Windows Weekly Episode 763 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.

Leo Laporte: (00:00)
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurrott's here, Mary Jo Foley's here. And so are the feature experience packs, the online services experience packs, the web experience packs and more what our web experience packs will find out will also welcome defender back and HoloLens it. Is it dead or just resting? It's it's all coming up next on Windows Weekly podcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley episode 706 3 recorded Wednesday, February 9th, 2022. Like a Leg on a Whale,

Leo Laporte: (00:47)
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Leo Laporte: (01:25)
It's time for Windows Weekly. The show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft. Yes, we're gonna do that with Paul Thurrott from Thurrott.com. There he is right there. And on the left on the lift, it's a Mary Jo Foley from microsoft.com. She's doing jazz hands and together they are the dynamic duo of Microsoft reportage. Hello kids? Yes. Thank you. For Mikah for filling in for me last week, I appreciate that. We're returning him into a Windows guy inch by inch. We are, I like it. It's fun. We are. It's a little, it's a little creepy, but it's fun. I like tempting people to the dark side. Come on. It's nice. It's nice over here. So thank you, Mikah. Yeah, I was in a town so nice.

Leo Laporte: (02:20)
They named it twice Carmel by the sea. Yeah. Carmel dash by dash sea. Yep. And it was quite pleasant. In fact, it's funny because just coincidentally on my Instagram feed a couple of days ago I saw Steve McQueen lounging at the beach at Carmel by the sea. It is a see, I associate that place with Clint. Yeah. Clint, Clint also I don't know if he still owns the Hog's Breath in there. We went by, it was kind of unassuming. I thought I expected something more medieval. I don't know why, but yeah. It's a beautiful, beautiful town, beautiful place. I investigated internet access to see if we could move there. And indeed they, if it was viable, they have fiber. So, and I saw that home prices and I said, well, I guess yeah, I was gonna say, I don't know.

Leo Laporte: (03:16)
I, Carmel is Carmel. Sorry is out there. Yeah. Carmel, Indiana. I can afford of course. Yeah. Well, that's part of the problem was the AT&T formerly known as the Bing Crosby clambake was going on while we were there at pebble beach. So traffic. Oh yeah. Pebble beach pebble beach. Yeah. I used to live in Monterey Pacific Grove nearby this, a great aquarium right there. Right. At Monterey best aquarium. If you've not been in the Monterey bay aquarium, highly recommended. Yeah. Really amazing. It's an area in a long time, but it's beautiful. I know. Same. Yeah. Yep. They've they've done a beautiful job. So we're looking at houses in Carmel, Indiana instead. Sure. Just get a big pool. Besim yeah, exactly. Who needs the ocean? So Hey, Hey Hoho, Windows 11. What's going on? What's the latest feature?

Paul Thurrott: (04:15)
What do you mean? Why have you heard something?

Leo Laporte: (04:15)
We, what packs? We got some packs, baby. What? Yeah. So I think anybody's been using Windows for a while. Well, think of these as the Microsoft, what are they used to call? 'em The fun toys. The, the power toys, power toys. No,

Paul Thurrott: (04:31)
No, actually, you know what though, before we jump into this, Mary Jo, here's some, here's some terminology from the past, right? Yes. We, everyone is familiar with service packs. Most people have at least heard of feature packs and option packs. Right. But Microsoft used to use terminology. They used to have they used to have things called hot fixes. Right. You remember that? Obviously? Yeah. They used to also have something called GDR. Does that term sound familiar? And I, something,

Mary Jo Foley: (04:57)
Something release, Right?

Paul Thurrott: (04:58)
Yeah. Generally deploy release, I think. Or general deployable or deplorable, deplorable release deplorable. Yeah. But I guess like service packs evolved to become GDR. Hot fixes were always GDR. And the point of GDR was that they didn't change any of the functionality. They just fixed bugs. Right. Because some early service packs added new feed customers complained and they walked away from that. So I've been confronting the past lately. So I've been inundated by all these terms from the past, over the past few weeks, GDR is hot fixes service packs. Yeah. Now we have all this, and then there was,

Mary Jo Foley: (05:36)
Do you remember, there, there was a hot debate back in the day about should Fe should feature packs have new features or not have my features. Right. Do you remember that? Like, yeah. Oh yeah.

Paul Thurrott: (05:44)
Right, right, right. Yeah. Also, yeah. The notion of like rollups, which we still kind of talk about. Uyep. And,uanyway. Yeah. I just, I it's, it's interesting how the language has changed. Uyeah. And the debate continues, but I gotta tell you they're escalating

Mary Jo Foley: (06:01)
The air. Oh man. So Leo, I don't know if you were hear when we found this out, but we heard from Panos a couple weeks ago that we're gonna get new features for Windows 11 in the mainstream channel in February. Yes.

Leo Laporte: (06:15)
I, we, we discussed that the a week I left. Yes. That's why I left. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley: (06:19)
Okay. And then you left because you're like enough enough, I don't want the new features. I've had it with

Paul Thurrott: (06:22)
These people. Well, there was a somewhat of a debate about were you gonna get 'em or are you gonna get

Mary Jo Foley: (06:26)
Something? Like, how were you gonna get 'em? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So then we kind of, we Paul and I, and I think some other people too have just said, okay, it's gonna be a cumulative update. That's how they're gonna roll this out. Right. And, and then they put out a blog post last week. That really, I think, I think they thought they were clarifying things, but it just, it made me just like, grab my head and start screaming when I saw this blog post, because they said, okay, there's three ways you're gonna get these.

Paul Thurrott: (06:52)
I mean, a plus for consistency on their part. Right. I mean, yeah. I, I, you all often caution me not to expect anything to change. Yeah. And that's this is because this is why. All right.

Mary Jo Foley: (07:05)
So there's three way, three ways. So we already know you could get a feature update this year in the fall, like that's that we know is supposedly on the roadmap. There's three other ways though, that you could get updates to Windows in the mainstream channel, in least three, at least three. Right? So we already knew about feature, experience packs. This was something that people started finding out about in 2020. And Microsoft wouldn't talk about like, when they were getting Windows 10 on their system, they noticed they were getting something called a feature experience pack. And when we went to Microsoft and said, what is this you're putting on people's machines? They said, no comment. The so later we found out the feature experience pack is the way they were going to deliver some features independent of the us itself. So the first feature pack had things like the updated sniping tool, a text input panel shell suggestion, user interface, just like a random collection of stuff. It

Paul Thurrott: (07:56)
Just sorry to interject, but a little go ahead. Point to this is, if you go into the settings app and go to system about it actually calls out the Windows feature experience, pack level that you're at separately from the OS version. And the reason for that is you might be in Windows 10, version 21 H one 20 a oh four or whatever the version numbers are. You could even be on Windows 11, something, and those experience feature or future experience pack numbers might be the same. Like you'll be on the same level, regardless of the OS version that speaks to the importance of, or to the point of it, which is updating the OS outside of the versioning. Right. Right. The, I wanna keep everyone up to date.

Mary Jo Foley: (08:42)
Right. So you think, okay. Feature, experience packs. That's how they're gonna deliver updates outside of the us. Oh no. There's more last fall October. They put a blog post out that talked about online service experience packs. Another one of these ones. We went back to them and said, so what's that. And how is that different feature experience, pack, no comment. Right? So they didn't wanna talk about it then all they'll still say about this is another way we're gonna deliver features independent of the operating system that they also did say feature experience. PACS can deliver broad improvements over multiple areas of Windows online service experience, PACS, delivering improvements for a specific experience and an example, the new Microsoft Microsoft account settings page that we talked about last week. Correct. Okay. So there's two, we knew about those two last week in the blog post, they add a third, which we had not heard about to date, right? Web experience packs, not the same as online service experience packs, not the same as feature experience packs those other two, go through Windows update. The web experience pack makes you take your update through the Microsoft store. Uso they said, this is another way we're gonna update features, but this one's gonna make you go through the store. Uand an example of something that will be delivered this way is the widgets experience.

Paul Thurrott: (10:06)
Right. Okay. Which I speculated was the case, but you, yes, you did got them to confirm this. I did.

Mary Jo Foley: (10:13)
Right.

Paul Thurrott: (10:14)
You get them to talk, how does that work? Here's

Mary Jo Foley: (10:16)
What, no, here's what I did. I saw the wording and I said, so you guys have never talked about this before. You don't even have a link in your blog post about what this is. So what is it? And I wait and wait and wait and wait and wait. And then they come back sometimes with some words. And that was the case this time. Nice. Okay. Yeah. But, okay. So now patch Tuesday came and went this week. Some people thought maybe we would get the new features on patch Tuesday or in conjunction with the patches that did not happen. So I went back to them yesterday and I said, so no new features yet. Are we gonna see those still this month? Yes. You will. More details to come, that's it?

Paul Thurrott: (10:58)
Well, they still have the C week so to speak. We do, we do next week. Yep. That's right. And tech, I mean, technically, I guess they could EA well, what is, what is C week the letter C C the B week, B week is when they, what is what? It's the first Tuesday of the month. I don't really think they have an a week buts. If they did. It would be the first oh they do because of the patch Tuesday, they do have a week patch. Tuesday's B week. That's right. And then C

Mary Jo Foley: (11:23)
A week was office. Yeah. Office was a patch. Tuesday was B C was preview of features coming in the next patch

Leo Laporte: (11:31)
Tuesday. Right. So B, C week is the patch Tuesday. The, the conjuring that just

Mary Jo Foley: (11:36)
Happened. Right.

Leo Laporte: (11:37)
Okay. It's the week. See week. Okay. No, I got it.

Mary Jo Foley: (11:42)
Yeah. Yeah. One, one of my followers on Twitter yesterday said we need to also have after patch Tuesday, weeping, Wednesday, because there's always patches a break.

Leo Laporte: (11:52)
Exactly.

Mary Jo Foley: (11:53)
Yeah. So we went back and forth about Windows Weekly with weeping, Wednesday.

Paul Thurrott: (12:00)
We'll cry over a beer together. Everybody we will.

Mary Jo Foley: (12:03)
Exactly. Yeah. So that's all we know right now. We know the vehicles there. Maybe there may be more kinds of packs that we don't know about. Like these are the three that we now know about. They seem to just keep multiplying like rabbits peach pack, service pack, this, that when these come out in February, it'll be interesting to see how and where the different features that they talked about, show up, like which ones show up where, right. Yeah. We, we know widgets will be widgets will be a web, a web service pack notepad, the new notepad and the new Windows media player also through the store. So I guess web service pack.

Leo Laporte: (12:45)
Well, those, I think those are just app updates. Just apps.

Mary Jo Foley: (12:48)
Okay. Yeah. Those are just separate. Then the other features that they talked about, like what was the other one that you talked about making it easier to juggle different Windows or something? I was, I was I couldn't figure out what that was, but when they described it, I'm like, I don't even know what that is. Yeah. I mean, in a way there's Android apps. I, it doesn't

Leo Laporte: (13:13)
Doesn't matter like how they're delivered in a way. I, I, I guess

Mary Jo Foley: (13:16)
It doesn't in a

Leo Laporte: (13:17)
Way, right. It might only matter to the people that are seeking these things. If you hear that some update is out and, you know, if only you had one place to look for everything, how convenient would that be? But

Mary Jo Foley: (13:27)
No, you know, you know who it matters to as admins, right? Like, they're like, okay, these are gonna come in and all different places on the machines that we're looking at. Right. And so now we gotta figure out where they are. And

Leo Laporte: (13:39)
Is it, this is pretty much how malware is delivered. Right. Different attached vectors.

Mary Jo Foley: (13:45)
Yeah. I don't know. Like sometimes I, I am mad. They don't give us enough detail, granular level detail, and blog posts. And sometimes I'm like, do you really need to tell every how you're making a sausage? I don't know, do you right.

Leo Laporte: (13:58)
Right. Right. Well, it makes them, if, I guess it makes it sound like they're doing something, when anyone who's using Windows 11 could tell you they haven't done anything. So, you know, I, I guess it's on the way or whatever, but even those February updates, they promise with the exception of a preview version of the Android app store, or are not monumental in any way. And even that app store experience is not great, you know? Right. I've been using a release preview channel. It's hasn't changed since last, whenever that came out in preview first I remember, or whatever, it's just, you know, there's only a handful of interesting apps. It's mostly garbage games. Yep. Those apps, by the way, speaking, updating update through that Amazon app, not through the store. So you have to deal with another set of notifications, another set of updating routines, you know, whatever and, and okay. Fine. Whatever. But it's not that store and a store thing. I think we were promised back in June last year.

Mary Jo Foley: (14:55)
So I'm, I'm thinking I'm an example of a person who's not even gonna want the Android apps on my machine. Right. They're all games pretty much right.

Paul Thurrott: (15:03)
Or no. Yeah. Unless, well, the Amazon Kindle app is maybe the one interesting thing to me. I think there's a United app. You know, if you are gonna pop out your laptop and do United stuff for some reason a couple of things. Cause I, Washington post might be one of them. There's only literally several apps. I mean, most of them are, are games

Mary Jo Foley: (15:22)
Like 40 something apps, that's it? Like, it's not all Android apps is just a few, right?

Leo Laporte: (15:29)
Yeah. Just a handful. I mean, I think most of them are, well, I know most of them are just games. Yeah. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley: (15:37)
Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (15:38)
And I try to find it. I don't know why, why wouldn't it come up? Maybe I'm on the wrong star. I'm on the wrong computer. That's why. Nevermind. I can't look here.

