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Windows Weekly 972: I'm A Tolkien Scholar
02:27:57
Phil Spencer & Sarah Bond Depart Xbox
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- [00:00]
Paul Thurrott
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell are here. We're going to talk about the big changes that just happened at Xbox. Paul. Xbox. Paul says no cause for concern. In all likelihood, his new book just came out. We'll tell you what it is and how to get it. And then Richard has a local whiskey that sounds pretty sweet. All of that coming up next on Windows Whiskey. I Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.
- [00:34]
Richard Campbell
This is Twit.
- [00:41]
Paul Thurrott
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 972 recorded Wednesday, February 25, 2026. I'm a Tolkien scholar. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, you winners and you dozers. You can doze through this if you want, but you won't want to because lookie, lookie, it's Paul Thurot from therot.com. he is in beautiful Mexico City. Hello, Paul. Are there any cars burning in your neighborhood? Any cartels?
- [01:11]
Richard Campbell
I don't think there are any cars actually burning in the entire country. I'm not saying this is fake news, but I am saying I'm safer here than I am in the United States. And one more person reaches out to me.
- [01:21]
Paul Thurrott
I know, I bet.
- [01:21]
Richard Campbell
Tell me I got to come home immediately.
- [01:23]
Paul Thurrott
I bet Richard Campbell is in war torn British Columbia. I'm sorry about the hockey thing.
- [01:32]
Leo Laporte
You know what was lucky Bounce. It happens. They played a good game and you
- [01:36]
Paul Thurrott
guys, you know, you got a bronze. And curling, and that's the Matt, that's
- [01:39]
Richard Campbell
the sport that really. At least the US Hockey team got a gold.
- [01:42]
Paul Thurrott
Men got a gold. It was. The women got the bronze. Okay.
- [01:45]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [01:45]
Leo Laporte
Now Homan got the bronze and Jacobs got the gold.
- [01:49]
Paul Thurrott
I think curling got a big boost in the Winter Olympics this year.
- [01:52]
Leo Laporte
It always does.
- [01:53]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [01:53]
Leo Laporte
I end up explaining curling a lot.
- [01:55]
Richard Campbell
I'm reasonably sure curling doesn't occur other than the Olympics and I refuse to believe otherwise.
- [02:01]
Paul Thurrott
We were at a pub bar having dinner and Lisa was looking over and of course they have. It's a sports pub, so they have all the TVs on. And it just happened to be that every single event was curling.
- [02:13]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [02:13]
Paul Thurrott
And Lisa said, that's the dumbest looking sport I've ever seen. I said, well, if you understand it, it's really like chess on ice.
- [02:19]
Richard Campbell
Well, went to flag football this summer. You'll see. We'll see.
- [02:27]
Paul Thurrott
Helly Buck was a brick wall. Says Joe wasn't a luck.
- [02:32]
Richard Campbell
Don't even pretend this is interesting, guys. Hey, I do.
- [02:36]
Paul Thurrott
Before we go too much farther, I Owe an apology. I know nobody who listens to Mac Break Weekly listens to Windows Weekly, but in case any of you do, there was a mix up on the factory floor yesterday. We have to reset our no accidents number that the would Something terrible happened with the feed and what I really think is terrible. And we're not sure how this happened. We think Apple somehow screwed up its caching. But everybody was trying to download the free version of Mac Break Weekly, which is almost everybody.
- [03:03]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [03:04]
Paul Thurrott
Was getting a notice that it's not free anymore and I got a lot of panic.
- [03:08]
Richard Campbell
Sounds like a Kevin thing to me. If you're going to investigate it, I would start there.
- [03:15]
Paul Thurrott
I'm blaming Apple. And anyway, all of our shows, every show I'm on anyway is free. For downloads we encourage you to join the club and you get an ad free version of the show. But we have no plans to put anything behind a paywall and that was just a mistake. So if you did get that error, try again. I think it's been fixed and our apologies. And if you ever get it again, it's not us, it's Apple and we, we, we apologize.
- [03:49]
Richard Campbell
Ironic that it was Mac Break Weekly.
- [03:51]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, isn't it?
- [03:52]
Leo Laporte
It is funny.
- [03:53]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Yeah.
- [03:56]
Paul Thurrott
Boy, big news right after the show last week.
- [03:59]
Leo Laporte
Pretty close. Yeah. Well, it was really this weekend.
- [04:02]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, they waited till Friday. Friday night at 5:00pm, you know.
- [04:06]
Leo Laporte
Well, is it bad news taking up the garbage?
- [04:09]
Richard Campbell
I, it's not good news. I mean, we'll see, right? I will say, I mean, look, I didn't predict this or anything but I, I did bring up last week. Haven't heard from Phil Spencer in a while.
- [04:20]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, you did. In fact, a number of people gave
- [04:22]
Leo Laporte
you credit like last ad piece or last news piece was like October. It had been a while.
- [04:27]
Richard Campbell
It's been a while.
- [04:28]
Paul Thurrott
Like people saying Paul called it.
- [04:31]
Richard Campbell
Well, I didn't call it. I, I just thought it was odd and I, I, I guess if press I would have said something to the tune of something's happening with Xbox and they've required him to be quiet, you know.
- [04:44]
Leo Laporte
And there was a bunch of rumors in July last year about Spencer and they said no.
- [04:49]
Richard Campbell
Right. Right now I wasn't thinking retirement.
- [04:52]
Leo Laporte
No at all. Although he's 58, like and he's been at Microsoft a long time. Like where are you going to go? Although to be clear, I have a number of friends who have retired out of Microsoft and it appeared somewhere else within a month.
- [05:06]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, that's the thing. So I hope he doesn't pull a Peter Moore and end up at Sega or whatever, you know, or some other company. But look, from my perspective, this is a real loss because Phil Spencer was a gamers gamer, but more important to me. Yep. But he was also so plain spoken and honest and to the point where it was problematic, I think for Microsoft. He didn't mind. In fact, he openly would discuss things that they were thinking about doing, they were planning on doing. He didn't want to disappoint anybody who was a gamer who cared about Xbox. And I do think he had a Panos, Panay and maybe even Terry Morrison type problem. Meaning there's this broader strategy above him that he has to fit into in his square peg into the circular hole that is Microsoft. And that constrains some of the things you can do. And we don't know the full story and maybe we never will, but one of the things we do know is that he wanted to release Xbox hardware that was portable hardware. And the senior leadership team or the board, I can't recall said no, it's too expensive, it's not going to make any sense financially. We're not doing that. And that's why we have the Xbox. Rog ally from who?
- [06:26]
Leo Laporte
Xbox hardware never made money. It was just a facilitation for selling games. Right. No console hardware makes money.
- [06:34]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. So I mean, right. The goal is to cost reduce over time and try to make the hardware profitable. You know, at least in that slice of time. They've never done it. Microsoft, Sony has done it and Nintendo has done it, but it takes time. You know, you don't, you don't have not, you're not profitable.
- [06:53]
Leo Laporte
Sell millions of units.
- [06:55]
Richard Campbell
Right. But they have a razor blade model. Right. The idea going in was always like, look, we're going to lose money in the hardware, but we're going to sell games and we're going to have that 30% fee from every game maker on each title and that's how we're going to make money, you know, and you make good hardware to sell good games and you know, the floats, all boats, et cetera. So yeah, it's never really worked, you know, that's the problem. The closest they ever came was the 360. That was kind of the shining high
- [07:22]
Leo Laporte
point red ring of death.
- [07:24]
Richard Campbell
Right. Which is kind of amazing but also showed you how loyal Xbox fans were at that time anyway, where Microsoft also did it.
- [07:31]
Leo Laporte
Right. Like I know people who got their 360 replaced three times.
- [07:36]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Including me, by the way. So across, I don't know the number Anymore, somewhere I've written this down. But across multiple dollars was the right number. No, I mean what I meant my number. Like I had multiple Xbox360 consoles and returned all of them at least once and some of them twice. And yeah, so they figured that one out eventually. But anyway, that was pre ex. That was pre Phil Spencer, by the way. Not that that means anything, but look, you're given hands a hand to play, so to speak. And he was given a hand to play. And I think he has or did the best he could do with the cards he was dealt. But you don't.
- [08:19]
Leo Laporte
I mean, no hardware strategy was Phil's strategy. We're going to outsource the hardware thing that Phil led. That. That's his deal.
- [08:30]
Richard Campbell
Now the goofy thing is they may temporarily reverse on that. And I. Look, we've had this conversation many, many times. Ideally, Xbox as a console would be great. It would sell well. It would compete effectively against PlayStation especially. It doesn't. It hasn't for three generations. They lose money on the hardware and it's getting worse and worse and worse and worse. And I think this business would be fantastically successful if they didn't make hardware
- [09:02]
Leo Laporte
well, and that seems to the direction Phil was going in. So why is he out? Because there's also the rumor that. That he's forced out.
- [09:10]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, so the. Yeah, the re. Right. So the reason I mentioned Panos, Panay and Terry Myerson was that both of those people who ran Windows respectively, ran into the situation where the broader corporate strategies were constraining them too much. And we know that in Panos case, they had so many cuts to surface and cuts and cuts and cuts. And he was like, guys, this doesn't make sense. This business doesn't make sense the way you're forcing it to be so limited. And that was a big chunk of. Or the reason why he left. You know, in Terry's case, it might
- [09:46]
Leo Laporte
have been a showdown moment. It's like, you've made it no way for me to succeed. Why should I stay?
- [09:50]
Richard Campbell
Right. Right. You're just setting me up for failure. You know, maybe in time we'll know the full stories of all these people we don't really know. So I can't imagine it was the handheld Xbox hardware. I'm sure that was a passion project for him or whatever. It was never going to save Xbox, so to speak. I do feel like, you know, there was and maybe still is some version of an Xbox console that is sort of like the switch where you can plug it in and use it on a TV or you can take it with you and that type of thing might make sense, but I don't know, it doesn't matter anymore, right? Because nobody knows.
- [10:27]
Leo Laporte
Right? You have to do it and find out. There's really no other way around this.
- [10:32]
Richard Campbell
So what we have, what we're left with is he decided to retire, whatever that means. You know, we'll someday, maybe we'll find a little bit more. Find out a little bit more. His presumed successor, Sarah Bond, who also, by the way, gamer, you know, well liked in the industry, etc.
- [10:53]
Leo Laporte
And big on the whole, we don't make hardware anymore. Like she was part of that narrative.
- [11:01]
Richard Campbell
Left as soon as he was out. Like, and by the way, the day this happened, we got to see the memos or emails or whatever it was that Nadella sent out that the new person running Xbox, we'll talk about her in a moment, sent out that Phil Spencer sent out. Didn't hear anything from Sarah Bond, which was to me very telling and sad.
- [11:25]
Leo Laporte
She did later post get the job and when she didn't, she's like, what am I doing here? She is also, I mean, very much Phil's lieutenant. She was part of that plan. So if there is a new plan,
- [11:37]
Richard Campbell
that's the thing you have to sort of imagine that that might be part of the deal, that she was maybe too closely aligned with Phil Spencer, that if I'm right, that, you know, requirements are coming down from on high. He was not interested in those requirements. I mean, she wouldn't be either and, but you know, she didn't get a send off, which I felt kind of bad about.
- [11:59]
Leo Laporte
She's going to land somewhere great. She's an extraordinary person and any gaming company would be delighted to have her.
- [12:07]
Richard Campbell
True, absolutely.
- [12:09]
Leo Laporte
I think Sarah Bond got the shorts end of the stick here and probably didn't deserve it. And I'm not worried about her at all.
- [12:15]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. And she's young enough that she'll, I'm sure she'll pop up somewhere. I mean, I feel Spencer will at least advise some companies or do whatever, you know, we'll see, we'll, you know, we'll see what happens.
- [12:26]
Leo Laporte
But you'll see her appear somewhere important in gaming. It's time for her to go lead something, whatever it may be.
- [12:35]
Richard Campbell
So yeah, this was announced very late on Friday, which is when you announce things that might materially impact your stock price and you don't want that to happen. So that's kind of how that happened. This guy, by the way, Phil Spencer, was at Microsoft for 38 years. He was at or running gaming. Microsoft Gaming for 12 years.
- [12:55]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [12:55]
Richard Campbell
He didn't really hit my radar until the beginning of 2015. So this is 11 years ago when they did that consumer event for Windows 10 ahead of the launch, and he was one of the people that presented and he talked about the Xbox app on Windows and whatever. And, you know, this is where they shut off the HoloLens. I think there was a Surface Hub device of some kind, probably Service Hub. I don't remember what that was, but hololens was a big chunk of that, obviously. And that's where we heard about the Windows as a service stuff. And everything changed and Windows was going to be free as an update and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But I hadn't heard. I wasn't. I didn't know him. I still don't know him, but I didn't know who he was. I didn't know what to make of him. And he had that kind of vibe. And I. And because I think this is accurate, where he was drinking coffee in a cafe somewhere on the campus and they were like, Phil, you need to be on stage in five minutes. And he just ambled over and talked, you know, and that was his style. He was just a person. And that's what I liked about him. So this has, this has caused a lot of problems out in the world. Now, Xbox fans, if you weren't full of angst enough, you will be delighted to know that the woman now running Xbox, I'm sorry, running Microsoft Gaming, was a former executive of Instacart. And her last two to four years or whatever it was at Microsoft, was spent working. And they made it sound like she ran it. I don't think she actually ran this business, but she was in Core AI, which is under the.
- [14:34]
Leo Laporte
With Jay.
- [14:35]
Richard Campbell
Right. So he. She worked. Right. So she, she reported directly to him. He is in charge of. It's kind of a. Well, actually, what I was going to say, I think might be wrong. But it's consumer AI, right? Not. It's not Microsoft AI, which is the Suleyman copilot stuff. It's, I guess Core AI is the name of it. Right.
- [14:58]
Leo Laporte
But I. Yeah, he's above Core AI, is one of his groups that. That's what Asha was running.
- [15:03]
Richard Campbell
Okay, well, her name is Asha Sharma. She's young, doesn't appear to know anything about gaming, is not a gamer, and of course, what people are. Because she came out of Core AI, the fear is like, oh, here we. Obviously, Satya Nadella is sending some message here that AI is so important that the person running Xbox has to have previously been deeply involved with AI we'll get to this in a moment. They claim otherwise, by the way, The thing. Well, there's a lot of things that are interesting. First of all, I just want to say I want to give this woman a chance. There has been a lot of hate dumped on her, which I feel is unfair.
- [15:49]
Leo Laporte
She jumped in the fire, and I don't even know that she knew she was.
- [15:52]
Richard Campbell
I mean, she had to have some idea. But it's like when you have a kid, you can train or read as much as you want, but you don't really know until you do it. And, yeah, this is a passionate community of extremely opinionated people, and they are not happy with her. And maybe that's a little unfair.
- [16:09]
Leo Laporte
Before she had a chance at anything immediately. She's only been in Microsoft for two years. She came in as well and then was promoted to president of Core AI. Like, she's moved very quickly. She clearly manages up well.
- [16:22]
Richard Campbell
Yes. So this could be complete BS in the sense that she just presents well and people like her and she's advanced, but she. Maybe she knows what she's doing, too. I mean, like I said, we got to give her a chance. I don't like the reaction I've seen to her. Although I too, am not, you know, you know, former Instacart. You know, you're like, what. What is. What is. What are you doing? You had. You had people in place that were already really good. The one thing that is the little asterisk to this is that her second in command is Matt Booty. He's been around for a long time. He's in. He's a gamer, gaming guy, whatever. And, you know, this is like if you have, like an unqualified president, but the vice president has been around for a long time and he's got all the experience and maybe it's going to be okay. And, you know, we'. But yeah, this kind of came out of. Well, it felt like it came out of nowhere, so. So we will see. Now, there has been a bunch of reporting on this, of course, some good, some bad, some indifferent. But one of the stories that came out of this was that IGN had gotten hold of the information that this was happening and they had to come out early originally. They were meant to announce this a little bit later. I don't know what to say to that. Sarah Bond allegedly was behind this Xbox everywhere. Strategy. And this is. Again, I don't actually agree with this, but there were a lot of criticism of the ads that were like, this is an Xbox, and this is an Xbox, and this is an Xbox. And people are like, what are you talking about? Consoles and Xbox? It's like, guys, this is the new. It's a new business. The. The point of this is you can play these games anywhere. Right? And I, Again, given the cards they were dealt, given the situation out in the market, given the way the world has gone, there's a reason they bought Activision Blizzard. You don't spend $68 billion for no reason. It was to transform Xbox, or really Microsoft Gaming, but Xbox, into a game publisher. Right?
