Windows Weekly Episode 807 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 (00:00:00):
It's time for Windows weekly. Paul Thro is here. We're gonna talk about the ftc. They're taking action against Microsoft in their Activision Blizzard acquisition. But what are the merits of the case? Paul thinks he might have had a, found a fix for his 12th generation Intel freezes. We've got some Windows 11 information. Microsoft's barring a buying a part of the London Stock market. What <laugh>, what, what <laugh> and some Xbox News. Plus the word of the week. It's all coming up next on Windows Weekly podcasts you love

TWiT Intro (00:00:35):
From people you trust. It's,

Leo Laporte (00:00:46):
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Throt. Episode 807, recorded Wednesday, December 14th, 2022. You're a contra. This episode of Windows Weekly is brought to you by Collide. Collide is an endpoint security solution that gives it teams a single dashboard for all devices, regardless of their operating systems. Visit K O L I D e.com/ww to learn more and activate a free 14 day trial today. No credit card required. And buy Nord layer. Nord Layer is a secure network access solution for your business. Join more than 7,000 fully protected organizations by going to nord layer.com/TWiT to get your first month free when purchasing an annual subscription and by code comments, an original podcast from Red Hat lets you listen in on two experienced technologists as they describe their building process and what they've learned from their experiences. Search for code comments in your podcast player. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show. We cover the latest news from Microsoft with this fellow right here. Mr. Paul Throt in his beautiful aquarium of joy. He's floating around like a clap or like a terrarium of terror. A terra of terror. Hello Paul. How are you? Hello, Leo. Happy holidays. I forgot my darn it. I forgot my next week right? Clip sweater. I'll wear it, but we'll both wear it next week. It'll be TWiTnsies. Okay. All right. Because it's our last, if

Paul Thurrott (00:02:18):
We're gonna have a Richard Campbell sighting next week as well. Oh,

Leo Laporte (00:02:20):
Will he come by? That'll be great. I believe so let's do it. That will be the 21st and it will be our last show of the year, the 28th we have a best of. And then we'll be back with live shows January 4th. Yeah. I wonder

Paul Thurrott (00:02:33):
The best of is it's gonna be two hours of Mary Jo Foley, just cuz you people won't shut up about it. <Laugh>,

Leo Laporte (00:02:39):
There is a little bit of Mary Jo Foley in the best of, I must say Yes. <Laugh> quite a bit. Quite a bit actually. Sure, sure. We are here, we are gathered together to mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, tell me what you said last week about the FTC

Paul Thurrott (00:02:56):
Actually, <laugh>. It's funny you say that. I was just, just wondering what I said last week, because since then this huge thing happened. So, I I, what had happened last week was that Brad Smith, president of Microsoft had put an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, which was kind of interesting. And, and, and we now know was because he had traveled to Washington DC with some other parts of Microsoft's legal team because they had heard that the FTC was gonna block or suit to block their acquisition of Act Activation Blizzard. Now, we didn't know that at the time. The other bits of news were that Microsoft had come to a 10 year agreement with Nintendo to bring Call of Duty to that platform. They also reached out to Steam. And Steam basically said, we don't need this agreement. We don't, we, we know you're not taking it away. Don't worry about it, <laugh>. It's gotta be

Leo Laporte (00:03:41):
Interesting. It's hysterical. Yeah. That's Gabe Newell just going, come on. I don't wanna

Paul Thurrott (00:03:45):
Play this game. Yep, we got it. We live right down the street. We're good. We're good. We're good. We're buddies. We're buddies. Yeah. So I basically came to the conclusion that every, you know, everyone's obsessed about Call of Duty, which I completely understand. However, what this is really about is yes, of course, more game franchises makes Game Pass or, and especially game streaming, cloud streaming, better Cloud gaming, <laugh>, we'll get that name right eventually. But really this is about mobile gaming. Cuz mobile gaming is bigger than console gaming. It's bigger than PC gaming. It's, it's the biggest gaming platform there is. And Microsoft has no role in that. And so they wanted to have a role in that. And, and to me, that was what was happening. Now, of course, when we had our conversation last week, what I didn't know was that the FTC was about to announce that they were going to sue to block this acquisition, which they have done. God bless them, <laugh>. So I, I'm not gonna go on a rant on this one. However, I am gonna point out that the more I learn about it, the more unreasonable this is. And look, I get, look, I get it. This is a tens of billions of dollars. It's a major shift for the gaming industry. There's a major industry player that is actively trying to prevent this from happening. It's something that needs to be examined. I, there's no doubt about

Leo Laporte (00:05:10):
That. But this is be, this is beyond, they were examining it. Now they are suing. And I I, I'll tell you what you said last week. You said it'll never happen. Okay. They'll never they'll never go after this. There's no reason for them to, but, we'll, well, I always, we underestimated Lena Khan, right? Who has blood in her eyes for the tech industry. And I don't, I think I, I mean, I shouldn't put words in her mouth, but I feel like she's making ex I'm gonna make an example of you, is what this is. That's right. As opposed to now the, the thing is it doesn't go to court immediately. The real problem for Microsoft at this point is how long this procedure will take. Yep. Because this is gonna be be years.

Paul Thurrott (00:05:57):
Yeah. Okay. May unless they reach a settlement. Right. So we'll see our consent. Agree. We we're gonna get to that. So the way, the more, you know, this is one of those things that's like this 12 stages agree for whatever it is, we, it kind of takes some time to set in what, what exactly is happening here. And Yeah, I, you're right. First of all, I think this is very political. Not that I wanna go too far down that road, but for everyone who thinks I'm some kind of a bleeding heart liberal, I will say three Democrats all voted yes on this. And I disagree with them completely. I'll throw that out there. But this is, this is a regulatory body which has experienced years and decades of just letting big tick to it, do whatever they want. And finally they're starting to realize, oh man, this might have been a mistake.

(00:06:43):
We should look at these things a little more closely. And then they decide to go after the one company <laugh>. So it's not gonna change the dynamics of anything really. I mean, ultimately the number three player in consoles, we'll still be the number three player in consoles. The games that you wanna play will still be on all the platforms you wanna play 'em on. It's really not gonna change much except for who owns what. I mean, it, it's, it's, I understand why Sony might be upset about this. I think it's notable that no other major ind industry players are upset about it. But

Leo Laporte (00:07:12):
Let's put ourselves though, I wanna put myself in her mindset. Yeah. I don't wanna assume it's just you know let's just kill the next big tech major net tech merger for No, you know, just

Paul Thurrott (00:07:24):
Cuz it is. But Leo, I really believe that's what it is.

Leo Laporte (00:07:26):
I think it is. But, but is so, but let's look at the competitive landscape. So is there mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, is there any case to be made that this is bad for gamers or wolves squash competition? Maybe. How about indie game dev developers? Is this

Paul Thurrott (00:07:40):
No, it is, this is one of the biggest, no, no. In fact Microsoft has done great work with indie developers. And I don't, I don't know as much about what Sony has done. I know Sony has its own independent games program or whatever as well. But the Microsoft idea at Xbox has done a fantastic job for them. I, this isn't a shift away from those people. Right. I, I think there's just an understanding that mic blatantly, Microsoft kind of looked at how they've competed over the years and they failed every console generation, right? So, well, you know, why, why is that? They did let, well, I don't let is a strong word, but they, you know, call of Duty was an Xbox exclusive and then it became a PlayStation one at the time. I said that was a huge mistake at, because the Xbox 360, if they had one market, it was first person shooters and letting them go to PlayStation, I thought was a big mistake.

(00:08:31):
They might have not been able to do anything about that. The other thing that we, you would say, kind of comparing Sony and Microsoft and the console market, cuz they're the only two that are really directly comparable, is that the big difference between the two for many years was that Sony had more exclusives. And this was one of the things that kept, came up again and again and again. And so largely because of Phil Spencer. It, I would say, let's just say because of Phil Spencer Microsoft started buying up game studios. They wanted more first party content. They wanted more exclusives. They wanted to have more controller over their own destiny. Cuz that, that's the thing they were getting hammered on. They look, most of the big games were everywhere, but the PlayStation had a bunch of exclusive AAA games that just were not ever gonna ship anywhere else.

(00:09:13):
 Since then, the world has changed, right? Sony is making a big push in PC gaming right now. Right. Which is actually really interesting. By the way, so is Google, in a way, Google is looking at PC gaming, even though they're purely mobile web. For the most part, Microsoft has expanded, has gone into subscription services with Game Pass. They've gone into cloud streaming or yeah, with game streaming with hey, we forget the name of it. Xbox Cloud Gaming, sorry. And Sony has responded with their own PlayStation Plus whatever, whatever. And, you know, they're working, they're, they're competing. And that's, you know, that's what they do. But Microsoft is trying to close the, the gap between PlayStation and Xbox on console. I think the hardware, they've done a great job especially this recent generation. They have two price points, which I think is really important.

(00:10:02):
 In the beginning, one of the complaints about the Xbox Series S is that maybe it would be a little underpowered and wouldn't compete effectively against PlayStation five. So far that's proven not to be the case. So they're in a pretty good place. But where these companies are both not doing great, I would say is in mobile. Microsoft basically has zero presence in mobile. I have no idea what Sony has in mobile. I don't think it's much, if anything, but Activision Blizzard has a bunch, right? So the competitive landscape, if Microsoft were allowed to acquire Activision Blizzard, I think we have to asterisk that a little bit because we have to say, look, let's be realistic about what that means. Microsoft will be forced to make some legally inviting agreements about what it will and will not do with some of the most popular franchises.

(00:10:43):
Right? We Call of Duty is the one that keeps coming up, but I, I think it's more than that. But I, the thing I've settled all along, and the thing when I said it would never happen, the reason for that was because this is the agreement they'll make. They'll say, look, call of Duty will always be in PlayStation. Call of Duty will be on your version of Game Pass in your version of cloud gaming. Look, there you go. Like, we're not, we're not ta we're not, it will benefit Xbox users, but it won't detract from PlayStation as a platform. That, that's, that's the goal with that. And Microsoft will have mobile games for the first time, but that's for, for mobile gamers, that's just a shift in the name at the beginning of the game when it boots, right? It's not, it doesn't really change anything.

(00:11:23):
It's not like Microsoft picks up Candy Crush and takes it off of iPhone or something like that. Doesn't make sense. And that's the big thing with the F T C argument. That bothers me. We can talk about what Microsoft has done and we can talk about what an agreement will force Microsoft to do, but the FTC is focusing on what Microsoft might do. It's like, it's like their version of Minority Report. It's like we rolled the ball down the thing and it said you were gonna take away PlayStation, you know, take away college duty from PlayStation. Sorry, you're guilty. And it's like, guys, <laugh>, we, we literally came to you and said we would not do that. So I don't, I I would say overall the net effect on the gaming industry, honestly, would be a minor positive. And the only reason I say that is because for those people that have chosen Xbox, they will now have more games in that stable that they can play if they choose to pay for a Microsoft online service.

(00:12:23):
 And I, I don't see any other major changes, but the FT sees lots of possibilities. <Laugh>, you know, which is kind of interesting. Ultimately though, I do think this is about, we haven't done enough on antitrust. Let's start doing enough on antitrust, and they go after the next thing. And by the way, it's, it's big money. I mean, it, it needs to be looked at. There's no doubt about that. But I, on, I think on TWiTtter or somewhere, somewhere I wrote this, I said, you know, this is like, let's close this barn door after the horses ran out of that barn door <laugh>. You know, it's like, it doesn't, it's, it's like a, a curious matter of timing. Now we have an FTC that doesn't wanna settle with companies. They wanna sue them. They wanna show that they're strong, they wanna show that they're serious. And I just think this was the wrong, you're making an example of the star student in class, not the little problem. Kids in the back were flicking, you know, elastic bands at the girls or whatever, you know. And I, I just find that crazy because there are, you know, we, you and I had our little discussion or debate or whatever about whether or not Apple is or is not a monopoly. And by,

Leo Laporte (00:13:31):
By the way, you victory to the, to the laurels, to the victor. You won

Paul Thurrott (00:13:35):
That one. Well, I, not exactly. I mean, look, we, we'll see what happens. But I think you,

Leo Laporte (00:13:39):
I hope you did actually. I mean, I, I think this is a very, very,

Paul Thurrott (00:13:42):
The one thing I had to explain to people is I, I, based on what you said later, I, I feel like we're kind of on the same page and you're, you're, you kind of pushed me to make me make my point. I honestly was,

Leo Laporte (00:13:53):
I was, cuz I agree with you. I was, that's fine. I was channeling Alex, Lindsay, and by the way, yesterday, <laugh>, so I mentioned that and he gave me all the excuses. And I, and I I'm brought up including the fact that both Microsoft and Sony charge 30%.

Paul Thurrott (00:14:07):
Yeah. But those are different. Anyway, so I just, my, my issue at the time was only that I, I honestly didn't even think about this. I was, to me, this was a foregone conclusion. Let's move on to this other thing. And then you pushed me on this and I was like, yeah, I had to sort of collect myself. I, I want you to defend it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I look, I think it's defensible <laugh>, you know, obviously. But what, whatever one anyone thinks, look it, I, I, look, I, I, unfortunately, I deal with people in my comments section. Like, I think Apple should be elected to allowed to do anything they want. It's their platform. If you don't like it, just go to a different platform. It's like the most narrow-minded, simplistic view of the world. And I feel bad for those people.

(00:14:44):
Like, that's crazy, but okay, whatever. Look at the very least, we have these big companies, and Microsoft's one of 'em, right? But Amazon, apple, Google, and Meta that are, in my mind, monopolies abusing their market dominance. Let's not quibble over semantics. They are dominant and they are abusing their market dominance. I mean, there's no, you really can't argue that. There are so many examples of it. And by the way, if you don't believe it, that's fine. Please understand that regulatory bodies all around the world have multiple lawsuits against all these companies. Like they, they're all being investigated. The fds the European Union is taking action starting in 2024 that will curb certain behaviors this is happening. So it's, you know, I get that we all have different opinions, but the reality is the regulatory bodies of the world are going after these companies.

(00:15:31):
You know, of those companies though, Microsoft, I think we could have a conversation about teams. I don't know if we talked about this last week. I mean, when I look at Microsoft and I think about antitrust today in 2022 there's really not much to look at here, right? I mean, you, you can, we can narrow the definition of things so much that, you know, okay, I guess, you know, obviously they have a, a monopoly of sorts in, it's still in the PC market, which is kind of interesting. Although I think it's worth pointing out that Apple and the Max are past double digit market share for the first time ever recently. And they're kind of going gangbusters. So the market there is kind of happening naturally. It doesn't mean they shouldn't have gone after Microsoft 20 years ago. I don't mean it like that, but that, it's interesting to see how that has or has not changed.

