Windows Weekly 919 Transcript

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

00:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Coming up on Windows Weekly. Micah Sargent here subbing in for Leo Laporte, paul Theriot and Richard Campbell kick off the show talking about Patch Tuesday and the introduction of Outlook to Windows 10. Yes, you've got the new Outlook. Are you happy about it? Probably not, but we talk about is it change or is it something else? Then we move into the AI discussion about that bid for OpenAI. That may or may not have actually been a real thing. Earnings, you know. We've got Qualcomm talking about how it's doing, amazon talking about how it's doing and Sonos continuing on its downward spiral. Before we round things out with Xbox Corners, I like to call it, and the tips and picks of the week, stay tuned. Podcasts, you love.

00:47 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
From people you trust.

00:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is Twit.

00:57 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
This is Windows Weekly episode 919, with Richard Campbell, paul Thorat and me, micah Sargent, recorded Wednesday February 12th 2025. The supermodel of apps. It's time for Windows Weekly. I am Micah Sargent subbing in for Leo Laporte this week, who is off chasing crystals for their energy healing properties. As always, we speak to two of the foremost Windows and Microsoft knowers. Is that?

01:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
a word. I don't think that's a word Keep moving forward.

01:35 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's good. Just keep going, just keep rolling with it, right? Yeah? Yeah, we are joined, as we usually are, by Paul Therot. Hello Paul, hello Micah, how are you doing?

01:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Pretty brain.

01:50 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
That's good, I like it. I like it. We're doing some Spanglish.

01:52 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm trying to work it into the local language here it's been in.

01:55 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Mexico City for a few weeks now, partial success.

01:59 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
And you're also hearing the dulcet tones of Richard Campbell is joining us with his best friend, a bottle of DayQuil.

02:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
How you doing yeah, no, I'm uh. After a month on the road, including a good week with the Therat's in Puerto Vallarta, I come home to immediately get the flu, but it's better than having the flu in a hotel. So yeah, I would be you know what they say if you don't take anything, you'll suffer for a week, but if you take all meds you'll get over it about seven days.

02:28 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I like that. I'm going to use that. I'd never heard that before, that's a good one.

02:32 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just a quality of life thing. Better living through chemistry yeah indeed.

02:37 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Indeed. Yeah, I really like Theraflu, which is that stuff you mix with hot water theraflu, which is that stuff you mix with hot water. Oh, and I introduced some friends who ended up with influenza a as well to it and they were like, oh my gosh, this is keeping me alive right now, but, yeah, still lasts about the same amount of time. Uh, but good enough in any case. Well, I'm glad that you're here, right, and that you are are aware enough to join us for the show.

03:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And I'm home, so the view is epic. Like, don't feel too bad for me.

03:07 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, it's gorgeous. I I mean, my goodness, do you go fishing?

03:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, absolutely yeah. For sure there's cod and salmon out there and dungeness crab.

03:18 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, come on.

03:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm going to come visit, oh, you visit. Oh, you're welcome anytime, mike. Hey, you know.

03:22 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Thank you, thank you all right. Well, um, I do want to say that I'm looking forward to kicking things off this. Uh, this week for for windows weekly, as is typical. Uh, for the show you know we gotta start with with windows and where things are, uh, patch tuesday is well underway, and let me disavow you of that positivity Of course. I mean, that's your role here, right, tell us about it.

03:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so two weeks ago we talked about the preview update. That was the Predicator to Predicator. Geez, I'm inventing words. We're all making new words. Yeah, exactly, let's move forward. Move forward To yesterday's patch.

04:05
Tuesday updates, uh, for windows 11. So windows 11 23 and 24 h2 base basically got the same updates. There's a couple of things that are 23 h2 specific for some reason. Well, mostly because they probably already in 24 h2, I guess.

04:19
I can tell you, looking at this list, I haven't seen a one of these. Um, I only have, I guess, five windows computers here, but I only well, usually more. I mean, I usually have more of a representative, you know collection, but I I have not seen a single one of these improvements. So a lot of the things that microsoft adds to windows these days are on what's called a cfr, a controlled feature release. So they roll out gradually in fact. Fact, I keep doing this. I'm going to check again. I keep waiting. I'm especially looking forward to semantic search on my dev box, but that's not this one anyway. So I'm not going to see that. I'm not sure why. I looked at it Anyhow. So for stable people unstable you can look forward to may have some of these things Improved taskbar previews.

05:08
So when you mouse over an icon in the taskbar for an app that has an open window, the preview that appears will be improved in some way that I cannot describe because I've never seen it. When you are accessing your camera on a AI PC or Copilot Plus PC and you have Windows Studio Effects, you'll get a central control panel for that in button form on the taskbar so you can just access those features more easily. Previously, and actually today still, those things are available in quick settings and then sometimes in the app, depending on the app. Vague file explorer improvements, including such things as creating a new folder through the right-click context menu. Actually okay, excuse me, I have seen one of these updates. It is this one mouse improvements.

05:52
What does that mean? Well, one of the fun new features in 24H2 is that the mouse cursor would disappear all the time. That drove me so insane that I have been using that power toy that we discussed last week. Right, that's the halo around the mouse. Yeah, you double click, double taps, control. It does that little. You know animation. You can see the mouse cursor. So I started using that because in 24H2, it would just disappear all the time. It was driving me insane. That is annoying Crazy. Yeah, they added the ability to change the time zone if you're set up as a standard user, as opposed to someone with administrative privileges, which you know. Okay, took you long enough.

06:32
I know there's a OneDrive continuity feature. If you're working in OneDrive on your phone and you're on whatever document or whatever the file is, and then you return to your PC, log in with the same account, it will say hey, did you want to keep working on that thing again, kind of a minor Apple-like feature. Some additional sharing features in Windows Share, which actually that interface has evolved a lot since they first introduced it in Windows 8, but it's evolved a lot even just in Windows 11. So I can't remember if I did this already. Someday soon, if I haven't already done it, there'll be a hands-on windows episode about that, because it's weird how much it's changed. And then some new keyboard shortcut inside of the magnifier accessibility app if you use that.

07:16
So, uh, none of it is major, I would say, but except for the mouse thing, which is awesome. Um, and then, if you're in windows 10, you get the new outlook. Yeah, I don't have a. I don't have a way to drop confetti on top of myself right now, but I would if I could. Um, so you know that the old mail, calendar, people app apps all went out of support as of the end of december. So now they're pushing outlook on everybody, because you know, everybody loves it sorry, is that?

07:43 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
is that classic paul sarcasm? Yeah, yeah that was sarcasm. Everyone hates, it sure um it's because it's just change, or is it legitimately bad?

07:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
it's actually rigid. I'll let you um maybe opine on it briefly it, um, it is change.

08:01 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it's change. Yeah, uh, because the the good news is the regular Outlook has been updated in a way that starts to annoy you a lot too. They pop up calendars you can't click on and things like that. So by making the old standby also annoying, it makes you more comfortable to be annoyed by the new one.

08:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I think it's overdue. I hear there are a lot of complaints. A lot of it has to do with old school.

08:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, the problem is you have Outlook reflexes that are a decade old and these Outlook reflexes are different. So my friend Paul Theriot convinced me to set it up on this machine, convinced me. Just mentioned enough times. I'm fine, I'm switching.

08:40
I didn't really push you on it, but I believe I cursed you about it for a little while and then, about two weeks later, I said listen, I've stopped noticing that. I'm using the new outlook. I'm just using it. So it's doing the things I'm supposed to do. It's not getting my way. It's just proof that you can get used to anything.

08:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you talk to the folks in war zones who just get used to explosions overhead Right Like.

09:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, like that, um, you talk to the folks in war zones who just get used to explosions overhead, right like yeah, like that right, you hear the bomb coming, you lift up the teacup for a second.

09:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It hits, put it back down, you're fine. You know it's just whatever. So it's not that bad. I, I, I don't know I've. I don't use an app, I use just the web apps for things like this, but I, I think it's fine. Every time I use it I'm like I don't understand what the blades are. It's fine.

09:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But anyway, you can, you can rest assured, you've also got better reflexes for learning new software than most humans. Paul right, like you do it so often yep, where, you know, the average info worker has been using the same suite for quite a long time and outlook is their sovereign app. It's the first thing they open, it's how they organize their day, you know, unless they're no, no, I, I do, I get it, I, I.

09:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But the one of the stories I've told on this podcast a lot and elsewhere in writing, is that thing about the, the pre-con session attack of the year. The cloud computing was starting to happen and it's the exchange administrator guy like he's, like you. You mean to tell me that my final act as an exchange administrator for this company will be to hand over the reins of this thing to microsoft because we're going to put it in my, at the time, office 365? And you know, yeah, that is the answer. The answer is yes and uh, you guys still need an administrator to manage outlet.

10:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, you may still have a role, but I mean but the the.

10:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
The fact is in that case, um, you know, your company makes whatever they make widgets or something they're not an email company. They didn't mean to have 50 people managing these things and it turns out things have evolved, there's a better way to do this, cost effective, et cetera, et cetera. So we're moving on and I think people who enter our industry when they're younger especially, do so knowing it's all about change. Things change and they're cool with change. They're cool change and then they're not cool with change. And you know, at some point you're in a position where you're the decision maker and you're not gonna make a good decision or the right decision for your company, because now you're worried about your job.

10:58
You know, for example, and I completely understand that the other, the, but the other version of this is I just started writing something about this, but I see this with AI. It's the same crowd, it's the same people who hate Outlook. Really, right, the old school guys, right, I'm never using AI. I hate AI. I've never seen a good use of AI. All it does is make garbage and it's like okay, so you've already said eight things that are wrong and what are you doing?

11:29
You know, but, um, they're guys who like want to take a wrench and like strip co-pilot out of whatever microsoft apps are using, or whatever it is. And it's like, guys, listen, I get it, this is happening really fast. It's happening even faster than things usually happen. I get it, and maybe you're late stage in your career, whatever, but, um, this is, you know, complaining about ai in word or excel or whatever is like complaining about spell checking or auto format or whatever the other tools are that make your life easier, and it's like we've kind of lost track of, like, what it is we're doing here. You know, and it bugs me when people who are especially people who are highly technical and experienced just kind of dig their heels in. Like this is where I draw the line, you know, and it's like okay well you know, the rest of the world's moving on.

12:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and AI, admittedly, is steeped in science fiction. It adds additional layers, yeah.

12:13 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think that the speed doesn't help. It's so fast and you know we're going to talky version of this is another story. I've told a million times about my friend's wife, who I hadn't seen in a while, and pull out my laptop and it's a think pad or whatever. And she goes oh, I stopped using windows because it's so buggy and crappy. I use a mac now or whatever. And I'm like, oh really, I'm like how long ago was that? She's like you know like seven years ago. I'm like, well, you know, your opinion stinks like, like, maybe that was true so yeah, like it's.

12:44
You know, maybe that was true seven years ago, I don't know. Uh, like I love you, but no thanks, you know. So condense the time frame and I think that's what's happening with ai, like I think. So you know, like I get this on social media all the time, I get it in email, I get it in the comments, whatever it'll be. Like some guys, like I went to what you know name the service and I typed in whatever I typed in and it came up with your average AI sucks. You're like OK, so I think it needs a little more testing than that. And also, was that like two weeks ago, or two months ago or half a year ago, like when was that? Like, because, I Wait, was that yesterday? Yeah, because if it wasn't two seconds ago, I'm not really sure you know you missed it.

13:17
There's a so yeah, so anyway, that was a long story about the new outlook, but it's it is. It's something I struggle with, I'm trying, it's just. It's just like a wall of negativity that I try I'm trying to deal with, I'm trying to be rational about it, but I there's something vaguely troubling about people who I feel should know better, just like kind of like Nope, this is where I'm done, this is it, I'm done. Word processors, as they were in 1997, were the end of the line. It's like okay, got it, got it, nailed my work perfect 4.3.

13:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I need nothing more yeah there's no one to hijack this over on the administrator side, but this patch, tuesday was a big one for sysadmins. Okay, talk to me. They uh, for the past four years, since 2022, or three years since 2022, there was a. There was a major update. It's kb 501-4754 for those. Love that you know this number yep I have it in front of me because I've been hearing about speaking of adhd, no but go ahead.

14:23
Yeah, but it was about strong authentication for certificates internally to Active Directory. Oh and again, we make fun of Microsoft a lot because they do dumb things, but I want you to see how cleverly they have managed this particular problem. So they want to improve. If you're going to run certificates for authentication in Active Directory, they want you to do it the right way. They used to be pretty loosey-goosey about the whole thing just to allow people to work, but it's a security risk and if you, it's for laterals, so somebody gets breached through an email, phish, they can lateral into administrative privileges with a weak certificate of authority through Active Directory. It's a big deal.

15:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This might literally have played a role in the hack of Microsoft 100%, absolutely, a year ago, or whatever.

15:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah. So they've given us plenty of warning a couple years worth of time to say look, there's a D-Day, and the D-Day is February 11th 2025, which also happens to be my 30th wedding anniversary, but that's a separate issue. Okay, yeah, okay, yeah, so, uh, and the way they did this is that, basically, patch tuesday pushes on to all versions of server requires strong authentication for certificates, so what it really means is your active directory infrastructure will stop authenticating if you're using src. Now you can fix it. You could, a set up your pki properly and actually get strong certificates working and everything is fine, or, b you can go into the registry for each of your ads and put yourself back into compatibility mode, which will last until september, when it'll stop looking at the compatibility flag. Okay, so?

15:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
what is?

15:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
your time frame now. Admittedly, they've been talking about this literally for two and a half years. So many sysadmins I know still had a stressful day yesterday because it was like, okay, I'm rolling this patch out, let's find out if I've done this right. Yep, and for some they had and some they hadn't. Uh, and then they. And then your option then is to go in and run around and do reg edits to get flipping compatible, to figure it out, because now you have a few months, but the the main thing that Microsoft's addressing, which is the most common problem with them all, is that nobody's paying attention to their Active Directory infrastructure at all, and so I'm surprised, today was a firestorm.

16:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It still exists.

16:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, and folks would like you to. You know Microsoft would like to use Entra. They make more money that way, but it's not that simple and you would again have to pay attention to your infrastructure. So it was suggesting.

16:49 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Entra and active or active directory are not exactly the same thing.

16:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're vaguely related, but yeah, there are some things going on there. Anyway, it was yesterday for me, besides recording a few, it rocks. It was mostly bantering back and forth with many of the administrators that know me well from run as and are just going. Well, I did this whole thing and I just don't know if it's going to fail. I got to keep watching for people to authenticate as this patches roll out, but there's going up. No, I'm literally RDPing into each machine and doing your reg edit each of the servers.

17:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
We make fun of Microsoft because they do dumb things thing it reminded me of. Like most people, I don't usually confront people in public. I prefer to do it on Twitter or whatever, but every once in a while you get that opportunity in person to finally tell someone how you feel about them. And I won't say who this was. It's someone who does something like I do. And she said I don't understand. You know why you're so mean to me? And I said oh, I can explain it it's because you're terrible so, um, that's amazing that you just yeah, yeah I haven't talked to her since anyway.

18:02
So tied is somewhat to what rich Richard just mentioned about commercial customers being impacted by this Patch Tuesday. Microsoft announced this past week it didn't go out on Patch Tuesday but sometime in the first half of the year they're going to allow those with managed businesses configure whether or not the windows 11, 24 h2 or more recent I guess out of box experience and windows setup this or not displays but rather downloads the latest cumulative update, which requires some discussion in a sense, because most of you are saying but it does do that, doesn't it already like, doesn't it already? You know this is a new thing in 24h2, so depending on the type of install you're doing, there are at least no, there aren't, at least there are up to three different times where you could check for updates. Right, and in windows 11 24h2, which I first experienced with the Copilot Plus PCs in mid-year last year, there's a new phase and you'll notice it If you're familiar with Windows setup and how it looks in Windows 11, with the white background, pastel colors et cetera, it drops into a new look and feel where you can see what's going to be the desktop, kind of bleeding through. It has a different look to it. I have a shot of it in the article that is associated with this, but it was the first time I'd seen it and the first time I experienced it was literally because Microsoft had, at the time, delayed recall and they basically put a whole new version of Windows and required anyone who brought up a Copilot Plus PC that month, or ensuing probably 30 to 60 days, install a full feature update, which took a long time. The average install time for this, regardless, is about 20 minutes.

19:50
Now, the way this works, generally speaking, is that if you're an individual, you're going to install that thing one way or the other, right, so you could go through windows setup more quickly, I guess, and skip it if they let you, or and then get into Windows and then you can just go to Windows Update, like people do, and check for updates and, sure enough, there's that cumulative update. It's the most recent monthly update, right? The point of cumulative updates is that whatever that month's update is includes everything from the past 12 updates or whatever it is. So they're going to let businesses skip that. They're not going to have to go through that additional 20 minutes, basically, and of course it's up to them when they install updates to some degree. Since they are creating a policy for that, I suppose individuals will figure out how to do that for themselves as well. Right?

20:38
So people make custom installs and all that kind of stuff, but I mean, for most people it's not a great experience. We all have this you buy something new, you can't wait to try it and you get away because there are updates. Like everything, does this right? Windows arguably invented that, or at least perfected it, but whatever, it's gotten even worse, I guess, or better, depending on your outlook in 24H2. So they are going to let businesses say no to that. I think it's funny the way Microsoft described it, because instead of saying we're going to allow you to turn it off, they said we're going to allow you to turn it on. It's actually on by default. So they're sort of saying we're going to allow you to keep using it the way we intended, or you can just turn it off, which I think a lot of them are going to do. Okay, let's see, you were gone last week, so I was going to ask you.

21:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I wish I wasn't, but I was.

21:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Do you remember if we talked about? Well, you were gone. So Microsoft has various channels in the Windows Insider program. So if you're in Windows 11, there's Canary, which no one can understand. There's Dev, which, as of today, is still on 24H2 updates program. So if you're in windows 11, there's a canary, which no one can understand. There's dev, which, as of today, is still on 24 h2 updates. There is beta, which, as of today, is still on 23 h2, and then this release preview program which can actually have a build for any supported version of windows right. So before the preview update went out for both versions of windows 11 yesterday, the release preview channel ejected this similar build about a week earlier. You know whatever.

22:10
Okay, so that's where we're at. But you know, nothing can be simple. So we're in a little bit of a window here where, if you're in the dev or beta channels, you can switch into the other right now if you want to. And the reason is 24 is sorry. Dev is going to move on to whatever the next thing is. They haven't said it, but 25 h2 25 h2 right.

22:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Whatever that is supposed to be the closest, the rawest code yeah, so discounted canary, because we just don't know, because everyone discounts canary, because nobody understands it.

22:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yep, yep, uh, yep. I I'm sure the canary build will soon get the new outlook.

22:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Just to then. Beta is the next most mature.

22:48 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Right, so beta right now is on 23H2. But you have the option, if you want to, to check for updates and you'll get the same build that's in dev and if you accept that, you'll move into 24H2 testing. Right, so they're shifting things a little bit, so we're just in the middle of that. So there was a new beta build yesterday and, if you weren't confused yet, you'll enjoy this sentence. Uh, that was for people who never opted into 24h2. So it's still on 23h2, which is one of the two current versions of windows 11, but not the most recent version. Does that make sense? Good, yeah, uh, so in um 24h2 you will already have seen, I think. Uh, actually, let me look right here, cause I'm not actually I have. I have trouble remembering what's weird. No, I don't see it on this one. Okay, so, uh, certainly on a co-pilot plus PC. If you have, well, you will have 24 H two. Right, they all do. Um, you'll see the new version of paint which we did discuss last week and there is, or soon will be, a Hands-On Windows episode about, and that new version has a co-pilot button which I know everyone loves. So no complaints. And all of the AI functionality.

23:56
Well, four of the five new AI features that are in the app are in this pull-down menu. Some of them are co-pilot plus PC only, like co-create and the new generative fill and erase. I only see two of those three things on my P the one PC I have like that here now, and then the other two are available to everyone. That's the let's see if I can figure this out. Image creation and background removal right, those don't require an MPU or whatever. For some reason they work with everybody.

24:27
Those things are commingled in one menu. They're not actually in order, they're not marked in any way. It's hilarious. But that's the new app. Honestly, it's a good idea because we've reached this point where we don't really have a place in the ribbon to put entire buttons or whatever. So now we have a button with a menu. So that was a lot of talk for a really innocuous new feature in one app, because there are no other new features in that build. But anyway, if you're in the beta channel, did not go to 24H2, you have 23H2. Check for updates. You can get the new Paint app. Have fun with that. More excitedly, excitingly, whatever, midi is making a comeback of sorts.

25:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Really.

25:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, I remember seeing a band, as I swear to God this was the late 1990s. I know this doesn't sound possible, but they had an Atari ST on stage, specifically because it came with MIDI ports Built in the back. Yeah yeah, an Atari ST, specifically because it came with you know, midi ports Built in the back, yeah, yeah, and that thing had been, you know, not supported or not a thing for at least a decade.

25:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Five pin connectors, man, yeah, it's old school.

25:33 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I guess Windows has just been using this USB MIDI something driver whatever since forever. We just made fun of the Canary channel, but actually there's a new midi 2.0 standard and, uh, the initial support for that through windows midi services is now available in the canary channel for these six or fewer people that are interested both people are really excited about it.

25:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, midi is a serial standard, so usb is universal serial bus. Right, that's right, that's right they all do. They are friendly to each other.

26:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Carl will be excited about this yeah, I was gonna say maybe you have a legacy device of some kind, you're probably using a mac, but whatever you know what, it's fine. Uh, they're doing it. Okay, I don't think it better, I don't think this is going to impact too many people, but it's, it's. You didn't look. No one expected to see the word MIDI appear today. So you know, let's just embrace it for what it is. And then again, kind of outside of whatever channels we're talking about, microsoft is updating the photos app similarly to what they're doing in the paint app, with a bunch of new AI capabilities and that same hands on Windows episode I keep referencing, for some reason, also features that stuff. So they're doing things a little differently. There's designer integration, which I believe we talked about last week. There's some stuff that's been in that app for probably a year or more now, and then there's some new stuff that Microsoft announced I don't know, october last year or whatever. That's kind of finally starting to roll out in the app. In fact, because I keep doing this, I'm just going to look at it. This is just a normal PC, it's not a co-pilot plus PC. So I'm curious what weird subset of features this thing has. Let me open this thing and yeah, so it has the designer integration which gives you like an inline Microsoft designer experience. You don't have to go to the website with it. You don't have to go to the website with it. You don't have to round robin a file. If you want to, if you're using it for design purposes, it's actually pretty cool.

27:26
And then, if you go into the editing features yeah, this is like a minor um, well, no, it's got some stuff. So, genitor of erase, that wasn't there before. That was a well, a generative background erase was is part of paint, it has been for a while. But actual genitor of erase, meaning you can select the things you want to erase. So that's in this verse and that's actually pretty good. And then the background features, background blur, remove and replace. That's been in paint or sorry photos for a while. And then, if you have a copilot plus pc, you get additional features. So one of the features that should have been in paint by now on copilot plus pcs is, uh, ocr capabilities with like support for 160 different languages, and they were testing it. It was about to come out and then they pulled it Microsoft and never explained why, but now it's back. So if you have an image that has any text in it, you can do the thing that you do today and say snipping tool does this and I think there are other things.

28:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I ran across somebody asking about OCR yesterday too and somebody said like just paste it in a chat, GPT, and say what does this text say?

28:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, that works too. But if you're using Windows and you want to right click a file and what's the text? And get that text copied to the clipboard, snipping Tool works great. I think everyone has that and it's there now. But they're adding it everywhere. It makes sense, right?

28:44 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
so if, if the if the app has anything to do with images, they're going to add that capability, so it that's nice right that you don't have to leave the context, that's yeah, right, so I agree that having it in other places is easy, but right there, because that's that that came to macos pretty late in the game we only recently got that, yeah you can even, uh, pause a video, and if there's text in the video, you could highlight it and copy it and paste it somewhere. It's just nice to have it in that context.

29:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I can't I keep forgetting where I say things right. So either in windows weekly possibly when richard was gone last week and or in hands on windows, we would have talked about. We have talked about certainly, this feature that was originally part of recall but now will be made more broadly just in Windows. If you have a Copilot Plus PC which is called Click To Do which, when you hear the name you're like that's a stupid name. But actually the way it works is you hold on the Windows key and you click and whatever that window is, it does the AI purple and pink ripple and it examines the thing and if it is a graphic, it will look to identify the objects that are in there and if there's text in the graphic, it will do this OCR thing and if it's text, it will highlight all the text. And then you can do things like copy to the clipboard, obviously, but rewrite the text, make it more professional, more casual, but shorter, longer. You can turn it into a poem, which is hilarious. It's pretty cool, but the reason that's a neat feature, despite the name that's still slightly grating to me is that it's app agnostic, right. So you have features like putting features where they make sense in context, like I said, makes sense. If you're going to have OCR capabilities for images, yes, Photos, paint snipping tool, yep, makes sense. But having something that works with any app, because maybe use a third-party app or maybe use whatever it is Maybe it's a graphic on a website, Maybe it's a graphic in a Word document, whatever it is you can do it to anything and like having it out at the OS level, like ClickToDo does actually, is pretty cool. So it's text and graphics, as you would expect. Text and images. Yeah.

30:46
So I just went on, not a rant, but my kind of pet peeve of the day about AI and people kind of denying it or hating it and not wanting it. But this is maybe a good everyday example of it's just kind of there. It doesn't get in your way. It doesn't bother you. If you need it, there it is. If you don't, you just get on with your life, right. And so, yeah, okay, maybe AI is not improving your life, but actually this is a really nice, useful efficiency, whatever you want to call it feature. It's great.

31:14
So, yes, it's happening all over the place, with or without you, by the way. So welcome to the future. And then welcome to the past, Because yesterday I want you guys to imagine that Microsoft is going to announce that they have canceled HoloLens, that they are never going to do anything with this technology, ever again. But here's the trick you can't use the word HoloL in that announcement. Now, what I just said is not necessarily strictly true, but uh, there is a the, the whole lens variant that microsoft made for the us army um, which I think most would agree has been kind of keeping hull lens alive as a product. In a way.