- [18:29]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [18:31]
Richard Campbell
Way down at the end of the show, there's a nice report about video game sales from last year. And it's kind of interesting in a couple of ways how Xbox actually is still doing really well, which I think is going to surprise some people, if you haven't seen it already.
- [18:45]
Leo Laporte
I think there's another side of this as well, which is that part of making that deal with Activision Blizzard was saying, we are going to publish all games everywhere, which is good for the game studio business, but kind of bad for Xbox. Like, you basically said, Xbox gets no exclusives.
- [19:02]
Richard Campbell
Yes, but the. So the way that people get wrapped up in exclusives when it comes to video game consoles is kind of kind of freaks me out. The best games I play are not games that are limited to one piece of hardware ever. You know, like, ever. The best thing that ever happened to, like, a game like Call of Duty was letting me play first against PlayStation guys and then later also PC guys, because that dramatically expands the audience. That makes that everyone better, including the people who have an Xbox. So if you are gonna sell Xbox hardware, I guess one of the goals should be to optimize your own games so that they look as good as they can look on that console. I think one of the things that stalled in this generation was that they came out of the gate, I'm gonna say, a little bit behind PlayStation. Sony advanced the PlayStation with a. What do you call it, the plus model. What's the pro model, whatever. You know, raising the bar a little bit yet again. That's something Microsoft had done in the past, did not do this generation. And one thing we saw kind of repeatedly, it didn't matter where the game came from, but most games basically ran and looked better on PlayStation than they did on Xbox. And I. That was not by design on Microsoft's part, other than the fact that they did at one point very clearly just kind of give up. You know, they did a mild refresh, remember, but they didn't advance the technology in any way. Right? No.
- [20:28]
Leo Laporte
And we've kind of been at a wall for a while, hardware wise. Like.
- [20:32]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [20:33]
Leo Laporte
One of the arguments has been we can't afford better hardware because we can't afford to use the hardware we have. It costs too much to make a game that presses the limits of the PS5 and the, and the One X.
- [20:45]
Richard Campbell
And it's, it's a little bit worse than that too because in essence what they've done is made that wall higher by raising prices of the Xbox twice in the United States last year, by the way. And you know, again, a lot of what Microsoft is doing is not some warped strategy that anyone logical would look at and say this doesn't make any sense. It is a response to what's happening out in the world. Right. And so, you know, in many ways that's, that's been the problem. And that's what I mean by when I talk about, you know, your play, the hand you're dealt. A lot of it is just, you know, external forces and you know, yeah, maybe they made some mistakes here and there as well. But I mean, I think a big chunk.
- [21:22]
Leo Laporte
One of the arguments for having the core AI leader in there is that AI technology needs to be applied to game development. Game development costs for tier one games need to go down.
- [21:33]
Richard Campbell
Yes.
- [21:33]
Leo Laporte
For there to be a window to a next generation set of consoles.
- [21:38]
Richard Campbell
Interestingly, she went out of her way to claim that that's not what she's going to do. Right.
- [21:45]
Paul Thurrott
Although again, she said AI slop.
- [21:48]
Richard Campbell
Right, Exactly. I was going to say there's always an asterisk. And the asterisk is. She said AI slop. The thing that the three Focuses that she said were great games. The return of Xbox. Interesting. And the future of Play. Now that may sound. Look great games. Okay, we can throw that one in the trash. Everyone that makes games wants to make great games. The return of Xbox sounds like the return of the console. But they were talking about consoles. Right. Like even though Microsoft didn't come out the gate with the first Xbox branded portable gaming machine, they still intended to make one. That would be part of this family of things. We know they've been talking for the past two years about it. There's a next gen console is coming, so that's not actually new. The future of play. The hell can that be? I don't even know what that means. To me, the future of play is what they're already doing, which is the Xbox Everywhere strategy that everyone seems to hate so much. The future of play is not limiting the play to that one device. Right. Which look, if you have an audience of tens of, you know, almost 100 million people, whatever it is, PlayStation or a Nintendo Switch. Yes. I mean limiting, so to speak, is not really limiting at that point because you have a built in audience, it's great, it's a nice virtuous cycle kind of a thing. You know, the Xbox doesn't get to benefit from that. And so taking the, you know, AAA games or franchises that they have internally and bringing them, if they're not already there, to other platforms actually does make sense. So yeah, we'll see. Apparently Sarah Bond was not very well liked internally. That explains maybe why she wouldn't be the next person that said she was really easy to work with if you were outside of Microsoft. So if you were a partner, a developer, a game publisher, whatever, they loved her.
- [23:49]
Leo Laporte
I gotta tell you, I hear this theme over and over again lately that the most important thing you can do as a senior person at Microsoft is have a great, great relationship with Satya. Like that has a very strong effect on your outcome. More than your performance as I work?
- [24:06]
Richard Campbell
Nope. Any leader of anything, whether it's a country, a company, whatever, needs the friction of someone second guessing you and then needs to be able to admit when they're wrong. You know, when confronted by evidence that shows that the path you're on is incorrect, you need to have the self awareness or whatever you want to call it, to reverse course. That's not flip flopping. It's not, you know, that's smart.
- [24:32]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. And so that's my concern here, is that it's starting to feel like if you don't say yes to Satya, you haven't a chance.
- [24:39]
Richard Campbell
No. We can apply that logic to Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond. By the way, I mean one of the complaints there was if you weren't on board with her Xbox Everywhere strategy, you were on the outs with her and those people didn't like that. And look it, I don't mean to say I champion, I sort of agree that this is the right path forward given again the way the market's gone. But I'm not the be all end all of anything. So I hope that she was listening to criticism and then could, if the criticism was incorrect, she could answer that and if she was incorrect, she would change course, you know, if possible. Yeah, I don't know I don't know. I don't know.
- [25:15]
Leo Laporte
To have a CEO of Xbox though, this is killing me.
- [25:18]
Richard Campbell
This.
- [25:18]
Leo Laporte
All these CEOs, like, really, this is.
- [25:21]
Richard Campbell
Look, I.
- [25:23]
Paul Thurrott
They're there to run interference with Satya.
- [25:25]
Richard Campbell
No. So this is just the title thing. This is like at some point, I don't remember, it was somebody. If you look at a product like Windows, which has had 7 to 10 different product versions over the years, however you want to count it, whatever it is small, right. You could look at a browser like Firefox just came out, I think with version 148, you know, and it's like version numbers don't mean anything, you know, anymore. Yeah, no, they do. They actually mean quite a bit. You're still in the old world. It's okay. It's okay that this thing is on a six or four week product strategy or product release cycle, whatever. It's a different kind of product. It's not Windows. Although Windows has to adjust to. Right. So if you kind of apply that thought to why do we have a CEO is the leader of a company, which is the traditional view of a company. It's like, yeah, no, I agree with you. Richard and I both have talked about this a lot. This notion that over time there is like a. There are too many people of one title. It's like, all right, we have to invite the new title. Like, we have too many. We have all these product managers and product managers. Project. They say product and program managers. So it's like, all right, now we have directors, now we have whatever. And then it's like senior vice president, vice president. And then it's like right now the
- [26:43]
Leo Laporte
chain at Microsoft is vp, then corporate vice president, then president and then executive vice president. There you go.
- [26:51]
Richard Campbell
But now we also have these CEOs. So we have a CEO of Microsoft AI. We have CEO of Microsoft Gaming, apparently Microsoft commercial. Yeah. When Phil Spencer came in, he used to just call himself the head of Xbox. You know, that's the way he talks. You know, he's like, I'm in charge of Xbox.
- [27:07]
Leo Laporte
You know, I'm responsible for Xbox.
- [27:09]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I'm the parent. I don't know if you are familiar at all with the history of Xbox. You may know that one of the characters who was part of the core group in the early days was Seamus Blackley, gigantic, redheaded, well, formally redheaded gentleman who is friends with all of the people that were in the industry 25 years ago still. And like a lot of people from the old days, there's a woman who I don't know her name, but she's an Xbox person I never heard of, but has been heavily critical of the Xbox under Phil Spencer because it's not like what it was, the vision they had, although I would point out that the vision they had failed, but whatever was incredibly critical of this woman, while also sort of admitting like, you know, the old way of thinking about things doesn't work. Which is sort of what I was just saying, right, that, you know, we live in a different world. Today. Microsoft's world is very much focused on AI. And like Richard said, it's not difficult to understand how generative AI could be used to improve games or at least to help develop games. Right. If you, you may disagree about it being an improvement, an overly simplistic version is the, the thing I always bring up, which is some kind of an open world game where there's like an infinite number of side quests that you could go on that maybe parts of are generated by AI as you go. The, the buildings, the land, the, the actual quest itself, the people you interact with, the conversations you have or whatever it might be. I mean, to me this just makes sense. I talk about Call of Duty and how all these levels and all these games are all the same. It's the same, it's the same, it's the same. But, you know, some of them work better than others. Some of them work really, really well. And I feel like one of the things AI is good at is taking existing content, putting it in a churner and, you know, spitting out something like it. And I gotta be honest, I mean, if you look at the, whatever 16 multiplayer titles or maps rather that the most recent Call of Duty launch with, I mean, four of them are really good. Could we have eight more that are like those? You know, they don't have to be the same level, they don't have to be the same, they don't have to look the same, they don't have, you know, but I mean, maybe there's something there. But like I said, this woman Sharma has, you know, been very careful to separate herself from her past. You know, don't assume that just because now I'm doing this that I'm going to pull in all that, you know, the slop, as she said, which is a word Microsoft really doesn't like, which is kind of what makes that interesting that she said that. Anyway, Seamus Blackley's advice for this woman is twofold. One is that if she can't develop a passion for games, she should leave. And also that she needs to gain the trust of the community. And that one, I completely, Well, I guess I technically agree with both, although I feel like the first one's a little harsh. We don't know what her passion is. But gaining the trust of the community, that may be an impossible task. And I wonder, you know, it seems to me, you know, think about like Satya Nadella when he came in, right, he didn't actually bring in anything new from like ideas or business models or anything like that.
- [30:43]
Leo Laporte
He was one of the kinder, gentler. Microsoft.
- [30:45]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [30:46]
Richard Campbell
Well, but that's. That happened that, that happened as he came in. But if you look at him like when he, when he just came in, right, you know, from the outside, what he was doing, what he did and then what he did do, I mean, really was stuff that all started on Steve Ballmer. And if you have watched or read any of the recent Steve Ballmer interviews, it's actually, it's very insightful. He basically came to understand that I couldn't push this stuff through the board myself because we had a history and they weren't going to listen to me and that what we needed was new blood. And so Satya was like this younger kind of breath of fresh air kind of a thing and helped I think, revitalize the outside impression of Microsoft as a company. It wasn't this stodgy software maker, Office Windows Server from the past. It was, yeah, he had a much
- [31:39]
Leo Laporte
more new age vibe, but he at that time was president of Server and Tools, which included Azure. So he was a cloud guy with Guthrie as his architect.
- [31:49]
Richard Campbell
No, I'm not disagreeing with you. I just mean from the perspective of Wall street or customers, investors, whatever.
- [31:57]
Leo Laporte
And part of this was Ballmer been the guy who said Linux is a cancer and now Linux was a primary product on Azure.
- [32:04]
Richard Campbell
Yep. Yeah, it makes it hard for you to go. Steve Ballmer could not appear at a open source convention and give a speech. Right. He just, it just wouldn't happen. He couldn't do it. The history was just bad. Even though the company had changed under him. And so maybe what we should be doing is looking at her in that light. Does she bring, is she a breath of fresh air? Is she younger, maybe dynamic and has new ideas that maybe, maybe. Again, I'm not, I'm not saying I don't know anything about her, but I feel like we need to give her that chance.
- [32:39]
Leo Laporte
I, I agree. She's in her 30s.
- [32:42]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Geez. I mean, I mean, I don't know what the demographics of gamers are something
- [32:47]
Leo Laporte
going for that she's, you know.
- [32:49]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. And we're going to find out if it's real. Well. Or, and, or we're going to find out if it's applicable to gaming. Maybe it's the better way to say it.
- [32:57]
Leo Laporte
Well, in some ways it's like we kind of need a new vision for gaming because the old one has been mired in the muck for a while. So.
- [33:04]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. And again I just. But I want to be clear like, like Steve Ballmer. I think people might look at this and think, well this was Phil Spencer's fault. And I'm like, I don't, I don't think so. I think we have Xbox today, we have Activision Blizzard today because he was able to push that stuff through. I feel like had someone else been running that business it would have been spun off maybe, which I know some people want, or would have failed in some other way or would have failed sooner or whatever. However you want to say it. I feel like he. It's possible that he is a. I compared him earlier to Terry Myerson and Pano Spade. Maybe the better comparison is Steve Ballmer. Right. I feel like we're going to find out more in the future but for now we have this thing, you know, we have what we have. So this new Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma was interviewed by Windows Central, which is. She really went to the hard hitting place first, I guess and she said all the right things. Right. She talked about the return to Xbox as a return to the spirit that the team was founded on, not the return to console, by the way. I think that's kind of interesting. She was a baby when this happened. But in her words she's heard the terms renegade, rebellion and fun and she's like, that's what I was thinking when I wrote that, you know, this year is going to be the 25th anniversary by the way, of the OG Xbox, you know, which was a PC by the way, just like all the modern ones are.
- [34:39]
Leo Laporte
All of them.
- [34:40]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, all of them except for the 360. Right. Which oddly was the one that did great. Yeah.
- [34:46]
Leo Laporte
But it was also a bear to Write games for PlayStation done the same thing. And they both came back with the gaming industry going, don't do that again. Yeah.
- [34:56]
Richard Campbell
And I don't think this is unique to 360, but I think it was exaggerated with 360 that the initial games that came out for it didn't necessarily take advantage of the hardware and that over time you could see that improve by the Time that thing ended its run, it was a different thing altogether. It had really gotten a big boost.
- [35:17]
Leo Laporte
Well, there were two problems. One is it took a long time to get the hardware ready. So the game developers were running on emulators for a long time. Yeah, right.
- [35:25]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [35:26]
Leo Laporte
Well, I mean, yeah, the hardware. A lot of their games didn't run properly and they tried to fix things and it takes a while to learn how to use that stuff.
- [35:34]
Richard Campbell
Yes, PowerPC architecture is crazy. I mean, at the time that seemed like the future, I guess, but that
- [35:41]
Leo Laporte
was the VLSI era, the make your own chips era. Very much so. And then it went to no, the standard general purpose chips are fast enough, if not faster and cheaper to make.
- [35:54]
Richard Campbell
Well, that's. Yeah, that's the beauty.
- [35:55]
Leo Laporte
Some ways we're kind of getting back to custom chips again.
- [35:58]
Richard Campbell
Well, I mean, we're at the point now where mainstream PC microprocessors, which are really SoCs that have a GPU, MPU and a CPU are fantastic for.
- [36:09]
Leo Laporte
Well, they're deeply integrated. Right?
- [36:11]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, they're fantastic.
- [36:12]
Leo Laporte
Plus we also have the TSMCs of the world. So making custom hardware has never been easier.
- [36:18]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, until China invades and then we'll see what happens there. Yeah. But yes, fair enough. So we'll see.
- [36:24]
Leo Laporte
The thing is, we're here, we are talking about new console hardware when you can't get anything made.
- [36:29]
Richard Campbell
Right now, if you read this interview and you look for any hint about new console hardware, you almost will not find it. I mean even that the one of the three goals which was return to Xbox, which I know for an Xbox fan who believes that consoles to be all and end all their ears perk right up. She's very careful to explain what she means by this. You know, we're going to make sure Xbox is a great place for developers and players. Yeah, that's what we've been doing all along. We want to invest in reducing the divide between different types of devices that they want to use with us. That's exactly what Xbox anywhere is everywhere. We're going to invest more in breaking down those barriers and helping developers build once and show up across different hardware experiences. That to me says windows in the console. I don't think anything's changing there. It doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean that nothing changes. It's just that I don't see the thing where she very explicitly says, sorry, this is like maybe the key point. This is her words. I believe Xbox starts with its fans and will grow from there. That's what I wanted to signal with the return to Xbox. In other words. I mean, Yes. I mean you could say, well, their fans want a console.
- [37:43]
Leo Laporte
I'm telling you what you want to hear.
- [37:45]
Richard Campbell
That's all that is. Yeah.
- [37:46]
Leo Laporte
Right. And now, now your, your bomber point is well set. Right. It's like, hey, the Spencer and Bond set them on this course.
- [37:55]
Richard Campbell
Yep.
- [37:56]
Leo Laporte
But are almost obstacles delivering it. And so, yeah.
