Windows Weekly 967: 2nd-Generation Bonobos

Summary

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Windows Weekly 967: 2nd-Generation Bonobos

January 21, 2026 — Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell

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Episode Overview

This episode opens with the usual relaxed chemistry between Leo, Paul, and Richard—from discussions of boathouse life and organ meats to the latest happenings in the Windows world. The core themes focus on Microsoft’s recent "out of band" Windows patch issues, the company’s relentlessly growing embrace of AI under Satya Nadella, the evolution of Xbox Game Pass on ARM PCs, critiques of insertification (the trend of tech giants making life harder for users to benefit themselves/Wall Street), and a healthy side of tech culture ranting. Plus, a typically epic "liquor pick" segment explores the rich and little-known history of Racia, a moonshine-esque Mexican spirit made from agave.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Boathouse Banter & Herring Anecdotes (00:53—03:38)

• The hosts open with lighthearted, location-driven chatter. Richard details living in his glass-walled boathouse with its foggy, gray-box ambiance and daily wildlife spectacles:
  • "Everybody eats the herring."
• Scottish breakfast, organ meats, and using oatmeal to make everything better.

2. Microsoft January Patch & "Non-Story Stories" (03:38—08:55)

• Paul explains a recent Microsoft Windows update debacle that caused:
  • Remote Desktop (RDP) sign-ins to fail.
  • Unprompted computer reboots on hibernation or shutdown.
• Impact limited to enterprise/education customers. No home/pro users severely affected.
  • [04:09] "Very typical for our community...got a lot of play, but didn’t really impact too many people." (Paul)
• Richard suspects a GPO (Group Policy Object) security misconfiguration.
  • [05:12] "This is almost certainly an exotic GPO security problem." (Richard)
• The story’s significance is questioned—framed as media blowup over niche issues.

3. RDP’s Struggles & Microsoft’s Legacy Burden (09:04—11:57)

• Declining but stubborn RDP usage in enterprise.
  • [10:08] "This is Microsoft’s cross to bear, you have to support all these old legacy things..." (Leo)
• Modern Windows actively discourages typical users from setting up RDP, so only power users feel the pain.

4. "Insertification," Self-hosting, and the Everyday Carry Rant (11:57—12:56)

• Paul rails against the trend of labeling everyday objects as tech lifestyle ("everyday carry") and the related self-hosting obsessions:
  • [11:16] "I literally get a creepy feeling up my back when I hear that term...What are you, a superhero?" (Paul)

5. OneDrive "Folder Backup" Controversy (12:56—19:21)

• Microsoft quietly enables OneDrive Desktop/Documents/Pictures folder backup in Windows 11/10—even after users say "no".
  • [12:53] "What they are doing is just turning it on anyway." (Paul)
• Turning off folder backup is cumbersome and creates misleading shortcuts instead of restoring the old structure.
• Recently, a partial fix: users get a prompt to move files back locally or leave them in OneDrive.
  • [13:54] "It’s a half step in the right direction...but you have to know where to look." (Paul)
• Still opt-out, confusing, and potentially storage-filling for unsuspecting users.
  • [16:13] "If you don't have enough storage, it will give you an error." (Paul)
• Discussion tied to Microsoft’s overall pattern: "Insertification"—quietly shifting user control in service of their business goals.

6. Xbox Game Pass & Windows on ARM: Progress & Problems (20:13—25:33)

• Windows 11 on ARM (Snapdragon X) originally could only stream games, not download from Store; more recently, users can browse/download, but curation is imperfect.
  • [21:11] "It should be a curated experience…only show the games compatible with this computer." (Paul)
• Now, Xbox app on ARM highlights which Game Pass games "fit" your device’s performance.
  • [23:26] "Microsoft says 85% of the games in the Game Pass catalog are compatible with ARM-based PCs." (Paul)
• Frustration at the lack of clear marketing to explain and celebrate this progress.

7. The Great AI Rush & Microsoft’s Insertification Problem (35:51—77:44)

• Satya Nadella’s strategy: AI everywhere, even when the value to the customer is dubious.
• Wall Street drives decisions; real innovations or customer desires less relevant.
  • [67:29] "They’re selling us on this vision where the thing that makes that possible...today requires an astronomical financial investment." (Paul)
• Criticism of AI "bubble": Businesses buy AI tools uncritically, with zero attention to actual productivity gains for users or developers.
  • [74:13] [Richard paraphrasing a meme] "Nobody’s checking...It's not being measured..."
• Open skepticism that any of this makes sense outside of investor optics.
  • [73:44] "I think the bubble needs to burst. I really do. I think the best thing that could happen to us..." (Paul)
• Good AI exists, but not in the everyday features being heavily marketed. Sentiment that the field is vastly overhyped.
  • [86:08] "My point is they're overemphasizing this so much that they have turned it into something only the richest companies in the world can do." (Paul)

8. Linux as a Windows Successor? (50:32—56:05)

• Leo brings up the prediction Microsoft could "do the funniest thing imaginable" and replace Windows with a Windows-themed Linux.
  • [50:42] "'I predict...Microsoft will discontinue Windows in favor of a Windows-themed Linux distribution.'"
• Paul: Today, that's actually "extremely doable"—compatibility and UX issues have lowered over time.
• Workflow inertia is the real obstacle, not technical feasibility.
• GUIs and platforms have converged.
  • [55:11] "GUIs have kind of converged. Even Mac has become more and more Windows-like." (Leo)

9. App/OS Insertification: Apple, Microsoft, and the Path to Lock-In (57:00—63:16)

• Apple criticized for rigid UI changes (Liquid Glass), hard security lockdowns, dev restrictions, and push toward subscription services, affecting user freedom and customization.
  • [57:36] "It reduces accessibility...this is an example of a company imposing its will on its users." (Leo)
• Microsoft and Google push subscription lock-in too, shifting basic consumer value to recurring revenue.
  • [60:56] "That's more and more the focus—not are we selling a lot of Macs..." (Leo)

10. Company Purpose: Investor Management vs. User Value (64:54—67:12)

• Paul and Richard agree that Microsoft is now, fundamentally, a "money management real estate company"—just as Google is an ad company.
  • [64:54] "Microsoft is a money management real estate company that also has tech and infrastructure..."
• Amy Hood (CFO) and financial engineering now run the show; product direction is secondary.

11. SME Tech Culture: Second-Generation Bonobos (38:12—40:12)

• Richard tells the "second-generation bonobos" story to illustrate how cultural inertia—and learned helplessness—persists within tech organizations.
  • [39:03] (Richard) "[T]hey've removed all of the bonobos that ever got wet, but the ones that are there still beat the hell out of every newcomer who dares to touch that ladder."
• "15 years on is not that long for cultural change"—old institutional habits die hard.

12. Windows Insider News & Modernization (41:47—43:29)

• Paul briefly describes subtle UI improvements in the Windows Insider builds (modernized account dialogs).
• Canary channel remains "an orphan," with Richard hoping for positive updates due to recent team reorganizations.

13. Notepad & Paint: Genuine Upgrades or Faux Progress? (43:29—47:35)

• Notepad gets Markdown and a "Welcome" experience; most new features are opt-out.
• Paint: New features (like "Coloring Book") increasingly require Copilot Plus (MPU-equipped) PCs—some are underwhelmed.
  • [46:45] "It's called Coloring Book...you can prompt it and say, I want a picture of a teddy bear...it'll create a black and white outline you can color in like a child." (Paul)
• Recognition that Notepad and Paint are, nonetheless, well-updated and useful apps.

14. Security & Authentication Tips (121:24—130:05)

• Paul walks through best practices for Microsoft account and device security:
  • Use passkeys (password manager/Secure Enclave).
  • Enable Microsoft Authenticator for M365 accounts—most secure and convenient.
  • Proton Authenticator recommended as best all-around free, open-source, fully encrypted option.
  • [124:41] "The very best method is to use a passkey...It's wonderful, but the very best method is to use a passkey...two-step authentication set up passkeys and an authenticator app."
• Richard notes: Microsoft is making 2FA mandatory for all M365 accounts by the end of the year.

15. Local AI: Microsoft’s "AI Dev Studio" Preview (130:05—135:26)

• New developer APIs and Windows app demonstrate local AI capabilities—text/image generation, translation, spell check, image enhancement—using Copilot Plus PCs’ MPUs or CPUs/GPUs.
  • [131:39] "You can see it hitting the MPU and how it's not hitting the CPU, et cetera, et cetera...But this is really, it's not so much a thing you're going to sit there and chat with exactly. It's more of a guide to what is capable right now on any PC."

16. Xbox Segment: Marathon Returns & Game Pass January (99:15—110:10)

• Bungie’s Marathon reboot (from Halo-makers) is forthcoming; excitement over its old-school flavor and gameplay.
• Xbox app improvements for ARM and Game Pass games, including performance-check indicators and cloud save syncing.
  • [105:22] "...goal here is you look at a game and it's like, yeah, this thing's going to work great on your computer or not. Right. I mean, that's actually useful information."
• Rumor: Microsoft may launch a free, ad-supported tier for Xbox Cloud Gaming, mirroring industry trends.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamp Highlights

• [04:09] Paul: "This is very typical for our community these days, but it’s got a lot of play, but it didn’t really impact too many people and it’s been fixed."
• [16:13] Paul: "If you don't have enough storage, it will give you an error...everything that's in that folder in the cloud is now going to come to your computer."
• [21:11] Paul: "You should only see the games that are compatible with this computer. That’s how that should work. Right? That’s how stores work."
• [39:03] Richard: "Second-generation bonobos...they've removed all of the bonobos that ever got wet, but the ones that are there still beat the hell out of every newcomer who dares to touch that ladder."
• [67:29] Paul: "They're selling us on this vision where...today requires an astronomical investment that outweighs the profits this company generates every single quarter now. And I'm sorry, I don't see it."
• [73:44] Paul: "I think the bubble needs to burst. I really do. I think the best thing that could happen to us, the number of people I'm talking to right now is like, I can't wait till the bubble bursts so we can get on with it."
• [124:41] Paul: "The very best method is to use a passkey...turn on two step authentication, set up passkeys and an authenticator app."
• [146:49] Richard (on Racia, agave, and moonshine history): "This is the best kind of alcohol. The kind invented to avoid paying taxes."
• [153:13] Richard: "It's one of the reasons it became moonshine, because the upside to the taxation and regulation is consistency and quality. The downside is you cheat."

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Memorable Moments

• [11:14] Paul’s everyday carry/self-hosting rant: "It’s a term of tech stupidity of I have got my head so far up my ass that I think my tech out in the Apple watch. It’s everyday carry."
• [46:45] Paul’s bemused take on Paint’s Coloring Book: "You can prompt it and say, I want a picture of a teddy bear. And it will create a black and white outline version of a teddy bear that you can then color in like a child.”
• [39:03] Richard’s bonobo experiment story, to explain organizational tech inertia.
• [73:30] Paul, calling for the AI bubble to burst: "I think the bubble needs to burst. I really do. I think the best thing that could happen to us..."
• [156:17] Richard’s joy in discovering Racia: "This is the simplest, most honest manifestation of agave in a whole area you didn’t know about.”

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Liquor Pick: Racia—The Tax-Dodging Spirit of the Mexican Highlands (143:13—156:52)

• Richard delves deep into the roots (pun intended) of Racia, an agave spirit from Jalisco, Mexico, traditionally made "under the radar" to avoid tax collectors, with production only legally recognized in 2014.
• Noted for its botanical "gin-like" character, distinct from the peppery notes of blue agave tequilas.
• “Sometimes I want that, sometimes I don’t. ... I gotta keep this bottle around for the summertime. I want two ice cubes in this and a couple of fingers, and I’m gonna sit on my deck and watch the dolphins do their thing and drink this lovely drink.” (Richard, 155:44)

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Final Thoughts

• The episode encapsulates the TWiT ethos: insider expertise, skepticism of corporate tech narratives, historical knowledge, and irreverent fun. The hosts poke fun at insertification, bad design, and the economic priorities now driving Microsoft and Apple—while still recommending good Notepad/Authenticator/Azure features and savoring obscure liquors.
• For users looking to stay abreast of user-impacting Windows news—minus the media panic and plus plenty of context—this episode delivers.

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Key Segments & Timestamps

• Boathouse banter: 00:53–03:38
• Windows update kerfuffle: 03:38–08:55
• OneDrive "folder backup" drama: 12:56–19:21
• Xbox on ARM & app curation: 20:13–25:33
• Insertification & AI industry critique: 35:51–77:44
• Linux as a Windows successor: 50:32–56:05
• Security/app picks: 121:24–130:05
• Racia & liquor history: 143:13–156:52

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Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat is here. Richard Campbell's here by the skin of his teeth. Richard's got a very interesting liquor pick, but that's not till the very end. Before that, we're going to talk about Microsoft's out of band patch for Windows, and maybe you had some little issues. You'll find out what happened and Richard's theory about why. We'll also talk about Satya Nazella's desire to bring AI to everything and everybody, despite the feelings of some of its users and a big Xbox game. Pass January. All of that coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 967. Recorded Wednesday, January 21, 2026. Second generation Bonobos. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, you winners. And you dozers too. Wake up, wake up, wake up. Look who's here. Paul Thurrott from thurrott.com, formerly the super site for Windows, now in old sunny old Mexico City. Hello, Paul.

[Paul Thurrott]

Hello, Leo.

[Leo Laporte]

And from the boathouse in beautiful British Columbia. That would be a good name for a pub or something.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, the boathouse.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, the boat house.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Where are you going, honey? I'm going down to the boathouse. Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

A lot of nautical themed items on the walls.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you remember that. Remember we were having that small renovation done in the big house that was going to be finished by Christmas?

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, Christmas 2026. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't specify the year. I like your boathouse, though. You've got.

[Richard Campbell]

It's very nice here.

[Leo Laporte]

It's surrounded by a glass so you can see the. The ocean or the bay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's all about the sea, of the sea view. Here. It is. It is a studio apartment. It is not large. So on days like today where the. The. The fog is all the way in, you are in a small gray box.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I like that, though.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. In the summertime when the sky is clear and you can see out to the islands in front of us and so forth, like it's untouchable. And you know what? The herrings. The herrings are just getting going so that soon there will be genocide outside to watch every day.

[Leo Laporte]

But it's the. It's the. It's the whales eating the herring. Or the seals.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Or the seals eating the herring. Or the dolphins eating the herring. Or the.

[Leo Laporte]

Everybody eating the herring.

[Richard Campbell]

Everybody eats the herring.

[Leo Laporte]

I love herring. Yeah, I bet. Because you're a good Scot. You like the kipper herring, don't you?

[Richard Campbell]

You know, I can take one down, which only after I've been drinking whiskey the whole night before and I'm already in poor decision making mode.

[Leo Laporte]

My mom, I don't know why she would get you get the cans of kippered herring and she would put it in, she wouldn't fry it. She put it in the pan with boiling water, just slightly submerged just to.

[Richard Campbell]

Warm it up, tin up and then.

[Leo Laporte]

Serve that with eggs instead of bacon.

[Richard Campbell]

Now next weekend, or not this weekend, but the following weekend, I will be back in Glasgow for a couple of days. I will be spending a night at the Craig Gachi and I do get the Scottish breakfast with the black pudding and the haggis and it's very good. It's so very good.

[Leo Laporte]

I have yet to become an organ meat donor.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it turns out if you, if you grind it up and mix it with oatmeal, you wouldn't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay. And if everything's better with oatmeal.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Ladies and gentlemen, we aren't here to talk about those organ meats. We are here to talk about something even more lovely. Windows. There was kind of a kerfuffle out there on the Internet.

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like Windows compares favorably to organ meat.

[Leo Laporte]

In both cases. You don't want to see the sausage.

[Richard Campbell]

Being made, but it should be definitely made into sausage.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes, exactly. So what happened?

[Paul Thurrott]

This is very typical for our community these days, but it's got a lot of play. But it didn't really impact too many people and it's been fixed so I guess we're okay. But the January 2026 Patch Tuesday update borked some features in Windows for certain users, all of which are business or commercial customers. And so the two big ones were remote desktop connections, just sign ins were failing. And the second one, which to me was the one everyone sort of reported on but it wasn't happening to any individuals we was that you would go to shut down or enter hibernation, like you know, basically close the lid of the laptop and instead of sleeping or hibernating or shutting down, it would just reboot.

[Leo Laporte]

But it only impacted happen to anybody.

[Paul Thurrott]

It impacted enterprise and education customers, not home and pro users.

[Richard Campbell]

So I mean I totally get enterprise because they'll have a bunch of other like GPO stuff running. But education that, well, it's just commercial.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean. Yeah, I think education is probably just based on enterprise, I would imagine.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes, it's probably actually enterprise. So this is almost Certainly an exotic GPO security problem.

[Leo Laporte]

Interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Probably.

[Leo Laporte]

And of course it gets attention because it's out of band.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, it's Windows just screwed up again. Yeah, it's like a story.

[Richard Campbell]

They've totally reorganized those teams. Right. Like client and core being brought together. Like I would. We've had a lot of successful updates the past year. Very few failures. I would not be surprised to get a little twitch of them right now as they reorganize.

[Paul Thurrott]

But that's like saying AI works most of the time, but we still report on the 1. You know, the times when it goes bad, it goes bad.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, same thing with self driving cars. Yes, they're safer than humans, but when they crash.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, it's a good one story. Yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

When man bites dog, that's news they say.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So yeah, there was a story I saw today in my feed that was ATM crashes somewhere in the world. Who cares? Like a single ATM machine I saw. And it's like Windows 7 sign in screen and you know, it's okay. Okay, so what, we're going to be outraged by this. This thing's on an isolated network all by itself. They probably very specifically left it there because it requires very few resources compared to modern computers. And the ATM machine is not an i9, you know, and to be clear.

[Richard Campbell]

You should be delighted. It's a Windows 7 login screen because it was probably a Window XP long screen not that long ago.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean it's just a complete nine story, but.