31:59 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's the you know the big and also crippled them too, because the army wanted so many things.

32:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's super specialized and yeah yep. So what Microsoft did was partner with a company called Anduril, which is fascinating to me because, for some reason, this company has come up in my tech feed a couple of times in the past two weeks, and I've wondered about it because Anduril, of course, is the name of Aragon sword and the lord of the rings. I'm a nerd, like all of you, right, and, uh, you know they reforge it and whatever, so but they are a proper military contractor yeah, proper.

32:34
Proper in the sense that they absolutely have contracts with the various parts of the military to the tune of hundreds of millions, to several billions of dollars so they're, they make drones, they're.

32:44 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're a drone company.

32:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, yep, this is Palmer Luckey, who previously founded Oculus right, which sold to Facebook or better, whatever it was called at the time. He left there under mysterious and definitely negative circumstances. If you look this guy up, he is so comically a tech bro that it's impossible not to make fun of him. I'm gonna try hard.

33:06 - Richard Campbell (Host)
He's in his 30s for god's sake.

33:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, it's. It's crazy. So microsoft is. So the partnership is microsoft doesn't have to deal with this anymore, but they will be the preferred not the exclusive, by the way, but the preferred cloud service for this stuff. So, as you'll still, you'll be part of it. So this is a way for microsoft to kind of wipe their hands of the hololens thing but still get some business on the back end.

33:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Perhaps there's still other verticals that are using hololens.

33:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So yeah, the question is where are they gonna live?

33:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
they've obviously. Obviously the army was not happy with the circumstances, so they fixed the army problem. But now you have the other verticals.

33:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so HoloLens was last updated as a hardware device in 2019. So it was almost exactly six years ago, right, I went to that. It was Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Tim Sweeney was on stage and they kumbaya'd the hell out of that. It was great, microsoft was going to come up with the HoloLens 3. It wasn't enough of a leap. They ended up not doing it. I was actually with Brad in Las Vegas when he got the phone call from a buddy of his at Microsoft who told him the story, which was kind of interesting as it was happening, and apparently they got to prototype and said no, yeah, it just wasn't enough Enough of a move forward.

34:26
So I I feel like this world has kind of moved on. Obviously, you know, not hololens necessarily, which is ar, but um, there are mixed reality, vr, xr, whatever you want to call these things, solutions from variety companies. Microsoft supports I think all of them actually like. So apple with vision pro. Android is coming, or google slash android is coming out with android xr soon in partnership with samsung, but for everybody. And what's the other? Oh, of course, with oculus, um and their stuff. So I don't know. They laid off most of that mixed reality team mid-year last year, as I recall. I don't know. I don't really see a huge future here, obviously, but hollands is one of the remaining pieces of what we used to call that one windows thing, right where you could you create a universal windows app that theoretically could run on holland surface hub xbox windows on across pcs, tablets and phones and that whole IoT, blah, blah, blah, whatever. So most of that's been kind of dismantled.

35:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, Kipman was encouraged to depart in 2013.

35:31 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Encouraged to depart.

35:33 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm encouraging you to do the right thing, because otherwise, it was him and Scott Keene and there was a few. It was sort of a sweep of executive level. You know, misconduct that's right Moves all at once and he was in that.

35:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yes, so they've been leaderless, effectively.

35:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I know some of the folks that were still working on that and they were very much waiting for new hardware. This thing's in is in stasis.

36:00 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This feels like the type of thing where I I don't know if you know this, richard, but maybe they're, they're probably still part of the windows, or at least the more personal computing org certainly, and I'm sure from their perspective it's like is there some way you could go to this other thing or something, you know? Can we get rid of it? We just, can we just not do this anymore? Um, so I don't know yeah, I.

36:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, I think it makes sense in the sense that right now we, you know, look at how much focus they've put on AI related technologies. And you know, I've heard a whole org saying if you don't have AI in your workload, you're in the wrong team. That's right. And not that I don't think that augmented reality couldn't benefit from a bunch of these generative AI technologies, but Right.

36:44 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But this is platform building.

36:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I mean, this is not a time to be building a platform, so it's not a bad time to sort of put this on the shelf for a while. Keep a couple of smart hardware people around so that they're at the right conferences and seeing when the new chipsets coming down and you know, can propose at least.

37:01 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
hey, this might be a good time to move, I think well, the other thing about so, satya Nadella obviously his time at Microsoft, his time as CEO at Microsoft, will be marked by first the cloud, now AI that's probably going to be the extent of it, but whatever, that's the era. But the other thing he's really known for is this very, now very common thing at Microsoft, where Microsoft is going to meet their customers where they are right. And so when you look at AR, mr, xr, whatever we're going to call this stuff where customers are is increasingly the meta stuff. Maybe the Apple stuff, maybe this Android thing will take off, who knows. And that's where you go and say we can make a difference with AI. We'll support the users on those products and then we don't have to worry about the terribleness of building that platform or whatever. We'll just support the platforms throughout the world.

37:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well yeah, microsoft's wins have never come from original hardware. Yeah, right, I understand the surface line in terms of building reference gear, and most of the cases when you talk about the good mice and the good keyboards, it was about building reference gear. It's like, hey, this stuff could be good and it's perfectly fine to make a small lot product that is expensive and is good for certain customers, but it sets a bar for the rest of the ecosystem to build underneath or attempt to exceed.

38:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, or attempt to exceed. Yeah, I uh, yeah, I mean, I was at yeah, it was the the event at which they launched surface duo, which was that little. You know, the two-screen android thing. Yep, and I was. I think it's fair to say I was on the negative end of the spectrum on that one. You know, it didn't make sense to me at the time. We, samsung, had already done at least two generations of a folding phone. It was like what are you doing? You know a little late, yeah, and frank shaw is actually an android phone anyway. Yeah, but frank shaw said to me he says, let me, let me just ask you theoretically, like if we can make a small business out of this and it's profitable. I mean, is that okay with you?

38:56
I was like, yeah that's fine, of course, but it's the profitable thing? I'm not really you know like yeah, yeah, of course, that would be fantastic is're doing, like you know, we never got to that part of the conversation. So, yeah, I'm not ripping on Frank, but it's a fair point that he made, which is, yeah, that's fine. But I think the problem is these businesses, which I would argue, maybe are a bit of a distraction today because of the company's focus, like you said, what they are.

39:26 - Richard Campbell (Host)
And OK, well, and at the same time, like kipman's legacy, like the original surface.

39:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Before it was a laptop, it was a table. Do you remember this thing? Of course, I've seen a table.

39:29 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You could not show on stage because it was optically controlled and stage lights were screwed up every time. That's right it was like a pac-man machine from like yeah, it was literally the same form factor as the old pac-man machine, but he parlayed that into um that, the xbox accessory, right? You remember the?

39:46
gizmo that sat on top that yeah, the connect and do frame recognition and that was going to revolutionize xbox and not enough people bought it and it did great at first, and then it couldn't see people if their skin was anything other than lily white, which was kind of a problem.

40:02
Those great stories from the connect story. Like I remember, at one point they had to send out an email saying please is they had all these beta testers that were microsoft employees. Please do not beta test this thing naked, because we do have to look. We're literally doing body scans.

40:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, yeah, there's a because I'm testing right, the, you don't actually see this in real life, but the, the um, when they, when they do the demo of how it mapped the room, the connect, they would use like that matrix dots that would kind of go over and around Right, and so that effect actually figures prominently. If I remember correctly, I think it was a, uh, a paranormal activity movie where they were, they, the, the connect was making those green dots everywhere and, like I don't remember exactly how they did, but, like you know, something moved through the room and it detected the, you know the mass of the thing, right, um, but yeah it, yeah, it had, it was a flash in the pan, but it was, uh, yeah, briefly, very successful and then they decided it was going to be a requirement exciting.

40:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't think it was ever successful because you couldn't. Yeah, you know. The real question is can you make a game with this interface that people care about? And now we get back to the gaming problem, where the amount of money it takes to make a good game on that right um I think that, uh, I think that there's a this is, it's not.

41:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
This is not a microsoft problem, but I think there's a problem when you, as a tech company, in this case, have this, you come up with like this is not a Microsoft problem, but I think there's a problem when you, as a tech company, in this case, have this, you come up with like what is essentially a tech demo, like HoloLens was like this. Yeah, and the reason HoloLens became a product was because they had this tech demo and Sachin Nadella became the CEO and he saw that and he said make something. You know, this is crazy, let's productize it. And so they take this risk. They spend a lot. It's hardware too, in both cases right, so it's a huge investment. You're never going to get it right in V1. So you hope you know as we move down the road. You know, and Holland's got a lot better in V2, for sure, like Field of View and so forth, but a lot of times those like the things that demo well, aren't always great as products.

42:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, and there's so much more to making a product, the Kinect's, from 2010. Like, this is a while ago, right.

42:10 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so the Xbox 360 came out in 2005. And if you think about it, this would have been its mid-season bump, right? Yeah, just as this thing we've done 1080p. You know we've done a couple little hardware things Like the Kinect was maybe the thing that you know Pushes it through the second half of that lifecycle. Unfortunately, they lasted about 15 seconds. So you know, and you know we had the Nintendo Wii at the time and Microsoft was busy copying some of the UIs.

42:36
Remember they did a little me like avatars and with the little weeble heads and stuff, and I Think the Kinect was back when Don Mattrick was running the xbox yeah, yeah, the mr submarine, um, and he, uh, you know like, but they, I, there were games that were like. You know, you're going down the river in a raft and everyone's standing in the room jumping together and well, this was the real problem is they're video game players.

42:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Did you want them to? You're gonna try to make a move around they play video games.

43:02 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know, I know they're way more comfortable uh, sagging the couch, you know than they are jumping around the road.

43:07 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But how long did it take us to figure out how to play with the wii stick to play?

43:12 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
how many people threw one of those dumb checks through a screen exactly before they're like? Maybe we should put a strap on that thing.

43:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But this, this whole chain of heart, like from the surface table to the connect to the HoloLens, it's all, alex Kipman, it's a logical chain of technology actually.

43:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It moved into Earth, and every one of them is an example. I think we just talked about where it's like wow, that thing is an awesome demo, yeah, Product.

43:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Probably not a product Mixed results yeah, yeah.

43:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So anyway, I feel like this is logically the end of this, but all ends, that is to bring it back to the actual topic.

43:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but you put it on the shelf because, who knows when ar breaks out and or has an event where it's like, okay, dust that technology off again.

43:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Let's see where we're at so burke asked me about my submarine comment. So, after the xbox 360 that they did the xbox one, and the original plans for the xbox one were many. This was going, and the original plans for the Xbox One were many. This was going to be the one that was focused more on entertainment than gaming. Remember, that was their big push.

44:10
Kinect was going to be a requirement of this console and one of the other requirements is that it had to be always connected to the internet, including when you first set it up. So somebody asked Don Madrick in an interview before it came out and he said well, what if they're on a submarine? Like a lot of people in the US Navy, for example, are huge fans of Xbox, they play Call of Duty and everything. They can't connect to the internet when there are 10,000 or whatever it is 2,000 people on the surface and he's like, well, I guess you're going to have to get a different game. He said something like you answer Don, and that was kind of the end of him and it was the end of the online requirement for the Xbox One.

44:50
So, yeah, yeah, someone says, yeah, the Wii was an awesome demo. That turned out to be an awesome product. Yeah, those are tricky. I think that this is I'm not trying to rip on Microsoft, I don't think this is a unique Microsoft problem, but it's difficult to do that, to get it right. I think the companies that do get it right, like the we I guess nintendo with we that that's a win, that's a huge thing yeah, but nintendo also controlled this dev story, so they made good games for that control.

45:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah, and that's not how microsoft does things and it was a legit innovation from outside the.

45:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I don't, that's not even mainstream, that's not even fair. Nintendo is the mainstream, but outside of what the other companies in that space were doing, um, it was. You know, I compare them to Disney. They're just kind of different, you know. They just do things differently, like they. They looked at this and said, yeah, this is here's something wacky, it doesn't make sense. You look at the, the nunchuck controller, whatever.

45:53 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
You're like what is this thing? Like it's crazy, but that thing was super successful. Yeah, yeah, I mean good for them. Yeah, all right, uh, we have reached the end, yeah, yeah, yeah, we got there the end of the windows segment. We'll take a small little pause here. Uh, in fact, you know what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna remind everybody that's listening out there about Club Twit at twittv slash club twit.

46:05
For $7a month you can join the club and join the fun. You get ad-free access to every single one of our shows. You also gain access to the TwitPlus bonus feed that has extra content you won't find anywhere else behind the scenes before the show. After the show, special Club Twit events get published there. Access to the members-only Discord server when we're talking about the chat, we're mostly talking about the Discord, and so it's a great place to go to hang with your fellow Club Twit members and those of us here at Twit Paul's talking about his show.

