WW 933: Live from Build - Protestors, AI agents, Edit, Doom: The Dark Ages

Summary

Windows Weekly (Audio) - Episode WW 933: Live from Build - Protestors, AI Agents, Edit, Doom: The Dark Ages

Release Date: May 22, 2025

Recorded Live: Wednesday, May 21, 2025, at Microsoft Build Conference, Seattle

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Introduction

In this special episode of Windows Weekly, recorded live from Microsoft's annual Developers Conference, Build, hosts Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell delve into a spectrum of pressing topics surrounding one of the world's most influential tech companies. The episode navigates through significant announcements from the keynote, the emergence of Agentic AI, recent layoffs at Microsoft, and the evolving landscape of AI integration in Windows and developer tools.

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Protests at Microsoft Build

A notable backdrop to this year's Build conference was the persistent protests related to geopolitical tensions, particularly the Israel-Palestine conflict, and growing concerns around AI technologies. Paul Thurrott shares his firsthand experience of navigating through heightened security and multiple disruptions during the event.

Paul Thurrott [02:16]: "I take no stance on the Israel, Palestine thing, but there are a lot of protesters. It has inserted itself into our lives here."

The hosts recount incidents where protestors aggressively attempted to disrupt keynote sessions, highlighting the tense atmosphere at the conference.

Richard Campbell [03:01]: "It’s way more than a little disruption."

Such disruptions have become a recurring challenge, with Build being interrupted multiple times by demonstrators aiming to voice their dissent.

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Microsoft’s Layoffs and Company Morale

The episode takes a somber turn as the hosts discuss Microsoft's recent announcement of laying off 6,000 employees—approximately 3% of its workforce. This move, juxtaposed against the backdrop of a robust quarterly performance, has stirred uncertainty and fear among employees.

Paul Thurrott [13:06]: "It almost felt like a countrywide warning this could happen to you."

Richard Campbell reflects on the arbitrary nature of the layoffs, which have seemingly affected every team without clear metrics, fostering a climate of doubt and diminished morale within the company.

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The Rise of Agentic AI and AI Agents

A significant portion of the discussion centers around Microsoft's ambitious foray into Agentic AI. This technology represents a leap towards multi-agent orchestration, enabling AI systems to interact seamlessly with users and other applications.

Leo Laporte [24:40]: "What they were trying to demonstrate is how a genic AI can reach out and collect information for you."

The hosts emphasize the collaborative efforts among major AI players like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI in establishing interoperability standards such as MCP (Microsoft's new protocol) and A2A (AI-to-AI communication protocols). This cooperation is pivotal in preventing technological silos that could hinder AI advancement.

Richard Campbell [25:18]: "They're all vulnerable. Nobody has the confidence to say, oh no, we're going to be able to do this end to end ourselves."

The introduction of NL Web is highlighted as a transformative tool that allows websites to interact with AI agents, potentially revolutionizing user engagement and website functionalities.

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Microsoft’s AI Implementations and Features

Microsoft's integration of AI into its core applications marks a significant shift towards smarter, more intuitive user experiences. Demonstrations from the Build keynote showcased AI-driven processes in scientific research and material development, underscoring the practical applications of Agentic AI.

Leo Laporte [23:43]: "They made an Xbox motherboard play Forza submerged in this newly invented chemical."

Additionally, features like text rewriting in Notepad and image generation in Paint illustrate the system-level enhancements brought about by AI integrations, aiming to streamline tasks and enhance productivity.

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GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio Code Updates

Expanding on developer tools, the hosts discuss the open-sourcing of GitHub Copilot within Visual Studio Code. This move fosters greater flexibility, allowing developers to integrate various AI tools through extensions.

Paul Thurrott [47:00]: "What this means is that instead of you deciding that you want GitHub Copilot and adding that extension, it will just be integrated into the source for Visual Studio code."

The conversation also touches upon the challenges and opportunities presented by this integration, emphasizing the balance between proprietary AI enhancements and the open-source ecosystem that Visual Studio Code thrives in.

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Windows Updates from Build

The Build conference unveiled several updates to the Windows platform, focusing on enhancing developer experiences and system functionalities:

• Windows App SDK & WinUI 3: Transitioning from UWP, the Windows App SDK offers a more flexible and modern framework for building Windows applications without being tethered to specific Windows versions.

• React Native for Windows: A revamped architecture introduces improved performance and type safety between JavaScript and native code, facilitating seamless app development across platforms.

• Windows AI Foundry: Aligning with Azure AI Foundry, this local AI solution supports small language models, expanding Microsoft's AI capabilities directly on user devices.

Paul Thurrott [56:43]: "The Windows AI Foundry is the local version of that. So it's very specifically for the local, you know, small language models."

These updates signify Microsoft's commitment to fostering a robust and versatile development environment, integrating AI deeply into the Windows ecosystem.

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New Features: Command Line Editor "Edit"

As part of the Build announcements, Microsoft introduced "Edit," a command-line editor paying homage to the classic MS-DOS editor. Available for free on GitHub, Edit offers a nostalgic yet functional tool for developers and power users.

Paul Thurrott [111:08]: "It's an homage to the classic Ms. DOS editor."

The editor supports keyboard shortcuts and offers a full-screen menu system, blending retro design with modern functionality.

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Xbox News and Game Pass Updates

The Xbox segment highlights legal victories for Epic Games, enabling Fortnite to return to iOS and Android platforms after a prolonged legal battle with Apple. This development paves the way for broader game accessibility.

Paul Thurrott [97:12]: "So if you have an iPhone or iPad, you can get Fortnite again. It's just like it's going to party like it's 2020."

Additionally, the hosts celebrate new additions to Xbox Game Pass, including titles like Hellblade 2 and S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2, enhancing the subscription service's appeal with a diverse game library.

Richard Campbell [106:14]: "And so that's it. That's a good one."

The integration of GeForce Now into the Xbox app on Windows further exemplifies Microsoft's strategy to unify gaming experiences across platforms.

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Community and Club TWiT

Leo Laporte emphasizes the benefits of Club TWiT membership, offering exclusive access to live keynotes, a dedicated Discord community, and various perks that enhance the listener experience. This segment underscores the importance of community support in sustaining and growing the podcast.

Leo Laporte [109:31]: "If you're a club member in our club Discord, but also on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kick."

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Conclusion

Wrapping up the episode, the hosts reflect on the dense array of announcements and developments discussed, from AI advancements and Windows updates to Xbox news and community engagement. They also share a lighthearted moment experimenting with AI-generated Minecraft-style avatars, showcasing the playful side of technological integration.

Leo Laporte [95:16]: "It's a really cool thing, it looks just like us."

As they sign off, the hosts invite listeners to join Club TWiT for exclusive content and reiterate their commitment to delivering insightful and comprehensive coverage of Microsoft's evolving landscape.

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Listener Notes:

• Official Show Notes & Links: Available to Club TWiT members on Discord.
• Further Reading: Detailed articles and insights can be accessed on Paul Thurrott's website and Run His Radio.
• Subscribe: Follow Windows Weekly on your preferred podcast platform for ongoing updates and analyses.

Transcript

[Leo Laporte]

Hey everybody. It's time for Windows Weekly and a special show today. Richard and Paul are both in Seattle for Microsoft's Developers conference Build. And they will talk of course about the keynote which we streamed live on Monday. But a lot of big announcements. Agentic AI the theme of the show. We also have Windows News, Xbox News. It's a jam packed Windows Weekly. Coming up next, podcasts you love from people you trust.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is twit.

[Leo Laporte]

This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 933 recorded Wednesday, May 21, 2025 live from BUILD. It's time for Windows Weekly, the show we cover the latest news from Microsoft. My friends, there is news from Microsoft at the BUILD conference in beautiful Seattle, Washington. I bring you Paul Thurat from Thorat.com, richard Campbell from Runners Radio. They're sitting side by side.

[Richard Campbell]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

Put your phone down, Paul. We've got a podcast to do. Oh, isn't it?

[Richard Campbell]

See, it's not AI this time. Not.

[Leo Laporte]

No, it's real.

[Richard Campbell]

Reaching across the screen. It's a real thing.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say I really enjoyed Monday's keynote. If you haven't seen it and it is on the TWIT plus feed for club members. Not public, but it is on the TWIT plus feed. I should mention we did the Google keynote yesterday from IO. We did the Build keynote for Microsoft on Monday. We will be doing the Apple keynote in a few weeks. All of that will though will only be club members. Not because we want to, but because of takedown fears. Apple has threatened us both on YouTube and Twitch. @ this point we decided not to take the chance. So we're doing it privately in the club. If you're not a club member, seven bucks a month, that's all it takes. You can just pay for the one month and get access to all three if you want. But the TWIT plus feed does have the Build keynote, which I thought was really great. Paul and Richard joined me. I was very impressed, but we're going to get to that. But first, a little word of warning if any blood is splattered on our hosts during the show today.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just want to be clear. I take no stance on the Israel, Palestine thing, but it has, there's a lot of protesters. It has, yeah. It's inserted itself into our lives here.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's been remarkable.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, we saw, we heard a little bit at the keynote and that turned out to be a Microsoft employee who sent an email to everybody saying bye and then did it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, but, so, but There were. There are. There are more stories, I guess, is the way to say it. So even. Even to that event, for example, if you watch that on the live stream, you saw and heard what we heard, which was. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Just a little disruption in the.

[Paul Thurrott]

Bit of a pause on Sasha's part. Kept going.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Stumble a sentence, nothing more.

[Paul Thurrott]

But, I mean, you should probably tell this story, though, like, what actually happened in that room that day, because it's way more.

[Richard Campbell]

It's way. Yeah. So the guy popped up in the middle, and so all the black shirts appear and start converging on him. And when they were just about to him, two. Two more people went up the wings.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, this is. They were trying to get on stage.

[Richard Campbell]

They were trying to get on stage, and then other people appeared off the side and took those people out.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

So, yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

So there's a lot of security.

[Richard Campbell]

There's a lot of security.

[Paul Thurrott]

Day one was like a military zone here. It was like police and tactical gear, like big trucks driving around.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it all employees?

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, no, no. Because anybody can buy a ticket, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, hundreds.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a strange place to choose for a protest.

[Paul Thurrott]

Like. Well, it's here in Seattle. It's Microsoft's hometown.

[Leo Laporte]

Microsoft is also accused of supporting Israel with some of its Azure capabilities. But Microsoft itself says, no, no, they're a regular commercial customer.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like, you know, you're spreading hate speech on Facebook and they're like, we're not doing it. They're doing it. You know, like we. You know, we provide the platform, you know, that kind of thing. But. Right. So that day, after I did the keynote coverage from the hotel room, so after that, I wanted to get over to the convention center, which is right next to my hotel. So right around the corner, I walked. I wanted to go to the press room, which I was told was on the third floor. And there are probably 100, 150 maybe protesters outside, making a lot of noise, all the military, like, police stuff going on, kind of like Boston in 2013 or whatever. And could not get in the building. Right. I spent the next 45 minutes walking around that block, trying to get in the back, go through the garage, lots of security, blah, blah, blah. You get inside. I ran into David Ortno from the Net team up on maybe the third floor. And as we were talking, these two security guards bursted out of a door, and they're like, we got people on the second floor. We got people on the second floor.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's actually been a lot of local protesting occurring Meaning, like in a particular session, maybe, or whatever it is. So I saw this. I saw this. I think it was the verge was like, protesters have now interrupted build three times. I'm like, no, it's. It's closer to 25 or 30 times.

[Leo Laporte]

Actually, a lot more than that.

[Paul Thurrott]

You just don't really see what's. You just don't see it.

[Leo Laporte]

So, you know, it's interesting because Google maybe locked it down better at Shoreline, but there weren't, as far as I could tell, no protests.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Well, there was. They're in their own facility there. Right. So they have their own. You know, they can.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they're not. They're at Shoreline. But it wasn't. I'm sorry, Open to the public.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, in any event, this is day one was just crazy. I also.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm not going to lose a point where they closed the doors. You couldn't get out.

[Paul Thurrott]

You literally couldn't get in or out. Like, it was crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

The. The protesters were being very aggressive to anyone with a badge on.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And so they basically held all the. The attendees inside while the police cleared the sidewalks.

[Paul Thurrott]

On day two, Tuesday, yesterday, I again, you know, head over to the convention center at whatever time. And this was much calmer outside, Right. And I'm talking. This is one example of, like, the stuff that just doesn't. It's not making the news. No one has seen it, you know, whatever. But I was standing on the corner right in front of the entrance to the convention center and talking to my wife on the phone, just catching up, you know, and, you know, people are coming and going in every direction. It's like a scene from like a. Like a Joker or Batman movie. Like, I. Down the street, it kind of. Kind of a little bit of a hill. I could see a woman in a nice suit, like, really dressed up, holding two big, you know, sets of balloons. I froze there and. Okay. And like light blue balloons, right? And it's something you would notice because it's unusual. But then you're like, okay, well, people have parties and she's a work event, you know, who knows? And so I didn't think about it again, and I concluded this call. I went through security, which is tedious. And I'm walking away and maybe 10ft away from security, and I hear a commotion behind me, right where I just left. And I turn around, and that woman has pushed past security. Let the balloons go. These banners come down. It's like Free Palestine or whatever. And they're both setting off alarms. They're like, and so they're floating up into the atrium. It's like 100ft. And then she ran back up. And I'm like, okay. It's like, okay. So now there's these alarms going off inside the convention center, but just in that little area, the security guards all run over. They're all looking at it like, yeah, no, we're not going to get those down there. You know, like, they're like, way up there. And I was like, okay, well, that's kind of weird. So I turned around and went up the stairs. And then I thought to myself, I swear to God, it might have been 30ft later. You can see, like, the conventions just happening, people coming and going. And if you weren't right there, you didn't even know what happened.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And because of the way it happened and so quickly, no one, you know, made a video of it or anything. So you don't see it online. It just. But it happened and they disrupted it. And so I could. I was imagining, like, five minutes later, someone would leave a session, go out that entrance, you know, the exit, and maybe register there's alarms going off at the ceiling. But thinking like, whatever, like, you know, alarms go off, you're in a city like, like, what is it? But they did it specifically to disrupt in that moment. And that's what's been happening. Like, there's been a lot of stuff like that.

[Leo Laporte]

And, you know, of course, this is a charged subject in the United States right now, all over the world, and a lot of tech companies are getting a lot of heat because of their participation or involvement with Israel. But I wonder if we're going to see worse. Well, from the anti AI folks in a few.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, it's only a matter of time. This is like a science fiction movie made real. Right. Where it's. Yeah, the people.

[Leo Laporte]

People believe really strongly that AI is a plagiarism machine.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's the.

[Richard Campbell]

It's the.

[Leo Laporte]

You know, we. We had somebody on intelligent machines last week, Emily Bender.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Who basically, you know, is a puritan like that. Thou shalt not allow a witch to live. They think AI is witchy.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is the part of the plot to Contact. Right. The Carl Sagan book and then the movie where these religious people are like, no, you can't go into space and try to find God or whatever it is you're doing. You know, like, you're.

[Leo Laporte]

So I think we're going to see some. Definitely some serious protests.

[Paul Thurrott]

Someone.

[Leo Laporte]

This is shocking to me that this much is going on.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, me too. Today Listen, listen. I traveled for work right after 9, 11. There was heightened security everywhere. No people on planes. You know, go to Vegas and whatever. This is worse than that in the sense that it's more intrusive and in your face and it's bizarre. Like, I've just never experienced this. I've gone, you know, Richard's gone to more stuff than I have. Like, I've been to Israel. Like, I, you know, I. I just have never witnessed anything quite like this.

[Richard Campbell]

So these guys were very organized and they were quite aggressive. It's surprising.