Mary Jo Foley: (15:48)
Yeah. I just, I wanna see how this goes, because this will be the first time since Windows 11 ship that they actually talked about rolling out features to people who are on the mainstream channel and not in the dev rings. Right. That's right. Let's see how it goes. Let's see how people find this experience.

Leo Laporte: (16:08)
Yeah. They'll find it confusing. Oh, they won't find it at all. Maybe the blog posts we kept keep referencing, by the way also talks about changes they're making to the Windows insider program, which you really have to look for to understand, you know? Yeah. I don't, I don't really, I didn't see too much there. The, the, the couple things that stand out to me are the Devon beta channel are still not associated with a particular version of Windows which I think is a mistake. Uthe window, the dev channel might get more experimental, whatever that means. I mean, I they're, we're already kind of testing features the

Mary Jo Foley: (16:45)
More experimental.

Leo Laporte: (16:46)
Yeah. Right. Okay. And that's fine. Yeah. There is gonna be a brief window. Again, like we had last summer where you can move between the dev data channels. Yeah. And the beta channel like today, like it is today. I mean, this isn't really changing, but they're just kind of reemphasizing. This is closer to what will probably appear for stable users in the future. Meaning that yeah. If a feature makes its way from dev to beta, it's probably gonna be in Windows 11 at some point, but they're not promising. No,

Mary Jo Foley: (17:12)
They're not promising.

Paul Thurrott: (17:14)
Yeah. And you, and you know, Mary Jo asked me an interesting question. I I'll just kind of throw it to the audience. Cause I think this is, I, I really had to think about this. If you wanted right now to test a future version of Windows 10, is there a place in the Windows insider program for that? Right. And I was like, I, wow. That's, that's an interesting question. The only thing I could think of is that I assume this hasn't changed or hasn't changed yet, but as of the last change with the insider program, if you had a, a, a computer that didn't qualify for Windows 11 and you put it into the release preview channel, you would get Windows 10 right now. Of course, that was before 21 H two shipped, which it has, they haven't shifted to anything. So I would imagine here we are in February, if you have a, a non-eligible PC not eligible for Windows 11, I think that's how you could get it. Yeah. But man, would that be disappointing? Right. And,

Mary Jo Foley: (18:12)
And what, what are you getting at this point? Right? Like what kind of features are

Leo Laporte: (18:15)
You getting? Right. Whatever was in 21 H two. Not much. And if you, if you qualify, I mean, you probably would've gotten that anyway, I guess. Right, right. I would think so. I don't know what's going on there. That's a good question.

Mary Jo Foley: (18:26)
Is there anybody, if anyone's listening who either in Discord or the ch or the chat is that, are any of you in Windows on Windows 10 and in the insider program still? And if you are, have you gotten anything? Like, what have you gotten? Cause I, I, well, I don't know why about this, but

Leo Laporte: (18:45)
No, it's a good question. I, because this is one of those instances of clarity that Microsoft number of provides. I think if you're in the Windows 10, if you're on Windows 10 and you're in the insider program, you're in the release preview, you're getting what you would expect to get, which is future versions of apps at this point. Right. You that's, you're just getting app updates.

Mary Jo Foley: (19:04)
Yeah. Yeah. So, yep. I think that's where we are. Okay.

Leo Laporte: (19:12)
So what about these these

Mary Jo Foley: (19:14)
Cab brewers there? Hold on Windows 10 release preview, nothing new so far. Oh, he's

Leo Laporte: (19:20)
Actually doing it as we speak in real

Mary Jo Foley: (19:22)
Time. He ha he's I have Windows 10. Oh. In the release preview. Oh yeah.

Leo Laporte: (19:28)
Okay. Well, it's good to clear that, get that all cleared up. Yeah. I guess I'm not sure we clarified anything, but yes,

Mary Jo Foley: (19:37)
I dreamt about that. That's the weirdest thing. Like I woke up. Oh, that's sad. It was a dream. I know. And I'm like, why did I even think about that? You need to get a cat or

Leo Laporte: (19:44)
Something. It's,

Mary Jo Foley: (19:46)
That's terrible.

Leo Laporte: (19:47)
Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley: (19:47)
It's really bad. I, you know, it's weird during the pandemic. I just feel like I dream about way stranger things than I used to. My dream are

Leo Laporte: (19:54)
Much more vivid than they used to be. Like, I spent a lot of time dreaming now. All of a sudden I literally woke up and had to describe a dream to my wife before we did anything else, because I was like, I'm gonna forget this. And it's nuts. Yeah. And yeah, just today. Yeah. Yeah. So there's some, somebody should do a study. There's something there. Yeah. Yep. I mean, it could be Windows 11, but I'm thinking it's the pandemic. I'm just thinking. Well, it depends on what you're obsessed about, you know, so true, true. That certainly there are some Microsoft fever dreams in there. Yeah. it excuses me, but Windows 11, preview weather app lost timestamps and the changing weather throughout the day. I hope you hope you will. Let them know. I okay. That's from heat sinks Weekly. He clearly cares a lot about okay.

Leo Laporte: (20:45)
ISO bars. Oh, I will now run the weather app for the first time ever on this computer and see what it says. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Did you watch the did you watch the Samsung event this morning? No. Yeah. I, I did. Okay. Just trying to make some conversation. No, I dream about it. So I have a, not yet cuz it was today. I, I have a link. I don't have a link. I have a mention of it later in the thing was save it. Yeah. Yeah. It's not huge, but there was some Microsoft integration stuff I thought was kind of yeah. I, what I thought was really interesting. I Lisa and I were watching Jason streamed it and that's exactly what I said. Lisa is micro, you know Apple's an ecosystem. Samsung doesn't really have an ecosystem to call its own.

Paul Thurrott: (21:37)
So, you know, makes sense to, well, they sort of do right. I mean, they have this galaxy thing, they have a tablet and they have services and apps and stuff and, but it, but they're slow. It's weird where decide to stick and where they don't, they they're switching to OneDrive for storage and inter device interoperability. They used to have their own thing for that. Right. And I thought that was an interesting move in their part because they're basically doing what Microsoft would've done 20 years ago, which is just offloaded on someone else was already, you know, hosting that anyway, but okay, that's good. Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (22:11)
Are giving up, let's talk about our our fine sponsor. Shall we? And then we shall return this episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by Intel orchestrated by the experts at C D W. They understand to keep up with changing business needs, organizations of all sizes need to stay secure, connected, and protected. And that takes powerful processors that are built for today and tomorrow, like Intel's built for business 11th, gen Intel core vPro processors, the 11th gen Intel core vPro processors provide you with a performance security and remote manageability needed to continu and move forward and stay productive. Even while on the go CDW works with Intel to provide the right technology to fuel productivity and innovation. CDW can access your distributed workforce and their needs and implement the Intel vPro platform to configure devices powered by 11th gen Intel core V row processors, accelerating digital business transformation. When we talk in performance, man, you're talking a new processor, core architecture that delivers increased overall application performance. That means less time waiting, more productivity from anywhere. And it's compatible with wifi six to prevent delays. It's got built in AI that accelerates and optimizes speed. And of course, when it comes to security, Intel hardware shield builds in protection, detecting and preventing malware and network threats without sacrificing performance. And as for remote manageability cloud based or hardware based management for it, leaders means consistent features across notebooks, desktops, and workstations within a business for increased performance and security trust Intel. And it orchestration by CDW people who get it learn more at cdw.com/intel client that's C E D w.com/intel client. Thank you, CDW for supporting Windows Weekly. We appreciate it. All right. Yes. I'm still on wifi five. Fine. I'm teasing you. I'm teasing you. In fact, you know, it's funny because they made a big deal about six E and I think that we're just gonna go right to seven and forget it anyway. Yep. Yep. Are no major 60 routers really. Right. I mean, there's some, there's, there's some route and to your hardware and I mean, everything has to be 60 and and I think we're just gonna skip right to seven now.

Paul Thurrott: (24:40)
Yep. I was waiting for, yeah. Whatever came after six, well, a big house. Like I have to, you know, I need like multiple nodes everywhere, you know, you're gonna, and well, you're moving though, right? You haven't, you're not gonna stay in that house. That's next house. Do what we did get somebody crawling around in the attic, in the basement and putting an ethernet everywhere. Right. And then we we did the ubiquity thing, which is not cheap, but then everything's managed what is ubiquity? So ubiquity is kind of a prosumer. A lot of businesses use it. They have the dream. What is it? Dream Weaver. The dream station. The dream Weaver is the dream Weaver, which is the big router. It'll do all sorts of fancy stuff, bonding, multiple connections and stuff. It's got a lot of security built in and then we got a big switch, 24 port switch.

Leo Laporte: (25:31)
Actually we got a 48 port switch cuz I don't know why. And then I don't know why. And then we got ubiquitous prosumer really kind of almost enterprise grade base station units. And we put five in and all of that was, you know, a lot of money, but because I just didn't want to hear from Lisa when the wifi went down. Yeah. And actually it was also cuz of COVID cuz Michael was going to school through zoom. Lisa was working from home. Oh, I was freaked when I started with the kids coming home. Yeah. I was prepared to be working from home. And so we really wanted, I hardwired everywhere. Next house wouldn't be worth doing it now unless you know the dream machine, that's it ubiquity, unify, dream machine, little ad there for them. The unpaid that I paid them for that ad.

Leo Laporte: (26:25)
Yeah. All right. Now what was it you were gonna did? Did I interrupt? Interrupted something. What's next Windows defender. I love that game. I was more of AAX film, but I think defender was really a lot of fun. Now wait, we have to do the new features new features first, first. Well, yeah, these are just cause you care about these leaked on Twitter. Talk a lot about these leaked on Twitter. And then we'll talk about playing defender on when this is the new way we leak things is on Twitter. Yeah. I mean Microsoft leaked it. No, no, none of this is particularly exciting. New sticker editor is pretty exciting, dude. Like I said, well,

Mary Jo Foley: (27:08)
It's rom corners who are exciting. Wait till you get the stickers. Right.

Paul Thurrott: (27:12)
I like emoji, but they're not everywhere in my life yet. Is there some way I could get them on my desktop? I'm not even really sure what stickers are. There's a video for that. Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, the Windows 11 video guide the instruction in 1995. I looked exactly like that. That's from too B Jones. 99, 42 on our disc. Thank you. B Jones. Yeah. yeah. So as I said to Rafael the other day what we were discussing stickers thing, you know, it's like if only the stickers could somehow display live data, maybe there could be like a weather sticker and a chat sticker and a stock. Oh, so there, oh these are widgets then I don't know what they are. I think, I literally think they're just what they sound like. I think they're just, you can have a background and they're gonna let you put little stickers around which a little image, sticky notes. I think so. Oh please. We don't know because they haven't announced it yet. But anyway, there's a, an interface in some leaked bill or I don't know where it is. Yeah. Of some it's gotta be more like widgets. There's no sticky notes. No, no that can't be, it doesn't look like

Mary Jo Foley: (28:20)
Widgets. It looks

Paul Thurrott: (28:21)
Like. I mean, if you take, if you take a widget and you simplify it kinda like Windows 11 did to the UI, what do you end up with? You end up with a static image and Lord. Yeah, we'll see. Is this because we have a Mrs. Grossman sticker factory over here and it's very popular with the five year olds. Sure fact, you always know, build a bear when there's yes. Like right next door. It is literally next to jelly, belly and builder a Barry. How did you know? So, so you always know that there's a five year old in the family because you see these mini vans go by and the back Windows just loaded with stickers. They'll love this feature. Yeah. Yeah. It's for kids and for other people who like emojis. So we'll see there's a new sustainability section in coming to the settings app.

Paul Thurrott: (29:06)
It's gonna give you a, not a five star system, but a five leaf system to tell you how sustainable your PC is at the moment. I, it sounds to me like they're just adding eco power management type things there. Yeah. And people have over thought this one, but this is a new task bar setting that will automatically hide the task bar when you're using your device as a tablet. If you do use your device as a tablet, a I'm sorry, because in Windows 11 that got really simplified too. And people hate it because there used to be a dedicated tablet mode. They're like, oh, maybe tablet mode's coming back. I'm like, yeah, I don't, I don't think that's what this is. I think it's just one more setting for that mode that they have now. Unfortunately, and then today we got, you know, by the way, one of the things that is coming that's kind of exciting is there's a new task manager, so that one's been leaked a couple different times and the later is league from this person. I don't know if it's a gentleman, but albacore on Twitter. Albacore. Yeah. Albacore. Yeah. Says that they're gonna add more information to the task manager, including app health, battery health and more, we don't know what more is

Mary Jo Foley: (30:17)
Sticker health. I'm sure.