[Leo Laporte]

But I know it got everywhere. It got everywhere.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like a Family Circus cartoon. Right? You see a blue screen in a airport or a train station and you're like, oh, Windows, there it goes again. Or you're like, oh, Windows, it's everywhere. Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

But you know, I'm not very. I will definitely say, oh, Windows, there it goes again. I just don't take a picture of it and post it because come on. Well, who cares? Not surprised at all. There's no airport in this world you can't walk through that doesn't have at least one screen on a BIOS right now.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I will never not take those photos because of what I do for a living. Because I might need it someday for some awesome story. It's just good B roll. Yeah, it's just, it's just smart on my part. But yeah, most people I think would just look up the screen that's not doing what they expect and be like, you know, there goes like. It's typical for this place, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, I'm not surprised. You know.

[Leo Laporte]

So we begin today with two non story stories.

[Paul Thurrott]

Two non story stories. Well, what was blue stones? Oh I see, the ATM thing. Well yeah, that was, that was not officially in the list.

[Leo Laporte]

But it doesn't matter. You say once you say it, it's in the list. If I, you know what I'm saying?

[Paul Thurrott]

Fair enough. If I have learned anything from Leo, it's that I have to cover the non stories because it's going to come up.

[Leo Laporte]

You know it's going to come up.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm going to bring it up.

[Leo Laporte]

You're right. You know what? You're right.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're going to be like, well what about this thing I saw, you know, I heard. Yeah. Through the grapevine.

[Leo Laporte]

But I as I said before the show, I'm very proud of myself. I'm going through as you know every day I go through my beat check of all the stories and both those stories came up multiple times and in all cases I did not say yeah, let's cover that. I agree with you. They're non stories.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just whatever. Well I mean you know, anytime Microsoft screws up a Windows update it's well.

[Leo Laporte]

And you know me, I'm quick to jump on them on the, you know, Windows 6 bandwagon.

[Paul Thurrott]

But as you're about to discover, the.

[Richard Campbell]

Vast 30 minutes number of installs work just fine. There were very few.

[Paul Thurrott]

You need a very amazing that's again but the vast majority of planes land just fine. You know, it's like the problem, you know, we got to be careful. I don't know, we'll see. But anyway, I have to look at these things and then within 10 seconds it's like okay, this is not right. A widespread problem for my audience. So I'm not going to worry about it too too much.

[Leo Laporte]

Anybody in the chat room have you know any of these issues? Probably not. I bet. I bet not. I'm not seeing anybody saying anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Being outraged.

[Leo Laporte]

No.

[Paul Thurrott]

Maybe they could be like Verizon and give us some money back.

[Leo Laporte]

You know it did happen to it.

[Richard Campbell]

But only fulfilling the form.

[Leo Laporte]

It happened a. Well a well known YouTuber. Oh well there Linus tech tips.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh perfect. Perfect. And he definitely anyway so he probably.

[Leo Laporte]

Handled that, you know the thumbnail was.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. I couldn't remote desktop into my other windows computer. Windows sucks. Oh well you wouldn't using Windows so much. I don't know, whatever. But it's just yeah. This is the world I live in. It's terrible.

[Leo Laporte]

Same update seems to have some rhymes with mogul saying broken remote desktop in.

[Paul Thurrott]

Some cases, yeah, that was one of the two issues.

[Leo Laporte]

So, yeah, that is definitely a. What did you call it? GPO security bug.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and also there was a big push for a while there on the Enterprise side to get rid of rdp, the whole remote desktop thing. You were supposed to work through admin center and so forth. And so I suspect they pulled it out of the security path for a while and they're still cleaning up that mess.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you know, this is.

[Richard Campbell]

They had to give in. People could not put RDP down. It's a draft.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Microsoft's cross to bear, is you have to support all of these old legacy things because.

[Paul Thurrott]

So the good news on RDP is if you sign into your computer with a Microsoft account, you got to try really hard to make that work in the first place. Like this. I did a tip or whatever on this probably a year or so ago. It's super hard. Modern versions of Windows are not designed to allow pass through from a Microsoft account. So you got to. You got to really go out of your way to make that happen. So at that point you probably know what you're doing and it's not, it's not an issue that's going to affect normal people, like individuals. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Burke, who has two of my old Windows computers, says he hasn't had any problems.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You know, I am not unhappy to no longer be running enterprise infrastructure in my house anymore.

[Leo Laporte]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, like, you know, behind this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is a disease that every person in our industry, including myself, fell into, which is like, I'm going to manage my home like it's an enterprise. I mean, you can do it.

[Leo Laporte]

Then the next thing is self hosting.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

You fall into the self hosting.

[Paul Thurrott]

I am. So self hosting is on my list of terms that I literally get like a creepy feeling up my back when I hear that term. It's like everyday carry. What are you, an idiot? You mean like your. Your wallet and your phone, you jackass. You have to have a stupid name for it like you're a superhero.

[Leo Laporte]

Get my pocket watch.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, what are people talking about? Like, everyday. Carrie, just. God damn it. Unsubscribe. It's a term of tech stupidity of I am. I have got my head so far up my ass that I think my tech out in the Apple watch. It's every day carry. That's like, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, sorry. I got to save my IR for the thing that really matters today.

[Richard Campbell]

Oh yeah, this is the good one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, we're going to get to it. We're going to get to it. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I'm excited. Something to look forward to.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm not going to take it anymore, but we'll get there. First, this is what I'll call a half a step in the right direction and without beating this one to death, because God knows I have over two and a half years. In late 2023, Microsoft started quietly enabling folder backup in OneDrive in Windows 11 and probably running 10, but probably 10 too. After you said no. Right. And you could say no multiple times depending on the configuration of the time. This has changed over time, but you would typically see a screen in the out of box experience. Right. When you first set up Windows, do you want to back up your files to OneDrive? Nope. Like, are you sure we really want you to do this? Like, nope. It's good. Get a little pop up notification. And there were other methods over time, but those have kind of gone away. And then it was Microsoft mom, you.

[Richard Campbell]

Know, I'm deeply disappointed in you for not having done well.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. Except that would at least be some form of communication because what they were doing. Well, what they are doing is just turning it on anyway. Yeah. So you can't possibly mean it. Well, you explicitly said no possibly two to three times. And it was like, you know what, we're just going to do it. And if there is no better version of insertification than that, in my opinion. But this caused me over time to make a bunch of changes. First of all, and I should say, what are the problems? Right. Well, the problems are the folders that backs up by default are Desktop, which I use as a scratch space. I think a lot of other people do as well.

[Richard Campbell]

Sure.

[Paul Thurrott]

Documents folder, which of course people probably use or might use. And then the Pictures folder, which could have your entire library of photos you've ever taken your entire life in it. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Several hundred gigabytes just waiting there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Including things that you don't understand are there. So for example, on this particular computer, when I go to my Documents folder, I don't know why this is still allowed. We have the ability to virtualize the file system and redirect this stuff, but Microsoft does not do it. But on this computer, I have Battlefield, Call of Duty, PowerShell and Visual Studio 18 all have folders in my Documents folder, the local version. What the heck is that? And by the way, why would I ever want that synced to the cloud? This is specific to this computer. Anyway, among the many problems with this, if this is not what you want. Right. Is that you would Maybe not even realize it was happening. If you did realize it and you knew how to find it, you could go into OneDrive settings and turn that syncing, they call it backup, but syncing off one folder at a time, you'd be harassed every time. And then it would leave the files in OneDrive and put a shortcut in the local folder that link to the one in one drive, which is just bad behavior. I'm turning this off because I don't want these things in onedrive near leaving them in onedrive. What happened to my files? So I noticed this over the Christmas break. There's been a change. And in their classic communication style, they have not explained it. But what Microsoft is doing now is everything I just said still happening? Except for the last thing. So if you know where to look and go into OneDrive settings and turn this thing off one folder at a time, it gives you two new screens. The first one says, you know, it's sort of an are you sure Screen. Like you can continue backing up to that, that folder to OneDrive or you could stop the backup and choose where to keep the files. And if you choose where to keep the files and change it, it actually gives you the option to keep them in OneDrive or keep them on your PC. That's good. And like I said, this is a half step. But here's the couple of problems with this. First of all, I like that they did anything. This is an improvement. If you have synced these folders without you knowing, you could, as I just said, have your entire photo library. Now you're telling it now. You want that back on your PC and you do not want that back on your PC.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

If you don't have enough storage, it will give you an error.

[Richard Campbell]

But that person actually got most of the disk space.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. This is not a only bring back the files that were originally on my computer. It's everything that's in that folder in the cloud is now going to come to your computer. And that could be a problem. That could be a problem too. The other problem is sort of related to the recall issue last year, right? Not the security thing that everyone made up and wasn't real, but the fact that originally Microsoft was going to force you to opt out of recall. So as originally envisioned, you would buy a Copilot Plus PC and it would start taking snapshots all day long as you were doing stuff. And if you knew where to look, you could turn that off. You would opt out. Right. In OneDrive's case, sorry, it's A negative option. Yeah. So people complained. And of the so called changes they made, that was the only really important one. They made it opt in. Which, yes, I think every AI feature, I think anything that's kind of a dramatic change when there's an alternative should be. You should be told about it. Right. And you could opt in, you could decide that's what you want. In this case, it appears that you can opt in because again, like I said, you have multiple places where you can see this, where it says, hey, do you want to. You want to use folder backup? You're like, no. But then it does it anyway. So it's a fake opt in and then you can opt out later. It's like plus you have to know where it is. And to me, this is the big problem. This is a hidden ui. I don't think that most average users would even know where to look. It's possible that most average users wouldn't care either, by the way. But for people like us listening to the show or me, certainly I have my own thing going on with OneDrive and the way I use it. And I do not want to use your folders, I do not want green eggs and ham, and I certainly don't want you to turn it on without telling me, which is insane, especially after I said no to it. The one thing I don't know for sure, and I should have, I actually reset two computers today so I could look at this is if you bring up a new computer, 25H2, whatever, I don't know where it starts, whatever the latest version of the OS that's probably on the media creation tool that you get from Microsoft.com if you go to OneDrive immediately and go to Settings and then go into. They call it backup. There's a little yellow bar that says we're going to back this up as soon as we're done syncing because it has to bring down the stub files. If you say no, then it's possible. I can't verify this yet, I need to do this on more computers. But it's possible that it will never turn on backup. And again, this is a good half step forward. The problem is you have to know.

[Richard Campbell]

To do it at that particular moment.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Right then. Well, you have, depending on how many files you have in OneDrive, you might have an hour, you might have two hours. It's not going to be too much time. But you, if you are a power user or enthusiast, whatever, and you bring up a new Windows 11 install, you know, you've Reset your computer, new computer, whatever it is, if you know to look. It's possible. So next week, I think by next week I'll know for sure, but.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm not sure on that one. So I don't know what to call it. What do you call it? One step forward, 13 steps back. I don't know what that is, but it's a small improvement over the previous situation, I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. The other problem is you don't know if it's intentional or not, but this might be a bug.

[Paul Thurrott]

It feels malicious to me, but yeah, fair enough.

[Richard Campbell]

But this idea that you can only get to those. Don't back this up by having a transfer a sync running so that you can see we're going to back this up.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, right. I see what you're saying. I think we're too far into this for me to give them the benefit of the doubt, but I hope you're right.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, that's why I thought it might be an accident. Like it might have been unintentional. Like eventually a PM's going to see if you're not supposed to do that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know. It's in line with their malicious behavior to date. But, you know, we'll see. We'll see. I could have held this one until the game section, but I thought it was important enough to mention this. So when Windows 11 on ARM shipped with the Snapdragon X based chips. Right. Back in June 24, 2024. Yep. You. It came with the same Xbox app that everyone gets. Right. But you couldn't do anything with it except stream games from the cloud. If you had at that time Xbox game Pass Ultimate. Right. There was no ability to browse the store to download games to the computer. It just wasn't there. And my thing at that time was like, guys, this should be a curated experience. Right. You should only see the games that are in that catalog that are compatible with this computer. It should. That's how that should work. Right. That's how stores work.

[Richard Campbell]

That's also a real powerful experience for somebody buys ARM is seeing that store getting fuller and fuller and fuller over time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Instead of emptier and emptier. Yeah. Which was the original experience. So I think, I want to say it was August, but sometime late last year, they started providing the ability to browse and download games from the store if you're on Windows and arm. I guess I've forgotten this, but it was only in the insider program. So I did this. And this was also tied to some other things like the ability to play Fortnite and other games on arm, right? Which I did back in November, whatever. But again through the Insider program. So maybe I'm not sure how much of this is tied to Insider or not. So yeah, it's nice. You can go into the Xbox app and you can download games, but as I discovered, there was no curation, right. So I could go download Call of Duty, right? Whatever the latest version is, install that whole damn thing. It takes a long time, right? Go through all the stuff and then you run it. It's like this game doesn't run. It's like, why did you let me download it? You know, like that's stupid. So today Microsoft announced that the Xbox app is now fully available on Windows 11 on armor. I don't understand. Like this was, this is already there, but it's. Because now it's available to everybody, right? It's outside of the Insider program. So it works like it did last, whatever. August, November, what? Pick your time frame. It doesn't really matter. Except they did a step toward curation. Well, no, it's definitely curation. But they're not hiding the apps that will not install. But what they are doing is delivering yet another one of these kind of performance. You remember the Windows Performance Analyzer, whatever it was called, to give you like a score across your cpu, gpu, disk speed, yada, yada, yada, back invested time frame, which by the way is still hidden in your computer. But they used to have this score, right? And so what they're doing now is for each title they're providing a Windows performance fit. I don't know if it's a number or checkbox or whatever it is, I haven't seen it yet. But that will indicate whether or not this game will play well on any given device based on its hardware specs. But this is particularly important on ARM because most, well, I'm going to say most games don't work well. Microsoft says 85% of the games in the Game Pass catalog are compatible with ARM based PCs.

[Richard Campbell]

Maybe not telling you what's emulated and what's native.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean almost all of it's going to be emulated, but it's. Yeah, but, but again, these are all good.

[Richard Campbell]

They've got to have a benchmark somewhere internally about how many they've got to do their conversions like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. So one of the issues with arm, one of the few issues really is that between Microsoft and Qualcomm, you would think they would just provide this to the World, Right. They would have that kind of thing and they don't. There's a third party that has a website you can go to that lists whether games are compatible or not. It's completely out of date. It hasn't. It's. I'm sure it's updated all the time, but every time I look at it, there's no information for games I'm literally playing at that minute. And so it's a little out of date. And I feel like this is something that should be in the box in Windows and this feature gets us close to it. It's close enough. So if you're in the app, you know, the Xbox app, and you look at some game you're running on Windows and arm, it says, yes, this is going to run great, that's fine. Like it's better than nothing. It's better than what it was. So, you know, another step forward.

[Richard Campbell]

They should be highlighting this. This is a commitment to the customer. This is how you tell us that you're serious about arm.

[Paul Thurrott]

This should be a thing when you're in ARM that just says here's a page with all the games that work great. You know, just show that, yeah, this is going to get better with xp.

[Richard Campbell]

Guarantee a good experience for customers who are arguably still taking a flyer on a one generation processor.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. Which by the way is a miracle of all kinds of performance, reliability, efficiency, whatever. It's a miracle. But. But games are special guess. I mean, you know, we've talked about this.

[Richard Campbell]

This could have been a heartbeat, right, of how things are getting better.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm not gonna, I'm not. I'm just playing devil's advocate here. I'm not defending this because I feel like this should have shipped on day one. But it's possible that just from a timing perspective, it just wasn't ready. And we can't hold off on releasing chips with new computers. It's a whole industry here. So they did what they did and like I said, I'm not defending it, but I didn't like it. I complained about it, but this is better. So it is better. And X2 will make it better too, whenever those games ship soon.

[Richard Campbell]

But I'm holding on tight for X2. I'll be an early mover on the X2 and then I'll probably get punished for it, but I'm okay with that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't think so. The X1 is so great. I mean, my favorite part to this day is the lowest end first generation Snapdragon X. You can get it's awesome.

[Richard Campbell]

It's awesome for what it is. For the price is crazy.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, not for what it is. No. I mean literally just as a laptop that I use every single day to get work done without caveats. It's awesome. And that's the lowest end version.

[Richard Campbell]

There are very few times you get to hear Paul Thurrock giggle but one of the ones you can hear is when he opens it up.

[Paul Thurrott]

You witnessed it in person. Because every time the.

[Richard Campbell]

That's weeks old that he hasn't touched in a few weeks and he opens it up and it's right where he left.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like.

[Richard Campbell]

Like that'll give the giggle just like that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Because look, the computer I'm using right now which is the highest end i9 something. Whatever stupid intel, whatever this thing is, it's. You play roulette every time you open it. I wonder what's going to happen. You know, it doesn't. Doesn't come on I guess after the power button or it's coming out of hibernation for some reason. I didn't even know that was enabled or you know, you just never know what you're going to get or the camera doesn't see you or it's a nightmare.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and you're hitting your sort of thoughts on the rain point is something's going to come up but you don't know if it's actually. Well, something's going to come up. You should reboot.

[Paul Thurrott]

It may be a Balrog. I don't know. Yeah, it's going to. Yeah. If it's an intel computer.

[Richard Campbell]

I can't tell you how many times I've had a machine tell me. I shall not pass. Right. Like that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. You shall not sign in. Actually that did just happen last week. So yeah. So yeah, there'll be more Xbox stuff later, but I thought that was worth noting. It's. This is a big deal. This is a nice, nice. This is a big step forward and.

[Richard Campbell]

It could be a bigger deal. They could be talking about this more.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean this is when. This is what all those people that were talking about the ATM machine. Where are you when this happened? Like this is actual news.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. If I'm a consumer retailer of PCs and I've got these ARM machines to sell, this is the story you want to pitch to consumers. You're going to love this. The only reason I can think they're not is because they currently think that the user doesn't realize that some games won't run.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're stuck in. I don't know, hopefully it's not an infinite loop, but it's like a non virtuous cycle where people understand the intel brand. So they're like, obviously I want that kind of computer. And they're like, this is other thing that's actually way better in all these extremely important matrix or ways. But it's possible if you want to play high end games with a dedicated GPU or whatever, something like that, like it's not going to work. And they're like, yeah, I don't want that. You know, I just want, I just want the thing I know. And it's like, you know what? The thing you don't know in this case is way better than that piece of junk you do.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And well, and again I'm feeling like you guys aren't talking about this because you believe that the customer doesn't know enough to know that might even be a problem. And I really, that upsets me. Like you should not count on the ignorance of your customers to make sales.

