Windows Weekly 935: Don't Spritz Yourself

Summary

Windows Weekly 935: Don't Spritz Yourself – Detailed Summary

Release Date: June 5, 2025

In this episode of Windows Weekly, co-hosts Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell delve into four major controversies surrounding Microsoft’s software and hardware ecosystem, with a particular focus on the evolution of Notepad, upcoming Windows updates, compliance with the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), and developments in the Xbox division. Additionally, they touch upon industry earnings, password management changes, unionization efforts at Microsoft, data management with Synology NAS, and emerging cocktail trends in Mexico City.

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1. The Great Notepad Controversy

Notepad’s Evolution and Modernization

Richard Campbell leads the discussion by tracing the history of Notepad, highlighting its origins before Windows as a DOS application named "Multi Tool Write." Over the decades, Notepad has undergone several updates, including modernization for Unicode support in Windows NT and UI refreshes in Windows 10 and 11.

Introduction of AI Features

With the advent of Windows 11, Microsoft introduced substantial changes to Notepad, integrating AI-driven Copilot features aimed at rewriting, drafting, and even converting text into poems. Campbell emphasizes that these additions serve as a showcase for developers to leverage AI capabilities within simple applications.

Notable Quote:
Richard Campbell (07:40): "Notepad has never not been in good shape. They've always done right by Notepad and its users."

Community Reaction and Insertification

The integration of AI features sparked backlash within the user community, with prominent figures like Mary Jo Foley expressing dissatisfaction. Campbell counters this criticism by introducing the term "insertification", which he defines as corporate-driven changes that may harm users despite not being forced upon them. He argues that users have the option to disable unwanted features, thereby maintaining the tool’s simplicity.

Notable Quote:
Richard Campbell (12:56): "This stuff's fine. It's fine. Like I said, I use it every day."

2. Microsoft Build Updates and AI Focus

Insider Preview Builds and Patch Tuesday

Campbell discusses the latest Windows Insider Preview builds, including Canary builds introducing features like Voice Access and semantic search. He anticipates a significant Patch Tuesday update in June, promising enhancements such as Click-to-Do actions, Copilot integration, and improved connectivity features.

Notable Quote:
Richard Campbell (23:10): "The June Patch Tuesday update is going to be big. It's exactly as you would expect."

3. Compliance with the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA)

Microsoft and Apple’s Adaptations

The conversation shifts to the EU’s Digital Markets Act and its implications for major tech companies. Both Microsoft and Apple have implemented changes to their operating systems to comply with DMA requirements, such as allowing users to set default browsers and managing application updates independently of centralized stores.

Notable Quote:
Richard Campbell (60:33): "They got rid of that problem. And if you are using Bing or the Start Experience app, it will no longer keep prompting you to use Edge. It will just respect your choice and move on."

4. Industry Earnings and Market Performance

Performance of Major Tech Companies

Thurrott and Campbell review recent earnings reports from key players like Lenovo, HP, Dell, and Nvidia. They note Lenovo's strong performance, Dell's steady growth despite challenges, and Nvidia’s robust stock performance driven by innovations and strategic partnerships.

Notable Quote:
Richard Campbell (68:44): "Nvidia is fascinating for all kinds of reasons. They've been doing not just double-digit growth, but like high-end double-digit growth for a long time."

5. LinkedIn CEO’s New Role at Microsoft

Confusion Over Terminology

A significant controversy arises around the LinkedIn CEO, Ryan Ruslansky, who has taken on a broader role overseeing Microsoft 365 and Office Copilot. Campbell expresses confusion over Microsoft's terminology, noting that Ruslansky refers to the suite as "Office" multiple times despite Microsoft officially branding it as Microsoft 365.

Notable Quote:
Richard Campbell (71:10): "It's like the new head of NOAA who said, what, we have a hurricane season in America?"

6. Password Management Changes

Microsoft Authenticator App Updates

Microsoft is phasing out its built-in password management and autofill features in the Microsoft Authenticator app, urging users to adopt third-party password managers like 1Password and Bitwarden for enhanced security and cross-platform compatibility.

Notable Quote:
Richard Campbell (82:52): "So the first one is third-party password manager, and I listed the good ones."

Emphasis on Passkeys

The hosts discuss the growing adoption of passkeys as a more secure alternative to traditional passwords, highlighting their benefits and integration with password managers.

7. Xbox Handheld Device Delay

Delay of Microsoft’s Gamind Handheld

A report from Windows Central reveals that Microsoft has delayed the release of its first-party Xbox handheld gaming device, originally slated for the holiday season. Campbell speculates that Microsoft’s shift towards ARM-based platforms and potential integration with Nvidia technology might be factors influencing the delay.

Notable Quote:
Richard Campbell (93:22): "A lot of hardware-related rebranding and reorganization seems to be a factor here."

Layoffs and Organizational Changes

Following the delay, there are rumors of impending layoffs within Microsoft’s Xbox division, possibly linked to the unsuccessful hardware initiatives like the Zune and the challenges of maintaining profitable gaming hardware.

8. Unionization Efforts at Microsoft

Support for Unionization in Gaming Divisions

Microsoft-owned game studios, including ZeniMax, have made significant strides towards unionization, reaching agreements that protect employees from arbitrary dismissal and ensure fair grievance procedures. Additionally, Raven, another Microsoft subsidiary, is in legal battles over unionization practices.

Notable Quote:
Richard Campbell (76:36): "The big one to me is actually just pay. So the minimum salary going into this was a little over or almost $21 per hour. That goes up to $25 immediately and it's going to go up again to $28 and some change in just a couple of months."

9. Data Management with Synology NAS

Transition to Synology Drive

Campbell shares his positive experience transitioning from cloud services like OneDrive and Google Drive to Synology Drive, highlighting its seamless file synchronization, on-demand access, and robust security features. He praises Synology’s remote access capabilities and integration across Windows and Mac platforms.

Notable Quote:
Richard Campbell (125:34): "It's unbelievably great. So I have this thing where, you know, like the book folder is all local. My to-do folder, which is most of my site stuff, is all local. So I could be on a plane. It will sync when I connect."

10. Emerging Cocktail Trends: Spritzers

Innovations in Cocktail Presentation

The hosts conclude with a lighter topic, discussing the rising trend of spritzers in Mexico City’s cocktail scene. They highlight the introduction of tower ice cubes—large, clear ice blocks designed for aesthetic appeal and enhanced cooling. Campbell describes innovative spritz recipes and the shift towards visually appealing and refreshing drinks suitable for warmer climates.

Notable Quote:
Richard Campbell (149:32): "These ice cubes are perfectly clear. They're gorgeous."

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Conclusion

In this episode, Paul Thurrott and Richard Campbell provide an in-depth analysis of Microsoft's ongoing efforts to modernize its software offerings, navigate regulatory landscapes, and adapt to market demands. They also shed light on the internal and external challenges faced by the tech giant, including community pushback, organizational restructuring, and competitive pressures in the gaming hardware sector. Additionally, practical insights into data management and a glimpse into evolving social trends in mixology round out a comprehensive discussion aimed at tech enthusiasts and industry professionals alike.

Transcript

[Paul Thurrott]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat is here. Richard Campbell has the week off. He's on safari in South Africa. Plenty to talk about. We. We have the Great notepad. Actually, it's four controversies today. The great notepad controversy of 2025. The great. I don't know, Authenticator, password management controversy of 2025, and the great Xbox Contra. Look, just stay tuned. It's a great window. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Richard Campbell]

This is Twit.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell. Episode 935, recorded Wednesday, June 4, 2025. Don't spritz yourself. Oh, hey, hey, hey. All you winners and you dozers. It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thur is here from thorat.com. this reminds me of the good old days, Paul, when it was just you and me and we just had a grand old time ranting and raving.

[Richard Campbell]

I was trying to find my Fitbit readiness score, which I think is going to be a negative three.

[Paul Thurrott]

Are you ready? Actually, you know what my oura ring says? I'm. I'm. Actually, it says, we don't understand why your readiness is so good. Because your sleep was terrible.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, look at you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look at you. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

What?

[Paul Thurrott]

How's that? How are you doing that? They say today my. Oh, no. My readiness is only 69. I never am.

[Richard Campbell]

I.

[Paul Thurrott]

My sleep is 53. It says, Pay attention.

[Richard Campbell]

Where's this thing? Stress management. 67. That's. I don't know what that means.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Why don't I see that? I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And my glucose is elevated.

[Richard Campbell]

No. Yeah, that's good. But actually, that's the only good news I got. Solid. I go to the. I went to the doctor. I've been dying to get these tests. I'm going to write about this soon. Like, I got all my test done. This blood works and everything. Everything's great, you know?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Blood pressure, when they measured it was like 115 over 70. My glucose is down.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

My cholesterol, way down. It was like half what it was. So I was like. She goes, yeah. She goes, you kind of. She didn't say it this way. This is how I talk about it. She said, you know, you kind of ran the rack on this stuff. And I was like, nice. And then she goes on medication. I was like, whoa, whoa. Give me a sec. Give me one second. You know, like, geez, you know, don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

Think you're perfect, Paul.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. She's like, you know, like, if it was just up to you, you'd be dead. Like. Okay, okay, okay, settle down, settle down. Jeez.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sorry. That's pretty funny.

[Richard Campbell]

New doctor, you know, she's tough.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, man, I love my doctor. I went this on Monday because my blood glucose is pretty high. And he said, okay, you want Ozempic. I said, I thought I was gonna have to fight for that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. He said, I'll do this as soon as it's in a pill form.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Which is soon.

[Richard Campbell]

Is that happening, Lily?

[Paul Thurrott]

Cause when that happens, they've passed their first stage clinical trials, then I can.

[Richard Campbell]

Just eat whatever I want. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think the theory is that you don't want to eat.

[Richard Campbell]

You don't want to eat. Yeah, no, I've experienced that phenomenon. It's powerful.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's another thing that happens, and I'm. And I was talking before the show, I. It apparently reduces your impulse control, so I've made a little table of my weight.

[Richard Campbell]

Those two things are contrary.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I'm just curious to see if they go down too.

[Richard Campbell]

She's like, so I noticed you've never eaten anything all week, but for some reason there are three new cars in the driveway. Like, what's. You know, like, what's going on?

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm hungry for food. I need powerful gasoline. Moose espionage in our discord says, I'm waiting for Ozempic in a. In cupcake form.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, in God's perfect form.

[Paul Thurrott]

Let us, my friend. So I should mention, Richard's not here because he's on safari.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, he sent me a picture of a rhinoceros.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, man. He was in South Africa for a conference. And then I guess. Is he with his wife or is he alone?

[Richard Campbell]

I think I would know that because I follow.

[Paul Thurrott]

All alone. Looking for lionesses, as it were.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if she was there. Actually. The fact that she hasn't posted anything recently suggests she probably is there because the connectivity is terrible.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's why he's not here. He would be here. He would be in his little glamping tent.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Doing the show because he's so dedicated that way. But there is no connectivity in the veldt.

[Richard Campbell]

He's a die hard. I thought I was bad about this kind of stuff.

[Paul Thurrott]

He really is. You don't have to be that way, Paul.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know. I don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

As long as one of you is.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, as long. Right. Well, you have two mental patients over here.

[Paul Thurrott]

I go nowhere, so I just. I tootle up to my attic and that's. That Yep. So I see here that the great Notepad wars have begun. What are you talking about?

[Richard Campbell]

It's important that we have a different controversy every week. This week we have at least two or three. That's pretty good. I'm going to lead with the most important story of all, which is of course Notepad. So Notepad has been around since before Windows, Right. People didn't know this at the time because no one paid attention to this stuff, but there was something called Multi.

[Paul Thurrott]

You say before Windows.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Was it dos?

[Richard Campbell]

As a DOS app? It was called Multi Tool. Notepad I think was the name of it. Wow. Multitool something, some write or Multi tool write, something like that. And then that was going to be the name when Windows was happening. But then I said, well, we need something simple than that. And it became Notepad and Notepad has been in there ever since. So there have been a few notable updates to the app over the first 30 years or so. It was redone for Unicode in Windows NT and made into a 32 bit app. There was some big stuff around Windows 2000 related to encoding formats and stuff. There was kind of a focus on IT pros and admins for a while and then Linux because of Linux and the subsystem and well before that POSIX actually as well. But this kind of interoperability angle. Now developers obviously, because with the Windows subsystem and terminal you can do these kind of cross platform things and Notepad needs to be able to open those types of documents, et cetera. But when we got, I should say a couple of minor UI things, very minor over the years, up until about Windows 10. So you know, Windows Vista, they did like a code refresh on Notepad that didn't really result in too much from an end user perspective, etc. I'm probably forgetting some stuff. But Notepad is a plain text editor. It's something every OS has. It's not complicated unless you try to write one, by the way, because I'll tell you, doing my Notepad knockoff NET Pad, very difficult. It's actually pretty complicated under the covers. And then we got hit Windows 10 and so with Windows 10 they started changing things. They put it into the store, right, so they could update it more frequently, which probably set off some red flags in certain places. And then in Windows 11 they really amped it up. So I'm not going to go through every change they've made, but there have been a ton and they first modernized it for the Windows 10, Windows 11 look and feel. Which honestly, they've done a terrific job with. Paint was a two year nightmare where they screwed that up completely and then it took them a long time to get it right.

[Paul Thurrott]

But is it okay now? Is it?

[Richard Campbell]

Yep, it's fine. I can't say it's perfect, but it's fine. The big things there were, they added something that looked like a ribbon but wasn't and you couldn't collapse it. It's humongous. That's still the case today, by the way. So it takes up a lot of UI space, but it was also only light mode when they first shipped it. And so you'd have a dark mode thing and it was like a spotlight on your screen if you ever opened it by mistake or on purpose, it was terrible. That's fine. They also screwed up all the keyboard shortcuts, which was horrible for people like me that use the app all the time. But they got there, that's in good shape. But Notepad has never not been in good shape. They've always done right by Notepad. So first they did the UI refresh. They put a winui front end on this thing. Must still have code in it from 1993. I mean, there's no doubt about it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I'm sure it does.

[Richard Campbell]

A classic C C Sharp app from a million years ago. It's legacy code. There is text encoding formats that nobody knows how they work. And Notepad does them seamlessly. And there are people at Microsoft who have looked at the code and said, we don't actually know how they do this. Like, it's astonishing.

[Paul Thurrott]

We have no idea.

[Richard Campbell]

They're like, yep, can't figure this out. They basically just take guesses. Like sometimes they'll be like, well, if this charact in this position, try this. And if it works fine, if it doesn't do this, you know, that kind of thing. So in recent years, I'd say last two years, the big updates to Notepad have involved functional things. They've added things like that recent sub menu and the file menu. So you have all your recent apps or recent documents. Okay, cool. They've added, well, the tabs and the new settings, ui, all that stuff. New ways to do things like fonts and all that stuff. Good. But also the AI stuff. And so you see these copilot features in there for rewriting, drafting, make it shorter, make it longer. One of the funnest features in Notepad today, I think this might require a copilot PC is you can open a document and will rewrite it as a poem. It's amazing. It's useless, but it is amazing. And of course, because of the era we're in now, people who would watch this show, people who read my site, people like me, might look at this and I should say, almost always do and say, no, this is too much. Leave it alone. Why are you touching this? It's a text editor. Why would you bulk it up with features? Why would you bloat it? Why would you do whatever? But the thing is, watching this happen, and because I use Notepad so frequently, I actually think they've been very respectful to the app and to its user. So if you don't like these features, anything I mentioned, anything I forgot, you can turn them off. Like, you can just ignore them. It doesn't actually get in your way. So if you don't want AI, turn it off. It's a switch. You can do that. If you don't like spell checking, turn it off. If you don't like using different tabs, you want to use different Windows, there's an option in there for that. Like, you can make it work the way you want. So this to me does not meet the bar of insertification, right? Which there are different ways to kind of define that, but actually I wrote one in this that I thought was decent. Insertification occurs when a company changes a product or service to benefit itself strategically, financially or whatever, while knowing full well that this change will harm users, right? So you can think of things like Microsoft or Windows 11 saying, hey, would you like to try and fold a backup? It's super useful. You would love it. And I'm like, nope, don't want to do that. And it's like, but, okay, but you should really turn it on. It's great. I'm like, yeah, no, I hear you. I don't want it. And then you reboot your computer and it's just turned on and stuff starts syncing between computers, and you're like, I didn't. I literally told you not to do that. That's insertification, right? That's Microsoft wants you to do this so bad that they will just ignore your explicit wish and do it anyway. And this stuff in Windows 11, like, around telemetry, the crapware, the constant feature updates, the force, Microsoft account usage, blah, blah, blah, whatever. That you could argue is insertification. But there's a big difference between Microsoft in this case improving an app and you just not liking it. And in certification, right, you could say, well, yeah, but the copilot stuff is kind of pushing their AI aims and all that. Kind of stuff. And it's like, yeah, it is. But like I said, you can turn it off. You don't have to have it. More to the point, I think the real reason for that stuff is to show off what is possible. Right. These apps are in some ways a showcase for developers where they can say, look, if Notepad can do this, I mean, I could put this in my app. One of the big things that they did at build this a couple weeks ago now was show how easy it is, how few lines of code you need to add to an app, to add AI rewriting features. I've done this myself. Back in January, February, I wrote a stupid, simple app just to show that stuff off. It's really not that hard. So I think that's the point. Right? And so I guess I've gone across against the grain on this one with a lot of people, because I just watch people react in outrage every time Microsoft announces any new feature in Notepad. It's been just.

