Windows Weekly Episode 826 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 is time for Windows Weekly. I'm back baby. Richard Campbell's here. Paul Thurrott is here. We've got Microsoft's earnings. They'll give us their analysis. The UK government says Uhuh, the Microsoft. And what does that new update preview mean? We'll find out that and more. Next on Windows Weekly podcasts you love
TWIT Intro (00:00:25):
From people you trust. This is twi.
Leo Laporte (00:00:36):
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. Episode 826 Recorded Wednesday, April 26th. 2023. Make it Sun Tori to Windows Weekly is brought to you by ACI Learning. If you love it pro, you will love aci Learning aci Learning offers fully customizable training for your team in formats for every kind of learner across audit, cybersecurity, and it from entry level training to putting people on the moon ACI Learning has you covered. Visit go dot aci learning.com/twit to learn more. And by lookout, whether on a device or in the cloud, your business data is always on the move. Minimize risk, increase visibility, and ensure compliance with lookouts Unified platform. Visit lookout.com today and by Collide, collide is a device solution that ensures that if a device isn't secure, it can't access your apps, it's zero trust. For Okta, visit K o l i d e collide.com/ww and book a demo today.
(00:01:48):
It's time for Windows Weekly. Hey everybody, I'm back. Sorry. Thank you to Micah for doing such a yeoman's job. Such a, that's actually that not a good thing. Is he yomen better than a journeyman? He did a good job. Yeah, he did a great job. Yeah. Really good. But I am back. I'm sorry to say. And good news. So are Richard Campbell from Run As Radio and.net Rocks and Mr. Paul Thurrott Thurrott.com and lean pub.com. Hello, Jens, did I miss anything while I was gone? <Laugh> It's been madness. Nonstop, nonstop. You missed the second half of Richard's you know, whiskey lecture <laugh>. Yeah. The long parts <laugh>. I think I referred to the Gartner Hype Cycle every show. I That's right, <laugh>. I was told that this class would be a seminar, not a lecture. I, I hate it. A little disappointed.
(00:02:42):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, this time we're gonna do Japanese whiskey. So I'm excited about that because I'm very curious. It has a good reputation. And of course, bill Murray drinks it, so I will be very curious to learn more about that. But first a word, <laugh>. We, we do, we have to do a show to keep the ads from happening all at once. That's all I'm saying, <laugh>. Sure. So let, let's, there were some big story, actually. The big, I did not miss the big stories. This has been a very, very big day. Where do you, where, when would you like to begin?
Paul Thurrott (00:03:16):
Well, I think we'll start with the the biggest story of all. And the UK
Leo Laporte (00:03:22):
Blocking
Paul Thurrott (00:03:23):
Courage just acquired over a hundred classic games in the 19, oh,
Leo Laporte (00:03:26):
Nevermind. No, no, no. Actually, I'm excited about that, but we'll save that for later. <Laugh>. Yeah, I am too.
Paul Thurrott (00:03:31):
No, I mean, I think, well, I mean, I threw it in the ba I actually meant to talk to somebody.
Leo Laporte (00:03:36):
I don't have your notes up yet, that's why I made you do this. But I'm, I'm pulling 'em up right now. So I, I
Paul Thurrott (00:03:41):
Stuck this the UK story back with the Xbox stuff, but maybe we should talk.
Leo Laporte (00:03:45):
I think it's a pretty big story, don't you?
Paul Thurrott (00:03:48):
I, there have been a lot of what I'll call WTF moments in this process. This, and I gotta say Sure. This was definitely the biggest one. And the reason is every indication was that the UK was going to just greenlight this acquisition. Yeah. They already said Yes. That's what makes sense. Yep. No one has ever, so of all the issues that anybody Sony has ever raised nobody has ever really raised the specter of cloud streaming. Right? It's always been Call of Duty, call of Duty, call of Duty. And then Microsoft has said, Hey guys, it's not about Call of Duty, it's about mobile gaming, you know, mobile gaming. And then the UK said, Nope, it's about cloud streaming this market that doesn't even exist. But we're worried about it because, you know, that market leader who's not from the uk by the way doesn't have a, a cloud gaming kind of solution yet. So let's just, why don't we just see what the, what, what
Leo Laporte (00:04:45):
The worst thing was their tweet in which they announced this, the UK C m a competition of Markets authority had a PlayStation con reversed, but still Yep. Clearly identifiable station controller. Yeah. PlayStation controller in it. It's like, oh, I get it. Okay.
Paul Thurrott (00:05:05):
Okay. I don't I, I, I don't, I just, I'm just confused by it. It's just, it's like it's like walking around the, a corner getting hit in the face with a two by four. You just don't see it coming. You know, it, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Leo Laporte (00:05:19):
Their initial, so what happened initially was they said there, there, there was plenty of competition in the console market. Hmm. So, no problem,
Paul Thurrott (00:05:28):
No worries there.
Leo Laporte (00:05:29):
But then they somehow decided that, oh, the cloud gaming market is, it's entirely different market, unrelated mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. Mm. And in that case, Microsoft is a leader, a dominant leader,
Paul Thurrott (00:05:41):
A dominant leader, a a dominant, because
Leo Laporte (00:05:44):
Sony doesn't got out of the business. Sony had guy, guy, Sony had.
Paul Thurrott (00:05:48):
Okay, this, listen, because I write about Microsoft, I, it's an unhappy truth that the term antitrust comes up a lot. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I have to mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I've had to research this. I look into it a lot. I understand what the differences are between different jurisdictions and whatnot. And I gotta tell you, one of the, one of the foundational truths of antitrust when it comes to monopolies and market power and abuse, is that there has to be a market to be impacted <laugh> for this thing to even be a discussion. Yeah. There is no market for cloud gaming right now. It's nothing it, it's the tiniest thing in the world. And I'll just tell you from kind of a practical standpoint, having actually used it, unlike apparently any regulator from the uk, that it's not going to replace consoles anytime soon, if ever. And the reason is, it's not like, in other words, like we go from one thing to another in a lot of markets, you know, the truth is, gaming has just expanded to include lots of device types.
(00:06:48):
You know, the biggest part of the gaming market is mobile casual games. You know, things that I, I don't care about personally. That that's the big stuff. You know, Wordle has a more of a monopoly than Microsoft does. You know, <laugh>, so, right. I mean, I, there's more people playing word liberty. I'm just saying <laugh>. And then you get into the whole Sherman Act and say, and it has to be doing harm. It has to Well, but this is the uk and so I don't know what their rules are, but you could look at it from the Right. The, they're <laugh>. Yeah. The uk the, the Florida of Europe has decided that <laugh>, that's, that's harsh. I know. I'm sorry. That's really harsh. I don't know. I'm sorry. So, yeah, no, I'm sorry. You don't really hear them say UK man, you know, glues themselves to the toilet some time.
(00:07:34):
They're, you know, okay. We'll say so. Look, I, I, I guess whether you're trying to protect competition, which is what is typically the case in the in Europe anyway. Yeah. Or if you're trying to protect consumers, which is typically the case antitrust in the United States, there is no harm here, <laugh>. Like, there is no, there is nothing to protect. This market is wide open. I, if you were gonna make a, a bet on the future you could make a good case for Sony, the dominant company of consoles having a pretty big play in cloud streaming. You could also make a pretty big case that a company like Google, which failed, could do a pretty good job of this, because they have the cloud computing part of it. Microsoft does too. Amazon does too. Help me again, but is Amazon Luna dominating anything right now?
(00:08:22):
No. a company like Apple or again, Google that has a big mobile play, could have some kind of an impact in this market. Nobody knows. This is all speculation because this market doesn't really exist. It's not important. So I I to be, I don't mind, there's ar there are arguments to be made about things that are true. You know, Microsoft does do this. I don't like arguments that are like, Microsoft might do something right. Or this market might turn into something. Yeah, it might. But we all have ideas. I mean there's no guarantee in a market this day that anything is gonna happen. That is a silly reason to deny this acquisition. There are reasons to ar to argue this point. Right? There are, there are, there's a debate to be had. Absolutely. not with this <laugh>, like, not this part.
Rich Campbell (00:09:19):
That's Well, and, and they're basically saying like, the only remedy is not to merge that we would have to regulate other, like, wow. They're not even leaving the core. They're not even really leaving room for a negotiation.
Paul Thurrott (00:09:30):
Well, the funny thing, can they
Leo Laporte (00:09:31):
Stop this? Can they do it?
Paul Thurrott (00:09:33):
Yeah, for sure. I mean, unless you don't wanna do business in the uk, right? I mean, that would be the,
Leo Laporte (00:09:37):
That would be the right way to do it. Say, Hey, you don't want Call of Duty. You don't need call
Paul Thurrott (00:09:40):
Duty. So, okay, if we go back in time, about 20 years, this was the argument that a lot of Microsoft enthusiasts were making about the eu Screw these guys, if they can't figure it out, we just won't, just don't sell stuff in eeu. What <laugh>, it's like, it's one of the biggest markets in the world, but unfortunately for the uk, they decided being part of that market was dumb, and they just drifted off on their own like an island and weird. Now they're their own thing. And honestly, could you make a case for like, all right, we just won't do a business there. I mean,
Leo Laporte (00:10:15):
Yeah, but what if they said, if you don't give us Call of Duty, we may give Yes. Any whiskey <laugh>
Paul Thurrott (00:10:23):
Yeah, sure.
Leo Laporte (00:10:24):
That could be
Paul Thurrott (00:10:24):
Problematic. Okay. Well, I mean, that's a,
Leo Laporte (00:10:27):
No, they don't have a lot of leverage in this, I think. No, they really don't. Saying
Paul Thurrott (00:10:30):
It doesn't, but you know what? I don't even want to get into that. That's not, I, I, I wouldn't,
Leo Laporte (00:10:33):
They wouldn't, Microsoft,
Paul Thurrott (00:10:34):
I don't think it's, it's not good business to exclude. This is such a market. Yeah. But this
Leo Laporte (00:10:37):
Is such a big deal. And if it's only the u well, we'll have to wait and see what the US does. But it's the only UK that blocks it. I know. What do you do? Do you say, okay, nevermind,
Rich Campbell (00:10:46):
Mind. The, and the EU hasn't finalized either, but if the EU falls in, in and says, okay, that's different. I mean, I almost wondered the UK's just taken a flyer to see if anybody's gonna join them.
Paul Thurrott (00:10:58):
But <laugh> the argument doesn't make any sense. In other words, like, you know, I, the complaint I had about the arguments we've seen so far from the United States especially, but also from the eu, has been you're taking Sony's stance. I don't understand why you're backing this company. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you're just taking their side. Like, it doesn't make sense. Like I said, I think there is a debate to be had for sure. And I think there are very, we've talked about this very logical things Microsoft can do to answer any antitrust concerns around guarantees, around providing games and rival platforms, et cetera, et cetera. Every one of those applies to this imagined world in which cloud gaming or cloud stream, or whatever you wanna call it, becomes some major market. You just ensure that the same guarantees exist. We will release Call of Duty on the Sony plays station of whatever Stripe for the next 10 years. And anything that Sony releases as kind of a, if we put it on Xbox Game Pass or game cloud gaming, we will put it on whatever Sony's cloud gaming thing is called. We'll do that. And, you know, Microsoft would agree to that right
Leo Laporte (00:12:02):
Now. But that doesn't sound like the UK is allowing for that, it sounds like. Okay.
Paul Thurrott (00:12:06):
Well, that's,
Leo Laporte (00:12:08):
No,
Paul Thurrott (00:12:08):
This is just the way it is.
Leo Laporte (00:12:09):
It's either you d either, you know, we, you can't do it. Now, by the way, I went out, didn't the EU already give it a, a green light? I think it did. So the, sorry, we're waiting on the us the fts?
Paul Thurrott (00:12:22):
No, the EU has not, has not
Leo Laporte (00:12:24):
Yet. Well, I thought they did.
Paul Thurrott (00:12:25):
No.
Leo Laporte (00:12:26):
Oh, okay. Yeah. So we're, so that, so that would be, that would be a thing You could do <laugh>.
Paul Thurrott (00:12:32):
But the, the look, if, if some regulatory body was to make a good argument about this and, and get some good concession out of Microsoft, you would expect others to look at that and say, Hey, you know what? This makes sense. We're gonna do this here as well. <Laugh>. But the UK just announced doesn't make sense. No one is gonna look at that and say, you know, maybe they're onto something. Yeah. You know, maybe they have a minority report machine and they know what's the future crimes that Microsoft's gonna commit, and we should stop that before it happens. Well send Tom Cruise in.
Rich Campbell (00:13:05):
Well, their, their concern was there might need, there might be need for additional regulation. I'm like, aren't you bureaucrats? Isn't that what you do for a living? Yeah. Why would you be avoiding that?
Paul Thurrott (00:13:14):
I Right. <Laugh>. It's just a, I mean, if, if they look, if they had come out and said, look, we're really concerned about Call of Duty, and we don't think that what Microsoft conceded it was enough. I would completely disagree, but at least it wouldn't have come out of left field. Yeah.
Rich Campbell (00:13:29):
Actually, and it's negotiable, right? Yeah. You'd lead with a
Paul Thurrott (00:13:31):
Negotiation. This was just, this was like, you know, we've been we're almost 18 months into this, right? So you know, 15 months-ish, I think in we have made the same complaint again and again and again and again, and again and again. And now here's the decision. Oh, it's something else we've never discussed. Right? What not. My mother used to argue, what is, this
Rich Campbell (00:13:52):
Is crazy. Well, it's smacks a bad face, you know? Right. Like, that's really what it is. When it's like, oh, Lisa, we lost that argument. So I'll make a new one. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:13:59):
Lisa calls it re trading. Yes. Or re-litigating. And it's, it's really a, a bad form, frankly. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> to do that. Yep. You want to retrade the deal, you've already made a deal. Yep. But what, alright, let's let's, it's kind my job to raise straw men here. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Sure. what if the, let's let's say UK's presumption, which is that the cloud gaming market is a separate market. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> if, and they clearly think that Yep. Then it doesn't, then it does make sense. Right. Cause Microsoft, as small as that market is, blah, blah, blah. It does dominate it, doesn't it?
Paul Thurrott (00:14:38):
No.
Leo Laporte (00:14:38):
No. <Laugh> Wordle does. No, they don't. It's the wordle that they should go after. Yeah. But is wordle Cloud gaming? I guess it is. No,
Paul Thurrott (00:14:46):
It's, I'm sorry. The Wordle, my wordle joke was that <laugh>, well, Myrle is a casual game that's typically played on mobile. It's it's part still a much bigger
Leo Laporte (00:14:55):
Market cloud. What is cloud gaming?
Paul Thurrott (00:14:58):
Cloud gaming is cloud streaming, right? So in other words, you sit, you have a controller and maybe you're connected to a smart tv or you could be, I'm
Leo Laporte (00:15:05):
Not talking about internet gaming particularly, but No. This idea of a console in the cloud. Yeah. Yeah. And but, so if Microsoft's dominant there, aren't they? Who, who else is dominant, but Invidia
Paul Thurrott (00:15:19):
Doesn't matter if they're dominant there. This is, I'm trying to imagine like what is dominant. Nobody is. This, is, is who's dominant in VHS players today, right? <Laugh>, right? Like, what are we talking about?
Leo Laporte (00:15:27):
But I'm just saying, the UK regulator clearly thinks that cloud gaming is a market, a nascent market, and wants to protect it for competition.
Paul Thurrott (00:15:37):
<Laugh>, I don't know what to tell you. There, there are established players in, in gaming, I actually just named all of them, but it's, you know, apple, Google, Tencent mi Microsoft, the cloud gaming, Nintendo, what you just
Leo Laporte (00:15:51):
Described, I'm consoles in the cloud.
Paul Thurrott (00:15:53):
I am describing right now, all of the big players, the top five or six gaming companies in the world, right? Yeah. So these are the guys who have the market power, the, the cash the resources to enter new markets that we're gaming might go, right? What's interesting is, and I don't want to go through this whole list, but it's bizarre to me that most of these companies have kind of stayed in their lane, right? Sony and Nintendo both do, and Microsoft actually do not have big plays in mobile. Nintendo has released a handful of popular mobile games, but they, they're like, no, I think we're done. They've never gone back and said, Hey, we have this rich library of Nest and s Nest and N 64, whatever games from a million years ago that would play beautifully on iPhones and iPads and stuff. They've never even entertained the idea of entering this market for some reason, even though it would bring them untold billions. Like it would be the simplest thing in the world, they've never done it. Sony ha like Microsoft has gotten into game services that are kind of not streaming, but cloud-based, right? Xbox Game Pass PlayStation now where you have a library in the cloud, well,
Leo Laporte (00:17:03):
That's like
Paul Thurrott (00:17:03):
Steam your device,
Leo Laporte (00:17:04):
I mean, yep. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I mean, steam is the dominant, but that's not Cloud Steam's not gaming. Right? That's a
Paul Thurrott (00:17:10):
Steam's not a subscription service. Right. Where you get a library
Leo Laporte (00:17:13):
Of gaming. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Right.
Paul Thurrott (00:17:14):
They're not a subscription
Leo Laporte (00:17:15):
Service. So, so, so criterion number one is you gotta be a subscription service.
Paul Thurrott (00:17:20):
No, no, no. I'm just describing what these people are doing. I, what I'm saying is what, what they're upset about is something that doesn't actually exist. What they're, the, the market they're concerned about is what used to be Stadia. What is Amazon Luna, what is Xbox Cloud gaming, which is a perk of Xbox Game Pass, ultimate only, which is $15 a month. By the way, it's not inexpensive. So does Microsoft dominate that market? Oh, and this is what others do. Gforce. Now, there, there, there are other services, right? I mean, there's others, but tho those are the kind of the big ones, right? So I, I, I mean, I don't know. I mean, do we stop forward from getting to EVs because they make traditional cars? And what if they dominate that market? Do we, you know, do you like, do you Yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:18:08):
I understand. No, I completely agree with you. Don't think I don't agree with your argument. Yeah, because Damnit, I do.
Paul Thurrott (00:18:12):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it just doesn't make sense. But I'm
Leo Laporte (00:18:15):
Just trying to put myself in the mindset of the UK regulator that clearly said we can, because this is what the whole thing will happen, was at first they said, oh, it's not a problem. And then they said, well, but if we separate cloud gaming out, it is. And that's where they're, that's what they're doing.
Paul Thurrott (00:18:29):
I, I, the problem I have with this is I was talking to Richard about this before the show, like there's no scenario where cloud streaming gaming over, like a cloud stream game takes over for any of these markets that exist today. Right? So the big markets today for gaming are mobile slash casual.
Leo Laporte (00:18:47):
That's always gonna be dominant. I agree with you.
Paul Thurrott (00:18:49):
Pc, PC and console. Right? You know what I,
Rich Campbell (00:18:52):
I'd point out mm-hmm. <Affirmative> Booster, which is one of the few, like independent cloud streaming small.
Paul Thurrott (00:18:58):
Okay. UK company.
Leo Laporte (00:18:59):
I never heard of them. Oh. Oh, they're protecting booster
Paul Thurrott (00:19:05):
<Laugh>. Oh. And by the way, booster came out today and said, we completely disagree with this decision. Oh, really? And support Microsoft's acquisition. No, really? Did they? Yeah. Really? They really did love it. Yeah. They completely disagree with this. It's not like a curiosity
Leo Laporte (00:19:19):
Disagree, no one to call self preparation. B,
Paul Thurrott (00:19:22):
It's not like they ever went to the government that, of the country they live in and said, Hey, could you protect us? So they didn't ask belligerent monopolist. Sony asked,
Leo Laporte (00:19:30):
Didn't asked for it. Yeah. Sony asked for it. We know that. Right? Otherwise,
Paul Thurrott (00:19:34):
Look, I, I, there are, my point is only this Apple, Amazon, Google, Tencent, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, all have the ability to compete in this market if they want. Most companies are not <laugh>. And having actually used these services, like I said, unlike most of these people, probably, I can tell you, we're not ready. This is not taking over. This is not replacing something. Yeah. Like, in other words, Microsoft's like, Hey, we lost in console. We need to dominate in another market so we can, you know, not worry about that. That market is not cloud gaming. That market is mobile they need, and they're never gonna dominate that market. They're just gonna be competitive in it. So in the same way that Windows used to dominate personal computing and is now just a small, a rel well, a not the biggest platform, let's put it that way. Microsoft today is a much bigger company than it ever was, and a very, very successful, and everything's fine. Microsoft is never gonna dominate mobile gaming. They're never gonna dominate a market that is big and powerful that is called cloud gaming. They, that's not gonna exist. It's just a perk of this other stuff. Yeah. It's just another way to, but they are
Rich Campbell (00:20:42):
Well positioned with their game pass to, ultimately that's create a subscription model for all games. That's what I, you know, and the more, and the, this, this gobble up of all of these gaming studios, to me, it always seems like they're trying to fill out game passe as wide as they can get it while there's companies to buy. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:20:59):
So, but yes. But if we you know, to, if we understand the history here, the one other reality we need to just remember is that this was Sony's strategy for many, many years. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and Microsoft ignored this. Microsoft got rid of game studios. Right. It wasn't until fairly recently, and yes, maybe to this shift of like, how could we make Xbox make sense within the context of the new Microsoft and this such to Dell and cloud computing. We could do this other thing that they started buying up game studios. So this is really Microsoft responding in many ways to Sony mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and to a company that has dominated this market for the past, you know, whatever, 20 years, whatever it's been. So yeah. I, I mean, mi Yeah. Microsoft's a big company. They can afford to buy game studios. So can Sony, by the way. And they have, and we, you know, we, we don't have to go down and re-litigate the whole thing about exclusive games and blah, blah, blah. We, I think everyone understands the issue. But this, this cloud thing, what are we talking about, <laugh>?
Rich Campbell (00:21:56):
It's, it's a left field move.