[Paul Thurrott]

When intel announced their latest. Well, again, it's not just See it's, this is what I mean by it's a cycle. So it's the whole industry, right? From the customer to the retailer to the PC maker to the chip maker to Microsoft and back, right? It's like a, we're all at fault here, right? And you know, intel just announced the Panther Lake chips which absolutely have huge GPO advantages, still have reliability issues based on one computer. So let's not get too excited but you know, we'll see if it's really there. But one of the things they announced was like this thing's going out on like 125,000 different computer models or something where you know, Qualcomm will have you know, 6 or 12 or something and AMD has like 25. And it's like, yeah, it's not because it's better, it's because this is the inertia from their dominance of the industry where they were paying off PC makers. And that's all this is. It's literally just we keep partnering with the same company who was terrible, but they give us so much money that this is all anyone gets to know about. So when Best Buy has an ad on tv, it's all intel, dun, dun, dun dun. And then intel advertises, Lenovo advertises whatever it is and it's all intel and it's just a shame. Sorry, am I going on too long? Leo arrived like Leo's got the yellow flag out. Like he's ready to Penalty.

[Leo Laporte]

I just thought this would be a good time to long hammer. You are watching Windows Weekly with Paul Seurat and Richard Campbell.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, I thought I'd just say that gives you a chance to wet your whistles. Have a little haggis. And we continue on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. Welcome to Sephora. I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfumey.

[Leo Laporte]

I got you serum moisturizer or moisturizer?

[Richard Campbell]

Serum.

[Sephora Advertiser Voice]

Let's get into layering.

[Paul Thurrott]

My concealer is making me look worse.

[Sephora Advertiser Voice]

Sounds like the wrong shade. Let's get you matched. There's only one store that really gets what you're going for. Get beauty from people who get beauty. Only at Sephora. Hi, I. Let's get you a basket.

[Leo Laporte]

It's football season and you can now get almost anything you need for game day delivered with Uber Eats.

[Paul Thurrott]

What do we mean by almost? Well, you can't get a running back delivered, but you can get baby back ribs delivered.

[Leo Laporte]

A strong defense?

[Paul Thurrott]

No. A strong deodorant? Yes. A six pack of abs? Nope.

[Leo Laporte]

Six pack of beer? Yes. Get almost. Almost anything for game day delivered with Uber Eats. Official on demand food delivery partner of the NFL. Order now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Alcohol 21 plus and in select cities. Product availability varies by region. See app for details. TaxAct can think of a million things more fun than filing taxes. TaxAct is going to name some now. Sitting in traff, folding a fitted bedsheet, listening to your co worker talk about his fantasy team digging a hole. Digging an even larger hole next to that original hole. Unfortunately, TaxAct's filing software can't make taxes.

[Richard Campbell]

Fun, but TaxAct can help you get them done.

[Paul Thurrott]

TaxAct. Let's get them over with. So two bits of Windows Insider news. So last week, probably late last week, I don't recall, but Microsoft issued a single build to the beta channel, which, if you recall, it's been beta and dev on the same thing for a long time. Lately that's been 25H2 Canary Beta only.

[Richard Campbell]

Kind of a big deal.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that is selfish news. They didn't say anything about this, by the way. No. When beta and dev have been on the same tree or whatever branch or whatever you want to call it branch, they have never done this before, so I think this is notable. We know that Canary switched over to 20, what they're calling 26H1 late last year, and they've given us nothing new there so far. But the fact that Dev did not get this exact same build suggests that they soon will be going to 26H1 as well. Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not like a huge update, but if you've ever gone into the Settings app and gone into Accounts, anything that triggers a dialogue. Right. A change account type, like if you're going from an MSA to a local account, or in reverse, or anything or account info, like you want to change your username, whatever it is, whatever comes up in that dialog has been a windowed version of a UI that debuted in Windows 8. Not kidding. So in Windows 8, those were full screen experiences. In Windows 10, they shrunk them down to Windows, but they kept the UI from Windows 8. Windows 11 has done the same, and they've been slowly modernizing some of these things. And so they have, in this build, modernized those dialogues that appear within the accounts area of the Settings app, if that makes sense.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Not a big deal. Right. But kind of interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

You were mentioning Canary when I interrupted, and I'm hoping you're gonna say something derogatory about Canary, because it makes me happy every time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. What I would say derogatory about Canary is that they have added no new features yet, and I don't know what they're doing.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's still an orphan is what you're telling me.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't get it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think those things will start appearing in dev. Actually, the next. The little next blurb, the first little hint that may be something new. Although I don't believe it'll be unique to 26H1. We'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm just hoping that the reorg. We know there's a reorg going outside of Windows is going to land on insiders in some way and say, either take Canary away or give it a freaking purpose. I would argue probably take it away because it's just no reason.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't. Yeah, I don't know. I want to believe that there is going to be positive change from this, but I don't know. I haven't seen much evidence of that so far.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, I have. That's a big fire hose. And they try to do it, you know, through Christmas. So I gotta get pavan some slack. Like, I want this to come true, that this gets reorganized.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. So here's. I can give you a reason to give up all hope. So I was really excited when what used to be the Windows Phone team took over Windows. Big Windows. Right. So this was Terry Morris and Joe Belfield. Terry Maris. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I just felt like their heart collectively was in the right place. And they did a lot of things right Pretty early on, like returning to the desktop, focus from the touch first focus, et cetera, et cetera. But the thing we didn't understand right up front was that Terry Meyerson was tasked with a horrible thing which was you need to make Windows make sense within the Microsoft of the day, which was the cloud focused Microsoft where it's about subscription services and online services and that resulted in Windows as a service. But also the crap where the ads, the tracking, all the terrible stuff that we still deal with today. So that was like the little asterisk at the bottom of that story. Yeah, I would add the same.

[Richard Campbell]

It sounds like they were also pressing him on seat. Revenue doesn't count anymore. You need recurring revenue.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right?

[Richard Campbell]

We need to, because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, so you're never going to make money on that again. Show is another one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Only one guy who doesn't matter said that. But. But we need more revenue per user in a world in which we're not able to charge people for upgrades because no one would ever pay for that. But yet we do want them on that latest version. We're going to give them Windows for free, the update. But in return you're going to do all this other terrible stuff. And look, it's fair to say it has not worked out. So I think the same caveat applies to pavan. Right. Which is now we're in the AI era and we all know how this has worked out, right. Copilot Everywhere, all the AI features everywhere. Copilot Plus PCs with these features that honestly some of them were pretty cool but they're relegated only to those computers. So you have to buy a new computer. Has to be a specific kind of computer. So he's still operating with sort of guardrails, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And I hope you're right. I hope it could happen.

[Richard Campbell]

I think he's got teams with more clout around him, you know, looking at folks like Office and so forth that are demanding things of Windows that. And he can only push back so hard too.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like this is.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I know, but that's what I mean. You know, by the time Terry Meyerson wound down, it was pretty obvious that he wasn't able to do what he wanted to do because he was constrained by these requirements. And I'm worried that this will happen to this guy. So we'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and again I'd also go, this is part of Windows no longer being the center of the company. You have to learn how to convince other teams to play.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. I mean. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And the Windows team never had to do that before. Like, it doesn't surprise me that it's going to take some goes to finally get to a place where it's like they get.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're 15 years into this. I mean, this is, you know, this has been happening for a while.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, the problem, Paul, is that too many of those folks there are still the same guys. Right. Especially on the window side.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the old Osterman line. It's like unless they got eight wives and a cocaine habit, they don't need the money and they're still working. No, but you can't convince them of anything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right? But the guys who were the champions of the universe at the time, like the Brian Valentines, those guys are long gone. So when Windows literally was ruling the world, that was a completely different org and a different mindset. And the people who are there now adopted that. But they were never on top of the world. So I don't.

[Richard Campbell]

They're second generation bonobos from the banana experiment. I agree, but. Okay, you know, but that's. But say that again.

[Leo Laporte]

Second generation bonobos.

[Richard Campbell]

Do you know this story? This is a classic, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

No.

[Richard Campbell]

The bonobo being a very. This very clever ape and quite emotional and expressive. So the demonstration is actually, you do this, a bunch of other creatures. They put a stepladder in a room with bananas at the top of the step ladder. And as soon as the bonobos touch the step ladder to go after the bananas, they turn on sprinklers and bananas hate getting wet. So they quickly learned, you touch those bananas, you're going to get us all wet. And so now they start taking bonobos out that have had that experience putting new bonobos in. And every one of the new ones goes immediately to go for the bananas. And the others beat the hell out of them because they don't want to get wet.

[Leo Laporte]

No, don't go to the bananas.

[Richard Campbell]

Exactly. Until eventually they've removed all of the bonobos that ever got wet. But the ones that are there still beat the hell out of every newcomer. Tears to touch that ladder.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. That's.

[Leo Laporte]

What have we learned here? Yeah, bonobos communication.

[Richard Campbell]

That 15 years, 15 years on is not that long for cultural change. That's my point.

[Paul Thurrott]

All right.

[Leo Laporte]

Second generation bonobos, kids.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And that's why I said, okay, I get it. You're at second generation bonobos, but they're still beating the hell out of each other.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know. I don't know. Anyone joining the Windows team from 2015 on had to kind of understand you were the third world nation. I, I don't, I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

No. But it also takes time to grow up. A set of leaders know how to work across those teams the way a bunch of other teams do. Like, I, I am empathetic to the problem of finding their places.

[Paul Thurrott]

I am not. So I, I just, I don't. These people should not believe that they run anything. I, I, I, this doesn't mean they.

[Richard Campbell]

Know how to make it work either.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. So we'll see. I mean, I, like I said, I want him to, I like this guy. I want him to succeed. I want Windows to be better.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and the whole unifying the teams thing was the best thing I'd heard a long time on Windows. As a guy who's not a wild Windows fan in the first place. Right. It's like, okay, that's the right thing to do, is pull the teams together.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. In the middle of all. There's other features in these builds. Who cares? All right. So today, Microsoft released new updates to Notepad and Paint in the Insider program. But this is the little interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

How much better can these apps get? That's my question.

[Richard Campbell]

So much better.

[Paul Thurrott]

But only in the Canary. No, I don't want to. Let's finish the sentence here, please, because this will answer questions in the Canary and Dev channels. So that, I'm not saying that that's never happened before, but that is interesting to me because that 26h one bit. Right. So the only, the asterisk here is that, of course, 26H1, 25H2, 24H2, while it's still supported. Whatever. Actually might not be, but whatever it is, they're all going to have the same features anyway. Right. So it's possible we'll just see these features come to other parts of the Insider program and then just to stable. And it will have nothing to do with 26H1. But I thought that was kind of interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And it is an update in Canary synced dev, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean, sometimes you'll see app updates that go across all channels. And that's when I saw this. I thought, that must be it. But then it said Dev and Canary, and I was like, oh, again, I'm not sure that's unique. That's interesting because there was a time.

[Richard Campbell]

When we thought Canary was pre dev. Right. The order was Canary Dev Beta.

[Paul Thurrott]

There was a time when it was. I mean, this is the thing. They kind of, at one point there were definitions and then they just erased them, you know?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

They got very fond of saying that none of these channels equate to any version of Windows. And then they sort of backstepped on that because, you know, now they do. Some of them do, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

But some of them don't. So Canary does not, supposedly. No, that's not true. But Canary now does. So Canary, for the first time since that change now is very specifically 26H1. Yeah, whatever that means. This is confusing. I. And I did this in my living room.

[Richard Campbell]

It would be nice to have some guidance. Yeah, but you study it way harder than anybody else. But actual guidance, that'd be something.

[Paul Thurrott]

There used to be a thing where you could tunnel into the internals of Windows and you could find stuff out, and you'd be like, I've come bearing light. I know the answer. And now I've just turned into, like, a palm reader. I have no idea. There's no science behind this. It's just, you know, whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

I, too, am staring into the crystal and seeing my own reflection.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And I burned my eyeballs out, and I don't even know what's happening anymore. But the Notepad update includes more Markdown syntax, right? So they've added markdown support already and, like, strike through nested lists, that kind of thing. There's also. They've added so many features to Notepad, they need a welcome experience, which I know is going to rub everyone exactly the right way. So when you first launch the app, and then later you can go to it from a menu, it will tell you what's new in the app, because there's a lot of new stuff, including. Okay, no, I'm sorry, I don't want to interrupt.

[Leo Laporte]

Just wondering how Mary Jo Foley might.

[Paul Thurrott]

I can tell you how she feels because she complains about this to me privately now instead of on the air. She's not happy about it. But the thing is, with the exception of tabs, which you can disable as a functionally, but not as a ui, like, there'll always be a tab. Right. You can disable all this stuff. Right. So if you don't like the copilot stuff, if you don't like markdown support, if you don't want it doing spell checking or grammar checking, whatever it does, you can turn all that off. So it's opt out now. We're going to beat that term to death. But I. I use this app every single day. I use paint every single day, too. And I have. I don't just note. Have a problem with this. I think these apps are great. Like, They've done a really nice job with these apps.

[Richard Campbell]

Is it a Copilot plus PC experience that makes it great or is it anybody?

[Paul Thurrott]

No. Well, I mean, no, actually. So to date, all of the features they've added to Notepad, not Paint but Notepad are for everybody. If you have a Copilot plus PC, some of those features can be run locally, which is kind of interesting. But that's. So taking in that reverse direction, Paint is a lot like Copilot PC itself in that it is confusing. And if you said, okay, they've added 20 new features in the past year, which is probably an exaggeration, 10 or 12 of them require a copilot plus PC. So the experience you see, the options you see will differ if you have a normal computer or if you have a Copilot plus PC.

[Richard Campbell]

And is that specifically mpu like, is this MPU utilization? That's exciting.

[Paul Thurrott]

It is, yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because, you know, think about it. It means a graphics app, right? So one of the things I'll talk about in the back of the book is the APIs that are behind all this stuff, right? And when it comes to AI, and you have an app yourself, a third party app developer, or you're the guy that makes Notepad or Paint or whatever, the top level APIs, the big APIs or the, the APIs with the most functionality, I guess, are all text and image related, right? Think about it. I mean, think about what it is that things like recall or Click to do do, which is interact with what you see on the screen, which is comprised of graphics and text, right? And if it's a graphic that is text in it, they can make that into text, right? So it's. This is where all the action is occurring. So anyway, the Paint update, I believe. No, I do know. Okay, I'm sorry, let me, let me restate. There are two new features. One does require a Copilot PL PC. The one that doesn't is something called. This is such a stupid. Well, I guess if you're a graphics guy, this makes sense. It's a fill tolerance slider. So in other words, you're going to fill something over an existing image or maybe in a new layer and it's going to have some level of, I think basically transparency, if that makes sense. So you could do like a fade or something with that, you know, that new part of the image. And then if you have a Copilot plus PC, and God help me, if you were looking for that one feature that would prove to the world that this Thing is a product activity demon. It's this.

[Richard Campbell]

This feature is called Dynamic Gradient.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nope, no, the next one. It's called Coloring Book.

[Richard Campbell]

Ah, yeah. That's why I paid for our Copilot plus PC.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it is. And this is what you can do. You can prompt it and say, I want a picture of a teddy bear. And it will create a. A black and white outline version of a teddy bear that you can then color in like a child.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Oh, I know, I know, I know. Listen guys, I know you're rushing out to the store to buy one. Just let us get through the rest of the show before you do that. I know, it's exciting.

[Richard Campbell]

It only gets more exciting from here.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's crazy, but this is like whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Anyway, it's the naming.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look, I'm not known as a negative fellow, but I know I can't get through the sentence. I really like Notepad and paint in Windows 11 right now. I really do. I think these are great, great app updates.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it. Is paint.com over that? Is that you paint.net or.net?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, it's still. It's still in on. It's still a going concern. It's still a viable. I don't know if it's Photoshop level, but something between Paint and Photoshop maybe.

[Leo Laporte]

And Notepad plus plus still.

[Paul Thurrott]

Still a thing. Yeah. If you like, you know, taking it to 11 or something. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

But if you like simplicity, it's the paint.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, that's the thing, you know, that's. If you want me to complain about Notepad, I won't. But I will point out that they haven't added some power user features that I do feel like Notepad would benefit from. For example, the ability to display line numbers.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

That are in Notepad and in other text editors. So it's possible we'll get those kind of updates in time as well.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't know if I need line numbers. I'm in VS code.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no, that's fair. I'm going to just move. I keep saying this. The text mode, text editor they made, the one that runs on the command line edit or whatever, I'm just going to start using it. I'm going to literally regress to stall command line.

[Richard Campbell]

What's old is new, my friend. What's old is new. Next you'll be setting your screen to 80 by 25.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'll tell you what I don't need, Richard, is a frickin mouse. Okay? That's for children.

[Leo Laporte]

You should say that I've become Mr. Tuohy. I am all about the Tuohys. I don't want gooeys. I want tuis to text.

[Paul Thurrott]

I want it to be less gooey. I don't need the nuggety center. I just want to get stuff done.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm a fan.

[Richard Campbell]

I appreciate it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Burke asks, what adult needs a coloring book? I would just say two things. One, children use Windows too. But also there are a lot of adults that are children. Right. There are adults that are dressing up as Obi Wan Kenobi, walking around in the world like idiots or you know, we've regressed as a society. This is actually, this is right on point I think. Yeah, I'm never going to use it but you know, whatever, it's. I don't know, maybe you could take an image and turn it into a coloring book image. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

So I wonder if I should bring this up. I probably shouldn't. I'm going to make Mad Paul mad.

[Paul Thurrott]

Listen, you can't. There's nothing you could do to put me over the edge at this point.

[Leo Laporte]

This comes up from time to time and it's something actually I've said many times Mason Remillet, who's a computer guy, he's been around, he does games, he's been an instructor says prediction. This is in his new blog. Microsoft is going to do the funniest thing imaginable.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, I'm in danger.

[Leo Laporte]

He says.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's a great graphic by the way, isn't it?