[Paul Thurrott]

They don't want it to change.

[Richard Campbell]

They don't want anything to change. This is a big problem with the community these days. I think it's like, we're all old enough now. It's like, stop changing things. And it's like, guys, just because you've calcified doesn't mean the rest of the planet has. I mean, things evolve, you know?

[Paul Thurrott]

But historically, Notepad's been the, like, plain text editor, right?

[Richard Campbell]

It still is. Still is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, so you're not losing that.

[Richard Campbell]

This is. No, this has not changed.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's still writing text files, not RTF files like WordPad.

[Richard Campbell]

It doesn't do RTF. It's not anything like, it's still plain text. And that's the thing. Like, one thing, I've used Notepad for a lot over the years, and now I usually use different methods, but people have said this to me as well, is you get some kind of formatted document of some kind, you just want the plain text version, pump it into Notepad, it strips everything out, copy, paste it back. Plain text, right? It still works great for that. Like, that has. That has not changed. So been kind of weathering this as it goes along as they add features. I'm like, you know, this stuff's fine. It's fine. Like I said, I use it every day. I love Notepad, and I love it so much, I'm still trying to copy it. I spent a lot of my time on this.

[Paul Thurrott]

You have your own.

[Richard Campbell]

It's so stupid how much time I spend on this. So this past Week, couple of years ago, Microsoft announced that they were updating, providing another update to the Notepad app. It's in the dev and canary channels in the Windows Insider program. Microsoft, they don't always do a great job of explaining things like this. And I feel like this is something that should have come from maybe the developer group or whatever it is, the platform or something to explain why they're doing this, because they still haven't. I have a theory which I'll share, but what they announced was they were adding support for lightweight text formatting to Notepad. Now I want you to imagine the sound of a rocket ship crashing into the earth, because that's what happened in my world. The whole world lost their minds.

[Paul Thurrott]

I kind of understand that.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, because when you hear that, you think of the wrong thing, right? Like what you thought I just said was they're going to support rich text and that's not what they're doing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not rich text. They're not supporting rtf.

[Paul Thurrott]

But how can you support fonts without in plain text files? I don't understand.

[Richard Campbell]

You support Markdown.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, it's going to be a markdown editor.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. So. Well, I should say it's not going to be a markdown editor, although you could use it like that, I guess. I've not seen it. I literally have three, if not four computers on the dev channel that I could get this on. And to this moment I've not seen it in person yet. You know, they roll out over time, but it's still, it's a markdown, for those who don't know, is plain text. It's a markdown language, I guess similar to HTML or xml. Right. It is lightweight. It's designed to be both machine and human readable, meaning that a document that was formatted with tags for Markdown where use hashes and you know, brackets and things is still, you can still read it. You look at it like, yeah, no, I can read this. It's not all, you know, gobbledygook or whatever. It's not like programming code, like a C programming language thing or something. It's readable. So plain text always will work everywhere. No problem there. There are lightweight Markdown, I'm going to call them like sort of word processors. I use something called Typora that does this where you and a lot of like programmer type editors will do a side by side view where you write in the code, which is plain text and they show you a preview of what is really an HTML view of the formatted document, Right. But the document itself is plain text. It's just as small as any text document. There's nothing special going on. It's just the language itself. Markdown. So it's not. It's not changing to Markdown format by default. It's not, you know, it's not. It's not going to show you an HTML view of the document. It's plain text. That's all it is. So why would they do this? Is it to confuse people? Is it to, you know, replace WordPad? This is one of the big. Oh, that's why they obsoleted WordPad. No, it's not. Has nothing to do with that. WordPad was a security disaster waiting to happen. They got rid of that more slowly than they should have. Markdown is the language, so to speak, the format, the style that is used by almost all developer documentation now. So if you go up to, like GitHub for example, and you look at a readme file for a project, that's Markdown, and it renders in HTML, right? Like you. Whatever they use in the backend can render that thing so it looks like HTML or it is HTML, right? I use Markdown to write my books. I use Markdown to write every article I write on the website. I use Markdown every single day, all day long. Like, I love Markdown. And there's nothing wrong with Markdown. It's just plain text. It's not rich text. It's nothing. But people see this, and of course, Microsoft, you know, they're trying to make it friendly that when you're using a Markdown document or if you start typing code that could be translated into Markdown, like you type hash space, whatever, that becomes a heading one, it pops up a toolbar with heading, bullet lists, bold italic buttons so normal people can select text and make a link or make it bold or whatever. So people see this picture and they're like, oh, my God, oh my God, oh my God, what are they doing? What are they doing?

[Paul Thurrott]

What are they doing?

[Richard Campbell]

So I wrote this article explaining what they were doing, because Microsoft didn't explain it. And like I said, I have my guess about why. I think it's for developers. Like, if you think about all the stuff that's going on with developers in Windows 11 and all the changes over the past couple years. Yeah, I mean, this makes. This makes plenty of sense. I'm actually psyched to doing this. It would be kind of amazing to me if I could actually use notepad to write lightly formatted documents right in Markdown format and not have to install another app. Right now that's probably not true because the way it is right now, it's just going to be pure code based. And I actually do want to see the like the formatted view. But one of the things I do now is, you know, type pora. The app I use typically for the website is it supports a keyboard, well, a shortcut for copying pasting into like basically non formatted HTML. So it's perfectly clean HTML, no extra nothing in there. It's wonderful. I love it. Notepad's not going to do that. Maybe someday it will. I hope so. You know, I mean, no one else does, but I do.

[Paul Thurrott]

Temple is a great way to write because it's so clean. It's so clean. There's no ribbon, there's nothing.

[Richard Campbell]

I know. I love it. And if I was using a Mac, the IA Writer is an even better.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's a good one. Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

It's such a good app, but it's not as good on Windows.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's why I use Obsidian, because I can write down.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. And by the way, what do you call it? Notion too is good. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Notion uses Markdown. That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

Notion supports Markdown syntax. You can already write in Google Docs in Markdown syntax. It doesn't save it as a Markdown file, although you can export to Markdown.

[Paul Thurrott]

But if you know Markdown everywhere.

[Richard Campbell]

It's everywhere. That's the point. It's literally everywhere. In fact, you might argue that Notepad is a little late to the game. In a way. It is a text format. Microsoft does want developers to use Windows. It is, you know, a piece of that puzzle where it just works. So to me, this makes total sense. But man, I have never spoken. I have actually, but I've rarely seen like this community just lose their minds collectively all at once in such a dramatic fashion. And most of them just misunderstood what was happening. I'm not here to dump on Mary Jo Foley, but I'm going to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Does she freak out? Because I know she's a massive Notepad user.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep, I posted this. You know what? I feel like I probably use it more than she does, but it's fine. It's fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, that's all she writes.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm not going to actually dump on her. I'm kidding. But she did text me, I swear to God, like two seconds after I published this. And she goes, I swear to God, we were texting back and forth like half an hour after this. She has two comments like, this is not going to go, well, I'm not going to read this word for it. But the attraction notepad is as simple to distraction free. And if I want writing advice, I'll use word one note or loop. Like, okay, so I mean, this is sort of the stuff I addressed in the thing. And again, Mary Jo is very typical of the argument against this, which is like, well, first of all, this stuff actually doesn't get in the way. It has never, it's never bulked up or bloated or destroyed the ui. Like, the app has only gotten better and has only looked better in the last couple years. Like it's way better than it's ever been. And you don't. I don't get to say that a lot about Microsoft. I kind of want to revel in this a little bit. Like Windows 11, which in some ways is like this cesspool of terribleness. This one thing, it's not the only thing, but this one thing. They've really gotten it right the whole time. And when people start like complaining about it, I'm like, oh, guys, come on, we've talked about this. There's a lot to complain about. Let's focus on the stuff that we should complain about. This is not one of them. I mean, it just isn't. So anyway, the thing with Mary Jo was funny, but I don't know why I didn't anticipate it. I feel like I should have given her a trigger warning or something. But, but yeah, so, so we, we went through that yesterday. That was amusing. But I, there's no reason to like to use a different. Like, I would never install like a third party text editor in Windows for, for normal texting as a VR developer or whatever. Obviously there are reasons, but this thing works great, it looks great, and I can't wait to try this. I, in fact, I feel like I, I'm going to find it a little lacking. Like I want it to go further and we'll see what happens in the future. But anyway, that was, that was the controversy I woke up to on Monday morning. It's like, here we go. I'm like, everything's finally calmed down. I've gotten over Build. Everything's good. You know, it's like, okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, all right, you've reassured us all, so maybe.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm sure some people still disagree. I can't, I'm not gonna, I can't.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I can understand people saying, you know, a program, there ought to be a very simple pure text editing program in Windows.

[Richard Campbell]

There is.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's called Notepad they don't do, they don't do words. I mean. Right. They discontinued that.

[Richard Campbell]

What's that?

[Paul Thurrott]

They don't do WordPad anymore. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So, yeah, WordPad was. WordPad was always kind of an oddball. So going back, mini Word. Yeah. So yeah, in the beginning there was the text editor Notepad and the rich text editor Write, remember from the early web series.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah, right, I forgot about that. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So Write evolved into WordPad and then there was also like a separate project that turned into the word processor that was in works, which was also not Word compatible. Right. But over time, WordPad, like Notepad, evolved in its own way. And so it became compatible with Word because of the antitrust concerns around the open doc, the open document formats. In the early 2000s, Microsoft open sourced that stuff and then made this thing part of Windows that was compatible as well, which is why it's compatible with Word documents. Right. So today we have a web based version of Word that does that. But the last major update to WordPad was for Windows 7 when they were promoting the ribbon to developers as the not the simple, what was it called? The scenic ribbon. And there was something you as a developer could add to your own app. I've tried this, by the way. That was horrific. But you could do it if you didn't mind writing a million lines of XAML code and you could construct a ribbon that was a rough approximation of something you might see in Office or whatever. Right. The apps that would have the ribbon. So they added the ribbon UI to WordPad, which I think bloated it up, frankly, because it was very simple before that and then never updated it again in a meaningful way. So it's been sitting in Windows for years. It's a security vulnerability. This is a way people can get a Word document onto your computer that has a virus in it that can run. And it just wasn't worth updating. So they eventually deprecated and removed it. It's actually been gone from Windows 11, I think for almost two years now. But at least a year and a half. The world has kept turning around the sun. We're okay. It's okay. No matter what it is. No matter how little used something is, someone will always mourn it and then bring it up every time something else disappears. Oh, I knew this company was screwed when they killed the Zone, you know, or whatever. There's always like the one person who's like, oh, I love that thing. And it's like, yeah, but you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, there's still, there's still your.net pad. There's notepad.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. There's all kinds of.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, the Mac has an editor called TextEdit, but it's by default an RTF editor.

[Richard Campbell]

It does both. That's right.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is not really a good pure text editor.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So most Mac people actually buy or BB edit or use a free version of Text Wrangler. And they're happy, you know, because I think it's reasonable to say you. You kind of. If you do any coding or website development or anything, you kind of need something that's not going to add anything.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, you need. Right. Wordpad's good for that, by the way. But Microsoft has Visual Studio code, which is cross platform, which, by the way, supports Markdown. And you can. I have, and I do, for the books, add extensions that do things like spell checking and grammar checking and markdown syntax checking and whatever. And that's the beauty of Visual Studio code. Right. So I'm trying to understand the cross section of the world that is technical enough that they understand everything I just said and are outraged by Notepad, but don't have a developer editor of some kind of. Which there are a million free versions. It's like, what do you. I don't even say. What do you mean?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, VS code is another good choice for just plain text.

[Richard Campbell]

Ed. I think of it. Yep. Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right, let's take a little break because we do have a preview update in week D, whatever that means. You winners of dozers. You know what that means? Paul Thorat is here. Richard Camel is on safari. I kid you not.

[Richard Campbell]

I know. It's like sentences that don't make sense when you first hear them and you're like, no, that's. That's what he said and it's what he meant.

[Paul Thurrott]

He won't be back, I presume. Well, next week, if he doesn't get eaten.

[Richard Campbell]

He would make a fine meal for a lion.

[Paul Thurrott]

A lion would be so happy.

[Richard Campbell]

They'd say, jack, the best day that lion's ass, they might say.

[Paul Thurrott]

Has this been marinated in a whiskey of some. Some sort? There's an aromatic.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's like when you go to. What's that place called? Not Fridays, maybe just Fridays, where everything is like Jack Daniel's sauce.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. More to come in. Just a bit. It's just me and Paul. Kind of like the good old days. The good old days of Windows Weekly. Well, they were probably the bad old days. But don't worry, we'll revert to normal Next week, our show today brought to you by 1Password. Now there's a name I know you know, over half of IT pros say that securing SaaS apps is their biggest challenge. You know, with the growing every every company has them, right? But with the growing problems of SaaS sprawl and shadow it because you know, guys gotta use chat GPT, right? It's not hard to see why. Thankfully, 1Password has a solution that's so great. Trelica T R E L I c a by 1Password can discover and secure access to all your apps, managed or not. Trelloca by 1Password inventories every app in use by your company and then. And you'll love this pre populated app profiles. Assess the SaaS risks, let you manage access, optimize, spend, enforce security best practices across every app your employees use, even the ones you haven't approved. You can use it to manage, shadow it to securely onboard and offboard employees too. And to meet compliance goals because you've got a full record. Trelica by 1Password provides a complete solution for SaaS access governance. And it's just one of the ways that extended Access management from 1Password helps teams strengthen compliance and security. 1Password's award winning password manager is trusted by millions of users, over 150,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. And now they're securing more than just passwords with 1Password. Extended Access Management. 1Password is ISO 27001 certified with regular third party audits. Oh, and the industry's largest bug bounty, I might add.1 password exceeds the standards set by various authorities and is a leader in security. Take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged. Shadow it. Learn [e-mail] Windows Weekly that's 1Password.com Windows Weekly all lowercase. The number 1p a s s W-O-R d.com WindowsWeekly we thank 1Password so much for support in Windows Weekly. You support us too, by the way. It's very simple. Just go to that special address. 1Password.com Windows Weekly thank you. 1Password 24H2 oh, you're muted.

[Richard Campbell]

Sorry, I mute myself because I can't resist making sounds. Sorry.

[Paul Thurrott]

Poor impulse control. Paul.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, exactly. I need that Ozempic, baby.

[Paul Thurrott]

I bet breakfast at the Thorat household is a lot of ha.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I don't actually eat breakfast, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, but if you did, you don't read the newspaper either.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh no, I do that and that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Do you give up on that printed newspaper?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, no. No, I'm not a. I'm not a dinosaur.

[Paul Thurrott]

Caveman.

[Richard Campbell]

Jeez. I don't do that. I can't remember the last time I got a printed newspaper.

[Paul Thurrott]

Isn't that funny? I was talking to my piano teacher. She has a young student who never saw a newspaper in her life.

[Richard Campbell]

You know what I do miss, though, is back in the day, as we say on the Kindle, you could get a New York Times or whatever subscript, and the thing you would get every day would be that day's paper.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

So if you have the app, whatever you're reading, the New York Times, the Post, the Wall Street Journal, whatever it is, they promote things however they promote them. So obviously there's news that's new, but you don't get the whole day's new stuff in one place. Well, I mean, there's probably a view for that, but I kind of want that to be the homepage or whatever of the app. I kind of miss that. I like to go through.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wait a minute. You're saying if you go to newyorktimes.com now.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I just use the mobile app. I mean, there's probably a view that is like today's paper, but this is not the default.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, you're right.

[Richard Campbell]

It's.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like editorial.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So they might show. So what happens is I'll miss things. Right. There might be like a Wire Carter thing or a sports thing or some, like. I don't really like to read all of the entertainment news, but there might be some one random thing where I'm like, I actually would have.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know what? We're showing our age. Because that's really what the print newspaper did.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what I'm saying.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you could scan the front and you'd know what was important. You go to the sports page, you kind of knew where stuff was.

[Richard Campbell]

Sunday would come, and I would separate this thing out. Like I was cutting fish in Japan or something. Yeah, here. This goes here. Yeah. You know, I'm going to read them in this order.

[Paul Thurrott]

Not anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

No, that's all curated.

[Paul Thurrott]

I wonder if. Wow. It's also an infinite page. Holy cow.

[Richard Campbell]

In the app, it ends like you just went by the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Somewhere there must be a link that says.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, there is. It's somewhere. Like, if you go to. Maybe to the top, there's a menu. I'm sure there's a.

[Paul Thurrott]

There used to be.

[Richard Campbell]

No, they're definitely.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, here. This. Maybe the hamburger.

[Richard Campbell]

There's definitely something. Maybe there's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Maybe there isn't. Anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

It's got to be like a today's.

[Paul Thurrott]

There used to be a front page link.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, there used to be. I mean they do make the paper, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

You can get the paper. I get it for my. You know who I get it for? My 92 year old mom.

[Richard Campbell]

For your painter and for.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, like.

[Richard Campbell]

And for the packing mater.

[Paul Thurrott]

My mom, my mom likes the Sunday Times. I used to get it, you know, because it was kind of fun.

[Richard Campbell]

That was, that was the holdout. Like we would. There was probably a couple years maybe where we got just the Sunday paper, right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you get the crossword puzzle in.

[Richard Campbell]

The magazine we live in, you know, Boston. Like the Boston Globe used to be this enormous high quality publication. You start turning into like the highlights magazine you see at the dentist. You know, like this little San Francisco.

[Paul Thurrott]

Chronicle wrapped theirs in the Sunday funnies. That was the first thing you'd see.