Paul Thurrott (00:21:58):
Yeah. It's crazy. I, I, yeah. I mean does, I mean, does Microsoft have the best cloud gaming service? I
Rich Campbell (00:22:10):
Mean, only if you don't necessarily understand what cloud gaming is,
Paul Thurrott (00:22:13):
Right? I mean, the one thing you can't do on cloud, at least I can't, is, you know, play a third person shooter. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> with great graphics, especially multi-player. It's just this, the latency, the lag, whatever you wanna call
Rich Campbell (00:22:25):
That. It's just, oh, and that's got nothing to do with cloud. That's got everything to do with internet. Like, welcome to reality. This beat light is a tough rule to break Beep.
Paul Thurrott (00:22:32):
Right. Which is the de def defining feature of this type of service. It's not, you know, it's, I mean, look, we people play games on phones. Cause everyone has phones. It's convenient. They could be standing in line at a supermarket, tap it away on some Jewel game or whatever. It's no problem for someone to, to suspend the money it costs to do a cloud streaming game thing and that, and then be in a place and using a device where this even makes any sense at all, requires effort and money. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And that's not what these people are doing.
Leo Laporte (00:23:02):
So Microsoft says it's gonna appeal, but who I don't know who to whom you appeal The Queen. I'm sorry. The king.
Paul Thurrott (00:23:10):
Right.
Leo Laporte (00:23:11):
Who to whom does
Paul Thurrott (00:23:12):
One appeal? I would like to appeal to common sense
Leo Laporte (00:23:15):
<Laugh>.
Paul Thurrott (00:23:16):
That's,
Leo Laporte (00:23:17):
I don't know. I don't know if common sense can overrule affect my experience is it does not overrule governments. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So this
Rich Campbell (00:23:24):
Is, I'm sure they can work their way through the, the UK court system as
Leo Laporte (00:23:27):
Well's gonna go to court. Yeah.
Rich Campbell (00:23:29):
There'll be plenty of, you know, white powdered wigs and things. They'll be fun. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:23:32):
Sure. Solicitors.
Paul Thurrott (00:23:34):
John k Cleese could be in an ad.
Rich Campbell (00:23:36):
That's it.
Leo Laporte (00:23:37):
<Laugh>. All right. Well I'm sorry to upend your your order, your orderly
Paul Thurrott (00:23:44):
Progression. No, no. I, no, actually, I, I, I meant to discuss the placement of that one story cuz I felt like maybe that should have been the top story. I
Leo Laporte (00:23:50):
Think for a lot of us, it's like a it's a big story cuz it's like, what the hell? And what does it mean? I mean Yeah. How do you go forward after this?
Paul Thurrott (00:23:58):
. Right. I mean, I, I look, I, I mean a lot, I've a lot of people on Twitter or whatever, like, oh, Paul's gonna be really out of his gorre on, you know, windows Weekly clean today. And it's like anyone who knows anything about anything should be confused by this. This is not,
Leo Laporte (00:24:11):
You know, everybody should be acting
Paul Thurrott (00:24:12):
Me overreacting with something. This is like, this doesn't, this doesn't make any sense. So
Leo Laporte (00:24:16):
We were waiting, I mean, in May, I guess the US will dec our mystery of judge will decide, and I th mm-hmm. I think they will probably follow all those other countries who have said, yeah, yeah. That deal that you made to just, you know, get rid of this and that. Right. And that was, that was enough
Paul Thurrott (00:24:31):
On the wave. The one in, the one interesting thing, I think this is a fact is about all of the countries that have approved this deal. I, I think, I believe this is true. I don't think any of them have required a single concession. Right. Right. The, the countries that have said, okay. And there are several have all said without condition,
Leo Laporte (00:24:50):
Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Chile, Serbia, Japan, which is probably the one that really matters here. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> South Africa. And it's funny. Yeah. Isn't that ironic? Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:24:59):
Sony's home country is like, yeah, no problem. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (00:25:01):
Like what is the EU will make its decision May 22nd. Although, okay, the reason I thought they'd already decided, writers said last month that it was likely to be approved.
Paul Thurrott (00:25:11):
Yeah. Well, they said the same thing about the uk
Leo Laporte (00:25:14):
Yeah,
Paul Thurrott (00:25:14):
Right. UK was likely to be approved. They, and maybe
Leo Laporte (00:25:17):
That's what's going on is the the UK is saying, like, as you said, let's see who else will go along with us. And we're
Paul Thurrott (00:25:23):
Still waiting here, putting down on like a Vegas bed or something. Like they were trying to screw with the results.
Leo Laporte (00:25:28):
Watch this, watch this. And then I was wrong. I think it's August that the administrative judge takes it up in the us. I
Paul Thurrott (00:25:38):
Mean, well,
Leo Laporte (00:25:39):
Are we rooting for this deal to go through? Like, is this a good thing? I know Microsoft is, but it's, you
Paul Thurrott (00:25:44):
Know what I, let me, let me, I wanna be clear about this. Cuz I think a lot of people just assume, like, rooting, you know, that's a good word. Like, I'm like, we're cheerleaders or something. No, I don't,
Leo Laporte (00:25:54):
It doesn't matter if
Paul Thurrott (00:25:55):
It goes, I don't, I don't care. I, I don't, I don't mean to say I don't care. I, I, I do play a Call of duty. It's gonna impact me in some way. I, my point is only, I just don't see any valid reason to try to block No,
Leo Laporte (00:26:06):
I agree. This deal.
Paul Thurrott (00:26:07):
Yeah. That's all. Yeah. It's not an emotional thing. I just, I just look at it logically and I'm like, I, I just don't,
Leo Laporte (00:26:13):
It's not the end of the world. If it doesn't go through for Microsoft. Maybe, but not, no,
Paul Thurrott (00:26:17):
It doesn't. That's not gonna change my life at all. It's not
Leo Laporte (00:26:19):
As bad as, as like, mad dog hotdogs going out of business. It's not that. It's not at that.
Paul Thurrott (00:26:23):
You love about that. That is the worst thing that has ever happened to me. <Laugh>. So I, no, I am, I'm the kiss of death for restaurants. This has always happens to me. Every time I fall in love with the place, they're like, oh yeah, we're retiring. You know, like, every time. How do you know about this <laugh> instant Instagram
Leo Laporte (00:26:43):
<Laugh>.
Rich Campbell (00:26:44):
It's like that
Leo Laporte (00:26:45):
You keep posting. So I have to share, I have to say I share your passion for hotdogs. God, which is by the way, hot. You know, the, the next best thing to slow suicide. But I, so I noticed every time you post a hotdog,
Paul Thurrott (00:27:00):
I say, and
Leo Laporte (00:27:00):
Then I saw maybe it wasn't you, but somebody, is
Paul Thurrott (00:27:03):
There a picture you can bring up of the hotdog? Because
Leo Laporte (00:27:06):
It's a pretty good looking hotdog, I gotta tell you. Unless you're purist. I'm kind of, sometimes I go, I just want No listen, mustard and relish. I don't
Paul Thurrott (00:27:13):
No, I hear you. But now this is better. This, this hotdog is so fresh. It almost feels like health food.
Leo Laporte (00:27:19):
Now here's the real. Yeah. Good, good one Paul. And almost convinced me, <laugh>, here's every time I have a talk hot dog, Lisa says, you know, that's gonna cut your lifespan by by half an hour.
Paul Thurrott (00:27:34):
I would say, so is all the complainant <laugh>?
Leo Laporte (00:27:38):
See, I <laugh>. Oh, well maybe I don't <laugh>. It, the, the thing to me that's most important is the actual hotdog. I know. Maybe that's not the case for some Yeah, no, I agree. And it's gonna have a nice snap when you buy it into it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, right? Am I wrong?
Paul Thurrott (00:27:57):
No, you're right. And actually, when we go to the, we go to minor league baseball games here in the Lehigh Valley, and I don't get the normal hotdog. I get the what do you call the, the brat? The polish the brat.
Leo Laporte (00:28:09):
Smokey or the polish. Yeah,
Paul Thurrott (00:28:11):
The polish sauce. What's Polish? It called
Leo Laporte (00:28:13):
Kiba.
Rich Campbell (00:28:14):
S Smokey ki
Paul Thurrott (00:28:14):
Bassa
Leo Laporte (00:28:15):
Peel Plaza.
Paul Thurrott (00:28:17):
And I order it plain. And I I do what you were just talking about. It's just mustard, mustard, mustard and
Leo Laporte (00:28:21):
Relish. That's it. Yellow mustard. Yep. Not Dejan.
Paul Thurrott (00:28:24):
Oh. Oh. <Laugh>, if you wanna see me really upset, give me honey mustard on a hu. Oh,
Leo Laporte (00:28:31):
<Laugh>. Why?
Paul Thurrott (00:28:32):
Yeah, please. That's happy. I'm like, what is what fresh hell is this
Leo Laporte (00:28:36):
People, let's get serious here. You've gotten
Paul Thurrott (00:28:38):
Way off target here anyway. Yeah.
Rich Campbell (00:28:40):
Well I don't, don't mean to drag
Leo Laporte (00:28:41):
You back to the gaming
Rich Campbell (00:28:42):
Part of it. No,
Leo Laporte (00:28:43):
No, no. I'm stalling cuz I want to pull up a picture of this hot topic. Oh
Paul Thurrott (00:28:45):
Yeah, yeah, sure. Yeah. I gotta,
Rich Campbell (00:28:46):
I don't mean to drag you back to the gaming part, but for my friends who are in the gaming industry, there's a lot of folks who are really looking forward to Bobby Kotak going away.
Leo Laporte (00:28:54):
Well that's true. Activision is a problem.
Paul Thurrott (00:28:56):
Yes. That, that is, that's almost the number one reason to let this go through. Yeah.
Rich Campbell (00:29:00):
Well, and, and generally speaking, the folks I know who are working for other groups, right. That have now been acquired by Microsoft, like Microsoft's HR and sort of policies around things make for better work. So, you know, folks are happy. A hundred
Paul Thurrott (00:29:14):
Percent. A hundred percent.
Leo Laporte (00:29:15):
So here's a Mad Dog's hotdog, which I can't believe this is yours. It must be your wife's has lettuce on
Paul Thurrott (00:29:21):
Edge. No. That, no, no. That's mine. And let me tell you what this thing is called. It's called the Ferris Bueller's Day Off <laugh>. Yeah,
Rich Campbell (00:29:27):
I was thinking it looks like a Chicago dog. It's
Leo Laporte (00:29:29):
A Chicago dog with that pickle wedge. But what's That's exactly right. The lettuce. It should have bright green
Paul Thurrott (00:29:35):
Reli. Listen, I told you. It's, it's, it does. And underneath it's fresh and wonderful. And it is,
Leo Laporte (00:29:41):
Oh, I'm so depressed. I want that dog badly.
Paul Thurrott (00:29:45):
That's a, we can walk there. That's how close that place is.
Leo Laporte (00:29:48):
Roy's at the yard, which is also walkable here. It's the place actually where cows go to die. It's the auction yard, geez. For cattle and Petaluma. But they also have a Roy's at the Yard restaurant, which features Chicago dogs. Wow. And they're supposedly good. I've never gotten over there. Although I, I worry cuz I think it's a Vienna sausage hot dog, which I don't, you know what?
Paul Thurrott (00:30:11):
That might be interesting. I, I, I, like I said, the polar sausage thing is,
Leo Laporte (00:30:15):
I think Vienna sausage is actually the traditional Chicago dog. I believe The problem
Paul Thurrott (00:30:18):
Is you grew up in the United States and you, you eat hot dogs. You think this is what sausages are and, and Oh yeah. They need have good sausages. But here's the
Leo Laporte (00:30:24):
Thing, then you go toner. You can actually,
Paul Thurrott (00:30:26):
You can make a really good hot dog That's as good as any sausage. It's just very rare.
Leo Laporte (00:30:30):
Yeah. Nosies. Now you guys gotta make it up to Vancouver. We have Jappa dog. What's your dog? Jappa dog. Jappa dog
Paul Thurrott (00:30:38):
Does have like fish
Leo Laporte (00:30:39):
Eggs on it. It does not sound good. A little nory sounds vaguely racist and it doesn't sound good. <Laugh>. Yeah. Little Japanese me dog. Little teriyaki Japanese
Paul Thurrott (00:30:51):
Has. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (00:30:52):
That's what my, that's my grandma's. It's real What Sauce from World War ii. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Okay. but, okay. Anyway, let's move on. Because how the other big story. So that was, in my opinion, I thought a big story.
Paul Thurrott (00:31:04):
Honestly, I think Mad Dogs was the big story of the week.
Leo Laporte (00:31:06):
<Laugh> Mad Dogs. Number two, the number three story of the week was earnings. Earnings came up. Before you do that though, I want to take a little break cuz we you know, we don't want the ads to happen all at once. So let's put that on hold. You go get a dog. I'm so jealous. When is Mad Dogs close?
Paul Thurrott (00:31:24):
Monday is the last thing.
Leo Laporte (00:31:26):
Monday. Mm. Is it too late to get tickets to fly out to Mace <laugh>? I was in Philadelphia Airport last Friday. I could have run on over, popped down, popped down for a mad dog. We had a five day layover, I'm sorry, five hour <laugh>. It felt like five days. It was only five hours. That's a long layover. But that was so customs could examine our luggage. Sure. perhaps you've noticed, whenever you watch our shows, ACI learning the sponsor of our studios. Thank you. ACI Learning. We really appreciate that. Also, the sponsor of our shows. You might say, well what is ACI learning when it's at home? Well, it, you may know the name it Pro IT Pro's been with us for a decade now. One of our sponsors. We love it Pro you now get the Audit Pro, you get the expanded practice labs.
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Paul Thurrott (00:37:07):
Wait, I have some breaking news,
Leo Laporte (00:37:09):
Breaking news,
Paul Thurrott (00:37:10):
News. The Mad Dog's Facebook account says, stay tuned for some exciting news. And there are three exclamation points. So I think it might be good news. We're coming back.
Leo Laporte (00:37:19):
<Laugh>. Well, so you're saying the owners retired, so maybe one of they're selling it to the employees. That would be the best possible.
Paul Thurrott (00:37:25):
Literally five days ago they announced, or maybe it was 10 days ago or whatever, like since we've moved here, they announced they were retiring. It's like, guys, we just got here. We
Leo Laporte (00:37:34):
Just found you
Paul Thurrott (00:37:35):
Anyway. Don't go away. I never understood why someone wouldn't buy this business or continue it or whatever. But
Leo Laporte (00:37:41):
Anyhow, is it, is is it a whole restaurant? Is it a stand? What is it?
Paul Thurrott (00:37:45):
It's a former house. So it's about, it's house sized.
Leo Laporte (00:37:49):
It's a house.
Paul Thurrott (00:37:50):
It's indoor and outdoor seating is a hut, is a an ice cream shop.
Leo Laporte (00:37:54):
Oh my God.
Paul Thurrott (00:37:55):
It's right on the edge of a park. You,
Leo Laporte (00:37:57):
You food in Mace. I don't understand it.
Paul Thurrott (00:37:59):
I don't understand how this, anyway, sorry. It's
Leo Laporte (00:38:02):
You food in Mace
Paul Thurrott (00:38:03):
Me falling in love with it. Just what
Leo Laporte (00:38:05):
To Paul's Insta and, and the amazing things that they eat at the at in mace. It's incredible. All right. Enough of that. Although, although someday I hope to walk the borough of Mace Trail, I'm just saying. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:38:24):
Yeah. I have hope one day to be able to delineate what that tri is, which we've been trying to research it. <Laugh>. We can't figure it out. Paul's gonna
Leo Laporte (00:38:31):
Revitalize it. So let's talk earnings.
Paul Thurrott (00:38:34):
Yes. it was good and it was bad. It wasn't, it was good for many things. That's, yeah. It was good for everything except for the stuff that I care about. Yeah. X Xbox, <laugh>, it's a good for Microsoft overall, I would say you know, there's no way to know this for sure. But one of the bits of math that I did for this earnings report was whether or not, you know, and again, you have to kind of guesstimate here, do more than 50% of Microsoft's revenues now come from the cloud. And I believe that they do. Right. So they've been kind of marketing themselves as this cloud computing force, you know, for the past decade or whatever. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And now they are <laugh>, you know, and the interesting, I also actually, oh, I put this in my analysis. We'll get to this.
(00:39:17):
I Richard will enjoy my, my, my AI theory of the week. <Laugh> Nice. Which is the, a new feature of Windows Weekly <laugh>. So the, the hard numbers, cuz I come up with one almost every week. <Laugh>, the hard numbers are 18.3 billion in net income on revenues of 52.9 billion. Those are both gains year over year, nine and 7% respectively. That's good. Microsoft cloud focused businesses are, again, their top businesses. Intelligent cloud, which is basically Azure and server 22.1 billion, up 16% productivity and business processes, which is office, you know, Microsoft 365. Linkedin Dynamics is in second place, so to speak. 17.5 billion in revenues, up 11% year over year. And then warrant or more personal computing windows, Xbox, and Surface. Can't stop walking into that door. <Laugh> is 13.3 billion in revenue is down 9% year over year.
(00:40:17):
Yikes. 9%. Yeah. Is that mostly surface though? Because PC sales are terrible. We know that for everybody, all of this sales, everything in this business is terrible. So <laugh> we'll, we'll get to that. Unfortunately, so here's my new AI theory. <Laugh>, we should have we should have music for this Paul's AI theory. Oh, AI theory <laugh>. Microsoft stock price was stagnant for over decade when c bomber's, c e o, it was right in the 30, $35 range forever. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and Satcha. Nadela took over and new Microsoft, blah blah, whatever. They are now the second biggest company in the world by market cap. Their stock prices through the roof, Wal Wall Street, $295. Yep. And the reason they love them, it's all this cloud computing stuff, and I don't have the exact number on this, but for years like quarters of years in a row, <laugh>, if that makes sense.
(00:41:12):
Many quarters in a row, Microsoft would tout 70 plus percent growth in Azure revenues. Right. Sometime, I wanna say last year that started falling finally as it would it rights, the market's maturing. You can't grow. I mean that, that kind of rate is just off the track. Eventually you've moved the workloads. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. It just doesn't, you know, there's not much you can do about that. So I, I don't know the, the number off the top of my head, but I'm gonna say a year ago, Azure revenues probably grew, I wanna say 46%, something like that. Flash forward to this past quarter, it hit 27%. You know, it's on the way down. So my AI theory of the week is, Hey, wall Street being exciting, excited by us is what's driven our stock price, which is what's driven our market value. We need to do something to inject that excitement. Again. That thing is ai. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Huh?
Rich Campbell (00:41:59):
I mean, I wouldn't disagree with that. I just think they found it by accident. Yeah. Cause it was really, you know, that that was what wasn't quite a wholly owned subsidiary before, but clearly is now. Right. Actually having an experiment that got a bit outta control.
Paul Thurrott (00:42:14):
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I may AI has maybe gotten so good that it acted on its own for all we know. Maybe AI is holding Microsoft hostage. It's hard to say.
Rich Campbell (00:42:23):
Well, somebody's having Hall Ionizations and I don't think it's a software
Paul Thurrott (00:42:26):
<Laugh>. Yes. so just, I, I mean I'm gonna look primarily at more personal computing. I I, there's a part of productivity and business processes, which is office you know, office 365, Microsoft 365 teams. So we can, we'll talk about that a little bit, but, and Richard, I don't know if you care enough about the rest of the company to talk about any of that, but, Hmm. I'll just say that things are not going so well in <laugh>, in Mudville. So windows revenues from PC makers fell 28% a quarter. Surface revenues, devices revenues surface fell by 30%. These match neatly to the IDC numbers that PC sells in that quarter fell about 29%. Right. Same time period. We'll, see, I I, we don't have the Gartner numbers yet, but these things seem to make some sense that have
Rich Campbell (00:43:12):
Been expected.
Paul Thurrott (00:43:13):
Yeah. Well, I, not as bad as last quarter, I don't remember the exact number again, but I 37, 30 9%, something like that for revenues from PC makers, that was the fall off. So it's trending in the right direction, but obviously we wanna see this you know, flat line at, at some point hopefully this year, you know, we'll see. But
Rich Campbell (00:43:33):
New hardware in the fall, like that's her best shot for.
Paul Thurrott (00:43:35):
Yeah. And there is, there was some interesting sort of inform sort of interesting information from Microsoft about this. They, they said something to the tune that PC sales were actually better than they had expected. <Laugh>. He's like, okay. And that part of the problem was that there was a lot of inventory sitting on shelves under the channel, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, in other words, that we had sold these PCs into the channel, people hadn't bought them and now they're just kind of sitting there and we have to get through that backlog before this thing kind of turns around. The problem for Microsoft is that revenues from PC makers don't reflect PC sales from this quarter. Typically, they re reflect PC sales for previous quarters cuz they sold those licenses to PC makers ahead of time, so to speak. Right. So it's, you know, I don't, I don't what to say about that, but in the good news department for Windows commercial products and cloud services, revenues for Windows increased 14%. It didn't have a lot to do with Windows. Like, in other words, there wasn't anything that Windows did to make that true, but Right. Because Windows is part of Microsoft 365 as licensed to enterprises. There was a lot, there's an
Rich Campbell (00:44:42):
Apportionment apportion happening
Paul Thurrott (00:44:43):
There. Yeah, yeah. That has nothing. Yeah.
Rich Campbell (00:44:47):
You sell more M 365 Windows gets to show some revenue. I mean, it really shows just how much M 365 they're selling these days. Yeah. I I do think the powerhouse is office. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.
Paul Thurrott (00:44:57):
I agree. Yep. You know? Yep. Yeah. There's, there are more people using office than there are people using Windows. You know, that's one way to look at it. I mean, you know, cuz you don't have to be on Windows. Right.
Rich Campbell (00:45:06):
Well, and your timing's right about the 10 years, right. It was in 2013 that they finally picked cloud over Windows when they shipped Android and iOS versions of Office. That's right. You know, that, that was sort of, to me internally, that was their pivot moment. It's like right. Is they had been promised that it, that iOS and Android were gonna become irrelevant because Windows everywhere was gonna solve all problems. They were gonna have a perfect tablet and phone solution and that why would you bother? And then they, when that didn't quite work out.