[Leo Laporte]

It's Ralph Wiggins.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love Ralph.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I'm in danger.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're married now, right? I love Ralph.

[Richard Campbell]

It's impossible.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like duck, duck, duck, duck, duck. And he never stops, you know.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, by the way, the hottest skill right now in Claude code in the AI dev world is called Ralph Wiggum, which is great. I love it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love it. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

He says, I predict within 15 years Microsoft will discontinue Windows in favor of a Windows themed Linux distribution.

[Paul Thurrott]

So by the way, this comes up every six months. Yeah. So I'm not sure why he thought he would just do this now. First of all, that would be extremely doable. I think if we had had this conversation even just a couple years ago, I would have said the smoothest thing I've ever heard of.

[Leo Laporte]

Many Linux is now really support Windows PCs very well.

[Paul Thurrott]

So if you think back, we just talked about this so you don't have to think back too hard. If you can't remember this, you might want to go to the doctor. But at the start of the show we talked about Windows and ARM and how the only little Achilles heel, and it only matters to some people, is the game stuff. Right. For it to run games, it has to emulate them and it does surprisingly well. And it's going to get even better in X2, like we said. But that's been the thing they've been kind of working on to kind of get it there. Linux has been doing that for 20 years and so Wine and the stuff that Steam, what's the Steam emulator called? Something like Prism. But Proton. Right. We've gotten to the point where that stuff actually is pretty mature. The other thing that changed and this helped the Mac is that, you know, 20 years ago compatibility with Windows desktop apps like Arbitrary, any app was super important. But with the move to the web and web technologies and things like apps just kind of work everywhere now you'll see things, you know, you can run Edge on Linux or whatever. Right. I mean we are at the point there's a Microsoft engineer. I can't think someone will know this who has a Linux distribution that's very specifically looks exactly like Windows 11. Right? Yeah. To kind of ease that transition, we have Linux distributions like elementary, but even more so Zorin OS that are going after Windows users. They released their latest version back I think in November and had a million new customers over the first week. The biggest adoption they've ever seen ever. So yeah, I mean that all of us have. I refer to this as workflow. It's maybe not the right term, but we all have this list of apps we use that we're comfortable with. We all have a list of services that we use that we need to get our work done every day. And then we have our way of doing things, which is keyboard shortcuts and menus and blah, blah, blah, whatever. And the bar on that for me has always been pretty high. It's gotten a lot lower. And honestly the, the primary sticking point for me is Cloud Document Sync that actually just works like Files on Demand. And I know there are third party things that sort of work. But you know, if, if Synology Drive would release a client, I'm sorry, Synology would release a Synology Drive client that worked on Linux and worked like it does on the Mac and Windows that would, I mean that would chip away the only really big thing remaining for me. And I'm kind of a Windows guy if you're not paying attention.

[Richard Campbell]

But I think we've, you know, the corollary is also true. Maybe Windows is the GUI that Linux has been looking for all its life.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it could be because two have to be true for this day really makes sense.

[Paul Thurrott]

So when I. The obvious choice for someone like me or anyone who's frustrated with Windows and this is true today, it was true 10, 15, whatever years ago would be like just get a Mac, you know. But I've owned more Macs than most Mac fans and I love the hardware, I always have. There's just something about it that I just hate. I mean I literally viscerally hate. And if Linux could get their act together somehow and I say Linux like it's a thing. There are like 2000 distributions, they all have different app package formats and all kinds of UIs and it's a mess. But, but I don't, I think there's something there because the keyboard shortcuts are the same and it has, you know, similarities that are just small but people don't think about. Maybe I don't mind a different ui, that's not an issue. Like I. As far as like just the style of graphics or whatever. But the app stuff is not as big of a deal.

[Leo Laporte]

Lot of links. Distribution is ape Windows, frankly it's a thing. Even Gnome, which is kind of the default, often the default desktop for Linux is very Windows like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, yep.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean I think GUIs have kind of converged. Even Mac has become more and more Windows. Like they've kind of converged on this.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean fundamental. There's something, I think one. Well, literally one of the biggest stories last year was Apple making the iPad more like a computer, if you wanted it. And I think that might be enough for a lot of people. I think that kind of thing's simpler, you know, it's still familiar. We've all used iPhones for a long time or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

But Microsoft's been down that road and has turned back.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

They don't want to do it. That kind of touch.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, they never had a successful mobile platform that would make sense as the inspiration for something. Yeah, right. And that didn't go well. Right. Because the phone they made was not popular. Making something like an iPhone or Android that works on a tablet, a desktop, big screen, whatever. I think makes sense because they're a billions of people literally who are used to that and maybe even like it, you know, But I don't know. We've gotten pretty far in inertia so far. So, you know, we'll see.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, I would submit inertia is the whole problem with Windows.

[Paul Thurrott]

Inertia is the problem with most of our world, for sure.

[Richard Campbell]

With the world. Yeah, maybe that's right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah. No, I mean, I mean, we're well past this mattering anymore, but in the early 2000s when Steve Jobs was around and they were working on Mac OS X and blah, blah, blah, whatever, you know, their problem was inertia. You know, they had something that was technically better than Windows for a long time, visually has arguably always been superior, but they didn't have that user base and they didn't have that app base and they didn't have businesses and that's the inertia that they didn't get. But now they have an iPhone and now they do have that inertia and they could make that work for them, you know, we'll see. Anyway, you didn't upset me. Listen.

[Leo Laporte]

And actually I'm kind of at Mac apostate now. I've kind of.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's an interesting.

[Leo Laporte]

So insitified.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

No, and that's the problem I have with both Windows and Mac is these companies now are really.

[Paul Thurrott]

So how is the. So I don't see this so much on the Mac, so. Because I don't use it that much. But how is, you know, compared to Windows, Windows is easier. Like I just talked about folder backup. Right. Like, how is the Mac. How would you say, insertified? Like, what are the top problems on the Mac from your perspective?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, the big one that's current is this UI that they are imposing on everybody.

[Paul Thurrott]

Liquid glass, which is the rounded window corners that aren't really rounded. And yeah, it's a failure.

[Leo Laporte]

It reduces accessibility. It doesn't look good. It's just there's all sorts of issues. And this is an example of a company imposing its will on its users. And unlike Windows, it's Apple's way of the highway. You can't, you know, Windows, you can really customize. You can make it look completely different if you want. You know, that's why Stardock exists. There's no Stardock for the Mac. You do it their way and there's no other way to do it. So that's problem number one. Problem number two is actually something Steve Gibson was talking about last week on security. Now, both and extensively for good reasons for security, both companies as well as Google with Android, have really locked down their developers to the point where if your app is not signed by a certificate from those companies, it will not run.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. This is a problem with desktop platforms because they predate this mobile world with app stores and the lock in And Microsoft tried this with Windows 10 S most famously. But Apple has an app as a Mac App Store, right. And they have, but they own the developer program. You can't just go buy like Turbo Pascal for the Mac and make apps, you know. Well, maybe you could, you could.

[Leo Laporte]

I can and I have. But you have to jump through hoops. You have to, you have to have. There's command line tools you have to use to sign your stuff. It's just, it's just an extra speed bump. And then finally, and Anthony Nielsen's bringing.

[Paul Thurrott]

This up, I know that really scares.

[Leo Laporte]

Me is the Creative Creator Studio, which is a subscription.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know I had a guy asked me about, I do a Friday Q and A thing and someone thought this was the greatest thing since sliced bread. And I said, this is a disaster.

[Leo Laporte]

This is the beginning of the subscription.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just, just from the perspective of you have this thing that used to be called Ilife, which is, you know, photos and imovie and whatever. And then you have something called iWork, which of the productivity apps. But now we have these pro level tools, Final Cut Pro, et cetera. And you're making a subscription that includes all of these things together for some reason. What is this like, what do they have?

[Leo Laporte]

Word processor is now for creators, the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Only thing they have in common is an Apple logo. And then on the other side, some Apple fan who can't throw his money at Apple hard enough.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know that's for a reason to throw more money you. Every single month for the rest of my life.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

For things I will never use.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the case part is Apple has suddenly said, you know what, we make a lot of money on services, we make a lot of money with ecosystem.

[Paul Thurrott]

And by the way, that will slow. How do we prevent that from happening? This is a, this is a bald grab and I don't like it. It's not that some of the features they're talking about aren't interesting. It's that you used to be able to buy this thing called. Well, you still can today. But that's going to go away. You know, it's going away. Final Cut pro, buy it, 300 bucks. You own it, use it for several years, you buy the next version, whatever. But they don't want that. They want that per month, per user, every for the rest of your life. And they're going to start adding features that you're going to need and you're going to be stuck.

[Leo Laporte]

You'll see this. Their quarterly results come out on 9 days 29.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's going to be.

[Leo Laporte]

And you will see them talk about what is the term, Richard, for revenue per user?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, it's literally average. It's APU or something, something like that.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is more and more the focus. Focus is not are we selling a lot of Macs, it's how much, what's the average?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not how many users we have, although that matters. It's not how many hardware devices we sold though. That's literally where they make all their money. But.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, it is. But for now, services has been. Is really on a very steady.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but services also relies 100 on you having an iPhone, right? Like that has to exist first.

[Leo Laporte]

Like that's all Apple, right? This whole thing is.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's literally an iPhone.

[Leo Laporte]

You get a Mac, you're in the ecosystem, everything talks everything else.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's better for Apple for you to not have an iPad, a Mac or a watch, but to have an iPhone and whatever the highest end Apple one service thing is, right, that's way better for them.

[Richard Campbell]

But that's what I mean the services model, you know, people are going away from buying every new phone. It's every other phone. And so the services model can fill.

[Paul Thurrott]

That in every fish phone now, I.

[Richard Campbell]

Mean, yeah, but now you're starting to jeopardize the model. As the services model becomes more important, sooner or later there's going to be a VP efficient for a promotion is going to say hey, what if we didn't just support Apple gear.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's interesting by the way, which has already come up from time to time and been shot down. But as services becomes the. This is so we're going to ease into this. But my rant of the day, so to speak, or the week, whatever is this for Microsoft and I brought this up, I think last week, this notion that you could make an argument that Microsoft is not a technology company just like Google isn't. Google is an ad company. Microsoft is a money management real estate company that also has tech and infrastructure. But the way they're actually making money and what I mean by that is not literally gross revenues per quarter, although that ties into it. It's the thing that makes it the 1 to 5th most valuable company in the world, depending on how we spin the wheel today, is how they can fool Wall street and investors into believing that this AI crap they're throwing at us makes any sense whatsoever on the scale they're doing it at. And it does not. But they're just cooking the books and pushing out like the devaluation of hardware over double the amount of time than they've ever done in the past. And it's just all a smoke screen. So we can get forward and make sure that when this thing collapses, we'll still be left standing. And along with the other top four companies or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

No, it feels like the infra. Well, a. Culturally, they're becoming an infrastructure company. And that's one of the reasons I think a lot of developers are really confused and distressed right now is that because the margins are totally different. But the bigger thing here, we've never seen this on the balance sheet yet, is how much is all that real estate worth and how much is it appreciated?

[Paul Thurrott]

That's the thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Because that's what overwhelmed a company like McDonald's eventually. At some point. It's like retail land is worth a lot of money and keeps gaining value or whether your restaurant is profitable or not.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm not a, I'm not a financial expert, so I'm really not the right person for this part of this discussion. But the one thing you'll see on the Microsoft books is even though they have more money than God, they will get loans to pay for things because they can do it at such a rate that they make more money doing that than they would if they spent their own money.

[Leo Laporte]

That's what rich people do too.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly. It's. It's very common and it's. You know, I'm. I don't understand it. I'm not. That's not my world. But that's what I mean. They're really just managing money and it's not, it's not quite there yet. But in the same way that whatever the figure is for Google this month, this quarter, whatever 70ish percent of their revenues come from ads. Microsoft's not there yet. You cannot make the claim that 70% of Microsoft revenues are from real estate. Money management, whatever. But that's where it's going. That arc of success for them, market cap, stock price, whatever you want to call it, is all money management. And also just like investor management or investor analyst management, Wall street management.

[Leo Laporte]

Does every company get to that stage or every industry? I remember that's what they say. McDonald's really isn't about making hamburgers.

[Paul Thurrott]

What was that? Richard will know this. What was the Dutch company that used.

[Leo Laporte]

To East India company.

[Paul Thurrott]

The last time we had a company like this, it was then where this thing was more powerful than the government. Right. That they supposedly reported to. Right. And it's been a long time since we've had anything like this. So this is, you know, for us, like today, living in the 21st century, this is, this is new. And it's not one company. Right. It's five. Maybe. Yeah, Maybe seven. I'm going to call it five.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, the area you have not seen seen yet is what happens when companies with that much liquid capital start buying Treasuries in those kinds of numbers. Like what If Microsoft had 300 billion in US treasuries right now? And being unhappy would mean just put them up for auction at a half point off so the Fed can't do their auction raises. That's an interesting place to get to when you have that much money hanging around.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, that much money is fundamentally undemocratic. Look at Elon Musk putting $10 million into a, a Senate race.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because $10 million for Elon Musk is like me buying a hamburger. I mean, that's a couch. That's the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

But it throws the race. And I thought we had limits on this stuff, but there are ways around it united. Yeah. And, and so this is, I, I think all of this undermines democracy in.

[Paul Thurrott]

The long run 100%. If you want to be outraged, just read Apple in China and then apply that, everything Apple did in China to every other part of our industry. And you'll see it everywhere. You'll see it everywhere. It's gross.

[Richard Campbell]

I, I hanging out here in Canada where we do entire federal elections in 45 days. I don't understand you guys, man. Like, Holy cow. Well, 45 days, beginning to end. It's over.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right? Our system's quite broken.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, work on that.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just, I mean, it is so. God, I don't know how far I want to get into this, but. I wrote, I published it today. I wrote this the other day. But you know, Satya, Nadella, we've talked about this. He, you could make a case that Amy Hood runs that company, not him. Right. Because of the money management stuff.

[Richard Campbell]

Back to your finance. Yeah, financial.

[Paul Thurrott]

We've made that case over many months. Whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

Sure.

[Paul Thurrott]

Last August. I don't remember August. I think he gave up most of his CEO duties to Judson Altoff. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Commercial CEO.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So what is this guy doing with his time? Like, what's this, this genius at the head of Microsoft, this giant brain? Like, what's he working on?

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

What he's working on is one 600 word blog post he publishes every six months, apparently. Because that's all I've seen come out of this guy. And what he did in this blog post was blame his customers for talking about slop and not understanding the, you know, the value of this. And if you would just start paying us for this, you would see how important it is and blah, blah, blah, whatever. And I think I reached the point where I'm like, no, no, it's not just insertification, right? It's insertification with cancer. It's with cancerous growth. It's insertification exponential. You know, when you say that insertification is a company that is literally harming its own customers and partners to advantage itself. Because that makes economic sense, by the way. That's money management. That's when that makes sense, when you have so much money to Leo's point, right? And that is what Microsoft is doing right now. So I am, I wrote this in the thing and I've said this before, I'm not an AI skeptic. That's not the point. I will talk about AI in the back of the book. We'll talk about it later, whatever. There's good stuff going on with AI, but AI is not 80% of our industry from a functional or financial perspective. They're just faking it. Faking that it is. The AI features that you see being added to Windows or being added to Microsoft 365 just to keep it in our little world are the things you would get for free. It's not really free, but for free in the past because you were paying for that thing. You know, if you go back and find an episode of the show from eight years ago where five years, whatever time frame, and there was a segment on Microsoft 365 and all the new features they added that month, they didn't raise the price of your subscription or triple it in most cases, right? You just got it because you were paying them. And this is a good relationship. It's like we're going to keep this thing fresh, we're going to keep adding features, we're going to make it better. And you're like, yep, I love it. It's a no brainer. Windows, same thing. No, like I said, they have a problem with Windows especially because they can't really. No one is going to pay them for any Windows. Like no one. So you know, they're like, look, we're developing new features. Their AI features are so stupid expensive. You know, we need to figure that out. But here's the thing. I look, we could always criticize Microsoft, right? Microsoft going back to the beginning of Microsoft, the concerns about the quality of the product and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But the thing is if you wanted to buy something from Microsoft, pay them for something, whatever it was, whatever product or service there was a value, and if you saw that value, you would do it. And they became super successful. They are the most powerful company in the world. For a long time. That's what they used to do. I remember this. You all remember this, right? They do not do this anymore. I just talked about a coloring book feature in Paint. Like, not that it doesn't. I mean, it's fine that it's there. That's not really the issue. And that's not really the problem. It's that they're selling us on this vision where the thing that makes that possible, which five years, 10 years ago, would have been a feature, who cares? Today requires an astronomical financial investment that outweighs the profits this company generates every single quarter now. And I'm sorry, I don't see it. Here's the thing. If you went to any shareholder, logically, because you can't talk to them this way, but if you could, you could say, look, we're not going to add markdown support to Notepad. We're not going to add the coloring book feature to Paint. We're just going to sell the product we have and be like, okay, that makes sense. Or. Or we could spend 30, 35 billion, whatever we're at now, a quarter building out an infrastructure that will be a nuclear wasteland in three years or something. I don't know. The. The set of a neck. The next Planet of the Apes movie. What am I talking about? You know, it's crazy. So I, I, The. The way I told this story, like, we were in a. We were in the taco bar, which, sadly, Richard was just here and wasn't able to go there because they were closed the days he was here. But we were sitting there on a. Like, a dead night. There was no one there. So we know those guys were hanging around. They're giving me alcohol to try. Here's a Mexican something. Here's this, Whatever. And so, you know, they keep going back to the Mezcal. They're like, you should try this. I'm like, I don't like Mezcal. I don't like smoky drinks. He's like, but you should like it. Yeah, yeah, I get it. And I feel like that's what Copilot is. And AI at Microsoft, it's like, you know, I don't want this. Literally every single customer, they have pretty much. And they're like, yeah, but you should like it. Yeah, no, I hear you. I Don't like it. You know, they're not doing it for you. That's the problem. They're doing it for Wall Street. They're doing it for investors or shareholders. I guess they're doing it to rig the system so that through money management, they retain their position in the world. And we are so far removed from a company that used to sell a product or service to people or customer, whatever businesses that saw value in it, that it's not even the same thing anymore. We're not playing the same sport. I just think it's tragic. Richard brought up developers not kind of following along from like, we used to develop Windows apps and then we would go to build and they would. All they would talk about is the cloud. Like there were built entire builds where they never mentioned Windows. And all these guys are sitting in the audience, they're like, we just paid $2,000 a ticket and then a week in a hotel in Seattle or wherever we are. And what are you talking about? And what they were talking about at the time was something that made more sense for Microsoft than them and they were trying to sell you on. But there's an opportunity here and you're like, all right, maybe there is. And now they're doing again with AI. The difference is the, with the cloud, you could say, look, it's going up like this. The, the potential exposure to customers is humongous. With AI, the only way you can do this is the cost and it's just not the same thing.

