Windows Weekly 916 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. I am so jealous. Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell are in Puerto Vallarta, but they're going to focus. They're going to focus and talk about big news changes in how Microsoft and Google deliver AI to their office tools, windows and the PC market. Tiny growth, a little analysis of what this means for the future of personal computing. And then we'll talk about AI everywhere and Microsoft kind of loosening its hold on open AI. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly.
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell, episode 916, recorded Wednesday, January 22nd 2025: ¡Agua Gigante!, it's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft, and today we take you to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, where our two protagonists are enjoying the sun and fun. Hey boys, you look very relaxed. We've been having a good time. Nice, Paul Thurrott. On the right there in the? Uh in the navy blue, dark blue. Uh, Paul is, of course, at thurrott.com. That's his blog and his books are leanpub.com. On the left there in the Mexican mosaic, it's Mr Richard Campbell of runasradio.com. Wow, do you get news down there in beautiful Puerto Vallarta?
0:01:41 - Richard Campbell
Yeah but it's, all in Spanish, yeah, which makes it less stressful. Actually, everything sounds like a, like a novella telenovela and a swear word open ai, okay.
0:01:56 - Leo Laporte
Well, there is a lot of news, so I uh, I think I'll let you uh get right into it, although I wouldn't have started with this, to be honest. Yeah, I would have started with the ai story but okay, you, you buried it, buried it, that's fine, that's fine I don't really honestly think that matters oh well, there you go. Good, good you've.
0:02:17 - Paul Thurrott
You've ranked these in the order of importance, so well, I moved this one ahead of windows because to me this is a fairly profound change and, um, it's probably just the the first of several that are coming along these lines, right, well, what's?
0:02:31 - Richard Campbell
happening. I'm not going to get into color. You tell the story first and then I'll kill.
0:02:37 - Leo Laporte
He's the color man. Paul, You're the play-by-play guy.
0:02:40 - Paul Thurrott
We've been talking about this over tequila anyway, so everyone knows, the last two years have been this rapid expansion of AI for individuals and for businesses, different go-to-market strategies. Google, as it does, has been copying the market leader, like they do in mobile In this case Microsoft right. And so when Microsoft announced Copilot for Microsoft 365, they we'll do a Gemini something, something it'd be the same thing and cost exactly the same amount, and the consumer side is a little different, but basically you get the same thing Gemini advanced for as a consumer with a Gmail account, two terabytes of storage, et cetera. So very similar strategies. If you wanted AI, you had to pay for AI.
Microsoft, of course, has Windows and they're putting some free things in Windows If you have a co-pilot plus PC. They're putting a few more things in Windows that are AI-related, local AI. But the cloud-based stuff, which is far more powerful and feature-complete by now for sure, has always been pay for play. That's kind of the simplest way to say it, I guess. But there have been some changes happening, so I don't remember when this was, but back in August September timeframe, something like that Microsoft raised the price of Microsoft 365 for consumers, so the personal and family versions in select markets Australia, I think it was, parts of Southeast Asia, almost like they were just testing to see how that went. They also introduced this system of AI credits so that if you had a Microsoft 365 account, paid Microsoft 365 consumer account, you could do things that previously might have required Copilot Pro, which is that $20 per user per month service that's analogous to Microsoft 365 Copilot. Let me know if I lost you completely, because this is dense.
0:04:30 - Richard Campbell
Well, and the point being that Consumer 365 isn't even $20 a month, so why are you going to pay $20 a month for Copilot?
0:04:37 - Paul Thurrott
That's the tough thing. So at the time, family was at $99 a year. Six users, terabyte of storage, full access to all the Office apps on desktop and mobile, yada, yada, yada, whatever else. Or you could add $20 per user per month, which is $240 per user. So all six, whatever. That, it's over a thousand, it's like 1200, whatever $1,300 plus a hundred for Microsoft 365.
The thing that's weird about that or I think is unfair about that to consumers anyway, microsoft's costs are enormous, but the amount of functionality you get are exponentially smaller than what you get just from Microsoft 365. The value prop wasn't really there. So with this system of AI credits and even us here in the United States, western Europe, wherever you've seen this, and even us here in the United States, western Europe, wherever you've seen this you can do things like designermicrosoftcom and create images and you could go against this AI credit balance, which at the time we didn't even know what it was, let alone what each transaction costs. But we've been doing this for a while. It's the reason I stopped paying for Microsoft Copilot Plus, because that was what I was using it for, and now I've never exceeded any limits. So I just use it to make images every month and it's free. It's. I mean, I'm paying for Microsoft 365, actually twice, but I'm paying for. I pay for these subscriptions, so to me that made sense. I get this kind of benefit.
So then last week happened, and it's really. It's so complicated because Google and Microsoft have both made major changes. The Google changes that were just announced are only for businesses. The Microsoft changes that were just announced are only for consumers, but these things are still roughly comparable. We talked about this part of it, I think, last week that Google killed Gemini Advanced for businesses. They still offer it for consumers and all of those features are now in workspace, and workspace went up per user per month some couple of dollars. So I think the math I did at the time was 17%, if I remember correctly, um a day or two later, so probably it was after the show would have been after the show last week, microsoft announced their changes that they'd already made in some parts of the world are going everywhere, including the United States Price hikes for personal and family Microsoft 365. They still offer Copilot Plus if you want to pay that $20 per user per month.
So a little different from Google, and my life has been upended ever since, because people are technical, pick everything apart as they should, and this seemed to me to be very fair. And then you kind of dig into it and you see little problems and I still think it's okay. But the more I think about it, I think this is a step to a future where this will maybe be more equitable, right? So the issues I will say the primary issue is that only the primary account holder on Microsoft 365 family gets these AI credits. Yeah, that's a mistake. Yeah, there's no way to dole them out to everyone in the family. There's no way to allow everyone in the family just to access from that single pool. There's no option other than if someone else wants to access from that single pool, there's no option other than if someone else wants to access those features, they have to pay $20 per month, which, you know, again, is super expensive.
So I sort of think about this and I still feel like, for people you know, individuals, families, microsoft 365 families, a no-brainer Six users, I should say the price went up to $130 per month. So it's 30% price increase. It's a big increase, but it's the first time the price has ever gone up on this thing and it's still an incredible value just for all this stuff. It's incredible. It's still a no-brainer to me, but I hear the complaints and I feel it too, like my wife would want to access this. There's different ways to look at this. There's different ways to look at this, but in my view, not that this is all of it, but if the $30 per year thing covers the cost of me having AI credits for the year, I mean, why not let me pay 30 bucks a year for another person right To join it? Like that to me, makes a little more sense.
0:08:52 - Richard Campbell
So I think I actually think we're going to get there. I think the pool for everybody is the answer. I mean, I see the juggling that's going on right now. If you make the family deal too good, you're starting to start sabotaging your business. That's right.
0:09:05 - Paul Thurrott
That which has always been a big problem, which I think is an unreasonable fear, but but yeah but especially when you talk about the ai stuff.
0:09:12 - Richard Campbell
It's always been a concern. But the other part of this is you don't want to make the like. Really, they should make co-pilot for families, like five bucks a month, yeah, and except that they'll overuse it. So the idea of doing the points pool. So if you're barely using it, it costs you nothing more. That's right, and as soon as you use it a lot, it's like you should be paying for this.
0:09:30 - Paul Thurrott
And I think there's a middle ground too, where I hit or we hit or whoever's in the family, whatever the system is. At the time you hit the limit and they're like yep, sorry you shut off. See you at the top of the next month. You know, the top of the next month. I mean, how about let me buy more AI credits? Yeah.
0:09:46 - Richard Campbell
And if I do?
0:09:46 - Paul Thurrott
that enough. Five or 10 or $20 increment, whatever it might be. And if I start spending that $20, it's like, okay, well, maybe now this let's roll you into a monthly, that's right.
0:09:54 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, in the end, these guys, it's not like they need, they're not worried about the money, it's the utilization. Like you want to see that people are using this, like to me that seems more important.
0:10:04 - Paul Thurrott
So there's no way for us to know what this costs Microsoft, but we have this vague understanding that these AI transactions for lack of a better term are expensive. They're getting less expensive over time. I think that's why they're able to do what they're doing now. If you compare January 2025 to 2024, it's better. It's better than the previous plan, which was only you can pay a lot to get this a little right. Um, I think some of this feels like mvp.
0:10:31 - Richard Campbell
You know that they're just experimenting to see what people will pay again. I don't see any accounting anyone anywhere. They're looking and saying oh no, we're making a profit off of this. Oh god this is more about charging enough that people pay attention to its price to see how many people are willing to pay at all, regardless of what it actually costs. Because I think, if they gave it away for free which I almost feel like they're headed down that path that this eventually is just a feature that's included with your other paid products.
0:10:59 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
0:11:00 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, yep, that you would never know if it's actually valued.
0:11:02 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so that you would never know if it's actually valued. Yeah, so if, look, we go from $100 a year to $130. Okay, and if a year from now it's $130 and everyone gets in or whatever they change, great. If it was $200 a year, we start to have a conversation. I guess you could argue it's still a good value on some level if you use a lot yada, yada, yada. But you know there's a conversation there. But yeah, I think as their cost comes down and as they have a sense for what people are actually using, they'll iron this out. And so everyone's freaking out because that's what we do. But I mean, I wish it was a little better. I'd like to get my wife in on this. I think she would use some of this stuff.
0:11:41 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, and it's the biggest thing is, I want people who are not in this industry to be playing with this and they see value in it.
0:11:48 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So also just in the negative column for this offering, I will just point out one of the big battles I've been fighting for the past I don't know two years now or a year and a half, whatever it is is this notion of forced OneDrive usage in Windows 11, right? And how they just enable folder backup and don't give you an option. As part of the way I use this product, which I admit is not a common, mainstream way to do so, I have specific folders in OneDrive that I use for my documents and how I do things and whatever, and I don't use that folder backup feature. But when I do use products like Microsoft Word or Excel or whatever that save documents, I save them to the desktop, which is not backed up automatically on my computers. Only because you configured it that way. Yeah, by the way, you really got to work at it to get it there. No, he really wants to back up your desktop. I can't use Copilot in Word or Excel or whatever unless I am backing up to OneDrive. So this is sort of like the autosave feature. Right, you can't use autosave in the Office apps unless you're saving to OneDrive. It doesn't have to be one of those backup folders, but it has to be OneDrive. So, yeah, you know they're still directing users.
Using what Microsoft products is like playing a Rails game. You know you're going to go from point A to point B and there is only one path from Microsoft's point of view. You're going to take their path and I like to go on side quests. I don't know, I'm a little different. You're an adventurer, yeah, so, but yeah, I, I, I think. Look, ai is the biggest thing that's happened, maybe in this industry in our lifetime, maybe, but if not, it's one of the biggest. Obviously, um, it is going to have the most profound impact in um, not consumption tests, but you know, creation tests, right, whether it's straight up office productivity or creation like you're creating images or videos or whatever. That's.
0:13:43 - Richard Campbell
That's where it's going to have its impact and that's's why this is important, because this is still the primary way that most people create documents you know, whatever you know, untoward Media on the YouTube channel made a great point, which is, you know, one of the upsides to putting a little bit of pricing is so that not everybody tries it at once. Yeah, because they can only scale so far. So this is also a way to control the rate of expansion. Keep your systems from tipping over.
0:14:07 - Paul Thurrott
So Copilot Plus for consumers and you've argued otherwise into a good point too, I think. But if you're a very small business with a little lower tiers on the business side as well, microsoft 365, copilot Plus were too expensive, just a little too expensive to experiment, whereas I think now we're in the opposite equation, where it's still too expensive if you want everyone to have it, but now we're limiting it so that someone in your family gets it and the others don't.
0:14:36 - Richard Campbell
How I made my family fight over it. That's kind of a tough one. It's also a feature that they get a lot of use of. Full stop, this guy. They have a credit pool for a variety of services.
0:14:46 - Paul Thurrott
You know what this reminds me of is that point system they had in Zoom when it first came out. Remember you couldn't pay for things with dollars or whatever your currency was. You had to buy like Microsoft points Right, and it's those Microsoft point gift cards and like just put them back?
0:15:04 - Richard Campbell
I don't know.
0:15:06 - Paul Thurrott
All right.
0:15:06 - Richard Campbell
Well, I mean I it. To me it feels like progress. It really does. Or is it progress, it's progress.
0:15:13 - Leo Laporte
Thank you, let's get it, You're in. You're in Mexico now, buddy.
0:15:19 - Paul Thurrott
It's progress. Well, him and his, him and his wife Canadians have said the word progress one too many times. In my presence, I start to twitch.
0:15:29 - Richard Campbell
He's a little twitchy.
0:15:31 - Paul Thurrott
I'm like oh, how do you say that? Anyway, yeah, so if you're looking at this from a business perspective, microsoft 365 hasn't changed. I'm curious where that goes right, I feel like it's going to. And if you're looking at it from the Google perspective, their consumer stuff hasn't changed, right? Only the business side's changed. So it's the opposite sides of the fence, in a way, but the business models are very similar.
The big difference there is that Google, at least for businesses, is not even offering a paid AI add-on anymore, and Microsoft, for consumers, is. But they've made it possible for many more people to access these features in a limited way, for free or as part of the thing they're already paying for, right, the Microsoft 365 subscription. And, by the way, until just I think it might've been even yesterday, when I started writing about this, as this was happening, I was like you know, one of the weird things here is there's no place you can go and see how many AI credits you have or how you're spending them. This is half-baked. No, it's there now, so you actually can go to the Microsoft account website and go to your Microsoft 365 subscription page, and I think it's 60 AI credits a month, and then I'd actually still. At the time I looked, I still had 59 credits somehow. So I don't know.