[Paul Thurrott]

So the other thing we. So just real quick, someone said to me something to the effect of, well, you know, they're against this kind of violence in Palestine, so at least they're not gonna be violent. I was like, I don't think that guarantees that. But, you know, the notion that someone would be hypocritical. On that note, I don't think it's that much of a stretch.

[Leo Laporte]

No, no, no. These things, you know, I've been parts of protests in the 60s and 70s against the Vietnam War. And what, There was mob. Once you're in a mob, once the mob is doing something, you've lose all individual will.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes.

[Leo Laporte]

And. And mobs will do things that I.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wouldn'T have done just in the moment, you know, because.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, in the moment, as individual, it escalates and then mobs have no, you know, conscience or brains. They just are mobs.

[Paul Thurrott]

So.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's very scary.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So day two in that, there was a second keynote, like Google does, you know, like a developer keynote. And that was also disrupted, by the way. And no one even knew what happened if you weren't in the room, because that time you didn't even hear it happen. So.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, Jay was interrupted. They cut the feed.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Oh, they cut the feed. Oh, maybe that's smoke.

[Richard Campbell]

He was very close to the front and very loud.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm sorry.

[Richard Campbell]

I think there was a moment where they just said, shut the mics off. So Jay just stopped. And then when they cleared him, then they might came back on and continued.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, so I. Speaking to folks here, Microsoft knew that this was probably going to happen. They were training all of the speakers to, at all costs, just keep talking.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And they were told, listen, if everything goes south, the teleprompter disappears. You're just standing there and just whatever, hundreds of people in front of you talk about your day, what you had for breakfast. Just keep going. And the idea, yeah, do not give these people a platform. Don't give them what they want, which is to disrupt the normal activities of the show to make their case. Right. And, you know, I thought Satya did a great job with that.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Especially because he. It was like a one second, not yet even.

[Richard Campbell]

It was literally just a stumble of.

[Paul Thurrott]

A wall, just kept going. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

And this is like Chicago in 1968. This is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it reflects the. The deep divides in this country.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And the world these days.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, absolutely.

[Leo Laporte]

And look, it's. Big tech is taking a lot of the brunt of this, and I don't think it's the end of it. I think there are many issues.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think this is the beginning of it. Unfortunately, what happens is, you know, when you see this on the news or whatever, that gives other people ideas, you know, and then it's like, oh, this is something we could do. We could do something worse, you know, that kind of thing. So it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, let's not give them too much time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, no, but. But I just, you know, the reason I wanted to highlight this is because.

[Leo Laporte]

It'S not getting covered in the news.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is incredibly unusual. I mean, I mean, unique, really. For me, I've never really experienced anything quite like this. And especially the Microsoft thing. And, you know, it's like if you, whatever, wherever you land on this debate, it kind of doesn't matter. It's just. It's a. It's just a. It's a. It has cast kind of a weird shadow over this show. Like, it's. It's been very.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's not the only shadow on this.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, I know, I know. No, but there's other shadows.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, let's talk about the other shadows.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I mean, this. This concerns about the future of the show. Although, you know, I talk. So this.

[Leo Laporte]

What is the. What are the concerns about the future?

[Richard Campbell]

The other shadow of the show is the layoffs. Last week, it really seems to have hit the.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, of course. 6% layoffs and mostly developers. It looked like 3%.

[Richard Campbell]

It was 6,000 people.

[Paul Thurrott]

6,000.

[Leo Laporte]

3%. Sorry.

[Paul Thurrott]

And this is another thing. We've talked to folks here about that, obviously, and there were speakers that were.

[Richard Campbell]

Let go that were supposed to be.

[Paul Thurrott]

Presented at least one Microsoft booth in the show floor of the area that was not manned because those people were all laid off. And this was. It's a weird timing. There are theories about this, but I was talking to a friend from Microsoft who was telling me that the only thing that he'd ever encountered that was worse than this was, you know, over 10 years ago. And it was. It sounds like a crazy exaggeration, but he said that people were all. Everyone on these teams were given emails and they all had different instructions. So they talked amongst themselves and like, oh, what does yours say? I said, what does your say? And some of them were brought into a room As I think, 100 people or so in a room standing there. Some guy gets up on the stage, reads the script and says, all right, HR will be out in a minute and tell you what your future looks like. And then he left. And it was like, what is happening? But this time, the weird, random nature of it, the weird, seemingly random, the weird. It doesn't matter what your tenure success rate was or whatever it was very random. Has caused people who maybe never worried about their future to suddenly think, wait a minute, anything is possible now. And it's that kind of doubt that I think is a huge problem for the morale or whatever of everyone at this company now. It's like we're the most successful company on earth on many measures. And they're being super aggressive.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. The timing was not good. They had the quarterly results. They had a great quarter.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And then they lay off 6,000 people.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

So, yeah. And in a way that seemed at once symmetrical, like every team was touched, but also arbitrary as to who it was.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. A separate person had told me, said, look, you know, back in, whatever it was February, they laid off low performers. These people had been warned well in advance. Like, the only issue there was that unfortunately some people had actually, I guess, turned things around. But because it was so late in the cycle, their overall record was still kind of bad. So they. They were like, but wait, I fixed myself. And they're like, no, you're out. You know. But this one was less, I don't know, like metric based. I'm not sure what it's called.

[Richard Campbell]

It was not metric based.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It just seemed to be. It was business based that they were. They were actually looking at the costs. And you had specific. No, not even that.

[Richard Campbell]

6,000 people in this equation. It's like 2 billion a year. They did 10 billion in buybacks that quarter.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, it's just not enough money to matter, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

No, there was a weird. It almost felt like a countrywide warning this could happen to you.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. That's what it really feels.

[Leo Laporte]

That destabilizes.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what I'm saying. I don't understand.

[Richard Campbell]

Seems to be happening.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what I don't understand. There's a lot of. I just kind of self doubt. That I've not seen here before, which is bizarre.

[Richard Campbell]

I have 2011.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay.

[Richard Campbell]

That's the last time I've seen the company like this.

[Paul Thurrott]

And by the way, that might be. That might be the thing I was just referring to. Might have been 2011.

[Richard Campbell]

2011 was the time where everybody seemed to. One thing I noticed because I go to campus regularly was was I was sitting in Red west and watching the parking lot clear out at 5:30.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And you know, people used to work here 24 hours a day. They just came and went, oh my God.

[Paul Thurrott]

Sunday night I went over to the campus for their little pre show event. This is the original part of the campus. So it's like buildings one through eight or nine or whatever it is. It looks like Space City over there. It's completely different. Yeah. You wouldn't recognize it if you were used to the campus. For many years it looked like a college campus. This thing looks like a Star wars set. And I had a friend who worked at Microsoft for about 20 years who came over afterwards and we drove around the campus and we were both kind of reminiscing like, this used to be here, this used to be here. We're like, no, we couldn't figure out where we were at points. We're like, this is completely different. But the other half of that is that there are buildings, they started right before the pandemic and they're just sitting there, empty shells or like girders and like empty pits in the ground. And he was like, you know, Emmy Hood's like, yeah, we're not finishing these. Like, we're going to leave these things here. We're not spending money on this. And it makes half of the campus look like a war zone. It's the weirdest juxtaposition of richest company on earth. And they don't have the people to fill these buildings now. Not because they don't exist, but because a lot of these people just working from home, they don't have the, you know, not everyone's coming in.

[Leo Laporte]

What's funny is a lot of AI teams were cut.

[Richard Campbell]

Everybody was touched.

[Paul Thurrott]

Everyone.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Then so somebody, Paul is telling me in the Discord that the Python team was cut on their way to the Python convention.

[Richard Campbell]

So at the time it was stunning. And you know, I've heard stories of, they were in a meeting, a VP appeared in the meeting, said, you can wrap this up, you need to wrap this up.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, like you and you need.

[Richard Campbell]

To go see HR right now. And then dropped out of the call.

[Paul Thurrott]

Incredible. So I was standing on the. Before the event, I was standing there doing something on my phone. And Raphael came was. He lives right across the street. He came over with his wife. We were talking for a little while, and as we're talking, I'm looking over this vast space. Like, the Microsoft campus is the size of a town. It's, like, incredible. And it spans over the highway. It's this huge thing. And I literally at one point said, you know, I could see a guy like, you know, a mile away coming up over the top of the, you know, the little hill there. I'm like, you know what this feels like? This is like the beginning of one of those zombie movies where the world is completely empty. And then you see a person in the distance and suddenly you realize they're running at you and they're like, what's going on? And it's like a Zomb be, you know? And I was like, there's no one here. I was like, this entire Space City thing was completely empty. I mean, there were people in the building I was about to go into, and him and I and his wife, but the whole, like, usually this stuff happening, like people moving around cars and whatever. And I was like, there's no one here. Yeah, it's. It's very. These things don't make sense together. Richest company in the world. Empty. You know, Richest company in the world. Buildings are never going to be completed. They have a geothermal thing, a structure that was described to me as being a hole that goes down to the center of the earth. And I said, you know, you're describing the plot of Stranger Things, and this is really weird. Like, it's just. There's something weird going on here. I don't know. I don't know what to tell you. It's very strange.

[Leo Laporte]

The lead of the Microsoft's CPython team, the core developer.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Matt Dreboom, wrote on LinkedIn. Microsoft's support for the faster C. Python project was canceled yesterday. We were all minus one set to attend the Python Language Summit at Pycon today. And in fact, notifications came out while we were en route to Pittsburgh.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, boy.

[Leo Laporte]

They also laid off a longtime Typescript developer. It hit languages for some reason, and.

[Paul Thurrott]

AI, but again, I think that speaks to the random nature of it in the sense that, like Richard said, I think every group was touched by this. Like, it was. They were just like, taking one here. We're taking one here.

[Leo Laporte]

But you. You almost can't say that it was AI to blame for this, or can you?

[Richard Campbell]

No, it doesn't seem like.

[Leo Laporte]

I don't think so.

[Richard Campbell]

No, no, it definitely. And it's not. That's just the thing that's interesting. It's like, it's not the money. It's not any given team. It's not anyone's performance.

[Leo Laporte]

It's inexplicable.

[Richard Campbell]

Stock price was already up from the phenomenal quarter. The only thing I can point to is it's to keep the workers afraid.

[Leo Laporte]

That's not good.

[Paul Thurrott]

It worked for the Empire and Star wars for a little while. I mean, it's a very strange strategy to me. Well, this is. When we first talked about this last week, the thing I would have said at the time, I think is generally speaking, with whatever these types of things, you can point to something and say, look, there's a reason here. And you may agree with it or not, it doesn't matter, but this one is like, I'm really struggling to understand the point, you know, like what they're trying to achieve because it just doesn't seem to be rational.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You know, well, and if, if it was to galvanize the employees, I think it did the opposite because they seem very demoralized.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, my God. Yes. Yep. And I, Yeah, like I said, it's.

[Leo Laporte]

Weird to do it right before build. Or maybe would it be worse to do it right after build? I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

I know the answer to that.

[Paul Thurrott]

The typical time to do this, it seems, would have been tied to the end of the Christmas. Well, well, yes, but I mean, for Microsoft, you often see big changes occur right as their fiscal year ends, starts.

[Richard Campbell]

Right in June, July, which is likely still to happen.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right? That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

So July, there will be shuffling because there always is with the new fiscal world.

[Paul Thurrott]

I've heard before July, by the way. So. But yeah, there's going to be more. I mean, that's one thing I've heard consistently, like, this is not the end of this.

[Richard Campbell]

And which speaks to that fear quotient. Again, this is.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's a lot like what happened in the gaming industry last year, where it just felt like it was like, is this going to stop? Like, at what point do we have enough people to do the stuff we're trying to do with games, you know, and. But now it's the company, you know, not just. It's not the. It's not just games. Anyway, on that happy note.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my God, let's talk about agentic AI. Actually, I want to take a break. Just to clear your head. We could do that. Yeah. Unless you want to go right into it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. All right.

[Leo Laporte]

I have to say I really enjoyed the keynote on Monday, especially compared to the keynote on Tuesday. Google's keynote, it was really.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I'm fascinated.

[Leo Laporte]

You said, and I think it's true that it was very developer focused. They wanted to make it more developer focused and it felt that way.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you think showed a lot of stuff. Well, Google does the thing that Apple does, which is they have the keynote which is a marketing event.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a more public.

[Paul Thurrott]

They right after it ended they had a developer keynote, which is what Apple does. So I just real quick on that and I was pre briefed on a lot of the stuff that Google announced, I thought. But then most of the stuff they announced in that first keynote I was not pre briefed on. So I heard about all the developer stuff and some, a few other things. But as they kept unrolling like we're doing this, we're doing this, we're doing this. I was like, what? What is happening? Like, it's like I thought I had a handle on what they were going to announce and it went on for two hours of this is stuff we never mentioned to anybody. And I, if anything, I almost feel like they had too much stuff. Like it was overwhelming.

[Richard Campbell]

That seems very Microsoft to overwhelm a keynote.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it was definitely shock and awe and I think for them it was a message because a lot of people still think they're behind in some way. And they were like, in case it's not obvious, we are not behind.

[Leo Laporte]

So anyway, I really enjoyed. The thing that stuck out for me was the chemistry demo. They had a Microsoft employee who was a chemist show how they used Agenic AI to pull in all the scientific papers. They were looking for a new compound for cooling with no weapons. So they set the print.

[Richard Campbell]

Pardon me, no PFAs, right?

[Leo Laporte]

No PFAs without those forever chemicals. So they pulled in all the scientific papers, they gave it the parameters, the AI went out, collected information, then generated some sample molecules which they thought would fit the bill, then tested in the computer, tested the sample things, came up with a molecule to try. They made it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And they said this should work.

[Leo Laporte]

And then they showed dropping an Xbox motherboard in there and playing Forza in the motherboard. Stay school. It was submerged in this newly invented chemical. And then he said, well, if this seems like a demo, don't. It's not. We did this, right? That's right.

[Paul Thurrott]

He actually started walking away. Oh, I'm sorry, by the way, that was real. We just did that right now.

[Leo Laporte]

But what they were trying to demonstrate, not so much making new materials, although that was kind of amazing, but how a genic AI can reach out and collect information for you. And there's two technologies they talked a lot about. MCP and A2A.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, yeah. And the other half of. Well, yeah, no, you're right. I'm sorry. I was gonna. There's a. Yeah, sorry. This is a related thing. I was, we were talking before the show and I was trying to remember. Yeah. Who would. Yeah. That's the NL web stuff. But the interesting thing to me about that, and we touched on this briefly I think last week, is that the big AI companies, you know, so anthropic. I almost said Apple, Just kidding. Google, Microsoft, OpenAI et cetera, are agreeing on these standards. Right. For the.

[Richard Campbell]

Which is so.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so to me such a relief because this could easily have been siloed.

[Paul Thurrott]

If that would have prevented any forward progress. If Google had their own thing and anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft, whatever had their own thing and like this would have halted all progress.

[Richard Campbell]

It also speaks to. They're all vulnerable.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

Nobody has the confidence to say, oh no, we're going to be able to do this end to end ourselves. Let's go there. I mean I tried to find ways to be successful last.

[Leo Laporte]

Apple tried and failed miserably. So now they're talking to everybody.

[Paul Thurrott]

They could still get it right. But I, but last year, sometime last fall I think it was Satya Nadella said that models, AI models were a commodity. And I.

[Richard Campbell]

What Was this quote? 1900 of them in the foundry now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Over 1900, yep. And. But I think the extension of that now is. Well, okay, but that means you're also a commodity Microsoft because this is the if everything is AI, nothing is AI argument. Well, but everyone's.