[Richard Campbell]

You're talking about. What is Satya doing? You know, he's at Davos right now saying if more people don't use AI, the bubble might burst.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think the bubble needs to burst. I really do. I think the best thing that could.

[Richard Campbell]

Happen to us, the number of people I'm talking to right now is like, I can't wait till the level burst so we can get on with.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, just get on with like. Yeah, yeah. Remember we used to talk about like important things that were improving your day to day efficiency or something. Like, remember when that was the focus?

[Richard Campbell]

Include a group of tools that are sitting under the AI umbrella. Umbrella. That's not the point. The point is right now we're forced to make stupid decisions because of this bubble effect. And I would like to get over it because I got stuff to get done.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, the meme that was going around just before Christmas was the, you know, presented to the board buying all these licenses for an AI related tool to the tune of millions of dollars. Got sign off with no metrics deployed. It all was congratulated and promoted. Nobody's checking.

[Paul Thurrott]

Not even one time. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

They don't even know if it's being used. It's not being measured.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not even being audited. That's hilarious.

[Richard Campbell]

It got sign off on a multi million dollar spend for a product with no metrics.

[Paul Thurrott]

If you care about the quality of software or whatever you want to call that. If you care about your soul. I don't know. If you just care though. It would be painful. The best thing that could happen to our industry, to our world, maybe to Microsoft certainly would be for this thing to blow up in their face and for them to actually go back to a system and it sounds crazy. Where they actually do things that benefit their customers and that's the relationship we have with this company.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know they're losing. They're not those actually lost.

[Richard Campbell]

Ultimately they are. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm gone. I don't even. The only reason I'm not using something else is because everything else sucks too. And I'm just so.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean the only thing worse is everything else.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yep. And it's not just. And I want to be super clear about this. It's not because I know it so well. It's not because of familiarity. I mean obviously that plays a certain role. But I can do this. I make change all the time. I would have no problem switching to a Mac or an iPad or a Linux computer or whatever it is if that made sense for me. It's not. It has nothing to do with what I'm used to. This good. And by the way there is good in there of course as well. But I increasingly. And not. No. No. Overwhelmingly what they do now. What the new that comes out of Microsoft is garbage. That has nothing to do with anything any of its customers want. It's not just me. It's. And it's not just the guy in the corner complaining that I may disagree with. It's all of us. I don't. I. I don't know what the heck this company is doing anymore. It doesn't make any sense to me.

[Richard Campbell]

Well there's a lot of folks inside the company that are saying the same thing. I don't know what we're doing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Well maybe there's a new company to be made that can go off and do that thing because this is getting. This is. It's not even frustrating. It's beyond. It's infuriating. And. And to be for. For. It doesn't have to be Satya Nadella but it's particularly bad when it comes from him because I can't stand when he opens his mouth. But for anyone to come to anyone else and say, the problem with AI is you, you're not spending enough money on it. You're not using it enough. It's like, excuse me.

[Richard Campbell]

And you keep calling it slop.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We came up with a fun word. Now it's our problem. Like, I'm sorry, but if you were doing something that mattered to us that we could actually use that would benefit us, that was the thing you say it will be. It's always, it's always happening next week or next year or two years, whatever it is. Last year we were talking about AI agents. I don't have any AI agents. I don't have anything doing anything on my behalf except spending my money on things I do not want. And I listen, I'm open to it. I can't wait to see that agent. I have not seen that agent. The most advanced agent I have is Siri and it makes my phone pink when I say its name by mistake. That's the best thing I have so far. The rest of it is garbage.

[Richard Campbell]

And, well in Google 3. And Gemini 3 hasn't gotten there yet.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, well, for what? Like Gemini 3, I can make a great image. That's fun. I mean, that's great. That's not my life, though.

[Richard Campbell]

It's going to be what Siri responds with soon. Real soon now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, look, like I said, I'm not saying there isn't stuff there that is valuable. There is. I love that I can take an image and super res it and, you know, take an old scan from a photo that's like, you know, 300 by, you know, 320 by 240, whatever, and turn it into a 4K image. It actually looks like that thing. Like, that's, that's, that's great.

[Richard Campbell]

I got a buddy who put his time into digging up all these old sepia photos of family members long gone, great grandparents and things, and got little 15 second animated clips in color.

[Paul Thurrott]

That can be magical. I mean, absolutely, absolutely. Now I go to Instagram and it's the opposite of magical because it's like celebrities who have died hanging out in heaven or whatever. And it's like, stop. Or this is what this person looks like at 25. This is the horror show. They are now at 70 or whatever. The thing is, like, it's always stuff like that and it's like, okay, like, whatever. But yeah, the thing you described wonderful is There a business model for that? I don't know. I think those, those APIs are free. I mean.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. The question is, would he have done it if he was paying for it? I don't know the answer to that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know either.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I'm tired of it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm just tired of it, you know.

[Richard Campbell]

And you're just not alone on this, Paul. Like the people are really tired.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no, I feel like I'm not alone in this one.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. There was a time where we looked at recessions as an encouragement for companies to go back to focusing on what their customers actually valued.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And this is why it started with you, Richard. We were in Mexico last year. Sorry, Puerto Vallarta. And Google took away my YouTube account. Right. And so that was the start of it for me last year.

[Richard Campbell]

You were very excited that morning.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah, I was. Very excited is a good word. I was living in interesting times and you know, but I look, this kicked off something for me and now I'm self hosting my everyday carry in the nas. I hate those. Sorry, but you said them so well. I know, I know I struggle, but this has become a. I think we're being attacked by the United States or something.

[Richard Campbell]

The, the bombing has begun.

[Paul Thurrott]

This has become a push for me. It did. I didn't intend this. I didn't do this on any design or purpose. But actively replacing big tech garbage with little tech solutions that are made by companies actually give a crap about me as a, as a customer. Right. It's not about doing free things, although some of it will be free. But it's about giving money or paying money to companies that actually value that relationship and give you something in return. Which I distinctly remember doing with Microsoft back in the day. It's been a while, you know, so they, whatever, they brought this on themselves. This wasn't. Yeah, I don't, I'm not like, I'm.

[Richard Campbell]

Just amazed at their responses to complain. That weird doing it wrong. You know, like this is, it's like, It's. This is AI's iPhone antenna moment. You are holding it wrong, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Right? Yeah. Literally. Look, if you are not a good writer and AI can help you write better, even if it's something simple like a text message, a response or something, or you're about to send a text message or an email and it, it just fixes the spelling for you. Awesome. These are great features. These are not the features that drive our industry financially or functionally, but they are great. If you were using Google search and now you use Google Gemini, you've made a lateral move. And if it is somehow better, great. That's what an upgrade should be. This is not the entire business or industry. It's just we're overemphasizing something that we're just all going to have. At the end of the day, we're all going to have this wherever we want it. You could have it on your computer. It might be a little tech search service like Proton, whatever it's called, Lumo or whatever. Or you could just go Google everyone. It was pretty easy. Everyone uses Chrome, everyone uses Gemini. Maybe that's going to work out great for them. That's fine. Is it better than it was with Google Search? Yes, it should be. It's like 15, 20 years later. It should be better. Is it worth $45 more every month than what you were already paying? No. You should expect things to get better. That's what you're paying for. It used to be, you know, anyway. Or, I mean, so, Anthony, it's like you will own nothing and be happy. Maybe I'll own everything and be happy. Maybe that might be my outcome, you.

[Richard Campbell]

Know, Pretty sure that's the billionaire's outcome.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, and by everything, I mean, you know, it's like if you don't pay for the product, you are the product. Which is an overly simplistic term, but. Or go back to the EULA issues that we used to talk about in the late 90s, early 2000s, where it's like, has anyone ever read this thing like, you don't own the software on your computer, you don't own that, you know, that kind of thing. But okay, whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

You own a license to use it.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I could disconnect it from the Internet and they're not taking it away. I mean, I think the big difference between software you buy from a shelf and software you stream from the cloud is not necessarily the delivery vehicle. It's that the company that owns that thing can make an arbitrary change at any time and scrup your life anytime they want. And that was not the case before. No.

[Richard Campbell]

Well. And we celebrate it when it's John Deere disabling tractors being used in war. But we're also freaking out when a farmer cannot get their tractor repair without paying for a John Deere tractor come out to do it.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. Which is insane. Yep, yep. Yeah. Look, when. When I. We again, just arbitrary numbers. But you go back 20 years and some mechanic in a shop and some random small town is complaining because cars are becoming computerized, and now I can't fix them because I'm mechanical and they're, you know, computer electronics, whatever. You're like, yeah, but you know, things progress. Right. But now we have those DRM DCMA based systems where you're not allowed to reverse engineer this thing because they want to be able to control that. And if HP wants to sell you ink and prevent you from buying other companies inc. Or if John Deere doesn't want you to fix your tracker by yourself, even though anyone could do it, we're talking about something entirely differently. This isn't progress anymore. Right. That's control, that's anti consumer. It's bad. It's not the same thing.

[Richard Campbell]

That is the difference. Without a doubt.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyway. Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody said once, and I think this is actually recently and I think it's not so bad is that there are two right now kind of different schools of AI. There's the AI or AI company. There's the AI company started by an entrepreneur who comes from the social media era, Sam Altman. And then there's the AI companies that are computer scientists by computer scientists, which are Anthropomind and DeepMind at Google.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And my experience in the last few months is I am mostly underwhelmed by the ones that are started by the social media entrepreneur types and frankly they're the ones who seem to be driving the conversation in this kind of sci fi story description of AI and I'm most impressed by anthropics.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's very interesting. Yeah, we'll see how that plays out.

[Richard Campbell]

But DeepMind's release of 200 million protein fold solutions to the public. Right, right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Or they find there's some ancient manuscript we've had a hold of for hundreds of years, no one can read the damn thing. And AI comes along and they're like, oh, here's what it says. You know, that stuff's amazing. That's amazing.

[Leo Laporte]

So I mean we've always seen that there is like this.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, the point is I'm not, I want. That's why I said right up front I'm not an AI denier. That's not my point.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

My point is they're overemphasizing this so much that they have turned it into something only rich, the richest companies in the world can do.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Artificially and to ensure their survival as this shift occurs. Because there are technological waves in our industry. Right. I mean we all know this and we're in the midst of one. I'm not denying that. What I'm saying is they're Exaggerating it. And it's not. It's. Yeah, it's the Sam Altman. This thing is going to be sentient and it. We're going to bow down before this new God is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my life. It would make a fun movie.

[Richard Campbell]

And we've already made.

[Paul Thurrott]

Which is that. Right. To Richard. Richard's made this point many times like that we have all been colored or biased by the science fiction that we grew up on. Right. It's just. I don't know. Yeah. So we have these expectations. I don't have flying cars, by the way. I don't live in a paperless office. I. I like. You know, it's a simplistic thing to say, but a company that can't do spell checking accurately. I get news for you. They're not making Skynet. You know, it's not happening. They're not doing the Terminator robot. And if they somehow figure that out, it's not going to work because those people don't know what they're doing. I don't know. I'm sorry I'm ranting here, but it's. I'm just, I'm. I'm pushing back on this more. I was already kind of pushing.

[Leo Laporte]

Meanwhile, in the club Twit Discord, Darren Okey, who is our resident AI guru, has during this conversation written and published on GitHub a notepad for Mac. Because he was lamenting the fact that there is nothing like Notepad for the Mac.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I mean, so that kind of, that kind of vibe.

[Leo Laporte]

And he wrote it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, Right. So right now make a million dollars selling it.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no, that's not the point. He's sorting it and giving it away. He doesn't need to do it.

[Paul Thurrott]

The fact that you can do that is amazing. That's. I want to be clear. I'm not denying this is amazing. Right. You know, Dave Plummer did this. He recreated Notepad on Windows, but in the style of Petsol, using C and C. Right. He created it from scratch. The reason this exists is because the code for this app exists out in the world already. And they just put it, you know, they threw it together. It's wonderful. Like, I think Leo was talking about this maybe a week ago. The, this notion that we're all going to have this ability to make these little apps that are just for us.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's transformative, it's wonderful. It's not a business model for those guys. This is the problem. Like I, you know, it's kind of. Kind of interesting. I don't know. No, I don't deny the capabilities. I want to be super clear about that. What I'm taking an affront to or whatever or what I have a problem with is the money. And that these companies that used to be about this relationship between a customer and the business are now not about that at all. And that didn't have to happen. I don't quite know how we got there.

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[Paul Thurrott]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Richard Campbell]

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[Richard Campbell]

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[Leo Laporte]

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[Paul Thurrott]

Good morning, crust.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a great day to be a bread brother.

[Paul Thurrott]

Ugh.

[Richard Campbell]

Mornings are not my jam or jelly. Oh, come on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Stop loafing around. I just woke up feeling hollow inside.

[Richard Campbell]

Just grab one of the new morning.

[Leo Laporte]

Uncrustable sandwiches like Bright eyed Berry or.

[Richard Campbell]

Up an apple filled with 12 grams.

[Paul Thurrott]

Of protein and tons of deliciousness crust.

[Leo Laporte]

What are you eating?

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just granola.

[Richard Campbell]

Not even yogurt.

[Leo Laporte]

No crust, no fuss.

[Paul Thurrott]

Uncrust your mornings.

[Leo Laporte]

You're watching Windows Weekly. Paul Thurat from Thorat.com, richard Campbell from Runnersradio.com, we're glad you're here. We're glad our club members are here. Thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And let's see. Is it time for the Xbox segment or do you want to talk a little more about AI?

[Paul Thurrott]

We have more. We have too much more.

[Leo Laporte]

Up to you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no, it's fine. Microsoft has been adding Copilot to all of its products for almost three years now. Remember, it was February 2023. Right. I think they came up with what we now call Copilot. The way they have done this is part of the problem I have. Right. They just add it. They add it before it's ready. They keep changing it because it wasn't ready. I point to simplistic examples like the way they move the icon around seven times in Windows 11. The way they rewrote the app at least three major times, I can think of. They had no idea. They were so busy moving fast and breaking things that they just didn't care at all about their customers. And then people complained. And then a year, two years, whatever, later, they start doing things like, oh, now you can opt out of it. Oh, now you can have as an IT admin, a GPO script or whatever that will eliminate that for your users or whatever IT is. Those are the types of things Microsoft used to do before they launched a product. Right. This is the point I made in that thing about Satya Nadella in the article version, which is that move fast and break things works. When you're a startup, it's cute when you're what was then called Facebook and you're small and who cares? But when you're Microsoft, what your customers want is for you to move deliberately and don't break anything. That's what we want, not break it. What are you doing? No one has ever wanted you to break anything ever. But that's what they do. So we are literally almost exactly three years later. And they did actually have this ability. It was a little hidden, but they can remove Copilot from Microsoft Edge now because literally, almost. Not literally literally, but almost literally every single person that uses Edge does not want it. They do not want it. And even the people who love AI, the people who love it the most would be looking at ChatGPT or now maybe Anthropic or whatever. Right. I mean, it's fair to say Copilot has not resonated with almost anybody. GitHub. Copilot being the exception and not the same, but just has the same sort of name.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, it's the original name that they've been hijacked and everything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, well, we said this when they did it. It's a good brand. Right. The idea that AI will sit beside you, so to speak. Metaphorically, or.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, whatever. Well, that's that whole implication that you are still the pilot.

[Paul Thurrott]

That you're in control. Right. Which is very much not what Microsoft was doing as they rolled this thing out. Because they were in control and they were forcing it on you. Right. Which is a problem.

[Richard Campbell]

And In Control is a relative idea too. Right. You are responsible. It's really more. And this is Cory Doctorow's line too, Right. It's like this is the reverse Centaur. You will take the blame when it malfunctions, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. Anyway, that's a small Thing, but that's fine. ChatGPT or OpenAI, last fall, sometime late last year announced the product called ChatGPT Go, which is just a lower cost version of Chat GPT for emerging markets. I think in US dollars it was three to five dollars a month or something like that. It was only for select countries. Right. So even Mexico did not have access to this. But last week, sometime in the past week, they announced this thing is now worldwide. You can actually get it in the United States and in Mexico. And I think the U.S. price might be, might be $8 a month in the U.S. i think in Mexico it's closer to $4. So it's going to vary by country, obviously whatever the local currency is. So it's a less expensive way to gain access to this stuff. It's going to come with lower limits. Right, of course. And of course it's going to come with ads. Over time they're going to start introducing ads because of course they are. Right. This is the model for anything you pay every month there's going to be that lower cost version that has ads. Right. And so no surprise there, but at least this will spread this to more people. Will this make up the $600 billion that it's probably more than that now that OpenAI has committed to spending at with other infrastructure companies? No, but will this make them profitable? No, but it kind of has to be part of it. And if you just whatever, if you just care about making technology accessible to everybody in the world, I mean this kind of has to happen. So I guess. And then this one. I don't know what to think about this. There was an article this past week about how. What's that? The original, you know, it's like the wanted ads. What's that site called? The Craigslist. Craigslist.

