Windows Weekly 944: Shakin' the Treats

Summary

Podcast Summary: Windows Weekly 944: Shakin' the Treats

Podcast Information:

• Title: All TWiT.tv Shows (Audio)
• Host/Author: TWiT
• Episode: Windows Weekly 944: Shakin' the Treats
• Release Date: August 6, 2025

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Introduction

In episode 944 of Windows Weekly, hosts Leo Laporte, Paul Thurot, and Richard Campbell delve into Microsoft's remarkable journey to becoming a $4 trillion company. The discussion spans Microsoft's vision for Windows in 2030, recent AI advancements, Xbox developments, and a special segment on whiskey. The conversation blends insightful analysis with relaxed banter, providing a comprehensive overview for both tech enthusiasts and casual listeners.

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Microsoft’s $4 Trillion Valuation

• Leo Laporte [03:01]: "Microsoft became the second company in the history of all mankind to become a $4 trillion enterprise."

The hosts explore the factors contributing to Microsoft's unprecedented valuation, highlighting the pivotal roles of Windows and Xbox. They discuss how Microsoft's strategic shifts and robust revenue streams have propelled the company to this financial milestone.

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Comparing AI Investments: Microsoft, Apple, Google

• Paul Thurot [03:07]: "Well, I'm not saying that has never happened before, but I mean, in recent years, if you look at revenues like they mic. They've been kind of competing with Microsoft."

The conversation shifts to the competitive landscape of AI investments among tech giants. Paul points out Google's substantial earnings surpassing Apple's, attributing part of their success to strategic AI investments. The group contemplates whether Apple’s late entry into AI will impact its market standing.

• Richard Campbell [04:08]: "AI Apple is coming in late. You know, this is smart. However unintentional it was, everybody else has rushed and you know, it's getting..."

Richard commends Apple's cautious approach, suggesting that their strategy to delay AI integration may pay off by avoiding rushed, subpar products.

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Detailed Overview of Microsoft’s Quarterly Earnings

• Paul Thurot [05:45]: "So last week ... Microsoft reported their quarterly earnings ... Made a lot of money in the quarter. Made a lot of money in the fiscal year..."

The hosts provide an in-depth analysis of Microsoft's latest financial results, detailing revenue streams across different segments:

• Productivity and Business Processes: $33.1 billion

• Intelligent Cloud (Azure): $29.9 billion with a 26% year-over-year growth

• More Personal Computing: $13.5 billion, including Windows and Xbox

• Paul Thurot [06:27]: "For the year. I'm mixing up numbers all over the place with a net of over 100. Sorry, $100 billion net of for the year."

The discussion emphasizes Microsoft's diversification and strong performance across various sectors, underscoring the company's resilience and adaptability in a rapidly evolving tech landscape.

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Microsoft’s Capital Expenditure and AI Infrastructure

• Paul Thurot [07:39]: "Well, one of the big bits they brought out in that post earnings conference call was that that number is actually going to go up dramatically for this fiscal year."

Microsoft's commitment to AI infrastructure is highlighted, with capital expenditures projected to rise from $80 billion to at least $30 billion in the current quarter. This massive investment underscores Microsoft's focus on maintaining its competitive edge in AI and cloud computing.

• Richard Campbell [24:27]: "No, they're not spending that on market."

Richard clarifies that the significant spending is directed towards data centers and AI infrastructure rather than marketing, emphasizing the strategic allocation of resources to bolster Microsoft's technological foundations.

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Layoffs and Corporate Culture at Microsoft

• Paul Thurot [12:35]: "But it wasn't until I think it was the very last question in the Q and A at the very end where someone finally asked about it."

The hosts address the sensitive topic of layoffs at Microsoft, tracing the history of workforce reductions under CEO Satya Nadella. They discuss the impact of these layoffs on employee morale and the broader company culture.

• Richard Campbell [13:30]: "One of the themes I hear over and over again, especially lately, is that this was not about reducing headcount or saving money. This is about changing the culture."

Paul and Richard explore Microsoft's narrative around layoffs, suggesting that the rationale extends beyond mere cost-cutting to a deeper cultural transformation aimed at positioning Microsoft as a market leader.

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Microsoft’s Strategic Focus and Vision for 2030

• Satya Nadella [37:37]: "He has his own kind of take on it ... I'm trying to think of the actor whose name I'm now zoning on Apollo, Ian Neeson."

Discussing Microsoft’s strategic priorities, the hosts emphasize the company's focus on security, quality, and AI transformation. They reference Satya Nadella’s presentations and initiatives, such as the Windows Resiliency Initiative and post-quantum security measures.

• Paul Thurot [44:21]: "Right. The infrastructure of a Data center ... retaining investment value."

The conversation highlights how Microsoft’s investments in infrastructure are designed to provide lasting value, ensuring that today's expenditures continue to benefit the company for years to come.

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Windows 2030 and AI Transformations

• Paul Thurot [37:37]: "Security. Well, no big deal. It's not like Microsoft's ever harmed other app makers that they compete with or anything."

The hosts discuss Microsoft's vision for Windows in 2030, focusing on AI-driven transformations and enhanced security features. They ponder how Windows will evolve to meet future technological demands and maintain its relevance in an increasingly AI-centric world.

• Paul Thurot [41:30]: "So the windows app SDK ... it's a nightmare."

They also touch upon the challenges Microsoft faces in modernizing Windows and integrating new technologies, citing frustrations with the Windows App SDK and its development process.

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Insider Program Updates

• Paul Thurot [50:51]: "But not too much happening in the insider space."

Updates to the Windows Insider Program are briefly covered, noting that recent changes are minor and not particularly exciting. The hosts mention features like administrative mode for Windows 11 and minor tweaks to File Explorer settings.

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AMD’s Strong Earnings and Competition with Intel

• Paul Thurot [70:34]: "So yeah, AMD's heading. It's not even close. Like it's, it's so far ahead of intel."

The episode delves into AMD's impressive quarterly performance, highlighting significant revenue growth in the client and gaming segments. The hosts compare AMD's advancements with Intel's struggles, discussing the implications for the CPU market.

• Richard Campbell [63:06]: "Is this trying to get ahead of the tariffs or is this I can't buy intel so I better buy amd?"

Richard examines the factors behind AMD's success, including market shifts towards ARM-based processors and the company's strategic partnerships with PC manufacturers.

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Insights on Apple, Amazon, Qualcomm

• Paul Thurot [65:26]: "Apple, you know, which has obviously nailed AI."

The discussion broadens to include insights on other tech giants:

• Apple: Continues to lag in AI investments compared to peers but maintains strong brand loyalty and product performance.
• Amazon: AWS remains its most profitable segment despite challenges in its logistics and retail operations.
• Qualcomm: Reports steady revenues with strategic moves to address market changes, especially in AI and mobile technology.

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AI Technology Developments and Local LLMs

• Paul Thurot [74:59]: "You could run it locally on your own hardware, like a PC, a Mac, or maybe even a mobile device."

The hosts explore recent advancements in AI, particularly Microsoft's introduction of open-weight Large Language Models (LLMs) that can be run locally. They discuss the technical requirements and potential implications for developers and end-users.

• Richard Campbell [75:45]: "And if you do look at the x86 world, there's a, a nightmare of problems."

Paul and Richard analyze the hardware demands of running advanced AI models locally, touching upon the limitations of current consumer hardware and the necessity for specialized GPUs with ample memory.

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Xbox Growth and Game Pass Updates

• Paul Thurot [92:23]: "So, we have some Game Pass stuff happening, as we do every month."

A significant portion of the episode is dedicated to Xbox and Microsoft Gaming. The hosts highlight impressive growth metrics:

• 500 Million monthly active users for Microsoft Gaming

• 5 Billion in revenue from Xbox Game Pass for the fiscal year

• Over 500 Million hours played on Game Pass

• Upcoming titles like Assassin's Creed Mirage joining Game Pass on August 7th

• Richard Campbell [96:30]: "They bought the big players. And I was presuming World of Warcraft. And I'm being a little facetious. I'm presume Call of Duty is bigger."

The conversation underscores Microsoft's strategic acquisitions and their impact on Xbox's market position, reinforcing its status as a leading gaming platform.

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Whiskey Segment: Sherry Aging and Macallan

Transitioning to a lighter topic, the hosts share an extensive discussion on whiskey aging processes, focusing on sherry casks and the renowned Macallan brand.

• Richard Campbell [130:03]: "So what, what is sherry aging actually about? It's about shipping the, the barrels."

The segment delves into the historical and technical aspects of sherry aging in whiskey production, explaining the differences between dry and sweet sherry, the types of oak used, and the evolution of the aging process.

• Richard Campbell [136:17]: "And so this has been the reality for 50 years."

Detailed insights are provided on how Macallan and other distilleries have adapted to challenges in sourcing quality sherry casks, leading to innovations like sherry-seasoned casks and double cask aging processes.

• Paul Thurot [144:20]: "Right. The infrastructure of a Data center ... retaining investment value."

The hosts critique the marketing strategies around age statements in whiskey, emphasizing that perceived quality often hinges more on branding than actual aging.

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Conclusion

Episode 944 of Windows Weekly offers a multifaceted exploration of Microsoft's financial triumphs, strategic pivots in AI and gaming, and an engaging deep dive into whiskey aging. Through rich discussions and insightful quotes, Leo Laporte, Paul Thurot, and Richard Campbell provide listeners with a comprehensive understanding of current tech trends and corporate strategies shaping the industry.

Notable Quotes:

• Paul Thurot [03:07]: "Well, I'm not saying that has never happened before, but I mean, in recent years, if you look at revenues like they mic. They've been kind of competing with Microsoft."
• Richard Campbell [04:08]: "AI Apple is coming in late. You know, this is smart. However unintentional it was, everybody else has rushed and you know, it's getting..."
• Paul Thurot [05:45]: "So last week ... Microsoft reported their quarterly earnings ... Made a lot of money in the quarter. Made a lot of money in the fiscal year..."
• Paul Thurot [37:37]: "Security. Well, no big deal. It's not like Microsoft's ever harmed other app makers that they compete with or anything."
• Paul Thurot [74:59]: "You could run it locally on your own hardware, like a PC, a Mac, or maybe even a mobile device."

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About the Hosts:

• Leo Laporte: Renowned tech journalist and podcast host.
• Paul Thurot: Technology analyst and frequent contributor to Windows Weekly.
• Richard Campbell: .NET expert and co-host, known for his deep technical insights.

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This detailed summary encapsulates the core discussions, insights, and analyses presented in episode 944 of Windows Weekly, offering a comprehensive overview for those who haven't tuned in.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat's here. Richard Campbell. Microsoft is a $4 trillion company. We'll tell the story of how they got there. We'll also talk about Microsoft's vision for Windows in 2030, plus a little AI news, Xbox news, and some whiskey. You shouldn't buy all that. Coming up next on Windows Weekly, podcasts you love from people you.

[Paul Thurot]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurada and Richard Campbell. Episode 944 recorded Wednesday, August 6, 2025. Shakin the treats. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello all you winners. Hello all you dozers. Good to see both of you.

[Paul Thurot]

Not.

[Leo Laporte]

Not all two of you. All of you. This is the show where we talk about the latest from Microsoft and my golly, my gosh, it's a wonderful time to say hello to Paul Thurot, thurat.com and Wonderful Life. It's a wonderful life. Are you back in Pennsylvania?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

How does that happen?

[Paul Thurot]

How did that happen? I don't know. It was a 20 hour day of terribleness.

[Leo Laporte]

Why come back is what I'm saying.

[Paul Thurot]

Because my daughter is graduating from college this week.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's exciting. That's this week?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, congratulations.

[Richard Campbell]

It only happens once in theory.

[Leo Laporte]

And there is next to Paul, shoulder to shoulder rubbing elbows even though he's in Canada. Mr. Richard Campbell from Madeira Park, British Columbia. Hello, Richard.

[Richard Campbell]

Weird said dark. It's kind of a misty rainy.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh yeah, Richard, thank you for mentioning that. Sorry. Thanks for all the dust and orange sun that I'm experiencing. Penn, Pennsylvania.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

I asked my wife why it was so freaking weird outside and she said canada.

[Richard Campbell]

No, Canada.

[Paul Thurot]

Could you stop burning, please?

[Richard Campbell]

We got a lot of forests.

[Paul Thurot]

Canada.

[Richard Campbell]

I checked the numbers for BC alone and it was 135 forest fires running right now.

[Paul Thurot]

Jeez, are you going for the Guinness Book of World Records? What are we doing?

[Richard Campbell]

We got a lot of trees.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, now. Now you do.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, yeah, but it's raining today.

[Leo Laporte]

So I fear that this will be headed our way soon because you know we're coming into the.

[Paul Thurot]

If it gets to Mexico, it's all over, man. Then you're. You're out of the continent. Like I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

But Mexico City is in a swamp.

[Paul Thurot]

That might protect was 2000 years ago. Now it's in a.

[Leo Laporte]

It's all filled in.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know, what do you call it?

[Leo Laporte]

It's landfill, which is a solid. Solid.

[Paul Thurot]

Let's build something on top of a.

[Leo Laporte]

Hole so Microsoft became the second company in the history of all mankind to become a $4 trillion enterprise.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, and it was all thanks to Windows and Xbox, baby. Oh, wait.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we were talking about yesterday on MacBook Weekly, Apple's earnings. And I said, you know, if Apple could just get AI together, they might make some money.

[Paul Thurot]

Hey, speaking which I don't know why this isn't kind of a bigger story, but Google's earnings or revenues were almost actually. Were they more than they might have exceeded Apple's?

[Leo Laporte]

They had an incredible quarter. They did exceed Apples by several years.

[Paul Thurot]

So I'm not saying that has never happened before, but I mean, in recent years, if you look at revenues like they mic. They've been kind of competing with Microsoft. They're both Apple and Google now. Like 20 billion above Microsoft in revenues. Like I believe Google was more. And it's like that's, that's actually pretty unusual. You know, they don't have a lot of relatively low margin hardware products to worry about. You know, at least none of the sell well. So, I mean, I don't know. There's an interesting case to be made that Google might have, at least for now, dodged the AI bullet in a way which is kind of interesting. But.

[Richard Campbell]

AI Apple is coming in late. You know, this is smart. However unintentional it was, everybody else has rushed and you know, it's getting.

[Leo Laporte]

That was smart on Apple's part.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I think.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't. They were trying. They just did. They pushed.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. The question is whether Apple's historical model for success will play out here as well, I guess. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Last year they were trying to be a fast mover and it did not. To Apple's credit, what they didn't do was ship a bad product.

[Paul Thurot]

It's like, who's done this best? The guys that made Duke Nukem forever? Yeah, let's try that. Well, this. Yeah, that was a mistake anyway. Yeah, this is going to come up. I think Apple's going to be okay. I think Apple's going to be okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I think maybe, who knows? I don't think it hurts them actually to be a little behind in AI.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I mean, we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

Nobody's not going to buy it. Well, here's the question. Do you think somebody will not buy an iPhone and will buy a Google phone instead?

[Paul Thurot]

Because listen, people have been buying iPhones for. Yeah. Decades almost. Despite the fact a series Siri has always been a joke. So how is this any different? It's like this is, you know, if anything, the AI capabilities that they have now in Apple Intelligence are at least okay. Like they work or whatever. So it's, this is not. I mean it's no big deal. It's not like Apple's ever harmed other app makers that they compete with or anything. I would. Don't worry about it.

[Richard Campbell]

You're fine.

[Paul Thurot]

Be fine.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyhow, they'll be all right. Now let's talk about Microsoft.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. At least for a little while. So last week, right at the end of the show, Microsoft reported their quarterly earnings and then after that they had an earnings call like they do every quarter and man, this was one for the ages. So just to start with the earnings, no huge surprises here. Made a lot of money. Made a lot of money in the quarter. Made a lot of money in the fiscal year which ended June 30th. The revenue number is quarterly two. Almost 282 billion. I'm sorry, that's right. That looks, that seems wrong.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, 282 for the year.

[Paul Thurot]

For the year. I'm mixing up numbers all over the place with a net of over 100. Sorry, $100 billion net of for the year. 101. Yeah, almost 102 billion. Sorry, I was looking at the annual there and then. Yeah. So the quarter was 27.2 billion of net income on revenues of 76.4 billion. These are double digit increases year over year. It's big. I don't remember when this was. So 2. It might have been actually. They probably said they were going to do this before the beginning of this past fiscal year, but they at some point last fiscal year moved all of the revenues that are from Windows 10 through Microsoft 3. I'm sorry, Windows, anything through Microsoft 365 into productivity and business processes, which is where the rest of Microsoft 365 was. So that has been their biggest business since then and it still is. Right. So 33.1 billion. But intelligent cloud, which is Azure, huge growth, 26% year over year, almost the same number, 29.9 billion. And we got some interesting numbers there which we'll discuss in a moment. For the first time ever, which I think is amazing. And then more personal computing, which is where everything else kind of falls. So the rest of Windows, Xbox, I think search might be in. Yeah, Search is in there. Still stuck in that 13 billion range. So 13.5 billion a mirror.

[Richard Campbell]

13.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Well, it's been there for a long time though. There was a period of time where the three businesses were each about 10 to 11 billion and they were kind of Neck and neck each quarter. And then the cloud, you know this, the cloud rocket is what just broke out like big time. And for a long time it was intelligent cloud, which is Azure. And then more recently it's been the Microsoft 365 bit because of that revenue shift. But.