[Leo Laporte]

They're making Azure agnostic. Right. In fact. And Elon Musk, well, we got to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Get to that later because there's something that to me was very striking. You have Elon Musk is suing Sam Altman and OpenAI over the future of that company. They're cross suing him and Grok and whatever it is. And you put your whole company's future was resting on OpenAI shoulders for a while there and still biz.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Practically speaking. And you put both of them on like not on stage. They're both video things. But I mean who are we sending messages to here? Like this is. That's a crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, they're just valid point to give.

[Paul Thurrott]

Them both Airtime, is it because, like you said, we don't have 1900 models are in the Azure AI foundry. So now I guess we have two more in their Grok models. Why didn't we have any of those other people?

[Richard Campbell]

Why was never on for Deep Sea?

[Paul Thurrott]

But why would you put. Yeah, why would you put them on stage? What is. Is, are Microsoft developers clamoring for Grok models? I don't think so. I mean, like, like, so there was a. Like, to me, that was very much a message or a series of messages being sent in both directions.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, to Sam Altman. From Sam Altman. But I also thought, really interesting, you know, if you knew, if you knew you were going to be protested, that was going to be the lead story. You knew putting Elon on the screen was going to be controversial. Like one way to control your lead story.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. We can do something even stupider and we will refocus the news nicely.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Because if you think about it logically, or you think about it just practically, I, like I said, I don't, I don't think anyone was asking for this. I, I don't think it. I don't think it would have mattered to anyone.

[Richard Campbell]

He didn't raise the stock price because Elon had three minutes on the screen.

[Paul Thurrott]

Nope. But there he was. And, wow, you're going to call this guy out. I mean, this was a message to the US Government in some ways, if you think about it.

[Leo Laporte]

I mean, which is probably a wise thing to do.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's part of the strategy. Like, we, like we're racing forward. We don't want anything getting in our way. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

You know, and we've got a couple of billionaires with us.

[Leo Laporte]

A smart CEO at this point definitely appeals to Trump and says, you know, hey, here's. Here's a million bucks for your inaugural committee or whatever. We talked about this yesterday on Mac Break Weekly when Trump was in Saudi Arabia with Jensen Huang and Elon Musk. By the way, he says to Jensen Huang, I'm glad you're here. Tim Cook's not here.

[Paul Thurrott]

Wow. Tim Cook might have other problems if he went to Saudi Arabia or the.

[Leo Laporte]

Middle east or whatever, but this is the point. I mean, he's keeping score. Yeah, you think so?

[Paul Thurrott]

You're a CEO. It's part of your job. Captain of Revenge is keeping score.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, it is a little stunning to see how quickly these companies adopt it, you know, adapt to corruption, but that's what they're doing. They're adapting.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, honestly, I think they formalize corruption. Really. I mean they've, they've corruption at scale, you know, is there.

[Leo Laporte]

It's so funny. When I worked for years, I worked for iHeart and we would get training every year on how not to bribe people. I love it like don't bribe people in other countries. Even if we'll help you. The business, you know, it's against the, it used to be against the law in the United States. They've actually eliminated that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, sure.

[Leo Laporte]

The, you know, there was this sense of if you're a US Business, you're above that, you don't do that. And now there's the sense that. And this is what happens by the way. This is what happens with corruption.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Is it doesn't take. People are very quick to say, oh, it's not illegal anymore, let's go. Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

You see that. But this is business. Like we talk a lot about this. With quarterly earnings that Microsoft, but not uniquely is disclosing less and less every quarter almost as if to probe and see how much they can get away with. And what they've discovered is they can get with everything.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You know, and even the shareholders aren't challenging them. Like, yeah, you have invested this company. You do not know how it's actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

Performed and you couldn't care less because the thing is soaring and you're like, you know what, you just keep doing what you're doing. I'm not going to ask any question.

[Richard Campbell]

Telling you you're making money. You should believe us.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. And that is not a healthy relationship by the way. But that's. Yeah, that's our world. What other good news?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, back to gentic AI.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, I'm so sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, politics is the order of the day apparently in Seattle. Microsoft, very much behind this, wants to do it. Apple or Google. Same thing yesterday at Google I o.

[Paul Thurrott]

You can see how these companies line up. Right. Everyone needs the support of all the third party services, etc. So that's completely understandable. I think the big divide between Google and Microsoft is that Google has a lot of presence with consumers through really popular services. Gmail, Maps, photos, et cetera, search, I mean obviously, whatever. But the whole Google thing, everyone understands that Microsoft's got incredible penetration in Fortune 500 especially. But we'll just say commercial business, whatever, government as well, any big organizations. The primary push with them from the beginning has been the Microsoft 365 part of it. That all makes sense. Both these companies are going to do fine. The question is how do they succeed otherwise? I think Microsoft has A better infrastructure story and in the sense that. Well, or even infrastructure history maybe. So all their work with Azure and the cloud has really set the foundation for this stuff. So they're going to get a lot of third party support. You won't see the little badge running on Microsoft. It's like designed by Apple in California but made in China. It's like designed by random company but hosted on Microsoft. You're not going to see that, but they're going to get a big chunk of that, there's no doubt about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, well, they propose using Entra as an agent authentication technology, Microsoft's own authentication technology, which makes.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's smart. That's good. Yep. Complete.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And through Intune, by the way, which is the way that a lot of these smaller companies will do that. This is not the heavy infrastructure of the past. It's this cloud hosted service that a company of any size could take advantage of. So yes.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. And it scales really well. You've got five seats. It works. You've got 5,000. It works.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. So smart.

[Leo Laporte]

So this NL web you were talking about is designed to make it easier for websites to interact with your agent. So this gets to a conversation.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So the Microsoft cto, Kevin Scott. Right, Good guy, I guess, tends to ramble. And there was that moment he said.

[Leo Laporte]

Himself, I'm an introvert. I hate doing this once a year. I have to.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that was true a couple years ago. I'm not sure about that anymore. But he. Yeah, we get it, you're an introvert. We're all introverts. But I would have interrupted him if I was on stage, like I said during the live coverage, which was like, dude, I got this. There are two things that NL Web does that are super important. One is it allows you as the operator of a website to give your users a natural language way to interact with your site. So I have a horrible site search kind of a problem. The ability to use this interface, like if you plug this stuff into whatever website you have and your own users can do that. So maybe you have like a login system of your own and you have paid users or whatever it is that will work for you. But the other half of it is the interoperability with AI agents out on the web. And that's going to be the. That's going to be the divide. I think a lot of sites are definitely going to want to do the first half of it and then it's going to depend on the second half. But Leo, I think before the show, you would ask like, you know, whether any website owner or whatever would want to kind of opt out of this or not use this system. And the answer in the end is probably no because you are going to get locked out of the world if you do that. Like this might become the way that most people interact with websites. We have this kind of very standard thing with a web browser and we type in a URL, we do it, but that might be changing. They keep comparing it to HTML css. Like this kind of just accepted standard. It's the way we do things.

[Richard Campbell]

It works, you know, and they can do it against your will. Like the, the show we did on Playwright mcp where that's a web testing tool.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

That you can use a prompt to go and strip anything you want out of a website.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So this is a, this is a way for you to let you to open up your site to be stripped. It's a, you know, or what.

[Richard Campbell]

But not, I mean, except you're going to be stripped.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's. It's just, you can do it against your will. Be good. You know, you can, you can, you can join in.

[Richard Campbell]

So you have a choice. Sort of.

[Paul Thurrott]

So this is where I was. I talked to Mary Jo at length yesterday on the phone and she asked me this. She has a way of getting into a very insightful question which, you know, is kind of a non technical person I was surprised by. But she said, she said, I don't know if, you know, she says, like this is going to come out of the blue maybe, but do you have any. I thought open. I thought I saw something where OpenAI had invented this technology, but you don't see anything about that. Like Microsoft's like, we invented it. And I was like, Mary Jo, I, I was literally just looking into this exact thing. You're right. OpenAI, if you look it up, has announced this last year sometime or maybe or even earlier. And what I found out was that this was actually invented by DeepMind at Google. And there were three individuals. I don't know if it's a patent or whatever their names are on it or something like that, but whatever the situation is, one of those guys went to Open A. No, two of those guys went to OpenAI, one went to Microsoft. And OpenAI did announce this like some time ago and Microsoft has now announced it like it's new and we're doing it. And this is another one of those things where I think there's multiple threads going on here. But I think the big thing here is that this is going to be an interoperability standard that all of these companies are going to agree to use and whatever. I think that if OpenAI, given the current climate, had come up with it, other AIs might have said, yeah, we're not doing that. And that Microsoft doing it makes it a little more palatable maybe. But also for this thing to actually work, it can't be a fly by night. Not that they're the most well funded fly by night in all history, I guess, but I think there's an interesting story there about that. As a person who does have a website, I look at this and I'm like, no, this makes sense. I, I'm definitely going to do this. The question is whether I do the second half of it, and I think we'll see how it develops. But I do think this is going to be a big deal. I think this is as big of a deal as this is like the Web 2.0.

[Richard Campbell]

This is the mashup right now. Suddenly mash up with prompts.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're finally getting Hailstorm and the Microsoft thing from 30 years ago or 20 years ago. 25. So, yeah, anyway, there's a lot going on, basically.

[Richard Campbell]

Weirdly exciting and dark at the same time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I think it's great and I guess this is what happens. It happens on the Net too. When it's a nascent technology and no one is the. As you said, no one owns it. Everybody cooperates until such time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

Unless somebody can dominate. Just the sense that nobody feels like they can dominate, I think is good news.

[Paul Thurrott]

And we do have that history of the web as a backdrop. You know, this is super simplistic, but, you know, this site works best on Internet Explorer or this site works back best on. We can't. Guys, we can't do that anymore. This site has to just work everywhere.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, you probably won't be using a browser in this agentic world. You'll have your. Your agent. Well, contact their agent.

[Paul Thurrott]

Busy. Yeah, no, so, I mean. Yeah, right.

[Leo Laporte]

And the, the demo they did reminded me, I mentioned this on our keynote of the Knowledge Navigator video that Apple did, I think in the 80s, where a professor John Scully, he's talking to his tablet. Yeah, it was John Scully era. He's talking to his tablet and the tablet's an agent saying, your mother called. And he says, get this professor online, show me the. And they did a demo that was very similar to that. And I thought we are actually getting close to this kind of agent.

[Paul Thurrott]

100%. The thing is transitions are never clean breaks. Right. So you were like, we're not going to be using web browsers. And like yeah, probably in the future that's true. But in the interim for a long.

[Leo Laporte]

Time we'll be using it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, there'll be some class of users that are older people maybe that are used to this now. This is the way we interact. So Google and Microsoft both are putting all these agentic and AI features into their browsers. You're going to see websites that do it. Maybe your primary interface with the world is whatever. I can make something up like Gmail and Gmail through the plug and play stuff on the back end with MCP and whatever else will through Gmail offer you the ability to do this thing which is basically agentic background tasks that are multi agent and you don't really think about, you don't care. Why would you care? As you're a user, it's like doing whatever it's doing on the back end but you might actually launch that thing from what you think of as a website. Right. And maybe if you're a Google person, you're doing it through Chrome and that's how you view the world. It doesn't really matter. I mean you could do it, you know, through a low code thing in Windows. You could do it through an application like a native app on whatever platform. You could do it from wherever. Like it's, it's, it's going to be everywhere. Like that's kind of the point, you know, it's going to be very pervasive.

[Leo Laporte]

Really. I'm, I'm, I'm excited about this. I'm not one of those people will be marching out front saying no AI.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, unless you wake up tomorrow and someone has created Twitter TV and it's all AI based and it sounds, looks exactly like all of us and then maybe you will, I mean, you know, Google.

[Leo Laporte]

One of the things Google announced yesterday is they've made an app for Notebook LM for both iOS and Android. And of course I had played with it and I had given it like nine transcripts of security now and I said make a podcast and it sounded just like security now except it was this kind of, kind of nice guy and gal talking about the same subject.

[Paul Thurrott]

The best demo in a way that Google, I don't think they showed us on stage but you can get NotebookLM and use it to get summary of all the stuff that they announced at Google I O Which you know, like I said honestly makes sense because there were a million announcements and so it's just a podcast that summarizes their own show in their own app using the tools they announced. Yeah, it's like.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm a little concerned.

[Paul Thurrott]

Genius.

[Leo Laporte]

I'll be honest.

[Richard Campbell]

It's very inceptiony.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

A little concerned.

[Paul Thurrott]

There's a guy, I guess he works at Microsoft now. I'm embarrassed. I wasn't 100% sure I knew this, but Oren Thomas, who came up like I did, writing for the same magazine.

[Richard Campbell]

And whatever, he's got almost as many books as you.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, he might.

[Richard Campbell]

He might have more.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, he's very prolific. He's a great guy. Smart. But he did. He did something like this as well, and I haven't seen it yet, but not the main show floor. On the other side, there's a booth where he has, like, a little. It's like an agentic projection, and he's trained it on his voice and his inflections and all this stuff. And then he uses, like, the. Whatever tool this. You know, he's like, here's the story, but summarize it, make the points, turn it into a script, feeds it into the thing, and, like, it basically produces a podcast that's a video of him talking, but it's not him. And he's like. It's like. Right. You know, this is just a matter.

[Leo Laporte]

Of time before I am not here.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what I'm saying. Like, I. Look, as far as you people know, we're sitting here together. And the truth is, Richard and I are not even human beings. We've never met.

[Leo Laporte]

We're too sloppy for.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah. Well, that's how you know it's good, you know?

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I honestly think that that's what it'll end up being. That podcast won't be for information. Podcasts were for companionship.

[Richard Campbell]

And you.

[Leo Laporte]

You don't want to. Contrary to what Mark Zuckerber says, you want your friends to be real people, you know?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you don't know my friends, I hope. No, yeah, I. You definitely don't want it to be me, I can tell you that. Like, you know, some, like, fake version of me. Like, no, not a fake.

[Leo Laporte]

We want the real.

[Paul Thurrott]

Casually kind of a downer and the.

[Leo Laporte]

Real Richard and the real whiskey. None of this fake whiskey with the real deal. Hey, we got whiskey coming up. Back in the book, too. Lots more. We didn't even cover all the new AI stuff, so there's a lot more to come. Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell are in Seattle along with 1 million protesters for Microsoft build. And we will have more. I should mention that all the cheers you hear in the background, that's not protests, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, unless they're protesting GitHub, Leo, it seems.

[Leo Laporte]

Who would protest GitHub?

[Richard Campbell]

The best thing ever, they're doing a giveaway. And so I think those cheers are each time somebody gets.

[Paul Thurrott]

They're getting like an octocat or something. Yeah, a GitHub chachki of some kind of.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, so you're near the GitHub.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, you can see the little. What do you call it? Octah.

[Richard Campbell]

Octocat.

[Paul Thurrott]

Octocat. So I love the octacat. The octocat is like the mask, the eyes that are like, you know, like hello Kitty or something or whatever that is.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, well, more to come in just a bit. We're glad you're here, you all you winners and dozers. It's nice to see you. Our show today, brought to you by Spaceship. I got a question for you. Why I do this? We all assume that simple and affordable means. Well, that's kind of basic. It's only for beginners, right? Well, I gotta say, tech professionals want to save time and money too, right? Simple and affordable is for everybody. That's the idea behind Spaceship, the pioneering domain and web platform that takes the pain out of choosing, purchasing and managing domain names and web products. I have never seen anything so slick, so easy to use, so cool. And they've got all sorts of stuff, not just domains at below market prices. They've got shared hosting, virtual machines. You can get your business email there too. So it's not just below market prices for domain registrations and renewals, which is, by the way, a good reason to move your domains there. Spaceship has some pretty fresh ways to deliver simplicity. For instance, there's Unbox. That makes it easy to connect Spaceship products to your domain, configuring it all in just a few steps. And if, if you know, configuring DNS by hand is a little intimidating or just a pain in the butt, you'll love to know about alf. Alf, your very own AI. Don't think he's an alien. He's an AI assistant for making life easy. From domain transfers to updating DNS records, ALF loves the stuff. You probably don't. And ALF will do it for you. I like it. Also, that Spaceship, they're new and so they're trying stuff. And that means they've got a great roadmap on their website so you can explore, suggest and vote on new features and products. And they already have started implementing some of those things. They've got a new messaging product that is super cool. So customers and the tech community, you get what you really need at below market prices. It's a win win all around. Visit spaceship.com TWIT to discover exclusive deals on domains and more. That's spaceship.com TWIT very cool. Highly recommended. Microsoft 365 copilot anything new there?