[Richard Campbell]

That's right. Sunday Funniest. Same thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Gosh, it's funny how, you know, young people are going what are these old farts talking about? But it's funny how this stuff is so gradual, right? You don't, you know, I've been inside a bank in years, you know, same.

[Richard Campbell]

Right, exactly. We, we've been.

[Paul Thurrott]

Used to be a teller.

[Richard Campbell]

We don't have a bank we could go into. Ours is online only. So.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

This is like no one. If anyone gave me like a thousand dol. In cash, I wouldn't know what to do with it. Like I, I'm not going to mail it to the bank. You know what I mean? I don't know what envelope. I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, cash is probably going away. I know the penny's gone.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Things change and they change so gradually you don't really notice. Except one day you wake up and you go, yep.

[Richard Campbell]

No, you can still look at magazines. Anyone who's involved in tech can point to these examples of the transitionary things. Right. So the Kindle comes out and whatever. The Sony E Reader, whatever that was called. One of the initial features was like it would have a page turn animation.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It was like, oh, it's just like reading a book or like the.

[Paul Thurrott]

All the apple, you don't need that anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

Mobile stuff used to have like, you know, felt on the game table and you know, like you. The whole desktop metaphor was like, let's give you something new, but we'll make it a little familiar. Folder opens, get you over the hole.

[Paul Thurrott]

Take a file out. Folder closes.

[Richard Campbell]

But enough years go by and you're like, why are we Doing this again. Everyone's like, I have no idea. We just accept it. Why is there a picture of a floppy disk for the save icon everywhere? Most people have no idea what that thing is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Never saw one. Well, many people of a certain age have never seen a phone handset, and that's still the icon for the phone app on most.

[Richard Campbell]

So in a weird coincidence, Raymond Chandler does the old. I think it's called the old new thing. He's got a great blog every day. Has some blast from the past. Technical blog thing he just posted about. Program Manager in Windows 3 had a search button that had a little, like, magnifying glass.

[Paul Thurrott]

Magnifying glass, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And they were like, this makes total sense. And then they got an email from a customer or whatever from some other country who said, I'm just curious, why do you have a picture of a frying pan next to search? And they were like, okay. So they just got rid of the icon. They're like, you know, it's just not worth it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Search, Frying pan. Of course, everybody.

[Richard Campbell]

What does that have to do with search?

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, that's hysterical.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, my God.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I noticed Notion still has a frying pan next to its search, so.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And Right. I mean, Notion actually is kind of.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look, they have it. They have an inbox.

[Richard Campbell]

An inbox, yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look at that.

[Richard Campbell]

We just accept these terms. It's like, what does this even mean? It's like there used to be a box, and you're gonna wait for this.

[Paul Thurrott]

A wooden box.

[Richard Campbell]

It used to be on the desk in the office in the building you traveled to to go to work.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, what was that? Work. Oh, yeah, I remember that.

[Richard Campbell]

I know this is. What I just said sounds insane. It sounds as insane as. I'm never going to get this right. I was watching a YouTube video where the guy said something like, I use Arch Linux to run Docker, so I can do the. Whatever the name of the image thing is. And I'm like, you lost me on the second word of that sentence. I'm like, I don't even know what you're talking about. I mean, I kind of do, obviously, but it was like, we just say things that we don't even like.

[Paul Thurrott]

In a coincidental related story, Lisa asked me what Docker was.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, nice. And you said jeans.

[Paul Thurrott]

I talked for half an hour in circles trying to explain what that is. I remember when I first heard about containers in Docker and how I had no idea. It really took me a while, but now I'm just kind of used to.

[Richard Campbell]

It, everything's like this. The first time you heard about vms, same thing, right? You're like what? I don't. What are you talking about?

[Paul Thurrott]

You're running an operating system in the operating system. What are you talking about? You got Windows in my Mac os. Yeah, anyway. Anyway. Anywho, I don't know how we got into this old man conversation.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't either, but it's more interesting than what I'm going to say. So last week was weekday. On Tuesday of weekday, which is the every other from Patch Tuesday, Microsoft releases preview updates for Windows that are a preview of the coming Patch Tuesday update. They did a 2223 H2 update, which bunch of new features that we would expect. We know a bunch of stuff is coming but they didn't release one for 24H2. And I said I predicted they will do it. There was some something that this happens. This happened a bunch of times. A couple days will go by. I predicted Thursday. I think it actually happened late Wednesday. But they will release this preview update because there is going to be a humongous Patch Tuesday update in June. Right. So next Tuesday. And they did. And it is humongous, right? It's exactly as you would expect. So I don't really have to go through this exactly because we've talked about all this stuff before. But this is like Click to do is coming to the EU Ask Copilot as an action inside Click to do new text actions in Click todo shortcuts for pen users in Click todo those search improvements we've been talking about where I call it semantic search because I think it needs a name on and on it goes. You know, Windows key plus C to invoke Copilot like we used to with Cortana for a million years. Image descriptions and narrative goes on and on and on. Like the June Patch Tuesday update is going to be big. And I would say this is probably the second big, big, big Patch Tuesday update that will happen this year. So if you want to get or it happened so far this year, I should say if you want to get going early on that you can install the preview update. If you don't, just don't you'll get it automatically. It's fine. So that did happen. And then I have a theory about why it was delayed because I kept checking the page where Microsoft lists the updates for each version of Windows 11 and under 24H2 on the actually it has the date. So that's not right. On the Tuesday, Last Tuesday, the 27th, they released an out of band update which I went back about a year and a half and I didn't see another one of these. These happen. I'm familiar with the term out of band, but typically you'll get something like this if there's like a zero day or some kind of serious problem, whatever it was. In this case something tied to Hyper V which is the virtualization platform and Windows speaking, which. So the day that this would have come out, normally they released this out of band update and maybe they just wanted to give it a day because the next day, very late the next day, but they did eventually release that, the preview update. So. So that happened. What else we got? And then there have been, well, three, four really four, three sets of. But four Windows Insider Preview builds since we last spoke. There have been two Canary builds, which is really unusual, including one that just happened. I didn't have the link in the show notes for those of you watching it on Discord or whatever, but it's in there now for Leo and whoever else. But the Canary build today added features that we are seeing in other parts of the Insider program. So nothing serious, but energy savers compatible with Intune, the phone companion part of the start menu is re rolling out, et cetera, et cetera. So all the stuff you see in there is nothing unique to Canary in there, but there's stuff that hasn't been there before. The build we got on Friday, there was only one build Friday. But also Canary is a new accessibility feature called Voice Access. I'm sorry, Voice Access is not a new feature. That's a feature, but it's getting a new user experience to help you discover it better and get going with, you know, speaking to the computer. So that's pretty good. Yada yada, yada, yada yada. Yeah, okay, so that's most of the Canary stuff, but of more import because I think it just impacts more people. Was, I think it was yesterday, maybe the day before they released separate updates for the dev channel and beta channel. These have been the same for a while now. Remember, they were both on 24H2 for a while or could be beta was 23 and 24H2, but this is I think the first one where they've started to diverge again. So there's a couple of features that are common to both sides of this equation. Quick Machine recovery we've been talking about. This is if your computer is having problems booting, it will actually just go right into Windows recovery environment and you'll get whatever remediation you'll reboot, and it should fix it. And then the phone link improvements, which is specifically the some improvements to that phone companion sidebar thing on the Start menu. So if you have a Samsung or other kind of rare kind of a few phones that do this, if you have screen mirroring, if that's an option on your phone, you'll see that in that pane. For example, if you're an Apple user and you've got icloud synced up to your computer so you can access that stuff in photos, you'll see memories from icloud in there as well. So kind of bringing those things a little more closely together. But then there are several features that were specific to the dev channel. So a draft feature for copilot in Word, which I'm not sure why that's. Well, it's because it's a click to do feature, and that's a Windows 11 feature. But if you have a Microsoft 365 copilot subscription, have the desktop version of Word installed, you'll be able to use click to do to click on nothing and then draft a new document, right? It will actually help you get started. Usually you click on something and it does something with that text, but in this case, you'll click on nothing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Click on nothing, it says. Huh.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. Yeah, there are no text actions.

[Paul Thurrott]

What would you like to do?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, my God. So this is unrelated to what we're talking about. I just. But this just happened. So yesterday I was laying on the bed, I had two laptops open. Like I said, I've got dev channels.

[Paul Thurrott]

On as one does, one for the left hand, one for the right multiple.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I was setting something up over here, working over whatever it was, and my phone rings, right? So I pick up the phone, I'm like, hello. And I can't hear anything. But this has happened before. I know what's happening. I look at the computer. The computer has picked it up because I have phone link installed, right? Because I'm trying to get this phone companion thing on all the computers so I can write about it, whatever. And sure enough, there's a little dialogue that says. One of the buttons says, like, transfer to mobile device. So I'm like, I solved it. Like, I get it. Click. I'm like, hello. Nothing. Hello? I look at the thing. I go to the other laptop. It says, it's got the thing up. It says, transfer to mobilize. All right, I got this. So I click it over here. I'm like, hello. Nope, it was transferring back and forth. It never went to the phone. And I'm like, you got to be kidding me. I'm like, this is the best. If you want to understand Microsoft, just think about what I just said, how insane this is. So I literally had to close the laptops to get the. Well, I mean, I could have probably. Sorry. Other ways, but you know, this thing's the background processes. Not like closing the app doesn't really help. If you try to close that little thing, it will hang up the call like you get it. I'm like, so the. Anyway, I get to the person and this woman that I've never heard, that's.

[Paul Thurrott]

A very patient caller, I must say.

[Richard Campbell]

I thanked her for this. She was laughing so hard.

[Paul Thurrott]

She could tell this is what was happening.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. She said, I don't know exactly what you just did, but I know it had something to do with some laptops or something. And I'm like, yep. And I'm like, thank you for. Thank you for riding that with me. I'm like, I.

[Paul Thurrott]

So was she hearing you through the laptop microphone?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah. Because she's like. And she said, oh, now I can hear you really well. Before, you sounded like you were coming out of a tunnel. And I was like, yeah, that's what it sounds like when you're on a laptop microphone. Terrible. But she just sat there and let it happen. And I was like, thank you for waiting. You know, so that was.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know what, we're all modern people, we know how it is these days.

[Richard Campbell]

But how stupid. Seriously, like just honest to God. So I. Since I'm just on this topic, like we've been talking, we've been talking about click to do and so. And one of the things that's associated with this. We're going to talk about this a little more in a second. Is these app actions. Right? And so there are these. Chris. This is a leaf blower two feet from me now, blowing away, but we.

[Paul Thurrott]

Can hear it perfectly. That's the good news.

[Richard Campbell]

Good, good. That's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Who's outside now is guys with leaf blowers. That's the only people outside these days.

[Richard Campbell]

Exactly. Yeah. This is like the suburban dream. It's a quiet bucolic, you know, every day. Like. I know.

[Paul Thurrott]

And they're all working like one stroke engines, so they smell.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. They're disgusting. You think they would be flying around in Star wars things by now making no sounds. But no, they're louder than ever. There's more of them Anyway. So seriously, there are two related things happening in Windows 11. Some of this is Copilot plus PC specific. Some of it is just for everybody. Right. So you'll be able to right click on things that could be an image, it could be a text document and be able to get these text actions. This is extensible. So Microsoft has apps in Windows that support this, of course, but they are opening it up third party developers. So like something like Notion. I, you know, I'm just making this up, but I could click a text document, it could say, add this to Notion or something. Right? Okay, cool. I showed this to my wife this morning because it was just so outrageous. If you're familiar with Windows at all, you know that you can right click a file and you get this menu. This menu is shorter in Windows 11, or I should say it used to be, because it's about to get really long. And among the things that you could get in there were options like open with and then you get a list of, of apps that are compatible with that thing. You know, on a, on a submenu, like. Okay, so like when I right click a PDF file, I see various browsers and whatever else. Cool. The share also a lot of choices. And then now where they're getting these new things. So they're adding actions in there that are specific to apps that are in Windows. Right. So I get a Edit in Notepad option on. On a PDF file which actually I'm not sure, I'm not sure what that's for, but. Okay, fine. When I right click a. Just making sure it does it. Yeah, this is.

[Paul Thurrott]

You just sold your house in a contract. Don't worry about it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, it's fine. And I edited that thing in Notepad for some reason.

[Paul Thurrott]

So it's got the new DocuSign feature.

[Richard Campbell]

All right. I said earlier that the phone link thing where it's going between the two computers, but never to my phone was the most Microsoft thing ever. This is potentially even better, the most Microsoft thing ever. So when I right click an image file in Windows 11 now these are the options I see. And these vary a little bit by computer, but pretty much this is it. Ask Copilot. Okay. Edit with Climp Champ. Weird. That's a video editor. Edit in Notepad. Nope, that doesn't make any sense. Edit with Paint. Okay, fine. There's already an Open with, but that's fine. And then it says Photos and Photos has a submenu. So what do you. Why would it have a submenu? There must be multiple actions that Photos can do on this image. No, the submenu has one item. It just says Edit with Photos.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wait a minute. It's got a Edit with Photos menu that has a submenu that says Edit with Photos.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it's a Photos menu that has a sub menu with Edit with Photos. But the point is, next to that Photos main menu is an option that says Edit with Paint. Why doesn't it just say Edit with Photos? And why does it say Edit with Notepad? This is Microsoft. This is. If you're wondering why I sometimes appear to be insane, this is why. It's this stuff. It's the daily, illogical nature of everything I see in Windows. Breathtaking.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyhow, sorry, can't you. Am I wrong or didn't there used to be a folder that you could put stuff in for the right click context menu? Right. The send to folder or something like that.

[Richard Campbell]

Of course, that's probably still there some. Well, no, they don't really do send to anymore.

[Paul Thurrott]

So you could put an alias in there and it would send to.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they have Share. Right. And so up until two seconds ago, there was a share option that was an icon, but also an item in that context menu. Today, depending on which computer you have and where you're at and things that is also something that pops open a sub menu. So in my case, on this computer, whatever, I just. Right. Clicked it says Share with and then you go out and it says phone link, Outlook, Copilot, and then more options and more options launches that share pain, which.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

We've been dealing with since, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is briefcase on there?

[Richard Campbell]

No, it should be though. Yeah. Put that now copy to a floppy and bring it to a different computer. Yeah, Briefcase.

[Paul Thurrott]

Another thing kids don't know about is.

[Richard Campbell]

My briefcase or just, you know, turning off the entire Internet with an icon on your Windows 95 desktop.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You can't get on the Internet yet. You have to launch it.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm just seeing if this is. Oh, you know what, Leo, I apologize. In the classic menu that so is thus the menu in Windows 11 and can be reached in Windows 11 in a slightly more convoluted way. It does still say send to. So yeah, it's still like a vestigial.

[Paul Thurrott]

Somewhere there's a folder that you could put.

[Richard Campbell]

And of course it's like a Documents item that has like a Documents Library icon from Windows Vista. Because seriously, this is an archaeological dig of the past and what is happening. Wow, I love that. I can send it to the desktop and it says create shortcut parenthetically, because this Document is on the desktop and that's hilarious. Don't get me. Please don't make me go down this path. It's just what it is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Let's take a little break so people can try this at home.

[Richard Campbell]

Exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Just. It's like right click everywhere.

[Richard Campbell]

Stuff I did with Windows, you know, see what happens.

[Paul Thurrott]

I, you know, honestly, I kind of am starting to feel for you because as somebody's writing a book that is, in theory, going to document every feature of Windows you have. It's the. It's Sisyphus you have. There's no way.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can.

[Richard Campbell]

There is. You're right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Cleaning the Aegean stables.

[Richard Campbell]

This is me coping with the fact that I need to just give up. This is. This is impossible.

[Paul Thurrott]

It can't be documented.

[Richard Campbell]

Imagine. Imagine. Imagine I did it. Imagine this morning. I'm like, holy, I did it.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's done. I got it.

[Richard Campbell]

It's all done. I get an announcement. Microsoft's changing notepad. Microsoft's changing snipping tool on the desktop. Like it never ends.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can't finish this.

[Richard Campbell]

Nope.

[Paul Thurrott]

So what are you going to do?

[Richard Campbell]

I'm going to step in front of a bus. You know, I'm going to cut off.

[Paul Thurrott]

The soles of my shoes, get me a sailboat and sail around the world.

[Richard Campbell]

This is why people retire. You know, eventually you get too much of this. Right. At some point, it just like, you're like, am I making a difference?

[Paul Thurrott]

I was talking the other day about how for. In the early days of computing, I don't know if you experienced this. I felt like, it's a fire hose. I can't keep up. Everybody's ahead of me. I'm running as fast as I can and I can't keep up. But then it kind of last 10 years, it's been. I kind of. Oh, I caught up. It's like not changing that much, you know?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you know what, though? I don't actually think it ever slowed down. I think what happened for you and I both is that the stuff that we cared about, care about, the part of tech computing that is interesting to us was not the focus. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

So when enterprise cloud, whatever was happening, I was so happy to ignore most of that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, and not worry about it. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

It wasn't actually.

[Richard Campbell]

AI is happening. And guess what, baby, the spotlight is back.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we got pits.

[Richard Campbell]

You thought that was a fire hose. This is a tsunami.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, that's what I was going to say. It really is crazy now. I mean, it's just.

