think it did that, by the way.

1:58:59 - Paul Thurrott
I think it literally read my mind Leo, I'm glad you asked.

1:59:01 - Leo Laporte
No, I didn't. No, I don't, I mean so okay, so I'm leaving out a few details, but the it must have known from previous code what you were on your way to do.

1:59:11 - Paul Thurrott
That could be part of it. In one case, I did write a comment before I wrote the block, so it's possible it looked at that and said okay.

1:59:21 - Richard Campbell
But there were multiple examples where describe what you intend to do and it could switch the code out and it wasn't.

1:59:26 - Paul Thurrott
I want to be clear.

1:59:27 - Leo Laporte
I wasn't even thinking of co-pilot, I was just the comment is the prompt says out of sync and I think that that's accurate it when you write a comment, you're actually writing a prompt okay, I, I, I accept that.

1:59:38 - Paul Thurrott
I'm just. What I'm saying is, I didn't know that at the time and then then it wrote the code block and I'm like what is happening?

1:59:43 - Leo Laporte
And then neither did the Siamese cat, and this is how it works. Where did the quarter?

1:59:48 - Paul Thurrott
go. Where's the quarter? Yeah, no. But yeah, I listen, not a professional developer, I want to highlight that again. But if you are a developer and you've kind of poo-pooed this, I'm just saying it's free it's amazing.

2:00:01 - Richard Campbell
Look at it. Look at it, it's unbelievable. I'm talking to teams now, where if the developer's not using copilot, it's not like they won't hire them, it's like they immediately like we need to teach how to use this are you writing code on a parchment?

2:00:14 - Paul Thurrott
how are you doing work?

2:00:15 - Leo Laporte
you know, like I, you brought your chisel it's it's fascinating to me because it's slowly spreading throughout all our shows. Steve gibson had the same experience with assembly revolution yesterday. Jason snell said I can't believe it, uh, but uh, I can't. I can't remember what model he was using. I think chat gpt knows yeah, so apple cloud is good at this too.

2:00:36 - Paul Thurrott
Anthropic cloud I, one of the first does very well. Yeah, the very first thing I ever did was I had written, uh, the c-sharp class for this coming thing I'm doing, and I published or wrote about it. And then that day they announced an update to cloud and they said specifically like it's better for program, like oh, let me give it a prompt and say I want to, I want to make this class. What does it look like? It made exactly. It was almost letter, it was almost identical. And that was good for me because it kind of verified that I had written the right thing unless we both hallucinated somehow.

2:01:07 - Richard Campbell
Validation from software yeah, but you know to be the skeptic.

2:01:12 - Leo Laporte
One of the reasons this works so well is because it has a massive database of code and code is extraordinarily repetitive. So my God, of course somebody else has written that many, many times and so it's not you know.

2:01:24 - Richard Campbell
And although or reason you shouldn't write it again. Let the tool do its job precisely.

2:01:28 - Paul Thurrott
You're reading through a database on a loop, but you want every third one, right? Is there an efficient way to do that?

2:01:36 - Leo Laporte
you're not the first person to do that.

2:01:38 - Paul Thurrott
I know that, but I do what everyone else does. I google it. I usually end up at stackoverflowcom.

2:01:42 - Leo Laporte
Steal their code.

2:01:44 - Paul Thurrott
Nope, not that one, but it takes me time, this one. I just said four. I was like what's the call? Oh, you want a loop? Ok, I didn't say anything about every third one, it's a ampersand three.

2:01:55 - Richard Campbell
I'm like you've got to be kidding me.

2:02:04 - Leo Laporte
That's really funny, unbelievable, yeah, really good, yeah, just I don't know. This is, on the one hand, it is magic. On the other hand, we are cats, I know, and we don't. We aren't. There are some things that might make us feel a little bit less magical about it, like the fact that this is really based on code that's been written many, many, many times, and so.

2:02:23 - Paul Thurrott
No, but even that, but that's the convenience right. In other words, like I said, we could.

2:02:26 - Leo Laporte
Oh, it's hugely convenient, all of us have done this.

2:02:28 - Paul Thurrott
We've Googled it.

2:02:28 - Leo Laporte
I've been saying this for two years. I've been using chat TBT for my common list code.

2:02:32 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but now that I've seen it, it's real.

2:02:45 - Richard Campbell
I mean idea that it's actually is the more.