(00:16:22):
I think the real issue for Microsoft when it comes to Monopoly is going to be, it's kind of a weird thing to say. It's, it's like office productivity, right? It's what used to be office. And in fact, when, when Windows had, was dominant in the personal computing industry, and that was personal computing, one of the sides shows there was, you know, actually there's this other product that's even more dominant than Windows. And that's called Office, right? Because Office at the time was also on the Mac office. Today is now one mobile too, right? So, and we're not talking, and Office Is not Office. Office is three office 365 is Microsoft 365 is whatever, you know, this giant thing. And Microsoft has done, I would say, with teams something very similar to what it did with Internet Explorer in Windows 95, back in 19 95, 96, right? They bundled a product with another product given it gave it away for free. And over time, they actually surpassed the capabilities of that competitor who in that case took them to court. Right? Do

Leo Laporte (00:17:25):
You think the d OJ case against Microsoft back way back in the nineties was justified? How did you feel about it at the time? I'm wondering,

Paul Thurrott (00:17:32):
It is astonishing that I still write about Microsoft today. I wanted that company broken up. No, I I I, you you

Leo Laporte (00:17:39):
Agreed with what the DOJ

Paul Thurrott (00:17:40):
Was doing. Oh, 100%. In fact, I I cannot believe it wasn't broken up. I can't, and not into two companies. I'm, I was thinking three or four. I had very specific plans around they should have went down. So, so, so did Dvorak. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, it is humbling to think back now and look at how much more dominant Google and Apple especially are today, and compare it to the relative smallness of what Microsoft was doing. I, the, and actually, I think this is, I think it's Cory Doctor or somebody, somebody of our time today has referred to big tech. These big tech monopolies as stupid. Like, they're, they're succeeding despite their own like stupidity. Like, they're actually not that, it's not like they're genius, genius, IANS or anything. Like, I sort of feel like Microsoft in the nineties succeeded despite itself in, in many ways, I'm surprised they didn't stumble more badly.

(00:18:37):
 And I feel that same way about Apple and Google today with these mobile platforms. It's like, I, I, look, please make all the money in the world selling your phone, apple make all the money in the world licensing your operating system. Google, that's, I have no issue with that. Everything else you do is terrible. <Laugh>, you know, it's like terrible. And it's, it's really, it, it's, it's hard. It's hard to understand when people try to defend that behavior. But anyhow, I, all right. So they sue, they su or they sue to block it. Here's what we've learned since then. First of all, the FTC suggested in its filing and it in, in this announcement more explicitly that Microsoft had. So here's the rationale. We're, we're afraid Microsoft's gonna do something terrible. The reason we are afraid of that is because they did this exact horrible thing before they told EU regulators that they were not going to pull xx, which is Bethesda software off of different platforms.

(00:19:33):
And then when you okayed it, they j did just that. There were two games at Red Fall and one other one that they pulled off whatever platform and C c, so the <laugh>, the EU actually came up public and said, that never happened. Microsoft never made that promise. And by the way, those two games they pulled, or whatever games they pulled, they're not AAA titles like Call of Duty and whatever else. It's, they're just too ga. They just didn't make market sense to bother, you know? Yes, they did become what the eu, the FTC calls Microsoft exclusives. I would call 'em Xbox. But I don't think this was like a millions of people around the world crying cuz they couldn't get Red fall on their Nintendo Switch or whatever it was. I don't, I just, they, they made such a big deal out of this.

(00:20:19):
But Microsoft immediately denied this ever happened. And then the EU came out and said it didn't happen. Now, if you wanna take a nuanced reading of the complaint versus whether or not Microsoft kind of lied to the eu, it, it's actually is, it is pretty nuanced. It's not clear. It's not like, oh, the FTC lied, you know, or the FTC completely got this wrong. I, I even looked at it like, well, maybe they said something cuz they refer to them as European regulators. And I thought maybe they promised the uk what's it called? Competition to Markets Authority. Maybe that's what it was. Maybe that's who they meant by European. But actually, if you look at the literal complaint, they call out the European Union and the European Commission, which is the regulatory body there. Yeah. So, okay, there's that. Then Microsoft <laugh> reveals in the wake of this two different things that I think are incredibly damning for the F D C one.

(00:21:13):
They offered them a consent, a a consent decree agreement. We will legally be by like, we're not just gonna say it. We're gonna sign papers that require us to do things like bring Call of Duty to the expo to the PlayStation for 10 years or whatever. It's right. The FTC listened to this and say, yeah, we're gonna sue you anyway, don't care. Also, Microsoft didn't just offer Sony Call of Duty for 10 years, you know, to no reply whatsoever. They offered to bring Call of Duty to Sony's version of Game Pass slash Cloud Gaming, which is PlayStation Plus. They said, look, you're afraid that we're gonna make, make people go to Xbox cuz this will be like an better thing on Xbox. We'll bring it to your thing too. Complete silence. Nothing, nothing. So I, this to me is outrageous. Now, you had said upfront, you know, I concluded with, I still think this is gonna go through, et cetera, and the Yeah, I actually do still, I think Microsoft's gonna win this because,

Leo Laporte (00:22:16):
But it's gonna take years. It has to go Well, it depends who depends who. So the first thing is it goes to the ftc and then it goes to an in kind of internal process, right? A judge that it's through the ftc and then only then does it when its way into the courts. And then of course, there's all that appeals and so forth, is if the, if

Paul Thurrott (00:22:39):
I think ft, there needs to be a little a special dinner at the White House, maybe get the air, the president to say,

Leo Laporte (00:22:44):
Man, I think if the FTC wants this. So it's a war of attrition. If they want it, they can, they can drag it out so long.

Paul Thurrott (00:22:53):
The ftc can you say the

Leo Laporte (00:22:55):
FTC can, but Sole Con has decided that

Paul Thurrott (00:22:57):
She, but what's the <laugh>? But what's the point? Well, that's

Leo Laporte (00:23:01):
The question. What's

Paul Thurrott (00:23:01):
The point? You asked up front, you asked up upfront, like, why would they do this right Now, I don't mean to bring like a, like a xenophobic aspect into this, but the only company that's complaining is Japanese. Aren't you here to protect US companies and US consumers?

Leo Laporte (00:23:15):
Well, you must think there's a, so there's two costs. There's two reasons for antitrust, especially in Lena Khan. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And, you know, her big thing is monopsony, not monopoly,

Paul Thurrott (00:23:24):
<Laugh>, monopsony,

Leo Laporte (00:23:25):
Monopsony. But the, but I would, I, you know, grossly simplifying, there's two big issues. There's harm to consumers and harm to innovation, harm to other companies, right? I, I don't see a harm to consumers because there are so many other companies still doing this. Maybe a harm to innovation. That's why I asked about indie games.

Paul Thurrott (00:23:43):
I actually think this benefits consumers ultimately. Yeah. Like, one, one of the things that happened this year and will continue happening next year, is that individual console game purchases for AAA games have gone up from 60 to $70. Like, so they, they're hitting this weird price point where a lot of people are gonna hold off in purchases they might have done anyway in the past, right? That kind of thing. So you ma you start making games available via subscription services. I don't mean game streaming, but just game pass where you can download the thing. So you're paying 15 bucks a month. You were already paying six to $8 a month for Xbox Live Gold on Xbox and whatever the Xbox Live gold equivalent was, or on PlayStation, I don't know plays, it doesn't matter. Playstation, I don't know what it was called, it doesn't matter.

(00:24:29):
But now they have this PlayStation plus PlayStation, whatever they call it, and they have, they're basically lining up against Game Pass and, and cloud gaming make it available over there too. So, I mean, first of all, it, it doesn't harm the competition Sony, which I guess I don't, u s antitrust isn't that involved with, but it certainly doesn't help or hurt consumers. In fact, it, it, it eases a fi a burden in some ways, I think, on people and lets them play more games than they would've otherwise. Right? I mean, I plus, well, here's the Microsoft. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:25:03):
Here's the monopsony argument and Monos,

Paul Thurrott (00:25:05):
Yeah. What is the

Leo Laporte (00:25:06):
Mono is the market situation in which there's only one buyer. And so Monopsony, Herz would hurt potentially in the game developers if there are, I mean, there isn't only one, but if there was, you know, a small number of buyers of video games or, or person publishers, that would be a monomy. And so I think that, that, well, we'll see what her argument is. I haven't read the pleading, but that could potentially be, the argument is by doing this, Microsoft's kind of pulling up the ladder behind them on other game companies being

Paul Thurrott (00:25:39):
Created. Look, I, it's a fact that a game like Call of Duty requires a studio's that can spend money like a movie studio that's, this is not guy,

Leo Laporte (00:25:48):
There's no guy in a basement writing a game, you know? Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:25:51):
The Super meet guy is not making Call of Duty five or whatever. Like this is, these are hard games to make. But

Leo Laporte (00:25:57):
You could see if somebody developed, you know, dwarf Fortress, you know mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and they said, well, we, you know, Microsoft, we can't get him on the Xbox because Microsoft wont, you know, is a monopsony.

Paul Thurrott (00:26:10):
There, there is an example of something that's a little bit like, I don't know why you just reminded me of this, but remember when Netflix went from being a DVD v shipment system to being an online service, right? Yeah. And they had streaming videos, and it was in the beginning big deal,

Leo Laporte (00:26:22):
Right? Everybody said

Paul Thurrott (00:26:23):
It's, it was a big deal, but in the beginning, but it, but the <laugh>, the beginning of it was small, right? It was like, we, you pay for this DVD thing. We have this other thing. We're gonna give it to you as part of your subscription, so you can install this app on your, you know, on your device or whatever, play it on your tv. And then all the movies were like these weird b to direct, direct direct to video things that were like, what is this stuff? Like what is, this is crap. And over time, of course, it got super high quality over time, it turned into H B O. Like, they, they make their own content. They do this stuff, whatever. Right? Right. So it's not fair, this is not a direct comparison because Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Cloud gaming were not what Netflix was.

(00:27:02):
Right. In other words, that isn't where the dregs went. And I don't mean to call, actually, let me rephrase that. I, that's not where Indie gaming went, right? They were like, look, we gotta, no one, none of the big players are signing up for this. Let's get all the indie guys in. It wasn't like that I Xbox Game Pass and no Xbox Cloud gaming, or if anything, a mix of those things. Like you see AAA titles, you see mid, you know, size titles and you see indie titles. So it's not exactly like that. But I guess you could make an argument that, did the arrival of Netflix, the service we know today make it harder? Or did it make it easier for second rate content to make its way to people's eyeballs? I guess I'd argue it has made it easier. Cause I think that stuff's still there too, right? You know or it's there somewhere you could watch it on YouTube. It's, it's, it's, you know, we have these choices now, so I don't, anyway this is to bring it back to gaming, I guess. I don't see indie gaming becoming less important or less of a, a thing because of this. It just shifts where this stuff is published. I those games are still important to Microsoft on Xbox, on pc, whatever. They'll still be in Steam. They'll still be on Xbox. They'll still be wherever. But I mean,

Leo Laporte (00:28:18):
Honestly, mono, Microsoft has a monos monopsony on the Xbox. Just as Apple has a monos Sony on the app store. I mean, that's the, that's the monosomy. Yeah. They're the only people who can, who control buy games, right? They control all the games on the

Paul Thurrott (00:28:29):
Xbox. Yeah. On the, but this is not just Xbox. That's the point. Like, this is Xbox Console. I was say PC and, and I,

Leo Laporte (00:28:36):
I'm really curious what her, what her logic is. It's on the surface,

Paul Thurrott (00:28:40):
The fact that we've seen the complaint. I've read this thing TWiTce. Oh, you did?

Leo Laporte (00:28:43):
Right. Oh, good. All

Paul Thurrott (00:28:44):
Right. I, I have not walked away from us saying, oh, okay, I can see this <laugh>. Yeah. You know, like, I don't, I read it and I'm like, it again. It's, it's slightly outrageous. It, it's I will say it's interesting even during the pre previous administration, you would get some sort of official documentation like this from a government body. Like, this is actually pretty well written. Like this is, you know, but in the industry and reading this, I'm like, yeah, this is not, they're not making a good point here. You know, they're just not. It really is about what ifs. Well, we're just afraid that, okay. But, but there could I, you know, look, before we knew about any of this stuff, all Microsoft has to do, we all said, was make certain concessions to competitors like Sony and say, we will do this. That's how you fix this problem. I, this lawsuit was not necessary. Yeah. Microsoft was already bending over backwards. Right. And it will be interesting to see, I don't know the exact dates, but I think the EU is sometime in March, and the UK is also sometime early next year, they're gonna have to weigh in as well. And what happens here will impact what hap happens there. No doubt about it.

Leo Laporte (00:29:52):
So this is the really weird thing that Lena Kahn wrote. I'm just looking at a letter she wrote that Senator Warren just published, but this was back in March Warren. Okay. And a bunch of senators sent her a note saying, please, you know, you gotta watch this Microsoft Activision transaction.

Paul Thurrott (00:30:09):
And because Elizabeth Warren is a huge game player, and God, does she care about this market?

Leo Laporte (00:30:13):
<Laugh> <laugh>, no. But she, you know, she's, she knows something about finance. Anyway Conn wrote back, I share your concern that, and this is what puzzles me, monopsony power in labor markets may enable firms to harm workers in a host of ways through undermining their rights. And diggies, although antitrust law in recent decades, has generally neglected monopsony, monopsony concerns and harms to workers given that activ. So I strongly believe that merger investigations must scrutinize the impact on labor markets. I don't what labor markets, how, what would, what, I don't even understand what that would,

Paul Thurrott (00:30:49):
How did you catch the use of the word may, which is, may, could, might is all over these documents. It's

Leo Laporte (00:30:55):
Just, yeah, I didn't notice that. I, I,

Paul Thurrott (00:30:57):
A lot of speculation.

Leo Laporte (00:30:58):
Maybe what they're worried about is if you are a game designer mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, there'll be too few places you can go to get work. But that doesn't make any sense. And you, Microsoft could clearly prove that's not the case. Right. You don't have to work for a Microsoft activist. You

Paul Thurrott (00:31:14):
Know, we've completely lost the script on this, because a year ago, the big activism blizzard story was the toxic environment in their workforce. And Yeah, no kidding. The thing we were saying, and when Microsoft announced this and, and they said was, they're gonna clean this up. They're gonna do a good thing for the workforce. They're gonna do, what, what's that guy's name? Bobby Ko, whatever. Yeah. Ko

Leo Laporte (00:31:36):
I mean, all of this happened. Bobby was trying to get the hell out of Dodge because it was so many Right. Investigations of his misbehavior at Activision. And and he Oh, yeah. Saw,

Paul Thurrott (00:31:47):
Yeah. No, it's like he,

Leo Laporte (00:31:48):
To dump it.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:49):
Yeah. Microsoft basically gave him a part. It's 70 billion this thing goes through.

Leo Laporte (00:31:53):
Exactly. Yeah. You got a pardon. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:31:55):
You'll have enough money, at least to have

Leo Laporte (00:31:56):
Lawsuits. Maybe the fact that Microsoft just released its investigation and admitted that they hadn't done a good job with harassment in its own workplace. Yep. Maybe

Paul Thurrott (00:32:05):
That was super bad timing.