- [37:59]
Richard Campbell
So look, the thing is like, will this woman have the same impact on this business that Satya did on Microsoft more broadly? Does she have. Because you know, you got to remember this business, whatever it is, is is not the enterprise, the, the cloud, slash, now AI audience, you know, big business, whatever. These are people, these are a lot of men, a lot of now middle aged men probably they have their. They're kind of setting their ways with what they think Xbox is or should be.
- [38:38]
Paul Thurrott
I don't know.
- [38:39]
Richard Campbell
I mean it's not her fault, but necessarily. We'll see. But in other words, if she follows through on what Phil and Sarah Bond would have done anyway, if that's all she does, does that help sell it somehow? Does that make it better for people? I don't see how it could. So I don't know. I'm worried for her. I mean, I'm more worried for Xbox. Not because I feel like she's unqualified necessarily, although we're going to find out. But I do feel like the Matt Booty thing is this fallback, the escape hatch. Right. So when she goes to get a job at the next food delivery service upstart or whatever it is, we have this guy and this guy. Unfortunately, or seriously, for better or worse,
- [39:28]
Paul Thurrott
it's always a parade at your place, isn't it?
- [39:31]
Richard Campbell
Well, not always, but for some reason during this podcast. Sorry, the. I don't know how to say this, it sounds almost racist and I apologize. But unfortunately, or whatever, just matter of circumstance, I think for a lot of Xbox gamers, the guys. And it's got it is guys who feel the most strongly about consoles and whatever nonsense that we all care about see themselves in the mirror. When they look at this guy Mad Booty. They do not see themselves in her.
- [40:04]
Paul Thurrott
That's what Gamergate was all about.
- [40:06]
Richard Campbell
Yep, it sure was. No, it's just. I know. I don't think we're ever going to escape it. I. This is the. This is what I mean, it's sad, it's unfortunate, it's not fair, it's not right.
- [40:14]
Paul Thurrott
It also ruins the culture. I'll be honest, for everybody, 100%. Those guys.
- [40:19]
Richard Campbell
100%. So I. My knee jerk reaction to Seamus Blackley, for example, or anyone. There was a guy on Twitter I lost my mind on who was talking about how she's Indian and that's why she was. Stop, please, dear God, it's DEI man. Yeah, it's like, what are you talking? Are you mental? Like this is letting the worst of the worst have their moment in the sun and they don't deserve that moment. And she deserves a chance. And we'll see. And look, if she fails or she does something I disagree with, I will be critical of that. But it's not because she's a woman. It's not because she came out of AI. It's not because she's Indian or whatever she is, because I don't care about that. I do care about Xbox in the business and I want it to survive and thrive and I hope that this gets us there. And I, I don't see anything. Well, I meant I like Phil Spencer, but what I see is the like the negativity like that Pavan Davalori got when he was like, we're going to talk about AI and copilot it ignite. Because of course we are. We're Microsoft. That's what we do. And the world lost their mind on this guy. And that was unfair.
- [41:32]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it was unfair, but it was also not reading the room. The lash back against AI is large,
- [41:39]
Richard Campbell
I guess, but I mean it was a fairly innocuous tweet.
- [41:43]
Paul Thurrott
I think what she said actually makes sense and we're not going to fill it with slop just because we can. And I think it's clear there's a role for AI engineering.
- [41:51]
Richard Campbell
It's the right thing to say. Right?
- [41:53]
Paul Thurrott
You know, our 23 year old son, who's a serious gamer, is adamant. I don't want to play games with AI in it. You know, I think that that is a commonly held point of view. I don't think it's gonna wear age.
- [42:09]
Richard Campbell
Well, no, and I understand why. I mean you better than anybody. I think because you're, you're deeply invested in AI and using it and you see it. I think you would agree that people are going to have, or have already had in some cases a moment where they're like, oh, oh. Actually that's. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Right? You know what I mean?
- [42:30]
Paul Thurrott
The thing I always bring up is in Skyrim, when you meet an NPC who says, I used to be a warrior like you, but then I got an arrow through the knee. And the 500th time you hear that, you wish some AI would come in and write some new block for you.
- [42:45]
Richard Campbell
That's what I mean. It could be like that. It could be in that wheelhouse, you
- [42:51]
Paul Thurrott
know, and there will be. There will be awful uses of AI.
- [42:55]
Richard Campbell
And I said this really early on. AI will win awards for writing, for making music, for making videos. It will win awards for video games. And this whole AI has such a. I'm not. And again, I'm not like an idiot about it. Like, I don't mean everything is awesome. It never makes any mistakes. It's fantastic. Whatever. I don't mean that. But it's. It has a bad rap. And if, you know, I look at some things that people say about AI and I think if you replace the term AI with spell check or just technology, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But people hear AI and they stop listening, they lose their minds.
- [43:37]
Paul Thurrott
This is the world, get ready. I mean, we're going to see this big split, a schism in the world between haters and lovers of AI and there's really very little middle ground, unfortunately.
- [43:50]
Richard Campbell
But this is the. This is basically politics.
- [43:54]
Paul Thurrott
It's.
- [43:54]
Richard Campbell
We have to make the people who disagree with us look like non humans.
- [43:58]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's what's happened, hasn't it?
- [44:00]
Richard Campbell
And that makes them. Then we don't even have to pay attention anymore. We're not going to debate anything. We're not going to find middle ground. We're not going to arrive at some consensus. We're just going to say, no, you're an idiot and you have no. You have nothing of value to offer. I've stopped listening to you and I. That makes me not. It's not. Sad is not the word. That's horrific. Yeah, it's a very bad outcome. It's the worst possible outcome.
- [44:27]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [44:32]
Paul Thurrott
Let's take a little break. What do you say? And we will continue on. We did the Xbox segment first. That's a. That's a good thing.
- [44:40]
Richard Campbell
Well, I did that. We have. Yeah, we just.
- [44:42]
Paul Thurrott
There's the one story and there's brown liquor and all sorts of good stuff ahead. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Mr. Richard Campbell. Richard and I are heading to Florida next week. Micah will be in filling in for me. Richard and I are going to Zero Trust World, which is Threat Locker, one of our sponsor, Threat Lockers. Big security conference. Should be a lot of fun. Steve Gibson and I are going to do a presentation there and Richard will be. We got him A. You know, all these conferences now have podcast centers, right? Booths. So we got him a little. I don't know what it'll be like a little podcast booth.
- [45:19]
Leo Laporte
It's more of a lounge, but it'll do.
- [45:21]
Paul Thurrott
It'll do.
- [45:21]
Leo Laporte
I've seen the layout of it.
- [45:22]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, you've seen it. Okay.
- [45:24]
Leo Laporte
While I'm there too.
- [45:25]
Paul Thurrott
I will not be able to be there. I have to go do things. But I will be back two weeks hence. And Micah loves doing this show.
- [45:35]
Richard Campbell
Good. We love Micah.
- [45:37]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, he's great.
- [45:38]
Richard Campbell
So that everybody loves Micah. Who doesn't love Micah?
- [45:40]
Paul Thurrott
Who does?
- [45:40]
Richard Campbell
That's a way to judge somebody, you know. You don't like Micah, something wrong with you, man.
- [45:44]
Paul Thurrott
They should put him in charge of Xbox.
- [45:46]
Richard Campbell
That's right. Yeah, yeah. We're not. What do you mean? We're not doing shooters anymore.
- [45:54]
Paul Thurrott
He is.
- [45:54]
Richard Campbell
He's.
- [45:55]
Paul Thurrott
That's probably would be the negative. He's a very kind gentleman.
- [45:58]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, he's a little too gentle, you know? No, I want to kill something, by the way.
- [46:01]
Paul Thurrott
That's the argument for Asha is let's get a woman in there. It can only help video games to add some diversity, different points of view. I think there are a lot of people like me who are, you know, I like a good first person shooter. Shooter once in a while, but I'd like to see more gaming styles out there.
- [46:21]
Richard Campbell
Of course. I mean, this is the thing. Like, this is what people are upset about. Some feature in Windows 11. Like, I don't want that in there. And it's like. But you don't mind that it's in there for other people, right? Like if you can, if you can turn it off or ignore it, you don't want to eradicate it for everybody. Right. You just don't want to see it yourself. And they're like, no, I want to get rid of it entirely. Like, yeah, you're the problem then. It's you. It's you.
- [46:42]
Paul Thurrott
It's all about me.
- [46:43]
Richard Campbell
Yep.
- [46:44]
Paul Thurrott
Our show today, brought to you by our sponsor, Bit Warden. Love these guys. The trusted leader in passwords, pass keys and secrets management. You know, Steve Gibson yesterday did a. A whole segment on security now about that ETH Zurich finding it was related to Bitwarden, Dashlane and LastPass. They said those are.
- [47:06]
Leo Laporte
We.
- [47:06]
Paul Thurrott
We had to use these three because these are the only ones that had open source client side. So software so that we could in fact test this. And what they tested is what happens if a malicious actor gets control of the vault.
- [47:21]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [47:22]
Paul Thurrott
And in all three Cases there were bad things a malicious actor could do. I loved Bitwarden's response and I just wanted to mention this because I know you probably saw this and maybe you just read the headline and thought, oh no. Bitwarden's response is thank you to Eth Zurich. This is why we're open source. This is why we have people audit our code. It helps us get better. Their response was not defensive. It was not, oh no, you guys are, you know, making it up. It was, we're gonna fix this. It is. And Steve's point during the show was it is not a hair on fire situation. This is not something anybody needs to really worry about. But this is why I love Bit Warden and why I think open source is so important. For stuff like this, for anything that uses crypto, people have to be able to look at it, they have to be able to bang on it, they have to be able to find flaws so they can be fixed. Bitwarden is consistently ranked number one in user satisfaction by G2 and software reviews. They've got 10 million users. They take that user base very seriously. They want to give you the best product. They're in 180 countries by the way, and this is probably, maybe surprising, but it's not just for individuals. 50,000 businesses use Bitwarden and that's one of the things Bitwarden really takes seriously is their commitment to you to make the best possible product. Whether you're protecting one account or thousands. Bit Warden keeps you secure all year long, consistent updates. I'll give you an example. They just added to the enterprise a feature that every enterprise needs. Bit Warden's Access intelligence. It lets organizations detect weak, reused or exposed credentials and immediately guide remediation. Getting your users to replace risky passwords with strong unique ones, which closes a major security gap. Credentials are one of the top causes of breaches. Bitwarden's access intelligence helps your business make sure that those bad passwords are visible, prioritized and corrected before exploitation can occur. And incidentally, Bitwarden builds very much a very similar feature into the personal versions of Bitwarden as well. So that if you as a user have a bad password, who doesn't, right? Or a reused password, Bitwarden will let you know and help you fix it. Bitwarden also cares a lot about individual users. For instance, they just created Bitwarden Lite. I love this. A lightweight, self hosted version of Bitwarden's password manager. It's built for home labs, personal projects, any environment that wants a quick setup with Minimal overhead. So you can host your own vault, which is great. And it's very easy to do. Bitwarden supports direct import from by the way, a lot of people have, you know, get into password managers by using their browser. Not necessarily the best, not only in terms of security but in terms of convenience because it's on, you know, one machine, maybe it syncs to another, but is it on your phone? Is it everywhere? Bitwarden is. So Bitwarden supports direct import from the browser Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi into the encrypted vault without that separate plain text export. So that simplifies migration but also reduces the exposure associated with that manual export. You got to make sure you delete the in the clear password dump that you just put there on the hard drive. You don't have to do that. It just goes straight from the browser into Bitwarden. G2 Winter 2025 reported Bitwarden continues to hold strong as number one in every enterprise category. And that wasn't just for the last quarter. That was for the last six straight quarters. People love it. Bitwarden setup is easy. It imports from most password management solutions. So the move the migration is simple. Took Steve Gibson and me minutes to do it when we did it a few years ago and I've never looked back. Bitwarden's open source code is reg. This is important. Again, regularly audited by third party experts, Bitwarden welcomes that publishes the results of those reports. You can look at it too. It's right there. GPL licensed on GitHub. Bitwarden meets SoC2 type 2 GDPR HIPAA CCPA standards. It's ISO 270012002 certified. Bottom line, get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan for your business or as an individual, free for life forever across all devices, all for free as an individual user@bitwarden.com twit that's bitwarden.com twit bitwarden.com twit it's the best bitwarden.com twit we thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. Oh, Paul left and came back. So now you've rotated. So I'm going to rotate you back.
- [52:04]
Richard Campbell
I'm comfortable with it and I know that our viewers will also handle this in a mature fashion.
- [52:10]
Paul Thurrott
No they won't. No, they won't.
- [52:12]
Leo Laporte
What happened?
- [52:13]
Richard Campbell
Paul?
- [52:16]
Paul Thurrott
Let's. I guess we should talk about Windows. What you what you got?
- [52:20]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. Interesting week. The first one is The Wall Street Journal had a report about Nvidia entering the PC market again with a new system on a chip design. And they completely screwed everything up. They have no idea what they're talking about. Nice.
- [52:36]
Leo Laporte
It's like they described it wrong. Just a bad article.
- [52:39]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, you can tell when people don't know what they're writing about. So there are two different things happening. Nvidia invested, I think it was $5 billion in intel, probably to please the US government. They certainly have nothing to offer Nvidia. But one of the things that intel is going to do is make it. Which they don't even need to do. I don't know why they're doing this, but they're going to integrate an Nvidia GPU into one of their processor SoCs in the future. Right. So today if you think about like Intel Core Ultra CPUs of the Panther Lake generation, they have really nice. Actually the GPU is awesome. But you know, cpu, gpu, NPU on board, on the die. So imagine that. But with an Nvidia gpu, which would be a step up for sure. But okay.
- [53:26]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. It's just that they run hotter and they're bigger. Like one of the things about those integrated chips is that they're really, really efficient. Right. They may not be the fastest things, but they are capable of sitting in a die and not overheating it.
- [53:39]
Richard Campbell
I don't have this in front of me, but the computer I'm using now is whatever. It's an Intel Core Ultra 7 something. It does have a dedicated Nvidia GPU 16 inch screen, which I love. I do have a Panther Lake laptop. It's a 14 inch screen, so maybe they're not directly.
- [53:59]
Leo Laporte
And they use the X E3, right?
- [54:01]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, that's the one with the nice. Yeah, the really. The nice one. I will. They're not 100% indistinguishable. The Nvidia one's a little bit better, but honestly they're close enough where it's like, oh my God. This is actually really interesting. I haven't written about this yet, but I got in a. It's a Lenovo ThinkPad P series portable workstation, 16 inch screen. This thing is like an inch thick. I haven't seen a laptop this thick in possibly 15 years or more. I don't. It's been a long time, but this thing has. I already forgot the name of it. It's whatever the latest RTX Broadwell gen. It's a high number. It's like I didn't even know this existed. This is not designed to play video games. Right. This is a workstation. But you know, I put Call of Duty on it. I got to tell you, I keep having this experience where you play games and you start seeing things you've never seen in the game you play every single day and you're like, what is happening? Like, I fell down on the ground in the game on purpose and there's grass in front of me and there are bees buzzing around and I'm like, I have never seen bees in this game. What is happening? Like there's like a whole new, like, you know, it's like your eyes were improved or something. Like it's, it's, it's the next level. Like, it's amazing. It makes. It looks basically as good as like battle. What do you call it? Battlefield 6 looks like it's really good. So there are levels of these things. Right, but. So that's intel and Nvidia. Right. And that partnership, you know, we'll see what happens. But. But we also know that Nvidia has been trying to get into the market for ARM based SoCs. And we've heard reports now, and the CEO of Nvidia confirmed this on stage one day late last year. They are working with MediaTek. MediaTek is a company that put out a Copilot Plus PC level ARM based SoC last year for Chromebook plus machines. Right. Which if you put Windows on that thing, if you could, it would be a Copilot plus PC. Like it's, it has the, you know,
- [56:01]
Leo Laporte
powerful and tops that kind of thing. They're doing highly integrated soc as well.
- [56:08]
Richard Campbell
Yep. So the Wall Street Journal report is commingling these things. These are two different things. Now I'm going to read between the lines a little bit because I know that the intel thing is not happening anytime soon. But according to this publication, Dell, Lenovo and others will begin selling Windows 11 PCs based on this new Nvidia MediaTek chip. This is happening in the first half of the year. So soon it's a return to the consumer market, which they don't, I don't think they explained in the article, but they were the chip behind Windows RT. Right. When Microsoft was developing Windows 8 and RT side by side, which is the same system essentially. Right. They looked at using ti, Qualcomm and Nvidia. And I want to say one more that I'm forgetting. I don't know, Sam, I don't remember the other one. I think there was one more. They went to market with Nvidia and they chose Nvidia because of the graphics. Windows RT and Surface RT obviously failed, but it wasn't. I wouldn't say it was Nvidia's fault. Right. I mean, a big chunk of this was Microsoft, but a big part of it too is just the state of ARM at the time. There was no way for the ARM chips of that day to emulate x886 code. So that wasn't on the table. Well, it wasn't possible. They just didn't do it. But you have to think that they looked at this. I mean, it's such an obvious capability, but they weren't capable of that at the time. Now that's not the true. That's not the case anymore, obviously.
