WW 956: Blowing the Dust Off Skype - Azure's Front Door Leaves Customers Locked Out

Summary

Windows Weekly 956: Blowing the Dust Off Skype – Azure's Front Door Leaves Customers Locked Out

Podcast: Windows Weekly (TWiT)
Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell
Date: October 29, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into a week marked by high-profile Microsoft outages (thanks to Azure’s “front door” woes), the latest on Windows 11’s semi-mysterious feature updates, and the ongoing Copilot/AI frenzy. Paul and Richard dissect Microsoft financials, business strategies, and even offer a nostalgic nudge at Skype and D&D. As always, their witty banter and sharp skepticism are on display, particularly regarding tech industry financials and the future of Xbox.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Azure Outage: The Front Door Gets Locked

[03:35–10:09, 24:35–29:14, and more throughout]

• Massive Azure "front door" outage renders services (like Microsoft.com, Loop, Teams, and more) inaccessible.
• Root Cause: Configuration error—classic, almost always "human error" or "DNS."
• Discussion on cloud reliability, circular dependence ("can’t get into Authenticator because I can't sign into Authenticator"), and the recurring backlash against cloud computing.
  • Leo [06:03]: “People say, ‘See? The cloud’s no good, you can’t rely on the cloud.’”
  • Paul [05:47]: “See, this is why the cloud is nonsense and we’re all going back on prem, he says, from 18 years ago.”
  • Azure status page becomes a joke: "You have to log in to see that it’s down, which requires logging in... which you can’t do."

Microsoft Quarterly Earnings and Tech Industry Finances

[13:07–16:13, 39:59–48:07, 139:41–145:12]

• Earnings delayed by the Azure outage.
• AI Infrastructure Spending:
  • Expected $25–$28B on AI infra this quarter alone; final number revealed at $34.9B.
  • “If you look at the major players, they’re basically money managers moving circular investments around to inflate valuations.”
  • Richard [08:47]: “That’s essentially the symbol of a bubble… you’re at the edge.”
  • The “shell game” of OpenAI → Buy Azure → Microsoft "income" and investment.
• Lack of Transparency:
  • "Not a lot of hard numbers” from Microsoft or other Big Tech on where the money actually goes, especially in AI.
  • Paul [76:50]: “Only one business at Microsoft still reports hard numbers—Microsoft 365.”
• Editorials and Critics Starting to Notice:
  • Wall Street Journal finally calls out Microsoft for lack of transparency in AI investment.
  • Paul [47:54]: "You can't follow the money. And I think that's the point."

Windows 11: The Endless Update, H2 Mystery & Feature Rollout

[10:17–23:46, 32:37–35:20]

• Preview (PU) and H2 Update confusion:
  • Updates for 24H2 and 25H2—the same KB number, same contents, just a version number increment for most users.
  • “Lots of big, slow downloads with very little obvious change.”
• Controlled Feature Rolls:
  • New Start Menu, battery icon color changes, start menu phone link, semantic search in Copilot+ PCs now “rolling out.” Whether you actually get the features is random.
  • Paul laments: “I have several computers, all on the same version, all with different features. There’s no master switch, no ‘enable all’.”
• Cloud Storage in File Explorer:
  • Eventually, expect File Explorer to search and integrate with third-party cloud services like Google Drive—once providers opt in.

Copilot, Copilot, Copilot

[35:44–51:48, 84:07–95:00]

• Copilot’s continued sprawl—now in consumer products, M365, and everywhere else.
• Copilot Vision (voice-first, now bringing in text entry), deeper integration with everyday productivity features.
• Richard [51:05]: "You think about it—if you built a master Copilot, the permission request would be insane… Instead, every little app asks for a bit, and soon Copilot knows everything."
• Copilot events begin to focus on “human-centered AI”—Mustafa Suleyman’s consumer presentation praised for being “more human than anyone at Microsoft in ages.”

Microsoft vs. Regulators: Consumer Antitrust Suits

[42:17–44:56]

• Australia sues Microsoft over ‘forced’ Copilot upgrades and price hikes in consumer M365 plans.
  • Plan changes handled via “negative option billing” and poorly communicated.
  • Echoes earlier EU complaints about bundling AI/Cloud features into existing plans.

Industry Bubble Talk & The Pivot/Enshittification

[101:57–107:16]

• Discussion of how the tech economy has gone from making products to just moving money and speculation.
• Cory Doctorow’s concept of “enshittification” and “pivot” as signals of a business in trouble:
  • Paul: “When a company says pivot, it means we failed.”
  • Meta, Microsoft, Grammarly/Superhuman all cited as examples.