Leo Laporte (00:32:07):
Maybe, maybe that's a concern. That one now you have two companies with harassment issues.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:12):
Well, they do. Yeah. <laugh>. Yeah. Let's not, maybe

Leo Laporte (00:32:15):
That's what, honestly, maybe that's what this is. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott (00:32:17):
Well, but then again, you know, you could look at, look, I bad things happen and mistakes are made, and all that stuff. But you also have to look at how people or companies in this case address those problems. And honestly, I don't, I, look, I don't think that stuff ever should have happened, but Microsoft is at least belatedly, right? But doing the right thing now, and I think that speaks well for what they might do. Like, since we're all speculating,

Leo Laporte (00:32:42):
The headline on the, on the FTC press release is agency alleges that maker of Xbox, AK, and Microsoft would gain control of top video game franchises, enabling it to harm competition in high performance gaming consoles and subscription services by denying or degrading rival's access to its popular content. Again, Microsoft offered a consent decree and said, no, no. We'll,

Paul Thurrott (00:33:06):
We'll guarantee not to do that. We we're not gonna do this. Yeah, exactly. Yep. That's what bugs me. They proactive, well, I don't know, proactive. I, I, the no one will come out and say this, but the understanding is that the FTC alerted Microsoft that this was how they were gonna land. And they, that's when they went to,

Leo Laporte (00:33:23):
They do Washington, dc They do say, and by the way, they did this before with Bethesda.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:28):
Mm-Hmm.

Leo Laporte (00:33:29):
<Affirmative> you know, that's the smoking gun. Well, you know, when they got xenex, they, they, they went exclusive with Starfield and Red Fall.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:38):
Oh, not with Quake and Doom and Wolfenstein and all those games people actually wanna play. Yeah. Yeah. That's like, seriously, huh? I mean, I

Leo Laporte (00:33:47):
Don't know. Microsoft has already shown it can and will withhold content from gaming rivals today. We, by the way, stop Microsoft from Gaming Control.

Paul Thurrott (00:33:56):
I'm sorry, I'm li I'm, this stuff makes me lose my mind. <Laugh>, Microsoft has shown that a canon will withhold games from gaming rivals. Let's flashback about 20 minutes when we're talking about Sony strategy of game exclusives, right? That they held from their rivals. Yes. That's what competition is. What are you talking about?

Leo Laporte (00:34:15):
Well, presumably they would act in the same way to block a Sony Activision acquisition as well. I mean,

Paul Thurrott (00:34:20):
The, the thing that's different is we're not looking at, in other words, this isn't Sony, which only makes PlayStation and Microsoft, which only makes Xbox. That's not the world of today. These companies are both expanding and want to expand further into other markets with games. There's a lot of cross pollination going on right now, and it doesn't make sense for companies that want to expand beyond their own installed base with hardware, which is relatively small, which is the conversation we had last week. 80 million units in the bestselling generation ever for Xbox. Apple has sold more than that in one quarter with iPhones. Right. We talked about that. They, they're trying to expand this in this. They wanna make this something bigger. Both of them have certain strengths, but Sony has started bringing things that used to be exclusives to PlayStation to the pc. Right?

(00:35:07):
We, the world is changing. It doesn't make, this is not Microsoft swooping in to buy Activision Blizzard. Take all those games away from Sony, take 'em all away from the pc. Again, this is sort of their pla form, but, you know, but that's not what it is. That's not what it is. This is they're often lucrative franchises on other platforms, multi-platform. I play Call of Duty every day. I play against people who own PlayStations. I play against people who have PCs. That's the world of today. That was not the world of 10 years ago or 15 years ago, or whatever. You know, it's, it's a different

Leo Laporte (00:35:43):
World. Here's, here's my hope, and I think this is reasonable, is that the, this looks gonna first go before an administrative law judge. That judge will mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I presume, a a as most judges do try to get the two parties to meet in the middle and end this, right. Battle. He, I think if he goes to, or she goes to Microsoft and says, look, all we need is a consent decree saying you're never gonna do this. That none of these games will ever be exclusive to. Which Microsoft has already said, yes, we, we would do that.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:15):
That's what they're, we already said that, and they still

Leo Laporte (00:36:17):
Assume this. I know. Well, but maybe they have to go through this process and then make it official formal consent decree. And I would bet then that the administrative law judge would say, okay, case, case done. It's over. Right? And that can happen in a fairly swift fashion.

Paul Thurrott (00:36:32):
Okay. Yes. But actually, you, you raised the specter of what might prevent that from happening, which is there's gotta be more than that. Right. Like, you, you, you wanna believe that if they take this step, that it's not simple. Like this woman's boss told her, she's gotta sue, stop settling, got don't

Leo Laporte (00:36:48):
Show from Biden. I think this is coming from Lena Kahna. This is what she was appointed to do. I mean, ultimately it does come from the president. Cuz he appointed her. Right. He knew what he was gonna do. They are saying now August, 2023 for a trial before an administrative law judge. So if nothing else, this puts this off for nine months. Which is

Paul Thurrott (00:37:07):
I know. And now it's like at that point, like, what he, oh, yeah. Well, at some point you have to say, look, let's lick our wounds and move on. I mean, I'm sure one of the things Microsoft is doing collectively is looking out into the world and saying, all right, what else is out there? What if we bought, you know, four or five smaller franchises or, or studios or whatever. I don't know. I I, well, how's Electronic Arts doing these days? Yeah. You know,

Leo Laporte (00:37:31):
Why are they, why are they buying Activision? I mean, I'm, I'm sure we

Paul Thurrott (00:37:35):
Well, it's on the strength of all those, all those gates,

Leo Laporte (00:37:37):
The franchises. Yeah. Yep. Not that they would necessarily have to be exclusive. They're not trying to build Xbox's business. They're trying to build their business. Selling those games would make them money on every platform. Right. Call of Duty.

Paul Thurrott (00:37:51):
It's not just Listen,

Leo Laporte (00:37:52):
Call of Duty. I mean, it's also, you know, Warcraft and World of Warcraft.

Paul Thurrott (00:37:55):
Yes. I, right. We keep mentioning Call of Duty, but there's a lot more to it than that. I, there is a naive part of my personality that would like to see things like Sony and Microsoft kind of get together and say, let, let's hammer this out. Like we have this thing that we're doing. We're gonna have these things we're doing in the future with cloud services. But, you know, let's interoperate more. You know, I, I happen to be in the Microsoft space, and this is something that Microsoft has been trying to do with Sony. Just game interrupt where you can play in the same game together. Sony blocked that, remember Minecraft, they couldn't play on Sony with players and other platforms. That was, that was from Sony. That's them being terrible. Terrible. If you wanna look at past behavior with regards to video games, <laugh>, cuz there's plenty of bad behavior.

(00:38:41):
 I think Sony's been a, a, a bad actor more than Microsoft has. But I would like to, I would still like to see them work together. Just like, I'd like to see Microsoft and Sony kind of work together on things related to browsers and stuff like that. Like, I don't understand why when I browse to you know, I use Edge and I go to google.com, it's like, oh, you should be using Chrome. Stupid idiot. You know? Or if I go to download Chrome with Edge, it's like, oh, what are you doing? We have a way better browser. It's like, guys, I get that we're competing and everything, but I think there just needs to be a point where some people are gonna use this, some people are gonna use this work together for the better. Good. You guys have shared customers.

(00:39:19):
Like, this is stupid. And I think when it comes to interoperability and video games, that's maybe in, that's the conversation. But that's maybe, well that's not more important, but it's just as important. I think it's, it's an important aspect of the changing world of video games that I think is getting lost here. Cuz it's like Sony versus Microsoft. But we're, we have shared customers too. The, and, and we could share customers through cross play <laugh>. Right? I mean we, you know, like I said, I'm interacting with PlayStation people, which, you know, drives me crazy cuz they're terrible. But <laugh>, it's just,

Leo Laporte (00:39:54):
They're just a bad class of people. They're

Paul Thurrott (00:39:56):
Just Exactly, exactly. They would be on the second deck of the Titanic. Yes. But

Leo Laporte (00:40:01):
We're kidding. Don't send emails. <Laugh>. All right. I wanna take a little break. We could, this is a, a great subject. Obviously. This the lead story of the week, perhaps of the year. Tomorrow we're doing a recording for our holiday episode of TWiTt. That's Christmas day episode of TWiTt. So obviously I'm not gonna make everybody record on Christmas Day. So Paul will be there for that. Jeff Jarvis. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yep. doc Surles, Steve Gibson. I imagine this will be one of the stories we'll talk about. I'm gonna pick, I'm gonna try to narrow it down to 10, the 10 top stories of the year. Oh boy. Nine of them are, are Elon. So we need one. I was

Paul Thurrott (00:40:39):
Gonna say, I assume nine of them are Microsoft related <laugh>. Do, do other things happen in

Leo Laporte (00:40:43):
Tech? Some other things have happened and this will be a chance for people to hear your thoughts on that. It's fun. We're just, we're bringing in the people who've been around tech a long time. Been around TWiTtter a long time. Yeah. And it's gonna be a lot of fun. Tomorrow we're gonna record that you could watch live at 1:00 PM Pacific, 4:00 PM Eastern if you want, but you know what? Save it for a, a treat on Christmas Day. How about that? A little? A little. Or a boxing day? A special little, little treat. We'll have more with Paul. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and his ranch and his rage and his upsets. No, he'd been very calm so far. I haven't, haven't prodded you too much though. Sure. I will try to do that in the next segment. Then

Paul Thurrott (00:41:27):
I turn into Yosemite. Sam

Leo Laporte (00:41:28):
<Laugh>. Whoa.

(00:41:31):
Youin. Yeah. <laugh>. Our show today brought to you by Collide. Don't go all Yosemite Sam on your employees. If you're in it collide has a different way. Turn your employees into the most useful, most as best, the best ally you can imagine. Instead of the enemy, they're the ally. Right? The challenge with the vice security has always been it's so hard to scale it. Right? The bigger you are, the more edge cases you introduce, there's dang employees are at it again with a B, Y O and a D, the easier it is for significant issues to escape. Your notice when remote work took off, just got exponentially worse. Ryan. So whether you're a fast growing startup that needs to graduate from managing device inventory in a Google spreadsheet, <laugh> or <laugh>? No, I know you do that. Or I think we do. Or an enterprise trying to speed up service desk issues.

(00:42:34):
You need visibility into the fleet of devices in order to meet security goals, compliance, and keep everything running smoothly. But how do you achieve that visibility When your design team uses Max Accounting is on Windows. All the, all the developers love Lennox. Oh, you get collide cuz among other things, collide is multi-platform. It's an endpoint security solution that gives it teams a single dashboard for all devices regardless of operating system. And you'll love it because, you know, we, we focus a lot on, on, on collides that uses Slack and all that stuff. But what we don't talk as much about, about the the dashboard you've got, you can, you can ask Kaline and answer all the questions. Mdms just can't. Like, do you have production data being stored on those, on those laptops out there somewhere? Or are your developers SSH keys encrypted?

(00:43:33):
 They're the private keys aren't sitting in a public folder, are they? Hey, and a host of other data points, you'd have to write a, I don't know, what are you doing writing a custom shell script to do it? Probably. Right. Think about it if, if a Linux vulnerability is exposed tomorrow, but put yourself in this situation. How will you figure out how many of your machines are at risk? You have to go look at each one. What kernel are they each using? File a ticket with a team that manages your MDM and they'll wait to get a report back, send a mass email and hope the Lennox users respond with Collide. You have realtime access to your fleet's data. And the best part is, instead of installing, and to me anyway, as a user, is instead of installing intrusive agents or locking down devices, which pushes your users, you know, to use their own devices, which is a nightmare, right?

(00:44:25):
Ka collide takes a user-focused approach that communicates with your users over Slack in dms and gives them the advice, the instructions, the security recommendations they need to make themselves secure. And they love it because they're empowered and you're explaining why this is important and they do it and they feel good, they're accomplished, and you get the job done a lot easier. You can answer every question you have about your fleet without intruding on your workforce or putting crazy glue in the USB port. Visit K o l i d e collide.com/ww to find out how. If you follow that link, they'll hook you up with a goodie bag, including a beautiful Collide t-shirt. They have a couple, this is my favorite, the Pinocchio T-shirt. Honest Security. I love that. You also get, you know, a variety of Clyde stickers, a Clyde Deb coaster for your beer mug. You just activate the free TWiT, you get all this swag, no credit card needed. K O L I D e.com/ww. I I really like it that they offer our, our listeners t-shirts. I think that's great. K O l i d e.com/ww. We thank 'em so much for their support of Windows Weekly. Okay, Paul. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:42):
I have highly, I have a highly, highly technical question to ask

Leo Laporte (00:45:45):
You. Yes, sir.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:47):
Is the following sound coming from Discord? It sounds like this Bloop Yes. Is okay. No,

Leo Laporte (00:45:53):
No, no. Not Discord. Maybe mask it on.

Paul Thurrott (00:45:56):
Oh, from ma. Oh, that's what it is. Okay. Yes. So

Leo Laporte (00:45:59):
Mask it on. And this is annoying to

Paul Thurrott (00:46:01):
People. Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:46:02):
Okay. It it, you can turn those sounds off, but it's not immediately obvious.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:07):
It's, is it next to the English language thing? It's

Leo Laporte (00:46:10):
Like, you know, that's one of the

Paul Thurrott (00:46:11):
Prompts. It's probably a notifications

Leo Laporte (00:46:13):
Maybe. Yeah. So if you create, I'm using the advanced interface. I don't know if you are, but when you create columns among other things in the columns. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's settings for

Paul Thurrott (00:46:26):
Yeah. At the top. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:46:27):
Notifications. So I where somewhere. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:31):
I don't see it

Leo Laporte (00:46:31):
Here. I don't see it anymore. Nevermind. They must have changed it.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:35):
I'll just, I'm gonna mute the tab for now. But yeah, I, I have literally, I, I've done everything I can to make, I thought it was my phone. I thought it must be Discord. I thought I muted Discord. I'm just gonna mute the site. It's, it seems to be coming out of the Yeah, the body of the laptop.

Leo Laporte (00:46:51):
It's that bloop. It's, yeah, it's the, they have a unique bloop notifications must be here now.

Paul Thurrott (00:46:59):
This is what I get. Like, I, I post something right before the show starts and

Leo Laporte (00:47:01):
I'll, I just turn off thank people are responding notifications.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:04):
I don't mind. I I wanna be notified of pe you know? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:47:07):
Well, lemme just turn off your sound, I guess. Yeah. I, for a longest time people were complaining. They say what, Leo, I keep hearing Bloops coming from your show. Yes,

Paul Thurrott (00:47:15):
Yes.

Leo Laporte (00:47:16):
That's the worst thing is when they're coming in the show and people don't know that, you know? Right, right. Oh, crap. I just screwed up your Lord.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:23):
It's like you're hearing this. Right. It's not just in my head.