- [57:31]
Leo Laporte
That line's been passed a while ago now.
- [57:32]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, thanks to the success of Snapdragon X and the Prism emulator that Microsoft has, the platform is just elevated dramatically. And it's. To me, it's actually the best route to go. But the Wall Street Journal doesn't know that, apparently. They don't mention that. They do say that this new partnership that they have will result in hardware that runs Windows but can compete more directly with the latest MacBook model. So it's like, okay, I mean, that's what Snapchat does.
- [58:01]
Leo Laporte
Matter.
- [58:01]
Richard Campbell
Okay, whatever. Competition's good. That's fine. I'm glad to see it. I'm curious. Mobile World Congress is any day now, right? It's sometime in March. That seems like the obvious time to announce anything. So when they talk about computers coming out in the first half of the year, I have to believe that MediaTek,/Nvidia Microsoft will announce something maybe at Mobile World Congress. I've not heard that. I don't know that for a fact.
- [58:25]
Leo Laporte
It's the first week of March, same time that we're at.
- [58:28]
Richard Campbell
Okay.
- [58:30]
Paul Thurrott
I hope they support Linux too. This would be nice.
- [58:33]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, that I don't know. I do know on the Qualcomm side that they talk about that a lot. I mean, there's, you know, there's a big push there for that. That said, running Linux on those machines is actually incredibly difficult. In my experience, it is.
- [58:47]
Paul Thurrott
No, you're right. But I would imagine traditionally been really good with Linux, but Nvidia less so.
- [58:53]
Leo Laporte
So.
- [58:54]
Paul Thurrott
Well.
- [58:55]
Richard Campbell
Oh, that's interesting. Okay. Yeah, yeah. X2, I would think. Same time frame. I mean, we were expecting first half of the year, etc. Etc. So we'll see what that looks like. I just say I'm upset By how? The person that wrote this has no idea what they're talking about, obviously. But clearly something is about to happen. So that's why that report appeared. So that's good news. So if you've been waiting for this, you've been wondering when's that reported exclusive contract between Qualcomm and Microsoft going to run out? I think it just did. So it looks like we're going to finally get this. So we'll see what that looks like. We're not going to see that from the Wall Street Journal report, but we'll see it soon.
- [59:39]
Paul Thurrott
Who is the author? Just so we know who to not read.
- [59:42]
Richard Campbell
No, I don't. Look, this is, I don't know and please, if someone's going to throw it in the discord, it doesn't matter. This is an esoteric niche part of our market. It's not to be unexpected. That. Well, look, you.
- [59:57]
Paul Thurrott
But that's all we have. You, Paul, and that's why you guys exist.
- [60:00]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I mean, look, you're in. I know too much about this stuff, right? So these guys, they know that because they announced it. Intel and Nvidia have a partnership and they're going to work on this thing. That's a fact. Like this is.
- [60:11]
Paul Thurrott
And that's a scoop. I mean, that's good, right?
- [60:13]
Richard Campbell
It's happening, right? So, and then, you know, there have been reports and the guy, like I said, Jason, whatever his name is, the guy from Nvidia basically confirmed us on stage one day working with together on ARM based chips as well that will compete with Qualcomm and run, you know, Windows 11 on ARM, et cetera. So this has been, these things have been in the works, you know, so they're both happening. They're both separate, but they are both happening. I think the ARM one's going to happen first. Okay. All right, so it's Week D. Happy, happy Week D, everybody. My favorite. I assume by now we're all on board with that means, but last month, you may recall, they released the weekly Update for Windows 11 late, I think it was Thursday or Friday that week. This week it came out on Tuesday when it's supposed to. So that's good. So that suggests that the next Patch Tuesday update is on track. There's nothing new here. We've talked about this stuff multiple times. But this is a preview of the Patch Tuesday update we're going to get in two weeks. So this is things like Sysmon, you know, the Mark Russinovich system internals tool, camera settings for Pan and tilt, if you have that in your camera. The network speed test. That is not really in the taskbar, but that's what we're gonna call it. Improvements to Quick Machine Recovery, which is the way it should have been from
- [61:33]
Leo Laporte
the beginning for arm's a big deal, dude. I mean, for a system that. It is, anyway.
- [61:39]
Richard Campbell
Yep, yep. Isn't that the one they said they were never gonna make on arm, I think.
- [61:44]
Leo Laporte
Well, it's rsat, which is the more secure version of rcp. But yeah.
- [61:50]
Richard Campbell
Okay. You can use WEBP images on the background. That's fun. Emoji 16.0, which I know all of us are super excited about. And this is just. I don't even know why this is listed, but it says BitLocker improvements. But it's really a fix. There was a problem with BitLocker that I've never experienced, despite the fact that, by the way, I do this every week. You enter your recovery key in that blue screen and then. Not blue screen of death. Like, if the screen is blue, and then you move on. Apparently, a lot of people were doing that and the device stopped responding. So they fixed that. Whatever. Not for the first time, but notably Windows 1126H1 was part of the patch or the weekd updates.
- [62:36]
Leo Laporte
Okay.
- [62:37]
Richard Campbell
So that impacts three or five people.
- [62:41]
Leo Laporte
Both guys.
- [62:41]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, both guys. Yeah. But that also hints at the fact that the Snapdragon X2 is imminent. That, you know, there are laptops sitting there waiting to go out into the world. So I think that's going to happen pretty quick.
- [62:51]
Paul Thurrott
Want.
- [62:53]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, me too. So there's that then in the Insider program. I'm getting ready to give up, folks. Like, I'm trying. Right. This is a test of how much illogical behavior my brain can handle. And I got to tell you, it's overflowing at this point. Like, I can't deal with this anymore. God. I don't even explain this. So once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, we had this thing called the Windows Insider program. And you would. At the time, there were rings, but they became channels. But let's not worry about that too much. And then I miss Gabe. Yeah, we all miss Gabe. The. We missed the engineering part of it. You know, it's like, remember when this was about engineering? Yeah. I mean, it is, but just now, the engineering is ridiculously stupid. So we have whatever you want to call them, rings, channels, whatever. And typically these things target some version of Windows, but you get into these weird situations where you have two versions of Windows that are supported they are. New features are being tested in different channels, but they're the same features. And then a release preview build will come out, which is the thing that comes up before the week, the update, which is the thing that comes out before patch Tuesday. And depending on which version of Windows you're testing in the release preview, because it could be one of two, at any given time, you're going to get the same build, same features, but you have a different version of Windows. And if you don't understand what I just said, please just don't worry about it. It's ridiculous. It doesn't matter. We get into situations where Dev and Beta are testing exactly the same build and features for a long time and then they split. And now for the first time ever, they're both on different build streams of Windows, the same version of Windows. And you're like, what is it? Why on earth are you doing this? And the assumption is that they'll move on to the next version of Windows, which is 26H1. But now we know that's not happening. So the assumptions, maybe they're going to move on to 26H2. We nobody knows. And then we have Canary, right? Canary. The name Canary suggests that you will be the person testing the furthest out features first. Right? You're the Canary in the coal mine. That's the point. That's the name. That's why that name exists. You're going to hit it first. But if you enrolled a PC in Canary, you will have discovered that you were testing things last. And we'll get to that in a moment because there's a new Canary build, but whatever. Now, given everything I just said and I glossed over a lot of details because seriously, there's now two part. There's two different. They're not channels, they're sub channels. I don't know of the Canary channel. So last week they released an optional update that if you accepted it, if you went in and got it, you had to go get it. You won't just get it automatically. You are on a different build series. Just like Dev and Beta are at a different build series, but of the same version of Windows. But now within Canary, you can be on this different build series for 26H1, which is a system that will only ship for Snapdragon X2 based computers, but you today can test it on X86 computers for some reason. Okay, I, I don't know. I don't know what to tell you anymore. Like, it doesn't.
- [66:19]
Leo Laporte
You're not talking about the release preview at all. Like, it's. We thought. And maybe this is just you and me.
- [66:25]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [66:25]
Leo Laporte
Canary got it first. Then Dev.
- [66:27]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah.
- [66:28]
Leo Laporte
Then beta.
- [66:29]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [66:29]
Leo Laporte
Then Release candidate.
- [66:31]
Richard Campbell
The reason you think that is because your brain works and you're logical and that makes sense, and that is the right way to test software. It doesn't matter what we call these things, it doesn't matter how many of them are there are. But you start the one that's the furthest out, get feedback. Maybe you change a little bit, maybe you don't. You bring it to the next one, the next one, and then eventually you release it to the public. That is not the way the system works. It literally is like just an explosion of nonsense.
- [66:59]
Leo Laporte
Well, way back when we talked about. I think there's a bunch of different teams here. And now it's becoming clearer. Like, the ARM folks are on a different stream and maybe they need to be, because this is only the second one of these Snapchat games processors.
- [67:13]
Richard Campbell
The thing is, it is going to come together at some point, right? And that point will almost certainly be. Well, except it won't be. Right? So we talked about this. It's going to be 26H2, but also maybe Windows 12. You know what I mean? We don't know anyway, you know, like, some societies have or less societies, but some, like, you could go to a palm reader or something and they read like tea leaves in the bottom of a cup. This is like reading vomit, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, look at that. There's a new feature over there in the corner. Looks like some corn. And there's some more over there. It's just all over. It's gross.
- [67:52]
Leo Laporte
You're in the Insiders to get an insight into what's coming for Windows. And at the moment, it's hard to tell.
- [67:58]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, no, it's. It's absolutely ridiculous. And then before they announced that little bit of stupidity, there were three Windows Insider builds last week. Canary Dev and Beta. Okay, Dev and Beta, despite being. Whatever they are, are the same H2s. They're both 26 H2, but different versions or something. I don't know. It's there. I know, it's crazy.
- [68:23]
Leo Laporte
Canary Beta 1's the latest version of the dev one.
- [68:26]
Richard Campbell
And this is. I swear to God, even just talking about this gives. I think if I should have, like, a constant blood pressure monitor, it would be like, abort, abort. Stop talking about this. Your brain is hurt. You're hurting yourself. So if you're in Canary, God love You and God help you. What you got in this build? This is before the split was a bunch of stuff we already have everywhere else, right? Cross device, resume improvements.
- [68:51]
Leo Laporte
We talked about this a million times for Snapdragon 2.
- [68:55]
Richard Campbell
Well, no. Well, I mean. But also x64. Because the only people in the insider program are.
- [69:00]
Leo Laporte
It's both.
- [69:01]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I mean, even.
- [69:02]
Leo Laporte
Even though I can chew right now, to be doing testing a Canary.
- [69:05]
Richard Campbell
I know, I know. I. It's like I said, it makes me crazy. You know the Windows. Hello ESS stuff where you can have like an external fingerprint reader if one only existed?
- [69:14]
Leo Laporte
Second, I ordered one.
- [69:16]
Richard Campbell
Oh, you do. Look at the. Okay, great. That's great.
- [69:18]
Leo Laporte
So it's a usb little.
- [69:19]
Richard Campbell
Please send me the. The.
- [69:22]
Leo Laporte
I don't know that it works. I just ordered one. It's.
- [69:24]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, no, I want. I'm dying to see this. Anyway, who cares, right? This is stuff we've already seen.
- [69:28]
Paul Thurrott
Who cares if it works?
- [69:30]
Richard Campbell
Well, I mean. No, no, I mean, who cares what's in Canary? It's all. There's nothing new. I don't have anything to tell you. This is. You could just rewind it to four weeks ago and we talked about all of it already. Who cares? The stuff that went into dev and beta, which again, different build paths or whatever, Same features. Yeah, there's no end to the noise that can happen here. Oh, there it is. So that was two whales communicating with each other. I guess now they're chatting close to the ocean. Yeah, I know, and I did. I didn't think so either. Jesus.
- [70:07]
Paul Thurrott
There is very good sushi, though, in Mexico City, so there must be some seafood somewhere.
- [70:11]
Richard Campbell
Well, it's the Paris of Mexico. I mean, they get everything here, right? There you go. Anyway, there is improvements across context menus, settings and taskbar. I wouldn't describe any of these as major, but if you. I can't do this easily here, but if you were to right click on a file and open. Right. Actually, let me just look at that. Let me see what it looks like. Well, it already is in the right. I don't even know what they're talking about. Anyway, the open icon will have the right icon for the default app for that file type, which is exactly what I just saw when I tried it here, so I don't know what that's all about. And then. Whatever. None of this is major. Last week we talked about an update to the Pain app, but only in the beta channel, for some reason is now rolling out to the dev channel, because of course it is. It should have happened last week. No one knows why. Who cares? I just. I'm losing my mind with the inside of stuff. Like, I. I can't.
- [71:08]
Paul Thurrott
Is there. Why do they have three channels? Is it four?
- [71:12]
Richard Campbell
Sorry. Or five, depending on how you look at it. Right.
- [71:14]
Paul Thurrott
Because there's Dragon channels and the.
- [71:17]
Richard Campbell
Well, no, I mean, there's like Canary is split in half now, although that will eventually rectify itself. There's Dev and Beta, which used to be the same, but are different. And then if you're in the release preview program, you could be on 24 or 25H2, because those are both supported versions of Windows. Even though you get the same kb, the same what we used to call cumulative update.
- [71:38]
Paul Thurrott
Are they doing, like, AB testing? Is that. I mean, what.
- [71:40]
Richard Campbell
You know what? See that too, again. I can. I can tell you what your problem is. You're smart thinking again. That makes sense.
- [71:49]
Leo Laporte
Gonna end in tears.
- [71:50]
Richard Campbell
And of course you have to. You can't accept that. It's not something like that. It's not. There's no logic to it. There is nothing that makes sense in the Insider program. Nothing.
- [72:00]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, is it different people? I mean, or is it all That's.
- [72:06]
Leo Laporte
Well, that's been my thought, that there's various teams.
- [72:09]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, there has been some with Tommy
- [72:11]
Paul Thurrott
gets their own channel.
- [72:12]
Leo Laporte
I don't know if it's that.
- [72:13]
Richard Campbell
Well, I don't know about that. I. I don't know.
- [72:18]
Leo Laporte
Keep looking for Leo, and it just doesn't seem to be any. My error.
- [72:23]
Richard Campbell
I do feel like, you know, there was this complexity that occurred during the development of Longhorn where they couldn't build a product anymore. The system they had didn't scale past some number of product groups, all putting code into the system at the same time. Right. So before Longhorn, you know, I'll just make up numbers because I don't know what they are, but maybe there were 20 groups and that worked fine. But when they got to Longhorn, maybe it was 100, and it was like, nope, this is not working. And this is what caused Jim Alchen essentially, to come back to Bill Gates and say, look, this isn't going to work. We need to start over. This. We've. We need. We've bitten off too much. We need to scale this whole thing back. And, you know, Vista was the result. I'm oversimplifying, but I. I look at what is happening in the Insider program and I'm like, we only have Windows 11 now. Like, how is it like this? But it is like this. It's It's.
- [73:17]
Leo Laporte
I just don't know if Pavan's had his hands on this yet.
- [73:20]
Richard Campbell
Like, I love that you keep giving this guy the.
- [73:23]
Leo Laporte
I really want the benefit of the doubt.
- [73:24]
Richard Campbell
Oh, I do, too.
- [73:25]
Leo Laporte
Glad there's a boss. Somebody called Ball.
- [73:27]
Richard Campbell
I know, I know. He seems competent, he seems smart. He seems like he has logic in his brain. I'd like him to apply it to this program, you know, and just bring it back to what it was.
- [73:40]
Leo Laporte
But at least I don't even care if it's what it was. Just consistent.
- [73:45]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, well, that's what I. But that is what it was used to be. Like, logical and consistent.
- [73:49]
Paul Thurrott
I don't.
- [73:49]
Richard Campbell
You know, obviously this thing expanded over time and changed and evolved, maybe devolved or however you want to say it, but it's gotten to the point now where it's like, I don't know that I can point to any single part of it and make sense of it. There's a beautiful story in here that's tied to Enterprises wanting to stay on whatever version of Windows and not upgrade. And Microsoft said, yeah, we can figure that out. We'll just make a new version of Windows and we'll have the same features in both, and you can stay in your stupid version that you think you want.