Paul Thurrott (00:45:36):
Yeah, it was close.
Rich Campbell (00:45:37):
It was close. Missed it,
Paul Thurrott (00:45:38):
You know, it was just, just missed it just
Rich Campbell (00:45:40):
A little, little bit.
Paul Thurrott (00:45:41):
It's by the way, not a horrible idea, just in theory. No, no. Single out model. All it. But yeah. It, it is interesting that we'll just tie it to Sacha Nadella. It's not completely him, but this era of Microsoft coincides with this push to the cloud office was a product that was able to move to the cloud very successfully. Windows nuts.
Rich Campbell (00:46:01):
Well, and I think they had been driven by the fear of Google Docs and that's good fear to have. That's right. And they certainly were going their own way on that. So they, they needed a cloud, I think even before Microsoft really thought they needed a cloud.
Paul Thurrott (00:46:12):
By the way, to that point one of the, you know, Google Docs showed up whatever year that was mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And one of the first things that they offered out of the box, I think was this notion of realtime collaboration. Right. You could have a, a Google Doc or a Sheet or whatever it was, and two or more people could be in there editing side by side. Right. This was something that Microsoft had a lot of trouble with because their software is kind of, you know, legacy, code base, whatever. And one of the reasons we used Notion here is because Mary Jo and I at the time had a, we, you could not collaborate in real time together. We used to tell each other when we were done with the notes and get in and out, and so I was
Rich Campbell (00:46:44):
Right. Or you, if you're using OneNote, you'll keep corrupting it. Right? That's
Paul Thurrott (00:46:48):
Right. It's, it was horrific. So this morning I was working on the show notes and, and something started animating below me. <Laugh>.
Rich Campbell (00:46:55):
And
Paul Thurrott (00:46:55):
I was like, what, what's going on here? And it was you <laugh>. Yep. And you were there
Rich Campbell (00:46:59):
My pieces
Paul Thurrott (00:47:00):
In. Yep. And by the way, no problem at all. Yeah.
Rich Campbell (00:47:02):
Not a
Paul Thurrott (00:47:02):
Thing. It is it's interesting and coincidental that it's possibly this year Microsoft will finally have, you know, kind of solved this problem by introducing Loop, which was designed for this use case from the get-go. Right. So it took them you know, 15 years. I don't
Rich Campbell (00:47:20):
Know what it means. Well, the problem is that they were bound to windows, so you kept having to have that client to server or interaction. Yeah. Where Google said it's browser baby, and that's all there is. And that naturally means constant con conversation back to the client. To the server.
Paul Thurrott (00:47:36):
Right. It's not coincidental that realtime collaboration works in the web-based versions of Word and Excel and whatever else. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> in ways that it's doesn't work well in the desktop process.
Rich Campbell (00:47:47):
I I always get the sense that Microsoft would, that the office guys would love to scale the client side
Paul Thurrott (00:47:52):
Products. Yes. Right. Love to. I mean, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's, that comes up a lot. Could they move to web-based? I mean yeah. I I think we're getting there. Everybody,
Rich Campbell (00:48:03):
They could, could they make it, could they make a browser open as slowly as word? I don't know. That'd be challenging. It takes a while. <Laugh>
Paul Thurrott (00:48:09):
No. These are the guys that made ie. They can do it. Yeah, I <laugh>
Rich Campbell (00:48:13):
And can they wide screen a browser as well as like a white screen outlook? I don't know. It's a's worth a
Paul Thurrott (00:48:18):
Try. In, in a related theory department, you know, Microsoft is in the midst of upgrading, well some people wouldn't agree with that term, but migrating outlook to this new client. Right. Which is obviously a web-based code base. And it's tough because Outlook, like the rest of office, everyone has their pet feature that they need and it's a different feature for everybody. And there are 11,000 features and you can't do every single thing in this Rich Desktop client on the way. We just can't. And so it's not gonna please anybody like that's mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know, but I sort of feel like this is the, the test case. If we could, if we can get this Outlook client to fly, then we're at Excel. Powerpoint have to follow <laugh>, you
Rich Campbell (00:48:55):
Know? Yeah. Outlook's always been the orphan in some respects. It's tell one note came along, I think they felt bad for outlooks, so they brought in one note to make a real series often.
Paul Thurrott (00:49:03):
Sure, sure.
Rich Campbell (00:49:05):
Yeah. As opposed to the protest that got kicked, you know, brought in and kicked out.
Paul Thurrott (00:49:09):
Yeah. The ones that didn't work at all, like InfoPath and
Rich Campbell (00:49:12):
Infopath. Yeah. There's, that didn't last long.
Paul Thurrott (00:49:15):
Yeah. No. Yeah. Okay. <Laugh>. So let's see. All right. So windows bad office. Good. <laugh> then surface terrible. I, the only notable thing
Rich Campbell (00:49:25):
Xbox took a beating too.
Paul Thurrott (00:49:26):
Yeah. We're gonna get there. <Laugh>, so don't worry. Surface will be quick because Surface came up once in the earnings report and it came up once on the call, once the entire time. Wow. If you search the transcript, the word surface actually pairs twice. Twice. But the other time was because they were using it as the word surface. Small s not as the product. As in we are surfacing it, you know, something like that. They didn't talk about it at all. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So revenues fell by 30%. Again, you could tie this into the whole you know, product sitting in the, in the shelves, whatever, not being sold, you know. Okay. And the Xbox, the Xbox is a tricky one. And I'm, I'm not sure if I give Microsoft to pass on some of this. So for example hardware sales, which is consoles, you know, peripherals, et cetera. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> fell 30% year over year.
Rich Campbell (00:50:16):
Now you're talking about comparing against 2022, but nobody had anything to do but play consoles and the only reason 2021 is there wasn't any.
Paul Thurrott (00:50:25):
Right. So you're, that's the exact caveat that Microsoft provided, which was, yeah. They didn't say it this way, but this is like a, an unfavorable year over year compare, like yeah.
Rich Campbell (00:50:35):
Compared to 2019, like then you'll see something.
Paul Thurrott (00:50:38):
Yeah. Well, so the issue here is that Microsoft, when the, when those consoles first came out, they were in short supply. Yeah. And there was a magical moment last year where the Xbox Series s especially, but let's see, the new Xboxes were available, you could buy 'em. And that was this quarter, a year ago <laugh>. So Right. You're kind of saying, well, like, well, you know, 37
Rich Campbell (00:50:56):
Had this explosive quarter.
Paul Thurrott (00:50:58):
Yeah. So you could look at some of the other numbers then. Right? So for example gaming overall fell 4%. Xbox content and services
Rich Campbell (00:51:06):
Still feels like residual.
Paul Thurrott (00:51:08):
Yep. No, Xbox Con and services actually went up 3%. Right. So that's the part of the business that includes the subscriptions. Right. And one of the things they said on the conference call is that the Xbox subscriptions, as they put it, so they must mean Game Pass plus Xbox Live Gold.
Rich Campbell (00:51:25):
Right.
Paul Thurrott (00:51:27):
Are about to surpass a billion dollars in revenues per quarter.
Rich Campbell (00:51:30):
That's exciting. Yeah. well, and it, it shows that, you know, that was bombers metric. It show only show me a business when it's a billion dollar business. Right. But, you know, it's not like Xbox is any slouch. They maybe be struggling against PS five. They're not struggling against anybody else.
Paul Thurrott (00:51:44):
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Right. And this is a business that would probably compare very favorably, favorably to PlayStation if they had a mobile play. <Laugh>, you know. Yeah. So thanks you uk, which
Rich Campbell (00:51:55):
Are still miles away from getting, I mean, just the company.
Paul Thurrott (00:51:59):
I also, I just point this out too, you know I, and I've said I've written this somewhere, but I appreciate Microsoft talking about how, you know, we, we don't have a big play in mobile. We don't have any play in mobile actually. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And you know, basically, and this is one way we can get going on this Microsoft has tremendous ip. They have lots of grain franchises, halo gears, et cetera. Sea of Thieves, whatever. You're telling me you couldn't have made mobile versions of these games guys? Come on. Really? Yeah. I mean, I know there were some Halo mobile games that are not real halo, right? Yes. call of Duty on mobile. There's no reason Halo couldn't be on mobile.
Rich Campbell (00:52:33):
Just saying No. And it's just, you need to build out the skillset. Yeah. Right. They, in the end, those really do need to be native apps. So that means you've got Swift developers and Java developers, which I think they certainly have Java developers to build their own version of Java these days. So there's no reason
Paul Thurrott (00:52:49):
Microsoft building its own version of Java. That's crazy.
Rich Campbell (00:52:51):
Time. Dun, dun dun. Yeah. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (00:52:53):
What goes around comes around. Anyway. Yeah. Well
Rich Campbell (00:52:56):
You know, when once your dev stacks owned by Oracle, you'll take any, any, you know, Porto Storm,
Paul Thurrott (00:53:02):
Isn't that, I think Apple does that too. And I know Linux does
Rich Campbell (00:53:05):
Jr. They open jdk. So Yeah. Who's using Oracle?
Paul Thurrott (00:53:09):
Java after all.
Rich Campbell (00:53:11):
That's true. Java.
Paul Thurrott (00:53:13):
Yeah. I usually don't You have, I, I mean, is it, yeah, I was just, so, I was just saying, I was just thinking through this, like, I, you get Java as part of like the Android sdk and I, I, as I assume that's open J open jdk, isn't it? I'm not really sure.
Leo Laporte (00:53:31):
Yeah. Cuz it, Oracle sued Google cuz they won't use Oracle.
Paul Thurrott (00:53:33):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I think it must be open. It must be open jdk.
Leo Laporte (00:53:36):
Well, I dunno if it's open jdk, but there's something that Oracle, well, something thats not,
Paul Thurrott (00:53:40):
What else, what are you talking about? They're using it, you know, Microsoft, they're using visual j plus plus 6.0 <laugh>. Okay. Anyway, sorry. So, and then with regards to office stuff they went teams surpassed 300 million monthly active users in the quarter in January. That number was two 80. So that's going up again. They didn't talk about this, remember for several months. For some reason, after talking about it endlessly before that, they're back to talking about it. So that's moving in the right direction. There's also a whole teams ecosystem. I'm not gonna have the, the, there are no hard numbers here, but there are things like teams, rooms, teams, phones teams, premium. That whole ecosystem is exploding right now. So that's Teams as a platform, of course it is. Right. Teams, teams can almost be something that sits beside office. And as we'll discuss in the future, maybe something that has to sit beside office. We'll, we'll see about that. And then everything's up here. I mean, everything office is up office, commercial revenue is up 13% paid office 365 commercial seats up 11% to 382 million. Office consumer revenues were basically flat up 1%. And the number of views was there is up 12% to 65 point. These are big numbers, you know? Yep. 3 million.
Leo Laporte (00:54:58):
This is not your, you're emerging a new market. 300 million teams, users is Mindboggling. Yep. Who are
Paul Thurrott (00:55:04):
These? Especially with Compare It. Well that's, well, okay, here's what's interesting about this to me. I'll tell you who they are. They're, there are 382 million paid Office 365 commercial seats. That's who they are. Yeah. Right. So, one of the issues I had with Teams uptick, you know, maybe two years ago was how, how are these numbers not the same number? Right? Right, right. Who are these
Leo Laporte (00:55:25):
80? There are almost millions of people who refuse.
Paul Thurrott (00:55:27):
You're, you're telling me there are hundreds of millions of people not using this thing.
Leo Laporte (00:55:31):
But when they say, when they say that number, it's a, it's, it's active users. It's not just like they own it, it's
Paul Thurrott (00:55:36):
Active users. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Yeah. Someone kq, I guess is, does actively using teams include uninstalling teams? No, that's,
Leo Laporte (00:55:45):
You have to open it once a month.
Paul Thurrott (00:55:47):
It's actively un, un not using teams.
Leo Laporte (00:55:50):
Open it once a month. <Laugh>.
Paul Thurrott (00:55:52):
Yeah. We're gonna talk more about teams. Later in,
Leo Laporte (00:55:54):
It's probably the 300 million people who are using it, calling the 382 million people. Yeah. Or like, maybe 150 million people use it, but they call the other a hundred or something. I don't know.
Paul Thurrott (00:56:04):
Yeah. And they're calling it to find out how do they get rid of it. Yeah. <laugh>. And actually there's a tip. There's a good, well, we're gonna talk about this. This's a tip for getting rid of teams. It's not as easy in this alright. It's
Leo Laporte (00:56:14):
Not as easy as it sounds. That's Microsoft's motto, I think.
Paul Thurrott (00:56:18):
<Laugh>. Yep. Yeah. There's a funny thing about teams where if you just uninstall the business client, if you got, if you acquired it through work, in other words, it was delivered to your pc, you either downloaded the suite from work, or you already had the suite, and then you, after a certain data a couple years ago, whenever it was, they, they actually just send it to your computer. If you just go and uninstall it, it will come back <laugh>. And so
Rich Campbell (00:56:41):
There's a, I know, I know you missed me. Oh, this's a trick. Yeah. This,
Paul Thurrott (00:56:44):
There's a trick to that. You, you can, you can say no,
Leo Laporte (00:56:47):
Save that for your tip.
Paul Thurrott (00:56:48):
Yeah. It's not my tip, but it's just a, it's a good tip.
Leo Laporte (00:56:51):
Save this.
Paul Thurrott (00:56:52):
Save probably. Well, I don't tip, you know, how, how to not use Microsoft Software, the new, you
Rich Campbell (00:56:57):
Know, my next book tell, don't wanna use Microsoft <laugh>.
Leo Laporte (00:57:04):
So what we're, so what does this tell us about Microsoft's business? What is their business?
Paul Thurrott (00:57:09):
See, to me, the takeaway here is what I said up front, which is that they have crossed that line where they are, what they've been saying they are mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you know, they are pri they are a cloud computing company, right? Yeah. This has been the mantra under Sacha Nadela. We're, we're gonna refocus everything on the cloud. The businesses that can't or haven't gone along with that are the ones that are down right now. Which is kind of just probably coincidental on, honestly. It's just a, something that's happening right now. But wind windows is a product line that doesn't lend itself well to the web. I know, I mean, to the cloud there. I know this Windows 365 and all that. But you know, surface is by, it's a hardware line, you know, hardware, product line and an office. We just talked, we mean, I'm sorry, not an office. Xbox, we talked about, you know, yeah. Cloud gaming is gonna be this small thing. It's not gonna, it's not gonna cloud gaming is not the future of Xbox, unfortunately. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> it's, it's part of the future of Xbox. Right. I think the future of Xbox is this heterogeneous, we're gonna meet you where you are type of thing. Where we're gonna let you play games wherever you are. And Mo for most people, those games are gonna be native apps, you know?
Rich Campbell (00:58:13):
Because they play better
Paul Thurrott (00:58:15):
Cuz they play better.
Rich Campbell (00:58:16):
Yeah. I mean, I would also argue that all of the hardware bound businesses and Windows is one of them. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> are taking a beating because of the, the end of the pandemic and those That's right. Anomalous years. Yeah. But I would argue that's true for cloud too. Mm-Hmm. Because those were anomalous years for cloud. They just happened to still come into positive. Cuz there's still lots of room to grow here. We've been in a saturated market for PCs since 2010. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, clouds the kinda thing,
Leo Laporte (00:58:44):
You turn it on, you don't turn it off now. Oh, the pandemic's over, I can turn off the cloud. You just use more. So I, well,
Paul Thurrott (00:58:51):
I I I look the next getting them
Leo Laporte (00:58:53):
To turn it on was the big deal. And that's why they benefited in Covid and
Paul Thurrott (00:58:59):
They was knock back switch. Right. Remember during the pandemic Zoom, and, and Teams did this, and a lot of services probably did this. They said, look, we're gonna release, we're gonna relax some of our restrictions because we understand this is unprecedented times. It was nice. But the problem is people <laugh>, you know, use the stuff. They get used to it. And now these companies are turning those things, dialing in the back. Right. Teams premium is made up of some new services, but there's also some older services that used to be free during the pandemic that now they're charging for. And that obviously rubs people the wrong way. Right. As it would. But this is the reality of the world. And so usage was definitely up during the pandemic, but I, you know, aside from, you know, people bought a new pc Right. All of a sudden we were just remembered we need PCs. These services, I mean, I, I think the goal of a lot of people is to do less of this stuff now, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's like I want, I I people are
Rich Campbell (00:59:52):
Remarkably burned outta screens.
Paul Thurrott (00:59:53):
Yeah. Yep. It's
Leo Laporte (00:59:56):
Is it just me or is Microsoft kind of slow at releasing new surface
Paul Thurrott (01:00:01):
Products? It is not just you. Okay.
Leo Laporte (01:00:03):
Because it feels like Lenovo and Dell and hp Yeah. They're, you know, they're constantly putting out new stuff.
Paul Thurrott (01:00:09):
Yeah. And Surface
Leo Laporte (01:00:10):
Does is feeling a little, like, they almost da I know they just put out Lenovos Pro Nine, but it feels a little dated
Paul Thurrott (01:00:15):
Almost. They didn't just put out the Surface Pro Nine. Oh. So that's the thing. So yeah, Lenovo and hp and Dell and all those companies, their business, that's their business. Right? Their business. That's, they do. Yeah. you know, the, the Surface PC line is like a, it's like a corner bicycle shop, you know, it's just not the same level. <Laugh>. Well, I mean, it's really, it's, it's kind of a boutique brand. I mean, really I, I think they finally gotten into the point, I, we talked about this I think a few shows ago. This notion that they ran into a lot of reliability issues several years ago. And it was really hard to recommend them. Even though I, I really like Surface PCs personally, but if a norm of a, you know, non-technical person came to me and said, Hey, I'm looking, what do you think I should get? And they do
Rich Campbell (01:00:58):
Well if they have your phone number.
Paul Thurrott (01:01:00):
Yeah. Well, people I know. I mean, in other words, get these, you're
Rich Campbell (01:01:02):
Pretty careful.
Paul Thurrott (01:01:04):
I, it's, yeah, I don't, right. Exactly. I don't, I I've not, I don't recommend surface products to others, you know, but I, but then again, if enough years of this go by yes. So that's one thing. And the other thing is the issue that Leo just raised, which is they don't really, they don't rev these things enough in some cases. And what happens is they, they do typically have a, a big release cycle in the fall. Yeah. What's one thing year, smaller, smaller thing in the spring, sometimes valley
Rich Campbell (01:01:32):
Thing this spring.
Paul Thurrott (01:01:33):
Yeah. But they don't, you won't see them revamp everything. That's the problem. So like, this year, it's like, which, you know, which five of the seven products are we gonna get <laugh>, you know, and then one will kind of remain in market or two, you know, for another year or something. So you, you do get this, it, it does feel like a little bit of a slow boil.
Rich Campbell (01:01:52):
It's, I mean, we got in October last year, we got the Pro nine and the laptop five.
Paul Thurrott (01:01:58):
Yep.
Rich Campbell (01:01:59):
We haven't had a new Surface book. Well, we had the Surface, the
Paul Thurrott (01:02:02):
Surface Studio. Yeah. Right. Instead of a surface.
Rich Campbell (01:02:04):
So,
Paul Thurrott (01:02:06):
So that's due, those are all due, I would say. Right. This coming year. There were Kev Brewer put in something about, well, I guess I <laugh> it's from my side, but the, this notion of Microsoft, look, I think we talked about this last week, the notion Microsoft looking at smaller versions of the tablet form factor, because we need more of these things including an arm powered surface. Go four, which is the small one. Yeah, I mean, okay.
Rich Campbell (01:02:33):
Now, I mean, I think you and I have already debated this, but there's a real innovation coming here will be some kind of N P U.
Paul Thurrott (01:02:40):
Yeah. For a hundred percent. Yep.
Rich Campbell (01:02:41):
Yeah, exactly. That, that makes their large language model products sing.
Paul Thurrott (01:02:46):
Yep. Yep. And you know,
Rich Campbell (01:02:49):
And then they can play that little game where it's like, Hey, if you're using, you know, our co-pilot products on a surface device, it costs this much. Right. But if you don't have a service advice, it's going to, it's all the computes on the cloud then, and it costs you more.
Paul Thurrott (01:03:02):
Right? Yeah. We're gonna see,
Leo Laporte (01:03:04):
You know what, speaking of mps, the, the top line on this for me is when you compare Microsoft's quarterly report with Google's
Rich Campbell (01:03:11):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>,
Leo Laporte (01:03:12):
I think we're seeing a shift. Google's going down, man, and Microsoft's going up, and it's all, it all ended up being about ai. And Google's mishandled. This Sundar Pacha is not exactly a visionary. I'm starting to see rumbles that maybe, you know, Google is in, in, in its, you know, decline.
Rich Campbell (01:03:33):
I don't know that there's any profit in, in these large language models yet, but certainly the gestalt has been consumed by I don't
Leo Laporte (01:03:41):
Wanna profit would be that if nobody's, if people stop using Google search, let's start using Bing search. Maybe profit is step three.
Paul Thurrott (01:03:50):
So I, I would just say yes, but people did and, and would've said that about Microsoft and Steve Ballers. Right. whether it was fair or not.
Leo Laporte (01:04:01):
That's true. And they came back. But I think that that is the exception of that prover rule, because they got an amazing c e o who, who, who literally turned the company around. This is a ga you know, this is Well,
Paul Thurrott (01:04:12):
I I I mean, it's not like they were sinking down the drain or anything. No, but
Leo Laporte (01:04:15):
I I, no, but he, he pivoted the company, don't you think? I
Paul Thurrott (01:04:20):
Well, he certainly
Rich Campbell (01:04:21):
Receiv you're talking about Sat
Paul Thurrott (01:04:22):
For it. Yeah. I mean,
Rich Campbell (01:04:23):
He, the company was already pivoting Satche.
