Windows Weekly 908: Twenty-Six Boxes of Napoli

Summary

Windows Weekly 908: Twenty-Six Boxes of Napoli – Detailed Summary

Release Date: November 20, 2024
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell
Podcast: All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio) – Windows Weekly

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1. Introduction and Welcome Back

The episode opens with Leo Laporte welcoming listeners back to Windows Weekly, introducing Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell. Richard had been absent due to travel and illness, leading to some light-hearted banter among the hosts.

2. Microsoft Ignite and Agentic AI

Timestamp: [00:43 – 09:28]

The primary focus of the episode centers on Microsoft Ignite, an annual conference where Microsoft unveils its latest technologies and strategies. This year's Ignite emphasizes a significant push towards Agentic AI, a term used by Microsoft to describe AI systems capable of acting autonomously on behalf of users.

Key Points:

• Shift in Microsoft's Focus: Paul expresses concern that Windows is no longer the central focus of Microsoft, with more resources being allocated to Azure and AI initiatives. He remarks, "Windows hasn't gone great. It’s been rough." (07:34)

• Agentic AI Defined: Paul explains Agentic AI as AI agents that can perform tasks autonomously, comparing it to services like IFTTT but enhanced by Large Language Models (LLMs). For instance, setting up an AI to monitor and act on exchange rate fluctuations saved his family significant money in Mexico (17:50).

• Security and Trust Concerns: The hosts discuss the implications of Agentic AI on security and trust. Richard humorously notes, "AI is a marketing term designed to leave people of their money." (21:14) while Paul emphasizes the importance of user control, stating, "Copilot is not in your face. You can turn it off." (27:31)

Notable Quote:

Paul Thurrott [03:30]: "They call them Pythonistas."

3. Windows on ARM and Installation Challenges

Timestamp: [79:53 – 88:38]

The conversation shifts to Windows on ARM, focusing on the challenges and recent developments in making Windows compatible with ARM-based devices, such as those powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon processors.

Key Points:

• Driver Integration Issues: Installing Windows on ARM devices poses significant challenges due to the lack of readily available drivers. Paul shares personal experiences of attempting clean installations and encountering non-functional peripherals without proper drivers (84:14).

• Recovery and Installation Tools: Microsoft offers recovery images tailored for ARM devices, which include necessary drivers. However, creating a bootable USB requires additional steps, like adding Windows on ARM (WoA) drivers manually (87:00).

• Future Prospects: Despite current hurdles, Microsoft is making strides in supporting ARM architectures, with upcoming Windows 11 builds aiming to streamline the installation process and enhance compatibility (88:38).

Notable Quote:

Paul Thurrott [84:14]: "It's like a wizard of Oz where it just opens up and what?"

4. Enhanced Security Features in Windows 11

Timestamp: [85:44 – 108:43]

Security remains a paramount concern for Microsoft, and the hosts delve into the new security enhancements announced at Ignite.

Key Points:

• BitLocker and Device Encryption: Microsoft is enabling BitLocker (referred to as Device Encryption) by default on all Windows devices, ensuring full-disk encryption to protect user data (97:00).

• Smart App Control: Introduced as part of Windows Security, Smart App Control leverages AI to monitor and block untrusted applications. Initially in evaluation mode, businesses will have policy-based controls to enforce this feature, enhancing protection against malicious software (103:43).

• Folder-Based Encryption: Windows now offers folder-specific encryption that requires Windows Hello authentication for access, adding an extra layer of security beyond full-disk encryption (104:16).

• User Account Control (UAC) Improvements: Enhancements to UAC aim to streamline administrative privileges, allowing temporary elevation through Windows Hello authentication, reducing the reliance on static administrator accounts (111:04).

Notable Quote:

Paul Thurrott [103:43]: "They're doing the same thing with hot patch – ability to install security patches without requiring a reboot."

5. Xbox and Gaming Developments

Timestamp: [168:21 – 175:45]

The episode transitions to updates and insights related to Xbox and the broader gaming landscape.

Key Points:

• Phil Spencer’s Vision: Phil Spencer, head of Xbox, discusses the future of gaming, emphasizing cross-platform play and the integration of AI to enhance gaming experiences. He hints at developments akin to the Steam Deck, potentially utilizing ARM architectures for efficiency.

• Game Releases: Exciting new titles such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 are highlighted. Paul mentions preloading these games to ensure immediate access upon release, reflecting the advancements in cloud gaming.

• Cross-Platform Streaming: Discussions touch upon the importance of cross-platform compatibility, where games are accessible on consoles, PCs, and even mobile devices through streaming services. This approach aims to expand the gaming audience and enhance accessibility.

Notable Quote:

Paul Thurrott [172:17]: "It's a way of meeting you where you are, right? Your game."

6. Reflections on AI and Automation

Timestamp: [17:50 – 35:04]

A substantial portion of the discussion revolves around the implications of AI-driven automation within Microsoft’s ecosystem and its societal impacts.

Key Points:

• Trust and Control: The hosts debate the balance between leveraging AI for efficiency and maintaining user trust. Paul expresses concerns about AI making autonomous decisions, potentially overriding human control (25:12).

• Real-World Applications: Examples such as automating mundane tasks in Microsoft 365 through Copilot illustrate both the benefits of increased productivity and the risks associated with AI-driven oversight.

• Ethical Considerations: The conversation touches on ethical dilemmas posed by AI, referencing HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey to highlight the potential for AI to act logically yet harmfully from a human perspective (29:19).

Notable Quote:

Leo Laporte [36:00]: "Give it the nuclear codes, don't give it weapons, don't give it things that have agency in the real world. And that's exactly what we're doing."

7. Closing Remarks and Community Engagement

Timestamp: [208:14 – End]

As the episode nears its conclusion, the hosts briefly address community aspects, upcoming shows, and promotional segments. They encourage listeners to join the Club Twit community for exclusive content and to support the podcast.

Key Points:

• Club Twit Membership: Listeners are invited to become Club Twit members to gain access to ad-free shows, exclusive content, and participate in community events.

• Upcoming Content: Teasers are provided for future episodes, including discussions on Windows security innovations, game releases, and technology trends.

• Final Thoughts: The hosts reiterate the importance of staying informed about Windows developments and the evolving landscape of AI and gaming.

Notable Quote:

Leo Laporte: "What do you think is selling Chrome though? I mean I don't even know how you sell Chrome. It's an open source project."

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Conclusion

In Windows Weekly 908: Twenty-Six Boxes of Napoli, the hosts engage in a comprehensive discussion covering Microsoft's strategic shift towards AI and cloud services, the challenges and advancements of running Windows on ARM architectures, and significant security enhancements in Windows 11. Additionally, the episode delves into the future of gaming with Xbox's cross-platform initiatives and the integration of AI to revolutionize the gaming experience. Throughout the conversation, the hosts balance technical insights with personal anecdotes, providing listeners with both informative content and entertaining dialogue.

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Note: Timestamp references correspond to the transcript provided and serve to highlight the context of quoted sections.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Theratz here. Richard Campbell's here. You know where they're not. Microsoft Ignite. We get the explanations. And what's going on at Ignite? It looks like AI is a big push. What a surprise. They call it agentic AI. We'll also talk about a big Xbox segment coming up. Some great new games coming to Xbox Game Pass and a couple of really old games coming back from the dead. It's all next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell. Episode 908, recorded November 20, 2024. 26 boxes of N time for Windows Weekly, the show. We talk about everything. Microsoft and the entire crew is back and it couldn't make me happier.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, hello.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hello.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard Campbell. We missed you. Richard was gone for a couple of weeks.

[Paul Thurrott]

Who is this third man?

[Leo Laporte]

First in Tunisia, where there was no Internet and then you didn't. You fell ill in Lithuania. Yes, you, you.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was getting nervous.

[Richard Campbell]

You would not have wanted that show. It was grim.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I bet. Anyway, we're glad you're feeling better.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And you're back in Madeira park, bc.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. In the storm.

[Leo Laporte]

Just in time for the bomb cyclone.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Which it's interesting, even though we are miles apart, we are sharing the same storm.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. I'm on the. I'm on the top edge of it and you're on the bottom edge of it. So there you go.

[Leo Laporte]

And poor Olympia Washington is dabbing the belly button. Taking.

[Richard Campbell]

Taking it hard.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, anyway, welcome back, Richard. We literally did miss you. It was.

[Richard Campbell]

I miss you guys too. It was really weird to not have that midweek conversation.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I was telling Richard before the show began that basically my friends are the show. Other people I do the shows with, that's who I talk to you guys like six hours a day. And that's enough.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

He's got time for friends after that.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't need no one else. And actually, to be honest, I would should include like the club members in the chat room and all that because those are. Even though, in fact, somebody in there, Paul Holder, said, well, I consider you a friend, even though, you know, you probably don't. I said, paul, we've never met, but you are absolutely my friend because he and I are coding buddies. He's like a really hot shot coder and so I ask him all my coding questions. We were talking about that the other day where it's still probably the Case that if you want. If you're looking for a gray beard in, you know, php.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not going to probably be in your community.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, not these days.

[Leo Laporte]

It's going to be online. Paul Thurat is my gray beard when it comes to Delphi.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, I think it was Mark Rozinovich or maybe Scott Hanselman said recently that they had talked to some expert in some coding, like, you know, Python or something. And they said, well, you're a. You're a PI. An expert in whatever this language is. And he said, I used to be, you know. Yeah. And. And that's the thing, you know, life goes on.

[Richard Campbell]

Languages change, too.

[Paul Thurrott]

I used to. I used to dream in vcl, but I. That's a long time ago.

[Leo Laporte]

They call them Pythonistas.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I was.

[Leo Laporte]

I was a Pythonista long when it was 2.0. So I'm. I'm way out of the loop now.

[Richard Campbell]

As long as I got my copilot with me and I can spew out some Python that might.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, nowadays, copilot really is good at Python. Paul thurat [e-mail], richard'[e-mail] and of course they are not. There's somewhere they're not right now, which is ignite.

[Paul Thurrott]

What the hell? Actually, before we get to that, Richard missed two episodes. So what I'd like to do is go through.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, let's go through them all.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. All of the notes and just make sure. Yeah. That we know where he's at. Because I feel like there were a couple of things in there especially. Actually, we may reference a few things you missed. Richard. Sure.

[Richard Campbell]

He know I make Net rocks episodes on Net conf.

[Paul Thurrott]

Stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Announcement stuff in the can. So I'm pretty up to speed.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Oh, no, no, I'm not. I was more interested in. There were specific parts of each of the past two episodes where I was like, man, I really want to talk to Richard about this. Not this guy, you know, But. But no, no, because Richard specifically, I just, you know, with your background and everything, it was. I was super.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, well, we should look back on a couple of those things.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and then I had a whiskey pick the first week, which was a whiskey movie. A movie about whiskey. And then called Whiskey Galore. And then Paul had a lovely cocktail from Mexico City, the Salmancito, which we.

[Paul Thurrott]

Learned was invented by a guy we know there. And he totally underplayed that when he described it to us. We took it as kind of a joke. And then Found out, my wife found out, researching it, that he actually invented the cocktail, which is pretty cool. It's a neat thing then.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard, don't worry, we plugged Net rocks every week.

[Richard Campbell]

We did.

[Leo Laporte]

Your latest episode was featured, so.

[Richard Campbell]

Thank you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no, and I listened to the episode where you were talking about Windows and ARM and it becoming a first class citizen, et cetera, et cetera, and Aria Henson. I was telling Leo and I just had this experience. We were flying home and I was rereading Stephen Snofsky's book and he talks about me in the book. He references me in the book a few times. Right. So you get that weird experience. You're like, huh, you know, so I'm listening to the episode with the windows and arm and you said something about me and how excited I was. Every time I opened the lid of my laptop, it just came on. And I said to Leo, I said, sometimes it's really weird being me or really interesting being me, you know, because I listen to this. Not because of, because I want to. Like, I'm interested in it. Like I, you know, it's not completely coincidental that I know you, but it is, you know, it's an interesting. You've been doing this thing for a long time, so now you're a co host here in the show and that's awesome. I get to see you every week. But like, I would have listened to this regardless, you know, like, it was just, it was.

[Richard Campbell]

Sometimes my stories involve you these days.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, look, I am better or worse.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I understand listening to Richard's show, but why are you rereading Stephen Sinofsky's book? It seems like once through would been enough.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So I have actually reread parts of it possibly a dozen times by this point.

[Leo Laporte]

The part where your name is brought up.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, no, no, no. And I. No part of it is just therapy. I'm trying to get over that part of my life. But also, no, given the way Windows has gone, you know, it might have been a couple of weeks ago, I don't remember. I written this story about reliability in Windows. And actually it will come up today. Actually, we're going to talk about resiliency today, for example. But when you look at the state of Windows today, it hasn't gone great. And it's been rough and yeah, at the time, very critical of Windows 8 and all the stuff they were doing and everything. And I go back and reread and reread and reread, you know, the rationale and I Think to myself, you know, actually there was some adult supervision there that we don't have today and I.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyway, yeah, I just think Windows is in a weird place because it's not the center of the company anymore.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, that's a big part of it. Yeah, for sure.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just a. It's a different. You've got the old timers who don't want to move and the new folks who drew a short.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're not attracting talent there because the people who are aggressively looking to get ahead at Microsoft are going after those parts of the company that are top of mind like cloud and AI and all that. So. Totally, yeah. You get the. Whatever that stuff is at the bottom of the coffee filter. That's the Windows team to do.

[Richard Campbell]

I think you know that the. It was Osterman who left the Windows team, went to Azure and I asked him about that and he said there's a couple of thousand 30 plus year folks still working in the Windows team. Interesting. And they're very hard to deal with because this is his quote. He says unless they have eight wives and a cocaine habit, they don't need the money. So how do you motivate them?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I made the case just, I think it was yesterday actually that there's also two parts to this, to the Windows team. Like it's not really Windows team, but the groups that contribute to Windows, the groups that make Windows what it is. You know, there's that back end stuff. This has been true for a long time. Right. And so Jim Alchin days, that was like the server group, you know, these days it's the Azure group. Those are the adults, these are the David Westin's, the, you know, the people who do the security stuff, the people who do the foundational work, et cetera. And then you get this kind of clown card, doofuses that are throwing out new features all over the place and they're not testing them and they're causing reliability problems. And so, you know, our relationship with Windows can vary widely depending on what part of the company we're talking about. There are very, there's very deep, fundamentally strong security work being done in Windows through things like windows, hello, ess, etc. That is impressive. And then there are stupid icons on taskbars and doofus, you know, uis that like I don't even know what they're.

[Richard Campbell]

Doing anymore boxes and all of that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So those, that's the. It's like a person with a split personality. It's like a. Watching a loved one fall to dementia, but you have to keep dealing with them. And sometimes there's a little burst of something that sounds correct, and most of the time it's, you know, they're calling you by the dog's name or something. So it's, you know, it's. It's a weird relationship. But, yeah, that's. Anyway, this week on Paul's therapy, we're going to look at.

[Leo Laporte]

You have to say you're making friends on the Windows team.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't. Who cares? Do you think I care about those people at all? They don't care about me and they don't care about people using Windows. So what's the difference? This is a different world. I could not care less about those idiots.

[Richard Campbell]

Why aren't you at Ignite? I know why I'm not at Ignite, but why aren't you at Ignite?

[Paul Thurrott]

Because I could be in Mexico for one more week and. No, the big reason was they did not invite. They didn't invite the press until very late in the game and making it very expensive. And as the kind of calendar clicked by, I was like, yeah, I know. So I talked to my wife about it and said, maybe this just doesn't make sense. And then they sent out a little feeler email and said, hey, we're trying to figure out, like, who wants to go and everything, you know, and so I was like, yeah, maybe. And then they invited me and I'm like, yeah, I'm not going. It's just too late. You know, you should have done this in September. I would have booked this. Yeah, I would have booked this a long time ago. Like I did back in the day. It just gets really expensive. You know, I went to build, but they did the same thing. And it wasn't as bad, actually, but they did the same thing and it was expensive. And it didn't have to be that expensive.

[Richard Campbell]

It's unnecessary expense.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So I just made that decision. And then, of course, because I'm me, I flew the day it opened. So, you know, I was. I always try to fly, like, on big Microsoft days, so that's prone to.

[Richard Campbell]

Booking hotels where I suspect they're going to want me early. And this canceling of it doesn't happen.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I thought about this, actually. I could have booked, you know, I could have booked some kind of a flight thing in advance, I guess. But you know what? I.

[Richard Campbell]

You only fight so hard.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I tried.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Well, normally I would be doing podcasts from the event, but they decided they didn't want a podcasting Space. And I'm like, do I want to find another gig or do I want to go home after? You know, this would. I would have flown from Lithuania to Chicago.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was going to say, it's not like you haven't traveled enough.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's not like I've been stuck at home, you know, with nothing to do.

[Leo Laporte]

To what do you ascribe this change in Microsoft's attitude? I mean, why wouldn't they want to have podcasts there?

[Richard Campbell]

I think it's a new leadership team for the Ignite show. There's been shuffling around and they've got a lot of learning to do. It's.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think there was.

[Leo Laporte]

They didn't know this is what you did.

[Paul Thurrott]

They didn't have anything to do for a couple of years. And they all left.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

And now there's a new group coming up, and they just don't know what they're doing effectively.

[Richard Campbell]

Microsoft is relearning how to do events, and so you got to have the conversations over again. So there's plenty of product teams that were reaching out to me, saying, hey, you're going to do the podcast. Right. Can we get this and this? So you're like, I happily forward that all on to them. It's like, if you want me, it takes a few weeks to set this up. Let's figure it out now. They didn't budget for it in advance, so there's only so much they can do. And it ended up being just not practical.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, the irony for me, I'd have to go look at this is that I. And I flew yesterday. Right. So yesterday was a really busy travel day. But if I were to go back and look at what I got done and, you know, I've got Laurent writing news as well is incredible. I mean, we probably published 12, 15 articles yesterday or something. I probably wrote five to seven myself. Two of them were premium articles. Like, it was. It was a good day.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't really need to be there anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, sometimes it's good to be in person, see people. You know, the only way I got.

[Richard Campbell]

Woolsey back on the show was to see him at Build and Go, Dude. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know.

[Richard Campbell]

And email to your blue in the face that there's certain actions you make when you're in person.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. You make eye contact for one second. It's priceless. It's. No, it really is, I think. Well, yeah, I mean, it. Look, it's jail or, you know, superstardom. It could be. It's the spectrum, but it's it can be very good. This is true of everything, you know, in person, meetings. When I was at the company I was at previously, we talked online every week and we got nothing done.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then we would meet in New York for an afternoon and all of a sudden stuff happened, you know, and that's.

[Richard Campbell]

I remember hanging out in a hotel room with you for a day and laying out an entire years of editorial content. You could have batted that back and forth email for a year and.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, we did. We. We did for two years. Yeah. Did nothing. Yep. Nothing happened.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So. Yeah. I mean, it's. Anyway, we're not there. I don't know what to tell you. I mean, I have mixed feelings about it. I've already heard from a couple people who said, hey, you know, where are you?

[Richard Campbell]

I've got a bunch of those.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like I actually wanted to see it.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds like you're a little miffed in Microsoft for not doing right.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, no, I. Well, look, these two, these are two. The two issues I raised are separate. Right. There's the continual second class citizenship of Windows, which is a problem. You know, this is my, the center of my career. So that's, you know. Yeah. As far as a good night goes, it's not, I don't. That one's not personal to me. It's just. Yeah. I wish they had gotten their act together. If they had, I would have. My wife and I would have gone from Mexico to there to home. But you know what? It's busy. We have got. The three big holidays are coming up. My daughter's graduating from college soon. We got to go figure that out. There's gonna be a lot of driving and moving of things and whatever. We're busy. So, I mean, honestly, having a kind of a week of downtime between things is not so horrible. So.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. I mean, and Richard, I mean, I think his year speaks for itself. He can. Look, you know, you don't have to know. All you have to do is watch the show and you know, he's somewhere different. I don't know how he does it. I've said that many times. I mean, you travel a lot. It's.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep, I'd be. And again, I would be there if I, if I was doing the podcast junket thing. I would, I would have a good time and it would have been a very challenging to have done those two weeks abroad right before.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Because you're wrangling a lot of podcasters. You see me play that game. Yes. Oh, yeah. It's enjoyable.

[Leo Laporte]

So does it? You're not saying that it means this is a reflection of the kind of the end of the in person conference.

[Richard Campbell]

No, not at all. This is.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, no.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm relearning how to do in person conferences.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Institution, some way of preserving that institutional knowledge.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not how this came.

[Leo Laporte]

Put it in loop or something?

[Paul Thurrott]

No. The way that build went well enough that I thought, okay, here we go. They got it. You know, they. They waited longer after the pandemic, you know, ended than a lot of companies did. And it got weird after a while, you know, 2020, obviously, understand, 2021 got it. And then 2022, you're like, really? And then 2023, like, oh, come on, guys, are you serious? Like, what's happening here? You know, so they went a long time. Microsoft, these events will go through only a little bit of it. I mean, it's an explosion of information and they. I don't know, they could do a better job of figuring that stuff out, but they're figuring it out. So I think they'll get there. You know, it will come back eventually.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it may not be there, but you're paying attention to it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I sure am. Yep. So there's. There's a lot going on and I think this is something that's going to bleed into next week, maybe literally in this case, and then into the coming year. But, you know, a couple of things just to kind of level set this or whatever. You know, we've been talking for a long time now, a couple of years. We reference about what Microsoft is doing with AI. We reference the Stevie Batiste stuff. You know, Bill, not this past build, but the previous build. He talked about those three apples, east side, inside, outside. And now what we're seeing is something he did talk about. It was a year and a half ago, where he actually referred to inside. Is that the third one? Yeah, the inside ones. Right. As potentially. He said you could think of these things as agents, you know, they will become more intelligent.

[Richard Campbell]

I think it was outside. The third one is outside.

[Paul Thurrott]

They'll go off and do things on your behalf in an autonomous way. Right. And that's literally what Microsoft is announcing or has announced now.

[Richard Campbell]

They're not alone. Like, all of the movers and shakers in this space are all about agentic right now.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. I don't like the word, but we're going to live with it. So, you know, it's kind of got it in there. It's like, what does it mean?

[Leo Laporte]

What does it.