2:02:47 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I don't necessarily older, but size of data set size this came up with, uh, one of your shows, richard, I think it probably uh, dot net rocks, and it was probably the guy. The guy used to run flutter. Um, I think it's the former microsoft chris sells. Chris sells. He was saying you know, one of the problems with flutter is that, you know, in the dot net space, which is what I'm working in, if you google something there's a million, because this stuff goes back 20 years, there's a million. But if you need some help with like flutter or one of these newer frameworks, probably exactly uh, it's a, there's less.

2:03:16 - Richard Campbell
You know, they said it's very limited, yeah, so I mean yes, that that might have helped too, but I look if you're working in visual studio and cl's been around a long, long time, but there's not a lot of open source tcl, right? Yeah, right, it's really. What was the data set available to it? Yeah, so yeah so that's not.

2:03:34 - Leo Laporte
I use an open source language like uh common list it's really interesting to me that apple script, which is a terrible language and weirdly arcane. It turns out these ais are very good at writing and he used the code unmodified.

2:03:46 - Paul Thurrott
That's great, though, because you need the help with something like you need it, we need it everywhere. I up in your head yeah intel us or tell it what do you? What do you call it in visual studio or even?

tell us intel a sense when it does auto complete or whatever. It's one of the nice things about visual studio. You object name, dot list. You like, yep, that one dot. But you know you kind of go from there right it's, it's a nicety, it's more than a nice. Honestly, once you start using something like that you kind of wonder, god, how did I do this? Before you were breaking open a book, looking up the list of properties and stuff. You did, yeah, slowly. So this to me is an, not an automatic, but it's the same level of oh my God.

2:04:25 - Richard Campbell
And then yeah, you see this reaction when someone uses tele sense for the first time, especially an experienced coder, and they're like, yeah, what the what?

2:04:33 - Paul Thurrott
Okay, yeah, no, it's I, I. This will benefit anybody? Who uses these products Like it's. It's incredible, and I've not had this reaction to any ai, anything about writing, or well, although the poem thing in notepad is amazing, but other than that, that's on hands-on windows, by the way uh, it's um, it is amazing, it's stupid, it's useless, but it's, it's amazing. But this is just incredibly, immediately and obviously a huge productivity booster that absolutely justifies the cost, if you're gonna pay for it.

2:05:04 - Richard Campbell
I wrestle around with like razor pages for the run-ass site and that and have co-pilot, just like. Where is x?

2:05:10 - Leo Laporte
and it's like it's in this stupid header.

2:05:13 - Paul Thurrott
Oh, thank god, okay it's it's excellent and look, anyone who's watched this show for any amount of time knows I don't talk about like this, about almost anything. It is amazing making.

2:05:25 - Richard Campbell
All throughout making happy noises. What is that? I know?

2:05:28 - Paul Thurrott
I don't even know how to handle it. I'm like what is that feeling? It's like you're happy. Is that what this feels like? Why did I like this all the time?

2:05:36 - Richard Campbell
Um no, I mean it's awful.

2:05:38 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah Well, that's right. Thank you for reminding me, Um, but yeah, no, it's, but it's. I can't, I'm just going to repeat myself.

2:05:44 - Richard Campbell
It's a revelation.

2:05:45 - Paul Thurrott
It's amazing, it really is, it really is.

2:05:48 - Leo Laporte
Ah, I feel refreshed. Let's talk about Xbox. I want to do a screen share. That's not frustrating at all.

2:05:56 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, this isn't as good. So I think we touched on this last week a little bit, but ces, microsoft, uh, kind of hinted at this. Well, said, literally, we want to do more around gaming handhelds. But of course, the question that comes out of this is well, yeah, but like pc gaming handhelds or xbox gaming handles right and so, yeah, so I right, and I think this is, I think this is the holding pattern we're in as a platform, I think, when people are nervous about Xbox in the future and hardware, what's going on, and I think we're waiting for this to kind of coalesce into something that's more of a strategy and less of like vague talking every couple of months, you know. So we'll see what that looks like. But I I'm interested in because I've returned to PC gaming to some degree the notion of a Switch-sized PC game machine is actually kind of interesting, other than the tiny screen I can't see with my really old eyes, but I like the idea of it. I like the idea of something you can stick in the bag.

2:06:55 - Richard Campbell
But that is the essence of a Steam Deck anyway.

2:06:57 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, right, right. So Lenovo is selling a portable gaming device or PC that you can choose between SteamOS and Windows, and this is the first and I think right now, the only. But there will be more of those devices and this is another pain point for Xbox people, because SteamOS is going to kill us. This is what's going to happen. It's like guys, relax. I mean there were pros and cons, I think we talked about this. But Linux is great because it uses fewer system resources Good. But Windows is better for compatibility and you have a choice of storage.