0:16:49 - Richard Campbell
It's almost a Dan. I wonder if Microsoft thinks about not looking like a cell phone company. You know, like cell phone companies have these family plans with a pool of data that's exactly yes, so, okay, so I don't want to get too.
0:17:03 - Paul Thurrott
When you said this pool should be available to everyone. This is what yes, so okay, so I don't want to get too. You, you were I when you said this pool should be available to everyone. This is what I, I, this is what I thought of and and I could see people complaining about it and I got to be honest, I have no sympathy for this whatsoever. So back when cell phone plans were really expensive and you could have a family plan, but it was not unlimited and everyone had the same pool, my wife, my daughter and my son were all on the same plan, yeah, and my son would exceed the limit every month, right? And my wife would just be like come on man, like what are you doing? Like he was like off the charts. More data usage than anyone else, right?
0:17:34 - Richard Campbell
The teenager. He had a routine that involved a lot of data. Yeah, probably video.
0:17:38 - Paul Thurrott
So you could say, well, that's here, to which I would say, good, yeah, this is, people are sharing microsoft 365 family accounts with random people, they know. Yeah, so if you don't want bob that got your neighbor across the street using all your ai credits, here's an idea. He's not part of your family. Like, like, nobody cares, you know? Like, see to me this is not a huge problem.
0:18:00 - Richard Campbell
It's actually a really useful solution. Yeah, yeah, I agree so I think, it's okay, that's my point, I guess. Okay.
0:18:07 - Paul Thurrott
Here we go. So I've used two AI credits this month so far. Two it says you use a credit each time you prompt AI in apps like Word, powerpoint or Designer. So it hasn't been since January 1st, right? This is going back to late last week, well, not even. Oh, okay, this is going back to late last week, well, not even, oh, okay, yeah, no, they just. Well, he's just been introduced, they've had AI credits, but they haven't been, you know, like keeping a tally, kind of like. When Azure launched, they were like this is how it goes. So now they are and you can kind of see, so it will take some months, I think. I suspect in my case there might be a month or two where I'm like oh, I actually hit the limit. My problem is not that I'm hitting a limit. My problem is I can't buy my way out of it without subscribing at a huge price Without going to the full haul.
Yeah, See, I'd like to see some middle ground where it's like all right, so $60 credits $20 or 60 more credits. It's an idea. Yeah, whatever the number, whatever the amount, just give me something that's not $20 a month.
0:19:02 - Leo Laporte
you know, it sounds like it's almost a freemium model, right that they expect you to pay for it yeah, I kind of.
0:19:08 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, exactly. So, like you know, my wife and I pay for whatever the duolingo subscription is called, but every once in a while I'll run out of the in-game currency which is used to, you know, do certain things, whatever it is, and, like you can buy these things for small amounts, right, and I, if you were to look at the last 12 months, I bet I did that twice. You know, I'm glad it's there. I mean I don't like paying, but I mean I'm, I'm, it's better than nothing. Yeah, and I feel like this is the natural um, it's the progression of things, progression that will have. Yeah, exactly, I agree, yep, so, yeah, big deal. I, I think this is. I can't stop writing about it. You know, people keep finding these little things they don't like about it. Um, which is what?
0:19:52 - Richard Campbell
our world does, and I often debate this whole yeah go ahead.
0:19:56 - Leo Laporte
I was just going to say do you think this is an acknowledgement that AI is costing them more than they thought it would?
0:20:04 - Paul Thurrott
Actually, I think it's an implicit acknowledgement that that cost is starting to come down. If it was still as expensive as it was to them a year ago, they wouldn't be able to do this.
I think that's why one of the articles I wrote was baby steps. I call it baby steps because, look, this is a step forward. It's not a big step forward If you just want everyone to have AI, whatever blah, blah blah, but a year from now and maybe less because it happens fast. Right, but maybe less than a year from now or whatever it is. The next step will be one of the things we've talked about.
0:20:36 - Richard Campbell
I mean, I don't know what they'll do, obviously, but maybe they open it up to the whole family, maybe they let you buy credits, or something when you, you know, thinking on the back side of this, they've now had 18 months, two years worth of workload to look at, which means they've been able to tune the infrastructure, optimize the LLMs, like all of these different things, and they're probably getting some substantial returns on that. So it's costing them less to operate it Right, and that gives you room to start playing with.
0:21:12 - Paul Thurrott
Now your problem is not enough utilization. So I, how do I increase the workload? I drop the price, yeah, yep. So yeah, I don't look it's. Unfortunately, this is still a subscription service. Prices still go up over time, etc. Etc. But I I what richard said, which was I think it just becomes a feature of that thing you're already paying for. I think that that's. It has to land there, right and google already got there. Google just did it for businesses.
0:21:27 - Leo Laporte
Okay, or it's an acknowledgement that not enough people are using.
0:21:33 - Richard Campbell
Yeah and enough is a relative concept. Right, it's like some are, but we'd like more now because we're not tipping over, yeah.
0:21:43 - Leo Laporte
How come you've used so few credits, Paul? What are you using instead?
0:21:46 - Paul Thurrott
I know you're using ai I've only used it to create a few images for my website you, you like something else better no, I don't. Well, I'm not. I don't use ai for writing. I don't use microsoft office for anything, yeah, so I basically use it to create images. So I this is the type of thing like I think my wife would like using this, and I don't have a way to make that happen, like I can't. There's no way to transfer without her paying a lot she's not the primary.
0:22:12 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, right, that's a very weird thing to do yeah, um, but I use. You have a family account right, yeah, yeah, so weird and it's actual family members in it.
0:22:24 - Paul Thurrott
I don't know that my kids I don't know what they think about this, like I don't know that they would care one way or the other. I really have no way of knowing.
0:22:30 - Leo Laporte
But you know, I set my girls up with accounts, but they barely use them I guess I'm a weirdo because I bought the 20 chat gpt subscription right, the sonnet claude anthropic subscription, the perplexity AI subscription. I was spending probably $100 a month on these various AIs.
0:22:49 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, but you're in the business.
0:22:51 - Leo Laporte
It's part of my job, but I also find that different ones are good at different things. That's right.
0:22:55 - Paul Thurrott
And I think that's going to shift over time. But I did the same for a little while. I paid for Microsoft Copilot Plus for I don't remember three, five months, whatever it was. I've paid for OpenAI, chatgpt, whatever that's called Pro. I have been using GitHub Copilot a lot in Visual Studio and if I hit a limit there, yeah, I could picture I'm not going to do it for the. I don't. I'm not a professional programmer. I don't use it. Like you know, I'm not going to. This is not my primary aim. But yeah, as I'm working on this really complicated project, the value there is unbelievable. I would absolutely pay for that. It's fantastic. But, um, but yeah, I mean I.
You know, last time I wrote that editorial like I will not pay for AI, it didn't mean I wasn't going to use AI, I just AI is going to be a part of this is kind of my tip is about this a little bit. You know it, this a little bit. You know it's going to be a part of everything that we use. So we're going to use it, you know. But I feel like, like, like, fundamentally, to me the product is Microsoft 365. It's word Excel, powerpoint, outlook, whatever it's the, whatever amount of storage you get in one drive. It's the integration you get with windows, where you can access everything seamlessly, like there's value there. The AI stuff is well, it's spell checking, it's grammar checking, it's the stuff that used to just get with it, and to me that's how it should be and, like you said, I think that's where it's going to go. Yeah, that's what I think I said spitting on my screen.
0:24:23 - Leo Laporte
All right, before we go on to Windows, even more exciting than office. Uh, I'd like to uh interrupt with a word from our sponsor. If you don't mind, gentlemen, take a nice little. Uh, I don't know what do you like? A hamica break and we'll be back. Little horchata for all. Stay away from the tequila, that's all I ask.
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Okay, let's talk about I'm shocked Big growth in PC sales.
0:28:04 - Paul Thurrott
Huge. I think this was the best year we've had in one year, and by a very slim margin.
0:28:11 - Leo Laporte
When you put it that way, wow.
0:28:14 - Paul Thurrott
Depending on how you look at this flat you look at this flat. But yeah, 254 million PCs sold last year, more than the 251 million sold the year before. But 1.3% growth not great.
0:28:29 - Richard Campbell
Better than a 1.3% decline.
0:28:36 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, I mean yeah, sure. So, yeah, you have to go back to well, last year was worse, but other than last year, 2006 to find a year where pc makers sold fewer devices before the smartphone, before the iphone.
0:28:49 - Richard Campbell
That's right. That's what we're talking about. Yeah, numbers are pretty clearly linked to, yeah, people's mass migration to the phone being that's fascinating, you connect the two.
0:28:57 - Leo Laporte
I mean, yeah, a smartphone doesn't replace a pc, no, but except that it does for a lot of work, for a lot of consumers.
0:29:03 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, you got to remember, before the smartphone, before the iphone, all a lot, everything that we did that had anything to do with personal computing yeah so if we were still using facebook and we didn't have phones, we'd all be doing that on our um, on our p doing right now, you know, still for some reason. But yeah, I mean, if you ignoring the pandemic, which was that weird outlier, you know, I think we've kind of settled into where the PC market is. Idc and Guard one of them a little less fervently than the other still believes we're going to see a big punchy kind of upgrade cycle because windows 10 going out. But I, honestly, the way microsoft is spreading that out over three years for businesses, I don't know, I'm not, I'm not really convinced. Um, I don't.
You know, there's, there's, there's a lot, lots of micro data in here that I didn't write about but maybe worth is worth mentioning just briefly. You know there are rumors that the Snapdragon well, there's a rumor that the Snapdragon X-based PCs didn't sell right under a million units and it's like, oh, you know, but okay, but how many million units of business class Ultrabooks are PC makers selling? And is that not closer to 30% of all of those computers? I mean, it's probably not as bad as people think.
0:30:23 - Richard Campbell
Well, and if you look at these, pc sales are largely business. Business doesn't buy first generation machines, yep, let alone a new platform, right, so that kind of staggers it. And they don't buy when it's released, they buy when they're on cycle, when their warranties are expiring and they have to cycle out. So you can ship a new machine but you're not going to get a shot at a business for three to four years.
0:30:43 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I think you know Microsoft and the PC makers, but we're working to try to make this seem exciting. And I thought that wrapping it in AI would be the solution, yeah, whereas I think wrapping it in 12 hours of battery life and no fan noise. Yeah, and instant on it actually works, maybe, but that said, we have been stung so many times by poorly performing or unreliable computers that who would even believe that. So I think we need some amount of time.
0:31:11 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, there's no substitute for time on this. The enterprise buyer in me is like I'll take a second gen, thanks, and I might get one of the first to just experiment with. Yeah, and then, and I'm also watching and saying how well does it play in intune? What's its update policies, right? Oh, we threw arm into the mix and arm still isn't in the normal update cycle. Okay, like I just can't manage this machine, why would I introduce it? Right?
0:31:36 - Paul Thurrott
I think it's gonna.
0:31:37 - Richard Campbell
I think it's gonna happen but I don't happen to, but I also don't think it's going to happen.
0:31:39 - Paul Thurrott
I think it's going to happen too, but I also don't think it's going to trigger a PC revival in the sense of additional sales every year.
0:31:45 - Richard Campbell
It's going to scavenge sales from traditional platforms. Yeah Right, that's really what's going to happen. That's fine.
0:31:51 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, so you know, 250 million-ish devices still pretty good, I guess, in the scope of things. I mean, I don't know where smartphones landed last year exactly, but it's going to be a billion, right? So 25%, and then tablets are, whatever they are, 100-something.
0:32:05 - Richard Campbell
No, if you want to be sad, be in the tablet market. Yeah, turns out there's only one vendor.
0:32:09 - Paul Thurrott
I was going to say, if you're not named Apple, you could be very sad. So they keep trying. People keep, keep trying. People keep their ipads, that's right. They keep their ipads longer. They keep their pcs, that's right. Yeah, and as a relatively newer platform.
0:32:27 - Richard Campbell
They're probably ever more reliable anyway. I mean just just less going on. People replace pcs because they're breaking down. Yeah, fans are failing, you know, they're starting to squeal, and you know, and windows software rots this doesn't.
0:32:37 - Leo Laporte
This doesn't tell us what the turnover rate is of PCs. I wonder what the turnover rate is. Do people? Keep them for five years.
0:32:45 - Paul Thurrott
It's a lot longer than it used to be. It's the same normal.
0:32:49 - Richard Campbell
PC on the business side. It's four to five years now. It used to be two, but it hasn't been for a while Because there's just no reason for it. You're not getting anything that matters. So what you're seeing here is.
0:32:59 - Leo Laporte
there's no growth in the market. No, which is what you'd expect. It's saturated. Everybody wanted a PC, has one and all the sales are basically turnover after X. Number of years and fewer people want them.
0:33:11 - Paul Thurrott
I was going to say so that makes it go down. Very few people want a PC. The problem one looks forward to getting a phone. The problem with a PC the problem with one looks forward to getting a phone. You know it's exciting, kind of. I mean that's slowed down too, but you know that's where you spend your time. You know, right, the problem the PC, just from a perception perspective, is that it is for work. For work, you know, I know the gamers.
0:33:29 - Leo Laporte
I guess it's true. Why would I need a PC? I think you're right. I, what do I?
0:33:35 - Richard Campbell
need, and this is where it came from in the first place. Pcs were too expensive for personal use. They were business devices.
0:33:41 - Paul Thurrott
Right, and they've come full circle in a sense, I think that a lot of people, some percentage of people who this year going forward, they hit the end of the run with whatever PC and they start looking around. You know, some of them are going to go with an iPad, some of them are going to go with a Chromebook. Even some of them are gonna go with a chromebook. Even some of them might not go with anything. They'll be like whatever I have else is fine.