[Richard Campbell]

No it's insane. It has never been like it is now.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, I. Every week I'm preparing for Intelligent Machines. Coming up later, our AI show. And so I bookmark AI stories and it's. It is a. It's an endless. There's. Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

This was. I actually wrote an article about this because between all that protester stuff and all the announcements, it built and Google I O right in the middle of it and the 100, a million. Whatever they announced and whatever else was going on, at some point, those little bugs that turn into a little ball and they roll. It's like a little pill bug thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Pill bugs.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what happens to you eventually. You're overloading. You're like, I just can't. I can't function.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, here's the good news. Apple's keynote is coming up on Monday and they're not gonna say anything.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, that was why this week was so great. And then Notepad happened and I was like, what are you doing to me, Notepad? I just got over it. I just got over it. Not so much Notepad, but just like the response from other people like, hey.

[Paul Thurrott]

Paul, just think it. We have nothing to talk about, nothing to write about if things like that didn't happen. No, that's not true.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I. I'm not that kind of glass half full person. But I hear you. I mean, I hear it like I. You're right. I owe Microsoft a wonderful career.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. And thank goodness we've had to explain this.

[Richard Campbell]

Probably not going to go postal on a campus or anything, but I. But, you know, we'll see. We'll see what the future holds. It's hard to say.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's why he plays Call of Duty, folks. Gets it out of his system.

[Richard Campbell]

Work it out. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Let's take a break. When we come back, there is more to talk about. Actually. DMA changes for the. Because of the eu, but. But I don't know if we're going to get them here. There are earnings to report. Lots more coming up with Paul Thurat. You're watching Windows Weekly. Richard has the week off. He's on safari in South Africa. Our show today, brought to you by Threat Locker. You know, I mean, if you listen to our Tuesday show, Security now, you know what a crazy world it is. Ransomware is just killing us, harming businesses worldwide through phishing, emails, infected downloads, malicious websites, I mean, RDP exploits, who knows? You know, you don't. You don't know where it's coming from, but you don't Want to be the next victim. You need something that will protect you no matter what. You need Threat Lockers, zero Trust platform. How does it work? It's really simple. It takes a proactive and this is the key. Deny by default approach by default. It blocks every unauthorized action, protecting you from both known and unknown threats. You have to explicitly authorize something before somebody can do it. This works so well and it's one of the reasons that mission critical enterprises use Threat Locker. Businesses that can't go down, like JetBlue, right? Also infrastructure like the Port of Vancouver, they both JetBlue and the Port of Vancouver, they use Threat Locker because it shields them from zero day exploits and supply chain attacks. Exploits no one's ever heard of before. You know, brand new and, and, and real nice side benefit. You get a complete audit trail for compliance. Threat Locker, they call it their ring fencing technology. Really innovative. IT isolates critical applications from weaponization because bad guys can't use it, they're not authorized. It stops ransomware dead in its tracks. This is actually really important. It also limits lateral movement within the network because just, you know, perimeter defenses aren't perfect. If somebody gets in, you can't let them just do anything they want. And that's what Threat Locker does. It's what zero trust is all about. Threat Locker works in every industry. It supports Mac environments, they've got great 247 US based support. You get comprehensive visibility and control. Just, I mean talking about infrastructure, just ask Mark Tolson, he's the IT Director for the city of Champaign, Illinois. You know, city governments are highly targeted by ransomware. That ransomware guys love that. So what did he do? He got Threat Locker. He says, and I'm quoting quote, threat Locker provides that extra key to block anomalies that nothing else can do. If bad actors got in and tried to execute something, I take comfort in knowing Threat Locker will stop that. End quote. That's the point, right? Unless it's explicitly authorized, it doesn't happen. Stop worrying about cyber threats. Get unprecedented protection quickly, easily and cost effectively. By the way, I want to underscore cost effectively. I was shocked when I went to the site and I said really? That it's that affordable? Find out. Visit threatlocker.com twit. You can get a free 30 day trial. See how it works. See how easy it is to implement. And you know, sometimes people say, well, I don't know, zero trust. Am I going to feel like I can't do stuff? Oh no, no, it's perfect. You could do whatever you Want.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

But just the bad guys can't do stuff. Learn more about how Threat Locker can help mitigate unknown threats and ensure compliance. It's a great solution. Threatlocker.com TWIT threatlocker.com TWIT we thank him so much for supporting Windows Weekly. And of course, you support us when you use that address. So do threatlocker.com TWIT what are you laughing at, Paul?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, some discussion about half glass, full glass, half empty. I've told this story before. I apologize, I repeat myself a lot, but I literally said this in this moment. I don't remember what I was talking about. My wife looked at me and she says, this is many years ago. She's like, oh, you're. You're a real glass half empty kind of person. I'm like, glass half empty. I'm like, I finished the water and I see a crack in the bottom of the glass. Yes. And I'm just waiting for the internal bleeding to start. My glass is empty. I would give anything to be that positive. I. That's not even close. Oh, my God.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's a. There's a crack in the glass.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you know the old joke, an optimist says the glass is half full, a pessimist says the glass is half empty, an engineer says the glass is poorly designed. Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

That was. That was a very token laugh.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I. No, I was. I was. There were variants of that. I wasn't sure where you were going. I had a color version of that as well.

[Paul Thurrott]

But, yes, I know. All right, let's talk. The Digital Markets act is the EU's attempt to get big companies to toe the line.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So if you've been following this kind of these stories, you know that Apple's not following these rules. And Apple's gotten in a lot of trouble.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Microsoft, curiously, has just kind of rolled over. They're like, yep, no problem.

[Paul Thurrott]

They've been here before.

[Richard Campbell]

They know they're kind of the model you might want to follow. By the way, guys, Apple, that is so. Yeah, I mean, I don't know, about a year and a half ago, they have a page that describes all the changes they make to Windows for the DMA in the European economic area. Sometime between now and next couple of months, they're going to implement a bunch of more changes just based on feedback from the EU or whatever. And it's all stuff that everyone listening to this is going to want to have wherever they live. Like when you set the default browser, it actually sets the default browser for everything, not just a couple of things. And has a clear link for PDF as well. And doesn't make you go to Edge in certain circumstances. Like unless you chose Edge, obviously you can take any web search provider out of Windows Search, including the stuff that Microsoft builds in. You can uninstall the Microsoft Store, right, and it will still keep the apps up to date in the background. It just gets rid of the apps. So if you have apps that are included with Windows and they update through the store, that will still happen. It doesn't break it. This is kind of the old we can't take IE out of Windows that would break Windows kind of argument. So they got rid of that problem. And if you are using Bing or the Start Experience app, which is Jesus, what's wrong with you. But whatever, it will no longer keep prompting you to use Edge. It will just respect your choice and move on. And you read this and you think, yeah, this is what a DE and certified version of Windows 11 would look like. So the one thing Microsoft isn't doing is making these changes available to anyone outside of the, well, the European economic area. There are already third party utilities that basically configure Windows as if you were in the eu. And I suspect they will continue working. So there will be. This is worth, this is something I'm going to look into once these are all available. Like I want to see if we can just do this everywhere because you know, respecting your choice, I mean, what a concept. There's that. This is just interesting because of the Microsoft angle on this one. Bloomberg analyst Mark Gurman has got written more words about Apple this year than I think are warranted. But a lot of hand wringing over Apple Intelligence, what's going to happen at wwdc, blah blah, blah, who cares? But apparently they're going to drop the current version numbers that they use for iOS, iPadOs and all their major platforms and move to a year based system like the one Microsoft did in the mid-1990s. And by the way, they don't do that anymore for a reason. And the reason is everyone thought that the software they were using was always out of date because they didn't update their systems every single year. So Apple does. And I guess that's the theory. But the idea there is that now you have to, right, like no one's going to be wanting, you know, if you bring up your iPhone and it says, oh, you're using iOS, you know, 19 or something, and it's three years later, you're gonna be like, what's going on there. So I think that's kind of a weird problem.

[Paul Thurrott]

I brought that up yesterday on Mac Break Weekly. Like this was a lesson Microsoft learned when people were using Windows 95 in 1997. And yep, it's two years old.

[Richard Campbell]

But the other thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

But Apple does update every year.

[Richard Campbell]

They do, right. I think that one you can defend. There's the potential they might do this with the devices too. So the iPhone, they say everything is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Going to be 26. This is a rumor of course. We'll find out Monday.

[Richard Campbell]

So yeah, so right now, if you, if you follow this stuff closely and if you don't, you're normal, don't worry about it. But iOS and iPadOs are in the same version number. Mac OS, WatchOS, TVOs and Vision OS are all on their own, all different. They're all completely different. So this will line all those products up with the same number. By the way, Microsoft did that before too. They did that and I think it was 1993 when they took Word 5, PowerPoint 2, Excel, whatever it was on, did the next version and put them all in version six. Right. So I'm not saying Microsoft Innovator, Apple Copier, but I'm kind of saying that because it's fun. But you know, whatever. There's a reason Microsoft doesn't do the date thing though. I think Apple, I think they'll be okay. I think it's. It's probably okay. Plus I think there's some plan where they might start rolling out phones over a period of time. So that will still stay current. It will make sense. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're thinking of doing what Google does, which kind of the mid year release, that's fine. And the end of the year I.

[Richard Campbell]

Just thought it was. As I read this, I was like, man, where have I heard this before?

[Paul Thurrott]

I know I brought that up like 30 years ago.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't want to spend too much time on this. I mentioned there were at least three major controversies this week. I'm going to say there are actually four. Four, none of these are any of them. But I want to get by these so we can get to the next one. So Microsoft, all the big tech companies, earnings IDCs come out with predictions for PC sales this year. Lenovo gangbusters a couple weeks ago.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, we talked about Lenovo and then I just saw was it Dell did pretty well too.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, Dell, HP have both come in and then Nvidia, which is only kind of related on the side but, but.

[Paul Thurrott]

The other OEMs didn't do quite as well as Lenovo, but it is definitely an up market for PC sales. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Earnings are always interesting to me because I look at the numbers and I look at how they compare to a year ago. I look at whatever they provide. I'm very interested in the hard numbers. But the thing that sinks or swims for a company is often just what they say. It has nothing to do with the hard numbers. Right. And one of the problems I guess is, you know, HP has this really rigid accounting system and they're, they're honest and they were like, look, tariffs, uncertainty, blah, blah, blah. We just, we're just, look, we don't want to, you know, be too upbeat about the rest of the year because we really don't know how it's going to go. And their stock like fell off a cliff, you know, like that's what, even though they're doing fine, like they're doing fine, they're doing, you know, their PC business is doing, you know, not quite as well as Lenovo's, but almost as good. Dell, same thing. Like if you compare these two companies, not their total revenues because they're very different companies really, but the part that makes PCs, HP's PC business, 9 billion in revenues. Dell Smaller company, 12 billion.

[Paul Thurrott]

Bigger company.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, bigger, sorry, by market share I meant.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, okay. Yeah, but yeah, they made a lot more money.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And the vast majority of those sales from commercial PCs, not from the Dell consumer business has fallen off a cliff. I feel like it has to do with the xps and rebranding and everything is a Dell now. And what are you doing? Seriously? The most mental kind of rebranding thing I've ever seen. If you care about brands. But whatever. Nvidia is fascinating for all kinds of reasons. We know they're one of the biggest companies in the world now. They're, they've been doing not just double digit growth, but like high end double digit growth for a long time. Still doing that, although it is starting to slow. They took a $4.5 billion charge because of tariffs and still nailed it. And as a result their stock went through the roof because it's like these guys are killing it. You know, it's kind of interesting. Even though they're actually, you know, they're getting hit a little bit on stuff and there are rumors that Nvidia and Mediatek will be coming out with a, a chipset incorporates an Nvidia GPU that runs on ARM by the end of the year. So this, you know, we'll see, we'll See what happens there. Okay. That's earnings.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right.

[Richard Campbell]

So this is the second major controversy of the week. This one is a little vague because it was reported through Bloomberg. The guy involved in this confirmed it on LinkedIn. But there's like no details and there's all kinds of misnaming of things both on the part of Bloomberg and the guy from Microsoft, LinkedIn. So the current CEO of LinkedIn, Ryan Ruslansky, I believe he's been CEO for, I don't remember the time frame, but several years, is on the senior leadership team at Microsoft. But remember that LinkedIn is run as a standalone company. Right. It's run independently. It's not tied into Microsoft's earnings, although they do discuss it every quarter. It's not part of the central company. Like it's, you know, they bought this company, I think it was 26 billion ish, several years ago. They've been just letting it do its thing. This guy is going to run what he and Bloomberg both called Office. I'll remind you that there is no such thing as Office. Microsoft renamed. Well, the overreaching product brand is Microsoft 365. But the Office suite as we sort of knew it, is referred to as the Microsoft 365 apps or the Microsoft 365 desktop apps. So it's kind of bizarre. But he will report to. He used to be under Scott Guthrie. So this was intelligent cloud, the Azure cloud AI part of the company. He's now part of productivity and business processes, which is Microsoft 365, also the commercial side of Windows. He's going to be under Rajesh Jha, who the leader of the Windows team reports to. He used to sort of run Windows when we didn't have a direct leader of that business. He's, you know, he oversees a bunch of things. But Microsoft 365, let's say, let's say he described it as. Let me, I just want to get the way he worded it because it's very strange. He's going to continue to be the CEO of LinkedIn, an independent subsidiary of Microsoft, which he calls out. But he's also going to step into a broader role leading Microsoft Office and Microsoft 365 copilot. Okay, so I guess we're calling it Office again.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's so weird.

[Richard Campbell]

I know he refers to it as one of the most iconic product suites in history, although I would say it's not a lapse.

[Paul Thurrott]

It sounds like it's intentional.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Which is really, he says Office four or Six times in here. It's crazy.

[Paul Thurrott]

So it is intentional.

[Richard Campbell]

It's. Well, or he just literally has no idea what he's talking about. He's from LinkedIn. No, I mean that. I'm not being funny or whatever. I think this guy doesn't know what he's talking about, so I don't know what he's talking about. So, yes, the product suite. So this is what it used to be. Right. So Office was this thing that ran on Windows but also on the Mac. There's a web version, but now there are mobile versions of these apps. There's a lot of them. Actually. Copilot in the Microsoft 365 Sense is an app and a service that's part of that whole world. There are other components of Microsoft 365 that are, you know, I would call them server or cloud based, I guess, services. Right. He's not in charge of that. So I guess what he's referring to really is the, the client stuff. I don't think it's like Windows specifically. I think it's all of the clients. But again, I really don't think he knows what he's saying here. And he says, yeah, productivity, connection, AI, they're all converging at scale. Office and LinkedIn are utilizing used daily by professionals globally. Looking forward to redefining ourselves in this new world. I am looking forward to some clarity on this guy because I have no idea what he's talking about.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is like the new head of NOAA who said, what, we have a hurricane season in America?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bloomberg referred to Office as a bundle. I just mentioned that they aligned all the version numbers right back in 93, 94. That time frame, that's when it went from being a bundle to a suite. We haven't used the term bundle to describe Office since I was a child. That's not.

[Paul Thurrott]

Maybe you're reading. Check the date on this article.

[Richard Campbell]

I know the whole thing is crazy. I don't. Even according to Bloomberg, which I don't know where they got this from. Well, actually I do. I'm sorry. There was an internal email sent at Microsoft which I'm looking forward to seeing because I think that might provide some clarity. Bloomberg has seen it. They did not publish it. I have not seen it. It's not anywhere or it wasn't before the show started. So I think we'll see it eventually. But according to Bloomberg, and if you know anything about the world I'm part of here, you'll understand how crazy this sounds. Apparently they're not rolling out AI quickly enough in the Office apps, which is not what's happening. If you talk to any Microsoft customer, I think they would all tell you the same thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's pretty fast.

[Richard Campbell]

Slow down. Yeah, but to me, the big thing here is that if you go back to the beginning of 2024, which, remember, was right in the wake or in the midst of really, the. The Sam Altman Drama at OpenAI and what's going on there, and Microsoft bet so much. There have been at least three major reorgs at Microsoft based on AI. Right. There was the creation of the Microsoft AI organization, they called it this kind of weird group that sits outside of all the other groups and is led by. I forgot his name, sorry, Suleiman, the guy from.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah, yeah, Suleiman. Yeah, yeah. Mustafa Suleiman.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Moustaf. Thank you. I didn't write about this at the time, but I saw him at Build, and he was the guy who did the Day two keynote that got interrupted by the protesters. But Jay Parikh, who used to be the software. The. What do you call it? The head of engineering for Meta, is going to. They hired him in October to be the AI Apps czar. What are we just making stuff up now? Like, what are you talking about? I'm the king of AI. We have a Microsoft AI organization, we have an AI apps czar. And now the LinkedIn CEO is going to run what he calls Office. And I'm like, what is what? So, yeah, I'm.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look, these get vetted thoroughly, right? These kind of releases. There's no way this is an accident.

[Richard Campbell]

What he wrote on LinkedIn, you will agree this was not vetted in the slightest.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

The best part of this is there's. I don't know if you saw it. I linked to it in the.

[Paul Thurrott]

I can look. Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

There's a graphic that accompanies this. And it's, It's. It. I don't know what this is like. It's like the way people thinks it looks. And it's like a line that goes from school to insert, associate to manager to executive, and then it says how it can look. And it's like this mess of different ways with all these different points, and it's like, okay, what does this have to do with you running Office? Like, what? It's, It's. It doesn't make any sense. So it looks like a hat rack.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, just like that grass. Anyway, is this something to be promoting?

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know. Is this. This is what Office looks like at the top. And this is what it will look like by the time I'm done with it. Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

This was in his.

[Richard Campbell]

It will be more colorful. That's cool. I like that. Yeah, that's in the announcement. I know. I don't know. And he's going to run Office, so, Yeah, I feel good about it. I know. It's almost like someone realized I got enough sleep over the weekend or something. And they were like, no, he can't.