[Paul Thurrott]

It means so just real quick, so just to take a step back, Microsoft has been talking about and allowing developers and IT pros to create things that have been called agents or something like agents for some time. The thing that puts agents over the top in this era is the LLMs that they're going to run against. Right. That you know, they've had all these different ways of doing this, but now thanks to Generative ar just at least we'll say LLM capabilities, they become much more interesting. So the way I and I'm curious maybe Richard will define this slightly differently, but to me all these things are online services that you configure to respond to certain events perhaps and to come back when something happens. So actually Leo, I referenced this last week, but when we were buying our apartment in Mexico City, we were playing that there's a term for this geo arbitrage, I think where we're paying in US dollars but we have to buy it in pesos. There's an exchange rate and that exchange rate goes up and down every day. So my wife went to some service and said alert me when the exchange rate goes over 20. Like 20 to 1. 20.5 to 1 was the one she was looking for. And so every time that happened, she would transfer some amount of money into an account we had that was in pesos and we get a good exchange rate. And by her math, she believes we save somewhere between 5 and $10,000 doing this because she favorably played the exchange rate in the years since the peso has done tremendously well. The dollar's done poorly and the exchange rate changed to 17 to 1. At one point I think it even went into 16 point something to 1. And so we don't care anymore. So we just go on with our lives. So right after the election, my wife all of a sudden got an alert on her phone. She looked down and said hey, the Exchange rate is 20.5 to 1 again. It's the first time she's gotten that thing in three years. She's like, huh, the agent never stopped it. Never. That's. And it's just sitting out there doing this thing. It's like a simpler or an as simple example might be a Google flight alert. Like I would like to I'm going to go on some trip. I don't care when I go, but let me know when this particular flight falls under a certain dollar amount and at that point I will go book it. And so Google will send you an email or whatever, however they alert you. It's that sort of thing, but operating perhaps against an LLM or a set of LLMs. You can imagine in the Microsoft Graph Sense with Microsoft 365 you might be working against some kind of a corporate data set.

[Richard Campbell]

I would also say softer metrics. Like she's looking at a particular exchange rate from a particular source, not across all possible sources. And also she's setting the thresholds herself. She's saying this is the number I care about as opposed to give me the optimal number.

[Leo Laporte]

But this isn't like AI. You do that with if this, then that sure.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but it is AI. I'm being overly simplistic. My examples are pre AI examples.

[Leo Laporte]

Which is still agentic, would you say? Or does agentic imply AI?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, agentic as a branding term is explicitly AI.

[Richard Campbell]

AI is a marketing term designed to leave people of their money.

[Paul Thurrott]

Generally speaking, AI is what you call.

[Richard Campbell]

It when it doesn't work. As soon as it does work it gets a new name, right? It becomes large language models or something.

[Leo Laporte]

We've had forever since the von Neumann architecture, which is a deterministic code where you say periodically poll this data source. If this number goes up, do that. That's not AI, that's a step by step deterministic program.

[Paul Thurrott]

Maybe I poisoned the poll by being.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I'm just saying. But, but it is important because I do think AI does something different. It's a little more non deterministic. We can't, we're not really sure what it's doing. We know how it's doing it, but we don't know exactly what's going on in its little coding brain. It's not as simple as that. So when Microsoft says agentic, presumably they're talking not about deterministic programming.

[Paul Thurrott]

I do compare it though to the if then, then that type thing because I think for. But for a different reason because conceptually I think people can hit like my wife's thing with the exchange rate or Google Play thing. It's very simple. It's a simple concept. A non technical normal person could be like, yeah, no, I completely understand why I would want to do this. The if then, then that stuff can get complex. Like it can get into an area where a lot of people might look at that and say, yeah, I can see the value in this power automate.

[Leo Laporte]

Now you're coding though, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

But yeah, now we're talking about something that's a little complex and it's outside of my. And it's possible that some of this agentic stuff may fall into that category by which I mean, Microsoft will provide some simple examples of things that work, you know, that you could look at and say, yeah, okay, no, that makes sense. I like this. But then there are going to be these more complex things you can build using their tools. They have tools for non programmers like Copilot Studio and then they have the Visual Studio type stuff that is for developers.

[Richard Campbell]

AI Studio.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, AI Studio, yeah. That gets, you know, that can get complicated. Right. So I don't know, I feel like I always reference Stephen Petich. Right. I mean, he's my guiding light here in so many ways. But I always think in terms of things like orchestration. Right. This is something I talk about again and again when he talked about this type of thing. And again, this, I think was a year and a half ago. I don't think this was this past year, I think it was 18 months ago. Ish. He was talking about, remember he used the term a copilot of co pilots.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Which is some kind of nirvana thing, I guess, for like, you know, AI and the Microsoft graph and all that kind of stuff. But the idea is that AI is going to be the orchestrator and what it's orchestrating are these other, these online services that are up in the cloud and then apps that you use as the user. And it's doing this, you have to give it permission and all that. I know people, privacy, people are going to freak out when you start talking about this stuff. But you give it permission, just like you might have given Cortana or whatever permission because it's your personal assistant. It has to know about your schedule and has to have access to your data. The stuff that Cortana might have done was pretty straightforward. Hey, you have a meeting. The stuff that AI might do, potentially, right. If this, if they pull this off, it's going to be a little more complex, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You know, the big thing if you talk about the automation side would have been that it would have done the exchange for you. Right. That it might have even fired off the email to negotiate a rage, like, yeah, yeah, you know, you start to get into more sophisticated options there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, therein lies the question. If I have a bot of some kind that says, you know, normally just say, give me an alert if an airfare is good price, as opposed to, hey, I need to travel somewhere in this range to these locations, buy them. When you find the breast rate, just do it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean, there's an element of trust there that's. I think it's a bridge too far For a lot of people, for sure. But in my little world, I see a lot of pushback from people who don't want Copilot specifically, whatever that might be. Copilot. And that confuses me, not because I think it's so useful and why wouldn't you want it? But because Copilot is not in your face. Copilot is a thing that you can turn off. Well, unless you hit the stupid key all the time like I do, then it's in your face. But okay, but forget, you know, forget about that. Or you use Microsoft Word or Excel or PowerPoint or whatever it might be, or Outlook, right? You can use Copilot to improve your writing, to help you create a spreadsheet or whatever it might be, but you don't have to, right? The thing about the agenda stuff is that depending on your organization, in this case, because right now we're speaking specifically to commercial customers, but this will come to consumers too, is that this may be working on your company's behalf and it's just going to happen. There's an unavoidability aspect to agents that I think will alarm those people who already were alarmed by Copilot to a whole new degree. And I am not a conspiracy theory. Whatever. I certainly have my pet peeves and all that kind of stuff. But like I said, I look at Copilot and I think, well, whatever. It's good, bad and different, but I don't have to use it if I don't want it. I do worry that the agentic capabilities. Richard, what was that? They came up with a service that would rate you as an employee's usage of internal resources and whether or not you were spending enough time in meetings.

[Richard Campbell]

Viva learn.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, Viva learn. Right. So that kind of. That's an agentic capability, right? In a way.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and it's. There's a whole area, especially in the email marketing side of things, or in marketing in general, called in Prescriptive Analytics. Before LLMs became hip, we were already doing this and the prescriptive analytics was looking at variations on tickle emails. So you've been to the site, maybe you throw some stuff in the cart, you haven't bought anything. When's the right time for me to send you an email to sort of prompt you to come back? What's the language in it? So we'd write a bunch of variations. The tool would look at the response rate and tune itself.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's cool. There you go. Yeah, yeah, it's cool, but it's also scary.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, it's Super.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

We're immediately in the uncanny valley of software.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. It's algorithmic. It's the same thing Tick Tock does. You know, it's just observing behavior and adjusting for that behavior.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And that's where you.

[Paul Thurrott]

But that's what the Terminator does too. You know, like.

[Richard Campbell]

And then it shoots you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Then it kills you. It keeps going until it finally kills you. That's that. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Now, I mean getting away from the marketing side of things, I watched a prescriptive analytic models for deciding when to service steam turbines.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, see that's good stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

Then it was based useful when the way you know, when's the part going to wear out, the thing's actually going to fail versus when's the maximum utilization. Like it was all these balancing act. There was also a prescriptive model for when to evacuate ahead of wildfires, knowing that evacuations cause injuries and death themselves. So if do you evacuate earlier when it's less urgent even though you're incurring more costs to decrease arm or do you evacuate later? And so a lot of these models just analyze all the data together on it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean what you. I'm sorry, you know, it's again, I just said I'm not conspiracy theory guy, blah blah, blah, whatever. But I always, I mean like grew up reading Asimov, you know, the rules of robotics, et cetera, et cetera.

[Richard Campbell]

Which by the way science fiction.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, I understand, but that you went. But you. And this is what colors all of our views of this stuff. But it also I think will be pertinent in a moment or something like HAL9000 in 2001 where it gets these two conflicting commands and then suddenly it's better for the mission if it has to kill one of the astronauts to get to the next.

[Richard Campbell]

To be clear, it had decided to kill all of the astronauts was the best way to get a successful outcome to the mission.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, there you go. So in the human view, HAL went insane. But in its view, or in the view completely rational. It was just logical.

[Richard Campbell]

If you make a whole universe into paperclips, it's like this was the mission.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. No. So in other words, in the.

[Leo Laporte]

Has ever made a mistake?

[Paul Thurrott]

Something like the example you gave where we're looking at like we want to. We can't prevent forest fires, but we want to make sure that we get out in front of these things as.

[Richard Campbell]

Quickly as possible, minimize harm.

[Paul Thurrott]

We launch the planes, minimize harm, et cetera. The first thing they're going to do is eliminate you, the human Being from this process. Because you're the problem, you're the slowness, you're the.

[Richard Campbell]

If you burned all the houses down in advance, you don't have to evacuate it out.

[Leo Laporte]

So. But I mean, that's okay. These are all nightmare scenarios of poorly designed.

[Paul Thurrott]

But not all use Windows every day. Of course they're nightmare scenarios of poorly designed software. That's the point. This is the company making the software. I mean. Yes, let's be clear.

[Richard Campbell]

They're making tools so that you can make these.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, of course.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

They're not going to make the paper clips. They're going to let you make the paper clips.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So look, again, I don't want to come off as kind of a nut job about this, but so many times I see people in our industry kind of overreacting, overreacting, overreacting. And I look at this stuff and I'm like, I think I'm going to overreact. Like, it's a little.

[Leo Laporte]

This is what people do, talk about AI safety and where some people were worried about AI. I think that's not unreasonable. And really it comes down to who do you trust to create this and who do you trust? Okay, not Microsoft. Do you trust OpenAI? Do you trust Anthropic? Do you trust Meta? Who do you trust?

[Richard Campbell]

You get that Microsoft's punting on this. They're not creating it, they're just giving you the tools that you can create it.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but they trust, trust you.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're telling me that you wouldn't use Bing Forest Fighter Service to do what you just described? Like, I. Look, I think every one of those companies you mentioned is chaotically evil. So it's kind of hard to like, who do I trust?

[Leo Laporte]

A new fundamental question is Big Tech, do we trust it and should it be trusted? And what they really should seem to be doing is becoming more and more rapacious and more and more jitified, and then maybe you don't want to trust them with your AI.

[Richard Campbell]

I think most of these tech companies are fairly panicked at the prospect of not winning this current race.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's true.

[Richard Campbell]

And so.

[Leo Laporte]

And so they're throwing protections out the window.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

As fast as they can.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, so, you know, one of the things Microsoft talked about a lot this week. I'm not going to get this term right, but maybe I am going to get it right. Let's see if I can find it. The human intervention that. Yeah, they call it Human in the Loop. So there's an approval.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a military term.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Of course it is, because that's where this is headed. That's my point. It's going to be literally terminated robot. But again, it's hard to imagine that this process doesn't eventually determine that the human in the loop is the problem. So we have these things that are being automated that we're. Possibly jobs that people did. Okay, we're eliminating those jobs. I think we all understand that. So now we get this one guy in a lab coat or whatever, in some kind of a tower, you know, saying yay or nay to these things, making sure that the logic is sound or whatever. But, I mean, isn't he the problem now? You know, like, it's like literally the Terminator plot, you know, it's going to.

[Richard Campbell]

Be spread across a lot of people, all trying to make those decisions.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is, I mean, honestly the fundamental question of our time, I think.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Well, I mean, look, it's logical that a service that would act on your behalf is the. Is a next step beyond. We have this capability where you can bring up a prompt or whatever interface and say, I would like this thing. You know, make me this thing, or help me with this thing, or summarize this, whatever it is. Like, that's fine. But that's a very manual process. It's also kind of a weird throwback that we're suddenly typing again in a world which, you know, we've moved on to graphical user interfaces, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, eventually, it should be a voice interface for all of us.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, of course. But here we are doing this thing I still. I did this morning. I typed in a prompt to get a pretty picture, you know, that's not.

[Leo Laporte]

The end of the world, is it?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's not. But the next prompt's gonna be like, let's end, like, now make the world look like this picture. And maybe that is the end of the world. I mean, like, I. You know, I. Well, or worse yet, I mean, so we talk about. I love that we. I love all the terminology of AI like hallucinations. Hilarious, right? We have this fun new word. Not a good word. We used to just say. Just call it what it is, a bug, you know, or whatever. A logical mistake. Whatever. A training. A literal bug got into the training data and now everything is colored wrong, you know, whatever it is.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, more. It's more like it's something that the engine made up. I don't think it's a bug in the training.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean, but it's making up based on its input. Like, in other words, if you're going to train the data on the Internet and then you ask it something for like an objective fact, you know, what is one plus one? And it's like, you know, there are 11,000 different answers to this. So we're going to have to, you know, deterministically decide which of these is the most accurate.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, but if, but, but a common hallucination would be who is Paul Thurrott? Paul thurat died in 1984.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what I'm saying.

[Leo Laporte]

That the, the question is, where did it, where did it get that? I think the reason.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, clearly that one came from Reddit and then it was. No, I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Or, or Wikipedia, where anyone from anything. Yeah, that's literally just putting two words together that it doesn't understand.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So like a year ago or whatever in the past year, when you talk to someone, you know, normal non technical about AI or you'll see these warnings everywhere you run the chat, GPT or whatever it says, hey, just so you know, it's not always right. You should check your, Check the facts, you know, and everyone's like, okay. And no one does, you know, and legal documents go out, policy changes, you know, like.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's going to become. I think you're right.

[Paul Thurrott]

But now it's going to automated.

[Leo Laporte]

Check the facts.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now it's going to be automated. Now you're telling me this human in the loop potentially will be checking this after the fact.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

What is he standing over the smoldering remains of like civilization? He's like, hey, I found the bug. It's funny.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, where's that undo button?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I don't know if you're going to laugh when you find out what it was. Hello? Anybody here?

[Leo Laporte]

This does take me back to a conversation I've been having since the very earliest days of, of, you know, open AI a couple of years ago, which is, AI is fine. Don't give it agency, not agentic, but don't give it agency.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you know those words like don't.

[Leo Laporte]

Give it the nuclear codes, don't give it weapons, don't give it things that have agency in the real world. And that's exactly what we're doing.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, or could do.

[Paul Thurrott]

We.

[Richard Campbell]

Nobody's actually done this. And this again, I meant, I mentioned the military reference because that was a very specific.

[Leo Laporte]

Ukraine is doing it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

This is specifically what the Defense Department said they wouldn't do. Right? Is that in the end a person still makes us that they wouldn't go.

[Paul Thurrott]

To Laos, but I mean, you know, I mean, like what?

[Richard Campbell]

No, no. And you could. And you can still question it because certainly the software is framing up the view so that the person making a decision only sees, you know, one option.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's the other thing.

[Leo Laporte]

And some poor grunt who's in a double wide trailer in Austin is going to say yes or no based on the information the AI gives it.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what I'm saying. Imagine it seemed to become smart enough that it's like, look, we're not. We're going to pretend this guy's still in a loop. We're going to feed him bogus data so that we get the answer we think is correct, and then we're just going to do the thing we would have done if we didn't have this shackle to begin with.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you think that anywhere in the world, maybe Ukraine AIs are making kill decisions?

[Richard Campbell]

Not. Not officially. Now, that being said, right, there was a case in the UN specifically about a drone carrying a 40 millimeter grenade with an image recognizer. See, so that doesn't mean Ukraine's deploying it, just that this product existed with an image recognizer. Yeah, so it recognizes a particular. It's tracking for a particular face. When it sees that, it charges towards it and explode.

[Paul Thurrott]

So you understand this is the reason that Microsoft stopped selling facial recognition technology Police, because it was biased toward people of color.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's why Google engineers rose up when Project Maven came along for Google, they didn't want to be doing that kind of work. But I think those days are. They look great.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right, so to take it out of the apocalypse just slightly and look at it maybe from Microsoft's perspective, especially from, you know, like office productivity. Right? What they're really, when you think about it, like, just forget about the AI, the scary stuff, the Terminator robot that is literally going to kill you in your sleep this week. But if you just forget about that for a second, it's really about efficiency, right? You know, the automation, office automation has been with us since the days of AT&T talking about paperless offices that we still haven't achieved, by the way. You know, this is. What are the, what are the things that are hard for people to accomplish? How can we help them get over that? How can we help them get by that? And, you know, you can look at those positively or negatively. There's all, you know, in the same way that I talk about, you know, these services that create images. And I'm not hiring a graphics artist or a painter or Whatever it is to make these images, I'm using AI. So I guess there's a job there that's kind of gone away. But for me, you know, this is more efficient, cost effective, etc. Etc. You know, what, what are the doldrums that what we used to call a knowledge worker, you know, faces in a day or you come in, in the morning, you know, like, God, I. Richard, might remember Outlook 98, 2000, one of the versions, way a million years ago, started giving you this kind of daily view. You know, you'd log into the app and it was like, here's what your day is going to look like. It was always terrible, right? It was all these meetings and whatever, but you would have this debut or whatever, my day or whatever they called it. And you know, people, I think use teams like that, kind of a dashboard, but this is the type of thing where it's kind of an advanced version of that. It's like, we'll use AI to say, look, these are the most important emails like that you got overnight. Like, you need to go, go do this one first. Or, you know, you're meeting with a person from whatever team, and you met with this person 17 months ago, his first kid's name is this. And you talked about this and you know, that kind of helpful, you know, like you have a little piece like the eyes we're springing here.

[Richard Campbell]

And you already get the Viva emails, if you're using Office365, saying, hey, you wrote an email yesterday saying you would do this for this person by the day.

[Paul Thurrott]

Did you? You. Yeah. Now they'll be like, we know you didn't do it. We can tell you you didn't do it.

[Leo Laporte]

So asking rhetorically, asking for a friend.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. Which is that right? Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think you did.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, that's. That's what I want to hear from an AI. I want to hear an AI say, I'm just asking questions, Just asking, just asking questions.

[Leo Laporte]

People tell me, I hear.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

According to people in the know, you have not done their job.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. The opposite of not clink. What was like this Schultz on. I know nothing. But he's like, I see everything I see. You know, I hear everything I know.

[Richard Campbell]

And we're starting to have these bots sit in the team's calls now for exactly that reason. Interesting. They keep better notes and they do when we say, okay, well, I'll take that on. It's writing the summaries and saying, you agreed to these things. You know, I'll Play you back the transcript if you want.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just in the middle of a meeting, it'll be like, I think Paul's playing Call of Duty. I don't think he's actually paying attention.

[Leo Laporte]

So we agree, though, that these are very useful tools that can be really huge and in business.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, potentially. Sure, of course.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But they have some potential risk.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Would you.

[Leo Laporte]

I advocate against them for that reason.

[Richard Campbell]

I think, you know, if it's. We take risks all the time for potential benefit.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

We drive down the highway at 60 miles an hour and just pray that the other guy's not gonna turn into.

[Paul Thurrott]

Our lane because we. I just gave this. I gave a talk and I kind of mentioned this story and I talk, told the story again in the podcast. But, you know, I go back to that cloud computing thing and the Exchange administrator freaking out because, like, you're telling me that my final act as Exchange administrator is going to be handing over the reins to my company's email to Microsoft. And the answer is yes. You know, the world has evolved and you haven't. And by the way, your company does not exist for email infrastructure. What are you talking about? You're not in a place where you can make a good decision for your company because you're worried about your job. And all you've been doing for the past 10 years is every other Exchange version. You've been doing a migration and that you sort of thought you were just going to ride out your whole career doing this, but the world changed.

[Richard Campbell]

But the joke is that there's still a role for the administrator on that. It's just doing more valuable things than that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, he's still involved with email. That's sort of the point. Yes, you may or may not have a role at this company. I guess we'll see. But it's up to you to make yourself valuable and well.

[Richard Campbell]

And there's a whole bunch of stuff you weren't getting around to that was more preventative. Right. You've never set the rules around monitoring for harassment via email. You've never bothered with box management because you've been too busy doing the day in, day out, crashing in the surf or keeping a mailbox running.

[Paul Thurrott]

The positive spin here is that instead of being reactive now, which is the big story with it, right, you're going to now be able to be proactive. You're going to get to those things like AI, if it works correctly and works well, will automate those things that for you, were drudgery and time consuming and prevented you from doing the things.

[Richard Campbell]

That I've seen Microsoft use line a bunch of time. Removing the toil from the work.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Right, yep. So that you are eventually it's going to be the removing you from the work. But yeah, yeah, the toilet.

[Richard Campbell]

That's always the implication, Paul. Except there's no evidence it's actually true. Right. Like the reality is there's higher and higher level work that wasn't gotten to. I don't know anybody in it that's gotten to the bottom of the to do list. In fact they couldn't get out the third item.

[Leo Laporte]

So.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, no, I'm not, I'm not disagreeing. Listen. In fact I would just say personally though I am aware of this. It's very easy to fall into this. It sounds true. Trap. You know there's probably a term for this. But. And I. Even though I am well aware of that and I kind of try to preach against it and think for yourself and all that kind of stuff. Yes. But I feel, you know, I feel like with AI I've been pretty clear headed so far. It's definitely been all over the map because AI happened so quick and. But I look at this thing and I'm like okay, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, for me I've done very well.

[Richard Campbell]

With science fiction tropes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, fair enough.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, all the way back to the Luddites after they smashed the machinery. It was rebuilt and all of those folks ended up being supervisors running higher. Automation, clothing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, and clothing did.

[Richard Campbell]

Price dropped worldwide.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right, right, right, right.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean that's what actually happened is that the automation made it possible for the market to become many times larger. Yes. Many travel agents lost their job when we put travel online. But the travel industry grew by orders of magnitude. It employees four more people and good.

[Leo Laporte]

Travel agents still have a job.

[Paul Thurrott]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but good humans, you know, it used to be a good.

[Paul Thurrott]

But if you said to a younger person especially or I keep saying normal person, I realize that's vaguely insulting, but I'm including myself in the abnormal part of that list. That there are people who would sit at a desk and type way on a computer and book things for you. They'd be like what is this?

[Richard Campbell]

Why would you do.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're describing like what is this? You know, like it doesn't make any sense.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's only, that's only 20 years and it's already irrational.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Well then, but then again, 100 years ago something like that didn't exist. There was no such.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean you're going to fly through the air.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean, well, and just the notion of traveling for fun. Like I would, I would travel because my people were being killed and I had to get out of here. Like that was the only reason I would ever move.

[Richard Campbell]

Traveling for a better future.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Traveling my life, traveling.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is, we're talking a post World War II thing, basically. I mean, like, yeah, this notion that you might, you're doing this for fun. You're not invading the company in the country. You say you're, you're going to go there and eat and drink and stuff and then you're getting back curious and you're coming back. Yeah, exactly. What are you doing? Yeah, that's. And you're taking pictures. Yeah, yeah, there's a whole lot of stuff there.

[Leo Laporte]

I just. Can we take a quick break? Because we're getting, of course, long in the tooth, as one says, as we do, and we have lots more to talk about, but you are watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell reunited. And it feels so good.