It's not just Steam. I mean, steam is, I guess, the big one, but it's not the only one, right? And if you, I don't have numbers for this, but I bet most PC gamers just go wherever, get the games wherever. I mean, they get them all over the place and I bet some percentage uses some form of Game Pass and they can play from that library as well. So I think choice is good here. I like to see I guess I'm just vaguely happy that this is working out.

I feel like a lot of these other PC form factors kind of of come and go, but I feel like this one's going to stick around, so that's kind of cool. Uh, and speaking of angst, microsoft is is going to. I can say, you know, it's sort of couched, like, uh, they might be bringing other games to other platforms. No, I mean, they are like, we know this right. Um, there's a coming uh second remake of halo coming down the pike, absolutely going to be on Sony PlayStation. You know it is right, so that's going to happen. There's been a bunch of people who have cited various sources. You know, flight simulators coming to PlayStation and even the Switch 2, which is kind of interesting, even the switch to, which is kind of interesting. Tied to that is a lot of switch to rumors of the past week. As soon as tomorrow, I guess Nintendo could announce this. I'm a little surprised by how much it is. Just the switch again. I mean, obviously it's a much faster processor and there are other improvements but it's a hardware refresh.

Really it's a yeah, for all the waiting and wondering and what's going on, and what is this refresh? Really it's a yeah, for all the waiting and wondering and what's going on, and what is this? What's the next thing going to be? It's like, ah, it's more of the same um which maybe is the right thing to do. What do you?

2:09:09 - Richard Campbell
do with perfection, right like what?

2:09:10 - Paul Thurrott
yeah, there you go, you find a younger model. Richard, that's what you do no, um so yes a little faster chip inside.

Yeah, it might actually be like twice as fast. It's a, it's a significantly better several years right like switch was out yeah, and, and they were rumored to do something like this a few years ago. They had. They did, like the oled version, the light version, and I think there was supposed to be. It was talk of a 4k version or something, but I think obviously, well, not, I think they didn't do it. So now we're going to get the switch too, so that's fine, and they can probably keep the old one.

2:09:42 - Richard Campbell
There's a lot of memory, and for what? For Call of Duty, for Flight Simulator you know, for 2024. And they don't do realism graphics in Nintendo land, right yeah.

2:09:52 - Paul Thurrott
I know Well, it's going to be interesting to see how those ported games look, but that's like a Nintendo already won that generation, this current generation, by a wide margin. They're looking good and then they could come up with a thing that could kind of fill in the gaps, frankly. So there's these Sony games. I don't know if those are going anywhere. I know they go to PC. But Xbox games that could come to this platform that I think would solve or answer some questions right, Like I like the idea of the Switch, but I don't play a lot of those types of games.

So if it, had some shooters and some things like that. It's like, oh yeah, maybe, maybe you're just playing the wrong games, paul, that's all, that's absolutely true, uh, animal crossing may not have any violence.

2:10:36 - Leo Laporte
Can I snipe?

2:10:37 - Paul Thurrott
the animals Is that part of the enjoyable.

2:10:41 - Leo Laporte
Uh.

2:10:47 - Richard Campbell
I just uh, I just want to set up a sniper's nest. Is it wrong? I don't, yeah, probably.

2:10:49 - Leo Laporte
No, there are no roggin of zelda frowned upon. Zelda has fighting, doesn't it?

2:10:52 - Paul Thurrott
there's some combatants of a sort yes, that sounds yeah. What do they argue? What do you mean fighting?

2:10:56 - Richard Campbell
like they swing a sword.

2:10:57 - Paul Thurrott
One of them pops into a jewel, oh okay you clearly played the game richard there are no jewels or coins or whatever in the games I don't know. It's all about the mushrooms yeah, I did get attacked by a dog and call it call of duty mobile the other day, though, so that's still a thing.

Um, that's amazing that's kind of fun yeah uh, and then uh, microsoft announced uh, an expansion, I think of their iFixit partnership, where they're selling official Xbox repair parts, and uBreakFix is coming on board to do the same. But this is a company that has locations you can bring an Xbox to and they'll repair it for you, instead of shipping it to Microsoft and hoping for the best, I guess. So they're making these things more easily repairable, essentially it's good.

2:11:47 - Leo Laporte
Nice, it's good. Although how you would break an xbox, I don't know. I mean, well, I kicked mine through the wall one time that's one way.