[Richard Campbell]

And to be clear, underneath of 365 is also Azure. Not from a revenue perspective but in the end Microsoft has become a cloud company. Revenues reflect it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I was going to say 100% but it's more like 75, 85%. But yeah, I mean, yes, obviously that's the focus. Yeah. Okay. So without knowing any of those numbers, I mean I think we all knew the quarter was going to be pretty good. And one of the questions was what was their capex spend, which is their AI infrastructure spending. They were talking about how they were going to spend 80 billion in this fiscal year. That fiscal year has concluded. I at one point had pointed out that this number was actually going up and they did end closer. I think it was about 85 billion for the year. But one of the big bits they brought out in that post earnings conference call was that that number is actually going to go up dramatically for this fiscal year. So for this current quarter it's going to be at least $30 billion. And yeah, it's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

So like when you nice to, to just know you've made more than a billion dollars a week.

[Paul Thurot]

I, I, yeah. And when you look at what do.

[Leo Laporte]

You do with that money?

[Paul Thurot]

Well, you invest it in AI Leo. And, and the thing is it's like you know, big tech and Apple we don't, they don't really. Well Apple, it does actually give a capex number. We're going to talk about that in a little while. But Apple has always been and still is far behind the other companies when it comes to things like R and D and in this case investing in AI infrastructure. But they are spending on that stuff. But Google and Amazon and Microsoft especially like the three combined is like the net worth of every company, every country on earth except for the United States or something like it's an incredible sum that they're spending.

[Richard Campbell]

Starting to become that sort of William Gibson esque, you know, corporate world where these are, that's right. This is, this is country money.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. What was the company from the Alien movies not Knock knock. Oh yeah, something with an N chat.

[Leo Laporte]

Room will do it. Nor, nor I confuse it with the one in Die Hard.

[Paul Thurot]

That's exactly right.

[Richard Campbell]

Nakatomi.

[Leo Laporte]

Nakatomi is Die Hard.

[Paul Thurot]

Nakatomi's yeah, that's.

[Leo Laporte]

What's the alien one.

[Paul Thurot]

Now that I hear that I can't.

[Leo Laporte]

Wailing Yutani Wayland Yutani Kev Brewer. Nailed it.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay. Whaling Nutani. I thought it was going to be different. Okay. But yes, that's. That is it. Yeah. So yeah, we're living in. Yeah. Are better this. Is that better than Skynet? Yeah, probably a little bit.

[Leo Laporte]

But is anything better than Skynet? Nothing's.

[Paul Thurot]

There's anything not better. I don't know. Anyway, so yeah, these companies are spending a lot. But the big thing for me heading into this call was how or if they would address the layoffs. I got the vibe from all of the unprecedented hard numbers that Microsoft provided literally for the first time in many cases ever that it was like a hand waving thing, like there are no layoffs. These are not the layoffs you're looking for. Look at all these other things. And it wasn't until I think it was the very last question in the Q and A at the very end where someone finally asked about it. But basically Microsoft, first of all, under Satya Nadella has been laying off employees from the beginning. This is actually something that's been fairly consistent. I only went back a little while, but looking at my own stories from thorat.com, i mean there were at least three. Well, so far this year there have been three rounds of layoffs, big round, you know, meaningful rounds. Last year there were three. In the previous year they laid off 10,000 employees all at one time. I mean, so it's, you know, it's kind of, it's not unprecedented. Of course, the way they've gone about it is a little tough. Right. We've talked about this and you know, first, the first wave were all allegedly performance based. It still caught people by surprise in some cases because there were employees who had been warned ahead of time that they were on the line here and maybe you should improve.

[Richard Campbell]

And it turned a corner.

[Paul Thurot]

But it was. They had looked back over a wider period of time and still got laid off. So that was deflating, obviously. And then there was the May layoffs, which were incredible and terrible. And we talked about that at length and the experiences we had in Seattle. And then of course what were going to be the June layoffs which turned into the July layoffs in part because Microsoft wanted to announce this XBOX portable gaming platform without undermining it with news of layoffs, but several thousand.

[Richard Campbell]

Because that's fine for Build but not fine for Expo.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, yeah, that's. You learn, you know, you Learn your lesson, you would hope. But also like, they never should have done what they did in May, but okay.

[Richard Campbell]

One of the themes I hear over and over again, especially lately, is that this was not about reducing headcount or saving money. This is about changing the culture.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Of we want to be number one. Right, Right. The company has made a very comfortable business of being number two in everything.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And they, and now Satya wants something.

[Paul Thurot]

Now they're getting aggressive. All right. I mean, look, theoretically that sounds great. And as does, you know, something like, well, we're reducing layers of management. You're like, excellent. That is a, it's a good goal. But again, it's been kind of brutal. And by the way, I think the number so far this year is 17,000 employees. Right. Which in a company size of Microsoft. Right. 250. Whatever the number is they have now employees, it's a meaningful number. Percentage wise. It's small. And Microsoft made the point in that conference call that they are essentially the same size from headcount today as they were a year ago. Which is kind of like a weird.

[Leo Laporte]

That's interesting.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. It's not what you expect. Right. And some of this, obviously some layoffs are going to result in maybe employees finding obviously positions in other companies. But also I suppose they could get positions elsewhere in Microsoft or be doing something different.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I've seen a lot of hire backs.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. It's a big, complex company. If they can reduce some of that complexity. Yes, that makes sense.

[Richard Campbell]

But I, I gotta tell you, I ran across one lady who will remain nameless who was let go in May and rehired within a couple of weeks. And it was let go again in July.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

And has been retired again.

[Paul Thurot]

Boy. Well, she likes to wonder what her.

[Richard Campbell]

Mental state is like.

[Paul Thurot]

Like. Yeah, you feel like a ping pong ball.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no kidding.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I have two minds because on the one hand it's horrible for the people who experience it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

But on the other hand, is it Microsoft's responsibility to, I mean, it's ultimately their responsibility to be a well run, profitable enterprise.

[Richard Campbell]

The question is, does this make it a more well run company or not?

[Leo Laporte]

If it doesn't, then they're failing their stakeholders and they should stop. But given that they've had a pretty successful quarter.

[Paul Thurot]

That's the thing. When you hear like intel is laying people off and the streamlining, like, yep, this totally makes sense, you guys, because.

[Leo Laporte]

They'Re failing, you're failing. Maybe you want to do it before you fail.

[Paul Thurot]

That's still the tough One, look, this company's been around for a long time. A lot of these employees have still been around for a long time. It's possible that a lot of these people are in parts of the company that aren't the way forward, you know, that they're part of the past. And it's always horrible.

[Leo Laporte]

I've been laid off. It's not a no, no.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, I've had to lay people off. By the way.

[Leo Laporte]

It's never a happy thing for anybody involved.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, you rephrase the question, which is how much more money have they made if they hadn't demoralized the whole company?

[Leo Laporte]

The demoralization is a big. That's a very good point. There is a company morale issue as well.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, there is. Yes. I'm not sure we could measure that explicitly, but when we've had to.

[Leo Laporte]

When we've had to cut back and lay people off, it's terrible for morale. But the, the alternative in our case, not Microsoft's case, was laying everybody off and going home. So, yeah, yeah, it's not something you ever want to do.

[Richard Campbell]

And I've done this as well and also seen that the folks that were left stepped up that because we were clear why we were doing it and what we were, what the goal was and how we did our selections and, you know, as hard as you get.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, so. Which is not what just happened and.

[Richard Campbell]

Not at all what happened.

[Paul Thurot]

What Microsoft needs right now, I would say pretty badly. And again, there's no suffering.

[Richard Campbell]

Satya put out that letter that said nothing other than I acknowledge that some of you are upset.

[Paul Thurot]

I might have said this when you were gone. I guess I probably did because I.

[Richard Campbell]

The way I described you when I'm not here.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I've said this about Satya Della a lot, but that memo is a great example. Put it into Word, ask it to generate a summary, and it just says this page intentionally left blank. It boils down to no words. It starts off with hearts and prayers and thoughts and prayers or whatever, and kind of goes from there. And it's like it just doesn't say much. Although I did get that they've said it before, but succinctly put. Microsoft's focus going forward is, in this order, hilariously, security quality. And the first time I said this out loud, I couldn't get through it. I was laughing too hard. An AI transformation. So, yeah, okay, again, viable goals. I guess, if you're into generalities. Okay. But let's get specific because this is what made this earnings call Fun. Microsoft, for the first time in history, told us what the revenues of Azure were.

[Richard Campbell]

Is that because they were finally more than Amazon? Is that what this is?

[Paul Thurot]

I think so, but. Well, I think it was more like layoffs, Azure revenues. And everyone's like, oh, because, you know, analysts probably went into this call with whatever questions and then they just started talking and they were like, wait, what? And sure enough, the next eight guys, the first eight people or whatever, just talked about this. It was like, are you kidding me?

[Richard Campbell]

So it worked.

[Paul Thurot]

So I have a question for you, more math centric folks. 42. Oh, sorry. You're pretty close actually. So the number for the fiscal year that just ended was $75 billion in revenues. Now we know that this is a certain percentage more than the previous year, which means we can compute what that is. So for example, I, I figured out a 34% jump in revenues means that Azure made $56 billion in revenues in fiscal year 2024. Now they have been reporting that number forever. So someone, if they wanted to and they didn't value their time, could keep going back and saying, what's 40% of this? What's 70% of this? What's this? And now, because it's revenues, we're never going to get to zero, Right? Right. It will be 0.000 something at some point, but we're never going below zero. But we could kind of figure out like when Azure actually became a meaningful business revenue wise and then compare it to when they were talking about it like it was. And I bet you'd find there's a five to eight year gap. So I think that's kind of, that alone is fascinating because there was no stated reason for saying it. Now if you kind of just look at their earnings and compare them to a year ago, two quarters ago, whatever, there's no big difference. It's like, why now? We don't know, but I suppose part of it might be tied to the capex spending. Spending and trying to get ahead of that because ultimately that spending, which is about AI, is directly related to Azure as well. Right. Because that's where a lot of their AI infrastructure lies. So that could have played a role. Maybe that was why. But they didn't really say that and I thought that was kind of interesting. So that was the, that was the first big one, but there were actually several more. Right. So Satya Nadella is talking. He did the Azure bit, I think, up, up top. In fact, I think it's like 12 seconds into his talk, like it's very quick, like hey, Azure, something something, you know, it was just like everyone lost their minds and forgot, you know, didn't hear the next 10 minutes. Right. So there's been a lot of news lately. Copilot also ran in the market compared to ChatGPT especially, but also to Gemini and other AI chatbots. True consumer side seems to be true on the business side, et cetera, et cetera. And Satya Nadella who referred to Copilot Microsoft 365 Copilot as essentially a new tier of Microsoft 365, which is the way I sort of describe it because it's like a significant added cost, said that he called it. The family of Copilot apps has surpassed over 100 million monthly active users across commercial and consumer. Now, consumer users do not pay. By and large, commercial users all do. I think he was mostly talking about Microsoft 365 copilot based on the way he was talking from then on. He specifically talked about certain features that were part of that, et cetera, et cetera. But 100 million is not insignificant. It's not as many, it's not even close to what ChatGPT has and that's growing faster, et cetera, et cetera. But those are all paid users by and large. I would say 90 something percent are paid on the, you know, for the, the meaningful part of it. So that's, you know, not horrible. No, not bad, not bad.

[Richard Campbell]

GitHub over compared to ChatGPT, which is what, 800 million? Although.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I can't remember. Yeah, right. Most of those are not paid. Right. But then again they do have. In the world of like consumer paid AI, I bet they're number one. I mean you would hope actually paying. I would think they are. I would think they are. GitHub. Copilot has over 20 million users. That's significant because I think it was April when they said it was 15 million. Now previous December they made a free tier of that and I can say from having used it ever since in Visual Studio that that's good enough for a lot of people. So I wonder, I don't what that number is, you know, paid versus non paid. But it's a. I mean I use it almost every single day and I've never once had it say, hey, you're getting kind of close to the line there, buddy. You know, like it's, it's just kind of worked like it's given me.

[Richard Campbell]

The only people I find that pin their token usage are developers.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, like actual professional developers.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, sure, that are really building things and putting it seriously to work.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, no, I'm making a ridiculous app that is wasting my time more than anyone else's really. But anyway, all right.

[Richard Campbell]

But we love it.

[Paul Thurot]

And there were also some really good numbers around Xbox and Microsoft gaming, which I'm going to save for the Xbox segment. But the common thread here is these things are all kind of meaningful numbers. They're all AI related except for Xbox. They're all positive things obviously. But the theme seems to be like, look, it's working if we just spend 80 to. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

No, they're not spending that on market.

[Paul Thurot]

40 billion. But the.

[Richard Campbell]

There's two things that I think about when I think about that $80 billion. A, it was cash, not borrowed.

[Paul Thurot]

That's true. Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. It would have just been stock buybacks otherwise. B, it's mostly data centers, which, you know, might be a workloads, it might not be. It doesn't matter. You know, in the end, it's not even the compute. You know, I've been doing the numbers on data centers and it's like 60% of the data center cost is the infrastructure, not the compute. 40% is what you. But your, your concrete, your power, your cooling, the infrastructure around it, there's 60% of the cost. The machines are going to change out every five years, whatever you put in them one way or the other. And that's sort of the diminishing cost. Like the argument is they're building them too quickly right now for utilization, which doesn't seem to be the case because we're having utilization problems. So the build as fast as you can, but even if the demand dies off, a lot of that money is retained. A lot of that value stays in place.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm trying to see if I put this in here somewhere if I can find it, but yeah. So to your point, yeah, three of the last four quarters they made significantly more in profits than they spent on this this past quarter that has only gone up like that's actually. That situation is actually better than it was. I don't remember where would this. Can't find it in my article here. But there was a point in there about Microsoft back when they spaced out Windows revenues in the windows 7 and then 8 time. Well, I guess they stopped during 8. But they would put revenues aside, so to speak, so that they could smooth it out over time, which is a fun accounting trick. That sounds illegal, but whatever. Questionable. And you know, Windows would make an exact 20 billion a quarter, you know, or whatever the number Was right. So, okay, they are actually doing that with some of the cloud stuff as well right now. And so what they showed was that not only do they have, did they make the revenue and profits to pay for this stuff, but they also have this spend that's coming. So this is like customers that are big companies that are going to spend an enormous amount of money on Azure essentially for whatever reason might be Microsoft 365, whatever it is, and they're actually spacing out the revenues now. So they didn't say it exactly like this, but the inference was not only have we paid for this stuff essentially with cash, which is basically what you were saying, but we have the commitments to double or triple the amount we'll need to do the same in the coming year. So the point, I think one of the points they were trying to make in this conference call was, look, I know these numbers are big, I know this looks scary. I know you're wondering what are we doing? And it's like this is paying for itself. Don't worry about it. And a lot of us at the.

[Richard Campbell]

Same time, they, earlier this year at least put a few projects on hold. Which makes me wonder if they're not just looking across the gamut of simultaneous projects saying these are the most expensive ones. Why don't we pause these and maybe we can negotiate a better deal while we're moving ahead on the most cost effective ones.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep, yep. Yeah. And, and I, again, I don't have these numbers in my brain, but Zamy Hood was talking about the amount of years that you know, like we're spending on this, this stuff. And like you said, some of it is this, some of it's this, some of this and some, some of the technology bits are more short lived than others. But a lot of the server type things that they're putting in are several year investments. Like they're going to be there for a while.

[Richard Campbell]

Sure.

[Paul Thurot]

And maybe longer than I would have expected in some ways. But.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the infrastructure of a Data center, the 60% is 50 years.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like that's the concrete and then power poles and that kind of stuff is going to stay right the heart, the 40% is a five year cycle.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

And of course, but, and there are, there's a bunch of stuff they kept in during the pandemic when they, when compute pressures went way, way up that are well aged out and they're starting to roll some of that stuff out.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

So they do, you know that five years in arbitrary number, it's not like those machines burst into flames after five years.

[Leo Laporte]

We were talking about this on Twitter on Sunday, weren't we? You were there?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I was there, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Because people are saying not just about Microsoft, but in general that the capex spending on AI, in fact it's now as improving gdp, it's more than consumer spending. So it's massive. But the point that we were making on Sunday, and you're actually filling it out now, Richard, is that that infrastructure sticks around.

[Paul Thurot]

Maybe the computers like it has a half life.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it does because the CPUs and the computers and the GPUs have a half life.

[Paul Thurot]

I wonder. So we, in our country, we were big into things like steel, you know, and fossil fuels. And those things are. Well, steel is gone basically from the United States for all intents and purposes. And fossil fuels are obviously on the way out. Right. And so you see the impact of those shifts on these communities that, you know, just like the gold boom stuff in California from a couple hundred years ago where it was huge and then it was gone and there were ghost towns and you know, these abandoned places, et cetera. So we're going to build all these data centers and I'm wondering, like, these will be the sets for the post apocalyptic movies of the future where it's like, yeah, every big building is going to be like a former data center or Amazon warehouse. And they're all like, that's our whole country.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, there's actually a precedent for that. Look at the malls.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, right. That's exactly what happened to malls.