[Paul Thurrott]

So good. Oh, boy. Without the bad wine.

[Leo Laporte]

The peaches and herbs of Microsoft journalism. Our show today, brought to you by Threat Locker. Do zero day exploits and supply chain attacks keep you up at night. You don't get much more serious than that. Right? Well, you don't have to worry anymore because there's a way to protect yourself, to harden your security with Threat Locker. Threat Locker is really amazing. It is affordable, zero trust that protects your entire network worldwide. Companies like JetBlue Trust threat locker to secure their data. And unlike maybe some other airlines keeping their business operations flying high, here's the deal. Threat Locker takes a proactive, and this is the key. These three words are important. Deny by default approach. Deny by default approach to cybersecurity. That means it blocks every action. It blocks every process, blocks every user unless explicitly authorized by your team. That makes sense, right? In the past we've assumed, hey, if they're in the network, they're, you know, they're cool, man.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's.

[Leo Laporte]

We know that's not true anymore. So this gives you much more granular control of what's going on. Threat Locker helps you do this zero trust thing and provides a full audit, by the way, of every authorization, every action. Then that's so useful for risk management and compliance. Plus they have a great 24. 7 US based support team. They will support you in onboarding and beyond. This is a way to stop the exploitation of trusted applications within your organization to keep your business secure, to protect yourself from ransomware organizations across any Industry could benefit from Threat Lockers ring fencing. That's why they call it. You have inside the ring and outside the ring. Ring fencing isolates critical and trusted applications from unintended uses or weaponization. It limits attackers lateral movement within the network.

[Paul Thurrott]

Boom.

[Leo Laporte]

They run up against the ring fence. Threat Lockers ring fencing is so good it was able to foil a number of attacks that weren't stopped by traditional EDR. And I guess the best example is the SolarWinds Orion attack companies using ring fencing. No problem. No problem. Oh, and by the way, Threat Locker works for Max too. So your entire network can be protected with Threat Locker. Get unprecedented visibility and control of your cybersecurity quickly, easily and cost effectively. And I mean it. When I went out and priced Threat Locker, I was blown away because I assumed, oh no, this is going to cost. No, it's really affordable. Anybody can afford this. Everybody should use it. Threat Locker's zero trust end point protection platform offers a unified approach to protecting users, devices and networks against the exploitation of zero day vulnerabilities. Get a free 30 day trial and learn more about how Threat Locker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. Visit threat locker.com that's threatlocker.com I had a great conversation with these guys. I was blown away and just. I mean look at the reviews, look at what people say about Threat Locker and you'll see this is what you need. Threat locker.com we thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly. And you support us. Of course. If they ask, tell them I heard.

[Paul Thurrott]

It on Windows Weekly.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you Threat Locker. I really like this AI conversation. I don't mean to truncate it, but I think it is very important and when you're going on about agentic stuff, it's important to understand what that we're gonna.

[Paul Thurrott]

The word agentic is gonna come up a lot this year. It's just. You might as well just rip the scab. It's happening. Yeah, I agree. This is the start of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Excellent. Thank you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no apologies necessary. Thank you. What else is going on?

[Richard Campbell]

New hardware.

[Leo Laporte]

I got to send you that Snapdragon thing. I still haven't. I have to go down to the UPS store.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, no worries, no worries. Yeah. So that box was so successful. Microsoft's doing it again.

[Leo Laporte]

No 200 very happy users.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So what they've announced and are releasing is not until next year. I don't think it's coming out until the spring. Is a what is basically a net PC. Remember what were those thin PCs yeah, Oracle offered them. Yeah, they had like Sun Microsystem talked this up. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The network is the computer or something.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And they were onto something. It was just. They were about 20 years too early on that one.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and by the way, can I point out, Paul, for years I've been saying this is what Microsoft should do, that the best, most secure way to offer Windows is in the cloud on a thin client, which they have.

[Paul Thurrott]

You mean to tell me that my last act as Windows administrator is going to be handing over Windows?

[Leo Laporte]

But yeah, I mean, yes, if they priced it better. Now, the client's not expensive, Right. It's just the monthly fee for Windows.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. And that varies wildly depending on the resources you have in that cloud PC and the type, the capabilities, etc.

[Richard Campbell]

But it doesn't cost much when you're not using it, like for intermittent use. It's a good point.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, we do that. Yeah, we use that.

[Leo Laporte]

Our editors were working on Premiere in the cloud using us. They would spin up Windows when they need it and they would spin it down. As long as they turned it off, it wouldn't cost us anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right.

[Richard Campbell]

If you forget about it over the. For a couple of weeks, you get a bill and you're really sad.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So leave it on. To those of us in the sort of what is now like the client, you know, Windows community or whatever. We look at this, we think, could I have one of these please?

[Leo Laporte]

With like a mini statement though, that one of the reasons it's hardened is it doesn't offer win 32.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no, it doesn't really do much locally. It's a very stripped down version of Windows that's just designed to do the connectivity stuff and some basic.

[Leo Laporte]

But even in the cloud, do you have. You don't have win 32 in the cloud either.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, you do.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you do. I get.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, there's some unspecified intel processor in this thing. It's probably like a celeron.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, they said a custom os. Is it a Windows OS or just.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's Windows. Yeah, it's a stripped down version of Windows. It's probably Windows 10X. You know, they had to do something with it. It's probably Edge.

[Leo Laporte]

All you need is Edge, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, it's a web app. No, I don't. It's. It's unclear, but it has, you know, a couple ports and, you know, whatever. It's just the basics, but it's a cute little box. I still, I'm intrigued that Leo actually had a really good real world example there. Because I still I wonder about this from an IT perspective how compelling this could be.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean I've certainly talked to some shops that have been all in this for years. Right. Like they use virtual desktop going all the way back to Zen with Citrix.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So that they just don't have the machines on board. And this was often when we had remote offices where they're going to be online anyway. So the latency is unavoidable. The bigger thing was control over data. I watched whole dev teams work this way where the code never went to the destination machine. It was all executing central repository somewhere.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now for this to make back in the day we had terminal services like he says Xen Citrix.

[Richard Campbell]

Now you have Azure virtual desktop and Windows 365.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, that's right. And yeah so the issues would be.

[Leo Laporte]

Security, privacy because if you're uploading, you know, important secret code, you don't want it somebody on somebody's cloud.

[Paul Thurrott]

Microsoft could probably reassure no.

[Richard Campbell]

Or generally is the customer doesn't want the user to have the code.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So I'm keeping it in the cloud because it's actually safer there.

[Leo Laporte]

Safer there. But it's all look, if you could play Diablo over the network, latency shouldn't.

[Paul Thurrott]

Be too much of I played Call of Duty online over the network anything is possible. So yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Depends on the quality connection.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, quality of connection. Which most businesses probably have a pretty high speed connection.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. I suppose if your needs are minimal, which a lot of people's are and if like Richard said, if you only need it sometimes even better.

[Leo Laporte]

Well the question is how minimal is this?

[Paul Thurrott]

How.

[Leo Laporte]

How much do you give up by doing this? I mean in theory it could have.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, in theory it could be anything. That's the point. Like in theory you could be running against a box that is more powerful than anything you'd have at your own desk. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

You're also no longer upgrading those devices. Right. Like here I am on a two year theory.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well that's part of the. You need to tell me.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean I always thought that this is the best answer Microsoft could offer to the security issues because it's always up to date, it's always patched.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Microsoft has secured their own infrastructure perfectly well over the past year alone. I mean I wouldn't worry about anything, everything's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

But they'd have to reassure people that the network operate the network operation centers.

[Paul Thurrott]

Were the first hurdle here is that this is in the cloud. This is not something that's in your Cloud. It's not in the private cloud. This is in Microsoft's Microsoft cloud.

[Richard Campbell]

And let's face it, they've had better uptime than you did.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, that's not my. I 100% think it's a great idea. I don't mean it like that. I mean that for some organizations, some people, some. Whatever that. But that's the untenable part of it. It's like, well, hold on a second. This isn't in our own. Whatever it is.

[Richard Campbell]

But you're already using Azure. Like, that's already true, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I'm not. Again, I'm not actually disputing it. This is the thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. That said, if I was responsible for a company infrastructure like this, I would have a separate backup source, which I even have for my own M365. Right. My synology backs up my M365 instances onto a drive here. Just because. So if I lost access to M365 for whatever reason, I at least have a copy of everything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Okay. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's sort of a reverse way of thinking. Like, I want to work in the cloud, so it doesn't matter where I go and what device it works, but I also want to copy elsewhere.

[Paul Thurrott]

So if I was on a submarine. Richard.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. I've done this scenario with Jeff Snow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. He's like, let me make up the stupidest possible example.

[Richard Campbell]

We did this for. We did this scenario for a ship off the coast of Gabon during the ebola crisis in 2014.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, boy.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Where we did. The undersea cables going into the western Africa were just not fast enough. And so they moved a ship with a couple of racks worth of gear, and it was basically a localized Azure node to support the healthcare professionals that were fighting the emulsion.

[Paul Thurrott]

So it's like Azure arc before there was Azure arc, essentially. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And so it was a way we had. We had a better sell signal coming off that ship onto the. Into the city in Cote Ivory than they had normally. And we weren't depending on any of those things. Right. And then. And then every so often, it would synchronize.

[Paul Thurrott]

I. Well, I mean, I mentioned the exchange story because it's so relevant to everything, but it's. Yeah, this is the same type of thing. I mean, where Windows security and updating and whatever else is not the point of your business. You know, I just do for a living people. Yeah. We want them to sign in, securely authenticate and get work done and then go back to their lives. And you're not shipping hardware around the world you're not configuring laptops. And then hope you know, the same.

[Richard Campbell]

Way you change that Exchange server, that exchange administrator's life, you're going to change the desktop sys admin's life too. Right now he's on a pro. You know, he's taking care of 1500 seats in a mid size organization. He's shifted so that every year he's replacing 25% of those machines under lease. And so that's 300 something machines that he handles every year to get redeployed with a team of folks. I put these thin PCs in. I don't have to standardize the machine. You can run different VMs as you need and they get upgraded all the time.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right, so you've got this little device, 350 bucks or whatever it is, obviously keyboard, mouse and some kind of a screen. Yeah, and actually you don't even need that. I mean, you could run this off an iPad if you had to. I mean, right? People do that software. Yeah, of course. And okay. I mean it's interesting. I think connectivity has gotten to the point where this is possible.

[Richard Campbell]

When you're dealing with 20 millisecond symmetrical gigabit fiber, that's as long as you maintain the bandwidth, you'll be all right. As the number of seats goes up, it gets more challenging.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just don't do it.

[Richard Campbell]

That's a great device to send home. They're not going to do anything else with it. Right. You're going to configure that device so it can only communicate with the company's instances.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

The kids aren't going to play on it. There's going to be a very little porn on that device.

[Paul Thurrott]

I bet you could play Doom on it. But. Yeah, no, fair enough. No, you're right, you're right. Okay. No, that's cool. And Microsoft said, by the way, there will be more of these types of devices. I could imagine hybrid, not just from Microsoft.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a reference device.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean there'll be more. Right? I mean, and that we can get.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't we already have such devices?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, the thin PC movement's old, like it's been around a long time. But this is a new wave and the ARM hardware is especially good for this. But also the cloud is bigger.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not Intel.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is it also. Well, it eliminates. Well, this one is I think is intel, isn't it? I believe. I think this one is. But, but this is a good point because actually you could make it out of an Arduino.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't really need.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. It could be a Raspberry five. Right, exactly. And you could have this thing that's super efficient and silent. And if it is arm, you don't have to worry about compatibility issues anymore because you're running everything.

[Leo Laporte]

I love how they show it driving two giant screens.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's to reassure you that, you know, you're not. The user experience isn't going to change. Really.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, they've been, you know, the dev box stuff that Microsoft does for Visual Studio developers where you're kind of hitting. You're potentially hitting this incredibly powerful computer up in the cloud and you could have a very thin and light laptop. You could have a Mac. You know, it doesn't matter, Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That's better than that. If you're only compiling once a day, you can run a light instance while you're coding and then give me more cpu. It's time to compile. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

There you go.

[Richard Campbell]

Or actually you push it off, you push it through.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean this is the. Yeah. This is the initial promise of cloud computing. It's infrastructure when you need it and you're not paying for and when you're not using it, etc.

[Richard Campbell]

Instead of me sending 1500 dollars laptops out to my employees to work from home, I'm sending a $300 head unit. That's not good for anything else.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's okay. Yeah, no, that's a good argument. I like it. Yeah. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, it's. I mean, I'm strictly thinking from a system mins.

[Paul Thurrott]

Perspective.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know that a consumer wants this. Although this is the machine you want a grandparent to have. Just because they can't break it, really, they should.

[Paul Thurrott]

They could call it Web tv.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, there you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, yeah, okay, I'm coming around to it. I'll say, you know, Azure virtual machines and then they did Windows 365. I was like, I don't, I don't quite. I mean, obviously there are reasons, there are certain reasons. I didn't see it as kind of a mainstream thing, but actually using my own words against me, which is probably smart thinking back to that exchange guy. It's the same equation, right? At some point, this is the problem. We're spending too much on the people and the hardware and the maintenance and upkeep and blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And of Windows in this case and Windows PCs. And that is not what the point of this business is. Right. It's yeah. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

There's a great side. I've done a bunch of run ads is on avd, on Azure Virtual Desktop.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

The subtle thing you don't get until you really start using this is that when the user logs off, like that instance is actually dismantled so that when you start it back up again, it literally rebuilds it. You get a fresh copy of Windows each time. There is no.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's sort of like Windows Sandbox does something similar, except there's a state that you get back here, you're connecting to your data, et cetera.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's kind of a kiosk effect.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it just.

[Richard Campbell]

You were saying nothing's going to change. There's a big thing that's going to change.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is.

[Leo Laporte]

It's less a Chromebook experience.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, really.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

But you still get to run that one weird cranky win32 app that you need. Except now it lives in a sandbox in the cloud with an administrator making sure it doesn't get out of hand. You don't have to make it run on everybody's machine.

[Leo Laporte]

By the way, they said that these are Copilot plus too. Right? Okay, that's so weird.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's weird. But okay, that's fine. I mean, that's fine. Yeah, because it makes sense to run AI locally in the data center that is also hosting the cloud AI that is too expensive to run. Because. Okay, I can't do the math on that. But look, this is when it was Terry Morrison. This is the event. They announced the Surface laptop. They did. Microsoft did an education event one spring, so 2015, 2017, somewhere in there, and he's walking around with a US thumb key. And the idea was USB thumb key that, you know, you have a lab in this case of students and we need to reset these things between classes. And here's this goofy kind of sneaker Net way to do this. This is something I dealt with in the 1990s. I worked at a computer in a. A lab at a school.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And same. Same situation. They were older, obviously. They were, you know, big honking desktop computers running Word Perfect and things like that. But the idea was that you would reboot and it would run a script and it would wipe things out and bring things back. And the next students would come in. That would take many minutes, but they would come in in the next class, whenever that was, and they would have a fresh computer. Everything was backed the way it was supposed to be. That's still a concern. I mean, this is, you know, and now we can do this in the cloud and it's. It's clean.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And here, let's imagine you're running classes in a day. You've got four classes that day of 30 kids each.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

You pre run them all. So all those 120 VMs are already ready to go. Right. And as one group of kids finishes and logs out, you destroy them. They don't need to be.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it happens automatically.

[Richard Campbell]

But you're not waiting for them to start up. They're already ready. So when the next kids sit down, they light up. That's the great thing about the cloud.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

You don't have to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Even just a basic productivity work or whatever that experience is kind of Windows rot, where the thing slows down over time, you get wonkiness. This is one thing you have to admit as a Windows user. One day you'll run an app that runs every day and it doesn't start right. Or something happens or it stops connecting to the webcam or whatever it is. This is a way to. This is an extreme way, but isn't a way just to get around that.

[Richard Campbell]

This is the kiosk effect. You get back to the starting state every day. You turn it on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. All right, all right, all right.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and I just think. I mean, again, I'm thinking totally enterprise, because I think that's why you keep me around.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but that's what this is for. That's the audience.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, this could be a good consumer.

[Paul Thurrott]

Experience, too, I think. Look, one of the things we're going to talk about in a few minutes is some of the Windows security innovations, for lack of a better term, that they discussed this week at Ignite and very much focused on commercial customers. Right. Businesses, education, government, et cetera. But a lot of this stuff is also coming to consumers and will eventually come to consumers. And that's kind of the point. When you look at something like the security baseline of a Copilot plus PC, it's astronomically in a different class than a normal computer. And there are things that take long periods of time. That's something I just wrote about this in the context of copilot plus PCs. TPMs were kind of invented in the timeframe from Longhorn. When they were looking at the time was like, what do you do? Like, what is the point of this? And now they're just standard equipment. The switch, even just like 64 bits, started with XP, went probably mainstream, maybe Windows 8, Windows 10, somewhere in there. And now it's the only platform for Windows. So we don't even do 32 bit anymore. So sometimes these things take a long time. But yeah, this stuff will. Yeah, this stuff is absolutely going to come down to consumers. Yeah. And then, I don't know, I feel like for a lot of people it's going to be software. But when the time comes to upgrade to a new computer and people might be like, well, maybe this is when I go to a Mac or a Chromebook. What Microsoft might be selling or PC makers maybe would be a. Well, here's a. You know, you had a pretty good experience with this IdeaPad or whatever it was. How about you buy an IdeaPad thin client and you know, you have a Microsoft 365 subscription or whatever we're calling it now, and you get access to this thing that's kind of awesome. Up in the cloud, maybe. And by the way, it's always going to be safe and clean and work great, you know. Yeah, maybe I could see it, I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And when it does go out, it goes out for everybody.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So taking the day off.

[Paul Thurrott]

The whole world's taking the day off.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a thing on the extreme other end of this spectrum. So we have the copilot plus PC. Right. And so these are the PCs that have these additional hardware requirements instead. You know, not that anyone would buy such a thing, but you could buy a. Or you could make a 4 gigabyte RAM Windows 11 computer. I guess that would be stupid, but you could slow storage, et cetera, et cetera. Copilot plus species, 16 gig minimum. I think it's 256 on the Ram NPU. We all know the stuff, you know, really modern. It's all the latest chip sets and all that kind of stuff. Those things launched on Snapdragon back in June without that major new feature, recall and not a lot else to show for it in the AI sense. And so since then, Microsoft's been expanding the platform to AMD and Intel, obviously, but also adding new functionality. So they announced some new features for these computers, I think, back in September, October, I don't remember September. October. Somewhere in there, none of it has appeared. But they're talking that up more now during Ignite as well, like click to do. You know, it's one of the big ones or. And also recall, by the way. Right. So recall has been delayed multiple times. I enjoyed every time they talk about recall and talk about all the new features that they're adding. And I can point to the original documents and say, are these really new features? You know, we'll see, but whatever. You know, we're going to talk about Windows in a minute, but there's some deep architectural stuff going on in Windows for security especially. But not just security, but in addition to the clown carve stupidity features that we talk about every week, there's actual like computer science occurring too. So you know, there's a little bit, we get, we get a little bit of both. But yeah, I don't, I don't know what to think of any of this AI stuff I keep. And by AI stuff I want to be clear. I mean local AI stuff running against the npu. I feel like this is a solution in search of a problem in many ways.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah, no, and it's a panic, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

We need an implementation of these LLMs for information workers. That really makes a difference.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. It has to run on device, it has to require them to buy a new computer. It's very important. That's a big part of it. And I, but I keep coming back.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean even the most, by far the most successful LLM right now is GitHub Copilot. And you don't need to run it locally. That's not a thing. But it's got a utilization like it's almost a justification for the stack for a very small sector of the world.

[Paul Thurrott]

It would run, it would probably run great locally. I mean, honestly, I mean, you know, especially if you were doing something very specific. I'm working in a specific language in a specific framework.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I don't think you care because you're online anyway. You've got to be interacting with GitHub anyway. You know, that's your normal workflow. What's the difference?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So I don't think the customer cares about running locally. I really don't. I think Microsoft cares about it, but I don't think the customer cares.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, the thing customers will care about will be these specific features that improve their life and they just won't understand that it's because it's running locally. That's the problem with it. So if you edit video, for example, I mean, obviously you need a bunch of horsepower and graphics capabilities, et cetera, et cetera. There's a, there's a growing list of capabilities that run off an MPU that are frankly rather amazing and, but I'm talking about a pretty small audience there. So when you talk about Mom Pop and you know, the, you know, whoever, these people are kind of non tactical and you're like, all right, well what's in Windows or whatever in Copilot plus PC that's going to mean anything to them?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I don't think they.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm like, geez.

[Richard Campbell]

They just want it to work where it runs. And so do the point you're going to make a pricing difference. The cloud version costs more than the local. For a small group of folks, that's going to matter. Most people if you charge it all, they're not going to use it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, for a Snapdragon computer, the big thing to me is the efficiency and performance and all that stuff and the battery life. And I, you know, I tweeted about this yesterday. It's not a joke. We got on a plane, it was four, four and a half hour flight. But one of the things they told us up front is like the first half of the plane doesn't have power. Sorry, you're not going to charge your devices. And the people next to us were freaking out. They literally like were handing their phones off to the flight attendants who could bring them back to the back of the plane and charge them for them. So I was like, no problem. I have a Copilot plus PC.

[Richard Campbell]

Boop.

[Paul Thurrott]

Open it up. Charged my wife's phone and my phone and ran this thing the entire flight and got a bunch of work done and had 55% battery life.

[Leo Laporte]

They should put you in. That's awesome.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, and it was. That's life changing now. Did I do a single local AI anything during that flight? No. Not even one. Right. I didn't. That didn't matter in the slightest. Had I, it would have been super efficient. But I just don't. There's nothing there that's compelling. So there. I honestly, the only compelling thing they've ever announced is recall. And that's the one thing they keep, you know, delaying. And I'm like, I, you know, but I think. I don't know that this will actually be. Actually, most of this probably won't be local. In fact, it definitely won't be. But tied to the agentic stuff and to the expansion of copilot capabilities in Microsoft 365, they're going to be changing the Windows UI a little bit to accommodate these things. And of course the apps themselves are going to change as well. But. But there's a bunch of new capabilities coming across Microsoft 365 that will run across the cloud. That will run across the cloud. But I was talking to Brad this morning. He was telling me, he's like, there's something weird going on with Windows 11 because I think it's like the beta channel. They changed the way things are rendered in the taskbar. All of a sudden out of nowhere, they never announced anything. And I said, yeah, I think it's because they're using it on stage at Ignite to show off these new Microsoft 3 CAPE 365 capabilities that run off a little page or whatever they call it in the taskbar and they needed something to run it against and so they skipped the canary channel. They just went right to beta. And that's happening. Right? That's part of the clown car stuff, I guess. It's like we're just rushing to kind of meet the needs of whatever group or whatever. So, yeah, new AI capabilities for Copilot Plus PC and Copilot Actions is the name of the thing I'm referring to, by the way. Sorry, I didn't say that these are cloud based capabilities, But I think Microsoft 365 is going to be the bigger benefactor from this stuff or I should say users of Microsoft 365. I'm not saying there aren't any examples. It's fun removing a background from an image in paint or whatever. It's good, it's a good capability. I like it. But I think the big advances are going to come across or come through, you know, the applications we actually use to get work done. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, you know, whatever. So I think that's the bigger space or canvas or whatever for this stuff. So anyway, I need to digest this stuff a lot. Still more, I should say. So I suspect we'll probably talk about more of this stuff next week.