2:11:54 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I don't know what's going on. It's a lot slower than it used to be.

2:11:57 - Leo Laporte
Um, yeah, mine's tucks deep inside the television console.

2:12:00 - Paul Thurrott
I don't I blew a metric ton of dust out of the back of one that I'm pretty sure that was doing something for sure. Yeah, yeah, dust is a black mark on the carpet behind it, on the. You know like what's going on?

2:12:13 - Richard Campbell
yeah, it's just not doing good uh all right, good show, do you want?

2:12:21 - Leo Laporte
do you? Do you want to do any other Xbox stuff, or are you going backwards?

2:12:25 - Paul Thurrott
I think oh, I forgot. Yeah, I skipped ahead. I'm sorry You're moving backwards. The other thing is, I feel like this happens now throughout the year. This used to be one, two, three, whatever events a year, but now it's just kind of all the time because it's online. So next week, I think on the 28th, do I have this? Do I have this? No, 23rd, sorry, microsoft is hosting a developer direct live stream. So this is where we're going to finally get to see this new Doom game, which I'd say definitely I'm going to try, you know, because it's so different from Call of Duty, but I am looking forward to that.

2:12:58 - Richard Campbell
So we'll see what else happens. Call of Duty.

2:13:01 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, so we'll see how that goes. Yeah, you don't go to hell and call of duty a lot, except metaphorically, um, yeah yeah, that's what I decided to.

2:13:11 - Leo Laporte
That's why I'm playing so much piano. I decided, instead of compulsively playing valheim, I'm going to compulsively play the piano and maybe at the end of a year, I'll have some accomplished something a lot more frere, jac Jacques in one bird. Yep.

2:13:24 - Paul Thurrott
I'm going to type Frère Jacques into GitHub Copilot and see what it comes up with.

2:13:28 - Leo Laporte
Wouldn't it be cool if you could use an AI? Well, I guess that wouldn't be cool. Major C chords I did. I did actually use an AI to make some music for you last week the whiskey Sure. Yes, I will not play that again. Again, sorry about that, but he's still traumatized. Yes, you're watching windows weekly. That's paul thurott there. Uh, he is, of course, from thurottcom and to make sure you get a premium subscription for a lot of more goodness, it's a great site to visit. I visit every day, literally, quite literally. Uh, and of course, his books are at leanpubcom. Richard camel is the host of two fabulous podcasts run as radio. We'll talk about the latest episode in just a bit and also, with Carl Franklin, net Rocks. If you're a NET person, do you guys talk about the Paul's NET woes?

2:14:15 - Paul Thurrott
No, I think this is below that. There's so many woes.

2:14:17 - Leo Laporte
There's so many woes, so little time. Thank you for joining us. We're so glad you're here. Time for the back of the book, and let's start with a tip of the week from Paul Theriot. Paul.

2:14:32 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, we ran into some friends last weekend at a party or whatever and it became really clear immediately they were not drinking, which is fascinating, because these guys are definitely alcoholics. They drink way more than I do?

2:14:45 - Leo Laporte
What are you doing? And? Uh why, why, why dry January. So I was like that's curious.

2:14:51 - Paul Thurrott
I said do you do this every year? And she said no, it's the first time we've done it.

2:14:55 - Leo Laporte
That's how you know you're drinking too much, if you, if you participate this is the first day I've not had a drink, literally yeah no, I was like I don't.

2:15:02 - Paul Thurrott
That doesn't work for me. So I was kind of thinking about this, because a lot of people just like, if you go to the gym, the gym now is packed, right, it's full of people, can't get on machines, you know, you know they're going to be gone.

2:15:12 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, by the first right yeah, hurry up and give up on your resolution yeah.

2:15:17 - Paul Thurrott
so how many times does that have to happen before you're like you know? Maybe there's something like a different approach to this. So, without it getting into the weeds, I'll just keep this to kind of work related stuff. I try to make what I think of as micro changes, like smaller changes, but I do it more frequently, so I have it's not a hard schedule, but I have this kind of monthly, quarterly and then annual thing that I try to do, just maintaining file, you know, files, and archiving things and all that kind of stuff.

So because it was January, this was a perfect storm of these things, um, but a lot of it just has to and you know it's inbox zero for email, kind of factors into this or um, you know where things are replicated or backed up or whatever kind of factors into this and um.