- [74:21]
Leo Laporte
That's what happened with the. With 24H.
- [74:23]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, 20. It might have been 23H2.
- [74:27]
Leo Laporte
Well, I don't remember.
- [74:28]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, well, with Copilot, like, oh, you
- [74:30]
Leo Laporte
can stay on 23H2, but you're still getting patches for that. So we're just going to patch you to 24H2.
- [74:35]
Richard Campbell
The way it started, literally the. The beginning of this little form of insertification was Copilot was coming to Windows and it was going to come in the. Then I guess it was 23H2. And enterprise was like, yeah, we're not installing that damn thing. We're going to wait till next year. And Microsoft's like, yeah, we don't want you to wait for a year. And they shipped the September cumulative update that year with every feature but one. That was going to be what 23H2 was.
- [75:01]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [75:02]
Richard Campbell
And so 23H2 eventually came out and it was a nothing burger. There was nothing there. But you already had already been forced. And it was a way to force those people to get this thing they didn't want. And now that's that. Now that's the strategy. That's all they do. Now. This is the.
- [75:16]
Leo Laporte
Again, version numbers mean nothing.
- [75:18]
Richard Campbell
Not a violent person, but God damn it.
- [75:21]
Leo Laporte
Okay. Surrounded by Violent acts.
- [75:23]
Paul Thurrott
I'll tell you, you want to go crazy with version numbers. Just start trying to pay attention to what's going on in an AI. It's impossible.
- [75:31]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, it's going to make the browser thing look reasonable. It's crazy. Yep.
- [75:35]
Paul Thurrott
Let's take a little break. We will talk about your new book. Yep, it's coming. And actually it's here.
- [75:42]
Richard Campbell
It's here. It's not complete, but it's.
- [75:44]
Paul Thurrott
I decided lots more to come. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Our show today brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. I mean, if you listen to any of our shows, it's become pretty clear that any business has to take a look at AI in the business. I don't care if it's Xbox or what. The potential rewards of AI are just too great to ignore. But so are the risks, especially with exfiltration of sensitive data attacks against enterprise managed AI. And then, of course, there's also the issue that generative AI increases opportunities for threat actors. It means they can easily and quickly create phishing lures, write malicious code, automate data extraction. I just saw that. A new attack today where the bad guy uses AI to create a very effective malware attack. It's. It's rough out there, isn't it? That's why you need. Yes, Zscaler. There were 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked to AI applications last year. Chat, GPT and Microsoft Copilot together saw nearly 3.2 million data violations. So it's coming from inside the house. It's coming from outside the house. It's clearly time to rethink your organization's safe use of public and private AI. But you should probably ask people who've done that. For instance, Siva, the director of Security and Infrastructure at Zuora, Just here's what he says about using Zscaler to prevent AI attacks.
- [77:26]
Richard Campbell
Watch.
- [77:27]
Paul Thurrott
With Zscaler, being in line in a
- [77:29]
Richard Campbell
security protection strategy helps us monitor all the traffic. So even if a bad actor were
- [77:35]
Paul Thurrott
to use AI, because we have tight
- [77:38]
Richard Campbell
security framework around our endpoint, helps us
- [77:41]
Paul Thurrott
proactively prevent that activity from happening.
- [77:43]
Richard Campbell
AI is tremendous in terms of its opportunities, but it also brings in challenges.
- [77:47]
Paul Thurrott
We're confident that Zscaler is going to help us ensure that we're not slowed
- [77:51]
Richard Campbell
down by security challenges, but continue to take advantage of all the advancements.
- [77:57]
Paul Thurrott
With Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI to boost productivity across the Business. Their Zero Trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI related data loss protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance too. Learn more@zscaler.com security that's zscaler.com security we thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. Paul's latest book is Much Needed D and Shitify Windows.
- [78:38]
Richard Campbell
Maybe I just said this to my wife, but the other day I said to somebody, I was like, you know, this book is good because it's going to be short. It's about 100 pages now. It might be 150 at most when I'm done. So you know, compared to 11, 1200 pages for the Windows 11 field guide. Like you know, reigning it in. Like I like that. And then I think other people are gonna look at it and be like wait, I need to read a hundred page book to figure out how to de and shit ify Windows. Like what? Why is it so long? You know? And it's like I can't. Yeah, I don't know. It's got a lot of screenshots I guess. I don't know. Anyway, yeah, as I think people know, I've been working on this. So I've been publishing chapters to the site. I decided this morning I was going to wait until I have two more chapters I wanted to get in there. One about security and one about just fixing annoyances across the system, apps and experiences. And I was going to wait till the security chapter was done and I was like, yeah, I'm just going to put it out there so it is available. You know, LeanPub supports this publishing format where, you know, the book is not complete yet. Right. And you can buy it and then you get the updates and yeah, you can fix it as you go. I made a fun little googly eyed piece of poop image for the, for the COVID which I'm particularly proud of. So anyway, just trying to, just trying to keep it, you know, whatever. So it's cheap. It's only, it's 4.99 if you want to buy it, if you don't, don't worry about it. But there you go. And so I just, I don't know, the other day, I guess maybe Monday, I think it was Monday, I probably published the chapter about Copilot and AI. And right now, even though there are thousands probably of utilities that do things like clean, debloat, disentify, whatever, however you want to say it, Windows 11, there is no one good tool that does this for AI. There are many tools that do Part of it.
- [80:35]
Leo Laporte
Right.
- [80:36]
Richard Campbell
And Windabloat, which is the one I like the most for just general DE and Suretifying does that as well. And so they do a pretty good job. But if you really want to get in there and remove all of the AI stuff in Windows 11, there's nothing that does it in an automated fashion. I don't actually think that's a good idea anyway, honestly, because I feel like you may maybe the. I don't know, the AI features in Notepad are offensive to you for some reason. You can turn that off pretty easily in the app. Right. You can't, by the way, turn off any of the AI features in the Photos app, which is kind of interesting. You can turn off some, but not all of the AI editing features in Paint, which by the way will differ depending on whether or not you have a copilot PC or a non copilot PC. That's curious. And so I don't know, maybe someday we'll have. This is an area I suspect I'll be updating as we go. But for now I basically describe how you can disable, turn off or whatever, every one of those things. So there's that and then sort. Yeah, well, no, definitely tied to this. The reason I wrote this is because I've spent a lot of time my entire adult life testing alternatives to Windows. Right. Going back to the floppy disk based versions of Linux in the 1990s when Apple brought Steve Jobs back and they announced OS X, bought an Ibook so I could test that. And I've had. I think I've owned more Macs in the past 25 years than most Mac fans. You know, I've owned so many Macs, I've tried every version of Linux imaginable. I've tried a few I hadn't tried in recent days. There's a Microsoft engineer who makes one called. What's it called? Anduin os, which is kind of interesting. Things like Debian.
- [82:31]
Paul Thurrott
Is that another reference to the Lord of the Rings? Anduin, Isn't that. It sounds like it is, yeah.
- [82:36]
Richard Campbell
Like the. No. And well, Anduin might be. Is that the name of the river? Because the. The sword Eragon's sword was Andoril. Yeah.
- [82:44]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [82:45]
Paul Thurrott
Ander, you're right. It's the river that crossed most of Middle Earth.
- [82:48]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. The rivers. Anduin. Yeah. I'm a Tolkien scholar.
- [82:53]
Paul Thurrott
Yes, you are.
- [82:55]
Richard Campbell
So I'm trying to do a, like a focus each month. So my February focus was and is this book, but I don't know if it's Going to be March or April probably, but I'm going to go into a lot of these things. There are some really interesting. You can do things like Chrome OS Flex. If you can find a laptop that actually works with it, you can run Linux. Right. And so you get this like full desktop version of Chrome plus thing, you know, whatever Linux apps you might want to run, which is actually very interesting. So I just kind of. I just wrote a big thing about the stuff I've done so far in that area. But there'll be a month, I don't know, sometime in the first half of this year where I kind of focus on that stuff. But if anyone has any recommendations about whatever alternative. I mean, obviously Mac OS X or Mac os, which is. I hate. But whatever, it's out there and it is a thing. Or even the iPad can be a good laptop now, various versions of Linux, whatever. But anyway, okay. Dapa Dabadoo Related to Windows Semi. Last week we had Lenovo's earnings. They warned about RAM prices extending through the end of the year. HP reported their earnings and they extended that warning into 2027. Yay. So they had a good quarter, actually 6.9% gain on revenues to 14.4 billion. Over 10 billion of which came from their PC business. The rest of it, the 4.2 billion that remains, came from printing. Not surprisingly, printing is not doing great
- [84:27]
Leo Laporte
well, it's generated for billions for that. They've made everybody hate printing in every way.
- [84:32]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. And HP is one of the. When Cory Doctorope talks about certification, he actually mentions the HP Printer Inc. Scandalous. Sure. Which is this. You know, they force you to use their ink. It's like, guys. And this is why the DMCA and reverse engineering is such a huge problem right now. Because you should be able to. As a consumer, you own the printer. You should be able to put squirt water into there if that's what you want. But they don't let you do that. So whatever.
- [84:58]
Leo Laporte
There was a malware that would force your printer head to stroke over a point of paper so small it actually set fire to the paper.
- [85:05]
Richard Campbell
That's awesome. That is awesome.
- [85:09]
Leo Laporte
Wow.
- [85:10]
Richard Campbell
Which is what should. Well, you know, like we were promised the paperless office in the 1970s. You know, I told you guys the story about the printer here, right? Like the. Did I tell you the story? We. I needed to print a return label for Amazon here. Amazon here works exactly like the US you get next day, same day, whatever. It's great. But when you return, there's fewer options and I don't even remember the name of the store. It's not very close to here, the closest one. But I had to print a label. I couldn't go there and just give them like a barcode or something or QR code. I had to print it, put it on the box. So we don't have a printer, obviously. I have a. There's an older American guy in the building we're friends with. I figured he must have a printer, and he does not. And he said. And he told me what I already knew, which is that there are all these businesses. I mean, I swear to God, within a two block radius in any direction, there are eight to ten printing stores, like Papillerias. And they don't just do printing, but they do all kinds of paper stuff, right? Because paper is humongous here because we live in the 1970s again. And so we went to the closest one and I brought it on a USB key. I had it on my phone and the USB key, no problem. Put it in the computer. Do I want black and white in color? I want black and white. It's two pages. There's the thing you put in the box. The thing you put in. Right. You know the drill. And then I asked him, I said, cuanto cuesta? Which is the. How much does it cost? And he said, dos pesos. Oh, Jesus. And I was like, it's like a nickel.
- [86:35]
Leo Laporte
You don't have a 2 peso coin?
- [86:37]
Richard Campbell
I was like, I don't. I asked him to repeat it. There's no way I heard that correctly. It's 10 cents. And I looked at my wife and I was like, do we have dos pesos? So she got out here, a little change purse, like an old lady, and she's going in there, she's looking around, she pulls out this coin. It was like this big. I gave it to the guy and he went into his drawer and he handed me three even smaller coins back. And I was like, I should have gotten color. I don't know. What. What is it? So here's the thing. How much. How much printing would I have to do? Where it would make sense to own a printer here?
- [87:09]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's why there's no way I. Like, even a page is ridiculous.
- [87:15]
Richard Campbell
Look, I mean, maybe you could get a good. Print it for 150 bucks maybe, right? Like, how much would I have to print? And the thing is, it's the only time I've had to print here in four years. I. If the thing sat here and didn't print I'd have to replace the ink. I would never catch up.
- [87:30]
Leo Laporte
You'd have to buy a printer each time you wanted to do that.
- [87:32]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, exactly. It's like dose, dose pesos. I'm like, I don't even. Do they make money that small? They do. They don't.
- [87:38]
Leo Laporte
Anyway, it was the ups, the place where I have to drop off my Amazon returns, which is the ups. Restore has a printer.
- [87:45]
Richard Campbell
There you go.
- [87:45]
Paul Thurrott
Because they know they probably have a fax machine too.
- [87:49]
Richard Campbell
I'm just like in the United States a lot of times with Amazon, I could just go to Whole Foods and they scan a QR code on my phone and we're done. You know, they just, they don't. I don't even need the box. They just do all this stuff for you. So I look, I could bring something to Kohl's and I, I assume I printed some labels. I guess I must have, but I don't. Doesn't happen a lot. It certainly doesn't happen a lot here. I don't know. Anyway, that's one of the many humorous things about Mexico. Okay. And then speaking of humorous or ironic or hypocritical, I don't know. I just want to remind everyone that Tim Cook infamously said you could converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but that's probably not going to be very pleasing to the user. He was referring to Surface and this combat combining of tablet and PC into one device. At that time, I said, you know what else you could combine is a toaster and an oven. And that could be very useful. Turns out those sell pretty well. He later referred to Surface in different times that year as compromised, confusing and deluded. So I wrote Diluted like a fox because now Apple's doing it. Apple later this year will Release touchscreen based MacBook Pro models for the first time. So it took them. Let's see, Surface RT and Windows RT came out in, what, 2012. So 14 years later, diluted has become genius. So we'll see what the other thing that this is not the same. I know. I'm surprised nobody called me on this. But according to Mark Gurman, the guy from Bloomberg now who reported on this, the macOS software will be dynamic, meaning that you can switch between an interface that's optimized for touch and one that's optimized for point and click, which is what? Two modes, which was one of the primary complaints about Windows 8, right? There were two modes. There was like desktop and touch. They're not going to do it that way, obviously. But I guess if you go to touch a control on the screen, it will kind of expand or something. Who cares? I don't know. Anyway, I, I often wondered why they didn't do touch on Mac, if only for developers. Because to develop for all those touch devices that Apple does make, like the iPad, iPhone, whatever, it was one of
- [90:10]
Leo Laporte
the most compelling reasons to do that
- [90:12]
Richard Campbell
would be the reason. Yeah, you'd want to touch the thing like that, you know, that makes the emulator work better. To me, I don't know. But I don't think that's why they're doing it. I, I'm going to guess people ask for it, I don't know.
- [90:24]
Leo Laporte
Customer demand.
- [90:25]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I guess so. I mean Steve Jobs referred to this, that a multi touch laptop as ergonomically terrible. But of course the new Apple, today's Apple, made something called Liquid Glass, which is just terrible, ergonomic or otherwise. I don't know.
- [90:44]
Paul Thurrott
No relation to aeroglass. Right.
- [90:47]
Richard Campbell
Well, well, I mean, funny you say that because a lot of people have actually compared it to that. Right. One of the things that was weird to me as a Windows guy at that time when this was when Windows Vista came out Longhorn into Vista was where we got Aero Glass was they had at that time, Remember this was late 2006 when that came out. So five years of experience with transparent and translucent effects in Mac OS X at the time. Right. If you think back to the first version of Mac OS X, the first couple of versions, one of the things that was wrong with it was you could see like what was behind a menu would bleed into the menu and it made it look muddy. Right. So they fixed that over time. It took a couple years, but if you go back and look at screenshots of the first, you'll see it. Like it's weird. Like if there's text underneath a menu that's displaying over something in an app, it bleeds through and looks terrible.
- [91:42]
Paul Thurrott
Microsoft made exactly that same problem with Liquid Glass.
- [91:46]
Richard Campbell
Right. So Microsoft, Right. Microsoft made that same mistake with Vista and they fixed it over time. I mean like the, the glass that was in seven was an improvement over the glass that was in Vista and then they got rid of it. Nate. But whatever. And yeah, so now we have Liquid Glass and it's like you have these weird glass, I don't know, whatever. They are dynamic glass controls that expand as you touch them for some reason and then it blocks content. It's like, didn't you, you made this mistake before. Like, what are you doing? But I Don't know, different. Different generation, different people, I guess. I don't know. I don't have too, too much on the AI front, but I'm just going to blow through this quick because I don't think people care too, too much. Gemini 3.1 Pro came this week. I think this is a response to stuff that Anthropic especially, but Anthropic and OpenAI are doing. And this is just another week, so another leapfrog and blah, blah, blah.
- [92:43]
Leo Laporte
Gemini 3 is really quite good.
- [92:46]
Richard Campbell
Yep. And that was big, big News. And then Gemini 3:1 Pro is like, like nothing, you know, Like, I think we're just getting used to it, you know, it's just like, oh, yeah, it's awesome.
- [92:55]
Leo Laporte
Just expecting greatness now.