46:34
Hands on Windows I've got Hands on Mac and iOS Today and Hands on Tech, and all of those you can get ad-free versions of by joining the club, so of by joining the club. So please consider joining the club. We've got a two-week free trial that's going right now so you can kind of test it out and see if it's for you. And, to those of you who are already members, you can refer your friends to earn months of Club Twit free. That's twittv slash club twit slash referral. So be sure to check that out as well. All right, that is all I have for you, which means it's time to head back to talk about AI and dev.

47:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Which I stupidly just looked at my news feed and there are two stories that may well do fall into this category.

47:22 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
So I'm not going to talk. Breaking news alert.

47:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I can't get into this too deeply, but chat GPT 4.5 will has not been announced. Well, no, I'm sorry, it is a thing. Right, yeah, they're updating chat GPT 4.5. I shouldn't be reading this in real time. Let me go to back to this. It looks like they're saying that chat GPT 4.5 will be the last non-reasoning model and chat GPT 5, whenever that happens, will include O3, which will then no longer be offered as a standalone model.

47:54
But there's more going on. I don't want to get too deep into the weeds there. And then in our notes, let me see how I did things. It's like it's in a little blender. Later on, we're going to talk about some dev stuff related to AI, but Microsoft just announced a course for generative AI for beginners with NET for generative AI for beginners with NET, and that's actually that's really interesting to me. I suspect that I'm just looking at it real quick. I suspect this is cloud-based AI, not local AI, which is what most people think of AI. So I'll be looking at this. Maybe we'll talk about this more next week. Anyway, okay, so we're heading into what I I call conference developer conference season.

48:39
Uh, usually that involves uh build from microsoft and google, io from google, obviously in may, and then in june apple has wwdc and since this has been the schedule, microsoft and google have played this little game of chicken where they try not to get in each other's way, sort of, but sometimes do and, uh, they could not have gotten in each other's way more this year, as it gets, yeah yeah.

49:03
So the other day microsoft announced that build would be may 19 through 22 in seattle. Uh, google io, then google, then a scheduled io for may 20 to 21, the two days in the middle of that four-day span. Now here's the thing, here's the problem. Well, there's a couple of problems. There is some overlapping audience here, I would imagine right, and audiences right, because not just developers who may want to be involved with both I'm sure there are some but also just people who are like bloggers or press or whatever and want to cover both these events. It's going to be hard to do both in person, right? So I guess you could go to the build keynote and then leave that and get on a plane and fly down to mountain view or whatever and go to the google thing, the next, whatever. So good luck with that. But the reason this is a problem is because google's event is at their own facility. They could schedule this whenever they wanted.

49:51 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're not at the they're not beholden to a conference center, mosconi or anything yeah, they could do this like they just did.

49:57 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They're like when's built?

49:58 - Richard Campbell (Host)
yeah, let's do it then like it feels a little, you know whatever but okay, where build is at the washington, uh, kind of steak and veg service, right, yep, in seo, all right.

50:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So there's that um. And then, speaking of like um, just like openly hostile people, I would like to trip secretly if I could. Elon Musk and some group of investors have Well, I say supposedly, because at the time the story was they have made a bid for open AI. They offered ninety seven point four billion dollars to buy open AI. Elon Musk has been trying a variety of legal tactics to undermine open AI, a company he co-founded back in the day and then tried to take over and was kicked out of. And was kicked out, yeah, and he's just really upset about how I guess successful they are, probably, and he can't stand it and whatever.

50:46
Okay, so this is just the latest one. It's kind of underhanded and terrible. Two things to this. One is Sam Altman got on uh x slash twitter I still call it twitter, but so does sam alton and he wrote no, thank you, but we will buy twitter for 97. I wrote uh, 97.4 billion. I mistyped in my article. I just noticed 90 for the same price, like, in other words, like, that's a cute number.

51:08
But of course, um, they're going for a valuation now that they could make open ai worth as much as 300 billion, depending on how things go over the next couple of months. So we'll see, but it's just a little crappy thing. But the other thing is, officially no one has actually made a bid for OpenAI. So a couple of days went by and he said look, I just want to let everyone know we talked to the board about this. They've never made a bid for our company, so I don't even know. They just made this huge announcement about it but like they've never given us a bid, so we can't even evaluate it, we don't have to. We're going to say no to it. But um, I, I just well, it's not an open.

51:45 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Ai is not a public company. There's nothing to bid on. There's no process here.

51:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They do it's, they're trying to undermine confidence in this company because he I don't know, if you know, he has a little company called xai, for example. You know that is allegedly competitive with this and whatever it's. The whole thing is so stupid. It's like it's like two children grew into adults but didn't grow into adults in their minds. And they're still kids and they just slap at each other and I don't know. Are you talking about tech bros? That's weird. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, a tech bro and a what appears to be a robot, all right. So I don't know, and you can guess which one I mean by that.

52:22
Um open. Ai obviously has about three million chat gpt services. Now, uh, chat gpt search. Um required a sign-in, but now you can just go and access it on the web. You don't have to sign in. There are limits when you're not signed in. There are limits when you don't pay whatever, but they're spreading wide as well as deep.

52:41
Now Google announced that Gemini 2.0, which is a family model it's not a single model is now available the way they described. It is available to everybody and it's like yeah, not everybodysterisks, but it's in the process of rolling out to everybody. And what I mean by that is like if you're in Google workspace, for example, you still don't have the final version of some of these models, but whatever they're, the models are done, they're heading out there, they're, they're available, they have that thing we talked about Richard will remember last week when he wasn't here, but reasoning models were the you know, kind of sits there and thinks out loud and and and people are more confident, and that kind of thing. So you know everyone's doing it. Uh, it has that. Okay, so there's that. And then, um, to further the lightning round mode of this part of the show, um, github co-pilot, which to my mind, still is possibly the best and the most useful, the yeah I would say most measurable benefit like yeah, there you go.

53:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I've got very good numbers now from a bunch of different teams about the productivity increase of developers. It's a better part of a year than to really learn how to get it in their workflow. It makes a big difference yeah, 20 20 20 to 30 performance you know deliverable this.

53:53 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm surprised it's not higher.

53:54 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Honestly, I for me some people get more, but that seems to be consistent, yeah okay.

53:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So it's to me it's magic. I, I think it's incredible and I I have run into a couple of instances now where I think you might have been around for this right. I described like me trying to parse this really complex line of code it created to replace like a block of code I had written and you sort of assume it's correct, right, and it's super complex, and I'm like, uh, nope, it's like I went there. I'm like this doesn't do the same things and it didn't.

54:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But but other than that, I mean it's been, it's been really, really good and that's one of the things I've noticed too is, as your work gets more complex, as you, the tool struggles more well, well and yeah, I mean, and then God help you.

54:37 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like the things. Like I'm not a professional developer, so the thing I'm working on I've hit the limits of peak Paul here Like I can't, like I have a hard time If it's not first thing in the morning and I sit in front of the thing and bring up Visual Studio.

54:49 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Look at my own code that I wrote and I'm like nope, like I can't, like I can't, I can't handle it like so. No, no, I've definitely used the tool to explain what the heck I wrote yesterday.

54:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
But this thing, you know what this will do is take what is ostensibly I'll say objectively at least more readable code. It's more simplistic because I'm an idiot, but and it will take the code and write it into something way more efficient. But it's also concise and, you know, terse and hard to read and I'm like I, yeah, I probably does the same thing.

55:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't know, yeah, it's a different, you know link expression in a loop, right, yeah, yeah although copilot does a good job of flipping between those, so yeah, I so um, I'm waiting for it rocks like. I use the link expression because it's very terse, but I have a comment that is exactly so.

55:36 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so the the the more down-to-earth example of this that, like, any human being would kind of understand, if you know the developer is use a tool like grammarly or the. You know the ai features in word or whatever it is, and you've got some sentence. It underlines something and it says uh, yeah, you probably want to this word, maybe you reused it too many times or maybe it's not not. You know, the one that always cracks for me is I'll write it's hard to know what, blah, blah, blah. And it will say you know the word difficult is better. I'm like okay, so I'm like you know what, you're probably right, I'll switch it. I use difficult. I start typing again. Then online's difficult. I'm like what he goes.

56:07
You know github co-pilot, I can sort of get into this as well. It's like you know there's a better way to write this. You're like okay, and then it takes the thing, it expands it out into this little thing, like, okay, I wouldn't have done it that way, but okay, fine. And then you start working on more guys like, oh, actually, you know there's a better way to write this. I'm like let me guess it's the other way. Yep, it's the other way, yeah, and you know it's just like. So you kind of round robin it and you're like I don't know what's going on anyway. So, uh, like the rest of the ai world, um, it's github co-pilot is well, they added a bunch of new features, uh, for one thing, including, uh, gemini 2.0 flash is now available in the model picker. Yeah, uh, it was anthropic before and chat, gpt and obviously co-pilot, um, and now you can do gemini and um.

56:52
But they're they're previewing, uh, what will become their what they call an autonomous agent. It's codenamed project padawan for now, speaking of, you know, like a popular movie franchise references and, uh, it will, you know it will do everything. It will bake bread, it will whatever, it will drive your kid to school, it's gonna whatever. But, um, it's not all you can, all I can do right now, because I don't pay for this and there's no way for me to really see it. I can just look at their videos. But, um, this is an agent that will work on your behalf in an autonomous way, where you kind of set it off on some research project or whatever it is and it will do the thing that you ask or the multiple things will do.

57:31
I don't remember the number, but some number of tasks at once, and then it will come back. You know you'll be sitting there working in visual studio, probably doing that round robin thing. I was talking about wondering where your life went. And it will say hey, we came back. You know, we, we solved the problem, you wanted us to solve, whatever. So, um, not surprisingly I'm speaking very theoretically here, because I you know, I don't have it- so thomas demke promised us to pull requests.

57:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right that this tool would actually get to the pull request point and now you get to review the code and decide if you want to add it or not.

57:59 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I am struggling not to do this sort of thing because I'm working on this programming project. Like I said, it's above me and I've chosen a technology that's not well suited for the task. There's all kinds of problems I'm the biggest one, but whatever. But there is a capability that's in AI. Today you could do this in chat, GPT or the other AIs, but this tool specifically will be designed for this and specifically for the kind of developer work that you do in Visual Studio, meaning you might be using XAML to make the UI for a Windows application or a cross-platform, like a MAUI app or whatever a web app, whatever. What you can do is draw a picture of a UI. You can literally use a crayon and scan it, or however you do it. Here's the window.

58:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Here's what I want it to look like Get a little Microsoft.

58:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Paint going there, yep, and then make the code. And not just make the code to make the UI, which would be useful, but also write the underlying to the, you know, click, event handlers, whatever it might be. Um, yeah, so pretty soon we're going to be like the uh, the guy with the whistle at a traffic stop that nobody pays attention to telling a what to do and it's like, yeah, I got this, I got it, you know I mean, I do appreciate that it's easier to criticize code than it is to write it from scratch and so having the tool generate the initial chunk code.

59:14
I let me tell you I it's easier to criticize anything than it is to create anything. Yeah, I mean that's that's the.

59:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's just a question of you know what is the net time? Right? Yeah, because you're gonna. You're gonna end up having to go through that code and make some corrections and push back and forth, and certainly, you know, I've been in this iterative cycle where I'm tweaking and tweaking. Eventually it's like okay, go away, I will finish this so you've reminded me of something.

59:39 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I didn't intend to tell another story like this, but actually I think this might be instructive. So my wife and I are both writers, right, we have both sort of collectively agreed that like we're not going to use AI to write, like we're not going to say I have to write a story about this topic, could you throw something, cobble something together, and then I'll go edit it or whatever. However, in my wife's case, I had shown her it was some of the things I was doing for Hands-On Windows, where in a Copilot plus PC in the next version of Windows 11, you're going to have this little AI thing that could rewrite and make poems and do all that stuff. I showed her some of that stuff. I her the uh click to do thing with the purple and pink, you know, razzle, dazzle, whatever. Apparently this inspired her, which is not usually her reaction to things, I tell her and she went and started looking at ai and was thinking, like in my workflow, like how could I actually use this thing?

01:00:26
So one of the things she does the most often involves four steps. The first step is you talk to someone on the phone or on it's not 1999. You talk to them on Zoom and she records those things. And then those people would be like a doctor or some kind of medical or healthcare professional. It could be a person who had an experience with whatever the thing is she's writing about and they can tell their story. So she's on the phone for half an hour 45 minutes, whatever it is, and she does this several times a week. So she then takes that recording that zoom generates and she pushes it through microsoft word, which has a transcription tool built in. You might not know about, but it is in there and, uh, she was doing this early on, like when she first started doing this. It was only that transcription feature was only available in the web version of word at the time, but now it's everywhere. So cool, and now you've got this text document, that's your conversation, which can be quite big, so she will. Then the third step is she goes through that thing and she pulls out the main points and she kind of organizes them in whatever way she wants, but after that she writes right.

01:01:26
So I would say, as a writer, the only thing she should be doing in some ways is writing, but you also have to talk to people, in her case, like her deal is, she talks to people all the time. That's what she does, yeah, so you can't eliminate that. But the other two steps are kind of interesting. Could ai be used to not just transcribe this thing but then make a summary of some kind in a bullet list or whatever that you could then build what you write? And in her case, she does write herself. She's not using the air to write for her, for her.