[Richard Campbell]

We're still very much in the announcement phase of this too. Yeah, this is the dragging on wave two. Like we're still, you know. You know what I miss at a keynote at Ignite is a, you know, Columbia Sportswear or the case study, the company up there saying, hey, we've been using this for the past three months and here's the benefits we've had. Like it's been a while since we've seen that and I haven't seen it at all for AI technology.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. It's an unspoken role at any Microsoft keynote that the best part of it is some company that is not Microsoft.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Showing up with their own kind of unique brand of, you know, marketing and whatever it is they do for a living. And all of a sudden, wow, they're really interesting. And it kind of snaps you out of this, this boring bubble story about.

[Richard Campbell]

What you could do here doing it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's always been the case. That's why, like, you know, when they brought up the Rock, you know, to talk about the Xbox, or they brought out some drill sergeant one time who was awesome. Or like the. What's the. I can't think of. I don't know, clothing brands was like Laurent something or whatever the name of that company was, was really interesting. They did that NASA thing that kind of blew up in their face right before the pandemic, unfortunately. But that stuff is fascinating.

[Richard Campbell]

That industrial light and magic that came up with.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean, that stuff is always interesting, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

Or you could have some Microsoft guy drawn on and on about nothing. I don't know. Like, these are the options.

[Richard Campbell]

And the bigger thing to me is what's the implication when that group is on the stage doing that is like, we've been using this for months and here's our success story. Not. Hey, they just thought of this, right? That's right. And it's not even.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, this was a cool thing. It was one of the things about mixed reality that was actually pretty good. There was a good story there where they would bring in car designers and say, you know, we get the guy making the car. Instead of like having an elephant sized lump of clay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're gonna. He's gonna design it with a Hololens and then he's gonna bring other people into the studio and they're gonna walk around in a three in real space, but with mixed reality headsets on and look at it. And they could open the car door and they could look at the, you know, how things lined up and they could see it in 3D space. That's amazing. Now it's just kind of a small audience, which is kind of the problem. But still from the outside, you would look at that, be like, wow, that's awesome. You know, and it gets your mind working a little bit. Like, well, how could we apply what they did here elsewhere, you know, or maybe to what we're doing at work or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Show us the wins. We need some wins.

[Leo Laporte]

As an elephant sized piece of clay, myself. Yes, I really.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's a, there's a almond flavored candy that they sell, the kids sell on the street in Mexico. And I refer to it as the. The best tasting clay I've ever had. It has the, it has the consistency of the, the grout that you put between, like, is it a little gritty? It's like. What do you call? Yeah, it's gritty. And it's literally like compressed wet sand. It's like Halva.

[Richard Campbell]

Yum.

[Leo Laporte]

Sounds like halva.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hold on one second. Stephanie, what's that candy called that I called clay? Marzipan, I guess. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Marzipan.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's Delmen flavored clay. Like, this is the best almond flavored clay I've ever had.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, exactly. Marzipan.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it was good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's in. There was a town in France when I was a kid that we went to that was like Marzipan City. And even the gas stations would have marzipan sculptures because it sounds like the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Name of a place. I'm pretty sure it's the name of a city on the, on the water in Mexico somewhere. Marzipan. Mexico City. It's. It's built on clay. It's perfect.

[Leo Laporte]

I love marzipan.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Winters there are fantastic. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, let's take a little break and we shall continue. We're going to get to Windows 11. It's funny, the minute the show ended last week, Microsoft put Windows on ARM on an ISO and Paul sent me a note saying it happened again.

[Paul Thurrott]

Start recording. We can talk. Let's do another show.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll get to that in just a minute. Paul Thurat is here. He's actually back home in [e-mail] also back home in Madeira Park, British Columbia, Richard Campbell. We are glad to have them both back home. Our show today brought to you by US Cloud. I had never heard of US Cloud and I talked to these guys and I went, wow, more people ought to know about you. They're the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. So, yeah, it's not really about the cloud, it's about support. But it's like, like Microsoft support. Better, faster and cheaper. Pretty good, right? US Cloud is the global leader in third party Microsoft Enterprise support. They support 50 of the Fortune 500. A lot of big businesses switch to US Cloud because they can save 30 to 50% on a true comparable replacement for Microsoft Unified support. US Cloud supports the entire Microsoft stack 24, 7, 300 and 65 days a year. They respond faster and they resolve tickets quicker for clients all around the world. But you're always talking to real humans in the US and your data stays in the US and so for a lot of companies, that's very important. And the engineers are the best in the business. US Cloud really works hard to get the top. They pay them well, they give them great benefits to get the best engineers out there. So when you call, when you say, I got a problem, you're going to talk to an expert Level engineer with an average of 14.9 years. That's for Break Fix or DSE. There are, as I said, 100% domestic so your data never leaves the US. Oh, and here's another thing they do that I really like. I don't think Microsoft offers this. Financially backed SLAs on response time. They're giving you a guarantee. Initial ticket responses average under four minutes. When, when the house is, when your network is down, your hair is on fire. You don't want to wait any longer than you have to. Four minutes. The cavalry is on the way. In 2023 last year they, they talked to their clients. 94% of US Cloud's clients said they had saved 1/3 or more when switching from Microsoft Unified Support to US Classified. Now I, when I talked to these guys, I said that's great, but really you should focus on the fact that it's better support. It's not just less expensive. From Fortune 500 companies, large health systems, major financial institutions, and yes, federal agencies, US cloud ensures vital Microsoft systems are working for over 6 million users globally every day. I'm talking the biggest brands. Caterpillar uses US Cloud, HP, Aflac uses US Cloud. Dun Bradstreet, Under Armour, KeyBank, even, and this might be the best endorsement of all. Even the IT folks at Gartner have chosen US Cloud for their Microsoft support needs. I saw an interview with a Director of Information technology with a great quote. He said, and within an hour US Cloud responded with I want to say, four engineers. So they not only did they bring the right guys to the call, but they brought the cavalry. I just felt like, wow, that was amazing. That was unlike anything I experienced with Microsoft in my eight years of being with Premier. We made the right choice. You should make the right choice. Oh, and by the way, when it comes to compliance, no one gets it better than US Cloud. Their ISO, gdpr, ESG compliance, it's a strategic imperative that drives operational efficiency, legal compliance, risk management and corporate reputation. They adhere to these standards not because they have to, because it fosters trust and loyalty among customers and stakeholders. It attracts investment and ensures long term sustainability and success in a competitive global market. And they are succeeding. What a great company. US Cloud. Book a call today to find out how much your team can save. Again with the saving. It's not just you're saving money. Better Microsoft support for less. Oh, it's faster too. Uscloud.com uscloud.com book a call today. Better, faster. Microsoft support for less. How about that? We'll put that all together in one. Uscloud.com we thank them so much for supporting the show. You support us when if they ask you, you say, hey, I saw it on Windows Weekly that those guys really, they told me to call and I did. USCloud.com thank you for your support US Cloud. All right, it's time to talk about Windows.

[Richard Campbell]

Weird.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, I figured we get to it eventually. Yeah. As Leo mentioned, I. Right after the show concluded last week.

[Leo Laporte]

Because we were saying, why isn't there an ISO for Windows on is for.

[Paul Thurrott]

Months, you know, so sometime the past month or so. I think probably when 24H2 was released, they put a little note on the download page. Hey, it's coming. You know, we promise.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what Aria said too, on the show. It's like, don't worry, it's coming.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah. It's unclear what took so long. I mean, if you go back. Well, I mean to the original. There's never been a downloadable ISO other than through the Insider program for Windows 10 or 11 on ARM. And there was never any for Windows RT. Right. Of course that required new hardware. Why would there be? But you know, this is becoming more mainstream. This is kind of necessary. There's a. This part of that conversation you were talking about with Aria on your show is that ARM devices have always been a little different than x86, x64 devices in the sense that the. I kind of. I don't know what to call it. It's like the support stack for these things is more integrated. You know, PCMaker ship this thing that is kind of a. It's a thing, you know, and I know it's serviced over time, but. But if you were to try to do a bare metal install of this, you run into these issues where you have to have all the correct drivers and you can't go to hp.com and download ARM drivers. Really. Right. It's still kind of a weird problem. I think that's part of it. Yep. So there's a big difference.

[Richard Campbell]

There's also a general push by Microsoft to just build the drivers for everybody. Right. Like they don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right. Quality control thing. And that has factored into it.

[Richard Campbell]

Imagine you have a chance to reset this. This nightmare of the driver problem.

[Paul Thurrott]

There is a. There are a variety of ways to restore or reset or whatever it is. Repair a running install of Windows on a PC. And if you have an ARM based device, especially a new Snapdragon X based whatever, you should avail yourself of all of those things before you ever Try this.

[Richard Campbell]

That thing already has the driver set in it, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Like that's the main thing that's built for your machine. That's right. If your PC maker offers you a recovery image of some kind that you can use to create a bootable recovery disk, which Microsoft does, by the way, for its ARM based Surface devices, you should use that, you know, because you could run into problems. One of the interesting things that Microsoft advises is something I've actually seen many, many times, which is you take an x64 computer of whatever kind and you're like, I want to do a clean install this. And by clean install, I mean like an actual clean install. I want to make sure there's no way bare metal this thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Phone home.

[Paul Thurrott]

Phone's home to HP or Lenovo, whoever it is. Yeah, I want, I want Windows.

[Richard Campbell]

I want all my crap work gone. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Like. Yep. And then you run the installer and what you find is that the mouse doesn't work. So you have to use the keyboard to pad around and do that kind of thing.

[Richard Campbell]

You can't connect to a network because network stack doesn't.

[Paul Thurrott]

Those drivers aren't there. Right. So I have no problem moving around with a keyboard. I have, I'm. I've gotten very good at the disk setup tool and setup.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Using it with the keyboard. Right. No problem there. But I've often had to attach a USB C to Ethernet adapter to an Ethernet cable and plug that thing into the box.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

To get that to work, use another machine.

[Richard Campbell]

The load drivers on a USB key to stick in the machine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now that part you can't do with arm, but the plugging into Ethernet, Microsoft recommends it. Right. If you run into this problem. So I guess the. Here's the good news. The no caveat ways in which you can use this ISO are to install Windows 11 on ARM in a VM, which you can only do on an ARM based PC.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And if you have a Mac and Leo brought this up last week when you were gone. But. But for some reason you're stuck on 2223 H2 using parallels or whatever. Typically Parallels, but also other Fusion, whatever you might be using. Download the ISO and just run setup from there and just do an Upgrade, you know, 24H story. You don't have to worry about the drivers because it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, because I am on 22H2 as we talk.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just use the straight up ISO. Okay. There is no media creation tool from Microsoft that works with the Windows 11 Arn Arm. You know, there's no Installation assistant.

[Richard Campbell]

You can't make a usb.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Could you use Rufus or something to do it? Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Does Rufus support it? I haven't tried that yet. So I just got home. So that's one of the things I'm going to look at. I'll try it. I'll try it. When you use Microsoft's downloadable Surface. What's the term? I guess restore image, whatever they call it, you actually use the restore. I'm using the wrong terms here. I'm sorry. The recovery drive, there's a recovery drive wizard that creates a recovery USB drive. Right. In Windows you can use that and then you overwrite with the Surface specific stuff, boot with that thing, it has the drivers, et cetera, et cetera. So that's actually the better option for that kind of computer. Yeah. I mean, could you create like a raw? I don't actually. I think you could. Right. It's just an ISO. I mean, I don't see any reason why you couldn't. I haven't tried it, so that's one thing I haven't tried. But. But I don't see any reason why you couldn't. You could use this on an older pre Snapdragon X or Snapdragon Elite, whatever the actual name of that thing is. PC to just kind of upgrade in place. If you're not getting the upgrade through Windows Update, like that should work. You don't have to worry about drivers in that case, but as a kind of pure restoration kind of utility. It's not, not quite there, you know, in the sense that it won't work for everyone and it's not the type of thing you want to take the chance on. Like, we'll see what happens. Like, no, because if you screw this thing up, you know you're going to have to go back to the PC maker and say, hey, could you, could you fix this for me? You know, you don't want to be careful with it, but if you have a Windows 11 on ARM device and want to run Hyper V and put a VM in there, this will work for that. If you have, like I said, parallels on a Mac, no problem. It's better than using that UUP dump site because it's official, it is from Microsoft, but it may not have all the drivers you have to get online. If you can get online with the Ethernet cable, then you can go into Windows Update and that should get you the drivers you need. Right. That's how that works. So that's true on x64 as well. But at least it's here. I don't mean to say there are caveats, but there's just more to know, that's all. Just be smart about it and know all the options you have. If you are actually having issues. There are existing options. Everyone knows about their Windows recovery environment that reset this PC functionality. But there's also new stuff. I think it's new to 24H2. If you go into the recovery options and settings, there's an option called Fix Problems with the Windows Update and it actually reinstalls Windows without impacting your apps, your files or your settings. And that's true of apps you've downloaded from the web. That's the first time they've offered something like that. Right. A lot of their restore tools in the past were like, well, we'll keep the store apps, but you're going to have to go reinstall Chrome and Office and all this stuff. This actually keeps that. So if you're doing this for restore reasons, just avail yourself of the other tools first. This should be a last ditch answer. Like, don't. Don't say like I have a. Like a new whatever, you know, Copilot plus PC Snapdragon. I just want to have a really clean install. So I'm going to like. Yeah, I'd be careful with that. I wouldn't. I just uninstall the things you don't want instead. That's a better approach, but at least it's there. So yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Now I did find some blog posts from folks who figured out too. You can use Rufus.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, you can. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Bill upset. But the main thing they said was because all drivers are slipstream, you need. The smart thing to do is to take the WoA drivers and put them on the USB key with.

[Paul Thurrott]

How do they get them though? Like get them out of the computer itself? Like.

[Richard Campbell]

No, they're talking about the generic, the generalized woas from Microsoft. There are sets up.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, okay. Like the class drivers.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So you take all of them. You put them on the USB key as well.

[Paul Thurrott]

See. Why aren't those on there? They should be.

[Richard Campbell]

So. But they're not. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And so if you add those then it will, as it's setting up, find them and slip stream them in.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm trying to remember where I saw this. So.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's. And that is an ARM EUFY boot. So that's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, that's good. I mean that's good. So I don't remember.

[Richard Campbell]

Your mileage will vary. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Good luck. I'm trying to remember why I Ran into this, I don't remember. But one of the issues I've kind of questioned in the past about copilot plus PCs on Snapdragon is they ship with 20 something slms right on the disk. So I was always curious, you know, when they make this ISO available, is it going to be 10 gigabytes or 20 gig? It's not. It's just a 5.1, you know, normal size. And that means that those things will have to download as you need them. And I actually saw this one time and this is what I'm. I can't remember where I saw this. But imagine you are running a Copilot plus PC. Maybe you just did the clean install with this thing and you go into Paint and you use the image. What's the one that's only on Copilot Plus? Whatever the feature, it doesn't matter. Use some feature in Paint or Photos or whatever that's unique to Copilot PC. So it shows. The feature shows up and you click on it and it says you don't have the LLM you need for this. And it actually downloads it then.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this thing, I don't know if there's some facility in the system where it will do this automatically in the background if you're not doing anything. But I do know and I just, I can't, I can't remember how I ran into this. But if you run into an on demand or you run into a feature that needs an LLM and it's. Or an SLM and it's not on the disk, it will download it. It will actually tell you like, give us a minute, we have to download this thing. So that's how they're doing it. I think it's the answer to that.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's just that you need the basics. Like the default ARM configuration doesn't even have a display driver. It has no network. So you can install it, but then you can do nothing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Then you can't do nothing.

[Richard Campbell]

You can do nothing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Which by the way was what you did with Windows rt. So it's like going back in time.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Well, I feel like the reality, of course, when you're an OEM who builds your own machines is this is the base install of Windows. It comes with nothing. And then you actually build out your driver set for your machine.

[Paul Thurrott]

The thing that. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So I don't know why they would have shipped it like this. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

The reason this is confusing is that the base configuration in Windows and ARM with Snapdragon X is virtually identical for all of these computers now, they all have their own things for sure. I mean, I don't mean to downplay that, but one of the things that's astonishing about these computers is how the same they all are. Right, Right. So it seems like the. I'll just call it class driver because I'm not really sure how they do it on an arm, but like the class driver for the keyboard, the trackpad, the screen, the whatever, networking would be the biggest one. Really. Not the biggest one, but one of the topics, top whatever five or eight. Why aren't those in there? I don't understand that. Like I.

[Richard Campbell]

That's absolutely. Everybody would need.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that surprises me. So maybe this evolves over time. I don't. There are reasons for sure, but I, you know, they're quiet about. They never even announced that they did it. They just put it up one day, you know, so whatever. It's better than nothing for sure. It's certainly better. I mean, my God, we've been waiting for this for years. So it's good that they did.

[Leo Laporte]

So where did they put it? I'm looking and I don't see.

[Paul Thurrott]

So if you Google, download Windows 11.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean I've got Windows 11 website page. Yeah. So there are three or four. Scroll down, go down now, ladies and.

[Leo Laporte]

Gentlemen, the moment you've all been waiting for.

[Paul Thurrott]

Paul. No, no, it's teaches me how to use a computer. This will be great. There you go, right there. So it says download Windows 11 disk image ISO.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's a bold link. It says Windows 11 ISOs for ARM64 devices are here. It's in the next section down.

[Leo Laporte]

Ah, yes, available here. Ah, there's a link.

[Paul Thurrott]

So there's a four letter link in that page.

[Leo Laporte]

It says here.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm surprised you didn't see it. No.

[Leo Laporte]

And then it has all that stuff before, but I'm not going to worry about that.

[Paul Thurrott]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

All right. And what the nice thing about Parallels is I don't need it on a USB key.

[Paul Thurrott]

I can do it from the. That's right. You just run it right up there. You just mount it and run setup. Yep. So you have to choose language. You could. Yeah, you'll get it.

[Leo Laporte]

Very nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. And actually since we did, let me skip ahead just for a second because this is ARM related and I don't know why I didn't put these next to each other. Google some months ago announced they would bring Google Drive to Windows 11 on ARM and now they have. So it's in beta. I just put it On I put it on my Surface laptop. I think it was the morning I flew home, actually. So it would have been yesterday. It feels like a million years ago. But assuming I'll use it for some number of days. But I had switched temporarily back to OneDrive because this was not available. Assuming all goes well so far it's been great. I'll go back to Google Drive because it's better. But yeah, I've been waiting. This is my only significant. Actually, I think it's my only software incompatibility issue with Windows 1111 on ARM to date. So, yeah, problem solved. So that's good.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. The big message for Windows at Ignite is not these new copilot features. It's not. Whatever. It's security. Because I don't know if you got the memo on this, but security is job one at Microsoft now and it's the priority. It's weird because they really push the AI thing. You would think it might be AI, but it's not a security. And they were talking security around the cloud.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, I don't see a lot of conversation about security in Windows.

[Paul Thurrott]

There is. There's a whole thing. There's a. And so you're familiar with the Secure Future initiative? Yes, they have one just for Windows now. They announced this because. Of course. So I wrote this in the notes, I wrote this in my article. But I want everyone listening or watching this podcast. I want you to close your eyes for a second and just think. When I say the words Microsoft Windows to you, what are the first things that come to mind? Now it's going to be a range. Some of it's going to be unprintable, but I'm guessing that what no one thought of was security or resiliency or anything like that. I'm guessing no one thought that. Which is interesting because that's what Microsoft seems to think is top of mind for most people that use Windows. I think Windows is the result of a lot of inertia, especially with businesses. But. But to be fair to them, like I said earlier, I think I said this up front in the show. Yeah, I did. There are two halves to the equation when it comes to Windows. There's no singular team, really. Right. There's the architecture side, which is in Azure, and then there's the clown car, as I call it. The stuff that they throw features out like an ape throwing its feces at people at the zoo. So the security side's actually. It's pretty solid. Right. And there's a bunch of stuff in Windows 11 now. And there's a bunch of stuff coming that is actually really exciting. And one of the things I've talked about a bunch and I really think people don't understand this is the Windows hello ESS stuff that's in Copilot PC. So we talk about how they raise the bar on the system requirements, but they also raise the bar on the security requirements to a degree that is actually kind of off the charts. And this will become the baseline for Windows security going forward for all computers. Right. It takes time. You have to transition the whole customer base over to these newer computers that have this kind of stuff. But it is an exciting change. And for businesses, they've announced a bunch of specific features that I think most people don't know about. Some are new, so that explains that. But I mean some of them have been around for a while, like Windows hello essentially, which I think PC makers had never really rolled out because it's super expensive. Customers didn't understand it, no one was really asking for it. It's a very stringent set of requirements, you know. But now this is getting added into the, into the mix. I went back and looked this up. I had this vague idea that this might be true. But Microsoft announced their Secure Future Initiative, the new version of trustworthy computing, late last year. Two weeks later, Russian hackers broke into their infrastructure and started a two month long escapade that they still to this day have not fully admitted to Microsoft. And so May came and billed and they were like, all right, we're going to re announce this. Like we never did it in the first place because people probably don't think we're serious about it. So they sort of pretended they were saying it for the first time. And then two months later, a month and a half later, crowdstrike happened, right? So now it's November again and we're like, all right, so listen, we're really serious about security. We're doing this again. And it is worth looking at the stuff that they're doing to secure Windows. There's some very interesting things coming up. I'm super curious both you, Leo and Richard, what you think about this one, because this blows my mind. I saw that in Windows 24H2 that Microsoft was enabling. They call it BitLocker sometimes, sometimes they call it full or they just call it Device Encryption. It's because the branding on it's different depending on what kind of version of Windows you have. It's just full disk encryption is what it is. But whatever they said they're enabling it by default on all computers, all PCs. And I'm like, oh, well, that's kind of interesting given that you've been doing that for five or seven years already. What does that mean? Right. And so in later versions of Windows 10 and Windows 11, they enable disk device encryption of BitLocker when you sign into a Microsoft account or to a Microsoft work or school account. And the reason they do it then is because when you do that, they can save the recovery key up to your OneDrive. Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

If you have Windows 11 Pro or better, you can go into the BitLocker control panel and you can enable it manually if you sign in with like a local account. Right. So you can do that, but you have to save the recovery key first. You can't save it to the disk you're encrypting. Right. It has to go somewhere else. But once you save it, they will let you then encrypt the disk. So I was like, well, how do they, how would they possibly enable it automatically in all computers? Because they still allow people to sign in with these older account types. And the answer is they don't. So I don't know what they were talking about. Like, they can't be activated until you back up that recovery key. So I wasn't sure what that meant. But in a coming version of Windows first, for businesses that are using Enterprise Edition, they're going to enable. This blows my mind. A folder based encryption capability that. Sorry, it's tied to folder backup in some way. So it's like desktop documents, pictures folders by default. But you can, I guess you can add other folders. I'm like, okay. And you have to sign in with Windows hello to or authenticate with Windows hello to get into those folders as an admin. Interesting. But the disk is already encrypted. I'm curious, what is this? They literally refer to it as double encryption.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

And that reads like a joke.

