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Windows Weekly 918: Casa Chaos
02:46:53
FY25 Q2 earnings, reasoning models, deprecation
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Transcript947 lines
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A
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat is here. Richard's taking the day off, but we do have the latest information about Microsoft's earnings. We're going to break it all down. I'll give you a hint. It was a pretty good quarter. Well, we'll also talk a lot about AI week two. Paul says of submitting to our new Chinese overlords. And then it's Xbox time and some really interesting new games coming from the Microsoft studios. All that and more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.
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B
This is twit.
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This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 918 recorded Wednesday, February 5, 2025. Casa Chaos. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, dozers. Hello, winners. Hello, Paul Thurat.
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B
Hello.
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A
Our man of the moment. He is. Paul's in Mexico City, but you can always find him at thurrot.com and his books@leanpub.com Richard is in Stockholm.
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B
Yep.
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A
Notorious for its incredible bandwidth.
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B
Yep.
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A
Apparently for Richard, not the hotel he's in right now. What is he staying in a. In a motel?
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B
I. One of the things I wanted to talk to him about is that his wife is back home and they had some incredible snowstorm and she was without. Without power for at least two days.
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A
Oh, no.
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B
I'm just trying to see if anything.
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A
A snowstorm. Holy cow.
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B
Y.
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A
It's. It's a.
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B
It's wild world. To be fair. It's. We have similar problems here in Mexico City. We're having lunch today in the shade. It was a little chilly.
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A
What was it? 73?
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B
71, Leo. But you know, the point is.
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A
Oh, God, I want to be there so bad. I want. I just. Now that you told me they have the best hot dogs you've ever had.
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B
I'm actually. That was Puerto Vallarta, which Macunji has a famous. I was almost said world famous. That's a bit of a stretch. Well, it's world famous now, but they have a.
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A
They do have a hot dog, mad.
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B
Dogs, which is fantastic. That's amazing that you know that.
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A
I told you it's world famous.
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B
It is. Okay. Yes.
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A
But now I want to go to PV and try those.
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B
That was a good dog. It's a reminder that hot dogs, probably as originally envisioned, were just straight up high quality sausages. Right. That were good.
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A
No, no, they were.
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B
But no, they were never.
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A
They were always leftovers.
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B
I know, but that's the best part of any animal.
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A
You got to do something with the lips.
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B
We've completely misunderstood food for so long in this country.
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A
Look, hot dogs are phenomenal. I don't want to. I don't care what's in them. Parts is parts, parts is parts. It's all part of the thing.
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B
This one's a little livery. Okay.
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A
Anyway, Rich is not here. Yeah, but that's okay. He may, he may show up. It depends. I don't know what he's up to. But that's okay because we got you and we have lots to do because Microsoft reported its earnings.
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B
Yeah. And we. It happened as we were doing the show last week. So I didn't have much of a chance to look at that obviously for last week's show, but since then I've looked at it a lot and I got to tell you, I'm getting a little tired of it.
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A
But this is the last time you'll have to talk about it for three months.
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B
Yeah. The ensuing week, and it's not over yet, has been difficult because of all the earnings. I just take my quarterly moment to complain about all the math I've been doing lately. It's not great. Anyhow, In Microsoft's case, 24.1 billion in. Nope. Yeah. Net income. Sorry. And 69.6 billion in revenues. Those figures are both double digit gains year over year, 10 and 12% respectively. Yeah. So they're doing okay.
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A
It's okay. It's good. It's a good thing.
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B
Yeah. So every quarter I do this analysis of their earnings based in part on the additional information they provide during the post earnings conference call. And of course for the past year and a half, ish, there's been a lot of AI until this quarter there was a lot of Activision Blizzard. They stopped talking about that, which is kind of weird. But I typically obviously focus on the consumer side, the client side of personal technology, which is personal technology. So as Microsoft has shifted more and more to the cloud, I find myself less and less interested in most of it. But in this case, AI is interesting. And then as I wrote this analysis piece, again, don't want to oversell it, but as I wrote this I realized there's so much going on just with AI, I think I'm just going to focus on that. Plus the consumer stuff. The client side stuff was kind of uneventful except for a couple of bits of bad news. So anyway, long story short, I've mentioned a few times that Microsoft has this invented business now call it Microsoft Cloud. That is little. Well, not little, but lots of bits and chunks from around the company that are cloud related that non business contributed about $41 billion in revenues in the quarter. So 41 billion of 70 billion ish in revenues came from the cloud. So that's if you were. That's 59% by the way. So if you're wondering is the Microsoft cloud story just a story? No, like actually most of their revenues now are derived from the cloud.
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A
More than half.
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B
Yeah. So the two biggest business units and they're pretty close to each other are both cloud centric productivity and business processes. This is the part of the company that is Microsoft 365. They used to be the second biggest business but Microsoft started putting I think correctly by the way the Windows revenues attributed to Microsoft 365 into that business where they belong. So now it's a little bit bigger than Intelligent Cloud which is azure basically in server. 25.5 billion in revenues. Both of those businesses up double digit growth revenue productivity and business processes. What we might call Microsoft 365 is actually 42% of Microsoft's earnings. Intelligent Cloud Azure mostly is 3630 so we'll call it 37%. And then coming in third. A distant third. He's so cute. Look at him try. Is you gotta love them. Just the little engine that couldn't more personal computing.
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A
Is it Bowser driving that car?
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B
Yeah, I wish it was. I hope you mean Bowser from Shannon by the way. But no.
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A
Right. Of course.
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14.7 billion in revenues which by the way is 100% flat from a year ago. It's not up or minus some tiny percentage. It's literally exactly the same number. 21.1% of Microsoft's earnings and frankly falling right now that Activision Blizzard has been part of that for a while. So just top, top level stuff. I guess it occurred to me in writing this that you know with the Steven Snofski discussion we had last week and Deep Seek and how disruption almost always comes from outside of that business or industry that disruption will come from a smaller outsider who has no, you know, skin in the game right now and can do different things and has to be forced to work around the dominant players, et cetera. That it's possible that deepsync I have a really hard time saying that by the way is to Microsoft AI OpenAI what Linux was and still is to Windows Server. Right. In other words, in the beginning it's like oh, the small thing, who cares are cute. And of course AI is happening at an accelerated timescale. It took Linux I had to kind of look this up. I want to say it was almost the better part of 20 years to become what it is today, meaning the primary infrastructure for computing. Right. Windows was worried about Linux as a desktop thing and Windows Server was worried about it as a server issue. And I would say ultimately Linux went out over Windows Server. There are more Linux workloads in Azure today than there are Windows workloads, you know, for example. So it's possible that Deep Seek, I don't know why I can't say that will play a similar role in AI and we won't have to wait 20 years. We'll probably have to wait about 20 minutes, frankly, because these things happen. So I think a lot of people.
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A
Are doing it not just on Azure, but everywhere. Hugging Face offers it.
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B
Yeah, it's interesting how quickly it spread to everything. But I. And we'll see how well we've already seen in some ways. You know, Nadella, we'll get to this as address Deep Seek in the earnings call. Sam Altman, we'll get to this later in the show, talked about it as well. They're both pretty upfront like this is in fact changing things. They were both complementary. I know there's a lot of doubts from the outside, a lot of questions, a lot of whatever, but I think it's fair to say however they did it, they might have changed things a little bit. And that's interesting to me. Microsoft a couple weeks ago came out and said this publicly. I think it was already pretty obvious, but they were talking about spending $80 billion in the fiscal year, which ends at the end of June, on AI infrastructure. They had spent just under 20 billion in the first quarter of this year. They spent just over 20 billion in the previous quarter. Next quarter, sorry. And at this growth rate, if you look at the last three quarters, if they keep growing that amount every quarter, they'll actually spend about $95 billion on AAI infrastructure before the end of the fiscal year, which is a lot closer to 100 billion than it is to 80 billion. I mean, we'll see what happens. But I think that's kind of interesting because that number has only gone up and that's that capex number that everyone talks about. So, yeah, like I said, Satya Nadella, pretty complementary to Deep Seek. I'm trying and I'm trying to find that part where he basically mentions this thing we were talking about. Is it Jevons Paradox, this notion? Because he. Well, let me get, let me get.
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A
Actually, did he say that?
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B
Did he say he didn't Say no, he didn't say the term, but the way he described it was. He was describing this. So they had eight analysts ask questions at the end of the call, all eight of them asked about AI. The first one was AI in the context of Azure and whether this could somehow bring Azure back to the heady growth levels that it had, you know, before it started to slow down. And to put this in perspective as your growth, revenue growth in this quarter was 30, 31%, if I remember correctly. It's been that way for a while. That's an incredible growth rate for a mature business. Yes, it was 70% for a long time a while back. But you can't expect anything to grow. Like, to me, it's crazy, but to Wall street, this is a concern. Right. So one of the people asked him about this, and I'm just trying to see if I can find his exact quote. But he said that as token prices fall. Inference, inference computing prices fall. That means people consume more, there will be more apps written. The type of optimizations we're seeing now means AI will be much more ubiquitous. Therefore, for hyperscaler like us, Microsoft, a PC platform provider like us, this is all good news as far as I'm concerned. In other words, they can't lose. Yeah, he just said it. Exactly. He just said he did.
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A
That's Jayvon's paradox.
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B
Yeah, he didn't say the term, but that's actually absolutely what he said.
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A
As the price goes down and the efficiency goes up on any commodity, people use more of it, so they end up spending more and more revenue.
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B
Yeah, and we've talked about this a bunch, but Microsoft is one of three to five companies that can even afford to have this kind of infrastructure, is incentivized to actually make it, and is in fact building it out. We'll talk about Google briefly later. But they're spending a similar amount of money, by the way, this year, doing some of that.
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A
They just announced what, $75 billion they're going to spend.
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B
It's very close to what Microsoft is spending. The numbers are close to each other, as are the revenues of these two companies, by the way. Kind of interesting, but that's the thing. It's them, it's Amazon, it's Google and Apple to some degree. But Apple's not going to do it, right? I think Apple's approach to this is slightly different, obviously.
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A
Well, that's where Microsoft's in the catbird seat because Apple doesn't want to run those data centers. I mean, they do run some AI Data centers. But ultimately it's going to be. They're going to use. They already do use ChatGPT and eventually Claude Google Gemini.
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B
That's right, yeah.
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A
So Microsoft is couldn't. Is there in the catbird seat. They couldn't possibly be in a better position.
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B
This was how I described Azure's impact on Xbox a year or two ago. It's like, you know, Microsoft could lose it all in video games, but doesn't matter. They could also still win in video games by being that kind of back end provider.
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A
Right.
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B
And that's what's happening here with AI to an even greater degree, I think. So to me that's very interesting. A lot of questions about Copilot and who cares.
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A
But people, people were very, the analysts. These are analysts, right that are asking the question. They were very obviously very interested.
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B
Yes.
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Did they though point out. Well, that it's gonna, that it's that in fact one of the things that scared people about Deepseek was that Microsoft has committed, as have everybody else, this huge amount of money and huge amount of hardware resources. Looks like, we don't know for sure, but it looks like this Chinese company did it cheaply.
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B
Right.
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And that kind. And that was the threat that it undermined this model where you have to.
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B
This is where the Jevons paradox thing comes into play. Right.
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He's saying we'll still make money but it still calls into question why are they spending so much? Do they need to is I guess the question.
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B
Well, they're still under capacity, that's the thing. So at some point that will have to slow down and then effectively stopped. It never really stops, obviously. But you know, to the degree that is has to stop, we're always looking for that, right? I. Analysts are obviously they're not actually concerned about technology. Right. They're, they're concerned with earnings per share and you know, it's all financial stuff. So the very first question was actually about Azure growth, which to me is an old school question to ask right now. It's like, hey, remember when everything was awesome and you were growing really fast, but because Azure growth was so fast, like how come you can't do that anymore? And it's like because it's a humongous business and it's really well established now. What are you talking about? Like of course this thing that was tiny in the beginning grew fast. That stops at some point, right? Like that's just common sense. The fact that this was the first thing that came out of anyone's mouth was to me exactly what these people are like. Like they're coming at it from a different perspective. But the interesting thing to me isn't so much the questions, it's this is Microsoft's opportunity to do some positioning and talk about things which are interesting to me. Right. So there were two things that came out of this, these questions at the end that were related semi specifically to Microsoft365/Microsoft365 commercial. Right. And one was this notion that Microsoft and other companies have talked about two things lately. One is the second wave of AI being agentic where this software can go out on your behalf and do things for you and then kind of report back when something has occurred or whatever if it has to ask a follow up, which is interesting. And then more recently and inspired by Deep Seek, I'm going to really work on that one. This notion of reasoning models where it kind of spells out in front of you it thinking through the problem. It doesn't actually have to do that to be effective. But OpenAI found this, Google, these other companies have all found that. It's kind of a weird way to put it, but if you let AI think about a thing before it actually delivers the final pretty incredible answer.
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A
It's very incredible.
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B
Yeah. There's also an effect on users when they see it doing that that they end up trusting it more. Yeah, right. So you like I can see they show their work. Yeah, yeah. Right. So Deep SIG Seek does that. I don't know that they're the first, but I think they might be. But now Microsoft, all the reason OpenAI, Google just today and same thing, they're all doing this now. So it's not the major step forward that say, well maybe it is actually. Maybe that's not fair. So agents are a big step forward, but I think this is also a big step forward. And someone had asked them about penetration of copilot in the enterprise. Yeah, yeah. Whatever it was. And I think it was him. Or was it Amy? No, it was him. He said that it's moving into a phase where people are expanding in businesses or use of this technology across the company and collaborating with others. And Microsoft thinks of this as thinking with AI and working with people, which is kind of to me is kind of a fun little marketing bit because people are afraid of this. And so when you say it like that you're like, oh, that's fun. You're almost talking about a copilot. Right. This is going back to the original term for this kind of stuff. So I thought that was pretty Good. And then he reiterated that Copilot is the UI for AI. Right. Hearkening back to, I don't know, some time ago when he was talking about in the future that, you know, today we have the start menu and we launch apps from there. And that AI, it was kind of vague at the time, but he was like, AI will be the UI of the future. I don't think it's going to be a text prompt, but.
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A
Well, it's Voice then, right?
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B
Voice. Yeah, I think it's going to be the big one. And you see that across the board. Like everyone's starting to do that. So. Yeah. Okay, interesting.
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A
HAL9000. What could possibly go wrong?
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B
Yeah, I think they should make a movie about that. A lot of things could go wrong for the rest of the company. Just because I do care about this stuff. Windows did not come up a lot. Kind of interesting. Windows did not see the giant bump we were kind of hoping for. Obviously the industry hasn't seen it either. I did a little bit of math on that based on the few bits that they gave us. And if you factor in the Windows 10 end of life impacting the market and blah, blah, blah, whatever. 2.7% revenue growth. Like nothing. Like it was just not. Not great. This is an interesting like Non data point. 15% of premium priced PCs in the US sold over the holidays. Talk about like taking up giant market and squishing it down to nothing.
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A
Narrowing it down a little.
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B
We're copilot plus PCs, so 15% of nothing. That's nice. They do expect. I mean I think this is reasonable in the context of copilot plus PCs just becoming PCs will be the majority of PCs sold in the next several years. Okay. I don't know. Surface never mentioned by name.
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A
Really? Didn't they just announced new Surface devices this week?
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B
Yes, they did. But the problem is that business is tanking. So the only mention was that the. The revenue gains they saw from PC makers, which was tiny 4% year over year, was partially offset by a decline in device revenues. Meaning Surface. Right.
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A
Ouch.
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B
So it just means it's still going down. And then I see I said the. Yeah, there was a. I'm surprised they even said this, but Microsoft was surprised by how. Well the perpetual version of Office 2024 is selling higher than expected. So that actually had a positive impact on their revenues. But they were not expecting that. That's.
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A
They don't want it either. Right. They really would prefer not to sell you.
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B
That's right.
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A
License they want.
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B
So for the people out there. So if you're nervous about versions of Microsoft 365 subscriptions that don't include AI, right. They have the. I don't know what they call them. Classic or whatever.
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A
Many people prefer that.
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B
Yep. This Office 2024 thing maybe gives you a little bit of hope because Microsoft always wants to move on to the next thing, but its customers always show it not to do that. So maybe this is good news for you folks if you're worried about it. We'll see.
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A
But yeah.
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B
And then the other one, of course, is Xbox. So Xbox, there's some good little data points in there, like Call of Duty 6 or Black Ops 6 apparently is off to the best start of any Call of Duty game in history.
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A
And funny to hear that in a Microsoft earnings.
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B
Well, yeah, I'm starting to get comfortable with it. It's like Doom and the other ID software games fall under here now. You know, like the. I mean, a lot of gaming is.
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A
Inside of Xbox or inside of my big player. Yeah.
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B
Yep. So. But man, the numbers are so bad on Xbox. Overall gaming revenue, this is the business. The whole business was down 7%. Xbox hardware revenue, not surprisingly, but still 29 down in the quarter. Man, I don't know at what point does it go negative? Like, I don't understand how it can keep falling by those numbers. But Xbox content and services only up 2%, driven by growth in Xbox Game Pass. All of which, by the way, I mean, almost literally they didn't say this, but just based on the few things they did say was because of Call of Duty being on Game Pass for the first time. Right. So people are obviously looking at this subscription saying, all right, so I could buy this game or I could pay for this subscription. And okay, I think I'll bet, you know, I get all these other things. I'll try, you know, I'll give it a shot. So. But still, 2%, that's tough. So. And then they have all the soft numbers, you know, 140 million hours streamed on Xbox cloud gaming, a record. Over 4 million people played Indiana Jones. Fantastic. We don't know how some of them bought it, some of them got it through game pass, etc. So not a lot of good news. And it's going to keep going. That's the thing. So Xbox, there's no light at the end of the tunnel yet. And I think we talked about this last week, but Phil Spencer has been very public about things that I would previously have called rumors, you know, like Xbox is working on a portable gaming Device. He's talked about this multiple times since last week's show. I did watch an almost hour long interview with him and it was kind of shocking like how much I haven't seen this kind of transparency out of Microsoft in, since Jim Alchen maybe like 20 years ago. It's been a long time. It's very, it's very strange. So yeah, so that's most of it.
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A
Top line for me. Maybe it's just because I don't know anything is that they made $2 billion a week.
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B
Yeah. Well, okay, so you have to look at things like, well, net income, which is profits. Right. You have to look at.
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A
Right. 24 billion in three months.
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B
It is. But you also have to look at free cash flow, right. Which is, this is bizarre, but Microsoft's free cash flow from operations, right. $22.3 billion up 18% year over year is exactly, exactly the amount they spent on AI infrastructure.
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A
Oh, so they're spending all their profit.
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B
Yeah, we talked about this last week a little bit, but and in prior quarters you know that we, we sort of said it like, look, they can, they, they're paying cash for this. They can, they can afford it.
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A
Right.
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B
And last week we raised this issue where from a shareholder perspective you like to see Microsoft investing in the company because this is future revenue growth, etc. Etc. It's certainly, it's more risk, but it's also a much higher reward than like buying back shares, et cetera. So I think for now it's okay. But again, this is where we're about to cross the line. We'll see what happens this quarter. But this quarter the profits, so to speak, and they're spending on AI were identical. And before they always, the profits were always higher.