01:01:54
But and the answer is yes, and so she said you know, I don't think I'm ever going to go back to doing it the way I used to do this, like I, this thing saves me an enormous amount of time, it's super effective. And the other thing and she can be very specific She'll say like, for example, she wrote a story about like I don't remember it's foods that help with let's pretend it was inflammation or something and across three different interviews she got 10 food types, of which there's some crossover, but not entirely. And now she can go to OpenAI or in her case she used GPT, I think and say look, go through this thing, organize these claims they've made, find reliable research from the past five years that supports or debunks these claims, one at a time and it's go with sources and then she can go to the source, make sure it's credible, make sure it's real, real this this is stuff she did manually all that, she's an intern's job right yeah, and right right.

01:02:48
So I mean, she's a freelancer, so she is the intern. But yeah, so to the people.

01:02:52 - Richard Campbell (Host)
She has a digital intern that's pulling these things together for her to validate.

01:02:56 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so the reason I mentioned this now, the reason you reminded me of this, is because this is how software development is going to go. It's not that you're going to be removed from the equation as a human developer. It's just that your use of the tools is going to change and I will become part of it. It doesn't necessarily mean it's going to write all the code for you although you know, in some cases it can do that but I I think there's use cases, like my wife's, that can be applied to you know different steps, different jobs, yeah, totally agree, yeah.

01:03:24
So there you go, and I'm struck. This is you know she's already, she's made a leap. I have not made. I still, when I think I write every day I write thousands and thousands of words. And when I think about what I just said, when I think I write every day, I write thousands and thousands of words, and when I think about what I just said, when I think about what she's done and I think about how I might use, I am like I don't, I can't, I, I can't get there. So maybe I will, but right now I haven't done it. So okay, one more thing Last May, at build, microsoft announced about 3000 things, but one,000 things, and one of the two or three that really, really interested me was something called the Windows Copilot Runtime, which is not a runtime, but let's get past that.

01:04:03
It's just a collection of APIs and models that run on device. So these were for Copilot plus PCs. That's why they're not well, it's a developer thing. They would have announced it anyway, but they also announced the Copilot Plus PCs right at the same show. So there'll be all kinds of capabilities. You'll be able to use your own code.

01:04:21
We talked about some of them earlier, actually right.

01:04:23
So all the things that are in recall or click to do, or the generative AI erase and fill and whatever else that's in paint and photos and whatever else right, you'll be able to use your own code as a software developer on Windows.

01:04:36
But the asterisk here and the reason, the thing I mentioned up front about the NET course on generative AI, the reason that's important, unless I completely misunderstand it, is that that will be broadly applicable to any developer, because those things happen in the cloud and you as a NET developer could write an app that runs on a phone, it runs in a website, it runs as a Windows app, if you're one of three people who are still doing that.

01:05:01
And the Windows Copilot runtime stuff is very specifically for on-device AI, which today is this hard gap between two sets of capabilities that I think are eventually going to come together and be that orchestrated thing, right, yeah, uh, and I mean it on multiple levels, because the the windows co-pilot runtime capabilities I hate saying the word runtime over and over again because it's not a runtime, but whatever those apis, uh, only run on the mpu. They only run if the mpu is of a certain power, like a co-pilot plus pc. There's no fallback if you don't have those things Right and so I don't have an ODBC for this to run a.

01:05:39
GPU, or that's right they don't have the right, an orchestrator that would say okay, what that?

01:05:45
abstracts that from the developer, the OS you know, and says look, you're asking to do this. If you have an MPU, that's the best way to do it. We'll do that. If you have a gpu, we'll do that. That's going to be fantastic. We'll be able to take down the power grid in miami or whatever, but it's fine, it will work. Um, if you don't have that cpu, be a little slow, but it will work, yeah, and if you don't have that to the cloud.

01:06:05
that's the thing. The final fallback should be that hybrid scenario where, okay, so what's the corresponding api that's up in the cloud and that's the piece. We don't have this, actually, until about yesterday, we didn't have any of it because, well, there obviously are cloud APIs and all that stuff.

01:06:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But yeah, no, the OpenAI API has been emulated by a bunch of the other LLMs because it is a common, it's becoming the common interface, it's becoming an ODBC. Yeah, exactly, so I'm doing this in the house here. Right, I'm still calling out to the open ai api for the language stuff in the house, but I can replace it with a local model running cloud that has the open ai yeah, simulator in front of it.

01:06:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, this is interesting because, depending on what it is like, when um copilot plus pc first came out and it was image generation capabilities that would run on the device, compared to the same app, slightly different feature, but run against the cloud the images you would generate off the MPU were garbage like compared to what you could do against the cloud. Now, from Microsoft's perspective, they just save 17 cents because you're not hitting the cloud. So you know it's better for them and then someday maybe we'll catch up enough and it'll be good. What I've seen since then is that the capabilities that run on device have actually gotten better. I'm not saying the image generation is as good as not, but there's all these, well, slms really Microsoft confusingly calls them local language models because it's LLM again and stop. But whatever SLMs that run on device, they've gotten better. So I described Notepad and the rewrite stuff. That stuff's fantastic, but the thing that's been missing is that thing they announced last May the actual Windows Copilot runtime. Where are these APIs right? So about a week ago they hit the Windows app SDK 1.7 experimental three release. So if you go back to the tape and I did, davlon Polari said this will come out next january. He actually said that and it kind of did it. It was february, but they only missed it by a couple of days. It was a slightly different version of the app, sdk. Whatever, who cares, it's experimental. You cannot use this in production. It's not like you know. Sometimes in dot net pre-release they'll say like actually, this first preview or what do they call it? Release candidate, you can actually put it in production if you want. It's not there. As we started the show, raphael texted me and said you're not going to believe this because we were chatting about this yesterday. They just put it into preview. I had guessed, and he had guessed separately, that these capabilities will be released to build in stable and this suggests that's what's going to happen.

01:08:34
I just mentioned that I am not a professional developer. I feel it's important to keep highlighting that. But I've been waiting. I keep checking like when it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it? Where is it, where is it. It just came out.

01:08:50
So I actually wrote a little app, which I wrote an article about, that just does two things you paste in text and then you can summarize it or you can rewrite it, and that's two of the capabilities, right that that you know, microsoft word does with copilot, that notepad does with this new built-in capability on device. And let me tell you something it's about seven lines of code and it works freaking great. Like it's awesome, it's impressive. I don't know what I'm doing and I wrote an app that does those things and it looks like garbage because I didn't care. I was just throwing it together, just trying to make it work. It's happening. So this is very exciting and there's a bunch of stuff.

01:09:22
So we mentioned OCR. That's one of those capabilities the ability to isolate objects in an image so that you can then do generative fill or generative race on that thing. That's in the APIs. I can't remember all of them, I'm sorry. Off the top this is a bunch of them, like it's a big list. So I suspect when build comes around in about two months, that microsoft's gonna have a pretty good story. The problem is and the question is, the windows app sdk is very specific. Well, this part of it, sorry, the windows copilot runtime. These capabilities are on device. Mpo requires MPO, requires a Copilot PC. There's no fallback. You can test to see if the machine meets it and if it doesn't, the else clause is up to you. There's no APIs for you.

01:10:05 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You've got to go figure that out. In theory, this is what Microsoft's good at, although I realize Microsoft builds compatibility layers when they're not leading in a market or believe in a market. Yep.

01:10:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So the way to think of this and I think this is going to change. So I said my guess is they're going to announce this, but the question I have is will they announce the next step, which is some form of fallback? Right? Logically, the next form of fallback, the first form I guess, would be GPU CPU, right yeah, mpu emulation be GPU-CPU, right yeah.

01:10:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
MPU emulation on GPU. Mpu emulation on CPU? They'd be so I mean, it's like turning.

01:10:41 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
MPU proxy to cloud. It's probably a registry switch. It's probably going to be really easy, right? Yeah, I suspect it already exists, but the more sophisticated thing would be that orchestrator thing, if they can go to the cloud with it. Now, the reason to believe that's not going to happen is because we can look at what's in windows 11 today and that does not exist, right. So I just mentioned these things.

01:11:00
If you have notepad and you're running like now, you have to be in the dev or beta channel and you have a co-pilot plus pc, you will get a little ai icon that will give you those features I described. If you're running it on a normal pc, like the one I'm using here, it just looks like notepad, looks like that thing is not there. You don't get that. If you're running paint and I mentioned the new co-pilot menu with those features If you have a non-co-pilot plus PC, you'll just get the two features that don't require that. If you have a co-pilot plus PC, you'll see all four, because two of them require the MPU. So Microsoft's not even doing it yet, right? So I'm looking at a future that they're not even doing. So to me, what this needs is that thing I just described, but I've been waiting nine months and I think others have too, so I'm excited that it's finally happening. I think Build is going to be super interesting, even though most of it's going to focus on the other stuff, like not windows and whatever.

01:11:57 - Richard Campbell (Host)
but I would. I'm looking, sorry. I mean we'll see Like there seems to be a lot of energy around what they're doing at build.

01:12:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah. So if you're, if this stuff is in any way interesting to you, definitely pay attention to build this year.

01:12:10 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think it's going to be, I suspect we'll both be there right, we'll see I might go to the google one it happens to be the same week as ndc oslo, which I love and I'm already accepted too. They said, oh, please don't go to oslo. I'm like why let's have a meeting, like okay, well, that meeting hasn't happened yet, but I strongly suspect I'm not going to oslo okay, interesting.

01:12:33 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Okay, well, let's talk about this, yeah all right, uh, anything else in ai dev news before we head into?

01:12:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
no I guess I feel I hope I didn't babble there. I'm actually very excited about this um and and I think it speaks to that conversation up front about like well, yeah, I've never seen any. I do anything interesting, it's like you're not looking hard enough. I mean you know there's a bunch of stuff.

01:12:57 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Great, all right. It is time now to move on to earnings, where we always have some pulse. Favorite learnings yeah.

01:13:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh boy.

01:13:07
Yeah, so we're in that part of the quarter and there'll be a few more next week, I think the PC makers There'll be a few more next week. The PC makers I think it's Lenovo and HP are always going to bring up the rear with this stuff, but we did some of the big ones Apple, microsoft, google slash, alphabet last week. This week we get some more, like Amazon, the biggest one, like $188 billion in revenues. The big thing there is not so much their revenues, not AWS revenues, although that's interesting to look at to compare to what Microsoft's doing with their Microsoft Cloud. Non-business is they spent $28 billion in this quarter on AI, infrastructure, capex, build Yikes. That's more than Microsoft. Microsoft was 21, if I remember correctly, 22, maybe, and they said in this fiscal year they're going to send $ billion dollars, compared to the 80 billion that microsoft threatened or promised or whatever. Google had a similar excuse me number.

01:14:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I don't remember that one, but these companies are spending because, like there's, no, tomorrow they're spending cash like this would have been money that otherwise been used for stock buybacks yeah, jeff bezos was making a bet of the money and jumping on it from a high height.

01:14:19 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now they're actually using it. It's fun. Yeah, it's a little oily.

01:14:21 - Richard Campbell (Host)
One of the arguments I've heard is that the hype around AI is useful in terms of being able to secure zoning. Yeah, to be able to get that. Whether they use these data centers for AI or not, they're going to need them eventually, yep, and so right now. If you think about just a few years ago, before this AI cycle, there was a real pushback on building more data centers. That's right. The towns were refusing them, and now this they're utilizing this hype cycle to get past a lot of these barriers.

01:14:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I made this point either last week, when you weren't here, or the previous week, but you know't here the previous week. But you know, in the lehigh valley where I live in pennsylvania it's full of amazon warehouses. Now it's a nightmare. There's trucks everywhere.

01:15:02
I'd give anything for those things to be data centers I mean yeah and uh, you know our, if you're familiar with, like the um, uh, what do you call as a mob, foundation books. You know there's this planet that is has been covered just in. It's just looks like metal from out of space, because it's yeah, it's all metal, it's buildings and whatever, and this is what this is we're gonna have, like it's. We're gonna have data centers in the ocean. We're gonna have them in space with satellites. We're gonna have them. You know it's good, it's.

01:15:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We're heading into a crazy future, but um, it's, but I think this feels very much like the end of the dot-com boom, with all the fiber being laid. Yeah Right, it is a sprint to spend the money while you can make the moves, while you can Yep, because it will end.

01:15:45 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's right. And then the one I remember is I think it was Verizon was going to fiber the entire state of Vermont, yeah, and then they realized how much it was going to cost and that had changed and they were like, just kidding, we're not going to do that, and uh you know, they had to pay some bills there um, but then, yeah, then 2001 came along, a whole bunch of those companies went broke and but the fiber was already laid and now it was a little 10 cents on the dollar.

01:16:08 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, right, like the, as much as this is insane, it's also useful right, yeah?

01:16:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, well, we we're gonna use this infrastructure there's no doubt about it. I mean whatever infrastructure these companies still can't meet demand.