[Leo Laporte]

It's twice as good.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's twice as good.

[Richard Campbell]

It's like double secret probation. Only difference.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is the type of joke I make. I'll say something like, my password is 1234, but I'm going to make it 1234 because now it's 64 bit. So it's way more secure. It's a joke, right? It's stupid. That's what this reads like. It's not a joke. They're actually doing this. They call it double double encryption.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

I guess it helps how. I don't. It's because it's two encryptions Come on, man. It's. It's twice as good.

[Richard Campbell]

There's more encryptions.

[Paul Thurrott]

It might be exponentially as good. I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, hot patch is great. This is the ability to install security patches without requiring a reboot.

[Richard Campbell]

How many times have we heard that one?

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. There's stuff like that. There's a feature that's been in Windows 11 for a couple of years now called Smart App Control. So if you're running Windows 11, go look for it. It's hilarious. Run Windows Security. I'm actually going to do it on this computer. I'm curious what it says because I think I already know what it's going to say, but Windows Security. And then you go to App and Browser Control and it will say Smart App Control. It's one of the things. So you go into settings and on most people's computers by this point it will be all grayed out and it's off. That's how it works. There's nothing you can do to turn this on. So when you get a new computer or you reset a computer, Windows App Control or Smart App Control goes into evaluation mode and it will sit there and learn about the apps you use. And if it can be turned on, it will actually automatically turn itself on, which by the way, I've never seen that one, so I don't know what to tell you. But you can turn it on manually if you do it quick. It has to be within the first week or so of using a new computer. Once you turn it on, it uses AI to evaluate the behavior of apps that you've just installed. And if it sees weird behavior, it will actually prevent you from running that app. When it does that, you will of course turn it off. And when you do, you can never re enable it. Now technically you can re enable it if you know the registry things to change. But there's no UI for re enabling it. And so for businesses they're adding a. I think it's just called App Control for business probably or something. They're adding a policy based way for IT admins to force that on users essentially. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It should just be group policy.

[Paul Thurrott]

It should just. Yeah. So I was told, yeah earlier this year that this was going to be enabled by default. So it would not be an evaluation mode, but it would just be on in default. In 24H2 it's not. So this is one of those things. I've looked at a bunch and it's not. The behavior's not changed, but it is something that's been in Windows 11, I want to say, for at least two years. It's kind of experimental in a sense. It literally is an evaluation mode by default. But if you're.

[Richard Campbell]

So is this, like, in Canary? Like, where is it?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's unstable. You can do it. Right now.

[Richard Campbell]

It's just off.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So if you like. So if you run Windows Security, the app, you know, it's like a dashboard, and then go into the. I think it's called App. I just did it. I'm sorry, I just lost it. App and Browser Control, I think. Yeah, App and Browser Control. And then the first link in there is Smart App Control. And if you go into Settings, like I said, if you've been running Windows 11 for a while, this thing's off and there's nothing you can do. Right. But if you've reinstalled Windows or new computer, you can actually enable. It's in evaluation mode by default, but you can enable it and it will protect you against untrusted apps and drivers, I guess is the way to kind of put it.

[Richard Campbell]

How do they assess untrusted AI?

[Paul Thurrott]

So if you address that. I don't even know why you're questioning this.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's weird to me you would.

[Paul Thurrott]

Even ask that question. Yeah, I mean, I. My experience with this so far is that I've never found a good way to demo it. I've never found a good example of something I could definitely run where it would be like, oh, yeah, no, this is. This is not good. And then it just kind of, you know. You know, I enable it and I never have any problems. Right. But if you run into a problem, you can turn it off and then. But I do know if you do turn it off, you can never turn it back on. Not using the standard you want.

[Richard Campbell]

I love that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's good stuff. There is a new modern version of Windows. Hello. From a user experience that's coming where they explicitly mentioned the passkey stuff they've been using under the covers for the past year or so. Yeah, about a year. Which is cool. Right? And so sometime in the past month, Microsoft talked about how they're expanding passkey support in Windows. That's going to get nice. So that stuff's cool. That's happening or will be happening soon. That's cool. I'm trying to think what. Oh, here's the big one, actually. This is the big one. So starting with Windows xp, to my memory, Microsoft simplified the types of user types you could have or. Well, it's really Permission types really. But there are administrator users and standard users, right? We've had this since Windows xp, rather than having different, you know, different, more granular control over that kind of stuff. So, so administrator, standard user. It's sort of like Windows SKUs. That was the same time where they introduced the Home sku, right, to the NT product line. So we had Home and Professional. And so Microsoft kind of sits back and they look at all the features and they're like, all right, this one's going to be in Home and also Pro, this one's only going to be in Pro. Right. Like you make these kind of decisions and so they made the same decisions with permissions, right? Like administrator class users will be able to do certain things that standard users can't. Right. And so the way Windows has worked ever since is that if you need to, as a standard user, do something you can't do, you could escalate and send, basically you would send a notification to an administrator class user who could approve it for you. Or if you knew the administrator class user's username and password, you could enter that information then and, you know, bypass the block and go do it. So this system's not great. Fair enough. So I don't know if this, Let me think about this. Is this Windows? I think this is straight across Windows. So it's probably Windows Pro and Enterprise. But in the, like, the managed versions of Windows, they're going to allow you to authenticate against Windows. Hello. To allow things to happen as an administrator. So in other words, we're recognizing that most people set up a computer and they're administrators, right? But they're going to run as a standard user most of the time. And when they need to do something, some action, some task, whatever it is that requires administrative privileges, they're going to have a temporary administrator token created that occurs when they authenticate with Windows Low. So hopefully it's facial recognition or thumbprint, it could be a pin. And then as soon as that thing's done, you're back to standard user.

[Richard Campbell]

Mean the thing that Linux has done for forever.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what?

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like Microsoft invented this. And I don't know why you have to.

[Richard Campbell]

Anybody would talk any other way.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I'm sure that, look, it's a good idea wherever it came from, if that is how. Yeah, that sounds right. It's like a visual, like a GUI version of Sudo, I guess maybe is the way to think of it. Windows Low based Sudo. Yeah. So it's a good idea.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, for sure Just getting people to not operate routinely with administration privileges.

[Paul Thurrott]

This has been the dream forever, right?

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, it's like that with one shop where they had a script for every admin account. With a moment you were running an admin account, there was a red flashing light.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh boy.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. It's just like. It's only when you went down to a domain account that you didn't have that problem. Although now folks complain about power of domain accounts, but, you know, yeah, right.

[Paul Thurrott]

People who care about security have tried this. Right? You're out there, you're going to hear this go, yep, I did this. You, you create an administrative class accounts because you have to. The first one you sign into with the computer is an administrator and then you're like, all right, but that's just there for me to approve things. So now I'm going to create a standard user account that I'm going to use and I'm going to, every time something happens, I'll just enter whatever I need to authenticate against the administrative account and then use that for about 15 seconds. And you're like, no, screw this. This is a pain in the ass. Yeah. It's like, it's horrible. So no one does it. And yeah. So this is there 25 years later, like, all right, maybe we solve this. Maybe this is it. It sounds like a pretty. This sounds good to me. A lot of the security stuff they're doing in Windows 11 right now is relying on this Windows hello based authentication.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I think it's smart. I think this is, I think that's a good idea. So.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, well, and it's just the, it's partly to do with Windows. Like, the login process has such an extensive impact that the only really we to do it had been to log all the way out to log back in. You know, there was a UAC escalation, but it's only if you trigger uac. So it only works in certain circumstances where you can temporarily use it in minimum privilege to apply that UAC constraint.

[Paul Thurrott]

Uac. I, I was, I was, I think I was wrong about this, but I, I always compared UAC to that third brake light. They added the cars in like 1986 or whatever year. I remember they did that. And I, and I, you know, okay, why are we adding an extra brake light? And it's like, well, people will notice this and they'll like, they'll see the brake lights better, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm like, yeah, then they'll just get used to it and they'll ignore it, you know, and I actually seem to ignore. But, you know, the third brake light has persisted. So maybe it works. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

Once you put a rule in place.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you see this? A24H2 is installing good things coming your way.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's so exciting. I can't wait till he loses his keyboard and mouse capabilities. But.

[Leo Laporte]

The good news is the emulator handles all of that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, of course. I don't have to worry about that. Anyway, I feel like people don't pay attention to UAC anymore. I think that's part of the problem. Right. For my. I don't think most people do what I do, but I know that if you hit tab three times and hit enter, it gets rid of it.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't tell people that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. I'm sorry. I. But I'm like, tap, tap, tap, enter. Like, that's what I do.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't it sometimes ask for your password?

[Paul Thurrott]

No. Oh, uac. No, you're. It will. So actually this just came up when Richard was gone. So in the insider program somewhere, they're updating UAC to, I think, avoid the thing I just described similarly to like a 2fa app. Like, sometimes it will give you a number, sometimes it'll give the number on the other side. Sometimes you have to, you know, it does something along.

[Richard Campbell]

The indicator is playing that game because.

[Paul Thurrott]

They'Re trying to get rid of the, you know, thing I did too.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, the pattern.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So they're tap, tap, tap, enter.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're doing that with.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I love. I love the way authenticator says, you know, look, look at the requester for the number. Look at me for the number. Type the number in.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, Yeah, I do like that, actually.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Were you being sarcastic or do you actually appreciate it?

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, I really do appreciate it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It makes you think.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I think, no, it's a little extra nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's different every time. That's absurd.

[Leo Laporte]

Brake light.

[Richard Campbell]

But it also, you know, it's the fourth break light.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's the fourth break.

[Richard Campbell]

I've talked to administrator who they talking to a user whose account was under attack. And while the account was under attack, the guy approved an authentication that wasn't him, like, while he was on the phone.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because you're like, stop. This freaking thing is always asking me stuff like, yeah, this is.

[Richard Campbell]

And the whole thing with the authenticator numbers is you have to be both sides because you need to be able to see the number.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, Right. So. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

I can't believe he just did that. It was right in front of me, like, while I was there.

[Paul Thurrott]

But that's what it's like being a human being. You're flying. That's why AI is going to take us out. I can't wait. It's only a matter of time.

[Richard Campbell]

The AI will wait if it presents a wizard where you can go next, next, next. Done.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're like, hey, copilot, how do I, like, just get rid of UAC props altogether? Is that a thing? Could I do that?

[Richard Campbell]

Would you like the end of Civilization Wizard? I can do that.

[Paul Thurrott]

You have to. But you can do it. But there's a uac. I'm just, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

So you're just going to have to hit.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, just authenticate with Windows. Hello. And we're good. There's been a bunch of stuff through the Windows Insider program since we last spoke, including one that just happened today. Most of it is not particularly interesting. They're getting rid of the beta channel for Windows 10, which is hilarious because they just started it up again at the end of June. But whatever, who cares?

[Richard Campbell]

Windows 10 was over, over.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I guess it is again. So there's a bunch of just. I don't even care about most of this stuff, honestly. But the big one, the one that people are going to want to pay attention to, came out last week, I think, after the show, as always, last week's show, which is a new release preview channel build of Windows 11, which has a lot of additional things, which means it's almost certainly coming out on patch Tuesday in December. So if you look at this list, you get an idea that this was supposed to be 24H4 and they didn't quite make the final cut. Right. For the initial release, it includes some things we've seen before, like the Android sharing capabilities from File Explorer and on the desktop, there's like that Start menu thing where if you have your Android setup and phone link, it pops up in a weird little regurgitated side panel thing. System tray updates, where it's like the shortened form of the clock now, which they showed like six months ago. Jump lists in the start menu. It's a bunch of little things, just a bunch of them. I think this to me is like, okay, this is what we really wanted to do for 24H2. So I'm guessing here kind of. But. But I think this is going to be.

[Richard Campbell]

Do they stop going at 24H2 at some point? Can it be 25H1? Can't it?

[Paul Thurrott]

So, all right, I'm fascinated you just said that because this is not in the Notes.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's November.

[Paul Thurrott]

A couple weeks ago, Google announced that they were going to change the schedule for Android. Right. They've always released toward the end of the year. They kind of finalize it in August usually and then. And it goes out of new devices like later in the year. Now for them, what that meant was typically in August, I'm sorry, in October, they would release new Pixel devices and it would have that version of Android. They would usually be the first ones. Right. And then it would go out to others, you know, Samsung would follow in January, whatever they claim because of their third party OEMs, which I read as. Because Samsung, the only one that matters, that they want to change the schedule so that they release this thing by the middle of the year. So in the second quarter. And so Android 16 is going to have this shortened schedule where all the behavior changes that you see in the UI will occur in probably, you know, May or June, something like that. Android 16 will come out. And they said they're doing it because of these partners. Right. Samsung, Samsung, who increasingly is releasing their best and most important products in August. Right. Which is the folding devices.

[Richard Campbell]

Right? Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

This past year, actually last year, and then again this year, they tried to move this timeline up, they tried to ship it early. They missed last year, they missed this year by two months. They didn't even come close. So they announced new Pixels in August. They did all their pixels in August, just like Samsung does for folding phones with last year's Android. Nice. So if you thought Microsoft was stupid, they're right there. But now they've started up this thing. So honestly I look at this and I think, yeah, this is the right time to do it. You want to hit the end of the year stuff, you want to hit back to school, you want to hit holiday, whatever. Why wouldn't Microsoft do the same thing? Right. They sort of half did it last year. They released 24H2 first for Snapdragon. Right. In June.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

But then they waited until November or October. Sorry. And now I guess sort of December for the full version.

[Richard Campbell]

We're still playing with that idea that there's this six month exclusivity and we don't really know when it ends.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I don't want to give them ideas. I definitely don't want to go back to our system where they do two major releases every year. But I actually do think that the second quarter of the year is the better time for that major release. I think that is the better time. Interesting you just said that. Because to Me. Why not have a 25H1?

[Richard Campbell]

Why not? Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then go to 26H1. Like skip the H2. Forget H2. Who cares about H2?

[Richard Campbell]

Do it in the first half of the year.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

In which case you're already late. It's November. H1 is upon us.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Anyway, that's. That would be my recommendation.

[Richard Campbell]

I just really don't ever want to say 24H2 ever again. That's what I'm looking forward to.

[Paul Thurrott]

I 24H2 is. I don't remember if you missed this or not, but has been easily the buggiest, most unreliable version they've ever released.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh God, I just installed it. Knock that off.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but they have cute icons in the context menu. It's nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Remember when it said, you know, great things are in waiting for you?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I believed it. See, I'm on 24H2. That was the ISO I downloaded, I think.

[Paul Thurrott]

Let's see. Let me look. I'm going to look at mine. I think you're on the. Oh, I actually have a newer but you might. So you should go to Windows updated. But you have a newer.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, I haven't done the monthly.

[Richard Campbell]

Updates because you updated now you'll need update.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's right. You might want to just join the insider program, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I've learned my lesson.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then just real quick, this is just semi related because earnings never end. Lenovo, the world's biggest maker of computers had significant double digit gains, profit and revenue year over year.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oddly not from PCs necessarily. Like their revenues from PC sales only went up 3% year over year. However, they did predict that for full year 2025, which for them is when is their fiscal year? I can't remember exactly. It might be the next. We might be in the first quarter now will be significantly better PC sales. So they've actually upped their prediction for PC revenue growth for the coming year. So I think it was 5 to 10%. Now it's 10 to 15%. So they're talking like we pretty much guarantee it's going to be double digit PC growth in the coming year, which is kind of amazing. And they credit two things for that AI PCs because they kind of have to but Also that Windows 11 replacement cycle which you've been talking about for years but has to happen eventually. And with Windows 10 exiting mainstream support. Not mainstream support, just support I guess unless you pay for the extended support system stuff in October, next year probably, probably will start happening.

[Richard Campbell]

So it wasn't the PCs that gave them double digit growth, what was it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it wasn't cars, it wasn't Iot. It wasn't smart devices. No, it was data center.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So everyone, even like companies that are just not big players in this market, like amd, kind of falls in this category in an even bigger way. Even though they're nothing really, a lot of their growth is coming from that part of the business. Lenovo has been trying to diversify beyond the PC for a long, long time and they obviously have a phone business, et cetera, but you were gone for this. But AMD announced layoffs and they're actually laying off people in their PC and gaming divisions to focus on AI in the data center, which they see as a major growth area for them. They are not five. That's not fair. I was gonna say 5%, but it, it's some, I can't remember how small they are compared revenue wise to Nvidia, but it's somewhere in that, it's somewhere in that area. It's very small compared to Nvidia. But for them, you know, the PC has a, has a very definitive, you know, size to it. It's not like if they go gangbusters, they're not going to be a much bigger company than they are now. But if they can make some growth happen in the data center with AI, that's a huge growth potential.

[Richard Campbell]

All right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Lenovo never broke up like HP did. Right. So they still have both sides of that kind of fence. Like I think Dell. Yeah, Dell does as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Okey dokey. Maybe we do a little breaky wiki here. And then I know you want more AI, so you're going to get more AI.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we're going to smack it with it.

[Leo Laporte]

You've been asking for it, now you're gonna get it. Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell, you are listening, dear. Winder and Doder, winner and dozers to Windows Weekly. This show brought to you today, as it always has been, literally by Cash Fly. How many times have you heard me say it? Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by Cashfly at Cache. Actually, in the early days of the show, Paul remembers this. Back when we were in audio, it was like brought to you by AOL Radio for a while and brought to you by bittorrent for a while we were suffering, to be honest. We just didn't have the bandwidth to give you the shows you want. And when we moved to video, it was even worse. Fortunately, Cashfly to the rescue. For over 20 years, Cash Fly has held a track record for high Performing ultra reliable content Delivery, serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. And now, Cash Flies better prepared for the holidays. Yes, Cash Fly gets ready for the holidays. Better prepared than ever before. Cash Flies the only CDN built for throughput. Ultra low latency video streaming. Delivering video with less than a second latency to over a million concurrent users. Lightning fast gaming delivers downloads faster. And as you're playing with zero lag, zero glitches, zero outages. If you've got a site or anywhere with images on it, you'll love Cashfly's Mobile Content Optimization, which gives you automatic and simple image optimization just like that, so your site loads faster and looks better no matter what size screen you're on. The thing we really appreciate about Cash Fly, we didn't know at the time, you know, bandwidth was very spiky. We didn't, we didn't want to pay for like the maximum bandwidth we'd ever use. It went up and down some, some days there was hardly any. So they offered us flexible month to month billing so we could figure that out as long as we needed. And they'll offer that to you too, by the way. Plus, once you understand, you know what your needs are, you could get discounts for fixed terms. The point was for us and for you to design your contract when you switch, they're very flexible. A couple of big announcements. They wanted me to talk about managed object storage. Cashfly is a new object storage solution designed to increase speed and reliability to industry leading levels. The hardware, get this. This is so cool. It's entirely based on NVMe, so it's going to be better suited to users with large numbers of small objects. It's completely S3 compatible, of course, and it will easily integrate into your cash fly MOS, into S3 or any other tool set you've designed. And here's the best part. There are no egress or ingress costs, no zero egress or ingress costs, just a flat volume fee. And they've just added a new POP in Austria's capital city, Vienna. So let's all go have some soccer tort. Central Europe will see significant improvements in latency and average transfer speed. That's one of the things Cashflow does so well by putting a server closer to you, closer to your customers. For us, it means no matter where in the world you're downloading our shows, you're downloading from a server that's nearby. So it's fast. They've also added some new reseller features to the portal. You can now be classified as a reseller and have numerous full accounts under your reseller account. This is great for MSPs, each of which can operate independently, but the billing is all centralized. Cash Fly. We love Cash Fly rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs. And you could do something we. I think we were. It must have been an early beta of this because we've been doing this for a long time. You can shield your site content in the cloud. We upload to Cash fly so there's 100% cash hit ratio. There's no cash misses. I love that feature. They call it SOS. You might want to try that. Cash fly's elite managed packages give you the VIP treatment. I know we've always gotten great treatment from our dedicated account manager. He or she will be with you from day one. Ensuring a smooth implementation and reliable 24. 7 Support when you need it. Look, you owe it to yourself. Learn how you can get your first month [e-mail] Twitter. You need me to spell it for you? That's Cashfly at C A C H e f l y.com twit thank you cashfly. Thank you for all you've done for us over. How long has it been, Lisa? It's been 15 years. Something like that. Yeah. A long time back. We go to the now refreshed Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell.

[Paul Thurrott]

Do we have an audio only live stream of this show?

[Leo Laporte]

You know, actually least let me since.

[Paul Thurrott]

Our someone asked on Twitter. I'm not asking.

[Leo Laporte]

We want this. We used to. We used to be on tunein and because we now stream on eight different platforms we've been constrained. One of the platforms could be the audio stream but we wanted to get it to YouTube and Twitch and Discord and TikTok and LinkedIn and Facebook and X and Kick. That's eight and we. So I don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean you could listen to the audio like I. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but people want. I know what they want. We used to have a. You could just listen. Have an audio stream. A live audio stream. It was@TWIT AM. Check if it's there or not. I think we're working on getting it back.

[Paul Thurrott]

We. I.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, I want to have it back. But remember the thing that has changed? We used to do 24. 7 streaming, right? So when we would do reruns and stuff, we don't do that anymore. So it won't be that you just turn it on and leave it on all day and all night. As much as you might want, Paul.

[Paul Thurrott]

I like to sleep to it. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

I think Twit AM might still work. If it doesn't. Russell's working on that. We're going to. So I apologize. I know it's been down since the studio closed.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not something I. I've thought about. I just.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm glad you asked because actually I've been getting some email from people and I do want to tell people that. Yeah. Also I should mention we're working on a best of for this show. As long as we're talking business. So if you have some ideas of moments of great rage on Paul's part.

[Paul Thurrott]

Or.

[Leo Laporte]

A comment that you enjoyed or whatever, we're looking for those clips. Anything that happened in the year 2024, go to TWiT TV. Best of the more information you give us, the easier it will be for our editors. But anything that you remember that you'd like to see in the end of year best of which is coming up in not too long, believe it or not, about a month.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, now back to the AI and antitrust and more. The section you've all been waiting for.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's actually no AI in here that I can think of. Well, I guess it factors into this a little bit. So. So according to a report in Bloomberg, the DOJ in the ninth states that are arrayed against Google in its losing search antitrust case in the United States are going to recommend or have recommended to the judge because he gave him various choices that Google sell off Chrome as part of its remedy. There's a lot more to this. They looked at selling off Android. They looked at selling off the advertising business. They are apparently also going to require them to make various changes to Android and the App Store, et cetera, et cetera. But the big one, of course, is this Chrome thing. And the reaction to this has been entertaining to me. I'm not 100% sure personally this is.

