Paul Thurrott (30:31)
And let's see. So we have some insider builds. I. I wouldn't be surprised if we got some more today or at least by the end of the week. But dev and beta on the same features. But 25H2, 24H2. Right. We. We all know they get the same features and then release preview 24 and 25H2, which is confusing as well. But the release preview builds are the ones that are going to point to what 25H2 will look like at launch, which should happen. Well, we'll see. What. Where are we in the schedule? Yeah, it's probably going to be the second Tuesday of October will be the preview release and then I would imagine November will be the, you know, the public whatever release, the one they will actually jam down your throat, so to speak. That's not technically how they phrase it, but the one you actually cannot stop. So October, I guess this is what Microsoft would call that is the release who cares. A lot of new copilot or I should say click to do stuff and actually both all of those builds. It's weird watching Microsoft move from thing to thing in Windows and elsewhere. Right. Remember with Microsoft 365, there was a period of time or Office as we used to call it where it just seemed like every month was like this crazy period of like every month was like crazy updates across the stack. It was crazy. And then they did teams and then suddenly it was like, oh, a lot of teams updates. Like it was all teams. You know, it wasn't all teams, but it was like 90% teams. And then Windows 11 comes around and it becomes like copilot, right? Copilot's over here. Now it's over here. Now it looks like this. Now it's a window. Now it's a pane. Now it's another window. They keep kind of screwing with that recall. About a year and a half ago was the big story Recall kind of turned into a big nothing burger. But they came upon something called Click to Do. And now it's like Click to do keeps getting updated all the time. And Click to do is one of those things that integr with those app intents or app actions, actually we call them in Windows. And so this is where a lot of the focus is. You have to have a copilot plus PC so it impacts nobody, you know, or. Well, that's not fair. It's probably less than 10% of people. Whatever the numbers, it's pretty small still, but there's a lot of action there. So that will always be the case, or that will be the case until we move on to the next thing, whatever that's going to be. So nothing major, I guess, unless you care about the gaming handheld stuff, you know, that was going to be running Windows, but a special version of Windows. They've already did the work for the Xbox app and the Xbox or the game bar, which used to be the Xbox game bar, to adapt them for these devices with compact modes. And now they're doing like full controller navigation for those devices. The idea is that you, you know, the thing is a controllers to get a screen with the controller on either side. You could just navigate the UI completely with a controller and not have to fall back to, you know, tapping the screen or connecting a touchpad, mouse, whatever. So no big deal. Let's say what else. That's mostly that. So I've been updating the book for 25H2, which will be a new edition of the book. And I've been. I'm changing the way it's going to look. So I've been kind of going around the table of contents and picking things just to see if everything makes sense in this new format. I have. But I recently wrote about Quick Machine Recovery, which was added in 24H2, but it was a new. It's a new, A new recovery tool of the past. I'm going to call it six months or so. Not a lot to do there. It just will come on when you need it. So if you get into a situation where your PC can't reboot into Windows because you install the driver is usually what happens and it screwed something up or maybe even had malware, whatever it might be, this thing will connect to. Well, you actually have to. If you're not connected with a wire, you have to connect it to a WI FI network yourself in the recovery environment it boots into. But then it will look to Windows Update for a fix. And this is, this kind of speaks to the part of that conversation we just had where with Windows 10, one of the goals was to get as many people as possible on the same version. And this is why, because if we're all on the same version, which we're not, but if we have just a few versions and most people are there, it makes it easy to find problems that impact lots of people. And that's the types of fixes that will go to this quick machine recovery thing, right? Because Microsoft gets this telemetry data and they can see, hey, AMD or whatever driver is causing problems for everybody. Let's put the patch into Windows Update. So if you can get into Windows, you'll get it, but if you can't, this will go into Windows Update and get it for you. And it's, it's, it's kind of, it's funny in a way because the way it is by default as an individual, if it can't find an update, it will just sit there trying to reboot all day long, you know, on some schedule. And if it eventually finds one, you'll be fine. And if it doesn't, you'll, you know, like you just have to sit there, watch it reboot all day, I guess. But. Oh my God, it's not that fast. But it's. But the theory here is something bad has happened, like meaning community wide, meaning for everybody, and they can put that patch in one place and everyone will just get it right. Will happen automatically. It's not a bad idea, honestly. So anyway, there's nothing to say there as far as like what you should do. You can go look at it. You can. Actually, it's my article about that post I put up. There's a command line you can run to simulate a problem so you can see what it does, which is cool actually, but hopefully you'll never see it really. But if you do, the goal is that it should fix the problem for you. We'll see how that works in real life, but that's the plan. It seems reasonable to me then. This just happened right before the show. I haven't looked at this very closely yet, but Microsoft today announced something called the Windows 365 cloud apps which are in public preview. And this is if you think about, I'm going to lose track of these names, but you go back 20 years, Microsoft had these pre Hyper V virtualization technologies mostly for businesses that would go out through like MDOP was one and App V was one of the other ones and they were slightly different. But App V, if I remember correctly, was the one where you could basically deploy a virtual app instead of an entire virtual operating system to a desktop. So somebody signed into at the time would have been an active directory environment. You have this policy set up so when this person is in this group, they know we're going to send down a cloud based version of Word, Excel and PowerPoint or whatever it might be. And it would actually run virtually just by itself. Like it would just be the app, not the entire operating system. So Windows 365 to date has been sort of the whole. Not sort of has been literally the whole operating system, but running virtually in the cloud and then use like a remote desktop connection to get to it. So the Windows 365 cloud apps as I understand it, is sort of like the App v for the 21st century, where it was technically also the 21st century, but just work with it where you are. Your company is deploying apps virtually through the cloud individually. Right. So you may not need full Office, but for some reason it may be around frontline work or whatever. You need a very specific app. I wouldn't probably be worried, but let's just pretend it's worried about. They would just deploy Word to you through the cloud and you would run that, that one app virtually on a machine, which could be an iPad, could be a phone, could be a computer, could be whatever. That's the point. So this will not impact like people, you know, like end users or individuals or consumers. But it's a, you know, it's an extension of this thing they've been doing in the cloud. So. Okay, good.