[Richard Campbell]

Craigslist, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Craigslist is like the only thing left from the old web, sort of. I would say Wikipedia is actually the same kind of a company or service, whatever. They are 25 years old and they announced in the past week partnerships across the board. So Amazon, Meta, Microsoft Mistral, the French one, and Perplexity, and they're already partnered with Google. So that's everyone. But by the OpenAI, it's kind of interesting. So that they can legally use data from Wikipedia and Wikipedia gets paid. And I have already seen people who have contributed to Wikipedia who are outraged that the content they wrote will be used by AI because those are the types of people that would hate AI. Right. And I get it, but I don't know this is one of those things, like you love something, right? Whatever it might be, you love Firefox or something. Like you want that thing to survive. Right. It's not doing great. You're like, okay, well how, you know, like where. What's the line? You know? So this one, I'm not sure what to say yet about this. Whether this is good, bad and different, I'm not really sure. But I like the notion that. I like the partnership thing more than I like the theft thing, I guess is maybe how I would put it. That makes sense.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, I'm appreciative that Wikipedia is always on the edge. Right. With this foundation set up, they suddenly have plenty of money. I'm sure that's going to be the outcome of it. It's just not enough money to matter to those tech giants. But I get it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Yeah. Selling out, you know, it's. Yeah, that's exactly the way people would describe it. It's correct, I guess, you know, technically. But selling out, I mean, it's a. You. You want them to be successful.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like, I, I know that.

[Richard Campbell]

Stay alive.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. A lot of other people, a lot of people who want that would maybe want it to happen a different way, but of course they don't have an idea about how that could happen because there is no way for that to happen. Happen. So.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I mean, the types of money that AI needs to survive, big AI is not there, but that money that they're paying to Wikipedia is there. And that makes a difference to that company or that organization. So we'll see.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. We had Jimmy Wales on a couple of weeks ago. I don't. I really trust Jimmy and I trust the Wikipedia foundation. And I think there are people who just hate AI.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Leo Laporte]

And anything with the word AI in it. Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it's just viscerally a huge problem for them. Yeah. Yep.

[Leo Laporte]

But AI is already scraping Wikipedia. That's.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know that. That's my question. It's stealing regardless, so might as well.

[Leo Laporte]

Get some money out of it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

This way with the foundation is very clever because it means recurring revenue.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Not. Not going down, the litigation approach, none of that stuff. It's like, hey, why don't we all work and play with each other?

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's acknowledging the reality. And, you know, I don't know how well funded the foundation is. I know they're always asking me for more money and I give them money every, Every month and I think we can.

[Richard Campbell]

I do it annually, but. Yes. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's worth it. Yeah, absolutely.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

You know what else is worth it, my friends? The Xbox segment. You've waited. You've suffered long enough. Let us delve into the latest in Xbox gaming with Paul Thurat.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is a test of the Reese's broadcast system. If you're currently eating Reese's. This is just a test. Continue living the dream. If you aren't. Oh, boy. Drop what you're doing. Go get Reese's now. Do not stay calm. Push people out of the way. I love it. AI Is coming to get me. It's only a matter of time.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, the. The folks that did Halo Bungie are making and releasing for Xbox. I don't know, maybe I should have looked in your notes. The marathon, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I didn't put that in my.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm excited about that.

[Paul Thurrott]

I am too. I mean, it was delayed, right? So now it's coming out in March, I think. Yeah. Good. I mean, it's good, right? I mean, it is good. Do I not have a link for this? I do not have a link for this. Oh, there it is. Yeah, it's. It is good. That. No, that's a good point. I'm interested to see.

[Leo Laporte]

Is if you played Halo, you will. It'll feel familiar in some degree. I hope they were.

[Paul Thurrott]

I played Halo, I mean, marathon on a black and white Mac.

[Leo Laporte]

I know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Years ago. I know. I mean that. That was a thing like it was.

[Leo Laporte]

We played it in a marathon fashion in the old site studios back in 1995. 96.

[Paul Thurrott]

That was what the Mac like that was it for the Mac. So, you know, we had Doom and before that, whatever, like Wolfenstein, etc. But you know, the marathon. And it was. I think it was Mac only for a long time.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it was. Yeah. In the beginning it was fun and we could play. It was a LAN party game so we would all play at the same time. It was really fun.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I'm curious. I'm definitely curious to see it.

[Leo Laporte]

It's now they're calling it an extraction shooter, so.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, geez. There we go. It's gonna. What's that thing? Arc raiders. It's going to compete with that, I guess.

[Leo Laporte]

What are you extracting? Ores, minerals, Dollars. My pocket. It kind of does. Here, I'll play a little clip from it since we might as well pad this segment as much as possible.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Leo Laporte]

It kind of reminds me. It looks a little bit. I don't know, it looks a little like.

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know. How can you.

[Leo Laporte]

How can I Describe it.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is a tricky one. So it looks, by the way, there's a definite old school quality there.

[Leo Laporte]

Old school. That's the word.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's a little bit of a Halo thing there too.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Which you played Halo. It'll be very familiar.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean, everything Bungie makes looks like Halo. Like, this is the problem.

[Leo Laporte]

But boxy Halo, like old.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's what I mean. Like. Yeah, it's got that retro 90s kind of look. Whatever, you know, like Counter Strike this for a long time where it kind of looked older. Or Borderlands, which has an almost cartoon effect, but plays fast, you know, like Overwatch maybe. Well, outright cartoonist. Or Fortnite.

[Richard Campbell]

Borderlands never forgets it's a cartoon. All of the death animations are hysterical. Yeah, but. But even Counter Strike Two, right, with its sort of arcade ification, was, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Think, this to be fun to play. I kind of don't mind the lack of graphical.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I. I mean, what matters more to you if you're playing online, especially, like performance or graphics quality, as long as it's at some level, which this is absolutely is.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'd rather have it just run, you know, 60 frames and just go to town.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Besides, there'll be a DLC in a year with an upscaler in it, so.

[Leo Laporte]

So Microsoft bought Bungie. That's when they made Halo, then. Then got rid of Bungee for.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I think those guys wanted to leave, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And they made. Not Titanfall. What did they make? Begins with a P, I think. Boy, I forgot Destiny.

[Leo Laporte]

Destiny, that's right, Kevin.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think there were two. Yeah, two destinies. But though, you know, I mean, fine, but Marathon was a big deal in this day and obviously Halo was huge.

[Leo Laporte]

It looks like you're in the Halo world a little bit, doesn't it?

[Paul Thurrott]

A little bit, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's okay.

[Leo Laporte]

And then you have the grappling hook.

[Paul Thurrott]

Grappling hooks?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, you can whiz around, play.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Grappling hooks are good for VR too. Because the worst thing about VR, you can't move around. There's no way to walk.

[Paul Thurrott]

So you need something grapple from place to place.

[Leo Laporte]

Grapple, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, really what it is is creating motions that don't make people nauseous.

[Leo Laporte]

That's the hard part.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And I guess. Sorry, a little bit of a simplified UI makes it easier to do in VR too.

[Paul Thurrott]

But even that. Even though it's simplified, that gives it a semi unique look as well. Right. Like it has its own vibe too. Even though there Are elements where you're like, oh, that looks a little bit like something, but it has an identity.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think it looks fun. I think it looks good.

[Leo Laporte]

The collector's edition comes with a little marathon statue.

[Paul Thurrott]

What a shit. Is like a. Like an emulator with the original, like black and white version.

[Leo Laporte]

It'd be fun.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Didn't they had make a marathon, a game called Marathon, like in the 90s, like there was.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that was the original. Was the. The original.

[Leo Laporte]

The original mid-90s?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Wow.

[Leo Laporte]

That was fun. And of course, I didn't know this, but my producer Carson Bonnie, who worked with me at the old site, told me that the entire team had decided to gang up on Leo and surround him with bazookas.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you're like, why am I doing so bad?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. They were all. I didn't know it until 25 years.

[Paul Thurrott]

Later, I want to see him legless.

[Leo Laporte]

But, you know, there was a rocket launcher. And they would surround me because part of the fun of it, we were playing games too. Like, you can launch somebody in the air if you hit the all rocket launcher.

[Paul Thurrott]

That was a big quake thing as well. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Or maybe that's what they were doing. They weren't trying to hurt me.

[Richard Campbell]

They were just trying to entertain themselves.

[Paul Thurrott]

At your death, at your expense. It's the same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

It did explain a lot, to be honest.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, well, the Windows 11 unarmed thing I mentioned with the Xbox app, et cetera, et cetera, is part of a broader January Xbox update that goes across platforms. The rest of it is not as interesting, but in case it wasn't clear up front and I should just run this app and look, I haven't looked at it yet, but that indicated the score. How well this will run in your PC is something the Xbox app has sort of had for a while. I believe it's going to be more explicit. And the goal here is you look at a game and it's like, yeah, this thing's going to work great on your computer or not. Right. I mean, that's actually useful information. I'm just trying to look at an app here to see what it does. Yeah. So this thing, Resident Evil. Well, we'll get to that in a moment. But this particular game performance check is not available yet is the message I see pretty much all the time, honestly, when I go through the Xbox app. So my hope is that we're going to start to see something that makes more sense, meaning it actually is useful information. So I believe that's the goal. This might not even be the latest version of the app. So maybe I should just not focus on that too too much. But anyway, so it's not just for arm, right? That's for everybody. So if you're on x86 or whatever, it's going to work. There's a game save sync indicator that's in the Xbox app that I did to see. So maybe this is the latest version. And what that means is if you're like, say I play Call of Duty on one computer. If I launch it on another computer five minutes later, I often get this dialogue. The process says, hey, the other one hasn't synced to the cloud fully yet or to all the computers. Do you want to use the latest synced data set that's on this computer or do you want to use the latest one from the cloud? They'll give you an indicator in the Xbox app. Now, you know that actually happened if that's important to you. And it would be important especially I don't really care in like Call of Duty multiplayer. But if you're going through a game, like a single player game and you got to level 18 or something, you don't want to pick up the game on another computer and it's like you're at level 16 because it didn't sync. Like, you actually kind of need to know that. So that's kind of cool. I think we already knew this was happening, but Xbox Cloud Gaming, which is the old project xCloud, sorry, is coming to hisense. And also something called V Smart TVs. V, like formally V I D A A. I've never heard of this. Okay. But big deal. And then some more handheld compatibility games, including like Arc Raiders, Claire Obscure, which is. Is one of those bigger things that has occurred in the last six months. Red Dead Redemption, Silent Hill 2, which by the way is being turned into a movie, more Xbox play everywhere games, et cetera, et cetera. But to me, the big thing is the ARM stuff, so that's kind of a big deal. But the January Xbox update is rolling out today. We also got our first, not our first, our second collection of Xbox game pass games across platforms for January. Right. So around the first of the month, it was probably the fifth or sixth. They released the first set or started to release. Now they have the second set. The big one here is Death Stranding, Director's Cut. I think there is a. I mentioned. I briefly mentioned Resident Evil. I'm just looking. I thought that was one of the games too. Yeah. Resident Evil Village is available with Game Pass Ultimate Premium and PC game pass today on cloud console and PC. I think as of right now, Bill, I know I say that. I don't know why I said that. This is my latent or the remaining French that I have in my brain village. I believe that's still the most recent game. Is that true? I think it is. Because the one before it was the biohazard one which I finished and I feel like this one I did not finish. So maybe I'll give that one a shot. And then obviously a bunch of games.

[Richard Campbell]

I've never heard of, but there's some killer games here. Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine is awesome. Final Fantasy 2, that's old. That's a very old Final Fantasy game. They were 15 or 16, but still awesome. And Death Stranding. You're either into it or you're not. It's an eclectic game. Like it's very odd, but it's quite extraordinary. Yeah, this is a hell of a lot for as much fun as we made of the putting out these things. This is a killer roster.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean it's no, you know, what is it like Goat Simulator? It's no spray paint simulator, you know, it's okay. It's okay.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. There's nothing you can do about Goat Simulator. Goat Simulator is just special.

[Leo Laporte]

The Untitled Goat Game.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, the Untitled Object.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Anyway, so that's okay. So that's out. And then there are rumors that Microsoft is going to introduce a speaking of, you know, chat, GPT Go. In this case a free ad supported tier of Xbox Cloud gaming. There we go. So we've gone from it's only an ultimate to it's in all the tiers to now, I guess we'll see a version that'll be free and ad supported. So it's like, you know, before you can get into this match, you're going to watch a little ad from Spick and Span or whatever. But you know, Colgate, I don't know, I'm just trying to think of stupid brands from the past. Ancient Chinese secret. What was that company? I don't know. But Nvidia does this now, right. With their GeForce now cloud gaming service. Obviously when you pay you get faster access, better points in the queue and more access and all that kind of stuff. But in the same way that doing something like this for AI services makes sense, I mean, it does make sense, right? I mean you want to make it available to as many people as possible.

[Leo Laporte]

Spic and Span is still around.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm still surprised. Yeah. As we were discussing with Richard and his wife while they were here. It's like Sears Roebuck and Woolworths are going concerns in Mexico and they're basically long gone in the us. I mean, maybe not entirely, but they're big deals here for some reason. So I guess, I don't know, anything is possible.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Had a great time in Mexico City. The tricky part was getting home.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. My God.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh yeah. You were there this past week.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

What was hard about getting home was it a lot of flights?

[Paul Thurrott]

The actual act of getting home.

[Richard Campbell]

The issue is this fog. There's been fog at YVR for days and for some reason Aeromexico just kept postponing their flights, literally for days. So we were supposed to fly home on Monday and got there only to find they had postponed the flight to the next morning and kind of left us in a lurch. But fortunately I had a nice friend that took us out for dinner and we had a great time, but then we had to be on the flight the next morning. So we got back there first thing in the morning, very little sleep, and 10 minutes before the flight's supposed to board, they cancel it outright and rebook us on the 5:30 flight. Later that day I told my wife.

[Paul Thurrott]

We just need to be comfortable with the idea that you guys are moving in.

[Richard Campbell]

We're moving in. We're just gonna be back again.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Because literally as we're getting the boarding cards for the 5:30 flight, they say it's delayed to the next morning, which would be this morning. So at that point it's like, clearly they have a problem. Like I'm looking at other planes are flying into YVR in this. In 00 fog, which is not a trivial thing. So then I looked at the Air Canada flights and we had to fly through Toronto, which meant a very long day. But we got in Last night at 2 in the morning and crashed in the city at my friend's place for a couple of hours and then we're on the 7:30 ferry here.

[Paul Thurrott]

I didn't think you were going to the show today regardless of getting back into Canada.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Because in case it's not clear, flying from Mexico City to Vancouver is pretty much directly north. But he flew from Mexico City to Toronto, which is on the other side of the continent.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So that he could then fly back across the continent to go to Vancouver. Like it's. These things are not close to each other.

[Richard Campbell]

No. So instead of a six hour flight direct, it was five and a four and a half hours to Toronto, three hour layover, five And a half hours from Toronto to Vancouver.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yikes. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I'm glad you got home.

[Richard Campbell]

Ah, me too. Home.

[Paul Thurrott]

Good. He's smiling a lot more than I would be. And. And handled it a lot better than I would have handled it, but.

[Richard Campbell]

And we did land at 2 in the morning in 00 fog. Like you could see nothing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. It's incredible.

[Richard Campbell]

Airplanes are capable of it, you know.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Meanwhile, I've been going down the Spic and Spam rabbit hole. So it turns out there's this little company in California called Kik that has been buying up classic home brand names and manufacturing them. Names you'll remember like Spic and Span, Comet, Chore Boy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Remember? I didn't know Comet was gone.

[Leo Laporte]

Comet was that none of these are gone.

[Paul Thurrott]

Gritty sinkhole.

[Leo Laporte]

They're just making. Made by this one company. Now, that is. That is believed in the market.

[Paul Thurrott]

So there's the Marketplace.

[Leo Laporte]

World Top job Cinch.

[Paul Thurrott]

By the way, that looks literally like my pantry. That. That could be a photo.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. And all your products, they've been acquiring, you know, these brands as they kind of fade Greased Lightning. And now they make them La Parisienne. Old Dutch. I think this is fascinating. This is a. This is a kind of an area of America.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

American industrial history. That's quite interesting.

[Paul Thurrott]

A lot of brands that kind of. This happened to, like Polaroid, you know, turned in like it's still around. Sort of like it's not the company it was, but.

[Leo Laporte]

No. And it's not the company at all.

[Paul Thurrott]

Boy is a form of AI if I'm not mistaken.

[Leo Laporte]

Shore Boy would be exactly great name for an AI Chatbot.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. You like?

[Leo Laporte]

Sure. Boy. Contact Kik and see if we can get Shore Boy. Hey, everybody. Leo Laporte here. It's your last chance. We're in the final stretch of our 2026 audience survey. So important for us both to know you better because we don't gather information about you except this one time a year. And it helps us with advertising, and we collect no personal information. We just want to know about you in general. So if you would help out. If you haven't filled out our survey yet, this is the time it closes. January 31st. TWIT TV survey 26. It helps us improve our shows and it helps us make money. And we need to do both. So Survey is at TWIT TV survey 26 should only take a few minutes. Thanks in advance. Hey, we're going to get to the back of the book. It's coming up in just a Moment. But first I want to put in a little plug for those wonderful, wonderful people. Not sure.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're not sure.

[Leo Laporte]

Boy, those wonderful, wonderful people in our club. Club Twit has made such a difference. Lisa and I are very grateful to all of you and all of our hosts and all of our staff are, because Club Twit is keeping Twit alive. And it's a pretty important job from my point of view. I could retire, I guess, but I kind of like what we're doing. And if you like what we're doing, the best way to keep it going is to join the club. The club gets you some benefits, lots of them. You get access to the amazing Club Twit Discord, where there's always a great bunch of people talking about all sorts of interesting stuff. The kinds of things that geeks are particularly interested in. Not just during the shows, but, you know, there are two Minecraft servers for the club. There's all sorts of stuff. It's a great place to just kind of hang out. We also do special programming in the club. There's your chore boy hard at work. They love the AI in the club. We got Home Theater Geeks is coming up, I think tonight. Aren't we doing Micah's Crafting corner? Or did we do that last night? Maybe that's over. Johnny jets rejoining the crew. We haven't seen Johnny since the radio show went away. He's going to talk about traveling and tech on the 29th, the 30th. Stacy's Book Club. The Heist of Hollow London. Great book. Recommend it. Worth listening to. Still have time to read it or listen to it. We have the AI Users group. That's the first Friday of every month and a great place to see people like Darren and Lawrence and so many interesting people. Manny. We're using AI to do some very amazing things. Lots of demos in there. Really is like a user group. So that's one of the benefits. You also get ad free versions of all the shows. That's another benefit. That's a significant benefit. You get the good warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that you helped us a lot. I've been saying till through last year that 25% of our operating costs came out of the club. It's now going to be more than.