- [92:57]
Richard Campbell
Yep, that's where we're at. And it's everywhere. So if you have the Gemini app, notebook, lm, whatever, you know, it's everywhere. If you're a developer, enterprise, consumer, you're going to see it everywhere and you're not going to notice. Who cares? Late last year, Mozilla replaced their CEO. The new CEO said, we're going to put a key, an AI kill switch in Firefox that has just been released. I'm sad that it's not called the AI kill switch, by the way, but there is a switch. You can block all AI enhancements with one click, which is pretty good.
- [93:27]
Leo Laporte
So what does it do? Like, all AI dies, but like, does not appear in the browser.
- [93:32]
Richard Campbell
So here's what they did. Right? This reminds me of, you know, anyone who, anyone. So anyone on earth. I guess I was going to say anyone who has used a mobile device and has been on a plane may have noticed. And Windows does this too. You can put the device in airplane mode and then you can enable like Wi Fi or enable Bluetooth or both. Right. And you're still in airplane mode. But that thing has come on. This is the thing Microsoft never did with S Mode, remember? Like, let's have S Mode, but we'll have an exception for, for Chrome or something, right? The. The little insight there is that the next time you're in airplane mode, and I believe this is true of all these platforms like mobile and on Windows and Mac, maybe, I don't know the Mac, but it will remember what you did last time. So the next time that you go into airplane mode, it will leave on WI Fi, if that's what you have, if that's how you had it configured. Because maybe you're going to connect to the WI fi in the plane, right? That makes sense. So the way this thing works is you can block all AI enhancements, which should say, AI Kill Switch, but whatever. And then there's a selection of the AI features that's in the browser and you can go in and say, well, actually I want translations to work. So you're still blocking all AI, but translations in this case. Now, someday in the future, Firefox may release some other AI innovation or feature, whatever. That thing will be off by default. But the thing you've said you want on will remain on. So that's, to me is like the right way to do it. Like this, you know, that's good. That seems good. I don't think we're ever going to see anything like this in Chrome or Edge, you know, Pretty sure. I'm pretty sure. Yeah. Just knowing, you know, the strategy there. And then Duck AI is DuckDuckGo's private AI chatbot. It's actually pretty good, by the way. You could use it to create images as of, I don't know, a month or two ago. And then just this past week, they added the ability where you can upload an image and then edit it using generative AI. So you can. The obvious use case is here's a photo of you or you and your wife or something or whatever it is. And say, like, make this a watercolor or make this an anime or make, you know, whatever the style is you're looking for. And I, I tested it with it. You know, it's. You know, it's actually pretty good. So this is completely private. It's free. I mean, you obviously run into limits if you use it too, too much.
- [95:50]
Leo Laporte
You just pay for it if you want to use it more.
- [95:52]
Richard Campbell
Yep. Yeah. And, you know, if you want something that's anonymous, but it's not local AI, it's using cloud AI or whatever I think it's using. I think the underlying. I believe it's OpenAI. It's using. I think so. But whatever it is, it's. I was like, okay, this is actually, you know, and this is that little AI, little tech thing. Like, I. It. It's getting to the point where that stuff is, you know, actually pretty good.
- [96:17]
Leo Laporte
Just works.
- [96:18]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. So it's there. It's there if you want it.
- [96:21]
Leo Laporte
That's interesting.
- [96:23]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Well, well, well, Indeed, indeed, indeed. Would you like to do an Xbox segment?
- [96:31]
Richard Campbell
I would, and I would like it to be all good news. What do we got coming?
- [96:35]
Paul Thurrott
Any minute now. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Trombone Thurat and. And I don't know what I'm going to call you? Richard Campbell. Richard Auga Campbell.
- [96:50]
Richard Campbell
Yes, that's what he is. The old fashioned horn and
- [96:55]
Paul Thurrott
ah, Richard Glissando Campbell.
- [96:57]
Richard Campbell
I thought that was happening in my room. I'm surrounded by AI.
- [97:04]
Paul Thurrott
This is Windows Weekly. We're glad you're here, all you winners and dozers. We're especially glad for our club members. We appreciate your support. Now on we go with. Let me think. Oh, the Xbox segment.
- [97:18]
Leo Laporte
Paul, can you do this?
- [97:20]
Richard Campbell
There was a little change at the top. We did a little bit at the beginning of the story, at the beginning of the podcast rather nothing to worry about. You know, everything Xbox going gangbusters. But the first two stories I have in here are actually related. So the February update for Xbox is out. If you have an Xbox game pass ultimate subscription, you can now stream games from your console. This could be Xbox series S, X or S or Xbox One xns. Interestingly elsewhere to where whatever endpoint, you know, it could be like your Fire TV, stick a PC, whatever at 1440p.
- [98:02]
Leo Laporte
Because that was previously limited to 1440. The X was the 2160.
- [98:08]
Richard Campbell
I'm not going to remember that anymore. I mean I believe the way they marketed X was it could sort of do 4K.
- [98:14]
Leo Laporte
Was 4K.
- [98:15]
Richard Campbell
Just kidding. It can display 4K still images. We're just kidding. But you know, I mean obviously these things have improved over time. But I don't remember anymore what they. I don't know. I do remember liking the Xbox One X quite a bit. A bit. Also the Xbox One S. But anyway there's that they've added some like new sounds to if you have a rog Xbox ally which is a non event. And then the second story I had in the. Because I had that there originally. If you are in the Xbox Insider program and you have the Xbox app on your PC and you play a game, the Xbox app will appear after the game's over and give you like a game recap which in my experience is completely pointless. But it is there. I have seen it. I see it.
- [99:01]
Leo Laporte
Play the game again.
- [99:02]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I wish there was a. Can I, I can't bring it up on this thing. Yeah, no. So it was like it's sort of. It's like an AI thing. It's like oh yeah, you did pretty good. Like you had like 20, 25 points in that game. You know, at positive KD. Like you know, keep it up buddy,
- [99:15]
Leo Laporte
you're doing great by 12 year olds four times.
- [99:18]
Richard Campbell
Exactly. And one of the times it was just lag it's not even your fault. Yeah, no, it's just. It's pointless. But now that's. I guess it's out. So that was available in two Insiders. Now I think it's just coming to everybody, so there is that. Okay, actually, I guess the sounds are for everyone on Windows, so that's not just the rag Xbox, Ally. There's some little minor improvements in there, actually. So. Removable storage, formatting support, advanced shader delivery indicator. Come on, man. And then some other small improvements. No big deal. And then the recap thing, which again, ridiculous, but whatever. You can turn it off if you don't want it. And you will turn it off, I guarantee it. I'm not sure I even know who this company is that I've ever heard of them, but there's a company called Sensor Tower, which, Which is an analyst firm, and they took a look at 2025 video game sales and there's some really interesting data in here. And this is across mobile, PC and console. They often commingle PC and console, which is incredible to me, but okay, I mean, fair enough. PC gaming had a record year across units sold. Premium game revenue. Premium game growth and units. No, I said that. And Steam. Steam revenues were $11.7 billion, up 13% year over year. To put that in perspective, Apple App Store game revenue was over $50 billion. And Google Play Store game revenue was over, was almost exactly $30 billion. There were 225,000 games released last year. That means an average of 7, 617 new games every day. Wow. Think about that. I know.
- [101:05]
Leo Laporte
It's almost like podcasts.
- [101:08]
Richard Campbell
Yep, we're calling those shows now, by the way. I don't know if you heard, please
- [101:12]
Paul Thurrott
don't call them pods. I hear more people calling it pods. Is that just me?
- [101:17]
Richard Campbell
No, the worst usage of that term is people who make podcasts. If I could reach through the Internet and punch them. That makes me crazy. It's right up there.
- [101:27]
Paul Thurrott
The new crowd. The bros.
- [101:29]
Richard Campbell
Exactly.
- [101:31]
Paul Thurrott
Today on the pod, Jason, we got
- [101:34]
Richard Campbell
some guys together to make a pod. You're like, oh, I will murder. Okay, I'm glad that makes it bugs me.
- [101:40]
Paul Thurrott
We're old school. We call them podcasts.
- [101:43]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, we call them what? They're called shows. This is the logic thing again. Like it has a name. Idiot.
- [101:48]
Paul Thurrott
Anyway, I'm sorry, The show would be preferable to podcast.
- [101:52]
Richard Campbell
That's true. Right, right. It's like we need a new term for video podcast. No, we don't. It's a video podcast.
- [101:58]
Paul Thurrott
Done it's a show she's done. This is why I never liked the word podcast, because it implies how it's delivered. It's just a show. You get it on the Internet. Might be video, might be audio.
- [102:09]
Leo Laporte
I get asked on podcast.
- [102:11]
Richard Campbell
I think the confusion. Yeah. A lot of people.
- [102:14]
Paul Thurrott
Not a podcast.
- [102:15]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. So if you have a video podcast, you could. It could be just be on YouTube, you know, so to you, it's like a video. Like. Yeah, yeah, whatever.
- [102:23]
Paul Thurrott
But you don't call it an audio.
- [102:26]
Richard Campbell
No, you don't. You don't. You also. You know this. You don't call it an odd.
- [102:30]
Paul Thurrott
It's odd today on the odd.
- [102:33]
Richard Campbell
Are we. So it's like when you see a sign, it's on a giant space and they truncate the term. If you have enough space.
- [102:41]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [102:41]
Richard Campbell
Spell it out.
- [102:43]
Paul Thurrott
You know, it's like, I'm too. Things are moving too fast for me.
- [102:47]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, I'm too. I'm too cool.
- [102:49]
Paul Thurrott
I don't have enough time to say podcast.
- [102:51]
Richard Campbell
That's right.
- [102:52]
Paul Thurrott
I say the pie.
- [102:53]
Richard Campbell
That's why we say the whole thing. We're slow moving. We're old, you know?
- [102:55]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. We got.
- [102:59]
Leo Laporte
I wonder how they counted these game titles. What's happening?
- [103:02]
Paul Thurrott
25,000.
- [103:04]
Richard Campbell
Wow. This is the. These numbers. When I say these numbers, it's going to be hard to conceptualize.
- [103:09]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [103:10]
Richard Campbell
Because they're all over the map. So, for example, I mentioned that steam was 11.7 billion in revenues, and that is one third or a little bit over one third of what Google Play Store game revenues were. It's a little over one fifth of what Apple App Store game revenues were. However, 52.2 billion game downloads on mobile overall. Of those, 42 billion were on Android. So there were far more on Android, but Apple made far more money. Not. Well, not quite double, but 7.8 billion on iPhone. Of those. No, I'm sorry, not of those. 52.2 billion on mobile, or 50 billion. We'll call it 2 billion on PCs and consoles combined. 2. 1. 25th. What?
- [104:00]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [104:01]
Richard Campbell
Okay. This is where things get interesting to me and to anyone who cares about Xbox. Of those 2 billion downloads across PC and console, 546 million were on Xbox. 626 million were on PlayStation. Those aren't that far off. No, that's. You would not expect that. Right? I mean, you might think it would be half or less, but it's not. It's like whatever that is, 80% or 2 or 75% or something like that. 857 million run PC. So PC is bigger, but not bigger than the two combined. And you know, maybe half again as big is the right way to say that, if that makes sense. There's a lot of other. I wrote a bunch of this stuff,
- [104:45]
Leo Laporte
but like, you know, what is this? 7 billion smartphones in use in the world today.
- [104:50]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [104:50]
Leo Laporte
And there are 52 billion games, mobile games downloaded last year.
- [104:55]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [104:55]
Leo Laporte
So what is that, six, seven games per person?
- [104:59]
Richard Campbell
I'd like to know what the hell you people are doing on your phones. Because I. To me, a phone is. Well, phone calls and texts, which both are irritating. Other forms of messaging, photos, you know, take pictures. I post them to social media. So that's on there. I think that might be it. Let me look at my phone. What else do I have on here? Is there anything? Well, email. Okay. I get email there. Maps. Yeah, Maps are good. Uber. Right. Which I only have on my phone when I'm here. A browser. Because, you know, you might want to read something. Google Translate. Because I'm in Mexico. Yeah, it's about it. Weather. Weather is fun. I like looking at the weather. Anyway, you guys are apparently downloading six games every month. I don't know, that's like. I guess you're. I. I don't know. Whatever you're doing, it's fine. I. Fine you do you be you. It's okay. Last year was the first time that in app purchases in games exceeded in app purchases in apps by revenue. That's almost $86 billion just in game. In app purchases and games across the board. Battlefield 6 was the best selling game last year. The top three games, by the way, all made by EA. The other two were versions of EA Sports FC, which is the, you know, soccer, as we would call it. United Football. Right.
- [106:21]
Paul Thurrott
Football club.
- [106:22]
Richard Campbell
Football club, yep. But Fortnite is the top game by size of player base on both PC and console.
- [106:30]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, but you've already got Fortnite.
- [106:32]
Richard Campbell
Yep, but. But the activity is still humongous. Right. And I have to say, having played it recently, it's actually pretty good.
- [106:38]
Paul Thurrott
It's a fun game. Yeah.
- [106:39]
Richard Campbell
Here's the thing though. What do you think number two is? This is number two of most played games on PC slash console. What would you guess number two would be?
- [106:48]
Paul Thurrott
Call of Duty.
- [106:50]
Richard Campbell
Call of Duty is number five.
- [106:51]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, what's bigger than Call of Duty in the world?
- [106:55]
Richard Campbell
Surprised. Nobody gets gta. That's number four. Minecraft is number three. But you know what number two is? This is. Sit down. This is crazy. Counter Strike 2.
- [107:04]
Leo Laporte
Ah, that's interesting year old game.
- [107:07]
Richard Campbell
What Counter Strike 2 is Half Life Engine 2.
- [107:11]
Leo Laporte
Like what does that include?
- [107:14]
Paul Thurrott
Like the mods, like TF2 and stuff like that.
- [107:17]
Richard Campbell
It doesn't. That. I don't know.
- [107:18]
Leo Laporte
I'm sorry.
- [107:19]
Paul Thurrott
Probably not.
- [107:19]
Richard Campbell
I don't know. Top shooters on PC and console by monthly average users Fortnite. Counter strike two. Right. Call of Duty PUBG. And Battlefield 6, top shooters by downloads though this resets things in a very strange way. Marvel Rivals, which I wouldn't play on your computer. Battlefield 6, Delta Force, which is a remake. Arc Raiders, which is new. Yeah, I was gonna say it's a remake. It's not a remake. I'm sorry, it's new. And then Call of Duty. So there's a lot of data here. Obviously there's more. I mean they go in, there's a lot in there about the way that mobile games are monetized and I, you know, whatever advertising and I don't really care about that stuff. But the thing that, the one thing that sticks out to me is the, the PC slash console game downloads numbers. 546 million on Xbox. 626 on PlayStation. Those are close. Those are way closer than I would have thought. I'm fascinated.
- [108:24]
Leo Laporte
I want to dig into those numbers. Is this where the games acquisition that Microsoft's done so that if you have game pass, you're getting new games, you're getting caught.
- [108:34]
Richard Campbell
Exactly. And the other thing that's not clear there is. Well, no, maybe it is clear. I don't know. They say on PC, I don't know if on PC they mean broadly on PC across, you know, Steam, Epic Games and then by the way, also Xbox on PC. Right. Or if Xbox, if that number includes the PC part of Xbox. It's not clear. I, I went and searched through it to find out if, to see if I could find that out and I, I couldn't. It's not really there. Yeah, but you know, 10 cent number
- [109:04]
Leo Laporte
one game generational thing here, like one of the reasons I think Marvel Rivals does so well is that kids, you've got a generation kids who grew up with MCU and they all want to play Iron Man. Right.
- [109:14]
Richard Campbell
Speaking of mcu, I, I might highlight the MCU as the first actual version of AI Slop and you pull. People are all idiots. All right, so just throwing it out there. Let's make the same movie over and over again. How many alien threats to the planet Earth can we have? I don't know. How many MCU movies are there? Because literally, anyway, interesting stuff.
- [109:36]
Leo Laporte
I Think crazy. Yeah. I'm wondering about those numbers, especially when you talk about EA numbers, because they're private now. They don't have to report their numbers.
- [109:46]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, well, they're about to be private, so that's happening later this year. So they just released their financial report, you know, one of the last ones.
- [109:55]
Leo Laporte
The last time.
- [109:56]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, that's going to disappear. But, you know, whatever anyone thinks of the little investment group that's buying this company or why they would spend so much money on ea, actually, they're doing pretty good. And of course, they have those evergreen franchises in sports. Right. With all the.
- [110:11]
Leo Laporte
What you're going to need is you paid a lot to buy all that stock back. That's a lot of money.
- [110:15]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah. Interesting.