0:34:02 - Richard Campbell
I mean, yep, you know, it depends if you hit a point where you haven't turned on that pc in a long time. When you turn it on, it blue screens, you're like, or it goes into an update cycle that takes an hour.
0:34:12 - Paul Thurrott
That's why I hate this thing. You're like yeah, I mean, look, I know it's. It's not true of everybody, of course. People watching this and certain classes of business users, those people who need Excel, like full Excel, are like yeah, no, I'm never getting that on my PC.
0:34:27 - Richard Campbell
Or they want that 40-inch screen like usable 3840x21.
0:34:31 - Paul Thurrott
But this is the minority part of the market. The good news is it's a lucrative part of the market. So even though the market's smaller than it used to be, the chances are pretty good that the average price of PCs is much higher because the networks have come and gone and these are higher quality devices.
0:34:46 - Richard Campbell
And I don't know if it did break these numbers out. How many of those PCs are laptops versus actual desktop machines? I think it's the vast majority is a laptop. People want a portable computing device.
0:34:57 - Paul Thurrott
It's not even close and they're not happy with how small the form it's like I'd like to get something that's like a laptop, but I want it to lock me to one of the rooms in my house. Do you have?
0:35:07 - Leo Laporte
yeah, we have this kensington lock thing you could put it around.
0:35:09 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's awesome yeah yeah, you could latch it to yourself like you're a prisoner exchange program, like yeah, I guess. But I mean, even just within a home, it's nice being able to sit out in front of the tv or lay on the bed or whatever you know so at some point you're going to see not a decline. Yeah, you think well, this is the question. I think we're we're kind of in this rolling.
0:35:32 - Richard Campbell
I think the early oscillation is the smartphone revolution and the second oscillation is the covid pandemic is pandemic yeah, yeah, I think we.
0:35:40 - Paul Thurrott
If you just kind of ignore that, you know, you can kind of see what the trend really is trend.
0:35:45 - Richard Campbell
It's low one percent.
0:35:46 - Leo Laporte
Steve jobs said the pc is a truck. It's for people who are hauling.
0:35:51 - Richard Campbell
So coding or they're doing video editing their f-150s.
0:35:55 - Paul Thurrott
It's well, it's what? Uh, we it's. It's what used to be a workstation, right right, it's for work.
0:36:01 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, even you don't need a pc, and you know, just for yourself personally there are all these trends.
0:36:06 - Paul Thurrott
We talk about the integrated graphics and pcs that can play games awesomely. Now, uh, the ever less demand for adding graphics cards and things like that, like the pc, is, you know, it's, it's matured, it's, it's um they sold a quarter of a billion of them. We gotta say it's not bad.
0:36:22 - Leo Laporte
There's still only so what that sounds like is there must be what? One and a half billion out there?
0:36:28 - Paul Thurrott
it sounds like there's a rough what we said five-year turnover yeah yeah, five-year turnover look, there was a period of time right before the iphone hit, where we were looking at. We're going to sell 500 million of these things a year. This was going up and up and up and then something happened. This past.
0:36:45 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, so specialists need them. I need it because I'm a coder, for instance. Yeah, by the way, it's a laptop, it's not a desktop gamers might want desktops, so video editors, uh, 3d designers, they may want desktops, where big screens and peripheral devices matter.
0:37:01 - Richard Campbell
Here's the irony.
0:37:02 - Paul Thurrott
Apple could kill this market right now if it wanted to. They could just make the iPad more powerful. The chip's already there. All they have to do is improve the software.
0:37:08 - Leo Laporte
They've been saying this for a while. They've been putting out ads that say what's a computer? But they haven't taken the technical steps they need to make this thing.
0:37:25 - Paul Thurrott
They still sell macs. Maybe they don't want to have a pro. How about an ipad pro os? Right you?
0:37:27 - Richard Campbell
know, and I guess because macs are lucrative from a unit, you know, like a margin, and they don't turn fast, yeah, where you know, I think apple's got an incentive there, but the mac mini m4 is an unbelievable device oh, I love it.
0:37:38 - Leo Laporte
I have hearts yeah it's tiny, it's amazing it also is astonishing so you could put that into a smaller device that is more like yeah, I don't know I would put that into a laptop, frankly, and then well, they will. That's coming, that we'll see that soon yeah anyway, I I love there'll always be a market for pcs, but I'm a pc guy.
0:38:00 - Paul Thurrott
I'm a computer guy yeah, no, I am too, but we're also what. How old are we again?
0:38:05 - Leo Laporte
well, I mean the other thing well, we use it for zoom, okay. So yeah, for podcasting we need pcs. Well, do we? Don't do it, I don't know, no, I did.
0:38:14 - Paul Thurrott
I've been doing the podcast in the morning on my phone. The picture quality is better than it is on my computer. Gosh darn it.
0:38:21 - Leo Laporte
What a world we're entering, yeah, yeah. And so the only thing that's tying you to this is a keyboard and a mouse. You have these user interface devices that you kind of still need, but AI and voice recognition someday may replace that. Then you really won't need a PC, you won't even need a device.
0:38:45 - Richard Campbell
It'll just be in the house, you know, yeah, you can see at the point everywhere, your phone is really your carrier of your identity. Right, you can harness compute on demand, that's right.
0:38:50 - Leo Laporte
Well, I for instance, I'm wearing this oops, where is it? Oh, here it is. I'm wearing this ai device that's recording everything, sending it. Now, it doesn't have the power to do anything. It sends it to the phone, so it's a little phone companion, right, and and um, I think we're gonna see more and more of that kind of thing. The phone will be the base station, right, and then I get insights on my screen, uh, on my phone email. Is that the last bastion, is it?
0:39:17 - Richard Campbell
phone's not great for email no, but there's whole generations of, there's younger generations now that are not using email for anything. They don't use email at all. Nope, that's where your. Teams and your Slacks come into play, gosh darn it. It's all changing. We're going to have to kill this show.
0:39:34 - Leo Laporte
I'm sorry, guys.
0:39:36 - Paul Thurrott
There's no reason to do Windows Weekly. Thank goodness, in fact.
0:39:42 - Richard Campbell
I could be drinking tequila right now. I mean seriously.
0:39:47 - Paul Thurrott
Except that it's still a thing.
0:39:48 - Leo Laporte
Yeah.
0:39:50 - Paul Thurrott
It's a.
0:39:50 - Leo Laporte
Thing and it's now primarily enterprise.
0:39:55 - Paul Thurrott
Well, yeah, I mean I would add a couple of things to that. A lot of gamers right Gaming yeah, I mean I would add a couple of things that a lot of gamers right Gaming, yeah, but also just creators. You know people who maybe they are. They have a YouTube channel or a blog or a sub stack or whatever it is. They're doing stuff like we're doing right now. Maybe they're out in the world. You know the travel blog guys are out doing stuff and you know they need something. You can edit video on a phone.
0:40:16 - Leo Laporte
Rick Steves has been doing amazing travel blogs with his phone for years.
0:40:20 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, sure, but his TV show isn't made on an iPhone, right? It could be.
0:40:25 - Leo Laporte
Could be.
0:40:27 - Richard Campbell
It could be, but it's pretty sure there's some production done on a different device. Yeah, yeah, but it is the exception. That's a narrow pool, relatively speaking.
0:40:35 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, but it's a lucrative pool too. That yeah, but it's a lucrative pool too. That's the point. The creator types, just to make it a simple term, or the gamers? Small percentage probably of your role?
0:40:44 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, but they're willing to spend money. They want something good and, let's face it, the gaming industry is swinging PC again. The consoles have their problems.
0:40:54 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, right, and PCs I keep talking about it are awesome for games.
0:41:00 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah, new ones, all right. Why don't you talk about something fun like 24H2? That's fun. Is it fun? I think it's fun.
0:41:06 - Paul Thurrott
So usually in February, march, but this year in January, because 24H2 is of such high quality. Oh geez, I know They've reached this new phase in their stage rollout of the product, where it's going out basically to everyone. So if you are as an individual I mean businesses can control this, but if you have a computer that is compatible and have not gotten it yet, you're going to get it now you know. And of course this is that last year before the support ends, without the you paying for it. So they're also pushing it aggressively to Windows 10 users as well who have compatible.
0:41:42 - Richard Campbell
PCs. They are willing to take the PSS hit they're about to take for going after home versions because it's a big PSS hit. They're going to get a bunch of calls. People are going to be upset.
0:41:53 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, and unfortunately, in this case there's reasons for it, because 24-2, aside from just the reliability and compatibility issues is some fundamental lower-level changes, whereas 23H2 was a minor update. In fact, it was the same code base as the previous version, so that was really easy. This one is actually a big update, it's an OS update?
0:42:15 - Richard Campbell
It really is. It's not just a minor patch, it's a new version of the OS.
0:42:18 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's the first version that makes the Windows 11 base hardware requirements start to make some sense. So yeah, anyway. But hey, damn the torpedoes man, it's going out. So I don't know what they're doing, but they're shipping it to everybody now, so that's fun. And then there's actually some interesting movement in the Insider program. I don't have this yet on my computer, actually. Let me test it again just to be sure. Yeah, I don't have it still, but if you have a Copilot Plus PC running on Snapdragon X enrolled in the dev channel, which I just described, a pool of seven people, yeah, that's what I was thinking.
0:42:57 - Leo Laporte
You mean?
0:42:57 - Paul Thurrott
both people.
0:42:58 - Leo Laporte
All seven of you listen up.
0:43:01 - Paul Thurrott
And I'm one of them and I don't have it you will start to get an AI-powered Windows search experience, which Microsoft announced in October, back with a bunch of other stuff they announced for these Copilot Plus PCs. It will come eventually to other Copilot Plus PC owners, meaning AMD or Intel-based, and I can't describe it adequately because I don't have it. But for people who like keyboard shortcuts, you probably know that Windows Key plus Q and Windows Key plus S to date have both brought up that search highlights box, the search box essentially, instead of the start menu. They both do the same thing. On my computer, windows Key plus Q now brings up this little goofer thing.
So this is the beginning of click to do outside of recall, and the idea here is that I could put it on something and it will tell me what I can do. It's like a glowing mouse pointer, except it's a ball Yep, and it also is not working. So I just reset my computer before I came here. So this was working before, so I already had that feature. Now I I'm gonna get it again at some point. I'll keep trying on that, but anyway, so they they got rid of that, but the Windows key plus s will continue doing search and as I do it now on this computer.
0:44:09 - Leo Laporte
It's the old, you know, the original, the standard doesn't have to build up a database before it can do it, right, yeah?
0:44:14 - Paul Thurrott
I think so it's probably well, yeah, so I bet part of it is they're downloading an LLM or an.
0:44:20 - Leo Laporte
SLM right.
0:44:21 - Paul Thurrott
Because this is a local feature. It's going to and it's certain languages, but it's going to. This might be the thing that solves search, right, and it works with OneDrive, interestingly, of course, but it will also work with other cloud storage services. So we'll see what this looks like, but it's going to be tied to this refined text action that's in the click to do thing. I was just showing Richard, but no one else. You don't even know what I was talking about, but there's also, I think there's like a, it's like Windows key plus click. Yeah, so that does it too, and actually that one's that's almost working, see the little ripple effect yeah, you had your whole screen ripple.
0:45:04 - Richard Campbell
Yeah. By the way, the first day we were here, earthquake yeah, 6.2. It was a good one. It was cracks in the walls, all kinds of good. Oh that's a shaker to do, only differently. Yeah, just want to make sure I let the ripple across your screen and thought 6.2.
0:45:18 - Paul Thurrott
I don't want anyone to think microsoft microsoft did not cause that, not make that earthquake but, it's, but yeah this is a new ux experience.
0:45:26 - Richard Campbell
Yep, this idea and you're basically asking copilot to participate in search like this is. This is um stevie batish's whole. You know the outside part where it's like yeah, find me the copilot appropriate for and I'll point to something, and the copilot will appear.
0:45:42 - Paul Thurrott
This is the type of thing I think AI is going to be. This is how we're going to know it, just the contextual like what can I do? Yep, and it's going to expand on that list of things. It was like the big and don't make me make the choice for what to do and how to do it. Yeah, so in boy, I gotta think about this. It was office 4.0, the mid 90s. They added right to right, click right. That office did it for us. Then I came to windows context. That was the point. It was specifically context, because I worked in a computer lab and people would say they'd be sitting there in word, excel or something which I didn't know, the products very well, and I said, how do I? And I had no idea. And then after a while it was like well, did you right-click on it? And they're like no. And then they right-click and they're like, oh, there it is. So that's kind of nice, and tell Windows 11, and they sabotage that.
0:46:27 - Richard Campbell
What if we make it into icons you don't recognize? Is it better now?
0:46:33 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's like an eye test where both sides are blurry, um, but yeah, so this this is kind of to me, is like the modern version of that. It's going to give you more contextual help with things. Um, so you can, you can click on an image and search for, like, show me other images like this or tell me what this thing is. You know, you can think of all this stuff it might do, but, um, anyway, this is coming to windows very slowly and only on, uh, copilot plus PCs at first, although I have to think this is going to have to come to everybody. Yeah, but right now, early, early testing.
In some ways, the more interesting bit, just because it's closer to happening, is, if you look at the calendar, you will see that next Tuesday is the fourth Tuesday, which means it's week D, and it's going to be when we get the next preview update for our first patch Tuesday cumulative update of 2025. Right In keeping with that schedule, microsoft, either today or yesterday, released a build of 24 H two to the release preview channel, which is what they do right before they bring it to the preview, I'm sorry, to the preview update right in stable. So we actually have this list of features Like these are the things we can expect to preview update right in stable. So we actually have this list of features Like these are the things we can expect to see in stable in February and honestly I'm not sure I heard about any of these before this week.