[Richard Campbell]

Everything.

[Paul Thurrott]

Everything is new. I don't even know where to start. So obviously the multi agent. I like that they're finally using orchestration again. This is talking about that I guess they were waiting for agents and multi agents. You know, we mentioned the entire ID integration, all that stuff, NL web, etc. Most of the, I would say most of the Microsoft 365 copilot stuff we knew about already, but now it's rolling out. So now it's. This is that Wave two thing they announced back in April tied to that Microsoft 50th anniversary, right? So this is all the. If there's an AI feature that's out in the world from some other AI, Microsoft has it too. So Microsoft has Copilot notebooks, which are basically the Notebook LM type stuff and Copilot podcasts, et cetera, pages where you can go in and interact with others and what do they say, ideate and create and all that stuff. Copilot everywhere, blah blah, blah, agent store. There's all this stuff I can't even keep track now of what's actually new here versus what was announced just before the show or a month or so before the show. But on the developer end, GitHub Copilot obviously integrated into or can be integrated through an extension right now through Visual Studio code and also Visual Studio proper and all the advances there. But they announced that they show that they're open sourcing GitHub copilot in visual Studio code. That's really interesting. What that means is the way Visual Studio code to me is the way every application on earth should be. Especially something like a web browser where I feel like it should be this basic shell. And then you get like, maybe you get a little menu where you're like, I want this feature.

[Richard Campbell]

I want this through extensions.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, through extensions. Literally through extensions.

[Richard Campbell]

There's a philosophical thing here too, right? VS code is very roll your own. Where Visual Studio comes with everything is Battleship. It's the ide, right? It's integrated environment.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is, I think going to be controversial. So what this means is that instead of you deciding that you want GitHub Copilot and adding that extension, it will just be integrated into the source for Visual Studio code. Thus will be part of the product.

[Richard Campbell]

Now it's protectionist.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Because now I think it has to do with Cursor and all these other things are going to. Because Visual Studio code is an open ecosystem basically Gemini could come in with their own extension. OpenAI could come in with their own extension and you can do the pair thing where you have like a side by side interface or whatever.

[Richard Campbell]

But I don't know why this I already open Cursor and Visual Studio code. I know I already do that.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

Why do you think I'm going to stop?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Well, because maybe VS code is now just part of it. I think this is the theory.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. I mean it's never stopped using Visual Studio code. But the fact that there's an extension are built in doesn't going to stop me using other AI tools.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, that's right. Right. 100%. But you're right. This is absolutely why they're doing it. So there are a lot. Well, Cursor is an example. Cursor is built using Visual Studio code. It is Visual Studio code. Slightly modified. Right. So it's electron. Yeah. And you might see, you know there'll be some person, some company, whatever will make a version of code that will be GitHub copilot less. You know. You know this is going to happen.

[Richard Campbell]

It could fork.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Leo Laporte]

It's open source.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm really surprised that there's not more forking going on in that sense. I mean lots of things I do get for but they're not like fork and actively developed. Instead it's shown as an alternative.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Well this generation doesn't fork as much the kids these days. So you forking kids. So I don't know, we'll see how that progresses. But I, I saw that I was like that's cool. Why? You know so why we know.

[Richard Campbell]

I think we've come to why.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think we know why. Yeah. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's interesting again I'm surprised about the amount of insecurity in this space. Yeah. That people they're all afraid of trying to make advantages.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's such a big new. It's such big news when Microsoft embraces open source to any level. So they do this visual code thing. It's an astonishing success story outside of the Microsoft ecosystem.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Linux users, open source users, everyone's like everybody loves Visual. We want to hate this company. But this we love. This tool's great and Then they do something like this and you're like, well, this is kind of why they hate you. And you know, like I. But we'll see. But you're right, someone who feels strongly about using Gemini or OpenAI, whatever it is, they're going to, they will keep using you.

[Richard Campbell]

It's all free except for the tokens.

[Paul Thurrott]

But I think this is. Yeah, no, and that's what's neat about it. I use GitHub Copilot pretty regularly. I've never run into a limit. I don't pay for it. It's kind of amazing. So we'll see. They're also bringing GitHub copilot agent montage mode to other IDEs, third party IDEs like JetBrains, Eclipse, Xcode, Apple thing. That's fascinating. So they're kind of hitting it on both ends, right? So in the same sense that anyone could use whatever AI with their editor. Well, they're going to say, well, you could use our AI with your editor, you know, that kind of thing.

[Richard Campbell]

At the same time saying, no, our editor has ours built in no matter what.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's a little hypocritical. It is going out and putting on everybody else's editor, but in your editor, no compiler, it's built into the code.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just take exception to one part of that. It's not little hypocritical, it's just straight up hypocritical. But no, you're right, but it makes sense. Okay, so when you think about GitHub Copilot or any of these AIs and the types of uses that they might have, or what you might use them for, I've used them in very basic ways. Pointed at a method and say, could you make this more efficient? Could you find bugs, whatever it is.

[Richard Campbell]

Why does my code suck?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, that's a lengthy explanation. I've gotten very lengthy explanations of that, by the way. A little too hurtful. But AI at its heart, I think the best at a very high level is like you can do it, you can use it for busy work that saves you time. I think one of the neat things that they're pivoting on right now is this kind of app modernization thing specifically for. NET and Java. For now, I think it's going to just go to everything where you have this code base, it is, whatever it is, and it's like, okay, so do a code assessment. We already do that. Do the code rewriting where you make it more efficient, find bugs, etc. Excellent. But now okay. Now upgraded to, let's say, like the latest version of. Net, or maybe it's a native Windows app and you're like, I wanted to have the Windows 11 UI or whatever it is. And it's like, this stuff is actually very hard or can be, or time consuming. And it's like, just set this thing up to go and do this in the background. It will come back later, give you a new, like a forked, to use that term again, repository with all of its changes, documentation, explain exactly what it did, and then you get that you can commit or agree to the commits as you go through it and say, yep, this one. Yep. Oh, no, not this one. And this is an excellent use of AI, Right. In the sense that developing developer tools, developer processes, et cetera, have emerged as the early winner for, like, AI use cases. This is a little more specific. Like, this is. I really like the. I really like this because I. I don't do a lot of software development, but when I do it, it's like this kind of thing. And let me tell you, it's a nightmare.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and also, that's what a lot of people are doing. Right? It is super. You. You don't work on the same code base every day. You have to drop into a code base and make changes.

[Paul Thurrott]

And that's a.

[Richard Campbell]

And you're really hoping you're going to be done that day.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. Or God help you, it wasn't even code you wrote. Right. It's almost certainly the company.

[Richard Campbell]

And let's face it, if you did write that code, it was a month ago.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not code.

[Paul Thurrott]

You're like, I cannot believe this. Yeah. I don't even know what's happening here. Yeah, like. Yeah, exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

So no code is code you wrote.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. That's right. Sadly, that's true. What do you mean? I Stack Overflow wrote it. What's the problem? The point is. No, but anyway, that stuff, to me is fantastic. So I feel like we've been talking for a long time and we've oddly glossed over a lot of the stuff from Build so far, but it's just so dense and so much. I think the way to handle this maybe is that a lot of this are things that, as they start actually happening. We're going to keep coming back to this stuff. Right. So I guess we could shift to the Windows stuff from Build specifically. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Because Windows, there's not a lot of conversation about. Net@build, even though it's a developer show, but there is a lot of Conversation about Windows.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's fascinating.

[Richard Campbell]

Which is fascinating because Windows hasn't been talked about for ages.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know.

[Richard Campbell]

It sure was this week.

[Paul Thurrott]

We used to. The reason we have this notion of a build bingo card is that when Windows was the center of the universe, it was always like, well, what's going to be the most important thing? But then we saw over time that Windows was getting edged off the board. And we've had years where Windows was not even a thing.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, once Azure was the focus, the conversation on Windows went away.

[Paul Thurrott]

But now it's coming back because Windows is the client that Microsoft has, that has a billion users. We've talked maybe too much about all of the changes that they made to Copilot. We've run what, version 17 of the app or something. They moved the UI like 100 times. It's just been like kind of a chaotic mess. But we're starting to see things that I think are actually very useful. You see little glimpses of it and things like text rewriting capabilities in Notepad or image generation capabilities and Paint or whatever it might be. But. But they're starting to bring these things out to kind of a system level. And we're going to touch on this all over the place. There's just a bunch of it, but in kind of a speed dating sense. Big changes. The Microsoft Store, where they're improving support for Win32, meaning desktop apps, they're not going to charge developers fees. So if you have a desktop app that you want to put in the store but haven't because you're like, I really don't want to give Microsoft a portion of the whatever, you don't have to worry about that anymore. There's no fees notion is in the Microsoft Store now. Right. For the first time, for example.

[Richard Campbell]

So they're doing the opposite of Apple. Then again, yes, they are the Microsoft.

[Paul Thurrott]

Store, they're doing literally the opposite of Apple. That's exactly right. There's been this story for the past couple years about Microsoft trying to make Windows the best place for developers.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

You see that in a lot of things. You see that in the Windows subsystem for Linux, which is now 10 years old. Right now it's open source. And so why would you open source this thing? What's the difference? And I think the difference is when it first came out, there were three to five or whatever number of distributions you could put in there. The addition of new distributions has been very slow. Although oddly this year I think we saw it was Fedora most recently. And I Want to say maybe Arch Linux, I don't remember, but I believe that what this is about is just lowering the barrier for. You have some random distribution.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. You want to put your distro and go for it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Just make it super.

[Richard Campbell]

Why does anybody.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. What's the difference?

[Richard Campbell]

Use what you want to use.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you know, we forget this, but like the first version of WSL was this kind of static thing that was part of the operating system and not really easily updatable. And now it's turned into more of an open platform that's separated from the operating system so that you can. They can update it whenever they want to the store, et cetera. It's much easier to install and maintain an update.

[Richard Campbell]

And what's happened over the years now is that both Windows and WSL have. Have evolved and put hooks to each other.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right, but separately.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, whatever Linux you put in there, it does have access to the file.

[Paul Thurrott]

System and so forth, which is amazing. Right. And they added support for GUI apps. Remember, at some point they've just done what they can to make this, you know, friendly for developers. So that's big. Maybe that might be the biggest one. But last year they talked about something called the Windows Copilot runtime, which I jokingly said was not a code, not a runtime, but. But less jokingly, never actually appeared. So that was May last year, February of this year, they released the first preview of this in an experimental channel or experimental part of the beta or preview channel, whatever it was, of the Windows app SDK. By the way, it works fine. It's really good. It's for local AIs. No, it works great. It actually works great, but it took them forever. So that's going away now they've renamed it to the Windows AI Foundry to have it link up with the Azure AI Foundry. Azure AI Foundry supplies, like you said, over 1900 models, mostly in the cloud, but also local. So if you have a computer with a GPU or a MPU especially, you know, not especially, but also an MP copilot plus, you can do that. And so the Windows AI Foundry is the local version of that. So it's very specifically for the local, you know, SM small language models. And, you know, it's exactly what I think what you think it is, but the. It's hard to remember this stuff, but two years ago maybe they introduced this notion of dev home, which they just deprecated and now you're seeing the features of this thing appear elsewhere in Windows. Right. And I think there's it's weird to see this happen in the developer space. You know, it's one thing to move like a copilot icon around the UI, but you announce APIs, you take forever to ship them. There's all kind of reasons why that happened, but doesn't matter now they ship finally and you're like, okay, actually this is pretty good. And they're like, yeah, we're not doing this anymore. And you're like, okay, what's happening? You know, it's a little, it feels a little rushed but you know, MCP integration in Windows 11, app actions being.

[Richard Campbell]

Able to write prompts to control things in Windows 11. Right. Like amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Smart. One year ago the big news was recall and the copilot plus PCs and you flash forward several months. They didn't ship it for a long time. It was only in preview until two seconds ago. But the thing that emerged last year, the far more interesting thing was this click to do feature, which is a terrible name, typical Microsoft name, but the idea that you can interact with anything that you see on screen and there will be smart actions on the back end based on the type of content you see in front of you. So if it's text, you'll have text actions which will be things like, like summarize or whatever. Rewrite in Notepad to begin with. If it's an image, you can do things with paint or photos. And they said pretty early on they're like we're going to open this thing up but we're going to bring in other apps and they're announcing this. So they have an App Actions API. If you're running Windows 11 I think in stable but if not, it's about to be unstable. If you go into where I'm looking at my computer now, if you go into apps, you'll see a actions page and right now it's just paint and photos and they will have. It's not there now but you'll be able to go in and select not just which apps can supply those actions, but which actions they can supply. And then apps can themselves programmatically add themselves to this list. So that's going to expand pretty dramatically. They've mentioned some third party companies that have already started adopting this, like Zoom is one for example, Todoist, Raycast, et cetera. So you're going to see a lot of that kind of stuff, stuff we talked about VBS enclaves in the sense of, well, recall. Right. And copilot plus PCs. This is that secure storage on disk that helps with Encryption and protect sensitive information. Keep it on the device. They're opening that up to third parties. So you'll be able to write apps of your own that will have their own VBS enclave on disk.

[Richard Campbell]

And VBS is not Visual Basic script.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, it's not. Sorry.

[Richard Campbell]

Virtual based security.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Virtualization based.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, that's right. I mentioned the Dev Home thing. So Dev Home's going away and one of the big components of that, one of those things I was looking at, because this could. I was like, this is going to be. This is important for the future, was it would use winget in the background to set up not just the apps that you install, but the configuration for those apps, which is the piece that's missing from winget natively. Right. So I bulk install apps, but I also want them to be configured to my specifications. And so in devhome, they had this system that was called Desired Safe Configuration, where it was a YAML file, which is another type of xml, where you would specify in that file the configuration of each of the apps that you were installing. That has now become part of winget. Right. Because dephome is going away and that makes sense to me. So I feel like winget is. Winget's been amazing ever since they announced it, honestly. But I feel like it's finally getting to where I want it. Because it's nice to bulk install things, but you also want to bulk configure them. Yeah, not really possible right now.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and now with PowerShell 7.5, which is this week's run as DSC3.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Which interacts with all that and it's also cross platform and is about maintaining a state configuration.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. Yeah. So this, that, that to me is fantastic. Yeah. And there's other. I mean, there's other stuff. Yeah, There's Power choice.

[Richard Campbell]

The list goes on.

[Paul Thurrott]

It just goes on. Right. So whatever. There's a whole thing going on there. That's amazing. Right. So that's good stuff. What else? From a developer perspective, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. I don't know where to go with this stuff. Microsoft announced there were 50 million visual studio users. Now, this is across Big Visual Studio and code.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's funny that they mix those two together. They got nothing to do with each other.

[Paul Thurrott]

But listen to these.

[Richard Campbell]

Mostly it's hiding how many Visual Studio users there is.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know, I know. Big Visual Studio. The first time I ever visited Microsoft campus was for what became Visual Studio. It was codenamed Boston. Oddly, it was a Way to bring the visual tools from Visual Basic and the awesome back end stuff from Visual C and merge those things together. It took a couple of versions, but obviously they got it there. It's pretty amazing.