Leo Laporte: (30:19)
Yeah. One of your stickers is not looking too good. Maybe try something a little more colorful. So yeah. You know, whatever, I think this is gonna be these, I think these are some of the smaller things that are gonna happen for the next feature update. Basically

Mary Jo Foley: (30:35)
These, hopefully these are the smaller things, right? Because these are pretty small is what you're saying. They're pretty small. Well, and

Paul Thurrott: (30:43)
Yeah, listen, I, I even, even I could write an application that is a drop target for documents, but Microsoft apparently is incapable of doing that because the new task bar doesn't do that. Like the old task bar always did that. So what you, what you find over time is that in their zeal to really simplify the OS, they really chopped off a bunch of functionality we used to have. Yeah. And if you're a person who relied on that functionality and I don't even think it's fair to call these people, power users at this point, I think a lot of people relied on different things that are kind of missing or in different locations now it kind of throws you for a loop and it makes you a little bit less efficient. And I've been using Windows 11 since last June. And I still to this day will grab a file on my desktop, drag it down to the task bar, wait for something to happen. I'm like, oh right. I'm using Windows 11. Doesn't do that anymore. So maybe they'll bring that back. That would be a little better than say stickers to me, but right. They can do both long as they do do both.

Mary Jo Foley: (31:46)
I'm thinking there's gonna be something that they consider a more quote, major change coming because they did note in that blog post you were talking about earlier about the future of the insider program that they're going to let you change rings, go from dev to beta soon. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott: (32:01)
Right. Temporarily. Right. Just be clear that this is temporary. I don't understand why they don't why they can't just let you do that permanently. Yeah. But you know, Microsoft,

Mary Jo Foley: (32:11)
I dunno the window. Yeah. They want us to say the word window, the window of opportunity is opening and it will quickly

Paul Thurrott: (32:17)
Buzz. It's not a magic window, but it's not

Mary Jo Foley: (32:21)
Magic window. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't even write about the stickers and all these things. I, I, my, my editor's like, are you gonna write about the stickers? I'm like, no, not gonna.

Paul Thurrott: (32:34)
You're like, no, I have journalistic integrity. I don't know.

Mary Jo Foley: (32:39)
No. It's like, I wanna care. I do wanna care because hard. I'm sure there are people who care.

Leo Laporte: (32:44)
Right. Yeah. Well, I feel like you're almost like you're being punked on Twitter when they say, oh, and the new features stickers. Let's see if anyone writes about this. Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't. I would say we, we we're waiting for confirmation. Yeah. Okay. On the flip side, I will say, this shows you how starved we are in a Windows 11 cents for any right. Notification of anything new coming. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I stickers. Yeah. I would normally ignore this as well, but you know, we're, we're not working with a lot here. You do have to, you do file, you know, every day something that's right. Well, I think you should write a story about the new brand new uTempest,uI'm sorry. Defender. Yas. Revenge. Yas revenge. We did.

Mary Jo Foley: (33:31)
Oh, we did. Oh man.

Leo Laporte: (33:33)
Didn't worry about that. Yeah. Is this just, I mean, I don't understand what's new. I, nobody does. Cuz they've given this name to 11 different things in the past five years. Right?

Mary Jo Foley: (33:44)
Right. So first let's talk about the problem of defender. How do you solve a problem? Like defender, right? How do you catch a cloud and pin at the

Leo Laporte: (33:52)
End? How do you solve the problem? Like defender, go ahead buddy. Superior. It's all on you.

Mary Jo Foley: (34:00)
Remember when Microsoft started branding everything.net. Remember those days, we're back to this now with defender, right? Everything is defender. Now

Leo Laporte: (34:09)
Remember when any, everything was called outlook, why don't we call it outlook defender to

Mary Jo Foley: (34:12)
Really confuse? Don't give them any ideas. They might do that

Paul Thurrott: (34:15)
Somewhere. A, a light went off in Redmond. Yeah. Someone is racing to his boss's office. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley: (34:23)
I haven't. I have a boss. This defender. Got it. I got it. This particular defender is the thing that I made the code name of the week, like two or three weeks ago. Gibralter Gibralter yeah. Remember when you were talking about Gibraltar, right? So this leaked back in the fall, bleeping computer.com had E on this and they're like, it looks like Microsoft's gonna take Windows defender or what is now called Microsoft defender for Windows. And they're gonna overhaul it to make it something that not, not only protects your own PC, but it protects your family's devices that are, that are part of your ecosystems. So it also gives you notifications about the phones that up to five owns and or max and or tablets. And you can see through a centralized view in this new defender, the health sorry, the security status of all these things.

Mary Jo Foley: (35:12)
So if there's a problem, you'll get a notification, you'll get an alert. So I'm like, wow, that, that seems like a pretty big deal. And, and then this is this preview of this exact functionality went live in the Microsoft store on Windows. So if you're in the us or you set your region to us, you can download this. Now I downloaded it and it downloaded onto my machine and worked to get your devices, to connect you there a QR code, or you can send yourself an email link and then you click on that. And then this defender also goes onto your devices. So everything's great right now, all you need is a Microsoft account. It's free. But once they turn this on, it's not gonna be free. You have to have a Microsoft 365 subscription, either the family or the some subscription to use this. Oh

Leo Laporte: (35:58)
Boy. Yeah. Why didn't they just call it one care then he asks,

Mary Jo Foley: (36:03)
Yeah. Right. That's what it is. Isn't it

Paul Thurrott: (36:06)
Right. Remember these to charge people for antivirus. Yeah. Yeah. Giant. They bought giant anti mal. No. Was it anti spyware or anti malware?

Mary Jo Foley: (36:16)
Yeah. One of those two giant. Yep. Yeah. So here's, here's how, why they're not gonna call it that. And they're gonna try to shy away from saying, they're charging you for anti anti malware. So defender is built into Windows 10 and Windows 11 through the thing that's called Windows security. Like there's an app in your machine called Windows security. And it has defender in there for free. Right. This thing, even though it's called defender is more like, almost like a ma a security management console than it is the anti-malware thing itself. Yeah. But just to keep it confusing, they're calling it defender. This is why this is so confusing. The defender branding defender. You're gonna call it defender. Right. It's called the Microsoft defender.

Leo Laporte: (37:07)
What are they gonna call defender?

Mary Jo Foley: (37:09)
Exactly. Exactly. And what are they gonna call window security? Are they gonna rebrand

Paul Thurrott: (37:13)
That? Well, by the way, window security is another product or app or whatever you want, wanna call it. Whose name has changed at least 11 times since 2001. I mean, it's, it has. Yeah. That's been called all kinds of things. Its names. Yep. Name is Legion, I guess we say

Mary Jo Foley: (37:29)
Yes. Yes. So yeah. It's I was writing down all the things that have been rebranded in the past two years as defender. There were like 10 things. And then I looked at my watch and I'm like, is it five o'clock somewhere? Cause I, I definitely need to be right now. I was like, wow, this is so confusing. So unbelievably confusing. And you're right, Paul, the thing that was Windows that is Windows security. You know what it used to be branded Windows defender. Well, yeah,

Leo Laporte: (37:58)
But oh yeah, that was Microsoft security essentials became defended. That's right. Yeah. And then that was one. It was Windows live one care before that it was giant. Antiox giant anti well, I thought it was giant anti spyware or giant anti malware, something like that. But forgive me. I missed IPO. No it's okay. I

Mary Jo Foley: (38:20)
Missed spoke. You're mixing your Malware

Paul Thurrott: (38:21)
There was a version of Windows where, where that product actually had the ability to configure which app started at at boot time. Now that's built in the task manager. I mean this, the history of this stuff is insane. Yeah. And it sounds like it's getting even more,

Leo Laporte: (38:38)
It's a long tradition of that. When Microsoft decided it wanted to do a digital encyclopedia and Carta, it bought the world's cheesiest encyclopedia. The one that you would get a book at a time at a grocery store, was it, what was, it was a Funen waggle. What was it? They bought, they bought some cheesy thing. Is the backbone and made it already.

Paul Thurrott: (38:59)
What was the, they have a rich history of doing that though. Like remember where they lost it on double click and they bought what'd they buy that stupid company that no one ever heard of. It's like when you, when you rage buy. Yeah. Yeah. It just never works out. Yeah, no,

Mary Jo Foley: (39:16)
No.

Leo Laporte: (39:17)
They bought, they bought call a encyclopedia.

Mary Jo Foley: (39:19)
A lot of people were asking me if you could use this new defender preview to also look at security status of your iPhone and iPad in theory. Yes. But in reality, no. Right, right. Kinda like your phone, right. Maybe someday it'll get more features and be able to do something on an iPhone and iPad, but I'm not blaming Microsoft and blaming apple for that. But yeah, you it's mostly for managing Android, but also max and your Windows PC

Leo Laporte: (39:50)
Frosty, Winnipeg says you could call it Windows security sticker.

Mary Jo Foley: (39:55)
Right. Okay. I like it.

Paul Thurrott: (39:57)
The sticker says my security is great. Wait, that's just a bit map. It never changes. Yeah. It's always been green. I thought I was fine. That's the way to do it.

Mary Jo Foley: (40:09)
Yeah.

Paul Thurrott: (40:11)
Sometimes you know, a little placebo works. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually, let's be well, I'm curious. It's pretty good. Right? I mean it's it does the job. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a good idea. It's yeah. It's come a long way, baby. No, it's it used to be one of those things that did poorly in those benchmark tests or whatever. But I honestly now it does

Mary Jo Foley: (40:34)
Well, right. It's always like that's

Paul Thurrott: (40:36)
This is one of those things you actually don't have to think too much about. Yeah. You've got a good antivirus. This is what I tell everybody. You already have a good antivirus it's built in. You don't need to add another one. Yeah. Save your money. Yeah. Mcafee does not need your money anymore. Oh my God. Talk about, I, I review a lot of laptops and the strained ways in which they beg you not to wanna install them. They, they basically scream as they go down.

Leo Laporte: (40:58)
It's by the way, for, for code name, crazy. Sometime the code name for in Carta was Gandolph. Oh, was it really? Yeah. This is also for frosty Winnipeg after the successes of Compton's multimedia encyclopedia in 1989 in the early days of CD ROMS and the new grow year, multi me encyclopedia in 1992, Microsoft initiated car Carta under the internal code named Gandolph by purchasing non exclusive rights to Funen waggles non exclusive, you know what? Look you could keep doing it. Grocery stores need an encyclopedia sure. And Carta was actually pretty beautiful. I thought. Yep. Yeah, it was. Yeah. Okay. Now you know more about in Carta than you'd ever want to know. I think.

Leo Laporte: (41:50)
And yeah. Giant was giant. Acquisition was 2004. Thank you. Out of sync, our chat room font, a font, Microsoft acquires, anti spyware leader, giant company. It's a few too many adjectives, I think in that sense. Yep. It was a good product. Giant was giant. Good. Yeah, it was. Oh, okay. Yeah. But you're right. It's giant and spyware. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I, before Microsoft bought them, I was using that product and recommended it. It was good. Okay. So they are the ones who really turned it into APY. Well, Microsoft needed something obviously. Right. And being Microsoft, they didn't go about it, the right. But they eventually got there. I think charging people to fix a problem you created is kind of problematic. I, but you know, whatever, but I made that case, you know, 15 years ago, ago. Yeah. You can see somebody running down the hall saying we gotta fix this.

Paul Thurrott: (42:49)
I just, listen. I got a fire hose. Yeah. But you set fire to the theater. No, but I got the fire. I got the hose here. See, you should remember. I got the host that's I, I just remember that part of it. Yep. There's no need to fear giant malware is here. What was that? That Steve Palmer or something? It almost looks like him. It looks like the guy from mash. Winchester. Yeah. Frank A. Little bit. I don't know who it is. Some guy in an outfit. That's all, that's all we know. Charles Winchester II. Charles Winchester II. Yeah. Oh, this is interesting. According to some guy named Paul thout I don't know if it's credible. Okay. Probably not. Microsoft. Probably not reportedly. Looking at acquiring Mandiant oh, this is a news story. So I didn't actually write that story. You'll be interested. Well, okay. He is French. You call him lave. I probably desperately not to say his name a loud too many times, but yes. I think I would say, yeah, he says Microsoft is what brotherly an acquisition talks with maintenance, formerly fire. That's Bloomberg Bloomberg fire eye. Yeah. So that's more of an enterprise product. Not a yes, right? Yeah. Right.

Mary Jo Foley: (44:19)
So yeah, that there was a whole messy thing last year where Manian sold off the fire eye products business. Well,

Paul Thurrott: (44:26)
I was gonna say you remember who they were, right? You remember who fire eye is, right? MCFE but I like fire. Yeah. But no. What was that guy's name? Mark. the guy who was like the only guy in fire right back in the day. But these were, this was the company that found the U P and P vulnerability. His XP two months after it shipped. Right. Oh wow. Jim Al had to come home from his trip, you know, trustworthy computing happened. It was because of fire eye. Yep. Oh, wow. That's that's who that company is. They had a, they had a good name. Yep. I think that's no, they did. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I, I remember very well. We talked about, we, we talked about Mandy and, and fire eye actually quite a bit on security now, actually this is fire eye was founded in 2002. Yeah. Mandiant became a subsidiary fire eye. Oh, I know. It's all complicated.

Mary Jo Foley: (45:15)
It was a mess. It was a big mess. All

Leo Laporte: (45:17)
Complicated, complicated and fire

Mary Jo Foley: (45:19)
Eye. So Manian Mandy got split out right from fire eye. Man's the enterprise part, like you said, and mania and Microsoft already have a lot of things going on in terms of deals or joint business. Yeah. Managed fence products and E five and blah, blah, blah. So they're not, they're not strangers to each other, so it wouldn't be surprising to see Microsoft buy them. That makes sense for you. Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (45:44)
Good. All right. We'll keep going. Sorry guys. It was it Wasi security. I, it discovered AI. E I E I. Oh, E I E I, oh, oh, this is NP and P vulnerability to win XP in the early days of security companies. They had a lot remember. Woo, woo. And the cult of the dead cow. They had a lot of odd names in, oh yes. I remember that. Yeah. Cult of the dead cow guy went around and around and he was a Twitter just left Twitter. He was a security guy at Twitter. Of course he was course he was, oh my God. This is just this is the rat hole that I know is my brain tweet can suck you into a rat hole like that. Yes. So let's move on. Is there a Windows 10 and 11 app installer vulnerability?