Leo Laporte (00:47:27):
Okay. Okay. Did we do the whole FTC thing? Are we done?

Paul Thurrott (00:47:31):
Yeah. Yeah. I think we're done. Now.

Leo Laporte (00:47:33):
You've been talking for a while about an interesting issue you've been having on those 12th gen Intels.

Paul Thurrott (00:47:38):
Yep. And you asked, I still have not reached out to any No, I, I asked, I asked publicly. I said the, you know. Yeah. I've gotten some emails from people. You know, I will say one of the things that's gotten lost over the months is the impetus for this. Like, how it started. I, I keep talking about it in the context of browsers, but that's only because that's where the problem is seen the most frequently. So it's an easy thing to find. And, you know, all you gotta do is load it up with tabs and, you know, you'll see what I'm talking about. But the actual issue is not browsers. Right. I think we, you and I talked about this notion that maybe it has something to do with, you know, windows 11 process scheduling or whatever. But which I, I do think it's Windows.

(00:48:18):
I think ultimately it's Windows 11 not being optimized for this new hybrid architecture. I think I, we could just simplify it like that. However, that said, maybe I'm wrong because the way I s saw this in the beginning and still see it, is when the laptop is docked right. To a u USB hub, u s BBC hub or a Thunderbolt dock. And the thing, over time, I've expanded my experience with this happening to multiple computers and I mean like 15 laptops and then multiple docks. There was a dock inside of an HP conferencing monitor, which is u s BBC doc. I have an anchor u s BBC doc. I have a Cal Digit, is that the right name? Thunderbolt three Dock. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:48:59):
Yeah. They, they make actually is my favorite doc is

Paul Thurrott (00:49:01):
The They Thunder. Yep. It's Great. Dock. Dock. Yeah. And I have a, th I have the Thunderball three version here at home and in Mexico, I have an HP Thunderbolt four dock. And I've experienced this multiple times in all of these docs and hubs. And I, I just, because people email me and say, yeah, I'm having the same problem with you know, whatever Chrome. And it's like, okay, it's like, are using a dock or hub? Like, no. It's like, well then you're not really <laugh>. You don't really have the same problem. So, so you think

Leo Laporte (00:49:26):
It's Doc Hub related? Not

Paul Thurrott (00:49:29):
It is. It's ab It absolutely is. Because

Leo Laporte (00:49:31):
When you don't have a doc doesn't do it.

Paul Thurrott (00:49:33):
That's right. Now, now finally got an email from someone who listen, heard me complain about this. I can't say who he is or where he works, but I do want to read a small part of it or at least paraphrase it because he has seen this exact issue. And this person rolls up PCs for multiple PC makers always in tandem. And this, these are his words. Us, bbc or Thunderbolt three slash four Doc. All of the hp, Dell and Anchor Docs I've tried, have had this issue. He, he notices it in Teams. He uses Edge and hasn't seen this so much in edge. He, but he did, he had a little bit of data, which is very interesting to me. He says, I noticed when researching this issue that the C P U was down clocking to blow 0.5 gigahertz when the issue happens.

(00:50:17):
And I'm wondering if you, me, have used Task Manager to check if this is happening to me as well. And I haven't. So that's something I'm gonna be looking at. Interest, he says, this person that Dell appears to have know about this issue because they have released multiple bios updates, and now the issue appears to be fixed on Dell. Ah-Huh. <affirmative>. Yep. Uhhuh <affirmative>. So that's interesting. Now, coincidentally, or not one thing I've noticed because well, doesn't matter because I, I review a lot of laptops. I, HP laptops, whatever reason, and I have a bunch of 'em in the house right now. A lot of firmware updates happening on HP right now. And by firmware, I mean the bios part of the firmware, like the and it seems like this might be how a PC maker would fix this. I don't have a lot of experience in this area other than when Microsoft got into the PC market with service.

(00:51:09):
One of the issues that came up was that Microsoft as an inexperienced PC maker didn't understand all the problems that hardware makers had with dealing with hardware from Intel or AMD or whatever like that. These things would ship with bugs and that they would be responsible for fixing them on their own machines. So firmware updates. So this was the thing where Microsoft had had that Surface gate problem I've talked about where Surface Pro four, espec, no, sorry, surface Pro four to some degree, but Surf Book one especially had major issues with coming outta sleep. They would hott bag all the time. Remember all that stuff. Microsoft got into such an argument with Intel that they actually dropped support for older chip sets in Windows 10 at the time, just to kind of make them mad and demanded that Intel fixed this. And Intel said, no, this is your problem.

(00:51:53):
And this was like the sign of immaturity with Microsoft, cuz they didn't have a lot of experience with PCs. I talked to people from other PC makers, I can't say which ones, but I was told by two different people that they were happy this happened. Not because people were hurt by it, but because this would force Microsoft to understand the issue and would design Windows better, because they never understood when they came to, you know, to Microsoft and complained like, we need an easier way to make this happen. They were like, that's the problem for you and Intel or whatever, or you and t whatever it was. And now that this has happened the feeling is maybe Microsoft will have a little more you know, humility and hmm. I don't know e empathy <laugh>, you know, with regards to this kind of a problem.

(00:52:36):
Anyway, I've someone I listen, I get a lot of email from people, like, I think I'm having this, and they do or don't, you know, it it, like I said, we've lost track of the the hub slash doc part of it, which I think is key. This person has seen exactly what I've seen across multiple computers. Just like me, multiple PC makers just like me, multiple doc types just like me. And I have not, I don't have a Dell doc, but I do, I have tried on two D hps, the anchor is the one I travel with and use all the time. I never had any problems with 12th gen. This thing has been a champ. It's still a champ. I'm using it right now for the show with an AMD based machine. It works great. And there you go. So I'm not saying, I, I, I don't, I don't mean to say I've solved it <laugh>, you know, or someone else solved it for me, I guess.

(00:53:22):
 But I w I was, I I just wanted to bri this update because someone has, for all the emails I've gotten about this topic, someone wrote me and I've, I Yes. That's that. That's it. That's exactly it. That's exactly right. And he's given me a little bit of a little bit of a troubles shooting step I can take. So I kind of want to force the problem now to, and I will actually, I'm going to just so I can see if I can see this thing in task manager as well. Yeah. Anyway. Hopefully I'm not crazy. I mean, I'm crazy in other ways, but at least on this issue, like I said, I've just been kind of blown away

Leo Laporte (00:53:58):
Interesting

Paul Thurrott (00:53:59):
By how little I've <laugh> seen out in the world of o other reviewers, you know? Yeah. Like, it does great in benchmarks. Like that's fantastic, but what's a benchmark? Like,

Leo Laporte (00:54:07):
It's like they don't really use it for real work. That's one of the things I, you know, before the show was saying, did you change your, your Zoom laptop again? But I have to say I admire you because that's one of the ways you test stuff is you use it.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:20):
I actually use it.

Leo Laporte (00:54:21):
If you don't use it, you're not re you can't really review it. That's right.

Paul Thurrott (00:54:24):
You have to, during the pandemic, one of the things I started doing with laptop reviews was saying, look, my battery life claims here are, are nonsense <laugh>. I can't, I can't, I can't. I'm just not using it on battery in real world conditions anymore. I'm not bringing it with me, putting in a bag, going someplace using it over here. I'm not doing what people do. I'm just, I'm sitting at home with it. You know, it's hard to, you know, it's hard to come up with anything that's real world. I did a battery life test this year. It might have been, might have been October, where until I flew with it, it had gotten whatever the battery life was, which wasn't very good. It was it was a 16 inch HB Envy, four hours and something, whatever minutes, whatever it was in battery. And I'm like, I'm gonna use this thing on the plane. It's not gonna make it the flight's a little bit longer than that <laugh>. And it, it, it was fine. There was like 33% left. I'm like, there you go. Nice. There's a nice, nice, like, oddly enough, like you actually go in the world with this thing and it acts differently because you use it differently. Yeah. Nobody

Leo Laporte (00:55:21):
Knows until

Paul Thurrott (00:55:22):
They do it. You know, you're, you're within two seconds of a power plug. So, you know, that's

Leo Laporte (00:55:26):
Why I always behave differently. I always hate the the 14 hours running video benchmark because nobody does that.

Paul Thurrott (00:55:33):
So that's

Leo Laporte (00:55:34):
A Lacey benchmark cuz you

Paul Thurrott (00:55:35):
Could just do it. I'd like to say I asked about, I almost, I almost said I asked about that. I didn't ask about this. Hp I will say HP said this, so I'll just say HP went on. They actually, they always provide this figure and, and my rough real world results at the conclusion of a review is somewhere around half that, or even a as low as a third depending on the computer. But what they said was, they actually came out and said, they said, look, we know people don't like this, but the reason we do it is because it's an orange to orange comparison. So Right. For our purposes, we can do the same test. We know it's always the same. Right. We can run it Jen over Jenna with competitors. Right. And we can say, look, this on this one test, which is not the whole world and not the way everyone does things. It is, here's the numbers, you know, and Okay, I get it. But you know, I

Leo Laporte (00:56:22):
Get it. I've masked it on re rehash. I figured it out. Okay. There is a there is a column called notifications. Of course there is <laugh>. Of course there is. Okay. And if you click the little settings icon on the upper right, you can turn on or off all the sounds. So there you go. And you can do it. I,

Paul Thurrott (00:56:39):
And you gotta be in advance. This is in advanced Right.

Leo Laporte (00:56:41):
Is in advance. Advance. And you can do it per, you know, I, you see I've, I've got separate things for all of the different, and you can do it per notifications per type. Oh, there you go. Or you could just revoke permissions to make noise.

Paul Thurrott (00:56:53):
I don't ever want sounds, I I turn off the notification sounds on everything I use. Yeah. I hate

Leo Laporte (00:56:58):
Sounds, I go into the first thing I do in, when I set up a new browsers, I go into content and I turn off the a really annoying thing. Can we, can we notify you? I say, no, don't ever allow that. I don't wanna see that. They can't <laugh>. Right?

Paul Thurrott (00:57:12):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (00:57:13):
They can't. And they never will. Cause

Paul Thurrott (00:57:15):
That's a, yeah, if you set up a new phone from scratch, you'll spend this first four weeks retroactively turning off notifications. Ah, <laugh>. You know, so that's what that experience, it's all you do. That's your life. Your

Leo Laporte (00:57:26):
Life has become actually is another thing. I I I, when we were doing iOS today, I said the new phone, first thing to do, go on notifications, turn everything off, all of

Paul Thurrott (00:57:36):
Turn it off. Let's turn it all off. And then, I mean, I want, you want like a phone call probably

Leo Laporte (00:57:40):
Collectively you can go in con calendar notifications. I probably do want. Yeah. But that's the thing is most of them you don't and that's what keeps you from being productive. <Laugh> is the constant,

Paul Thurrott (00:57:52):
Oh, eruption. Hey,

Leo Laporte (00:57:54):
Over here by the way. Oh, hey, I got

Paul Thurrott (00:57:57):
Some's for Exactly. Right. That's the, you know, that's why like, listen, I don't, I have no formal schooling in anything actually. <Laugh>, I mean, other than maybe art. And I, I, I remember being in that Microsoft, the audience at the Microsoft event where they talked about the dual screen things and they were like, dual screens make you more creative. No, they don't <laugh>. Whatcha are you talking about? You're distracted and <laugh>. It's just a distraction. Or it's like I, yeah, like the search highlights feature. When is 11, you, you, you go to search and then there's this thing <laugh>, it's a full of information that has nothing to do with you, what you're looking for. And you're like, I and you look at it and if you're like me, I don't know what I mean, if I have a d h ADHD or whatever it is, I've lost track. I've already forgotten why I'm even here. And like, I'm sorry, but like, yeah, like that kind of a feature that's just wrong minded. It's wrong minded cuz it's there not to make your life better or to help you. It's there to help Microsoft. Right. And it's like, guys, come on. Like this is just, you can turn it off, you know, thank God. But something

Leo Laporte (00:58:54):
The chat said, and I've, and I've seen this advice too. First thing they do when they set up windows is turn off all windows sounds. You

Paul Thurrott (00:59:00):
Said that boom Me the same thing. Yep. Yeah, exactly. Same thing. Yep. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (00:59:04):
Yep.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:04):
It was you who, and by the way, it will, yeah. It will come back. That's what makes me crazy. So there's certain cumulative updates and certainly feature updates where you, I'm using a computer and it's like bump, bump, bump. I'm, I I turned you off. Like what? Like that's, I

Leo Laporte (00:59:19):
Know

Paul Thurrott (00:59:20):
That's our world.

Leo Laporte (00:59:21):
I know what a world we live in. Huh?

Paul Thurrott (00:59:24):
It's an

Leo Laporte (00:59:24):
Interruption. I guess that's the first world problem in a nutshell. You couldn't have a more first word problem.

Paul Thurrott (00:59:31):
My computer first the first world problem. You know what the first world problem is, man, have an airline food choice has gone downhill over the hell are you talking, listen, you're like a, like a Greek God flying through the air and your concern is you can't get a good snack. The people who've never been on a plane in their entire life,

Leo Laporte (00:59:49):
That's that great Louis CK I know Louis's, you know. Yeah. No longer a good guy. But that was a great routine where he, you know, says, you know, you,

Paul Thurrott (00:59:56):
He's like, he's like, the message has to, he's like, he's guys complaining cuz the message hasn't gone through. He's like, he has to boom off a satellite in space and go down, give it a second.

Leo Laporte (01:00:05):
<Laugh>, take everything for granted.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:07):
It's a beautiful put down. It was a

Leo Laporte (01:00:10):
Bit

Paul Thurrott (01:00:10):
Beautiful.

Leo Laporte (01:00:11):
Yeah. and I'm, and at your recommendation, I am now installing a bunch of Dell updates, which I did. Yeah. But there you

Paul Thurrott (01:00:18):
Go. See? Okay. Yeah. So maybe this will

Leo Laporte (01:00:20):
And well, I don't, I have, I have an 11th gen. I haven't had that problem. 

Paul Thurrott (01:00:24):
Oh. Oh, 11th gen.

Leo Laporte (01:00:25):
Okay. Yeah. And I'm not is

Paul Thurrott (01:00:26):
A doc. I thought you just got this in. Oh, are you sure it's

Leo Laporte (01:00:30):
11Th? Oh, you're right. It is a 12th.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:32):
Yeah, I was gonna say

Leo Laporte (01:00:32):
I've never seen the problem, but I'm not on a dock unless you include this. Yeah, yeah. This little dongle that the I guess I am, I mean, this Dell thing is a dock, I guess

Paul Thurrott (01:00:40):
It's a little dock. Okay. So I've never suggested it on that

Leo Laporte (01:00:43):
Comes of the USB dongle so that you can have an H D M I.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:45):
Yep. So have like H M I U, SB and u s BBC or something.

Leo Laporte (01:00:49):
Yep. That's exactly, that's it.