01:16:25 - Richard Campbell (Host)
The reason amazon is spending this money, one of the reasons stabilizing the power grid, because they're demanding so much power well, you know, we got to make those funny graphics or whatever.

01:16:34 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you know the memes. And then this has been. You know had been delayed for some time, but in about what is this about? Two weeks, yeah, two weeks from today, actually, amazon is going to have their next devices and services event, which means two things we're going to get to see Panos Panay again, which you know.

01:16:53
yay, I'm excited, I'm excited. I'd like to see him to be replaced by an AI avatar, but we'll see. And this will be that conversational Alexa, just like Apple, is trying to improve Siri to be less like Zoe Deschanel and more like a rocket scientist. They're doing the same thing, so we'll see what form that takes. It took longer, they didn't describe it quite this way, but basically said it's a hard computer science problem. They're working on it, okay.

01:17:18
And then my favorite news of the week Actually, qualcomm announced their earnings, you know, 11.7 billion, 11.7 billion in revenue. Sorry, up 17%. But as part of the little earnings conference call, surprise, surprise, arm Holdings contacted them and said just kidding, guys, we're done. Sorry about that, we're good. They withdrew their complaint to the judge and went yeah, well, you are going to lose. Yes, and it's like maybe we shouldn't be attacking our biggest customer and you think we, we still want more licensing fees. It's probably going to come from another company, so, or some other set of companies, whatever. So that's, that's great, so that's moved on.

01:17:56
And then, just because I like beating on them now, because they they've hurt me so much and I'm going to show you where on the bear, uh, sonos, uh, has had another negative quarter, another negative year actually, and, uh, they were supposed to release the broadest set of products ever in their history. Last year they released two, one of which triggered that sonos skate thing with the app fiasco and blah, blah, blah, whatever. So, uh, they got finally got rid of the ceo, I think last month, and then restructure dev too, right, yeah, and layoffs and whatever.

01:18:24 - Richard Campbell (Host)
so you know, I mean good luck so this this really means taking a lot longer to fix the problem, like you're now talking about reconstituting a team to try and figure out how to yeah, I guess, sonos I.

01:18:38 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I think the way the teams were built is every product had its own team and there was, like you know, maybe there's a simpler structure here where we actually work with each other.

01:18:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm still wrestling with is the. Is the team fighting internally or are they fighting management like who's really the power broker here? I can't tell you how? Many times I've been in situations where I realized, hey, this company's actually built around this chunk of software written by this guy four years ago, and he left two years ago and you've been decorating it ever since.

01:19:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I just uh, so I can't. I don't know anybody who works at sonos anymore, but I I do know that they. This always comes out right. So they do the app fiasco. They screw it up. They can't release the old app again. I don't know why they didn't leave in the market.

01:19:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Blah, but whatever they they might have a licensing problem.

01:19:22 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They did all this stupid stuff they did, and then what comes out is their employers were telling them not to do this before they did it. They were like you know what's going to happen.

01:19:30 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Right like they, so I'm hoping that it's those guys who are left and the credible ones or whatever I hope you never know but often the best and brightest when he gets to the situation. They've got another job anyway, so they leave, right, I mean?

01:19:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
they have good core tech. Their products, their hardware products are of high quality. Sure, no, they're all over my house.

01:19:53 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They're all over your house, no.

01:19:54 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I know I have a ton of them are of high quality, sure, no, they're all over my house. They're all over. Yeah, no, I know I have a ton of them and I the app has always stunk and the new one is even worse. Yeah, it's prettier but dumber. You know it's a supermodel of apps, whatever but it's.

01:20:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I'm now relying on my home assistant interface to sonos to be able to actually I just rely on an airplane.

01:20:09 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Now I don't even I pretend the sonos app doesn't exist. Yeah, or?

01:20:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
spotify. I mean, that's your work. Yeah, yep, now it's just a. It's just a semi-smart speaker.

01:20:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, so there you go, okay, somehow wow, we got through that pretty quick we did. I feel like I missed something. That's all right sometimes that happens.

01:20:28 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sometimes it's something big but hey, it's a, it's a light xbox time around, yeah.

01:20:34 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Which you know what.

01:20:35 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I love it Anytime I'm on there's always a corner of the show, and this is Xbox corner. Do we have the Halo?

01:20:46 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Oh, the Halo music, yeah, we haven't actually heard that.

01:20:48 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Oh, is there like a jingle.

01:20:50 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, yeah, it's like the Halo music in reverse, it says Master Chief is dead. If you listen carefully, okay Jeez, in the beginning, god create. Oh, I'm sorry. So one of the problems covering Xbox is a business is that it hasn't been going well for a while, and so in I want to say it was 2015, maybe they stopped releasing console sales numbers.

01:21:24
Now, this is something a lot of companies did, even Apple. Remember Apple? You started super transparent. I recorded we sold this many Macs, this many iPhones, this many whatever, so they stopped doing that right. Macs, this many iPhones, this many whatever, so they stopped doing that right. The problem for Xbox is that they compete in a market where the other two players release very explicit numbers, right? So we kind of know exactly. Well, we literally know how many PlayStation 5s have been sold, how many Nintendo Switches now have been sold. You missed this, richard, last week, but the Nintendo did their latest quarterly financial release and, uh, had to revise their estimates again. So by the end of nintendo's, yeah, downward, sorry um pitching the switch to for so long.

01:22:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I think they're actually hurting switch sales.

01:22:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
People are waiting yeah, so they're not gonna. Their goal was, by the end of the fiscal year, for switch to be the best selling console of all time. It's gonna just miss it barely.

01:22:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
But obviously this year it will. It's easy to fix. You just bring a discounted version of the switch that's right.

01:22:20 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
They'll definitely keep it in the market for a while.

01:22:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It'll be fine just, you got to drain the shelves. What are you gonna do? Plow them, sell them off. Well, I mean, look, make enough to make it the best selling of all time, just and then well, no, it's.

01:22:32 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
It's fine to have a lower. There's going to be compatibility between the games and it's OK to have this. That's fine. But in Microsoft's case, we've had to deal with all these kind of soft numbers for a long time.

01:22:42
Microsoft uses different metrics for success, because the sales numbers are not a measure of success. So there's this engagement so many users, so many monthly average users, so many people. Every once in a while we will get a Game Pass number. We haven't got one of those in a while. But so there's a video game company you probably heard of called Take-Two. They did their quarterly results Not particularly good, by the way, but whatever and they just kind of throw it on a slide. Like 94-plus million, the current generation consoles have been sold as of November 2024. Now generation nine means PlayStation five and Xbox series X and S, and we know how many PlayStations have been sold, which means we sort of know how many Xboxes have been sold, even though Microsoft hasn't told us. I've gotten some weird pushback about this, as if, like, somehow we're guessing on this. And yes, I mean I would use the word estimate, I would also use the word educated in there somewhere, because we're not pulling a number out of anyone's butt or anything.

01:23:43 - Richard Campbell (Host)
We know how many you made. You know how many ship the stores. You may or may not know, my name was actually sold in the stores, but somewhere in there is these guys have insight into the channel that we do not.

01:23:51 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So this is not a random source like this is you. I'm not saying it's 100% accurate, but it's accurate enough. So here's the thing If you do the math, that means that fewer, probably fewer than 30 million Xbox Series X and S consoles have been sold in this generation, which is less than half of the 65.5 million we knew that Sony had sold through that same timeframe. Roughly it's a month off, but close enough, right? Sony did not sell 10 million more in one month.

01:24:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
They might have said a million or two, it's close box.

01:24:21 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Didn't sell 30 million more to be competitive, so yeah, so in the previous console generation and again we went through that entire thing not knowing what they were selling, the, the general feeling and it was based on some reports like this and some other things that whatever estimates from whatever analysts etc. Was that sony was outselling microsoft at that time from by about two to one. And the feeling in the current generation and you can go back and look at this it's horrible every quarter double digit and big double digit losses in revenues quarter over quarter, like year over year, rather quarterly year over year in console hardware revenues. It's. It has to stop somewhere like it's.

01:25:00 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It's bizarre how long this is going on this stop is the question.

01:25:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So we've gotten reports that are much vaguer than this, that have suggested maybe this gap might have grown to as big as three to one. Right, but whatever the number is, it explains the xbox, which is the thing I said earlier about software. They'll meet the in this case, players where they are, and it's why, you see, xbox is more about being a platform that works everywhere, or as many places as they can. You're going to see Switch 2 games, more games on PlayStation, pc games, cross-platform, blah, blah, blah, whatever. Um, what this means is if this figure is accurate and I did write it that way, I didn't just say like this figure is accurate, but it seems good to me.

01:25:41
Sony is currently outselling xbox by about 2.25 to 1, and I gotta say that is not bad compared to what we thought it was. And just you know, just looking at how much money they're just erupting into the world on these consoles, it's just not working out. So, look, we can debate whether Microsoft will or will not be successful with this new strategy. I think I've made this case a lot of times. I think it's the right strategy. I think it's the one that could work. They are the biggest game publisher in the world now yeah.

01:26:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, let's see Meantime.

01:26:16 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
while the consoles aren't doing well, they own the majority of game houses right and with that in mind, they had a major new release this week not really uh king, which is the other part of activision blizzard we don't really talk about because sometimes depending.

01:26:30
That's the mobile game story they were so excited about so even when it was in a standalone, like when activision was its own company before microsoft bought it it was they would refer to themselves as activision, activision blizzard and activision blizzard king, sometimes in the same paragraph. So they're different names, but those are the three primary components. Um, microsoft had made the case in the past that, uh, it wasn't so much about Call of Duty, although fantastic, they needed to get into the mobile space and that was what the King part of that business did. So most people in the Microsoft space are familiar with King because Candy Crush was included in Windows for a horrible short period of time, and if you didn't like the new Outlook, I got to tell you Candy Crush is stupid or whatever. So what I can only describe is the perfect king slash microsoft mashup.

01:27:19
The latest version of this game franchise is called candy crush solitaire, uh, which I assume will be followed by a candy crush mind sweeper, candy crush reversi, candy crush pinball, oh yeah, 3d or whatever, like you know. Um, so there you go. So I'm, I'm, what? Am I? 50? I think I'm 58, 58 years old? Uh, I have to do the math on that because I'm old and uh I. There's no version of my life where I play this freaking game. But whatever it's uh, I'm sure it's big or something with the kids or whatever, I don't know everybody plays some version of candy crush at some point in their life.

01:27:53
You can't deny it's not just a thing I'm trying to think if I've ever played it. I think I've played games like candy crush.

01:28:00 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
There was a game on windows phone that was uh, I think it was called bejeweled, maybe yeah same species yeah, bejeweled, but yeah, there are quite a few of those match three, match four games, and yeah, I don't. I don't know if I've ever played Candy Crush proper either, but I've played one or two.

01:28:17 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I assume it's exactly like Wordle it's intelligent.

01:28:22 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Definitely Challenges the brain, absolutely, honestly, something I don't know. Wow, look at the time and we've already made it to, I know We've powered through this the tips and picks of the week and it of course starts out with a wonderful. I guess you've got kind of a set of tips of the week.

01:28:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, more than I expected to have. In fact, between the time I wrote that, put the notes in here and then started the show, I actually added two items to this. So Richard was there when my phone buzzed and I looked down and it was the guy I work with and he said we're locked out of our one of our twitter accounts.

01:29:02 - Richard Campbell (Host)
That was a great morning for you. You were very excited.

01:29:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, I handled it in a very adult fashion, so the um actually stomp off.

01:29:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You just said I have to go exactly.

01:29:11 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
And then there was breakfast without you, the cape unfurled and he was gone and it was a blast of smoke. But the but within minutes of this I also got an oh no, brad texted me and he said I can't upload the latest video to our youtube channel. Could you reinstate me as a manager or whatever? I'm like, yeah, sure. So I told the story. I don't want to beat this death. I've actually retold the story many times because it's trauma and that's how I get through it.

01:29:35
But YouTube blocked me out of my YouTube channel without any warning. We had switched the ownership over to me two years ago two years prior when I took control of my part of the company and we had been uploading videos for two years and then we couldn't. So, yeah, I went back. I didn't have breakfast I for two years, and then we couldn't. So, yeah, I went back. I didn't have breakfast. I went back to the room.

01:29:57
I spent a bunch of time on a chat with YouTube support, which the word support should be in air quotes, because they didn't get any. I was very upset with these people. I then spent the week. You know, we flew home from Puerto Vallarta. We I kept checking in, kept checking. Can we get you know, can we?

01:30:14
Whatever, and again without beating it to death, to get this back I had to go back to the owner of the company before, ask him to reinstate Brad's Google Workspace account, reset the password so I could get into it and then they could send the code to them, to him. And the first time it asked for an authentication app authentication, which don't have. So I asked, looked for other forms and it had his phone number. Last two numbers were there and I knew those were brad's number, so I texted brad's like please give me the code, do this. And he did. And then I went in to switch the ownership back to me. For the second time. I got into the account and it asked for an authentication again and this time there was no choice it had to go through the authenticator app. And I texted brad, knowing the answer, and I said you're going to be able to, can you?

01:31:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
do you give me the authenticator?