[Paul Thurrott]

He may not sleep any longer.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, geez.

[Paul Thurrott]

That is the weirdest picture I've ever seen. I don't know why you would put that in a business communication.

[Richard Campbell]

I just. I'm sure sometimes I communicate in a fashion where people like, I don't know what's going on with that guy, but this thing is just unhinged. I don't even. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see.

[Paul Thurrott]

And by the way, is this guy the right guy to run Office or. I'm sorry, I don't think.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it doesn't exist. Definitely put him in charge of the product line. It doesn't exist anymore. That's. That's exactly what he's good for. I don't know. Anyway, this LinkedIn thing that he wrote, it's like, this is the CEO of LinkedIn. It's like, on LinkedIn, like, making no sense. Which, honestly is the most LinkedIn thing I've ever seen, if I'm being honest. Did I not. What did I do? I didn't have. Oh, I have a wrong link in here. Like an idiot. That's okay. So sometime, I think it was about a month ago, I'm sure we talked about this at the time, but Microsoft announced that they were going to. Why do I not see this? Get rid of the password management and autofill features that are in the Microsoft Authenticator app. Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. That's a little weird, to be honest.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. And it's reasonable to ask, okay, why. Yeah. What's going on there? So just maybe they don't want to compete.

[Paul Thurrott]

Maybe. Are they worried about antitrust action?

[Richard Campbell]

I doubt it, but. So, you know, I think most people are familiar with the notion of authenticator apps. The Microsoft Authenticator app works particularly well with Microsoft accounts, meaning both the consumer Microsoft accounts and Enter ID accounts.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you have to have it, right? If you want to do.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's, it's. It's. I actually really like the way they do things because they mix it up. Right. So it's not always, like, to Type 1 of 3 codes. Sometimes it will send you a number and say, put that into the app. And sometimes they, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

But if you want to do passwordless for your login on the Windows, you have to use Authenticator, right?

[Richard Campbell]

You could use a. Well, you could use a passkey, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, you can. Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I mean, you could do that. Task keys complicate things in some ways.

[Paul Thurrott]

How would you do a passkey on Windows if you're not?

[Richard Campbell]

Because Windows can save passkeys, so you couldn't do it the first time you logged in. You would probably use it on the carrier app, or you could. Whatever your secondary verification was. But once you do that, it actually creates passkey and then you can use pass through there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Steve Gibson was really praising this move. I mean, I think this is an improvement in security. But he didn't. He said, but you have to use the Microsoft Authenticator app.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, look, there's a lot that goes into this. Honestly, it's better security, I think, frankly. Yeah. One of the little roundabout things you can get into is I use. What if I use Paul. I can't remember. Proton Pass, which. You know, password managers are really like identity managers, right. So obviously they do autofill on mobile. That's what they really do on desktop. But they do things like credit card numbers, obviously, or there's all this additional stuff. But one of the things they're starting to do is passkeys and passkeys. That gets you into a weird area because you don't really want only one app that does everything. Because, for example, you should be using 2fa to get into the password manager to begin with, and you don't want that in there.

[Paul Thurrott]

You wouldn't use passkeys to get into your passkeys either. That would be probably right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But one of the fun things I do on mobile is I'll be like, I'll open. Like, I did this yesterday, Private Vault, which is part of OneDrive, which is an app on mobile, and you go and you have to authenticate. So the Windows. The Microsoft Authenticator app comes up and then you put your thumbprint on, and then you're just in. And you're like, okay, so was that secure? I guess it was like. It feels weird sometimes, but it's important that these two things are separate, but also that you. Yeah, you don't want to have a million of these things around. You don't want to have. I mean, people. We talked about this at some point. You know, people move from browser to browser and they keep their password. They don't think about it. So the passwords are out there in a million different places. Probably.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyway, that's why you use a password manager.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. And by the way, I would add one word, well, one phrase to that, which is use a third party password manager. Don't use the Microsoft, the Google one, the Apple one. Like you want something that's going to work everywhere and identically everywhere and work well everywhere. We all know the big ones. But 1Password, Bitwarden Dashlane and the 1.

[Paul Thurrott]

1Password and Bitwarden are both sponsors.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. But they are the best. Right. So any of those are fine. And they work everywhere. That's really the point. And they're seamless.

[Paul Thurrott]

And they do passkeys too, which is.

[Richard Campbell]

Passkeys are fantastic. I love passkeys on I sign into my password manager and then I sign into my Google account and the passkey choices come up and I select the one I want and I'm in. It's the best, actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

For some reason, our workspace account, I think passkeys are not enabled by default in Google Workspace. So I had to talk to our IT guy and I said, can you enable that? And he said, yeah, it's for some reason Google, who is a big supporter of passkey, says is still in beta in the enterprise. Which is weird, but I was surprised. Yesterday I logged into. I was logging into Wired and I have a Conde NAS subscription.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

They support passkeys now.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, directly. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Which is really good. I mean, more and more places are supporting passkeys.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. A good password manager will tell you when one of the things, one of the accounts that it's protecting has a better way to authenticate. Yeah. So maybe it's a two FA thing and an authenticator app. Maybe it's a passkey. Whatever it is, like it will actually tell you. So the goal is to automate that as much as possible. Do the right thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Every time Fast Mail uses passkeys. I use passkeys wherever I can get.

[Richard Campbell]

How to. Like Amazon uses passkeys. Amazon was an early adopter of passkeys. They do a good job. But I also have it set up in such a way that I will use my passkey and then it sends me an OTP on my phone anyway. Or Adobe, which is hilarious, will send me. You put your username in and then it sends you a. It's like, do you have a passkey? I'm like, yes, I use the passkey. This is. Okay, good. Now enter your password.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, no.

[Richard Campbell]

Like Adobe is The worst, like they're just stupid.

[Paul Thurrott]

See, I really want ways to delete. This is why I thought what Microsoft did with Passwordless was very cool because it really emphasized you don't need a password because Passkeys is even more secure.

[Richard Campbell]

It's better not to have it. It's one less app.

[Paul Thurrott]

Better not to have it. That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

So the two things I just wanted to communicate about this because the reason I mentioned this today is they've started alerting people in the app. So if you use my Microsoft Authenticator, you will have seen a pop up that says, hey, by the way, this is going away. Here's what you can do or whatever. And what you can do is not ever use Microsoft password management. Jesus, come on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like.

[Richard Campbell]

So the first one is third party password manager and I listed the good ones. But the second one is to use this app solely for Microsoft account authentication purposes. You know, two FA verification. It's awesome for that. The one thing it doesn't do is have any sort of cloud sync. And there's some controversy here because the Google one doesn't have true end to end encryption, but it is actually encrypted at rest and in transit and all that stuff. But Google Authenticator saves it to your account. And what I have to say, I just, I love signing into my Google account on the phone and just getting it. Like I don't have to recreate it, I don't have to back up and restore. The problem with that stuff is sometimes you maybe lose your phone or whatever or something's wrong and like manually going back, which I've done so many times, creating all of those accounts again in an Authenticator app is a nightmare. It's possible. I mean, I've done it a bunch, but having it sync is, I don't know, that might outweigh the small fear you might have about whatever. But the question I think people are asking is, well, why are they doing this? Right? If you're in the Microsoft ecosystem and you use Microsoft products and you're on mobile, so you're using an iPhone or Android, you've probably seen you can use Microsoft Edge the browser or Microsoft Authenticator the app as your autofill provider for passwords and whatever else, they're working off the same backend data store. So the fact that they're removing this capability from Authenticator suggests to me that maybe they're trying to push people to edge, right? Like, yeah, but here's the thing. You can just install Edge sign in with your Microsoft account because it's going to auto go through. Right. You've already done this authentication work on the phone. It will have the passwords in there and then you can pass them through. You can use that for autofill. But don't do that really, because get rid of the Microsoft thing and use third party. Yes, don't use that. But, but you could do that. So my, my guess is that that's why. But I don't.

[Paul Thurrott]

And most, by the way, good third party password managers will import those Edge passwords. So you could move it over to Edge.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And, and import it and then delete them from.

[Richard Campbell]

This is very standard. So all password managers support the same format for import export.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And then there's, you know, a lot.

[Paul Thurrott]

Of times they say, hey, do you want me to move all your bitwarden used to do this. You want me to move all the passwords out of Chrome or Edge or Firefox?

[Richard Campbell]

If you are using Authenticator. And well, they'll get. Microsoft will do the work for you. They'll actually delete those. Right. So they're going to. Well, except they won't delete them from the cloud. So you can't. In the Authenticator app, go and select all delete.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh really?

[Richard Campbell]

But you can in Microsoft Edge, at least in the desktop version of the browser. So do that, use it that one time for that, install Chrome and then never use it again. That's the best.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the best policy. But that's just me.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

So. And speaking of things people love, the new Outlook for Windows is now on a monthly update cadence and they're actually starting to add features that people really want, like the ability to disable Copilot. Right. Which is probably the big one. But also they're starting to implement this Pst file support, which is one of the biggest complaints that, you know, people have. In the 1990s, I literally like 97, 98, I carried around a PST file in a floppy disk in my pocket because these things were so unreliable when the Outlook first came out. I had to have a backup of this thing. And it was everything, it was your whole life in a PST thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, right.

[Richard Campbell]

So psd, they changed the format at one point, but PST is carried through this entire time. It's still a major part of the desktop, the old version, the classic version of ola, and they're starting to add that compatibility to the new version so they can phase out the old version. So that's starting to happen. If your consumer account. You can move emails between accounts. That's something that didn't work before. Better offline support. So instead of seven days of email by default for offline use, it's 30 days now, that kind of stuff. So it's getting there. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I am saying you complain too much. Back in, I don't know, maybe March, February, something like that. Oh, it must have been March, because I think it was part of the big copa copilot wave. Two announcements Microsoft announced these two AI Reasoning Agents researcher and analyst for Microsoft 365 copilot. Those are both generally available. I'm surprised they don't have one called legal or lawyer, you know, which is maybe as necessary at this point because people seem to be using that a little too much. But these are the things where these agents will go out on your behalf and research, you know, deep topics and come back after some period of time and do that kind of analytical work. So I, I don't have much experience with this other than that I, I did something like this in Gemini where I have the standard query, I ask all AI agents just to compare the results. And when I did this with Gemini, it provided me with the same results but just a lot slower. So if you feel like you need that waiting period, I guess this is the way to go. So that's part of that. Again months ago, I don't remember the timing of anything, but OpenAI blew everyone away several months ago when they announced that Sora tool for transforming text prompts into videos. Since then, of course, Google just did their VAIO stuff at I O. That was amazing. Microsoft has a history now of taking paid OpenAI products and making them available for free and sometimes in limited form. So. So there's now a Sora based Bing video creator that transforms text prompts into short videos. Lots of limitations on this compared to the OpenAI tool. So it's on the phone only. So you have to install the Bing app for now. So they finally figured out a way to get people to install Bing. It's pretty cool actually. It's free. It's only on your phone right now. It only does like 9 by 16 portrait videos. It will do 16 by 9 soon. It's limited to 5 seconds in length for videos where SAR is 60 seconds. And the free version can only make 10 of these at the fast speed every month. After which you can just use standard speed or you can. Actually speaking of Zune, you can spend Microsoft reward points to make more videos at Fast speed. Geez. Seriously, I don't know. The language of this stuff is, is so insane. Basically getting AI credits with Microsoft reward points, which is a nonsense sentence. I'm sorry I said it. But it's in the phone, it's coming to the web. So you'll be able to do it on a desktop soon. They'll do 16 by 9 soon. I assume they're going to expand the availability to be longer videos, maybe for people to pay or whatever it is. But I have to say I did make a couple of videos with this. It's pretty cool. I've been doing this with the Firefly stuff that Adobe offers through Creative Cloud, which is kind of amazing because in that case one of the options you can actually choose between, I think they call it graphics or images and photorealistic or whatever. And the photorealistic ones are like yikes. They're actually, they're pretty good. But look at this. I mean this is worth looking at. It's pretty cool. It's not there today, but soon if you go to bing.com create you'll be able to access it there on the web as well.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay, a couple more real quick. These are just kind of industry stuff. New York Times infamously is suing OpenAI Microsoft for copyright infringement. They did a pretty good job of demonstrating that these things stole from their paywalled content, but okay, we'll see what happens there. But this past week they announced a licensing agreement with Amazon. So Amazon's going to be able to use content from the New York Times across its AI platform. So for training but also in their end user products. So we're going to be seeing this in Alexa based implementation somehow. So if you have an echo speaker or whatever, you'll be getting the horrible news that the New York Times writes. So have fun with that. This one's just a rumor, but this is interesting to me because Samsung is such a big partner with Google on Android and Android 16. There's a whole like Samsung interplay thing there going on where like live notifications, which are very similar to that Dynamic island thing on the iPhone, is appearing first on Samsung but going to be part of Android. They're doing desktop mode which is based on Plex and the improvements Google made are feeding back into Plex and is not Plex. I'm sorry Dex. The desktop environment. It's really interesting. But according to again, Mark Gurman, Samsung and Perplexity could announce an integration agreement on their devices that could start as early as the S26.6 devices and if that happens, this might be the default AI on Samsung's devices, not Gemini. So that's kind of. It's interesting. And maybe they're just playing the two companies against each other, I don't know. But I did not expect to see that. If anything, I thought these guys were getting closer together. I don't know. I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

I like your AI generated picture for these New York Times. Amazon thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, if you search my site for New York Times, you'll actually see 2, 3, 5, whatever images like that. Because every time I do a New York Times article like this, I use that AI thing and they actually look like they're of a family of AI robots or something. It's kind of funny.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're all in the family together. How cute is that?

[Richard Campbell]

The last one, the robot was stealing the paper and running away from the paperboy because they were stealing the content.

[Paul Thurrott]

But now. Oh, that's good. I like that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

What do you use to do?

[Richard Campbell]

This is that copilot, Microsoft Designer, which is the. It's OpenAI based but through Microsoft. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okie dokie. Let's see. I guess we've got an Xbox segment coming up. Are you ready? Let's do a brief sponsor mention and then we will get into. Now why is that doing that? I don't want to see that. I want to see me. There we go. So let's get into the Xbox news. What are we going to do in replacing the Whiskey Pit? Because Richard's not here, I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

All right, actually I'm going to talk about spritzers a little bit. I didn't put this in the notes, but this is something. There's been these interesting trends that occurring in cocktails that have occurred this year that I think are maybe worth mentioning.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right, good. I like that.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's spritz Spritzes.

[Paul Thurrott]

We have shrubs. You ever have a shrub?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's like getting. It's like Zune squirting. It's like, can you spritz me with your Zunic beverage? I sprung a leak. I don't know what's going on here.

[Paul Thurrott]

Spritzing. All right, this episode of Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat brought to you by US Cloud. You've heard me talk about those wonderful people. The number one Microsoft unified support replacement. You know, it's, it's funny because when I first met him, I said, what do you have to do with the cloud? No, no, no. We replace. We are the Global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. Oh, okay. Supporting 50 of the Fortune 500. Now I feel dumb. You, like, are the big guys, right? Well, here's why. Switching to US Cloud can save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft's Unified or Premier support. 30 to 50%. Of course, saving money wouldn't be any good if it weren't as good as Microsoft. How about if it's better? It's faster, twice as fast. Average time to resolution versus Microsoft. And US Cloud has the best engineers. You're getting support from the smartest best US based engineers. I said, how do you do that? They said, we have great benefits, great salaries, we attract the best people, which means you get the best support. But there's another thing US Cloud does, and I somehow doubt Microsoft will ever do this. They'll help you save on your Azure expenses. Yeah, Microsoft's not interested in that one. US Cloud will though. They have a brand new offering, their Azure cost optimization services. When was the last time you evaluated your Azure usage? I mean, we can, we're among friends here. It's. I know. You know, you got other things to worry about. It's probably been a while. Which means you probably have some Azure sprawl going on. A little spend creep, right? Well, the good news is US Cloud makes it easier than ever to save on Azure. They offer an eight week Azure engagement. It's powered by VBox. It'll identify key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. And you're going to get expert guidance from those brilliant US cloud senior engineers with an average of over 16 years experience with Microsoft products. They know their stuff. At the end of eight weeks, your interactive dashboard will identify, rebuild and downscale opportunities, unused resources. You'll go, wow, I'm going to really save without in any way reducing my Azure capabilities right now. You could take that money, reallocate it. Those ID dollars, I know they're precious towards things you really need. You know one way you could keep the savings going? You could invest your Azure savings in US Cloud's Microsoft support like a few of US Cloud's other customers. Completely eliminate your Unified spend. Let the savings continue. Here's somebody who did this, Sam. He's the technical Operations manager at Bede Gaming, B E D E Gaming and he gave US Cloud five star six. This is his review 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 spent on Azure. But once you get to 40 or $50,000 a month. It really starts to add up. Yeah, you bet. It's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure, identify and eliminate Azure creep and boost your performance all in eight weeks with US Cloud. Visit uscloud.com right now, book a call, find out how much your team can save. That's uscloud.com to book a call today and get faster Microsoft support for less. Can I also say better, faster, Better Microsoft support for less. Thank you usCloud for supporting Windows Weekly. A lot of customers of Microsoft support here. I would betcha. I'd betcha. Let's Talk Xbox Gaming. Mr. Paul Thurot.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. This is the fourth of the four big controversial stories from this week. Wow. Yeah. There's a report in Windows Central that Microsoft has now delayed its first party Xbox, Windows Gaming handheld, which could have come out as soon as this. This holiday season they're going to focus on the third party stuff. We know there are at least a couple of companies that will come out with these things. Right now they're Windows handheld gaming devices. Right. They're not really Xbox. But I'm not sure what to say here. I'm not sure how many more delays or holding patterns or whatever you want to call it that Xbox can withstand as a platform. But here we are. I have this now long running theory that Microsoft wants to base Xbox as a hardware platform around arm. Right. And this is based on some leaks that came out a couple years ago around the Xbox platform. They were looking at the time at making the next Xbox console be ARM based. And you know, today that's Snapdragon, the Qualcomm chipset, which the second gen of will be announced in September and we'll see what that entails. But one of the big expectations and rumors is that much more powerful graphics. Graphics. Right. Which will help with that sort of thing because all the existing Windows games have to be emulated. That's a problem. And you know, they've done some stuff in the platform to make it easier like Auto SR and so forth, but you know, that needs to improve. And then the part I've kind of added to this, the part that I just sort of thought of was well, if they're going to do that, it would make sense to have a consolidated Xbox platform that ran, you know, across PC and the console. Right. That the next gen software platform, you know, they could do it as a requirement of developers who create games for Windows and, or Xbox or both. Right. That these should be maybe the same thing. It should be the Same platform. And of course, you know, for developers, I mean, I don't mean to say all that would mean is, but what that would mean is that, you know, if you're in the store, you're in the Xbox platform, you're going to target ARM. But it would also run on X64, of course. Right. And that will always run great, that's no problem. But it would just kind of add that ARM compatibility dynamic and I think that is what would put a handheld gaming machine over the top for sure. Right. Because you know, one of the things we've heard a lot, but especially this past week, is that if you have like a Steam Deck or a. I'm not sure which of the third party devices, but I think it's the Lenovo device where you can get SteamOS or Windows. SteamOS runs way better, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh really?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, because it's based on Linux, it's lighter weight, better battery life, et cetera. The trade off there is that the selection of games isn't as big. So if you can live with what's available through Steam, the Steam store, and thus on Steam Deck, Linux, which is not horrible by the way, but is a subset of what's available.