Paul Thurrott (01:04:25):
It was just that he was
Leo Laporte (01:04:26):
The partner. Okay. Yeah. And I know a lot of people would say, oh, don't forget, Steve Ballmer began this process, blah, blah, blah. He
Paul Thurrott (01:04:31):
Did all the Yeah, no, he
Rich Campbell (01:04:32):
Really did. Palmer knew the feature was the cloud, and he was an impediment. And he stepped out. He got outta the
Leo Laporte (01:04:36):
Way and he put the right person in.
Rich Campbell (01:04:38):
He needed a place to scream, and he found a basketball team. It's excellent. <Laugh>.
Leo Laporte (01:04:41):
Never, nevertheless. I, I don't think that's a common thing most companies decline,
Paul Thurrott (01:04:49):
But which
Rich Campbell (01:04:50):
You're really talking about here is when does PAAR get replaced?
Paul Thurrott (01:04:53):
Yeah. And I don't, there's no reason that can't happen immediately. No, I should
Leo Laporte (01:04:57):
Can't happen. Oh, they should have, could last them years ago. It's obvious, but
Paul Thurrott (01:05:00):
This is, but, but, you know, different people have different skillsets and they're better in certain situations. You know, it's the you know there was a j it doesn't matter. But the, I
Leo Laporte (01:05:11):
Understand
Paul Thurrott (01:05:12):
The notion is
Leo Laporte (01:05:12):
All of this is ephemeral, but at the moment,
Paul Thurrott (01:05:16):
It, you,
Leo Laporte (01:05:16):
Like Microsoft is, is kind of,
Paul Thurrott (01:05:19):
You need a different guy from war than you need for leadership during Com times, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But Sun wanted to, was a great, was great for a time, and then he wanted to nuke China.
Leo Laporte (01:05:28):
<Laugh>. You could argue Bomber wasn't as good as, I mean, China's not even as good as Balmer was. And I
Paul Thurrott (01:05:34):
Don't know, I I, I, my look, Google today earns more revenues and bigger profits than Microsoft. But
Leo Laporte (01:05:42):
They're, but, but their adver look, their big stuff, search and ad sales are down, not, not down. Numbers
Paul Thurrott (01:05:49):
Are down. I just, yeah, no, I know, I know, I know. By the way, Google Cloud just had their first ever profit this
Leo Laporte (01:05:55):
Quarter. Well, that's true. Interesting. Okay. You're right. That's a good point. May you know, so I, so are they gonna be smart enough to say Google Cloud in the class
Paul Thurrott (01:06:02):
Also? 17% of Google? Yeah,
Leo Laporte (01:06:03):
It's tiny. I mean,
Paul Thurrott (01:06:04):
There's some tiny percent. Yeah. So that doesn't really matter too much. No, I, I don't, I just don't think it's, they're up and down times. I just don't think it's, it doesn't necessarily mean go, Google's still humongous. Like, it doesn't mean they're doomed and they still have incredible
Leo Laporte (01:06:19):
AI understand power
Paul Thurrott (01:06:20):
That they
Leo Laporte (01:06:20):
Could wield and they could turn it around. But
Paul Thurrott (01:06:23):
I agree, it might require leadership change.
Leo Laporte (01:06:25):
If you had said 10 years ago, who's gonna be the bigger company in 2023, Microsoft or Google, would you have bet on Microsoft?
Paul Thurrott (01:06:36):
No, but would you, you would bet on Apple <laugh>. I mean, yeah, right. You know, I, I mean, well, apple, this whole world is toxic, right?
Leo Laporte (01:06:43):
Apple maybe. But
Paul Thurrott (01:06:45):
Yeah, I'll say it's interesting. The, the two biggest companies in the world have been around since the 1970s, you know,
Leo Laporte (01:06:51):
And what's, but they're the oldest. Exactly. The thing you gotta, I'm thinking is what's the disruptive technology of the 2020s? It's ai. And that's right. One would've thought Google would have a massive headstart on that, and I think they did. Okay.
Paul Thurrott (01:07:06):
But disrupting your own business is hard, right? Yes. You talked about this, I think before you went away this notion that yes, Steve Jobs did this with the iPod and the ipo. Yes. The companies just don't do that. So I agree that AI could and probably will disrupt these markets. The, the, whether Microsoft be the company that takes advantage of that is an open question. I, I, I think open AI and chat, G P T and these technologies will float a lot abouts. I don't know that Microsoft's gonna have a big differentiator because they own half
Leo Laporte (01:07:34):
Of, they own half of open ai. I
Paul Thurrott (01:07:36):
Know they own, I know, that's fine. I mean, on the back end. But as far as like their consumer facing brands, I mean, Bing is still a boat anchor. I, I can't stress this enough, how bad that brand is and that, that Microsoft is latching.
Rich Campbell (01:07:50):
Somebody reminded me the other day, you know, I said, I don't know why they went with Bing. He said, well, what did Satcha do before he became head of Cloud? And then ultimately c e
Paul Thurrott (01:07:59):
O. Yeah. He worked on Bing.
Rich Campbell (01:08:00):
He was the Bing guy.
Paul Thurrott (01:08:01):
Yeah. But that means he should know better.
Rich Campbell (01:08:03):
Well, except he, you know, he gets a call from his old Bing guys who say, we've been working on this thing in private for a couple of years. It's clearly hot. A hundred million users. Come on.
Paul Thurrott (01:08:13):
I do agree. You know, so Imagine came out and said, Hey, look we have this AI thing now we're gonna call it co-pilot. That's the brand. Right? And people out of we would all agree that's a good brand. But you know, when you, when you go to search and you failed with Microsoft, we forget the other ones. Remember there was Microsoft Live search and, you know, yeah. There were other names to this thing. We all mocked it when they went to Bing and to spend bang for a long time. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you rebrand that thing again, that really sends a bad message, right? Oh, no, no. That tells you No, that tells you. And I think that's why, that's the real reason why. But it's, it's latching itself to that brand is such a mistake. Yeah.
Rich Campbell (01:08:50):
But it's so I think it was also the quickest mover. The product that's gonna matter is M 365 co-pilot. Like
Paul Thurrott (01:08:56):
Yeah, I agree.
Rich Campbell (01:08:57):
That's the one, that's the only thing that could take, that's the whole market. The idea that a, that a information worker is going to have a chat with some software before they start working the beginning of the day. It's pretty profound.
Paul Thurrott (01:09:10):
It's I <laugh> it's almost like monopoly maintenance in a way. It's, it's what re allows 'em to retain the advantage they already have. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And it makes those products
Rich Campbell (01:09:21):
And deal with a huge problem, which is you don't know which product to use now. You don't have to know, because the tool's now gonna tell you which product to use based on what you asked for. I don't want to see the wrestling matches inside of Microsoft about what product gets recommended first. <Laugh>. But, you know, it's still really powerful. You guarantee it's gonna steer you towards various Microsoft products.
Paul Thurrott (01:09:42):
Yeah. We can <laugh> Yes. We can state that with certainty. You Yeah.
Rich Campbell (01:09:46):
It's ready. So I need to edit this photo. Have you looked at Photoshop? Don't think that's gonna happen.
Paul Thurrott (01:09:50):
Right? That's right.
Rich Campbell (01:09:51):
Although, I mean, if they did this at the Windows level and provided an interface for third party software,
Paul Thurrott (01:09:57):
Actually you're, you, you just hit on something that's kind of interesting because we think of office productivity, knowledge worker stuff as a certain thing. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, it's, it's worth processing, its spreadsheets, whatever. But what we're really talking about here is what today we would call creators. Right? Right. It's a little goofy to me to say that Microsoft was actually kind of onto this term early on. You will remember the first couple of Windows 10 updates were called Creator Updates <laugh>. Oh yeah. We all met, we all made fun of them for that. Yes. Everyone's a creator. You know what, everyone is a creator. Right? In a way. And so you could kind of expand the types of things that AI can improve from a productivity standpoint away from traditional, or aside from addi traditional productivity to include these kinds of new types of productivity, right. Blog writing and YouTube video scripts and, and video editing and image editing, et cetera, et cetera. I think you're gonna see Microsoft make a big push in that stuff too. So you had just said, you know, they're not gonna recommend Adobe Photoshop. That's true. That's because they have something called Microsoft Designer <laugh>, you know, or whatever these other tools they have are. So Yes. They're, they have Clip Champ even, which I know sounds goofy, but as we've talked about, that's actually a really rich video editing solution.
Rich Campbell (01:11:07):
Yeah. I just recently played with it, and it's not
Paul Thurrott (01:11:09):
Bad. It's, it's actually fairly excellent. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I mean, I, I use Photoshop Adobe Premiere and everything. I, I, granted I'm not, I'm not Tim Burton or anything, but everything I need is in Clip Jam. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, and it's free. I mean, it's, it's not horrible.
Rich Campbell (01:11:24):
There's a premium version if you want it, but I'm not sure what it would do better other than stop putting it's made with Clip Champ on every file.
Paul Thurrott (01:11:32):
Well, yeah. I mean, there's a lot more stock imagery and video and blah, blah, blah, whatever. Right. But one of the things that's coming to that is 4K output, which does not exist in,
Rich Campbell (01:11:41):
And once again, we get back to this whole idea of who's been innovating in their monopolies for the past couple 20 years. Cuz the only thing we've seen in innovation for Search by Google is more ads per square inch.
Paul Thurrott (01:11:54):
Sure.
Rich Campbell (01:11:54):
And, well,
Paul Thurrott (01:11:55):
It worked for a little while. You know, it, it, it, it's been working. And I think the lack of competition, good, strong competition has allowed that to stagnate. Yes. But like we were saying, I, this disruption doesn't come from Google, it comes from outside of Google. But, you know, I, one of the things that disruption could, cause I'm, I'm, I wonder if there isn't an example of this. There probably is, is the, for the market leader to change in response to that disruption and retain the lead, right? That could still happen mm-hmm.
Rich Campbell (01:12:22):
<Affirmative>. And that I'm more but better for it. That's need a little smack in the head to get moving.
Paul Thurrott (01:12:29):
I just thought of a great example of this. So I, I <laugh> Microsoft adopted arm again for Windows 10 mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. And I talked to Terry Myerson about this at the time, and he went on this rant about these stupid little intel stickers that were the laptops. He's drove 'em insane. He's like, my goal is to get rid of those stickers. That's all I care about. I just wanna get rid of those really. And the way I Yeah. He hated those stickers. So one of the, one of the, one of the side impact, or one of the side effects of this push to arm is Terry and Microsoft and Wind, you know, windows org today, whatever they are, doesn't really care if like Qualcomm wins or Intel wins or whatever. They just want all PCs to be better. So if all Qualcomm achieves is to get Intel to make more efficient chips Yeah. Victory. Right? It doesn't really matter who wins, you know, in this case is, but the has. Yeah. Otherwise,
Rich Campbell (01:13:20):
And we clearly saw that with the last arm cycle, right? Like the big thing that happened was Adam
Paul Thurrott (01:13:26):
Yeah. Right, right. But the big thing, now they've changed their architecture. Yep. Now Intel Chip says have hi hybrid architectures with performance and hi efficient course. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> that would, they would never have gone in that direction if it wasn't for em. Right. They would've just kept, we would, we would've 10 gigahertz penny and four chips. Now <laugh>, you know, that's what we, what, that's what we would be doing. And they would be,
Rich Campbell (01:13:46):
And our own little liquid nitrogen do. Yeah. They would
Paul Thurrott (01:13:49):
Be Exactly. Heating the apartment. Exactly.
Rich Campbell (01:13:51):
Yeah. Everything would've been fine. Yeah. Like
Paul Thurrott (01:13:52):
Those old tile based heaters in Eastern Europe. Except it would be a desktop computer. <Laugh>, you know, every palace should have one. Yeah. Let's take a little break, come back much more to talk
Leo Laporte (01:14:01):
About. We got products, we got Windows, we got 11, we got Microsoft 365, we got Xbox, whatever number and, and apps and Lika. We're going to we're going east, we're going to Japan. All of that coming up. As Windows Weekly continues, you stay here. You windows and dozers wanna tell you about our sponsor lookout. Well, you know, if you listen to security now, you know, we're in a world of hurt. We're in a world of hurt. And, and it's just getting worse because, and by the way, this is, employees love it. Enlightened management loves it. Our data, our, our endpoints are all over now. Business has changed forever. This is, this is the product of the pandemic boundaries where we work, even how we work disappeared.
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Paul Thurrott (01:17:09):
Yeah, nothing major. We can actually rip through most of this pretty quickly. <Laugh>. So the big one is that, and I, I actually, since I wrote these notes, I published a story about this. So Microsoft used to release, lemme see if I can get this right. They used to release preview and optional updates on what we call W is Week D, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, the la the fourth, usually last week of the month, not every month. That would happen I, i two, three, maybe several times a year, but not every month. Starting sometime in the past couple months, they switched this two week, I'm sorry, see, I got it backwards. It was week C <laugh> originally. Sorry, that was the third week. Now they've moved to week D. So Week D is ideally located an equal distance from each week B of the previous and the next month, right?
(01:18:02):
The idea being that every be halfway between every patch. Tuesday there's a week D and that's where they can release an optional or preview update. And so what they've kind of formalized over the past couple months is every month, basically they, the only time they haven't done it since last September is January, we're gonna release a preview update of the next past Tuesday feature update, small f and so they just did that this week. So the first, the, the fir the first time this kind of entered my radar was back in February. February was when they released the preview version. It was February, I think it was February 28th, was the preview update of the moment two update that they released on Patch Tuesday and March, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> subsequently they did it again and now they've done it again. And now I've gone back and looked.
(01:18:50):
And actually I found that, like I said, every month, except for one time since September they've been doing, they've been doing this. They, they've shifted the schedule a little bit between Week D and Week C. But, but having the two week spacing off of patch Tuesday is good. Yeah. That's the new thing, right? Yeah. So this is, this is interesting <laugh>, right? Not the, this update, the, the update they is released is not that interesting actually. Right? the one big thing that you can see if you install it is if you go to Windows Update. Now there's a new option under the check for updates button that says, get the latest updates as soon as they're available. And you can click it on. And when you do that, you'll actually get the latest, what it's, this is how it describes it, non-security updates, fixes and improvements as they roll out.
(01:19:36):
In other words, when they release a preview version of one of these updates, you'll just get it. You, they won't have to ask you to take it and you won't have to agree to it. Interesting. So if you're, it's kind of a strange positioning here, but if you're an early adopter, but wanna stay unstable, don't wanna put your machine, don't wanna enroll it in the Windows Insider program, this is a way to ensure that you're automatically gonna get these updates as soon as they come out, rather than having to wait for the stable over lease on Patch Tuesday, the latest clip Champ. Yeah. Well, yeah. So there <laugh> again, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm try, I'm always trying to understand what they're doing, cuz they never explain it clearly. But they have said every year we're gonna release a new feature update, capital F, capital U Right.
(01:20:20):
Feature update a, a version upgrade. Version upgrades are unique in the scheme of things because they don't all roll out at once to everybody. Right? they, they, they slowly roll them out to the community based on compatibility, et cetera, et cetera. You know, the, the 22 H two update didn't fully roll out, I think until, I think it was February. This took a long time, maybe March. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, that's how those things go. That's the only thing that makes them unique. But between each feature update, they release cumulative updates. Some of them are security updates and some of them non-security updates. And these days with Windows 11, most of them include new features.
Leo Laporte (01:20:57):
I'm glad you brought this up cuz I have been a little confused by something on my screen. I did the, I did Patch Tuesday when I got back.
Paul Thurrott (01:21:05):
Yep.
Leo Laporte (01:21:05):
Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> and then still to be done is this cumulative update preview.
Paul Thurrott (01:21:11):
Yes. That's the, the update that that just came. It must say it's like, it's April, right? Says 2023. Yeah. Yeah. So this is the update I'm just describing. If you install this, what you will get is that option I just described, the ability to start getting these updates automatically rather
Leo Laporte (01:21:27):
Than strike it. I mean, the computer that preview, like I, well I'm not on the, cuz I'm not an insider anymore, thank God.
Paul Thurrott (01:21:33):
But yeah, so you're unstable. What
Leo Laporte (01:21:34):
I wanna preview of anything for I don't, I,
Paul Thurrott (01:21:37):
I why I can't help you with, but I'll <laugh> what I can tell you, I really can't, they really
Leo Laporte (01:21:42):
Don't experience explain what I'm gonna get here, but okay. So I
Paul Thurrott (01:21:45):
Should
Leo Laporte (01:21:45):
I do it
Paul Thurrott (01:21:46):
That, that I can help you with. Yeah. So think of it, just think about the, think about the schedule, right? So the second Tuesday of every month is past Tuesday the second Tuesday of April was the 12th. Yeah. Right. It wasn't 12th we got, so when
Leo Laporte (01:21:58):
I come home, it's installed. I'm installing it. Okay. Yep.
Paul Thurrott (01:22:01):
Yeah, that came with that by the way, came with some new features. Hmm. Okay. Two weeks later. This past Tuesday, yesterday, I'm sorry, it was the 11th. I'm looking at the wrong day. Two, two weeks later. Was yesterday the 25th. Yeah, that's week d This is when they shipped that thing that you're seeing, which is the preview update. It's the preview version of the Patch Tuesday update that's gonna come out two weeks later.
Leo Laporte (01:22:23):
Oh. And you don't need to be insider for this. This is a preview <laugh>.
Paul Thurrott (01:22:28):
Yeah. So the difference, so the difference between a, a normal update, if you will, a, a normal non-security
Leo Laporte (01:22:33):
Confusion
Paul Thurrott (01:22:33):
Here. Oh, I, I, I am making a career
Leo Laporte (01:22:36):
Out of your Do they think they <laugh>?
Paul Thurrott (01:22:39):
I do. They think that
Leo Laporte (01:22:40):
People don't ever go to Windows updates. So they'll never see this. So it doesn't matter.
Paul Thurrott (01:22:45):
Well, okay, so again, you're introducing an interesting conundrum. So they have, they have, there's windows,
Leo Laporte (01:22:51):
There's info button that does nothing, which is great.
Paul Thurrott (01:22:54):
It's not gonna give you anything. So here, like you have to just go off what I'm gonna tell you. So, okay. The idea here is that I don't think the Windows Insider program has enough engagement. I think this is part of the problem. Ah, so they, this this, they, they've kind of formalized this notion of let's get this stuff out into the world and we're gonna split the difference, you know, between past Tuesdays we'll do preview versions of these updates. So we'll give us a couple of weeks of more volume of people testing this update. And, you know, who knows, maybe we'll fix some problems. The thing is, if you're not installing Windows updates, you're not looking at Windows updates. So you wouldn't even know that this thing is available, nor would you install it. <Laugh>. Right? <Laugh>. So that's okay because two weeks from today, well, two weeks from yesterday, this will go out to stable. So you will eventually get it, whether you choose to get it or not. The difference between this and two weeks from now is you have to choose to take it now.
Rich Campbell (01:23:45):
And I don't see the incentive in two weeks, it'll be in your box anyway.
Paul Thurrott (01:23:50):
Yeah. So the incentive is, this is what I mean, it's a little strange. You're enthusiastic enough about this that you want to do this, but not enough to put your computer and the windows inside a program <laugh>. Right. You know, that's
Leo Laporte (01:23:59):
So weird.
Paul Thurrott (01:24:00):
It's, it's like there's a fifth channel now. Yeah. It's like the stable preview channel if you want. Like, I'm just making up a but that's what this is. Yeah. So we know from right before windows 1122 H two shipped last September slash October, because again, we're doing a preview stable release thing. That's weird. But whatever the rumors emerged of something called these moment updates, right? And the, the way the story went was the first moment update is gonna come out in October slash November. Cuz again, preview then regular. And that was the one that included like the file the tabs of File Explorer and some other stuff. And then the second moment update was supposed to come out in February, well March. But, you know, February 28th was the preview version. And that included, who knows whatever that had whatever it had in it. But you know what, I, I've gone back and looked. They've, they've shipped new features every single month. Wow. except for January. Because January is after December. And December is when Microsoft is off for half of the half the month. And they didn't release a preview release that month. So they just didn't do one in January. I wonder, I
Rich Campbell (01:25:04):
Wonder if we're just being experimented on, I wonder if they're, they're considering the idea of cutting the Insider program substantially. And so that, and if they can show that, hey, if we, there's a certain number of people who are gonna install this preview no matter what. We don't have to put 'em in any program. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:25:20):
But nobody knows what they're doing when they say install this, it's not
Rich Campbell (01:25:24):
There. There's no downside to
Paul Thurrott (01:25:25):
Windows for that. So hold on. So they don't know. You're right. But the thing, what you're not seeing is what happens after you install it. So now when you go to Windows update, there's a new option at the top of the window and it says get the latest updates as soon as they're available.
Leo Laporte (01:25:38):
So I'm gonna install this kind of blind cuz no one really is telling, has told me what's gonna happen here. <Laugh>.
Paul Thurrott (01:25:44):
Like I'm telling,
Leo Laporte (01:25:45):
But now you're telling me thank goodness. And this is why folks, I just wanna remind you, you listen to this show because otherwise what does this
Paul Thurrott (01:25:52):
Mean? Yes. And so the thing is, but this time they're actually documenting it here. So unlike what you see, they're actually documenting it from now
Leo Laporte (01:25:58):
On.
Paul Thurrott (01:26:00):
They will, well, no, there's a link. You can click it and it goes to a website and it tells you what this means. It actually, they've actually said, this is what this
Leo Laporte (01:26:07):
Will, once I install this one from now on, it will be,
Paul Thurrott (01:26:11):
It's optional. It's a preview. Right. It's not, you know. Right.
Leo Laporte (01:26:14):
Okay.
Paul Thurrott (01:26:14):
And it, by the way, introducing, I don't, I don't want to call this a new term, but I it's a Microsoft, I, so I wrote an article today called Continuous innovation, which is Microsoft term for these monthly updates. Right. The, the actual term for this in internally is controlled feature rollout. Oh. And you know what? It's almost not worth getting into the weeds on it. I'll just say that I, well, I just already said it. The, we're gonna do a feature update, capital F, capital U once a year. But we, Microsoft, we reserve the right every month between now and then to release other features. And they have every, like I said, every month, this
Leo Laporte (01:26:54):
Gotta be more than that though. This thing is still, it's only 7% in 30 or seconds or a minute or so.