[Richard Campbell]

The argument with the malls is that they overbuilt. And so that's what these guys are trying to do.

[Paul Thurot]

But that's the question here. Right. So I mean, but there's another analogy.

[Leo Laporte]

Which talked about on Sunday, which is the railroads, which in the 1880s overbuilt. Most of those companies went bankrupt. But we didn't lose the infrastructure.

[Paul Thurot]

No, we just stopped fixing it.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, and it transformed America to have a transcontinental railway. You could make the same argument that.

[Richard Campbell]

Followed of the dot com boom was the fiber optic cables laid around the planet that also largely went bankrupt and were bought back at 10 cents on the dollar. And a reason your tech support comes from India.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, but it's also the reason that you have fiber and high speed. Look at broadband adoption in the United States, except for the most rural areas, is, is transformation. It's killing television.

[Richard Campbell]

Who are finding fiber like their job is, is dark fiber. They find a piece of dark fiber like it was put in, but never.

[Paul Thurot]

Like you, you Go to, like a new build that was never finished, and you strip the copper out. But now you're.

[Richard Campbell]

They want to find the other end because often they're val. Like, they got lays that were hard to get right.

[Paul Thurot]

And.

[Richard Campbell]

And some of them are really valuable. So it's like, hey, we found this set of fiber sticking out of this building. Where do you think it goes? And then they do this sort of detective work on what permits were pulled when. And then, you know, eventually knock on another building store. Like, hey, there's a chance in the back corner you've got a pipe that you don't know about.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Do you mind the other side?

[Leo Laporte]

There are two subjects I'm fascinated by that are kind of little covered but are so important. One is logistics.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And, and, and how deeply that technology is rooted in everything we do. We're learning it kind of now with tariffs. But the other is infrastructure, and you just take it for granted. You know, I walk down my street and all the wires are underground, so I don't see the telephone poles, the fiber, whatever.

[Paul Thurot]

Move to Mexico. You can see every wire in the world.

[Richard Campbell]

They're all above ground here too.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but. But it's hidden infrastructure, but it's. Yet it's vital. And the way it got there is a fascinating story. Anyway, we have to take a break. Speaking of fascinating stories, we will continue with this conversation. You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat, Richard Campbell. I didn't even get to plug Richard's website, which is dotnet rocks and that's where he'll find dotnet rocks and run it. Actually, it's runasradio.com you'll find net [e-mail]. they're all there.

[Richard Campbell]

They're all there.

[Leo Laporte]

And he's there. He's back in Canadia, which is Canadian, for a week. He was on a cruise. He was on a cruise to Alaska. Paul, you remember going to Alaska? You remember getting Covid on the boat? You remember several.

[Richard Campbell]

Several of our friends have come off the boat.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, the funny thing, I remember being told I have Covid. I. I never.

[Leo Laporte]

I can't say I've gotten coveted twice. Both cases, it was on a cruise.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And we're planning a riverboat trip in a month. I'm wondering.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a smaller boat, you'll be fine.

[Leo Laporte]

And there's lots of fresh air.

[Paul Thurot]

You get different sicknesses far more quickly than they got Covid.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, you might get trichinosis, but that's a different thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I've always wanted to travel through the Southeast of the United States, and right now I'm reading histories of the Civil War and it's really fast. I can't wait. The history is going to be really incredible. We start New Orleans. Love New Orleans.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyway, it's going to be cool.

[Leo Laporte]

It's going to be very exciting if we get to do it. But first, the reason it's an if is because we're doing construction on the house and Lisa says, if they're not done by September 20th, we're not going. And I said, but, but, but we made this reservation in 2021.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurot]

We.

[Leo Laporte]

I really, I really want to go home. All right, let's take a break. More to come, more sad tales of luxury trips to come. First, we have to pay for those luxury trips with our fabulous sponsors. No, that's not what pays for my luxury trips. In fact, this thing, we paid for this so long ago, I don't even forgot that I even paid for it. Four years. Four years we had to make that reservation. I do actually want to talk about something really important. If you are a business and that is SaaS security, we talk about it all the time on all of our shows. This episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by 1Password over half of IT professionals say securing SaaS apps is their number one challenge. And actually if you think about it, you know your employees are using AI, they're using all kinds of SaaS, some of it approved by the company, some of it not. With the growing problems of SaaS sprawl and shadow it, you can see why this is a growing problem. But there is a solution. Thankfully Trelica by 1Password T R E L I C A can discover and secure access to all your apps, all of them managed or not. This is such a good solution. Trelika by 1Password inventories first thing it does inventories every app in use in your company. Every one. Then they know about all the apps. So they have pre populated app profiles which will assess the SaaS risks, letting you decide, you manage access, optimize, spend, enforce security best practices across every app your employees use. Even shadow also helps you securely onboard and offboard employees and of course it helps you meet compliance goals. Trelica by1Password provides a complete solution for SaaS access governance and it's just one of the ways that extended access management helps teams strengthen compliance and security. This is the new thing from 1Password Extended Access Management. You know their password manager, right? We've used, we've talked about it for years many of you still use or have been using it for all that time. 1Password's award winning password manager is trusted now by millions of users, over 150,000 businesses from IBM to Slack. But 1Password's gone beyond securing more than just passwords with this new 1Password Extended Access Management. Now, needless to say, 1Password is secure itself. ISO 27001 certified. Regular third party audits. By the way, the industry's largest bug bounty, 1Password exceeds the standards set by all the various authorities and is a leader in security. You can be confident when you're using 1Password, and I think you probably know that, right, that by reputation. Take the first step to better security for your team by securing credentials and protecting every application, even unmanaged. Shadow it. Learn more at 1Password.com WindowsWeekly that's 1Password.com WindowsWeekly all lowercase.

[Paul Thurot]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

No caps in there. 1Password.com WindowsWeekly we thank him so much for supporting Paul and Richard and the show and all of us. Thank you. 1Password. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt this conversation. I'm going to step back and let you two continue on.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm laughing about this Windows 2030 thing just because you realize that means the next version of Windows 2030, it's only five years away.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, it's been a while, though, since we've gotten a Windows Vision video. So I'm kind of excited about this on that in that sense, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

Can I play it? Is it allowed?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's. I mean, it's seven minutes long. I wouldn't play the whole thing, but it's David Weston. This guy's in charge of baseball.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so it's more talky talk.

[Paul Thurot]

Security. Well, no, he talked. There's some interesting stuff in here, actually, I would say.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, so we'll just. Everybody should go to therot.com and take seven minutes and we'll just wait.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay. You're back. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Here's David. David. I won't turn it up. I'll just let you watch.

[Paul Thurot]

He's talking wizzle or whatever he's called.

[Leo Laporte]

He looks like the wizzle.

[Richard Campbell]

Look at that. He's deleted his LinkedIn account. That's interesting, huh?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. It was probably too professional. So I.

[Leo Laporte]

Is he. Is he responsible for Windows in the future?

[Paul Thurot]

Security. Security.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurot]

He's actually. He's actually pretty great. If he can get. He's great. Yeah. So. No, he really is.

[Leo Laporte]

He doesn't look like a Microsoft corporate vice president.

[Paul Thurot]

He looks. Yeah, I think that might be part of the point of his success. Yeah, so yeah, I mentioned this earlier. The core focus for Microsoft, according to Satya Nadella, is in this order, security quality and AI transformation. Right. And so the first of what they promised will be some series of videos about their vision for how Windows will evolve in the future. Focuses on security. Thus Dave Weston, although he talks about just agenic use cases and how natural language will change the way we interact with computers.

[Richard Campbell]

AI all the time in this context. Right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I mean, look, even in its kind of nascent, ridiculous state today, Copilot and Windows, you can see how it's kind of going to go in this direction. I mean a lot of the. Well, the first way we interacted with these chatbots was by text, you know, typing. It was like, what are we doing? We're going back to a command line.

[Richard Campbell]

So right back to Stevie Batish. Right. Like that's really when we started, started talking about Windows.

[Leo Laporte]

That was such a great talk. We continually refer to it too, which is.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, all the time. But his kind of take on this. I'm trying to think of the actor whose name I'm now zoning on Apollo, Ian Neeson.

[Leo Laporte]

I have certain.

[Paul Thurot]

Type thing. No, sorry, I didn't mean to go in a serious direction. But he has his own kind of take on it. So you can talk like you're like multimodal interactions. You're like, okay. And it's like less eyes, more talking. It's like, okay, there you go. Less toil work. Right. And Microsoft is doing a lot of hand waving around AI because there are a lot of interested parties who are scared about this. Right. And in this case it's users who are like, we're going to lose our jobs because of AI. It's like, no, no, no. It's going to take away the bad work. It's going to.

[Leo Laporte]

You're going to lose your job for other reasons, but it won't be AI.

[Paul Thurot]

You're still a terrible human being. So that's a problem. But no, he kind of just steps through the different ways that humans will always be necessary and because of course he does. But I do sort of like the, because you can go off the end, the deep end with technical talk and people are like, what are you talking about getting rid of toil? A lot of what he's talking about is obviously security related. So it's Windows resiliency initiative and how it ties into Microsoft's broadest stuff. He talks a little bit of about, about post quantum hardening of Windows or making Windows quantum safe. Which is interesting because quantum computing has not happened yet. But they, they're already building, you know, quantum or like encryption that can't be broken by quantum, et cetera, et cetera.

[Richard Campbell]

They're being. Not building, starting to deploy.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah, sorry, I didn't mean. I mean they make it like it exists.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So, and then just the notion of the shift to agentic systems, et cetera. And okay, fine, he hits on this thing that's really interesting. He says this about security, but I would apply this to computing in general. He is saying that computers are going to change a lot and that the way we interact with them will change a lot, but also that customers are looking for. And the way he described it was appliance level security. And he compares it to a. Now with the understanding, of course smart appliances have had problems and all that kind of stuff. But he's like, basically you have a washing machine or refrigerator, does this one thing. It just does it, you know, it's not a general purpose device that you can add anything to and it, you know, send you notifications and runs apps and stuff. Although those absolutely do exist to some degree. But yeah, I mean, fair enough because I, I wrote this really long thing about the iPad partly on the plane ride home yesterday where when you think about how computers might evolve, you know, in Microsoft's experience, they've taken this big complex thing and they've kind of built down to go to different devices and hasn't been super successful. In Apple's case, they did do that one time, obviously with OS X and then they went to the iPhone. But ever since then it's been these kind of smaller, lighter, cleaner, more modern systems that are fine tuned to whatever the form factor or device type is. And with the iPad you get to this point where it does that kind of 80, whatever percent that all computers can do. And our audience is that 15% is like, I could never use that because it doesn't have. But the 85% is a bigger audience. And when something like you open it and it just turns on and there are no fans ever, and it gets 18 hours of battery life or whatever it is. And now it does all this other stuff too. And if you don't want that, you don't have to have it, but if you do, you can. And you know, it's like this, it solved this kind of matrix of problems that frankly I think Apple could have done many years ago, but didn't, but now have. And this is kind of a problem for Windows but that's not tied to this video per se. But it was interesting because I had just written most of it and when I heard him say that, I was like, huh. Because I don't think Microsoft has anything in the works that I would call an appliance, like personal computing experience. Right. The best we're going to be able to do, at least, unless something's going to come out of the woodwork and surprise me is something like Windows 11 on ARM, which has inherent advantages because it's ARM and because they've gotten a little rid of a lot of cruft, which is, you know, the rest of Windows hasn't and it's not x86, frankly, that's a big part of it.

[Richard Campbell]

But all of that software problem is becoming less important because we don't really need software anymore in the gentic world.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, yes, so. But that is also a problem for Windows because if that's the case, you don't really need Windows. Yeah, right. You know, most of our time is spent with these more personal devices anyway.

[Leo Laporte]

So we're in the browser.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Which runs on anything. And so I feel like, you know, that we all know the Steve Jobs thing, right? Cars and trucks and all that. I think in computer speak, I would say that computers have become what we used to call workstations. And these other devices are like computers.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, it's funny because for a long time you needed the truck if you want to do coding. You might not even need that anymore.

[Paul Thurot]

If you do still need it, it's an artificial limitation because there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't do this on a device. Right. But obviously not obviously. I mean, you can run Visual Studio code on a Chromebook if you install that Linux subsystem, whatever that was called, whatever it's called, you can't. There is a Swift Playgrounds thing on the iPad which is not the full, you know, the full xcode, obviously, but you can actually use it to make apps. I mean, to some degree it's not the same. It's not xcode. I get it. It's not cross platform and all that, but it could happen.

[Leo Laporte]

Some say not being XCODE is a virtue.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, well, but that's the thing. That's the point thing. So our audience and our group, our people, us. The obvious pushback on this is. Well, it doesn't do. Like I said, it doesn't have this, like, I need this. I need this one ancient printer, this one weird esoteric device, or my job is very specific and I do this. You're a coder or whatever. Like you can. There's always the thing and it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I know, but, but, but no one's doing that. You know, like, like there's. All of the major productivity apps are on this thing now. Like all video editors are there, all the social media stuff, all the things I use, Notion, IA, Writer, Word Affinity, Photo, Photoshop, what's it called, DaVinci Resolve is on there. It's nuts. Anyway, so things are changing. So sorry, David, but it's probably.

[Richard Campbell]

I'll give you the corollary to that, which is using the playwright MCP to do testing on a website rather than write the tests themselves. I'm writing prompts to generate the tests, which means when the new version of the website came out, I just reused the prompts to regenerate the tests. I didn't have to go edit all the tests.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I think the first disconnect, maybe for me, and this is like a developer thing that maybe that audience would kind of understand was when the focus shifted to web development is why Visual Studio code became a thing. Right. It was, it was answering this problem because you didn't have to have this big, huge Visual Studio thing to do that. In fact these people were doing something. These people, you know, developers, web developers, by, by and large are working in what I would think of, or maybe other developers might think of as an almost unstructured way where it's like a folder is the project and you're working in an editor and you're deploying to a website maybe. And it's not this build, compile, link kind of heavy process. It's something that can happen in a more efficient manner. And in the beginning, to people like me, at least, it looks like a toy, it looks silly. And then one day you wake up and you realize 85% of all developers are doing this and what you're doing is the, you know, the minority is. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Now the IDE has fallen out of favor with the younger generation. I mean, arguably Visual Studio code was, we want to build an open source editor. And one of the reasons was there is a generation of developers that have never used an IDE because they were expensive.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, right, right, right. I, yeah, yeah, I, Yeah. There's a thing that Apple's been doing for a long time that is not a part of my daily life that I think now that the iPad is more of a mainstream computer, maybe will become more of a thing for more people. Right. Which is the maybe consumer Version of what you just said. There's this thing that's happening that we weren't really aware of, and that thing on the Apple side is this icloud thing where you write apps to work with icloud and you don't worry about file systems and you don't do file management. And, you know, I experienced that in small ways, like by writing an article in IA Writer on an iPad or a Mac. And there's no save or save as it's just. It's just saved in icloud and you don't.

[Richard Campbell]

Those three and a half inch floppy icons don't exist anymore. Yep.

[Paul Thurot]

They're not there. Yep. They've saved a lot. They've made the system a lot simpler by not having a floppy disk icon.

[Richard Campbell]

But I work in jupyter notebooks. I just don't save anything.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, like, notion always there. Right, Right. To be fair to Microsoft, this was, you know, One note from V1 was like this. And it was like, what do you mean there are no document files? Like it. It takes a while to get around that when you're used to the old way.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

But once you use it for a little while, you realize, oh, like, you mean this is just gonna. Just gonna work? Like, that's. I guess that's one way to do it. I've been using Microsoft products. I didn't know that was an option. No microl.

[Richard Campbell]

S reflexes.

[Leo Laporte]

Strong.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, my God. The smartest thing it can do is just register it and just keep going, you know, just let you do it.

[Richard Campbell]

Make a little icon pops up the side that says, okay, Boomer. And it keeps.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yes, yes, yes, exactly, please. Yeah. Flip over the floppy so we can finish saving on the other side.

[Richard Campbell]

That's it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Because I know you off that notch so you could use both sides of the disc.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, man.

[Leo Laporte]

People are wondering what the hell you're talking about, but I've been there. I know.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep, yep. We used to have to spin a tape forward to the right point. You'd write it on the outside so you knew where the program started. You know, you're like, oh, you just missed it. Come on, go back. You know, it was a good time. Okay, so. All right, so future Windows, blah, blah, blah. I guess we'll see what happens. Anyway, reclaim our lives, et cetera, et cetera, before we get to the insider stuff, which honestly isn't too big this week.

[Richard Campbell]

And I'm not unhappy that this is CVP talking about Windows because nobody seniors talked about Windows for a long time.

[Paul Thurot]

That's a good point. No, I was saying something about David Westin. He was the guy who had brought. He talked about the Windows use of Rust for the first time, for example, in the kernel. And he's been, you know, part of this future, what's called the Secure Future Initiative that Microsoft's doing. He's been big during all the. Every one of the Windows Resiliency Initiative or whatever that's called, milestones. He came up recently when they announced administrative mode. Right. For Windows 11, which is now rolling out in the Insider program, some of the new system restore capabilities, et cetera, et cetera. So he's. He's been a presence. You know, he's been out there. But yet, like Richard said, you don't really. You don't hear Satya Nadella talking about Windows all that much, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I would defy you to even find someone with a title CBP of Windows anymore. Like who. Who is it?