[Richard Campbell]

The right thing to do or it's generating revenue. How do you make a business out of a product you give away?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, because it's the distribution vehicle.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't disagree.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's the theory. Yeah. No, I know. I don't know. It's hard not to look back at the Microsoft thing. Remember when Microsoft was found guilty of antitrust violations late. Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

In 1999.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. They were going to separate Microsoft into the OS company and the application company. That was the. Yeah. And this is not as dramatic as that. No, but it's still. Still, you know, it's Kind of interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it sounds like table stakes in a consent decree negotiation.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah. I think one thing we can 100% guarantee is there will be no more of these special deals. Right. So the 20 whatever billion that they pay Apple every year. Going away. Yeah, the thing that keeps Mozilla in business. Going away. Sorry, Mozilla.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you do have a new administration too, so it'll be interesting to see.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Although the new administration hates Google, so.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I was going to say it doesn't. No one seems to remember this and I'm going to include myself in this list. This lawsuit was actually brought under the Trump administration, so. Yeah, so actually.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's still been running through.

[Leo Laporte]

But that's the point. It's been going on so long, administration.

[Paul Thurrott]

Continued it and then. Yeah, government moves years off.

[Leo Laporte]

Whatever remedy. What do you, what do you think is selling Chrome though? I mean I don't even know how you sell Chrome. It's an open source project.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Well that's the thing. Like how much could this. I think the three of us could afford to buy Chrome. Like I like what is. Like Chrome is a standalone business.

[Leo Laporte]

Like what is analyst said it was worth like 20 billion.

[Paul Thurrott]

Please. For what.

[Richard Campbell]

How are you going to.

[Paul Thurrott]

I was told the super site for Windows was worth a million dollars. When I tried to take it back. Like I, I. Yeah, sure it is, but I.

[Leo Laporte]

Who would buy it and why would they buy it?

[Paul Thurrott]

What man would want her? No, it's just. Yeah, no, yeah, it would be Microsoft. There's no, there's no way Microsoft could. Microsoft. There's no way.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no way.

[Paul Thurrott]

I honestly, I think the one company that makes sense here is Mozilla.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, Mozilla. No, they don't have.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I'm trying to stay in the industry. It will be some horrible sales force. Oracle, Salesforce, IBM. Yeah, terrible. Amazon, but it won't Amazon.

[Leo Laporte]

This isn't going to happen.

[Richard Campbell]

Like I said, I think this is table stakes in a consent decree negotiation.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think what happens is some form of behavioral change where they can no longer tie their.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you say there'll be spankings?

[Paul Thurrott]

Spankings. They will be. Do not make me make you go. In a timeout. I will do it. I'm going to Blair Witch. You get up against me.

[Richard Campbell]

No safe words here.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I don't know. I don't have an opinion.

[Leo Laporte]

It's hard to understand how it would even work because Chrome is based on an open source project called Chromium, which admittedly is mostly Google employees, but it is not owned by Google.

[Richard Campbell]

Microsoft uses Chromium for Edge.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's roughly comparable to Android when you think about it. Right. So Android aosp. But the thing that people want is what we call Android and that's the Google Play, Google Maps, Gmail and you pay for that. Right. And so that's obviously not true of Chrome, but Chrome, Google makes money through their advertising engine and by the way, all the built in tracking. Right. And so when Microsoft made Edge, the big promise was we're going to give you Chrome but without all the Google terribleness. Fair enough. They did it. But they added their own terribleness. Right. And so, so instead of getting tracked by Google, you get tracked by Microsoft. So is that better? Maybe, but I don't know, it's kind of a thin line.

[Leo Laporte]

So Bloomberg's whether how intelligent Bloomberg is or not said it's worth $20 billion.

[Paul Thurrott]

$20 billion. Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but I don't again what people will actually pay. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well that's all you want.

[Leo Laporte]

And I don't understand really what, what selling it even means.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, I know, it's bizarre. It's bizarre.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like selling Linux. You can't sell Linux.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is the real reason that they're talking about basing Chrome OS and Android now. You know, I don't know, I, it's very.

[Leo Laporte]

No, actually what they're talking about is porting Chrome OS to Android to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you know. But yeah, so now it's, it's, it's basically Chrome on top of some thin Linux. Like.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I mean the whole thing doesn't matter what happens to Chromebooks, what happens to Chrome. I don't, I don't. It doesn't make sense. This is a judge who apparently.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know, to me it's fascinating.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually it's not the judge, it's doj, I should say.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we didn't get to see what might have happened to Microsoft. Right. Because that fell apart. But it's, there's going to be some. You know, when you hear about breaking up Google, it sounds super dramatic, but what it really means is there are parts of the company that are going to maybe, maybe could get sliced off or. Right. To me it seems like the advertising business should be the thing like that Google becomes a tech.

[Leo Laporte]

I think they'll do that too.

[Paul Thurrott]

But that's what I mean, it feeds.

[Leo Laporte]

Into the advertising business because they gather.

[Paul Thurrott]

Information about you make these technology products they're actually making. They're doing pretty good. I mean it's not a top five big Tech company. But Google Cloud, whatever, paid services, have hardware, et cetera, that's a business.

[Richard Campbell]

The argument would be that Google Cloud and the Google Suite would be better off being away from the ad business. Yeah. Because right now they're all hampered by anything that impairs ads.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, right. Yeah. I mean, that was the thing, like when Microsoft was going to split up into the two businesses, there was talk of like, well, now Microsoft will put out Office or whatever that company's called, will put out Office on Linux. Because now they're not constrained by these competitive demands that, you know, the broader company at that time had.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. But that already, that did happen to Microsoft. Once Azure was their focus, suddenly there was Office for iOS and Android.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right? Yeah. Right. Different.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you know, that's exactly what happened. Yeah, but first you had to make the operating system not the focus of the company.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, yeah. So advertising is the focus of that, of this company, Google, majority of the business right now.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's why they wanted to sell. Because what they're saying is, sell the Chrome and Android, well, you prevent the. That gather data for your ad base.

[Paul Thurrott]

How are you distributing your abuse? Right. You're doing it through these unfair deals you have with Apple, et cetera. Right. Worth tens of billions of dollars. You're doing it through, honestly through Android as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Cory Doctorow points out that selling Chrome actually will have the exact opposite effect. He says no company that buys Chrome, any company that buys Chrome will know it only has a couple of years before Google will be permitted to create a new browser.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just create a new browser? Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So this company, whoever buys it, would be incentivized to extract as much value from Chrome as possible. So it could make Chrome worse.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, yeah, that's why. But by the way, I didn't read that, and I don't mean to say that's why I. But that's why I think, like, Mozilla would be the best possible outcome here in a way. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't have $20 billion, I can tell you.

[Paul Thurrott]

They barely. No, no, no, no, of course they don't. No. But they could get a loan. No, it's, it's. No, it's people. For example, like, one of the things I've said about Xbox is like, look, they want to get out of hardware. Maybe there's a model where the Xbox console could become something that they license and allow hardware makers to make. Right. There could be multiple consoles or whatever these devices are. And then people say, well, hold on a second. Like if Microsoft can't make money making this. How could these other companies make money? Well, Microsoft doesn't make money making PCs either, but these companies do. So smaller companies that just focus on this one thing, that have maybe smaller margins, whatever, can make a go of this thing. And so I think in this world, a company like Mozilla could take this product and without all that advertising nonsense, it would be a small.

[Leo Laporte]

They could do that today if they wanted to take Chromium.

[Richard Campbell]

If that would have worked, it would have done it with Mozilla.

[Leo Laporte]

There's ungoogled Chrome that people can use.

[Paul Thurrott]

But Chrome had their finger on the scale the whole time because Chrome was paying to play or Google was paying to play. That's the point. Google looked. I don't want to understate. They made a good browser, too. But the problem is they also abused it. There was stuff going on behind the covers that is bad for consumers. So Mozilla got kind of pushed, pushed aside. Because Google has infinite money. They can pay to make sure.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's hysterical that people are even.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, they talk about.

[Leo Laporte]

Because it's all going to go away January 20th. You might as well just throw everything up in the air.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think this one's going to. I don't think this one is going to be.

[Leo Laporte]

But we don't know what shape it will take.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it'll change. You know, the funny thing is it's not worth $20 billion. It costs more than $20 billion, right? Well, Google spends billions. How much Chrome getting. Getting Chrome placed in front of everybody.

[Leo Laporte]

That's true.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a cash point, not a revenue.

[Leo Laporte]

That's an interesting point.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, but when Google pays Apple for, you know, what it was, 20, 22 billion bucks a year, they're making 40, 60, whatever it is.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they're making that revenue, Chrome.

[Leo Laporte]

But you have an ad business tied to it with that.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what I mean.

[Richard Campbell]

That's how they're making the revenues in the ad business.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. That's what I mean. Yeah. Chrome, that's why it's not really worth $20 billion. Because when you strip away the revenue that it makes, it's just a nutty.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a nutty request from the doj.

[Paul Thurrott]

To be honest. And I.

[Leo Laporte]

Honest, I think nobody gets a way.

[Richard Campbell]

To try and negotiate a consent decree.

[Leo Laporte]

And that, you know, I understand. I think what seems to be happening right now in Washington is the current administration is trying as best it can to get whatever it can in the next Two months. Whether it's started by the previous administration.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, yes, I do. I. Yeah, but what do you think.

[Leo Laporte]

Elon Musk's going to say about that?

[Paul Thurrott]

Maybe. Maybe X could buy it.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I think. No, I think you're not wrong. The relationship with the tech billionaires and the incoming administration is not small.

[Paul Thurrott]

Not at all. That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

And Sundar P. Has very much been kissing up to the new administration.

[Paul Thurrott]

You have to just. The ring, you know, like I would.

[Leo Laporte]

If I were him.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's not exactly a tech bro, but I, you know, he wear a bandana or something. He could get in there.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it's funny because J. It's so confusing. J.D. vance loves Lena Khan and thinks. Yes, that's funny because he's praised her publicly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

He thinks that big. So there is this kind of b. B. Partisan consensus that big tech's bad for different reasons, but completely different.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So there is definitely a. A target on big tech. But it's. I think that we know that the Trump administration is pretty transactional, so it's really going to come down to how.

[Paul Thurrott]

Great term, by the way. And it's accurate. Okay. Yeah. I'm just sort of. To me, it's interesting. I don't. I don't actually have a strong opinion about it. I don't. I don't. It's not.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think it's a remedy.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know what. I think Richard's on to something. I think as a regulator, it's sort of like, you know, when you're playing a football game, final seconds of the game, a team is on the verge of potentially scoring a touchdown, but it's fourth down and they. They're trying to get the other team to come off sides and it doesn't work. And you call a timeout and you just kick, you know, and like, what they're trying to do is like, maybe we can force them to the table and say, look, you've. I guess you're going to go for this nuclear option. Okay, Sorry. Our mistake. Let's make some concessions. Because the better outcome here is behavioral concessions that come from Google that the government agrees to or the courts or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Stop. Although I guess you've already. You've also. I mean, you've been found guilty. It's kind of too late for this. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. It's fascinating.

[Richard Campbell]

Paying for Chrome placement would not actually be.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wouldn't that.

[Leo Laporte]

Correct.

[Paul Thurrott]

There you go. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But it kills Mozilla.

[Paul Thurrott]

It does. I know, but you. I. But see, everyone says that, and you're right, but that's not. Look, if your business is being propped up by what is essentially.

[Leo Laporte]

Maybe you should be killed. Killed.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, maybe you should be killed. Yeah, maybe you should be allowed. No offense, but, I mean, I, I love what Mozilla stands for. They've made a lot of mistakes. And if, if your business is literally predicated on the world's worst company feeding you money every week to keep you alive so they can point to you and say, hey, look, we have competition. It's not a business. You know, sorry. I mean, I'm sorry, but that's not a reason to allow the abuse of this company to continue. Continue. It just isn't. It's. I'm sorry. You know, I love Mozilla. I wish.

[Leo Laporte]

No, we need. Because we need the diversity.

[Paul Thurrott]

We don't want. And we. We need more of that kind of company too. I mean, but they. I. You know, this is not working, so.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Richard, you missed the whole.conf thing. You had no idea.

[Richard Campbell]

I feel like people are quite annoyed that I wasn't there to host a session too, because I was in.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I. Maybe this is something I got to talk to. But this. So I have so much I want.

[Leo Laporte]

To talk about the Union Hour show.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, I know. So I got to move on. I'm going to move on. So I'll do. Uno platform, which I've kind of ignored for a long time, is sort of a WPF replacement by Cross Platform. So inherently interesting. They have a. There's a lot of hot reload in the industry right now, but they also have what they call hut. I think they call it hut design, which is horrible. But basically you have a designer container and code and you can update the design in real time and it refreshes on the.

[Richard Campbell]

So it depends on hot reload, which is a. NET capability.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's very, very interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

So the UNO guys are taking on a really hard problem because these relativistic UX approaches where you just dynamically build, they're really hard to build a designer for.

[Paul Thurrott]

And so, yeah, so for people who don't. People, people who aren't programmers will probably remember classic Visual Basic. Well, anything with Canvas, a form, you would drag controls onto it, you would double click the control and you would write a little bit of code to handle that event. And it was awesome. It was funny.

[Richard Campbell]

It's also still true today, right in Studio 2022, you can make a WinForms client and you will get the designer, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So the successor to that stuff, Microsoft got C with Anders Heilsberg and they did Windows Forms. It was probably roughly 2,000, whatever it was. And then for the. Net wave or whatever, they did Avalon, which became WPF. And they've had that. And that's been kind of brought back from the dead. Like, I've been working in WPF this past year, right? We've talked about this a lot. There's a bunch of.

[Richard Campbell]

They've made some attempts at a designer.

[Paul Thurrott]

For wpf, they have, but that's where it's falling apart. So if you like, this is where I just looked at this today. In fact, I was working on this before the show. There's a lot more information about the updates they did for WPF and.NET9 and videos from. NET conf. So I've been watching that stuff. There's some new capabilities they never talked about anywhere else. They've done a horrible job of communicating what they've done. There's more work to be done that will occur in. Net 10. But in WPF today, if you bring up an existing new project, whatever, in Visual Studio, what you get is a wireframe view of the UI in the XAML designer. If you go to winui, which is the most modern, whatever version, you do not get a Visual Designer. Microsoft has basically given up on this. So there was a time period where they. Remember, they had Expression and Blend and whatever they were doing over time. But Microsoft, you asked, and Uno has. They asked, they said, are you going to do this? Like, no, we're done. We're not even going to try anymore. So the reason they made Platform Studios is because Microsoft's not going to address this problem. So it is a very real problem, because complicated apps like professional app, not the stupid things I make, but like, you know, like apps that, like a company would make is a team of people involved and you have programmers obviously writing code and then. But you also have designers working in things like Figma and nevertheless shall meet. And so I talked to these guys this past week. It was kind of interesting because I'm sort of vaguely aware of this stuff. But today, if you create a design of an app in Figma or whatever, whatever app you might use, and then you hand it off to the developers, I said, well, surely this must export to XAML or whatever. And they're like, no. They literally look at a picture and they recreate it in code.

[Richard Campbell]

It's like, Figma definitely generates C and.

[Paul Thurrott]

Xaml I know it does. Yeah, I think it does do C markup. But the problem is it's not like a live view.

[Richard Campbell]

It is literally like, it's definitely a stage. You design your hands and you spit it out and now you embed it in your app.

[Paul Thurrott]

So Uno is basically given or made this capability to take a Figma design and in real time do a hot refresh into a code based version of it. So that as you maybe remotely even cross platform or looking at this app with multiple people, someone could say, hey, I think we should move the button up 3 inches or whatever it is, is. They can do it in Figma and it comes up in the code. It's like this is, it's kind of, it's exciting.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and addresses the bigger problem here, which is I need us to work on a tablet as well as a screen.

[Paul Thurrott]

And that's, that's right.

[Richard Campbell]

It's also called, it's the media query effect.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So it will work on web, work on Android, it works on iOS, et cetera. So that's good.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, it's compelling and it's long overdue in some respects.

[Paul Thurrott]

I need to talk to you about that. We're going to talk and. Seriously, dude, not done. Can we, could we just make. Yeah. Okay. All right. So I'm sorry, I didn't mean, I don't mean to pester you in like live on a podcast, but.

[Richard Campbell]

Wouldn't be the first time. Can we talk?

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

I go away for two weeks.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. Yeah, I know. It was like the critical two weeks too.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, oh, I'm just, I'm laughing at you. Messaged me a couple of times. You're gonna make it this week. But Kev messaged me too, so I'm like, somebody's been missing me.

[Leo Laporte]

I think I just want to go on record, I did not send you any emails.

[Richard Campbell]

You did not, Leo. And I'm a little sad, really. It's like I, I thought, I know where the love is.

[Leo Laporte]

I thought, gosh, I wish.

[Paul Thurrott]

Richard, the first week you missed, I, I, I, I tell my wife this story too. Like, I talked about the guy, the. I almost said the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was written by Douglas Adams. Douglas Adams, Sorry. Yep, yep. So he, like, a lot like Stephen Fry was like this in the early 2000s, had a tech blog, blog, and then of course, sadly passed away. But he had this tech assistant who worked with him and he kept the thing going for a little while and at the time what had just happened was like Mac OS X Tiger had come out. I remember he said he had written in this blog, like, you know, Douglas would have loved Mac OS 10. Tiger. Douglas would have got Tiger. And I don't remember what the topic was. It was two weeks ago. But I said to Leo, I'm like, Richard would have got this. Like, I know. No, I know. But you were gone. And I was like, I wanted to talk to him about this and gone but not forgotten.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. I got to talk to you, Matt. Okay, so Xbox. We've had, we've had, we've had our week weeks. We've had our less than exciting weeks. We've had our really big weeks actually this year. It's been kind of interesting. This is a big one. Like, this is a big week for like games, you know, Xbox and otherwise. Phil Spencer gave another interview and as Phil Spencer does, he just starts talking about stuff. He's like, you know, and I have to think at some point someone, and there's only really one person higher up than him at Microsoft, come to think of it, will say, hey, dude, shut up. You know. But he kind of talked about how, hey, you know, the hardware's not the future. That said, we do think about portable Xbox something, something. And we're working on it. And I'm not saying it's coming out anytime soon, but this is an area I've kind of speculated a little bit about whether this thing might be like a Steam Deck type thing like PC based or the future could be this ARM based thing which we know they were working on. We don't know what came of it. We'll see. But he actually talked about it. It's like, dude, what are you doing? It's crazy. Like you've got stuff to sell and you're just talking about something else. And he also talked about this. The mobile app game stores they want to make on iOS and Android and those in the US that's been delayed because the Google stuff has been pushed back and they're going to obviously appeal. And I said, we'll see what happens. But it's inevitable that Microsoft and others will put their app stores on these platforms.

[Richard Campbell]

But it also is necessary, right? Like in the end, Microsoft owns the game studios. They're going to make the games for all the existing platforms. Like, why would you make an Xbox portable when there already is a Steam deck and all of your games run on it and you will make money every time a game gets installed on it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think that. Right. So the Next story is about this new ad that Microsoft put out that is freaking people out, even though they've been talking about this for two years. But this notion that Xbox is not the console only it is in fact the console is. You know, remember when like Steve Jobs got up on stage one time and he said, hey, the Mac used to be the center of the ecosystem. Now the Mac is out here and this is other stuff. And the other stuff was, you know, mobile devices, you know, iPhone especially. This is that moment for Xbox. Like we made a go with this. It's been 20 years, it hasn't really gone great for us. But now we own all these game studios and they sell cross platform. We're going to bring more of our stuff to those game studios. And one of the things that Phil Spencer alluded to was this notion of like, you know, the next Xbox, the next Halo, it's going to be on PlayStation. I mean, come on now, the way you react to that. Not you, Richard, but anyone is kind of telling, right? For the hardcore kind of Xbox guys, they don't want to hear that. Like they get freaked out.

[Richard Campbell]

I like my tribe. Don't mess with my tribe.

[Paul Thurrott]

Here's the thing though. I've played Call of Duty a lot and Call of Duty improved dramatically when they, they made multiplayer cross platform. They first did it console to console, PlayStation, Xbox together. It dramatically expanded the audience. Right? Way better. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And the network effect is a bigger benefit.

[Paul Thurrott]

More players. Now you also have PC users in there and by the way, you also have cloud streaming guys in there. So you could have a guy like literally in a game, you could have a guy on an Xbox with a controller, guy on a PlayStation with a controller, guy on a PC with a controller, guy in an iPad with a controller. He's doing it through cloud gaming. And why not? Yeah, why do you care? So it's tied to your question earlier. Why? I think part of it is they want the hardware thing that they do to be ARM based and because it's efficient for all the reasons we know. But that the Xbox hardware, whatever it might be, will be sort of like a, it's a PC based platform with one exception. Every place or Xbox console has been a PC, essentially PC.

[Richard Campbell]

Except for the 360.

[Paul Thurrott]

Except for 360. Right. Which is PowerPC. So I feel like the next one, they want it to be arm and now they'll offer, they can offer this. You know, this didn't work.

[Richard Campbell]

You're going to spend those $50 million developing an arm based Xbox that you're going to make no money on. You basically sell it for cost.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Unless you have a hardware flaw, in which case it's going to cost you billion.

[Paul Thurrott]

They could farm out to hardware makers. Right. That's part of my. That's just a thing I invented.

[Richard Campbell]

But you still have the basic problem of there's no point in improving the machine right now and giving it more performance when the studios cannot fully utilize them as they are.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like the real inflection point. The reason there's no PlayStation 6 is that the studios are screaming, don't give us more compute. We can't use it.

[Paul Thurrott]

We can't even. Exactly. We can't take advantage of the thing we have.

[Richard Campbell]

No. You know, it costs too much.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. But if you consolidate.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Like this.

[Paul Thurrott]

So. But here's the. Part of the problem right now is you have mobile, which is two discrete platforms. You have desktop, which is one, but two if you include Mac and three if you include Linux platforms. You have Xbox or console. Sorry. Which is three discrete platforms. So, you know, I know we went down this path.

[Leo Laporte]

Really.

[Richard Campbell]

It didn't go great. You know, Nintendo lives on its own. It's its own games.

[Paul Thurrott]

But you can't ignore that market. They have won again this generation by far. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, Nintendo got off the hardware race 10 years ago and they've been running ever since.

[Paul Thurrott]

Worked out pretty well for them. Yeah. Exactly. Which is why I sort of wonder about this notion of Xbox hardware. Thanks to AI based in this. We're great on Qualcomm or ARM hardware. Upscaling and all this stuff where you could have like this thing that honestly could not run this stuff very well. But because it does upscaling. It looks great.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean it was run professionally.

[Leo Laporte]

So much compute.

[Richard Campbell]

I can afford to not actually fix the game. Just do it dynamic.

[Paul Thurrott]

Don't worry about it. Exactly. I feel like it's still back to.

[Richard Campbell]

The problem of why do I need to build a new piece of hardware.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Because I think the plan here would be a singular platform that would run across what we think of as console and PC.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it would just make it easier on developers to create app or games that would run across platforms.