But the big change for me was, if you go back, like um, I guess a year ago, I had just finished my big digital decluttering, photo consolidation work, which was just this epic multi-month awful process. But I did this knowing that every year going forward, january would come every year and I'd have to go get all the photos from the previous year and then organize them in the same way. So I just started working on that and it's not awesome. I mean, I have to use these tools that I've forgotten how to use because I used them a year ago and it's been a while and I'm going to do this now where the rest of my life or whatever. But I think it gets easier too, because digital photos taken with phones are just, you know, full of metadata, they're easy, um, but it's just, you know, rather than like I'm just not going to drink you know it's like yeah, are you, though, you know, I mean I, I think it just, you know everyone's different.

I guess maybe that works for some people, but it's never worked for me. So I try to just do smaller things and but more of them, I guess. And then it's like a Valentine's day, you know. It's like I guess you could wait until this random day to tell your wife or girlfriend or spouse, or whoever it is, that you love them. But you just do this throughout the year.

2:17:09 - Richard Campbell
Right.

2:17:09 - Paul Thurrott
Why do you need a stupid day for that, I don't know. Okay, and then the app pick. There was no announcement and I didn't write about it yet, but Starduck put out Start 11 version 2.5. This is the one that they were beta testing earlier. That lets you put the task bar on the sides of the screen. Once you do, Thank goodness, yeah. So if you kind of held off on this or whatever I weren't sure you needed it or wanted it you know that might be enough to put it over the top. There's actually a bunch of stuff in there related to businesses and managing this across like a deployment and all that kind of stuff. But for individuals, the big thing to me is you can move the taskbar. You know Microsoft still doesn't let you do in windows 11.

2:17:52 - Richard Campbell
I got giant screens. I don't need a bar all the way across the bottom of it. My vertical resolution is everything I know. I know Lines of code, man, I think it matters.

2:18:04 - Paul Thurrott
I agree, so you can do it with that.

2:18:07 - Richard Campbell
that's one way there you go all right okay, now I can migrate the dev machine to win 11 because start 11, because of start 11 well, by the way, there you go uh clearing up uh deployment blockers since windows 8.

2:18:21 - Leo Laporte
There you go guys, but they've been doing this start menu for a long time, right? Yes, since Windows 8.

2:18:27 - Paul Thurrott
Windows 8 was the very like Brad Ward. I remember that. Yeah, he was at some event with me and Mary Jo and he's like ooh, I have an idea. You know I'm going to fix this problem.

2:18:35 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's a good idea. Nice Yep, okie Doki. Hey, you know what that means. It's a time for Richard Campbell. Let's start with a run as radio pick of the week.

2:18:47 - Richard Campbell
I have my friend, matthias Carlson, back on the show. It's been a little while and we were talking about DevOps docs or just a shorthand, for part of your CICD pipeline should include some level of documentation generation. Most software that you're building are responsible for. You need some level of documentation around it. Apis are the classic one, but also resource allocations like what are you using in the cloud? That sort of thing, because often you need to refer to it and different folks need different things, right?

Certainly, from the operations side, rarely can we count on developers when they make an update to a software saying, hey, we've now. Developers when they make an update to a software saying, hey, we've now incorporated this new platform in it. So the fact that we can have a tool that analyzes the deploy and then builds up that list is usually the moment where we find out oh, we're now using XYZ resource. Is that being built in the right location? Is it properly allocated with the right resource tags, like all of the things that operations folks care about for resourcing more than devs do, so just catching those. But it also was useful from the perspective of if you're building API documentation, inevitably when you make those docs they are already wrong. So having the build process bound to generating those files just means you're more likely to have accurate API documentation.

There was a good conversation at Jobout. This should just be part of the pipeline, even if it has an edit pass afterwards. That routine set of updating was really, really important, so it was great. Good, proper DevOps-y type talk about how do we do this, love that stuff. Include this in the process, love in the process.

2:20:25 - Leo Laporte
It's not out of date. I have a friend who uh specializes in writing tests for cicd deployment, so that you automatically test before you push.

2:20:34 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, seems like a good idea, right you have built into pre-prod right and then you run it through. You know testing can be very expensive. I've got projects where they have big you know service level agreements and so we actually have to benchmark the new versions. They will actually support the SLA. They need a transaction rate like this Perfect, before you deploy.

2:20:55 - Leo Laporte
Test it before you deploy.

2:20:56 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, Seems simple. Yeah, you have to run it. The cloud makes this dramatically easier. I used to build racks of hardware for this.

2:21:03 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, oh yeah. Build a simulated product CICD is kind of amazing, really.

2:21:08 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, and it just got so much easier as we were able to build it out in the cloud. So I've got some Azure DevOps shows coming, as well as GitHub Actions and things like that, just because you know, our lives are better.