[Paul Thurrott]

That.

[Leo Laporte]

Because I don't know if you noticed, there were no ads in this show. The ads have gotten kind of scant and I don't want to be beholden.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't want to.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't want to only do stuff that advertisers want us to do. I don't, I don't think that's the way to run an editorial operation. We want your support. You vote. You tell us what you want by going to Twitter. TV Club TWIT. $10 a month, $120 a year. There are family plans, there are corporate plans. If you like twit and you want to keep twit around, Crafting Corner is tonight. Okay, that's going to be fun. 6pm Micah Sargent. 6pm Pacific, 9pm Eastern. Micah Sargent. He says they're doing paint by numbers. So that's your coloring book right there, Paul. Paint by numbers. This week on Crafting Corner. Join the club, will you? Twit? TV Club Twit. We would very much like to have you. And it is very much a way of voting to support twit to keep it going. You wouldn't want Paul Thorat to actually have to work for a living, would you?

[Richard Campbell]

Goodness, no.

[Leo Laporte]

No. Hell. Oh, bless you.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm so sorry. Excuse me.

[Leo Laporte]

Now.

[Richard Campbell]

Have any serviceable skills? That's the question.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you know that the sneeze sound is cultural? You probably knew that. Richard, you're that kind of guy would know that. That the achoo is cultural. Different cultures have different sneeze sounds. It's a learned thing. It's not what it needs to sound like. Okay, just thought I'd pass that along. See, this is another thing you get from the fabulous.

[Sephora Advertiser Voice]

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[Paul Thurrott]

Well, the holidays have come and gone once again. But if you've forgotten to get that special someone in your life a gift. Well, Mint Mobile is extending their holiday offering of half off unlimited wireless. So here's the idea. You get it now. You call it an early present for next year. What do you have to lose? Give it a [e-mail] Switch limited time.

[Sephora Advertiser Voice]

50 off regular price for new customers. Upfront payment required. 45 for 3 months, $90 for 6 month or 180 for 12 month plan taxes and fees. Extra speeds may slow after 50 gigabytes per month when network is busy. See terms.

[Leo Laporte]

Paul Thurot, Back of the book. You kick things off, will you, with your sniff of the week.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, man. Yeah, last week I, you know, it's January, not so much a resolution thing, but it's a good time of year to kind of take stock of things, whatever. And I wanted to focus on security, primarily for online accounts, but also just computer device security, I guess. I had written something about Passkey specifically for Windows users, but this past week I wrote a couple of more articles. One was about securing a Microsoft account and the other was about an Authenticator app. And on the Microsoft account side, this is something probably no one will ever do. But it's kind of interesting. If you go and try to create a new Microsoft account today, by default they're not offering you an Outlook.com or Hotmail account anymore. You can still get one, but the default now is you just type in whatever email address you have and it becomes a Microsoft account. So there's a built in kind of recovery functionality there because it's hosted by a third party. Presumably this thing will be secured in whatever ways that service offers as well. But if you start to type something like, not that this address is available, but paloutlook.com, then you get the dropdown for outlook.com and you can start trying to pick one of their addresses, in which case they'll be hosting your mail as well. So that's not going to impact most people, but from a high level view when it comes to methods to identify yourself when you log in or just to verify your identity, which happens from time to time, obviously these accounts have passwords, although they can take that away. You can have second or third email addresses that are, you know that they can send codes to. Right. Also for recovery. But you sign into your account, you enable two FA or what they call two step authentication, which you should do. You have to have multiple methods to authenticate yourself, right? So I recommend having at least one email address. But honestly, two would be good. You can text a code which I don't like because I know that's insecure, but man, they hound you to add your phone number to this account. And it's bizarre. That one I'm still trying to deal with. But they support two forms of authenticator apps. If you do have a Microsoft account and you care about it, use the Microsoft Authenticator app, if only for that account. It's way better. But if you want, you can use a third party authenticator app. But it works the way you know, that kind of thing works. But the experience with a Microsoft account, with a Microsoft Authenticator app is literally passwordless. It's wonderful but the very best method is to use a passkey. And if you are signing into a Microsoft account with a passkey this is a password manager preferably third party but whatever it's in your browser. You don't even have to type your username. You just go to the site, whatever it is, Outlook.com, and the thing will pop down. Do you mean this one? Yep. And you're in. That's it. It will do like a Windows hello kind of authentication. So anyway I recommend well not recommend demand turn on two step authentication set up passkeys and an authenticator app. Microsoft Authenticator ideally is the job there.

[Richard Campbell]

Related to that Microsoft is now making it mandatory for M365 accounts hard to FA by the end of this year you simply account will not work work.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well that's the right, that's the right thing to do.

[Richard Campbell]

And the only reason they've been extending it is because some companies have still been struggling with it. But bit by bit it's just like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Not possible for individuals. It's. It's weird but pass keys and this would be a passkey that would be in your password manager, maybe in your browser on your computer or passkey in the app that's on your phone that used for autofill which is the same service.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is both the most secure and the most convenient. It's kind of amazing but you should still have an authenticator app that's the next most secure, next most convenient that you will have to with a few exceptions have to have a phone.

[Richard Campbell]

Well and I like the phone number for recovery.

[Paul Thurrott]

I do too.

[Richard Campbell]

You don't like defined as an MFA.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you cannot do it that way with Microsoft. I have no idea why. It's bizarre. So there's that. When I looked at authenticator apps I know this is going to be semi controversial because everyone has a little favorite and you can't write about something like this without hearing about every single authenticator app. But there is a clear winner here and that winner is Proton Authenticator. Free open source, fully encrypted. You can import export if you want to go somewhere else or come from somewhere else, et cetera. I like having an authenticator app be separate from the password manager, although some password managers support that. One of the a couple of reasons I like that is because you can't store the key to a vault inside the vault. So you're always going to have to have something else. I mean it's, you know, might as well just do everything through that. That's that's my.

[Richard Campbell]

Now I've always been biased that if you, if you're an M365 user, you should really be using Microsoft Authenticator and if you're a Google Workspace user, you should be using Google Authenticator because they have so many benefits for something you interact with the most.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So the companies that have their own identity services, essentially Apple, Google, Microsoft, have their own ways of doing things. So I would say that you are better off using a third party Authenticator app for everything except a Microsoft account. Or if you're in the Apple world because you have multiple devices. The way they do 2fa is just different. They don't support Authenticator apps.

[Richard Campbell]

And that's always my question is, so if I go Proton Authenticator for everything, am I still going to be able to use it for M365? You can stopping me from using it. Yeah, I guess that's true.

[Paul Thurrott]

My advice, right? So my advice for Microsoft people or people in Microsoft accounts is have Microsoft Authenticator. If just for the Microsoft accounts.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can also add it to the Proton or other Authenticator app. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not because they do support other Authenticators.

[Paul Thurrott]

It still works. You can have both. Right. If you're a Google guy or you have Google, everyone has a Google account, right. So yes, you could have Google Authenticator. They don't do full encryption though. That's the only problem there. If you have a Gmail app, the Google app, if you're on an iPhone or just the Google discovery feed on an Android. If you just have Android, right. You can authenticate yourself through that phone's biometrics without the Google Authenticator app. So you don't actually need it. So you could add, you can add Google and Microsoft accounts to any Authenticator app. You cannot add Apple accounts. It's kind of strange. So I'm actually going to write about Apple and Google.

[Richard Campbell]

That was a real question here. It's like, okay, get a Microsoft. Microsoft and Google will play well with others to some degree.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, they do, but they have a better experience inside their own ecosystem. So in Microsoft's case, that means the Microsoft Authenticator app or actually Microsoft Edge would probably do it. I don't haven't tried that actually. But we'll have the Microsoft Authenticator app in the Google world. Gmail, the Google app, that might be about it actually, but there's a couple of apps that will do it for you as well.

[Richard Campbell]

I always like how Authenticator, at least Microsoft's Authenticator would make mix up the whole. And do the number thing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Where sometimes it's like, I'm presenting a number over here. Type it in on the phone. Or here's the correct number. Choose from these three. So there's no consistent pattern. Like, it's really hard to hack out.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's especially true of Microsoft 365 Commercial, where the prompt could be on either device. Right. So typically the Microsoft account experiences, you go to sign into outlook.com and it says, here's the number. It's 56. And then you get this alert on your phone and you tap it and it says, here's three numbers. Tap the number you see on your computer. 56 is one of the numbers. And it does not Windows. It does face ID or whatever you have. And you're in. And that's how it works. You never typed anything. It just. It's nice. What you're describing is it goes in the opposite direction. You get a prompt that says, type the number you see on your phone. And you get a prompt on your phone, the phone says, here's a number. You got to type that in your computer. So it goes in the opposite direction. Either one of those is great. And like you said, they mix them up. That's smart.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Well, and I think it's also a way to get people to stop ignoring it. Like you. They find a way to make you attentive to the authentication process.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think of. I always think of the middle brake light on cars. You know, for the first year or two, it was kind of. It was unique and different. You really paid attention to it. Now we don't care anymore. You know, like, it's like every server of CAR has these kind of stupid. But yeah, so there's that. And I'll do more. I'm going to do a more general passkey article, but the big one for me is going to be the past manager bit. And I would say that one's a little tough because there are at least three apps in my brain that are very, very good. But they all have a couple of unique features. And without giving away, it's no surprise. I mean, it's 1Password and Bitwarden, but I would also throw in Proton Pass, which is the one I actually use. But we'll get there. We'll get there in the future.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and you know, the funny thing about password managers is I have never met anyone who started using a password manager and stopped. There's lots of people who won't start.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, but it's like.

[Paul Thurrott]

So again, I'M going to get. I'm going to. Yeah, I'm going to get to this. But the, the real trick that. Well, the first trick is what you just described. You have to go to it and do that thing, right.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You also have to stop using the old thing and delete everything in the old thing, which I think a lot of people don't do. I bet all of us have vestiges of password collections in multiple places. It's just very easy. But the next step after that is also using it to make sure that you're not on the dark web, that you're not reusing the same password everywhere, which you are all doing. I'm doing it too. We all do it using it.

[Richard Campbell]

Like the only person who's not doing is the person who's using a password manager. Because it's. Because.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, hopefully I'll torment you. Yeah. But even the same password twice, but you've imported passwords. So you are doing it like a lot of people are doing it.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You have to help you fix it. You have to get over the hump of. You don't need to know the password. Don't worry about it. The password manager is everywhere you are. It's on your computers, it's on your phone. You can have it in your tablet. You never, anytime you actually have to type a password in that thing will have it. You don't need to know the password. The only password you need to know if it has that is the password for the password manager. Right. That's the. That's the trick. But we'll get to that. That's a big can of worms and I'm going to make people upset when we go through that. Past couple of weeks, I've been talking about ways to do local AI. This one's a little bit left field, but Microsoft has an app called AI Dev Studio. It's in preview. It looks a lot like the apps they have for like. What are they called? Like WinUI3 Gallery or WPF Gallery. It's for developers. But this app is interesting because it shows you what's possible with local AI in Windows. And if you think back to would be build 2024. So almost two years ago, Microsoft introduced something at the time called the Windows Copilot runtime, which is not a runtime, but it was going to be these APIs for developers. And then almost a year went by, they never released it. They finally released something in January, February 2025 that was a very early preview. You had to be on a experimental version of the Windows app SDK to even access this stuff, it never really fully came together. So at last year's build in May, they replaced that with something called the Microsoft AI Foundry, right? And there's a local version of that you can have in Windows which is text based. And that's the thing I talked about last week. But the big change to me is that the APIs for developers that they started talking about almost two years ago are actually now available. So if you go into this app, you can see what those things are, right? And so like I said, the big advances to me are text and images. But there's more, right? There's audio and video, there's software coding, there's smart controls, et cetera, et cetera. But if you look at just text and images, just keep it simple. As a developer you could, and this is what I'm starting to work on myself is write an app that can generate text, summarize text, just have a chat interface, translate text between languages, grammar checking, spell checking, paraphrasing, you know, shorten, you know, lengthen text, etc. The image stuff is very similar. So generate images, obviously generative AI, but delete objects from images, remove the background, enhance an image. The primary use case there being the Super Res thing I was talking about. So you take a 320 by, you know, 240 image, whatever it is, and upscale it to 4K and it doesn't lose, you know, it's beautiful. This is available to everyone now and this is the kind of thing that's interesting if you look at how many the samples in here so you can play with it. You have to download models, you can choose if you have a Copilot plus PC for those to be MPU based models. And you can see it hitting the MPU and how it's not hitting the cpu, et cetera, et cetera. But this is really, it's not so much a thing you're going to sit there and chat with exactly. It's more of a guide to what is capable right now on any PC. And it's actually a surprisingly good list, especially when you consider how long it took them to come up with anything for developers. So inside the app itself, you will have to download some models you can interact with or yes, interact with many of these capabilities just within the app just to see what it's like. And then you can kind of apply this to what I'm going to call little tech solutions for AI that are going to run locally. Right. So whatever you're using if it was that the JAN AI or whatever it might be, these models will all be available in those things and you can see where these things are at. And I have to say it's surprisingly good. So if you are thinking that like, you know, small language models are maybe two or three years behind LLMs, they're not. They're pretty good. I mean they are behind, but the capabilities are pretty impressive. So if you're interested in this and you want to see what you'll be doing pretty soon, like with a local AI or could be doing right now if they support it already. This is a neat, this is a really neat app. It's just a. It's astonishing how many AI based capabilities are in there. It's worth looking at if you care about this stuff. It's worth looking at.

[Richard Campbell]

Cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, you know what I'd like to look at right now? I'd like to look at Run as Radio with Mr. Richard Campbell.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, I did an unusual show for this particular week. This is my friend Amber Vandenberg. We called the show ideation to implementation. So not a techie show. This is more of a soft skill conversation. But it came from a request from a listener saying, hey, I'm getting presented with these projects but I can't get my team moving. I can't get buy in like that whole problem space of how do you actually get a project started and how do you get it finished? From the political angles of it, often the tech is the easiest part. It's actually getting all the players lined up, making sure you do the right things to show success. Those are the issues. So Suddenly we were 35 minutes into a conversation about, you know, that whole idea of how fast you can actually move. We end up in ethical mammon and sort of speed of trust conversations is like how do you reach across all those lines to get folks on board and give them a clear starting line, a clear ending line and a deadline. Right. Like each of those parts were important to it. And I really enjoyed the conversations because it was very coherent step by step thinking through the issues to be able to be successful. Often delivering well on Attack doesn't turn into a win for a company. Like if you don't do these other steps to actually show the win in a way that's meaningful to non technical people, it doesn't matter.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Runners radio 1020. Well, I think the only thing is really left is heavy drinking at this point.

[Paul Thurrott]

Totally.

[Richard Campbell]

And I got, I got a couple of stories related to this particular alcohol. I thought now you know, we left Mexico behind. We would. I would talk about something other than Mexican alcohol. But I was wrong. We had to do a little shopping on our way before we went home to bring certain gifts for certain people. And I decided to get something unusual in the agave space. I thought I was looking for tequila or mezcal, and I was incorrect. I found something else completely else, called racia. And then when I wanted to understand what the heck that was, I ended up having to dig all the way into how alcohol, what alcohol is about in Mexico, full stop. Because if you unpeel the onion and go all the way down. The agave plant has been important in that region of the world long before it was called Mexico. I mean, literally for centuries, archeologists have found evidence of the agave plant being used 9,000 years ago. So. And they're not just for alcohol, obviously. The agave is a very versatile plant. It is quite edible. The flea, the flowers, the leaves, the stalks, all edible food. The worms on it and this. Yeah, we're talking about the tequila worms, which not actually a worm at all. It's a larva of a moth that is a destructive pest to it, but also apparently delicious. And so has been is a mentioned eaten food again, literally for millennia. Oh, and by the way, never found in tequila. You will occasionally find it in mezcal. It is a gimmick. There is no reason for it. Yes, you can eat them. If you can handle the gross out factor or not. It's not a big deal. The fibers in agave are incredibly robust. They may make clothing out of them, they make fish nets out of them, they make rope out of them. The thorns are sharp and sturdy and good for sewing. And to the point where in the Aztec mythology, the Mexica group, there is a God of fertility and nourishment called Mahuel, who is literally this inspiration of the agave plant. And it turns out, because it's full of carbohydrate, as this plant's growing, this particular point when you're growing the agave, and we've talked about this before in tequila making, where it concentrates sugars in the main ball before it makes a stem to do reproduction. And if you harvest it at that point, you can get a lot of sugar from it, bake it a little bit, steam it, or roast it to increase the amount of sugar production. And humans have been clever for millennia. They figured how to do that a long time ago to pull this sweet SAP out of a roasted agave and it would naturally Ferment. There are lambic yeasts in that part of the world to make a drink. A kind of beer called pulque. Now it's also known as Ocktli, which is probably the original name from the Aztec era. The Spanish also called it agave wine. They called everything wine if it had a little bit of alcohol in it, sort of a milky product. It's still available today. You could buy this stuff. Although at that time, if you go back to the pre Hispanic era, this is very much a ceremony or religious drink. So it wasn't consumed in large quantity. But when the Spanish arrive in that world, arrive is a great term in 1521, it doesn't take very long to find pulque. And it's much easier to make them beer because barley does not grow well in that part of the world. And so they start scaling the production of it massively to the point that by the middle 1600s this becomes heavily regulated as is the drunkenness problem that's generally happening. You know, Spanish empire stuff. We're going to skip back and forth of the ages there, but we're. That's the, you know, your typical product. When you find a carbohydrate, a sugar source, it's not hard to make a beer product of some kind, 4 to 7% alcohol. It's the distillation that gets more interesting. And the story of the distillation of pulque is back. It's still back in the 1500s. So in 1565 the Spanish Empire, which has already been in control of the area that is in Mexico for some time, has now made it all the way around the other side of the world and they've taken control of the Philippines. And the Filipinos being very much ocean going folks anyway, considering the part of the world and they're working on the ships for the Spanish Empire and there is a route called the Manila Galleon route that runs between Manila in the Philippines and what we now known as Acapulco in, in Mexico at that time, the area known as Nuevo Galacia. But that which is basically the whole west coast of what is now Mexico and plenty of the Filipinos as they make it across the Pacific Ocean, which is a. In that era, you're talking the 1500s, that era, that it's a very easy to die journeying across the Pacific Ocean. So when the Filipinos make it to New Galatia, they're not inclined to go back on that ship again. And they just started this disappear and integrate into that the society of the time. And they also bring a bunch of the products from the other side of the world. So the reason that they're integrated into Mexican culture is things like tamarind and rice and mango and coconut all comes from the Filipinos coming in on the Manila galleons. Well, they also know how to turn coconuts in because it is a concentrated carbohydrate into a kind of beer that the Filipino called tuba. But they also had a simple but completely unique distilling technique to make a liquor called in the Filipino language in Tagalog, lambagnoc, but was quickly coined by the Spanish as vino de coco, as in the wine of coconuts. In the area that we now know as Colima, which is again, a very old name. In and around Jalisco, there's a record from a governor from 1631 talking about 262,000 liters of vino de coca being produced. So that's a lot of booze. What's interesting about it is the stills that were used are completely different from the European style stills. There's not a lot of metal, and so they used as little as possible. The still looks more like an inverted cone where at the bottom of the still is a large metal bowl that's going to contain your ferment. The pulque that's got a bit of a fire underneath it. You don't need to get it too hot, right? You're just trying to evaporate the alcohol. And then built around that bowl is a cone made out of wooden staves. And then at the top there is another metal bowl that's smaller, that's got cold water in it. So that as the alcohol evaporates, it's going to hit that upper bowl and it's going to cool and drip down. And in between the two, you've got a kind of pan shape with it's angled with a pipe coming out of the wooden box. And that's where the alcohol is going to drip out. By the way, you can still find these stills in the Jalisco area. They're rare because they're not particularly efficient today. They use much more efficient stills, but they're super simple. They could break down into something very small, transportable in ship, and it will make you a kind of alcohol from it. And so it appears that the first time that agave SAP or pulque gets distilled is because of these Filipino stills. And that product made from the distilled pulque is called mezcal.