[Richard Campbell]

They only really got there once they got to Net. The two versions that predated Net were just holding all the other ides.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So this was like the progression of Office. Office at one point was a bundle and then it became an integrated suite and then. And yeah, at some point you have the same backend for all the stuff. So Visual Basic had, I think it was called named Vegas at the time.

[Richard Campbell]

Visual Studio had its own. Yeah, the Visual Studio was inner Dev and Java. That's all it was. That's because of actors and as Haroldsbury did that.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I saw him briefly Yesterday. There are 25,000 extensions for visual Studio in the Visual Studio marketplace. There are over 100,000 for code.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. That's how popular the difference between open source and closed source. Right, right there. And it is 30 years of Visual.

[Paul Thurrott]

Studio and 10, I think, for code.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, just barely 10. Yeah, like that's the. You ever wanted better proof of the difference. There's the difference.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's incredible.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, plus the extension model for Visual studio has changed four times, five times in 25 years or 30 years.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I'm sure they got it right this time.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, and that's one of the reasons Visual Studio code has the advantage, because they kind of took the right one that Studio lutened on the back of. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

If you want to know. Aside from just the sheer bulk of it, if you want to like, to me, the place where the oldness, if you will, of Visual Studio and the newness of code expresses itself the best is in the GitHub integration.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

I find it to be perplexing in Visual Studio and very natural and normal in Visual Studio.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm afraid the guys who built the extension weren't real users. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right. It absolutely felt like that. Yep. So, you know, whatever. Oh, let me mention this thing because I thought was. This is kind of small news in the scheme of things, but there were two big announcements related to native code apps in Windows, which is crazy. But okay, so one of them is the Windows app SDK, which if you think back is the. We're going to fix UWP finally. Right. And so uwp the problem. Well, a problem with that was that each version of UWP was tied to a specific version of Windows 10 in.

[Richard Campbell]

The Windows 10 days. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And that thing started out meaning there was A major new version of Windows twice every single year.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep. So IT people were sad.

[Paul Thurrott]

It was, yes, it was a big problem, but from an app developer perspective, it's particularly a problem because maybe you introduce new controls, new capabilities, whatever it is, you have to be on that version of newer or newer.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I love the. I love the position that Microsoft put it in where devs are saying, hey, we can't roll a new version until you update Windows. And it's like the IT people going.

[Paul Thurrott]

What are you doing? Yeah, it's crazy, right? So. So there are actually many improvements in the Windows app SDK compared to UWP, it's desktop technology.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, the big thing is that WinUI 3 left the Windows integration. It's an SDK now.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what changed it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So if you want the modern. If you want to create a modern Windows app for whatever reason, yeah, you get WinUI 3, you get all the APIs. It's any supported version of Windows. So you don't have to worry about the versioning stuff. It's not tied to a version of Windows. Very smart. But the Windows app SDK is still kind of a weird, kind of an odd duck, or however you want to say that. And there are these individual features that are not. It's the same problem as before, but they're tied to versions of the Windows app SDK. And so someone as a developer, you might say, well, hold on a second, I have this app and I'm using some version of some feature. I have to almost make something up here, but it doesn't matter, whatever it is. And now you've revved it it and now you're moving on and you've added other things, but I want to stick with that thing. And so they're doing further granularity. I'm not sure how to say this, but they're going, starting, I know probably in version 1.8, whatever comes out this year, they're going to allow you as the developer to install individual components of the Windows app SDK. And now you don't have to worry about the versioning of the Windows app SDK the same way that you don't have. So to me, like, that's most people probably listening. They're like, I don't even understand what you're talking about. Which fair enough, enough. But it's honestly kind of a big deal.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

The other thing tied to that is React Native. So specifically React Native for Windows, whatever the name of it is, so is obviously based on React Native itself. That Technology was just. They just redid the. The architecture of React and the renderer in a major new version, which they literally call the new architecture, like capital N, capital A. Now that is the default on React native for Windows. Major performance improvements. But the big thing here is like Async access to and from native code and JavaScript type safety between JavaScript and native code. New native renderer, meaning win UI3. This is huge. So if you are coming at the World from the JavaScript web app space and want as part of what you are doing to get an app on Windows, this is, this is humongous. Like this is. This is something I'm actually going to start looking into now. So I thought this was really interesting. So this, you know, this is my little. My little area where I'm like, this is. This is what interests me the most. And it probably is going to get lost in all the. The noise here at Build, but to me it's a big deal. I was originally had an AI section in the notes and then I realized.

[Richard Campbell]

You rolled it in.

[Leo Laporte]

I think it's the whole show.

[Paul Thurrott]

So. Leo, I don't know. Do you have a. Do you have a Windows thing happening where you are? Do you have Windows? Are you able to run. Do you have windows 11 somewhere that you can put on screen?

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, it's running right now. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So one of the things they announced here, which I just thought was really fun, I think this might have been the night before Kevin Scott did this. You can upload a photo to Copilot using the app in Windows. Right. And now you can tell it to make it look like Minecraft and.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I like that.

[Paul Thurrott]

You should try this. It's fantastic. Like I. Okay, I have this great picture that we took at an ignite right before the pandemic and I had it. I'm trying to find it here. Now I can't show it to you, but this is. I can show Richard at least this is the Minecraft version of that. So that's Mary Jo, that's me, that's Gary. But hilarious. Yeah, it's just, it's awesome.

[Richard Campbell]

So you just take.

[Leo Laporte]

Let me upload an image first.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Like find an image for like people if you can. Or you know, something where you can. Can recognize what it's doing. But you can in the same way that like OpenAI had, that was copying the anime style from a famous animator. Microsoft owns Minecraft, so this is perfectly acceptable. So you can have it. Minecraft eyes.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, so that was the big thing with OpenAI. A little while ago, everybody was doing Studio Ghibli. Right. So, yeah, makes sense. Or action feature.

[Paul Thurrott]

Whenever you can get that up. It's a cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Just trying to find a suitable picture first.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's cool. It's a cool thing. It looks really. It looks, it looks really cool. Like, it kind of makes me.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, it has to be a 10 megabyte file. Okay. Now I have to find something small.

[Paul Thurrott]

I might do my avatar over. So it's like.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's a good idea.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it looks. It looks really cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's a really good idea.

[Richard Campbell]

You really should screenshot the two of us and.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, if I had a way to do that. I'm sure I do. Let's think about.

[Paul Thurrott]

Think.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, you're on a Mac. Hey. Okay, so this should just.

[Paul Thurrott]

I believe it's command alt3f3.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, something like that. Oh, yeah, I got it. I got it. Okay, now. All right, I'm gonna. You don't have to focus.

[Paul Thurrott]

We'll come back to this. But it's, it's. It's a really cool. It's a really cool. It's a stupid thing, but I think it's fun.

[Leo Laporte]

That's great. Yeah. You know, and nobody else could do that because they don't have the intellectual property, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

I don't know. You say that, but. But making an 8 bit version of anything is actually kind of a thing. And I guess you're right.

[Richard Campbell]

It's basically what we do with the run as headshots.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. Right, right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, yeah, you do a great job.

[Richard Campbell]

We just low res them and go grayscale.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

It takes away the axe murderer effect of headshots. It's always what drove me crazy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. The caption of that photo is always. You've killed again, haven't you?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

So Google, part of the 1100 things they announced this week, is obviously bringing more Gemini Nano features to Chrome and other Chrome AI features. So Microsoft's doing the same thing on the Edge side. I mean, we've had an integrated version of Copilot since day one with the sidebar, et cetera, et cetera. So language, translation, PDFs, new developer features. Google's doing that exact same thing. The ability to use your paid subscription, whether it's consumer or business, in the panel, Excel, and then summarize Word, Excel, whatever, PowerPoint documents right from the sidebar, which would be something you could do either something you upload or just you're viewing it side by side, which is amazing. Copilot Chat's going to get all the agents, blah blah, all this, all the stuff like it's just like all the stuff as you would expect. All right, so I think that's.

[Richard Campbell]

Should we take a break and yeah, just looking at our time going, we.

[Leo Laporte]

Got Minecraft us and do a show at the same time. It's not easy but I have the shot. I will now attempt to Minecraft as I promise it's on the computer here and I have to move it to a computer here and blah blah. Anyway, before we do all that, maybe I should give a call to US Cloud, the number one Microsoft Unified support replacement and our sponsor. We've been talking for a few months now. You probably know the name should ring a bell about US Cloud. They are the global leader in third party Microsoft support for enterprises. They now support 50 of the Fortune 500. But I think you probably saying to yourself, okay fine, but why should I switch to US Cloud? Well, switching to US Cloud could save your business 30 to 50% over Microsoft Unified and Premier support. And now I hear you say, well that's good, it's gonna save me 50% but it better. It's gotta be as good as good. How about if it's better? It's twice as fast. Twice as fast. Time to resolution versus Microsoft on average. Okay, that's pretty good, right? Plus the best engineers in the business with an average of 16 years of Microsoft support with break fix and I think so you're getting better, smarter people, faster time to resolution, half the price. Here's one more thing, something I don't think Microsoft's anxious to tell you, how to save money on Azure. US Cloud is excited to tell you about a new offering. Their Azure cost optimization service. I mean, let's be frank. When was the last time you evaluated your Azure usage? This creeps up on you, right? If it's been a while, you probably have some Azure sprawl if you will, a little spend creep going on. But good news, saving on Azure is easier than they think. With US Cloud, they're offering an eight week Azure engagement. It's powered by VBox that identifies key opportunities to reduce costs across your entire Azure environment. It knows all, it sees all. And that's when the expert guidance from these great engineers at US Cloud comes in. Senior engineers, an average of over 16 years with Microsoft products. They'll help you figure out what you need and what you don't need. But at the end of the eight weeks, what you're going to get, the most valuable part is this interactive dashboard that's gonna, you know, it hasn't done anything yet, but it's gonna identify, rebuild, and downscale opportunities, unused resources. You can take that, all of those. Reallocate your precious IT dollars towards things you need, like. Well, maybe I would suggest investing in US Cloud's Microsoft support. That's what a few other US Cloud customers do. And the savings just keep on coming because you're going to completely eliminate your unified spend. I'll give you a great testimonial from Sam. He's the technical operations manager at Bed Gaming B, E, D, E. He gave us Cloud 5 stars. Most you can get saying quote. This is a direct quote. We found some things that have been running for three years which no one was checking. Those VMs were, I don't know, 10 grand a month. Not a massive chunk in the grand scheme of how much we spent on Azure, but. But once you get to 40 or $50,000 a month, it really starts to add up. Yeah, it's simple. Stop overpaying for Azure, identify and eliminate Azure creep, and boost your performance all in eight weeks with USCloud. Visit uscloud.com, book a call today to find out how much your team can save. That's uscloud.com, book a call today. Get faster Microsoft support for less US Cloud. We thank him so much for supporting Windows Weekly. Now I'm going to get back to my main job, which is turning us into Minecraft characters.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, you got to stick to your wheelhouse.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. I know what. I know what I'm good for. I know what I'm good for. On we go with the show.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I'm trying to do it, too. And it's. I think.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, I. I had to get the screenshot. Now I have to send it over from this computer to that computer and, you know, it just takes.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, I got one. Look.

[Richard Campbell]

That's pretty great. Oh, my God, that's so funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, but you're not sharing it with the class.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, I don't know how.

[Leo Laporte]

Put it in the discord. Put it in the discord.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, there you go.

[Richard Campbell]

We can help you get it into the Discord.

[Paul Thurrott]

You look like a 70s Unix programmer.

[Richard Campbell]

Totally.

[Leo Laporte]

I look like Steve. That's who I want to look like.

[Paul Thurrott]

So weird. Oh, my God.

[Leo Laporte]

All right, I've got this screenshot. Now I have it on a Mac. Now to get it into Windows. Step two.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I'll put it. Here we go.

[Leo Laporte]

Step three. Let's see. It's in the discord. I can pull it Up.

[Richard Campbell]

Yep, he did.

[Leo Laporte]

That's good. I like it.

[Richard Campbell]

It's funny.

[Leo Laporte]

It doesn't.

[Richard Campbell]

All right. But it doesn't look Minecraft at all. It looks. Anyone.

[Paul Thurrott]

Can anyone else point out the primary advance that is occurring in this photo compared to all other AI image generation you've seen to date?

[Richard Campbell]

The text is still you. Readable.

[Paul Thurrott]

Text is readable. Exactly.

[Leo Laporte]

It is very.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. That's amazing.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. We are making huge headway.

[Richard Campbell]

This is it.

[Paul Thurrott]

A quantum AGI is exponential. Right over the top. Right over the right over the hill or whatever.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, now that you've done it, I don't need to do it. So throw this screenshot out.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I always, when I love this stuff and then I start to feel guilty, like, am I burning down rainforests while I'm doing this?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. I find it's best just not to think about it.

[Leo Laporte]

Try not to think about it. All right, moving on, let's talk. Hey, what's the big topic today at Microsoft Build Windows?

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, not really, but yeah, separate from and also concurrent with Build, there's been a bunch of stuff going on with Windows. So last November at Ignite, they announced something called the Windows Resiliency Initiative, which is part of the Secure Future Initiative. And they pulled in some stuff they're already doing like Windows, hello, ESS and VBS enclaves. And then they announced some new stuff and one of those new things was something called administrative protection. Right. And which was presented at the time possibly because it was Ignite as a commercial only feature, meaning for Microsoft's business customers. But actually it's coming soon to the Windows. Well, actually it's in the canary. It's one of the few features in the Canary.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow, A Canary build is actually a canary.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. They've never updated it, but back in January they did release it through there. It will be coming soon to dev and beta. If it didn't just happen. By the way, as recently as yesterday, I haven't had a chance to look at that yet.

[Richard Campbell]

So what does it actually do?

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. So if you think about the user account protection was like uac, sorry, User account control was a kind of an additional prompt. I think of it as like the middle red light on a car. You know, all of a sudden, one year we just had that. It was. It was designed to put something in front of you so you thought about what you were doing.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

But this takes that to the network. Yeah. So what this does is basically do what I think a lot of people thought UAC was doing, which was because you're basically running at a lower elevation level most of the time now, which is the way Windows should be. Which it should be anyway. It creates a temporary elevation, an actual account that has elevated privileges to do whatever the task is that requires that. And you have. Well, you technically don't have to, by the way, but let's say you have to. You have to set it up so you can actually turn it off later. But you, you use Windows hello to authenticate yourself. Right. And hopefully biometrically. But you could do a pin, you know, obviously, I guess if you turn it off, you'd have to type in a password, which to me would be horribly inconvenient. But they don't actually discuss that. And then as soon as the task occurs, that account is destroyed. It's just destroyed. So it's, it's temporary, comes, it goes, and you have to authenticate. And if you think back to the primary complaint about user account control when they implemented it in Windows Vista, it was that it was. It interrupted too much.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Too often.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is going to be way worse than that. And because I don't think people understand your console. Right. Yeah. So it's going to be interesting to see how this goes. To me, what this reminds me of is, well, it was Windows XPSB2 and then before that, Windows Server 2003, where the. They lock these things down to such a degree. The big saying in the server side was like, it's a server, not a surfboard. So like the version of IE they had in there at the time was completely denuted, you know, protected mode. Yep. Didn't do anything by default. And it, it's going to have that kind of a vibe to it.

[Richard Campbell]

So, you know, and back in the day when I had a real job, which is a really. A very long time ago, I had a boss who insisted on having an administrator account. So I created an account called sysadmin that had no rights at all.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love it.