Paul Thurrott: (46:40)
Yes, there is. This is, this is crazy. And this is actually another last night. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I, I, this is another thing I talked to Rafael about and he was, he was literally kind of pushing me towards what he was hoping I was gonna say, which was what I eventually did say, which is this, the Ms. IX is an app packaging format that Microsoft uses for do net apps. Right? So for example, do net pad, that's actually how it's distributed. If you choose to deploy it in any way. And, and Ms. IX is an app deployment protocol, I guess, technically or uses an app deployment protocol that allows apps to be installed from a server, which could be on your network or from a web server, which could be anywhere in the world. Right? So they found, they found there's no supposed known exploits, but they did F or someone told them.

Leo Laporte: (47:28)
And they found that it was true. There is a vulnerability that can spoof these things. In, in other words, you could put malware on your computer very easily. So what Microsoft did was if you click the link to install one of these things, remotely, it downs up, loads it to your computer instead of installing it. So you're safe, except then you can just install it from your desktop or whatever. And like, why does that, that doesn't mitigate anything. You've just, all you did was download the malware. Now it's sitting there waiting to be installed. So this thing actually doesn't do much of anything except add a step to getting the malware. And supposedly what they're gonna do is, or I guess I assume what they're gonna do is release a fix of some kind. So that is kind of scary because if somebody spoofs the install, they'll spoof the thing that you downloaded and you'll get the bad, you know, malware Laden package, if that's what it is, right.

Paul Thurrott: (48:24)
Theoretically it's used by, it's used by everybody these days. It's actually very common. So it's the default installer. I mean, it's the installer, right? It, it is, yeah. You might call it the, it is the way to install apps, Windows. It's not the only way, but it's the, you know, it's the preferred, it's the way, except is it you, yeah, I think it is sure. It is sure it is. And I, by the way, by popular demand, somebody was saying, don't you have a theme song for rat holes. What we do. I hope it's round and round by hole that that's, it's not a long theme song. Oh, that's that was the whole thing. Well, there's a longer version. I don't, I don't seem to have that. Is that just the way it ends? Yeah. I hope it starts with like wipe out, you know, with it's a, it's a tribute to Merlin man who used to a Mac break Weekly, just take the whole thing off track.

Leo Laporte: (49:32)
And so we had the little song we would play, but something like 43 folders of rat holes. But, but all the remains of this is just the one rat hole. But honestly, if you're in a rat hole, you don't need a long jingle to announce it. You could just, you know, it's a good point. Yeah. I'll fight it somewhere. That's pretty good. Yeah. It's pretty good. It's well done. We in the, in the early days of TWiT, because our production values were so poor, people would like give us music and stuff. Now people go, you don't need my music. You got, yeah, you got you're in living color now. Well now they probably just ask you to pay for stuff. Yeah. They want money. Yeah. Yeah. Do you accept guest posts on your network, Leo? Hi, my name is Bob. Oh my God. Content, you know, blah, blah, blah. That is a plague. If you have a blog anywhere, that is a plague. That's all I get. Do you get those two Mary jokes? 90% of my emails. Yeah. And then they get, then they send another one saying maybe you missed my first one. Then they send a third one saying, I aren't you listening. It's like, no, I'm not it's

Mary Jo Foley: (50:39)
I just send back one word. I send back, no

Paul Thurrott: (50:42)
Blog, all these things. I don't send blog. I never reply. And I get these reports every week from Google. It's like, man, you block a lot of spam. Is everything. All right. Really? It's everything. Right? Yeah. They're freaking, they're like you're in trouble. Google 70% more ha spam this week than you did last week. Oh, that's sediment analysis.

Leo Laporte: (51:01)
Is everything. Alright. You seem a little angry. Is everything. Yeah. Is, is this you? How can we tell this is you hollow lens three. Now I've heard conflicting back and forth reports on this. And I figured, yeah. While I was on vacation, it came to me, you know, who would know Paul and Mary Jo, I'm not dead. Is it dead? What's going on?

Mary Jo Foley: (51:21)
Okay. So this is based on a business insider report, but see, I, I read through the whole thing and I'm like, you know what? It seems credible to me. Yeah, I don't, I don't know for a fact, if HoloLens three got canceled in the middle of 20, 21 or not, I think it's very telling about HoloLens that no one noticed if it did get canceled in the middle of 2021 until now. Fair enough. But that, the story says Microsoft cancel their whole metaverse strategy is in disarray, which I agree I disagree with because right now HoloLens has absolutely no connection to what Microsoft's doing in the metaverse. I mean, ver okay. Not none but very tangential. Right. right, right. They, and then they kind of went back and said, you know, there's reports, you've read from the wall street journal and other places saying hundreds of Microsoft people have quit to join meta, like Don box, who you're talking about. And a lot of other people to work on their basically their

Leo Laporte: (52:17)
Equivalent, they were after the the stock options. But

Mary Jo Foley: (52:22)
That's what I said. I'm like, no, they wanted the money. They

Leo Laporte: (52:24)
Wanted modern. Now, how do you feel about Ferrari? Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley: (52:29)
Yeah, no. And then Alex, Kipman got in the middle of it and he said, I saw, I see some people saying HoloLens too was canceled. And we shipped that in 2019. Well, a lot of people in the chat room and they remember it did get canceled ho there was gonna be a HoloLens too in 2017 and they canceled it and came out with the HoloLens in 2019 that they called the holo two. I think

Paul Thurrott: (52:50)
Would've been three, by the way.

Mary Jo Foley: (52:52)
Yeah. That's what I think is happening. Right. Like I I'm like, okay, they may have canceled holo one, three, but they're gonna come out with something at some point called hollow. Right.

Paul Thurrott: (53:03)
Look, what do you think Alex Kitman is gonna say, Alex, Kitman the only guy left with the light on, in the door behind him in this part to Microsoft. Cuz everyone is left. Obviously he's gonna say nothing's wrong. Everything's fine. He has to say that. So he does his commentary on this, I think could all you need to know about it is he didn't tell you the truth about what happened to HoloLens too. So you can skip the rest of that tweet. It's just, this is wrong. Sorry. it's very clear. A lot of people have left Microsoft and not part of the company to go to meta, especially this, this is a fact, I mean, this is just happened. So yeah. I mean yeah, I think you're right. I, I think it, this is the same situation as before they're recalibrating. Yeah. Pardon in the pun and we'll see what happens

Mary Jo Foley: (53:48)
Right there. So the monkey wrench in all of this is business insider throws in this other thing and says, they're also working with Samsung on a consumer version of this is, and by

Paul Thurrott: (53:58)
The way, that, which is nuts,

Mary Jo Foley: (54:00)
That so, and they

Paul Thurrott: (54:01)
Are no, no, they are. We already know they are. They Samsung has been making mixed reality headsets for years. Oh yeah. But

Mary Jo Foley: (54:09)
This is is not, but not they made it sound like it's not that necessarily with like

Paul Thurrott: (54:12)
Some feature thing. What I, what I mean by nuts is I don't think that has anything to do with HoloLens. The Microsoft, like you kind of alluded to this upfront, Microsoft has mixed reality solutions, which is VR, right? Like these headsets for Windows and as AR, which is standalone headset called hauls, all of Microsoft's VR competitors now have moved to like standalone headset type things. It's possible that what Microsoft is working on with Samsung and probably with other partners is a standalone VR. They would call an Mr. Headset and that could be new and that's fine. But that doesn't impact hos there's always been a, a very distinct difference between the two platforms. You know, they do similar things, but they're not the same thing. Right.

Mary Jo Foley: (54:56)
So I don't, you know, Microsoft does have that $22 billion contract with the army for HoloLens, like technology right. And that contract is running behind. That is a fair act. It's not working out as they wanted it to, but I can't imagine unless the army cancels that contract, that Microsoft would just be like, you know what, forget it. We're not doing HoloLens. Right. Forget

Paul Thurrott: (55:17)
It. But I could imagine them saying, you know what, this not consumer, but this enterprise product that has, you know, has found a, a, a market and niche uses for whatever companies is going, okay. This government thing, this army thing is way more important. We're gonna put whatever resources we have into making this thing, which is no doubt, a CU highly customized, secretive kind of side project that you could call a hos 2.5 or something, whatever, something completely, you know, not completely but slightly different. Yeah. Yeah, they could to put their focus on that. Yeah. And I think with all those people leaving, you know, what are you gonna do? You gotta focus on the thing that's making the money you do.

Mary Jo Foley: (55:55)
You do. Also remember when we were talking about at CES Qualcomm, making that weird announcement about working with Microsoft on ships for augmented reality and mixed reality. Now that announcement makes way more sense that Microsoft didn't say anything at the time. Right. Because it was Qualcomm who announced it and they didn't say it was gonna be for the HoloLens. They just said for future you know, mixed reality XR devices. So it, they could have been referring to the Samsung thing when, when they talked about that. Right, right. That might be what they, why that might be why Microsoft said nothing. There is because they were like, yeah, what are we

Paul Thurrott: (56:34)
Gonna say? There's a huge divide between a consumer oriented virtual reality headset, no matter how it connects to anything and an augmented reality headset that so far has been aimed at the enterprise market and now government slash military. Yep. Right. These are, these are, you know, we were talking about Atari video games earlier. It's like comparing, you know, comparing like battle zone to an actual tank, you know, like yeah. They're, they're similar, you know, but they're not the same thing.

Mary Jo Foley: (57:02)
Right. I, I thought there was Daniel or Bino, a window central wrote a good editorial about this. And he brought up the fact that, you know, the reason everyone's looking at this is cuz Apple's gonna come into the market. Right. And so more and more people are like, okay, what's gonna happen here. Microsoft already has a head start, but does it even matter? You know, Samsung needs to compete with apple because they don't really have a way directly to, right. So you know, what if Samsung and Microsoft work together as Samsung does the hardware Microsoft, but then you're like, what does Microsoft contribute here? Right. If it, if Samsung does the hardware and if it has to be Android, like what's Microsoft doing in that picture,

Paul Thurrott: (57:41)
Maybe they're bringing what, what is now called Windows mixed reality to Android. Right. And that's how they do it as a standalone product. Maybe it made more sense maybe than a Windows on our, yeah. You don't need a full board, general purpose operating system. You don't yeah. You don't want it. The other thing is you know, regarding apple, by the way, I mean, as far as like AR goes real world usage I bet the number one AR application in the world is like Pokemon go or something very similar to that. Exactly, exactly. Right. Right. And if, if you look at AR solutions on like an iPhone or an iPad, especially where honestly yeah. That's way more of a mainstream experience where you could walk into a museum and do the thing I always talk about. We have a dinosaur skeleton in front of you, you hold up your iPad, then you see the dinosaur, you know people are doing that now, right?

Paul Thurrott: (58:32)
No, one's wa you can't do anything with a V what are you gonna do with a VR headset? You can't walk around with those things on no. Right. You know, it's a different, it's a different type of experience. And you might, it is argue in that note, apple is already in the lead without even having a headset. Yeah. Just as far as people actually using it, you know, I don't know if it's misdirection, but when they asked Tim cook about it last week in the earnings call. Yeah. He said, well, we have the largest number of AR applications in the world on iPhone and iPad. Yeah. Well, there you go. But that's actually, that's almost certainly true like that. Yeah. That makes sense. That's where the main street they're using it on their phones or maybe their iPads. Yep. You know, VR, VR has been that thing we've been looking for for years and years and years, it has a niche kind of a space, especially in gaming and an even smaller niche among people are just doing experiential things, really flying virtually through a rainforest or something, or a kelp farm or whatever it is.

Paul Thurrott: (59:25)
But yeah. And that's cool. I mean, I'm not, I'm not making fun of that, but I mean, it's not, it's just not something we're all, not, we're all zoning out in front of TV still. No one we're not zoning out together on a couch with headsets on. Right. That's just not really happening. Right.

Mary Jo Foley: (59:38)
You know, when, when Microsoft did the hollow lens, I used to always think, why does it have to be a Windows device? Like why does it have to be a mini version of Windows in there? Because Microsoft has other operating systems, right? They have, they own embedded operating system. What's it called? Rtos. Right. They, they have Azure IOT core, Azure IOT edge, like why I'm like, why can't they use something else and stream the content from the cloud. Somehow

Paul Thurrott: (01:00:09)
I think the answer to that, and this I'm not defending this, I'm just saying, I think the actual answer is they had that one Windows idea where they were gonna have a single programming platform that was gonna across all these device types phones. Yep. Headsets, consoles, Windows computers, right. Yeah. And we can debate whether that made sense when they did it. We know it hasn't really worked out. Right. Ubut I think that's why, you know, the first version of HoloLens, wasn't it, it was Intel based. The second version is arm based. I think it is. We went and talked about this last week. I don't remember. But yeah. Uyeah. I mean, it's yeah. Why is right, because why does the, why does a whale have a Vesti you know, a vestigial leg in the rear of his body, because what it goes back to the past, what, you know, no. Cause it was a thing a long time with the whole thing. Come on. No, it's, it's really what, this was a thing for this animal a long time ago. This platform was a thing for Microsoft. No, you're right. You're

Mary Jo Foley: (01:01:09)
Right. In the past they had, I you're right. They had the crazy, maybe not so crazy idea of one Windows everywhere when that fell apart, though, it feels like shouldn't have they gone shouldn't they have gone back to the drawing board and said, okay. So that was a bad idea, right? Like that didn't work. We, we don't have a problem.