I mean I kind of fully expected to be like, okay, I'm going to know what all of these things are Like. No, not so much. So mobile hotspot, a feature in Windows you know, share your internet connection. It's going to support six gigahertz connections for Wi-Fi 6E, which I guess it doesn't. Obviously it doesn't know. So that's kind of cool.
Actually, let me look on this computer. I started to see it on this computer. I'm not seeing it here now, but it's coming soon. So File Explorer is getting a tabbed homepage. So instead of those kind of areas where it's like quick access, favorites, recent items, whatever, those are all going to be on separate tabs and they're adding one for shared and, depending on whether you're a consumer or business customer, you'll see files and emails and other things that people have shared with you, and I think business users, you'll see things that have been shared in a group at work or whatever as well. So that's new.
If you've ever used a computer with Windows Studio Effects, you know that you usually get like a little pop-up but not always right where you can control that stuff.
So Microsoft added this thing to Quick Settings, where you can, which is not it was just Windows key plus A where you can control it from there, but now they're just going to put it down in the system tray, so it's just there. So anytime you're in an app that is using the camera and can take advantage of Windows Studio Effects, you'll see a button in the system tray and then you'll be able to get to the features from there, which is pretty cool. And then this one I don't quite understand. It reminds me of when Microsoft improved the quality of the icons that are on the widget. You know the widget area down there in the corner. So the description is improving the previews and animations that show when you mouse over apps on the taskbar. So when you mouse over apps on the taskbar it tends to just show a miniature of the window. It's a little thumbnail, yeah. So I guess the quality of it's going to go.
0:49:38 - Richard Campbell
It's kind of hard to say because they don't show a picture of it. You said animation, so it's like please touch me.
0:49:43 - Paul Thurrott
Well, it's the thing that you know the way it appears, or will it fly around the room? Yeah, I don't know. I hope so. Yeah, Hopefully it will be like a purple and pink AI extravaganza.
0:49:52 - Richard Campbell
Nice, so.
0:49:59 - Paul Thurrott
So next week I bet we talk about that happening in the preview update and then two weeks later, it will be in stable 24-H2 ADD edition.
Yeah, exactly. And then there's three more builds, one this week and two from last week, that actually are kind of interesting all of them. So yesterday or early this week which yesterday or the day before, I guess there was a Canary build. Nobody really knows what Canary is, but whatever the hell Canary is, which is, I think, the first to include a feature that Microsoft announced at Ignite, which is what's called admin protection. So admin protection is basically what Microsoft does with Windows Hello, ess. It requires you to authenticate every single time. In this case, you do anything that requires admin privileges. Right, you elevate up. It requires you to authenticate every single time. In this case, you do anything that requires admin privileges.
0:50:41 - Richard Campbell
Right, you elevate up, even when you're an admin. We're trying to get to pseudo, right, right. We're really trying to get admins to not be in an admin account.
0:50:49 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So we're like look, we get it. You're going to use an admin account. You can't help yourself. Yeah, do everything at standard use level, protection and, if it requires an escalation.
0:51:05 - Richard Campbell
You're going to have to authenticate with windows a lot. That's right, yeah, so that's actually really cool. Um, I will say it's super important. Like this is about just half administration, right, it's really healthy. It's super important yeah, super annoying too, by the way, but super important, it's super important, so they're doing that now I I've talked to organizations that have, when you escalate to admin privileges, they want flashing lights in the room, right, yeah, they want them not in the privilege because they're the reality light effect.
Admins are being targeted by the black hats because they have the privileges right. It's all the riskier and everybody make clicks on the wrong thing once in a while and the first user on any pc if you're an individual is an admin account too.
0:51:36 - Paul Thurrott
I meanevitably that's good. Look, I know some people do this. You might even do this. Some people will sign in the first time with an admin account, then create their actual user account and then they'll authenticate against the admin account but using the standard user account. That's very responsible, but very few people do that, so this is kind of basically forcing that on people with one account More so.
0:51:58 - Richard Campbell
You also that. So this is kind of basically forcing that on people with one account more so. I mean it's you know what you also talk. Call it uac2, right? Yeah, yeah, it's kind of that way. But this angle with windows hello, where, while you're in elevated privileges, it's taking screenshots the whole time. Yeah, and look, I've been the administrator accused of wrecking the production system, even though I didn't touch it.
But they're like you were the last person along in that account, because all we have is that you logged in with that privilege level. We don't really have a telemetry of what you did. Sure, I would want these screenshots.
0:52:25 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, these screenshots show what I did, like it wasn't me. I was pricing porn the whole time. Oh yeah.
0:52:32 - Richard Campbell
I'd rather an HR violation than yes.
0:52:38 - Paul Thurrott
Last week there were actually three, but two of Windows 11, one of Windows 10. So the beta build, which is tied to 23H2, right is getting some new interfaces in the settings app, which is kind of cool. The Microsoft's been talking about this since last year, I think. But they're going to allow third-party developers to extend widgets on the widgets board and the widgets interface.
0:53:00 - Richard Campbell
And then the alternative. We're really looking forward to developers coming up with ways to make widgets go away forever. Yeah.
0:53:07 - Paul Thurrott
And then alternative search providers for Windows search in Europe because of the DMA, so that's fun. And then this is 24H2. It's basically the features. I just well, some of them are. So's basically the features. I just well, some of them are. So some of the features I just mentioned.
So some of the stuff from Explorer, the taskbar, the Windows 3D effects stuff, but a couple of others OneDrive, continuity because Microsoft cannot stand that they're not Apple and the idea there is that using OneDrive on your phone to do something and the next time you go to your PC it says, hey, did you want to keep working on that thing, whatever it might be, but on your PC, which I think is going to have limited success, frankly. But I appreciate what they're trying to do Improved Windows Share, improved or extra keyboard shortcuts in the Magnifier app that you'll be shocked to know weren't there to begin with. And then, the biggest one of all, windows 10 is getting the new Outlook app. So, starting in the release preview channel, you can get that now or you can just wait till next patch, tuesday, and you're going to get it, whether you want it or not. As we say in Mexico, tomalo. So it's coming and it's replacing the mail-in calendar app that expired at the end of last year. And then this isn't really Windows, but I wasn't really sure to put this and I had to say I had to read this three or four times for me to know what was happening. What does this mean? Yeah, so Microsoft is making a subtle and yet not at all subtle change to what happens when you sign into your Microsoft account on the web, right, the way it works today is you sign in, you authenticate whatever it is, you have two of a and you get, you get through and it says hey, did you want to stay signed in on this computer?
Like you know, if you trust it I don't know that, anyone even know what that meant, but you know it doesn't actually do anything, right? So the way I, if it's my computer, my browser, I'm like, yeah, I want to stay signed in, I don't want to go through this all the time, but now they're just getting rid of that and if you sign in, you will be signed in all the time. So you actually want to be careful with that, because if it's a shared computer, if it's a public computer, god help you. You don't want to sign into your Microsoft account. Walk away from the computer, close the browser. Doesn't matter, you'll stay signed in. Do not do that. So they want you to use an in-private or whatever your browser calls it tab if it's not your computer. But basically they're saying look for this stuff to just work. We're doing so much interaction with your Microsoft account now that actually it would just ruin the user experience if you weren't always They've been ruining the user experience for a long time.
0:55:34 - Richard Campbell
I don't know if it's going to make it better. And I don't know if it's going to make it better, right, and I don't know how many people actually use kiosk machines. I know. I know If they make that dialogue show up less often, I think people will be happier.
0:55:46 - Paul Thurrott
So I don't think this is a common source of security problems, but I think it is a low-hanging fruit kind of we could fix this and it would solve one of the more egregious problems, even though it doesn't happen that much.
0:55:57 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see if it actually makes a difference in any way. Yeah, or people, just because once it stops popping up, nobody will notice that it's not popping up.
0:56:04 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, somebody sent me this on Twitter, one of those things, and I was like I don't even know what this means, you know. But then they announced it and I was like means you know? But now I get it and I, you know, I, I think people who use the microsoft account like I do, you're like, look it's my computer, I get windows. Allow, I'm signed in, it's whatever. I, yes, please stay signed in, it's fine, like it doesn't change anything for me personally, but I, yeah, I don't know who, like who's using a public computer with their microsoft account. I don't know, but it's dangerous, I guess, so don't.
0:56:41 - Leo Laporte
All right, okay well, you know, we could uh talk uh about ai in just a second. How about that? Yeah let's do that. How do you feel about that overall, in general, pretty you feel good, let me.
0:56:57 - Paul Thurrott
Let me ask. I'm gonna ask copilot what I think about that uh, my b computer I think really, I think very highly of it.
0:57:07 - Leo Laporte
I have to train this thing to give us uh, show titles, because it's pretty funny, right, it's, it's, it's. It gives me funny insights into the uh the world, and somebody in the discord said you should use that for show titles. Oh yeah, good idea. Let's just see what it thinks. My day, my daily memories, frustration yielded a relief and cautious optimism amidst lingering health concerns oh my goodness.
0:57:33 - Richard Campbell
Wow, do you have lingering, health concerns?
0:57:36 - Leo Laporte
well, I've been feeling poorly, but otherwise no, uh, sunday, laughter and love filled the air tinged with a hint of melon colony yes, tinged with a hint of tequila of tequila. Let's see here what's going on today, because it's been listening to the show. Yeah, as I have yeah, it's like I.
0:57:56 - Paul Thurrott
You know, we found the weak link and his name begins with a p and ends with a t leo explores the humorous potential of ai in generating creative show titles.
0:58:05 - Leo Laporte
What? And reflecting on personal experiences and ongoing health issues.
0:58:11 - Paul Thurrott
It's really focused on the ongoing health issues yep, you know who doesn't have ongoing health issues? Ai, ai never does.
0:58:20 - Leo Laporte
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Oh, and look at the view in beautiful Puerto Vallarta.
1:02:04 - Richard Campbell
Somebody was asking, so I figured I'd bring it up such. It's a perfect day despite the earthquake. It's a little hazy a little hazy yeah, yeah yeah, it's pretty nice well it.
1:02:14 - Leo Laporte
Haze is good. You don't want that direct sun beating down on you. Where, where are the ladies? They are down at the pool. Like letting the direct sun beat down upon them, I'm hopefully. Do you like this resort? Would you recommend it?
1:02:29 - Richard Campbell
Oh, absolutely yeah. The Vedanta resort in in in Nouveau is fantastic. It's been a great day there before we have where. This is where I did the Hornitos show last year.
1:02:39 - Leo Laporte
Ah I, or as I call it, horny toes. There you go. Uh wow, now see now. There you go, uh wow, now see. Now. I'm thinking because we, we need a, we need a vacation now I'm thinking I might, uh, this might be the place to go.
1:02:53 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, lots of choices you can. There's quieter parts and busier parts, like whatever you prefer, so here's my question and can you swim in the ocean?
1:03:00 - Leo Laporte
because that, yeah, most of the places in Mexico you can't no, you, I mean because there's riptides.
1:03:06 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, so you, you can do a little wading. I would not recommend swimming.
1:03:10 - Leo Laporte
The riptide risk is significant I don't see the red flags. Every time we go we've gone to both cabo and cancun there's giant red flags and there's guards on the beaches saying don't go here, you can't go in um, good, and you're good.
1:03:26 - Richard Campbell
It's big long uh sandy beaches here, so it's a long walk to the water too oh okay, it looks pretty, though.
1:03:32 - Leo Laporte
All right beautiful. How are the tacos? Unbelievable as good as Mexico city, Paul, yeah, man don't make me laugh okay, but they're the next best thing. Yeah, they're good. Yeah, all right, we'll be right down.
1:03:51 - Paul Thurrott
This place has so little to do with Mexico City, it's almost nothing. Well, that's, it's a very good town right.
1:03:58 - Leo Laporte
These are the tourist regions that Mexico set up, separate from where real people live, to make Americans feel okay, and only recently have they started putting in highways so that locals can even get here.
1:04:09 - Richard Campbell
Right, they didn't want locals to get there. Yeah, that being said, I mean I I very much want to go up to tequila and do a distillery tour, but it's still a three-hour drive yeah, there's nothing like driving on those highway on those I love Mexico, though I love the food.
1:04:25 - Leo Laporte
The people are so warm. I just love it.
1:04:27 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, it's a fantastic place.
1:04:28 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, and PV, you can stay in town, so maybe, maybe we'll look at that I want to stay at there's a hotel called Casa Kimberly. It's the old Elizabeth Taylor, richard Burton complex. Yes, absolutely, I'd love to stay there. They have a. They have rooms for each of their movies, as you do, as one does. I want to stay in the Night of the Iguana room, but that's you know. All right, let's talk AI.
1:04:57 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so you might have heard about this little Microsoft OpenAI partnership.
1:05:02 - Leo Laporte
So this is to me. This was the lead story Stargate mangate, stargate plus. It showed that microsoft was perhaps relaxing its grip on open ai yeah, I don't really.
1:05:14 - Paul Thurrott
I don't see it that way. I I think of this more like the the part. I think the important part here is that microsoft gains access to open ai's technology. Everybody understands that OpenAI, exclusively to date, has been on Microsoft's Azure Cloud it was the original deal, yep but Microsoft is one of the few companies that could even afford or even attempt to try to host their stuff.
1:05:42 - Leo Laporte
Well, but there's Oracle, right, that's who the other guy is.
1:05:46 - Paul Thurrott
But this is so rare and so hard to do that there really aren't too many other places for this company to turn. Microsoft has struggled to meet the needs of OpenAI. Sure, so Microsoft also, and by Oracle you mean Amazon. You said Oracle, but I oh wait a minute. It doesn't matter who Oracle, Amazon, Google, whatever it doesn't matter who?