[Richard Campbell]

Because he never used it. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

That's so evil.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love it.

[Richard Campbell]

What you're actually seeing here is that's what they're doing. Sure, you have administrative privileges, but they're off. And it's only when you actually do an action that's going to utilize administrative privilege that it's going to do something. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

The weirdness of this is that. Well, the problem with this. The problem. A problem with this is that it's not just users that are lazy. This is just the way Windows is. Right. So app developers also don't think about this enough. So One of the problems with this is going to be apps, because apps have been written in a lazy sense, too. They just assume you're going to have elevated privileges. And so the reason they're talking about this now is it's coming very soon is the phrase, which I take to mean 25H2, by the way. But they want app developers to take note of this and try to run as little of the app as possible in elevated privilege mode or whatever. They. So the hope is that anyone will actually pay attention to this. No one will, but.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, you know where it's going to happen is on developers, because that's going to apply to them, too.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right. Well, this was a Windows developer blog post that was.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, one of the first things you find out is Visual Studio's got a real problem with not having full super user privileges.

[Paul Thurrott]

So I could be wrong, but I think that's exactly the example they use. They're like, this thing is screwed.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, what's going to happen? I've done this before where I've had reduced privileges for a developer and it's like, nothing works.

[Paul Thurrott]

So if you're a developer and you've ever tried to do like a Windows app, SDK, app, whatever, you actually have to turn developer mode on for this to even work. And I'm wondering now if they're not going to do something like that for like. Look, we realize you're a developer. You're going to screw everything up. So we'll give you the opportunity.

[Richard Campbell]

We'll give a workaround, which just means that you will continue to build software that needs super user 100% all the time.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's exactly what it means.

[Richard Campbell]

And we're back to the same problem.

[Paul Thurrott]

So. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay. So there's that. And then we've had a series of Windows what updates to Windows. Windows. Well, Windows Insider preview releases, maybe the most notable one because this points to next month's. Where are we in the calendar? Actually, this month's preview update, probably next Tuesday. And then next month's patch Tuesday is a release preview channel build of Windows 1124H2. And so this is a preview of. We're going to see in. Where are we now? June, right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Now that it's just about 25 and 25 H2. It's a perfect time, actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. I should say tied to this. The next thing we're going to talk about is, you know, we've been doing the same builds in dev and beta channel. This is where. Where am I at yeah, this is where beta channel no longer gets new 23H2 build. So if you were stuck on 20, not stuck. If you chose to be on 23 did not go forward to 24H2, you're going to. Now you're getting it like. So there's no more 23H2 in what.

[Richard Campbell]

Only have one in beta. This can't persist. There must be another. I can't imagine what it would be called.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, you know, speculation.

[Richard Campbell]

One could speculate what's the number after four?

[Paul Thurrott]

We'll see. So you know, it's in the scope of like, say like this past month's patch Tuesday update, which was humongous. It's not as big but. But new text actions for click to do. You're going to see that stuff come to AMD and intel based copilot PCs, which is great. Image descriptions, narratives. A lot of stuff is stuff. It's going to be familiar. We've heard of this like the semantic search stuff, which they're technically not calling it anymore. The ability to. Oh, not to remap. We already have the ability to remap the copilot key to a limited degree, but they're bringing back the Windows key plus C shortcut. I'm just actually I'm seeing if that works on my computer. Yeah, I still don't have that. That's curious and whatever. Most of this stuff is not particularly interesting, but not a huge one, but just again kind of refining a lot of the AI stuff that we've been talking about. And then a little further out is. And this is tied to what we talked about Earlier Devn Beta 24H2 is these new AI actions submenu in File Explorer. So if right now if you were to to right click on an image in 24H2, you would see actions in that primary menu related to the two apps that support that. But now there are going to be multiple apps. So they're going to do a sub menu and we're seeing the beginning of that plus additional actions related to Photos and Paint for images and Notepad for now. But eventually you're going to see that for Word and Excel and third party and whatever. So if you have Adobe Photoshop, you'll probably see it in there for that eventually. Advanced Settings is a new page in the Settings app that is also tied to devhome being deprecated. These are a lot of the settings that you could do easily through DevHome. Now you're going to be able to do them through the Settings app. And this primarily developer related and one of the features that you can add, I believe this is already there, it's in Devhome is the ability to map a GitHub repository to the file system and then when you're reviewing that have commands related to committing and pulling and pull requests, etc. Yeah. So that's kind of cool for developers, I think. And the rest of this is like.

[Richard Campbell]

That'S the way one of the other source control systems used to work, is it Turtle? Something like that.

[Paul Thurrott]

But it's like a file system. I love that. I mean right now, for example, like, you know, if you go into Visual Studio and grab a GitHub repository, obviously it's going to put it somewhere locally and then, you know, sync. Right, right.

[Leo Laporte]

And I do that with my Tortoise svn.

[Richard Campbell]

Tortoise svn. Yeah, yeah, you're right, Darren. Exactly.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So the thing you don't get. So you get a replication of it in the file system but you don't get there's no UI in there. Right. For you. And so I do all that stuff from the command line now, which is fine if you know what you're doing. But like, you know, having a UI is.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, there's common sense. It's good.

[Richard Campbell]

The UI is just the file system, like it's pretty painless.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. It's good stuff. I like, I like that a lot.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then There was a 23H2 release preview build as well, which is again, they're lining up the stuff. So it's features we had seen before, like that drag tray feature.

[Richard Campbell]

Getting ready for the end.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. And Then also Windows 10 has a release preview build and I believe this is a big one, folks. We're going to get the seconds display back in the clock.

[Richard Campbell]

We're out of good ideas. Let's try some bad ideas and then we get another version when we put it back.

[Paul Thurrott]

Richard, you're.

[Leo Laporte]

I always used it because if it that way I knew if my machine was hung.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go. Seconds are ticking. You can't wait a minute. That's crazy.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. I want everyone to take a gander at his computer. This is a Surface Studio laptop.

[Richard Campbell]

Studio two. Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Dead. They've killed it.

[Richard Campbell]

All the laptops, they killed it.

[Leo Laporte]

You killed it?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it was dead.

[Richard Campbell]

Wait for it to burst into flames because I'd like a new one anyway.

[Paul Thurrott]

Now this is. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

I spent a lot on this machine and it's not been great.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right. Yeah. So my expectation is we're. Well, my hope maybe is we could see a Surface laptop that has the AMD chip, the new one nine whatever hx, you know, whatever the. You know, which is like having a gpu. It's like incredible. Like they're incredible. And I think this would solve this problem, like the need here.

[Richard Campbell]

I've been trying to look at Ryzen Nines on a motherboard to build a PC because I still like to build a PC.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's hard to find. It's just tough. And again it's like, is there a way to sneak in a Copilot Plus PC hand built in a depth desktop chassis? No joy so far I haven't had that much time to work on it. But yeah, it's a problem.

[Paul Thurrott]

This thing, this little laptop I have here is just Lunar Lake. It's fine, whatever. But there's a. The next one that I'll review is a AMD Ryzen 9 whatever. It's a little thicker battery life, but battery life is like eight hours. You know. The performance is nuts.

[Richard Campbell]

I can play down here like right there.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. It's crazy. So the.

[Richard Campbell]

It warped the case on my phone.

[Paul Thurrott]

Crazy.

[Richard Campbell]

It's so hot.

[Paul Thurrott]

My hands are a little cold. I might actually.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, no, you can warm up on this. I'll fire up a video game and this thing will properly cook the table.

[Paul Thurrott]

This, this integrated graphics set they have with a 2880 by whatever the number is at full res, every feature turned on. High quality graphics runs at like 80 frames a second. In Call of Duty, it's like it's not. So this is going to be. That's to me is a game changer. I think that's going to be humongous. But yeah, they apparently. Look, Microsoft has kind of settled on these two devices, Laptop and Pro. They have a range of models now. I mean anything could change. But I think the big thing is going to be that we on the business side, I think it's only business. They offer intel versions of both of those still. They have had AMD for laptop. I'm just saying. So like I said, I. Look, a Lunar Lake is not going to solve this problem.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm ready to move off of Surface. I think they've made.

[Paul Thurrott]

They've, you know, they screwed.

[Richard Campbell]

I missed Pinos. They also killed the studio.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love that.

[Leo Laporte]

That's why Pumped anymore. That's why you're thinking the air is going out.

[Richard Campbell]

They've also killed the Studio desktop machine. Right.

[Leo Laporte]

Of course, that's.

[Richard Campbell]

It's still on the site. It's just out of stock. Always Yep. So that whole line is done. This is one of them because this one's got the trick right? You could pop the screen out.

[Paul Thurrott]

How often do you do that? A lot.

[Richard Campbell]

Only when I show it to you.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

Okay, that makes sense. This is a minor thing, but a couple of months back, Microsoft announced companion apps for Microsoft 365 commercial customers using Windows 7. So these little kind of flyout apps like File search and people like the contacts management now they have, or they will soon have one for Calendar as well because you can never have too many calendars in your computer. I guess I'm not really sure what the point is. Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Trying to kill those things. Now they're bringing it back.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know. Well, this is the, this is the nature of Windows. It's like Pilot on pullback. Pilot on pullback. This one's a couple years old. But Microsoft has gotten in trouble in the EU for a couple things. But one of them is teams bundling in Office or Microsoft isn't the one.

[Richard Campbell]

Where the EU said they were unhappy, wouldn't offer remediation. They just like do something.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's exactly what.

[Richard Campbell]

And then when they did something says, that's not good enough.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's exactly right. So there's a new something. There's a little more new. Right. So it's just like they went to the extreme step of removing teams from Office or at least making a version without it. They took the additional step of doing that worldwide, you know, and the use, like, yeah, it's not good enough. Like what is good enough? Yeah, well, we don't know, let's try something else. So I guess since then they have in fact been working together.

[Richard Campbell]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

So Microsoft was like, look, we made this proposal, they've accepted it. But now the EU has put it out for comment to the public, meaning Slack, to see what the complaint is. Right. If there is one. And I have a feeling this one's going to pass. So they lowered the price further on the version of Office or Microsoft365 that does not have teams.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

They've agreed. This is very similar to the EU, Microsoft and interest case from 20 years ago. They're going to increase the interoperability. I believe they're just going to have APIs for Microsoft 365 so the teams like functions can be integrated with a third party app, Slack. And then they were already going to do this, but they've formally acknowledged or agreed they will allow customers to move their data out of teams so they can then put it into a third party process slack, slack meeting slack, 100% slack.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's important to remember that Slack is owned by Salesforce, right?

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, Yep. But this is like AOL at the time owning Netscape, because this started before that and then they continued it.

[Richard Campbell]

Then it suddenly landed in a company with a lot of money.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. And it's like, oh, you kind of killed your argument, didn't you? So, you know, we'll see. But the other one, and this is very similar to the other problem Microsoft has in Europe right now with antitrust, which is the cloud licensing stuff. And one of the, what do they call it, like, exit fees, like, one of the big problems is the big cloud players to prevent customers from migrating would make it expensive to move off. Right. So they got rid of that.

[Richard Campbell]

So now I thought that was a good move on the EU's, like, part. Yeah, right. That's proper competitive behavior.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly. Especially in the EU where like the big players, that's one thing, but there are a bunch of small players in the cloud space in the EU that, like in the United States. We've never heard of these companies, but, you know, they can't compete. Like, you can't. You're like, oh, listen, we have all these advantages over, you know, whatever it is, Microsoft 365 hosting, like, okay, but you don't understand, like, how much it's going to cost just to get the data out of there. You know, it makes it untenable. So they're doing the same thing on the client side. Although, again, I, I don't know if this is ever a restriction, but customers can switch between versions of Office. So if you're doing teams, you're like, I don't want to do teams. I'm going to pull the data out of there. Microsoft will allow that and not charge you extra for it. We're never going to. But put it into Slack. And now I can switch my subscription over for whatever users to a comparable version of the suite. Sorry, of the service, whatever, that doesn't have teams with no, you know, qualifications. Right. It's just kind of common side. This, I. This looks to me kind of like what they did do a year ago. But I think this time it's actually going to. I think it's going to work. And my speculation, I think it was last summer was that when the EU kind of came back and said, yeah, now you're going to fix this. And it's like, well, you didn't tell me to do anything extra here. I feel like it was just the price, like so whatever the cost was.

[Richard Campbell]

Per user level, it was like $2 less.

[Paul Thurrott]

And it was like that's not enough. Because when you add add, this is like the Apple, it's not this extreme. But when you add the cost of teams less Microsoft 365 + Slack, it's more than the cost of just Microsoft 365. So I was like, well, who would do that? Yeah, I mean honestly, some customers would because they have to use slack because of whatever their customers, partners, whatever use it. But they're just kind of streamlining that process. So that, that seems good to me.

[Richard Campbell]

Cool.

[Leo Laporte]

Let's take a little break because guess what? Oh, we're so excited. The Xbox segment is just around the corner. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thoradin, Richard Campbell surrounded by crazed developers at the built in, excited get happy people.

[Paul Thurrott]

People like free things, man, they are so cheap.

[Leo Laporte]

They must have broken out the T shirt cannon. That's all I can say. There's some real excitement happening.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm going over there after here. I want to see what's going on. I don't know.

[Richard Campbell]

It's custom made octocats.

[Paul Thurrott]

I want that.

[Leo Laporte]

That sounds Great.

[Paul Thurrott]

Great.

[Leo Laporte]

3D printed octocast.

[Richard Campbell]

Very cute.

[Leo Laporte]

I made a. I turned the Renaissance picture into a Minecraft picture.

[Paul Thurrott]

There we go.

[Leo Laporte]

That actually worked pretty well.

[Paul Thurrott]

So we're doing like this is the AI version of the telephone game.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, that's it. Yeah. We eventually just up one pixel each.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, right.

[Richard Campbell]

I like set of gray pics.

[Paul Thurrott]

I like the background, by the way.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I asked to put us in a field.

[Paul Thurrott]

I feel like I'm getting older in every version of this.

[Leo Laporte]

You are. I don't know know, it doesn't look like you at all. I think I'm pretty well rendered. However, I think that was a good, good job on my part.

[Richard Campbell]

Beautiful Anonymous changes each week. It defies genres and expectations.

[Paul Thurrott]

For example, our most recent episode, I.

[Leo Laporte]

Talked to a woman who survived a.

[Richard Campbell]

Murder attempt by her own son.

[Paul Thurrott]

But just the week before that, we.

[Leo Laporte]

Just talked the whole time about Star Trek.

[Richard Campbell]

We've had other recent episodes about sexting in languages that are not your first language or what it's like to get weight loss surgery.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's unpredictable, it's real, it's honest, it's raw. Get Beautiful Anonymous wherever you listen to podcasts. Funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Anyway, on we go with the show. It's time for the Xbox. After that Minecraft moment, time for the Xbox segment. Paul, give us some good news.

[Paul Thurrott]

I know I'm going to try to Burn through this quick. By the way, I want just to acknowledge Kevin Brewer. If you're in Discord, you know this already. But if you're not, you have no idea what I'm talking about. But when we do the show, he takes the show notes and he posts the link to whatever we're about to talk about. And I can't imagine how frazzled he's right now because the show has been.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, we've been all over the place.

[Leo Laporte]

He does a good job, though.

[Paul Thurrott]

Thank you for that, Kev. And I'm sorry for, for the way this has gone down.

[Leo Laporte]

This is another reason to be in the club, by the way, because then you could sit in the Discord and you get the links.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

In fact, Kevin, Kevin King uploads the show notes ahead of time, so you can even get those ahead of time.

[Richard Campbell]

Which we've promptly modified.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, well, you know, it's a work in progress.