- [24:12]
A
So what do they need it for? I think that's great. Now as you said, it's a bit of a risk. You're assuming AI is going to have a big payout.
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B
Right.
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A
And I think it's a fair chance to take.
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B
Right.
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A
I don't think anybody, I mean, I.
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B
Think spell checking has benefited Microsoft greatly from a revenue perspective. No. So yeah, I mean, yeah, it's a good bet.
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A
I mean that's, you know, it is. But what else are you going to bet on?
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B
There's two AIs, right? There's the AI that Microsoft delivers as first party services to customers, which I don't think is going to amount to much other than it being a component of things that people or companies do pay for like Microsoft.
- [24:49]
A
But maybe they don't want to buy it from somebody else. Maybe they'd like to build it themselves. Is that where that money's going or is it just going to data centers?
- [24:57]
B
Well, I think those are. They're kind of the same thing. Right? So there's, there's data centers. They have data centers.
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A
You can sell capacity to other companies.
- [25:05]
B
Right. So there's, and they talked about this actually in the call. There's some, there's a math involved to this. You know, where's the best place to put resources and where do we have to grow and what things are going to come offline and we can replace with something, whatever it is. And there's a balancing act here because what makes Microsoft more money, is it selling, I don't know, AI, whatever they are features in Microsoft 365 to existing customers? Is it providing that data center capacity to third parties are going to then sell it to customers that are not Microsoft's direct customers? In some cases, I think ultimately it's both will make money to whatever degree we can know that. But I think the second one is the bigger opportunity. Yeah, that's my.
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A
It's a good way to hedge it though because they're both making the picks and shovels and mining for gold. So one way or the other, competing.
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B
With your own Microsoft or your own customers is a Microsoft tradition. They're good at it.
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A
That's a good point. Many companies would see that as a bad thing, but they've done fine with it.
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B
Microsoft saw this as a bad thing.
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A
For many years until they started making their own computers. Right?
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B
Well, that was one big example, but I would actually say the bigger one in many ways, which we don't think about a lot because it's not really a consumer thing is they used to have a big partner ecosystem around server and so you would have. On prem servers you'd have these middle players that would support and provide added services. They would resell Microsoft things. But then Microsoft moved to the cloud, right? With Office 365, then Microsoft 365 and the story became, well, yeah, I guess you could have this guy Joe over here support your Exchange server. But who knows this thing better than Microsoft? We'll just do it for you directly. And instead of you having your own infrastructure that you have to pay for, you can take advantage of all the benefits of the cloud where capacity can go up or down as you need it. It doesn't cost you. Actually, don't worry about it for a little while. Microsoft kind of threw those partners a bone in Whatever ways they could, they still, to this day actually have a partner show every midsummer, July, whatever. But that situation today is very different. There are still Microsoft partners, obviously, but their ability to do anything other, you know, make money on anything other than pushing people at Microsoft is kind of limited to what it was before. So that was a big, big change for them. But yeah, they went after PC makers which historically have been, as a group, their biggest set of partners. Right. I'm not sure if that's true anymore, but it was true through, you know, 2012, 2015 for sure.
- [27:33]
A
I remember the shock when they released.
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B
Yeah.
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A
You know, their own computers. We, on this show, we were saying, wow, that's a brave thing to do. You're going to piss off all your OEMs.
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B
Yep. There's.
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A
They got away with it.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Well, probably because it's not doing.
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B
Yeah, I was going to say the reason. It's okay. It became, at first it was infuriating and then it became cute. Yeah.
- [27:57]
A
Surely Dell and Lenovo would not have been so sanguine if suddenly everybody was buying Surfaces.
- [28:03]
B
Oh, if you go, look, I'll just point to two things. One, there were a bunch of public comments by CEOs of those companies at that time. They were not happy. You couldn't find one, it was like, I don't really care, it's fine. You will not find that comment. And two, every single one of those companies adopted Chrome OS immediately. So the few that had.
- [28:20]
A
So it was a little risky.
- [28:22]
B
All. All did. So now granted, those things have not taken off in any meaningful way, but. But the point was like, yeah, okay, well, we can do other things too, you know. Yeah.
- [28:31]
A
So fascinating. Yeah, we, we will talk more about AI this afternoon because we're rebranding this week in Google as intelligent machines and it's going to be about AI. In fact, our first guest was. Is the former go to market leader from OpenAI. So I think we'll have some good questions for him about the history of OpenAI. He's just written a book about it and I'm excited about the idea of covering this stuff, but I am still in a huge mystery about whether, you know, what is going to happen. On the one hand, there's some real risks and dangers that are genuine. Steve and I were talking yesterday, he was very worried about, you know, AI hacking, you know, using, you know, hacking.
- [29:19]
B
The, like an injection type thing, basically. Yeah.
- [29:22]
A
Hacking the safety. And I said, well, what? Come on, what could possibly go wrong? He said, everything go wrong.
- [29:26]
B
What do you mean?
- [29:27]
A
This is like the most you ask how to generate a new toxin that's never been created before, it creates it. That could be a problem. And I thought, oh, I really thought of it that way.
- [29:37]
B
Microsoft especially. And I would imagine these other companies have sold this fiction where you don't have to worry about that stuff. Leo. Because is going to be a guy, he's probably wearing a white lab coat and he's standing between the AI doing those things and it actually happening out in the world. Except he's not. He's eating a sandwich. He's not making it work.
- [29:53]
A
Well, this was the whole topic of security. Now yesterday was AI jailbreaking. And the fact is there's not a single AI that hasn't been jailbroken. So what you really have to say is the notion of AI safety is an illusion.
- [30:10]
B
Yeah. Farcical. Yep.
- [30:12]
A
Which then now because I mock the whole existential threat to humanity. Come on, what's it going to do?
- [30:18]
B
I know.
- [30:19]
A
Well now I'm starting. And it's not by the way, AI, it's humanity.
- [30:22]
B
Right, right.
- [30:23]
A
Humanity is ultimately the threat to humanity. But using AI to be a threat might make them very powerful.
- [30:29]
B
Yep. Hopefully it'll be like everything else in life and it lands somewhere in the middle between it's this is nothing and this is the end of the world. But yeah, it's a matter of degrees, I guess.
- [30:40]
A
Yeah. Anyway, there's certainly a lot to talk about. All of our shows now are talking about AI. I mean it's the hot topic.
- [30:48]
B
Yeah. Is your Google show that's changing name and focus. Are you. Is there still going to be a Google no kind of component you're just going away from.
- [30:55]
A
Do you care about Google? I know you really don't care about. You painted Google for years.
- [31:00]
B
No, I mean I. It's like everything else in big tech. The truth is like a lot of people, I rely on Google for a lot of things. I mean the two tell me it'll.
- [31:07]
A
Still be Google believe.
- [31:08]
B
I mean I told that long story whenever that was last week or whatever. But I will talk about this later in the show. But in writing about something else that related to that. I had forgotten this. I had another problem with Google workspace support which I had forgotten about. They never solved this problem and just drifted off and. Yeah, so they're not great on that level. I mean I pave them, you know, whatever. But look, Google Maps, Google Photos, Gmail.
- [31:38]
A
There's nobody alive search Google every day in some way.
- [31:43]
B
So this is the deal with the devil that we all make really most of the time.
- [31:48]
A
So Google's still relevant, but I felt like a show. We hadn't been exclusively about Google for years.
- [31:53]
B
Well, see my problem, like you have, you have Apple content, obviously Apple has built this ecosystem right where they've gotten a lot of things right. They don't get everything right. That's not my point. But they, they, they tend to fill it out. Google does these little things where they're like, oh, we're gonna do this. And they kind of drift off and it's like. Yeah, if you compare like the pixel or nest, whatever it is.
- [32:14]
A
Spaghetti on the wall.
- [32:15]
B
Yeah, it's just. Yeah, I would. They don't seem to have a lot of follow through.
- [32:19]
A
No, they don't. And I think that's a structural problem.
- [32:23]
B
It's like a teenager that never grows out of it. I was like, could you finish something or you know.
- [32:27]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's worth having a Microsoft show, which we do, obviously this one. It's worth having an Apple show, which we do. We started this week in Google.
- [32:34]
B
It's fascinating to me that Google was.
- [32:36]
A
Going to be the third leg of the tripod.
- [32:38]
B
Why wouldn't you. It's the biggest. Probably going to be the biggest platform.
- [32:41]
A
Of all of them and yet it's not that interesting. And maybe that's the real problem. We also had an Android show which we ended up canceling because it just.
- [32:51]
B
That's amazing.
- [32:52]
A
There wasn't that much to say about it.
- [32:53]
B
I know. What do you mean? There was a security update today.
- [32:57]
A
Well, exciting. And to his credit, Jason and Ron and the gang, they've. They've gone and they continue to do it.
- [33:02]
B
Yeah. Oh, they're doing their own thing. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [33:06]
A
But. Okay. We just didn't have much of an. We only canceled because there was no audience for it. I mean, if there's an audience for a show, we'll keep doing it.
- [33:14]
B
It's amazing to me that that was, That's. They need to look inside on this one because that's. That's seizing defeat from the jaws of victory. It doesn't make sense that that Android specifically is not. Despite the fact that part of it is.
- [33:30]
A
It's just kind of there. I mean, it's.
- [33:32]
B
Right.
- [33:32]
A
It's the number one phone operating system globally.
- [33:35]
B
I know, but.
- [33:36]
A
So people use it, but they don't. They're not so interested. They want to listen to a show about it.
- [33:40]
B
Exactly. Apple got something right there. It's kind of interesting.
- [33:44]
A
Apple's. I Think Apple stuff is more than a utility for a lot of people.
- [33:48]
B
It's.
- [33:49]
A
Yes, there's some. They identify with it. There's some stuff going on with it. Anyway, yeah, I'm hoping that this week. We were going to call it this week in intelligent machines and it was such a mouthful. We just said, how about intelligent machines? By the way, the guy who coined the term intelligent machines, Ray Kurzweil, will be our guest next month.
- [34:06]
B
Awesome.
- [34:07]
A
We have some great guests planned. So every show we're going to have an expert in an area of AI because I. I don't know about you, but I feel like I. There's a lot to learn here. Oh, I'm. And it's changing, so.
- [34:18]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [34:19]
A
And then we'll do AI news and then, you know, it's still going to be Jeff, Paris and me, so there'll be a lot of tomfoolery. Sure. It's not good change that much. Yeah. Coming up, let's take a little break and then we'll get to Windows. We have a little bit more AI news, including Google's new AI model, believe it or not. Xbox, Microsoft 365. I do have the official word that unfortunately Richard is not getting online in Sweden, so.
- [34:52]
B
Oh, you heard this?
- [34:53]
A
Yes. He says, he messaged us and said, let me. I'll read it to you.
- [34:59]
B
I think I got to say it.
- [35:00]
A
So far, no luck. It's Wednesday night in Stockholm and where there is Internet, it is noisy. I think I'm out, so. And you know what? More power to him. I'm sure he's enjoying some luscious shlivovitz or something. He does have a brown liquor pick that he put in, but we don't have to do it. Or I could just mention it or. What do you want to do? Oh, he's going to. Oh, he already said he's saving his pick for next week.
- [35:26]
B
There you go.
- [35:27]
A
So do you if you want to get Stephanie to make a cocktail. Or we could just forget about it and I'll talk about a kombucha I really like or something. Okay.
- [35:38]
B
Kombucha is a perfect cocktail substitute.
- [35:41]
A
The kombucha of the week.
- [35:43]
B
Yeah.
- [35:46]
A
Actually for a while I subscribed to what was. I think they thought of it as a mixer.
- [35:52]
B
Yeah.
- [35:52]
A
A non alcoholic and it was all different. It was more like a shrub. You know what a shrub is? It was like herbal, fizzy. I didn't like it. Kombucha is a little more. A little more. More My. My speed. I Like kombucha, But I like kombucha. You know what I love? Horchata and homica.
- [36:10]
B
How about pulque?
- [36:13]
A
Pulque is amazing. When I was in Oaxaca with Mike Elgin and a bunch of people, we, we, we had a pulque party.
- [36:21]
B
They have, they have pulcherias here.
- [36:23]
A
Yeah, we went to a pulcheria. Yeah, so it's a precursor to tequila.
- [36:28]
B
Anything you can eat or drink can be an area, you know, just does this one thing, you know.
- [36:35]
A
We'll continue with Microsoft Aria in just a moment with Balthurat.
- [36:41]
B
I have a little bit of it myself.
- [36:43]
A
Yeah, get some pulque. I wouldn't mind a pulque of the week. Oh, they are so good. Anyway, this episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by Zscaler. Now this is something you want to live with. This is, this is zero trust done right with the help of AI. So here's the problem. Enterprises have spent billions of dollars over the years on firewalls, perimeter defenses, right? And then of course, you need VPN so your employees can get through the firewall and come to work, you know, virtually. Has all of this worked?
- [37:15]
B
No.
- [37:17]
A
Breaches continue to rise. It was an 18% year over year increase in ransomware attacks and a record payout of $75 million in 2024. Although I did see a story today that said that record payout was lower because people had just decided not to pay the bad guys. You know, the problem with that is they still have your data. What are we going to do? These traditional security tools, they don't. Not only don't help, they expand your tax attack surface with public facing IPs. That's how the VPN gets in. Bad actors see that, they can hang their hat on that, and they do it more easily now than ever with AI tools. Plus, once they're in the network, VPNs and firewalls don't do anything about lateral movement. They just assume, well, you're in the network, you can do whatever you want. So they connect the bad guys to the entire network. And what do the bad guys do? Well, the first thing they do nowadays is they look for, for data. They go through your emails, they go through your customer information, and then they leak it out via encrypted traffic, which the firewall struggles because they can't inspect encrypted traffic at scale. So you've got holes in both directions. You are leaky. I mean, I don't want to. I'm not saying you like you. I mean, we all are. This is why perimeter defenses are not enough. Hackers exploit traditional security infrastructure and they use AI to outpace your defenses. We gotta rethink what we're doing. We can't let the bad guys win. They're innovating at speed, exploiting your defenses. That's why you need Zscaler Zero Trust+AI. It stops attackers by one hiding your attack surface. You no longer have public IPs, which makes apps and IPs invisible. They don't. You know that lateral movement problem? No. Because Zero Trust does not assume that just because you're in the network, you're a good guy. Zscaler eliminates lateral movement by connecting users only to specific apps that they've been explicitly permitted to do so, not the entire network. And Zscaler continuously verifies every request based on identity and context. And it simplifies security management with AI powered automation. In fact, they use AI to analyze over half a trillion daily transactions to find the threats. The needle in those haystacks. Hackers can't. This is the bottom line. Hackers can't attack what they can't see. Protect your organization with Zscaler, Zero Trust and AI. You can learn more at Zscaler.com Security for our Canadian friends, Zscaler.com Security we thank him so much for supporting Windows Weekly and you support support us, of course, when you use that address. Zscaler.com Security did you go get some pulque, Paul?
- [40:17]
B
No, I got some water.
- [40:21]
A
You can't get poke here. Nobody, as far as I know nobody exports it from Mexico, but it is, it is kind of a mildly fermented on its way to being Mezcal. Mildly fermented? It's the same, you know, it's the same agave stuff and all that or whatever they. Whatever it is. The. I wish Richer were here to explain. Anyway, it's delicious.
- [40:42]
B
It's.
- [40:43]
A
It's lightly alcoholic, fruity flavored and wonderful. And I wish I had some right now, but you can't get it. All right, let's talk more. What do you want, AI? You want to talk more about AI? Are you done?
- [40:55]
B
Or you.
- [40:55]
A
Oh, no, let's do Windows.
- [40:57]
B
Yeah, so.
- [40:57]
A
Yeah, let's do Windows. That would be fun for a change.
- [41:01]
B
Yeah. A little light this week, but late last week we had a new dev build which I'm actually running on my Surface laptop so I can gain access to these new Copilot plus PC features they're starting to release.
- [41:15]
A
Did they not give you access to 01 now for free, like this is the high end. I don't want to jump ahead.
- [41:25]
B
But yeah, in Copilot. Right, but so in Windows specifically though, they're, they're now testing a thing which I don't have because they roll things out, you know, over time. So I can't even talk to this one. But they're, they're bringing AI powered search to Windows Search. Right. So what used to be. I got to be careful with this. No, no, this is so on a. If you're running a normal PC, not a problem. Today it's Windows key +Q or Windows key +S both bring up that search highlights box or whatever with a Copilot plus PC and I assume all Windows PC assume that's going to change. Oh, and I'm trying to maybe I just opened this up and look.
- [42:05]
A
That's interesting.
- [42:06]
B
Yeah.
- [42:07]
A
So it won't just be an index. A search of an index.
- [42:10]
B
Yeah. So I don't have it yet. But so Windows key. Oh, because Windows key +Q is turning into. What's the consolate. These features have such stupid names. It's the recall related feature. Click and click to do. Sorry. Because Q is like click, I guess, quick, quick to do like the, like the King and Mawitz. So Windows Key plus S Will Studio search. They're going to be doing like AI powered search. I don't have it. I've just looked again, but I don't have it. So, yes, this is the Microsoft 20 years later, maybe finally solving the problem they were trying to solve in Longhorn and before that in Cairo, which was that, you know, people search for things and they can't find them. Right. And so, you know, search is kind of dumb. It's index based, it's metadata based, but there's not a lot of metadata. And you know, there's a lot of talk about it 20 years ago and then it kind of went away and we still have these problems. Right. And I find my error even myself, I find I could go through OneDrive, which is not synced fully to my computer, but it has the basic file data and I search for things, can't find it. And I go to OneDrive on the web and I find it instantaneously. So yeah, I'm actually very eager to try this. I've been wondering about some version of iFeed AI, my OneDrive archive or something, and it uses that as the, you know, the back end. And I ask it questions and can say, oh yeah, here's this thing. And because I find it hard to find things I wrote a long time.
- [43:42]
A
Ago, you know, so I probably won't have it in my VM of Windows.
- [43:47]
B
On R. No, it's. This is super early on. So right now it's. It's dev channel, which is going to quickly move to whatever the next version of Windows is called. So probably 25H2 or if they go Windows 12 or whatever it is, but right now it's still 24H2. So we're in this window where dev and beta are the same and then that will change. So actually I'm not even sure. So it's kind of hard to say. If they're testing it in dev now, does that mean we're going to see it in Windows 11 in the coming months or it will be the second half of the year? It's kind of hard to say. But this one's brand new and it is rolling out slowly and it's only Qualcomm powered PCs right now. It will go to intel or AMD powered co pilot plus PCs.
- [44:31]
A
What the hell was that mean?
- [44:32]
B
You know what, I don't know what that was. Look like the hand of God there.
- [44:38]
A
Hello, Windows. Just wanted to.
- [44:41]
B
This is sa. I have a couple of questions.
- [44:45]
A
I don't, I don't. It had already started up. I don't know why it made that sound, but. Okay.
- [44:49]
B
That's funny, huh? Yeah. So anyway, so that was last week.
- [44:54]
A
Maybe it was Richard Teleporter recording.