[Richard Campbell]

I think we are in stasis right now. While generative AI penetrates the game development market.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. And while I, you know, maybe ARM is not. Well, I feel like ARM is there. But actually the weakest part of the Qualcomm platform is the graphics.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

And we just don't see native games running on is not going to be.

[Richard Campbell]

Relevant until we actually can utilize it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, so I. You said stasis. Great word. I think of it as like a holding pattern. It's like. Are we ready yet? Nope. Are we ready yet?

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nope.

[Richard Campbell]

We're waiting for a title to come out that utilizes generative AI to cut the cost of development more than in half, I would say by 60%.

[Paul Thurrott]

Dear CO pilot, could you make a version of Halo that doesn't size?

[Richard Campbell]

Get rid of having to pre generate all those backgrounds, get rid of having to generate all those scripts. Get rid of the most expensive parts of making a game that cost hundreds of people.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right, so this also has not gone well and this is a little down the list, but I would just mention that yesterday. No, today. Today, I think it was today. No, yesterday. I don't know what's going on.

[Richard Campbell]

Time is relative.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just flew back from Mexico. I'm out of my mind. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 arrived. Right. So this is the world inside of the game. Like it's insane. And part of. But part of this is the science experiment where in previous versions of the game, as you downloaded these world expansion packs, they would get all the high res assets and whatever. So, you know, you'd fly over Paris, it would look amazing. It would look like Paris. It would look like some blob, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Nope.

[Paul Thurrott]

You would have to download all those things. Yeah. To your computer or to your console. Now that stuff is going to be streamed from Azure. And so they're actually. This is the step toward this thing you're talking about where they're not necessarily generating new content on the fly, which I think is what you mean, really. But they're also not even allowing you. Even if you said, look, I got a two terabyte hard drive, I don't care, like download it, like, nope, that stuff is coming from Azure. We're going to streamline it.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And so we have our first example of what I would call kind of a hybrid game. You know, hybrid. This is hybrid cloud on prem, I guess. But day one did not go great, by the way. I guess there were a lot of problems getting online and performance was terrible. But you know, give it a second. I mean, we'll see. I think it will be okay eventually. But yeah, I think this is the. They're going to look at this and say, all right, well what about the next Halo? What about the next Gears? What about the next Call of Duty?

[Richard Campbell]

I think a lot of PMS are struggling mightily because they're looking at their budgets and looking at the risk and they're worried they're going to get totally scooped. You spend 150 million trying to develop a peer one tier, one game and somebody does it for 50 million and it doesn't matter what happens after that.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. Yeah. This is the Netflixization of games. The, you know, we're going to have Ryan Reynolds or whomever, and I pay him a lot of money and we're going to make this piece of garbage that's all green screen and then never actually go to Europe.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Or whatever it is. Right. Like, you know, but. But why not? I mean, and games have gotten too expensive to make and too time consuming to make, frankly. And the stakes are so high that if you screw this up, like you.

[Richard Campbell]

Have a dozen billion dollar games a year only.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean, like. And yeah, there's hundreds of games made.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Like, it's so you. It's why we keep retreading the same ideas over and over again. Why there's yet another Call of Duty one will make a billion.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, Right. I hate that Call of Duty was the inspiration for the Marvel Universe, but God damn it. Anyway. Okay. Is that true?

[Leo Laporte]

No, you just make.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, but I mean. No, but in the sense that like, not really. I mean, not literally, but you want. You can see the progression. Right. Not. Not literally, but yeah. Call of Duty is not that terrible. So. So this has been an awesome month for Game Pass. I mentioned Flight Sim. If you have Game Pass, you get flight sim standard and you get that on PC. The latest consoles, X and S get it on Game Pass, ultimate and PC Game Pass, you get it on game streaming if you have Ultimate. Right. So you can kind of play that one. I haven't yet played it. Like I said, just flew home. But I think Today or Tomorrow, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, that game that takes place in Chernobyl. Right. We've been waiting on this thing for 15 years. Is available. If it is. Well, as you watch or listen, this will be out. But if it hasn't come out yet, you can actually preload this PC or console. So get it going. Because seriously, it's like 100. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it going to be really great?

[Richard Campbell]

Huge.

[Paul Thurrott]

150. It's supposed to be very, very. It looks beautiful. We'll see. I am definitely going to play this one. I have preloaded it. I did take the time to do that today.

[Leo Laporte]

So you're wandering around Chernobyl.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, actually it comes out today. I'm sorry. Yeah, November 20th. So that's happening. Dark Descent is coming at the end of the month. This has been a good one. So there's been some good stuff. Yeah, big one. These are big games. Flight simulator outside of Activision, Blizzard and Call of Duty is arguably the biggest, you know, Microsoft Studio game of the year. I would say, like, this is. It's big. And I don't just mean on disc. I mean, like, it's a big, you.

[Richard Campbell]

Know, not physically, just.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's a big title for Microsoft. So that's a good one.

[Richard Campbell]

What does you speak of?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, Avowed, which is eagerly anticipated. Is it Blizzard? No. Obsidian game.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm going to play this S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 video.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's beautiful looking.

[Leo Laporte]

It's made in Ukraine. Did you notice that?

[Richard Campbell]

That's what Chernobyl is.

[Paul Thurrott]

A month or so ago I, I mentioned this, but there's a documentary about the making of this game that's for free. YouTube, wherever. Go watch this. It's incredible.

[Leo Laporte]

Looks a little like Half Life.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Has that feeling that in a second too.

[Richard Campbell]

It's all about the radiation.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Perhaps all the Zone really needs is our compassion. No, it's a video game. There's no compassion. Looks just like Half Life.

[Paul Thurrott]

It looks a little bit like Call of Duty too, until, well, of course, everything start occurring.

[Richard Campbell]

FPS looks like FPS.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's all going to look like Call of Duty soon. That's all.

[Richard Campbell]

It'll be left of Duty. All the time.

[Leo Laporte]

All the time.

[Paul Thurrott]

It looks really, really, really good. So for you Xbox holdouts, you, you.

[Leo Laporte]

Goons, Microsoft has a message for you. These are all different Xboxes, including an iPhone.

[Paul Thurrott]

To me, this is just common sense. This is what they've been talking about for two years. We're going to meet you where you are, right? Your game. You buy into this thing, whatever it is, a subscription, or purchase games, whatever, and your games will be available. Like where you are. Like, to me, this is common sense. And then you read headlines, you're like, oh, Microsoft doesn't even know what an Xbox is. It's like, guys, you got to start paying attention a little bit here.

[Leo Laporte]

This is an Xbox, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean, it's not an Xbox, but it is a place where you can play Xbox games.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it brings into the question of, like, what does it mean to say it's an Xbox? An Xbox is wherever you play Xbox games.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, but when, when Apple introduced the iPhone and they said there's an ipod in there, where people like, oh, yeah, but what does it mean, you know, an ipod? Like, I mean, guys, like the world Evolves like, you know, and in this case, I don't know if you paid attention, but they didn't really win the console war, so it makes perfect sense.

[Leo Laporte]

They might have won the game wars.

[Paul Thurrott]

The people who are the most offended by this are the ones who will benefit by it the most. Because your investment in Xbox continues. Right. Like it. You know what I mean? That brings it to more places. Like, this is what you should want.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

All restaurants and all games are Call of Duty.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. This is a Taco Bell. This is also a Taco Bell.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is a picture of a bathroom and like a. Like a rest area. This is also a Taco Bell.

[Richard Campbell]

Pretty soon we have to talk about the three shells.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's one of the. I don't remember when. One of the earliest things I remember that Richard said was you were joking about. What's that place? Arby's. You said it's like meat.

[Leo Laporte]

That's an Aptis description. Meat.

[Paul Thurrott]

Ish. You're like, yeah, it's sort of like meat. Microsoft does have. Or Blizzard, which is part of. Is it Blizzard? Yeah. Blizzard has an Xbox console exclusive coming. Or actually, I think it's coming on PC too, actually called Avowed. So that's coming in February. So you have that to look forward to. And then we have this crazy set of. I keep mentioning this like this notion of games being remastered or games just being upsized automatically and suddenly becoming replayable again. So Warcraft 1 and 2 remasters are I think available now, celebrating the 20th anniversary of that franchise. Warcraft 3 Reforged 2.0 is also available. Days ago, Valve announced the celebration of the 20th anniversary of Half Life 2. Yeah, a year ago.

[Richard Campbell]

I can't believe it's 20 years.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. So a year ago was really very old. Yeah. The 25th anniversary of the original Half Life, I think was last year, about a year ago now. This game was so revolutionary when it came out. It's like it was given to us by aliens. If you look at Half Life and then look at Half Life 2, that leap does not make sense. That game still looks great now. And by the way, I would make. In fact, I will make the case that this might literally be the greatest video game ever created ever. And it is still debate. Yeah, I know it's an unwinnable debate in many ways, but it's wherever you land on that, it's in the top five. I mean, it's right there. It is as influential as anything ID software ever made.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's impact on your company, the gaming industry. Like the way games are made.

[Paul Thurrott]

Awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

Awesome.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then they completely effed it up and they did Episode one two and not three and then not Half Life three and I could murder because they never left this thing.

[Richard Campbell]

But they got, they started making money on online games and suddenly those games.

[Paul Thurrott]

They did left for dead. To me, like, no, it makes me crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

But back to the same mantra, like it's just like it's too expensive to make games.

[Paul Thurrott]

The, the sale's over. But over the weekend this game was available for free, which they've done a couple of times on Steam. It's cheap. I mean if you want to buy this right now, it's probably 10, it's five or $10. It's nothing. It's still worth playing. It's amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a really great story.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's so much fun. It's awesome. The, it's been updated so it looks awesome on modern computers. Yada, yada yada, it's got all that stuff and they've integrated the two episodes into the main app, ui, whatever. It's just. God damn, it's so good. Separately, completely unrelated but still related, GOG.com, gOG, which used to be called good old gamers, announced a sort of like game preservation effort. And they have Some, I think 20 something games that are classic games that they certify run perfectly well in modern computers and look great and they'll keep updated, blah, blah blah. There's no DRM and all that stuff. Separate from that, basically a group of game enthusiasts released the original Unreal and Unreal Tournament both which by the way, just like another one, some of the greatest games ever made. Unreal primarily for single player, Unreal Tournament solely for multiplayer was so frenetic and fast and amazing. And this is the one where, remember this one, it was always like First Blood. It was awesome.

[Leo Laporte]

Awesome.

[Paul Thurrott]

They had all different game types like Carry the Flag and whatever. Awesome. And then they did a bunch of sequels. 2002, three, four, whatever. My son and I played these games endlessly. These games are available for free. They work fine on modern computers. They're owned by Epic Games and these releases were not by Epic Games, but people asked and they said, yep, we don't care, go for it.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

They let them out. It's good to go. Yep, it's awesome. So this is, it's, it's video game history. I'm not saying, I'm actually not saying that Unreal is necessarily playable, but Actually, a lot like the original Half Life, I guess. And I'm trying to think what else. It's like Duke Nukem is like this a little. But the first episode of this, the first part especially, is amazing. You wake up in a prison, the door is open, you don't know what's going on. You can get out, and there's an alien race, and bad things happen. But awesome game. Awesome, awesome, awesome. So a lot of really neat stuff happening.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, some of it is nostalgic, some of it is just, we have access. Compute. Let's do something with it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look, look, when it comes To Half Life 2 especially, I would say, yeah, nostalgia, it's also, right now, it's awesome to play this game. It's a great story.

[Richard Campbell]

In the end, it's fun.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's so good, so very fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it brings back the most important point about gaming, which is it's the game, not the technology.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. Although that's the thing. Yeah, absolutely, 100%. The world is so immersive. And your introduction, you know, you arrive on the train and you go through the process and someone grabs you and you think you're going to get beaten up. It's your buddy and whatever happens. But it's the introduction to the world is so perfect that by the time you step out into the, you know, the square and the thing comes up and takes your picture and, you know, the thing walks by, you're like, what is. How is this not a movie? How is this not a Netflix series?

[Richard Campbell]

I brought this up the other day about Half Life too, because Half Life was all inside a building. Right? It was your standard Wolfenstein scroller. Right, right. FPF scroller. And then the whole trick with Half Life 2 was you started out in a building and then you went out the door.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it's not just. It's like the wizard of Oz where it just, like, opens up and what.

[Richard Campbell]

Is happening directly into a derived Soviet brutalism landscape.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is so perfect. I, I literally, to this day, like, I, I've done this, I've done this everywhere in Europe. I did this with. The last time I went back to Boston, I was standing on the, the subway platform at the T with my friends and they did a little, like, announcement, and it was Half Life two to me. And I'm like, yeah, civil, civil in obedience, will not be tolerated. You know, please proceed to the processing facility. Like, it, you. It impacted me so much that I hear things in the real world and it sounds and it's Half Life too. Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It's such a good.

[Paul Thurrott]

So by the way, take the time, go watch the, the documentary about this is incredible the way. And sure enough like the guys who designed the game went to these abandoned train stations and wherever else in east. In Europe and they were like. And I'm like, yeah, no, obviously you did. It's perfect. So anyway, it's awesome. Okay, sorry. And then Sony has something called the PlayStation Portal. So the PlayStation Portal is not actually a portable gaming device per se, but it's a way to stream, you know, games or whatever. So now they allow you to stream PS plus games through this device which I know as I say you're like, wait, you couldn't do this before.

[Richard Campbell]

What was the point of this?

[Paul Thurrott]

But now you can. So yeah, now there's. I think there's. I don't know what the. I don't. I'm not sure the number of games. I want to say there's over 100 games. So if you have like PlayStation plus is their version of what used to be Xbox Game Pass. You know Game Pass. Right. So I think they have different tiers. They have, you know, different. I'm not really as much into that, but they have expanded this so PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and I think Windows PC. I think there's an app for it as well. You can, you know, play a bunch of their games over this service. So obviously of interest, but you know, not like of the Half Life two level quality of interest. So anyway, some good stuff. So yeah, it's been, this has been a good week for games.

[Leo Laporte]

Like good week for gaming.

[Paul Thurrott]

Might be the best week this entire year. I mean other than all the layoffs and studio closures. I mean aside from that like this.

[Richard Campbell]

Have to be a game developer, but it's fun to be a gamer.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I want to play Stalker 2 now. I have to check it out.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, I, I like I said I pre loaded it. I'm going to check.

[Richard Campbell]

That game is pretty dark, man.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks dark.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it looks beautiful though, right?

[Leo Laporte]

I'm still, I still play a game I started playing in Covid. I can't stop Valheim.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, Valheim. Okay. What's he gonna say?

[Leo Laporte]

What's they been smart. They released it Pre release for 20 bucks and then every year or so they had another bio.

[Paul Thurrott]

So you. Do you still play this on some giant screen?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, my 55 inch OLED.

[Paul Thurrott]

You bet.

[Leo Laporte]

I've tried playing it on smaller screens and it's not. No, I need to be a Vice Viking. I need to live as a Viking.

[Paul Thurrott]

Literally sit there and like, like furs and whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, yeah. I have a wolf.

[Paul Thurrott]

Are you gnawing on a turkey leg? What are you doing?

[Leo Laporte]

You're like actually locks. Meat is the meat. You really.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, they're locks. That's the, that's what you're gonna dip in Richard's drink later.

[Leo Laporte]

We will get to Richard's drinking in a bit. And the tips and picks of the week, the back of the book is just around the corner. You are watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. And our show today, brought to you by our good, our good, good listeners, the good people at Club Twit. We love you, Club Twitters and we thank you. If you're listening and you're not a member, I would love to invite you to join. We keep it pretty affordable. It's only 20 bucks a month, which is nice. You don't. Did I say 20? Yeah, it's only 10 bucks a month.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wait a minute.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's not that. It's only $7 a month.

[Paul Thurrott]

How much would you pay?

[Leo Laporte]

How do they get away with it? Many podcasts, you'd get one show for $7. But no, you get them all. You get, you get ad free versions of every show we do. You get access to the Club Twit Discord, which is a community of, you know, it's a self selected community of, of smart, interesting people who love technology. So it's a great place to hang. You also get to watch shows that we don't put out in public, like Micah's Crafting Corner. We've got the Chris Marquardt photo show coming up in a little bit. Stacy's Book Club. Another coffee clash with Mark Prince. That's going to be a lot of fun. We're going to do a coffee tasting. So that should be really interesting. All those, those are just, you know, benefits. But the real reason you join the club, I hope, is to support what you do. If, what we do. If you, if you like our shows, if you think the shows are worthwhile, if you like our hosts. By the way, I don't get any of the money. Not, not $1 goes into my pocket. It goes to Paul and Richard and John. Ashley and Kevin King are producers and Benito Gonzalez. It supports, it takes a big team to do this is. It supports them, Keeps, keeps the lights on. We've cut back as much as we could. We shut down the studio. We're doing what we can, but we really want to Keep doing the content because I think that's what really we bring to the table. That's unique. If you like it and you appreciate it and you listen, join the club. Seven bucks a month, that's all. It keeps it going. That's the key. Twit TV Club, Twitter. Scan that QR code in the upper left hand corner of your screen screen. Twit TV Club, Twitter. A couple of good things I should mention. 2 weeks free so you could try before you buy if you want. And when you join you will get a code that you could post on your socials and everywhere else and everybody who uses that code to join gets you a free month. So seven. Did I say seven bucks a month? It could be free forever if you have enough friends. Twit TV club. Twit. Thank you in advance. We really appreciate it's time for the back of the book and I think now would be a good time to introduce a man, a Myth, a legend. Mr. Paul Th.

[Paul Thurrott]

So one of the big differences maybe between the Xbox series X and s and the PlayStation 5 is that Sony went with just normal M2 slots for storage. Like so if you want to add, add more storage, it's actually pretty straightforward. Microsoft went with more of a traditional looking cartridge thing, kind of proprietary whatever. It's still an SSD obviously but haven't had too many options for storage and they've been pretty expensive and they still are. But right now the middle tier Weston Digital storage module which is 1 TB is a pretty good price for this kind of thing. Like better than Apple prices. Right. So. So typically I think the 512 is about 75 bucks. The one terabyte is maybe 130, 140 somewhere in there. And then two terabytes is. We don't want to talk about that. But the two lower end ones are on sale at Amazon and best.

[Leo Laporte]

This is physical storage, not cloud storage.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like a plug in little.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I have one in my. But you have to buy the one that's specifically for it.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. You can't just buy anything. So the Western digital version, the 1 terabyte is 1 is 99 bucks. It's usually 160 actually. So that's a good deal. That's actually a pretty significant price cut. Yeah. So if you need especially on an S if you like. I do like the initial S, I think it was 512 gigabytes. This is a pretty good upgrade. So you know, if you've been kind of holding off on that. This is the time, and I'm not going to spend too much time on this, but Microsoft has announced their Black Friday deals across Xbox, Surface, etc. Etc.

[Leo Laporte]

So getting to that time of year, aren't we?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Get in there this time. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You already had Thanksgiving, right, Richard?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, we do it in October, like civilized.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So do you have Black Friday in October as well, or.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, I, I. Listen, I'm pretty sure you guys put gummy bears in your stuffing, and I don't want to hear about this, but.

[Leo Laporte]

November 29th is the year all the Canadians come over the border to shop at Costco.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a tradition.

[Richard Campbell]

Use Amazon. We do have a family member who's us who's coming up next week, so we'll do Thanksgiving. Oh, there you go with him. Oh, it's just an excuse to eat.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm going to bring, I'm bringing Thanksgiving to Mexico. This is. I've talked to my friends. I'm like, I. I think Mexicans would love Thanksgiving. I think they would love the food aspect of it. I think they would love the food, but also just the whole family vibe of it. The point of it is not.

[Richard Campbell]

You've never met people so into family. To you.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what I mean. Like, I've been telling so many people, like, they're all curious about. They know about it, you know, but.

[Richard Campbell]

That and arguing politics, which is a very keen thing in the Mexican family. No, no, wait, that's wrong.

[Paul Thurrott]

The best.

[Richard Campbell]

Drunken uncles. That's what they do.

[Paul Thurrott]

Drunken uncles. No. Yeah. That's actually one thing people there are just kind of open about. They're like, who did you vote for? And I'm like, excuse me? Like, I don't know. I don't know if I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know about that.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, I. Whenever I'm in a foreign country, I just announced I didn't vote for him.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah. I just. Well, we, so we were, we were in France one year. So this back was like George W. Bush time frame and this guy in a market we had never been to. And I don't. I think we only went the one time. It was this random guy said, you know, if I ask you a question, I said, sherry, he said, do you support, you know, George W. Bush? I'm like, no, this guy's an idiot. And he says, he goes, let me. He goes, I don't understand. He goes, I. Every American I ask, yeah. Who voted for answers the same way. Like, how did this Guy become president. I'm like, you're not going to meet anyone who voted for him in your country. Those people don't travel.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

They can. Yeah. So French. Yeah. People are intrigued.

[Leo Laporte]

Surrender, monkeys. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Anyway, meantime, some time ago, a month ago or so, OpenAI finally released their initial early version of their Chat GPT app for Windows. Which was like a little bit of a middle finger, honestly, because the Mac version had been available for a while, the iPhone version had been available for a while, not.

[Leo Laporte]

I always just use it on the web. Web.

[Paul Thurrott]

Pretty sure those Apple didn't invest $13 billion in OpenAI. I'd have to look it up. But anyway, I think it's more about.

[Richard Campbell]

Dev resources than it has to do with.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I know, but seriously. But anyway, I guess it's gotten a lot better. So there's an updated version of it. It's now available to everyone who uses ChatGPT. You don't have to have a paying subscription like he used to before it works.

[Leo Laporte]

That's kind of cool.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So it's available, but actually they've also updated the Windows. I'm sorry, the Mac version. And I think this is an interesting peek at the future. So the way they're billing it is that it integrates with certain apps that you have installed on the Mac. And I'm like, okay, what does that mean? But actually they're all developer apps. So it's Visual Studio code Xcode Terminal.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So it'll notice you have Xcode and say, hey, you want me to fill this in?

[Paul Thurrott]

So it'd be like a pair. Yeah, that's very interesting. So I think obviously that will come to Windows eventually, but I also think the will expand out to other apps. Right. And so I think, you know, if you've been kind of like, eh, you know, like Chat or Copilot, who cares? Like maybe this is kind of an interesting thing. And then now it's time. Of course last week or whenever it was, Microsoft now allows you to remap the copilot key. I mean I guess one thing you could do is remap it to chatgpt, you radical leftist.

[Richard Campbell]

You troublemaker.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then just briefly, like Stardoc released their first 1.0 version of Dev Desktop GPT. And this is their, you know, a lot like, you know, same thing, like prompt opens up in the middle screen. But the big thing there, there's two big things there, is that they let you connect to multiple or different LLMs. So it's not just tied to a single thing. And you can. So you can pick whichever one you want for certain tasks. But they also have this kind of template capability which I look at as sort of a. Like a scripting capability. So you can write these templates that run against specific LLMs so that you're always. You're doing kind of a manual orchestrator kind of a thing. So this is a perk of object desktop. So if you're already paying for that, you get this for free. It's worth checking out, I don't think. Yeah, no, you can't. You can't actually buy it separately. So you have to, you have to have object desktop and then just real quick. Arc search is now available on Android, right? So it was open beta for about six weeks now. It's broadly available. And the big thing here is it's not like a straight, straight up web browser, but it's more like a kind of a front end to search. So you can just straight. You can just do a search and it will go to Google search or whatever you configure. But the big thing is their browse for me capability where they generate. Use generative AI to create like a nice presentation of something. So when you have a question like who is. Fill in the blank, this person or what is. Like, what is a latte? Or whatever, it's a nice presentation.