2:21:20 - Leo Laporte
This used to be a lot harder, oh yeah, hey, you know, don't let Paul know, but I think it's time to talk about a liquor pick of the week.

2:21:28 - Richard Campbell
Oh, my goodness gracious, I would never you know. It's dry, january Dry.

2:21:32 - Leo Laporte
January. How could I even?

2:21:33 - Richard Campbell
do my job if I was dry January. Little Paul, I got little.

2:21:37 - Leo Laporte
Paul, there I'm in.

2:21:37 - Richard Campbell
Mexico. Like you want to be sober here.

2:21:46 - Leo Laporte
By the way way, it's going to be an arctic freeze next week in mcungee, paul run time becomes that polar vortex is on its way.

2:21:51 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, all right, so I popped down to the commissary here at vedanta and looked around at a few things, because I've done tequila here before. We might do that next week with paul. But this week I noticed in the export section they had Buchanans which I hadn't talked about before. I usually don't find this in Canada, so it's always fun to grab one you don't usually see. It's a blend and one of the famous original blends going way back, james Buchanan and to be clear, this is not the James Buchanan who became the President of the United States, a different guy, uh, known as one of the great whiskey barons, although we'll talk about that a little later on. Uh, actually born 1854 in canada from scottish immigrant parents who decided it was a bad idea and shortly after his birth moved back to the united kingdom. Uh, and he was again it's almost like he was of a time that in the late 1800s his initial jobs were working in the whiskey trade mostly buy, sell that kind of thing and he saw, working in London for a Scottish company, that the marketplace was looking for milder whiskeys and so he set about to make his own blend. Right, and this is one of the reasons that blends were so popular back in the day is that we weren't into making 12 year old plus whiskeys. We were aging in barrels, but only for a few years and so they were pretty harsh and introducing grain spirits and things were about actually smoothing stuff out. And so, at 30 years old, in 1884, he sets up James Buchanan Co, uses all the contacts from his earlier jobs, buying and selling the resources around whiskey, to be able to buy and blend his own whiskey called Buchanan's Blend. It's also responsible for a whiskey sold to this day called Black White, because it had a black bottle with a white label and he's a hustler like a good salesperson gets out there. In fact, by 1895, just a few years later, he has a Royal Warrant from Queen Victoria. So it's a product that the Queen will buy, and there's still a little seal on the bottle to remind us all that. No, no, he's got a Royal Warrant there.

He finally built his own distillery in 1898. It's called glen totters. It still exists today. You've never heard of it because they've never sold a single malt. It was built as a blending whiskey from the outset, initially making buchanan. Although in the 1980s, when the market was uh on hard times, the production was low, uh allied distillers uh bought it for in 18. In 1989 they were then acquired by chivas, which is now pernod required. But so, uh, glenn toucher still makes whiskey, but they make it and goes in valentine's now just a different blend.

And then he forms the alliance in 1950 with john dewer, with with John Dewar and Sons, to create the brand they call Scotch Whiskey Brands, which is soon named Buchanan Dewar, because they didn't own the only Scotch Whiskey brands and they set upon their acquisition spree coming out of World War I. So they bought Port Allen and Isla Lougharoon in 1922. They got Benrinus and this then merges together to become the Distillers Company in 1925, which I also now appreciate as I'm reading more about all the people involved. Like Tommy and John Dewar, they were all getting on by the late 20s and so they wanted to retire. They became directors with a larger company underneath them by forming Distillers Company. In fact Buchanan passes in 1935. And then by the 80s, distillers Company gets acquired by Guinness. Guinness and Grand Metropolitan merge together and that's Diageo by 1997.

So that's sort of the chain of events for a blender who then eventually made other whiskeys and, like I said, he was one of the whiskey barons and we've talked about the whiskey barons before, just kind of indirectly, one would argue that the original Whiskey Baron is John Alexander Dewar, one of John Dewar's sons. When I talked about Dewar's aid I mentioned this, that John Dewar had his sons get involved and ran the facilities for doing the blending and eventually built some distilleries and things and his brother, tommy, went to London and sort of lived the higher life of promoting whiskey. Eventually he goes over to New York. They make the first promotional film about whiskey ever. Like these folks that they eventually call the Barons, they were about branding. Before branding was a thing and in some ways they invented branding and put Scottish whiskey into the world purview, not just inside of Scotland, and they literally became barons.