- [44:56]
B
Yeah, yeah, I tried tied to this. I Last Thursday I recorded some episodes of Hands on Windows and one of the. By the way, thank you. I mean, whatever. But it's one of the things I wanted to record was something about all these new features. So it's recall and click to do and there's new AI things. All of it like Notepad is AI now. Actually that one I did record separately, but there's different AI things happening all over Windows. Right. And that. There's something weird about that podcast to me where I spend a good chunk of that day kind of preparing for it and everything's great and I sit down in front of the computer in front of where I'm going to record it and it all goes south. The demo Bonino probably has to go to therapy now because of me. It's very strange. But the. I. I've never seen this happen. But this co pilot plus this Surface laptop that I have has been fantastic. Right. But I, I put it into the dev channel. I've been using it with recall so it has all this data you know, yada, yada, yada, whatever. And then that day, and this is before the build I just talked about, I think, or maybe it was that same day, maybe that was it. Maybe that build had just come up. I, I was like, oh, I should install the new build. And I did. And it was quick. And nothing worked after that. Like, I, oh no. Recall Disappear appeared. Click to do was gone. I tried to roll it back, I tried all this different stuff. And then the show was starting and I was freaking out and, you know, he's like, how many, how many shows you gonna do? I'm like, two. And he's like, two.
- [46:21]
A
And I'm like, don't. I don't. I can't, I can't.
- [46:24]
B
I did. I'm losing my mind here. So I will now do it again or do it for the first time actually tomorrow. Okay. So, and, and I've been, I've been doing like sister, I, I re, I reset it.
- [46:37]
A
Did you ever find, find out what was wrong?
- [46:39]
B
No. No, I have no idea. I can tell you I'm using system restore again for the first time in 20 years and I'm just trying to make sure this thing's okay. But I, I, it's hard to tell, you know, I don't know everything anyway, so hopefully tomorrow that will go good. But long story short, I don't have this feature. It's brand new, it's only Snapdragon, but it's still, you know, it's, it's what do they call a cfr. So it's going out slowly. Yeah. Kevro is asking if Recall is still in preview. Yeah. Yeah. So if you have any Copilot plus PC and you put it into the dev channel, that's where it's at. Interesting point actually, because I just said DEV is going to move soon to 25H2 or whatever they call that. That suggests that the stable release of that may in fact be 25H2. Maybe that's how that happens. You know, we'll see. You know, all we can do is guess. We'll see. I don't know. But then there are the some features like the AI powered search, which is going back to just Snapdragon. So AMD and Intel will get in on that sometime in the next couple of months or whatever. So always changing. Yeah. And then today I haven't looked at this too in too much depth, but Laurent fortunately did write about it right before we started the show. But there is a new Canary build as well. Canary is not tied to anything that makes it kind of fun. There is something called windows Midi Services 2.0. Midi has been around for 40 years, 45 years. I don't know. The fact that they have moved their services to from one point something to 2.0 is hilarious. But they're improving MIDI in Windows 11, if you could believe that. I guess they've run out of things. Things to think about.
- [48:24]
A
Well, it's about time.
- [48:27]
B
You wait till you see the eight track tape support the next build.
- [48:30]
A
It's really funny.
- [48:31]
B
It's very strange. Wow. Yep. So that's one. They've been talking a lot about this OneDrive resume feature. This is their attempt at a little bit of that Apple inner device stuff where you're on your phone or tablet, you're doing something in OneDrive and then next time you sign into your computer says, hey, you were working on this document over here, do you want to open it here? Like a continuity type feature? So okay. I mean that's fine. I don't see this as being a big, big deal, but good. And then File Explorer is getting a folder resume feature. So you've got File Explorer open, maybe you've got tabs or maybe it's multiple windows, whatever it is, and you reboot or sign out, sign in and it will comes back and it will optionally come back to the way it was. Yeah, session state.
- [49:17]
A
Nice.
- [49:17]
B
Yeah, I mean I'm working on that kind of thing for my stupid. Net pet app. So I hope it's as painful for them as it is for me.
- [49:25]
A
It's not a built in feature of the SDK or anything.
- [49:29]
B
No, I mean this is the thing I run into with this app a lot is that WPF is 20 years old and they've updated it twice. I don't know, they really don't really give it a lot of attention. So. Yeah, it's just not built for this stuff and it, this is. Yeah, I'm trying to work within the capabilities of the tool set and it's, it's humorous. Well, I'm. It like Deep Seek. Did you know, you know, confronted by the fact that I don't have all these capabilities, like what can I do? So you know. Anyway, so this one is kind of interesting. So this was years ago, but Microsoft announced that they were going to bring the edge text rendering technologies to Chromium so that it could benefit all Chromium based browsers. Right. So that was like three, five years ago or three or four years ago. And then the Chromium project announced that they were accepting These changes in commit form right. In March of last year. Nice. But now they're actually finally rolling it out. So I don't know what took so long, but I think most people would agree, honestly that the picture I attach, which is the one Microsoft provided, doesn't to me show anything but. Okay. But I do find the text rendering in Edge to be wonderful. And it's one of those things they actually really got right. It's only going to benefit Windows based browsers, by the way, I should say. Obviously it's a Windows technology, but Chrome is doing it, Chromium's doing it. Everyone's going to. So if you brave Vivaldi, Opera, whatever.
- [51:00]
A
So they've contributed it back to the Chromium project.
- [51:02]
B
That's right.
- [51:03]
A
That's nice. Yeah, that's nice.
- [51:06]
B
Yeah. And that means that if you. Not that anyone uses this now it's 2025, not 2005, but you can find it in Windows still. There's something called the Clear type text tuner. And if you want.
- [51:16]
A
Oh, it's Clear type.
- [51:17]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you want to. I know it's. It's like going back in time, but if you want to optimize how text looks on your computer for your eyes, you can do it. And when you do that, it will benefit the browser as well because it's, it's not a separate thing.
- [51:29]
A
It's funny because I'm so. I thought, well, maybe it's because Paul clipped this.
- [51:34]
B
Nope. The Edge blog.
- [51:35]
A
So I went directly. The Edge blog. It's exactly the same.
- [51:37]
B
It's terrible. Yeah.
- [51:38]
A
And you know, honestly, I never could tell the provenance from clear text anyway.
- [51:43]
B
Right.
- [51:44]
A
So.
- [51:44]
B
So this is. I go to the eye doctor like anyone else and you're in that. Get that machine up against your face. Excuse me. And she says, is it better here or here? Those are exactly the same. And then she moves some things around, she goes, here or here.
- [51:58]
A
Those are just exactly A or B. Yeah.
- [52:02]
B
And this, that, to me, that's what this is.
- [52:04]
A
It looks like it's just a little darker, maybe a little bit.
- [52:07]
B
A little bit better.
- [52:08]
A
It still looks fuzzy. Is it terrible? Maybe it's because it's a terror, like a highly compressed jpeg.
- [52:13]
B
I think this is a terrible image to have used. Yes, I think that's part of it.
- [52:16]
A
Yeah. Thank you.
- [52:18]
B
It's very strange. Yeah. Here we're trying to show the clarity of something. Here's like a 50% reduced quality image in JPEG format. You know, that's lossy. This is ridiculous.
- [52:27]
A
I do like it that they're contributing back to the open source project.
- [52:31]
B
Oh, yes.
- [52:33]
A
And it's cool that Google's incorporating it into all the Windows Chromium web browsers.
- [52:40]
B
Yeah, right.
- [52:42]
A
There's no equivalent thing on the Mac.
- [52:45]
B
They.
- [52:45]
A
They probably say, well, we don't need it.
- [52:47]
B
I think on other platforms. Google, I don't. Maybe someone knows this. I don't know. There's a Google text render. It has a name. I think if someone said it I'd know it. But it's. They have their own. It might be skia based or something, I don't remember. But they have their own thing. It's fine. Like it's, you know, it looks good.
- [53:04]
A
Yeah.
- [53:05]
B
But I've always thought that the, you know, you say what you want about Edge and I do say a lot about Edge almost every day. But the text rendering is fantastic. Like, that's always been true.
- [53:14]
A
Yeah, yeah. That's actually really important. That's probably the most important thing a browser does, really.
- [53:21]
B
Yeah, exactly. Right.
- [53:22]
A
You spend a lot of time reading text.
- [53:23]
B
Right? It's about reading. Exactly, yeah. And this one's just kind of interesting to me because. Well, for two reasons. So Microsoft has been using this word for over 20 years now. And just coincidentally, the other day we talked about this last week, Microsoft didn't. Well, I guess they sort of announced. They just revealed that they were getting rid of Dev Home. Right. They're removing it from Windows 11. And I don't remember what it was. My wife and I sit here in the morning and we read the news, you know, on our devices, whatever. And I don't. I'm trying to remember why, but it was tied to that. And I said something to her against, you know, which is stupid. She doesn't care about this stuff. But I said something like about Microsoft deprecating something. And. And she said, what does that mean? I said, what does what mean? She says, deprecation. I was like, oh, she's a writer.
- [54:10]
A
She doesn't know what. I guess it's kind of a computery.
- [54:13]
B
Yeah. I was like, well, I don't think about it because it's just been such a thing for me.
- [54:17]
A
Right.
- [54:18]
B
So coincidentally to this, Microsoft, within a day of that, put up a blog post explaining what deprecation means. And it's what I always sort of understood it to mean, which was when they announced that a feature is deprecated in Windows, for example, that means they're no longer updating it and they will remove it from a future version of Windows. Now, that could happen in six months, it could happen in three years, five years, whatever it is. But the reason for the blog post was to explain what deprecation meant in the context of support lifecycle. So if Microsoft deprecates a feature in Windows, like they did with WordPad, for example, about a year and a half ago, whatever that was, it's still supported. Right. So if you have users, you're a customer, and using WordPad for some reason it's supported. It doesn't. They're not going to add features to it or anything, but they will support it. But once it's taken out of the product, it's out of supports, obviously, so. But they would just, I think, I don't know, I guess customers started asking about it. Finally they have a whole website about deprecation. They talk about this all the time. It's. I don't know.
- [55:25]
A
Well, it might be kind of a specific technical meaning for them. I mean, there it is, a standard English word. I mean, it's not.
- [55:32]
B
Yeah. And not to be confused with deprecated.
- [55:35]
A
Oh.
- [55:36]
B
Or depreciated. Sorry.
- [55:37]
A
Oh, it's not depreciation. No, I understand that it's deprecated.
- [55:41]
B
I know you understand it.
- [55:42]
A
And deprecated.
- [55:43]
B
Yeah. So people might hear it and who are not in some street, maybe in.
- [55:47]
A
Did they. I mean, did they say anything other than what I think, which is we're not going to be using this much longer, so you might want to think of another, you know, use another tool because it's deprecated, like it's about to be canceled.
- [56:00]
B
They literally said that. Yeah. And okay, they. Well, yeah, because depending on the feature, you might have some, like they're speaking to the enterprise. Right. So you might have some people who are using this. You should tell them.
- [56:11]
A
So it's the warning that's coming.
- [56:13]
B
Yes, it's the. Yes, that's exactly right. It's time to start thinking about moving on from this thing. I think in most cases, no one's really using this stuff.
- [56:21]
A
You use an example, Microsoft in September 2023, deprecated WordPad.
- [56:28]
B
Right.
- [56:29]
A
But it wasn't until a year later that they removed it.
- [56:31]
B
That's right. And then. So, but so what I deal with fairly regularly are people who say, hey, what happened to, I actually got an email on Nasty Gram from someone about WordPad. In fact, I should find this. It was fairly funny. And literally Microsoft getting rid of WordPad, which they had telegraphed a year and a half. Like I said, it was the impetus for this guy. Yeah. He says, he says, hey, what happened? You know, I said, well, it was gone.
- [57:01]
A
Where'd it go?
- [57:01]
B
Is there any reason for this? And I'm like, well, yeah, it's a security problem. No one's, you know, it's not.
- [57:05]
A
It was deprecated.
- [57:07]
B
It's deprecated. He's like, well, I'm going to move to mint Linux. Like, okay.
- [57:11]
A
Oh, really?
- [57:11]
B
Because I mean, I. Okay.
- [57:15]
A
I mean, I'm sure there are some good choices on Windows to replace wordpad. Actually, wordpad was cool because it did. It read Word documents.
- [57:26]
B
Yeah. So that was the big thing. So back in the day, Microsoft had write and it had works, remember? And those two products did not, were not document compatible with Word, which was really bizarre. But once Office switched over to these Open Office documents, which are open source, they were able to do that in WordPad, but they didn't. That was like the last time they updated the app. So it really wasn't ever updated. And of course, these things. You mentioned this, I think during the ad, this notion of attack service, it's part of the attack surface of Windows. So you have this thing sitting on people's computers that most people aren't using. That is an attack vector. You could send an attachment that opens, et cetera, et cetera. So getting rid of it to me makes sense. It's bizarre to me to find out in 2025 that anyone is actually still was using this app and was confused by it being removed. But some things I sort of understand, like mailed calendar. It's like, I don't get it. What is. These apps are fine. It's like, well, they really weren't fine. But, but I understand, like, I get it, it's okay. But wordpad, come on, I. That's a, that's an old, that's an old tool, I think.
- [58:36]
A
Yeah.
- [58:37]
B
I think about it.
- [58:38]
A
Well, as Microsoft says, deprecation isn't the end, it's an opportunity.
- [58:43]
B
Yeah. Like, for example, I have been deprecated, but we're all. I have not yet been. I have not been deceased.
- [58:50]
A
The life cycle is limited.
- [58:53]
B
There's no positive updates happening here.
- [58:55]
A
End of life is coming.
- [58:57]
B
Feature shedding now, you know. Yep.
- [59:01]
A
Once available, this is actually. This would make a great film strip.
- [59:06]
B
Yeah.
- [59:06]
A
The beginning of a life cycle is often described with the terms launch and availability once available.
- [59:13]
B
The product side of the bell curve.
- [59:15]
A
When it's all downhill, it's most vigorous and productive period called support.
- [59:21]
B
Right. Until you're like, hi, honey, I'm home. And he comes home with his like, briefcase, with his hat.
- [59:25]
A
You sure are vigorous.
- [59:26]
B
You've got a good two, five or ten more years to go, buddy.
- [59:29]
A
He's most clearly marked with the terms end of life.
- [59:34]
B
That's how I see my career right there. I have five or 10 more years to go. Exactly. It's going to be one of those things.
- [59:42]
A
Oh, Lord. It's so funny that they wrote this, but I guess you do kind of need to. I mean, I'm sure everybody intuitively understands what they're saying except for Stephanie, but.
- [59:53]
B
Well, listen, I sort of, I almost respect her for not knowing or even caring in a way what it.
- [60:00]
A
She doesn't care. That's the real.
- [60:01]
B
Yeah, it's good. I think it's healthy. But I think the point of the Microsoft thing was mostly around support because, you know, Microsoft support policy used to be super obvious and very consistent, and now it's not obvious or consistent depending on the product. So explaining that in the context of support, like. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's fine.
- [60:24]
A
Yeah, okay. Okay, buddy. We haven't talked about AI for a whole 10 minutes. So we're gonna have a chance to talk more about AI in a, in a moment.
- [60:38]
B
And our Chinese overlords and our new.
- [60:40]
A
Chinese overlords, we welcome them. But first, a word from our sponsor. You're watching Windows Weekly. If you just tuned in, Paul is here. Yes, of course, in Mexico City. Richard was in Stockholm and was unable to get a decent connection. So he's on his way home.
- [60:57]
B
Get like a picture of his face on a stick and I'll just, I.
- [61:00]
A
Can always do that. You know what they do, they used to do on the news shows? They don't do it anymore. They'd have a picture of him holding a phone.
- [61:06]
B
Yes.
- [61:07]
A
As just a still picture of him holding a phone.
- [61:09]
B
Like he's like out in the field work or something, you know.
- [61:13]
A
This episode of Windows Weekly brought to you, my friends, my Dear friends, by 1Password. Now I got a, a rhetorical question for you because I think I know the answer. But you know, you tell me, do, do your end users always work on company owned devices? Do they stick to IT approved apps? Are you kidding? This is the real world. How do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices? Well, 1Password has an answer to this question. Extended Access Management. 1Password. Extended Access Management helps you secure every sign in for every app on every device because it solves the problems traditional IAM and MDM Cannot touch. I would like to draw a word picture for you. Okay. Imagine your company's security like the quad of a college campus. You remember that red, nice brick paths between the ivy covered buildings. The lawn perfect and green. That's. Those are the company owned devices, the IT approved apps, the managed employee identities. But think back. Carved into that beautiful green lawn were paths, muddy little paths, the ones people actually use. The shortcuts that are the actual straightest distance between point A and point B. The ones people use, those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow IT apps, the non employee identities, like contractors. But the problem is most security tools they. They're designed to work on those happy little perfect brick paths, right? And where all the security problems occur on the shortcuts on the little muddy paths. That's why you need 1Password Extended Access Management. It's the first security solution that takes all those unmanaged devices and apps and identities and puts them under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected. Every device is known and healthy. In Every app is visible. 1Password is ISO 27001 certified. They do regular third party security audits. It exceeds the standards set by almost every authority and it's a leader in security.1 passwords. Extended access management is security for the way we work today. Now generally available to companies with Okta and Microsoft. Entra in beta for Google Workspace customers Secure every app, every device, every identity, even the unmanaged ones at 1Password.com WindowsWeekly it's all lowercase1 the number 1p a s dash s dash w o r dash WindowsWeekly we thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly and we thank you for supporting us right back by going to that address so they know you saw it here. 1Password.com Windows Weekly. Now on with the show. Just a few more AI notes. Just a few more. Actually this is breaking news this morning.
- [64:26]
B
I think yeah, this probably isn't even in the right order anymore but I mentioned this up front that these companies that are supplying AI models are starting to move to reasoning models for a variety of reasons. Right? Deepseek was the first one I was aware of and you mentioned this. It's since propagated everywhere. So if you're a developer you use hugging face or whatever or if you're an Azure GitHub, it's everywhere. It's coming soon. The local version is coming soon to copilot PCs, right. So you can run it against the NPU on your computer. So interesting. OpenAI last week, I'm going to do this out of order, I guess. Yeah. Decided to release the reasoning model of their latest model family, like O3, free on ChatGPT. So no matter what tier you're on, you have access to this. It's interesting. Ask your questions and kind of watch it go through the thing. Microsoft, previous to that, had added it under the covers to Copilot. Right. And so if you are using Copilot in Windows on mobile, the web, whatever, you'll see, I think it says think deeper or something. You kind of flip the switch and you can see it do its thing. So between a week ago and today, we've all moved to reason. So now we're reasoning, I guess that's what we're doing. And so today Google announced that Gemini 2.0, their family of models, is now generally available to all of their customers. Asterisk, asterisks. Because actually, Workspace customers don't have the latest yet, but they will soon. So whether you're a consumer, whether using it through apps, whether using the Gemini app, whether you subscribe to Gemini Advanced or not, soon, Workspace developers, whatever, there's several of them. Gemini 2.0 models are all available. So reasoning is a capability. They're agentic. Right. So we're doing the agent stuff like, like we were talking about earlier, a little something for everybody, right? So there's a bunch of that stuff. So that's happening. And, you know, Satya Nadella was asked, as expected, you had to think Microsoft PR and the CEO were sitting around for about two weeks or, well, actually since the day of deep seqs, or about a week and a half, figuring out what they were going to say because they would inevitably be asked. And they were. But Sam Altman and actually several of the people from OpenAI took part in a Reddit AMA, which is worth going through. I wish there was a way to, you know, maybe AI could do this. You know, summarize an AMA where you only show me the questions that they answered so I could just read that part of it, you know. But what I did was I, you know, like, you probably do this too. If you, you want to see what people said in the name ama, you just search for their names, right? So they come up.