[Paul Thurrott]

The Steam deck was originally Linux and the least was originally Windows.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. But you could, you can mix them. Yeah. So if you have a Steam deck, you could install Windows.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

If you have a. I forget which one it is. The Legion, I guess the Lenovo, you choose between the two and I guess if you get Windows you could install Steam os. Right. And what people are finding is if they install SteamOS, it starts working a lot better. So this is a problem. This has been a problem. You know, Windows is a big general purpose thing. It does everything right. So Xbox, if you think about the Xbox platform we've had since Xbox one, so whatever 2011 or 2013, whatever year that was. This is Hyper V Windows based, you know, where, you know, you have a couple things running at once. So it's, it is stripped down. Is there some version of Windows, you know, that would make sense on both window or. Well, Windows or the Xbox console that would actually run the same apps and games? Well, games really. Right. Games are the big thing. Maybe. We'll see. So for now we're in this little bit of a blip and I'm not sure if it's real or not. So for whatever reason, handheld gaming PCs, to be clear, this is the thing that's a screen with the two halves of the controller, like a Steam Deck type device or Like a Nintendo Switch type device are kind of a, you know, they're having a moment, right. I don't know how big of a market this is. I don't know how sustainable a long term it is. I'm worried that this could be like netbooks or mini tablets where the compromise is too great and they don't have any staying power. And for a brief period of time it's like, oh my God, this is going to rejuvenate the industry. And I just don't, I'm not sure that's the case. There's also something, yeah, I did put this in the notes, thankfully. I've heard now from two different sources that there are going to be more layoffs at Microsoft this month. A lot of it's going to be in the Xbox area and that Amy Hood is casting more of a serious eye on businesses that are not profitable. And Satya Nadella has always kind of demanded this, but now it's like, okay, you've had X number of years, show us the money. If you're not going to make it, then you're going to have to make further cuts. It's possible that this handheld gaming thing fell to that, that maybe Phil Spencer went before this. I'm just making this up by the way. I don't know that this happened but that he went to possibly he would have to go to the senior leadership team and say we would like to make this device. And they would say yeah, tell us last time we made hardware that was profitable because no one can remember that day and it was probably 1983 with that apple add in card for CPM long time ago. And they said no. And that might be part of it, but it also might be this holding pattern thing. Like really what you want is not a halfway device that's still running on x86 that runs slower than the Steam deck. That looks bad by comparison. Maybe what you really want is the ARM based thing which requires all the platform updates, requires the next gen hardware. Maybe it's MediaTek plus Nvidia, maybe it's Snapdragon, maybe it's Snapdragon plus Nvidia, by the way, because that's something we already see through that Dell workstation that we mentioned a few weeks ago. So, so we can only speculate. But if this report is true, and I don't have any reason to doubt it, you know, if you had your hopes set on this, I would, you know, maybe scale them back unfortunately. So yes, in slightly better news, a couple years ago there was a Group of quality assurance workers that were part of ZeniMax, which is a Microsoft owned game studio that was part of Bethesda, still is part of Bethesda, but owned by Microsoft that wanted to unionize. And Microsoft was like, yeah, okay, we'll support that. And they've spent the past two years in negotiations over this new contract and unionization and Microsoft has agreed to their demands or whatever. So it took a while and it still has to be ratified by the union. But what this gives them is basically everything they were asking for, right? Which is protection against being dismissed, arbitrarily grievance procedures in game, credit it for the work they did in the game, which is pretty cool, right? Like kind of original Activision type stuff. There's a separate AI agreement that they reached earlier, which is basically that Microsoft can't just come down and fire everyone, say, sorry, we have AI now for this. They have to give employees a chance to show that maybe they could use the AI to do their work or et cetera. They're not just going to get rid of people for that reason. But the big one to me is actually just pay. So the minimum salary going into this was a little over or almost $21 per hour. That goes up to 25 immediately and it's going to go up again to 28 and some change in just a couple of months. So basically it's a big pay raise too. Well, at least on the base level employees. So there are other unionization processes occurring. There's an Activision Blizzard or an Activision QA team that also voted to unionize and we'll see how that goes. And then Raven, which I can't follow the trajectory of this stuff anymore. But Raven was a company that was created to build games based on the early ID software stuff. Remember they had like Heretic and Hexen that were based on the Doom engines is through whatever series of acquisitions is part of Activision is actually suing Activision and Microsoft Corp. As the corporate parent because of bad fate bargaining practices. There's all kinds of stuff going on with unions, but a little bit of good news in there too. And then this one, this is kind of a weird one to me. Jay Allard should be best known as being, I believe, the earliest or maybe one of the earliest people to try to wake Bill Gates up to the Internet in the early 1990s.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, that was. He wrote that memoir.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, he was one of three people who played key roles in that. And it's not clear to me just off the top of my head which one was actually first. But I think it might be Jay Allard. But he was ignored for a long time. But he was right.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's best known as the man behind the Xbox.

[Richard Campbell]

That's right, yeah. So he played a major role in the Xbox. He also played a major role in the Zune, which I think counterbalances that nicely. But it's weird to me that he's probably best known among enthusiasts for having created this thing called the Courier tablet, which.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's so funny. On Sunday we were talking about it because we had Lumareska from Microsoft on and he knew the whole story. Yeah, we talked about Courier.

[Richard Campbell]

This is worth. If you're interested in Courier, if you actually believe that this thing ever made any sense or was going to make a difference in the world, strongly recommend reading the Stephen Sinofsky book again. This comes up twice. Stephen was unfairly accused of killing this project.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's what we said on Sunday. It was Stephen that did it, you know, because he didn't want another Windows. He was in charge of Windows. He didn't want another computer.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, this is before that. It was actually office related. What he did, he was like, oh, no, no, I'm sorry, I'm mixing these things up. Sorry, sorry. The office thing was. Sorry, I forget something else. It's a different project. Yeah, this one was Windows, but he's like, what is this thing? Like, this is not running our platform. Is there an app?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, it was supposed to be that new Windows, right? What was it? Windows?

[Richard Campbell]

It was just a concept drawing. There was never like a thing. They never came up, like, here's the hardware, here's the, you know, this made it up. But people are like, oh, if they had just done this, they would have won everything. And it's like, yeah, Microsoft actually has a rich history of inventing things and not bringing them to market or bringing them to market and failing and then something else takes off. Right. And so look, I'm sorry, but this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Would have made it. They later did release kind of a Courier like device.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you talk about the Surface Duo thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

The Duo, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I was just too little too late in the long. Yeah. Oh, there are folding devices now. Good. Let's put a two screen device and.

[Paul Thurrott]

They did that tv, that phone with a two screen.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the duo. Yeah. Well, you're talking about Neo. Neo is the one they never released. They never released Neo, Never released that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Stupid. It was a stupid idea. So. Yes. Anyway, Jay Allard, for whatever reason, I kind of bugs me because he did some great things. I think most people kind of know him for courier, but. But what people might not realize is this guy kind of disappeared and he's one of. Actually it might have been thousands. I know so many people who worked at or were executives at Microsoft left the company and they went to Amazon.

[Paul Thurrott]

And a lot of them are they following Panos Panay?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, Jay Allard is not. But interestingly since Panos Panay did this, Ralph Groen, who was the head of the design team for Surface originally and then Windows and Devices has since followed him there. And Jay Allard last, I think it was last, I don't know, October ish also revealed he is also working at Amazon. It has nothing to do with Panospanay per se, although probably related. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because he's, he's on the Devices and Services team. I think he'll be working for Panos.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, so they're probably working together, but yeah, so this is not really getting the gang back together. These guys never worked together or anything like that. If anything, they were probably butting heads at one point if they ever even interacted. But it doesn't really matter. The one thing they both have in common is they both have failed hardware that they made for Microsoft. So have fun at Amazon.

[Paul Thurrott]

But they're good hardware guys. I think Amazon needs hardware guys.

[Richard Campbell]

So my issue here is only that Amazon doesn't make good hardware. So it's like the story with Panos as I understand it, this is not necessarily a fact, but this is what I've been told and I've heard this from multiple people is, you know, they were making cuts. And he's like, I can't be here if we're not going to. We have to do all the stuff I want. You know, he had all these ideas and they were like, yeah, we can't do that. You're not making any money. And it's like, so where do you go? You go to this company that has even less money. Well, I should say has less money. They're willing to spend on anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. And they pay plenty of money. But they're not spending it on Echo.

[Richard Campbell]

They'Re not spending it on Devices. So you know, look, they could surprise me. We'll see. But it is interesting. The thing he's working on, I just, I hate this. This is like an Apple phrase according to a. This is a third party report. Right. This is not like he didn't say this himself, but he is overseeing a team. Well, actually maybe he did say this, this is jl. And he probably did say this. They're working on Breakthrough consumer products. Okay. So everyone's like, I hope it's the courier tablet. And I'm like, you know what? I do too. I hope it is too.

[Paul Thurrott]

That would be funny.

[Richard Campbell]

That would be great.

[Paul Thurrott]

He's on the 01 team. Which I think is related to the always day one memo that Amazon's famous for.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. Adobe's the zero part of that. But yeah, go on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Breakthrough consumer products. You know what? I'd like to see that from Amazon.

[Richard Campbell]

Here's a fun fact about jail. It briefly worked at Intellivision. Yeah. So. And those guys are going gangbusters. So he's like the Midas touch.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think Xbox did okay under him. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Maybe not the Zun.

[Richard Campbell]

If you want to look at the red ring of death, there's a little cabal of characters there that he is one of.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's a good point.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, I don't know, but he's part of it. I mean, look, the whole point of Xbox, which was they had. They'd gone from Winji to DirectX and they were like, we got to build hardware around this. And the decision was, do we make this a Windows PC, which is how they went with Media center and tablet PC, or do we go the device route? And he kind of. It's interesting because you would call that the device route, but the first Xbox was a PC. Right. It was a Intel Celeron. It was a PC. I mean, it just was a PC.

[Paul Thurrott]

Was it running Windows or Windows ce?

[Richard Campbell]

Windows ce. But the hardware was. Well, yeah, I'm not even sure it was Windows C, but the hardware was just straight up intel x86. It was a Celeron processor, it was a hard drive. It was, you know, x86. So anyway, it's okay. I guess all I'm really saying is I wouldn't bet your life on this. You know, don't get too excited. But it is happening. It's worth knowing about.

[Paul Thurrott]

I would like to see Amazon do something interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

I would too. I just bought a Kindle Fire tablet just to check in and yep, they're just as terrible as I remember. They're awful.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're awful. You know, I like the Kindle Scribe, but I mostly use a Kobo Reader, a competitor, because I would read on.

[Richard Campbell]

A Kindle if I could actually run apps, even if it was a little slow, just for reading. But it's just Kindle And I'm like. But I read here, here, and here, you know, so.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, that's that old thing. I wish they still had the New York Times, you know, on it. And I wish you used to be able to have a daily mail from Pocket. I think it was Chris.

[Richard Campbell]

Pocket. Still do, by the way. Still do. No, but Pocket's gone. But that newsletter is going to persist, so that's.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, good.

[Richard Campbell]

You can still look at that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, how will I send it?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you can't save it to Pocket, Leo. You could. I mean, I just open them in a browser and save it to Instapaper.

[Paul Thurrott]

There you go.

[Richard Campbell]

You can do different things.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right. Well done. Bravo. A fabulous Xbox segment. We are going to get to the back of the book in just a second. Paul Thurat is here. Richard Campbell is. He's. You know, I realized. He says he's on safari in South Africa, but I also realized the Edmonton Oilers will be playing in game one of the Stanley cup finals.

[Richard Campbell]

You're gonna see him on TV in the final.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think he'll be at Roger's place.

[Richard Campbell]

It's like, my son was on curfew or whatever. He was in trouble for something. And my wife was like, you can go to the gym, but you have to send us a picture from the gym. So he sent a photo, and we both saw it. We're like, yeah, okay. And then my wife's like, hold on a second. And she zoned down on the TV in the background, and. And it was a Patriots game on tv, and it was August or July or something. She goes, nope. So I looked it up on the Apple I. Whatever the I thing was called at the time. And he was, like, behind a building with his friends in the Scooby van. And I was like, all right, I'm gonna go get him, kids. So maybe he's doing that. I don't know. I don't know.

[Paul Thurrott]

I remember somebody posting on Twitter a picture of a flat tire and said, just save this for the next time you're late to work.

[Richard Campbell]

Exactly. But it's snowing in the picture. I don't understand. I know it's crazy out. That's why we got in the car accident.

[Paul Thurrott]

Back of the book, just around the corner. But, ladies and gentlemen, first I want to put a little plug in for something we like to call Club Twit. The best darn club in the world. We'd love to have you as a member of Club Twit. It still says $7 a month on here. That's the Legacy pricing. It is now, if you are not yet a member, $10 a month. I warned you. I warned you that we were going to be raising prices. I think it's still a hell of a deal. At 10 bucks a month you get so much. Let me just. Why does it say that? Let me show it again. Now. It says $10 a month. You get so much for your 10 bucks. $120 a year ad free versions of this show. But every other show we do, that's a lot of content. You also get access to the wonderful club Twit Discord, which is a great hangout for everybody whether you're watching a show or not. Because the Discord is full of people like you who are having a great time talking about all the things geeks are interested in. We also do a lot of events in the Discord. In fact, the next event will be the worldwide developers. Oh, wait a minute. No. The next event's Friday. Our AI user group at 2pm Pacific, 5pm Eastern. I think Lou Mareska is going to join us. Anthony Nielsen, we're going to do a little vibe, show you what vibe coding looks like. Darren, I hope you'll join me as well. Darren Okey in our chat room does a lot of vibe coding. I saw Darren that Morgan Stanley said they've been using AI to save a lot of money. I have a feeling that Darren had a little something to do with that. That's just the caliber of people you get in the club. Twit Discord. Really fun people in there. WWDC will be in the club only now we would change how we do our keynote. You might have noticed that build was in the club only, as was Google I O To avoid takedowns on YouTube and Twitch, which has happened with Apple. We decided, you know, we're just going to do it all in private for the club so you get special velvet rope access. Monday, Micah Sargent and I are bringing our lunchboxes because we're not only going to do the 10am Big public keynote, we're also going to do the 1pm State of the Union keynote which is really more developer focused. So that's going to be a lot of. You have to be a club member to see that. If you can't be there live on Monday, we will put it in the Twit plus feed. Again, club members only. We've got a photo time coming up on June 13th with Chris Marquardt, Micah's crafting corner. There's lots of special events. We've got a Stacy's Book Club around the corner. Yes, you are fun. You club Twit members. It's exclusive, but it's not expensive. $10 a month. If you want to know more, please join the club. It makes a big difference to us. Yes, we have advertising that only covers about 75% of our costs. The club makes up the other 25%. That's how important it is to us. Without the club, we'd have to cut shows, cut staff. We don't want to do that. Help us make the programming you love. It's kind of like casting a vote to support what we do here at twit. Twit TV Club Twitch. Join the club. We'd love to have you this episode brought to you by Red Canary when cybersecurity threats hit fast, you need an MDR partner that moves faster. Red Canary delivers 24.7expert MDR support, total visibility and actionable insights. Plus it helps you detect four times more threats so you can stay ahead without burning out. Red Canary clears the noise and has your back every hour, every incident. Get the backup you deserve. Visit redcanary.com, 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. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know if you knew this.

[Paul Thurrott]

But anyone can get the same Premium Wireless for $15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities, so do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do.