Paul Thurrott (01:27:00):
I gar listen, the, the, the amount of time it takes to reboot is gonna confuse you even further. But yes, at the end of the day when this thing is done, it's just a switch basically. The only thing you're gonna notice, <laugh>, it's a switch. I'm not saying there isn't more. I'm not saying it's the only thing it's gonna <laugh>. I know. God bless you,
Leo Laporte (01:27:16):
Microsoft. I mean, look, I download all updates almost daily on Linux without Yep. Paying any attention to what I'm getting. Of course. So, you know, I, I guess it's silly of me to ask more from from Microsoft, but,
Paul Thurrott (01:27:32):
Okay, I, somebody I think you both asked, or maybe it was just silly, but somebody asked why, and I like, I can't help you with why I I can tell you what, why, why Microsoft?
Leo Laporte (01:27:42):
Why no one knows why. No, I I think they're experimenting. Yeah, that sounds right. The team, that team's trying to find its way, you think it's an AB test, maybe like, does that, but everybody got
Paul Thurrott (01:27:52):
They're playing gets it. So, well, so by the way, you know, what was an AB test? You know, we talk about this endlessly cuz this is the perfect example. Although there are others by the way. The search pill, right? That came out in October slash November mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. The, the issue with the search pill, actually one of the issues with the search pill was that not everyone got it. I, we kind of forget this now. A few months have gone by, but because I'm writing a book and I have so many computers and I'm upgrading 'em all, there was, there was this period of time where most of my computers didn't have it. And some did. And then eventually most of my computers had it, but one or two didn't. And then eventually it all had it and then March came and they just wiped it out cuz they came up with a whole new interface.
(01:28:32):
But that was a really good example of them shipping an update. They had never tested with the insider program. It had bugs regression no longer did the, the flyover jump list on previous searches. And then they just replaced it a few months later. And it's like, guys, why don't you just test this thing for a couple months? Give it to the insiders. They would've seen this, they would've show, said this is the problem, pay attention, you know. But I, I, I really Richard's right? They're, they're, they're just doing things in different ways. Now. Sometimes they throw it out unstable. Sometimes they skip the whole progression through the insider program and they'll store something right. In beta or write and release preview.
Rich Campbell (01:29:07):
Well, I don't know there's anybody left that was from the original Insiders program internally. Yeah. And so I don't, I just don't know that they, they value it anymore. You know, Microsoft don't wanna make new things. It's,
Paul Thurrott (01:29:17):
It's like it was bring your kids to school or Workday and then the parents all went home and the kids stayed. Now they're just running the show. I don't know what's happening over there. It's very, very strange. Well,
Leo Laporte (01:29:26):
I'm still installing this, which all it adds apparently is a feature to the menu, but it's still going eventually. So
Paul Thurrott (01:29:34):
Well here's the good news, Leo. Unlike the thing you did early last summer when you got your Dell Extra that was Yeah. Which is now running in Linox because I couldn't get rid of it. Yeah. We fixed it. Yeah. They finally did the window fixed. But yeah, it took 'em a long time. <Laugh>, I fixed it. This this thing that you're changing now Yeah. Will, will not harm you. Right? It won't. And
Leo Laporte (01:29:52):
Would, would you recommend
Paul Thurrott (01:29:53):
It's not irreversible once I
Leo Laporte (01:29:55):
Get this thing, would you recommend that I say Yeah, yeah. Gimme those feature updates. Whatever you
Paul Thurrott (01:30:00):
Want. I re I recommend is a strong term. I, I the, the concern assume it's gonna stay, you know, I guess the concern is sooner or
Rich Campbell (01:30:09):
Later is gonna be a bad preview. Inevitably it's a preview.
Paul Thurrott (01:30:13):
That's the thing. And I'm also, I guess my other words, it
Leo Laporte (01:30:15):
Really is kind of a quasi insider ring.
Paul Thurrott (01:30:18):
Yeah, it is. Yeah. It's,
Leo Laporte (01:30:20):
Yeah, they should Billy this five,
Paul Thurrott (01:30:22):
It's,
Leo Laporte (01:30:23):
They should say these are beta
Paul Thurrott (01:30:26):
Ah, oof. And Yeah, that's oof. You don't wanna go there. That's a harsh
Leo Laporte (01:30:30):
Word, isn't it? That's a,
Paul Thurrott (01:30:31):
The way they, so back in February, March, I don't reremember, it was probably March by the time they documented it, there was actually a post to the tech community blog that explained this new switch to Week D for the preview slash what's the other term? Optional update thing. And they explained why they did it and blah, blah, blah and everything. But they, they, they, they called it production quality. They said that, you know, it's reached some bar. Like they felt, you know, supposedly I, but look, they switch, they, they, they delivered that search bill without any testing. So that's the quality bar. I mean, it's right. They, they've certainly, and, but we complained about paint a couple of weeks ago, whenever that was a month ago. That still has never been fixed. That, that issue that I raised about the, the pain app, you know, so quality is not job one from what I can tell.
Rich Campbell (01:31:22):
Well look at how many ways they mess with the Big B icon Yes.
Paul Thurrott (01:31:27):
And
Rich Campbell (01:31:27):
How quickly they did
Paul Thurrott (01:31:28):
It. That's right. How
Rich Campbell (01:31:29):
Little you were involved
Paul Thurrott (01:31:30):
In it. Yeah. That's another great example. The Edge one 11 when they added the b icon and everyone freaked out. And then, even though, I mean, I think a new version of Edge comes out, what every three weeks is it? Or, yeah,
Rich Campbell (01:31:40):
That string, it was like three in a, in less than a week.
Paul Thurrott (01:31:44):
Yeah. They, they added a bunch of new features. And then so many people I, well, businesses complained. I mean, we, I think it was a week later, they said, okay, we'll let you remove it. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you know, and we're gonna bury it in the ui. We're not gonna make it easy. But they actually did a, the point behind that wasn't to let users remove it. The point was to give people a policy or businesses a policy they could use and remove it. Yeah. Wish they did. Okay. <laugh>, I just said we're gonna blow through way. Yeah. You
Leo Laporte (01:32:09):
Said this would be fast.
Paul Thurrott (01:32:10):
The rest of this is gonna be fast.
Leo Laporte (01:32:11):
Okay. Sure. Whatever you say.
Paul Thurrott (01:32:14):
So again, sometime ago, a month or two ago Microsoft announced that phone link would be updated to support iOS or iPhone. And that is now starting to roll out to everyone. So that's hit Stable or is started to hit stable. The chances are still, it could be weeks before a lot of people see it. I just check today. I don't see it on my computers yet, but
Leo Laporte (01:32:35):
I use it with my Samsung. So I I kind of want
Paul Thurrott (01:32:38):
It to Yeah, but that's phone link for Android. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So phone link for Android.
Leo Laporte (01:32:42):
Oh, oh, this is for iOS. Oh, yeah. For, oh yeah. Oh yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:32:46):
So that hit Stable pretty quick. There was a new beta chan, well, two, they do two builds, right. But two new beta channel builds since the last show. Nothing major there. There's only one new, well, no new features, but they added some languages to the live caption feature, which is fantastic. Live Caption is one of those features, I think I wanna say debut in 22 H two, if I'm not mistaken. Or in one of the moment updates. I don't, I can't keep track of this stuff anyway. And I think it was <laugh>, I think it was 22 H two. It doesn't
Leo Laporte (01:33:11):
Matter. I love live caption. Everybody's doing that now though. It's, it's
Paul Thurrott (01:33:14):
Yeah, table six live caption everywhere. Yep. That's one of the great reasons to use an Android phone. Yeah. Or at least a pixel
Leo Laporte (01:33:20):
Phone. Iphone does it too. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:33:21):
Does it?
Leo Laporte (01:33:22):
Okay. Every time I talk to my mom on FaceTime, I trying to figure out how to turn it off. I don't want it. Yeah,
Paul Thurrott (01:33:27):
Yeah. But it's really is if
Leo Laporte (01:33:28):
You can't hear or, or you want to watch a video in bed and you don't wanna wake your spouse, this is great.
Paul Thurrott (01:33:36):
Yeah, no, it's, and yeah, I mean one, you know, our son is deaf obviously, so we have always used captions wherever we can. And the thing that's interesting about captions is whether you have hearing loss or not, you start to rely on them. And the way they make TV shows and movies today, everything's so dark and explosions allow and voices low. I mean,
Leo Laporte (01:33:53):
I can't watch a TV show
Paul Thurrott (01:33:54):
Without, I think more and more people are turning captions on wherever they
Leo Laporte (01:33:57):
Can. Oh yeah. Even young people who have good hearing. Yeah. Yep.
Paul Thurrott (01:34:00):
Exactly. Yeah. It's, it's just a nice thing to have. And then this one's only a leak. So Microsoft has not announced this, but in coming in some future non-security update, you know, monthly update, whatever we're gonna call these things they are adding back features to the task bar that were regressions from the original version of the Windows 11 task bar, specifically app labels and groups like icon groups. Right. one of many, many features that got lost in the trans, or I guess two of many, many features that got lost in the transition to Windows 11. So that's in that bit the same task bar. Yep. And this is the prediction I made when Windows 11 first shipped, I was so freaked out that they announced this thing in June, shipped it in October, no feedback went into the product whatsoever.
(01:34:46):
Everyone was, you know, freaking including me. And I said, mark my words. You know, they ca this beautiful, simple looking thing. When's the welfare? Windows eight? You know, <laugh>. Yeah, exactly. <Laugh>. They're gonna keep, they well, the pro, well, so at least Windows, the one thing Windows eight had going for it was that it just took those features away. Right? Windows 11 has the same features, but they do less. So everyone, you know, it's a, it's, it's a different kind of freak out. But I, my, my guess at the time, and it's being proven correct over time, is that they'll just keep adding these features back until at the end. We're just, we're back at Windows 11, you know, windows 10. Again, I don't I, I there's more to do, but they're, they're, they're adding that stuff back. So that's good.
Leo Laporte (01:35:28):
Okie dokey. Alright.
Paul Thurrott (01:35:29):
See, I told you I could get that.
Leo Laporte (01:35:30):
You breezed through that.
Paul Thurrott (01:35:32):
Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:35:33):
What's not reasoning through that is this update, which is still <laugh>.
Paul Thurrott (01:35:37):
Yeah, I know. No, I know. I noticed the same thing churning along. I know. Yeah. I don't know why,
Leo Laporte (01:35:41):
But it does. It's almost as if they're doing more than they
Paul Thurrott (01:35:44):
Say the offline bit where, you know, it reboots, that takes a long time too. It's very
Leo Laporte (01:35:48):
Strange. I just, I just press the restart button, so I'll be back in about an hour. I'll,
Paul Thurrott (01:35:53):
I'll talk to you later. Yeah. But you'll, when you come back, we'll, we'll take a look at it. You'll <laugh>. So Yeah. After this next two
Leo Laporte (01:35:59):
Seconds, this is, this is, this is the screen Now. We're just gonna boy, the whole time
Paul Thurrott (01:36:03):
<Laugh>. Yep. Yeah, just leave it there. That's good.
Leo Laporte (01:36:05):
Actually it's moving along. That's pretty
Paul Thurrott (01:36:06):
Quick. Yeah, sure. No, sure. You'll be fine. <Laugh>. <laugh>. So
Rich Campbell (01:36:10):
Yeah, as soon as you said that it stopped, stopped,
Paul Thurrott (01:36:12):
It'll get to like 96% and then it'll say reverting <laugh>.
Rich Campbell (01:36:16):
That's it. Like, yeah. When he get to 19 and then starts going back down again. That's right. <Laugh>.
Leo Laporte (01:36:21):
Why is it hard? So hard? This is a completely peripheral conversation, but why is it so hard to do progress bars? It's just unpredictable because
Paul Thurrott (01:36:28):
Oh no. Cuz they're not accurate. Yeah. I, that's why they don't do them anymore. Microsoft doesn't, I mean, I
Leo Laporte (01:36:33):
Get a percentage, which is basically a text progress.
Rich Campbell (01:36:35):
Suddenly you're 21, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're just guessing. There's stats. It's a guess. And you try and the steps you don't really know. Look, get a 21% and then it restarted. <Laugh> went away.
Leo Laporte (01:36:45):
<Laugh>.
Rich Campbell (01:36:46):
Well, now that I've written it,
Paul Thurrott (01:36:48):
Come put it back cuz it's not done. I've
Rich Campbell (01:36:50):
Written a fifth of what you wanted to do. Now I'm gonna reboot your machine and it'll be back. It's just
Paul Thurrott (01:36:53):
Gonna come back and say 15% <laugh>. Yeah. Let's see what it says.
Leo Laporte (01:36:58):
Well, it's just sitting there, right? Oh, whoa, whoa. Hey, we're going now. Yep. That was a full reboot.
Paul Thurrott (01:37:05):
Yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. No, this, this this little switch in the UI is apparently come some kind of a bios feature because
Rich Campbell (01:37:13):
It's taken a
Paul Thurrott (01:37:13):
While. It takes, yeah, no, it takes a while. It's, this is, this is what happens. Its
Leo Laporte (01:37:17):
Not, I do
Rich Campbell (01:37:17):
Wanna get into this unbundling of teams and the whole Is Microsoft being untrustworthy? You're right. Like
Paul Thurrott (01:37:26):
Went down. I I know, I know, I know that.
Rich Campbell (01:37:28):
It's brilliant.
Paul Thurrott (01:37:29):
Listen, I've been there. I know, I know how this works. It's
Leo Laporte (01:37:33):
Not good. But we, but we had made progress. You and I, I
Paul Thurrott (01:37:35):
Literally said, I I, sorry. This is the first time I've, I I, I said out loud the first time I saw this. Did that just go down <laugh>? I have proof now. I have never seen that happen before. We have proof. I, yeah.
Rich Campbell (01:37:46):
I used to code those all the time. That only ran on April 1st. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:37:50):
<Laugh>. Yeah. It's like, I'm, I'm cuz I'm, look, I'm like this, it, it's taking a long time. So I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, what is, wasn't this number bigger? You know? Yeah.
Leo Laporte (01:38:01):
We're starting again. That's the second.
Paul Thurrott (01:38:03):
Got to 30. This one. This one this one, I think will go into your desktop. I think that's all it has to do. Only 30% of it, though. It's a long,
Leo Laporte (01:38:11):
It's so all as far as, you know, all this is doing is adding an item to the update ma screen. Except it's not,
Paul Thurrott (01:38:18):
The only thing I'm gonna admit to Leo is that the only thing most people are gonna notice is that it has added this one switch to the
Leo Laporte (01:38:23):
Setting. So maybe there's big security updates. It is a full reboot, by the way. I'm seeing the
Paul Thurrott (01:38:27):
Bias. It is literally a non-security update. <Laugh>. Yeah. It's like there are no security updates, but they of course, it's not like they always comply with their own
Leo Laporte (01:38:35):
Rules. They don't say sometimes. Yeah. I mean, apple often will do a security update without saying, because you don't want to tr you know, telegraph what you're up to, to, to the bad guys. Okay.
Paul Thurrott (01:38:45):
All right. I appreciate it. Like that. You guys think this back to
Leo Laporte (01:38:47):
30% kids we're here. Oh,
Paul Thurrott (01:38:49):
Wrong. Rolling along. It takes a long time. It takes a long time. All right. So while this is happening, I'll just point out that the Financial Times reported this week that Microsoft has agreed to stop bundling Microsoft teams with its office suite to avoid an EU antitrust of investigation. Which what I, I, what does that even mean? Is interesting. I know that, that's the thing. I literally, I, I <laugh>. So I wrote a follow up to this article where I kind of, what I literally, what does that mean? I literally, that's the, you know, the, in the notes it's, does Microsoft have an antitrust problem, right? So mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, I, it's like, what is, what does this mean? Yeah. Right. So I looked up, I looked up a few things. I wasn't, first of all, I don't, some of the language here I think is a little incorrect.
(01:39:37):
I think what they're really talking about here are Microsoft 365 subscriptions where you download the office suite from Microsoft. Right. Cuz you're paying subscriber and you get Right. The classic desktop apps. And I, I actually do have a commercial account. I have a, a, you know, a personal account. Obviously. I typically just use the personal account there. I don't have any great reason for that. Cause I think it's just cuz I sign, most PCs come with office. So I sign in and what that means to me is I have to go download the teams client manually. That's what, that's my experience. So there it is in my brain. Get the
Leo Laporte (01:40:11):
Latest updates as soon as they're available.
Paul Thurrott (01:40:13):
Oh, there it is. But you can click on a learn more
Leo Laporte (01:40:15):
And you can, everything's starting up so I can learn more here.
Paul Thurrott (01:40:19):
You can learn more. Thank
Leo Laporte (01:40:20):
Goodness. Okay. Yeah. You should have told me before I installed it.
Paul Thurrott (01:40:24):
I <laugh> listen. I, yep, a hundred percent. You
Leo Laporte (01:40:27):
Did your best. You did your best more.
Paul Thurrott (01:40:30):
Well, I, but the point here is that this update will eventually be mandatory. So you're gonna get this whether you want it or not, so, yeah. I mean, give us two weeks. Yeah. <laugh>. So anyway so I, I, I looked into this and what I found, I was, I, I actually asked Mary Jo about this. I was a little confused mm-hmm. <Affirmative> in March, 2019. So not like a month ago, and not a year ago, but four years ago, years ago ago. If you download the office desktop suite, suite from your workplace's Microsoft 365 account, it actually does install teams. Right. And it adds teams to existing setups that had done this previously before they were requiring this. I I'm assuming a lot of that's running out. I mean, we mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, it's probably all new stuff. So the, the reason Microsoft has this potential eu, or actually not eu, is it eu?
(01:41:21):
Yeah. No. Is eu I thought it was uk but EU issue is that Slack back when it was a standalone company filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft with the EU in July, 2020. So Right. Every year after this policy and a year before they got acquired Yep. By Salesforce. Yeah. Right. And, and man, the, the, the original complaint is fascinating. I remember <laugh> reading this at the time and thinking, this is really inflammatory. Yeah. It's, it's, it's very interesting. So micro, this is some of the language they use. Microsoft has illegally tied its teams product into its marketed market dominant office productivity, suite force installing it for millions, blocking its removal and hiding the true cost to enterprise customers. So I thought we gotta let's break that down. Okay. First of all, market dominant office productivity suite is a slightly outdated term. I I don't know that a lot of people are buying office on a Best Buy shelf installing it with a disc.
(01:42:20):
And that's how they acquire things. Like, I, I, I, that to me, when I hear that you're describing some kind of an old way of doing things, they are force installing it. It, so in the same way that they're force installing OneNote, you know, when you install office, if you acquire it through a Microsoft 365 commercial subscription. So Yes. Okay. Blocking its removal though. That was an interesting one. So I brought that up at the beginning of the show. I looked into this, and as it turns out, if you install teams this way, and you then go and uninstall teams, it'll come back. And that's because, and this is the tip you have to also uninstall something called the teams machine, machine wide installer. And Yes. That's the name of it. If you don't do that, that's the thing that keeps reinstalling teams.
(01:43:08):
So you have to uninstall two things, then, whatever, but, right. And then what was the third bit? Hiding the true cost to enterprise customers hiding the true cost. That's fascinating. Because that suggests that they are expressing the cost of this thing to their customers in some other way. Right? In other words, you thought you were getting this thing for free as part of this other thing you're paying for, but actually we're charging you for it over here. Right. I don't think that the enterprise customers give a buy any, you know, anything about the true cost of anything. What they care about is what they're paying for. Yeah. And I think one of the most fascinating things about Microsoft 365, we talked about this, is this notion of when you pay for this thing, you get a bunch of stuff that you don't even know is there.
(01:43:52):
And by force installing teams, <laugh>, they're putting it in front of you. You know, the businesses that are giving you Microsoft 365 as a user are paying for this thing, and they probably want you to use it, you know, for one thing. I Yep. They're more importantly, they don't wanna spend money on something else. Yeah, that's right. When they already own a product, and we could de debate whether better or worse. Yep. Already there was a I don't know if I can find this quickly, but there was a really interesting quote that relates to this from Satcha Nadela. Yeah. during the conference call last night about the earnings, this is what he said he wa by the way, no one asked about this. The, he just said this about some, actually, he said it, someone asked a question about, it seems like Office is a really big user base.
(01:44:36):
How do you keep growing this business? Amy Hood answered it, had a very long thing to say. And then he said this, fundamentally what we're focused on is making sure that the customers were able to derive the value of our offerings, whether it's the Microsoft 365 suite value, which is significant, whether it's E three or E five, which are the higher end tiers of Microsoft 365 mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, we wanna make sure that they're getting deployed, that they're getting used, and that's obviously gonna lead to our share gains in many cases. So, in other words, he directly tied the notion of customers understanding all of the stuff that they get that they're paying for already. And that the more they use that stuff, the more their share of this market is going to gain, which is exactly what Slack does not want. Right. Right. So, okay.
(01:45:21):
Does Slack, I guess the question here is, does Slack have some kind of a case? Is there a, a case to be made that Microsoft has a, a monopoly that they are abusing that monopoly to harm a competitor in this case? And there's a lot of other crazy language, like Microsoft wants a hundred percent of the money, you know, that kind of stuff. Right. Now, would it be similar to the case Netscape hat against Internet Explorer? I'm glad you said that. That's exactly what I compared it to <laugh>. So Yes, it would be, and what you find is that the same thing happened. The question is whether there's something illegal happening. So from a technical standpoint, yes. Microsoft saw DOJ did say there was something illegal in this case. Well, but, but, but, but we have to look at the technical aspect here, right?