- [67:13]
A
You know, it's like looking, when you get a new book about, I don't know, podcasts, you look in the index.
- [67:20]
B
To see if your name's in there. I think that's why I like the Steven Snofsky book so much, because I actually, I Come up in it. And not always complimentary, but for some reason it's always a little bit of a surprise to me, even though I've read it before. So I'm rereading it. Rereading it. Reread it. I'm like, oh, what's this? You've read this like eight times. Why is this still surprising? I. I'll make the guy from Memento anyway, so it's nice if you can't.
- [67:47]
A
Remember because it's new.
- [67:48]
B
I want that. I want to watch Star wars for the first time again, for example. I wish I could erase that part of my brain. Yeah. So anyway, he was actually pretty complimentary to Deep Seek.
- [67:59]
A
Yeah, I was kind of surprised. This AMA was fascinating because I thought. So we got it wrong.
- [68:04]
B
Yes. He said we're on the wrong side of history, which is an interesting way to put it. So. And he also. This is sort of like a Phil Spencer thing. He talked about how there have been disagreements inside the company about whether or not we need a different open source strategy, meaning an actual open source strategy. And not everyone in the company shares this view. They will be eradicated. No, he didn't say that. But it's currently not the big thing. But maybe because Deep Seek is open. Open to some degree, you know, maybe OpenAI needs to do something like that. And I would. I'm not sure if I'm really arguing this, but you could make the argument that the reasoning display, which is something they didn't want to do before. Right. When they first came up with O3, they actually hide that from you. So you see the end result, but you don't see it thinking. But now they've switched this on so you can actually see it thinking because of Deep Seek. And. And we found that people tend to trust it more. So maybe that level of openness at the very least is a step.
- [69:09]
A
Well, look, one thing we can agree, competition is good.
- [69:12]
B
Yes.
- [69:13]
A
And you can't, you know. Right, right.
- [69:16]
B
Yeah. And actually, I mean, Lisa Khan, you know, everyone's a big fan of that woman, but she had a. An editorial wherever I think. New York Times. Yeah.
- [69:26]
A
She's out of work, you know. Right.
- [69:27]
B
Yeah. Yeah. She said, well, she's got time to write, so. But. But she. Look, I don't. It's weird. I have a weird visceral reaction to her myself, so I'm trying not to be like, stupid about it. But, you know, she said something to the tune of, you know, Deep Seek shows that this business model that Big Tech has of closing the Fence and making sure they're the only ones who can play in a certain arena or whatever is fundamentally flawed. And honestly, it's a good, it's a good point. You know, so she's right. And I guess I said, Did I say Lisa Khan before? Lena? Yeah, Lena. Sorry. I, Yeah, I mean, so this is interesting. Like whatever the outcome is with how they did what they did, this has already changed things up. We just talked about all these reasoning things that are happening and yeah, you let in a little bit of light from the outside and all of a sudden things are different. I mean it's a fair, you know, when you, when you just shut the market down. So it's only you. This type of thing doesn't happen. Right. This is an example of when you're not a hammer, not everything is a nail. So I, it's a fair point. I don't, I'm not sure she's made too many in her professional career, but that's a good point.
- [70:43]
A
Oh, you hate her so much.
- [70:44]
B
I do. I can't stand her.
- [70:47]
A
I like her. I thought she did a lot of good.
- [70:50]
B
Listen, I'm, I am 100% behind antitrust. I, it's important. It's, it's, it's proven right. It needs to happen. I think she went in a complete wrong direction and I just, it's just too bad. Okay. The other thing that is start, if you think about this as maybe an extension of the agentic stuff is OpenAI has started testing really because they're doing this with their $200 a month customers and in a very limited form. This notion of using AI as a research assistant. And actually Google, the Gemini stuff has a little bit of this as well. And this is, you know, it's kind of domain specific right now. I think it's like finance, certain sciences, engineering, that kind of stuff where you have a body of work to work on that is not just finite but, but is actually really well defined and it's, you know, intensive because there's a lot, you know, they're relatively speaking, a lot of data, but it's fine tuned to this stuff. Yeah, I mean, I think, Yeah, I mean this is where it's going, of course. Right. And so this is, we're going to be debating this for the rest of our lives. Right. We're not going to see the end of this ourselves. But this is the type of thing, I think in the future people are going to look back and say, I'm sorry, you're telling me that used to pull A giant book off of a shelf, flip through it and then find some. Whatever it is, legal precedent, some engineering, you know, data, whatever it is, to make a point. And you called that research. It's going to seem silly, Right? But that's what we do, right? Not you and I. Maybe I don't do that, but I mean, that's what researchers do. A lot of this stuff is not, you know, obviously computerization helps, but, you know, having an AI, as long as it's grounded properly and working properly and reasoning and whatever it is, you know, it's not there now. Right. But I mean, I think this is. Yeah, this is what's going to happen. I. This came up. I don't remember before the show when it was, but I mentioned that we were eating lunch and it was a TV on. There's no sound, but it was the president of Mexico giving an address in front of the Mexican Congress tied to the anniversary of the Mexican Constitution, which I believe is 107, 108 years old this year. And I'm looking at the. You can, you know, they're. It's like CNN where they put a little text scroll at the bottom and kind of saying, this is what's happening right now.
- [73:22]
A
Right.
- [73:23]
B
And there was something up there about the. The popular vote. And I wasn't 100% sure what it meant. Right. I got the popular vote part, but I was like, so I don't know. Actually, now I do know, but I didn't know at the time 10 minutes ago how Mexico elects their president. Like, I know it's every six years and you can't run again, but I didn't know. Is it popular vote? Is it kind of electrocard? Whatever. Like we have whatever. So I said to my wife, because again, I keep involving her in technology and she doesn't care, but I said, this is the perfect question for Gemini. I'm going to ask Gemini. And I asked Gemini, actually, I might be able to bring it, but it's. I bet it's still there. It says, I can't help with responses on elections and political figures right now.
- [74:07]
A
Oh, wow.
- [74:08]
B
And I got to tell you, I feel like 50% of the time I ask AI to do something, I get a response like this. It's like, okay. So it literally says. And it goes on a little bit, but it says, while I work on improving, you should try Google Search. So I did. That all came up in Spanish, despite the fact that I've configured it for English. And it took me a little while, but the net answer Here is. Across the board, up and down the political spectrum, Mexico elects using the popular vote, including with the president. So I found that out. I have no idea what she was talking about because when I went to cnn, when I went to Google News, I went to Mexico News Daily. She talked today. There must be a news story about this. There was not. So maybe later I'll find out. Maybe it'll be in a weekly digest next week. I don't know. Things move slowly here. So anyway, I tried to. I wouldn't call this deep research, but I try. I was like, okay, this is. This is. This is. This is something I should be able to handle. This is a very specific question that has a single answer. Yeah, let's do it. And. Nope. Well, I didn't try others. I, you know, we were eating lunch, but I. I tried Gemini, and I was like, all right, I'm just going to Google this stupid.
- [75:30]
A
And. And did that work? I mean, I have so many AIs. I feel like one of them should know.
- [75:39]
B
Yeah, I mean, I.
- [75:41]
A
They're reluctant to talk about elections.
- [75:42]
B
I hate to open copilot on my computer because it's like a little cancer that keeps coming back, but let's see if I can. I'll give it a shot. Sure. They already regret it. As soon as I turn it on, I'm like, oh, you suck. Okay, let's see what copilot has to say on this topic. What? You know, let's see if they say anything. Think deeper. I'm gonna have it think deeper, too.
- [76:06]
A
Oh, think as deep as you can, baby.
- [76:08]
B
Yeah, baby. What system does Mexico use to elect their president? Right. It's a simple question. Oh, I got. It's making little curly cues. That's fun.
- [76:24]
A
I have deep seek says. Okay, let's tackle this question.
- [76:28]
B
Right, Exactly.
- [76:29]
A
Has President Sheinbaum suggested changing how we vote? Yes, by the way, her predecessor suggested it, but he didn't have enough votes in the Congress to do it. President Claudia Sheinbaum has proposed significant changes to Mexico's electoral system, primarily through constitutional reforms that would alter legislative representation and weaken independent institutions. This builds on our predecessor's agenda. Yeah.
- [76:54]
B
That's not good.
- [76:55]
A
Yeah, they don't.
- [76:57]
B
They're.
- [76:57]
A
They're going to abolish plural plural representatives. I don't know. I don't know. It's complicated. It's complicated is the answer.
- [77:07]
B
That sounds like object oriented programming to me. It's like polymorphism.
- [77:13]
A
Yeah. Plural pluranomial. This would remove so seats AG allocated to parties based on Their national vote share, which helps ensure minority votes in voices in congress. This would remove 200 proportional representation seats. They have a 500 member chamber of deputies. Wow. Centralizing power around the majority parties like her Morena coalition. Yeah. It's a power grab. Critics argue this is. Risks one party dominance. See? And this is from China, by the way. This is from China.
- [77:47]
B
Yeah.
- [77:48]
A
Oh, there you go.
- [77:50]
B
I've gotten a whole lot of nothing from Copilot. I'm going to try one more time.
- [77:55]
A
I got a really elaborate result. She supports AMLO's judicial reform to replace appointed supreme court justices.
- [78:03]
B
That was one of the first things.
- [78:04]
A
And lower court justices were those who are the popular vote reforms to dissolve autonomous bodies like the national electoral Institute.
- [78:12]
B
Oh, my God. So copilot says elections are fascinating and I'd love to help, but I'm probably not the best source for something so important. Wow. What about. What about the black mole in my arm? Can you tell me about that? Oh, yeah. You got cancer. Oh, you're dead.
- [78:28]
A
But I can't tell you about elections. New Sheinbaum has pledged to pass all 18 constitutional amendments proposed by AMLO, including. Wow. She's talking about big reforms, big changes.
- [78:43]
B
Yeah. Okay. So that happened to. I could see something was happening.
- [78:49]
A
Something's happening.
- [78:50]
B
Yeah.
- [78:51]
A
They're saying, we have constitution. It's old. We need to fix it.
- [78:54]
B
So the next headline, I'm almost going to get this in Spanish was it was activados Torinos protesting outside of the capitol. Something. And I'm like, oh, that must be some political thing. No, these are the people that don't want bulls to be sacrificed in arenas. And I'm pretty sure bullfighting ended Mexico, I don't know, 10 years ago. Yeah. Then a while. So I'm not really sure what that was all about. So I have a lot of questions.
- [79:21]
A
So the thing I love about Latin America and actually the. The, you know, Latin community worldwide is there's always a protest.
- [79:30]
B
Oh, my God.
- [79:31]
A
So there's always a protest. Actually, it's true of Greece too. Come to think of it, I haven't traveled to a country yet. There isn't a protest going on every day.
- [79:44]
B
So we've seen multiple protests in Mexico City. There's always something. And by the way, a lot of it's warranted. Right. But I always launch into my Rick Steves impersonation when this happens. We're standing there in the Zocalo, whatever. These people, people marching by looking for, like, women's rights maybe, or ending violence against women or whatever. It's perfectly. Yes. And then I'll be like, the Mexican people take to the streets too. You know, like, I just like launch into this. There's like a. It's like a cultural bouillabaisse. I just.
- [80:16]
A
Oh boy.
- [80:17]
B
Yeah, you're witnessing history.
- [80:19]
A
Isn't it interesting that at least in this regard the Chinese AI is much less censored than the.
- [80:27]
B
Yeah, so it's. Right.
- [80:28]
A
Very skittish.
- [80:30]
B
We're going to consider that ironic. Everyone was jumping all over Deep Seek a week ago asking about Tiananmen Square. Am I right? I asked it about an election in another country and it wouldn't do it. So explain to me which one of us is censored more? I mean, I don't even know what the point of it is.
- [80:49]
A
Anyway, welcome back to our cultural bouillabaisse.
- [80:54]
B
Yep, that's what we are.
- [80:56]
A
So it wasn't just Microsoft that had earnings. I mentioned Apple. Apple did very well. They had a big, big quarter.
- [81:03]
B
Who else?
- [81:03]
A
What else happened? How did intel do?
- [81:06]
B
Yeah, they did great, Leo. Everything, you know.
- [81:09]
A
Oh boy. Oh, the pain.
- [81:11]
B
Honestly, I'm just gonna say this out right, I, I think most of this is probably going to be uninteresting to everybody, but I had to write up every one of these and you're going to suffer with me. So.
- [81:21]
A
Thank you, Paul.
- [81:23]
B
No, no, it's a light show. We'll go through this quickly. So obviously intel and amd, the two primary chip makers in the PC market, Qualcomm, by the way, their earnings are either. I think they're today. So sometime during the show or after the show, we'll hear from Qualcomm, Amazon. Has to be happening any day now, so probably today, tomorrow, Friday, whatever. But intel, amd, you know, Intel's kind of continuing their streak. I wouldn't call it a total disaster, frankly. In fact, they, they beat expectations by only declining their revenues by 7%. But they also warned on the current quarter, which means it's going to get worse next quarter again. And so, you know, a lot of their stuff just amounts to more of the same there.
- [82:04]
A
It's a slow motion collision.
- [82:07]
B
Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I wish them the best. I guess AMD is doing fantastic in the context of amd. I mean, there's still half the size of intel when it comes to revenues, but by the way, they used to be like a third, so they're doing good. Their primary business now is data center. It's fascinating to me how often they're compared negatively to Nvidia. Like they're not making a lot of headway there, but that part of their business is growing dramatically. That's like I said, biggest business, biggest business unit, 69% revenue growth year over year. It's crazy. Client business, which is the PC stuff, is the distance. Second place, 2.3 billion in revenue, but that's up almost 60% as well. They're taking share away from intel, right? As they should be because their current generation chips are in order. Well, that's not fair. But are dramatically better than what intel has out in the market. So that's good. And then they have a gaming and a gaming business and embedded business. Those are both down. Gaming is revenues from console makers like Microsoft and Sony, but also from video game, you know, video cards. Right. Which is not going great. And so that stuff's down, but overall AMD is doing fantastic. And then, yeah, Apple, like you said, you know, just what are you going to say about this company? IPhone was $69.1 billion in revenues. I will go back to the tape to read the exact number, but if I'm not mistaken, mistake it.
- [83:33]
A
That's about the same as Microsoft.
- [83:35]
B
That's what I was going to say. Total revenues, 69.6 billion in total revenues from Microsoft. 69.1 billion just for iPhone. Yeah. So the iPhone is as big as all of Microsoft combined, which is astonishing.
- [83:46]
A
That is astonishing. Wow.
- [83:48]
B
It is 56% ish of Apple's direct revenues. If you factor in services which wouldn't exist because of that, it's, you know, 70, 80%. It's a lot. 80% price somewhere in there. Whatever. Mac and iPad sales, Both solid growth, 15% ish growth year over year. Because both those products, right, they revved toward the end of the year. So that's, you know, good stuff. So Apple's doing fine. They'll be okay. Also asked about AI, right? And they don't care. We're like, yeah, we're good.
- [84:20]
A
You know, their AI is the worst, but apparently that's.
- [84:23]
B
But they're like, we don't care. The big downturn. Well, so iPhone revenues, if I'm not mistaken, were flat. Yeah, they were flat. Technically down, but we'll call it flat with a year ago quarter. And a lot of that was because of China. China's revenues were down 11% issues there. But Tim Cook, God bless him, marketer at heart, he's like, look, one thing we found this quarter was that iPhones that had Apple intelligence, so a lot better than those that did not. And China is one of those markets, that does not. And so they announced plans to bring Apple intelligence to China in simplified Chinese in April. Right.
- [84:57]
A
We were talking about this yesterday on MacBreak Weekly. And this might be one of the benefits of deep seeks success because Apple gives deep seek in China.
- [85:07]
B
Exactly. They can. Exactly. You have to know they stood up and cheered when this happened. Oh yeah, no kidding. This is how we do it. And what a wonderful nationalist story to tell in China. You know. No, I'm serious. Like it's.
- [85:19]
A
We beat all the American AIs.
- [85:22]
B
Yep. And now we're working with the biggest American company. Biggest company.
- [85:25]
A
Yeah, it is. That's true. That's a good point.
- [85:28]
B
So that doesn't see what is right. Okay, so Alphabet, Google. Google. We'll call it 96 billion in revenues. I mean, let me find the exact number. I think it's seven. Money. Where is it? 75% except, excuse me, of their revenue. 75% from advertising.
- [85:46]
A
Yeah. That's actually way down from it used to be 90.
- [85:49]
B
I know, I know. It was, it was. By the way, it's been down a little bit since. This is actually up again a little bit, which is kind of interesting. Apple Cloud is actually doing pretty good as a business. 12 billion in revenues, up 23% year over year. That's.
- [86:02]
A
You mean Google Cloud?
- [86:03]
B
Google Cloud, what I call it Apple Cloud. Apple Cloud. Sorry. Myself immediately. Sorry. Apple Cloud is not exist. Google Cloud is doing pretty good. I mean, honestly, you know, that. That was kind of an also ran for a long time. Yeah.
- [86:14]
A
And then definitely in third place after.
- [86:16]
B
Aws, but still, you know, they're doing okay.
- [86:20]
A
It's profitable.
- [86:21]
B
It's. It's a business, you know, so they're doing great. Samsung, I don't really care too much about Samsung, but revenues there up 12%. But that's. Samsung is a business that's a lot of things. Right. So I. The phone part of Samsung is almost 18 billion in revenues of the 52. So it's not the impact on Samsung that, you know, the iPhone is on Apple because Samsung has like an insurance company and they sell refrigerators and they do weird stuff. So they have all this other stuff, but that's whatever. So we'll see what happens there. Obviously they just launched the new phones. That stuff has supposedly gone pretty good, but we'll see. And then foldables later and a year, yada yada.
- [87:03]
A
It does work better with Windows, doesn't it? This S25.
- [87:06]
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does. Yep. I find that more than vaguely irritating.
- [87:10]
A
They even have Features that you don't get anywhere with anything else.
- [87:14]
B
Well, Microsoft doesn't really make too many devices anymore, but yeah, Google or Microsoft Devices. Yep. I know it's not. It's okay. It's all right.
- [87:23]
A
I'm sure that's a good deal for Microsoft.
- [87:25]
B
It's not irritating or anything. And then this is a business like. I think you should look at Leo for.
- [87:32]
A
Because of club Twitter, maybe podcasting. You think?
- [87:35]
B
Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. No, I meant. So, so let me, Let me.
- [87:39]
A
There's no future in podcasting. I just tell you that right now.
- [87:41]
B
Let me try that sentence again. So Spotify is interesting to me only because it is super transparent about where the revenues come from. And they spell it out. So there, there's. For example. So right now they have 60,675 million users overall, up 12%. It's great, right?
- [87:59]
A
Mostly free.