1:06:05 - Leo Laporte
Oracle, amazon, google, whatever, it doesn't matter. Well, I would be more afraid of AWS and Google if our Microsoft than I. Am a four.
1:06:09 - Paul Thurrott
But so Microsoft makes some percentage of.
1:06:12 - Leo Laporte
Oracle's a big partner in this Stargate thing. I don't see those other guys.
1:06:16 - Paul Thurrott
Okay, Microsoft makes some we don't know but 20%, I think is the thing that's been reported of whatever revenues that OpenAI makes. Microsoft pays for the infrastructure that this company uses and it's not profitable.
1:06:31 - Leo Laporte
It's really expensive. Do you think they want to get out of it?
1:06:33 - Paul Thurrott
Nope, but I think if they could move part of it to other clouds, they'll still make money and it will ease up their own infrastructure. I mean this is kind of a win-win. Well, I guess I think I said this to you earlier, richard, this morning Like the one thing that's kind of weird about this is OpenAI, in using other clouds, will start to have an idea of where each of them is good, bad, indifferent, whatever, right. Sure, it might be kind of interesting if they're like actually, man, we should have went with Google, you know, or whatever it might be.
1:07:08 - Richard Campbell
Well, one of the stipulations on this is only if Azure can't provide capacity. Yeah, they have a right of first refusal Right. So I wonder if they didn't present the Stargate proposal to Azure, Right? And they said you know, we really want to run your Oracle stuff on our thing. You can go run it wherever the heck you want, but not here.
1:07:27 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So I don't know. We all know they're careening toward not being partners on some day, right, but I also feel like OpenAI is going to be as much of a relief to lose as it was a boon to get, relief to lose as it was a boon to get. You know that, so that if they end up going or just splitting their time and resources between different companies, that from microsoft's perspective it's going to be not happen quickly enough. So I don't, I don't know, I don't, I don't, I don't really see this is that huge of a deal okay, I do yeah, okay, I think it is another step on the path.
1:08:05 - Leo Laporte
I think the huge deal is this so Microsoft is joining with OpenAI, larry Ellison is also on the stage there to create this, and Sun, sun of Masayoshi's, son of SoftBank, to create this.
Now there are people who are saying, who are skeptical including, by the way, ironically, elon Musk, who says I don't know what they're talking about SoftBank doesn't have more than $10 billion. I've seen a larger number, like $30 billion, but the commitment is to $100 billion this year and $500 billion over the next four years, which is, by the way, way, an important number. That's how long trump's going to be in the white house. Well, according to the constitution anyway, that's how long trump's going to be in the white house. So, uh, this is a deal that is a big win for the trump administration, sure, but I think is also more. Well, I don't know, that's my I mean, that's my question, this I. To me, this is a fascinating. What they're going to do is build a giant data center and they're going to go after AGI and they're going to spend a lot of money doing it.
1:09:16 - Richard Campbell
And it takes a couple of years to build a data center.
1:09:19 - Leo Laporte
Right, I mean, four years is a fast timeline.
1:09:21 - Paul Thurrott
Microsoft is in this fiscal year, which is three quarters of the way through spending $80 billion on just AI infrastructure of their own.
1:09:35 - Leo Laporte
There is some sentiment. This is just a silly political statement. It has nothing to do with reality. Well and it might be and it could be, but I also think it's interesting. Yeah, it's interesting.
1:09:46 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's interesting, but I just don't think it's going to have any immediate impact if any.
1:09:54 - Richard Campbell
Well, and it's one thing to raise $100 billion to go build a decedent center. It's another thing to find the location, actually start construction and also have enough power and water to operate it.
1:10:03 - Leo Laporte
Well, that's why maybe it's not realistic. Yeah, it'll all be in arizona, where there's lots of water right.
1:10:08 - Paul Thurrott
Yep, yeah, nothing contested there. Um, I don't know, we'll see.
1:10:14 - Leo Laporte
All right, I just thought that was very interesting and this and the microsoft sub note is that this is kind of an opening of microsoft's what has been previously I think it benefits microsoft, because I don't.
1:10:24 - Paul Thurrott
I think they're tired of shouldering the load here.
1:10:27 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, you know I'm sure open ai is throwing proposals at microsoft all the time for other things they want to do on and it's like, guys what you know?
1:10:34 - Paul Thurrott
there's physical limits to what we can do, and we're the only company that can do what we're already doing.
1:10:39 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, you know well. It's like we also notice they're not talking about building their own data center.
1:10:44 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's right. That's right. I mean, if this was just open AI, they wouldn't be able to do this.
1:10:51 - Leo Laporte
Oh, no, no, no, but it's big names, big money.
1:10:55 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, no, I know, but if open AI the reason is open AI couldn't do this by themselves.
1:11:00 - Leo Laporte
Remember also, President Trump negated Biden's executive order on AI safety, basically saying, hey, don't worry about safety, let's go full speed ahead. His administration is very clearly all about AI, right?
1:11:16 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, definitely embracing big tech in general.
1:11:20 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's because of Elon's influence, but David Sachs is in there running. This is cyber czar of uh ai and and uh bitcoin, sure? Um? I? I just think it's very interesting. Um, we have the what. What are you looking? I see you looking at each other. What do you think in here?
1:11:39 - Paul Thurrott
one of one of our concerns doing this outside here is that somebody would start power washing the side of the building.
1:11:44 - Leo Laporte
I don't hear it. I don't hear it. Are you getting misted, gently?
1:11:47 - Paul Thurrott
missed. No, no, no, no it's, but there's some I don't.
1:11:49 - Richard Campbell
It sounds like there's some kind of machine, but it may be gone in a minute too.
1:11:52 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's okay we hear parades going Pauls by Paul's house in Mexico city. That's normal. This is all money, right, it's a Mexico's a party. Let's just face it. Yeah, you never know what's going to happen. Earthquakes, power washing parades, any of the above?
1:12:08 - Paul Thurrott
yes, the three pillars of Mexico society, big three, no, uh yeah, no, I I'm not trying to poo-poo this, I just think in the context of microsoft, it's like you know, it's fine.
1:12:24 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, okay, I think.
1:12:28 - Paul Thurrott
Okay.
1:12:29 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, I think that we're going to watch what happens and we'll cover this in a greater detail. I'm trying to get some experts on intelligent machines.
1:12:36 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah right, ai generally just from US versus China kind of competitive thing, et cetera. Yeah, I'm sure it's a big deal, but from Microsoft's perspective, I think people are looking, always just being like their relationships coming to, you know, unwinding, and it's like I don't know, I don't really. This is this seems normal to me, but we'll see, okay, okay.
1:13:00 - Leo Laporte
AI is one of those things where it's so funny it's hard to have a real opinion. Is it bs, is it real? Is it going to change the world in two minutes, or is it going to just fade away?
1:13:12 - Paul Thurrott
and it's just really hard to know yeah, I think all those things may be true, right yeah, okay, if you were to go back to I don't know, call it 1990, word perfect was selling their product where they had one floppy disk for the app and 12 floppy disks for all the printers, for the drivers, for the drivers, right, and then you could buy a third-party spell-checking module or whatever they called it. And people were like I think spell-checking is just going to be built into word processors and they were like I don't know if that's gonna happen. That sounds like crazy, that why would that even work? I mean, do we talk like that? I don't know. I mean I, I feel like I, I, I think ai, I think ai is a big deal, but I all you know we've talked about this. I think it's just a thousand needles of.
1:13:59 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, it's just a ux extension yeah eventually, it's a good one it makes everything better.
1:14:04 - Paul Thurrott
yeah, I mean for the most part. There are certain workflows that are interesting. The news headlines are getting really creative. It's good. I don't know, I don't know.
1:14:15 - Leo Laporte
I don't know what's going on.
1:14:17 - Paul Thurrott
From my Microsoft prism, I would just say it's fascinating to me that Microsoft is literally betting the company on this. Gates used that term a hundred times and never mentioned anything, and now they're not even really saying it. It's like no, you're betting the company on this. It's a lot of money.
1:14:32 - Richard Campbell
He bet the company on internet and went full-blown, and it worked out just fine. What he never did was bet the company on something that didn't succeed ultimately, and the pivot to the cloud was a big deal right Putting Windows from deal. Right putting windows from the center of the company elsewhere. After 30 years, that's huge. This is satch's play. I think he might be overdoing it, but I get what he's doing, and and right now, there's no downside because nobody's holding his financial feet to the fire, right? This company had so much cash. All it could do was buy back stock. The fact that it's investing it in anything.
1:15:05 - Leo Laporte
now they have something to put that money into Exactly.
1:15:08 - Paul Thurrott
And they're being aggressive. I don't like how chaotic it is, but I have to say Microsoft being aggressive is something I've grown very uncomfortable with.
1:15:18 - Leo Laporte
It's been a long time and I think in general, it's a good thing when you get all these companies involved. Stargate is open ai microsoft, softbank, oracle yeah, mgx which is a big investment. Uh, is the parent company arm nvidia and and the president all kind of saying, hey, let's, let's go after super intelligence?
1:15:42 - Paul Thurrott
yeah, I don't know if they're doing that I think, politically. I think this is about beating china, and yeah, which is fine.
1:15:47 - Leo Laporte
I don't mind beating china, let's beat china, no everyone agrees on that, but I mean it.
1:15:52 - Paul Thurrott
But the big tech rallying around this administration is really about no more regulations. Take off the shackles and let us just eat unfairly to beat the rest of the world put your foot metal to the pedal to the metal and let's go.
1:16:06 - Leo Laporte
So you know I'm not against it. They say they're building. The build out has already begun in texas. That's where they're going. It's in abilene. It's a big data center in abilene, okay so they're taking over an existing data it's oracles, yeah, oracles, oracles, been building this that'll help that'll.
1:16:21 - Richard Campbell
That'll get them going sooner, as long as they're in texas.
1:16:24 - Leo Laporte
So that means their electricity will be very unreliable well, they're going to need to pocket nuke right next door is what they're going to need. Yeah, if only one existed. Well, bill gates has those, uh that natrium things going.
1:16:35 - Richard Campbell
Maybe you can get that, uh, liquid sodium he does not even have the license to actually know the nuclear.
1:16:41 - Leo Laporte
No, nrc has not approved it, just no. Just the state says, well, you could break ground, but yeah, no they they're a lot.
1:16:47 - Richard Campbell
They're allowed to build the turbine island, the part that would make electricity.
1:16:51 - Leo Laporte
They're not allowed to build the nuclear island right, yeah, that was the news last week, yeah, that's 10 years away then yeah, really so. Microsoft's press release did say Microsoft and OpenAI evolve partnership to drive the next phase of AI. It's evolving.
1:17:12 - Richard Campbell
OpenAI started asking for crazy stuff and we said go do it with somebody else.
1:17:15 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, I mean Italy and Germany's relationship was evolving in the early days of World War II. It's evolving?
1:17:25 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, but who's going to be Czechoslovakia in this? Yeah, that's the question, right? I don't, I don't, it's, it's, it's boy. I'd hate to be trying to navigate this right now you know, I'd hate to be a satya trying to figure this no, this is happening in real time.
1:17:38 - Paul Thurrott
That's what's amazing about this it's just.
1:17:40 - Leo Laporte
It's so fast. We thought it was crazy when they fired and hired sam altman in two days yeah, well, we and dark satcha showed up for the first time.
1:17:48 - Paul Thurrott
Dark satcha's glowing eyes, you may not now yeah, I still don't think this is as big a deal as mark penn and google a skrugled campaign. But you know, whatever, put it in perspective, dudes. I'm just telling you pcs are dying. You need to find a new beat.
1:18:01 - Leo Laporte
I'm just telling you PCs are dying. You need to find a new beat. I'm just saying.
1:18:07 - Richard Campbell
AI. Well, yeah, and cloud growth is easing off and cloud.
1:18:10 - Leo Laporte
Is it easing off?
1:18:11 - Richard Campbell
Really, the problem is that the timing on this was impeccable.
1:18:15 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, interesting. Finally they got something to use.
1:18:17 - Richard Campbell
All of these, the whole point of the AI announcement making was when they were about to say, hey, our rate of growth on cloud it's starting to go yeah totally, it's perfect it's really interesting, they have incentives other than actually ushering a new era of compute I mean it's it's good for business, until it's not meantime the ftc put out a report.
1:18:38 - Leo Laporte
Oh yeah, what's?
1:18:38 - Richard Campbell
the ftc think well, I don't know that it actually is good for business. I'm still looking. Is there anybody in the ftTC anymore. I mean, I know they all went home.
1:18:48 - Paul Thurrott
Who's running the place? I'm pretty sure it's just a single light bulb swinging in a dark room.
1:18:50 - Richard Campbell
I think this is the going out the door report.
1:18:53 - Paul Thurrott
Oh, okay.
1:18:53 - Leo Laporte
It is oh it is.
1:18:54 - Paul Thurrott
This came out on Friday.
1:18:55 - Leo Laporte
This is their.
1:18:56 - Paul Thurrott
The FTC. So this meaning yeah, this is just the going out the door report, the parting.
1:19:09 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah, well, nobody's gonna do anything but they want people to know what they found.
1:19:11 - Paul Thurrott
This is their version of leaving a note of the death. Never a bought blizzard, but this was just a. This was a. They started this a year ago, January this month a year ago, so they had a report and, um, it was never meant to.
It was never going to turn into some criminal action or anything like that. It was just we want to understand what's going on. Honestly, the report's worth reading, especially for just mainstream users, because they do a pretty good job of explaining generative AI and what all this stuff means, and that's still kind of complicated stuff. But in the end, they didn't say anything profound. They said exactly what we know, which is that big tech is going to partner with AI startups to retain and extend their dominance in this market and no one is regulating them. It's like, yes, that's yes, you are correct, they, you know these deals were all structured to to avoid regulatory scrutiny, that they are acquisitions by proxy and they're done to prevent regulators from stopping them from moving forward. Yeah, so yep, a hundred percent.