[Richard Campbell]

@Mintmobile.Com Switch upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to DOL dollars per month required intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.

[Paul Thurrott]

See full [e-mail] now to the back of the book. Welcome to the family, Paul. Well, let's see. Let's start with the tip, shall we?

[Richard Campbell]

Indeed. Yeah. So one, I, you know, if you think back to February when I was visiting Richard in Puerto Vallarta.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Google, YouTube, whatever. Like cut me off from my YouTube channel and separated me from the content that's there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Shocked?

[Richard Campbell]

No warning? No. Hey, could you change this thing or fix something or whatever it was they were looking for? I have no idea. They never came up with an answer. They were useless. I would have gotten locked out of that forever. I just got lucky that Brad had a assigning like a 2fa authenticator in his authenticator like from 5 years ago. Like he just like sitting there on you, like just in there. And he was like, this is a long shot. But he's like, I used to, I think I used to use this. Let me look. And he's like, oh my God, it's in there. Oh geez. Here we go. Oh my God. What are you doing? My phone just, I don't remember.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is that Brad?

[Richard Campbell]

No, the phone just said it sounds like you had a really difficult.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, you said the G word. I know, but Google's gotten very jumpy.

[Richard Campbell]

I literally flipped this phone over so it wouldn't listen to me. Okay, that's a little lesson in itself. Right? Anywho.

[Paul Thurrott]

Always listening, Paul. Always.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, so you know, look, between all the insertification stuff in OneDrive over the past couple years and everything else, like it's, you know, I've been just kind of shifting things over. Not so much. Just like I'm gonna be like a hermit living in a cabin in the mountains or anything. But not to rely solely on these big tech things. I want to make sure my data is in different places and I can access it and do whatever. And so one of the things I started planning again because I had one in the past, it got old fashioned. I never replaced it. It was a NAS storage, so I couldn't buy it in Mexico because everything there is too expensive. Everything electronic related is too expensive. But that gave me some time to think about it and go over some things and whatever. And when I got home, I ordered a Sonal. Oh good. So I'm going to get a second one and I'm going to put that in Mexico. And they can talk to each other. Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

And they'll back up to each other. So you're mirroring each other.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, so that's kind of cool. But in the meantime I just have the one. So I've been kind of experimenting with it and I have to say, you know, this stuff has improved to the point where it does a lot more than the NASA had before, right? So obviously you can have like file access locally over the network. Okay, that works great. Remote access, which got turned off on my old NAS over time as it went out of support. But. But Synology has amazing remote access stuff, which I just actually wrote about today. But they also have these clients, right? And so you have a client, there's a client for photos. You can put it on your phone. It backs up to Synology. I'm like, okay, that's cool. That works great. They have something called Phenology. Synology Desktop client. The desktop client, right? And this works like the OneDrive client or the Google Drive client or Box or Drive Dropbox or whatever it is. And on Windows and Mac, not on Linux. Interestingly, although I think that might be coming eventually, it does the On Demand thing. So you can select files or photos and be like, I want this thing to always be available when offline. And, you know, it does the seamless kind of background sync. So I was like, well, I get two trips coming up. I went to Seattle for build. I was gone for five days or whatever that was. Then the Memorial Day weekend. We were way up in the Finger Lakes. And then I was doing stuff on my phone. So I was like, I can access this stuff in all the ways I do out in the world and we see how it goes. And honestly, in retrospect, I feel like I should have known this was going to be fine, because with On Demand.

[Paul Thurrott]

It'S scary though, isn't it?

[Richard Campbell]

It is scary, yeah. But as of last weekend, I actually switched everything over entirely to this. So I still have stuff up in OneDrive and Google Drive and eventually I'm going to back up to those services as well. But I'm just using Synology Drive now. And it works. It's like. It's a seamless. It works perfectly well. So I have this thing where, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this is. This becomes your desktop or this becomes more like Dropbox.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it's like Dropbox or Google Drive or whatever. So like I use in Windows File Explorer, I have these locations that are in the navigation pane, that point now that used to be OneDrive and then they were eventually Google Drive and now they're Synology and there's no difference. Everything I do works at home.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're probably faster because they're on the lan.

[Richard Campbell]

Honestly, I don't notice it at all. Like it's because it's just syncing in the background. It actually kind of doesn't matter.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, so you're working locally. The files are local when you work on.

[Richard Campbell]

Most of them are. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I have these, you know, like the book folder is all local. My to do folder, which is most of my site stuff, is all local. So I could be on a plane. It will sync when I connect. I've noticed. I mean it's only been less than a week for everything and it's been maybe two to three weeks for some things. I switched these things over in phases, but it's been, it's gone so well. I just, I can't believe how good it is. Like, it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm gonna have to try this because I've been using my Synology kind of in an old school.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Way.

[Richard Campbell]

That's how I thought I was going to use it originally.

[Paul Thurrott]

But then this is a backup system.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. But while I was in Mexico, I'm researching this and I was like, wait a minute, this sounds. I'm like, this can't be as good as they're describing, right? There's no way. And, but then as I used it, I was like, oh my God, this is better than. Way better than I thought it was going to be. It's way better.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm going to have to try this.

[Richard Campbell]

It's really neat.

[Paul Thurrott]

So you have a desktop client and then you have some software running on the Synology, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, the server version. It's in the server. It's called desktop. I don't know, it's called Synology Drive Server, I think. Is that okay? But it's a. I'm not up on the language yet, but it's whatever those packages you install.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, Synology has applications packages.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. They have Docker and, and speaking of Docker. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Once you, once you put Docker in your Synology, really you can run anything.

[Richard Campbell]

But there's even like, there's stuff that I, I thought I was going to do this other stuff that I think like now I'm probably not going to have to like one of the things I'm not really going to spend a lot of time doing is like media streaming. Although I have hundreds and hundreds of movies. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can put plex on it and use it.

[Richard Campbell]

I could. But the thing is like you can just access it over the network too. If I want to watch it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

I've done. I've streamed Star Wars. It's 1080p, not 4K but Star wars over the cell network to my phone from upstate New York and it was perfect. Like just out of the Synology drive client. I didn't even. You know what I mean? It's not a plex server. I just put. I just stream right from the.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just a file server.

[Richard Campbell]

It just works great. Like it's surprisingly great. So I don't know. Look, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not the hermit. I'm not saying drop all your big stuff, it's evil, you know, walk away. But like, like for me this kind of shifts the focus a little bit. Like I thought I would maybe keep using Google Drive and back up to Synology or whatever. Right. But now I've kind of flipped the script on that so Synology has become the main thing and we'll see. Like I said, it's been less than a week for everything, so maybe in two weeks it'll be a different story.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I'm going to have to try this.

[Richard Campbell]

I've been blown away by how well this works.

[Paul Thurrott]

Do you use their connect to?

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

So that's how you get to. That's the nice. You have to have a dedicated static IP address even. Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Well actually the way it works. I believe it. I don't think you do.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like, it's like dying DNS. It's a dynamic DNA.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So you basically they're a nat.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So if you don't like that because someone read this and said, well, hold on a second. How secure you're beholden to Synology and blah blah, blah. And I know it's not a big tech, it's like relaxing. But there are third party solutions for this kind of thing as well.

[Paul Thurrott]

You could totally put it on the Internet. But I think, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you want to be careful there. But yeah, but you know, over the local network it's all, look, the disks are encrypted. It's not just password and account protected. There's all these crazy protections built in for every range of attacks you can imagine. But does 2fa through an authenticator app, by the way. And when I attach from a Mac or Linux or Windows, if I go through the network, you have to sign in do the two FA authentication. I only get access to. Well, I get access to everything. I'm the administrator. But I mean, you know, I get access to my stuff, whatever is given to that account. It works normally of the local network, as you would expect, but to me it's the connect to stuff that's kind of amazing because you get that web browser based desktop, you know, front end desktop, whatever you want to call it, the dashboard, whatever it is, from anywhere. And then you get file, like the file app access from anywhere on a mobile device. I'm just surprised by how seamless it all is. Like, it works really, really well.

[Paul Thurrott]

I didn't expect. You've convinced me. I'm gonna install and you can put it on your phone, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. Yeah. No, I've done this. I've done things I would not do normally just because I just wanted to try it, but like I said, like streaming Star wars to my phone from a cellular connection in the middle of nowhere. Doesn't make any sense. But it worked great.

[Paul Thurrott]

It works.

[Richard Campbell]

I have the file app on my phone and my tablet, but I have the photos app on my phone and back up to the Synology from there, which is great. I don't know, like I said, not an insane person, but I could see people are like, I'm tired of this crap. I want to move on. I want to control my own data. If you add something like this to the whatever that is, the protons, the notions, the whatevers of the world, you have the makings of a complete solution that kind of cuts big tech out of the equation if that's what you want. So it's there and it works great. And I'm really surprised.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I am going to try it tonight.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, Take a look. I'm curious what you think. You know a lot more about this stuff than I do. I'm still kind of.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I use syncthing and Synology has a community version of Sync thing you can run on Synology.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So you can see on this, if you use the Synology server, you can see the files and everything every.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So if you have Linux and you want to access your files like the way I just described, you could go over the network, obviously, but you could also use. They have a client for Linux, but what it doesn't support is on demand. So what you would have to do is go into it and say, well, this folder I want to sync. Okay. But not the other folder. So you could do that or you could use a third party app. And syncthing is one of the best ones is my understanding. Yeah, I haven't tried it, but I believe it gives you some form of on demand. So you can actually see every file that you have access to and I believe sync two way in real time. I think I've not tried it because I don't really need the Linux part of it, I just tested it, but. But it does not do on demand. The Synology client, that's common though, right? Like I think there's no Dropbox, there's no Google Drive.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's not on you.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, you have to go through third party apps.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I'd be using it mostly with my Mac.

[Richard Campbell]

So when you use a Sync thing, so I guess you've used, does it do this thing I'm talking about? It's basically like on demand sync. You can say, I always want this offline. And it actually works.

[Paul Thurrott]

Basically the way syncthing works is it's folders that are synchronized wherever it's installed.

[Richard Campbell]

It's between two computers. Yeah, you're right. So one could be Synology, one could be a PC, one could be a PC, one could be a Mac or whatever.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I basically do that with my Documents folder on all the devices I use. It's not great on mobile because of the limitations of iOS, but how often.

[Richard Campbell]

Do you really need that? You know, like that's, you know, the fact that it's there at all to me is interesting. But. And it's important, like every once in a while there is something I actually do need, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Just the other night actually, I had something in OneDrive, the private vault thing, and I had it on my phone. It took forever to get into it, but I, you know, I got it. It's good to be able to get it. But. But to me it's more about the computers.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. And so I'm looking at. This is one of the things that's so great about it. I'm looking at my Synology, which is across the room. And these are all the packages I can install. And then including web servers. And then of course you install Docker. You can install anything, anything Docker supports.

[Richard Campbell]

There's also like an advantage to Docker, aside from the whole container thing that itself contained. So if you switch NAS's, if you buy a new NAS, you could just copy that thing out, put it on the nas and it just kind of works. That's of interest if that's what you want, like for Plex Server or whatever.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this is. What's it called? A Synology desktop server.

[Richard Campbell]

So actually go back to your desktop thing or whatever it's called. You already have it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, it's already installed.

[Richard Campbell]

If it's not in your desktop, click that thing in the top left, left. And you should see top left, sorry. And you should see in this view, Synology what's the name of. I don't have it in front of me. I'm sorry.

[Paul Thurrott]

I have File Station. Is that what you're talking about?

[Richard Campbell]

No, it's not File Station.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's Hyper Backup is what I use, by the way, and recommend for you to sync from one Synology to another off site.

[Richard Campbell]

The actual. What is the name? It is called Synology Drive, and on the server it'd be Synology Drive.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think. I do have it, so do the.

[Richard Campbell]

Search thing to see if it comes up. Surprisingly, it's not just there. I assumed it was just part of it, but maybe you have to install it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, you probably installed it.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, there it is. It's the bottom group on the left.

[Paul Thurrott]

Synology Drive Server.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Yeah, that's it. Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. And automatically.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then I have to, by the way, install the applications.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. This is a Celeron processor, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. It's not the fastest in the world, but it's.

[Richard Campbell]

No, actually, it's awesome so far, but that's what I meant.

[Paul Thurrott]

Uses Node.

[Richard Campbell]

It uses like, 2%. Like, the CPU is 2% less all the time. And the RAM, I. I upgraded it to, I think, 6 gigs of RAM. It's maybe 20, 27% somewhere in there. Like, it's. It's fantastic. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anthony Nielsen says. Yeah. He uses Synology Drive. It's just like Google Drive, basically.

[Richard Campbell]

I can't believe how. Yeah, I can't believe how good it is. I really. I was like, maybe if it. Even if it's a little slow sometimes, maybe it'll be all right. And I was like, wait a minute. This is identical. Yeah. It's so good on Windows and Mac. On Linux, you.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't care. That's fine.

[Richard Campbell]

You don't get this. Not the on demand part, but the rest of it is. Yeah, it's great.

[Paul Thurrott]

Very nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm installing it right now. And they have clients for all those operating systems. Yeah. So you would. And on iPhone and on Android as well.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Very cool.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's everywhere. Wow. So that's good. Turning that infuse, I think, is the name of the app on the Apple tv. So again, without installing Plex Server, it just connects. It sees the NASA and the network connects to it, and then it comes up with all this metadata. Beautiful folder, you know? Beautiful.

[Paul Thurrott]

You don't even have to run Plex.

[Richard Campbell]

Nope. Just works.

[Paul Thurrott]

What's the app infuse on the Apple tv?

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. It's unbelievable. Free. It's like, excellent.

[Paul Thurrott]

What a world. We live in.

[Richard Campbell]

I know, it's crazy.

[Paul Thurrott]

The thing is, there's so much stuff in the world that, you know, security enhancements for the newly installed package would be better supported. After you refresh the webpage. Yes. Okay, fine. I'm refreshing, by the way, if you.

[Richard Campbell]

Want to be blown away. I mean, look through the. I guess it's control panel. And then it's like the network access and the security views are like. It's crazy. What?

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I have it. I've gone through it many, many times.

[Richard Campbell]

Really good.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I have all the security turned on.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

If you try to log in really, really good, more than twice, it'll bounce you and all sorts of stuff. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. Yep. It has protection against, you know, denial of service attacks. And.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's really good.

[Richard Campbell]

It's really important.

[Paul Thurrott]

Synology is the king of the hill there. You know, lately people aren't happy because they run their enterprise.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I told you how I solved that problem, right? I just bought Synology drives. See, it's easy. No.

[Paul Thurrott]

Are they more expensive?

[Richard Campbell]

No, they weren't for me. I went the day that I priced them. The Western Digital red drives were more expensive.

[Paul Thurrott]

I understand why Synology does this, because people just throw. I do. I have, I don't know, whatever drives that were lying around and threw them in the Synology, and then those fail. And then you complain to Synology.

[Richard Campbell]

I was never going to do that, but I probably would have to spot WD red drives or something like that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, the nice thing about Synology is you can just throw drives in there.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but look, I appreciate. Look, I see the in certification part of this, but I also see, like, you know, they had the system for the business customers, and they're like, look, you want this to work, right? Like, all the time. We'll see what happens. Maybe the drive fails in two days and the joke's on me. I don't know. But so far it's been good.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm impressed. So now I'm going to. I installed it. So now I'm going to. Welcome to the Synology Drive suite. Okay. So you could actually walk through this?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So it's basically. It's an office kind of thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, there's that too, but. So you're running this on the server, Right? So this is on server when you download the client, which you can do from the web interface or from just synology.com, whatever, you know, installs. Right. And then you. You tell us how you want it. Yeah, I did it as two way Sync and then on Windows Mac, like I said it does on demand, which I love. And then it's exactly like Google Drive. You right click, you shoot. You know, you're like, I want this. Whatever the language is, I want this to be available all the time. It works fantastic. It's unbelievably.

[Paul Thurrott]

I have 27,383 gigabytes available.

[Richard Campbell]

I think I have it up that to a laptop I would. No, but that was the problem in Linux. If you actually just go through and be like, yeah, take it all, it will run out of disk space. And so Linux, you have to do that kind of old fashioned thing where you're like, all right, you said document your Documents folder. Like that would probably be. That would be fine. So you just go in and say, I only want my Documents folder.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, that's usually what I do.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean it works great for what it is, but you just don't get to see the other parts of your.

[Paul Thurrott]

File and you can even see what's going on, how many people are connected and so forth, which the devices are, et cetera. Yeah, this is great. All right, thank you for the tip. I love it must be something new because I thought I knew all about everything.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm surprised I told you anything you don't know about this thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

But yeah, I've been a Synology user for at least 10 years.

[Richard Campbell]

There was some point where it kind of came across this and I was like, wait a minute, could this be, you know?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And I was like, if this works, I'm using this.