- [88:00]
B
Big numbers, mostly free. But let me see if I can find the number.
- [88:02]
A
It's somewhere. So they make money.
- [88:04]
B
They have. Where is it? I don't have it. Why don't I have it?
- [88:08]
A
They added 35 million new users in the quarter. I'm looking for premium paying subscribers.
- [88:15]
B
So premium users. The ones who pay are not. It's not as bad as it used to be of a gap, but I believe it's. I'm going to call it 1/3 versus 2/3 roughly in that.
- [88:22]
A
Yeah, I think trajectory. Yeah.
- [88:24]
B
The. The 1/3 that are paying customers generate like 85 or 90% of the revenues or something like that.
- [88:30]
A
425 million AD supported users.
- [88:33]
B
Yeah.
- [88:34]
A
Out of the 670.
- [88:35]
B
200 and something. Yeah.
- [88:36]
A
So it's.
- [88:37]
B
Yeah.
- [88:37]
A
So it's roughly 2,250 million paying users.
- [88:40]
B
Yeah. Which is, you know, amazing. Right? Yeah. Yeah. But their revenues, you know, from the. Man, this is really. I think I was writing too much. I usually spell this out very explicitly and I did not do it this time. I apologize. Yeah. Because I'm always fascinated by this. But this is why things like Club Twit exists. It's why Thrott Premium exists. It's. You know, you could have a much smaller base of people who are paying versus some base that's ad supported.
- [89:05]
A
I mean, I would, I mean I would love it if a third of our user base were members of Club Twit. You probably. We wouldn't bother with advertising. Exactly the case.
- [89:14]
B
But 100 same I. And, and Right. I would give anything I to get.
- [89:20]
A
The way we've always wanted to operate. Right. So the listeners or the readers support what we do. And then you don't have to worry about advertisers. That's not the way the world works. At least Spotify, you know, it's funny, I mean, their, their operating income was $1.4 billion.
- [89:37]
B
I know.
- [89:38]
A
Euros on revenues of 15 billion euros. They give a lot back and they.
- [89:44]
B
Don'T get credit for that. And so just the other day they had a separate announcement about how, look, just to be clear, we paid the recording industry and artists $10 billion last year, a record, and higher than any other company, right? Yeah.
- [89:57]
A
Because more people are streaming on Spotify. They don't pay as much per stream as Apple or even Amazon, but more people use it.
- [90:06]
B
Well, but that's the, the law of size, right? I mean, that's, that's, that's their right.
- [90:10]
A
That's fine.
- [90:10]
B
But, you know, a lot of people kind of point at Spotify and say, well, you know, they're destroying the recording industry, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And actually, I think there's a case to be made that the recording industry would have disappeared by now, essentially, if it wasn't for this stuff. Because in that, if you go back and look at that $10 million announcement that they made last week or whenever.
- [90:29]
A
That was 10 billion.
- [90:30]
B
Yes, 10 billion. Sorry, 10 years ago. They look at what the industry was when they just started and it was the revenues in the entire industry were $13 billion.
- [90:42]
A
Really?
- [90:42]
B
Today they are paying almost as much to the industry as it made in themselves before they existed. So, yes, our artists will. Oh, look at making as much. Yeah, neither am I as a writer. I used to, you know, I used to be able to charge, you know, dollars a word. I couldn't get that now if I sold a kidney. That's the nature of things. And I, I honestly, if this type of thing hadn't come along, you're probably right. I think it would have cratered.
- [91:09]
A
Yeah.
- [91:10]
B
I'm not saying they're like Jesus or anything and they get everything right. I'm just saying, you know, if, if.
- [91:15]
A
If there weren't any way to stream music, you know, pay a subscription fee and have access to all music and stream it, people would still have to buy CDs or buy digital copies. That, that would change the equation.
- [91:28]
B
Well, except that we live in a world where. Yeah, well, right. I mean, that's. Hopefully it's a net gain for everybody, but it. Yeah, it's never that clean.
- [91:35]
A
But I mean, look, the real problem in the music industry is the labels get all the money, then they decide how much the artists.
- [91:41]
B
Yeah. The problem with the music industry is. The music industry. Yeah, the music industry, exactly.
- [91:46]
A
It is an industry. We're actually, I think we are on Spotify. A lot of people say Spotify has been bad for podcasting, and I, I wouldn't necessarily disagree maybe, but I.
- [91:57]
B
So I agree. I mean, look, Joe Rogan and. Yeah, they, they, they sucked a lot of the money out of the industry, I think, which is a big problem for you guys and for. Well, for us or whatever. On the other hand, like, as an independent, if you were. I'm not. But if you were an independent podcaster or whatever, they will host your podcast for free. They.
- [92:15]
A
Right.
- [92:15]
B
There's. The services there are pretty good. I mean, you know, and I, I.
- [92:20]
A
Think we are moving it. Some of our stuff to Spotify and it. Not to only Spotify. Yeah, that's what I don't like is that, you know, well, like Joe Rogan, you have to use Spotify to listen.
- [92:33]
B
Right.
- [92:33]
A
And I don't, I don't like that.
- [92:34]
B
No, I would never do that. I don't like that at all.
- [92:36]
A
But I think that we are moving a lot of stuff to Spot. To Spotify and we have a lot of stuff. A lot of people listen to us on Spotify. Oh, I know.
- [92:43]
B
We're.
- [92:44]
A
We're thinking about using their Spotify ad network.
- [92:46]
B
Okay. Yeah. Why not?
- [92:48]
A
Yeah, why not?
- [92:48]
B
Why not?
- [92:49]
A
Yeah.
- [92:50]
B
So, yeah, Spotify is a force to be reckoned with. I mean, it's very.
- [92:56]
A
Feelings about it. I know, honest.
- [92:58]
B
Yeah. But think about. So it wasn't too long ago, I, I'm not going to get the date right. But 2010, 12, somewhere in there. If you were to go back and look, Microsoft Office would have told you that they had 500 million, maybe 550 million users. Spotify today is 675 million users.
- [93:16]
A
It's amazing.
- [93:17]
B
That's astonishing.
- [93:18]
A
That's the thing. I mean, regardless of how I feel about how they've affected the music industry and the podcasting industry, users love it. People love Spotify and they're very happy with it. So Spotify, far and away the largest.
- [93:34]
B
Music Spotify advertises in Mexico using. Rolled up like paper rolled onto a wall. Like they like.
- [93:42]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like posters.
- [93:43]
B
There were Spotify. No, I mean, they're not even that big. They're like this. But they put like 20 of them side by side. Yeah. Like in my neighborhood up the street, there's always some Spotify ads on a wall. Right. It's bizarrely local. It's very interesting.
- [94:00]
A
Yeah. They're, they're, I'm, you know, I'm sure they're a big marketing company. I think they have hundreds of salespeople, marketing people, maybe thousands.
- [94:09]
B
Oh my God. It's probably. Yes. I mean, right, right. I mean the guys that used to market Microsoft Office have to do something now. So they're probably all young people, you know, they're probably all like 25 years old.
- [94:23]
A
Just like Doge.
- [94:25]
B
They'll just speak in emoticons or something. I don't know, Paul.
- [94:29]
A
The world is passing us by.
- [94:30]
B
I know. I'm okay with it. I don't care.
- [94:32]
A
I am too sometimes, you know. Sometimes you just gotta say, I'm a silverback, let the gorillas run free or something. I don't know. All right, hang on for a second. I want to take a break. When we come back, Microsoft 365 and the world famous Xbox segment. Stay right here. Of course, the back of the book as well. Our show today brought to you by US Cloud, the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. We've been talking for some time now about US Cloud. I remember the first time I'd never heard of him. I talked to him on the phone, I was like, wow, more people ought to know about this. And they said, well, we're hoping you'll tell them, Leo. It turns out they are the Global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. They now support 10% of the Fortune 550 companies. There's three reasons I think that US cloud is better. First of all, it's going to save you a lot of money. Switching to US Cloud can save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified or Premier support. Now that wouldn't be any good if they weren't also better support. Faster with a remarkable response time. Twice as fast on average. Time to resolution versus Microsoft. That's amazing. And they're better. Their engineers have on average 16 years experience. They are just the best. All, all US based. I said, how do you get these guys? I said we give them, you know, great, great benefits, great salaries. We recruit hard to get the best engineers and that you benefits you because of course they're helping you. They're the cavalry that comes when you got a problem. Faster, better and less. That's a pretty good offer. They also do other things to save you. For instance, US Cloud is excited to tell you about a new offering. Their Azure cost optimization services are completely independent of the support service. So here's the question. When was the last time you evaluated your Azure usage? I think it's you know, it's been a while. You probably have some what we call Azure spa sprawl. A little spend creep going on, right? You spin up some virtual machines, you forget about them or you're using them less and less. It's hard to keep track. Well, this is the good news. Saving on Azure is easier than ever. With US Cloud, they offer an eight week Azure engagement powered by VBox that identifies key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. You'll get expert guidance, access to US cloud senior engineers, those guys with over 16 years on average with Microsoft products. At the end of those eight weeks, you're going to get a beautiful interactive dashboard that will identify, rebuild and downscale opportunities and unused resources so you can reallocate your precious IT dollars towards the needed resources. Or, I don't know. Here's a suggestion. Invest all those Azure savings in US Cloud's Microsoft support. Save even more. That's what a lot of US Cloud customers do. Completely eliminate your unified spend. That feels real good. Sam, the technical operations manager at Bead Gaming gave us a little review. He gave us Cloud five stars out of five saying quote, we found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. These VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month. Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spend on Azure. But once you get to 40 or $50,000 a month, it really starts to add up. Yeah, I guess it would, huh? It's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure, identify and eliminate Azure creep. Boost your performance and you can do it all in just eight weeks with US Cloud. US Cloud. You gotta get to know these guys. They are fantastic. They're there to save you money and give you better Microsoft. Uscloud.com just book a call, find out how much your team can save. Uscloud.com book a call today and get faster, better Microsoft support for less and maybe save a pretty penny on all those unused Azure resources. Uscloud.com we thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly and you support us when you if they ask you say hey yeah, I heard about it on Windows Weekly. US Cloud. Okey dokey Paul, on we go with Microsoft 365.
- [99:08]
B
Yeah, I saw this story on the tech community blog that Microsoft has about Microsoft Designer being integrated into. It's so vague the way they said this like Photos and the Microsoft 365 copilot app. And I was like really? What does that mean? Right? So if you open the Photos app in Windows 11 and probably Windows 10 has been adding these AI editing features for some time now. So if you open a. I got a. Geez, every time I open my. Open this on a new computer, it's like, I've never opened Photos in my entire life. Anyway, if I open a photo in Photos, for example, and you go to Edit, you will see these little icons up in the toolbar that are AI related, right? So they have like background, like Generative Erase. They have background removal and background blur and all that kind of stuff. And okay, like, cool. So I'm like, what is. I'm like, okay, so obviously these are the, you know, Designer as sort of the, the newish brand, if you will, for Microsoft's generative AI, you know, image capabilities. Right. What used to be being Image Creator, although it's actually still being image created too for some reason, but whatever. But actually they have integrated Designer into Photos. So if you haven't done this, and I don't know if you have to. Let me see if it's on this computer. Yeah, so if you go to edit an image, one of the buttons now at the top is Edit with Designer. And that actually loads a version of the Microsoft Designer web app inside of Photos and lets you access actually some of the same features but a bunch of other new features, including things like selective edit, you know, like auto enhance, etc. Background removal, removal and replace. They don't call it that, but basically you're replacing the background with some other image or with a color. There's a bunch of stuff like that. You can use generative AI capabilities to create images or stickers or icons or whatever and add them to an image. And it's part of, of a whole design process. So. Huh. Like I, I actually didn't. I mean, I sort of knew the button was there, but I never even saw that before. So that actually is the thing. As for the Microsoft 365 copilot app, I think, yeah, last week I did an episode about that for Hands on Windows that will be out next week or the week after. I don't know what the schedule is, but it is interesting to me that right now there are two Copilot apps in Windows and one of them is Copilot, obviously the basic Chatbot, you know, AI Assistant, blah, blah, blah, whatever. But the other one is what used to be the Microsoft 365 app. So if you open that up as a consumer, God help you because you'll never get rid of it. It will keep coming up. It will auto Start with Windows. I actually. Sorry, I just did it myself. It's the Microsoft 365 app with two changes. There's a Copilot button in the sidebar, which, as a consumer doesn't do anything yet. It will, right? It says Copilot Chat is coming soon. There's a Create tab now, which is just a front end to all of the individual apps. Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc. And they've added Designer and, by the way, Clipchamp to that list. Also Sway. Interestingly, you might have thought that went away and some other things. So instead of having the apps in the sidebar, which you can actually still see, you can just. This is like a Microsoft Works type thing. Like just, you know, there's a front end for all this stuff. It will launch the appropriate app. If you have the app on your computer, it launches that app pretty good. If you sign in with a Microsoft worker school account, this app actually is kind of transformed. They got rid of all the app shortcuts. They use Create as the front end for all that stuff. And that Copilot tab does something. It actually gives you a Copilot Chat experience very much like the Copilot app, the standalone app, except that your company could, if they wanted to, well, turn it off or limit its knowledge base to corporate information. Right. And so this is the reason they have the two apps. They. This app can be locked down and I don't have it on in front of me, but when you sign in with a worker school account, it actually has a little green icon in the corner that tells you that everything that's happening here is data protected by Microsoft, you know, support the commercial customers. Why did I just tell you this? Well, the Designer integration with the Copilot365 app, which used to be the Microsoft365 app, which used to be the Office Apple, does not apply to the version of Windows that's the one on mobile. So if you have Designer on Android. Not Designer, sorry, if you have the Microsoft 365 copilot app on your phone, which you might, because it used to be called something that made sense to you, you should go look, by the way, they changed the name. So Designer is actually integrated into that in the same way that it is on Windows in the Photos app. So when you click the Designer tab, which is actually at the bottom, not on the side on the phone, or actually the Crate tab rather, and then go to Designer from there, you actually get the Designer experience inside of the app. So if you're familiar with how the Office app used to be or the Microsoft 365 app. You know that Microsoft still does, but used to only have individual apps for like Word, Excel, PowerPoint. Right. But then they had the Office app that had all that stuff inside of it. That's what they're doing with Designer as well. So if for some reason you use Designer, I shouldn't say that I use it for image creation for my, like my web articles. But it's really supposed to be a standalone competitor to like Canva or Adobe Express, where it boggles my mind that there might be professional designers that we use tools like this. But I guess there are. You know, if you want to make a pamphlet is kind of a stretch in 2025, but you're trying to make logos maybe or things that will appear over social media posts, whatever it might be. All of these solutions are for that reason. So I guess if you're out in the world on your phone, there is, I should say a standalone Designer app. But if you wanted all of those Microsoft capabilities across Word, Excel, et cetera, but just in one app, that's what the Microsoft 365 copilot app is now. And yes, I have a heart. I threw up in my mouth a little bit there just saying that.
- [105:28]
A
That's what it is.
- [105:29]
B
I know, it's weird. Okay, the number one response to this next story is, I didn't even know they made this product. I got to tell you, I'm getting a little tired of hearing that. But okay, so if you had a Microsoft360 or have a Microsoft365 personal or family subscription, one of the perks or one of the parts of that subscription was a VPN that people keep calling. In fact, we call it this too. It's like the free VPN that comes inside of Microsoft Defender as part of Microsoft 365 you actually pay for. It's not free, but it's free when you pay.
- [106:03]
A
Is it good?
- [106:04]
B
I have no idea. Like most everyone else, I never used it.
- [106:07]
A
So that's probably why they killed it.
- [106:10]
B
I have to say. So Microsoft, this is another tie to this sort of if you go into Microsoft Edge and you click on the little menu or you might have this in your toolbar even, there's something called Browser Essentials. This is a fairly recent Edge feature. It's where you will be notified of app updates now for whatever reason, but it kind of gives you an overall look at the performance and efficiency of the browser. It's like a little dashboard but at the bottom, there's something called Microsoft Edge Secure Network Preview. It's a vpn. It's free. There are limits on a monthly basis, and it only works with Edge. So when you initially enable this, you're getting a vpn, but not for your entire system like you would have got with the Microsoft Defender product or any other vpn. Right. But this thing actually works just within the browser. And honestly, that's pretty useful. Right? Like, sometimes you just want to do, like, you want to do one thing. Like, I'm here in Mexico, I got to do some banking thing or whatever it is. I got to get into this account. I want them to think I'm in Bought, you know, or Pennsylvania, where I live now, and I turn on the vpn, say, actually, they probably don't even have Pennsylvania in the free one, but whatever. I know Proton has Pennsylvania and do my banking thing and then turn it off. Right. So actually kind of having a per app VPN is actually not such a horrible idea anyhow.
- [107:30]
A
No. That's probably how people really want to use it, right?
- [107:33]
B
I think so, yeah. I mean, I think VPNs are confusing to people.
- [107:35]
A
And I also leave it on all the time. They want to do it when they need to be secure or they need to be somewhere else.
- [107:42]
B
Like, I've been experimenting with VPNs on this trip. I've been trying to leave my iPad with a VPN on the whole time. That's not going great. And then Apple TV, I have to.
- [107:51]
A
Say, I use our sponsor ExpressVPN, and I turned it on on the iPad and forgot that I turned it on and left it on for like six months and never noticed.
- [108:01]
B
Oh, that's fantastic.
- [108:02]
A
So, I mean, if you. If they have the right resources devoted to it, I guess, you know.
- [108:07]
B
Well, okay, but you're. You're home, right? So, like, yeah, I had.
- [108:11]
A
Yes, you're right. That was true. Like, in fact, I turned it on when I was in Mexico because I wanted to watch a football game.
- [108:17]
B
Yeah, I forgot. Yeah, yeah. So, like, I. I was tooling around Apple TV the other day, and they have like, Shutter. Shutter is like a service for like, horror movies and stuff. And they had a Shutter channel. And I was like, well, I don't pay for shutter. What does that look like? So I clicked on it and I can't tell, but it looks like you just get this now on Apple TV plus or something. I have no idea. But every time I clicked on a thing just to try it. You are not in America dude, yeah, it knew I wasn't here and I'm like, I'm using a vpn. Like why I don't have the device.
- [108:51]
A
Yeah, of course, of course they have other means.
- [108:54]
B
So useless. Anyway, yeah. Anyway, this product no one knew existed is going away. So sorry. Now. Now I will hear from everyone who used it. Except that's actually not what's happened this time. I've heard from everyone who was confused it existed in the first place. And I get, I've been told since this, that this was something that Apple actually has in the mail. No, the Calendar app in Mac os. But the Mac version of Microsoft Outlook is getting an email recall feature. So if you send something by mistake or maybe you, you know what I'm saying, you hit send, you're like, oh, I forgot something, or whatever, you can get it back. I feel like this has been a feature of email since email. I don't know what's going on here. But anyway, they're adding that. That's a feature of Outlook today in Windows, including in the new version. So welcome to the 21st century Mac users who are using an Outlook product for some reason.
- [109:49]
A
So there you go, There you go.
- [109:51]
B
I don't know.
- [109:52]
A
There you go. All right, all right. You want to talk Xbox?
- [109:56]
B
Yeah.