Paul Thurrott (01:00:51):
Yep. oh, maybe that's what I should be doing. The problem is, I, I have too many things. I guess what the other thing I could do is just, well this is Andy, so it's fine, but I could just plug right into the laptop, I guess, but then it kind of negates the point of

Leo Laporte (01:01:03):
No, no, you need to talk man. With a laptop.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:05):
Yeah. The one you want. One cable, one

Leo Laporte (01:01:06):
Cable, one cable. Man.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:10):
We'll

Leo Laporte (01:01:10):
Get that. Gum. I think a good move, Leo. Update your vendor drivers in the middle of a show. Yeah, <laugh>. Sure. That's,

Paul Thurrott (01:01:16):
Hey, as long the laptop's not running the show, we'll be fine. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:01:20):
I have done it even when a laptop is running the show, that's the set.

Paul Thurrott (01:01:23):
Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:01:24):
Yep. All right. Little break for a word from Nord Layer are sponsored for this portion of the show. Nord Layer is a really great solution for any business that kind of wants in just a few minutes to safeguard your network, your data, and who doesn't. I mean, the surging ransomware attacks employees working remotely. Business networks are more vulnerable than ever before. Nord Layer, I know you know the name, N O R d. Nord layer secures and protects remote workforces, but it also protects your business data. It can even help you ensure security compliance. And it is easy to get started, 10 minutes to onboard your whole business on a secure network. That's how easy it is. It's easy to add new members, create teams. You can have private gateways, even do things like IP allow listing that's gonna help you immensely. Right site to site connection, network segmentation, setting up secure network access.

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Paul Thurrott (01:04:42):
Over an hour into the show. 

Leo Laporte (01:04:44):
Time for Windows. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:04:46):
I look one thing people should understand, it's mid-December this is when Microsoft starts shutting down <laugh>. So you know, the Windows stuff is come, well actually we have some, we do have some news here. I guess there's some, there's some stuff. So there's a little bit stuff. Yeah. Since our last show, there have been two dev channel builds of Windows 11. I think. I, I, I'm not gonna go look, but I don't think there was a dev channel build prior to that for the last week's show. So the one we got today was just Microsoft experimenting more with how they're gonna handle search in the task bar. So they have a version that looks like the Windows 10 version where it's long and you see that little search highlight graphic at the end, and then they have the pill. They're gonna start, you know, I, they're experimenting with this in stable, so I, you know, whatever.

(01:05:31):
 This build is the final dev channel build of 2022. They said, so we'll have to wait until January for new dev channel build. But there was one last week and this, this is kind of interesting. This is a, like a, as far as like figuring out like why would they do this, right? So Microsoft or Windows 11 has a new interface called Widgets, which is based on an interface in Windows 10 that was called, what was it called? News and something News and Information News. And I don't know what it was but it's similarly ui, right? Prettier, right, it's Windows 11. To see this thing though, you need to sign into a Microsoft account today, right? Which is kind of interesting. So most people sign into Windows 11 with a Microsoft account, and if so this thing is autopopulated, you'll have your local weather, local news, et cetera.

(01:06:18):
 However, starting in the dev channel they have turned off this. So now what you will get is your local weather. If location services are turned on you can still configure widgets if you want, that are specific to certain account type stuff, if that's what you want. And you'll have a newsfeed, right? But you don't have to sign into your Microsoft account. That's kind of interesting. So why would they do that? And actually, I think the, the reason, this is kind of cynical, but I think the reason is this is the gateway to Microsoft online services like MSN and Bing and their ad engine. And if they don't let you get to it because you decided you don't wanna sign in with your Microsoft account, that means that stuff's not getting fed. And they want that stuff to get fed more than they want you to sign into a Microsoft account.

(01:07:00):
That's my theory. It's speculation, but that's an idea and that's about it for those two builds. So not too, too much. There are two other things happening in the dev channel though. So current, current, with last week's build, Microsoft revealed that there was a new version of the media player app, which is that kind of modern app replacement for what used to be Groove Music and what used to be Xbox Music for that. I don't feel like anyone really uses this app <laugh>, so I don't, it's not, it was like whatever. But separately, they enou and this one, they actually made an announcement <laugh> like a separate announcement. They didn't put it in a build announcement. There is a new version of the snipping tool available to people in the dev channel that adds screen recording functionality. So today in Stable Snipping tool is a screenshot app and it's pretty full featured.

(01:07:50):
You can say full screen, particular app, select an area, et cetera. But they're gonna allow you to do that, but with screen recording as well. And that's actually, I don't think it's a thing like a lot of people need, but it is a thing that should be part of the operating system. So that's actually kind of a nice little addition. So that has happened. Get rid of that. Look at me closing tabs cuz I'm using an a M D machine. It's not hanging. It's so nice. It's beautiful, it's so modern, it's nice. This just happened today. I want to thank Neo Winn for pointing this out. I don't know when I would've found it because Microsoft never announced this, but without any testing whatsoever in the insider program. Microsoft today is rolling out a new version of OneDrive to Windows 11.

(01:08:33):
And this new version of OneDrive has a Windows 11 style ui, which I know doesn't sound like much, but if you don't have it already, what you'll see if you click on the OneDrive icon is a a little kind of troll panel type window, right? Like what you like a, almost like a property sheet. This is something that dates back to like, I don't know, windows 2000 maybe. Like, it's a really old looking ui. I know OneDrive isn't that old, but I mean the style of UI is very old. And now what they do when you go into settings is you actually get a nice Windows 11 style window with the rounded corners and it's, you know, themed to what you have. And they've done the same thing for sub windows. So if you wanna set up like a folder sync or choose which folders to sync or no, you know, all that stuff, those sub windows are all modern.

(01:09:18):
Now. They're not the old style, which is cool. Hidden in here, by the way, is a new feature. So in Windows 11 through today you could use OneDrive to back up your desktop, your documents and your pictures, right? So in effect, in the file system, replacing those physical locations on disk with a location in OneDrive so that it would sync to OneDrive and then you could access the same stuff on every computer. I actually turned that off, but I could see where this is a very useful feature for people in this new version of OneDrive. You can also sync your music and videos folders, which I always kind of wondered why you couldn't do that. So now you can. I have to think they're gonna make an announcement about this today or tomorrow or something. I can't believe this, this dropped on us with no warning whatsoever.

(01:10:04):
 But it's here. So <laugh>, I enjoy it. I don't know, oh by the way, I should say, I don't know how you get it. So I have it on this computer that I'm using here. It's gone. But I had a computer back there. I was testing earlier. I don't have it on another computer. I've only had a chance to test those two computers. I updated Windows Update, I updated the apps. I don't, you know, Microsoft has different ways of updating different parts of Windows now. So this might be something they just flip a switch on the back. I have no idea how they do it. So they're both on the same build all that stuff. I don't know. Speaking of the same build Tuesday was Patch Tuesday and I don't usually talk about Patch Tuesday, but actually there's a couple of new features which we've seen tested in in where Paul in the Insider program and actually this this stuff appeared last month in a preview update.

(01:10:55):
Remember the week C is not is a our week, E is a lie. This is the stuff from Wiki <laugh>, right? So this is the storage alerts for OneDrive subscribers, the integration of Windows Spotlight into themes on personalization settings that kind of stuff. So that's, that went public. So this is, I dunno if this is a mini moment or whatever you want to call it, but it is a a functional edition that appeared in what should be a security and bug fix update. But that's, you know, again, Microsoft, they they like to update. And finally Microsoft announced this past week that with the release of Microsoft Edge version 1 0 8, which I think we talked about last week, no new features for end users, right? In four weeks, edge 1 0 9 will come out. That will be the last version to support Windows seven and Windows 8.1.

(01:11:48):
And the, and also the last version where the WebView two that's associated with the runtime that's associated with Microsoft Edge will also be the last version supported on those platforms. And then starting with version one 10, which I guess by this point might be early February, I can't remember the exact date. Microsoft Edge going forward will only be supported on Windows 10 and Windows 11. So there you go. If you're wondering why that would be windows seven and Windows eight are both being put out to pasture in January, I think January 10th. And or no, that might, that might not be the exact date, but Windows seven is now at the end of its three year extended support policy thing, remember? And Windows eight one is just at the end of 10 years. So this is happening in January. Edge is gonna go outta support. We'll see if they step back from that cliff, but that's the plan for

Leo Laporte (01:12:36):
Now put out to pasture. What a nice way of putting it. Yeah. They'll be in the chasing rabbits in the bliss world chasing rabbits,

Paul Thurrott (01:12:43):
<Laugh>. Yep. Yep. Leo, if I asked you what do you think the biggest problem with one note for Windows is, what would you guess? Yeah. Had to guess

Leo Laporte (01:12:55):
The biggest problem?

Paul Thurrott (01:12:56):
Yeah. If, if one note had one problem

Leo Laporte (01:12:59):
For Windows, what would it be? I would say collaboration.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:03):
<Laugh>. Actually, that's a good guess. <Laugh>. So, yeah, that's what I would say too. Actually. I would add things like multiple versions of the app, which is confusing. Yeah. That's going back and forth.

Leo Laporte (01:13:14):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:16):
Well, they're gonna fix what they say is the single biggest request. Oh, good. One note. Cause they're gonna add vertical tabs. Oh Lord. <Laugh>, I, I

Leo Laporte (01:13:26):
Just, oh Lord.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:28):
Yikes. So there you go. That's it, huh? Tabs,

Leo Laporte (01:13:32):
Vertical tabs. They're here, baby. You've been waiting for 'em, you've been begging for him. They're finally here.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:38):
I hope to never speak of this product again. <Laugh>. But

Leo Laporte (01:13:42):
The only reason I say collaboration is cause remember how hard it was for you and Mary Jo and how many issues we had.

Paul Thurrott (01:13:50):
Yeah. You can't say we didn't give it a try. I'm not gonna bring up the app to find out. We years nothing for like Yeah. At least 10 years, right?

Leo Laporte (01:13:55):
10 years. You gave it a try. 10

Paul Thurrott (01:13:57):
Years. Yep. So, you know, roughly 50 shows a year. What is that? 500

Leo Laporte (01:14:01):
Hundred shows. And, and as soon as you went to Notion, it was like all the pain went away. Just went away.

Paul Thurrott (01:14:08):
Yep. I've never had a problem with this on Notion.

Leo Laporte (01:14:11):
I mean, one advantage the notion has is you're, it's a web app, so you're, you're working on the That's right. Same data base as opposed to No, no, yeah. Having two different sets of data that you have to somehow

Paul Thurrott (01:14:23):
No, I agree. Communicate. I, I, I, yeah. And one Note is a victim of the time in which it was made, I guess. 

Leo Laporte (01:14:30):
Hey, use user 58, 74 is asking a good question. What? Have you heard anything more about Loop?

Paul Thurrott (01:14:36):
No. No. So the last we heard was at Ignite. And at that time we were hoping for, you know, we were hoping for big news about Loop for the past, I don't know, four, five major Microsoft shows. The only thing they said, and it was like the smallest announcement was that Loop would be in a private preview with certain, you know, sort of like the Microsoft used to have some, well probably still has something called the TAP program, right? The tech what was it called? Technology Access, advanced preview Access preview or something like that. Yeah. it was, it sort of reminded me of that. It's like, we're gonna go, we're gonna try this with a certain small subset of companies and then we're gonna start going wider on it. The speculation we had at the time was that this is probably a, a tough bit of computer science, you know, they might have bit off more than they could chew. I think it's still gonna happen, but no, it's not something you can just go get and and try for yourself.

Leo Laporte (01:15:26):
Not yet. You know? So, you know I don't, I don't, I doubt you care, but Apple because Apple takes off Yeah. The holidays. No, I do care. They updated everything yesterday. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And one of the things that we all got, whether you're on iPad, os, or Right, or iOS mm-hmm. <Affirmative> or or Mac Os is this new free format app, which I thought initially might be a little like Loop, but it's really just a I thought

Paul Thurrott (01:15:50):
So too. Yeah. It's just a whiteboard. Yeah. It doesn't windows.

Leo Laporte (01:15:53):
Windows.

Paul Thurrott (01:15:54):
Windows. Listen is YouTube gonna have to write an apology cuz they just dumped this on everyone's device? Or how does that

Leo Laporte (01:15:59):
Work? <Laugh>, I know everybody got us. We all just got this new

Paul Thurrott (01:16:03):
App's Cool. We were afraid. Cool. When you buy a new iPhone, we only ha we have like almost two full screens of icons. So now we have like two full screens. Like, we wanted to get that last space filled up with our own icons,

Leo Laporte (01:16:15):
I guess. I don't know.

Paul Thurrott (01:16:16):
It doesn't, so I thought the same thing. It's the only reason I looked at this is I thought this is their notion. Interesting. It's not gonna help me if, you know, there's no, there's no web or Windows version. It's

Leo Laporte (01:16:25):
A, it's a collaborative whiteboard. That's what it's

Paul Thurrott (01:16:28):
No, that's okay. That's fine. They should have one of those. That's fine. Windows has one. I'm sure they're a third.

Leo Laporte (01:16:33):
Third. What, what is Windows have for a

Paul Thurrott (01:16:34):
Whiteboard app? Oh, you're gonna love the imaginative name. It's called Whiteboard. <Laugh>. <laugh>. So yeah, so if you just bring up your start menu and type in whiteboard. Oh, you can see there's a Microsoft

Leo Laporte (01:16:42):
Whiteboard. Ok. Yep. Is it collaborative? Can I, can I share

Paul Thurrott (01:16:46):
Whiteboard? Yes. It's in fact this app, this app is based on the app. The first ship at the Surface Studio. Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Idea. There is, you'd have multiple people standing there whiteboarding away. You could do this with other people on

Leo Laporte (01:16:59):
Mine. I don't have it on my on my machine. You don't? No.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:02):
Oh. Oh, I am shocked. Well, I have it on mine, but it's you can get it from the store if you don't have it.

Leo Laporte (01:17:07):
Yes. Microsoft. It must be in the store. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:17:09):
Yeah. No, I think it, I'm pretty sure it comes with Windows. I don't know

Leo Laporte (01:17:12):
Why I wouldn't have erased it. Yeah, whiteboard do microsoft.com and it has a web interface, which is nice.

Paul Thurrott (01:17:19):
Yeah. I wonder if this is something like a PC maker can Well, I don't, I thought it was part of Windows. I'm not sure.

Leo Laporte (01:17:26):
You know what this is, this is very similar to what Apple's doing. <Laugh>. It's almost exactly

Paul Thurrott (01:17:31):
The same. Well, you know, if you're claiming that Microsoft was ripped off Apple, I can

Leo Laporte (01:17:34):
No, no other way around. Other way around. Huh? <laugh>. So I think I installed from the store cause I, I don't

Paul Thurrott (01:17:39):
Okay. I'm not sure what to say of that, but but you can, you can of course get it from the store.