[Paul Thurot]

Right. Is it so. Well, I'm not a big fan of.

[Richard Campbell]

Dave Weston, because I am. But the guy's in security.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Yeah. No, no, he's not part of. Yeah. Windows product development for sure. Yep. I mean, there is. Yeah. So that part of the world is technically. Well, it's weird because it's split between Microsoft 365 and, you know, more personal computing. But the. What's it. Rajesh Jha is the kind of overlord of that part of the world. And then Pavan is Windows, probably in more personal computing side. So that's like engineering and user experience, that kind of stuff. And then the insider program, etc. I'm not sure what his title is. He might. He might be a corporate vice president. This seems like there's probably thousands of them now. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

There's hundreds. But generally speaking, the definition of a CVP is they own a revenue stream.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's interesting. Well, that's a pretty important thing.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the threshold. The moment that you own income for the company, they make you a cpp.

[Paul Thurot]

Huh.

[Leo Laporte]

I didn't know that. That's interesting. I guess I'm a CVP for twit.

[Richard Campbell]

That's it.

[Leo Laporte]

But you guys are CVPs for Windows Weekly. You own this revenue stream.

[Paul Thurot]

Nice. Nice. Oh, great. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

But Lisa owns us all, so that's.

[Richard Campbell]

Really, you know, that would make her the ebp.

[Leo Laporte]

She's the. Yeah, she's the CEO.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Pavan Davalori is a corporate vice president, so I guess that's the guy.

[Leo Laporte]

So is this all defined at somewhere or is this a standard in all corporations or is this a mic? This is a Microsoft thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. This is the way I've understand Microsoft for a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

Do they publish anything like.

[Richard Campbell]

Not anymore. Yeah, it's just becomes.

[Leo Laporte]

It's not like the military where you know, you get your.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the thing now is it's been used as an attack vector. Right. Business compromise, of course on understanding hierarchies.

[Leo Laporte]

That happened to even little old us.

[Paul Thurot]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

Because if you know who's direct reports.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

And you can send a message from the CVP saying I own this revenue stream. So you send it to.

[Paul Thurot]

Actually I bet it's a count in Russia. It's been a couple of months, I think. I think Kevin might actually be a Chinese spy. I'm just saying.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, he's Korean.

[Paul Thurot]

No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, he's from North Korea. Yeah, yeah, his English.

[Richard Campbell]

He wants you to buy a bunch of Amazon cards.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, sometimes he slips up, that's all.

[Leo Laporte]

We send Amazon cards every week. Just, just teasing uk. Just teasing you, if that's your real name.

[Paul Thurot]

They're ice. Listen, be careful, okay? So Microsoft this week quietly killed Windows 11 SE, which most of you probably don't know is a thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh my God.

[Richard Campbell]

Second edition.

[Leo Laporte]

That was still alive.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So this is the stripped down, what do you call it, education focused version of Windows 11.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the one you could only download from the store, kind of a.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, no, no, no, that's S mode. So that's it. This is. But it's part of this, that world. It's like let's take this complex thing and try to make it simpler in this case to compete with Chromebook. Right. And so I don't remember what year this was, but when Terry Meyerson at the time unveiled the original Surface laptop, it was for some reason, even though it was expensive, targeting the education market, it was announced at an education event. And the thing I most remember from that event was not the laptop, but the fact that there's meaning, Microsoft's, meaning the Windows teams at the time solution for. We need something that's as simple as all these remote capabilities that Chromebook offers education customers was to put software on a window like a USB key and walk around each computer and plug it in. I was like, yeah, that's not going to work. So since then they've tried several different things. Windows 11 SE was one of them. And I just mentioned this thing is coincidental, but he talked about this, what do you call it, appliance like capability. Right. And I mentioned the iPad, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, I'd say the Chrome OS and the iPad are kind of examples of these more modern computing platforms that are simpler. And yes, they don't do as much. Although, you know, the gap is closing and the stuff that they don't do, maybe it's.

[Richard Campbell]

Is it just me or is it every time they put a letter after the number of the Windows, that's a doomed version?

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, this is also part of the wider story. It's like when you're a hammer, everything's a nail. So when you're Microsoft, everything is Windows. And then you repeat the success story over and over again and it works great until one day it stops working. But you don't notice until seven years later when the whole world has changed and you're still calling things Windows something and no one cares anymore and we've moved on. But yes, it's a. I don't know. Anyway, they're not doing it anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

So no, again, I don't know.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know what, Yeah, I don't know what we're going to do going forward, but that one's over. So there's that.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, Windows for ARM cuts away a lot of the cruft that the X's and the S's have been trying to do for years.

[Paul Thurot]

That's right. And I think that's as good as we're going to get it. You know, it's a good place to be. It's still Windows. I mean, you know that workstation thing I was talking about, it's still, you know, it's a full PC operating system, whatever. But yeah, it does get rid of the cruft and whether it's the architecture and. Or that. Right. Those things probably go hand in hand, but these systems are a lot more reliable. And I don't know why I didn't put this in the notes, but I also wrote a big thing about that this week. I had gone to Mexico with two nearly identical laptops, one running an AMD chip and running intel. And my wife, who has not once but maybe a million times wondered if I don't have Tourette's, noticed me freaking out about this intel based computer because it just stopped working all the time, like it was crazy bad. And I just looked. I didn't do a thorough thing over like every possible metric, but when you look at basic reliability, things like instant on and whether it actually comes on instantly and whether the webcam comes on and actually works and what happens when you open more than three tabs and what happens when you're on battery power versus plugged into power, et cetera, et cetera. There's a clear hierarchy right now and this will play out, you'll see. We'll talk about the earnings. A little bit plays out there. But we have this actually really reliable platform that only a few people are using. And then if you do look at the x86 world, there's a, a nightmare of problems. But the AMD stuff is heading. It's not even close. Like it's, it's so far ahead of intel. It's. I'm. I question the need for Intel. I mean at this point I don't even understand what the point of this company is.

[Richard Campbell]

They're struggling like you said. I think it's going to be parted out. The, the fabs will go make non CPU chips that are needed and they'll become arm. Like they'll have a design that they license to manufacturers.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I, Right. Unfortunately there's. Yeah, I mean there's bad news there too. Right. Like the 18A the. And then the coming 14A stuff which is the dream. I, that these intel nodes, I don't know, they don't seem to be able to make this stuff happen either. So I don't know. I don't know what to say about this. It's. It's kind of.

[Richard Campbell]

I just wonder what would happen if that. If that design team iterated with a tsmc.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. And actually like just said look, we're just going to do this. Yes, exactly. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And you work with the engineers that know how to make that, the UVLE system work.

[Paul Thurot]

I can't say. I mean, no, I don't know. Right. But yeah, the question you're asking really is the hold up here, the desire to do as much in house manufacturing as possible, which in back in the day was all of it. Is that the problem? Because you know, Lunar Lake has reliability issues for sure. And I mean it helped almost bankrupt the company last year. But, but yeah, I mean otherwise like without that push, what would they still be doing? They'd still be putting out these inefficient desktop processors disguised as mobile processors with MPUs that didn't do anything.

[Richard Campbell]

And you know, but they're excellent space heaters.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, they're okay graphics wise, honestly. I mean they're good. I would say even they're good. But I mean in my experience the AMD stuff is much better. I. It's.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I built one of each.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, well, you did Desktop, so I'm not. I don't have any. So the desktop stuff, I don't really know where that's at. And are you doing anything with dedicated graphics?

[Richard Campbell]

No, I put RTX is in both.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, so I bet. I mean, assuming it's tracks, I mean, I'm sure the AMD graphic stuff is much better. That's my guess. But I don't know that. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I put Nvidia in both.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, I see. Okay, so you did do. Okay, so you did Nvidia graphics.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, 5080 on the dev machine and 5060 on the streamer.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, well then, then it doesn't matter.

[Richard Campbell]

That will probably learn nothing and that'll be the same.

[Paul Thurot]

There you go. Well, you're a man. Okay, so not too much happening in the insider space. We had a. A pa and beta build, so 25 and 24h2 same features in both, et cetera. There's a single change to File Explorer that only impacts people who sign in with a work or school account, which is of no significance. And some minor changes to where things are in settings, which we've already talked about. They're kind of putting all the relevant search stuff into privacy now. Big deal. So not too exciting. Yeah, that's about it. So yeah, other. I mean if you look at stuff that's actually happening in the Windows world this week, it's almost nothing. We got rid of something a Windows no one was using and we're talking about the future in vague ways. So yeah, it's fine. Yeah, Microsoft had their earnings last Wednesday. Since then we've had Apple, Amazon, Qualcomm, and now today amd. So obviously I'll do those in reverse order. But the AMD one is actually the most interesting to me because a Blockbuster quarter of course major double digit gains in profits and revenues, but it's actually the client and gaming segment that's the biggest company there. Again, not Server.

[Richard Campbell]

Is that what?

[Paul Thurot]

Not Server. Data Center. Because they've been having problems with US export restrictions to China and so the growth and the revenues of client and gaming together is bigger than Data center for them right now.

[Richard Campbell]

Is this trying to get ahead of the tariffs or is this I can't buy intel so I better buy amd?

[Paul Thurot]

Well, if you were buying a PC you'd have no trouble getting Intel. What's interesting is that the mix of AMD based PCs has grown dramatically. Obviously there were no Snapdragon ones before last year, but that also is a small chunk. But the AMD stuff has Actually grown. So I just mentioned, I just reviewed HP in this case sells 14 and 16 inch OmniBook X Flip laptops in both AMD and Intel versions. You're starting to see more of that kind of thing. And so that part of the business, just PC processors revenues were up 67% year over year. That's what happens when intel doesn't pay off all the PC makers anymore, frankly. It's also what happens when you actually make the dramatically better product which is the case in this part of the world. So gaming revenue relatively small. 1.1 billion. These are dedicated graphics cards but also what they call, what was the term semi custom revenue meaning revenue from game consoles. Right. We know that AMD is the chipset under the PlayStation and the Xbox currently but also will be for the next generations as well. So that's like a good little business for them as well. And then yeah, I mean data center revenues are at 14% but, but they probably would have been up, you know, 50, whatever, 60%. It would have been bigger, you know, but for the export restrictions. So that's cool. I like to see them doing good. Qualcomm reported their earnings that this is kind of a non event in a way. It's, it's, yeah, it's weird. Like 10.4 billion in revenues. It's like again a 10%, it's fine. You know, handsets is their big business. They don't just make processors of it, they make modem chips and other kinds of chips. Right. 6.3 of that, 10 point whatever billion. So roughly you know, 60 something percent. They're going to start splitting out their revenues to account for Apple. So as Apple cuts them out of the picture you'll be able to see how that shifts things. It's kind of an interesting, it's smart.

[Richard Campbell]

Thing to do though because it shows the company overall isn't declining. You just have one contract going away.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So yeah, we know that's going to go down. So it's kind of, you know, that's kind of interesting. And then we have Apple and Amazon and these companies are unbelievable. So it's kind of hard to say what's going on here exactly but iPhone is something like it's under 50% of Apple's direct revenues. It's good. Services is humongous. That's mostly App Store. There are questions around that. I listened to the post earnings call with Apple for not the first time in my life but it's been a long time and it was just one of those timing things. I'D written the article and as I'm writing it, I can see on their news site that the live stream's happening, like in a few minutes. So I was like, you know, I could actually listen to this. And it was fascinating comparing this to Microsoft's conference calls, because I've listened to a ton of those and they're different. You know, they're the same and they're different. Right? So they're the same in that the CEO gives up, you know, gets up and reads off of a script. You can tell in Tim Cook's case, he's like reading off a piece of paper really stiff. Not like he is when you see him at public events. The CFO was there with him, just as Amy Hood is with Satya and Adela and the Microsoft calls. And it's a Q and A. And so that part's the same. But man, you would not expect this because you would think Apple would just cut these guys right off if they got inappropriate in any way. But the analysts on the Apple call were super aggressive, asking him very cutting questions, which were things that they did not discuss at all in their earnings report. Whereas the Microsoft one, it was all fawning and like, oh my God, thank you so much for this. You're doing so much better than we thought. Like, that's incredible. Like, congratulations on the quarter. Like it was great. You know, like there were a lot of sucking up and like just fell for that whole divert with all the numbers. Right. But in Apple's case, they would say, yeah, but what about it? Like, you guys are still behind an A, like what's going on? And they answer like, we don't really feel like we're behind. Like the next guy's like, yeah, yeah, but you guys were behind an AI. What do you think about that? They were really kind of aggressive and I thought that was kind of fascinating, but that part was interesting to me. And then Amazon, the most boring and arguably non tech tech company on earth, the most revenues is always the fewest, smallest profit. Net income, as always, because, you know, big chunk of Amazon's business is this logistics, physical goods thing, which is really, really high margin and uncertain and you know, you have to account for a lot of returns and blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. So like, whatever. But the part of the company that we kind of care about there was, I guess there's a couple. But the big one is Amazon Web Services. AWS was 31 billion in revenue, ish, 18% of Amazon revenues overall, but by far its most profitable business And I.

[Richard Campbell]

Think I have the warehousing is an incredibly low margin business with retail in general.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Yeah, right. It's like this enormous thing to make this little amount of money, you know, at the end. Right. But you know, okay, it's Amazon. Right. Also they talked about capex spending like all these companies. That was the other thing those guys asked about Apple. They kept saying like, you know, we know you guys don't like to break out of these numbers, but if you had to give it a number, what would you say you're spending on Capex right now? You know, that kind of thing. Apple actually does divulge capex numbers by the way, but they're also not building.

[Richard Campbell]

A bunch of AI data centers.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, well, yeah, they're building some. I mean and they talk about that, but yeah, not to the way that Apple, Google, Amazon and Microsoft are so Google, Amazon, sorry, is going to spend $100 billion this year on AI and infrastructure, etc. Etc. So you can compare that to what Microsoft did last year which was about 85 and what they are spending this quarter, which is 30 and you know, we'll see where that goes.

[Richard Campbell]

They maintain that Trend. That means 120 for the next fiscal.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep, yeah, yep. So yeah, these companies are all competing in AI, but they're also trying to, in a way competing to see who can outspend each other on AI infrastructure.

[Richard Campbell]

I guess that's a crazy way to make headlines.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

You got to spend if you want to make.

[Paul Thurot]

We don't feel like you're serious about AI. Do you think you want to spend a little more money, buddy? I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually it's interesting because Apple traditionally just does not spend a lot. Their capex is way below. It's half what Google spends.

[Paul Thurot]

I'll never remember these numbers, but Apple's R and D at the time when they were doing things like the ipod, the iPhone, whatever, it was like nothing. Microsoft is spending tens of billions of dollars on R and D and they're like, yeah, we got like Fred out back in a garage and he's got.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, it doesn't seem to hurt Apple. I mean they know it seems to.

[Paul Thurot]

Go, they, the Apple is terrible because no one can ever copy them and be successful doing that. You know what I mean?

[Richard Campbell]

Like there's no their own thing.

[Paul Thurot]

There's no guy who's like, I'm going to think like Steve Jobs and I'm going to do, you know, it's like.

[Richard Campbell]

No, you know, it's lots of people who think they can, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. It's just you can't duplicate the success. It's bizarre.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, it's amazing.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a break, come back, we have a development stuff to talk about. We've got Xbox, we got whiskey, we got it all. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. So glad you're here today. Our show brought to you by US Cloud, the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement. You've heard me talk about US Cloud now for a few months, starting to sink in. They are the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises since we started with them. They are now supporting 50 of the Fortune 500 companies. And there's a good reason. Cause switching to US Cloud saves them and can save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premier support. Half as expensive, but twice as fast. That's right, twice as fast. Average time to resolution versus Microsoft. So you're not just cutting costs, you're cutting hair polling, which is really good. You know, when your network's down, your hair's on fire. You've got a ransomware virus spreading or whatever it is. Speed is of the essence. But now US Cloud's really happy to tell you about something new that they're doing which can save you money on Azure. It's their Azure cost optimization services. This is probably something Microsoft would not be helping you with if they could avoid it. Because frankly, let's be honest, Azure usage just happens, right? Azure just happens. If you haven't evaluated your Azure usage in a while, you probably have some Azure sprawl little spend creep. It's not hard. Yeah, we need to spin up a new vm. We want to do this, but maybe you don't need all of that. So the good news is saving on Azure is easier than you think with US Cloud because they offer an eight week. They call it an Azure Engagement. It's powered by VBox. It identifies key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. You're going to get, of course, one of the other things that makes US Cloud so special. Expert guidance. Access to their senior engineers. These folks have an average of over 16 years with Microsoft products, which means they've forgotten more than I will ever know. At the end of the eight weeks, your interactive dashboard will identify, rebuild and downscale opportunities. Unused resources. Which means you can reallocate your precious IT dollars towards things you need more. But I've got an even better idea. How about let's keep the savings going. Invest those Azure savings In US Cloud's Microsoft support. A few other US Cloud customers have done that and completely eliminated their unified spend. So you keep saving. It's a win all round. Just ask Sam. He's the Technical Operations Manager at Bede Gaming. B, E, D e. He gave us cloud five stars. He said that's five out of five. 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, I bet. It's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure, identify and eliminate Azure creep, and boost your performance all in eight weeks with USCloud. Visit uscloud.com right now. Book a call today. Find out how much your team can save. That's uscloud.com, book a call today. Get faster Microsoft support for less. A lot less. Uscloud.com we love these guys and we thank them so much for supporting Windows Weekly and all you Windows users out there, this is going to be. I know we're going to be talking about this on the next show On Intelligent Machines this week. Stuff is happening in the AI. It's like, I feel like, I don't know, we're on the turn of the hockey stick or something. It's just wild what's going on out there. And we still haven't seen chapter GPT5, which is supposed to come out soon.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, that could be as soon as this week. But then today they just announced these. I love these terms like open weight, LLMs.