- [109:57]
A
Let's do a little game in.
- [109:58]
B
I do. If you are a fan of Microsoft bringing Xbox games to other platforms, this is going to be a big week for you because they've announced three new games that are coming to the PlayStation 5. Well, actually one of them isn't new. So Forza Horizon 5, if you're not familiar with the Forza series, there's the Forza Games, Forza Motorsport, etc. Which are the realistic, you know, simulation type games. And then this Forza Horizon 5, which is like the arcade style, like fun, the good ones. Forza Horizon 5 is an awesome game, by the way, takes place in Mexico, so that's coming to PS5 in the near future feature. And then I don't remember when this was exactly, but late last year sometime, Microsoft started talking up these new games or in some cases remastered games in the Age of Empires series. Right. So Age of Empires, I don't, whatever the name is, the latest, whatever the version is, three, whatever, definitive version, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And then there's Age of Mythology. They are bringing these games to the PlayStation 5 as well this year. In fact, I think the one of the two is coming within a month. So that's happening. So maybe your next Xbox will be a PlayStation. Anyway, Starfield is going to come to Game Pass standard. Game Pass standard is the thing that used to be Xbox Live Gold, right? Essentially. So this is the low end one that gets some number of games, 50 or 25 games in kind of a curated catalog. It's the. Oh no, I'm sorry, I'm mixing this up. Game Pass standard is the one that used to just be Game Pass. This is the replacement.
- [111:40]
A
I don't understand why you're confused about this.
- [111:42]
B
I know there's only 13 things called game Pass. I apologize. I'm a little frazzled anyway. So Starfield, I want to say was part of the other game past tiers, but before like ultimate probably. It's not PC actually. I can't keep track of anything. Who cares. But it is coming and they also announced some other Game Pass titles coming across all the different platforms. Madden 25 is huge. But to me, the one I'm really looking forward is something called Avowed. Have you seen this? Have you seen anything?
- [112:16]
A
What is it called?
- [112:16]
B
It's called Avowed. No. Yeah, so you should look this thing up. So this is a. It's like an. It's a role playing game, but it's an action game. It's an Xbox studio game, like literally Xbox Studios. Not some third party something. Something that they bought. It looks amazing and you know, we'll see. But this is. I'm hoping I might be able to test this one. I think I might be testing this soon. I'm really curious to see this one. I'm looking for anything frankly that can get me off of Call of Duty, but I'm struggling. It looks pretty good.
- [112:52]
A
So you play what, a guy running around.
- [112:57]
B
You play a guy running around.
- [112:58]
A
That's exactly right.
- [113:00]
B
I got it so far that makes it completely different.
- [113:02]
A
You got nice boots. Oh, and a fancy face.
- [113:08]
B
So you know, fantasy setting.
- [113:12]
A
Yeah. It's kind of World of Warcrafty maybe or.
- [113:17]
B
And it's not like Microsoft owns World of Rockcraft, so. Wait, what?
- [113:20]
A
Huh?
- [113:23]
B
Yes, they do. Oh well. Yeah, it's got a little Ori style graphics. Yeah, it looks pretty.
- [113:28]
A
Oh yeah.
- [113:28]
B
A little.
- [113:29]
A
A little Ori there. Yeah.
- [113:30]
B
Yep.
- [113:31]
A
You loved Ori?
- [113:32]
B
Yeah, Oreos Ori's like I listened to the music from Ori. Like it's like, it's.
- [113:37]
A
Do you ever play Baldur's Gate?
- [113:39]
B
Yeah.
- [113:40]
A
No, I don't like turn based stuff.
- [113:42]
B
I think exactly the straight up. I would call them like D and D type games.
- [113:46]
A
Like I just.
- [113:47]
B
I don't know.
- [113:47]
A
Yeah, it's a real dnd.
- [113:50]
B
Yeah, yeah.
- [113:51]
A
You can choose your side. Be it be a goon or a.
- [113:55]
B
Goon or a goal.
- [113:58]
A
Looks like some cool little things. Oh, you can. Yeah. Do some magic.
- [114:03]
B
This looks really pretty to me. Like this is just. Yeah, looks nice.
- [114:08]
A
It's, you know, it's so challenging these days to. To do something original. So I think this looks like a lot of other games. But. But maybe it's the unique part is that it's different.
- [114:25]
B
Right.
- [114:25]
A
Or it looks.
- [114:26]
B
Yeah. I mean it's a lot of. It's not just games but entertainment but also computer. Personal computing is like, hey, that thing over there is popular.
- [114:35]
A
Let's make one of those movies. Right.
- [114:36]
B
You know.
- [114:37]
A
Yeah.
- [114:37]
B
It's everything. Right.
- [114:38]
A
Like so this is kind of a dragon age or. Yeah.
- [114:41]
B
And it's. I think the big. Well, not the big. I think part of the rationale is that it is literally Xbox Studios and they probably, you know, this. Probably the development of this probably predates Activision Blizzard which owns Warcraft, World of Warcraft and you know.
- [114:54]
A
Right.
- [114:54]
B
It's like we're going to bring this stuff out but yeah, it's got a.
- [114:58]
A
Little Skyrim to it.
- [115:00]
B
100%. Yep, yep.
- [115:01]
A
I like doing that. I like Elder.
- [115:03]
B
Like Elder Rings or whatever.
- [115:04]
A
Yeah, yeah. The Elder Scrolls.
- [115:06]
B
Thank you.
- [115:07]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [115:07]
B
I mean this is. We've seen this a million times, but.
- [115:09]
A
So it's Bioware.
- [115:11]
B
Yeah.
- [115:12]
A
Which is a Microsoft studio.
- [115:14]
B
Yeah. Literally it like actually like predates. It's not even a broader Microsoft. It's like an Xbox Studios studio, if you will. Yeah.
- [115:21]
A
Wow.
- [115:22]
B
Yep.
- [115:25]
A
PC Gamer says if Starfield felt cold and sterile, playing a vowed is like putting on a lovely old jumper. Is it fashionable? No. Does it have some moth holes in it? Sure. But as the nights get chilly, it's warm and comforting and smells of happy memories. I don't know how a game can smell of happy memories, but. Okay.
- [115:47]
B
I think that sounds like it was written by AI.
- [115:51]
A
It was written by somebody named Robin.
- [115:53]
B
Valentine when I was learning to write. You're AI what are you talking about?
- [115:59]
A
That's what I love about the.
- [116:01]
B
You don't have memories of this.
- [116:02]
A
The dialogue. These reasoning models like Deep Sea Cap with each with themselves.
- [116:06]
B
Remember the first website I scraped? It was so interesting.
- [116:11]
A
It seems as if he's the second.
- [116:12]
B
One contradicted it completely. I'm so messed up right now. Anyway, to answer your question. 7 7. This is.
- [116:24]
A
I don't know, 42.
- [116:27]
B
Yes. This one also would be met with confusion. Much like the VPN that no one knew existed Microsoft 365, which is that Microsoft and something called Start GG have severed their relationship.
- [116:42]
A
Well, it's about time.
- [116:44]
B
Whatever that was.
- [116:48]
A
Anything with gg, I'm literally not going to even. It feels like it's malware. I don't.
- [116:55]
B
I like when I read something and I'm convinced, like, I'll get through this and be like, oh, okay, yeah, I remember that. And then I got to the end and I was like, is this an alternate. Are we on a different timeline now? I don't remember this at all. To the tune of. I actually am not sure this is true. But yeah, anyway, or as they put it, we're excited to announce that today Star GG will be returning to its roots. That's like saying, like, I've been laid off from my job. Yeah, I've been trying to announce I'm returning to my roots as an unemployed young person with no future whatsoever. I don't know.
- [117:32]
A
Yeah, I guess it's something with gaming because GG is usually.
- [117:36]
B
It's some competitive game you like an esports something. Something. You know, Microsoft, you know, when that stuff started taking off, a lot of the companies that were making games that would kind of fall into this category, like sports games, obviously, but games like Call of Duty, when. When they did their Warzone, you know, type game, like a lot of this was like, oh, we're going to turn this into an esports competition. And Activision was heavily involved in esports for many years. Probably still is. Right. As Microsoft, I'm sure it's still a big thing. But Microsoft didn't own Activision then, so I'm sure this was their attempt. Like, Google just bought DoubleClick. All right, find something else that no one's ever heard of and buy that. And that's exactly what they did. It was called aquantif and they wrote it off a year later. Right. And this to me is like a minor version of that. It's like, let's get into this thing that we hear people are doing for some reason and I don't know. So there you go.
- [118:29]
A
All the kids are doing it.
- [118:30]
B
Yep. Except they're not doing it on Microsoft. So congratulations.
- [118:34]
A
So there.
- [118:35]
B
Yep. Good job. And then finally Nintendo announced their earnings. This is the second, maybe third, but at least second quarter in a row where they've had to revise their prediction for Swift. Swift sales. Yes. For Switch sales. And what this means is that when Nintendo's fiscal year ends at the end of March, they're actually not going to hit. Hit the Number they need for the Switch to be the best selling video game console all time. They're going to fall just short of that. But the year has nine more months left after that. There's no doubt that before this year is out, the Switch will unseat DS.
- [119:08]
A
Well, they've Osborne it because they've announced Switch 2.
- [119:12]
B
Yeah. But the good news is the Switch 2 will be mostly backwards compatible. We'll call it backwards compatible. You don't know the full story, but probably backwards compatible. I bet they keep some version of the original Switch in market. Right. For a little while at least.
- [119:24]
A
So they have a chance.
- [119:25]
B
The low end offering.
- [119:26]
A
Right.
- [119:27]
B
The less expensive. So yeah, there's no doubt that they're going to keep going. I mean I, this came up earlier I think but one of the many difficulties I face just in my day to day life is the financial earning stuff. A lot of math, right. A couple of companies I covered, Nintendo's a good version. Japanese yen, Samsung, Korean one. They report their earnings in different currencies. Even Spotify does the euro, you know, whatever. So these numbers are weird to me and it takes me a long time to get through them. They don't do the conversion for me. Why would they? And then some companies don't do the year over year, quarter of quarter, whatever it is, growth and I have to calculate that. It's a lot of fun anyway. I do a lot of math.
- [120:08]
A
You should use an AI for this. That's, that's what AI is good at.
- [120:12]
B
You're probably right. I'm resisting, I'm trying to do the work for now. But here's the, here's the struggle with Nintendo. As the year progresses, they report their earnings in terms of the fiscal year. So this is a, this is a report for the previous nine months. It's not the quarter. So I had to go back to the previous two months, find out those numbers, subtract, do the, you know, a lot of stuff. It was a lot of fun anyway. Yeah, it's not great. It's no wonder I'm a psychotic. So in the nine months leading up to now, which is leading up to December 31st. Right. The three quarters of their fiscal year that ends in March, Nintendo sold. I just said all that now that count the number. Yeah. 13.74 million Switch consoles. Right. Wow. Which is a decline of 31% almost year over year, so. Yikes. So if my math is correct, in the holiday quarter ending December 31st they sold almost 7 million or almost half or roughly half of all those you know, which makes sense, right? Because the holidays, et cetera. But like I said, they've been cutting their forecast, et cetera, et cetera. So if they hit their numbers now, which they've revised twice, but if they do, they're going to fall just short of the 154 million units that it sold of the Nintendo DS and they will land at about 150. So all they have to do is sell 3 million or 3.1 million, whatever, in the ensuing nine months and. Or whatever amount of time, it doesn't matter until they kill it and they'll. The Switch will beat the number. There's no doubt. Like, it's just not going to happen as quick as we thought.
- [121:46]
A
It doesn't really matter.
- [121:48]
B
Well, I mean, yeah, it's a success.
- [121:51]
A
I just feel bad for the poor fathers who went out at Christmas and we're really excited to buy their kids a Nintendo Switch. Wrapped it up. Kid opens it up, says, I mean, there's no one coming out in a month.
- [122:06]
B
When this was invented, the world was in black and white. What are you doing?
- [122:10]
A
What are you doing?
- [122:11]
B
Yeah, I was gonna say, if dad bought one of these over Christmas, I hope he knew it was getting into.
- [122:14]
A
Because he literally know that the new one was coming out.
- [122:16]
B
That's a year. But we're in year eight. Come on, man.
- [122:19]
A
Well, that's why I'm amazed they sold. What did you say? 7 million. That's mind.
- [122:23]
B
I know, it's incredible. They have. The numbers are really kind of incredible. Over 50% of their sales are digital now, which is great, right? Yeah, I don't.
- [122:32]
A
I never buy a cartridge anymore.
- [122:34]
B
No, I haven't bought one since then.
- [122:36]
A
You have a Switch?
- [122:37]
B
No, but I mean for video games, like in general, on Xbox or whatever. Like, I. I haven't bought a disc since. No 360 days. I mean, somewhere there's no point.
- [122:47]
A
No, because the. They still have to download the 400.
- [122:50]
B
Gigabytes for the game and then on. I don't know how it works everywhere else, but on Xbox, at least you'd have. You had to have the. Maybe it's different now, but at the time you had to have the disk in the copy protection and you know, it's just. Guys, come on.
- [123:00]
A
Stupid.
- [123:02]
B
But yeah, no, the. The Switch is a phenomenon.
- [123:04]
A
I mean, I love my Switch.
- [123:07]
B
Yeah, it's.
- [123:08]
A
I still buy a game. Yeah, every once in a while. Well, you see, saved me doing Covid. I mean.
- [123:13]
B
Oh, God, yeah.
- [123:14]
A
I played Animal Planet obsessively.
- [123:17]
B
I'm surprised I never pulled the switch on the switch, a trigger or whatever on the switch. But like, my kids both own one, like independently. We had nothing to do with it. They both just got them on their own. Well, probably with our money, but whatever. We didn't make those purchases explicitly anyway. And I thought about it a million times and depending on what they come out with, I think it's in April, right, beginning of April, when they start.
- [123:41]
A
Talking about the next version.
- [123:44]
B
We know a bunch of Xbox games are going to go there. Microsoft has already explicitly said they're putting Call of Duty on this thing.
- [123:49]
A
Oh, interesting.
- [123:50]
B
Kind of interesting. Right. Because I want to see where they land. If you just Call of Duty, just to keep it to that, because it's. The only thing I know about is you obviously have the versions on PC and consoles, Xbox and Sony and there's.
- [124:02]
A
Mobile versions and then there's mobile, which.
- [124:04]
B
Is Android, and then iPhone and iPad. Right. So I played. Well, I haven't played PlayStation, but other than that I played all those versions. Right. So on the PC, PlayStation and Xbox, you can play online against all of that. Right. So you can.
- [124:21]
A
Yeah, cross.
- [124:21]
B
It's Crossplay, which is kind of amazing. I know I don't know on mobile, but I have to assume that if I go into Call of Duty Mobile and compete online against other human beings, which you can do, that those people aren't all on an iPad or iPhone or whatever I'm using. It must be across mobile. Right. So where is the switch going to go? Like, where does the switch land in that little equation? Right.
- [124:39]
A
I've never felt like it's fair. I mean, well, there's certain plan. Don't you have an advantage if you're on a PC over a mobile device or.
- [124:48]
B
Yeah, so what I do is I play it on the PC. But with a controller. But with a controller.
- [124:53]
A
Oh, right.
- [124:55]
B
Yeah. So I. Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel like the way that should work is that if you're doing cross platform. Well, maybe there's a switch for this, but I feel like you should only be playing against people using a controller.
- [125:07]
A
The same. The same device.
- [125:08]
B
Yeah. Because that would level the playing field because there is a twitchy response time thing you can do with a mouse.
- [125:14]
A
Right.
- [125:15]
B
And keyboard you cannot do with a controller. It's just impossible.
- [125:18]
A
Right.
- [125:18]
B
But I guess I'm curious about the Switch version and it will be based on a couple things like obviously the power of the control console, etc. Etc. But I'm thinking it's, you know, the existing one's 1080p. I mean, most people playing on PCs are probably 1080p. And if it's, I, I, I'm assuming it's going to be all the consoles together, you know.
- [125:40]
A
Right.
- [125:41]
B
So you're going to be playing with a joy con. You look like an idiot. Like, what, who's the, what's the Charlie Brown guy over there doing? Hop up and like, yo, he's on the switch. You know, like, you know what I mean? Like, it's gonna, it could be like, could be.
- [125:53]
A
Or it could be. It could be.
- [125:55]
B
So he's like, jump on up and like, what is he doing? Shoot something, anything. Shoot yourself.
- [126:01]
A
Play these games. Just, you know, stuck in a corner. Yeah, I'm going.
- [126:05]
B
My favorite is always like, you're trying to do this fast action movement thing. You like, you know, bombs are blowing up, stuff flying through the air and like you do this flying thing. Like you slide to the side, but there's like a, like a one pixel rock sticking out of the corner of the fence. And then you start. You like, you don't actually move forward. You're like super soldier can't get by the bump in the road. Like, I can call in a drone strike and a nuclear bomb, but I can't get over this rock.
- [126:29]
A
It's a rock.
- [126:30]
B
It's the stupidest. Just.
- [126:33]
A
Oh, the struggle is real, folks.
- [126:36]
B
Yep. It's mostly mental, but yeah. Oh, Qualcomm, by the way, reported their earnings.
- [126:42]
A
What do we, what do we see?
- [126:44]
B
I'm sure it's good. Yeah, it's doing great. Up 17% to almost $12 billion versus 11 billion estimated. So they're doing great. And they are set. Revenue up 13% to 7.6 billion. Net income profit 3.1 billion strong Q2 guidance. It's all copilot plus PC, baby.
- [127:04]
A
It is. It's not phones doing that.
- [127:07]
B
It's not copilot plus PCs either, actually. No, I don't think so, but I'll.
- [127:11]
A
Maybe it's. It's just licensing.
- [127:13]
B
I'll work it out. Yeah, it's all. They're licensed back to arm. That's their new business. All right.
- [127:20]
A
I, we do have a back of the book. We do not have Richard Campbell, as you probably noticed. So no brown liquor pick. I will do though Richard's.net show because I want to give that a plug. And we'll get your tips and apps of the week in just a little bit. I also would like at this point to invite you all. You heard Paul talk about Hands on Windows, which is the wonderful show that he does for us. Available in, in a variety of ways but really the best way to consume it is in the club. In fact, the club is what pays for it. We don't try to sell advertising on it. It's something for the club members. In fact there's quite a bit that we do for the club members. We have Stacy's Book Club coming up. End of the month tomorrow we're going to do Chris Marquardt's photo segment. We're going to review photos submitted for the, for this photo, I can't remember, was it luminous? Was that the, was that the term? And then we'll talk a little bit about photography news. We do a lot of stuff in the club, often using the Club Twit Discord so that you can interact with us. It's just one of the many benefits. The club is very affordable. We keep it as low as we possibly can. 7 bucks a month for that. You get ad free versions of every show with you know, your own unique URL. You get access to the club Twit Discord. Some great people in there, lots of fun going on almost all the time. You get special shows we don't put out anywhere else on the Twit plus feed. But mostly you get the warm and fuzzy feeling knowing you're supporting people like Paul and the shows that we do. It really makes a big difference to our bottom line. Yes, we're ad supported and ads ad, you know, pay the largest portion of our costs. But we couldn't do it without the club. It wouldn't cover all the costs. The club makes up the difference and we'd just like to get you in it. So Twit TV Club Twit. If you're interested, learn more there. And for those of you who are in the club watching live, thank you, thank you for, for your support. The other club members who are not watching live are not going to hear this because they get the ad free versions. 25 years ago, a small group of business and government leaders met in Washington D.C. they envisioned the creation of an independent non profit organization with a mission to help people, businesses and government mitigate the growing threat of cyber attacks. Today, the center for Internet Security embodies that vision. For 25 years it's worked with a global community of IT and cybersecurity experts to develop the CIS benchmarks and CIS critical security controls. These proven security best practices defend against common cyber threats and streamline compliance with industry frameworks, regulations and standards. Today, CIS Provides cybersecurity services, threat intelligence and critical resources to help public and private sector organizations alike strengthen their Cyber defenses. Visit cisecurity.org today. That's the letters cisecurity.org to find out how CIS can help your organization as we create confidence in the connected world.