Paul Thurrott: (01:01:25)
Microsoft Can never, they can never turn their back on anything. That's one of the problems with this company,

Mary Jo Foley: (01:01:30)
But maybe that's what's happening now. Right? Maybe, maybe somebody probably not Alex Kipman but somebody is saying, why are we running this on Windows right now? Like, does this make sense to do this right?

Paul Thurrott: (01:01:42)
Yep. Is there something lighter weight? And, and I always thought even when UWP was new, or I should say when UWP was new, I always sort of argued that for this thing to be truly universal, they should have brought it to Android and the web, you know, that kind of thing. Yep. And I, that maybe if you could run your apps on Android, then the, is what we're describing, could make, by the way, that may be literally what they're about to do. I have no idea. I mean, I, yep. Maybe that's finally happening.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:02:13)
I don't know. I keep thinking streaming is gonna play in, like, they figured out how to do virtualizing games. They figured out how to do virtualized Windows with Windows 365, the cloud PC stuff. I'm like, there's gotta be a streaming angle to this cuz they've got the cloud. Right. You, you think, what do they have as their assets? They've got the cloud. Right. And they, and they've gotta deal with Samsung. So what can they do combining these two things when you don't have a phone of your own in the middle. Interesting. How do you, how do you make this work? Right? Yep.

Paul Thurrott: (01:02:46)
Wow. This whole ends thing was way more interesting than I thought it was gonna be to say,

Mary Jo Foley: (01:02:52)
No, I I'm glad they got the story. If it is correct again, if it is correct, because you know, Microsoft's gonna quote in there for that they've given to me and other people saying we're not giving up on HoloLens. We're still going forward with HoloLens. So I, it, it begs the question like is HoloLens just gonna become a very niche thing and, or maybe just a military thing or just industrial. And then they also are doing these other things that business insider heard about on the side. Right? They,

Paul Thurrott: (01:03:19)
The same thing about silver light bearing

Mary Jo Foley: (01:03:21)
Jo, you know that, I know they say it all the time. There's always, you gotta always look at their quotes and say, there's one word in here. That's giving 'em an out. Where is the vestigial? Where's

Paul Thurrott: (01:03:33)
Okay. I'm sorry. I use that example.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:03:38)
I'm never gonna be able to forget about it until I work it into a story somehow now. Yep. Now, do you ever do this like words you wanna put in stories? Yep. Or expressions? I actually, in the story I wrote about the HoloLens three, I got the word HHA in there. If it's a word I saw that

Paul Thurrott: (01:03:57)
I saw that look at that. Yes. Happened in a while, but my wife used to sometimes challenge me to use a word in it. She says, just use this word today in a story. It would always

Mary Jo Foley: (01:04:08)
Be, we, we did that at ZD convoluted all the time. We'd go back and forth. Like, can you, yeah. Can you get this word in a story today?

Paul Thurrott: (01:04:15)
But so the funny thing is like, she doesn't read anything. I write. So she's not really privy to my style. So she, she would come up some word I'd be like, I use that word all the time. She's like what? And for, in her world it would be ridiculous to use, you know? I don't know. I'm trying to think of a word name, example of this.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:04:31)
I think we have to start doing that. You and me like challenging

Leo Laporte: (01:04:34)
Each other. Yeah. A challenge, a word challenge. Today's word challenge.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:04:37)
Today's word challenge. Get this in a story somehow. Yeah. HHA. HHA was fun to get in there. Yeah. Yeah. That's I said the metaverse the metaverse right now is a lot of HHA I think is how I think that's a

Leo Laporte: (01:04:51)
Fair description. Yeah. And the nice thing about a word like HHAs, it's got plausible deniability. Exactly. You could say, well, you know what I meant when I said Whoah, I mean, celebrating love. Woo. Could be woo ha. You know how Marines are? Like, booya like, it's the same thing. Yeah. Microsoft 3, 6, 5, Steve made a big deal over this disabling. Macros. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:05:24)
It does seem like a big deal.

Leo Laporte: (01:05:27)
Steve's position was what took you so long? I mean, they've always had that warning, but the warning was so gentle that yeah. And then, and the only button you was enable that it really didn't protect

Mary Jo Foley: (01:05:40)
Anybody, help anybody. Right. But

Leo Laporte: (01:05:41)
I understand why they did that. Cause they don't wanna dis functionality either. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:05:47)
Microsoft never just cuts stuff off. Right. Like they have to have a gradual path to, as an exit. So yeah. Starting early April, Microsoft's gonna make it a lot to enable VBA macros in their office apps, which is good. Like you said, what took them so long? Because the reason we're saying why it's good is goy the dog, you know, Kevin Beaumont, the security expert, he said very conservative number 25% of all ransomware is from these macros. Very conservatively. That's his, yeah. My that's a good number. Yeah. That's that's a big number, right? It's a goodly number. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you're gonna see a message bar saying security risk. Microsoft has blocked macros from running because the source of this file is untrusted and a learn more button. That'll take you to an article about why, you know why these are risky, bad actors, such a as such. It'll be good. And then they're gonna add it to other versions of office as time goes on, like the all the office, 365 apps then office LTSC office 20 21, 20 19. All of it's gonna get this. So yeah. It's it's good news. And one of those things, you're like, why did it take this long? Why did it take this long? Because people use macros. Yeah. Right. That's white.

Leo Laporte: (01:07:04)
Is it possible to deploy a VBA macro with Ms. IX?

Mary Jo Foley: (01:07:10)
Let's just the worst of all worlds.

Leo Laporte: (01:07:12)
The worst, the streams, right? Crossing streams. Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley: (01:07:14)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know.

Leo Laporte: (01:07:17)
Yeah, that was the ultimate. An insider Microsoft joke. When you think about it, that pretty much works. If you laugh, if you laughed at that joke, something is wrong with it. You listen to win Weekly is what it is.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:07:26)
Yeah. I'm gonna dream about it now tonight about

Leo Laporte: (01:07:29)
That scenario. So I'm sorry. I jumped on the Manian story. I see you have it here. So I apologize. No it's okay. Yeah, no worries. Wait a minute. Now this next line,

Mary Jo Foley: (01:07:40)
It has to be, I think there's a typo. There's

Leo Laporte: (01:07:41)
A, I think there's a typo. It says Microsoft Viva has 10 count. Monthly active is 10. The number you wanted just 10. Yes. 10 million. Not a million

Mary Jo Foley: (01:07:53)
Million, not a million to

Leo Laporte: (01:07:54)
That. 1,000,010 million, 10 million, 10 million. That's not that many when you have yeah. I users. Yeah. The way I, but you have to remember this targets enterprises and the, the more important number, perhaps, let me see if I can find it is they have over 1000 paying customers, which are companies like PayPal, REI, Unilever, et cetera. Who, so among them, there are over 10 million monthly active users. Also I, the other thing is this was kind of timed to what they're calling the one year anniversary of, of Viva. Yeah. This is not the one anniversary. This is the one year anniversary of when they announced it. You know, it went into public preview a few months later. It became generally available in early November. And I don't think a hundred percent of it is GA. I think it's like three quarters of it or something. I don't remember exactly. Which

Mary Jo Foley: (01:08:50)
I think all of it is now, but oh, you

Leo Laporte: (01:08:52)
Think it is now. Okay. Yeah. So it's not as bad sounds. The other thing is, you know, Microsoft, as Microsoft kind of moved to office 365 and then Microsoft 365, there's been this growing kind of grumbling in the partner space. And part of this thing is their training partners to support Viva, you know, solar for, for for companies, right? So the Accentures AVAs of the world, et cetera. Yep. And those folks have trained over 5,000 employees of their employees, I should say, to be consultants and technical architects for view. So this is, you know, it's an HR platform it's it's gross because it's for this hybrid world that nobody wants and whatever, but it's unfortunately pretty necessary. So

Mary Jo Foley: (01:09:39)
Right. Microsoft calls this, their ex employee experience platform. So it does a lot of different things. It's kind of like the SharePoint of an HRF and it's mostly

Leo Laporte: (01:09:49)
For bosses, right? I mean, oh, the SharePoint of HR,

Mary Jo Foley: (01:09:55)
There's, there's, it's a, also a lot of different things though. Like there's Viva insights, which is the way you can see how, how much time you and your employees are spending in meetings. And that those kinds of things, Viva connections is Yamer basically like showing people, okay. We want everybody in the company to see this Viva learning is how you can get employees to do more or both work learning and personal learning through all different kinds of courses from Microsoft and third parties and Viva topics is like the knowledge management part of this. So when you hear about like how, how, who would your company knows about topic X? An easy way to find out about that. So all these things are put together other into this employee experience platform. You don't need to buy the whole platform. But you can buy, you can deploy and buy these separate modules if you want

Leo Laporte: (01:10:47)
Gross. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. Terrible.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:10:51)
Yep. But you know, no, you know what, it's good for? I have to say, not that I've used this personally. No. onboarding people do during the pandemic, like all these people who got added to companies or switch companies, there was no easy way because you weren't going into an office. No, that's get them up to that's speed. Right. Absolutely true. That's right. Okay. Use Viva and go check out all the things you need to know about all the, all the ways we're working with. People in the company notices your own time management, all that stuff in one place that I, I can see that as being valuable. Right.

Leo Laporte: (01:11:22)
So all we've heard about the past year and a half is how everyone's quitting their jobs for some reason, which I don't understand. But yeah. Imagine onboarding into a new company during a pandemic where you gonna be working for home. You don't know if it's temporary or permanent or yep. Who knows and yeah. And no one, no one had this stuff in place to do this virtually. So

Mary Jo Foley: (01:11:43)
No. Or, or if your company buys another company, right. Like Microsoft buying activism, they're gonna add 10,000 people. Okay. There, these people aren't gonna go into an office unless thing changes drastically between now and when they actually buy them. So how do you get them up to speed with the Microsoft way? You know, how are they gonna know about growth mindset without this come on. It's important. So

Leo Laporte: (01:12:05)
Yeah. A growth mindset. So that was that your challenge today. Get that phrase into the, that was my word. That was the word she got. I'm gonna say growth and I'm not, I'm not gonna laugh when I say it.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:12:17)
Can she put growth mindset in a sentence and not laugh? And can she be

Leo Laporte: (01:12:20)
Serious? Meaning congratulations. Nailed it. I nailed

Mary Jo Foley: (01:12:24)
It. Did it guys. Okay. I'm done. My work is done here.

Leo Laporte: (01:12:28)
Relax. Why don't you relax. Take a little time. And I will do a commercial. How about that? More of an attrition mindset, but that's fine. Attrition mindset. Yeah. Slowly, slowly, fading away. Py all newie. Does, does he seem further to the horizon today? All our show today brought to you by very happy to say the good folks at new Relic. I am a big fan of new Relic. I've known about him for a long time. If you are a software engineer, if you're ASIS admin, if you run a network, you know, the 3:00 AM call, right? The, the one you just, you just don't want to get, you know, in the middle of the night and all of a sudden something's down, the server's broken the there's, the, the front end's blocked, whatever. And, and you, and of course, you know, it's all up on you, right?

Leo Laporte: (01:13:27)
So you're, you're going, what the heck is going on? Is it the back end? Is it the front end? Is it the global? Is it local? Is it the server? Is that that work? Is it the cloud provider? Did I push a bug in my last deploy? Do we have slow running queries? Wouldn't you like it? If you know the whole team's up, you're buzzing around you're messaging back and forth. It's 3:00 AM. You're in your gym gyms. You don't need to be doing this. You need new Relic. You need observe. That's the word. You need a window into what's happening on your network and your systems. According to new Relic study, only about half of all organizations have implemented observability on their networks and systems half. That means the other half are getting up at 3:00 AM going. What happened?

Leo Laporte: (01:14:16)
New Relic, the solution. These 3:00 AM phone calls are a thing in the past where if they do happen, you press a button. You say what you look, you look at your, your, your dashboard. You go, oh, well, I could see what happened here and fix it. New Relic combines now. And they're, they're always adding more 16 different monitoring products that you'd normally buy separately. That'll let you see in the entire stack in one easy space, you get application monitoring, which is fantastic unified monitoring for your applications, your microservices. If you use Kubernetes, you know about pixie, you should, if you don't get it, love it. You have distributed tracing, which means you can see all your traces without management headaches. So you could find and fix issues, fast network performance monitoring that goes through the data silo out into the whole system. A system-wide correlated view.