(01:46:09):
So we also we also have to, well, we have to determine if Office has a monopoly, right? I mean, so, but, but just from a, what they did technically, so to speak, is they had this dominant product, windows or Office, they saw a competitor, Netscape slash Slack, and they said, we gotta respond to that competitor. How do you wanna do it? Let's offer to buy 'em first bundle. Well, first they offered to buy 'em. They tried, they tried to buy first. They were gonna, yep, they did. Okay, that's not gonna work. All right. So let's just you know, bill Gates in this case said, Hey guys, we already have everything. We need to beat Slack. Let's just build our own thing. And they made teams when Teams shipped initially. Yeah. It was kind of a Slack clone. Right. It was, it chat-based instant messaging.
(01:46:47):
Right. It was basically the same thing. Microsoft then did to Teams. What they did to ie. They turned it into a platform and they made a better product. Yeah. By the time, ie. Beat Netscape, it wasn't because it was bundled with Windows, it was because it was a better product. No, that's absolutely true. I was there. I people forget that part of it. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And Teams today better, you know, it's a, it's, it's a much more complete product. It does more things. It's a complete platform. Yeah. And like I said, during the earnings call bit, it's also a complete ecosystem, right? Yeah. Are there small businesses or individuals that, companies that want to use Slack? Yeah, maybe. I mean, we use Slack. We still use Slack. Okay. There's also a stickiness. Once you, I mean, we, and we pay for office, but what, there's a stickiness.
(01:47:29):
Yeah. We gotta use both. Yeah. Because once you've got, that's invested into a platform. Thank you. That cuts exactly to my point, which is does Microsoft bundling of teams, well, one of my points foreclose slack or any other competitor from Key competing in this market, and you just made the case that no, it does not <laugh>. Right. you feel, you find value in paying for and using Slack. And so you do. Right Now, not everyone can make that decision. I think a lot of companies would look at this and say, guys, we're paying for this thing. We're gonna use it. That would be a problem if the thing you were paying for and using was less, was less good or whatever mm-hmm. <Affirmative> was not as good. Right. But I think most of these companies and Microsoft, like Microsoft's really big in the Fortune 500. They're probably not as big in the smaller businesses or whatever, but would tell you that this product is in fact better. Yeah.
Rich Campbell (01:48:17):
Other question is, are they going after the market? Like, is there a Slack
Paul Thurrott (01:48:20):
Importer? Yeah. Yeah. And
Rich Campbell (01:48:23):
I don't think there is,
Paul Thurrott (01:48:24):
But what do you think about the, this notion of off what some version of office, whatever you wanna call it, office, the Suite office, you know, Microsoft 365. Does this thing have a monopoly in the same way that Microsoft did with Windows in 1995 to 2005 or
Rich Campbell (01:48:38):
Whatever? No, because Google Docs is almost equally as big one. One would argue they were bigger for a time there and now, right. M 365 is doing very well,
Paul Thurrott (01:48:48):
But yeah, I would say so.
Rich Campbell (01:48:49):
There are other products in the market,
Paul Thurrott (01:48:51):
But yeah,
Rich Campbell (01:48:52):
Google doesn't offer a quote collaboration
Paul Thurrott (01:48:54):
Tool. The thing that was unique about Windows at that time was that it was the only way you could access anything related to personal computing for the most part. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, there was a Mac that was doing poorly. Yeah. And there was no mobile. Right. There were no smart TVs or smart devices. There was no, there was no nothing else. So Windows was personal computing. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> I, I, I could make a case of Microsoft 365 Office, whatever you wanna call it, is the best productivity solution. But the truth is, we live in an age where we're using Notion. Yeah. You know, I, I pay for Microsoft, but we're not
Rich Campbell (01:49:28):
Happy the solution. We do
Paul Thurrott (01:49:29):
Go to all, and I I use Notion there are lots of free and low cost solutions that meet certain needs. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, I talk a lot about markdown editors and note takers and things like that. I use, I use Visual Studio Code to write Yep. In Markdown, which is crazy. It's a Microsoft product, but I don't, my office doesn't have the same dominant
Rich Campbell (01:49:50):
No force. And they're also not doing the same things. Like if you go back to the original antitrust, even before the IE one, right. Microsoft originally sold basically made a deal with PC manufacturers. Is the only way you get to buy Windows is that you tell us how many PCs you sell, and we give you a rate. You know, you are basically paying for every pc no matter what. If you put another OS on it, you're still paying us. And then they said, if you don't put Office on, then Windows is this much more. Right. Or you can also include Office. Like, and that was pretty anti-competitive for a market dominant product already. And, and, and then the IE thing came in, which let's face it, the IE thing only happened because Gates slipped off the Senate, the, the, the Senate committee. Yeah, sure. Right. Like I guarantee you Zuckerberg and everybody else watches those videos from August of Oh
Paul Thurrott (01:50:40):
My God. It's like a business case study. Yeah, exactly.
Rich Campbell (01:50:43):
Don't ever do
Paul Thurrott (01:50:43):
This, but the, right, I mean, yeah, a hundred percent. We, you were talking earlier about things Intel does, right? I mean, one of the Intel got sued for antitrust in the eu 10, 12 years ago, whatever it was. And because of what happened to Microsoft, they just settled immediately. They're like, we're not going through this. No, we're gonna pay the fine. And by the way, the fine actually got rescinded years later. They appealed the fine part of it, but they Right. Changed their business practices to accommodate the eu. Which actually is the another important point here. What is it that Slack wants here? Like what's the, what's the goal and what's the precedent? One of the things that the EU did to Microsoft as part of the antitrust case there. Yeah. They had a b a browser ballot windows.
(01:51:26):
So the idea was you bring up Windows and they say, Hey, look, here are five browsers. Which one do you want to use? Is there a world in which there's a, a ballot for chat-based, whatever? And I would sort of make the argument that because Slack doesn't do everything Teams does, there's nothing else that could sit next to Microsoft Teams. Yeah. It would have to be a, a rolly run suite of things like Borland used to do, where they would te they teamed up with some other company to bring all the products in that would make it sort of like Microsoft Office, because no one company offered all of that stuff.
Rich Campbell (01:51:56):
No. And, and, and Teams is more than you even realize. I mean, if, if you create a group inside of teams that matches up with a group name inside a SharePoint, it's an interface over SharePoint. Like literally, you have access to the same docs. You can write through it. Yeah. There's so many things that they've deeply embedded into teams now that you, you, good luck. It's got serious advantages.
Paul Thurrott (01:52:20):
Right? A hundred percent. And the problem for Slack ultimately is it kind of doesn't matter what happens here. Imagine, yeah. Microsoft decoupled these things whenever that means Teams has 300 million users now, guys. Yeah, it is. As I've, I've, I've, it's just come up a couple times. It's a platform and it is an ecosystem. <Laugh>.
Rich Campbell (01:52:38):
Right. And they've already, and they, and they're talking about doing it again. It's like, what do you mean exactly? Like, what, what
Paul Thurrott (01:52:43):
Does that mean? Well, yeah, the language confusing. I that might be partially because the person who wrote it doesn't understand how office is deployed to businesses or whatever. I, I, I can't explain that part of it,
Rich Campbell (01:52:52):
But, well, the other thing is, it's not like Slacks going outta business. They're owned by Salesforce. They're not a little company struggling for survival anymore. They got sold for, what, $28 billion. Thank you.
Paul Thurrott (01:53:03):
Actually, all,
Rich Campbell (01:53:03):
All our leaders have done just fine.
Paul Thurrott (01:53:05):
You just, you, I forgot, I didn't even put this in article. I forgot about this. The other parallel between Netscape and this is that during Microsoft's antitrust trial in the United States, Netscape got acquired by a O l. Right. Really undercutting the case. If your situation was so dire, why were you such a valuable asset for this other company? Right. so same thing with Slack. I, I don't know that the EU would be swayed by that. They seem to be really into the little guys. But although Salesforce not a little guy I, and, and,
Rich Campbell (01:53:36):
And neither was Slack. 28 billion.
Paul Thurrott (01:53:38):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Actually, I think that was the biggest problem with Microsoft acquiring Slack was the amount of money. Yeah. I think, you know, if they, if it had been half that, I think Microsoft would've paid it just to make 'em go away.
Leo Laporte (01:53:51):
Why don't companies consider, there's so many, if it's just messaging you want, and I think Microsoft understands that's a commodity feature. There's so many other free choices. That's right. Out there. I don't under do companies really need the other features that Teams offers? Is that why I don't
Paul Thurrott (01:54:10):
Need is, you know, I, I, I think the issue really, honestly, it's, it's the Microsoft double-edged sword. The, the, the strength of teams in many ways, generally speaking, is the integration. Right. Richard was just saying it's really just a front end to SharePoint, which is correct. You know, this is another way for people who work in an organization or aren't a team, or working on a project, whatever it is, to collaborate on a, whatever. It's a set of documents, a presentation or whatever. And that, where that thing is, we're kind of hiding that from the user because they, they're just looking in the files tab and teams. They don't really care where it's stored up in SharePoint, who would, we don't
Rich Campbell (01:54:47):
Worry about file hierarchies anymore. Yeah. It just happens. Teams does that for you.
Paul Thurrott (01:54:52):
Yeah. I mean, in the old days, we would round robin these things like we're docs and stuff outlook via email, and that's stupid. Yeah. this is a way to have a live document sitting up in a file share somewhere. Again, SharePoint, but people don't know or care.
Rich Campbell (01:55:06):
And, and even when you do email that document to someone, exchange online sees that it came from SharePoint, flips it to a link, and then you are actually working on the original version with version
Paul Thurrott (01:55:17):
Control and all that good stuff. By the way, the integration continues, cuz loop's coming down. The Pi, the Pike and Loop will be away
Rich Campbell (01:55:22):
Doing even more
Paul Thurrott (01:55:22):
To do more of that live editing inside the document or create new types of documents and blah, blah, blah. On and on it goes. I mean, Microsoft is just taking this thing and run with it. And Slack is like, Hey, we're still doing chat-based you know, good for you. I <laugh>, you know, people find value in that and that's great. But I don't know that these things are direct competitors anymore. I, I've,
Rich Campbell (01:55:45):
They've moved away from that. And, and the, all of the voice integration stuff, the, the video stuff, like, they've done a lot. Right. It's, it's a mom would argue it's too many things, but
Leo Laporte (01:55:55):
Certain Slack. Slack too. I mean, Slack's trying to, by clarity.
Paul Thurrott (01:55:59):
So you, you guys, you said you use Slack, right? For example. Yeah. So there's nothing about Microsoft Office that makes it difficult or impossible for you folks to share document formats through Slack. Right. <laugh>, there's nothing, it's not like the, like Microsoft is engineered office to make that a worse
Leo Laporte (01:56:17):
Oh, yeah, yeah. Experience.
Paul Thurrott (01:56:18):
Yeah. You know, there's nothing like that that doesn't
Leo Laporte (01:56:20):
Exist. You're looking for the smoking gun. Yeah. Yeah. That, and I think Richard's right. There's a reason Microsoft never made a Slack importer. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:56:27):
They're, they're
Leo Laporte (01:56:28):
Very carefully, you know, negotiating, navigating around
Rich Campbell (01:56:31):
That. And they, they realized they needed that product space. They decided to try and buy before build. They weren't able to buy. So they built,
Leo Laporte (01:56:38):
Yeah. I don't know why. You know, I, all I could say is the stickiness of it. You have a lot of history in Slack. And because, you know, all, all of our conversation history is there. There's, I tried, you know, before Slack, by the way, we were using God, now I've forgotten cuz it got acquired.
Paul Thurrott (01:57:00):
Oh, that was the, it's, right. So there were other chat-based collaboration
Leo Laporte (01:57:03):
Solutions. Yeah. What, what were
Paul Thurrott (01:57:04):
When was called something like Hu
Leo Laporte (01:57:05):
Or Hip Atlassian owned it. Hipchat.
Paul Thurrott (01:57:08):
Hipchat,
Leo Laporte (01:57:09):
Maybe. Yeah, I think that was it. Anyway, so we were using that. People asked,
Paul Thurrott (01:57:12):
Well
Leo Laporte (01:57:12):
Fortunately when Atlassian sold it or whatever, or got acquired, I
Paul Thurrott (01:57:16):
Think they sold it to Slack,
Leo Laporte (01:57:18):
<Laugh>. Yeah. There was a tool to import. So it was Slack. We were able to move. But
Rich Campbell (01:57:23):
I, yeah, no, you're right.
Leo Laporte (01:57:24):
I've, I've tried over and over again to get Lisa, cuz that stuff's decision maker to get her to move to Matrix or something free, right? No. Although for a long time we had the free tier only of Slack, and we got, we hit a limit. And without telling her, I just started paying. That's how they get
Paul Thurrott (01:57:45):
You <laugh>. I just,
Leo Laporte (01:57:47):
How they get you. She just probably doesn't even know it's not free anymore. But yeah. I mean, you need, I think,
Paul Thurrott (01:57:53):
How much does, how much does Slack cost for you?
Leo Laporte (01:57:55):
A few hundred bucks a month? I think, I don't, I don't remember. Oh, for the whole, it's probably for the whole user
Paul Thurrott (01:57:59):
Whole
Leo Laporte (01:58:00):
For us. I think it's a few hundred bucks a month, but and it's not cause it's like 50 users or something at most. I don't know. I think there are other, I would love to use Teams. I think there are other things. There is a stigma against using teams. Sure. You look I mean, we're a tech company, right? So Slack was hip and with it and the smart thing to do as a tech company, you're with all your other Yeah. But, you know,
Paul Thurrott (01:58:23):
So here's the problem with that. You're right. But what that thing is changes all the time.
Leo Laporte (01:58:29):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Oh, I know. It's not that way anymore.
Paul Thurrott (01:58:31):
That's the problem. Yeah. That's
Leo Laporte (01:58:31):
The problem. Pretty soon it'll look like we're old hat
Paul Thurrott (01:58:34):
<Laugh>. Well well, I mean, in other words, the hot hip solution that is whatever to do this. It's not,
Leo Laporte (01:58:39):
It'll never be teams. I'm sorry, but I hate to tell you
Paul Thurrott (01:58:42):
This. No, no, no. I'm not saying Microsoft
Leo Laporte (01:58:43):
Wolves never be cool.
Paul Thurrott (01:58:45):
But the thing that will always be there and work and just be there is teams. Right. Like in other, you know. Yeah, no, you're right. And, and they are, they, they, I don't have it yet, but they've ele you know, apparently improved the client dramatically in this new version. So. Well,
Rich Campbell (01:58:58):
Yeah. If you're in the Microsoft ecosystem, then you have teams. If you're not in the WI Microsoft E system, getting into it for teams is not any fun. Sure. And Oh,
Leo Laporte (01:59:10):
That's interesting. I don't think we have Microsoft for everybody. Most people we're still using Google Docs. You know what's interesting? Google Doc does not have a competitor in this space. Right.
Paul Thurrott (01:59:19):
Which is weird,
Leo Laporte (01:59:20):
Right? They completely fumbled it.
Paul Thurrott (01:59:22):
They used to does he still, the guy who used to run Microsoft 365 went to run Google Docs, but I feel like he might have left.
Leo Laporte (01:59:31):
It's so inept. Google. I'm, I've never seen a couple. It's
Paul Thurrott (01:59:34):
Weird to me that they've,
Leo Laporte (01:59:35):
Since Xerox like this, I mean, it's just ridiculous. They had Hangouts and then they kind of split it into chat and meet.
Rich Campbell (01:59:44):
Yeah. Right. And Google made a mess of that. I, you know, I, I pay for a Zoom account for any, for all the folks as we
Leo Laporte (01:59:50):
Do. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (01:59:51):
Yeah. My wife actually pays for one for her work too.
Leo Laporte (01:59:53):
Yeah. We're happy with Zoom. Does Zoom do all that stuff? Could we use Zoom? No, no, no. Nobody
Paul Thurrott (01:59:58):
Uses Zoom for chat. <Laugh> do they? Right? I mean, I don't think
Rich Campbell (02:00:01):
So. No. Zoom is for video conversations for
Leo Laporte (02:00:04):
Recording. Well, Microsoft learned that lesson with Skype. Right. They thought everybody used Skype for chat. Well,
Rich Campbell (02:00:09):
Well, and people use Skype for a long, you know, I just real, I use Skype for a long time to make shows. And then eventually people are saying, oh, Skype. Yeah. I think I have that. Yeah. We, oh wait, it's updating.
Leo Laporte (02:00:18):
You've changed Zoom as we did. And actually Zoom has given us a much better result.
Paul Thurrott (02:00:22):
Well, Richard, so Richard, I, I, I don't speak for you, but you obviously have everything <laugh>, right? Yes. You can meet people where they are
Rich Campbell (02:00:28):
And,
Paul Thurrott (02:00:28):
And, but most people understand Zoom.
Leo Laporte (02:00:30):
I love it. Cuz I'll look at Lisa's computer at home and every one of these installs a men, she's on a Mac menu bar item. So she's got like blue jeans. What is this thing? Blue Jeans. What is that? It's, she's got like every, like, her menu bar is full of all, because as she's doing sales, she has to meet with whatever the client wants to meet with
Rich Campbell (02:00:48):
Wherever they are.
Leo Laporte (02:00:49):
Yeah. Yeah. We use meat internally. Google meet. Yep. I don't, occasionally we'll have to do a teams meeting.
Paul Thurrott (02:00:57):
I think when I do,
Leo Laporte (02:00:58):
Last time I used teams, when I tell the premiere I was quitting. So <laugh>, we used
Paul Thurrott (02:01:02):
Meat for hands on windows. Actually.
Leo Laporte (02:01:04):
You, you? Yes. What? Right?
Paul Thurrott (02:01:08):
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. No, no. Wait, do
Leo Laporte (02:01:10):
We? No, we use Zoom. I promise you.
Paul Thurrott (02:01:12):
Oh, it is a Zoom. Maybe it's not.
Leo Laporte (02:01:12):
Okay. I'm sorry. Yeah. But if you met with us, it would be me. Hmm.
Paul Thurrott (02:01:17):
I feel like it's me. Oh, no, I guess you're right. I'm sorry. No,
Leo Laporte (02:01:19):
Sorry, sorry, sorry. Yep. Yep. Sorry. And if they are, I'm gonna go spank 'em.
Paul Thurrott (02:01:22):
Nope, no, no. <Laugh>. Sorry. Sorry. I'm getting confused.
Rich Campbell (02:01:25):
No spanking required. We
Leo Laporte (02:01:28):
Zoom and Zoom has really worked with us, by the way, in a way that Skype kind of tried to, but really Sure. Never did well and have Zoom and Skype was
Paul Thurrott (02:01:36):
Always like, sometime in the future, we're gonna have this thing for professional broadcast. Just give us six more
Leo Laporte (02:01:41):
Months. We had Skype vx, we bought a big box. We had all this stuff.
Rich Campbell (02:01:44):
Ndi, I, yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:01:46):
And Zoom. But it, that's, I mean, we get great quality outta Zoom. It's, I'm so, well
Rich Campbell (02:01:50):
They, they, they went to ndi. I, at the end of their life, right. There was a huge battle inside of Microsoft for all the different voice products. Yeah. They had ucs and others. And then, and then it was over. Right. They're trying to, now it's basically consolidated around teams. But and Zoom grabbed onto that and ran with it and good for them. Yeah. Zoom's
Leo Laporte (02:02:08):
Done a good job. Yeah. So as teams, the dominant, I guess it is, if we 300 million million that monthly active users, it's gotta be the dominant messaging platform. Yeah. In business business messaging. Is that what it is? Is it business messaging?
Paul Thurrott (02:02:20):
Zoom is, Zoom's gotta be in there.
Leo Laporte (02:02:22):
But not, but they don't do messaging.
Paul Thurrott (02:02:24):
Well, you can, I mean, you can chat <laugh>,
Leo Laporte (02:02:27):
Right? I mean Yeah. But you can, but you have to start a, a Zoom meeting with somebody to chat with them. I don't know. Yeah. I don't even know. Right. Right, right, right.
Paul Thurrott (02:02:33):
Yeah. Okay. Yep. Yeah. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:02:35):
True. I don't, I don't know.
Paul Thurrott (02:02:38):
Yeah, no, you're right. You're right. <Laugh>, I guess it must be right? Certainly in the Fortune 500. It is.
Leo Laporte (02:02:44):
I think so. And yeah. I'm trying to think what the competitor would be. It's not WhatsApp, it's not Discord, it's not Matrix, it's
Paul Thurrott (02:02:52):
Not whatever nonsense Amazon has that no one even even knows they have.
Leo Laporte (02:02:55):
That's the funnies funniest thing. Amazon has all these compelling, I think fairly compelling offerings that no one knows, knows,
Paul Thurrott (02:03:00):
Knows exist. Yep. Exactly. <Laugh>. It's weird that Google, well, Google has, like you said,
Leo Laporte (02:03:05):
Me, Amazon doesn't believe in advertising. And yeah. Well that's, I just like to mention to all of our advertisers, you see, you see <laugh>. Yeah. That's why you advertise. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> makes a difference. People don't know, you know, don't, won't hear about Yeah. El you know, who else doesn't believe in advertising? Elon Musk. Yeah. But he's got a way to do it, which is to offend everybody and get them to talk about
Paul Thurrott (02:03:26):
It. Who was the worst explosion last week? Spacex or Twitter? <Laugh>.
Leo Laporte (02:03:32):
Oh, ow. I'm, I'm sorry
Rich Campbell (02:03:35):
Folks. I'm sorry. The, the crater under Starship is actually larger, but not by much. Yeah,
Paul Thurrott (02:03:40):
Right,
Leo Laporte (02:03:41):
Right. Oh boy. Yeah. I don't know. I think teams really is the incumbent at this point. Yeah.
Rich Campbell (02:03:49):
Yeah. And all the more reason to attack them.
Leo Laporte (02:03:52):
Sure. And you'd think Salesforce owning Slack would help build that up. But I don't think Slack's going anywhere. Nobody's adopting Slack. I
Paul Thurrott (02:04:00):
Don't So either. That's the weird thing. I I, and when they bought them, you have to sort of think, what's the point? Right. What are they gonna do with this thing? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and I, the point to me should have been to build this thing out and make it more competitive. And I feel like they've just kind of sat on it. I know they just released some new feature this week, actually, canvas or something. But I don't, I just don't feel like it's go, you know, compared to teams, te teams is teams has just exploded with functionality. Pardon?