[Richard Campbell]

What is latte?

[Paul Thurrott]

What is latte? Which is a question I often ask at Dunkin Donuts when I order a latte and they say, would you like some sugar with that? And I'm like, excuse me? I said I would like a latte. Do you not know what a latte is?

[Leo Laporte]

Do you not know what Dunkin is?

[Paul Thurrott]

That's a problem because, you know, I just see where you. I feel like if I wanted sugar in this, I would have asked you for that. But that's a.

[Richard Campbell]

Not that he has strong opinions about this.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think things mean things. And, you know, I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

This is where, this is where you go wrong right there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's probably true.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right. Yes. I'm sorry. From Duncan Donut's perspective is real quick. The reason they do it is because they make a latte for someone and then they go, there's no sugar in this. They're like, yeah, you didn't ask for sugar.

[Richard Campbell]

Didn't you order a latte?

[Paul Thurrott]

That's one. You ordered a latte. Latte does not have sugar. Sugar. This is our work.

[Leo Laporte]

You put sugar in a latte, but it is not a request.

[Paul Thurrott]

You Could.

[Leo Laporte]

But then you really think in Frappuccino is what I think.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yes, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

Can I Frappuccino just code language for milkshake? For adult, yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Growing up, it's like, milkshake. Can I have six different forms of sugar in a glass? Yes. We actually have a name for that.

[Leo Laporte]

How many pumps would you like?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, would you like. You've been asked that question. Something is going on.

[Richard Campbell]

I'd like the large Frappuccino and a shot of insulin.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anything. I'm walking out the door, right. There'll be no pumping.

[Leo Laporte]

I like it. You're a coffee, Pierce. Do you get good coffee in Mexico?

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm so sad you asked me this. So for. I spent. So there is good coffee in Mexico, but we spent 20 years doing home swaps in Europe, and every. With one exception, I think they all had, like, those little espresso machines.

[Leo Laporte]

Right, right, right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I wanted one of these for 20 years, and I begged my wife, and she said, no, these things are an ecological disaster. We're not doing this. Blah, blah, blah, whatever, whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So, you know. You know, she's smart. So we got to Mexico, and I was like, listen, I want to get a Nespresso thing. Can we just get an espresso? And she's like, all right, screw it. Yes, we can get an espresso. I hate it. I hate it so much.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not good coffee.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not good coffee. So we went through every single. They're all, like, city names and stuff. There's a. There's a. A kaleidoscope of colors. We went through every single one of them, and we only found one. I like. It's called. It's Milan. I think it.

[Leo Laporte]

It all comes from the same Keurig.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. It's the stupidest thing. So we go and buy. We. We have to, you know, get more. And we bring the capsules back, which, you know, it's Mexico. They throw them in the trash, and then they're like. Like, what would you like? We're like, we would like 36 boxes of Milan. And they're like, you don't want it? I'm like, no, just Milan.

[Leo Laporte]

Just the one flavor.

[Paul Thurrott]

I hate it so much. Funny, I wanted one for.

[Leo Laporte]

Get a bambino. Get a Breville bambino. You can make re real espresso.

[Paul Thurrott]

But what would I be like if I was happy, Leo, you don't want me.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, that's true.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, it's better. I got to be honest. Yeah, but you're right. No, you're right, there's better coffee. But.

[Leo Laporte]

But there. And I'm sure you can go out and get good coffee out there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, no. This fantastic. But one of the highest rated coffee shops in the entire city is like two seconds from her. It's stupid.

[Leo Laporte]

Mexico is the home of coffee and chocolate. I mean, there's really good stuff there.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's true.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, enough of this guy. Paul, Richard Campbell has some stuff to tell us. Let's start with Runners Radio.

[Richard Campbell]

Richard, my friend Dan Mallett, who I got to get face to face with at NDC Porto, which was a few weeks back and got to chat a little bit about how we test databases. So this was really getting into the development practice of continuous integration to continuous deployment, which is normal with your application, but it's a little trickier with databases because you can't just throw the database away and rebuild it. You kind of need to keep the data. But there's better and better tooling to make it more feasible to actually validate that your updates to databases aren't going to break anything. And so we got into a conversation around, you could write this code yourself to test your database, but there's again, you want a framework to make it simpler. And that framework is called T SQL T, although there are some others. We also talked about DBFIT as basically a mechanism for getting into that process of, okay, this next version of SAP needs these changes to the database. These are validated at deployment as part of the pipeline so that the whole thing get fixed together and treats the database changes the same way it treats a version of the application. So great conversation and great to sort of press against DBAs that are more on the administrative side to say there are ways to build your databases the same way that developers are building the app.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, there you go.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, there you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Now one thing we always miss, I mean, we miss your genial presence, your knowledge, of course, of, of. Of enterprise and, and really it's the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Alcoholism, let's face it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. So one of the, one of my friends, Glenn, who is from Norway, dropped this on me last week. Alved. And, and you know, it's funny, like, we talk about Vikings all the time, right? When you think about Norway, you think about Vikings. Right. And in the whole. These conversations about Scottish whiskey, you know, they. We have the treaty of Perth and how the Hebrides were controlled by the Vikings, like all that sort of thing, you kind of think, why don't those guys make whiskey? Because they really don't. It's very rare to Run across. In fact, there's only a handful of whiskey distillers in Norway. Norway is well on the west side of northwest corner of Europe, as it was described to me. The rock in Norway is the stuff the ice couldn't crush. It was fully covered during the Ice age, which is a plus and a minus. It means their mountains are very pointy, they were thoroughly scoured, but also that all that pulverizing of the rock turned into great silts. So their valleys are, are full of excellent soils. And so as the ice retreated at the end of the ice age and humans sort of populated the area, by the time wheat makes it up there, somewhere around 8,000 BC or so, it grows incredibly well. And by the, by the Neolithic era when agriculturally starts, it's barley. Barley is dominant again. Why aren't they got good water, they got great conditions, they even have oak trees. Why aren't these folks, folks making whiskey? Why aren't they as keen as the Scots were? Now it's not like there hasn't been alcohol in Norway. Going all the way back to Tacitus, the Roman historian who was of questionable quality in his writings. He's talking about in thousand A.D. how much feasting is an important part of the Germanians, of the Scandinavian people at that time, that they don't make decisions about having a big feast and they drink copiously while they do that. Now one of the big parts of that is that written language wasn't a big part of early Norwegian culture. And so you had feasts so that everybody was there because you needed witnesses for any agreements, because you don't have a written form of any of that. But when you really get into distillation, which, remember when we talked on the Irish that the first still sort of show up in the 15th century, well, they arrive in Norway then too. And that's when Norway gets its definitive alcohol. Initially made with grains. We know it today as aquavit. And so this is a high, a multi distilled grain based product. Although they switch potato when the potato shows up, which won't be for a while yet. But flavored with caraway because if you flavored with juniper, it'd be gin or Geneva, depending on your Dutch or your English. And of course by the 1750s when the potatoes come from the new world world because it grows, it can make more alcohol per acre. They use potato for that. They do. There are some versions of akavit that are aged in oak barrels. There is a species of oak up there, the querulous robust, which is a very sturdy oak. It's great for making ships when you want to go raiding around the world. Then they did make barrels from it as well. But by the. When the wave of aquavit mass production really comes on because of the potatoes, you start to see the first laws passed in Norway to manage the production of alcohol. So 1757, there's already laws in place limiting who can make the alcohol, who can sell it. Importations are control. And that has a lash back in the early 1800s where they lift a lot of strictures because the landowners who are now growing even more grain, want a right to distill for no other reason than they have excess grain. They don't want it to spoil. So making it into alcohol is a way to preserve that. And so and if you're producing it, you can sell it. And if 20, 30 years on from that, there's alcohol everywhere, there's explosions with small stills. Alcoholism really starts to get heavy. And this is when you're starting to get the proper state involved. And so it's actually the local municipalities that take control of liquor production. They take control of all of the sales initially of liquor, but ultimately by the 1870s, 70s with wine and beer as well. And so that by the end of the 19th century, in 1894, so forth, those same communities that are controlling it start to put in prohibition, restricting the sale of alcohol in general, region by region. And by 1917, when we get World War I, where there's restrictions on supply and so forth, you get the first prohibition of alcohol in Norway entirely, which goes into the 1920s. Actually somewhat ahead of what happened with the US but coming out of Norwegian prohibition, the federal government, the state instead of the municipality, started controlling all liquor, both production and sales, which is basically true ever since. So Norwegian liquor laws are very strict. They consider anything under 0.7% alcohol to be non alcoholic. 0.7 to 2.5 is what's called a low alcohol beverage. And those are more freely sold sold. You have 2.5 to 4.7% are most of your beers and things like that are considered category 1.4.7 to 22, this is generally a category would be like wine. That is though both of those could be sold by people 18 or older and are readily available in most places. 22% and above are considered spirit only up to 60% and anything over 60% is illegal in Norway to this day. So certain cask strengths like Abelur's abunda, they actually have to sort the bottles because some of Those come over 60, and they're not allowed to be sold in Norway. And plus you have to be 20 or older to sell spirits, so. And this course only applies to intoxicants, industrial alcohols and things like that. Not. Not a. Particularly a concern. But I would argue the biggest reason that Norway has always struggled with alcohol here is that that they don't have a small producer model like in the 2000 and tens, largely through the EU. And we've talked about this before, and it certainly applies in Denmark. They started making tax breaks for small producers so that you had a bunch of little companies starting to make different kinds of alcohol. They have done that for breweries, but they have not done it for liquor. And so they're kind of missing the market on all that as well. But it does mean that the handful of distilleries that make whiskey in Norway, and there's literally only five, are all big producers of other things, typically aquavit. So the coolest distillery in Norway is not one I really want to talk about today, and that's the Aurora Spirit Distillery, which is actually above the Arctic Circle. That's kind of their claim to fame. Wow. They use an old World War II German military fort as their distillery space. And we'll get into them sometime later. The one I've got here because Glenn gave it to me is the Halvid. So this is only about a half hour out of Oslo. In Drammersford is where it's on a farm. And Staley Halvorsen Johnson started it in 2007, although he wasn't making whiskey, he was making what they call herb spirits, and that is akavit and gin and the like. And in fact, his first production batches by 2009 start winning awards almost right away. And the distinction between gin and aquavit, again, being the caraway flavor versus the juniper flavor. But really in contemporary gin production today, it's about the local herb, so it makes it distinct. And that was under a brand they call Kimmerud, which is named for the farm that the distillery was started on. And not that I'm a big gin fan, but they do make a version called Navy strength, which is 57% alcohol. Drink carefully, boys. Like, that is very dangerous. Like, my goodness, essentially an ounce and a half. Right? Oh, by the way, you can't order a double in Norway. It's against the law.

[Leo Laporte]

They really don't like drinking.

[Richard Campbell]

And yeah, they. They are very concerned about the social impacts. And I think it has a. In general, the Scandinavians deal with this pretty seriously. And Part of it is that in the wintertime when it's dark all the.

[Leo Laporte]

Time, there's nothing else to do.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And it can get very dark. Right. And both emotionally as well as environmentally. And so they. Liquor controls are pretty strict. That being said, I routinely order two singles, pour them together and give them back one in the glass. That's fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's hysterical.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, just follow the rules.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So they halved since only started making whiskies in 2023. So they. They don't have long duration batches. This particular one is called the Sledgehammer 2024. And so this is a three year old. No wonder they're worried about du double sledgehammer. So initially aged in virgin American oak and then they do a finishing of less than a year in Woodford casks. In fact, they even identify.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Specific cask. This is cask strength. That is to say it's at 46.3% and they only make 900 bottles of it. So this is bottle 803 and it's only a 500 milliliter bottle. So you really. They talk about they only made 4, 450 liters of this spirit.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

You can't. They're all sold out now. It sells for 800 Norwegian kroners, which is about $72 US.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't have much to say about Halvorsen's distillery because they don't have any of the specs published. I found one photo of Stale. Who's the lead of the place in front of a column still now since they make gin in aquavit. Of course it's a column still. They probably have a rectifier or finishing still as well. Well. But have no specs on that at all. All Right. Smells. It's 46%.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's going to be pretty alcoholy and it is. But not burning, which is nice. Like my hair. They know my nose hairs have not curled up. Oh, okay. So. Wow. That's. That's a lot smoother than you would expect for only a 3 year old. Like they've done a good job. Lots of heat at the end though. Hello. I can feel it going down and heating up. So gentle on the mouth. Little fruit notes. Maybe a bit of that kind of leathery feel. First sips are always an illusion. You got to hit it again.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul and I are going.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow. Okay. Yeah. It's got a kind of roughness to it. Like it reminds you. I can almost say it's like the west coast of Norway. Like British Columbia. Rocks and ice and trees and deep water. Like it's. It's Pokemon, Smokey and lots of heat. But boy, that's special.

[Leo Laporte]

It's like a glacial moraine sliding down your throat.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, the first hit is like being hit by a sledgehammer. The second, when you don't care anymore. Yeah, you're good. I'm basically stunned. This is fun. This would. The. You know, I'm not going to hunt this down. And it's good because there's not very many of them. Right. Like you don't want to go crazy for that. But. But they're making an interesting whiskey, you know, and that's. It's nice to see the Norwegians starting to do this. I don't think it's easy to make whiskey for them there right now especially imagine only making 900 bottles of this. Like, that's all.

[Leo Laporte]

That's all there is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

They do. They do an addition.

[Leo Laporte]

They do. They do have another single malt, the Steiger. Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So. And. And stiger means it's the form of.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And that's.

[Leo Laporte]

That's otar.

[Richard Campbell]

It was. Stale's great grandfather worked in the coal mines of in Svalbard, which is the only coal mine in Norway. It's now closed and where the sea is called the Stager.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Neat. So we don't know what this tastes like because it's not the same.

[Richard Campbell]

No. The. The. The Sledgehammer 24 is a special edition again, finished in Woodford Barrels.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So that would change it considerably.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it is. Like I said, the oak tree. The. The robust oak tree is different from the qu. The. The other oak trees. It's. Again, it's the stuff you make masts and ships and stuff out of make grows very large, very straight. It's good.

[Paul Thurrott]

And drinks and ships.

[Richard Campbell]

So I don't know. The barreling is particularly that.

[Leo Laporte]

I bet their gin is good. I wouldn't. I would try.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and they're. I mean, make an aquavit for 100 years.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

So gin is basically just a different set of herbs.

[Leo Laporte]

Aquavit is a little close to a lighter fluid for me.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Really, it's just caraway instead of juniper. That's the.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the main decision.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

You distill up till you get to 8 to 80, 90 range. Then you soak it in botanicals. Then you cut it with water to 40%. That's booze. Like if you don't put the mechanicals in it you just made vodka.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Right. They sell it depending on which ones you've made. Geneva gin or.

[Leo Laporte]

That's interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not more magic than that. And the advantage of that is you can sell it the day you made it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

There's no three years of aging and all that expensive stuff. Make it and ship it right to be home. I have a couple more stories from this trip that I will save for later weeks.

[Leo Laporte]

I would love to hear them.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, I got a Taiwanese whiskey, so.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, wow. Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we'll have some fun.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think you're baking that up.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I wish I was. And it's not. I wouldn't have found trying to find something in Tunisia, but it's Islamic. They, they had a little bit of alcohol only in the hotel and generally frowned on to be drinking it. So I would tend to go into the down to the bar in the evening and have a couple of chivises and call it a day.

[Leo Laporte]

Mr. Richard Campbell. That's kind of his motto. I had a couple of shivers and called it a day.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Many days ended like that. But I'm going to be drinking the havoc and for a little while now.netrocks.

[Leo Laporte]

Is his website.netrocks.com where you'll find that and of course course runnersradio.com a pleasure. Welcome home. Glad you're feeling better.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, much.

[Leo Laporte]

We missed you. As you can tell because this is a three and a half hour show.

[Richard Campbell]

I did offer to talk to Paul yesterday. We just couldn't get it to work.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, I got it. I literally saw your message after we arrived home and I was like, ah, I guess you know it's going to.

[Richard Campbell]

Be a three hour call, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yep. We'll do it, we'll do it. We should talk soon.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul Thurat is@the rot.com t h u double r o doublegood.com. that's where his blog is and you should become a premium member because that's where the really good stuff is.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's the only way I'm gonna afford to get a haircut.

[Leo Laporte]

That's how he gets a haircut. And those delicious pods. What's the name, by the way?

[Paul Thurrott]

The name is Napoli. It's not Napa. I always screwed it. It's the red. It's a red bottom box and it's the only one. It's always comical when we buy 30 or whatever number of them then they're always like, you know, if you buy 40 we can give you A free cup. We're like, yeah, no, we'll get 40. We have all this Nespresso merchandise in our apartment now.

[Leo Laporte]

But anyway, 26 boxes in Napoli, stat.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I'll take the free cup.

[Richard Campbell]

I left one more link under the brown liquor. There should be in the show notes for the people who look. I didn't do a future of energy talk about Norway.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I saw that. YouTube.

[Paul Thurrott]

What is.

[Leo Laporte]

So this is.

[Richard Campbell]

This is one of the talks that I do, and the future of energy is talking about energy improvement in general. But I tuned into the country. So this June, when I was in the Oslo show, I talked about Norway's power generation and how it's evolving.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, very cool.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And it was fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it geothermal, I would expect, or.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, they're almost entirely hydroelectric hydro. Yeah. They got mountains and they got water.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

So Iceland is very. Is geothermal.

[Richard Campbell]

They're geothermal because they have volcanoes.

[Leo Laporte]

Volcanoes, Very nice. So you could watch this. It's a NDC conferences channel on YouTube. Search for Richard Campbell. The future of energy. I will be watching that tonight instead of the Desperate Housewives. Oslo.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Those are the two obvious choices.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. It's like Desperate Housewives.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul's books are at length.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, I did that dedicated nuclear. Nuclear power one.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I want to see that, too. Is that up anywhere?

[Richard Campbell]

It's up there. But you. I can't. Now that all the tech companies want to buy nuclear power, I cannot tell you how many conferences have called me. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do a four.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a hot topic. Yeah, you're a hot topic.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Well.

[Richard Campbell]

And doing it in Poland when I was talking about the Chernobyl disaster and I met a bunch of people who, as kids were taking iodine drinks.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They're probably not real thrilled about the.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just eat Cheetos. It's the same thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Almost the same.

[Paul Thurrott]

Know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

But just quick summary. You. Modern nuclear power is a very different thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, nuclear power has always been incredibly safe. Coal's killed way more people.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

With pollution. Yeah. The new nuclear power, really.

[Paul Thurrott]

Christopher Reeve, Superman, he's like, you know, just to be clear, flight is still the safest form of travel, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Good. I'll watch this. That'll be very. That'll be very interesting. And in life, lightning, I might add. Paul Thurot's books [e-mail] including Windows Everywhere and of course, the must have field guide to Windows 11. Now that I'm 24H2, I have to check the new 24H2.

[Paul Thurrott]

Check. There's been a lot of updates.

[Leo Laporte]

A lot of updates.

[Richard Campbell]

Your cheese will definitely be moved.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's been a lot of moving of cheese.

[Leo Laporte]

You've moved my cheese again. We do Windows Weekly. Normally it's only a couple of hours, but every once in a while we get a little excited about the topic and, oh, I could tell it was.

[Paul Thurrott]

Going to be big. You know, Xbox, ignite, a lot of stuff.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, there was a lot of stuff. It's good. Nobody's complaining that the shows are too long. You just, you know, as long as.

[Paul Thurrott]

My wife would like to eat dinner. But other than that dinner, we do.

[Leo Laporte]

The show normally 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. That would be 1900 UTC, as I mentioned, streamed live on eight different platforms, including YouTube, Twitch, Kik, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and TikTok. And of course, our Club Twit members can also watch Inside the Discord after the fact. On demand versions of the show are available at our website, TWiT TV WW. If you go there, you'll see a link also to the YouTube channel. A great way to share the show or little clips from the show with people who are not familiar with it. And we appreciate it when you do that because that helps us spread the word about the goodness that is Windows Weekly. Best way to listen, though, probably would be by subscribing your favorite podcast client. Merely go to any podcast app of your choice and click subscribe. It's free. And you will get the show the minute we're done with it. Which is exactly what you want, want. And of course, we thank our Club Twit members for the contribution that they make. Just remember, great podcasts thrive thanks to the communities they build and value. I know, I host a few I like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, Joe, for as I don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

Always drink Twit bear or beer, but when I do.

[Leo Laporte]

But when I do. That's good. That's good stuff, Joe. Joe's a madman. Thank you, Joe, for that. Join the Club Twit TV Club Twit Tonight, Micah's Crafting Corner. Bring your. He's going to be doing quilt.

[Paul Thurrott]

What's he doing?

[Leo Laporte]

He does. He does actually really great cruel work. But people. There are people there doing Lego. There are people doing any kind of craft at all. It doesn't matter. It's just a chance to hang and talk and have some fun. It's a community and that's what we love about it. So that's just one of many events at TWiT TV Club TWiT thanks to Richard Campbell. Thanks to Paul Thurat. You guys rock. I will see as does.net I will see you next week on Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Bye Bye.

[Leo Laporte]

Today's show is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies to see if you could save some cash? Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save when you bundle your home and auto policies. Try [e-mail] Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states now.

[Paul Thurrott]

AT T Mobile get four 5G phones.

[Richard Campbell]

On us and four lines for 25 a line per month when you switch with eligible trade ins. All on America's largest 5G network.

[Leo Laporte]

Minimum of 4 lines for 25 per.

[Paul Thurrott]

Line per month with auto pay discount.

[Leo Laporte]

Using debit or bank account, $5 more per line without autopay plus taxes and fees and 10 device connection charge phones.

[Paul Thurrott]

Via 24 monthly bill credits for well qualified customers.

[Leo Laporte]

Contact us before canceling entire account to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Continue bill credits or credit stop and balance on a required finance agreement due.

[Leo Laporte]

Bill credit end if you pay off devices early CT mobile.com and now a.

[Paul Thurrott]

Next level moment from AT&T business say.

[Leo Laporte]

You'Ve sent out a gigantic shipment of pillows and they need to be there in time for International Sleep day. You've got ATT 5G so you're fully confident, but the vendor isn't responding and.

[Paul Thurrott]

International Sleep Day is tomorrow.

[Leo Laporte]

Luckily, ATT 5G lets you deal with any issues with ease so the pillows will get delivered and everyone can sleep soundly, especially you.

[Paul Thurrott]

ATT 5G requires a compatible plan and.

[Leo Laporte]

Device 5G is not available everywhere. See att.com 5G for you for details.