- [110:18]
Paul Thurrott
Stay tuned, kids, because coming up in just a little bit, right after Windows Weekly, if you're watching live, we're going to have Jeff Atwood, who created Stack Exchange.
- [110:28]
Richard Campbell
You're not going to talk about the Samsung thing instead, because super interesting and completely new and different and. Oh, God, what was I saying? Anyway, that's great.
- [110:40]
Leo Laporte
It's a great guy. Ask about Yo Yos. He's big into Yo Yos.
- [110:44]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, I'll ask about yo Yos.
- [110:45]
Richard Campbell
I didn't know that.
- [110:46]
Leo Laporte
He's got, he gets, he goes all in on stuff, man.
- [110:49]
Paul Thurrott
He also started Discourse, which does our forum software, Twitter community. And he has a new initiative, Rural Basic Income initiative, that I think is really cool. He's pledged to give away half of his fortune and have a lot of fun talking about AI with the guy who basically was the first victim of AI with Stack Exchange.
- [111:13]
Richard Campbell
Right. Thank God AI is so popular with developers. Oh, wait, damn it.
- [111:19]
Paul Thurrott
That's coming up in just a little bit. I want to do a little shout out to our Club Twit members who make this show and everything we do possible. Nowadays. Club Twit is, I think, more than it was 25% of our operating expenses. I think it's more like a third of our operating expenses come from our club members. And while that, you know, some may say, well, that's not, you know, wouldn't you want to come from advertisers? Actually, frankly, I'd love it if we're 100% from club members. I love that idea. It's. It's your way of voting, right, of saying, hey, we, we support what you're doing. We want to hear more of it. If you like the programming you hear on Twitter, whether it's Windows Weekly or any of our other shows, if you'd like to get ad free versions of those shows, including this plug. I, you know we will always offer most of our content for free. I don't like paywalls. We stream everything we do live. We make it all available on audio. I think video is held back for some shows but I really we want you to have the shows for free. But I also would love it if you would think it's worth enough to pay 10 bucks a month for the ad free versions of the shows. And to get in the club Twit Discord, which is a great hangout and talk with us to get access to the special programming we put out in the club. Coming up tomorrow, Johnny jets back to Talk Travel. We we just did Micah's crafting workshop. That was a lot of fun. I mean we just do a lot of stuff in the club. It's a social group as much as anything else. So if you like the programming, you want to be part of the social scene, you don't have to, but you could twit TV Club twit. We would love to have you please join the club. It really makes a big difference to to what we do on Twitter. Now what we're going to do on the tweet is the very famous back of the book. Starting off with Paul Thurat and his. Let me put you in the middle again. His tip of the week. Paulie.
- [113:21]
Richard Campbell
Dripping in gold. That's cool. Dripping in Velveeta's supremely creamy golden cheesiness. That's respect. Elevate your drip with Velveeta's range of
- [113:31]
Paul Thurrott
outrageously delicious dips and dishes.
- [113:34]
Richard Campbell
Shells, cheese, melty blocks and heat and eat queso that go all in on indulgence.
- [113:39]
Leo Laporte
Flex on your fam with a creamy
- [113:41]
Richard Campbell
cheesy masterpiece and go all in on what you love with velvet Velveeta. Respect the drip and satisfy your cravings. Bring home the drip with Velveeta. I don't know. I guess these are. I don't know what. I guess what I really have Tip of the week. No, you're correct. And what I wrote was an epic. I do have. No, that was. I screwed it up. I do have a tip request. This is something. This has been driving me crazy. I know a little bit about windows, you know, and I know a little bit about how it works and yada, yada, yada. There's been a problem that has been getting bigger and bigger for me that I feel should be a solvable problem and it is not. Unless I maybe I'm missing something really obvious, I don't know. But touchpads are getting bigger and bigger on laptops, right? The one that's on, you can't see the laptop, but this is a normally sized 16 inch, the ThinkPad P series kind of portable workstation. The touchpad is the size of a Volkswagen Bug. And I have big hands, so clicking, you know, single clicking to me should be easy. I, I always configure a touchpad to support only two finger right click. And that means I turn off the option that's in the Settings app to do a one finger right click over in the corner or on the side of it over there. It doesn't matter who makes the laptop. It could be Lenovo, HP or whatever, it does not matter. But what's what I'm seeing more and more of is I click toward the middle of the thing and I get a double, I get a right click. And I believe I raised this issue sometime last year where if you bring up a, an interface that doesn't support a right click, for example, a context menu, it should never register right click on that thing because it doesn't support it. But you can right click in there and it will make the menu disappear. And you don't do it. You never go anywhere. And my argument to that would be like, well, if you're going to register the click, register it as a click. So what I'm asking for, and I'm kind of hoping there's a third party utility that does this, I don't understand why this doesn't work on any laptop I've ever used. I want to be able to single click anywhere on this touchpad by touching the touchpad. Right. In other words, I don't want to be on the left half of it, although I could be. I want to be anywhere on it. I've disabled one finger right click. Why can't I one finger single click reliably anywhere on this touchpad? I don't know. I know it sounds like the stupidest thing that's making me insane. So if you're out there and you have an answer for this, something that actually works, dear God, please help me because this is making me. It makes me insane. It makes me insane. Epic. So Microsoft is in the process of updating OneDrive on the Mac and this is harkening back to the late 1990s. Remember Microsoft's Mac apps back in the 90s were these kind of weird like pseudo code apps where it was really the Windows app, but they recompiled it on the Mac So it kind of looked like Windows, but, you know, everyone hated it. And then they finally went native. But someday soon, if you're an insider, you'll get it now. But someday soon, you will get this update. If you have OneDrive on the Mac, the dialogues and the controls and everything look and feel like Mac os. They're actually using native Mac controls. What were you using before? Like, that doesn't make any sense to me. There's a. I don't know, they gave it a name. But the. The Mac, as people probably know, has like a persistent menu bar at the top. So you get like a little Status icon for OneDrive, and when you click that, you get kind of a little menu of choices, which is very similar to when you click the OneDrive icon in Windows. They have named that the Activity center for some reason, but whatever, it's just a little menu. It looks like it will look like Liquid Glass if you have macOS 26 and higher. So, yeah, okay. And then Microsoft and Google just released new versions of their kind of, you know, flagship desktop web browsers, both of which have new features. The Microsoft stuff is not particularly interesting, but summarize and explain actions in for PDFs and an improved PDF read aloud experience on the Chrome side. This feature, I feel like this is in browsers already. I know this is in Brave, but they finally added a split view feature. And this is where you can have two different web page views in one tab. So you don't have to, you know, snap Windows side by side or whatever. They just put them side by side. I mean, obviously you'd probably want to have a pretty big screen for this, but whatever. I. I think I just had the. This for a long time, too. And then some good PDF stuff. Highlight text, add notes directly in PDFs right from the app, which, you know, we're getting to the point where we can say goodbye to Acrobat, finally. And then you can also save PDFs directly to Google Drive instead of saving them to the local computer.
- [119:01]
Paul Thurrott
So hallelujah.
- [119:03]
Richard Campbell
But seriously, Touchpad, help me. I don't know what's going on. I don't know why I can't figure this out. It's making me crazy. I scream at my computer every day now. Not for the normal reasons.
- [119:18]
Leo Laporte
These are new screens.
- [119:19]
Richard Campbell
These are the Abby normal reasons. Yeah.
- [119:22]
Paul Thurrott
I scream, you scream. We all scream.
- [119:25]
Richard Campbell
Any help? Please help me.
- [119:30]
Paul Thurrott
Okay, I'm confused. It was your tip and your app.
- [119:34]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, sorry. The tip was, I need you to give me a tip. And then I have Some app picks.
- [119:40]
Paul Thurrott
Yes. Yeah, okay, that's good. That means it's time for Richard Campbell and run as radio.
- [119:48]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I've had Steve Buchanan back on the show to talk about software as a service on multiple clouds, but not what you're thinking, not. I want redundancy between clouds because sometimes they go down. That's not what was happening here at all. Steve works on a particular product called Jamf and the product was originally built on aws and that's great for a certain number of customers, but there are a bunch of customers who wanted access to the product through Azure. And so he is leading the group that's re implementing it in Azure, trying to have a common code base and a common configuration, like trying to make it as manageable as possible. And so this was really a conversation about what's in common while not actually trying to do fail over any of that kind of craziness. And so it was. They kind of going cloud agnostic about it was mostly containers. Kubernetes is everywhere. But what's your deployment pipeline? Because they're going to be different. How does your identity system work? What's your instrumentation telemetry look like? And so that really we got to the meat and potatoes of what does it take to actually do a common dashboard for looking across all of your customers while running on more than one cloud, as well as making it as manageable as possible. So when a build happens, it's going to appear in all of the different versions.
- [121:12]
Paul Thurrott
Very nice.
- [121:13]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's great.
- [121:14]
Paul Thurrott
Very happy with it. Now the moment many of us have been waiting for. Time to drink. Oh yeah.
- [121:24]
Leo Laporte
Well, look, I've been home. So last week we've been doing Canadian whiskies and last week we did Lot 40, which JP Weiser, which actually Hiram Walker, like, talk about the oldest school of old school Canadian whiskies. So this week I thought I'd go completely other way and go totally craft whiskey. Now, there's always been some small distillers, but it used to be really, really difficult to be a small distiller. You had to get big to survive. And so the entry point got harder and harder and harder. But craft distilling really starts in the 2000s, the modern version of it. Anyway. It really started in California. It was a guy named Bill Owens who founds this thing called the American Distilling Institute. And it was about mostly about training new distillers, creating classes and curriculum and so forth for doing that. But it spawned up the west coast, both Oregon and Washington. Had more permissive rules for small producers. And so Oregon had always been pretty hands off with distillers in general. But they did have rules for if you're small, you don't, you can. It's pretty easy. So if you're like less than 25,000 liters a year and you only sold no more than a handle, a 1.75 liter to any given person and you could do tastings up to a couple of ounces, that's about it. They've changed those laws since then. But Washington State in 2008 did this full on craft distiller licensing program where as long as you're producing less than 150,000 gallons a year, which to be clear, you know, places like Brown Fornum, like Jack, produce more than that a day, you could do have a tasting room and do on site sales and so forth. And by the way, it worked. Within five years, by 2013 there were more than 60 craft distilleries in Washington. Like in the. It's happened elsewhere in the US since. But Washington state really led though ball on that. California, which originated the idea, didn't go around to passing craft distillery laws until 2015. But next door to Washington, in British Columbia, same thing happened. So seeing the explosion of crafts distilleries in Washington put a lot of pressure on and so they came up with the same kind of craft distilling rules in 2013. And we talked about this, the context of Okanagan distillers with their great whiskey, which it had a chance to try because they tried to drove that right at the very beginning. And so if we've talked about this a little bit before, but in British Columbia you can get a craft distilling license if you only use BC products. So grain, fruit, whatever produce you use in fermentation, you do all the fermentation and distillation yourself in bc. No additives, no preservatives, no artificial flavors, no neutral green spirits, you can qualify to basically be tax exempt from the at what they call the excise tax, which in B.C. is 124%. So it costs you 10 bucks to make a bottle of whiskey. You pay an additional 1250 to the government to be allowed to sell it. So starting your break even then at a 2250 bottle. But if you're under 50,000 liters, there's no tax at all at 2100 and 24% goes away. And then as you go up to 100,000 liters, it's graduated, so you pay a little bit more A little more. And after 100,000 liters, you no longer considered a craft distiller. You pay the full excise taxes and you can't direct sell. I mean, it's one of the measures of mainstream distilleries is they only sell through third party, right through retailers. And again, most commercial producers in Canada are making more than 100,000 liters in a day because they're all so very, very large. But this craft distilling was for small production, typically under 50,000 liters. And you are allowed to sell direct. You can sell through licensees, you can go to private liquor stores and you can have a tasting room where you're allowed to serve, but you're not really a bar and can sell some bottles. And so this story falls on is about a whiskey called, that comes from a distillery called the Sons of Vancouver. So very, very local. And the founders are James Lester and Richard Clouse. Now these two met in Fort St. John, which is in the central east side of British Columbia, really close to Alberta on the Peace River. This is oil patch country. So they both work the oil patch, made a lot of money because oil patch is oil patch. But, you know, weren't loving what they were doing. James has been the one who really studied process control as part of his apprenticeship. So he knew about flow systems and things. And they decided to bail out of the oil patch and sort of took a, took a few months off, went to Mexico and partied. James went down to Australia, Richard went to Colombia. They all both bartended on the side and did some home brewing and things like that. And after a while we're kind of headed back home again. James started working at a distillery in Seattle. I don't know exactly which one, couldn't find that out. But this is in that period of the craft, craft brewer distilling exploding in Washington state. And so he got really keen to do that in B.C. and when those rules came in play, it became possible. He got on board right in 2013 as the first set of laws passed. But in some of the interviews that I've read of his, he did take some whiskey making classes down in Washington state as well, and he thought they were kind of a waste of time. One of his quotes was, I spent four days in a classroom with 20 other people staring at PowerPoint slide slides and still wasn't equipped to open a distillery. But he tried, he got into it. He found some used dairy equipment, a thousand liter stainless steel pasteurizer which works basically as a mash tub, and a little 700 liter column still. And he started making whiskey in 30 liter barrels. So very small barrels, which is typical for small production. So James and Richard, with their experience in bartending, they very much came up with a vision of the kind of alcohol they liked to work with when they were bartending. And he said right off the bat that they had three main cocktails in mind. The dirty martini, which is just good vodka chilled down with a little bit of olive. The Caesar, which is a Canadian classic of the spicy version of the Bloody Mary with clamato juice and the amaretto source. And an amaretto sour is a classic sour. So it's a whiskey and the liqueur, although typically more, you know, when you look about a margarita, which is. Is tequila with a little bit of liqueur, the amaretto sour is the other way around. There's more liqueur than there is bourbon in it, but also a little bit of egg white and some. And some citrus, so forth. Amaretto is an interesting liqueur. The name literally means little amaro. And the Italians, of course, make amar amaros. They're all their. Every town's got their own unique version. The origin story of amaretto goes back to 1525 in the town of Serrano in Italy, where a woman steeped apricot pits in brandy. Now, why apricot Prince? Well, certain drupes and apricot kernels, bitter almonds, peach stones, all of them have benzo, benzala, benzaldehyde, which has a very distinctive flavor to it.
- [128:51]
Paul Thurrott
That's got to be good for you.
- [128:53]
Leo Laporte
And, you know, all out, I'll drink
- [128:55]
Paul Thurrott
anything with the bends in.
- [128:57]
Leo Laporte
It seems like benzaldehyde. Yeah, it's a natural occurring thing.
- [129:00]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [129:00]
Leo Laporte
But I would also point out that apricot kernels, until you treat them a little bit, also have cyanide. So. Yeah, don't drink that. Yeah, yeah, so. And it actually comes up a bit sweeter, although they tend to add sweeteners to it. And it's a little relatively low 21 to 28% scent.
- [129:15]
Paul Thurrott
I love amaretto, actually.
- [129:16]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, amaretto's pretty special. And at the time I always thought
- [129:21]
Paul Thurrott
it was almond flavor, not apricot flavor.
- [129:23]
Leo Laporte
It tastes like almond, but doesn't typically have almond in it. Also. Some do. I didn't know the version of amaretto that the Sons of Vancouver started making because, of course they immediately made whiskey when they got started. Right. I mean, as you always do. But it takes time, you know, minimum three years to even call it whiskey. And you've got to still, so you get to work and the first thing of course you make is vodka because it's the easiest and then you're trying to make other things. And they fell on this idea of making an amaretto. They called it number 82amaretto, where they take apricot pits, vanilla bean and orange peels, they steep it in the vodka they've made and then after it's matured a bit, they add a little bit of demaretto sugar and a bit of BlackBerry honey, which is very British Columbia, to get the flavor profile they want.
- [130:04]
Paul Thurrott
This is really good.
- [130:06]
Leo Laporte
It's also a hit at 26%. It was the first sort of craft made amaretto in North America.
- [130:13]
Richard Campbell
Full.
- [130:13]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I've always had amaretto di serrano, the Italian version.