[Leo Laporte]

Almost from the outside, they Invented mezcal.

[Richard Campbell]

They brought the distillation technique that turned this ceremonial beer product of the Aztecs into a 30, 40% alcohol, a single, single stage sort of lambic distillation. And we've talked about this before, that all agave spirits are generally known as mezcals. And that was always true. The Spanish called the vino de mezcal. And so but at each, there's lots of different kinds of agave and they grow in different regions, different climate zones and so forth. And so as different regions got good at making mezcal, you started using the region name as part of the name of the product. So if you go up into the Sonora, the northern part of mezcal today, you can buy an alcohol called baccadora, but in which is from a town in Sonora called Baconora, which happens to be on the Baconora river, because original naming. And this product was originally known as vino de mezcal de baccanora. Pretty simple. Today we just call it bacchanara. And what made it distinct, it used an unusual form of agave, Agave angustifulia, also known as the magae pacifica. But it's a kind of agave not found anywhere very much elsewhere. And it's specific to that. The bacchanoans always used it there. And so it got its own sort of recognition. It's not a well known Mexican alcohol, but bacanora has its own domain certification, just like champagne does. Though they only got it back in 2000. Right. So as you get mezcal production spreading through New Galatia, that's the whole west side of Mexico, into different regions, going up into the highlands and so forth with their different species of agave, you get different results. So the one you do know is once known as vino de mezcal de tequila. Right. Tequila being a region. And this is where the first commercial tequila products were made by the Cuervo family, they got the ticket from the Spanish government in 1758 to start mass production of that. And by the way, that name, vino de mezcal de tequila is the normal name of the product until the 1970s. The only reason it just ended up being called tequila is that the Mexican government was very frustrated with the fact that certain southwestern American states were growing agave and making it into alcohol and also calling it vino di mezcal de tequila. And so they copyrighted the name tequila as an intellectual property product. So nobody else could use the word tequila. And that's why it all started being called Tequila for a while there. And they've got the domain identification in 19. But also going back into the early 1900s, there was Franz Weber, a botanist who had been actually identifying all the different species of agave. It's not very obvious one from the other. And he focused on a particular kind of agave today we call blue agave, although back in the day it was called Weber's agave because he recognized it as a faster growing in the highlands area, easier to reproduce. And agave azul, as it's typically referred to now, is what all tequila to this day is made from because it's the most productive agave you can use. And another distinction of tequila was that they steamed the peanuts, the root of the agave, to extract the sugars from it, rather than roasting them, which is a traditional way, because the roasting techniques normally would add a smoky flavor to it that some people didn't like. Steaming the mezcal flavor. Yeah, that's the mezcal flavor. And mezcal, which we get to know is also the superset as a whole, now has its own domain DOM identification. Only in the 2000s, they actually get one. And they also set limits on the different states that could produce mezcals and the various techniques. But where tequila was strictly agave azul and Bacanor is strictly magnolia pacifica, Mezcal has a bunch of different agaves that are acceptable and an array of techniques. And yeah, most mezcals are smoky, but not all. And by the way, also true that most tequilas are not smoky, but not all. Right? It is. You have a choice on how you do your preparation.

[Leo Laporte]

Mike, he's going to be on in half an hour and he has his own tequila, own mezcal that he makes sure it's not too smoky. It's actually quite delicious. So.

[Richard Campbell]

But we're not talking about any of those. We're talking about Racia. And I have the bottle of rassija right here. So this is also from Jalisco. This is where tequila, Gomezcal and so forth all originated. The one thing you say for sure about rasija is it is not made with blue agave. It's actually made with a bunch of other ones. But rasia is not referring to a region like all the other names were. It's actually a term that means little root. Because this, my friends, this is the best kind of alcohol. The kind of alcohol invented to avoid paying taxes, you mean? Well, and it always ends up, you know, this happened in Ireland, right, where they started making Poutine to avoid the English. Taxes like this happens over and over again. So all the way back to 1608, the governor of Nuvo, Galicia, recognizes how much mezcal is being produced and starts imposing taxes on it. Now, most of these mezcal growers are down in the lowlands, in the area and so forth, and are easy to go collect the taxes on. But no, not this stuff. The mezcal growers, using a particular agave, the Maximiliana, only grows in the very high highlands, 2,000 meters plus. Right. And so it's hard to get to those guys, and they don't get the news very often, and the tax collectors don't want to climb those hills, and so they just kind of don't get around to paying taxes.

[Leo Laporte]

You didn't want to go.

[Richard Campbell]

And then when a tax collector does show up, they say, and he says, I'm here to count your penas, to pay taxes. He goes, oh, we don't make this from pina. We make this from the little root, which is what rasiya actually means is little root. Now, they're lying, of course, they're making for the pina. There's nothing else to make it from. But it's all part of the game of avoiding paying taxes. And they constantly go into hiding. They avoid the taxation equation literally into the 2000s.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. And it's one of the reasons it became moonshine, because the upside to the taxation and regulation is consistency and quality. And the downside is you cheat. And so this was always a black market product that was kind of hidden away from the rest of the world. And so it does get this reputation of being a dubious product of being a moonshine and potentially dangerous and poisonous, which may be entirely possible because it's kind of under control, but it is kind of unique and only got recognized as a legal alcohol salable in places like the US in 2014. But and it got its Dom in 2019, so it's super original. So there is a couple of different kinds of rhoecia today. They do roast the peanuts, but they roast them in clay ovens isolated away from the smoke, so they tend not to be smoky. And they use a couple of different agaves depending on where they're growing. So there's one set of rhecias called La Costa, or the coastals, which kind of citrusy flavors. And this is Agave angustifolia, or also known as the yellow agave, as well as Agave rhodicantha. And then La Sierra, or the mountains, is the kind of Pinier, stronger taste. And this is where Agave Maximiliana and also an even rarer agave called Inequality are used to make rasia. And so this particular one we found is. This is the Anastasia distillery, which is in La Estancia de Landros, which is over a kilometer above sea level in the Jalisco Footlands, where they use Agave Maximilia and which grown even higher up in the. In the Sierra Madres, and it grows a lot slower there. So you're technically talking at least eight years before the agave is ready to flower and makes that sugar concentration that makes it worthwhile to harvest. And then they roast it very slowly over two days to 48 hours plus before they do the fermentation. And for this particular one, for estancia, they actually do their fermentation in old Jack Daniels barrels, which I love. They're not aging it. Right. This is a blanco, right? There's no color to this, but it is fermented there and then later distilled. And they use lambic still, so more the European single stage still, although they do do a double distillation. There's another name that goes around for this, which is called Mexican gin.

[Leo Laporte]

Does it taste like gin?

[Richard Campbell]

Well, that's the point. It's very botanical. Instead of green flavor, you know, it's not got that burning. It doesn't have the pepper note you're used to with tequila. Turns out that's really from Agave azul. The Maximiliana doesn't have that. So there's all these flavors that are very regional now. I mean, traditionally, a gin is a high distillation that's in. You soak botanicals in it. There's been no botanicals added to it, but there's all these botanical flavors in this. Just a natural byproduct of the kind of agave. Now, this product is so weird. People don't know anything about it. It makes no sense that it's around anywhere. And yet you can buy it at specialty stores in the US and for 50 bucks, it's not even especially expensive because it's not famous, it's not heavily marketed. And I tell this story because I was so upset about last week's story about The Don Julio 70 and the Cristalino and, like, upsetting. I did the version of tequila, right? Like, the disruption of tequila, and then I run into this, and it's the simplest, most honest manifestation of agave in a whole area you didn't know about. That's always gone on. This product's been made for Hundreds of years. It's just been kept away from the public until literally the last 20 years.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

And now it's starting to emerge, and there's only a handful of them, but you can get it. You know, you got a fan friend who's a tequila fan. You get in this. This is exactly what we did. We got this bottle for our builder, the folks that work on the other house. We want to give him something nice, and we know he likes tequila. It's like I brought him a sip. It. It's like a gin. You would drink neat heat, it's just this rich. No heat. It's 40%. It's not big and bold, but it would be a sin to put this in a cocktail. It's so nice by itself. You know, once in a while, you find a gin that good. But that is this species of Mexican alcohol. It doesn't have to be the pepper bomb. You don't need salt and lime. Right. You could just drink it.

[Leo Laporte]

And I'm not crazy, to be honest. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know what?

[Richard Campbell]

It's a mood thing. Sometimes I want that, sometimes I don't. Right. Remember we did the Black Corner Hardenas, like last year when we were together in Mexico? And that was a big, bold, like, we're going for a ride called Tequila. I get that. Right? And then sometimes that's what you want. Dude, I gotta keep this bottle around for the summertime. I want two ice cubes in this and a couple of fingers, and I'm gonna sit on my deck and watch the dolphins do their thing and drink this lovely drink the same way I would like a gmt.

[Leo Laporte]

This looks incredible. I never blown away it.

[Richard Campbell]

So surprised.

[Leo Laporte]

Rice Ricea. R A, I C I double L A Ricea.

[Richard Campbell]

That's right. Yeah. And I'm just glad to have. When I started putting this together and realized it's such a good news story about the thing I've always liked about this gig we're doing, telling about craftsmen making an interesting product from the ingredients in their region. And so the big industry has come and destroyed tequila, in my opinion. From what we talked about last year, Tequila's kind of broken. Yeah, but agave is not. Agave's just not.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, agave is not broken. Ladies and gentlemen, as I rearrange the tiles, it is had. This concludes another thrilling, gripping edition of Windows Weekly.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, it's definitely not a brown liquor at all, but I make an exception.

[Leo Laporte]

It's normally clear.

[Richard Campbell]

It's crystal clear.

[Leo Laporte]

You wouldn't want to put it in a margarita I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

Ah, you'd lose out a bunch of things. The lime would overwhelm it.

[Leo Laporte]

Right. But Lisa might like it. I have to get a bottle of this.

[Richard Campbell]

If you've ever met a really nice gin where you just drank it on its own with an ice cube. Yeah, yeah, this is that.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm gonna go down to BevMo, see what they've got.

[Richard Campbell]

You're not gonna find a bevmo. You're gonna have to go to a specialty tequila retailer.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, okay, okay.

[Richard Campbell]

But there's. There's one around just like this especially. Whiskey shop.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

You go to a nice tequila place, you ask for a See. Yeah. And the guy behind the counter who runs the place will be delighted. You asked because you didn't just ask for Jose Cuervo.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, you went and got something so very sexy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Right. Really unique. Agave, alcohol.

[Leo Laporte]

All learned something here today.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I hope you did.

[Leo Laporte]

You'll find Richard [e-mail] and if you want to see all of the whiskey liquor tip pics, we've made a YouTube playlist at it. What is it? Something weird from my closet.

[Richard Campbell]

Something weird from my closet dot com.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, that's the link. You go there and you will find a lot of stuff. How many Kevin's been putting these together.

[Richard Campbell]

Last one was Posted on the 12th, so we're at 111.

[Leo Laporte]

That's a lot of drinking.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you know, I do my best. You know the great thing about bringing a bottle like this home, I was for work. Oh, by the way, this bottle flew home with us yesterday and it leaked. It was a brand new sealed bottle and it was fully bubble wrapped and then in a bag and all of it was wet. We lost maybe an ounce or two from it. This is synthetic cork in this particular bottle, and that's not that uncommon with synthetic corks. As the pressure went down on the fly.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Push the cork up and a little bit of the liquid leaked out. I always wrap these things and pad them like it's not that easy to break this bottle. It's pretty resistant. But what I didn't do, and I normally do, is I always take an old dirty T shirt and wrap it around the whole package as well. So that will soak up any. You don't want it into your bag. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

You call it the airlines share.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, well, because I actually brought.

[Paul Thurrott]

Plus, your clothes smell great.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, yeah, it's exactly that. As I got down to the part of the bag, I'm like, oh, no, I smell.

[Paul Thurrott]

I shouldn't be able to smell that. Yeah, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Oh, so that's not good.

[Leo Laporte]

Richard Campbell'[e-mail] that's where you also find.net rocks. A show he does with his good friend Carl Franklin. Paul thurat [e-mail] now I just went there and they have a. You have a new premium subscription service that explains what was going on last week on the website. So that's all set up. But you do need to re enroll as a premium member, which I will do, and then discontinue your old subscription so you don't get charged twice.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're talking about me?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, yeah, your site.

[Paul Thurrott]

So we're starting. Yeah, we're starting to do that transit. Sorry, I thought you meant him. I'm like, I don't.

[Leo Laporte]

You're talking about me.

[Paul Thurrott]

Memes. Yes. So this, it's going to be much better for everybody even though you have to take a couple of steps because this, it will be self service. So plus we'll be able to tell you ahead of time, hey, this is going to resubscribe so if that's not what you like that cancel it. This has been a big problem for us.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I count on that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, it's good.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, good. So thorat.com you can find his books as leanpub.com including the Field Guide to Windows 11 and Windows Everywhere. And you'll find them right here every Wednesday morning, 11am Pacific. That's 1300 UTC. That's 1900. I'm sorry, 1300 Eastern. 1900 UTC. I mentioned that because you can watch us do it live. Get the freshest version of the show if you watch live at those times. For the club, we stream into the Discord. But I think even club members like to watch on YouTube or Twitch or X.com or Facebook or LinkedIn or Kik. It's on all of those platforms. Pick the one you like. If you chat, I will see the chat because we have a unified. I have a unified chat interface that lets me see everybody's comments. That's very nice. Thank you. We appreciate everybody in there. Hello.

[Paul Thurrott]

What else?

[Leo Laporte]

After the fact, on demand versions of the show available at our website, Twit TV, WW. There's audio there and video. There's also a YouTube channel with the video and you can use that to share clips. Always a nice thing to do. And as I mentioned, there's also that, you know, Richard Campbell. 111 whiskeys and counting and more coming all the time. Thank you. Kevin King. He's working, he works hard on that. I didn't realize there were that many. That's awesome. Finally, the best way to get it, subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you get it automatically is as soon as it's available. And if you do subscribe in Pocket Casts or Apple's podcast or Overcast or whatever you use, if it has us a review section, leave us a nice review. Tell the world about this fabulous show.

[Paul Thurrott]

Cannot believe Richard got home for this show. I was 100% positive there was.

[Leo Laporte]

Did you get in just this morning or.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, we got, we got to the apartment at 2:30 in the morning, we're asleep by 3 up at 5:30 on the 7:30 ferry to get here by 9:30. And then I had an hour and a half to get this rig set up and running.

[Paul Thurrott]

I, I was, I was thinking if you even got to Vancouver, maybe you do it from a friend's house or something. But I. The fact that you actually got to your home is pretty impressive, actually. Really impressive. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And now it's time for a boathouse nap, I would think.

[Richard Campbell]

I gotta run the she who Must Be Obeyed down for a little oral surgery, which is the other reason we were hurrying home is that had to get done then didn't want to reschedule.

[Leo Laporte]

I hate that one.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, wish her the best.

[Richard Campbell]

And yeah, she's excited to get it done. It's been coming for a while.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, I know that feeling. You. The teeth start to fail.

[Richard Campbell]

We're not 20 anymore.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, no, my teeth are 120.

[Leo Laporte]

I had. Because I am so old, I had a bunch of amalgam fillings with mercury in them and some of them still are there, but most of them have been replaced by more modern materials.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, all my metal has been replaced with what is like porcelain or something.

[Leo Laporte]

They do a better job now. But you know, some of them still live, which is kind of amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

And they say the dangerous part is their removal in the first place. So if they're at risk, then get them out. But don't disturb.

[Leo Laporte]

Exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I think they start to fall out in my case like they were needed to be replaced. But.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Thank you, sir. Sorry to end this wonderful show on the dental note.

[Paul Thurrott]

On the dental surgery note.

[Leo Laporte]

We'll see you all again next time on Windows Weekly. Bye bye.

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