Leo Laporte (02:04:29):
<Laugh>. Three explosion metaphors in the,
Paul Thurrott (02:04:32):
The good kind of explosion
Leo Laporte (02:04:33):
Graph. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (02:04:34):
Not the Elon kind. <Laugh>.
Leo Laporte (02:04:36):
Kimberly might complain at this point. Anything more to say about this before you get to the Xbox segment? Cuz we're all waiting with baited breath.
Paul Thurrott (02:04:48):
Well, the, the Xbox stuff, all the good stuff's gone, you know, but yes, we can next day
Leo Laporte (02:04:53):
On the good stuff's gone. A
Paul Thurrott (02:04:56):
I mean, I could rant for more time for sure. No, no,
Leo Laporte (02:04:59):
No, no need. Let's launch, let's launch something of our own Xbox News.
Paul Thurrott (02:05:06):
Yeah. So there's a couple small additional items other than the wor the big one. <Laugh>. Right. Microsoft released the gig eighth world update for Microsoft Flight Simulator, cross PC and Xbox. This one is for Oceana. Ooh. And Antarctica.
Leo Laporte (02:05:21):
Ooh,
Paul Thurrott (02:05:21):
Fun. So more detailed.
Rich Campbell (02:05:23):
Is that, is that eighth or 13th?
Paul Thurrott (02:05:26):
Oh, you're right. It's 13th <laugh>. Yeah. Thank you for the That's awesome.
Leo Laporte (02:05:30):
It's World Update X's a
Paul Thurrott (02:05:31):
Roman. No, it's a Roman numeral. So I, it's
Leo Laporte (02:05:34):
V
Paul Thurrott (02:05:35):
Oh God. That's great. I am an American <laugh>. So more, more detailed imagery for Polynesia. Mesia Mesia, that's where you get melanoma, I guess. And the GLA gala, Galapagos Island, as well as key regions of Antarctica gonna fly over the gala. Antarctica, that just stove, but the key regions.
Rich Campbell (02:05:53):
Yeah. Key region. And just the ones with Starbucks in them.
Paul Thurrott (02:05:55):
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Rich Campbell (02:05:57):
If you, if you really want to find out how much disc space you have on a computer, <laugh> this Lights app. Yeah. This is the one
Paul Thurrott (02:06:05):
That's right.
Rich Campbell (02:06:05):
It's stunning. How much should they
Leo Laporte (02:06:07):
Have? They must have the whole world now, right? I mean, is there anything left?
Paul Thurrott (02:06:10):
Well, they're adding, so they, they have the, the world, but they're adding these, the the point of these world updates is to add even more detailed imagery Yeah. For key areas. So if you think of like, you know this is an obvious example. Well, the, well the one I flew around was in Egypt. Obviously the pyramids are all very detailed in the city and the river. And every, you know, they want to the places you would wanna fly because it's beautiful mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and make a point of making it as realistic as possible. So Yeah. It's fun. Yeah, it's fun. They're they're beautiful. They're really beautiful. Yeah. this one is a strangely appealing story to me. So, me
Leo Laporte (02:06:41):
Too. Me too. I know what you mean. This
Paul Thurrott (02:06:43):
Is, yeah, it's kind of hard to explain. It sounds obvious at first, but it's actually kind of hard to explain. So, Atari has acquired over 100 classic games from companies named Accolade Info, info Grahams and Micro Pros.
Leo Laporte (02:06:57):
I think it's Info Games 1980s. It's not Info Grahams.
Paul Thurrott (02:07:00):
No, it's Grahams. Is
Leo Laporte (02:07:00):
It really?
Paul Thurrott (02:07:01):
Yeah. I've always been confused by that. It's Grahams. Oh, <laugh>. So, huh. These games are all from the 1980s and 1990s. I know. It doesn't make any sense. I
Rich Campbell (02:07:09):
Thought all these games are owned by Steam already
Paul Thurrott (02:07:12):
<Laugh>, so I'm
Rich Campbell (02:07:12):
Kinda stunned.
Paul Thurrott (02:07:13):
Yeah. So here's the thing. So at Atari, the company Atari is not the Atari from 1970s. Right. It's a d you know, the name, the brand is kind of moved along and whatever, but that's true. These other companies too. So like Accolade is a ga a company formed of former Atari 2,600 programmers, right. Who were making games. There were a couple of ga, there were a couple of companies like this, like Accolade and Magic, right? These were, the reason these companies were formed was because Atari would never give credit to the people who made their games. Right. And they were like, we wanna put our names on these things. Right? So the first of those was Activision. Activision. Eventually they, Activision exists today. Microsoft's trying to buy 'em. Right. Completely different company. But Activision used to be like the guys who made like pitfall and, you know, games like that.
(02:08:00):
So two of the co-founders of Activision eventually left that company and made Accolade. Accolade made some of my favorite games from the 1980s across Combiner 64 and the Amiga. And those guys started Accolade. ALAC Accolade was later renamed to Info Grahams and <laugh> eventually was also renamed to G T I T GT Interactive. That company, if you're like, I've heard of this company, it's because they were the guys that pardoned with ID on the retail releases of Doom Two and Quake. Hmm. So if you bought this thing in a box, it would've said G T I or GT Interactive on the outside. That company was acquired from Info Grahams in 1999. Have fun following this story. Anyway, the point is, I, we don't know the full list of games and the, and the, the, the short list they provided. I've only heard of a couple of these, but the key one to me is Hardball, which is a, an amazing baseball game.
(02:08:53):
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> demolition Racer, which is a franchise. And then the Micro Pros games 1942 Pacific Air War, F one 17 A and F 14 Air Combat. That's some good stuff. These are classic, classic mm-hmm. <Affirmative> games. Nice. So I had some friends who worked on the hardball series. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. That's great. I love it. I played hardball. I, I bet across at least, at least three different platforms over the years, over many years ago. But yeah. So anyway, that's happening. That's cool. So Atari's trying to reinvent themselves, obviously, I think embracing their, their classicness, <laugh>, if you will, is the right way to go. Obviously they've had trouble trying to ship this new console, which probably was a huge mistake, whatever. And then finally and semi-related I guess propping up the notion that the Steam deck has done pretty well.
(02:09:43):
Is it Asus? I, it's Asus, right? Yeah. Asus is launching something called the Rogue Ally. Oh, that's Republic of Games. That's their Rog. There you go. Rog is their, alright. Right. That makes it, makes sense. This is a Steam deck. It looks like Steam Deck and it runs Windows 11. It's gonna be powered by a new series of Verizon processes from a md So continuing their custom processor trend like they do for, they've done for Xbox, et cetera. 16 gigs of Ram 512 gigs of P C I E, gen four s s D storage, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So the question here is gonna be price. What's the price? It sounds like maybe a little bit better than the Steam deck, to be honest. Well, it would, yeah. I mean, it's newer, right? So Yeah. 10 80 P 128. He 120 Hertz refresh rate, free sync. Nice.
Leo Laporte (02:10:36):
Nice.
Paul Thurrott (02:10:38):
How much, but how much would you, how much, what would you weigh to get into this 600?
Leo Laporte (02:10:42):
I'd pay $600. Yeah. Which is basically, I'm with the Steam deck costs.
Paul Thurrott (02:10:46):
Yeah. I'm worried it's gonna be more like 900 bucks.
Leo Laporte (02:10:48):
Yes. See, I don't know. I don't think so. Yeah. But
Rich Campbell (02:10:50):
But either way, how do you compete with Steam Deck? You're too late to the market. You don't have the game roster that they Yeah, that's true. Like, good
Leo Laporte (02:10:57):
Luck since you put Steam on it. It's Windows 11. I was gonna
Paul Thurrott (02:10:59):
Say, can you put, I mean, I assume you could put Steam on it, but Yeah. Think Steam
Leo Laporte (02:11:02):
Deck's a Linux box, which is interesting. They chose to go with Windows
Paul Thurrott (02:11:06):
For this, this one's Windows 11. So Yeah, there was, while you were away, Leo, there was a rumor, and I, I chased this one down. It's not as exciting as it sounds, but supposedly at one point Microsoft was looking at a, I'm gonna call it a game mode for Windows, windows 10 slash 11. And the idea was, you know, in the same way that if you have, you have a tablet and you detach the keyboard, it goes into kind of a tablet mode, which is a little muted on Windows 11. The idea is you would stall stock Windows 11 on this thing and it would go into a game mode cuz it detects the kind of computer it is. Mm-Hmm. And the interface could be something simple with just a list of games. It could be the Xbox app, you know, that kind of thing. Yeah. everyone got really excited about the the imagery that came out of this, but it was all made by a Mac using intern that didn't even work at Microsoft. So
Leo Laporte (02:11:52):
<Laugh> of course it was,
Paul Thurrott (02:11:54):
Don't get too excited about that, but yeah. But, you know, whatever, who's since moved on. But anyway interesting stuff. So this kind of machine, I, I do think there's, I think portable gaming is big. I, I, and I think this kind of thing is, could be big and, you know, steam Becker obviously has done very well. Has
Leo Laporte (02:12:09):
It, is that
Paul Thurrott (02:12:11):
Obvious? Okay. <laugh>, I feel like it's established. Okay. I will give it the same credit I give to the Surface Pro. It has established a, a form factor.
Leo Laporte (02:12:19):
It's a, it's a form factor. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (02:12:20):
And yeah. And people are starting to copy it. So Yeah. I mean, I, I think a lot of people look at the Nintendo it's the switch. This is what they're really, and they think, and they're like, I like the idea of this thing, but I would like this to be a PlayStation, or I would like to be Yeah. To play. Yeah. I think that's the, that's the deal there.
Rich Campbell (02:12:38):
In general, you're cramming PC games into a smaller form factor and not all games play.
Leo Laporte (02:12:42):
It was unsuccessful. I
Paul Thurrott (02:12:43):
Like that you called me unpopular, by the way. I, I, I read, like, I'll read an article. I just, the other day I read an article like I'm gonna make something up. Like manchego is a popular Linux distribution. And I stop right there and I go, is it,
Leo Laporte (02:12:55):
Is it, how do, how do we, it's defining, but how
Paul Thurrott (02:12:59):
Are you defining the popularity of this <laugh> Linux distribution? I have never heard of <laugh>, you know. Yeah, no, I popular
Leo Laporte (02:13:07):
Amongst a certain
Paul Thurrott (02:13:09):
Yeah, popular group. Popular in what way? Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:13:12):
Yeah. I mean, there's no doubt the switch is popular and I would argue that's what they're copying. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And yeah.
Paul Thurrott (02:13:18):
Yeah. But it's, but the, you know, the Steam deck is a more expensive device and a different kind of device. It's not gonna get the battery
Leo Laporte (02:13:25):
Life, obviously. See my, see my problem is, and I played with the Steam deck and I, and I didn't want it. We bought one, but I didn't really want to use it because it's, it's too small a screen. If you've been used to playing PC games on a big screen, it's just not, I don't, mobility's not that you're gonna have to wear binoculars to read anything going on in there. I don't know. The text on that thing is designed for a 27, 30 inch display. Yeah, exactly. Alright, let's take a break. We have tips, we have picks, we have booze, but, and we have half an hour. So that should be, that should be adequate. Should be be exciting. It should be exciting. Our show today brought to you by Collide, collide, we've talked about 'em before. They're device trust solution that ensures, and this is, you know, as we're learning about various breaches, this is probably the one of the most important things to protect yourself against unsecured devices, getting into your network using your apps.
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So what kaly does is say, Hey, let's update that browser so you'll be compliant. So you log in and the end user remediates the problem. This is how you get your fleet to a hundred percent compliance without overwhelming your IT team. Plus now you got the user on your side. They understand what's going on, why it's important, and they're thinking, they're thinking, they're saying, oh yeah, I wanna make sure everything's up to date and secure without collide. I-Team teams really don't have a way to solve these compliance issues. And, and <laugh>, this is the problem. Or stop insecure devices from logging in. With Collide, you can set and enforce compliance across your entire fleet. Oh yes. Collide is completely across platform, Mac, windows, and Linux. So your entire fleet collide is unique. It makes device compliance part of the authentication process. So the users logging in there, using Okta, doing everything right, then collide will alert them if there are compliance issues and say, stop, you've gotta fix this.
(02:17:21):
It prevents 'em from logging in. It's security you could feel good about. Because Collide puts transparency and respect for users at the center of their product. Users will appreciate it and will become part of the team to sum it up, collide method means fewer support tickets, less frustration for your users. Most importantly, a hundred percent fleet compliance. Visit collide.com/ww and learn more. You could book a demo, K o l i d e collide.com/ww. Thank you collide for supporting us. We really love Collide and thank you Windows dozers and winners for using that address. Cuz I want them to know you saw it here. That helps us. Collide.Com/Ww. Get that demo today. All right, back in the book. That means it's time to start off things with a tip from Paul Thurrott.
Paul Thurrott (02:18:18):
Hey, by the way this just end Amazon is shutting down their halo branded health and fitness products and services. What? Huh? Yeah,
Leo Laporte (02:18:27):
I have a halo. Nevermind. Yeah,
Paul Thurrott (02:18:30):
Here you go. Okay. Sorry.
Leo Laporte (02:18:33):
That was the, that was the bracelet that you would wear that didn't have an interface.
Paul Thurrott (02:18:36):
Well, they eventually ship one that did have a screen too, but yeah, it started out
Leo Laporte (02:18:39):
And you had to pay a monthly fee for, which is why probably nobody wanted it.
Paul Thurrott (02:18:43):
Yeah. What no one really wanted was to use your camera to take a picture of your fat ugly body so you can upload it to Amazon.
Leo Laporte (02:18:49):
That was a different one. I have that too. That was the fashion one. <Laugh>. Oh, it's awful. Also discontinued.
Paul Thurrott (02:18:55):
Yep. But
Leo Laporte (02:18:56):
There are, but Amazon now has every picture of my fat, ugly body so that there's
Paul Thurrott (02:19:00):
That. Yeah, no, me too. We're both there together. Yay. So, okay.
Leo Laporte (02:19:03):
Oh, that's right. Halo did do that at the beginning, didn't it? Yep. To, to measure your fitness,
Paul Thurrott (02:19:10):
I think BMI and
Leo Laporte (02:19:10):
To mock you frankly. Yeah, that's
Paul Thurrott (02:19:12):
Exactly, yeah. Like, like No, we wanted you to take a picture of you not an elephant. What's that? Thanks.
Leo Laporte (02:19:18):
What's
Paul Thurrott (02:19:19):
That? Can't be you. Do you have a photo? I forgot
Leo Laporte (02:19:22):
Picture. That's right. It's
Paul Thurrott (02:19:24):
Not good. It was not good. It was a little,
Leo Laporte (02:19:25):
It was a little, little warm. You and I the things we do for our craft.
Paul Thurrott (02:19:29):
I know. The other thing, by the way, in your detection, I had to turn that thing off. Oh, oh
Leo Laporte (02:19:33):
Yeah. I bet <laugh> it did. It said you were yelling at 3:00 AM Was there anything, anything
Paul Thurrott (02:19:39):
About really upset about something? Yeah. yeah, I'm at work.
Leo Laporte (02:19:43):
I remember Stacey Higginbotham. I think she sent me her halo because she refused to pose naked in front of it, which is completely understandable. I, however, and apparently Paul
Paul Thurrott (02:19:54):
Yeah, I know. I, to test it fully, you had to, you know, I gotta do it. Sure. It's our job. Yep.
Leo Laporte (02:20:01):
Oh, well. All right. There's an update. Want that little bit more
Paul Thurrott (02:20:03):
Halo awkwardness outta the way. Speaking of
Leo Laporte (02:20:06):
Both, so,
Paul Thurrott (02:20:07):
Yep. So yeah, people coming at this from Linux or well, Linux <laugh>, I guess I have the Mac too I suppose are probably familiar with the notion of package managers. This is a little less common in the Microsoft space. We have them, of course, chocolatey and so forth, chocolatey. But it's not a, you know, it's not, it's, it, it's never been a built-in function of Windows until fairly recently. Right? So we actually have something called the Windows Package Manager, which is a command line tool called Winget, which is by the way, freaking awesome. And I'm probably gonna have more tips about this cuz I've been writing about this for the book. You can use it for lots and lots of different things. But wanna stick to one use case for today. And that is this notion of bulk installing apps on a computer.
(02:20:48):
So, for example, you bring up a computer for the first time, which granted is something I do a lot, but other people do sometimes, of course. You maybe you bought a new computer or you use PC Reset or reset your PC and reset it. So Nate thing comes up clean desktop, you gotta get going, right? So there's a bunch of things you have to do. You have to configure some settings in the system. You have to install a bunch of applications. I ha in my case, I sync a certain portion of OneDrive, right? So that, that's on all the computers I use. And, you know, some of this is time consuming and one of the more Conti, time consuming bits is that installing of apps. So you can use Winget among other things to install and keep apps up to date, right?
(02:21:29):
The interesting thing is, because it's a command line, you can create a script that will do this thing in bulk, right? That's probably beyond the, not the type of thing most people do sit there and go to the, you know, figure out the exact command lines. However, there are graphical tools, including one that was written by Majek Hassan who used to write for thro com. If you go to Win, it's called Windall. And Windall is a, I'm sorry, windall.app is the url. Go there in a web browser and what you do is search for the apps that you want to install. So I search for all the apps I install in every single pc. It created a script which I can then run on a computer. So I think bring the thing up, run terminal, paste the script in, run the thing, command lines, installs, everything. Dun dun dun done. And it's nice because it's all automated. It's all automated. Unintended un unintended, unattended installs by default. You can change that if you want. Obviously you still have to go and you know, sign into the apps and do all that kind of stuff. But it really, this actually speeds up the process pretty dramatically. So it's kind of a neat use for this thing. So that's one thing I'm gonna, I'm gonna talk about Winget more in the future.
Leo Laporte (02:22:40):
I will give Richard a plug for this cuz episode 7 93 of Run as Radio had an interview with Sarah Lean, right?
Paul Thurrott (02:22:49):
Yep. Mm-hmm. <Affirmative>
Leo Laporte (02:22:49):
The product manager for
Paul Thurrott (02:22:51):
Not to be confused with Sarah Lane,
Leo Laporte (02:22:53):
Not Sarah Lane, Sarah Lean
Paul Thurrott (02:22:55):
<Laugh>, but yeah. Well you
Leo Laporte (02:22:57):
Couldn't be more lean than Sarah Lane, so I, I'm confused.
Paul Thurrott (02:23:00):
No, Sarah Lane looks pretty lean anyway, the point is <laugh>, that's what I'm saying. Okay. Yeah.
Leo Laporte (02:23:05):
<Laugh>.
Paul Thurrott (02:23:07):
Yeah, so Winget, so this is gonna be a chapter in the book. I have to figure out if I'm gonna put this in the app section of the fan line section, but that's a problem for a different day anyway. I've been writing it. It's, I'm, I'm fascinated by Winget is really, really a neat tool. And then the app update the app update. The app pick may surprise you a little bit. It will not surprise you to know that I used the Microsoft Authenticator app to handle second factor authentication requests on my phone, right? I assume Richard, you do too. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. It's a good one. You know, it's good. So it works well. However Google, which has been kind of behind a bit on this type of functionality, just released an update to Google Authenticator that adds a feature that the Microsoft Authenticator app does not have. And for people like me who move between different devices, this is actually super useful. What it does is it syncs all of your second factor codes, all of the accounts you have configured in the app to the cloud so that when you, when you use this app on a different device, that's, it didn't
Leo Laporte (02:24:07):
Used to do that. This is new.
Paul Thurrott (02:24:09):
No, right? No, you had to set, so think about how the process of like like how this works, right? So you have an iPhone in my case maybe, and you're like, okay, I need to go to my Microsoft account, my Microsoft 365 account bid, you know, whatever the things. I have all, all all those accounts and you kind of laboriously one at a time, put 'em all in and then you're like, all right, I'm gonna switch to the like an Android phone now, you know, I'm gonna use that instead. You have to do that like all over again, you know? Yeah. And
Leo Laporte (02:24:35):
Something you and I do a lot.
Paul Thurrott (02:24:38):
Yeah. It's kind of a problem. So what the Microsoft Authenticator app has, which is useful, is the ability to back up those things to the cloud. So you can, you can back up your accounts, I guess I'm gonna call it. But you can't seamlessly kind of switched between different devices. You, you know, if you add an account on one machine is still just on that machine, you can back it up and, you know, then you can restore it. But it's, it's not just like the seamless account based thing. So I haven't, I I haven't gotten this Google account Google Authenticator app update yet, but I'm intrigued by this. And to me, like I, this is one of those things that sounds, it's like, wait, this doesn't do this. Like, it seems like something it should just do
Leo Laporte (02:25:20):
Every authentication should at least do that.
Paul Thurrott (02:25:23):
Well, I, I, there probably, I mean, I, there are security concerns here, I guess. Yeah,
Leo Laporte (02:25:28):
Well cuz you're giving somebody else those keys, and by the way, they're saying in the discord that it's not end-to-end encrypted. Yeah. There that's not a good thing if it's not. Yeah.
Paul Thurrott (02:25:37):
Yeah. Okay. So yeah. But the point of this, okay, so that I, again, I'm, I'm not, this just, they just announced this. So
Leo Laporte (02:25:44):
We'll research this. We will
Paul Thurrott (02:25:45):
Research this. Yeah. This is, this is very interesting. This is something that's the way I play, I the base, the way I basically described this is I use Microsoft Authenticator. I'm definitely gonna take a look at this. I'm curious about this and I'd really like to see Microsoft do this as well. Yeah, because, you know, a lot of people do use Google for, you know, password management. They're signing into automatically in apps and on the web, right? On devices like, you know, Android phones and so forth. They work with all the Fido stuff. They, you know, they do all that stuff. So this is like one of those, depending on your, you know, where you have your things, right? I, I use the Microsoft stuff, but this is a, this seems like a good idea to me. Yeah. And this has been one of my issues.