[Richard Campbell]

It's kind of like they're inventing new terms because they don't have.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but that's important because traditionally they have not been private.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, right. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So that's a big deal.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's interesting. Yeah. I'm not sure what to make of this. Exactly. So this is.

[Leo Laporte]

They promised this and nobody believed they would do it, to be honest. This means you could, I guess, in theory, run it locally, right?

[Paul Thurot]

No, that's the point. Yeah. You could run it locally on your own hardware, like a PC, a Mac, or maybe even a mobile device.

[Richard Campbell]

That's huge.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They've never offered that before.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. So I need to look at this more closely because I got something from Qualcomm that suggests to me that there's probably an MPU optimized version of this that would work great on their laptops. But the big thing on the Windows side that I've seen so far is the GPU optimized versions of this thing. So you're gonna need a lot of RAM. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And specifically GPU RAM.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

One of them is 120B, which is pretty massive. I don't think I could run that on my, any of my systems.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, it requires, it requires 16 gigs, so that, that's, that's like saying Windows requires four gigs. So.

[Richard Campbell]

But is that 16 gigs in the motherboard?

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, that's a good video card. Right?

[Richard Campbell]

16 gig, 50, 80.

[Leo Laporte]

That's expensive card.

[Richard Campbell]

That's a $5,000 card.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So it runs on devices with up to 80 gigs of memory.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why you want that unified memory, Right. Because then you can access it.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, interesting. Okay. Yeah, so I gotta spend a little bit of time with this one. This is kind of interesting. We've had, obviously there are local models, but these are. Yeah, these are LLMs, like the cloud hosted models, but you can get them in different weights and, and if you have the appropriate hardware, run them locally, which is like interesting. Yeah, so we'll see. That's kind of big news. And then of course, you know, Microsoft is giving this stuff away for free. So you can. Because that's what they do as they do. Which is hilarious. Yeah. So for Windows people, there's the Windows. What's it called? Azure Foundry or whatever. Windows Azure. That doesn't sound right. Just Azure Foundry. Windows Foundry. I guess it's Windows Foundry if it's local.

[Richard Campbell]

Or is it AI Foundry?

[Paul Thurot]

AI Foundry, Okay. Yep. You can get them in Visual Studio code. Right, so Visual Studio code, I think still it's an extension, but there is an AI toolkit you can get for free. Obviously it's going to just be built in, if it isn't already and it's available through there as well. And then if you just use that, not even as a developer, you could just use it and interact with it as you would with like Chat GPT. It's literally a little text interface. You send it prompts and it answers and you can see for yourself. So it's. I'm going to play with this. I'm kind of curious with this one. About this one, I should say. So Apple, you know, which has obviously nailed AI. I mean, I think we can all agree they're leading in this area, is. Is looking to get rid of their latest partner OpenAI by building their own chatbot or AI model that will work on device and not need ChatGPT. Right. They want to have this thing that they own and have themselves and it will be their thing. And it's for Siri, it's for whatever else is on those devices. And yeah, I mean, if you could just make Siri actually be. Siri is. I don't know. Siri is like everything Microsoft makes. You know, it's like, it's like the one Apple thing where you're like, what? Or it comes up with.

[Richard Campbell]

Siri is like the Internet Explorer of Apple.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's like, you know, it's like, like that old meme where you had the browsers and it was like Netscape at the time was doing this and then Mozilla came around and did this advance and then Chrome came around and did whatever. And then Internet Explorer is like, yay, Internet. It's just over there. We try it. I don't know. Yeah, it's that, I mean, it's the.

[Richard Campbell]

First time we've seen sort of visibility into Apple teams that they're starting to have stories about the dysfunction within the Siri team. Alternative teams being put together. Like that is just not Apple. You never see that.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I mentioned, you know, this in terms of Windows and of course I follow Windows super closely compared to, say, Apple stuff. But, you know, you do this thing that works and it works and it works and then one day it doesn't work and you're like, wait, what? And I feel like Apple has maybe has run into that a little bit. Right. That, you know, they divided the company up in a certain way and it was, it always worked great. And there might be a, a call for more of a cross company thing, you know, that maybe they're not doing or something or whatever. But like whatever they were doing was clearly not working. And whatever they were doing over the past year to get Siri more intelligent did not work. And I don't know, this is leaked Apple meeting thing where supposedly this is in great shape now, you know, and I'm sure it is. I don't know. Anyway, I like everyone, look forward to the day when Apple can tell ChatGPT, we don't need you anymore, but whatever. And then Alexa, speaking of things that are terrible. So Alexa plus, I think is us only still, it's still fairly limited, but it's now going out to more and more people. I can't say that I've ever seen a report where anyone was overly exuberant about it working. Well, I've seen a lot of the opposite. I'm never going to use it because Amazon, whatever, who cares. But yeah, you can get it for free with an Amazon prime subscription at least. And then if you don't have that, it's 20 bucks a month. And at that point you should just get an Amazon prime subscription, by the way. But yeah, now they're talking about adding advertising to it. Right. And so that would be for different tiers. I mean, it's not hard to imagine an ad supported Alexa plus tier, I guess. Right? Yuck. So there's that. And then just on the dev side, just real quick, I don't want to beat this to death, but I've spent the past year now struggling to make wpf, which Microsoft has sort of brought back from the grave, work with like a modern app. It's not really possible or easy anyway. So I've switched over to the Windows app SDK, which is kind of their more modern native Apple whatever platform. It's not really a framework, but like, call it a framework. It uses WinUI as the WinUI 3 is like the UI framework, which is that modern Windows 11 look and feel, which I do like. But that's a nightmare too. It's a nightmare. It's a good look. I've always complimented Microsoft when it comes to developers because even as they move from framework to Framework or whatever, even when they moved off of. Net and went to WinRT and the Windows runtime and those modern apps. Well, but it. Okay, but it certainly is now. I mean, I. And now, you know, they went from that to UWP and then to, you know, Windows app SDK.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they've kind of left the UWP orphaned. And if you want to talk about Microsoft orphaning people, ask any Silverlight person. Like, does happen. But it is. No, no, that's.

[Paul Thurot]

No, it does. But my point was like, your skills move forward. Like, it's still all C. It's still all. NET or.

[Richard Campbell]

Net.

[Paul Thurot]

Like it's still familiar, whatever the XAML.

[Richard Campbell]

Is or Flavors is. Xaml.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, well. But you know what? I used to say this a million years ago. I would say this about C and Pascal, where it's like you've got these two languages that are really similar, but it's the differences that are really going to kill you. And I found that with, with this stuff. Like, it is bizarre. I mean, like, like I don't know that there is a single feature in the app that I write that is the same in WPF and in Windows App SDK. Like the APIs are all completely different. Like, it's crazy. And I, And I want to be super clear, they're never going to fix this. Like there's, there's no reason.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, they've been trying for a long time, right. That this is the political battle that became Maui. Right. Is trying to get the WIN UI aligned with the wpf, aligned with what was really Xamarin forms. You know, I trying to have a unified client story.

[Paul Thurot]

You probably know more about this than I do and maybe we should, well, offline, maybe we should talk about this. Like how this is structured. But from the outside it looks like. I know there are team. I know some of the people like there are teams and there are teams working on things. But like when it comes to stuff like the like wps like which is not a team at Microsoft, I think it's two guys in Pakistan. It's something very strange. You know, even like the Windows app SDK when I made this switch over, I had at least one guy who said look, here's a link or three links to these forum things from GitHub where people are freaking out because this thing is never updated and they've missed every schedule imaginable. And you kind of go and look at it, you're like, yeah, actually this is kind of bad. And I experienced this myself. You might remember a year ago at Build 2024 they announced what was then called the Windows Copilot runtime and this was the developers going to be able to access the same APIs Microsoft was using in Windows to do local AI stuff in their apps. And I was like, great, this is how I will do AI stuff in my app. You know, they didn't ship the first external preview for developers until the following January. And it was in a version of the like an experimental version of the Windows app SDK that you could not ship to customers. Like you couldn't use it in real apps. And as of today they, they've changed the name. That's what the AI foundry became. And some of the APIs actually are available but it's still like the whole group of it is still not available in like a shipping version of.

[Richard Campbell]

I think the whole thing's been undermined by the AI wave. Like there was.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So all these visions were pre chatgpt and Satch's famous letter.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Which is only 2023 man. Like it's just been that long.

[Paul Thurot]

There is two years of complaining and finally some young woman on this team has finally wrote a post and said, we hear you, you're right, we're going to fix it. And their long term plan is Actually to open source the Windows app SDK, which is what they did previously, obviously with. Net, but also with frameworks like Windows Forms and wpf. So that's either good or bad, you know, depending how you look at it. I. I don't really feel like there's a, like a focused team working day to day to get stuff out to make this thing better on a. Whatever, Bracelets, quarterly, monthly, whatever. Like it's.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, not great.

[Richard Campbell]

There are teams, but there's always, you know.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes, there are.

[Richard Campbell]

There's another part of this which is what are the product makers using?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, the question you always have to ask yourself when, as a dev, when you're looking through the various Microsoft stack is which teams are using this? How many Maui apps are there inside of Microsoft?

[Paul Thurot]

I know probably not many.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't think there's any. It's really the point.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I mean, we've seen this over here.

[Richard Campbell]

Same thing. Wpf. WPF went for years until Visual Studio implemented it.

[Paul Thurot]

And even then it was like part of it. And you know, it's. And this is the thing. I mean, there were little insights into this every once in a while. Like when Microsoft brought Forward the Windows 10 File Explorer into Windows 11 and then started updating it, they ran into some problems and they were like, all right, we're going to have to rewrite parts of this. The first way they did it was with something called XAML Islands, which was a way to get this kind of more modern code into a classic desktop app. And they essentially rewrote it to make it work for their app. And they were like, look, this is not a sustainable solution. And that was one of the inputs that went into what became the Windows app SDK, the Project Reunion thing. But now they've used that to update parts of the ui. Same thing. They did not rewrite this app from scratch. Looking at the Windows app SDK, I can see why that would have been. This is a nightmare.

[Richard Campbell]

This is a huge amount of work and there's not a lot of people.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And if it doesn't have AI in its title, it can be laid off at any time.

[Paul Thurot]

Some of this is bizarre. Like, let me give you this one, like real simple example that anyone would sort of understand. Windows 11 supports these color themes, like dark mode, light mode system. Right. So in WPF or in just in the Windows SDK, you know, you can test for which the setting the user is using. You can. It adapts on the fly. So if the user changes from light, dark Your app changes with it, right? So we've added this capability to wpf. And so you basically, you know, you have a UI in your app like I do anyway, where you can switch the style that, whatever it's called, the theme works great. And there are three choices, right? I mean, literally, as a developer, you can say, I want this thing to be light, I want it to be dark, or I want to follow the system. Those are your choices. And in the Windows app SDK, which is newer and more modern, there are two choices. I want it to be light or I want it to be dark, or I'll just ignore it. And if I ignore it, that means system. No. The answer is no. That is not how you do that. That's stupid. Like, as a developer, you're gonna have a switch statement or an if then, or whatever you want to call it, where you, you test for what it is and then you map it to what you have in an API and what you have in an API. If it's system, which is probably 90 something percent of all windows computers in the world, you ignore it. No, no. Just. No. It's just that's one feature in my stupid simple app. Maybe have 200 features. That's one. And every single frickin one of these things has to be rewritten. That's how stupid this thing is. Okay, let's move on. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I know this isn't my therapy hour, but calm down, God damn it. 25 years ago, a small group of business and government leaders met in Washington, D.C. they envisioned the creation of an independent nonprofit 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. Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips. Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new Family Freedom offer.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not the itinerary we're Following.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house. Bon voyage. Introducing family freedom, our lowest cost. To switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network.

[Leo Laporte]

Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com familyfreedom.

[Paul Thurot]

Up to 800 per line via virtual prepaid card. Typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg, Apple iPhone 16, 128 gigabyte 8, 2999 eligible trade in eg iPhone 11 Pro for well qualified credits end and balance due. If you pay off earlier, cancel contact T Mobile.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly, in case you were wondering. Not Paul's therapy hour.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, it amounts to the same thing, kind of both. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard and I just sit here on either side of him to keep him from, you know, breaking out of the box.

[Paul Thurot]

Let him talk, get it out.

[Richard Campbell]

Tell me how this melee makes you feel.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay. You know what always cheers Paul up? The Xbox segment. That's what's coming up next. Thank you for being here. Paul Thurot, Richard Campbell. I'm Leo Laporte. You're watching Windows Weekly. We do this show every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm well, when my cat's not lost. We were a little late today because I was looking for the kitty.

[Paul Thurot]

Are there any updates on the cat, by the way? No.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, as soon as you begin the Xbox segment, I'm running downstairs to see if I can shake the. Shake the treats again. I'm watching the cameras and I don't see her. But you know what? She's. What happens after a while is she sits outside the door saying, okay, you can let me in now.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we'll see.

[Paul Thurot]

I hope.

[Richard Campbell]

What does that pay you people for? Honestly?

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Really?

[Leo Laporte]

Dogs have masters. Cats have servants.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, they both have the same thing. They bring us food. They must be gods. No, no. They bring us food. I must be God.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a very important distinction.

[Paul Thurot]

Like, the cat's behavior is always like, you have no idea how important I am to your existence. And the cat's like, you're right.

[Leo Laporte]

So while I go shake the treats for the kitty, let's shake the treats for Paul. Time for the Xbox segment.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. So I mentioned up top, when we talked about Microsoft earnings, there were also some explicit numbers for Xbox and Microsoft Gaming.

[Richard Campbell]

100 million is a big number.

[Paul Thurot]

It is a big number. And this is another area where we could do some fun math. Maybe, maybe. So Microsoft Gaming, which is kind of an uber game publishing company really. Right. With everything Activision Blizzard have everything Zenimax Bethesda had, including ID software. Right. And everything Microsoft already had through its own in house stuff and the stuff it acquired. So the big franchises like Flight Simulator Halo, Gears of War, I'm forgetting some for some reason, but there's a bunch of these things anyway, so 500 million monthly active users. This is interesting to me because A, they've never used this number once ever.

[Richard Campbell]

Nope. B, they may never use it again.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. Although now I'll be looking for growth. So we have something to work from. But Activision Blizzard used to talk about this. Right. And so if you go back and look the last year they were around and would report their earnings normally, like a standalone company might a couple years ago. Yep. Depending on the quarter, it was somewhere between, you know, I want to say 365 to 385 million monthly active users. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurot]

Now you could say, okay, so let's say nothing changed. That's probably not fair.

[Richard Campbell]

And the bulk of those are going to be World of Warcraft, I imagine.

[Paul Thurot]

Maybe, maybe not. You know, so Microsoft has contributed some. Or Microsoft's other gaming studios maybe is the right way to say that, have Contributed the remaining 100, let's call it 125, 150 million, whatever that number is. Okay. And Microsoft Gaming is also a cross platform publisher. Right. And so one of the big deals, and this is controversial, I know, but they're now publishing more and more games on PlayStation. They for the past six months have had the top, whatever it is, three to five games on the PlayStation, which is astonishing to the point where Sony is now like, yeah, I think we're going to put stuff on Xbox two, why not? It's like what's happening. These two companies that were at each other's throats during all the antitrust stuff around Activision Blizzard are like best buddies now. Hilarious. It's nice, by the way, Google and Microsoft, that's how it can work. I'm just saying, just think about it. So that's interesting. Call of Duty has 50 million monthly active users. I don't remember the exact metric they use, but they were describing maybe by some form of engagement that the latest version of Call of Duty is the most successful version thus far in kind of a bid to counter the bad news around layoffs and game shutdowns and studio closings almost. I think the way they Put it was nearly 40 games actively in development for the Xbox as a platform, meaning across all those endpoints. And then Xbox Game Pass, I believe this is the first revenue number we've gotten. I think we used to get subscriber counts, but we haven't gotten that in a while. But 5 billion in revenue, almost 5 billion or somewhere around 5 billion in revenue for the fiscal year, which I think they described as a curse. It would be a wreck. I just, at this point is still going up and then over 500 million hours playing games over game pass in the fiscal year collectively. All right, so, yeah, so I mean, I, I think I made this point last week. This must have been when we discussed this. But there are these people in the Xbox kind of community that are still freaking out over the strategy, yada, yada, yada. But, but if you pulled the hardware part of this business out and just left the rest of it sitting there, not only would it be one of the most successful parts of Microsoft from a profitability perspective, but if it's not the biggest gaming company in the world, it's got to be number two. I mean, it's right there. It's humongous. Sure. So they've bought it. There you go.