- [130:33]
B
Like your favorite startup's growth curve, T Mobile's coverage keeps scaling because T Mobile helps keep you connected from big cities to your hometown on America's largest 5G network. Switch now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off up to $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com keepandswitch up to 4 lines of a virtual prepaid card. Last 15 days qualified unlocked device, credit service port in 90 plus days device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required card is no cash access and expires in six months.
- [131:04]
A
Paul Thurat Back to the matter at hand, which is of course just real.
- [131:13]
B
Quick though, before we get to the back.
- [131:14]
A
Yes.
- [131:15]
B
I was just looking at the Qualcomm earnings and like I do, I search.
- [131:19]
A
For key terms as one does. Yes.
- [131:20]
B
So I searched for the term PC and it does come up once it's in the word upcoming.
- [131:25]
A
So not a big part of the.
- [131:28]
B
Not a big amount of support there. But yeah, the, the, the estimates for the current quarter, the growth they expect to see is actually based on a rebound in smartphone sales. So yeah, something good's happening there.
- [131:41]
A
Yeah, I mean that's really. And it's all Android. It's, that's, that, that's their business. Yeah. Sorry. Anyway, tip of the week time, Mr. T. Yes.
- [131:49]
B
So I'm trying to remember how much of this has come up before, but I had the episode with YouTube, obviously we talked about this. Anytime something like that happens, you know, you sort of reassess things. Right. Like is what could I do differently here? Like what do I need to do to protect myself against whatever. So in the past, like a lot of people, I would say this, you might equate this to like a data loss scenario. People get the backup religion after they lose something important. Right. So in this case, I almost got locked out of my YouTube account, which is a channel or a. They have a term for this. I'm forgetting the brand or something that's associated with my Google account, which is a paid workspace account. It's a business account. Right. It's not a personal account. It's like something I pay for. In fact, I pay for six of them. So I didn't Get a lot of support. So that was kind of tough. So tied to this, I would just say about a year and a half ago I did this big digital decluttering thing. Now the biggest part of that and honestly the most important part to me was getting. Taking all the digital photos that I have and these include things that are scanned photos of analog photo or you know, paper photos all in, getting them all in one place, organizing them, getting all the data metadata correct as much as I can and then replicating that collection to multiple places so that if there's some disaster, everything's good. Right. But I did a lot more than that at the time. I also did some similar work with like my. What I think of as my personal and work archives. Right. So I have 30 years of documents, mostly work related home videos. I did other things. It was a bunch of it. So I've decided I went through a bunch of different stuff in thinking through this and I'm going to do something similar to. I'm not going to call it decluttering because although actually that's not a bad term for this, but sort of like online. I'm thinking of it as online accounts, but honestly it's like online identity.
- [133:49]
A
Maybe like online colonoscopy. Yes, that digital enema. I don't know.
- [133:56]
B
Yeah, no, the parallels there are perfect.
- [133:57]
A
It is. No, just kidding.
- [133:59]
B
It's the same discomfort but you know, it's necessary.
- [134:03]
A
Yeah.
- [134:04]
B
It's like when you give a dog a pill, it's looking at you like, I trust you, but I don't want to do this. Yeah. So there's a bunch too.
- [134:12]
A
This is good. You know when there were the wildfires here a few years ago.
- [134:16]
B
Yeah.
- [134:16]
A
I. We had a go bag. But I was amazed at how little of like the photo albums I was. I didn't need them. I digitized them all.
- [134:24]
B
Yeah, that stuff's huge. Right. Like so.
- [134:25]
A
And you know, people in Los Angeles, thousands of people lost everything and including their photos. I hope they had them digitized.
- [134:32]
B
It's a horrible thing in 2025 to do for that to happen. I. Yeah, this. I can't remember why this came up recently, but in 1987 I was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico with my real. My paternal father and the house burned down. My dad stupidly tip of the Christmas tree, threw it in the fire. I don't know if you know this, but pine trees explode.
- [134:55]
A
Oh dear.
- [134:56]
B
The whole house went down. Right. When the firemen showed up, they asked my father, and the house is burning. It's sitting There on fire. And they said, is there anything important in there you have to have? And he says, if you could grab my photos, that would be great. I have a photo of these burned out photo albums on the ground on the driveway. We still have these photos. They're fine. I have pictures where some of them have like the burn curl at the top like my grandfather in Ireland. Yeah. But they saved. Yeah. And most of them are actually fine. Right. So that was, you know, 40 years or 30, whatever that is. 30. Almost 40 years ago. 35, 40 years ago, whatever it was. So I, it took me 30 years, but I, I finally took all my paper photos, digitized them and did what I did. So I described it, but I did that work. It's hard, you know, it takes a long time.
- [135:43]
A
It's a real pain.
- [135:45]
B
But here's the thing. So we, I again, I don't remember if I mentioned this last week, but with Google in particular, but also Microsoft and to a much lesser degree Apple and sort of Amazon, you can sign into sites online with that account. It's easy, right? My Google accounts pretty secure in the sense that I have a passkey. It's seamless. It is the perfect combination of the best security and the best convenience you could possibly have for this kind of thing.
- [136:11]
A
Right. But it's still Google. Right.
- [136:13]
B
And if Google takes this thing away, right. Which they just pretty much did. Right. I got it back. But like that, you know, we've all heard these stories. So I'm gonna try to decouple my signs.
- [136:24]
A
Fire, right? That's worse than a fire. Gone in seconds.
- [136:28]
B
Yeah. So here's the thing. This is the thing I want people to think about a little bit. My primary Google account, like I said, is a workspace account, which means I have a private, like my own domain, thorat.com so if Google, if I wake up one day and nothing works and Google's like, sorry, you did something wrong or it doesn't matter, but you're gone, I can redirect that domain and all my email based stuff will still happen, right? Like I might lose data and stuff, but I can get that back. If you have a Gmail account or a Microsoft whatever account like outlook.com, hotmail.com, whatever, and they take that thing away from you, I get bad news for you. You're not getting it back. It's not your name, it's not you. You don't own it. You may own the content in there, but you can have a fun time going to court to Try to get that stuff back. But as far as sign ins go, if you're doing that single sign on thing, you want to be a little careful of that. Right?
- [137:20]
A
Back up everything.
- [137:22]
B
Yes. So someone says don't store the only backup of those photos in your home. Right, of course. No, I mean it's in. Right.
- [137:29]
A
So although I have a synology NAS in my home that has a lot.
- [137:33]
B
Of that stuff of course I'm going to get to that actually this is my end game. So I've had NASA's over time I'm on. My current NASA is way out of date and I'm going to get to that in a moment. But I went to Google to find. I'm going to do a Google takeout of my YouTube content. This is something I've never backed up. I have thousands of videos up there. You know you're not alone, Paul.
- [137:59]
A
I would guess most people have never.
- [138:02]
B
I never even thought about it. I thought about it now. So I'm going to back that up. I'm going to decouple all my signing with Google so that I can sign in with only the account.
- [138:10]
A
Good. Like that.
- [138:11]
B
I'm going to start working. This is, this is when I'm just going to be honest. I'm never going to finish this one. But ideally what you could also use is a. An email alias service like Mozilla Office One simple login. I'm a Proton customer so I get super login as part of that where you can create email aliases just you know, sign it to do anything online. Right. So I've done it for a few newsletter type things. I don't really think about it enough. This is something I'm going to try to. I'm never going to get there but I'm going to try to see if I can't move online accounts to an account that can be redirected at any time. So in that case if you think about that gmail.com, hotmail.com whatever it is account. If you're using an alias and you lose your Gmail account you'll be okay.
- [138:52]
A
You still have the email you may address. You may not have the email but you have the address but you'll be.
- [138:56]
B
Able to redirect it to another account and get it. Get, get.
- [138:59]
A
Well I do that. All of my, all of my emails I use fast mail but I own the dom. I own all those domains. So if I decided I don't want.
- [139:08]
B
To do fast, I want to be super clear. This is not like I'M not going back to like physical media, you know, whatever. But, but, but I print out every.
- [139:14]
A
Email I get and I have a stack of box. Does he, did he do that?
- [139:21]
B
Well, this is a long time ago. A lot of executives, a lot of paper.
- [139:24]
A
Will Hurst used to do that. He'd have, he'd print it. He'd say have his secretary print out his email and then bring it to him. Yeah, and then he'd write the response on the email and give it back to the Senate. She'd type it.
- [139:35]
B
Yeah, yeah. Jeez. Okay.
- [139:37]
A
Well that's pretty old school.
- [139:38]
B
AI is going to be, AI is doing that in about 10 seconds. So that's going to be nicely automated. This isn't related to anything that happened with Google. But I do also have like, you know, we talked about this in terms of passwords. I made the point some time ago about password management. We've all used every browser on earth and we store passwords there, we store them here, we store them here. Then we do this third party thing and we move to this one. The one thing I think most of us never thought to do, at least sometimes was get rid of the contacts in the old thing and they're sitting out there half protected. Not protected, I mean, whatever. So you want to be careful with that. That's a whole nother story, but semi related. I'm going to do something like that and this is like the consolidation thing where I'm going to have one contacts list that I will back up and replicate and whatever. And as I switch between phones I will on, I'm talking like this is. But I believe the way I'm going to do this is I will import everything into icloud and I will only use icloud on the iPhone. And then when I move over to Android again, I will delete that all and I will go over to Android and I will put it all in Google contacts. I'm just going to do this. So I'm going to see. This is one. It's kind of off to the side but it's related because it's online identity stuff. But the big one for me is the nas. So I'm lucky in that I have a home in Pennsylvania. In a home here. What I want to do is get a NAS that will, for both places that will replicate with each other.
- [141:00]
A
Synologies will do that.
- [141:01]
B
Yeah.
- [141:01]
A
So I have, I used to have a duplicate synology at the studio. Now I don't. And I'm kind of thinking I don't have an off Site copy of Mass.
- [141:10]
B
I mentioned this wasn't a complete list, but I have my personal work archives. I have my photo collection from my entire life and beyond because it has some stuff from my parents, grandparents, whatever. The, the. I don't know what to call this. The master. Whatever copy of those things is different for each one. But if this goes accordingly, I want that the. I don't. This is not a good term, but the, the main copy, the, the primary.
- [141:36]
A
Source, canonical, non decade. Penultimate.
- [141:39]
B
Nice.
- [141:40]
A
Okay.
- [141:40]
B
Yep. I always love the word penultimate. I know it, understands it and it's wonderful to be those. Nas's right. I will still have a copy of my photos in Google Photos.
- [141:56]
A
But that's a perfect way to do it because in fact the way I have my synology set up is it copies but does not delete. So it will copy everything because it's huge. Right. So there's no reason to delete anything. So everything is copied over to it. And if I delete something somewhere, it doesn't matter. It's still in the synology. I do have to get that replication set up though with a second synology somewhere.
- [142:19]
B
Yeah, and this is where you know, look, you're talking about geographical separation. You're also taught like, I don't think it's smart to have two copies in Google or something like. No, depending on what it is.
- [142:33]
A
If I had a second home. Yes, that would be the perfect way to do it.
- [142:37]
B
I, I understand what that sounds like, but I'm lucky.
- [142:43]
A
You may not have a second home forever.
- [142:45]
B
Listen, this is a small.
- [142:46]
A
What are you gonna do if you, if you move to me?
- [142:48]
B
I don't know. I mean, I, I would. I don't know.
- [142:50]
A
You know what you do? You set up a thing with maybe me, a friend and you my brother in law. Yeah, right.
- [142:57]
B
Yep, something like that. It will be something like that. You know, back in the. So the old, the old school version of this was this. I mean, I'm not gonna get the time right, but you'll understand the age when I say this. I had something happened. It was a data lesson that, you know, we, we get religion when we lose something, right?
- [143:14]
A
Yes.
- [143:15]
B
So I lost some data, whatever it was. And I remember going to my wife and saying, listen, this is going to sound, this is going to sound crazy, but bear with me. I need to spend $2,000 on two $1,000 FireWire based backup external drives which were, I think at the time, one terabyte, which in that day was. I mean maybe that wasn't even. But I think it is. It was. I can almost come up with the name of the company, but it's like a. They. It was for them. They were primary Mac based, but I actually got a FireWire card from my. I had a Windows server, but it was a blue circuit. Blue circuit? Yeah, I think it was Lacie. They were a thousand bucks a piece.
- [143:55]
A
Yeah, I had some.
- [143:56]
B
And I was, I was explaining it to her like a child coming like I want to buy something, you know. And she literally cut me off and said, just get it, just do it. I could tell you we need this. No, it was not great. That support, it wasn't for fun stuff. It was like, this is for our lives. Like we have to get this. And what I would do is not every month. Well probably in the beginning every month, but after time it'd be like every three months, every. Whatever it was, I would just run a backup, bring it over to my parents house, they live in the same town. Take the disk back that they had, plug that in, run it back up, you know, and then I would just do this. I would just make. I would physically carry a disk. They were big and a heavy metal thing. Right. So it's sort of the modern version of that, you know, except now it's going to be automated and it will just happen automatically. But what. Ideally what I want is this thing to have an app on the phone that will download the photos just like you know, Google does and Microsoft does whatever. And that will be the primary place. Right.
- [144:55]
A
This is such a common use case that Synology and I imagine all the other NAS companies also have apps that do exactly that. They will suck all the photos out of every device, including your mobile devices. They will, you know, back it up to the Synology and then they have a program called Hyper Backup that will replicate your Synology to the second Synology. Oh yeah, it's just, it's what, it's what it's set up to do. I mean that's the number one reason people use a nas.
- [145:21]
B
Yep. Yeah. No, it's so necessary. So look, what.
- [145:24]
A
It's a lot easier than it used to be. You don't have to buy that. Let's see. Drive for a thousand bucks.
- [145:28]
B
I know. Well, that's just gonna.
- [145:30]
A
The Synology.
- [145:31]
B
I'm sure the NAS will be. Yeah, it'll be expensive, but drives in it. Yeah, it's okay. Whatever, it's worth it. It's gonna do it. So next, next Wednesday, when I have completed all this work. No, this is going to take the Better part of the area, bet in some cases. So this is going to be. You know, it's a big thing. But, like, I. This. You know, this is what happens. Something bad happens, and you kind of sit back and think about it. I tried to. I threw the article about online accounts and signing with Go. I just wanted to see what people said, and I got some really good feedback from that.
- [146:02]
A
And that's the good thing, is because of who you are, you can document all this, write it up, and people can see it.
- [146:09]
B
Well, that was the thing. I actually wrote something to that effect. I said, look, in a lot of cases, when I write something, I'm like, look, I know about this topic, whatever. And then there are other topics where I'm not the subject expert. So there were things I got into, like, about a year ago or whatever, where, because Microsoft added a feature about passkeys to Windows 11, it caused me to go back. I go down this rabbit hole, and pretty soon I'm like, this is how you protect your Microsoft account. This is how you. Whatever. And so you. You kind of.
- [146:37]
A
You do.
- [146:38]
B
You walk into it.
- [146:39]
A
Yeah.
- [146:40]
B
So in this case, I'm like, that's.
- [146:41]
A
Why people loved Jerry Pernell.
- [146:43]
B
Yeah.
- [146:43]
A
Why they love Steve Gibson. This is why they love you. It's because you're a real user. And then when you start learning something, you share it.
- [146:51]
B
I try not to put myself in that kind of rarefied company, but, yes, I do.
- [146:55]
A
I did for you.
- [146:56]
B
Jerry Purnell used to say, I make these mistakes so you don't have to. And my response to that is a. That's beautiful, but I just make mistakes. And. And look, maybe if you can, you can learn from me. I'm a mess. Look at that idiot over there. Don't do that.
- [147:09]
A
That. You know, I cut my teeth on. Jerry Pinell, he was a Invite magazine and of course, a regular on TWiT when he was still alive. Great science fiction author, but that was why I loved him. And a lot of what I ended up doing on tech tv, on the radio show, and now on TWIT was inspired by that. Every man. I'm going to do it, and let's see what happens, and I'll tell you about it.
- [147:30]
B
Well, this is what Jerry Pernell, before he passed, sadly, you know, made the case, I think, effectively. He was kind of the first blogger.
- [147:37]
A
Yeah, it was. I mean, it was a magazine, but.
- [147:40]
B
Yeah, yeah, but that's.
- [147:41]
A
But the name of the column was Chaos Manor. I know she'll give you an idea.
- [147:45]
B
I have. Yeah. This is. I don't know what you would call this place. Chaos Hovel. I don't know, but Chaos.
- [147:52]
A
Casa Chaos.
- [147:54]
B
I love it. That's pretty good actually. Anyway, this is what I'm going to do. So we'll see what happens, but in the meantime, first thing I got to do is download freaking videos and see what that looks like. What a nightmare. Thanks, Google.
- [148:07]
A
As Jerry would say, you'll do that real soon. Now I'm going to start it the.
- [148:12]
B
Second we stopped recording the show actually. So literally I just got the email that I set it up already. I just haven't done it. Okay. So yeah, like 100 and something. Two gigabyte files. Do the math. Anyway. Okay, so there's that. Yeah. So that actually is all of that. So this is something, I think it's going to come up throughout the year. So you can look forward or regret it or whatever. I don't know. Or hate it or whatever it is.
- [148:38]
A
No, I can't wait.
- [148:40]
B
Okay.
- [148:40]
A
I'll be following along with interest. Do you want to do an App of the World week?
- [148:47]
B
I do. I wish I had a good one, but I don't. Someone says you would or Brooke says you would never put the stylus of a Galaxy Note in backward.
- [148:55]
A
Oh yeah, I do it so you don't have to. Right.
- [148:58]
B
I used to have a tape deck, you know, tape decks like a tape which is rectangular cassette would go. In the short version, the hole was the right.
- [149:06]
A
They have a little ejector. Right.
- [149:08]
B
So this one, it was the very strange. It was the what the width of, of the cassette. So I had this girlfriend, like she's trying to stick it in the wrong way. And I said, no, you got it, you got to put it in backwards. And she put it in with the tape side out and pushed it in. And that was the last day we ever used that stereo. Yeah.
- [149:29]
A
So didn't marry that girl.
- [149:32]
B
Didn't work out anyway. Okay. Yeah, epic. So actually I don't have an epic, but there was were three big browser updates this week actually. And they're all pretty big in their own way browsers.