[Paul Thurrott]

I dimly remember when they announced this.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, okay. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I don't know the age of it or anything like that, but it's awesome. It's really good. Then for Appic, two things. I just made fun of Edge a bunch, But Microsoft Edge 137 came out, I think it was last week. And it's weird because there's been this staging of announcements. This is actually the biggest release of this browser, I think since they went to Chromium. It's crazy. So there's a bunch of new end user features, picture and picture improvements, improvements to Edge for business and so forth. They're getting rid of a bunch of pointless, superfluous features they had added in the past that nobody even knows are in there, like the image editor and blah, blah, blah, whatever. They're getting rid of Wallet, which I never quit the Wallet Hub anyway. But they're just gonna have a standard password section like all browsers do, so they're not getting rid of the functionality, just the weird UI and like, okay, so you're like, whatever. It's a release of a browser comes out every six weeks, who cares? But then a couple of days later they announced the general availability availability of Game Assist, right? And this is that little mini browser that goes in the Game Hub. And this is delivered as part of Edge 137. So if you play video games on Windows, it doesn't have to be Xbox games, whatever game, it doesn't matter. Well, it matters. You have to use the game bar, but you bring up the game bar and that's the choice now. And you can pin it and you can have that mini browser running with you while you're playing the game. And this is what a lot of gamers do. They're like, oh, I'm stuck on this level, I want to go look in here and blah, blah, blah, whatever. I think we talked about this, I'm sure last week, but that's kind of a big deal. But I also mentioned this Windows 11 app action thing where you right click on something or you do the Windows key plus click if you have a copilot PC and you get compatible actions with what you see on screen. So today it's text and image. I think that's going to improve over time, although I guess technically most of what you see on screen is a text or an image. But third party apps can add themselves to this list. This is going to be a big extensibility model in Windows. Edge 137 adds that support to progressive web apps that are created with Microsoft Edge. So if you have a progressive web app and install it through Edge, if it supports this feature, which it can now, you will get that app Action support as well. So it's actually, it's like kind of a, a, it's kind of a big release. I mean don't ever use Edge. It's terrible, but it's kind of amazing like what they're doing here. Like it's a lot of, a lot of stuff going on there. So if you do use Edge, it's worth, definitely worth looking at this. It's surprising how much is in there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Edge 137, ladies and gentlemen.

[Richard Campbell]

I know. One more thing real quick. Sorry. Yes, sorry. This is not really related to Windows or anything. I just think it's kind of interesting. So a couple months ago, three months ago, Adobe announced a full, well, you know, for mobile, full Photoshop app for the iPhone. When that thing shipped, you had to buy a subscription to use It. Right. They introduced a new mobile plan for Photoshop. I think it's like Photoshop Mobile and web, which is $8 a month, so it's a fairly reasonable way to get into this. But the Android version came out yesterday and it's still in beta. And while it's in beta, it's free for everyone. It's really worth looking at because Photoshop has all kinds of problems in my opinion. But the AI stuff that they've been doing, Adobe is actually kind of amazing. And a lot of those key AI based features around image editing and so forth, like selecting objects inside of an image or spot healing or the magic wand stuff and the remove background, remove, whatever it is. That stuff's awesome. And that's all in the mobile app. And I'm not trying to promote Adobe per se, but actually I have to say this app is pretty impressive. It's worth looking at. So if you have an Android phone and check it out, I mean it's surprisingly good.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's a beta though still.

[Richard Campbell]

It is a beta, but it's. I mean it seems pretty, it seems like it works pretty great.

[Paul Thurrott]

Pretty stable.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it was good enough. Like it actually made me reinstall Photoshop and then I was like, oh, yeah, that's why I hate this thing. But it's, but it's, it's for the phone.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's good.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's. Well, because, you know, a lot of times you're out in the world doing whatever on your phone and you're like, oh, I'd like to post this photo, but those two idiots in the background or whatever. And this is, you know, wow. I guess too.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's cool to get rid of them.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice. All right, Paul. Absent Richard. I don't. I mean, we can say what's on. Run his radio this week.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we could do that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I could give him a little, little plug. Fixing a security vulnerability in Active Directory with Steve Sifus. Okay, okay. Why would a security vulnerability take more than two years to fix? Well, KB 5015754. That's why.

[Richard Campbell]

Glad you asked.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's why. So that sounds like kind of a fun detective story. Richard Campbell run his radio. It's at runisradio.

[Richard Campbell]

He doesn't talk about Net Rocks on this show, but I actually end up. I listen to both shows, but I listen to more of the Net Rock stuff and those shows are often fantastic. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

With Carl.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we've had Carl.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. Well, you can get it all as running at Rennes Radio if You go there. So Paul, you said you want to talk spritzes.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So when we were in Mexico, we were there for about four months. There was kind of this interesting series events that were related to like cocktails and cocktail bars and stuff. And so like just for the local aspect of it, Mexico up until late last year was kind of weird because there's a lot of bars and restaurants and Mexicans are incredibly friendly and you know, love social engagements and stuff. But there were very few places in Mexico City where you could actually go to a bar and sit at a bar and have that kind of bar experience. There are many places in Mexico City where there's an enormous bar seats and you cannot sit there.

[Paul Thurrott]

What?

[Richard Campbell]

Just like sit? I know it's bizarre.

[Paul Thurrott]

You have to stand.

[Richard Campbell]

But between November and maybe January last.

[Paul Thurrott]

Year, that must be their drunkenness prevention.

[Richard Campbell]

Cocktail bars started opening. And I don't know who does this, but the whatever organization does. Like the top cocktail bar, top bars or whatever it is in North America and Mexico City, a bunch of places we go are in there now. In fact, one of our favorite new bars is a speakeasy in Cadessa that, that I think was number 11 or something. And they were never on the list before. Like they deserve it, like they're fantastic. So there's that. I mean, if you're listening to this, you probably don't care about that unless you go into Mexico City. But the other couple of things that happened was a lot of people are probably familiar with this notion of like you get ice and it can be ice cubes or whatever. They have the big cube cubes like the big ones. And then if you go to a nice place, they'll have those perfectly clear ice cubes. And you can buy kits at home to make this yourself. But it involves getting the air out. It's complicated, time consuming. It's not great. We've tried a couple of different ways to do this. It's just not really worth the effort. But if you've ever gone to a really good cocktail bar and they have those perfectly clear ice cubes as if they cut it out of a cup full or something.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I don't know how they bought that.

[Richard Campbell]

But the other thing about cocktail bars is that there are different glass styles. So you get the tall thin glasses, whatever. I don't know the names of these things but. But we started seeing those kind of really clear ice cubes in. It was almost like triple height ice cube. So it's a tall ice cube that fits into the tall glass like exactly. I call them tower ice cubes. I'm not even sure that's the right term, but I saw one and I texted my brother in law because he's really into this stuff and he's like, that's weird. You just said it. I'm starting to see these things all over the place here. So for his birthday we bought some. You get these plastic or rubber kind of Amazon trays to make ice cubes. And they make those now in the tower form so you can put them into a tall glass. It's actually kind of a cool thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is it a picture on your Instagram or somewhere?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I'm not sure if I could find it easily.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'll find it.

[Richard Campbell]

But if you go to like the pictures we have of Ruby, the Ruby Wine bar, they have an entire refrigerator full of these things pre made within the glass so that when they make a cocktail, it just comes out with the ice cube in it and they can do just go right to it.

[Paul Thurrott]

The problem is there's so many pictures of alcoholic drinks on your Instagram.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's kind of hard to narrow it down. Paul.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

You make me so hungry when I visit you.

[Richard Campbell]

If you go past.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is all back home.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You got to go back to Mexico. A little bit more. A little bit more. There you go. In here somewhere. So Ruby. That one says Ruby. Maybe look in there. That's a possibility.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh yeah, there's a bunch of them in here. Yeah. Let's see.

[Richard Campbell]

But yeah, it's.

[Paul Thurrott]

There you go.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go. There's an example.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's a big square block of ice in there.

[Richard Campbell]

It's like a. It's like a column of ice cube.

[Paul Thurrott]

What the hell?

[Richard Campbell]

I know. They're beautiful. And those, that place does it right. So those, those ice cubes are perfectly clear. They're gorgeous.

[Paul Thurrott]

There is a way you can, you can buy a thing that will make clear ice cubes in your home. It's.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, but they're. It's.

[Paul Thurrott]

You gotta. Gotta get the bubbles out. That's the key. There's air and the salt in the.

[Richard Campbell]

There.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, all right. So next time I'm in Mexico City.

[Richard Campbell]

We'Re going to Ruby. I mean, it's happening in the US too. This is the thing. It's like, it's just a trend, right? Yeah, but the other, the other trend.

[Paul Thurrott]

Lisa got one for her sister for her sister's birthday, but it isn't exactly a square ice cube.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's got a shape it might recognize. I don't want to get.

[Richard Campbell]

I see too many more traditional. More of a family event.

[Paul Thurrott]

A family ice cube.

[Richard Campbell]

No, we have, like, the cubes of a couple of different sizes because some don't fit, depending on the glass. But, yeah, we. Yeah. So I. I just. The first time I saw it, I literally. I took a picture of it and I said it to my. I'm like, dude, what is this? And he's like, I just saw one of these. Like. Like, it's become a thing this year. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, it also means that you don't have as much beverage in that glass.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay. But.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, but is it somehow colder? Is it somehow better? It's just cool working.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Because there's more surface on it or whatever if it's the glass, you know, I mean, a lot of the big ice cubes aren't going to fit in that kind of glass. You want to have the. It's not. This is true of wine and apparently of cocktails as well. You want the right shape glass, depending on the drink. I guess. I'm not an expert on that, but yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

If you. If you and I had gone into a bar, like, a year ago.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

And someone had ordered, like, an aperol spritz, I would have been like, oh, that's a nice drink, Nancy. What's going on there?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's kind of a girl drink.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

But apparently Ruby has something special, so.

[Richard Campbell]

This has become a big thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I want a fluffy Paloma. What the hell is.

[Richard Campbell]

That's a. Yeah, it's like a spritz version of a Paloma, but they do something to. It's not whipped, it's not egg, but it does something that foams. Ah.

[Paul Thurrott]

They froth it a little bit.

[Richard Campbell]

They froth it somehow.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

The Ruby is a technically, like a. It's a wine cocktail bar, meaning a lot of their cocktails are made with wines. But wines mean a lot of different things because there's, like, fortified wines and things like vermouths and, you know, all this stuff. So vermouth is also a big thing in Mexico City right now. Vermouth is Spanish, but it's become a really big thing. There are a lot of places we know that make their own vermouth, including Ruby, by the way.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, brands. The buns even.

[Richard Campbell]

Look at that. They're gonna brand my buns and they buns.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's a. There's more of this tower glass.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. So wait a minute.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're not drinking Jaeger.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, no. That's almost certainly a vermouth.

[Paul Thurrott]

I bet Actually, but that's Jaeger in a bottle. I recognize it.

[Richard Campbell]

It's definitely not Yeager. So, anyway, so. But Aperol or spritzes are actually, like, really light and they're refreshing, and they typically have less alcohol. And it occurred to us, like, I.

[Paul Thurrott]

Actually like that spritzers.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, this is a good drink for, like, warmer weather.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, yeah, it's like Tang with alcohol in it.

[Richard Campbell]

So the two classics for spritzes are Aperol and St. Germain Spritz. Right. Those are the two big ones. But that place, Ruby in particular. But not just Ruby. Other places, too, because it's another thing we started seeing around, is starting to make other kinds of spritzes. And so if you get something like a Manhattan, you could typically make a Manhattan with vermouth. But you can also, like, in Mexico City now, in Spain as well, obviously, you can just. You can drink vermouth straight up. You can drink it, like, with ice. You can drink it with soda water. You can drink it as part of a cocktail. So they had, like. There's an alternative to vermouth called. I think it's pronounced Chinar or Cynar, which is. It's actually made from an artichoke, which makes it sound terrible, but it tastes. It's. It's an amaro type, you know, just like vermouth, really. And it's. They had a Chinar. I'm going to call it China. They had a Chinar spritz on the menu. So I was like, I should. I will try this. And I was like, oh, this is really good. Like, I would never think about drinking china solo or whatever, but I was like, this is actually very tasty. So I was like, well, you guys make your own vermouth. This is a vermouth place. How come you don't have a vermouth spritz? And that guy you saw the picture of Sebastian, was like, oh, that's complicated. I'm like, it's not complicated. Just take the china, right, and put it in the vermouth. But he was like, no, no, it's more complicated. And then he spent a bunch of time working on this, and he calls it a Paul Spritz. But it's like this. I don't know the exact.

[Paul Thurrott]

They invented a drink just for you, Paul.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, he worked in this thing for, like, half an hour, and I was like, I don't understand why you're not calling it like, an Ah, Paul, or all Spritz.

[Paul Thurrott]

But he was like, oh, Paul.

[Richard Campbell]

Or all. No, no, no. He's like, no, it's a Paul spritz. I'm like, okay, fine. But it's basically, it's basically a vermouth.

[Paul Thurrott]

Spritz, and that sounds delish.

[Richard Campbell]

It's even better than the China spritz. So this is like a whole. I mean, you won't typically find more than, like, you'll always see, like, Aperol spritz and maybe Saint Germain spritz. And then beyond that, it depends on where you are and what you put. But this is becoming a thing. And actually, if you're looking for kind of like a light summer alternative to like a hard liqueur type cocktail or just a hard liquor, these are really good choices. Like, they're, they're really good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Looks like fun. Yeah. Very refreshing, very light. And if you can get it with a, a tower ice cube.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, depending on the glass.

[Paul Thurrott]

They look so good, actually.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, it's amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Very nice. That's all on Paul's Instagram if you want more deets.

[Richard Campbell]

Today on how to become an alcoholic, Paul discusses first steps.

[Paul Thurrott]

It goes down easy, kid.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, that's part of the problem, but yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I, I, I stopped drinking aperol spritzes because I met, Ran into people like you who made fun of me.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, I'm not kind of a, it's not something I'm proud of, Leo, but I, but I also fall into it a little too easily. So it's, you know what?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's light. It's light.

[Richard Campbell]

It is. No, it is light. Honestly, they're really good, and I, I'm sure they're not good for you, but they're, they're just, it's, you know, it's good for you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Paul Thurrott, tharat.com He knows what's good for you. That's, that's, that's the place to go. Get a premium membership. You can read all the extra content, but it's the place to go to keep up on Windows and Microsoft news. T-H-U-R-R-O-T-T.com and of course, his books, the field guides to Windows 11 and Windows Everywhere, which is really interesting. History of windows [e-mail] and you pay your own [e-mail]. paul, you're going to be in Macunji next week or are you going back to Mexico?

[Richard Campbell]

I should be here. Where is it? Yeah, at least a month, maybe.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, you're gonna stay for the Fourth of July? Of course.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. At Least. Yeah, at least. It'd probably be mid July for the fireworks.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right, very nice. Anthony Nielsen is reminding me about curious elixirs, which is. Actually, I used to subscribe to these. They're non alcoholic. They're very herby.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Paul Thurrott]

And maybe more herby than I like. But I did like these and I.

[Richard Campbell]

Used to drink them without that. Today was a. I almost said sambuca a kombucha, which is not alcoholic. It's just like fermented, whatever. But like. But it's close to a cocktail. So if you. If you're kind of looking for something that's a little bit, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

I drink kombucha. I drink a non alcoholic kombucha. So, yeah, it's. It doesn't even have, you know, 1% alcohol in it. But, yeah, but. Yeah, no, I. But I like these spritzes. I tried for a while.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, my God. What's wrong with you? No, that's fine. It's fine.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, really good. Really good. It's nice to have something that's like an alcoholic drink, but it is.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's the trick. I mean, a lot of times you might just be out with a group of friends and like, yeah, I want.

[Paul Thurrott]

To be social, but I don't want to drink.

[Richard Campbell]

The Montreal thing has become a big deal like that. You see that pretty much everybody everywhere now, so.

[Paul Thurrott]

Love it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, let's go.

[Paul Thurrott]

Spritz yourself with an apparal. Don't spritz a Paul Roll spritzer. Oh, boy.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, the language isn't great, but you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Know what I'm saying, Spritz yourself. Tomorrow is, of course, Nintendo Switch Day, so I don't expect to see you around for another week.

[Richard Campbell]

Switch. Whatever, Whatever, whatever.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thank you all for joining us. We do Windows Weekly every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. You can watch us live on eight different channels. Of course, club members get the behind the Velvet rope access in the Discord. But it's also YouTube, open to the public. Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com, kik. You know, anywhere you can find us, watch us live. You don't have to because we make recordings available on demand, as we say on our website. Twit TV, WW. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly, so you can get the video there. Great way to share a clip with a friend. Of course, if you subscribe, then you'll get it automatically, audio or video the minute we're done. And forgetting to turn that off, wife over there.

[Richard Campbell]

Doing something?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, that's me. It's an Apple thing. You just know it and understand. But if you do subscribe in your podcast client, please do us a favor. Leave a five star review. Tell the world how wonderful Windows Weekly is. Spread the word. We appreciate that. Thank you all for joining us. Thanks especially to our club, TWiT members who make this all possible. We'll see you right here next Wednesday for Windows Weekly.

[Richard Campbell]

Bye Bye.

[Paul Thurrott]

The tech world moves fast and you need to keep up for your business, for your life. The best way to do that Twit TV on this Week in Tech, I bring together tech's best and brightest minds to help you understand what just happened and prepare for what's happening next. It's your first podcast of the week and the last word in tech. Cybersecurity experts know they can't miss a minute of security now Every week with Steve Gibson. What you don't know could really hurt your business, but there's nothing Steve Gibson doesn't know. Tune in Security now every Wednesday. Every Thursday, industry expert Micah Sargent brings you interviews with tech journalists who make or break the top stories of the week on Tech News Weekly. And if you use Apple products, you won't want to miss the premier Apple podcast, Now in its 20th year, MacBreak Weekly. Then there's Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. They are the best connected journalists covering Microsoft. And every week they bring you their insight and wit on Windows Weekly. Build your tech intelligence week after week with the best in the business. Your seat at tech's most entertaining and informative table is waiting at TWiT TV. Subscribe now. It.