(02:26:25):
I like to move between devices. Like I move, I use a lot of different computers. That's one thing. But one of the challenges to switching between phones is T-Mobile actually, but one of the other ones is this thing, this the, because the, you don't wanna lose. You don't wanna be out in the world <laugh> and have to authenticate in a banking app or you know, PayPal or whatever it is. And then you look at your phone, you're like, oh, it's on the other phone. You know? Yeah. Like, you want it, you want, you want that stuff to be with you. So it's, anyway, it's just something to know about. It's an interesting idea. And if that's not Windows enough for you guys, you know, first of all, screw you. But secondly rufuss the U sb Make a Windows install, you know key windows. Yeah. U U Ussb key us
Rich Campbell (02:27:13):
Bootable U SB
Paul Thurrott (02:27:13):
Key Yep. Is just upgraded to version four, by the way. Bunch of fixes in there. They dropped support, I think for Windows that been, or was that Yeah, I think it's the first one. Yeah, I think it's, so they dropped support for Windows seven, but this, there is a new version of that. I haven't written that one up yet, but you can look at that as, as well.
Rich Campbell (02:27:33):
It's outta support.
Leo Laporte (02:27:35):
Richard Campbell host. Yes, sir. Host of the fabulous Renez Radio and Don Net Rocks. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, you got something coming up on Renez, you wanna
Rich Campbell (02:27:43):
Talk published today. This is the show, one of the shows I did in Wales. Remember? We yeah. Stream from there. And this was a panel discussion I did with several of the speakers from the Sequel Bits conference talking about building data analytics teams. It was this sort of recognition that you just can't hire people in that this space these days. There's, there's so much demand. If you hang, you can fake the word data scientists into your resume somehow. You, you're buried in work. And so rounded up some folks that are serious in the space. Then Donald had a lot of experience just for fun. We had one of them remote, they were in New Zealand, so Anama came, came in from New Zealand. Eck and Maria were, were all together in the room. And just walk through this idea of how you would grow out a team, the different roles that need to be filled, and you know, what kind of upskilling can be done, what services are, are needed, and how you can really start taking advantage of the data your organization has.
Leo Laporte (02:28:39):
And now it's Suntory time. <Laugh> <laugh>.
Rich Campbell (02:28:45):
Yeah. I don't know if we're gonna get, actually have through this by the top of the hour, but let's try. You got
Leo Laporte (02:28:50):
14 minutes, dude.
Rich Campbell (02:28:52):
Oh, good luck. I know.
Leo Laporte (02:28:53):
Yama Yamazaki. I think everybody knows that as being Yeah.
Rich Campbell (02:28:56):
Kind of the astic let Japanese whiskey, let's start at the beginning. Yeah. The original Japanese alcohol is Japanese rice, wine sake. Yeah. Goes back thousands of years made from rice. They polish the rice to take the bra off. They brew it like, sort of like beer, but not really, because they use a fungus after Gillis or Azai. Now sounds bad, but that's also how they make miso, how they make, oh, okay. Soy sauce, like this is an edible fungus. It's in the air that releases, it releases amylase into the, in to convert the rice starches into maltose and glucose. Mm. And I remember all booze making is take a starch, make it into sugar fermented into alcohol happiness. Right. And typically they, they, the sake process is kind of unified. It's a simple, straightforward process that comes out about 18% alcohol. They typically lower it to 15%, although they occasionally do distill it to make another product called [inaudible]. Mm-Hmm.
Leo Laporte (02:29:52):
Which I have and love.
Rich Campbell (02:29:53):
Yes. Great stuff. And that's a low, you know, it's not a typical spirit either. They're typically 25 to 30% alcohol rather than the 40 plus, which is normal for spirits. So how did Japan get into whiskey? Well, back in the 17th century, they weren't into whiskey. They were a closed up country. They had had their challenges with the Opia war and so forth until a fellow by the name of Matthew Perry, no relation to Chand <laugh>, who was a com, who was a Commodore in the u c Commodore Perry. Oh yes. Yes. Showed up in 1853 with a gunship and said, let's trade right now. And so by the, he brought whiskey with him at the time, Uhhuh, of course he did well to-do, liked it. And so by the 1860s you start to see western style bars opening in Japan. The earliest records I could find was one from 1871.
(02:30:42):
And of course there's translation problems here. So there was a record of importing whiskey from Ireland called Cat Whiskey, which is probably Berks cause it has a cat on the label from that era. And whiskey from Scotland, which they called Dear Whiskey <laugh>, which is probably Dalmore cuz even in the 1870s they had the stag on the bottle. But real, the learning of whiskey making for Japanese starts with a guy named Maka Takai, who in 1918 goes to Scotland. And he was from a family of sake makers, and they paid to send him off to school there. He actually studied at the, at the Glasgow University studying chemistry with a focus on whiskey. He also came to study under Joseph a Nettleton. That's funny cuz that was my minor as well. That's interesting. Yeah. Chinese study with a focus on whiskey. I'm skill studying. Yeah.
(02:31:36):
All the time. And he interned at lawnmower and bonus and and Hazel Burn. And then he married a Scottish lady in 1919, which apparently upset all the families. Her name was Rita. And so in, but she realized that he really wanted to bring whiskey to Japan. So she went to Japan. And her story's actually kind of cool. If you ever get a chance to tour the Nicki Distillery, their house and stuff is still there. She was all in. So in 1920, Taura gets back to Japan. Now he's a guy with big ideas and no money. So he follow him with a fellow by the name of the Shinjiro. Tori and this is this, at this point, this guy's already very successful chemist, which at the time you bought alcohol from a chemist. He had a bunch of other lines of business.
(02:32:25):
And the company was called Sun Tori as a play on Tori San. Oh, how funny. I did not know that. That's great. And he, his original successful alcohol product was actually importing Portuguese wine, which the Japanese market found was too bitter. So he would sweeten it and rebuttle it and called it ADE Wine, which you can still buy today, huh. But in, in 1907, it was 60% of the wine market in Japan. So this guy was doing well. And now he falls it, he gets to know Takasu, they make a deal. And in 1923, they established the very first whiskey distillery in Japan, which is Yamazaki. And it was, and it's still there today. It's between Kyoto and Osaka. That doesn't mean they're able to make whiskey <laugh>. They struggle for many years to try and make a drinkable whiskey. Taur even went back to Scotland at one point to figure out what he was doing wrong.
(02:33:22):
Their first production whiskey comes six years later. It's called Shira Fota which is Japanese for white label. And people generally don't like it. So they are trying to incorporate more Japanese styles and flavors into it. And one of the challenges they have is that they are trying to use local oak, cuz Japan does have an oak tree quris Cria, also known as the water oak or Zaina Oak. Now this, if you ever get a picture of one of these trees, you'll see it's quite twisty. They're not great for making barrels with initially they were using 200 year old plus trees. Although the current cooperage is used hundred year old trees. The, it doesn't grow straight. It's prone to leaking. And they typically grow better in the far north. But otherwise, the barrel making process is more or less the same.
(02:34:13):
They char their insides much the same way, although they typically have to do testing because of the twists in the wood. And so they will assemble a whole barrel, fill it with water, judge how it's leaking, even swap out some staves and refit it. Also, when they initially started aging in Misura Oak, they found it tasted bad, which is, you know, he unfortunately taura is learning from the Scottish method. The Scottish methods showed that every few years you would take a taste and over time the wood flavors would emerge. And what he found with Misera Oak was that it was very strong right away. And it's, the presumption it would keep is just keep getting stronger. Although they later discovered that if you gave it 15 or 20 years, it actually mellowed out and became very tasty to the point where today there are Scottish whiskeys that buy a certain number of Misera barrels for aging.
(02:35:10):
Reg makes long 10 to wait. It's a long time. And you, and again, you, you mix barrels around. But it, it has distinct flavors that are unique to the wood. And so it, it does get around. It's interesting to see that today in a lot of distilleries have been built in much later times. They actually are started making wash backs the big barrels for doing for doing sugar extraction out of Misera Oak. So after 10 years of effort Taura finishes his 10 year contract with Sun Tori, and he leaves. Now Tori's not unhappy to have him go because he's making all this money on red wine. He's trying to spend it all, and he is ending up spending on a whiskey, and they're not getting good results. And Taur had been pretty adamant that they really needed to be in better turrah, like in the right locations that were more like Scotland.
(02:36:04):
And that's in the far north of Japan in Hokkaido. And here they were down in Osaka, which is not a good location for it. As, as far as Taser was concerned. You know, Tori wasn't too worried about that. So in 1934, taser establishes a <inaudible> distillery in Hakaido and and starts making more whiskey. So now that you've, you've got competitors, you've got some Tori, and you've got Nicki, you know, they had small funding, so they're trying to make whiskey Sun. Tori gets their first hit in 1937. So now we're coming into World War ii, and they make up blended whiskey. They just call Sun Tori Whiskey. But it looks very much like your sort of traditional blended whiskey. It's popular with the soldiers. Demand grows as the war end. The Americans like it as they've gone to control of Japan at the end of the war.
(02:36:53):
So Tori grows massively diversifies. They make all kinds of product. In fact, today only a third of their products are alcohol related. They make a lot of canned beverages and, and other things. So post World War II whiskey's hip for the sixties and seventies, and then it fades as the economic crisis that would eventually grab Japan. In the late eighties, early nineties, expensive drinks become less popular. Cheap drinks become more popular. And so the Japanese market for whiskey kind of declines. So Tori responds to that by starting to make competition grade whiskeys. And this is the one you've heard of, which is the Yamazaki 12 year old yamazaki. This was a totally traditional whiskey. They did everything Lou way. The Scotts did pure barley pot stilled, barrel-aged. They used a blend of urban and, and, and Sherry Cass as well as the, the Japanese Oak.
(02:37:50):
If you can find a bottle of this stuff today, which is tough, you're talking three, $400 for a 12 year old. I mean, it's good, but it ain't that good. I should also point out that the Nick, a distillery, the sort of rival distillery from the two original partners of the 30 splitting up, they won awards even before that one. I mean, Yamazaki was a gold medal. But then Nick a's Yoshi, which is the location of the distillery w won the award in 2001. So interesting that when Yamazaki hits their, gets their hidden in 2003, that's the same year that Lost in Translation comes out. And that's when you get Make it Sun Tori time as Leo's been happily quoting all along. And and it works, the demand worldwide for Sun Tori Whiskey goes through the roof and Sun Ma effect. Yes, sun Tori Diversifies.
(02:38:48):
Then they make they make a blended whiskey called Hibiki Harmony, which also wins a ton of awards. It's considered one of the best blended whiskey ever. And by the 2010s in 2015. So Tori goes on a buying spree. They buy Jim Beam Bakers, mark Booker's, bakers, basil, Hayden, knob Creek in Scotland. They bought bmo, Laroy, Ardbeg, Glen Acon caution. They own Canadian club and in Ireland Kanamara in Kiba. So they're huge multinational. They own stuff of all the, the place. They, they have to be one of the biggest, they're one of the, we're one of the biggest. They compete with Diagio and of course, again, only a third of their revenue from alcoholic beverages. They make money from a lot of different places. That's incredible. NII has won awards too, their original big award back in 2001. But they won in 2015 with their nii whiskey from the barrel.
(02:39:43):
They started experimenting. Taura loved the coffee still. We talked about this in the distillation, which is the continuous running still. So they still use the stills that he installed in the 1960s to make both their coffee malt and coffee grain. The grain is corn aged in bourbon cast. The malt is made from barley. Although to balance the flavor in it, Nicki had boughten Ben Nevi. We, I mentioned this in an earlier show, and they were putting a little Ben Nevis in it which brought up a bit of a scandal as whiskey was making a return in Japan, this idea that both Santo the biggest was adding Boor to some of their, and calling it Japanese whiskey. And Nick a was adding a bit of Ben Nevis to their so-called Japanese whiskey. And so many other, as those guys had all that success in the early aughts and now into the teens, many other distilleries have opened in Japan to make whiskey.
(02:40:42):
But you always get into this battle of what is whiskey and what does it really mean? So now they're finally, as of 2021, they created a set of rules. It's for the Japan Spirits and Liquors Makers Association. Of course Nicki and Santor directly involved in this. And their rules are the spirit must be fermented distilled in aged inter distillery in Japan. It must contain malted grain, but can contain other grains. It must use water from Japan. It must spend at least three years in wooden casks. It can't be distilled higher than 95%, which is incredibly high. That's vodka levels can't be diluted below 40% for the standard for spirit. It has to be bottled Japan. And if it doesn't follow any if it misses out on any of these rules, not only can it not be called Japanese whiskey, it can't have any Japanese symbology in it.
(02:41:31):
It can't use the flag, it can't use city names, it can't use Japanese graphics. Literally they is sei a a location in Japan? Is that where that comes from? Hibiki means harmony. Oh, that's, so that's why it's a blended way. It's their blended whiskey where they combine all these things to get to a blended flavor. And with the little time we have left, let me reference the whiskey that I've chosen here, which is o Oishi the whiskey sherry cask. Now this is a newer distillery only open in the two thousands, but they are doing, you know, if we talk about what is whiskey, whiskey is fundamentally a grain converted to sugars fermented into alcohol distilled to a certain level and aged in barrels.
(02:42:22):
Oishi is actually made from rice. They used the sake method <laugh>. Wow. But then they distill it up to a high distillation level, and then they age it in first Phil Sherry cast, I guess it doesn't matter what it comes from. Right, exactly. And its alcohol. It scores for the, the whiskey observer scored at 92 out of a hundred. Wow. Wow. Like that. Well, this is only eight year old too. This is not, it's, it's got no age statement on it, which means it's less than eight. Less than eight. Yeah. It's, it's below. Yeah. I gotta find this, this, you can find it's, I chat. You like it, it's, you're delicious recommending it. Yeah, I'm absolutely. And now again, for a no age statement, whiskey $80 is a lot of money to spend on a whiskey. Yeah. That's pricey. Yeah, right. It's, I mean, well, or $70 as long
Paul Thurrott (02:43:13):
As you understand what it, I mean, but as you, it's
Leo Laporte (02:43:15):
A rice whiskey, which is hysterically. Well,
Rich Campbell (02:43:18):
We get all the way back to the Japanese learning how to make whiskey like Scott. So like they Are you making Scottish whiskey in Japan, right? Or is it, is it just the barrel? Cuz you're using potstills from, from Scotland.
Paul Thurrott (02:43:30):
I would argue it is the most Japanese of Japanese whiskey.
Rich Campbell (02:43:33):
That's what I think too. Although with the new rules as of 2021, you can't call this Japanese whiskey. Right,
Leo Laporte (02:43:40):
Right, right. But it does have a Japanese character on it. Rules says distilled in Japan. So they must have changed the rules a little
Rich Campbell (02:43:46):
Bit. Well, no, the packaging rules don't come in full force till next year, the 20.
Leo Laporte (02:43:50):
Oh. So they're gonna have to change it.
Rich Campbell (02:43:51):
They're going to have to change it all. Right. Or they're going to be tweaks of rules or they're gonna add, the only real thing they're not complying with right now is having a little malted grain in it. So instead of, if you just added a certain Oh, just a little do it Okay. To be compliant. Okay. But I would say this is the most Japanese whiskey. Right. It is made with Japanese tactics.
Paul Thurrott (02:44:10):
They should make a case for changing the rules.
Leo Laporte (02:44:12):
Yeah.
Rich Campbell (02:44:13):
I they, well, and of course who's changing, who's fighting for these new
Leo Laporte (02:44:17):
Rules? Sun, Tori time <laugh>.
Rich Campbell (02:44:19):
The the incumbents. Exactly. <laugh> the ones. It's classic
Paul Thurrott (02:44:22):
Antitrust problem.
Leo Laporte (02:44:23):
<Laugh>. Damn.
Paul Thurrott (02:44:26):
Those companies. Oh.
Rich Campbell (02:44:27):
In a Japanese form.
Leo Laporte (02:44:28):
O h i s h i. If you can find it, 80 bucks, thereabouts.
Rich Campbell (02:44:33):
The, it's easier to find Hibiki harmony. And it's about, again, $80 for a blend is out outrageously expensive, but Japanese whiskey tends to be expensive. Yeah. Very tasty. One world's best blended whiskey for many years in a row. Nice. It's a classic sun, Tori. You can't go wrong. I wouldn't bother trying to hunt Don Yamazaki 12. You make yourself crazy.
Leo Laporte (02:44:51):
Somebody gave me a bottle and I think I still have it, so I'm now gonna treat it with the,
Rich Campbell (02:44:55):
It's very special. Deserves.
Paul Thurrott (02:44:57):
Yeah. I think it's time to do an in studio show.
Rich Campbell (02:45:00):
There
Leo Laporte (02:45:00):
You go.
Rich Campbell (02:45:01):
I, you seen, you remember that happened a few years ago.
Leo Laporte (02:45:03):
That's good. Yeah. Quite a few years ago.
Rich Campbell (02:45:06):
And then some, some Avor got in Amanda got involved. Might
Leo Laporte (02:45:09):
Have been There was trouble as well. Yes. There was trouble for sure. And Mary Jo was really the instigator. And since she's not here to defend herself, we're sticking with that story. <Laugh>. That's right. Mr. Richard Campbell run as radio.com.net rocks Rich Campbell on Twitter. Thank you for that enlightening conversation. Every time you do this, it makes me want to drink <laugh>.
Paul Thurrott (02:45:31):
I am gonna drink. I'll just lay it on the table.
Rich Campbell (02:45:34):
Yeah. Last week's show I referenced Woodford Reserve is a very unusual American bourbon. And shortly after that I got a picture from Paul saying, I blame you. <Laugh>. <laugh>. Yeah. And you know,
Leo Laporte (02:45:43):
True, you might not know this, but hotdogs and whiskey, excellent pairing.
Rich Campbell (02:45:48):
Excellent.
Paul Thurrott (02:45:48):
I also, you know, I I, I meant to text Richard a second time to tell you something my wife told me, which was that we tend to, we often will buy like a cheaper, like a Canadian club something, whatever mm-hmm. For cocktails and stuff. But when you put a good whiskey, a bourbon into a cocktail Yeah. It makes a difference.
Rich Campbell (02:46:05):
Yeah. And you tell a difference. For sure. You're an
Paul Thurrott (02:46:07):
Expensive Oh that's
Leo Laporte (02:46:08):
Interesting. Oh no, very much. Don't use cheap whiskeys, in other words. Well, no, no. First of all, use
Paul Thurrott (02:46:13):
Good. You can save a lot of money. Yeah. What you don't do is do a side-by-side taste test because then you'll find yourself spending three times as much. Cause Oh, a good bourbon whiskey
Leo Laporte (02:46:22):
Will, well, especially with an old fashioned or something like that, where whiskey is the predominant,
Rich Campbell (02:46:27):
You'll tell, you can tell the difference between a $20 bottle and a $70 bottle and a cocktail. Really, you
Leo Laporte (02:46:32):
Can use anything
Rich Campbell (02:46:32):
You want. Hundred bottle
Leo Laporte (02:46:34):
Iced tea. But in an old fashioned, maybe you should use good whiskey
Rich Campbell (02:46:37):
A little bit Nicer. Hundred makes sense. <Laugh>. But that's a huge, there's nice, it gets up to appointment. It's like, are you really putting mixer in that $400 bottle of whiskey? Yeah,
Leo Laporte (02:46:44):
Exactly. Whyt, just drink it straight and save the middle. Yeah. There's
Paul Thurrott (02:46:47):
Always a line, you know, but I, but, but a more expensive whiskey bourbon makes a difference. No doubt
Leo Laporte (02:46:53):
About it. Yeah. Nice to
Rich Campbell (02:46:54):
Know. Absolutely. And I, I am an expensive habit. I found in general, my relationship with spouses goes one of two ways. Is either stay away from that guy costs a lot of money.
Paul Thurrott (02:47:02):
Yes. Right. Or we need to him
Rich Campbell (02:47:03):
More. Yeah. Or Yeah. Don't buy anything till you talk to him. Cuz he gets us the good stuff. That's what
Leo Laporte (02:47:08):
Lisa tells. Hes me. Yes. I have a good spouse. Hey, thank you Richard. Richard Paul Thurrott is@Thurrott.com. T H u r r O t t.com. His book the field Guide Windows 11 is@leanpub.com, as is his newest book. Remind me, what, what's a, what is it again? Windows everywhere. Windows everywhere. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But not everywhere. Lean pub.com is actually where it is. It's also
Paul Thurrott (02:47:32):
On Amazon now, by the way. Oh,
Leo Laporte (02:47:33):
Well it is everywhere. All right. Nice. Thank you Paul. Thank you Richard. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11:00 AM Pacific, 2:00 PM Eastern, 1800 utc. I tell you those times because you can, you can watch live at live Twit tv chat, live at IRC twit tv or in the club Twit Discord Club twit. Gotta join it. Just gotta say that. Paul does a great show called Hand on Hands on Windows, which is club only. There's hands on Macintosh. There's all sorts of great stuff in the new home Theater Geek Show with Scott Wilkinson just emerging into the club as well. Twitter tv slash club twit, seven bucks a month ad free versions of all the shows, the Discord and, and great programming. But no whiskey. Sorry. No, that's on, that's all on you. We're not allowed to sell whiskey which is probably a good thing.
(02:48:26):
<Laugh> yet. <Laugh> after the fact, you can get the show at Twitter tv slash ww. When you get to that webpage, you'll also see a link to a YouTube page that's the show dedicated YouTube page. So that's another thing to know about. If you wanna share a clip or you just like watching the video, that's a place you can do that. I would say the best thing to do, be subscribe. We have links to the major podcast players, but it'll work on any podcast player. Just look for Windows Weekly. That way you'll get it automatically the minute it's available. Paul Richard, have a wonderful week.
Rich Campbell (02:48:59):
Thank you. Thank you.
Leo Laporte (02:49:00):
You too. And we'll, we'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. And I have only one thing to say now
Bill Murray (02:49:13):
For relaxing times. Make it some Tory times.