Leo Laporte (01:17:44):
It's so funny. Doug m who is a devoted Windows user in a regular charms says I've never heard a whiteboard

Paul Thurrott (01:17:51):
<Laugh> Really? Well,

Leo Laporte (01:17:52):
He says, I got it, but I never heard of it. So I don't know why I don't have it on mine. I don't think I

Paul Thurrott (01:17:56):
Erase. Listen. And everyone who goes in the hospital says that statement. I've never heard of it, but I never

Leo Laporte (01:17:59):
Heard it, but I got it. <Laugh>, Microsoft whiteboard. All right, I'm installing it. Yeah. Collaborative Digital Canvas and Microsoft 365. Do you think it came with Office? That's why you have it?

Paul Thurrott (01:18:12):
No, no. It's, it's a Windows

Leo Laporte (01:18:14):
Thing. That's weird that I didn't get it. I feel

Paul Thurrott (01:18:17):
Lift out. Yeah. I'm surprised. I Maybe it's something Dell could Nick. Maybe it's one of the optional things or something.

Leo Laporte (01:18:23):
Maybe, maybe it's very, I mean, just on the surface, it looks very similar to what Apple's doing with Freeform. That's funny. That's funny. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:18:30):
Well, that was funny. Look, I, I, I, I don't begrudge Apple making a whiteboarding app. That's fine. I think every platform should have something like this. It's

Leo Laporte (01:18:37):
Collaborative

Paul Thurrott (01:18:37):
Hybrid work

Leo Laporte (01:18:38):
Boards with somebody else or whatever. I

Paul Thurrott (01:18:41):
Don't know. Yeah. I mean, useful. There's only so many ways you can do a whiteboard. It's literally a whiteboard <laugh>, you know, that's the name. It's,

Leo Laporte (01:18:47):
You can embed, but you can put video on this and photos, text. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> sticky notes. That's all the same. Right? See I feel like West Loop's gonna have a similar thing, but it, but a much more broader variety of components. You probably have a spreadsheet component for instance, or stuff

Paul Thurrott (01:19:03):
Like that. I think the, yeah, the central confusion about Loop is gonna be that there are gonna be loop components you could use in other apps. Probably including Whiteboard at some point, although I don't think that's on the list right now. And then you can also run an app called Loop, where you can have your loop components. But some of those components can be things that bring in things like Excel spreadsheets, word documents, one note that's cool. What notes, you know, et cetera. Yeah. So you could imagine there being a whiteboard inside of a, a Loop document with other content and that that whiteboard comes from Microsoft Whiteboard. Yeah. Yeah. It's a two-way street. Leo,

Leo Laporte (01:19:35):
I downloaded whiteboard and I'm opening it right now. Microsoft respects your privacy, so, okay. That's all I can, right, right, right. That's all it says. It doesn't actually give you any choices, <laugh>, it's

Paul Thurrott (01:19:48):
Just, but they do respect your privacy.

Leo Laporte (01:19:49):
A banner. Banner.

Paul Thurrott (01:19:50):
We don't protect it, but, but we do respect it. Yeah, we get it. We get that you care about it. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:19:56):
Yeah. It doesn't have vertical tabs, that's all. I'm just asking <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:00):
I don't think it has any tabs. I don't, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:20:03):
Authenticator.

Paul Thurrott (01:20:05):
Oh right. I forgot about the authenticators. This is actually something I use not every day, but almost every day cuz I have an Apple watch. Right. So obviously, obviously people in the Microsoft space have probably heard of Microsoft Authenticator. One of the wonderful things about your Microsoft account is that you can sign in on a new PC or elsewhere and not have to ever type your password. These sends code to the thing love that authenticate whatever. You do it and off you go. It's nice if you have an Apple watch. Yeah. You can do that on your watch. Right? So, cool. So you look at your watch, double check. If they approve, it'll say there's a number on the screen to type in the right number. And you go, yeah, well that's going away. So Paul <laugh> think by the end of the month you're not gonna be able to do that.

Leo Laporte (01:20:43):
I use it all the time. Why would they take that off? I

Paul Thurrott (01:20:45):
Know, because it's apparent. It <laugh>. So that's actually confusing their description. The Microsoft's explanation says that the Apple watch, lemme see, I can find this Exactly. Yeah. Is incompatible with authenticator security features,

Leo Laporte (01:20:59):
Huh?

Paul Thurrott (01:21:01):
Yeah. so I don't know. This thing's been around for five years. It works great. I you have to, here's my guess here because actually I would never have guessed this, but right now I am testing a Google Pixel watch. Right? A Google, sorry, Google Pixel phone. Yeah. Which means I'm wearing an iPhone, an I excuse. I can't, I can't speak. I'm wearing an Apple Watch, but it's not connected to that phone. Right. It only connects to an iPhone. So the iPhone's out in the kitchen, it's connected to wifi, whatever technically you're supposed to sign in, hopefully biometrically, but pin on a mobile device as step one of approving an authentication request through Microsoft Authenticator. But if you think about it, I have given this watch permission to unlock my phone and do other things. Yeah. It's passing through this notification from the iPhone. Yeah. I'm not signed into my iPhone <laugh>. I have not, I have done nothing. I guess. Well, I Okay. Argue. No, no,

Leo Laporte (01:21:58):
No, no, no, no.

Paul Thurrott (01:21:58):
Because I have typed in a pen. I have typed in a pen.

Leo Laporte (01:22:00):
Yeah. Your Apple watch will not unlock unless you either unlock it directly

Paul Thurrott (01:22:04):
Or That's true. Okay. In your phone. It's a pen. Okay. So I, so at

Leo Laporte (01:22:07):
Some point there's a handshake that says, yeah, that's your watch and his long as, as it stays on your wrist, that's you mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So, fair enough. That's why this works. But maybe Microsoft doesn't think that's sufficient.

Paul Thurrott (01:22:16):
I dunno. I'm, I'm thinking they don't think that's sufficient. I, I don't see the language anywhere where it says, Hey, by the way, we're not gonna support pins anymore. I would imagine that the vast ma, or at least a huge percentage of people that use any mobile days device are probably using in pins. Right?

Leo Laporte (01:22:31):
So Apple's two factor, of course, they're not gonna take it off their own watch, but that's you double tap and that's, you can two factor on the watch as well. Yep. So it's weird that

Paul Thurrott (01:22:40):
Microsoft, I like using the watch for this. Oh. And I am Oh yeah. I am a little surprised. But I, I

Leo Laporte (01:22:45):
Don't know. I have two accounts on my authenticator on my watch. So

Paul Thurrott (01:22:49):
I have Oh, on your watch. I, I mean, I have multiple accounts in including

Leo Laporte (01:22:55):
You have more than one for say

Paul Thurrott (01:22:58):
No, I do, but I also have other accounts in there. So I have a Microsoft commercial account. Oh. I actually put the the Mastodon TWiTtch social accounts in there. Cause it generates a code. Right. I should have done

Leo Laporte (01:23:07):
That. Yeah. Yeah. I've been using Athe, but I could use Yeah, same. Microsoft's Authenticator. Well, but it's nots gonna work on the watch anymore, but

Paul Thurrott (01:23:15):
Now it won't work on the Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:23:16):
Exactly. Digg I know, I know. Yeah, Dean, I

Paul Thurrott (01:23:20):
Don't get it. Yeah. I don't know why I don't

Leo Laporte (01:23:22):
A suggestion. Forno another authenticator app that will, will Google's work on the watch. I don't know, because that is a very, that's so convenient. Yep. Because then I have to go get my phone. I got my wa I always have my watch on it. Well, you know,

Paul Thurrott (01:23:35):
Like sometimes on the Apple Watch, you'll get a, a notification for something like, nice. I'll be able to, you know, okay, this here. And it's like open the app on your iPhone. Like, okay, whatever. But the the authenticator has, has worked and it does, it passes through the information you need to okay it, right. If you get three different numbers or whatever. I really like it. I, I, to me it's not, it seems secure, but of course I'd say that I'm a,

Leo Laporte (01:23:58):
I'm an idiot.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:00):
So <laugh>,

Leo Laporte (01:24:00):
So I'm searching for Authenticator that works with Apple Watch. And of course it's, everybody says, oh yeah, Microsoft Authenticator, right? It works for the, for the Apple Watch. Too bad.

Paul Thurrott (01:24:09):
So it's possible a future Apple, or I guess a Watch ofWe update or something will add some security support. Something, something that will make this come back or something. I don't know. It's too bad. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:24:20):
Because if works up the number that's really secure. But you're saying they're getting rid of that number thing, so that's

Paul Thurrott (01:24:25):
Probably No, I didn't say that. I'm sorry. I didn't say that. They're not No, they're not getting rid of it. But I, I don't, I guess what I'm saying is, I don't know why this doesn't qualify. I was originally saying, you know, I'm not really signed into the, you know, the, like, I don't know how Apple watch apps work Exactly, but No, you are, it's absolutely, it's

Leo Laporte (01:24:41):
Authenticated. If you took that watch off, it wouldn't work. The authenticator wouldn't do it. It has to be

Paul Thurrott (01:24:46):
No, no, I get that. Yeah, I get that. Yeah. That's what I, I was kind of forgetting, but I Yeah, you have to, you type in a, you type a pin in, seems like a pin would do it. It does do it today. I don't know. Yeah. I don't know.

Leo Laporte (01:24:58):
I don't know. I'm doing the whatever emoji

Paul Thurrott (01:25:02):
<Laugh>. Exactly.

Paul Thurrott (01:25:05):
Where's the KY art when you need

Leo Laporte (01:25:07):
It? I still haven't learned how to do that. I just cut and paste it every time. I

Paul Thurrott (01:25:11):
Know. I don't, every time I say they get upset, it's a lot of characters. It's like, does are you actually typing that?

Leo Laporte (01:25:15):
That's a lot of characters. It's

Paul Thurrott (01:25:17):
Impressive.

Leo Laporte (01:25:18):
Let's talk about, this is the strangest story I've ever heard. Your next story. I

Paul Thurrott (01:25:22):
Would've, yeah. This would've been a Mary Jo thing. I would've sat back and not really paid attention to this. So

Leo Laporte (01:25:27):
I don't even get it. This

Paul Thurrott (01:25:28):
One, this one hurts my head. So whenever, remember, this is what the thing Mary Jo would've appreciated is there was a period of time they might still be doing it where Microsoft would reveal customer wins and, but call them partnerships. Right. We are partnering right. With, you know,

Leo Laporte (01:25:46):
Fidelity. Oh, right. To

Paul Thurrott (01:25:47):
Roll up. So I thought a second, I thought this, this might be That must be what this is. Yeah. It's not what it, because the opening sentences the London Stock Exchange has agreed to spend 2.8 billion on Azure and other Microsoft products. You're like, oh, there you go. It's a partnership. Nope. No, no. But it is a part, it's actually a partnership. So as part of the strategic partnership, Microsoft will also acquire 4% of the London Stock Exchange group. You're like, what? What is what I, so I don't what? I don't, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna, yeah. I don't know how, I mean, is the London Stock Exchange Group listed on the London Stock Exchange? If so, they must be a public company and maybe this is considered an investment. And so they own a small part of it, and that's what they had to do to get them to agree to go with Azure instead of say a w s or something. I I, I have no idea. So it's like money's exchanging hands. I don't know how much a four point 4% acquisi or a Yeah. 4% acquisition of the London Stock Exchange Group costs. You know, is it less than 2.8 billion? Probably. it could generate an additional 5 billion in revenue over the next 10 years. You know, if things go well, <laugh>, because I don't, why would, I don't know. I don't know. This is outside of my, it was just I felt like I couldn't not mention it, but I

Leo Laporte (01:27:14):
That's weird. Well, it's just a, you know what this diversification, it's just an, it's an investment,

Paul Thurrott (01:27:19):
Right? There you go. Sure.

Leo Laporte (01:27:21):
What are you gonna do

Paul Thurrott (01:27:22):
<Laugh> sometimes Sure.

Leo Laporte (01:27:23):
Sometimes you invest.

Paul Thurrott (01:27:26):
Yeah. Oh boy. Yeah. I don't really get it. And then this is of course related to that story. Microsoft, as you know, has two generations of the Surface duo, and they just released there in December, 2022. Software update for those both platforms. And one of the big things there, if you have a Surface two oh two, is it fixes the phone calling issues. Mm. that have occurred since that, I think it was like an October software update that brought it up to Android 12 L, which is the, the big screen two screen, you know, update of Android that they did last year, or no, I'm sorry, they did it early this year. I guess it's not a phone. So I don't see why this would've been a problem for anybody. But

Leo Laporte (01:28:10):
We were talking on TWiTt on Sunday about how great Windows phone was, and I wish, yeah. It would come back. We need the competition. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:20):
It's Microsoft

Leo Laporte (01:28:21):
Wishes it would come back too.

Paul Thurrott (01:28:23):
<Laugh>. That's like saying, you know, I really missed the Roman Empire. That was great. They should bring that back.

Leo Laporte (01:28:27):
Those were the days,

Paul Thurrott (01:28:29):
Times have changed. I, you know, that's the problem. I I, there was a moment in time, it could have been a couple years where they were kind of firing on all, well, well, they were firing on all cylinders, but it was also a new platform. So they had those kind of issues. Right. but they were ahead of Google and apple and key areas. The f the camera was incredible on those Nokia high-end devices, especially the Lumia 10 20. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:28:54):
Yeah. And they were well made and

Paul Thurrott (01:28:56):
Yep. I had a, I had one, I, I don't know why I was in, I think it was Boston Subway. I, I reached, I jumped up and grabbed a Gerda in the subway <laugh>, and my phone fell out of my pocket. Oh. Lumia hit the ground, cracked open like a lobster. It made this horrible cracking sound. I could see all of the insides of it, and I, I, I just, like, I pushed it back together. It was like lunch, and then it was, it was fine. Absolutely fine. Wow. It had no impressive problems whatsoever. Yeah. Wow. They were really well, they were well

Leo Laporte (01:29:25):
Made. Wow.

Paul Thurrott (01:29:26):
And you know, the polycarbonate thing, the uni body. Beautiful. But I agree. I agree. I mean, I, obviously, I was, I was intimately involved with that whole thing. I loved it. But you know, the world has changed so much and, and the advantages it had, I think have been superseded since then. I mean, I know the, the market today is not perfect. We, we just talked a lot about Apple today in particular, but neither Android or iPhone is, is perfect of course. But I don't know. There, the camera capabilities we have today are just next level, you know, compared to what we could do back then. True,

Leo Laporte (01:30:03):
True. They invented the camera bump, though. Let's not forget

Paul Thurrott (01:30:07):
<Laugh>. No, they invented. Did they? Well, it made it look like a camera. It

Leo Laporte (01:30:11):
Had a big bump.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:12):
<Laugh>. Yeah. They did a nice job with that because

Leo Laporte (01:30:13):
It had a 41 megapixel camera, which at the time was like,

Paul Thurrott (01:30:16):
Slower than crap, though. It, it could take beautiful photos, but my God, you had to hold that thing still. Like you were not catching, running people doing anything with that. It was so slow.