So John Alexander Dewar was also a politician. He was a stay-at-home guy. So he was the Lord Provost of Perth and he became a Liberal MP and so forth and he was granted a barony. He became the Baron Fort for the boy in 1917. His brother, tom uh, became the baron doer in 1919. Now, he didn't do it because he was a good politician, he did it because he was buddies with edward the seventh, who helps at the time. Yeah, apparently there were three of them hanging out. There's another tommy, a guy named tommy lipton, as in lipton t, oh wow, so uh. And edward the seventh was the son of queen victoria and he actually did become king briefly for about nine years, 1901 to 19 to 1910 and then he passed, and then it was george the fifth, and then george fifth passed in the 50s and that became wind elizabeth the second you left out edwardIII, but no one wants to remember him so it's okay.

And Edward VII also had the very first car in Britain. Oh neat, he's a Daimler male Phaeton that he got in 1900. The second car, Tommy Lipton. The third car, Tommy Dewar.

2:27:41 - Leo Laporte
These guys are great. This is that video we showed last week or the week before of them dancing in kilts and stuff. Right, that was the first ad.

2:27:49 - Richard Campbell
That was that first ad that they made in new york right so they just, and, and so I think the problem here is you've got a prince who's hanging around with some movers and shakers type like they were very popular in scotland, right, they were very wealthy, they were the nouveau riche and they were hanging with the, the old schoolers, and so making him a baron was a way for Edward to not look like he was, you know, hanging with the lessors, although, again, they were educated and articulate, intelligent and good contributors to society like these are not bad people, and James buchanan falls in the same category. He never it was ever a politician. He was famously known to be extremely well-dressed as he started making money and he made a lot of money. He was the driver behind the distiller's company and all those mergers and one could argue and he read some of his writings on this stuff he was saving his distilleries that were going defunct, right, that he liked the industry and he wanted things to go well, and so bringing them in and protecting their brands was part of the equation During World War I, when everything shut down.

He actually volunteers his services for no pay. He worked in the government in munitions and, along with some other, james Stevenson, who actually was part of Johnny Walker, did very much the same thing, ultimately ended up working for Churchill and so, coming out of World War I, buchanan is granted a Baron. He becomes the Baron Wolverington in 1922. And same thing happened to Steveson he became the Baron Steveson. There's more of them. I won't keep going on about it. It's hysterical.

2:29:22 - Leo Laporte
But yeah, these guys all be be these are the oligarchs of the turn of the last century.

2:29:26 - Richard Campbell
At one point buchanan is the third wealthiest person in all britain for making whiskey around. It's distributed around the world so, yeah, they call them the whiskey barons because they literally were granted baronies, wow. So meantime we got ourselves some buchanan 12. Its recipe is it's a blend, obviously, so it's a bit of a secret as to what it is. It's tasty. There's a little hint of peat in there. It's not real potent. Now the rumor mill says this is a blend of Glendulin, which you've never heard of Again.

Another distillery primarily making blends, although they do have a special edition they call the Singleton. Dalwini is a popular spey, great stuff, probably part of the blend. Also Talisker and Kauila, which are both Isla whiskeys, so they're a bit, you know, smokier and so forth. There's a big chunk of single grain in here and some grain alcohol to dilute it down, to keep the price down, because if you can find this bottle and it's not that tough to come by in the US I found it on Bedmo 30 bucks, so not a wildly pricey whiskey. You got a lot of choices. When it comes to blended whiskeys, I've always recommended, like the Dewar's, 12, but Buchanan falls cleanly into that category. This is original, popular Scottish whiskey going back more than a hundred years, made by a group of people who put scottish whiskey on the map and became barons in the process as opposed to and there you have it, which is slightly this is it a wacky story like just?

2:31:02 - Leo Laporte
it's how you, how you become a baron. Yeah, yeah, that's just make some whiskey day and age. Yeah, now they this is the deluxe you're drinking, but they have these other blends, like the, the master, which is what?

2:31:14 - Richard Campbell
a little older I guess yeah, this is kind of the the lead.

2:31:17 - Leo Laporte
This is the base product and then the special reserve 18 years, and the red seal 20. Are they better?

2:31:23 - Richard Campbell
they are more expensive yeah, that means they're better, right, remember if they got the year on it. It means that's the youngest thing in the bottle, right, right right, all right, it gets pricier from there.

2:31:33 - Leo Laporte
Just checking, I choose my whiskey about price. That's how you can't go wrong.

2:31:41 - Richard Campbell
And, by the way, the 30 bottle, like don't feel bad to put a little soda in this yeah, I notice.