[Richard Campbell]

They bought the big players. And I was presuming World of Warcraft. And I'm being a little facetious. I'm presume Call of Duty is bigger. Overwatch bigger.

[Paul Thurot]

I'm not. I don't know that. I mean, they're.

[Richard Campbell]

All of those games are new.

[Paul Thurot]

They're big, right? They're temples.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, but they are temples.

[Paul Thurot]

They are temples. Okay, so there, There we go. All right, so today in the game bar on Windows 11, if you're playing a video game, you can hit Windows key +G or if you're using the controller, that white lit up button in the middle there and you bring up the game bar. Right. And one of the big additions they made to this thing, oh, sometime in the past six months, was the Edge gaming assist feature, where it's like a little mini version of the browser. And the idea there is that so many people are playing a game and get stuck or whatever, they need some help and they switch context, go to a browser. If using a Windows PC, that's not a great experience, but whatever, that's what we do. And so now you can just do it without leaving the game because the thing comes, comes up as an overlay over the game. It can be there side by side if you want it that way you can always be on Screen, et cetera, et cetera. But sometime in the past three months or so they also, Microsoft talked about this thing coming down the road, which was like, copilot, like gaming copilot, like copilot for gaming. Which. I know a lot of groans. A lot of people don't like this. Yeah. But same theory. You're going to integrate it into this game bar. Right. Which is an integral part of Windows 11. It comes up on top of the game you're playing. Playing? I said it's an overlay. And now they're starting to test that.

[Leo Laporte]

What's it gonna do? It's gonna say you should turn left here.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, it's gonna say that. That, that's. No, I mean, no, I mean, I mean, I'm not joking. I'm sorry. Like, literally it is going to say that. Like the, the point of it is what AI does for you when you're in Word or Visual Studio or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

I need another your mama joke.

[Leo Laporte]

Look, I. Oh, yeah. It could teach you how to taunt. That would be good.

[Paul Thurot]

By the way. I wouldn't be surprised if we go there. Like, if you think like back in the day, like when multiplayer gaming was expensive or harder, whatever you had, maybe sometimes you had to have special hardware. Whatever it was. I used to shoehorn, like a phone in my shoulder and my friend and I would be. Because we were playing with both hands on the keyboard, but over probably a cable modem by that point in Phoenix, playing like Quake World together or whatever. Right. And you know, we could talk to each other and we weren't doing it in the game like you would now, because that was coming or whatever. But like at the time we were on the phone, you know, and like we're doing that thing and it looks.

[Leo Laporte]

Like you're trying to trash talk him.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I hope it's not like that Clippy, like. But, but, but we talked about. David Weston mentioned this. This notion that we're gonna have these more natural user interfaces, meaning you're going to speak to it and it's going to speak to you. And you could imagine in the same way you might call out today for one of these assistants, you might in the heat of the game, say, hey, how do I get by this thing? Or whatever it is. Yeah. So this is the natural evolution.

[Leo Laporte]

Or it could do my mapping, like, make a map of this as I move around.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Like what's the right. Or what's the most lucrative side quest I can do right now? So I can move, you know, whatever. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. So Would Elon do right now, get.

[Richard Campbell]

Someone else to play for you?

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, yeah, I wouldn't. I wouldn't go there. But anyway, look, this is a feature that knee jerk. This, you know, audience is going to kind of make fun of. But honestly, I think this. I think this makes. This makes as much sense as anything else. You know, some people will want this thing to talk to them, to coach them to get through something. Right. Some people will want that. Some people will want to just ask it a question or I need help right now. Like, just give me the answer right now. And what you don't want in that instance is. Okay, it seems like what you're asking me to do is tell you how to get by the troll. You're, like, killed by the thing. Like, no, just give me the answer, you know, so I can move on. Run. Hopefully that will be the experience. You're exactly right.

[Richard Campbell]

You're good.

[Paul Thurot]

Must run. Must run faster. Yeah. And you'll have like, mine will be Jeff Goldblum, you know, whatever you can do, however you want to do.

[Richard Campbell]

Life finds a way.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, so I'm not. Look, this is not something AI will find a way. And this, we. I don't know. We'll see. I'm gonna. This is something I'm kind of curious about, but I. I don't. In the same way that I. I don't often need to go to a. I mean, I've done it obviously, over time, but like, recently, types of games I play now, not a lot of questions, so I don't really, you know, it's fine. It's fine the way it is, but. But I am curious about it. I think it's kind of an interesting idea. And then I have the wrong link for this story. Of course I do, because. What else? That's okay. So we have some Game Pass stuff happening, as we do every month. And the big news for this next batch of games coming to Game Pass is Assassin's Creed Mirage is one of those titles. And let me look to see.

[Leo Laporte]

Is that where you go to a Vegas hotel and try to find your.

[Paul Thurot]

Way out of the casino?

[Leo Laporte]

Is that.

[Paul Thurot]

No, but that would be kind of fun. So that's what say it's coming tomorrow, August 7th. So Thursday this week, Game Pass ultimate and PC. Game Pass across cloud, console and PC. And then other things, you know, Aliens, Firestorm Elite. At least I've heard of Orcs Must Die, Death Trap mechanics.

[Leo Laporte]

I couldn't agree more.

[Paul Thurot]

Lonely Mountain Snow Riders, which, sadly is not something to do with the Hobbit but is.

[Leo Laporte]

Instead. It looks like you're skiing.

[Paul Thurot]

It looks like. Yeah. Something else. Yeah. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Orcs Must Die.

[Richard Campbell]

Warrior.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so funny. These are like. I remember when I was, you know, first started gaming with my Atari. You'd go to a store. There was this kind of dusty, flea bitten old store that didn't really wasn't well organized. The shelves, things were falling off the shelves.

[Richard Campbell]

And it could be selling porn, could be selling video games. Like what?

[Leo Laporte]

It was all video games. And they all had lurid covers much like these.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And they were all by small kind of indie teams and. Oh, they were most of them.

[Paul Thurot]

Last year I bought some in bags like.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah, there were still someone in Ziplocs. A lot of them.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

With the instructions were mimeographed.

[Richard Campbell]

Sorry.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I made.

[Richard Campbell]

I have game packs for games for the terrorist. 80 on cassette tape with cards.

[Paul Thurot]

I had a game. I had a game on the Commodus 64 that was on tape. And at one point I just. I did. I think I did by mistake, but it was like whatever the Commodore Key plus C or something. Or Break Commodore break or whatever. And I got into the source code.

[Leo Laporte]

And I was like in basic.

[Paul Thurot]

Interesting. I'm going to write. It's time for me to learn this language. I'm going to give myself a bag of infinite holding.

[Leo Laporte]

People of a certain generation probably did get into computing through gaming, right?

[Paul Thurot]

Oh yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a broker type magazine.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You had to learn to. I learned to debug before I learned to code.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly. Well, I also learned how to read Hex because I was removing.

[Paul Thurot]

I was going to say to make it shorter, they would put them in Hex and you'd have to. I used to have my sister read it to me in Run magazine and.

[Leo Laporte]

I type it in nine.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Because there was a time I didn't have. I didn't have a. A way to save it.

[Leo Laporte]

You didn't have a drive?

[Paul Thurot]

No, I had to go back and type it the next day.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, so if you thought things loaded slow now let me tell you something.

[Leo Laporte]

It feels like a flashback to that era where these were just kind of like. Whoever heard of these? I mean, a few, obviously. Assassin's Creed, but Mechwarrior. Orcs Must Die. Death Trap.

[Paul Thurot]

I mean, Orcs Must Die. Is that one I've heard of. Because there is. There's several of those at least.

[Leo Laporte]

Snow riders. I mean.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Who's developing these? Are these like.

[Paul Thurot]

It's no lawnmower simulator, but is this.

[Leo Laporte]

All some Belgian game company. Are they speaking Flemish and saying, hey.

[Paul Thurot]

Listen, we're going to look, this is going to be the golden age in a couple of months because in not so far from now it's all going to be AI generated games.

[Leo Laporte]

And these are human created making a.

[Richard Campbell]

Game as you play it.

[Leo Laporte]

There is a cutoff between. And that's what our friend John Graham Cumming from Cloudflare was doing, was trying to like let's preserve stuff that was created in the days before there was AI slop that we know a human made.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

Because pretty soon you won't know.

[Paul Thurot]

This is like saying, hey, this is thing on the cave wall over. You think we should save this? And it's like, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

We'Ll just paint another one someday.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Wow. Yeah, Anyway, anyway, anywho. And then just real quick, you know, Nintendo came up with Switch 2 gangbusters going great. It's the fastest launch I think of any video game console. Etc, etc. We'll see how it does over time. But I, if I remember correctly they, I don't know if they held off on the price because of tariffs. They weren't sure and then went with whatever. If they announced, they said we might have to change it and maybe they didn't for the console, but for some of the peripherals I think that might be closer to what happened.

[Leo Laporte]

That's exactly what happened.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. Okay. So what they're doing in the wake of that is they're going to actually start raising prices on the original Switch models which should help drive sales to the new ones I guess, but based on what they call market conditions, which I think is Nintendo speak for tariffs. So we'll see what the long term impact of this is. But Switch two is doing okay, I guess that's what I'm saying.

[Richard Campbell]

And then of course quietly Nintendo, you know, knocking it out still. Yeah, still playing Mario.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, remember when they announced the Switch, the new Switch, they, the price was much higher and everybody thought, oh, and I think they built in the terror they presumed.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay, okay.

[Leo Laporte]

That the tariffs would be there. They put them on the accessories because maybe they did.

[Paul Thurot]

This is all, you know, this is another area where like we see this in the Windows community a lot but like in the, in this space where it's like, oh, I'm not spending 4 to 50 bucks on a Nintendo. That's ridiculous. It's like, yeah, no, I mean who would want like something simple with great battery life that looks great and plays great games? Like yeah, you're right. Now you're smart. You should do whatever the stupid, complex thing you're doing is like, you know, I, I'm sorry, but it's, it's probably going to do pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

Like, I think now you. I don't know if you can walk into a store and buy it, but I think it's getting close, right? The supplies kind of filling out, which is good.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know if I said this, but like he just, just went out in the world that day and walked into some retailer and they had one and he's like, oh, could I buy this? And they're like, yeah, sure.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

It was like, nice.

[Richard Campbell]

I know I have a couple of friends who did exactly that. Just walked in having got not, not on the lines or anything, you know.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, I'm lazy, so I'd be like, yeah, they're not gonna have it. I wouldn't even try.

[Leo Laporte]

No, but maybe next time I drive by a Target, I'll, I'll pop my head in.

[Paul Thurot]

Just see. Yeah, see what they got. Ever notice how ads always pop up at the worst moments? When the killer's identity is about to be revealed during that perfect meditation flow on Amazon Music, we believe in keeping.

[Leo Laporte]

You in the moment.

[Paul Thurot]

That's why we've got millions of ad free podcast episodes. So you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every every breath. Download the Amazon music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts. Ad free included with Prime. Let's map out this week's amazing destinations and travel tips. Honestly, Will, I didn't plan any trips, but I did switch to T Mobile with their new family freedom offer.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not the itinerary we're following.

[Paul Thurot]

Well, I'm departing from AT&T and embarking on a new journey with T Mobile. They paid off my family's four phones up to $3200 and gave us four new phones on the house. Bon voyage. Introducing family freedom. Our lowest cost will switch our biggest family savings all on America's largest 5G network.

[Leo Laporte]

Visit your local T Mobile location or.

[Paul Thurot]

Learn more@t mobile.com familyfreedom. Up to $800 per line via virtual prepaid card typically takes 15 days. Free phones via 24 monthly bill credits with finance agreement eg Apple iPhone 16128 gigabyte $829.99 eligible trade in eg IPH for well qualified credits end and balance due if you pay off early or cancel contact T Mobile.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to take a little break and then it's tips of the week. The back of the book is here. Yay. A couple of. Couple of baps and then a liquor pick.

[Richard Campbell]

Whiskey lessons. I learned something new.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay, the whiskey segment lives on. All of that coming up in just a bit, but I do want to at this point remind all of you that this show exists. Yes, we have advertisers. We love our advertisers. But primarily thanks to the support of our club members, 25% of our operating costs comes out of the club. Thank you, club. Without that, we'd have to lay off people. We'd have to cancel shows. With the club membership, we are able to do more. And that makes me really happy because I want to do more. I think what we're doing is great, certainly fun for us. And I hope you're getting some value out of it. If you are, there's a way to support it. Visit Twit TV Club Twit. It's 10 bucks a month. What is that? $120 a year? We do have a yearly plan so you don't have to keep getting charged every month. People ask for that. We also have a two week free trial. We have a family membership, we have corporate membership. The benefits include access to the club Twit Discord, which is a lovely place to hang out with smart, interesting people who are not only talking about the shows we're doing right now, but are talking about anything. Geeks are interested in all sorts of stuff, including gaming. We have a pretty active Minecraft server. People who are in the club can play there, apparently. We have Wordle and Bracket City Players. We also have special events, in fact, there's some coming up this week. Very excited. Stacy's Book club is Friday at 1pm Pacific, 4pm Eastern. The book is this Is how youw Lose the Time War. It is a novella, so you still have time to read it and I recommended it. Jason Snell agrees. It's what? It's a fantastic, fascinating book. I'm glad we picked it. We have a vote among the club members. We have usually two or three choices from Stacy and this was the one we picked for August 8, 1pm Pacific. Right after that, it's our photo segment. Chris Marquardt every month comes by, looks at your pictures, gives you a new assignment. The current assignment is classic. And then gives you a new assignment for the following month. We tape a lot of the show's tape. Listen to me. We digitally record, we save the bits for a lot of shows in the club, including home theater geeks. IOS today. Coming up, the Google Pixel 10 announcement is August 20th. That's right before Windows Weekly. Guys, we might be a little delayed. I don't think we will be, but Micah and I will be talking about that. We do those now only in the club so we don't get taken down off YouTube and other places. So join us in the club for that. Micah's crafting corners coming up. Micah's doing Lego. I'm going to do some button sewing.

[Paul Thurot]

Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I need to. I think I brought him to my tailor, my tailor, my dry cleaner. And he said, can you fix the buttons? I said, yeah. And then he didn't. So I have to put some buttons on these weird shirts that I wear in the show. Anyway, that's kind of some of the stuff that happens in the club. You also, huh?

[Richard Campbell]

I built a PC.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that. By the way, after we do the shows live in the club, they go up on the Twit plus feed in the club. And you spent three and a half hours building that PC, Richard, I'm so grateful to you for doing that. That was incredible.

[Richard Campbell]

Just a patient guy watch.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard take the motherboard out, put it.

[Richard Campbell]

Back in, take it out again.

[Paul Thurot]

How many scarred knuckles did you end up with?

[Richard Campbell]

The end of the. I didn't draw any blood, but I was very close to sacrificing a chicken. Just an irony.

[Leo Laporte]

It was exactly why we started the club is for stuff like that. So thank you for doing that.

[Richard Campbell]

I gotta find another project because I'm not gonna build another PC for a while. I was thinking about putting LEDs on this cube wall behind me. Oh, that'd be fun. Wire that up on screen.

[Leo Laporte]

Anytime you want to put a project on the in the club, please do. I'm going to start doing a little after hours thing after Twit on Sunday nights because people have been asking. I don't have any shows where it's just me talking. So we're going to do that kind of like the old radio show. Anyway, there's lots of stuff going on. I think it's worth 10 bucks. I didn't even mention that you get ad free versions of all the shows. You wouldn't even hear this harangue. So please, if you will support us, support what we do. We can't do it without you. Twit TV Club Twit. And thank you in advance for your support. Thanks to all the club members also who make all of this possible. Now to the back of the book. Paul Thurat starts us off with his tip of the week.

[Paul Thurot]

I didn't do it. What? Oh.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm not guilty.

[Paul Thurot]

People probably remember that starting in Windows Vista, Microsoft had something called the Windows Experience Index score, which was a series of score across cpu, gpu, I think it was disk, ram, et cetera. That went away pretty quick. But the idea was you could look at those scores and determine which part of your PC you might want to upgrade. But actually the technology that's behind or was behind Wei, the Windows Experience Index is still available in Windows 11 today. It's just a command line utility. It's called the Windows System Assessment Tool. And the command line is WinSat or more specifically WinSat formal. Formal. I almost said formal. I'm still in still in Mexico, which has a form go to a command line, type in WinSat formal. Let it do its thing. It will open another command line, runs all these tests, checks your cpu, your graphics, et cetera, et cetera. I think it dumps five files into a folder which is basically C Windows Performance WinSat DataStore in the file system. And the one you should actually look at all these things if you're. I guess it's six files, but if you're interested. But it's the biggest of those is the one that I'm referring to where you get the modern version of that Wei score. And so if you open that, the biggest of those XML files, it will open in Edge by default, unless you've changed that and scroll down, you'll see in brackets, it's WinSpr is the section, it's to the top. So it's easy and you'll see it its score number. So it's from 0 to 10. And on this particular laptop, which is a lunar lake, you know, Core Ultra 7 Series 2, blah blah, blah, integrated, you know, graphics which are pretty good actually. Overall system score 8.5. Memory score 9.9. CPU is 9.2. So this is all out of 10, obviously. Right. And so video encode score really high. But Intel's done a good job actually of optimizing that. That kind of makes sense. And then graphics graphics score overall is 8.5. I bet if I had. And then it says it's funny. Gaming score 9.9. I'm not sure where that comes from because yeah, I don't know. DX9, DX10 pretty, pretty high too. But overall graphics 8.5. So.