Leo Laporte (01:30:25):
Yeah. All right. We kind of talked a little bit about the Xbox at the beginning of the show, but you know what, because there's no Mary Jo Foley, you have full reign to talk about Xbox all you want.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:38):
Yeah. So

Leo Laporte (01:30:39):
Let's do it.

Paul Thurrott (01:30:39):
<Laugh>. Let's do it. Prison. There, there isn't too much. In fact, I don't even know if we wrote, I don't know if we wrote up any of these <laugh>, like on the site. These are all kind of little yeah. These are all tidbits direct from Xbox Little, yeah. Tidbits Little

Leo Laporte (01:30:52):
Moose Bush for the back of the book. Just a little something to get you in the

Paul Thurrott (01:30:57):
Mood. Yeah, there you go. So riot Games, which I think makes a League of Legends is probably their big game. Valant. Yep. Those, those games are now available to Game Pass members, which is kind of cool. Not quite the Activision Blizzard thing we were hoping to announce, but <laugh>, you know, some good games here, so that's good. This one makes no sense to me, but it's hilarious. <Laugh>, Microsoft is offering a three month trial of com premium for Xbox Game Pass. Ultimate Members, I haven't looked this up because it's just gonna upset me. It's possible anyone could get a three month trial premium three month trial of com premium. I don't know. Com is a, an online service of mobile apps for meditation and sleep, and it's

Leo Laporte (01:31:43):
An interesting juxtaposition between Xpa game, Xbox Game Pass, ultimate and

Paul Thurrott (01:31:48):
Calm. Yeah. Just kill people for a couple hours and go bed to the, the soothing sounds of meditation. Yeah. It's like a relax a balance kind of a thing, so, okay. Yeah. I, I tried Calm for a little while. I'm not not what you call a calm person, but I I like the idea of it's calm,

Leo Laporte (01:32:06):
It's not for me. Calm.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:07):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:32:08):
Calm.

Paul Thurrott (01:32:09):
And then <laugh>, the other one was just a, you know, was any your recap pieces? So when Windows, let's see if I think through this exactly. When Windows 10 debuted, there were two Xbox apps, right? There was the expo, what, what, what became the Xbox Console Companion, I think was the name of it. And then there was something called Smart Screen. And Smart screen was a way that you could have like second screen experiences. If you had like, we're doing something on your Xbox and you had like a tablet, you know, hopefully a Surface or something there were some TV shows that offered these experiences. You could do things like, you know, stream games and stuff like that. Flash forward to Windows 11. Those are both gone, basically. They're still at the store. And there's a new Xbox app on Windows 11.

(01:32:56):
And the Xbox app is not a replacement for those other apps is something else. This is an app for Game Pass, right? So the idea here is sign it with your Microsoft account. You get access to the library, you can manage downloads, you could launch games through there. You don't have to, they're out, you know, in the start menu, desktop, whatever. The big complaint about the Xbox app, the new Xbox app is that it was really slow <laugh>. So this year they made a bunch of improvements, ui, et cetera. But one of the big things that, it was performance related, one of the things I'd like is some of that other functionality, because one of the things I do is I take screenshots or, or recordings in games on an Xbox, and I'd like to get those on my pc, and that should be in the Xbox app. I don't quite understand why that's not the case. So I actually download the what's it called? The Xbox Companion app, which you can get in store, like I said and do it, do it that way. But it's like, I, I kind of wish there was one Xbox, <laugh>, you know, app on Windows that did everything. But to my note, to my knowledge, there is not, it also is a client for Xbox Cloud gaming. So if you have the ultimate subscription, you can get that through there.

Leo Laporte (01:34:02):
Nice.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:03):
That's all I gots. That's,

Leo Laporte (01:34:04):
Well, that was easy here. I was bracing myself for a challenging, well,

Paul Thurrott (01:34:10):
Things are slowing down half

Leo Laporte (01:34:11):
Hour of Xbox News. Well, we did it all at the top of the hour is what we did.

Paul Thurrott (01:34:16):
Well, that was the big one, of course. Yeah. But I mean, as far as like new games coming to Xbox Game Pass, you know, yada yada yada. I think we're kind of hitting the <laugh> at the end of that. Yeah. For this month.

Leo Laporte (01:34:26):
Well, you know, where else you're not gonna get any extensive Xbox News? I don't think our sponsor Red Hat's Code Comments podcast. I don't think, I don't think there'll be a lot of Xbox in there. Actually. Code comments is a really cool idea. You know, when you're, when you're working on code, if you're a coder, you write comments in the code. I do, I write a lot of comments. I may be a little wordy add, you know, one plus one, add comment, add one that's probably not necessary. But the idea is you're gonna annotate what you're doing so that someone else can look at it and know what you are up to. Or more importantly, so that you, a year later, the new person that you are can look at it and go, oh, oh, is that what I, anyway, A small reminder to help others learn from your work is a good way to put it.

(01:35:15):
The idea of Code Comments, the podcast, the original podcast from Red Hat, is it takes you listening in on two experienced technologists says they comment on the process of taking an idea to market on the building process. It takes a lot of work to start in that whiteboard, you know, your Microsoft whiteboard and sketching it out to get it all the way to market. No one does it by themselves. That's why you gotta have code comments, right? The host is great. Bur Sutter, he's a Red hatter. He knows his stuff. In fact, he's, he's been a lifelong developer advocate, community organizer. So what he's doing is he's bringing in technologists from all over the world to talk about how they work and to trade stories and talk about what they've learned from their experiences. It's a great way for you to learn from their experiences as well.

(01:36:07):
You can, you can find this@redhat.com, red hat.com/code comment. Podcasts original podcast from Red Hat. Let me just see how many they've got out. I've subscribed, and you should just subscribe it. But you can always go to the the, the, the website and see the show. Latest episode, avoid failure in distributed databases. <Laugh>, Ben Darnell of Cockroach Labs talks about how they built their database to survive almost, almost anything. That's awesome. Deep learning, rethinking networks and telecommunications, how to align with open principles. All of this kind of grist for the mill with Burr. In the in episode four and it says, the first code I wrote for Cockroach DB was actually an implementation of Raft. In that week, I was able to implement probably the first 80% of the raft algorithm. Then it turns out we sped upwards in the next year working on what I'd say is the next 20%.

(01:37:05):
Yeah, that sounds about right. First 80 is easy. What a great show to listen to the Code Comments podcast from Red Hat. I invite you to check it out. You can go to, as I said, red hat.com/code comments podcast. You can look for code comments in your podcast player. You can also go to our show notes at TWiTt tv slash ww. We'll have a link on this episode. Thanks so much to code comments and Red Hat for supporting us. We like to support podcasts and they support us, so it's a nice thing to do. Thank you. Red Hat Paul, now would be a good time. <Laugh>. Now would be a good time to start the back of the book. And as always with the back of the book, it's your tip of the week to kick things off. Yeah. I don't know if you remember this conversation, but several months ago,

Paul Thurrott (01:37:56):
Excuse me Mary Jo was pointing out that she had these like popup text thingss that would appear in Notepad. Right. And I've never seen this before. So it's in, it's our best of show <laugh>. Okay. It's confusing. I did remember that. So yes, flash forward some number of months, whatever it is, and I'm working on the Windows 11 field guide, and I've gotten to kind of going back and forth, but I've been writing the, the hardware section, the devices section, and trying to come up with anything to write about, like keyboards, mice, and touch pads is beyond my skills, but I'm trying. And it's weird because mice and touch pads and things like printers and scanners and whatever else are all managed in the settings app in Bluetooth and devices, right? All the hardware components in your computer, but keyboard keyboards are not <laugh>.

(01:38:43):
Like why would that be? Well, there's somewhere else. So if you go into settings and go to time and language, you'll see that there's a typing section. Typing page, and some of it's related to the touch keyboard, like if you have a tablet or a two in one PC or whatever. But a couple of these options are not, these are just general keyboard settings. And I guess it's in time and language because a keyboard by nature would be defined to a language, right? You have a US keyboard, you have a, you know, I know I'm not, it's, it's a regional setting I guess, so, yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. I, yeah, I don't like it either. I honestly, there should be a keyboard thing in the other place. Yes. And it should link to this. I don't know. They, they do that with other things, you know, whatever.

(01:39:21):
But, okay. But this is where you turn off, this is where you turn on the feature. So one of the options here is show text suggestions when typing on the physical keyboard. And if you turn it on, you will get those little pop-up things. <Laugh>, that's what that is. And it works pretty well, I have to say. I turn, I turn it on, then turned it off cuz I found it to be annoying. I type really fast, so there was always these little windows coming up, you know, as I type. But one of the neat things that is associated with it is if you have configured your computer to support multiple languages, maybe because you speak two languages or you do business with another country that speaks to different language which is one of those things you can do in Windows and elsewhere.

(01:39:58):
 It will actually support multilingual text suggestions as well. So if you configure this thing for English and Spanish or whatever, you'll get text suggestions in the other language as well. So I thought that was kind of cool. So good Plus mystery solved. I don't remember if we solved it at the time, but I don't think we did. So it's good to know. Yeah, so that's where it is. It's in the book, right? No, I'm sorry. It will be in the book. <Laugh>, that part's not made it public yet, but yeah, don't hold your breath. I wrote a tip about it if you wanna see it, but <laugh> it's not, it's not gonna, it's not gonna sell any copies of the book for that chapter. Oh, hey. Oh, finally. Oh wow. Someone finally wrote up the keyboard situation. Actually it's hysterical cuz that's in the best of which is, which is great.

(01:40:35):
Yeah. Okay, nice. Good. the other, oh, so oh, oh, apex. So I have two Apex. One is, both of these are things I've actually recommended in the past, but both have come to the forefront again for different reasons. I've spent a lot of time recently as I do from time, time to time, trying to find a markdown editor for writing that I really like. I almost, I was like this close and there's a part of me that really wants to do this, went down the Visual Studio code path, right? Because Visual Studio Code supports markdown natively,

Leo Laporte (01:41:06):
But, oh, that's a bad idea.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:07):
I, I know, but you know, if you can download extensions that make it better for writing and blah blah, blah, whatever, it's a little too, you know, Cody Code editor. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:41:17):
It's Cody.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:18):
I mean, I kinda like that part of it, but it's, yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:41:20):
So I like vs code a lot. I can't imagine writing it anymore.

Paul Thurrott (01:41:24):
Yeah,

Leo Laporte (01:41:24):
And

Paul Thurrott (01:41:25):
I guess, you know, I, I, so I I, I'll just say this. The reason the reason I almost went with it was because the, the thing I've been using for the book and we'll continue to use for the book is an app called Markdown Pad two, which is not supported anymore. And that's actually part of the reason I wanna replace it because I have to install a very specific developer library. I have, I have to hold these things. I don't know if they'll always be available online. I, that will install a very specific version and I'm talking like a, it might even be, it's at least 10 year old version of some visual c plus plus library. It's a crazy, it's, it's just an old app, but the thing I like about it is it does the side by side view a hundred percent of the time. So you write in code over here and you see what it looks like in a preview paint over here, which I

Leo Laporte (01:42:08):
Really like. Oh, I do like that. Yeah. I mean, takes up a lot of screen space, but if you have a big screen, yeah, that's definitely the way it,

Paul Thurrott (01:42:13):
It's just, it's, I'm just used to it. Visual Studio Code supports that, but you have to turn it on every time. Unless I'm missing something. I, the, the, you can do it, but you have to turn it on. But there's actually, there's the app I'm, I'm gonna use for writing not for the book though, bec for that code reason is call Typo and it's been around for a while. You have to pay for it. It's worth it. It's, I think it's, it'd be $15. It's not super expensive.

Leo Laporte (01:42:36):
I'm using it since it was a beta and free and

Paul Thurrott (01:42:38):
Yeah. So you

Leo Laporte (01:42:39):
Understand it's, we're paying for it. It's really nice. Yep.

Paul Thurrott (01:42:41):
Yeah, yeah, it's really nice. And it, it's sort of like a lightweight Microsoft word, but you use keyboard shortcuts that are kind of marked down related or can use markdown code. Right. So if you type like hashtag whatever, it will turn it into a title one heading, you know. Nice. the only thing I stumble over a little bit is the way it handles U R L insertion. Like if you wanna make something a hyperlink, you have to really <laugh> you, you have to overcome your muscle memory cuz the way you do it in Word and everywhere else is a little bit different. And that, that part's a little interesting. But as far as making marked on mainstream, I would say this is really nice cuz what you're looking at is basically a rich text document with formatting. But if you, but you can just type, normally you could use menus and stuff if you wanna select styles, but if you know the codes, which I do, you can just type the codes. Right. It's

Leo Laporte (01:43:30):
Really, it's pretty too. It's a very, it's elegant, simple. Yeah. Have you ever, I mean it's the prettiest of them all. It only has a few different templates, but you, you can download more. You

Paul Thurrott (01:43:39):
Can download more. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:43:41):
Yeah. Have you ever used Obsidian the Note app obsidian? It does. I don't think it does that. Markdown conversion. It actually does. So this is cool things

Paul Thurrott (01:43:51):
Down. Isn't this a Notion type app? But it does, it's not

Leo Laporte (01:43:54):
Like Notion. It's a, it's more of a kind of a plain vanilla note taking app, but it's fully marked down and they have various preview settings including one that when you take your, you know, you stop typing or you lift your mouse, it will then preview it and then as soon as you start typing, this goes back to, oh,

Paul Thurrott (01:44:12):
That's interesting. So that's, I'm gonna look at that. So thank you for screening that up. This

Leo Laporte (01:44:15):
Yeah, that one's free <laugh>. It's not new. Look at it, it's pretty Typo is gorgeous.

Paul Thurrott (01:44:20):
I, I will say, so I, oh, I should say too, I'm sorry, I, I, one of the reasons I didn't go with Visual Studio Code is I write the things I write 99% of the time end up in WordPress. So outputting to WordPress is key and it has to be clean, right? So Markdown Pad, it's a little convoluted, but you can select HTML code type paste into the code editor part of WordPress and then go back to the visual style and it looks fine, you know, it, it looks fine, but Visual Studio Code doesn't, and it, it actually adds styles to the HTML code and I, mm-hmm. I can't, it can't be like that. So Typo. It's a little ponders. Cuz you do have to co you can do copy html code and then you have to paste it into the, the code editor in Word Press. Not the,

Leo Laporte (01:45:11):
But it saves out as MD file, so Right. You could just do

Paul Thurrott (01:45:15):
It. You can't do that. But I need, but I don't know how that does it, can you import directly from MD into Word print

Leo Laporte (01:45:21):
Wordpress? I don't, that's a should. I

Paul Thurrott (01:45:23):
Don't think you can,

Leo Laporte (01:45:24):
Should be able to open a

Paul Thurrott (01:45:25):
File. I couldn't agree. Could not agree more. That'd be amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Anyway, that's, that was part of it. So Typo does Clean

Leo Laporte (01:45:33):
Mark. The reason I use Typo also is it's completely crossed platform. Windows, Mac, Linux.

Paul Thurrott (01:45:37):
Yep. It's everywhere.