Leo Laporte: (01:15:12)
So you're not like going well, this one's all right. This is okay. It's okay here. No, you know the whole thing. And that's just four of the 16 tools. There's so much more, more importantly, you can pinpoint issues right down to the line of code. So you can be, you can say, oh yeah, it was, that was that fix. I pushed let's fix the fix. You know exactly what the problem is. And you can refresh it and resolve it quickly. That's why the devs and ops teams at DoorDash use at GitHub uses it epic games at 14,000 companies use new Relic, new Relic to debug and improve their software. Doesn't matter if you're a cloud native start up, our fortune 500 new Relic is for you. It'll take five minutes to set up in your environment. I mean, I mean, I'm serious. It's quick. And you, you know that next 3:00 AM call is just out there waiting here to get you. So you get new Relic before it gets you. You can, and this is the best part. You can have access to the entire new Relic platform and a hundred gigs of data free forever. You don't even need to give 'em a credit card. So what's stopping you sign up at new Relic. N E w R E L I C. New relic.com/Windows.

Leo Laporte: (01:16:29)
I can't, I don't, I can't imagine life without new Relic. You shouldn't have to new relic.com/Windows. Thank you. New Relic. Appreciate your support of Windows Weekly. And for you listeners and viewers, that's how you support us back. You go to new relic.com/Windows. Go ahead. This talk about that's over Nvidia. Yeah. Thinks over last week, this was rumored this week. It's true. Yeah, we knew it was basically, we knew it was gonna happen. Yeah. So here's the weird outcome here. That's possible. Arm is owned by SoftBank. Softbank has said they intend to basically spin this company off, have an IPO. It'll become a public independent company and then it can just be bought by some terrible company. So I don't know what you guys are all voting against, but now someone like Google's gonna buy 'em or something. Yeah. So I guess we'll see what happens. No, an IPO though, would keep them out of the hands if the big boys wouldn't it would it okay. Would it maybe not?

Mary Jo Foley: (01:17:30)
Well until somebody buys them if they can. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. I think they're just giving up on anyone buying

Leo Laporte: (01:17:37)
Them cuz of it was a steep price. It ended up it's funny cuz it started low. And then as the value went up, it ended up being like 42 billion or something. It was a huge amount of money. Yeah. And I think there was, you know, like a lot of these deals, they had to, you know, get some kind of financing a partner on this and I'm sure it just would've been really tricky, but I don't, I, the central problem for me here is I don't. I mean maybe I don't understand it. I, I, I don't see what the opposition to end video was. Exactly. the invi should have done, we're gonna talk about Microsoft and activism a little bit, but they should have had a PR campaign similar to what Microsoft's doing, made some promises, you know about what they would've done with the technology and how they would've continued licensing it at the same, you know, same partner, same everything. They should have been a little more transparent maybe, but it's over. So what's you gonna do? I think it's probably a good thing. I mean, I, I was interested, intrigued by the idea of a giant powerhouse of video, but probably better not to, not to have that happen. I'm thinking. Yep. Let's talk Xbox, Mary Joe, I'll take you off camera so you can your eyes.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:18:53)
No, the first story I'm interested in here BA

Leo Laporte: (01:18:56)
Oh wow. Okay. Yeah. Act vision as I'll call it act vision blizzard, right. Is the right publisher behind the call of duty series and many other popular games. But call of duty. Has I speaking from firsthand experience here has had some problems in recent years in that it's just the same game O over and over again. And they keep redoing the same genres over and over again. You know, the big things that have been popular for them in the past, obviously world war II, where they started the bottom warfare series has probably been the biggest thing and in black ops, which I think would get all agree is just like modern warfares or whatever. They went back to col to world war II last year. Curious choice. Didn't go very well. And I don't know if this is, that's probably not the first time ever, but they actually earned less money in the quarter ending December 31st than they did in the same quarter a year ago.

Leo Laporte: (01:19:51)
Oh, revenues were down 11.6% and their monthly average users fall from 397 million to 371 million. Almost certainly well, a combination of factors. Right. First of all, I think the world's kind of moving on in some ways also to different types of games. Right. So these battle Royal games like Fortnite are very popular. Call duty has a version of that. Of course. And it, you know, it does well, but I, I think, I don't know. I don't know what I think, but yeah, Microsoft's buy, so everything's fine. Don't worry. But it's kind of interesting. That's why that's right.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:20:30)
Yeah. I mean, Microsoft's looking for companies that are cheap, right. Like, or undervalued or

Leo Laporte: (01:20:34)
Whatever. Right. So, oh, this company is worth a lot less now than it was two years ago for sure. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yep. Definitely. Yep, definitely. So anyway, yeah, the, the new call of duty game is not done so, and and avision admitted that, you know, whatever, anyhow just in other related news then last week Leah was gone for this, but last week Sony announced their quarterly earnings. And we talked about their, the PlayStation sales have gone down actually year over year as well. That can be partially attributed to the component shortage obviously, but that has kind of dropped off more quickly than was expected. Nintendo also had to adjust their sales estimates for the future and also sold fewer consoles than they did a year ago, but they're still going gang busters. Like they sold almost 11 million switch consoles in the fourth quarter.

Leo Laporte: (01:21:26)
Lifetime is almost a hundred, four a million. It is now Nintendo's best selling console of all time, not their best selling game device. I know they have portable game boy things that have sold better, but still like this is, this is pretty impressive. And as far as the future goes, they actually did drop their estimates for the current fiscal year down by 1 million units. But they still expect to sell 23 million units in the year. That's I dunno, that's pretty impressive. So they're doing, they're doing great, but, but the big news is, and, and this is, this is an awesome example of timing and karma that I love so much. Microsoft announced today in a very long blog post they're open app store principles, which they have talked about before, by the way. And in fact, in a legal filing in the epic versus apple case, they mentioned these basic principles and they're basically putting their money where their mouth is so to speak.

Leo Laporte: (01:22:22)
So they had done this before for Windows. Remember, I think last year they made an announcement along these lines about how they would allow developers to use third party payment systems. Unlike, you know, other companies who will sh will not be named they'll hold their apps to the same standards we hold to third party apps, meaning we're not gonna promote our stuff over other company stuff transparent about the rules and all that, you know, it goes on and on. It's a big thing, but it's it some good timing because apple and Google right now are involved in antitrust cases all around the world, including the United States for their, I would say, you know, disgusting policies with regards to app fees and payment systems and all that kind of stuff. And Microsoft, which, you know, granted lost out in the, in the mobile space.

Leo Laporte: (01:23:10)
But if Xbox has proven anything to the world, it's that failure if handled properly can be like one of the best things that ever happened to you because Xbox has turned into such a gamer centric platform. And by fit in the mobile app space with Windows phone, they are now turning into the same thing for app stores. And they're doing that on Windows and they're gonna try to do it as much as possible on Xbox. That's a little trickier because the console rules are a little tighter, but they have basically 11 principles and they're saying like right away, we'll be able to do the first seven and then we're gonna work toward getting Xbox pushed over on the on the remaining four as well. But they also brought up the avision thing, which really, I think was really the point of this post today, which is by the way, yeah, we may now be the third biggest gaming company by revenue when we make this acquisition, but we're not gonna turn into apple or Google.

Leo Laporte: (01:24:06)
And we're gonna, our app stores gonna be open. It's gonna be fair to everybody. And as far as activism, BLI goes they have promised to make call of duty and other pro popular, active vision titles available on PlayStation, not just through the terms of any existing agreements, but past those terms. That's good news, right? Yeah. Yeah. This is, and it's the right thing to do. It's and they actually explicitly said they, they wanna take these games to Nintendo too. Right. That thing, I just mentioned the best selling console of, of all time, I guess, wouldn't they? Right. But the point of all this is, it's like, they're striking exactly the right moment. You know, the whole world has really up to complain about apple and Google and they're like, Hey, you know, remember us? Yeah. We have an app store too.

Leo Laporte: (01:24:52)
I know you don't know it. We do. We do trust us. We have one and it's way fairer than what those well, but as apple will point out, they charge 30% just like apple. Right. the developer pays don't think it's that anymore. Oh, maybe not. No, isn't it like 15 now. Oh, I think it's, it's even less than that on Windows. On Windows time, my Windows is slow, but nobody cares about Windows. I'm talking about the Xbox on the Xbox. Right. So that's what they're so yeah. So the problem on Xbox is that is a you know, the original Wald garden kind of thing. It's, it's where apple got all their ideas, right? From the video games, stories. Yeah. Both PlayStation and Microsoft at least. Oh, dating back to Nintendo, just the whole control they used to have over that ecosystem with the NES right back in the late eighties.

Leo Laporte: (01:25:36)
So yes, they're going to, if you look at the final four terms, right. That's where things get kind of interesting. These are the terms that are based. These are the developer terms, right? We will not require developers to use our in-app payment system. We will not require developers to provide. We will not require developers to provide more favorable terms in our store than they do in other stores. We will not disadvantage developers. If they choose to use a third party payment, all of this is against apple. This is the opposite. Yeah. This is, this sounds like they took Apple's contract and they added won't do everything, you know? It's very interesting. So I, this is a great this is smart for Microsoft on so many levels. It's smart because they want this activation acquisition to go through. It's smart because they are explicitly opposing apple in that epic case, which I think is very interesting.

Leo Laporte: (01:26:27)
Epic and apple or apple and M epic and Microsoft used to be at odds because Tim Sweeney couldn't stand Microsoft. Remember he hated Windows eight, cuz it had an app, a store in it and he was afraid. They were gonna try to kill steam and kill everybody and blah, blah, blah, whatever he was a night job at the time. But anyway now these guys are like BOS and buddies and standing up to apple is, is an interesting stance for Microsoft. And you gotta remember it wasn't that long ago, Microsoft tried to get Xbox game passes, Xbox cloud gaming service into the app store. And apple said, no, we have to review every one of those games. And we every single game, but in there we want that, you know, 30% fee on. And they said, no, it's not, it's a streaming thing. This we're not selling things. It's just like Netflix, you know, they stream movies and they're like, no, it's not just like Netflix, Netflix doesn't have games. Netflix actually doesn't have games now. But at the time Netflix was just movies and TV shows and in apples, little bizarre world those are two different things. So they're trying to push back against all those things. Yep.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:27:29)
I would say I, I wrote about this too today because oh 75% of what Microsoft did today with these principles is about activism, blizzard and them knowing that they gotta get ahead of this for like, they already know they're gonna face incredibly tough scrutiny and you can watch every blog post. They put a little tidbit to try to like, keep the thread going that we're gonna do the right thing. We're gonna be fair by the way. We're only gonna be the number three game company after this. Right. This not number one. Right. That's right. And we wanna do the right thing by customer and blah, blah, blah. This is all about that. Well, I, I wouldn't fail. This is 75%, 25% is like, let's also use this blog post to dig into apple. Right. This regulatory stuff, 25% is like, get apple while we're at it. Let's just do it's

Leo Laporte: (01:28:20)
2000 words on app stores and freedom and then oh, in apple sex. Yeah. Pretty

Mary Jo Foley: (01:28:24)
Much pretty much. Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (01:28:27)
Okay. But I wonder if, okay, so one thing I thought Microsoft might do is require game pass, require the subscription to game pass. And even if you're planning on the PS five,

Mary Jo Foley: (01:28:39)
They still might. Right. See, I

Leo Laporte: (01:28:41)
Say they won't. Right. And so they haven't ruled that out. Right. We'll see. Yeah. That'd be interesting. Wouldn't it? It would. But you know, if you look at the world today and I think the world for the foreseeable next, you know, several years, whatever we move from disc based games, being primary sale point on consoles to download, you know, digital downloads eventually probably streaming will be a big chunk of it, but I don't think it's fair to say it's gonna just take over and be it. Like, I don't think it becomes it. I think I, it would be insane for any game publisher to only make games available that way. So it's far more likely that they'll law for those games for sale and via game pass

Mary Jo Foley: (01:29:23)
And thats, do you think it'll just like music, it'll be like music, right? It'll be, well, almost everybody uses online, but if you really wanna buy it, you still can. But

Leo Laporte: (01:29:33)
I think it gets there. I just, I just don't think it happens that quick. Yeah. I, well see, I mean, maybe I'll be maybe I'm wrong. I don't know, but I, the world is moving in that direction. I just don't think it happens overnight, you know? Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley: (01:29:46)
Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (01:29:47)
Anyway, I, this is exactly the PR

Mary Jo Foley: (01:29:50)
Yeah, this is a, this is like Microsoft doing PR like it's a masterclass and how to do PR yeah. After you get burned by the antitrust regulators, you're like, here's what we learned. This is what we need to do. Like not just charge well and not

Leo Laporte: (01:30:04)
Just, but you know, they, they failed right. Xbox failed with the Xbox one, right. Windows phone failed, right? Yep. And the uthe Microsoft store, which used to be called the Windows store failed, you know, that whole one Windows it's failed. Those things all failed. So I get, you could, would give up and go home and, you know, take your ball and get outta here. Or you could completely recast and, and just do something completely new. And, and I think, look, there's no solution for mobile, but,uwhat they did with Xbox, I think is kind of magic for people who care about games. Like it's amazing. And when you look at just looking at something like Minecraft and how they, what they're doing with that today, every week, there's a freaking Minecraft announce, but they keep adding content to it's awesome. That's so great. Uthey're gonna be amazing stewards for activation blizzards. So that's what I say. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Did micro, you know, so Apple's going through now in its,uregulatory scrutiny,uwhat I would call the defiant stage. Yep. You saw them flip the bird to it's seven stages of antitrust kinda reaction. Did Microsoft ever go through a defiant stage? What Microsoft only went through a deft stage?

Mary Jo Foley: (01:31:14)
What talking about they kinda stuck at the defiant stage.