[Leo Laporte]

So there's no GUI for this. It's just.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, not anymore. It's just. Yeah, well, so they're okay. So they don't have a GUI for this per se, but they are updating that page and settings, which is system about. And they do call out in cards at the top like your storage, graphics card, RAM and processor, so you can at least identify them. They don't give them scores, but at least you, you know, it's easier to find than it used to be. But yeah, they used to have in the equivalent dialogue at the time in Windows Vista. It was, yeah, very, you know, it was called it on purpose. The idea was you were going to look at this and maybe upgrade, but. But it's interesting to look at it. Excuse me. This is actually a pretty mainstream system. It's pretty good. But if you look through the other XML files you get, you'll have more. Some of them were related directly to gaming metrics, et cetera, et cetera. So there's some good information throughout those files. But the one that is most interesting to me is this thing because it is literally what they were doing before, but. But still available. And then this must have happened. Yeah, it was last Thursday. So Proton, my kind of favorite little tech company, obviously has a password manager, really an identity manager called Proton Pass that does two FA codes if you wanted to. But I've always taken the stance that you wanted to do that within a separate app. And now they have a standalone Authenticator app. So I took the time to see if I could switch over to fully because I had been using a combination of Google Authenticator and Microsoft Authenticator and Google Authenticator the big draw for me was that it would sync these codes or these accounts and codes between all the machines to the cloud. Right. And the little niggling problem there was that it wasn't end to end encrypted. So there was a possibility, I suppose there is a possibility that something could happen to that. But you know, whatever, they're supposedly going to fix that. So Protons does exactly the same thing, except it is N10 encrypted. Plus it's proton, not Google. So great. So I did switch over everything that I used. Google Authenticator, that's seamless. Google supports export, easy. Microsoft does not. So if you're using Microsoft Authenticator you can't actually export those codes and you can't import anything into. Well, I think there is actually a way to do like a, like a column or what do you call it, comma delimited file or something like that. But anyway, you cannot import it from that into Proton. So if you are going to switch, there's going to be a little bit of work there. And based on what I've seen so Far you're going to want to actually stick with the Microsoft Authenticator app for Microsoft accounts because it has that really nice experience. You know, you sign in, you just put in your username, your email address, hit Enter, it asks you to prompt, you know, gives you a number or sends you a number. You get a number and send it back, whatever it is. But you don't have to ever type in your password. And it's just kind of a nice interface. And all the other third party authenticators don't really do that with a Microsoft account. So most people probably have like one or two. Right. Like you can have one for work, one for home maybe at most. So it's not a big deal. But if you are using all of your Microsoft or all of your accounts doing two FA through Microsoft Authenticator, that's a weekend project. So. But, but I really, but I like, I said I really like, I love Proton. I actually really like the interface of this app. I like just like even like the fonts they chose are really nice. It's got a, it's got a nice vibe to it. So switching from Google was really seamless and it's no big deal keeping, you know, Microsoft Authenticator around. I was doing it anyway.

[Richard Campbell]

So are you keeping it around because it's just hard to migrate off of.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, if, if Proton did what Microsoft does, I would just use Proton 100%. Right. Like, I, I don't know that they can't. I'm not really sure. I mean, I, I don't know. You know, it's, it's open source. Right. So I don't, I guess, I don't know. I don't know what the secret sauce Microsoft uses here. I mean, it's fair to say it's, it's possible. I just didn't stay like you are trying to authenticate against your Google account and you get different choices. It's like choose Passkey and there's no passkey on this device or whatever it is. You're like, okay, well, or for some reason it doesn't work with the one it wants you to do with the phone. And it's like your phone doesn't whatever it is. So you get different choices. And one of them is with an app. And if you have like the Google app on your iPhone or like Gmail or whatever, you can actually just launch the app. And when you do, a UI comes up and it says, is this you? And you're like, yep. And usually that's all there is to it. But today for maybe the first time, it actually gave me a choice of three numbers, like Microsoft does. Wow. And I was like, oh, there you go. That's not bad. It's a good system. So, yeah, the Microsoft thing, the thing that bugs me, the reason I wouldn't use that full time is just a. The sync thing. I know you can back up, but it doesn't do sync. And now that I know you can't, like, export it normally, it's like, guys, I don't know, you want to have a backdoor if you need it to get out.

[Richard Campbell]

And they have backdoor mechanisms. They're a pain in the butt. Right?

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. That's what I mean.

[Richard Campbell]

You could do a recovery. I've done the trial now, of course. Okay. I dropped my phone in the ocean. I need to set up a new phone without migrating. How bad is this? And it's bad.

[Paul Thurot]

Yep. Yeah, it's. I feel like it was architected almost for a different world, and they kind of made it, you know, work. And it works. It works okay. It works fine. Like, in use, Honestly, it's fine.

[Richard Campbell]

And I'm right on the edge now, especially setting up these machines of going, do I just have to go down the pass key wave now?

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. Right. So this is the problem. So hopefully you're using bit warden. Right. I'm not really sure, like, how that works, but hopefully what it can do is prompt you and say, hey, look, you have this list of accounts, and here's the 13 accounts that could have passkeys, but don't. You might want to look at that. Or here are the two or three or whatever it is that have some two fa that's better than a text message. And you're not using that. Maybe you should do that. Like, that kind of proactive help from like a, you know, a password manager can be really useful.

[Richard Campbell]

I would happily put all my passkeys in bit warden, But I still have other things popping up at me saying, gonna do that passkey for you.

[Paul Thurot]

Yes. There are so many problems with passkeys. I mean, passkeys are great. Portability is one of them. But it's not just that there's a user experience problem, and it's actually tied to the thing I just said. I don't remember what device. So I open a laptop I've not used in a month because I've been away, and it's like, oh, you got to sign into your Google account again. You're like, great. I have a Google Passkey on this computer. I have a Google Passkey in My password manager. So obviously when I choose. Yep. Re authenticate. It's going to give me one of those things. And it's like, do you want to use a passkey? You're like, you bet I do, baby. And then it comes up, it's like, all right, take a picture of your iPhone. You're like, wait, what? And then so I'm like, okay. I mean I can do that. So I'm like, okay, it's made a choice about where it's going to get the passkey. Just do it. Like I have. It's on here. It's protected with Windows. Hello. Like this should be fine. And right now it just varies. Even when there's a company like Google that honestly does a pretty good job with this, usually it will do that. It's like it's doing different types each time and maybe that's good security, I don't know. But it more happened to. It's happened a bunch this year. Right. It's like your phone, you're like, okay. And you like take a picture of the QR codes like, nope, there's no passki. And you're like, come on guys, you were supposed to make my life easier. What are you doing? I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

So you were using Microsoft's authenticator before this?

[Paul Thurot]

I was using a combination of Google and Microsoft and Microsoft specifically for the Microsoft accounts because it's great for that and Google for everything else because it syncs. But now Proton does that as well. But it does it with an encryption and you know, it's Proton. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I use two fas, which they don't, I notice put in this chart because it checks all the same boxes.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, does it? Well, but that. Okay. But I mean. Yeah, I don't, I mean I'm not sure like how you make that list right. If, I mean, I. Maybe it's because it's.

[Leo Laporte]

These are the most popular. You know, in fact, often when you are suggested a one time authenticator, they say just. They just say Google authenticator or Microsoft authenticator. They don't even mention the other ones. I used Authy for a long time, but I like Two fest. Actually.

[Paul Thurot]

Google's great. It's just. Yeah. You know, lately I've been.

[Leo Laporte]

The only thing I didn't like about Google was every time I set up a new phone, it was kind of a pain. I think now Google will export.

[Paul Thurot]

Right. And no, it just syncs. You just.

[Leo Laporte]

It will sync.

[Paul Thurot]

Okay. It's used to.

[Leo Laporte]

And that's.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. If you're, if you're using the same account. It's just there. That's what I love. That's what I love about it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's saved to the account.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Now I just store everything in Bitwarden. I give it. I gave up on it. Two different.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah, so. And by the way, if you do switch to Proton Authenticator, anybody from any other authenticator app, it will prompt you Google at the end when you export says, hey, do you want us to delete all this data? I didn't do that at the time because I wanted to make sure it worked, but now it's like, yeah, like, you should do that too. Just like you should get rid of your passwords in whatever password manager you you were using if you switch to a new one. It's a tough step, but it's, you know, it's one of those things. You don't want this stuff just floating around out there. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

When I migrated out of LastPass onto Bitwarden, there's a moment where I have an exchange file of all of my passwords.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. That in plain text. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It was a scary moment. Wait. To delete that one.

[Leo Laporte]

Don't leave that in your download folder, folks.

[Richard Campbell]

A giant CSV.

[Paul Thurot]

That's one of the. I mean, that's right. I mean, when I exported the Google thing, it was like, do you want to export a file version? I'm like, sure. Because I'm like, I can put this in, like, Private Vault or whatever it's called OneDrive. But then it's sitting there in my. Like I said, the download folder in your phone. You're like, is there a more insecure place on Earth than the download folder in my phone? Let me think. It's tough. You don't want to leave it there.

[Leo Laporte]

No, actually, that's our sponsors Trelica. That's one of the things it does is. Let me just look if there's anything in the clear in your download folder.

[Paul Thurot]

Oh, a plain text file of all of your passwords. Yeah. Or all of your. The codes or whatever it is. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I guess it's so common that they actually check for that. All right, time for run as radio. Mr. Richard Campbell.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Brought back my friend Christina Wheeler, who's now my friend, Microsoft employee. And in. In the theme side of this, I've been looking for case studies around successful M365 deployments. M365 copilot deployments, specifically because there's lots of people telling me I got to use M3 steroid copilot. And every time I talk to system insubi. They're like, dude, I have to get my quote unquote data estate in order. And nobody's data estate is in order. But that's not true. The financial services industry, because of its regulatory requirements, has pretty good controls over their, their data estate, so to speak. They are big on purview and data loss prevention and all these kinds of tools. And so Christine has been part of the consulting teams that have been helping these financial services move ahead with these things. And they're having substantial success. And it's because they are just, just that little bit more organized because they're required to be.

[Leo Laporte]

So, you know, with regulation, folks.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it's kind of the side effect of regulation is these pieces this. You have tagged your data sets and you're big on archiving because it's the law and you've like, you've got all these sorts of things in place so that when they aim copilot at certain areas of data, it pulls up good results and you don't have this security by obscurity effect which is not allowed for, for, for financial services. Like, they can't do that. So that to me was exciting. Like in the end, I can't teach you how to do this per se. Christina certainly run down certain elements, but it's like, look, there are places where they're having success and the place where they're having success is where they've taken data security really serious.

[Leo Laporte]

Isn't that interesting?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, very nice.

[Paul Thurot]

You know, you're trying to, just trying.

[Richard Campbell]

To lift the bar up a little bit more and find help. People be successful with these tools, you know, they're keen to use them. They're just trying to figure out what's the right way to go about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Now this is the part of the program, like in the wizard of Oz, where it goes from black and white to color our whiskey segment.

[Richard Campbell]

So the cruise I was just on and missed the show, although I had a couple of fans of the show on there, said, are you going to do the show from the boat? And I'm like, oh, no, no, I'm not.

[Paul Thurot]

That's awesome.

[Richard Campbell]

Maybe I could have, maybe not, I don't know. So it was, it was. If it's a, it's a cruise ship, like everything's questionable there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but I've done shows from a cruise ship. It's not fun.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, there was about 20 of us that all went for our friend's 50th birthday and one of the activities was a whiskey tasting. So Everybody was on me to go to the whiskey tasting. I'm like, listen, I'm not going to whiskey tasting.

[Leo Laporte]

I've tasted whiskey. I know whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, no, no, no. You have to go. You have to go. It's like you do. People just want me to torment the whiskey guy that's there.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you would be, wouldn't you? Because this is just a guy who got nominated to do this.

[Paul Thurot]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

He's not.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

So it's a brown color. I think it's alcoholic.

[Richard Campbell]

He had a very good script. It was just wrong.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, no.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyway, I got bullied into it, and then whiskey they were tasting was the Macallan color collection. The 12, the 15, and the 18.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that's not bad.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And funny, we've already did. We just did a Macallen 18 just a few weeks ago because I'd gotten one as a thank you present for. From a conference that I'd helped mc. And. And so I kind of sad to go back to McAllen so quickly, but I thought it was an interesting story, and I've ended up writing to the fellow my notes on this particular collection of whiskies.

[Leo Laporte]

Not in front of the rest of the people.

[Richard Campbell]

I may have said a few things while we were in front of them, but that's, you know, what are you gonna do? And then I ended up in a huddle with a bunch of the other tasters, not just my friends, asking questions about whiskey.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you became the expert. Love it. Love it. Well, you are the expert.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You know, I put the time in it. So we've always. We've talked about Macallan. I mean, right off the bat, it's like, why? You know, when Alexander Reed sets it up into 1824, and that's the number they always use. Why 1824? Because the excise tax goes in. In 1823. It becomes illegal to make whiskey if you don't have a license. So he got the license in 1824. The reality, of course, he leased the land in 1819, and it was always barley farms. In fact, through archaeology on the site, there's been barley grown in that place for three or four millennia. So they make a whiskey for a long time. In fact, the. And of course, he didn't call it the McAllen Distillery. He called it the Eichel's Distillery. After Easter, Eager Easter, Eichel's House, which goes back to the 1500s. So more or less, you're talking about this area growing barley. And when you have excess barley, you make it into booze and you have for ages.

[Leo Laporte]

What else are you going to do with it?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, of course. And so and. But it becomes Macallan when Roderick Kemp takes it over in 1892 and he actually renames it to Macallan Glenn Livet. The name Glenn Livitt doesn't get dropped off until the 1980s. And it's Roderick Kemp, who had previously run Talisker and Talisker had he gotten into the sherry casking thing. And that's what McAllen is known for, is sherry casking. Right. It's. That's the, the big deal. So I thought we better revisit sherry because what they're doing here in the color collection is a little bit different. And we've talked about this in various parts before, but I want to get into some brass tacks about what it really means to be a sherry cast whiskey. So sherry is a wine made in Spain, a particular set of regions. They call it the triangle. There's really two kinds of dry sherry and there's sort of sweet sherry. The dry sherry is considered the high end stuff made with the palomino grape. It was originally fermented in barrels going back hundreds of years. Today it's mostly large facilities that are making them. So it's all in stainless steel tanks. It's considered dry sherry because they fully fermented. That is to say, they consume all of the sugar from the grape in the sweeter versions. And there's generally two species, the Moscatel and the Pedro Jimenez. They stop fermentation to leave sugar in the wine by adding fortification to it, which kills the bacteria, and so you get a sweeter product. And why fortification? Well, one is to knock out the yeast, but the other is to knock out bacteria in general. Ports and sherries were invented largely as fortified wine because otherwise the wine would spoil. By raising the alcohol level to about 15 to 18%, you allow you keep the bacteria out so it can be stored for longer before the era of refrigeration and so forth. This is how you kept your alcohol from going bad. You know, typically wine, now sherry gets a little weird, right? Because sherry, they actually discovered that there is different ways to age sherry. If you just age it in barrels, it tends to lose color. As it ages, it gets paler and paler. And that's what they call the oloroso aging. And but if you age it, if you allow a bacterial film to grow over top of the. The sherry they call Flor, it'll actually anaerobically age. And so it'll keep its color while still getting that smooth flavor. And so the fino style of sherry uses floor, where the oloroso it doesn't. And so if they know they're going to make oloroso, they'll raise the alcohol level to the point where it kills all bacteria, around 18%. And that and it will lose color over time. Where the phenos, they only raise to about 15%, which is strong enough to kill a lot of the bad bacteria, but not so much to kill the floor. And the floor is maintained. And where this floor hangs out is in the celera. So the process of making sherry, and we've talked about this before, is this bodega style barreling where they have three layers of these large 600 liter barrels. Now, in the very early days, it was European oak. But as soon as American oak was available in the early 1800s, as the United States began to form and started trading with Europe, of course they were using barrels for storing everything. Right. That was the way barrels were done. And it would take very long before folks found out that the species of oak, what we know is American oak today, tasted better than European oak. And so long before the whiskey industry used American oak barrels, the sherry industry used American oak. They paint their barrels matte black so they can see if they're leaking because they keep them for decades. And this three layer of stacking, the bottom layer is the most mature. It's been around the longest. And, and then there's a second layer and a top layer. And the. Again, we've, we've talked about this before. When they're going to go do a ball in bottling, they only take about half of the sherry out of the bottom at each bottom cast to go into bottling. And then the middle tier gets partially drained down to the lower tier. And then the upper tier gets partially drained to the middle tier. And in the top tier gets the new make added.

[Leo Laporte]

This is a sherry aging barn we visited in Spain in Cadiz. And these were, this is what they made. Oloroso is incredible.