01:31:05 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
yeah, he did. He's, even though this thing had been dead for two years, was still sitting there in his app and I got the code. It's the only reason I got back into the scout. They never would have done it for me, sure, yeah, so I've been undergoing this kind of uh, it's going to be a year-long pursuit of, uh, rethinking a lot of things related to where data is stored and, you know, backed up and whatever all kinds of stuff we I've been talking about this. So, uh, I have now written three articles about this.

01:31:29
I've, if anyone wants to know anything about google, uh, youtube brand accounts. I know more than anybody anybody on earth right now, including the company. I've made a lot of mistakes with it, but it is a bizarre thing that I can, with my Paul at throtcom Google workspace account, sign into YouTube, go to a pop, a dropdown and select between different brand accounts. So I have one for a turn of spring, which is the thing I do with my wife, and I have one for throtcom. I can't use those brand accounts to sign into things like Google search, google maps, google Gmail, whatever it turns out, there are three services that you can use these things with YouTube. Obviously, that's actually what it's for Google photos, interestingly, but also Google takeout. So I made the mistake of doing Google takeout with my primary account, thinking it would give me everything. I was thinking I was going to get eternal spring, I was going to get throughoutcom, I was going to get whatever was in my account, right. And uh, I did it. I just did back it up for now. Eventually I'm going to do a NAS, you know, and I'll start replicating you know whatever. And uh, I put it together and I was like, oh, this doesn't have half of my videos, it doesn't have all the videos I did with Brad for First Ring Daily. Like where is this stuff? And I'm thinking I can't go to Brad and be like, hey, brad, could you download all the videos yourself? I look, why can't I? I own this thing, why can't I get in? But I had made the mistake. I didn't sign into Takeout with my brand account. So yesterday I did, and I every time I do take out.

01:32:57
If you ever use this service, it's actually pretty fantastic, but also pretty convoluted. I always choose two gigabyte files because they're just easier to download. You have to do it manually. There's no way to automate this. And, um, I think the first time I did it would not understanding. It wasn't all of it. There were 81 of them or something. Right, I was out at lunch with my wife yesterday. My phone buzzed. I looked out it's an email from Google. You know, google, it's like your takeout is ready. I'm like nice and I'm going to get the number wrong. Let me just see if I can find this number. It's crazy. This number is nuts. It is 20 terabytes.

01:33:35
Well, yeah, that's the thing 1,373 two-gigabyte files, nice Yikes. And I literally this is what I said I saw that on my phone. We're sitting there eating lunch and I said we're going to need a bigger boat. Yeah, and my wife who's apparently not in my head said excuse me, and I'm like I thought I was going to be able to handle this with the thing I had here, and now I can't. No, so I've done, I'm sorry.

01:34:03 - Richard Campbell (Host)
This is a great conversation about should you go NAS like what's the right?

01:34:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
way to do this, Yep, so it's actually it's not going to be as bad as it sounds Like. I looked at the whatever it is. The number was 1373, whatever files, and some of them are like 1.6, 1.

01:34:19 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You know like they're not all 2 gigabytes, so it's not 2.7 terabytes, it's 2 terabytes. It's somewhere in there.

01:34:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Whatever the number is, I don't know. So okay, but I still have to download them whatever.

01:34:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You can buy a drive that'll fit that.

01:34:29 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I did.

01:34:39 - Richard Campbell (Host)
I literally uh when I get home from mexico I'm going to get a nas, I'm going to start this getting a setup and, if it works out, the way I want it to.

01:34:42 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm going to do. I'll do two, and you know the other argument here is to use cold storage services in the cloud. Yeah, like what you, I mean amazon glacier or whatever.

01:34:46 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, I'm concerned about the same issue from the point of view of yeah, if I get locked on this account, all this stuff is gone, so I need it backed up somewhere. It just needs to be under a different set of credentials, that's right so whether those are credentials that are local. It could be anything right, or they're in the cloud, it doesn't matter, as long as they're a different set of credentials.

01:35:04 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, in in one of these articles I, 20 years ago, I had a, a 30 gigabyte, which you know today is hilarious. Gig is an mp3 file. I know, uh, go bad on a computer and I lost a bunch of stuff. So that's, that's how you get religion right. You have a loss, you have a problem. You're like all right, I'm not this is not.

01:35:23 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Everybody has to lose something before they really clue in the yeah.

01:35:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I went to my wife and I said you remember this literally 20 years ago I mean almost to the month 20 years ago and I said, uh, I'd done some research and I said I need to buy two, which at the time were ginormous one terabyte external hard drives, firewire 800 interface primarily for the Mac market, but I found a FireWire 800 card I could put in my Windows server and my plan was I was going to back up on some schedule to both drives the first time and then leave one at my parents' house and then a month later I would back up again and then I'd swap the drives to back up on some schedule to both drives the first time and then leave one at my parents' house and then a month later I would back up again and then I'd swap the drives and back up again in a month. And I did that for several years. But of course, cloud services happen one drive, google, whatever. So we have all these different options and it was actually literally 10 years ago. I got a NAS which at that time had two six terabyte drives mirrored, but only one of them, obviously one house, like a normal person, and I used that for several years.

01:36:23
It's out of support. Now I can't use it online anymore. I can't, like I can't access it from here because it's in Pennsylvania or whatever. So I'm kind of overdue doing this, but I think the shift for me is going to be. To date I've been putting my most important data, which is our photo collection, which I consolidated it's our work files for me date back 30 years and those things are replicated. They're in OneDrive or in Google, whatever they're in a NAS at home. But to me, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make the, the nas, as be the that are going to replicate to each other, be like the primary source of that stuff and I'll just I'll back up to google drive or one drive, etc because I like the three copy solution always makes me more comfortable, right and it's got that geographic bit to it right which you want, and so you're operating youtube.

01:37:14 - Richard Campbell (Host)
You have a local store and then you're synced off-site. So yep so ultimately, and all with different credentials, like I think it's a credential issue that's going to get you. You get locked out of a google account and everything's under that google account.

01:37:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You're hooped this was look, I do this, but it's. It's sort of like saying look, when bad things happen a lot of time or even a good thing you're having a child like you know what, you know your life's going to change. You have no idea how much your life is going to change.

01:37:40 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, yeah so it's only doesn't matter how many people explain it to you.

01:37:43 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
You just don't understand. Logically you can explain. It does not matter, so logically I knew this was possible. We've all heard stories about this. Some guy had pictures of his kid in the bathtub. They, they're cute, got some flag for child porn.

01:37:57
Yeah, they got flagged lost his account, never got it back. Great, there are all my photos. What the hell, google? Whatever, it is right this happens, but it has to happen to you, right? So I'm not thanking Google for this because they were terrible, but this was a reminder that I need to fix this. So I'm going to spend a big chunk of this year fixing this and you know I've already made a bunch of mistakes. It's hilarious, but that's what. I do, yeah, I struggle through it.

01:38:20 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So you can follow along Me getting away from actually having full rack servers down to Justice Synology. I feel pretty good about myself.

01:38:27 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
So I went back and looked. I have my archives there you know.

01:38:32
So I went back and I have this stuff, but there are multiple locations. I found the Lacey it was a Lacey was the name of the company external hard drive. I went to the Wayback Machine, found the website from that month and, sure enough, there is $9.99. My wife tore a credit, by the way, because I went to her and said I need to spend $2,000. This is what I'm going to do. And she was like just do it, I know, you know what you're doing. I, I know this is important, I don't have you, don't have to explain it, I'll just do it. And, um, you know, same reaction, like we're having the same conversation 20 years later. Now, I gotta you know. She's like yep, just do it, just do it.

01:39:04 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So I'm doing it, I'm doing the same money again.

01:39:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That's the the weird coincidence. Whatever that 100, so that's happening, and uh yeah, so I'll be suffering a lot this year. Um, bill gates last week came out with the first of a planned three autobiographies. This covers his life up through the formation of microsoft, so the book ends with him driving from albuquerque to seattle, right.

01:39:27 - Richard Campbell (Host)
So the famous and getting busted right twice.

01:39:30 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Yeah, you guys, I pulled over twice. I'm not sure if this is hilarious. I have mixed feelings about Bill Gates, but his I very much feel like he's rehabilitating image right now 100%.

01:39:43
But if you think about his life and you think about what I do for a living, the part I care about is the middle one, right, the Microsoft part. So that's going to come out in some two, five years, whatever it is. So I was thinking I'm not going to care about this book too, too much, I have to say. This book is much better than I thought it was going to be and it also covers more of a period that I that I care about, than I thought it was going to. I I didn't think it would have any of the albuquerque stuff, so it actually has all of that stuff. So between his and he go by the way he goes I this is I think it blows my mind that it never occurred to me. But Richard, you'll know this, and Mike, he's maybe so famous everyone kind of knows this. But when Bill Gates was young, there was two things that were really striking. There were a bunch of executives at Microsoft who imitated the way he looked and the way he did things.

01:40:28
So, like Jeff Rakes is a great example, but he had this weird habit he would sit in a chair and kind of rock back and forth and this is how he would process information so you could tell he was deep thinking or whatever when he did that, but he would do it without realizing he was doing it and of course, today they would have thrown him in a padded cell no, I'm just kidding, they would have. You know he'd have ADHD. He's on the spectrum, whatever it is. This is a thing we didn to talk about in the 1970s, so he was undiagnosed, right, and he talks very openly about that.

01:41:00
I think that part of the book is really interesting, but to me, from the industry perspective, it was a great reminder because I grew up reading these books the Genesis books about Microsoft, like Gates, by Stephen Maness, or Hard Drive, or the early books about Apple same thing and I always felt like I missed it. This industry we're in was invented in the mid seventies to late early eighties and it was gone. So by the time I was of age late eighties, whatever I missed it, right. And it turns out the internet was a nice little. You know, actually you're going to be okay, this stuff's still happening in our AI, whatever, but I had had read all the stuff. I'd read it multiple times, I you know, and but in more recent years.

01:41:39
You know paul allen, sadly has passed away but he wrote his memoir idea man, which, by the way, also worth reading, and between that book sorry, and and the, the final quarter of the gates book, we now have what I would say is kind of the definitive story of what happened with them inventing the thing. So I wrote an article about this. But the the thing I want people to know is the incredible thing that these people achieved the perfect nexus of time, place and people to invent this industry. Paul allen wrote he called it a simulator, but an emulator that would emulate first 808, 8008 Intel code on the PDP 10 that he had access to, and then did it for the 8080, which is the thing the Altair was based on, the first personal computer. Gates, using that emulator and a debugger that he wrote, created an incredible version of basic for the day and then later three versions never had hardware to run this thing on saved it to paper tape. Paul Allen got in a plane, realized on the way there he had forgotten to write.

01:42:47
The bootloader wrote it in assembly language 8088, 8080 assembly language, a chip he has never seen on paper right, got to the company and it was like 118 instructions too which requires whatever, that is, times eight, yeah, across a bank of switches to enter those all in. Yeah, got it right on the first try. And it said ready, how much memory do you have? And he typed in seven, you know seven, two, six, eight, whatever the number was. And then he typed in two plus two and it said four and it worked the first time. Yeah, he then entered the code for a lunar lander game, which worked the first time. All of their code worked. In fact, it was better on the real hardware, which he didn't expect, because a pdp 11 or 10 was much more powerful, ostensibly. But now that it's running natively on the hardware, he was like this thing is flying and that is the start of microsoft and it's the start of the personal computer industry.

01:43:48
And I'm sorry, but whatever I think about this person and these people and whatever or you think about them, that is incredible. It's incredible. You should read this book. That's my book. Yeah, it's excellent. All right, I feel like I've talked too much, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold off on my app. I'm going to show off. I'm going to hold off on the epic. I'll just do that next week, cause I do want to talk about this and I don't, I don't want to waste any more time with me, blah, blah, blah, and so let's just do that next week, if that's okay.

01:44:14 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I have yet that. I mean. That works for me, it works for you, richard Campbell I uh, I'm definitely getting that book.

01:44:24 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
That was, uh, that sounds really interesting. It's more worth it than I thought it was going to be. Um, I was kind of not sure, but it's, it's very good. It's, it's, it's very, it feels honest and it's well-written.

01:44:32 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Nice, all right, that means it's time to talk about the Run as Radio for this week.

01:44:37 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Mm-hmm. This week's episode's with my friend, robert Smith, fellow MVP, has been for a long, long time and one of my go-tos for Windows Server, and so we were talking about what does it take to move to Windows Server 2025? Now that it's been out for a while and so the conservative sysadmins are like do I want this? And it's a real good question of is it necessary to move up? And a big piece of this ended up being the active directory conversation, because, yeah, active directory is not an easy thing to get rid of.

01:45:07 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
you do still need to authenticate on premise and doing it through the cloud kind of feel like they touched it for the first time in a long time, too Like that in a meaningful way.

01:45:16 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Yeah, 22 had some things, but 20, you know again in mentioning that KB article, because that was the big push on we've got to fight against these lateral exploits through Active Directory that the black hats are using, and so one of the things that 2025 definitely builds up some stronger functionality in Active Directory that is both secure and easier to deal with. But it does mean lifting your AD functional level, which is again, these are old school conversations that means the functional level you want is server 2016, which is not that new. It's 10 years old. It's crazy. Yeah, um, but that means you have to eliminate all older versions of active directory from your infrastructure right to be able to go to 2016 functional level. So that's it's generally speaking.