Leo Laporte: (01:31:17)
I think that, yeah.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:31:21)
So is it a good

Leo Laporte: (01:31:22)
Strategy? I mean, might apple succeed? No, no. By the

Mary Jo Foley: (01:31:25)
Way, terrible strategy.

Leo Laporte: (01:31:27)
Yeah. One. So people probably forget this, but it came, it just came up in the news the other day, remember Intel's 2005, whatever year it was antitrust ruling and the EU was thrown out. Remember this just happened. Yeah. When that trial was still new, Microsoft had already gotten burned by the us, almost got broken up. They were going heavy in the EU at the time. My, that, that those guys forced Microsoft to change Windows in ways that are insane. When you look back on it and Intel got sued by the European commission or the European union. And they were like, yeah, we give up, we'll just pay the fine, sorry, we're sorry. We'll stop doing it. They literally just, they didn't do it. The, the looking at what happened to Microsoft, they were like, we can't afford a decade of this. Yeah. They just gave in now behind the scenes because you know, Europe slow, they had been filing, you know, things, filing things, filing things to, they actually just got it overturned, you know?

Leo Laporte: (01:32:21)
And that's what you can do when you're not belligerent. Right. They're gonna get the money back. Apple, apple has a, a self righteous indignation to them. That is as understandable as it is disgusting. It's just, it's not gonna work well for them. And Microsoft, if you look at this thing, if you please and do this, read their post, read what they say and compare it to what apple says about their app store and how the, the only stance they can make is, well, I mean, we're doing it for, to protect the users, right? This is why like we, the, the fees of there, because we're trying to keep the source safe for everybody. You know, like that's all they can say, the fees are there because you arbitrarily chose 30% and now it's a huge of chunk of money and you don't want to give it up. That's all it is. There's no, there is no, there is no actual rational justification to what Apple's doing. And then you compare it to Microsoft's and you're like, wow, this is, this is quite egalitarian here. What's going on? Are they trying to make money?

Mary Jo Foley: (01:33:26)
Lessons learned the hard way?

Leo Laporte: (01:33:29)
It's it's it's CRA the differences are insane.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:33:33)
Yeah. And you know, I just, this may be a crazy thought, but I feel like if Brad Smith wasn't there and headlining this and somebody knew was there, they may not have the institutional remembrance of that's. Right.

Leo Laporte: (01:33:45)
Yeah. That's, that's actually a really good point. Yeah. That's right. He is one of the

Mary Jo Foley: (01:33:49)
Few people left, went through it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte: (01:33:50)
That's right. He went through it because bill Newcomb left. Right. Like I think that's how long ago it was. Yeah. Yeah.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:33:57)
That's a good point. I, you know, it's funny. I saw that he was in Washington, DC, see yesterday and Frank Shaw was, and Jenny LA fluffy was also cuz they were doing some kind of testimony about the disability, like something to do with disability. And I was like, they're there for another reason. They're not just there for that. There's there's another reason that Brad Smith and Frank are in Washington and then this comes out and I'm like, well, this

Leo Laporte: (01:34:22)
Is why there is a bill before Congress right now to basically break up these app store monopolies. Right. Right. I mean, this is Microsoft related. Right? Of course this is Microsoft saying, look, this is how you do an app store, you know, without running a file of antitrust regulators. Yep. Yeah. You're gonna make less money. Apple star. You already make more money than every company on earth. Like, you know, if your app store revenue is dropped by 50%, guess what? You would still be the biggest company. The world make the world most money. You'd still be the biggest company in the world. Yeah. Period. True. Yeah. Well, and it gets harder and harder as other companies say, oh yeah, we're not gonna do that. We're not gonna do that. You don't have to do that to be a successful company that gets harder and harder for apple. Yeah. Yep. I'm a 10 year old, but is there a person you just mentioned named Jenny lay fluffy? Yes. Okay. I'm sorry. I almost spit up my milk. Well, no, she's you're pronouncing it wrong. Oh this is V OK.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:35:19)
No Jenny late. I'm sorry. I'm saying it wrong. Jenny lay. Flury not fluffy. Sorry. My bad. F L U R R I E she's Microsoft's chief accessibility

Leo Laporte: (01:35:29)
Officer. Oh, I know her. Yes, of course. Yeah. You know her? No, I actually know her. She's great. I'm sorry. You oh, nice. Did she marry a guy named fluffy? No,

Mary Jo Foley: (01:35:38)
I've screwed that up. Flury Flury poor. Womany sorry, Jenny.

Leo Laporte: (01:35:46)
Okay. I'm 10 I'm I'm sorry. It's embarrassing. You are 10. I have the mind of a 10 year old. I'm sorry. It's like a, like a, a woman in a James Bond movie or something. It does. Yeah. It, it does bad enough. She was named Jenny Le. Then she has to marry a guy named fluffy. Right? I mean, come on back. Sorry.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:36:04)
I'm very embarrassed. I'm sorry

Leo Laporte: (01:36:06)
Everyone. Jenny LA.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:36:10)
Yes. That sounds way better. When you see back

Leo Laporte: (01:36:11)
Much Patel, we're gonna take a little break then we're gonna get the back of the book

Speaker 3: (01:36:18)
For listening to TWiT podcasts. If you'd like to take it up a notch, you can get all of our shows without ads by joining Club TWiT, whether you're a loyal fan or once to give your employee something special with our corporate plan, you'll get the bonus TWiT plus feed with extra behind the scenes, outtakes and access to a member's only Discord all for just seven bucks a month. It's a great way to get just the content support TWiT tv and be a part of the tech community. Learn more and join Club TWiT at twit.tv/Club TWiT.

Leo Laporte: (01:36:50)
Have you seen house of Gucci yet? Speaking of bad accents house, house of Flury. How? See it's hysterical. It's lady Gaga Jerry army irons. But the best one is Jared Leto in a fat suit doing the most Mario accent I've ever heard. He's talk. Cause I like at least the whole time. It's just family. Aren't they? Yeah. Are they being sued? Yeah, I think they're not happy. I think so. Yeah. I think happy and the family ain't happy that man. Yeah. Yeah. They shouldn't be cuz it's not a flattering portrait. It's it's pretty it's but the accents, my God. And then I just read lady Gaga who was snubbed for an Oscar stayed in character for the eight months she was making the movie. She would talk to everybody like this. Even her mom. She say, mom, is she Madonna? Yeah. She at the crazy, she said, I don't know why to be lady Gaga no more. It's the funniest thing. Oh boy. All right.

Leo Laporte: (01:37:52)
Yeah. You're right. Knox Harington has nailed it. He says my problem with the house of Gucci was it was both too silly and not silly enough. It should. It should have lent into the insanity. I agree. They tried to be serious and silly. Just be silly. It's like that there's a Netflix series. Like the woman who saw the murder dress the girl with a yeah. With a woman with a girl. So same thing. It's like it's, it's sometimes it's hilarious. And sometimes wait, is this serious? Yeah. I started watching it. Hoping it would be a parody. Yeah. Of the girl in the train it's worth. It's still worth. It's still worth seeing regardless. But yeah. Oh, I,

Mary Jo Foley: (01:38:23)
I love her murder in the building. Same thing you guys saying?

Leo Laporte: (01:38:26)
Yeah. Silly. They lean into the silly on that one. Steve Martin. I like that one. I thought that was

Mary Jo Foley: (01:38:31)
No, I wanted it to be, I wanted it to be more a detective. No, let silly more detective more

Leo Laporte: (01:38:36)
Detective. So watch this Netflix thing cuz actually they like figuring out who did it is actually fun. It's it's a neat it's it's a neat show. It's short too. Hey, this is a new part of the back of the book.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:38:49)
Movie reviews, movie

Leo Laporte: (01:38:51)
Reviews, the newy bird Thurrott we

Mary Jo Foley: (01:38:57)
Pair beers with our recommendations.

Leo Laporte: (01:39:00)
Speaking of beer. That's right time for the back of the booklet's kick things off with, I think this is a tip of the week from Paul tht. Am I correct? Am I right? Just this kind of a general tip, which is you should enable to step authentication to verification, whatever they're calling it. Multifactor authentication for every single one of our online accounts, obviously. Right. but Google started auto enrolling people in what they call two step verification in their, for Gmail, Google accounts. And apparently over time they're gonna auto enroll, everyone who doesn't manually enroll. And that's smart because they found is that there was a 50% drop in account compromises just by enabling this one feature, which is, you know, kind of what you're looking for. So that that's a Google thing. I'm sure Microsoft has similar data, but wherever you can do this, do this.

Leo Laporte: (01:39:56)
And there's some, just a little bit of data to kind of back that up. So sorry. I, I have, I, I have a tip. I'm gonna save it next week, but I have a, I have a tip that is actually kind of funny because it makes me look stupid. But anyway, in the meantime I have two I have two app picks this week. One is that Google released fluter 2.1, which is a developer toolkit for creating cross platform apps. It started out as something for Android and iOS, but they're adding support for desktop platforms in the web now. And version 2.1 adds support for creating Windows apps, which is kind of awesome. This is a really sophisticated environment. If you know, people will often ask me, I wanna write a Windows app, like what's the best way to do it.

Leo Laporte: (01:40:41)
And unfortunately, here in 2022, the answer is like, well, you really shouldn't write a Windows app. That's the best answer, write a cross platform app. And you could do that with a web framework of some kind create a PWA perhaps, or you could use something like fluter or literally fluter. Microsoft has something coming down the pipe called.net Maui, which is basically the next version of Samin. And it's not exactly what fluter is because it doesn't support the web natively. Maui will support Windows Mac, Android, and iOS, but flutter today supports Android iOS and Windows and stable, but web Linux, et cetera, are all coming as well. Uit's, it's a pretty sophisticated, it's something to something to look into. I recommend it. Yeah. I like flutter a lot actually. Yeah. Fluter and dark. I do too. Yeah. Yeah. And that's good. How does it look in Windows cross platform? Does it look native?

Leo Laporte: (01:41:42)
Yeah. So it can you know, one of the tricks with the cross platform stuff dating all the way back to Java is that oftentimes what you see is some kind of a weird overlay or something that maybe has suited no native controls or whatever. So there's a lot of native control stuff. Microsoft has actually made contributions to this. One of the things they con contributed were they're fluent. Is it fluent or fluid? I guess fluent the fonts from the fluent design system are now part of fluter. So, or it can be added to a fluter project natively. So it pretty native and the widgets and all that. They look like real Windows buttons and stuff. Cuz that's always the issue. Yeah. They can. They absolutely can. Yep. Yep. I like, I mean some people a lot. I do too.

Leo Laporte: (01:42:24)
Yeah. Yeah. I'm gonna look at this again. I'm doing like a monthly programming project. Speaking of my second. So when I was away, I put my, the first of my four dot NPA projects up on GitHub and actually people like forking it and making contributions and stuff. And that's kind of an interesting little world to be a part of. But yeah, at some point this month, February, it's February. So February, I'm gonna wrap that up. I'm gonna, I'm gonna document the stuff that people have done on the outside. Make a few changes my own. I'm gonna kind of wrap that one up, but clutter's definitely what I'm gonna be looking at in the near future. I don't remember when this came up, but I know this came up. I, I tweeted about this some weeks ago, but among my many Windows frustrations are you have a bunch of images on your desktop or maybe they're in a folder and you double click on one.

Leo Laporte: (01:43:14)
And by default it loads up an application called Windows photos. Sometimes Windows photos has navigation controls. So you can hit the right arrow key or whatever, and go look at every single picture in the folder. But a lot of times, and this is getting to be more and more of a problem. There are no navigation controls. So you open an image and you want to go see the next one and you can't. And if it's like lately, I've been looking at all these images of screenshots from like Longhorn and everything. It's like a folder with 178 fol you know, files. I can't open these things one at a time. I, I need to, you know, scroll through them and I people have come up with like, oh, it's, if you leave it sitting there, the navigation controls will eventually work that hasn't actually worked for me, whatever blow.