- [149:43]
A
You're making me crazy here, Paul.
- [149:45]
B
I know, I'm sorry. So last week Vivaldi came out with 7.1 on desktop. And it was a big update, big changes. They have their whole kind of front end UI stuff. This week they did the Android iOS versions. They're both oddly completely different. This is something I was confused by. There's a couple of features that are the same, but between the two mobile versions, but they're actually quite different. The one thing they do share with the desktop too is the seamless sharing feature, send tab to device feature. So now, between all of the Vivaldi versions, if you use multiple devices, you'll be able to share to yourself more easily because you have no friends who use Vivaldi.
- [150:20]
A
That's. At least you have Vivaldi.
- [150:23]
B
At least you have. You'll always have Vivaldi.
- [150:25]
A
We'll always have Vivaldi.
- [150:30]
B
Firefox, they update every four weeks. It's hard to keep track of this, but 135 is kind of a big one, especially on desktop. So the mobile versions are small. Especially on Android is nothing. It's bug fixes, whatever. There's a couple of actual functional improvements on iOS, but on desktop we're getting the previously announced AI chatbot in the sidebar feature, which was available in Firefox Labs and beta, et cetera, but now it's rolling out to everybody. And this is that kind of. They're not the only ones doing this, but they're giving you the opportunity to plug into different AIs, right? So they support Anthropic Cloud ChatGPT, Gemini Hugging Chat. And I love this name. It's the Mistral. It's called Lerchat Le Sha.
- [151:11]
A
Mistral.
- [151:12]
B
I love it.
- [151:13]
A
It's better because it's French.
- [151:15]
B
I think that means cat.
- [151:17]
A
Anyway, you're right, it does, doesn't it? I thought do the French call chat the chat Noir.
- [151:24]
B
The shot. My AI has taken the shot.
- [151:30]
A
Do you have to have an account with this to use it or do they give you some free credits?
- [151:35]
B
Oh, God, I don't know. Actually. It probably varies by AI, actually. So I assume these are the public facing, you know, like the, the free. The free version of each, I would think. And then you could sign. Like, if you have ChatGPT, you could sign in and get whatever benefits you get from that.
- [151:49]
A
Because I pay for almost all of.
- [151:51]
B
These at some point. I expect you this year to not do that. At some point, right? Like, at some point it's gonna.
- [151:58]
A
Well, they all have different capabilities. So it's like, I can't. I can't just, you know, that's like.
- [152:05]
B
Imagine a person, because I'm gonna keep going back to the. Well, on the same exact example. Like, you're, you're a writer, so you're like, all right, so I'm going to write it in micro, Microsoft Word, right? And it's going to do whatever corrections. I'm going to save It. I'm going to open it Word Perfect. Because Word Perfect has a really good whatever. Grammar training. Like, okay. And now I'm going to bring it over to like Apple Pages. Be like, all right, so. Well, it would be insane, but you're kind of doing it. Okay.
- [152:27]
A
I have a folder full of AIs and then I'm wearing a bracelet. Well, this is another AI. This is Bai. I don't even know who this is. And I have the Plod Note, which. Oh, my God. Just. Just can't. It's. But it's kind of an occupational hazard. I mean, I. No, I don't think. Even if I didn't have to cover this, I like Chat GPT for some things. I like Claude for other things. Deep Seek is fascinating. Perplexity I use for search.
- [152:55]
B
Right.
- [152:56]
A
The funny thing about Perplexity is I can choose within Perplexity those models.
- [153:00]
B
Yep.
- [153:01]
A
So, I mean, it's hard to narrow.
- [153:02]
B
It's like you have a meta AI inside of Perplexity.
- [153:07]
A
Well, in fact, when I did the Deep SEQ search about the Mexican voting changes, I did it in Perplexity. But I use Deep Seek.
- [153:14]
B
Okay.
- [153:14]
A
I don't know. It's just crazy, man.
- [153:16]
B
I hope by next Wednesday I have a definitive answer on what this woman said today, but I right now have no idea.
- [153:23]
A
Well, if you had Deep Seek, the Chinese know.
- [153:25]
B
I will. Okay, Well, I do. So I'll get. I'll get to that. Anyway, there's a bike. There's a bunch of other stuff in Firefox 135 for desktop. So it's worth, you know, obviously, if.
- [153:35]
A
You have it, you just, if you're a Firefox user. Everybody should support Firefox. We need to have them. We don't want a monoculture. We need to have some competition among browsers.
- [153:45]
B
Yeah. So maybe, you know, this. This would be the type of thing you probably would know. I didn't write about this because it was. I think it's Mac only in the beginning, but there's actually a new kind of open source, new browser thing where they're actually going to do a rendering engine from scratch. Have you heard about this?
- [154:01]
A
Oh, no.
- [154:02]
B
All right, so maybe by next week I'll try to find this. I was like, oh, this is really interesting. And I went through the whole thing and then at the very end it's like, well, are you going to do a Windows version? Like, yeah, eventually. The problem is they're actually going to write it in Swift, for one thing, which is kind of Interesting. Which is becoming more and more of a thing. Okay, so that was a useless story. I couldn't even tell you who it was. So whatever. But that's how my birthday.
- [154:24]
A
I'll ask Chet.
- [154:27]
B
And yeah, it's not. It's not ARK and those guys. It's something completely different. Oh. Anyway, so.
- [154:32]
A
Ladybird, that.
- [154:34]
B
I think that's it. Yeah, that is it. Yeah. That's worth looking at. That's interesting.
- [154:37]
A
I asked AI and it told me so Ladybird.
- [154:41]
B
Because I'll try it.
- [154:42]
A
Yeah, that's interesting. Just what I need. You kill me. I can't. Every time I listen to this show, I'm start using a new browser. I mean, I want to stick with ARC for as long as I can.
- [154:53]
B
Yeah. My intent is not for you to switch browsers, but I. But this is one of those things I actually do think about a lot. And I don't know, I just. I care about it. I can't explain it. I'm just kind of into this.
- [155:05]
A
I just want one browser to rule them all.
- [155:07]
B
I know, I know. There's not. Well, it's like you said it with AI. I mean, each one of them does something a little better. Yeah.
- [155:14]
A
It's kind of like the same, isn't it?
- [155:15]
B
Yeah. Like browsers like that too. I always. I mean, I always have at least three browsers on my computer, but really?
- [155:21]
A
Well, I do know that's. I do have.
- [155:23]
B
I do. Yeah.
- [155:23]
A
Because I always use that. I have the default browser and then Firefox and usually arc.
- [155:28]
B
You gotta. Yeah, I have. This one is Chrome, Edge, Opera.
- [155:32]
A
Yeah. But I don't use them all because the. Because the tabs and the bookmarks are specific to that browser. So I don't want to jump around a lot.
- [155:40]
B
I know.
- [155:41]
A
I guess if you think about all the apps I use that have browsers built in.
- [155:46]
B
Don't. Don't. Don't even. Don't.
- [155:48]
A
I have many, many browsers, especially on a phone.
- [155:51]
B
Like the in app browser thing is so irritating to me. I just commented on some again to my wife because I can't bore anyone else when I'm alone with her. But.
- [156:01]
A
And I'm sure she loves it.
- [156:02]
B
No, it's tied to the story from lunchtime. I. I was getting results in Google in Spanish and I was like, look, I can handle this, but I really want them in English. And I've already configured this. Why is that not happening? And it's because I wasn't signed in because it was an in app browser, which means there's probably like 117 versions of Google Chrome on this phone.
- [156:25]
A
That's true.
- [156:25]
B
Whatever. Browser. Probably Safari or whatever. It doesn't matter.
- [156:28]
A
Well, if you're on a iPhone, the good news is it's all the same.
- [156:31]
B
It's all Safari. Well, except that it's the same rendering engine. It's not the same instance.
- [156:35]
A
Oh, no, I think they just call. No, no, I don't think they have a. It's not like Electron where they have built in the entire browser.
- [156:41]
B
No, no. Right. But I mean, as far as permissions go and me being signed.
- [156:45]
A
No, that's true. All the settings are unique.
- [156:46]
B
They're completely separate. Yeah. Which is freaking stupid. Anyway, the third and most interesting of these browsers is a new browser from Opera called Opera Air, which many will immediately scoff at, but give it a second. So this is a. They describe it as a mindful browser. It's very peaceful. Okay. And. Yes, and, and fair enough. There's a lot of features in here that have to do with mental health and mindfulness and stuff and whatever. Okay. So take a break and you know, you can meditate and they have a binaural Beats thing that is.
- [157:23]
A
Oh, no.
- [157:23]
B
Soothing and whatever. Okay. But hold on one second. The thing that makes this interesting to me is that this browser is actually like the anti Opera browser because it's also extremely minimalist.
- [157:35]
A
Yeah.
- [157:35]
B
So there's a lot I like about Opera. I mentioned this a couple weeks ago. Like, Opera actually is kind of nice. And so this is like you might call. You might think of this as kind of like a light version of Opera from a heavy UX perspective. So I'm actually kind of interested. This one. Like this looks. Looks. It's pretty looks. It looks nice. Like it's kind of.
- [157:54]
A
I'm downloading it right now and installing it. Thanks a bunch.
- [157:59]
B
Import your bookmarks.
- [158:00]
A
The rot.
- [158:01]
B
It'll be fine. It's okay. Rot. Let me see. Did my wife ever send me anything? Oh, my wife did send me a margarita recipe if you would like.
- [158:09]
A
Oh, isn't that sweet of her? Well, let me just give Richard his due. Even though he, yes, of course, has abandoned us.
- [158:18]
B
I know.
- [158:18]
A
Let me. Let me give him a little pluggy wug for.net or sorry, run his radio, which is the show that he does@runasradio.com and he would tell you, oh, this week can I do it in a. In a Richard style? I don't know if I can. Can you imitate Richard?
- [158:41]
B
No. This week we're going to interview in.
- [158:45]
A
The news, my good personal friend Carissa Koopmans to talk about Microsoft Entra ID protection. Episode 970, runasradio.com what's messed up for.
- [159:02]
B
Me is I listen to, well, both of his podcasts, but I listen to run his radio probably more than. I'm sorry. NET rocks more than runners radio. So literally.
- [159:13]
A
Because you're a. NET developer, right?
- [159:15]
B
Yeah. So I'm literally listening to this podcast right now. It's like my current episode, and it's about app migration. It's something I actually really care about.
- [159:26]
A
That's the show Richard does with Carl Franklin.
- [159:29]
B
Very good.
- [159:29]
A
And both are available@runasradio.com now we're going to defer Richard's brown liquor pick. He did. He did very kindly put it in here, but we don't want to preempt it because he's gonna. He says he's gonna use it next week.
- [159:43]
B
Okay.
- [159:43]
A
So let's talk margaritas, which is my wife's favorite beverage.
- [159:47]
B
Adult. So I'm starting to run into a weird problem in Mexico City with margaritas because I don't typically like salt. Like, if you think about just like actual salt, they really sometimes just like the big salt crystals.
- [160:02]
A
It's where they put pepper salt. So it's red.
- [160:04]
B
Yeah, I don't like that. But I've also. But I go to some places where they actually have what I call it fancy salt. But it's like fine grain salt. It's multicolor salt. And it's less. I don't know what that flavor. Like, whatever. Less salty, I guess, less sharp tasting. And I actually kind of enjoy that quite a bit. But the bigger issue is that Mezcal has taken Mexico by storm in recent years.
- [160:30]
A
Yeah.
- [160:31]
B
I was talking to a guy who owns a bar. Well, actually, it's a guy, you know. Well, you know of. Because of the salmoncito. Right. That guy. So he was saying, five years ago, you almost couldn't find Mezcal in Mexico City.
- [160:39]
A
Really?
- [160:40]
B
Yeah. It was not tequila. Yep. And now.
- [160:43]
A
Which is a version of Mezcal, to be fair, it's still Mezcal.
- [160:47]
B
So the big difference between tequila and basically every other Mezcal is the same difference between bourbon in most scotches, which is that in this case, Mezcal is smoky because of the. That's how they make it. They. They burn the leaves on top of the. The core of the plant. So I don't like smoky things. I've had more smoky drinks in the past two weeks than I've had In my entire life, and it's making me crazy.
- [161:09]
A
Yeah. I don't.
- [161:10]
B
And I just. We went out with friends last Friday or Saturday. I don't remember this matter, but to this bar that they love, that my wife and I were. It's on our to do list. And they only have Mezcal. They didn't. I'm like, you must have some. No, it was all Mezcal. So I was like. I had a glass of water and then we left. And they all had drinks. You know, like, I didn't get a drink there. It was weird. So Mezcal has become, like. It's a big thing. So in Mexico City, at least, you actually have to ask. You want to be. I have to, because I've found if I'll order a margarita and I'll get mezcal in it, not tequila. That doesn't make any sense to me. But. And we make. I've. I was never a big tequila fan, but since we've been coming here, it's become kind of a thing.
- [161:57]
A
I saw you a couple weeks ago in Puerto Vallarta sipping that.
- [162:01]
B
I've had a few.
- [162:02]
A
Tequila. Yeah.
- [162:03]
B
Yeah. Tequila is. Yeah.
- [162:05]
A
But you. You know, I'm looking at this recipe. This is how Lisa likes it, too. She likes the. The silver tequila. She doesn't want the reposado or the older.
- [162:14]
B
Exactly. Yeah. It's better for this. It really is. And plus, it's a clean looking drink. Like, it's a clear drink. It's like a lot of cocktails where it's super simple. It's just three things. The measurements are very easy. Two ounces of white or silver tequila, 1.5 ounces of triple sec, and then some one ounce of lime juice. Right. So classic. I'm not a big fan of.
- [162:40]
A
Like I said, don't use margarita mix. Kids get margarita.
- [162:44]
B
Margarita mix.
- [162:45]
A
Get some lime.
- [162:47]
B
It's a reconstituted margarita. No, no.
- [162:51]
A
But that's mostly how people make it here.
- [162:53]
B
Yeah. My wife points. She says that, yeah, mescalita is a drink. Mezcalita is just a margarita with mezcal. But I often get mezcal when I order margaritas. Now I have to. This has become the latte of the tequila or of the margarita world. Like, a latte is a very specific thing. Just like a margarita is. Yeah. And then I get it, and it's full of sugar. I'm like, what the.
- [163:16]
A
Is this in my coffee, please?
- [163:21]
B
Yes. So, yeah, there you go.
- [163:24]
A
So one thing Lisa likes to do with her margaritas is get Something called a top shelf margarita, where they float a little bit of Grand Marnier on the top.
- [163:34]
B
Nice.
- [163:36]
A
It's just more alcohol.
- [163:37]
B
I think so.
- [163:40]
A
So I don't go near it.
- [163:41]
B
But one drink, you would love, by the way, if you get like a. What's that rough. God, I just forgot the name of it. The.
- [163:52]
A
Door.
- [163:53]
B
No, I, I was. My wife would know this instantaneously. A pina colada, right?
- [163:58]
A
Yes.
- [163:58]
B
So sugary, sweet. It's wonderful.
- [164:01]
A
Yes.
- [164:01]
B
If you. You'll love it so much, you'll drink it a lot and then your teeth will start hurting and you'll wonder what's going on. One of the ways you can kind of gussy that up is to drip some aged rum on top of that thing and then, you know, it's kind of a.
- [164:16]
A
That sounds good.
- [164:17]
B
Yeah. Very similar to what you just said.
- [164:19]
A
Liquor will float on liquor.
- [164:21]
B
It's. Yeah.
- [164:23]
A
That's all right, Paul. This has been fun. It's like the good old days. We'll get Richard back next week. He'll be back in British Columbia where the snow is settling. I know, Paul, you'll be in Mexico City.
- [164:36]
B
His wife's photos were horrifying to me, but it was pretty, too.
- [164:39]
A
Yeah.
- [164:40]
B
You know, a lot of snow.
- [164:41]
A
Well, I'm sure there's snow, Makunji.
- [164:43]
B
Yeah, actually there is. So we got, we all got texted like, trash delivery is going to be delay today.
- [164:49]
A
Aren't you glad?
- [164:50]
B
My wife watched it. She's like, something must have happened. And I'm like, yeah, who cares?
- [164:53]
A
You glad?
- [164:55]
B
Whatever. Yep.
- [164:57]
A
Paul thurat is at therot.com T-U-R-R-O-T-T.com Become a Premium Member and there's additional content that's superb. Some of it makes its way into his books. The Field guide to Windows 11, for instance, which is available@leanpub.com and Windows Everywhere, which is a. An interesting, kind of unique history of Microsoft through the lens of its development frameworks. Both available@leanpub.com Richard Campbell is@runasradio.com and we are right here. Every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1900 UTC. If you want to watch us do it live, obviously you can download it at any time and listen whenever you want, but if you want to watch live, we're in discord for the club members. Also YouTube, Twitch, X.com, tick tock, kick, LinkedIn and Facebook. Eight different live streams that you can watch every Wednesday if you want to get the freshest version.
- [165:58]
B
I could not have rattled.
- [165:59]
A
It's in my head. It's burned in there now. They better not change anything after the fact. Go to Twit tv, ww. That's the Windows Weekly page. There's a link there to their YouTube channel. A great way to share clips of the show with friends, which helps us because you promote the show a little bit and maybe helps your friend with something useful after the fact. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client and get it automatically, audio or video, the minute it's ready, which will be a couple hours after the show ends. Thank you, Paul. Have a great week. Enjoy. A little pulque, a little taco. I'm very jealous. I see your pictures on Instagram and go, you're making me so hungry.
- [166:44]
B
I'm like. I pretty much just take pictures of sunsets and tequilas at this point, which.
- [166:50]
A
In fact, I think you just invented the tequila sunrise. But I might.
- [166:54]
B
This is not the future I saw for myself.
- [166:57]
A
Next week, I will be actually in Tucson for the international gem and mineral show. Lisa and I are going down for fun, but Mike Assar is going to fill in, so he'll be here next week.
- [167:07]
B
What's the. I can't. I don't even know what the event place is there. Where would this be?
- [167:12]
A
Oh, this thing is so big. It's not just in one place. It's. It takes over Tucson. It's in dozens of venues.
- [167:18]
B
Oh, that's cool. Okay, that makes sense. I mean.
- [167:20]
A
Oh, this is the largest gem and mineral show of the year. Yeah.
- [167:27]
B
Well, I would definitely try to find some good Mexican food. Whatever.
- [167:30]
A
I think there are some good places. I think.
- [167:33]
B
Yeah.
- [167:33]
A
It's where the chimichango was born.
- [167:35]
B
Yes, that's right.
- [167:37]
A
So what make this better?
- [167:39]
B
I have an idea. Deep fry it and then put it in some huge sauce.
- [167:42]
A
Sure. Take a burrito, fry it. Deep fry it.
- [167:45]
B
I'm worried there's not enough calories in this. Is there some way we could bulk it?
- [167:49]
A
This is the 70th anniversary Jeb and mineral show. It's magic. We're gonna have a lot of fun. Starts at the Tucson Convention center, but there are venues all over town, so it's gonna be quite, quite fun. Thank you, Paulie. Have a great week. Enjoy your life in Mexico City and all of you, we will see you next week right here. Windows Weekly. Bye.