Leo Laporte (01:45:38):
It's everywhere. I really

Paul Thurrott (01:45:39):
Like type one, so I just re so I, you know, just reinstalled it and it of course you, you, I have a code cuz I paid for it and I pasted it in and it said you've used the maximum number of like, and I'm like, oh come on, are you kidding me? But it just said click okay and it will remove the license from the last one. That huge. Oh,

Leo Laporte (01:45:55):
That's the right way. Which to do it. Yeah. Which is the right way to do it. Yeah,

Paul Thurrott (01:45:58):
Exactly. So that was great. Yeah. the other app, and I I think I might have recommended this as recently as a week or two ago, is Firefox. And the reason is the latest version of Firefox and Windows 11 now supports efficiency mode, which is that feature we talked about at some point recently. Right now the only app that natively supports efficiency mode outta the box, I believe is Microsoft Edge. And I believe the Firefox might be the second web browser to support it. But this is the thing that individual processes, which can be tabs or whatever other processes in the the application will run in a more efficient mode that doesn't hammer the CPU and thus will be better for battery life as well. And I have this belief that efficiency mode, based on what Microsoft has said, is probably gonna expand in the coming months and years to do other things as well.

(01:46:44):
But right now that's what it does do. And I know I had a tip, or we discussed at some point how you, you can, if you have an app that's hung, and by the way, this would've come up cuz of all the issues I was having, one of the things you can do is go in a task manager and put a process in that app into efficiency mode and see if that doesn't solve the problem before you kill it. That's an an impossibility on a web browser by the way, but you can do it with other apps. But now Firefox supports innovatively, so you don't have to, it's not something you have to manage, it just does it for you. I think the way Firefox does it is a little different from edge in that I believe it's only background processes right now. I could be wrong about that, but I, I don't think they'll apply Efficiency monthly. They don't sleep tabs, I think in the same way that edge does. But like I said, I think it's the, I think it's the second, the first non-Microsoft app to support efficiency mode, I think. And then this is unrelated to anything else, although this will make you wanna drink <laugh>. I have a word of the week today. And you might imagine my

Leo Laporte (01:47:45):
Wife love you to do this every week. I love this.

Paul Thurrott (01:47:47):
So my wife and I are are writers. Yeah. And we have conversations to us that are interesting that I think would bore the living <laugh> fell out of anybody else. Like they, we just, we will be reading the paper on our devices in the morning and one of us will say, Hey, check out this headline. Or do you know what I'll see a word in a New York Times article, I'll be, have you, I'm like, do you know what this word is? You know? And this was one of those words. So you've heard of synonyms, right? Which are words that mean the same thing? Yeah. You've heard of antonyms? Opposite. Opposite, which are opposites. Opposite. Yeah. Yeah. Hominems, right?

Leo Laporte (01:48:19):
Hominems they sound the same, but they mean different things.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:21):
All right. So have you heard of con There you go. Exactly. <laugh>, have you heard of Contras?

Leo Laporte (01:48:27):
No,

Paul Thurrott (01:48:28):
I have not A

Leo Laporte (01:48:29):
Word. Let me guess. Don't tell me.

Paul Thurrott (01:48:31):
Yeah. Yep.

Leo Laporte (01:48:32):
A word that contradicts another word. So raining, rainy and sunny would be contras. Is that a guess? Is that a good guess? No,

Paul Thurrott (01:48:42):
No, no, no. So those are, those are incidents, right? Or they're opposites. Yeah. So they're words that, so the, the official description is they are words that are their own opposites. The, the literal meaning of the word is, it's, it's really words that can mean two things that are opposites.

Leo Laporte (01:48:58):
Oh, I like that. That

Paul Thurrott (01:49:00):
The best example I can think of. And there's an excellent sentence that goes with, this is the word left, which could mean multiple things, but two of the things that could mean are remaining or departed. Right? So the gentleman have left, but the ladies are left <laugh>. Right.

Leo Laporte (01:49:16):
Oh, I like that.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:17):
Yeah. So there's a bunch of examples I could give you if you want. Seed.

Leo Laporte (01:49:22):
Seed

Paul Thurrott (01:49:22):
You can seed your lawn or you can seed a tomato. When you seed the lawn, you're adding seeds. When you seed a tomato, you're removing them.

Leo Laporte (01:49:29):
Oh, that's so good. What a great idea.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:32):
Yeah. So there's a bunch of these things. Give me some more, more

Leo Laporte (01:49:35):
And more contras, more off, more poly, more

Paul Thurrott (01:49:38):
Off. Okay. So off the word off typically means deactivated as in turning off. Right? Right. But it also means activated as in the alarm went off.

Leo Laporte (01:49:48):
You're right.

Paul Thurrott (01:49:50):
Yep. Weather. I don't mean weather like the sun. I mean weather like a weathered rock or something. Weather. Weather.

Leo Laporte (01:49:56):
So

Paul Thurrott (01:49:56):
Yes, weather. Yeah. Weather could mean can mean to withstand Yes. Something or come safely through something or to be worn away. Oh, yes. In other words, the company re weathered the recession, but the rock was weathered by the rain.

Leo Laporte (01:50:11):
Who knew a contra

Paul Thurrott (01:50:12):
Name? Screen screen is a good

Leo Laporte (01:50:14):
One. Screen.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:16):
Yep. Yeah. You can show a movie or you can hide something. You can like an en slightly something, you can screen it.

Leo Laporte (01:50:22):
English. Is there nothing it can't do? This

Paul Thurrott (01:50:25):
Is the dumbest language ever invented and we're all suffering because

Leo Laporte (01:50:28):
I wonder if those exist in other languages. They must.

Paul Thurrott (01:50:33):
So, yeah. So these are I I wouldn't call these exceptions, but I I know when we were learning French, like one of the tough things about French is that there's so many exceptions. No, I was gonna say gender gender's not a good example. Cause gender is just arbitrary. A river is feminine and a Right. The aara is masculine or something. Right, right. I it's not, that's not a good example of it, but there are, there are rules to the language, grammar rules, but then there are exceptions. Yeah. It's

Leo Laporte (01:51:00):
Transit, Spanish and Intransitive verbs, for instance, which we have also. Yeah. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:51:04):
We have, I think English is the worst of all. It is the worst. We're just used to it. Yeah. Spanish has fewer exceptions than English or than French. But one of the interesting, I'm trying to think of an example of this. I bet

Leo Laporte (01:51:18):
A German has no contras. I bet everything means exactly. <Laugh> German. It means

Paul Thurrott (01:51:24):
German only has Contras <laugh>. What was the thing in Spanish? There was the thing in Spanish about double. Like if you I'm trying to think. I I make up a word. Like a word like willow right. Has two L's in the middle of it. Yeah. If that word was in Spanish, it would always only have one L. Right. Like otherwise

Leo Laporte (01:51:40):
We,

Paul Thurrott (01:51:42):
But there is no version of that word with two L's. Like there's, that's something interesting about Spanish. I wish I had a better example. Cause that's not a real Spanish word, but words that look like they're English and in English would be s spelled with two le con, you know, two letters in a row always are just one letter. This, and I can't, I'm sorry, I can't come up with a good example of that one, but language is interesting. Anyway. I was as you know, like a, I'm not like a Pulitzer Prizewinning writer, but I am a writer and I, I've never heard this term <laugh>. So anyway, Contra. There

Leo Laporte (01:52:15):
You go. Nor had I, and I am language is one of my favorite things.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:19):
Yeah. I love words. No, you'd love it in our house in the morning all the time. Swing by. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (01:52:23):
Yeah. I know, right? I talk, but it's still the same language. <Laugh>. I've always been, I've always loved words. I've always been fascinated. Yeah. Contra, that's a great concept. Right? Thank you.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:35):
And there other names for a contra, by the way, I should say.

Leo Laporte (01:52:37):
Oh, what else?

Paul Thurrott (01:52:39):
Self antonym. <Laugh>.

Leo Laporte (01:52:41):
Okay.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:43):
And that And, and, and Antrum.

Leo Laporte (01:52:47):
Oh, anti Drumm. Well, if you'd said that, I would've

Paul Thurrott (01:52:49):
Known Antigony.

Leo Laporte (01:52:51):
Antigony. <laugh>.

Paul Thurrott (01:52:53):
I can't get,

Leo Laporte (01:52:54):
I like Antigony Contra makes

Paul Thurrott (01:52:57):
More sense. Isn't that like, isn't that a character in a Shakespeare

Leo Laporte (01:53:00):
Point? Yeah. Antigen. Yeah. Hey, Anny. Thou Hutz brought me many words.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:07):
I told, did I tell you this? I took a, I was taking a test recently and the woman asked me, who wrote Hamlet? And I said, oh God, I'm never gonna remember that guy's name. Like Lynn Manuel something. And she goes, no, Hamlet. And I said, oh, ham. Oh, Shakespeare, <laugh>. I was like, I was like wondering why you were asking me that. I'm like, I don't know. I didn't <laugh>. Okay,

Leo Laporte (01:53:26):
Don't go on Jeopardy. This my my

Paul Thurrott (01:53:28):
Impress. You heard of Shakespeare be very humiliating. Who wrote Hamlin? Oh, Manuel Miranda. I love the right paying attention. You know, it's just to get a, it's a job one, just show up, you know, <laugh>

Leo Laporte (01:53:40):
Ball the rot. He's gonna show up tomorrow. We're gonna have a lot of fun with our best. Well, no, it's not a best of it's a holiday TWiTt. And of course our best dubs will come up in a couple of weeks next week. Rich Campbell joins us. That's gonna be a lot of fun from run as radio and dot net rocks.

Paul Thurrott (01:53:57):
That's right.

Leo Laporte (01:53:59):
And Rich was on the cruise with us. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>

Paul Thurrott (01:54:02):
And he's listening to.rocks, net Rocks today actually.

Leo Laporte (01:54:06):
Yeah, it's a great show. So that'll be fun.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:08):
Fun. It's good stuff.

Leo Laporte (01:54:09):
But I hope he brings some brown liquor <laugh>. He's, he's taught me everything I know about Brown Liquor.

Paul Thurrott (01:54:15):
Me too. Yeah, me too.

Leo Laporte (01:54:18):
That'll be next week, the following week. The best of, and then all new episodes in 2023. How'd it get to 2023 starting January 4th? We do Windows Weekly on Wednesdays at about 11:00 AM Pacific. 2:00 PM Eastern Time. Unless Leo's standing on the desk that sometimes delays it. <Laugh> 1900 UTC

Paul Thurrott (01:54:39):
Got a lot of mileage out of my picture of

Leo Laporte (01:54:40):
That thing. I love that picture. Yeah. Yeah. I saw it on Macon. Paul's Tootin now at Thro at TWiTt Social

Paul Thurrott (01:54:46):
Luton and Tutton.

Leo Laporte (01:54:47):
He's a tooting <laugh>. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> what else? I know it's all gone out A clean outta my head. If you're watching us live, you should chat with us live at IRC TWiTT tv. Of course, you can Only is if you're a Club TWiTt member. The place to chat is the Fabulous Club TWiTt Discord, which is a lot of fun. I know you go in there as well, Paul and Mary Jo has hung out. I hope it'd be nice if Mary Jo would just pop by once in a while.

Paul Thurrott (01:55:12):
<Laugh>. Oh, well record Renee. She'll be on her phone in a bar somewhere.

Leo Laporte (01:55:16):
Yeah. Every once in a while. It's just kind of fun when somebody shows up. You gotta be a member of Club TWiTt. How do you get in the club TWiTt? Oh, I'm glad you asked. How do you get in a club? Twitt, Leo, I'm glad you asked. All you gotta do is spend $7 a month Now. Wait, now wait. I know that's a lot of money. It's a buck less than a blue check on TWiTtter, but it's a lot of money. Here's my suggestion, <laugh>. You go to TWiTt tv slash club TWiTtter and you see what you get for that seven bucks a a month. You get ad free versions of all of our shows. You get access to the Tutut Discord <laugh> Jesus. You're

Paul Thurrott (01:55:50):
Also supporting this is like, like licensed to gift for whatever gift licensed to

Leo Laporte (01:55:54):
Meme. Gift my to gift. Yep. Yep. And speaking of gifts, it'd be a great gift for the ha the geek in your life. We have a year long package, would be a good gift. As well as the monthly, you also get the TWiTt plus feed, which includes something else you might want, which is Paul t's amazing HandsOn Windows show. That's a club special. Every once in a while we put one in public, but most of 'em are in the club, as is Micah Sergeant's hands on Mac and the Untitled Lennox Show. So I wanna strongly encourage membership in Club TWiTtter. It really makes a big difference for us. It evens out the ups and downs of advertising mostly down lately. Yeah. So it really will help us continue to do the stuff we want and including, you know, all these show ideas and, and so forth that we would like to do.

(01:56:44):
But they're too new to have an audience. And so we do 'em when the Club, the club supports it. Twittter tv slash club. Little plug for that after the fact. Of course, we still make ad free version ad supported versions of all of our shows available on our website, TWiTtter tv slash ww. You'll also find it on YouTube. There's a dedicated YouTube channel and Windows Weekly to all the shows. And you can always subscribe in your podcast client. That's probably the best way to do it. So you get it automatically the minute it's available. Paul Throt lives@throt.com. He's posting there regularly. T h u r r o double good.com. If you are a premium member, you get a lot of extra content that's really worth it. The rot.com and his field guide to win his 11 is out now. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And and you know, when you buy it, it's kind of not a static dead tree item, <laugh>. It is true. It's always updated. There's always more in, in fact, there's also the field got to win us 10 included. So it's a really good deal. That's all@leanpub.com. Lean pub.com.

Paul Thurrott (01:57:53):
Indeed,

Leo Laporte (01:57:54):
Indeed. Has it snowed yet in Laura Mcce?

Paul Thurrott (01:57:59):
No. well just a, you know, that one time dusting dusting? We got one time, but we we, there's some storm heading across the United States that might be a mix of rain and snow. Snow

Leo Laporte (01:58:08):
Tomorrow. That's gonna be big in Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (01:58:09):
Yeah. We'll see.

Leo Laporte (01:58:10):
Well stay warm, stay safe. And

Paul Thurrott (01:58:13):
36 degrees. Leo, there's no staying warm. Oh, this is not, it's not good. It hurts. You wondered why I bought a place in Mexico?

Leo Laporte (01:58:22):
Ah-Huh. The balmy son. Well, are you gonna go to Mexico for the holidays?

Paul Thurrott (01:58:29):
No no. We're gonna go some either January, February.

Leo Laporte (01:58:34):
They must take advantage of the nice weather down

Paul Thurrott (01:58:37):
There January and February. I don't know. Something like that. <Laugh>, let's move

Leo Laporte (01:58:39):
There. Come on. We know you wanna wanna move there. Come on. Thank you Paul. The beauty of it is you can do this show from anywhere and I hope you will continue to. We'll see you next week with Rich Campbell on Windows Weekly. Bye-Bye everybody.