Leo Laporte: (01:43:58)
So anyway, eventually I said, screw this, I need a third party tool for this. I need something that just works. There are probably many, many choices. This one isn't particularly pretty, but it does the job it's free. It's called I don't. I need the hype announce it Han view. Yeah. This guy's name is IIN or I okay. IIN IIN view. Yeah. So, you know, it's, you can configure it however you want, but one of the things it does right out the box, that exactly what I just described. You have a folder full of files. You open one, right? Arrow key. Next, next, next. It's exactly what you want. So I'm done, I'm done screwing around with Windows photos. I wish stuff worked, but you know, this is a lot like the Windows mail app and Windows 10 and now 11 where I tried and I tried and I tried, I'm like, you know what? This doesn't work. Why am I doing this to myself? So,uthere are free alternatives out there. This is one I, this is the one I'm using. I like it, but nice. Yeah. Good. And now Mary Jo Foley, and you have a enterprise pick of the week.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:45:00)
I do. Yes. Windows 365 is getting one of the most requested user features. Maybe the most requested feature. I'm not sure if it's the, the most or one of the most that feature is Azure active directory join support. So Azure ad join support. It's definitely a feature business users have been asking about because it lets them bring cloud PCs through Windows 65, 2 users, without having to have Azure as part of the equation they can actually use and create a Azure ad joined cloud PCs on their network by using on-premises network connections. They can provide cloud PCs for people who are cloud only users in an organization. And people care about Windows. Hello for business, you can use this feature to sign into your cloud PC because you're using Azure ad Microsoft talked about all of this at ignite in the fall. I didn't realize, but at the time, but that was only in private preview. So as of today, this is all in public preview for anyone who's a Windows 365 customer. So this is a very big deal as far as advancing the whole cloud PC idea and practice for business users and everybody else. So yay. They did it. They said they would and they did

Leo Laporte: (01:46:33)
Nice. Yay. They said they do it. They did it in yay. H rah

Mary Jo Foley: (01:46:40)
HHA, not, not HHA. Rah, rah,

Leo Laporte: (01:46:44)
Rah, rah, and now code name pick of the week.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:46:50)
So two code names, both from business insider related to the HoloLens story, two things. We gotta keep our ears to the ground for. The, the supposedly canceled HoloLens three was code named Calypso. They say, and the new mystery device that Microsoft's building was Samsung for mixed reality. Extended reality is code named Bondi after Bondi beach in Australia. So if you hear those code names, it's about HoloLens,

Leo Laporte: (01:47:23)
Nice Bondi Bondai, Bondi, Bondi, right? I think it's about

Mary Jo Foley: (01:47:29)
Call Bondi

Leo Laporte: (01:47:30)
Bond. Yeah, there was a, the only reason I know is cuz of course Bondi or Bondi was the name of the apple color for the first iMac. And I think we said bond. Oh, is it really Bondi blue? Really? Yeah. Oh,

Mary Jo Foley: (01:47:40)
Okay. Yeah. This was named after the beach.

Leo Laporte: (01:47:43)
Yeah. That's as was Bondi blue, cuz that's apparently how the beach, the color of the a beach.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:47:50)
Ah, got it. Got it.

Leo Laporte: (01:47:52)
And now is this like a Leo? No DiCaprio movie. It kinda

Mary Jo Foley: (01:47:56)
Is.

Leo Laporte: (01:47:57)
Yeah. The island or something that goes beach. Let us do some beer.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:48:07)
Let us do a very weird beer pick

Leo Laporte: (01:48:09)
Up the, this is the funniest beer name. You've had a long time, by the way.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:48:13)
This beer, this is the real name, Western, Maryland vacation packages is the name of the beer that already tells you. It's gonna be weird, right? What the hell? Yes. Okay. So it's called that because one of the brewers that made this KWA brewing, which is an excellent brewery they're in Williams, port, Maryland, which I'm assuming must be in Western, Maryland. They brewed the beer in conjunction with heist, which is a brewery in Charlotte. Mm here's a description of the beer. This is a fruited sour, which is a very, a popular style. It features heavy amounts of mango, delicious, sweet coconut, and all the bread pudding we could pack.

Leo Laporte: (01:48:59)
Oh, that's disgusting. What I know, you know what? I don't want bread pudding in my beer.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:49:05)
I saw this and I'm like, I have to try it now because I love bread pudding. And I'm so intrigued by this. I, I

Leo Laporte: (01:49:11)
Do too, but I don't love it in my beer. Yeah. It's not. It's just the flavor of bread pudding. Obviously.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:49:17)
No, they brewed it with bread pudding.

Leo Laporte: (01:49:20)
In the beer, like on the bottom of the barrel, they stuck some bread pudding. They threw

Mary Jo Foley: (01:49:24)
The, you know, this is a thing that a lot of people do, a stouts. They throw crazy ingredients on like Graham crackers and M and MSMS and marshmallows. And they put stuff in to see what happened, bread pudding. So that's what I wanted. I wanted it to taste like bread pudding, but it didn't, it tasted like coconut mango

Leo Laporte: (01:49:40)
Smoothie that's because coconuts and mangos overpower, they did the bread pudding.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:49:45)
They did. I wanted it to pour out of the can like the thick bread pudding. That's what I wanted. Wow. It did not. It just poured out as a little thick neon orange beer and it tasted good, but all it tasted like was a fruit smoothie. It didn't

Leo Laporte: (01:50:01)
Taste like, did it come out like a like bread and a can, like it kind of schlop out of there or did it that's I wanted,

Mary Jo Foley: (01:50:07)
I wanted that. I don't know why, but I did. And it didn't come out like that. So I felt a little let down and it was very delicious. Here's

Leo Laporte: (01:50:17)
That? I liked the best from Kenny L on untapped. He says not a beer, but liked it.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:50:24)
Yeah. My, my review was similar or UN untapped. Mine was like, it was a delicious fruit smoothie, but not really a beer, not a beer. Yeah. Well,

Leo Laporte: (01:50:33)
You know, honestly, the name is good because you really wouldn't expect a beer to be called Western, Maryland vacation package. That's true. Which

Mary Jo Foley: (01:50:39)
Is that's. That's true. And to be good. Right? Right. Yeah. So they said the reason they called it that was, they went down to Charlotte at the Cushwa brewers and they said, we told them we, we had to come up with the perfect getaway. They took us up on the offer and came up on one of the most, slept on destinations for travel, Western, Maryland,

Leo Laporte: (01:51:02)
Not Eastern Maryland, where there would be an ocean. That's amazing. Inland.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:51:07)
Yeah. So it's a lot of good jokes going on. And once I saw bread pudding though, I was all in and I bought a can and brought it home and

Leo Laporte: (01:51:14)
I was just 0.0, oh, the Potomac is on the east, the west side. So it's is it bordered by the Atlantic ocean? On the east of, and then on the west Chesapeake bay comes right up the middle of it. Oh, it does it. Oh, so maybe the west would be on pike bay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. It could

Mary Jo Foley: (01:51:29)
Be, yeah. Okay. I've been drinking a lot of unusual beers lately, just cuz even a woman who, who lives IPAs cannot live by IPAs alone needs to try

Leo Laporte: (01:51:38)
New things, but really we don't need an orange mango smoothie for

Mary Jo Foley: (01:51:45)
The other one I was gonna think of. Maybe I'll save that for another week. That was also weird and terrible. Is there like

Leo Laporte: (01:51:51)
A fruitcake bear that has little built in hardened fruits? Yeah,

Mary Jo Foley: (01:51:57)
Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, Maryland vacation package

Leo Laporte: (01:52:01)
There is there banana bread beer cuz I would drink that. Yes, there

Mary Jo Foley: (01:52:03)
Is. There is. There's a very famous one from England who, if we have some British people on there gonna know beer, it's a banana bread beer. It's pretty good. Tastes like banana bread. See, I can

Leo Laporte: (01:52:13)
Take that. That's almost bread pudding. Yeah. Right

Mary Jo Foley: (01:52:18)
Now I love bread pudding. I love it.

Leo Laporte: (01:52:21)
It's not a liquid and it's not a solid, it's more of a magma kind of a thing is Yeah. What do we call that? It's a, it's saw it or something. Elastic

Mary Jo Foley: (01:52:33)
Six Leo. You gonna find Wells banana bread beer from the

Leo Laporte: (01:52:37)
UK bread beer. That sounds good.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:52:39)
I've it's very nice.

Leo Laporte: (01:52:40)
I'll take it's very nice. I'll take two. Yep. Well yep. Yeah. Well, so yeah

Mary Jo Foley: (01:52:49)
Guys, somebody has to take one for the team on beers and I'm here for you. You

Leo Laporte: (01:52:53)
Do it, you do it every week. She drinks something else. God awful. And saves us from it. Okay. Thank you. Major. You're a champion. You know, you're a hero, a frontline worker. I am. Yeah I am. Yeah. You're one of the heroes, right? I think Microsoft has a software package for you. Frontline worker. They do frontline beer worker, frontline beer worker. I might get you a hat that says that that would be good. Little baseball cap. Mary Jo Foley is@allaboutmicrosoft.com. That's a ZD net blog. Who owns you now? Is it still red ventures or have you red ventures? Okay. Just checking still red ventures. Yep. Just checking. Well, you know they spun off tech Republic tech Republic. Yep. So that was like, they were there for a cup of coffee and gone pretty much. Yep. Yeah. It's it's wild and now. Yep. Oh, you know we had Dan Patterson on on Sunday, TWiT from CBS. Yep. And now you know, there for sale. So it's all, it's just a, what a, what a crazy wacky media landscape. We it's always kind,

Mary Jo Foley: (01:54:07)
The video might buy us. Who knows the video might buy

Leo Laporte: (01:54:10)
The podcast. We could do. Yeah, we could. We could help em, somehow. I dunno. I'll do something. Some beer Eagle, brewery.co UK banana.

Mary Jo Foley: (01:54:21)
Now I'm looking for the Wells. The Wells one is the so

Leo Laporte: (01:54:23)
Apparently there's more than one. There's more

Mary Jo Foley: (01:54:25)
Than one.

Leo Laporte: (01:54:27)
Yep. It's just like a half of Iten that went bad. It's a little, it's got little chunky things floating in it now. No, no. It

Mary Jo Foley: (01:54:34)
Really tastes like banana bread. It does. It's

Leo Laporte: (01:54:36)
Is there a beer there's no, for, for for Lisa that tastes like Smarties. I bet there is I's of there's candy. There's lots of taste. Like there's a wine flushy with her name on it. Yeah. We wanna try once the weather turns, we're gonna try that. You're a famous rosacea slushy. Paul. Maybe we could do that in the cruise. We could talk them to, to, yeah. One of the slushy bars into a, this will be like a 1 0 1 level alcohol class. Oh man, man. We're gonna, we're gonna have so much fun with the peanut butter and the, well, she does make a mean peanut butter cup cocktail now and also a peanut butter and jelly sounds so good. Oh man.

Leo Laporte: (01:55:18)
Paul thrive. Yeah. I guess there's still room on the cruise. I don't know the cruises still on cuz guess what? The pandemic's over. Congratulations. I know we, we won, we meet won. We won humans won. COVID nothing. Well not exactly nothing, but you know, not exactly. It's kind of an overtime thing, but yeah, it thriller. It was, it was a thriller one by a field goal. But we are going in July to Alaska. It's gonna be a lot of fun. Paul and his wife, Stephanie are going. Yep. My lovely better half Lisa is going. She can explain how twit works cuz she's just go without us. I'll go to that one. I don't know. Yeah, I know. And then and then rich Rob, Paul Campbell, Richard Campbell, Richard, one of the, one of the cameras, one of the F and Rafael are both coming.

Leo Laporte: (01:56:05)
Rafael's coming. So it's gonna, honestly, it's gonna be a Windows cruise really? And I'm just gonna sit there going I'll install Lennox for anybody. It wants Windows everywhere is the theme Leo. So yeah. You know? Yep. You'll be in the lifeboat floating forms and the lifeboat, the life boat will be name, defender, defender. Nice. A lifeboat named defender. Oh, that's good. I like it. I was gonna name this a whale with an extra arm, but now no leg, a leg leg. It's a leg Paul th threats at Thurrott dot COMT H U R. You could tell. I'm happy to be back. I missed you guys. T H U R R O T T. He's also has got his field guide to Windows ten@leanpub.com and keep your eye peeled for the field guide to Windows 11. For those of you living on the dead danger zone he will, he's working on that one too.

Leo Laporte: (01:57:00)
Yep. And of course we get together do Windows Weekly, every Wedesday at 11:00 AM Pacific 2:00 PM Eastern 1900 UTC. If you like to join us, all you have to do is go to live.Twit.tv to watch the livestream. And you could chat with us at irc dot twit.tv. If you're a member of Club TWiT, there's also a Discord, lots of fun in the Discord. In fact, we've just added a new benefit to Club TWiT Discord members, Club, TWiT members access to our, I should have thought of this before our TWiT Minecraft server. We have a Minecraft server designed back in the day by OMG craft, OMG chat and his group. It's a beautiful, it's got the TWiT studios, it's got everything in it. And access is available to you as a Club TWiT member as well. So man, the benefits keep stacking up $7 a month.

Leo Laporte: (01:57:52)
What do you get? You get a free versions of all the shows you get the Discord and all its benefits, including the Untitled Linux Show ,Stacy's Book Club. We've got a, this week in space now with Tarik Malik and Rod Pyle. Friday I'm interviewing Mike Elgan and Amira about their Gastronomad adventures. It's all sorts of stuff. And also there's the TWiT plus feed with unique stuff that doesn't show up on the regular podcasts. So that's pretty good for seven bucks a month. I think we've made it a, a nice package, everything but a galaxy S 22 ultra everything, but twit.tv/Club Twitter, if you wanna know more of course we still offer free versions of every show we do after the fact at our website, twit.tv. In the case of this show, it's twit.tv/Ww. There's a YouTube channel for every show, including Windows Weekly. And you can subscribe in your favorite podcast player at absolutely no cost to you. But I do, you know, if you want, I do. I can ask a little favor do us as solid and give us a five star review. Let the world know about the best Windows podcast in the world. Windows Weekly. I will be back here next Wednesday. I hope you will too. Paul Thurrott Mary Joe Foley have a great week. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly.

Jason Howell: (01:59:16)
Don't miss all about Android. Every week. We talk about the latest news hardware apps, and now all the developer goodness happening in the Android ecosystem. I'm Jason Howell also joined by Ron Richards, Florence ion, and our newest co-host on the panel Huyen Tue Dao who brings her developer chops, really great stuff. We also invite people from all over the Android ecosystem to talk about this mobile platform we love. So the join us every Tuesday, all about Android on twit.tv.