1:20:05 - Leo Laporte
So yeah, that's, it't matter, no one's going to act on it.
1:20:10 - Richard Campbell
It's yeah, it's kind of weak sauce because I thought they did a pretty good job of selling it I think when you, when you can't do anything about it, you need to put the report out there, right?
1:20:19 - Leo Laporte
I'm telling you. It's a letter in the desk put out the report.
1:20:21 - Paul Thurrott
It's well, they can. They can hand it off to the next uh group and they can do what they want with it. I'm pretty sure they're going to play record they're going to play paper trash can basketball with it, but whatever, yeah, at least it's part of the public record. That's right that's the reckoning comes in there, up against the wall, that's true, we warned you, yeah, we won't yeah right, except we won't know that because ai will take over the news waves and we won't be able to tell anyone anything.
1:20:45 - Leo Laporte
Areas to watch regarding potential implications of the. They say that it's concerning that all these companies are partnering. They say the partnerships could affect access to certain inputs, such as computing resources and engineering talent. In other words, it could suck up all.
1:21:00 - Paul Thurrott
They're already talking about things that are happening.
1:21:04 - Leo Laporte
Could increase contractual and technical switching costs for AI developer partners.
1:21:09 - Paul Thurrott
I don't know say you're some small garage company that just started. You're like we did it, we have this ai advanced. The only thing we don't have is compute. We got to go to, can't get it. You know google, amazon, microsoft, whatever. We're like, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna do this, we solved it. And like, yeah, we don't have anything for you. You could barely keep a game past.
1:21:26 - Leo Laporte
You know streaming going, let alone anything. Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna agree with them. There is a legit concern that ai is going to be in the hands of just this handful of big companies, and that there is not going to be any.
1:21:38 - Richard Campbell
It's a certainty it's already done, you know well, I almost don't know that it was possible for it to be any other way, right so expensive. It was all driven by data, so those who had collected the data in the first place had the option.
1:21:49 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so it named the big cloud companies and then replaced the word cloud with AI. Yeah, we're done. How else was it going to come out?
1:21:55 - Leo Laporte
They also warned that the partnerships provide these companies with access to sensitive technical and business information others won't have access to. So it's really going to tilt the scales in the direction of the big companies.
1:22:08 - Paul Thurrott
The fun thing is they actually spelled out what all those things were, but then redacted it before they put it out in the public.
1:22:13 - Leo Laporte
So can't tell you because it's private.
1:22:15 - Paul Thurrott
It's worse than you think, yeah but we can't tell you.
1:22:18 - Richard Campbell
Just look at these black bars.
1:22:20 - Leo Laporte
It's awful, yeah, and they're saying that the the companies are Microsoft, OpenAI, Amazon, Anthropic and Google. Those are the bad guys. In effect, that is the cadre, the dominant companies. The cartel as we call them.
1:22:36 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, the AI cartel.
1:22:38 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, okay, everything's fine, we're fine.
1:22:41 - Leo Laporte
I want to get Amy Webb on to talk about this. I think this would be a good thing for her to address. She predicted everything that was going to happen, because she's a futurist. She knew, she knew and that was her warning yeah. She actually wrote a book about all of this, like years ago. The Big Nine, she called it, and it's nine because she included Chinese companies like Baidu, which you know. She's right, of course. Okay, All right, Anything else to report in the AI segment?
1:23:33 - Richard Campbell
All is well Hasn't taken over the world yet, yep, all right, would we know? Would we know? I think is the question. Oh yeah, you'll know, we'll know, you'll get an email hello, this is your new overlord.
1:23:41 - Leo Laporte
Just want you to know I like humans. Yeah, I think they're okay.
1:23:45 - Paul Thurrott
Your rent payments are now going somewhere else.
1:23:48 - Leo Laporte
Well, we have a little adjustment to make in our relationship and I think you'll enjoy your new role on Mars.
1:23:55 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I was going to say that adjustment is, you're no longer necessary in this relationship.
1:24:00 - Leo Laporte
Well, I think that's what the oligarchs think. But who's going to buy their crap if they don't have us little people? That's what I want to know oligarchs think. But who's gonna buy their crap if they don't have? Us little people? That's what I want to know. Somebody's gotta buy, buy all these phones. All right, let's take a break, then we can talk about the fun. The toy store is just around the corner. We're going to talk about xbox and, of course, because you guys are in pv, I think we should talk a little bit about tequila. It's a good idea. You insist, I do, I do and I can't wait for the tasting
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Okay, don't go to sleep, Paul, wake up. It's time for the xbox segment yay, finally I'm sorry, it took so long.
1:28:00 - Paul Thurrott
I'm sorry I blame myself. Yeah, I kind of blame you too, honestly it's all my fault.
1:28:09 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's not true?
1:28:11 - Paul Thurrott
okay, so I don't remember when, a couple months ago, microsoft previewed this notion of a microsoft edge game assist feature, which is basically a mini game or microsoft edge browser inside of the game bar, and it is now available stable. So you have to go find it in Edge and enable it. It's not there by default, but once you do I'm doing this now just to look at it you can bring up, uh, the game bar and then one of the available floating widgets you can have is this little browser. I guess. I guess there are going to be automatic experiences you get.
1:28:42 - Leo Laporte
So, if you're, I can't, I'm using it oh, this is cool yeah, so it's like a little walkthrough of the game that you can watch while you're in the game.
1:28:50 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so I just did like a google search for a game walkthrough just just to see it. But I mean there's a little um, uh, they call so you explicitly, explicitly looked for it. Well, I did because I'm not running a game, but, depending on the, it will actually just come up automatically, right?
1:29:06 - Leo Laporte
So which is?
1:29:07 - Paul Thurrott
kind of cool With AI yeah that is cool.
1:29:10 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's kind of neat. I see it's like Clippy. I see you're playing. You know Crisis.
1:29:17 - Paul Thurrott
Well, look, no one who has played a video game of any kind has ever not gone to a web browser and typed in how do I dot dot? Name of game.
1:29:24 - Leo Laporte
Is that okay? That's allowed, because I do that and I feel like it's cheating.
1:29:29 - Paul Thurrott
Come on, I'm trying to have fun, I'm not trying to crack a puzzle here.
1:29:33 - Richard Campbell
That's true, it's not a test. I got about 20 minutes for your puzzle and then I'm just going to go get an answer.
1:29:38 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, exactly, or you fail so many times. It just gets frustrating. I'm not here to be frustrated frustrating you like that.
1:29:45 - Leo Laporte
I'm not here to be frustrated. I'll go back in the day when you go to gamestop you'd buy the game and the book that goes along with it, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:29:50 - Paul Thurrott
So the web changed that. This makes sense. I mean, I think this, I like it. Yeah, when they announced this, I was like, yeah, no, this makes a lot of sense. So, yeah, I like it too. So that's cool, nice, um yeah it's good, so it's there now do I have to to use Edge.
1:30:04 - Leo Laporte
I mean, do I have to be playing the? I'm not playing the game in Edge, right?
1:30:09 - Paul Thurrott
No, no, it's just a floating thing. Okay, it's just a little bar you can pin it to appear, if you want.
1:30:13 - Leo Laporte
Does Edge have to be my default browser to do that? Probably, huh that.
1:30:27 - Paul Thurrott
I'm not sure, but I do know that.
1:30:28 - Leo Laporte
I switched the default search search and that it uses my search not bing, so it does at least.
1:30:29 - Paul Thurrott
Oh, that's good, oh that's nice, yeah, all right. Yeah, I was, you know, because you could picture them saying hey, this isn't going to work unless you make your default search in edge bring and it's like good on that. Yeah, yeah, they didn't do that.
1:30:37 - Leo Laporte
So good, thank you yeah, that's good I'm excited. It looks like the new xbox game pass is adding a Mexico power washer.
1:30:44 - Paul Thurrott
That's gonna be fun, yeah, it going to be fun.
1:30:46 - Leo Laporte
That's going to be fun. I can't wait to play that.
1:30:48 - Paul Thurrott
It's called ¡Agua Gigante!, no, it's that. So every month, every two weeks, obviously, there's new games on Game Pass across whatever multiple platforms. This is actually a pretty big month, not for Activision. Blizzard games because why would it be? There's's 14 titles, but there are a bunch, and uh, one of these is kind of curious, so one's called far cry and do don I? I don't, I'm assuming. I assume this is sort of a. This is like an add-on for the latest I love far cry, far cry.
1:31:21 - Leo Laporte
It looks like it's a great game.
1:31:22 - Paul Thurrott
I did too beautiful game yeah, sniper elite resistance, spin off a far cry 5. Okay, so let's spin out. All right, this is my, it's a great game.
1:31:25 - Leo Laporte
I did too.
1:31:25 - Paul Thurrott
Beautiful game. Yeah, Sniper Elite Resistance. It's a spin-off of Far Cry 5. Okay, so it's a spin-off.
1:31:28 - Leo Laporte
Oh, this is my game. It looks like it's the same Citizen Sleeper. Do you sleep in the game? Is that the Now you're talking. Now we're talking.
1:31:37 - Paul Thurrott
I don't sleep very well, I would do poorly.
1:31:49 - Richard Campbell
I noticed blizzard titles.
1:31:50 - Paul Thurrott
Right, that's what I'm, not one might give me a thunder here, but no, no, you're right, you're right, I just look at through goes any of these blizzard titles like probably that's um ubisoft?
1:31:57 - Leo Laporte
yeah, I don't see any.
1:31:57 - Paul Thurrott
Wow, yeah, the shady part of me, I like that. Yeah, that looks kind of fun. Um, orcs must die. Death trap, hilarious, awesome. So yeah, anyway, pretty good.
So that's kind of that's nice, that's nice that's nice um, and then I uh next night, next week, next tomorrow, next thursday, which is tomorrow um, we're going to get this uh online event, uh developer direct, which is a live stream, and they're going to uh show us gameplay from a bunch of games. Most notably the one is the new doom game right, which is roaming now, to be coming out in May, so Doom the Dark Ages, which is the third of the new generation Doom games.
1:32:34 - Leo Laporte
This is completely replaced E3, hasn't it? This is just nobody's going to.
1:32:38 - Paul Thurrott
Well, this and the seven or eight others they do over the course of the year yes, why would you bother right, I know exactly.
1:32:48 - Leo Laporte
So you want me to go physically to a place?
1:32:49 - Paul Thurrott
so I can see a game, so I can watch this video.
No, I'm going to download it Like yeah, no, I think the world, yeah, the, the, the, the industry is caught up. I think Mostly I'm looking forward to doing, but there's other stuff in there that looks really interesting and, you know, avowed, for example, which is kind of amazing. So we'll see and I wouldn't be surprised if there weren't a few we don't know about. But the biggest news of the past week was Nintendo finally came clean on Well, finally teased the Nintendo switch to the creatively named sequel to the.
What was that other thing called the original Switch? So you know, it's a bigger Switch, it's whatever percent bigger. People have done these like deep dives, like measuring it and figuring out the. You know how big it, you know whatever. So I, whatever. This is obviously a proven formula. I think it's going to be very successful. I'm looking forward to finding out how powerful it is, because there are rumors that this thing, that it's an arm chip inside and it could be three to four times as fast as the original, which would be kind of cool but nobody bought the switch because of its high quality picture or speed.
No, they bought it because the games were awesome yeah, and now great games, yeah yeah.
So if they can add performance and probably resolution improvements, I think, and it's going to play all most of the old games right, of course, I think this is going to be a big deal, obviously. So, looking forward to this, um, I guess I I said, did I say may? No, may was the doom thing. So april second, and they, the original trailer or the original video they released was the uk version. So everyone's like awesome, we're going to find out more on february 2nd because they wrote the date you know, 4-2, right 2025 and it's like no, no that's april 2nd, guys, sorry, um.
So yeah, april 2nd, we're going to learn more, but I wouldn't be surprised if we don't know more. They wouldn't go for april 1st. That seems sad. Well, I obviously don't want to hit April 1st, but I think that April thing is not coincidental, because Nintendo's fiscal year ends at the end of March and their goal is to become the best-selling console of all time by then. So that might be their big announce. Now that we are the biggest in the world, we are going to do the next thing. So I think that's the timing. So that's fun, that's really good. Yeah, and is that everything.
1:35:06 - Leo Laporte
I guess that's it I thought there was more, but I think that's it All right, there you go there, you go there, you have it. Well, that was a good one. Well, I guess I can't believe this. Maybe it's because you have a date at the pool.
1:35:26 - Paul Thurrott
I thought we were going to go long today. No, I did. I looked at this and I was like man, how are we going to get through this?
1:35:34 - Leo Laporte
Uh yeah, okay. Well, let me do one more break and then, uh, believe it or not, here we are at the back of the book, ladies and gentlemen. Uh, our show today brought to you I told you about some of the sponsors, but really, to me, the most important sponsor of the show is you, our listeners. We do it for you. That's the whole point of what we do. Uh, well, there's two points, I'll confess. There's a selfish point, which is I like hanging out with our hosts and I am trying to learn more about all these subjects, and what a great way to do it. Maybe you feel the same way. You get to hang out with us, learn. We are all in this together and we are headed into a maelstrom.