[Richard Campbell]

You can see how big those barrels are.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

They're, they're instead of the typically 250liter that we see with, with bourbon and with Whiskey, you're seeing 5 and 600 liter barrels. They're very large, they're heavy.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But also, sherry is not supposed to taste oaky.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And so they don't look a. The alcohol level is low enough that you're not having the same solvent effects. You're not pulling the phenols out of the Wood the same way you will would with a grain spirit. And they also keep the wood for really long. Most sherry makers will tell you 20 year old barrels are still too young. That barrels don't get really good in the Celera until 50 years old.

[Leo Laporte]

Look how ancient these barrels barrels look. Yeah, just they look middle ages.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, they want 50 plus year old barrels in there.

[Leo Laporte]

These were.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Which brings us back to this whole conversation about sherry aging whiskey. Because the, the sherry guys are not letting their old barrels go. That's just not a thing they never have.

[Leo Laporte]

Good point.

[Richard Campbell]

So what, what is sherry aging actually about? It's about shipping the, the barrels. So these bodega casks were never made available whiskey makers ever, ever. But back in the day in the 1800s, the way you shipped sherry was in transport casks also 500 liters, also American oak. But they were new make barrels and you only put it in there to ship them. And typically they were only in there for six months to maybe two years amount of time they get made up in batches. So they sit for a while, then they get loaded on ships and they travel for a while. Then they get unloaded into warehouse and they sit for a while. Then they go out to distributors, they sit for a while. And typically they were you again would send your servant down to the whiskey or the sherry purveyor with your decanter to fill a few bottles. Because glass was so valuable back in those days. And so everything was moved around by barrel. And if you were big in a place, maybe you bought a whole barrel yourself. And who knows how long it would take to use it. So would age to some degree in those barrels, in these storage barrels. But once the barrel was empty, what do you do with it? And so the first records we have of the Scots using X transport casks is like 1814. So this has been going on a really long time. These transport casks were being used to age whiskey because what else to do with the barrels? They would just you, they would just use them. And people like the flavor. Right. However, whiskey gets way more popular than sherry and bottles start becoming less expensive once you get to the industrial age in the early 1900s when we have 5 in 7 year olds helping them make glass bottles. And so those barrels start to get harder and harder to come by. These just don't use transport casks. And by 1986 the Spanish simply said you cannot ship in barrels anymore, you must ship in bottles. But long before that you already had the crisis. By the end of the 1800s you're already in trouble with. It's just not enough sherry casks to grow around. And so people innovate. In the 1920s, a guy named William Lowry who figured out that he could take a. A bare wooden cask, typically American oak. It didn't have to be. And he put about maybe, you know, it's a. It's a 250 or 300 liter barrel. He put about 30 liters of sherry into it. And then he'd use steam to pressurize it over a few weeks and it would force the sherry into the wood. And that got pretty much the same effect. And so for many years, that's how they did it. And then they went even a step further. There was a very thick wine syrup used in the sherry business called Paxeret. And so if, when you were. They started buying that stuff and you'd literally put a scoop of this into the barrel before you prep the barrel, and it would give you the sherry flavor as well. Although that got banned in 19, in the 1990s, because it was a bit more of just a treatment or a flavorant rather than actually coming from the barrel. So here's. Since the 1970s, this is largely what they've been doing. And now it's the only way since the 80s when they basically made it impossible duty. Either way, seasoning sherry casks is what's going on. So the whiskey maker specifies the barrel, the type of wood, the size, how much the inside of the barrel is toasted, all the specifications. The sherry maker makes that barrel on their behalf and then fills it with sherry wine, probably not fortified at all, and lets it set for six months, up to maybe 30 months. It obviously costs more the longer you let it sit. And in fact, if you only let it sit for six months, they'll likely take that liquid out of the barrel and put it into another barrel. They'll do it several times. But this liquid does not become fine sherry. It typically only becomes sherry vinegar. So the quality of the sherry is nowhere near the same. But this has been the reality for 50 years.

[Paul Thurot]

Years.

[Richard Campbell]

This is what they call sherry seasoned casks. So virtually every sherry cask whiskey I've ever tasted comes from this era of how they actually made these barrels. That they were never, well, a. It was never the fictional story of fine sherry barrels being taken from the Sherry distillery and used for whiskey. It was always just a transport cast. It was only a year or two ever. And now it's even more specialized, exact in exactly that way. And the whiskey, the Barrel might be reused several times. So it's just a flavor, you know, like in back to what the Canadians were doing with their 1/11th rule, where they just put sherry in the bottle, you know, under like 5, 4 or 5% and call it. That's still whiskey. Close enough. Because kind of that's what you're doing. Anyway, it is interesting to think in terms that all of these casts were American oak, because the utilization of American oak from bourbon casks doesn't come till after World War II. Right. That's as the American industry explodes Post World War II with the Bretton woods and the whole export model. That's when you start seeing these ex bourbon casks appearing in whiskey production. But long before that, sherry casts were made with American oak and had those flavors. And that's one of the things that people like. Like now, Macallan has been a very successful brand. You know, in many ways, I think I said this when we were talking about the original 18 sherry cask. This is the first expensive whiskey you typically buy because it's such a. They've done such a good job of maintaining this sense of brand and quality and so forth. But it also created some tremendous problem for them, too, because it did. I mean, they sold far more whiskey than they could possibly produce. And so where. Where they originally, you know, going back to Roderick Kemp in 1892, like, for a hundred years, they just made sherry cask whiskey. But as the sherry cask got harder and harder to get and they needed more and more, you know, it's a real problem when you're selling a lot of Macallan. 12, they didn't lay up enough 12 years ago. I don't think you can rush this that fast. Right. Like, you can't catch up. And so in the early 2000s, Macallan started experimenting with ways to try and age more quickly and to make other versions. And so the fine oak series that got introduced, which is in 2004, was actually aging in bourbon casks. They're far less expensive, they're far more plentiful, and they would do a year of finishing in these sherry casks. The real Crisis came in 2012. In 2012, they produced a line they called the original the color series. They actually called the 1824 collection, but everybody else referred to as a color series because they had no 18 statements on them. They were just colors based on the color of the liquid.

[Leo Laporte]

I know that these are marked travel versions.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. Because they're all for duty free. But this.

[Leo Laporte]

And you told us never to Buy anything at the duty.

[Richard Campbell]

And I'm going to tell you it again and I'll tell you why in just a second. But before this color series, this earlier one that they called the 1824 collection, they didn't have age statements on them. They were just called Gold, Amber, Sienna and Ruby. And they were, this is in 2012, $57, not $71, $103 and $184. They were not that popular. Because the other thing that the industry has done is convinced you that age matters.

[Paul Thurot]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That we've, they've pitched this idea so hard about aging Whiskey that a 12 year old is better than a 10 year old and a 15 year old is better than a 12 year old world, which may or may not be true. You know, these, these are marketing tactics. And so McAllen in their effort when they just couldn't actually use the age declarations because there's rules around them. Try these no age statements ones and they didn't go particularly well.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, this one's browner.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and let's just talking about aging in general, this whole idea of there has a minimum requirement for aging is only barely a hundred years old.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, this Scots got to this first. The original agreement, the original act was called the Immature Spirits Restriction act of 1915. It said that whiskey had to be aged at least two years. In 1916 they raised it to three years. Now why did they do that? Well, think of the name Immature Spirits Restriction Act. What they're actually fighting was cheap Irish whiskey, the whiskey with an e, because remember the coffee still, but coffee still invented in 1870 in Ireland and it made making alcohol really inexpensive and fast and immature. And as there's more and more cheap alcohol, you have more and more public drunkenness and so forth. And now that stuff gets associated with poverty and low class behavior and so forth. And so the Scottish, to differentiate themselves from the Irish, they dropped the E out of the name whiskey. And they go in with these rules about you gotta age it, you gotta, you know, follow all these rules. Those rules will get advanced even further into the Scottish Whiskey act as UK law in 1933, which doesn't get the barley rules and the distillation rules and so on. And then there's been continued updates. There were more updates in the 80s. The current version, which they call the Scottish Whiskey regulations over 2009, big on EU VQA compliance so that they can protect it internationally. But the actual restrict, you know, we now know that age statements are required to be the youngest thing in the bottle. So if you see a Macallan 12, you know, the youngest in that bottle is at least 12 years old. There might be something older in it because they got to try to get to a flavor profile, but it's 12. That was only a legal requirement in Scotland in 1989. They've been putting age statements on whiskey for a really long time. And in the, in the 1930s, 1940s, you wouldn't usually have a year on it. It would say old or well matured. And typically they were like in the 5 to 10 year range. It didn't really get to the really old stuff till later. But I just want to remind you that all of this, all of this is marketing. It's a hundred percent marketing. Sure, we put rules around it after the fact, but it was what will make you pay more for a bottle of whiskey. And believe me, it's worked for Macallan. Macallan is one of the largest distillery complexes in the world. They rebuilt their entire distillery. Actually they built it beside the old distillery is still there, shut down. They're talking about starting it back up again. But they make 15 million liters a year in the new facility which they started, they took them four years to build. In 2014 and 2018, they built this huge new facility. 36 stills like it is a beast.

[Leo Laporte]

It has a great reputation though, right?

[Paul Thurot]

It does.

[Richard Campbell]

The reputation, it's impeccable.

[Leo Laporte]

And I noticed these color collections are dated. They are. They do have years on them.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes. Because they've only made them for a couple of years. This particular series only started in 2023. So let me talk about three different lines of whiskey and we'll finish with the color collection. So the classic, which we call the sherry casks, there's lots of different wheels. But let's just compare the 12, the 15 and the 18. And I did the 18 a few weeks ago. It was a 418 bottle of whiskey. The 15 is about $155, the 12 year olds about $85. Now those are the straight sherry cask editions. They also made the fine oak series, but those are now gone. The current version of the mixed barrelings, where they do both bourbon and sherry are currently called the double casks. And there's a 12, 15 and 18 that are $72, $175 and $350 respectively. Slightly cheaper than the sherry cask, but only slightly. In fact, the 15 is more expensive. And I'll tell you why. Because it tastes the best. And so they've actually upped the price on that. So the color collection. So what's distinctive about the color collection? Well, as it says it is aged in sherry seasoned casks. That's all it's aged in. Now the barrels they've actually used, we've dug in a little deeper, found that it's about 90% American oak, 10% European oak. So they're using a combination of caskings. So both of them have been soaked in sherry for a certain amount of time. How long we do not know. But the prices at select duty freeze. The 12 year old is $92, the 15 year old is $186 and the 18 year old is $390. They cost as much, if not more than the traditional sherry casks version. Now, I tasted all three. The 15 tasted the best by far.

[Paul Thurot]

But.

[Richard Campbell]

And none of them are bad, but none of them are great either. And for the money, just buy the sherry cask. Like why you can save a little bit by going to the double cask and arguably it's a better made product. But in general, it just reminds me once again, buying these whiskeys at a duty free is a mistake. They're designed for people who forgot to get someone a gift.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why the bottles are so pretty.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

You know what?

[Richard Campbell]

If you forgot to get someone a gift in the taxi on the way over, stop at a Total Wine or a bevmo and buy a real bottle. Don't buy at the duty free. You're wasting money.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody wants to know how much you spend on whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I get given a lot of whiskey.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you don't have to spend anymore.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but admittedly I do. I spend some. And most of the time when I'm spending buying a bottle of whiskey, it's a hundred dollars, right. It's a 12. Yeah, I don't really try to buy old whiskeys.

[Leo Laporte]

So it's the 30 year old Macallan from the color collection. I mean, it's a 30 year old Mac.

[Richard Campbell]

$4,000.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, 4,000.

[Richard Campbell]

Which begs the question how, when they've only been making the color edition for two years. Yeah, right.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So what I wonder is, is this not them going through a set of barrels that wouldn't make it in the sherry cask edition wasn't good enough and saying, let's make something else? You know what? We'll sell them the duty free. That's what we'll do.

[Paul Thurot]

That's hysterical.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm not, I'm not going to make fun of McAllen. They've done an unbelievable job. Their product is good, you know, just don't buy into, Right. This branding. Taste it, taste it blind if you can and see what you like and enjoy that. And don't, you know, and try and resist the 18. It's just too much money.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course. That's why they sell it on a cruise ship. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the whole point of that. And it's. And that whole place is a big floating duty free, right? Yeah, that's what it is.

[Leo Laporte]

It's just floating. That's what it is. It's a whole duty free boat. All boats, duty free.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurot]

It's a tax free in Norwalk.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what a Jerusalem is.

[Leo Laporte]

I remember one of the first cruises. It might have been the first cruise I ever went on. In 1981, we went to St Thomas in the Virgin Islands and everybody gets on the boat with a giant box of booze.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

You go into town, the whole downtown is structured to have you buy booze and jewelry and then you get back on the boat with your.

[Paul Thurot]

It's like Sonoma.

[Leo Laporte]

And they say, are you going shopping today? This is the day we're in St. Thomas. I don't know if it's still that way, but yeah, yeah, Sonoma. There's. There's good stuff to buy in cinema.

[Paul Thurot]

Sure.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, kids, you have done your duty to God. And Microsoft said, duty, duty, duty, not duty free. You are duty compelled to join us every Tuesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. We stream it live. If you want to watch it live, you don't have to, but then you can chat with us live. And we always have a lot of fun in the chat room. Of course, Discord is the first place to go because if you're a club member, you get, you know, behind the velvet rope access including, you know, often a good amount of conversation before and after the show that has nothing to do with a show like where's my cat? Who is still at large.

[Richard Campbell]

That didn't turn up. You did your. You did your snap.

[Paul Thurot]

You know what?

[Leo Laporte]

I realized it might have to do with the fact that I'm wearing a shirt with dogs on it. I forgot she might be scared of me. It's all. There's all animals on my shirt.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Paul Thurot]

This is starting out like an episode of Dateline. Eventually it's gonna be like, leo, we know you did something to the cat.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm just, you know, Lisa comes home tomorrow, she said, it's okay, you can let the cat out. I said, if I let the cat out and it gets lost. You're gonna blame me for the rest of my life.

[Paul Thurot]

She said.

[Leo Laporte]

No, I won't. Well, now we're gonna find out.

[Paul Thurot]

Yeah. I've never known a wife to be vindictive, so.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, thank you everybody for joining us. You can watch live. Oh, I didn't mention not just in the Discord, but YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Xbox. No, X dot com, not Xbox. You could probably watch this on the Xbox, but we don't know how. Facebook, LinkedIn and Kickstarter, all of those stream us live. Every Wednesday. Did I say Tuesday? Wednesday, 11am Pacific after the fact. On demand versions of the show available on our website, Twitter, tv, Dub Dub for Windows Weekly and let's see where else. Oh, there's a YouTube channel where you can get the. Actually that's great. If you want to share a little clip, you know, like a whiskey clip. In fact, if, if you want to see all of the whiskey clips up to like it takes us a while. So maybe like four weeks ago, just go to. What is it? Something from my closet.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, something weird from my closet dot com.

[Leo Laporte]

Something weird from my closet dot com. And that is the playlist, the YouTube playlist with all the delicious whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean you can just find it on YouTube as well.

[Leo Laporte]

But yes, somebody, somebody named the show Windows Whiskey. I don't know why we didn't think of that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, somebody applied AI bottle of that page.

[Leo Laporte]

20 year old Richard Campbell and the background on that one.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, we're up to 94 episodes published. People have been. Wow, that's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

That's incredible.

[Richard Campbell]

How far behind are we now?

[Leo Laporte]

Not too far.

[Paul Thurot]

No.

[Leo Laporte]

Kevin, how Kevin's doing this. He's out in his spare time, you.

[Richard Campbell]

Know, he's working hard. That's the truth.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. There's also the best way probably to get any of our shows is subscribe in your favorite podcast player. It's free to do that. You get it automatically. You don't have to think about it. There's always audio and video for almost everything we do. And if you would leave us a good review, maybe even five stars, that would be nice. That would be nice. We'd appreciate the support. Thanks to our club members. Thanks to all of you for joining us. Paul thurat [e-mail] Become a Premium Member. I am. That's. There's great stuff, great stuff on that website always. You can also find his [e-mail] and you get a free copy of the field Guide to Windows 11 if you sign up for his newsletter at. What is it? Is it still. Have you. Have you moved it yet?

[Paul Thurot]

Not yet. Mid. Couple weeks, I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Couple weeks. So in fact, this would be a good time to sign up because you'll continue to get it no matter where Paul goes.

[Paul Thurot]

I think we all know where I'm.

[Leo Laporte]

Going, but the bad place, the hot.

[Paul Thurot]

Slice, it's a warm. Obviously it's gonna be warm there.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard Campbell [e-mail] that's where you'll find Run as radio, his podcast and.net rocks the podcast he does with Carl Franklin. And of course, you'll find them both here every Wednesday. Oh, yeah, Hide us. Hide yourself.

[Paul Thurot]

I don't know why I'm so low or I. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't matter where. The show's over.

[Paul Thurot]

Paul. Don't. Don't even. I know you got to fix it now.

[Leo Laporte]

Thanks for joining us, everyone. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly.

[Paul Thurot]

Bye. Bye. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out.

[Paul Thurot]

You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host.

[Leo Laporte]

You seek it out and download it.

[Paul Thurot]

You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom.

[Leo Laporte]

Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads, go to Libsyn ads.com that's L, I, B S Y N ads.com today.