2:31:46 - Leo Laporte
I always know when it's that kind of whiskey because they have at the bottom of the website they have. Here's some recipes for what to do. Put it in the pina fizz or a bucalata. Don't order a bucalata or a piña shot Bucalata. What, Ladies and gentlemen? With that we have come to the end of this fine episode of Windows Weekly. I hope you have enjoyed it. Next week, Paul and Richard will be sitting next to each other.

2:32:20 - Paul Thurrott
Actually, I think what you should do is you're going to be in.

2:32:22 - Leo Laporte
Puerto Vallarta. Okay, yeah, yeah, because it's dry january best time to drink. You should uh, paul, you should rent elizabeth taylor's house, richard, you should rent richard burton's house and you should do the podcast on the bridge between the bridge.

2:32:37 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, very famous romeo, where for?

2:32:39 - Leo Laporte
out, though, and you know, burton pretty much always brought a bottle of whiskey with him when he went over that bridge, so I think you're in good company.

2:32:48 - Paul Thurrott
There's no other way that exorcist two happens. I mean it all makes sense.

2:32:54 - Leo Laporte
Uh, the rot is at the rotcom. T H? U, double R? O, double goodcom. Become a premium member for all the goodness. Although there's lots of great free stuff, it's's great way to keep up on what's going on in between windows weekly episodes. Uh, he also writes many good books, including the field guide to windows 11 and windows everywhere his latest about the kind of a history of windows through its coding frameworks that's available at leanpubcom. Set your own price at leanpubcom. Rich Richard Campbell's website is run as radiocom. He also hostsnet rocks with Carl Franklin. You'll find them both at run as radiocom and you'll find them both here, along with most of the time, most of the time me, on Wednesdays, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern time, 1900 UTC.

2:33:42 - Paul Thurrott
So far as to say you might be a staple of the show.

2:33:47 - Leo Laporte
Maybe, maybe, maybe not. I don't want to claim ownership, I'm just along for the ride. Make me a baron, okay, a baron, I'm a baron of twit. That's good, the baron, I like it. One R, one R, I like it, one R.

You can watch us do the show live off a Wednesday by tuning in, if you're a club member, to our Club Twitter Discord, but you can also go to Twitch, youtube, tiktok. Now, that may change next week, we'll see. That's all up in the air. We're going to talk about that next on this Week in Google. We're also on Xcom, linkedin, facebook and Kik, so lots of places you could watch live. If you're watching live, we do watch the chat as well. I often chat in with the people, so please feel free to join those and join us live. That's the advantage of chatting is you're watching live. Nobody's really there later after the fact, but you can listen on your own schedule.

Just download a copy of the show. There's several places you can get it. Paul's got a link at his website, therotcom. You can also, of course, go to our website, twittv, slash ww for Windows Weekly. There's a link there. Not only can you get the show there, audio or video, there's a link there to the YouTube videos. That's a really useful thing for sharing little clips, little pieces of the show. And there's other things there, for instance, the playlist of Richard's Whiskey Talks. We've made a great playlist there and you have a direct link to it, right, richard? What?

2:35:22 - Richard Campbell
is that URL? Again, what is that URL?

2:35:30 - Leo Laporte
Did a direct link to it right, richard? What?

2:35:31 - Richard Campbell
is that url again? Did it populate? I forgot something weird from my closet. Something weird from my closet dot com. Okay, and it's all working. Now too, is it working good? All right, something weird from my closetcom, you will land on the whiskey, you'll get the whiskey playlist.

2:35:44 - Leo Laporte
Um, after the fact, the probably the best way to get the show is to subscribe in a podcast player. Uh, you'll find windows weekly there. We've been doing this show forever and ever 15, 16 years so most podcast players have finally cottoned on to the idea that it exists. Um, we're gonna be. Our thousandth episode is in a couple of years.

2:36:02 - Paul Thurrott
Believe it or not, we're at 9 15, it's amazing I can't do two years, yeah, two years, I guess a little less.

2:36:09 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, I'm at 9 67 on run s, so like this fall for a thousand percent?

2:36:14 - Paul Thurrott
when do we, when do we lap you, how does that? Oh yeah, never never, he's, uh, he's a few weeks he's running faster than we are. My son asked me when he was a little kid like when do I, when will I be as old as you after I die?

2:36:29 - Leo Laporte
that's true. That's a good point. That's it. I never thought of it that way. Yeah, yep. Well, on that bright note, um, thank you for joining us and we will see you, you all next week on windows. Weekly bye, guys.