- [130:16]
Leo Laporte
Well, di Serrano is an amaretto from Serrano Serrano, right? Yeah, the original. Original. Right. But so they also made a chili vodka that was a, was a hit as well. Very much the product you want for the Caesar. So they got the Amara, they've got the, the, the Martini, the Caesar and the amaretto sour nailed. So this is their money maker while they're trying to stay afloat. Although in 2014, talk about being craft. They do an Indiegogo Fundraise to raise $10,000 to build out the tasting room to make it a nice place to go. And they basically offer gift cards and private tours and used barrels and things like that as the perk for contributing. And they raised it successfully. 10,000 bucks. And that while they're laying up their whiskey, they've got this tasting room and they're making cocktails and things in there. And in selling their amaretto and so forth, does very well. They do another Kickstarter a couple of years earlier in 2016 to raise another $15,000 to get a bigger mash ton. So the little thousand liter one that they had, that was actually an old pasteurizer, they now got brought a proper 8,000 liter mash ton. Because they were selling well, they started barrel aging their amaretto too. Also, James started a course. He'd been training, teaching, he'd been writing class, making notes about his experiences, starting making a distillery. Frustrated with the classes that he had taken and so started setting up curriculum to, to teach whiskey making as well. And so in 2017 it all came together. He started with a group called the Distillery School. They did a one what clay class on distilling. They did a lot of interviewing before he started. They specifically said no long lectures or PowerPoint. You're all hands on. You're going to make whiskey edit. And in fact, one of their new partners, a lady by the name of Jenna Diablo, took that class. She had intended to start a distillery in Manitoba and ultimately by 22 becomes a partner in Sons of Vancouver. Also in 2017, there was a competition, the Diageo Reserve World Class Cocktail Competition. It was in Mexico and the winner was a lady named Caitlin Stewart.
- [132:25]
Richard Campbell
And.
- [132:25]
Leo Laporte
And her winning cocktail was called Spilt Milk and it featured Sons of Vancouver amaretto. And it just sent that amaretto flying off the shelves like those guys carried the ball for several years on their back of their craft amaretto, including by 2018, they had these barrel aged versions of of amaretto to add more character to it. Then they, of course, you hit the pandemic and in 2020 they shut down production and start making hand sanitizer, which is the thing you did if you had a still back then and that quickly, you know, don't need to do that anymore. In 2021, they do another Indiegogo, this time trying to raise $20,000, although they raised $40,000 because they're ready to release their very first whiskey. So they laid up their first bottles back in 2013, 2014, their first barrels. And these are little barrels, so they age quickly and they release their first whiskey. They called right here and win gold at the Canadian Artisan spirit competition in 21. So on the back of all of that excitement, they go, okay, we're ready to buy bigger barrels. We want to lay up a bunch of more barrels. We need some money. They succeed in raising that money, the perks, the pledges you would get if you contributed to this fundraiser was to get bottles of their new whiskey, which they had already tentatively named Cigarettes on a leather jacket.
- [133:56]
Paul Thurrott
They're so hip.
- [133:57]
Leo Laporte
Something very hip.
- [133:59]
Paul Thurrott
Very Vancouver of them.
- [134:01]
Leo Laporte
Yes. And then in 20, by the end of 21, because right here, done so well, they did their second release, which they called Marshmallows over a campfire. This was 98% rye aged American oak and ex amaretto casks. You have to wonder where'd they get the amaretto casks from?
- [134:22]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, interesting. Waste not, want not.
- [134:25]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. They had taken these old barrel whiskey barrels that they'd aged their amaretto in and made a special barrel aged amaretto and then used them again to make this special edition which is sold out immediately. But they only made 190 bottles. Right. This is still very small operation when you talk about you have to stay under 50,000 liters. They're not even close to these Kinds of quantities. So in 22, they release a new whiskey. It's. It's 100% rye aged American oak and bourbon finished in Caribbean rum casks. And the name, this is release number three. Palm trees and a tropical breeze.
- [135:04]
Paul Thurrott
Okay, they're good at marketing. Are they good at making Question.
- [135:08]
Leo Laporte
By the way, they also make an excellent Whiskey because in 23 they win Canadian whiskey of the year.
- [135:16]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, wow.
- [135:17]
Leo Laporte
Craft distillery had ever won that prize. Wow.
- [135:20]
Paul Thurrott
Tiny little place, all rye.
- [135:22]
Leo Laporte
They won. The barrel finished. They won. And they made 178 bottles of this that were gone in two minutes.
- [135:31]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, yeah, for sure.
- [135:33]
Leo Laporte
So time for another Indiegogo. In May 23, they do another Indiegogo. This time to increase production across the board, they raise $100,000. So 10,000 to 20,000 now $100,000. They also release a new liqueur they call. And guess what this is Quadruple sec.
- [135:58]
Paul Thurrott
Now I know triple sec.
- [136:00]
Leo Laporte
Yes.
- [136:00]
Paul Thurrott
I use that in my margaritas and other other mixed drinks. What is quadruple sec?
- [136:06]
Leo Laporte
It is like triple sec, only better.
- [136:09]
Paul Thurrott
One better.
- [136:10]
Leo Laporte
But you see the pattern here where they're starting to get whiskey. They can only. They've only made small batches taking years to produce. Only that earlier fundraise where they laid up 20 barrels. So they started to get some quantity there. And that's probably going to. That's likely the whiskey that I had, they're bootstrapping. It's laid up back then. Because now, last year was the year that they finally said, okay, 90% of our production is now, is now whiskey. Because that was the intent all along. They just had to build up the quantities. And by the way, the whiskey names keep coming.
- [136:43]
Paul Thurrott
I just like their front page, which says the whiskey you want your good friends to drink when you're dead.
- [136:50]
Leo Laporte
Yes, that's this bottle here. Literally says it on the label. There are other bottles though, the special editions. There's the homemade upside down apricot cake, amaretto casserole whiskey.
- [137:03]
Paul Thurrott
I'm buying it.
- [137:04]
Leo Laporte
Rolling hills in the morning mist, Islay palm trees in a tropical storm.
- [137:10]
Paul Thurrott
But so they, so they, they still, they only make whiskey or they still make amaretto. Make the amaretto.
- [137:17]
Leo Laporte
Right, they're making them. All right.
- [137:19]
Paul Thurrott
Okay, good.
- [137:19]
Leo Laporte
Their primary thing that they're running right now on their existing still and so forth is whiskey. And their whiskey making process is interesting. So they have that big mash tonight. And the mash is where you normally extract the sugars out of. Right. And then in a big production, you would then drain that Sugary water out into a fermenting barrel, right? A big open thing where you'd put the yeast in and it would ferment. They don't do that. They do everything in the same container. So they leave that mash at the bottom while they're doing their fermentation on top. And they do a long fermentation. A, they're using champagne yeast instead of regular brewer's yeast. So they're kind of away from the beer, gives it a little different flavor. But they do like a seven or eight day fermentation until the yeast is really done before they then run it twice through their column still, which gets it up into the high, into the high 70s, cut it with water down to 60% before they put it in a barrel. So they long fermentation and a low barreling. Now they're using small barrels so they age a little more rapidly, but they're starting to use the bigger barrels. And most of them today are now ex bourbon barrels. So those would be 200 liter barrels. And new American oak probably made the same size along with these odd ducks that they do with the rum and, and they've even got a, a sherry casking and so forth. So they've done a bunch of interesting things here. But this particular whiskey is sort of the first commercial scale whiskey they made back that, that kick that Indiegogo they did where they laid up the 20 barrels. That's this stuff. This is the wheated rye Whiskey. So it's 75% rye and 25% wheat. Which begs the question, that's an interesting mash bill. Like how did they break this down into sugar? So they're almost certainly, they don't talk about anywhere, but they're almost certainly using some kind of custom enzyme to do the breakdown.
- [139:12]
Paul Thurrott
Ah, interesting.
- [139:14]
Leo Laporte
And then they're doing that very long fermentation again. This was years ago and now it's coming up. It's on the box back here, it says three to five years. And the fermentation app is on grain, which is to say they, like I described, they're combining the mashtom of the fermentation into a single stage. And right on the back there, hope you can see that is the whiskey your friends will try when you're dead. So three to five year old, not that older whiskey, this one last year whiskey, Rye whiskey of the year. No heat, real easy on the nose and lots of really caramelly kind of rich flavors. This is such nice whiskey to drink. My goodness.
- [140:03]
Paul Thurrott
This is the whiskey you want to Give your kids.
- [140:05]
Leo Laporte
Well, I don't know about that. It's still an adult whiskey in the sense of it's alcoholic. It warms up going down. It's 50%. Five zero.
- [140:18]
Richard Campbell
Wow.
- [140:18]
Leo Laporte
Okay, that is.
- [140:20]
Paul Thurrott
That's 100 proof.
- [140:21]
Leo Laporte
That's 100 proof. Yeah, you. And the problem is you wouldn't know it till you're a couple of drinks in.
- [140:27]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, it's dangerous is what you're saying.
- [140:29]
Leo Laporte
It comes at you. But boy, for their first production whiskey, they have nailed it. Just, you know, all of these other whiskeys, they're small batches, like 100, 200 bottles. That's it. And if you. And if you're in the club, you can get one, they go really quick. I bet this is the one you can actually find in stores. Unfortunately, they are only stores in British Columbia. They have not gone to other provinces and they have not gone in other nations at all. You need to. If you want one of these, you need to come to Vancouver. I got this in my local liquor store. So, you know.
- [141:04]
Richard Campbell
Wow.
- [141:05]
Paul Thurrott
You know, I'm actually quite tempted that that would be worth a trip to Vancouver for, I have to say.
- [141:11]
Leo Laporte
So the story is awesome. The whiskey is lovely. Like, this is what you wanted when you thought about little craft whiskey distillers.
- [141:19]
Paul Thurrott
Good for them. What a great.
- [141:21]
Leo Laporte
And they're still under 50,000 liters, so they're still tax exempt and so forth. Like what it's. It's such a small operation. It's like three people doing this.
- [141:31]
Paul Thurrott
So in November, they're going to release their next barrel aged amaretto. I might get on the list for that. I love amaretto.
- [141:38]
Leo Laporte
Now I know what to get you for Christmas.
- [141:41]
Paul Thurrott
That would be a wonderful, wonderful Christmas gift.
- [141:43]
Leo Laporte
Not that I could ship it. I'm just gonna have to bring it down.
- [141:46]
Paul Thurrott
So even the, Even everything else, you can only get it in B.C. you can't.
- [141:49]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they've just not done. They've not produced sufficient quantities. When you're making 100 and less than 200 bottles of something, it's gonna sell here. Like, why would you spend any money trying to move it anywhere else?
- [142:01]
Paul Thurrott
They make their version of Midori, a melon liqueur. They make blue curacao. Yeah, I don't even know what Falernum is.
- [142:10]
Leo Laporte
These are all on you. And this is the bartender background, right? These are.
- [142:14]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, you can see it.
- [142:15]
Richard Campbell
Right?
- [142:15]
Paul Thurrott
These are all. These are all things you put in mixes.
- [142:17]
Leo Laporte
What's happened to these guys is they've become very hip with high end bartenders. For all of these specialties. So they've been adding these products because that's what the bartenders are asking them for. It's like, I need a better version of. And that's what they're doing.
- [142:31]
Paul Thurrott
Their London dry gin will punch you in the face with juniper. On juniper. On juniper. It's intended to be enjoyed after mixing by proper juniper heads. Please proceed with caution, and for the love of God, use good tonic.
- [142:50]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, no kidding.
- [142:52]
Paul Thurrott
Now I really want to go up to Vancouver. I might come back with a box. Wow, that's great.
- [142:59]
Leo Laporte
But you see the model here, right? Of you get that little rig, you lay up your whiskey. They.
- [143:04]
Paul Thurrott
They bootstrapped it.
- [143:05]
Leo Laporte
It's been bootstrapping with no money, bit by bit by bit. A lot of personal labor to build out stuff and to keep aging that whiskey until it gets to a place that's good and then do a batch. And meantime, you've got these cocktail mixers, these liqueurs and things, and vodkas to have some cash flow.
- [143:24]
Paul Thurrott
That's so smart.
- [143:25]
Leo Laporte
Very clever model. They've really done a great job.
- [143:29]
Paul Thurrott
Wow, that's. That's really neat. And I love it that they're the local guys for you. That's great.
- [143:34]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, they're super local. To me, it was a great find. I'm sure these stories exist elsewhere. British Columbia has more craft distillers per capita than anywhere else in Canada. We have almost as many as Ontario, with a third the population.
- [143:48]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [143:49]
Leo Laporte
And it's because we got these new rules in place first. Oh, that's smart. So, you know, other parts of the country are catching up, but in the meantime, these guys and many others like them, there's 60 of them. You've only heard me talk about four or five guys like Bareface. And, you know, there's some very cool whiskeys being made in B.C. and this was just another awesome find. And not out in the woods. They're in North Vancouver. They're in a very nice area of town, actually. Although apparently it's behind the Canadian Tire. Okay. It's independent.
- [144:18]
Paul Thurrott
Everything's behind a Canadian Tire. That's awesome.
- [144:21]
Leo Laporte
I mean, it could have been by a Tim Hortons, but it's almost the same thing.
- [144:26]
Paul Thurrott
Really awesome. Really great stuff as usual. What a fun show. Thank you. Paul Thurat. You'll find him@therot.com don't forget to become a premium member, support his work, and get great extra content. Of course, the books@leanpub.com now, three of them. Field guide to Windows 11 with Windows 10 built right in the windows everywhere. A history of Windows through its programming frameworks. And his newest, Deinshitify Windows. 100 pages of goodness for only 5.99 or something.
- [144:59]
Richard Campbell
4.99. 4.99.
- [145:01]
Paul Thurrott
Cheap at any price. No, cheap at. Never mind.
- [145:06]
Richard Campbell
Yep, it's cheap. Wait, cheap. What are we doing?
- [145:11]
Paul Thurrott
It's. It's a good book. You must read. Mr. Richard Campbell is@runasradio.com and Dotnet Rocks is there as well. The show he does with Carl Franklin. And we are going to head out to Orlando, Florida, where you're going to get a few dotnet Rocks recorded and do Windows.
- [145:29]
Leo Laporte
Doing a run as in a window.
- [145:30]
Paul Thurrott
I'm sorry, run as rather.
- [145:32]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [145:32]
Leo Laporte
And I have a particular Floridian whiskey in mind I'm hoping I can find while I'm there, maybe my homework.
- [145:38]
Paul Thurrott
Lisa and I might. Might help you out with that if you need some help. Let's see what else. We do this show every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. That's 1800 UTC. Next week, again, I won't be here, Mike. I'll be filling in with Richard and Paul. After the fact, you can get on demand versions of the show. You can watch. I didn't mention where you can watch us in the club to a Discord. YouTube, X.com, twitch, Facebook, LinkedIn and kick on demand versions of the show always available at our website, Twitter, TV, WW. You can also get it at YouTube. There's a video there at YouTube and that's a good way to share clips after the fact. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it the minute it's available. Simple enough. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. Have a wonderful week. Stay away from the car fires and the cartel bloodbath that is not going on.
- [146:39]
Richard Campbell
I was having a terrific eggs Benedict when all my American friends started telling me I needed to flee the country. And I was like, yeah, I don't think you understand what it's like here.
- [146:48]
Paul Thurrott
Now, you guys were in pv and I know, Richard, you like to go to PV every year.
- [146:53]
Richard Campbell
By the way, we have two friends in PV right now and they were there during this and they said you wouldn't know anything happened. So I'm not sure what these news
- [147:02]
Paul Thurrott
reports are about, but cartel proper propaganda, it's like they turn it.
- [147:06]
Richard Campbell
I don't know what it is, but they're like, we just go to clubs every night. We sit on the beach, there's no cops, there's no fires, there's no cars. There's no nothing. Like, I don't know. So. I don't know. I don't know.
- [147:15]
Paul Thurrott
So this is a tale as old as time. I guess news really likes to blow things up.
- [147:21]
Leo Laporte
And also that riots are more local than you think.
- [147:23]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Yeah, that's true.
- [147:25]
Richard Campbell
One block I had a riot when I couldn't get salmon on my eggs Benedict.
- [147:28]
Paul Thurrott
Am I right?
- [147:30]
Leo Laporte
Know I don't know.
- [147:32]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I'm glad you're safe and sound. And I will see you both in a couple of weeks on Windows Weekly. I'll see you, Richard, next week.
- [147:41]
Richard Campbell
Have a good time in Florida.
- [147:42]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, it's going to be lots of fun.
- [147:43]
Paul Thurrott
Thanks, everybody. See you next time. Hi there. Leo Laporte here. I just wanted to let you know about some of the other shows we do on this network you probably already know about. This Weekend Tech. Every Sunday, I bring together some of the top journalists in the tech field to talk about the tech stories. It's a wonderful chance for you to keep up on what's going on with tech, plus be entertained by some very bright and fun minds. I hope you'll tune in every Sunday for this Week in Tech. Just go to your favorite podcast client and subscribe. This Week in Tech from the Twit Network. Thank you,
- [148:21]
Richard Campbell
Sam.