In the next 10 years, Technology is going to change in every way possible and I want to be here for those 10 years and keep giving you these shows. Now, the good news is, we have advertisers and they do support us, but they don't support us, truthfully, at the scale we would like to. I mean, we've had to close the studio, we've had to let people go, we've had to cancel shows. That's why we started the club a couple of years ago. Club Twit is an extra revenue stream that can make all the difference. Right now it's only about 5% of our overall revenue. I'd like to increase that. Heck, if we get it to 100%, we wouldn't need advertisers, we could just do it all for you. I don't ever want to do a paywall though I'm not a paywall guy. I want to make sure everybody who wants to see this show can. There'll always be ad-supported versions of our shows, but if you want to support what we do and you want to add free versions of the shows, you want video for many of the shows that we don't put out, uh, in video in public, like hands-on windows Paul's show. Uh, if you want to join us in the Club Twit Discord, which is a great hangout, that's my favorite social networks. We're smart. I mean, imagine a social network where it's just smart, interesting, creative people with one easy subscription come boogie down in the club. Thank you, joe. He's been making magazine ads for Club Twit. Uh, that's just one of the many fun things that happens in the discord. I love it. I love it.
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We now take you back to Puerto Vallarta, where Paul and Richard are relaxed and ready to go with the back of the book. Are you ready, ready, all right?
1:39:45 - Paul Thurrott
So start with your tip of the week Paul. Yeah, we kind of talked about this a little bit earlier, but now that AI is becoming so widespread, right, apple intelligence is going to be opt-out any day. Now, as of iOS 18.3 and the other releases, microsoft, google, et cetera putting it in all their office productivity services. I use Grammarly and some other tools for spell-checking.
1:40:09 - Leo Laporte
So you use some paid tools. That's a paid tool, right.
1:40:12 - Paul Thurrott
What is it? Grammarly? I don't actually pay for Grammarly.
1:40:15 - Leo Laporte
There's a free version. Yeah, there's a paid tool, right, what is grammarly? I don't actually pay for?
1:40:17 - Paul Thurrott
grammarly. But yeah, you could, there's a free version. Yeah, yeah, there's a paid version as well, but yeah, I, I think it's.
You know, kind of like you were saying, uh, leo, that you know you pay for a bunch of different services, which makes sense, that's my job yeah, for what you're doing right yeah, I mean I I think there are enough options now for people that we should all be looking at this and trying to figure out what makes the most sense for us and where the best services are for what it is. We're trying to get done. And look, I mean, most of this is going to be your texting or writing an email that says, hey, this could be better, this is spelled right. That stuff is super helpful but, depending on your work, it makes so much sense to integrate it into your workflow where it makes sense, right. So I didn't show Richard this yet and I'm not going to do it now. It doesn't make sense. No one can see this.
But I've been working on this project I'm doing in Visual Studio and increasingly I mentioned this last week at Hub Copilot, but I've been for the past week hammering on this really gross, just difficult thing, that, uh, where windows presentation foundation just comes up short, where you kind of have to programmatically like scale through, like this visual tree, to find a control so you can do something to it, because there's no way to access it directly. And I've written three different versions of this app, this version of the app to try to figure it out, and this morning I just started over again because I wanted to write about it and how hard it was. And then I wrote the name of the. I wrote it differently this time too. I gave the one of the methods a slight, I broke it down as a module, so one of the methods that are very descriptive, descriptive name. And then GitHub, copilot filled in four lines of code and I'm like, yep, that does it and the thing I had written was so complex.
By the way, I did the job. I did it. I'm actually super proud. I figured this out because it's not very well documented, but I nailed it. No, I didn't, because what I did in 30 lines of code, it was like boop and it was like yikes. There's a better way, yeah, so look, we can, we can be indignant about this, we can be proud, whatever it is, but I'm telling you, we're we're at the point now where, depending on what you do I mean, everyone does different things, obviously but, um, there's something else that can help you dramatically. Oftentimes it will be free. Uh, I think it's time to stop pretending otherwise and take a look at the stuff.
It's to stop pretending otherwise and take a look at the stuff. It's I just like playing with it, frankly. Yeah, yes, I, I I mentioned this last week, I think I uh, we were at a family event over the holidays. There's a, a guy who's he's not really my brother-in-law, he's like the brother-in-law of my brother-in-law or whatever, but super nice guy, whatever, normal human being, mainstream, not technical, um, pays for open ai chat, gpt chats with it every, all day long, every day, and he's super into like health, fitness and wellness stuff and he's he uses, he just uses it. It's crazy, like talking. I talked to him for about two hours and it's just a normal human being and I think this is the inflection point.
Like I, when my friend chris asked me about whether he should get an iPod, was one of those moments, you know, like I, you know in the distant past now, but where someone who's just kind of a mainstream person is like I've heard about or, in this case, am using what is a fairly advanced, new, modern tool and seeing real value there. You know, and I, this is a huge problem, I think, in the technical space, where I think a lot of people just don't want to change that. They, they, they don't believe it, you know, um, so I don't know what to tell you other than try it please, because I think you're going to be really impressed, um, depending on what it is, obviously. But I mean, I, I it's come such a long way and it's I don't know what seven stages of grief you have to go through to get there, but at some point you will come around because you'll notice everyone else is getting ahead in life and you aren't Sorry, it's happening.
1:44:05 - Richard Campbell
It is a productivity booster Yep. For certain areas, yep, and in certain ways, yeah, because you have to find the parameters.
1:44:08 - Leo Laporte
I think you could also be an AI denier at this point and just say I will never use it and I don't like it and I want to and I want to live in a log cabin, if you don't try.
1:44:19 - Richard Campbell
Having a daughter who makes her living as a web comic artist like AI art is very threatening to her. I bet it is.
1:44:25 - Paul Thurrott
Oh no, that I, of course, but but I, an AI denier at this point, is like a flat Arthur, but you're just not. You're not paying attention like I get that you have strong opinions about something that you've never actually researched in any meaningful way, but you know I but you and it's like you and shack are in the same area there's going to be a human first movement where I do too.
1:44:45 - Richard Campbell
I do too. I are already seeing it in in in the art and music spectrum.
1:44:49 - Paul Thurrott
Yep it's going to be incredibly expensive, though, because, uh, you know this like this, the artisanal, human made creative item or whatever. But you know, the story I tell all the time and have told on the show is just this notion of how I use it, which is creating this artwork for the articles that could go on the web. I write, on many days, several articles, and I don't use AI art for every one of them, but if I use this once or twice a day, there's no human being on earth I could go to and say here's the idea in my head, make three versions of this picture oh, and do it instantly, yeah, and then show them to me and then I'll say yes, no or indifferent, and then maybe ask you to do more and then I will pay you nothing for this service.
How does that sound? Yeah, nope, you're not going to do that interesting. So I mean this is a. How does that sound? Nope, you're not going to do that Interesting, so I mean this is a problem. Now, that's not every. This isn't replacing someone's job, right? In this case, you just wouldn't have the art, it just wouldn't happen, or you'd use stock photos. I'd use stock photos. Exactly so it will. Obviously it's going to replace jobs.
1:45:47 - Richard Campbell
I'm not trying to talk anyone out of that, but job losses are, unsadly, a fact of life with any new technology and some of them are foolish, right, you see, companies who dump all their staff to implement ai quickly find out that it's not that simple and they've just crippled their businesses right like there's a lot going on here, um, but it is a twitching moment, yeah well, we talked about this.
1:46:12 - Paul Thurrott
You know the. The advent of photography uh meant that people who could create, uh, oil paintings of a family were no longer in demand, you know uh. And then the advent of digital photography meant that professional photographers were no longer in demand. It doesn't mean they go away. 100, it's a.
1:46:29 - Leo Laporte
There are still some people doing I have a picture of my great, great, great greatgreat-great-grandfather on my wall that an itinerant painter in the 1830s went around and he'd go around in a wagon and he'd say paint your portrait for $1.50. And I have it.
1:46:46 - Paul Thurrott
It's an amazing thing. You know that when photography first started, that the reaction of, I'll say, painters at the time was exactly the AI denier response, which was let me get this straight they have to hold perfectly still while you pick this stupid photo and then you won't find out for a long time that it even came out, and half the time they're sitting there with their eyes closed. It's black and white.
1:47:09 - Richard Campbell
When you think about daguerreotypes and there's a non-trivial chance that you will set fire to yourself and cause an explosion.
1:47:15 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, they're like. This will never take off. Oil paint and tungsten oil have never. Oh wait, look at the church's missives about Gutenberg's press.
1:47:23 - Richard Campbell
Yes, people get affected. There's no two ways about it.
1:47:27 - Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so I don't know. I think I've come full circle on this stuff. I don't know. I'm not sure I pay directly for anything that's literally AI, but I pay for products and services that use AI, and that's going to be something we don't even say anymore because of course they will all do that.
1:47:45 - Richard Campbell
They're a productivity amplifier, like your laptop and the internet Just another layer of that, that's right.
1:47:53 - Paul Thurrott
Right.
1:47:55 - Leo Laporte
All right, I'm ready to use another browser. You got any ideas? Any?
1:47:59 - Paul Thurrott
ideas. So actually this one. This is getting interesting. I know I've recommended or talked about opera in the past, um, but this, this is this. This recent announcement was interesting to me because they have a sidebar. Now lots of browsers have sidebars right, big deal, right, big deal right. But they also have a lot. I don't know what they actually call these things. They probably just call them sidebar apps.
But one of the problems I run into and Richard could see it now if he looks at my laptop is I have, whatever browser I use, I have six, seven little these things that I pin. There's services that I want to be able to access every single day in every browser. So it's email calendar, some social networks, and actually that's the best way to describe it. So I use them all day long, every day, but they're sitting there sucking up browser resources, and a browser is just sucking up computer resources. Most of the time. I'm not actually using those tabs, but I have to keep them open, and there's several other tabs I also just have open in the general course of a day. But there's this model that exists in mobile where, if you have messaging apps or social media apps, you can be notified when something happens and you don't actually use the app. It's not taking up resources when it's not sitting there in a browser tab or just open on your device, and that's what this sidebar thing does, right? So they added last week it was support for Blue Sky, discord and Slack, all three of which I use, by the way. I don't need all three open every day all day long, but two of the three I do, and Slack I use, and Discord too, as a standalone app. Blue Sky is one of those things I keep pinned in the tab, so these things can be installed, as I'm going to call them sidebar apps, and they will notify me when something happens. When nothing is happening. They're not taking up resources. They're just like mobile apps and maybe they're taking up some small amount of resources. I'm not actually 100% sure about that and there are other things going on, but that's actually very interesting to me.
What if I could have all of those services that I have pinned one day just part of a sidebar, like email is a classic example, but also social networks, where I go, use them when I need to or they alert me when there's something new, and otherwise they're not taking up resources, like that's actually not to mention just the UI space too. Right, because you can hide the sidebar, et cetera, et cetera. It's kind of like I don't know what to call this. I guess it's an alternative to the way I use a browser, in a way that I think makes some sense. So I've been, uh, I've been testing it.
I, since I came here, I've actually just been using edge again, but, like, um, the opera browser, I have it set up. The same way, I use the same same tabs, you know whatever, but I have these. You know, all the services I use are over here and I don't pin those, and I feel like I'm going to go back from time to time and as all of the services I use become these sidebar apps, maybe I, you know, maybe it becomes this more lightweight, better experience. Rich is like, yeah, probably you've never used technology. That's not how it works.
1:50:52 - Richard Campbell
No, there's one web view. It consumes the same amount of memory for every instance, and the fact that you're just embedding a few of them and calling them something else, I mean, is it a web view? No, no, no.
1:51:00 - Paul Thurrott
They're configured to check the accounts. So, in other words, the way it actually works is Messenger is not sitting here running, but there's a background thing. It will you know what do you call it when it alerts you that that form of notification is a I can't think of the term for some reason, but it's the same way. Mobile works right. So you have all these messaging apps on your phone or whatever social media apps or whatever. They're not actually sitting there taking up a lot of resources, but they will ping you when something happens. So that's actually pretty smart, that maybe that should be part of the whole web architecture thing. I don't know, but they're kind of getting around it in a neat way and they do other things around media playing and pop up, you know, picture and picture video etc. Etc. But just from that perspective I was like, okay, this is actually really interesting, so that's cool. Yeah, it's kind of cool cool, cool, cool cool cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.
1:51:49 - Leo Laporte
hey good, hey guys, let's talk about runners, radio, radio, what's?
1:51:53 - Richard Campbell
coming up. I'm excited, oh boy, oh boy, nicely leading up to the fact that we're doing the Microsoft Fabric Community Conference at the end of March. I have a show with Anna Hoffman this week, who hasn't been on in a few years. Brilliant lady. Calls herself Analytic Anna for a reason. She's been in data analytics for forever. Calls herself Analytic Anna for a reason she's been in data analytics for forever, and this is specifically about an announcement that came out at Ignite about the fact that you can now run a SQL Server 2025 instance inside of the Fabric workspace.
Now why would you want to do this In these early stages, especially very much a greenfield thing. The point being, if you're building an app that you know its data is going to be key to analytics, you might as well position the data as near to the analytics system as you possibly can, and so this is that option. To just say here you go, stick with the database. You know it runs in the context of Fabric, so you don't have to do any data syncing and the like, so you get quickest access to analytics and can be part of the real-time experience. And, as just one of those folks that knows this whole problem of space backwards and forwards and so walked us through some very rational scenarios for what is definitely a V1 implementation. Because I immediately went at her on the brownfield. It's like okay, you got an existing database, one, two. She's like easy, easy, tex. Like okay, you're going to need to know the rules, but you know sort of getting the reality that we're not just about collecting data, we're about being able to do stuff with it.
1:53:23 - Leo Laporte
And this makes it easier to do that. Hey, look at that bottle of tequila. Look at that bottle Tequila.
1:53:32 - Richard Campbell
You know, last week when I was here, I went and grabbed a bottle of whiskey from the commissary because it was Buchanan's and I'd never talked about Buchanan's before and it's hard to find in Canada but easier to find in other places. So that's why I went that way. But oddly enough, I've been drinking tequila lately with my friend.