01:46:07
Today, for most organizations, you only have one or two bare metal ad servers. They're your cold start servers, and then the rest are virtual machines. So you build out a template of a virtual machine relatively small because it's just doing 80 workloads, nothing else. There's no reason to combine it with anything and then make sure they're pushed in the right location so that they are available locally for however widely distributed your place was, and then you push up your functional levels, and this also involves certs and a couple of other things. So there's some work to be done there and it's good, old-fashioned work, but you get some wins. Some wins when you get to 2025. You get some functionality that make people a little uncomfortable, like smb over quick. You know, at its essential level, smb over quick is. You know, at its essential level. Smb over quick is exposing a file server to the internet. How you feel it like that should bother you because you've been living behind firewalls for a long time. Now, quick is very secure.

01:47:08 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Like I was going to say is this better than HTTPS?

01:47:12 - Richard Campbell (Host)
or yeah, it is, and, but more and more importantly, it's very efficient for file transfers and it takes load off your VPN. So you've got this whole conversation going on about. Maybe you know I could just hold stuff to one drive and be an M365 guy and that takes care of this problem, because that's certainly what they count on. Is SMB over quick, but if you've still got on prem file stores, you can get that same feature without having to ram through your VPN for it. So SMB compression another big feature on it. So good conversation from someone who's really doing the work. Like part of Robert Smith's daily job is helping companies get 2025 running, and so he's going through different organizations that are battling these problems, and so it was good to get him in on the show and just talk through. Okay, here's what I've seen over the past few months. These are the problems you're gonna have, but these is these are the wins you're gonna like you must talk to jeff wolsey from time to time oh yeah, well, he's on.

01:48:08
I try to get wolsey on every year. He's just tough to get, but last time I had him on he could, couldn't, wasn't allowed to call it server 2025. It was server v next.

01:48:15 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I'm sorry, of course I did listen. Yes, yes, yes, he was especially.

01:48:18 - Richard Campbell (Host)
It was like a lot of hyper v, I think at the time yeah, and then and you know that's an interesting angle on it you know I've been holding off on a show of like. Okay, so you had to flee vmware. How you feeling now because of the horrors that happened on the vmware side? Because for the most part vmware people look down on hyper v. Big time, right, yeah I mean of course yeah, but not anymore.

01:48:42
Well, it's kind of like oh how you feeling now? Right, like, virtualization is good, but virtualization vendors hard. Yeah, you know, very problematic. Anyway, robert's a good guy, super easy conversation. He just he was just straight do's and don'ts. This is going to be hard. This is going to be easy. Look for this, watch out for that. Boop, boop, boop, boop. You spend a half hour on that. You're in a better place for moving to 25.

01:49:07 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yes, All right, and now we round out the show with the brown liquor pick of the week.

01:49:15 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Well, I got to look at this. There's two links there Kev for a reason Because the Macmura story. This is the Swedish whiskey, because I was in Sweden last week. This is the one I wrote for last week and was unable to present Right. Macmura is actually a village about 200 kilometers north of Stockholm. It was originally a mining area. This is the ironworks, going back to like the 1600s, although the ironworks finally shut down in the 1970s as it just became too expensive to operate. It says so. This is not old whiskey, this is new whiskey.

01:49:51
Macmirror was formed in 1999, eight friends on a fishing on a skiing trip, all bringing different whiskeys, ended up talking about whiskey and how. Why are there no great Swedish whiskeys? The Swedes make their own alcohol. There's a Zach of it but they thought well, why couldn't we make whiskey? One of those eight is a fellow by the name of Magnus Dandenell who become the CEO. So they started operations in 2002.

01:50:15
Took a little while to get going, but to make a product quickly they did a clever thing they use 30 liter casks little little casks, instead of 500 liters or 600 liters, 30. So you got a lot more wood contact for your new make. So you age the spirit pretty quickly there. It has its own quirks, but they definitely tried to make a Swedish whiskey and of course the Swedes grow their own barley, so that's fine. They even have their own peat. So in fact they went all out when they first started making product to see can we get every ingredient for our whiskey, down to the oak barrels in Sweden, in fact within 150 kilometers of distillery, and ended up pulling it off, except for the yeast. The yeast actually comes from a separate source. So their original distillery was actually in the old MacMira Ironworks. If you go to that building now it says MacMira Distillery on the side of it. But after a few years making some of the money, they built a newer distillery as well.

01:51:17
But and everything they went on the modern style. So a lot of stainless steel, not a lot of wood. The only thing that's not swedish are the forethigh stills. So these are the four sizes, the guy who make the stills in scotland and that's where they got their stills from. Uh, they use swedish oak as much as they can, but but of course buy bourbon casks because they're arguably cheaper than the actual Swedish wood and they have problems with temperature. It's too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. It's not the consistencies that Scotland has, and so one of the tricks they do to age their whiskey is they use the old iron mine. They came with the license with the iron work, so they actually put. They cleared out a chunk of the mine and used it for barrel storage because temperature controls are a bit stronger, and they went on from there to actually build storage facilities all over sweden, up above the arctic circle, down on some islands, so they could sort of mix and match.

01:52:13
So very quickly these guys took off as a pretty successful whiskey maker, including hiring a woman by the name of Angela D'Arazzio as their master distiller, starting in 2004. She was the expert and she really liked the experimentation they were doing. And so the whiskey, the particular version I'm talking about today if you're going to go, buy some Mac Mirror, because they make a lot of special editions, but the brooks whiskey is their fundamental. It started coming out in 2010. The earliest have no age on them, which means they're, you know, three to eight years old. They're relatively young. If you look hard, you can find older ones now there's like a 10 year old, a 13 year old, uh, 2011.

01:52:52
They built a new distillery they called Gravity. They had this whole idea of building it as a tower. It's 37 meters tall, so over 100 feet high, and the idea was to lift the basics, the water, barley and yeast to the top of the structure and use gravity to work its way down into barrels at the bottom of the building, which then go to storage. The design of the distillery was to do experimentations with different barrel combinations, different aging strategies and so forth so they could make a variety of whiskeys. By 2013, they made their first peated whiskey called Svendruk. They still use the drying technique with electric heat, but then they introduce smoke to it in the finishing steps just to give a little bit of peat flavor to it. Macmira peaked in 2019. They were winning awards all over the place. You could also buy custom casking, so it became a very hip thing for a company to do, like a tour of Macmira and you'd get a 30 liter cask, lay it up yourself and then it would go into storage until it was aged enough and you could do your own custom bottling.

01:54:00
Where the story takes a turn is in when the pandemic hits, and I think it's because the company was highly leveraged that Magnus realizes that they're in trouble. It's tough to run the company in the pandemic scenario, so he brings in a professional. He steps aside. He says the founder. Now he's to run the company in the pandemic scenario, so he brings in a professional. He steps aside. He says the founder now has been running the company for a better part of 20 years, steps aside to bring in a pro guy named Johan Larsson, who used to work for a company called Peak Performance, as a CFO, to sort of optimize the company. It appears to not go well because within a year, d'arzio, their master distiller that's been around now for 15 years, immediately leaves. Although before she goes, in 2021, her last product is called Intelligence, which I haven't been able to get my hands on, but it was a version of whiskey quote made with AI. So they collaborated with ThoughtWorks to build an AI model based on the data streams coming out of the Gravity Distillery with all their different aging and blending and barrel options to try and find an optimal whiskey. And that's what intelligence is. And it's the last product that Diarizio made before she left.

01:55:19
So the pandemic obviously took a beating on the company. Their sales dropped off, market shipping was limited, there was all these sorts of problems, and so this Johan Larson didn't seem to deliver on his goals. Within a couple of years he's out in 2023. Uh, he blames the pandemic. He also blamed the ukraine war. I'm not quite sure why. I just read the press release and the acting the guy who takes over as acting ceo is the marketing director. So last year there was their 25th anniversary did this big party? They had these special casts, everything was exciting, and by february of 20 and by August 24th they filed for bankruptcy. Now this was a problem, because A everybody's a little stunned how do you run out of money like this? But I think it's just. They were over leveraged financially and were expecting constant growth and just were caught with their pants down on the pandemic and weren't able to get their refinancing done.

01:56:18
But, like most whiskey companies, they had a lot of barrels in storage, including all these custom barrelings. They started back in 2019. So there was all these folks who had paid for these barrels and wanted them back. But now they were locked down under bankruptcy and it's like but wait, we paid for that barrel and it turned out they didn't pay for the barrel, paid for the liquor that was inside the barrel. The barrel was stolen by the company and that was controlled and they weren't allowed to access it. So there was a big row over that and plus, they were under all under bond so they hadn't paid tax on it. So you couldn't get it out without paying the tax on it. So it was locked up.

01:56:48
And out of this comes, uh, in the fall last year, this guy named leon Hero, who had joined the board back in 23 when Larson left, so I think he came in. He's a fairly famous Swedish investor. He had a fair bit of money and so he did some bridge financing in 23 and came in as a board member and then when the bankruptcy thing goes down, he leaves. But by October he comes back with another investment company called Number One Capital. They refinance, he brings it out of bankruptcy. They're generally cheering him as a hero, which is funny because that's his name. But it looks like it was a tactic that he wasn't happy with the way the company was running. But right now, if you go to the website and I think you pull this up for a moment there, micah the only thing it says on the website is don't worry, we're going to make everybody whole, just watch this. So the main website is there's nothing to see right now because of all of this turmoil. So I also provided a whiskey based link because if you actually want to look at Brooks Whiskey, that's what it's about.

01:57:51
Brooks Whiskey is a classic style style of sherry cask whiskey.

01:57:58
It hasn't got an age on it per se it's probably an eight-year-old. They do Swedish oak with a sherry finish. It's about 60 US if you can find it at 40% ABV and it's completely drinkable. It's a perfectly normal whiskey, which is impressive for a small company that hadn't been around, been around for very long and is now, you know, struggling to to come back out of it and we'll see what happens.

01:58:23
You know the the experience of these young new age whiskey companies has been just up, up, up, up, up, right, can't, kind of can't go wrong, and this is one of the rock stars of the new age that just has fallen on hard times for any number of reasons and I think it'll have to come down to a lack of experienced leadership. Dan Donnell, I appreciate, stepped aside immediately when he knew he was over his head. They just got the wrong guy to fill in and he couldn't find his way forward, the way you run a company when you're in trouble is different, and finding the right person for that is hard, and so leadership has been the problem, and they've taken a really good company and got it right heavily on the rocks. Hopefully they can pull themselves out, but it was not the story.

01:59:06 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
I originally wanted to talk about Swedish whiskey while I was in.

01:59:09 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Sweden, and all of a sudden this craziness came up.

01:59:14 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Well, how dare you? I thought that was good. I don't think you intended it, but it was great, uh, on the rocks anyway, um, thank you. Thank you for the brown liquor pick of the week. Thank you for this episode of windows weekly.

01:59:28
If you out there uh would like to catch the show as soon as it's, you know, put together very nicely by, uh, our one, it's well composed. As soon as it's put together very nicely by our one, kevin King, it's well composed. As soon as it's well composed For its age, then you can head to twittv slash www where you'll find the show notes for the show as well as the latest episodes. Subscribe to audio. Subscribe to video. We do record the show live every Wednesday roundabout 2 pm Eastern, 11 am Pacific time. That's where you can tune in to get the show. Also, another little reminder about Club Twit twittv slash club twit, to help us continue to bring these shows to all of you. And now is the time where I say thank you to Richard Campbell uh for being here. Uh, anything you want to plug before we say goodbye?

02:00:22 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Um, no, we're, we're all in good shape. Of course, dotnet rocks and run as radio doing their things and I am working hard to finalize the details on the fabric conference which will be the first week of April in Las Vegas. So if you're interested in microsoft fabric, the data analytics tools, we've got about 8 000 people coming to the mgm grand go to the microsoft community, microsoft fabric community conference to check it out awesome, and paul, what about you, friend Rotcom?

02:00:56 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Anything else?

02:00:58 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Well, my wife and I are working on a book. We haven't talked about that too much, but if you go to Eternalspringcom no EternalspringCDMXcom, sorry you can find out about that there.

02:01:09 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Beautiful. All right, if you want to check out my other shows, well, good luck. No, I'm just kidding. You can head to twintv. We've got many, so that's where you go. Uh, thank you, gentlemen. Thank you all for tuning in this week. Leo will be back next week.

02:01:25 - Paul Thurrott (Host)
Uh, you better bring some gems back.

02:01:27 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
I'm gonna say his chakras will be aligned nice the crystals will be bringing energies Loaded down with alien technologies.

02:01:36 - Richard Campbell (Host)
Can't wait to see the amethyst planted in his nose. It'll be awesome.

02:01:39 - Mikah Sargent (Host)
Yeah, and so, yes, you can count on that next week. And that brings us to the end of this episode of Windows Weekly. Goodbye, everybody, thank you.