[Paul Thurrott]

What do you gotta do? Okay, so it's Bigwiggin Games. Without getting into the nitty gritty on this one, Epic Games got the, you know, in their case against Apple submitted Fortnite. And then Apple didn't do anything. And then the timeframe for it expired and they were like, okay, they're blocking us. You know, they went, complained to the judge. Apple's like, we didn't do anything. And then the judge had another rip roaring. Legal filing was best. And basically what it said was, you can solve this problem without me getting involved. If the court's intervention is required. The Apple official who is responsible for ensuring compliance will appear personally in the hearing on May 27. And any opposition brief will be filed, but whatever date, and we'll identify that person by name.

[Richard Campbell]

Wow.

[Paul Thurrott]

So we can.

[Richard Campbell]

Then I'm ready to put people in jail.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. And it's like, oh, wait, we approved it. Apple is, oh my God. So if you have a malicious compliance.

[Richard Campbell]

Going to burn them.

[Paul Thurrott]

Unbelievable. So if you have an iPhone or iPad, you can get Fortnite again. It's just like it's, we're going to party like it's 2020. So that's fun.

[Richard Campbell]

I get to stay home.

[Paul Thurrott]

Microsoft filed a legal filing in this case to explain that they have had a similar problem with Apple that they have submitted. They want to do the store where they can do game streaming, et cetera. And Apple keeps saying no. And they're like, you're required to allow us to do this. This is part of that ruling.

[Richard Campbell]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

And so we'll see what comes of this. But malicious compliance. Yep. They're terrible at everybody. They're pretty consistent. So there's that there was a job listing on qualcomm.com which I'm sure is now gone, but it specifically mentioned that they're looking for an applicant who can help with the next generation of Surface and Xbox products built on Snapdragon.

[Richard Campbell]

Excellent. That is the right thing to do.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. We've been speculating about this for a long time and I can't say this completely confirms it. I mean we don't know what that means exactly. It could just be a handheld thing. It might not be everything, but I really. We know from the leak from a couple years back that Microsoft wanted to make the next gen consoles based on arm. And a lot of things have to happen, as we've been saying, but not.

[Richard Campbell]

The least of devs.

[Paul Thurrott]

But yeah, so that's really interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

You kind of need Windows on ARM to even approach, you know, the Xbox 360 because it was the custom hardware. It made live for game developers really hard and it substantially slowed down game development. It raised the prices on everything. It was a mistake in the end.

[Paul Thurrott]

This week is also Computex. Rather than take another half an hour to talk about all the developments that are occurring there, I'll just mention one of them, which is that Dell has announced this week a workstation that has. I don't remember who was AMD or Intel, but whatever processor, Nvidia, dedicated graphics of whatever variant and the Snapdragon X MPU in a single computer. So there's an interesting mixing and matching occurring there.

[Leo Laporte]

Wow, that's blind.

[Paul Thurrott]

They went to these companies because they said they were like, look, we need this internally for AI development. It's kind of a weird ask, but is there some way we can do this? And I don't know which party required this, but one of the three companies said yeah, you can do this, but you need to sell this computer to the public as well. And so it's going to be very expensive. I believe it's about three grand or whatever, but. And it's kind of a one off I don't think. You know, no one expects this to be like a volume seller or whatever, but this is the thing, one of the things we've been kind of thinking about and talking about with Snapdragon or just Windows 11 on ARM, which is. Yep, for all the reasons everyone knows. Great, especially for thin and light laptops. But what about dedicated graphics? You know, this is something Apple doesn't.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, what about dedicated MPU? Give me an NPU and a PCIe slot.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So this is very interesting. Right? This is like we're. And maybe. Maybe this points to a solution. I mean, I did talk to Qualcomm recently. They. They acknowledged competitors were coming to this market soon, meaning Windows 11 on ARM. But, you know, there's indications. I don't. They're not even rumors. It's just like more than rumors that Microsoft wants to. In some way. They're not even. It's not clear they know how to combine the Xbox and Windows gaming worlds into a single platform of some kind. And that makes. To me. Makes.

[Richard Campbell]

Well, today ARM would make sense.

[Paul Thurrott]

I think so.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

You know, so again, a lot. Lots of things have to happen, but this job listing points to that is. Seems to be happening.

[Richard Campbell]

Somebody's working on it.

[Paul Thurrott]

No one, no one is saying anything. Qualcomm + Nvidia in this context. But there is Qualcomm + Nvidia on that computer I just mentioned.

[Leo Laporte]

And.

[Richard Campbell]

If you carve the N100 off, you can stick it on a card, stick it in my machine, and boom, I'm a co pilot. Plus PC.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh my God. That's pretty much.

[Richard Campbell]

I mean, we still can do the camera stuff and things like. Yeah, so there might be certain monitors I have to have that have the proper camera on it. Like.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

I could see that. Or you know, the right module.

[Paul Thurrott]

I mean.

[Richard Campbell]

But we should be able to build Copilot plus PC.

[Paul Thurrott]

Look, Copilot plus PC is just a spec. I mean, that's what I'm saying.

[Richard Campbell]

This is a spec that they.

[Paul Thurrott]

This could change and you can. Or you, as a Copilot plus PC buyer could turn off Windows. Hello ESS in the sense that you could just connect an external webcam that will never be compliant. And it still works fine. Like you don't lose any function.

[Richard Campbell]

There's another product to sell there. Give me a hello ESS module that plugs into USB C and it sits on top of my screen.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's just. The problem is there's an interception capability there. This is what they're worried about. But yes, fair enough. So that's very interesting thing. There is right now a gigantic Xbox monthly update that's going on across platforms. Well, meaning console, obviously, but also PC and mobile. And there's a bunch of stuff to it. This just happened before the show. So I've only looked at this at a very high level because I just didn't have a lot of time. But one of the things that's in here is a retro gaming anthology that's of Activision games Classic, built from the 80s and 90s, available to anyone on Game Pass from console, PC and Xbox Cloud gaming. Right now, it's not available for purchase separately, which as Laurent writes in our article, I think is a first. So we've seen these kind of retro gaming anthologies over the years in various forms, right. On CD in the 1990s and then digital elsewhere. But 50 plus classic Activision games, Commando, Grand Prix, Kaboom, like from the original, you know, Atari 2600, pitfall, et cetera, et cetera. So that's, you know, that's cool. There is GeForce now integration in the Xbox Xbox app, sorry, on Windows. So today, if you have an Xbox Game pass, sorry, ultimate subscription, you get Xbox cloud gaming. Got to really work through these names, right? And that means you can stream, obviously, but if you have a GeForce now, whatever games you have through there, you'll be able to stream through the Xbox app as well. It's cool. And I think this points to that future we've talked about every once in a while where Microsoft wants the Xbox app on Windows, which is the Xbox interface essentially on console, but on the PC side, to be the front end for all of the game that you do. And this is one step. But the next step, which is rumored to be happening this year, is integration with Steam and the Epic Games Store.

[Richard Campbell]

Nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right? So you have those accounts, you link them up with your Xbox account, you.

[Richard Campbell]

Get everything through all the stores, go through it.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep. So this is cool to me. So, you know, we'll see how that goes down. And then I already did that for some reason. I have the same link on all these articles. Okay, so I've screwed up the notes. That's amazing. It hasn't happened more often. There's other stuff. If you use the game bar in Windows, which I actually do pretty extensively, there's a big UI update there, which looks pretty cool. Updates to Edge Game Assist, which is that in browser or in. In UI mini browser thing where you can get help with the game side by side, etc. Which is cool. There's all that stuff. Custom Xbox. Yeah. Gift cards, meaning custom amounts. Like you could buy them in whatever amounts.

[Richard Campbell]

But now if you. 1025, 100.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah. So, but if you know what a game costs, like with the tax, you could be like, here's your gift card for 32.97 or whatever. And it's the exact cost of the thing. You could do that. One of the better games that I played last year, meaning one of the Few games that was not called Call of Duty that I played last year. Year was Hellblade 2, which is kind of an interactive adventure action game, kind of Viking era, whatever. Great graphics, good story. There's like a weird mental health component to it. That's part of it is the latest Xbox game coming to the PlayStation 5. So that will delight everyone in the Xbox because we're so open to that. It's fine. Second half of the month. So we're getting a new collection of Xbox box game Pass games, including, by the way, that Hellblade 2 title is one of several. So Tom Clancy's the Division 2 is in there. Spray paint simulator. Because seriously, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2. Right. Coming to Game Past Standard on May 22nd. That's great. That wasn't. That's. That's your. That's your day. One difference. So whenever that game came out, it was the biggest thing in the world. Probably late last year, I guess November, probably, you'll be getting it on standard, which is the replacement for the old Xbox game Pass, the one that everyone wanted. Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It's a pretty good game list. It's better than we've had.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep, yeah, 100%.

[Richard Campbell]

So, yeah, like, by that I mean two titles, I reckon you actually.

[Paul Thurrott]

Exactly, exactly. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

The Division 3.

[Paul Thurrott]

Well, yeah, Hellblade 2, Stalker 2, Tim Clancy's the Division 2.

[Richard Campbell]

And then of course, it's a massive online game.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right, Yep. Just. Yeah, this is a good one. Yeah. So, yeah. So kind of a big month. Am I missing anything? I think that's.

[Leo Laporte]

That's it. That's the Xbox segment.

[Richard Campbell]

Boys and girls coming in. We're going to make it.

[Paul Thurrott]

We're going to land.

[Leo Laporte]

We're going to enjoy that. We're getting to the back of the book, actually, just around the corner. But first I'd like to tell you about Club Twit. It's only seven bucks a month, but it won't be that price for much longer. So if you are a club Twitter Twit member, hang on to your membership because you will be. You'll still have the founder price of $7 a month, $84 a year. New kids will be joining will have to pay a little bit more. And if you join today, you can still get the founder pricing. So TWiT TV, Club TWiT. I think seven bucks is an amazing deal for what you get. Ad free versions of all the shows, access to the Club Twit Discord. And there's a lot more going on in the Discord than just chat about the shows. Of course that happens. Many of our hosts join in the Discord participate. That's cool. There's sections for everything geeks are interested in from gaming to photography and more. So you know, it's a really nice social network. We also do shows in the club. In the Club Twit Discord. As I mentioned at the beginning of the show, our keynotes now are all Club Twit only. So we did the Microsoft Build keynote on Monday, the Google I O keynote on Tuesday. WWDC is coming up June 9th. Those will all be for copyright reasons. Those will all be in the Discord only. Coming up this Friday, Dick D. Bartolo is going to stop by. We'll celebrate 2,000 episodes of the Gizwiz and I'm going to break out some of the old jingles and show episodes and things. We have our AI user group coming up first Friday of every month. That was great last month. Anthony Nielsen shows us how he makes those crazy moral panic interstitials. WWDC June 9th. And as you can see, we do a lot of shows in the club so you can watch live there. And photo time with Chris Marquardt June 13, 1pm Pacific and Wednesday June 18, 6pm Pacific. The return of Mike, his crafting corner. We had a lot of fun last week with the crafting corner. Joining the club is more than just supporting what we do, but that's a big part of it. 25% now of our operating costs get paid by the club members. Thank you. We couldn't do it without you. But you get a lot of benefits too. TWiT TV Club TWiT. Get in there now to get the founder pricing. And we thank you so much for your support. Now time for the back of the book. Paul Thurrock kicks it off with his tip of the week.

[Richard Campbell]

Paul club is killing it. The club is just.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm so distracted.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, is there stuff in the Discord?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh good.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yes. They just go. They're going to town.

[Richard Campbell]

So good.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, I love this. Yeah, we. Joe Esposito does these. Have you ever. This one of my. Tom Selleck in this. Have you ever contributed to keeping a network of shows alive and growing for the.

[Paul Thurrott]

I gotta go. TC has arrived in the helicopter up there.

[Richard Campbell]

Darren Oakley had a couple of killers too. Just so funny.

[Leo Laporte]

Darren's done some good. Good stuff too. Look at this. He made a. Oh, that's. Paul did this one. This is a bunch a land party. They're sitting around as the TV screen and the. Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff, I guess.

[Richard Campbell]

Going back a little farther.

[Leo Laporte]

Even. Even farther.

[Paul Thurrott]

It gets weird.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, this. By the way, I figured out what this is. This is the Notebook LM version of the show. Show.

[Richard Campbell]

There you go.

[Paul Thurrott]

There you go.

[Leo Laporte]

Strangely, versions of the three of us.

[Paul Thurrott]

Not quite versions of us.

[Leo Laporte]

Somebody says. What do they say? It's Ray Romano. I love this. Gordon Freeman, Jay Leno.

[Paul Thurrott]

The thing is, right, I. I recognize each one of those people.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, but they're not us.

[Paul Thurrott]

But they're not us.

[Richard Campbell]

There's almost a Jerry Seinfeld there on the left.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

But the. There's a great uncanny Valley rally moment in this.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, what Darren did is he had older pictures of the three of us, which he said I was trying to get a younger version of this. So he.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's what my wife's is trying too. Yeah, same thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

I like this, but I like a younger version.

[Leo Laporte]

A little younger, please. Anyway, what's your tip of the week, my friend?

[Paul Thurrott]

So I do not have a tip, but I have an app pick and a game pick.

[Leo Laporte]

Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

One of the many things Microsoft announced this week and I don't quite understand why they're doing this, but. But is a command line editor called Edit, which is available now for free on GitHub. You can get it for Windows or Linux. And. Well, part of the reason is you would install this in WSL or the command line.

[Richard Campbell]

It's the 50 year anniversary gag is what this is.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, is it a gag?

[Richard Campbell]

Oh, no, no, no, no.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's not a gag. It's real. It's actually.

[Richard Campbell]

But it's for the 50th anniversary.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's pretty cool.

[Richard Campbell]

It's an Ms. DOS roll flashback.

[Paul Thurrott]

It works. It's pretty good.

[Leo Laporte]

It's kind of funny.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

It's a TUI editor. Or is it a GUI editor that looks like a 2e?

[Paul Thurrott]

So remember the do dos editor uis like quick, quick Basic or whatever? Like it's full screen with menu system. Yeah. It's like. It's.

[Richard Campbell]

That's what they do.

[Paul Thurrott]

It does keyboard shortcuts, you know, Control O and you can navigate through the file system. It. It works well.

[Leo Laporte]

It says it's an homage to the classic Ms. DOS editor.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, totally. The 50th anniversary thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Right.

[Paul Thurrott]

So that'll be my next app. I'm going to do a DOS version of the. NET pad. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

And it's written in rust, so you know it's going to be very reliable.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's right.

[Richard Campbell]

Chances of this editor crashing.

[Paul Thurrott]

I noticed this App doesn't have tabs. That's genius. My game pick is something I was hoping to play more of, but of course now I'm here and I can't really. It's weird. I haven't had a lot of time to play games this week, but the Dark Ages is out and it's fantastic. Like, it's really good and it's. I've heard so many people describe this as like a throwback to the. It has nothing to do with any of the Doom games. It has nothing to, like, supposedly this is like a trilogy they've done, but, you know, the recent Doom 2016, Doom Eternal, and Doom the Dark Age is like, part of it. They're not. It has nothing to do with any of it. Like, it's a. If anything, it's further from the roots of the original Doom, as, you know, unnamed Space Marine, you know, the portals of Hell have opened up, etc. But it's really, well, it's really well done. It's a beautiful game. I will say, compared to Call of Duty, the primary download size of this game is smaller than the typical monthly update to Call of Duty. Like, it's. It installs really quick. It. You know, it's a great game. Single player, right? So you can do. Go do that. That part of it is very similar to Doom. So I'm. I. It's bugging me because I think if I had been home, I might have finished it by now. But I haven't really been able to play since I've been here. So I installed it on this laptop. I was like, yeah, you never know. Like, yeah, you do know. It's not happening.