1:53:48 - Leo Laporte
Well, there you go.
1:53:50 - Richard Campbell
We should probably talk about one of them.
1:53:56 - Leo Laporte
And this particular one is the flecha azul. They're extra anejo what?
1:53:58 - Richard Campbell
does that mean extra anejo? It really means extra old. Okay, it really comes down to so let's, we've talked about it before, but let's quickly recap. Um, the generic name for, uh, agave based alcohols is mezcal. Yes, tequila is a subset of those mezcal specifically made in particular regions like jalisco and nairit, uh, mijoan and uh, guanajuato. Uh, we are in nairich right now because on the, on the, because we're on that, the north side of the amica river, but you know, jalisco is right there and that's where tequila is, and tequilaquila is a town full of distilleries.
The blue agave plant grows best at high altitude perverse 1,500 meters or higher, 5,000 feet or so. That's high. Wow, it's a big succulent, you know, just like the things that are growing around your house that don't die easily. You're a big succulent, a big succulent and of course, you've seen it. It's got the spiky plants and so forth.
But the part that you want to make into tequila is called the pina. It's right in the middle. It takes about a year and a half to grow to maturity before they start chopping out the pina and then they're ready to make tequila. Now, there are complex carbohydrates in that pina that are not particularly good for making alcohol. So you have to break them down and the traditional method is to bake them. So they have stone or brick ovens that they cook them very slowly on. If you've had mezcal, you know it's smoky and that's a byproduct of this cooking process when cooked with charcoals and things that introduce those flavors very much the way peat is used to dry barley malt in the Islay and other related whiskeys.
There are modern processes now to improve the overall yield and performance of making pinas, where they use extraction, diffusion of things. But the traditional methods are more fun, including that they actually use this tahona, this big stone wheel, to crush the roasted pinas, often pulled by a donkey, these days typically a machine. Now that you've crushed it down, you've squeezed the juice out of it. Now it's time to make some alcohol. So you need to ferment. They do use brewery yeast in some more industrial process, but traditionally again, the area of tequila has a lambic yeast, a resident yeast that tends to inoculate these tanks. The fermentation rate is relatively slow. It typically runs for several days and if you're careful, you control that so that you get the product you're actually expecting and you essentially make a wort that they call musto, 6% to 9% alcohol. We typically call that brewer's beer on the the whiskey side, but it's very much the same process.
And now you distill uh, normal, typical tequila distillation is a two distillation process using initially a column, still uh, they call that shredding, and they get up to about 20 percent or so of alcohol and then they do a rectification step, which should be the traditional name, the proper name. It is a kind of pot, still called a rectifier. It's a little bit different. It's also tends not to be made of copper, because agave doesn't have sulfur in it like barley does. So you don't need the copper for the self-exhalation and copper is expensive and tougher to take care of and so forth. So they tend to just use stainless steel rectifiers and they typically come out about 65% after the second pass. There are some folks who do a third pass, but they're weird.
It is common in tequila at that point, at the high distillate level, to then do a chill filtration step and that is to avoid, as we remember, the term, flocculation, yes, which is a tendency for the alcohol to be cloudy when cold. And there's a reason for this this because typically, especially in Mexico, they don't even serve their tequila at 40% alcohol. They like 38. You don't see that abroad because 40 is a magic number for what is a spirit, but here, if you're buying domestic tequila for consumption, you'll find it mostly 38% and it will cloud very easily and that's why they said shelf-efficient stuff. Now if you simply cut the product to 40% or 38% and bottle it, you've made Blanco or silver tequila, the most common kind A lot of folks talk about.
This is the only true tequila because it only tastes of the agave. As soon as you put it in a barrel or anything, you're introducing other flavors to it. Now if you put it in an oak barrel for a few months, you make a reposato, also known as rested, and that's typically only a few months, and it gets a little colored. It'll be a bit straw colored and it has a slightly different flavor because the wood's now playing its game. You put it in for a year and you've made and the nejo typically one year is. It's not that long long. They age it for no, but the extra and nay hose are three plus years. So that's about as long as you typically see tequila and that it also changes the barrel behavior. So reposado is often while they're only to bear for a few months. These barrels are enormous 20 000 liters like multi-thousand gallon barrels, but as soon as you get into a nay hose they go down to 600 liters, or what we consider a typical 50 gallon barrel. Uh, and the extra nahos almost exclusively. You will also find in the longer aging that they use bourbon casks. Why? Because there's lots of them and they're inexpensive and they introduce a nice flavor, um, to the te, and so this is an extra in Nejo and it was indeed aged in bourbon casks.
So Flecha Azul is a new manufacturer of tequila. It was founded only in 2020 by a fellow named Aaron Marquez, with his friend Abraham Anser. So Aaron Marquez is a Mexican native, born in Mexico, but he immigrated to the US in the early 2000s. But he immigrated to the US in the early 2000s, was educated in Oklahoma and went into the oil industry. He is well-known in the oil industry. He created a company called Wildcat Oil Tools. He's one of the fracking billionaires, so made his money in the fracking explosion of the Permian Basin. In fact, today he's now one of the board members of Permian Resources. Abraham Anser is born and raised in Mexico and he's the number one PGA golf player in Mexico. So these two are friends and they decided they wanted to start making whiskey. They wanted to do it very traditionally, as they could afford to do so Within a year or two of starting, they got Mark Wahlberg on board as a major investor is this marky mark's tequila?
2:00:15 - Leo Laporte
this is marky mark's tequila.
2:00:16 - Richard Campbell
Right, that makes me like it less well what I want you to understand here is.
This is a tequila this is a professionally they this is wealthy people decide they want to make a whiskey, but then also chose to do it in very much traditional style. So how they actually make the whiskey is they went to one of the oldest distilleries in tequila. The Oradain distillery has been around since the mid-1800s Wow, and they are super old school. They have their own brands and so forth, but they agreed to make their whiskey following a particular approach. The Oradain distillery believes firmly in the stone oven roasting method of pina, so they use that traditional method. They still use the roller mill, the Tojonas, although again mechanically operated, but they don't like the other extraction methods. They have modernized fermentation distillation for reliability, so stainless steel tanks for fermentation in a sealed process and then stainless steel uh column and pot stills. And some of their products are triple distilled, but not not this one, and it has spent three years in bourbon casks. I couldn't find out which one, but it's probably Jack.
2:01:21 - Leo Laporte
Forget that Marky Mark had anything to do with it. Paul, what do you think? Well, rule number one is is it good? Right, yeah, rule number one, is it good.
2:01:29 - Richard Campbell
What I like in tequila is that pepper note, and this pepper note is there still, which is not easy to do in an extra anejo. An extra anejo often takes a lot of the agave flavors out, which is why a lot of tequila aficionados purely want Blanco, because they just want the pepper note. But there's definitely wood in this. It's bourbon, so it's a little sweeter. It's got a lot of heat, which, surprising, it's only 40 alcohol. Right, yeah, but there's a lot of heat in this. So I appreciate that very skilled with, uh, tequila makers made this for what is totally a nouveau marketing company. Uh, fletcher azul has gone everywhere they're at this. They've clearly cut a deal with this resort. They have specific displays for fletcher. They have their own cocktails it's all about marketing.
Yeah, it's all about marketing, and so, by that token, I did check. You can find this uh tequila in america. I saw it on total wine, however, in the boston area.
2:02:26 - Paul Thurrott
It's a little pricey.
2:02:30 - Leo Laporte
This is a 300 bottle of uh oh yeah, Paul, now how much would you pay?
2:02:35 - Richard Campbell
that's how much I did so my friend Paul decided he wanted to buy the bottle. I don't think he checked the price before he did oh my god.
2:02:42 - Leo Laporte
And so it better be good, is it good?
2:02:44 - Richard Campbell
that's a lot of money for tequila. It's pretty darn good, is it $300? Good, yeah, so you're not gonna make a margarita with that I'm staying here for five days for free, so $ $300.
2:02:54 - Paul Thurrott
Big deal, it's kind of us, yeah, yeah.
2:02:56 - Richard Campbell
It was a nice gesture and I'm glad to have got a chance to taste this. Yeah, me too, and we will finish it before Friday because I'm not taking it home.
2:03:05 - Paul Thurrott
You drunk.
2:03:10 - Richard Campbell
I've had people been bringing me whiskey, now in three ounce containers. They put it in their toiletry bag so I can try stuff and then here's, like here's the empty bottle plus the three little containers. But uh no, this is lovely and warming it is, you know it's. In that sense it is more bourbon like interesting it's got that kind of bourbon heat to it.
It's not that light, that lightweight funded drink tequila. This has got a lot more robustness to it. I don't know that I'd you do this as a gift. This is not your everyday tequila. This is a special one for Christmas. And it better be something you like, because you spent $300 on it.
2:03:44 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, they have a variety. Have you tried the Extra, nejo?
2:03:50 - Richard Campbell
This is the Extra Nejo.
2:03:51 - Leo Laporte
Oh, that is it.
2:03:52 - Paul Thurrott
We did try the Reposado as well, so we went with the most expensive one. Yeah, we had that at the bar.
2:03:58 - Richard Campbell
Yeah, we were drinking the Reposado at the bar, which was nice, without a doubt. Okay, so I mean again this is two Mexican people, one of which has made a lot of money in America decided they want to make has a tequila now.
Well, it's a thing right, and this guy is a top-tier PGA golf guy, so that's also a tie-in as well. They know what they're doing right. They're running a marketing machine, but they chose to make their tequila in a very legit way, so they're helping to support the old establishment and at the same time, using water marketing methods. So I have a tough time being upset with Fletcher's. They're fine, they're doing their thing, know what you got right, so we're going to test the theorem that tequila makes your clothes fall off.
I'm more of the tequila makes me. When I drink too much tequila, I start believing I'm invisible, and that makes other choices.
2:04:53 - Paul Thurrott
Maybe it's the tequila talking, but I like tequila. I start believing I'm invisible, and that makes other choices.
2:04:58 - Leo Laporte
Maybe it's the tequila talking, but I like tequila. Well, there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. Uh, windows weekly. Uh, we're gonna let them go back to their uh important duties.
2:05:08 - Paul Thurrott
They are in. Yeah, what's that thing called that kept with on the beach the um of the cabana?
2:05:13 - Leo Laporte
cabana our important cabana duties.
2:05:14 - Paul Thurrott
Yes, important cabana duties.
2:05:16 - Leo Laporte
Yeah, cabana duties.
2:05:17 - Richard Campbell
Actually it's celebration tonight in the theme park, so in an hour or two we have to head towards the theme park. So jealous, oh man, we're going to have some fun.
2:05:24 - Leo Laporte
I've been seeing Paul's pictures on Instagram. It looks so much fun. Have a wonderful time, you guys. Thank you so much for being here. Even on vacation, Paul Thurrottt is at Thurrotttcom t-h-u-r-o-t-tcom. Become a premium member for all the goodness, but it's a great place to check out for the latest news all week long. Uh, he also publishes his books field guide to windows 11 and windows everywhere at leanpub.com um, I just sorry.
2:05:53 - Paul Thurrott
This reminded me. Yesterday I was in the cabana alone. Everyone was gone.
2:05:56 - Richard Campbell
You took off to do your thing.
2:05:58 - Paul Thurrott
Girls were off walking on the beach. A guy comes over and he goes hey, is there anything else he can get you? And I was like, oh my God, I thought you'd never ask. It's been forever. And he goes. I was here three minutes ago, I'm like. It felt like forever Ask for a foot rub excellent, they come down the beach, they'll give you.
2:06:16 - Richard Campbell
The cabana section has a couple of massage tables.
2:06:18 - Paul Thurrott
Oh, yeah, oh yeah the service is not terrible no, richard campbell, he is run as radiocom.
2:06:25 - Leo Laporte
And of course dot net rocks with carl franklin. You'll find both at run as radiocom and he is our whiskey slash other kinds of liquor I like the brown liquor. He likes the brown stuff. But Chris will be okay too. Thank you so much for being here. We do Windows Weekly on Wednesdays, 11 am Pacific, 2 pm Eastern Time, 1900 UTC. You can watch us stream live. Yes, we're back on TikTok.
2:06:53 - Richard Campbell
It survived somehow. It was a tough couple hours out there, a rough couple hours doesn't doesn't constitute an endorsement in any way, shape or form.
2:07:01 - Leo Laporte
We just want to be wherever you might be. So of course, our club members watch on discord, but we're also on Youtube, Twitch, Tiktok, x.com, uh Linkedin, Facebook and uh Kick. So you pick, you watch. Uh, the chats are open and all of them, and I see all the chat comments. Great to have you all there. Now you don't.
Somebody was complaining yesterday. He said well, you never start on time. I just want you to understand. This is not a tv station. This. You're watching the behind the scenes recording of shows. It says that on the schedule.
The times are, you know, suggested if you want to listen exactly at the time you want to listen. There's an easy way to do that go to twit.tv/ww. You can download, or just watch on the website, the video, or download the audio or the video. There's also a link there to the youtube channel. Start the video at any time and probably the best way to do this would be to subscribe. It's free, it's a podcast, right? So get your favorite podcast client wherever you get your podcasts and search for Windows Weekly. You can get it automatically audio or video versions and listen. You know, if you want to listen exactly at 12.01, you can know. If you want to listen exactly at 1201, you can whenever you want to listen. Paul, Richard, I uh needn't say have a wonderful time. I think you're gonna yeah, all great and we'll see you back here.
2:08:25 - Richard Campbell
Uh, next week I'll be in London and you'll be in uh Mexico city don't think about the future, just enjoy the present.
2:08:32 - Leo Laporte
You're there that's what matters. Yeah, thanks for joining us everybody. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye.