[Leo Laporte]

It does have some of the similar creatures. I mean, there's the Doom guy, but it's done with Unreal Engine or something.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's like one of those time travel things. Like you're in some, like, not Renaissance.

[Leo Laporte]

Got the bfg, baby. Oh, my.

[Richard Campbell]

Does.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, it's well done. Like, it's. Yeah, the. The mechanics are great. There's a, you know, some new elements to it. Like, a lot of it is like you have a shield and you can block but also attack with it. And it's a big part of it. Like, you know, so a lot of people are like, this is about, like, they call it Parry, like, parry. Parry mode or whatever. But like what he just did right there, where you attack with the shield. Yeah, yeah, very effective. It's just great. It just runs great. Like, it's. It's really much fun.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. And you're killing.

[Paul Thurrott]

It feels a little bit like Serious Sam or something. If you remember those games from back in the day.

[Leo Laporte]

Right?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. But you're right. This does not look like Doom.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, not at all. Not at all.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, but it's as if you took.

[Richard Campbell]

Doom and got a Warhammer 40,000 feel.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah, maybe a little bit. Little bit of that recognizable Doom element.

[Richard Campbell]

Armor kind of thing.

[Leo Laporte]

Yeah. Okay, here comes Doom. Now here comes Run as Radio. Who's. Oh, you're gonna do that powershell thing, aren't you?

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, I already mentioned this because we happen to talk about DSC and a bunch of others. But my friend Jason Helmick, who is one of the great powershell gurus before he joined Microsoft, then he went into the PowerShell team as well, finally got a chance to talk to him directly about the latest version of PowerShell 7.5.

[Leo Laporte]

Nice.

[Richard Campbell]

We talked a bit about the cadence because he's very much on the PM side of things. PowerShell is open source and so there are community contributors. And so they tend to alternate between a release version that is heavily focused on the contributor contributions, where they've made sure they validate them all. So these can stay in. And then the following version, in this case it'll be 7.66 is what they call the Long Term support edition. And that one tends to synchronize with the new version of. Net. So this is the November. Yeah. So springtime we release the 0.5, which is the contributed the community edition. And then the 0.6 will come out in November with net 10. And then that's supported for three years, which is how long net 10 will be.

[Paul Thurrott]

Could sync up the version number.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah, now you're just talking crazy talk, honestly. And adjacent to that was. Was DSC3. So that's desired state configuration.

[Leo Laporte]

I misread it. I thought it was DOS3. I was so nice.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, that was DOS3.

[Richard Campbell]

That was a real throwback. Holy man.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's funny.

[Richard Campbell]

And so decided to state configuration is about maintaining the configuration of a machine. I originally used this back in the early days for maintaining a set of web servers that were in a cluster. Because often you have these drifts. Things happen to these machines and their configuration is not the same. So they misbehave. And DSC was really good at making sure all of versions were same.

[Paul Thurrott]

It's incredible to me that. That this term's been around for. In the Microsoft space for like 25 years. Yeah, like it's crazy that we're starting.

[Richard Campbell]

I've talked about DSC on and off. On run as for more than a decade. Easy.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And so now they're up to version three. I mean, a couple important parts. One is it's fully cross platform, so you can use DSC on Linux to maintain configuration now as well.

[Leo Laporte]

What does DSC stand for?

[Richard Campbell]

Desired State configuration.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, that's cool.

[Paul Thurrott]

So it's a YAML based configuration file and it's. And you specify the configuration. Well, you're saying for the system, but also for individual apps.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Paul Thurrott]

For software configurations and yeah. I mean every time you bring this thing up, you want to make sure it's configured exactly the way you want it.

[Richard Campbell]

And so it's a way to deploy new machines. It's a way to maintain machines. To say it has this thing drifted is the term we use when the configurations have been altered by other.

[Paul Thurrott]

This is what I want for my Windows 11 customization utility. Like you want. There's you. You set the configuration. Like, make sure it's always like this.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. Every time you boot up, rerun the configurator. Make sure we're correct. Yeah. And so. And Jason's one of the gods, you know, like his. His photo on Twitter is a picture of him with Manasseh and Russinovich and Snow. You know, like they. He's been. He's been in that loop and part of that PowerShell culture since the very beginning. The inventor of PowerShell.

[Paul Thurrott]

I just told a story about him yesterday to Rick klaus at Ignite 2019. I found him wandering around in the convention center. I'm like, are you all right? He goes, I have no idea where our booth is. I got to speak there in two minutes. And I was like, oh, I just came from back and bring you over. So I brought him over there and I was like, I found this homeless guy wandering around. He said he was with you. I don't know.

[Leo Laporte]

Awesome.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

So it's great to talk to Jason. I mean, he crossed over. He became a blue badge during the company and so forth. Is now working on the product.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, that's fantastic.

[Richard Campbell]

Been an advocate for forever. So I love everything about that. And he's clearly having a great time.

[Paul Thurrott]

Time. Nice.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man, we made it to the best part of the show. It's time for some brown liquor.

[Richard Campbell]

Dipped into the weird list today to go back to Scotland to talk about Tamna Vulin. Now actually, before I could talk about that, I have to talk about Glenn Livitt now. We're not going to talk about Glenn Livitt, the whiskey, because we. I actually mentioned Nadura how more than 100 shows ago. 812 is when I mentioned nadura. Glenn Livit is actually an important phrase. I mean, nominally it means the valley of the river. Right. But that would be specifically the Livit River. But it was also the term used bef when whiskey was illegal in Scotland. Like in the 1700s, Glen Livit meant the region where you got illicit whiskey. And this is in the north center of what we eventually call Speyside on the north side of the Cairngorm. But it was that back then, Glenn Levitt literally meant illicit whiskey. And this is where you got it from. And so when regulation comes to whiskey, when they actually, hey, here's how we're going to tax it. So for the 1823, right away a distillery is announced. It was already there. And they call it. That's in 1824. And what did they call it? They called it Glen Levitt. Right. That's. That's where it comes from. And remained the only with distillery on the river livitz it until 1966. So even though in Spaceide only becomes. Even though they started using that term, like it only became an official term in 2009.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

Like, did we take all these things for granted? But a lot of them are more recent than you realize. And Glenn Live were also guys who popularized the concept of a single malt. Like, a lot of these things come from that part of the world. And the River Livid is not a huge. It's one of the smaller rivers. It does feed into the Av. The Avon river, which then moves down towards the north. And you have the famous Bridge of Avon, which was built in the 18 early 1800s. And that's where Ballon Daloch is, which we've talked about before in Cragg and Moore. And then that continues on into the Spey River. Then there's a lot of distilleries around the Spey river before you ultimately end up in the North Sea. So Inver Gordon Distilleries, which is not in the spades in the northeast part of the Highlands. And it's actually a grain distillery. Owned a set of distilleries back in the early days, including Brookladic and Tulabarden and Jura, which we talked about just. I love that.

[Paul Thurrott]

You just rattle this right up. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

And so in 1966, when whiskey's doing extremely well and they need more capacity, they build this new distillery on the River Livitt called Tamnavulin, near the town of Town Navulin. And so it's all for blending. They. And although they started, they did a little bit of single malt in the early days and they had a little visitor center in the 1990s which is all closed now. In fact, if you get a picture currently of the town of Woolen Distillery, where it used to have the sign that says Towneville and it now says no visitors. Now everything changes in 1993 when White and McKay again, when I talked about Jury, we Talked about why McKay buys the Invergordin distiller. So that's the Grain distillery along with the other single malt distilleries. And they actually, because business is slowing down, shut down Tam Navulin to just mothball it because the demand's not that high and this is not a well known brand, so it's an easy one to shut down. And then when United Spirits buys them, they reopen. And that's in 2007 and starts to run it again. There's a famous controversy around this distillery because. And specifically United spirits, because in 2013, Diageo started buying shares of. Of United Spirits Spirits to do a hostile takeover. And the Scottish government intervened and said, yes, you can buy United Spirits, but you can't buy any of the distilleries.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, interesting.

[Richard Campbell]

And so they. And so they already own the shares and now they tank the value on them. So they had to finish the buy. But they ended up selling off White and McKay to Emperor Door, which I mentioned last time we were talking about Jura, which is this liquor conglomerate out of the Philippines. Philippines. But that's how that went down in 2014. It was because the Scottish government intervened in a Diageo hostile takeover. So. And only in 2016 did.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm sorry to interrupt. You don't have this with you?

[Richard Campbell]

Which. The whiskey.

[Paul Thurrott]

You. You do this every. Every week you have whiskey with you? I'm here.

[Richard Campbell]

They're searching all the bags. I can't get it.

[Paul Thurrott]

What the hell's wrong with you? I'm sorry.

[Leo Laporte]

Can't get whiskey.

[Richard Campbell]

No, they're searching all the bags.

[Leo Laporte]

Hotel room, then that's.

[Paul Thurrott]

I'm next to you if you don't have the.

[Richard Campbell]

No, I'm only one beside Leo. Do I bring the whiskey? That's how this. I'll get you a drink later. And by the way, good luck finding this.

[Leo Laporte]

Do you have some in the hotel?

[Richard Campbell]

Wine? I have whiskey in the hotel, but not this.

[Leo Laporte]

Not ton of. Ton of wine.

[Richard Campbell]

No.

[Paul Thurrott]

T we get something that is as described here is very similar.

[Richard Campbell]

I bet it's a sherry cask. Space side. You kind of can't go wrong.

[Paul Thurrott]

Scotch that has been kind of calmed down with some bourbon.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah. It's always started in bourbon barrels, right? Totally.

[Paul Thurrott]

And then made even better with.

[Richard Campbell]

And then you finished like nine months.

[Leo Laporte]

In a sherry cast.

[Paul Thurrott]

No, this is to me is the ideal classic spay.

[Richard Campbell]

A hundred percent. And this is what's. What's interesting is that with this distillery is in 2016, after all the shuffling is done and Emperor Dora kind of goes, well, what are we going to do with this? Right. Because they don't need the blending capacity, although they are still using it. Like they're still white. What black and white. Which white McKay makes. Makes like there's a bunch of blending whiskeys that they are using. That's the main thing that Tamavul. These guys put up 4 million liters a year and you haven't heard of them, right? It's not. But because almost all their whiskey goes into blends. But they did start a line of single malts. Nominally this one, this sherry cast, only for 2019. It's relatively new.

[Paul Thurrott]

Is it only you like primarily UK based.

[Richard Campbell]

Primarily UK. But I did find it on total wine for $40.

[Paul Thurrott]

That's incredible.

[Richard Campbell]

It's not expensive.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, right.

[Richard Campbell]

But again, because they're not. Not branding at all. They're not spending the marketing money. Whiskey is not expensive to make.

[Paul Thurrott]

Right.

[Richard Campbell]

It just isn't. And the barrel, the most interesting thing about this distillery, if you actually go study it, is it has massive rack houses instead of long, low rack houses covering the hills because it's so steep in the valley on the Livet river, they've got 10 barrels high, very tall, 40,000 barrels they can store. And it's not just tamnavulin. They store for a bunch of the other distilleries that are owned by White and McKay. Really. Emperor Dorano. And so it's a good aging space because it's very cool there down in the low part of the. Of the valley. It's an excellent place to age whiskey, but it's not big. So they. They build these tall rack houses and that's how they store their whiskey there. And so again, the vast majority of the stuff you're going to find in various blends made by Emperor Door and the few single malts there are, there's a couple of wine finishes. But this one is this sherry cask is a classic spay. It is a perfect spay. I could put a wrapper over that cover. You would never know. You would know what the heck it was. There's like 15 whiskeys from the space.

[Paul Thurrott]

Scotch is literally as exactly described like this. Like.

[Richard Campbell]

And it's. And again, what makes me laugh is I'll bet you if I could put. I could put a Macallan 12 beside again covered and this side by side and taste me go. That is the same. And the McAllen 12 is 150 bucks.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yep.

[Richard Campbell]

And this is $35, right?

[Leo Laporte]

Wow.

[Richard Campbell]

Right? It's a classic spay with no branding.

[Leo Laporte]

Tamna Volen, Tam Navulin. Sherry. Finished.

[Paul Thurrott]

And you seriously don't have any with.

[Richard Campbell]

I don't have any with me.

[Leo Laporte]

I'm really sorry he said it to me. Actually, Yarno had a good suggestion. Next time, take two bottles, one for security and one for Paul.

[Richard Campbell]

As long as you share, everybody's happy. Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

That's our brown liquor segment for the day. Thank you very much. Much to Joe Esposito for the COVID art.

[Paul Thurrott]

I love this, like, an. Like an ad for an episode of Heart to Heart from the, like, early 1980s.

[Leo Laporte]

It's such a great font. It's such a great.

[Richard Campbell]

I. I still think that's like an RCMP jacket.

[Paul Thurrott]

Oh, definitely. They're trying to be respectful of your Canadian narrative with the Microsoft logo.

[Richard Campbell]

It's great.

[Leo Laporte]

It's the Microsoft security. He's in charge.

[Paul Thurrott]

Yeah, I think it's the old Microsoft logo, too. Yeah.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

I know you have. You have more things you'd like to be doing there than sitting in a stud doing Windows Weekly, but we might go drink whiskey. We appreciate it because you gave us an insight. A look into what's going on at Build this week. Paul Thurrott writes and will write more about this, I'm sure, at thurrott.com t h U-R-R-O-T-T.com his books, windows Everywhere and the Field Guide for Windows 11, [e-mail] it's how long you can stay out there? The whole week, Paul. When are you going back?

[Paul Thurrott]

Back tomorrow morning.

[Leo Laporte]

Tomorrow. Okay.

[Paul Thurrott]

Then Friday we leave for the.

[Richard Campbell]

I'm gonna drive. I'm driving north tomorrow, too, because I fly to South Africa on Saturday.

[Leo Laporte]

Oh, man. You guys are traveling.

[Richard Campbell]

Yeah.

[Leo Laporte]

Well, have a great trip. Richard Campbell's at Run his radio dot com. That's where you'll find Run his radio and dotnet Rocks his podcasts. And you'll find both of them here on our channel, our Network every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. Wherever they are in the world, they're always here on Tuesday day and you should be too. You can watch it live if you're a club member in our club Discord but also on YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kick. Watch the live streams but that should.

[Paul Thurrott]

I still have no idea what Kick is. I. I'm really confused every time you say that. I. I'm not even sure it exists. I think you just throw a random one a word in there just to see if anyone I know them because.

[Leo Laporte]

They they sponsor an F1 team. They have a lime green car that's kick somber. So I've heard of them for that reason they're I think they're partly owned by Stake, I don't know. And Stake's a gambling entity.

[Paul Thurrott]

They also they're partly owned by Catch and also Throw Kick.

[Leo Laporte]

Catch and Throw. The big three after the fact on demand versions of the show available at our website. There's audio and video. There's of course video on the YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. Great place to go to show share clips from the show and the best.

[Paul Thurrott]

Way to get it.

[Leo Laporte]

Subscribe in your favorite podcast clients. You can get it automatically the minute it's available for free. For free. Just look for Windows Weekly and if you wish it would be very nice if you would leave us a five star review because people pay attention to those reviews. So give us a give us a nice thumbs up if you will. A reminder that club members and everybody should subscribe to our free newsletter at Twitter TV TV Newsletter Great way to keep up on what's going to happen in the days to come on Twitch. So I know sometimes we surprise you. We go out of nowhere with a build keynote and that kind of thing. All of that will always be promoted in the newsletter and that's free. TWiT TV newsletter. Thank you Paul. Thank you Richard. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks to all of you winners and dozers for joining us and we will see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye Bye. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads, go to Libsyn ads.com that's L, I, B S Y N ads.com today.