Xbox: Profit Mandate, Hardware’s Future, and the Business Model Shift

[110:40–132:56]

• Amy Hood mandates a 30% profit margin for Xbox division—hardware doomed?
  • Xbox historically runs at 12% margin. Software-only businesses (e.g., Activision Blizzard) can reach >40%.
  • Most hardware consoles are loss-leaders: “No game console has ever been profitable.”
• Xbox’s hardware future: Next-gen Xbox will be “very premium”—likely expensive and less mass-market.
• “Xbox on Windows” future: Xbox console moves closer to being a specialized Windows PC for gaming.
• Satya: "The biggest gaming business is the Windows business."
  • Office as precedent: Microsoft will aim to be an everywhere game publisher, not just a hardware seller.
• Halo Campaign Evolved officially announced: Full remake, crossplay, coming to PlayStation 5 too.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Leo [05:54]: “I'm gonna go get a metal stick and a rock and I'm just gonna start writing in the stone—best battery life of the bunch.”
• Paul [08:21]: “Big tech right now is just a money manager with a bunch of engineers somewhere.”
• Richard [30:56]: “What advanced magic do you perform to paste from the clipboard? Control-V?”
• Paul [32:21]: “Feature flagged: These are controlled feature releases. 'Controlled' is a hilarious word because it's literally random.”
• Richard [42:59]: “Negative option billing again—you have to opt-out or you get charged more.”
• Paul [47:53]: “You can't follow the money, you know. And I think that's the point.”
• Paul [49:36]: “Companion apps can be grounded in your own data. Copilot is a cancer—it will spread to everything.”
• Richard [115:03]: “That was Balmer’s line—don’t bring me anything that’s not a billion-dollar business.”
• Paul [120:41]: “The next Xbox will be very premium. I’m thinking at least a thousand bucks.”
• Richard [124:28]: “The point of making Xbox run Windows kernel is so you can use your Windows machine to make the game and push it to Xbox.”
• Leo [130:14]: “Let’s get Xboxed.”
• Satya (via Paul) [128:52]: “We want to be a fantastic publisher…taking a similar approach to what we did with Office.”

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Azure Outage Begins / Cloud Outage Banter: 03:30–10:09
• Earnings & AI Financial Bubble: 13:07–16:13, 139:41–145:12
• Windows 11 24H2/25H2 Update Coverage: 10:17–23:46, 32:37–35:20
• Start Menu, File Explorer, Feature Flags: 13:34–20:55
• Copilot “Everywhere” & Event: 35:44–51:48, 84:07–95:00
• Consumer Lawsuits (Australia): 42:17–44:56
• Industry Speculation & “Pivot” Trends: 101:57–107:16
• Xbox Profit Mandate, Business Model Rant: 110:41–132:56
• D&D Club Memories: 53:16–55:45
• Whiskey Segment (Redbreast Dream Cask): 150:28–163:02

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Additional Notables

• D&D Night Recap: The trio (and guests) recount their first club D&D session—“We kicked the living daylights out of a wheelbarrow and a plow.” [53:10–55:50]
• RunAsRadio Preview: [149:24–150:37] Episode with Grant Fritchie on AI for DBAs.
• Whiskey Nerd-Out: [151:21–163:02] Richard shares the history of Redbreast’s Dream Cask and his rare chance to sample it.

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Overall Tone & Takeaways

• Wry, skeptical, affable. The hosts interweave technical insight with strong opinions on business turpitude, cloud reliability, and the endless Copilot/AI feature sprawl.
• The episode is marked by deadpan sarcasm about Microsoft’s financial opaqueness, the cloud’s inevitable outages, and the state of tech investment as “speculation” and “bubble.”
• Real-world consumer issues (cloud reliability, price hikes, feature confusion) get time next to deep-dive nerdery (Windows internal changes, the Xbox as PC shift).
• The D&D stories and whiskey lore bring a human warmth and sense of shared “community club” to the show’s tail end.

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For Listeners Who Missed the Show

Windows Weekly 956 covers a wide swath of current Microsoft news, from technical details about upcoming Windows features and ongoing confusion over update rollouts, to hard-hitting skepticism about cloud service reliability and the mysterious flows of Big Tech investment. Paul, Richard, and Leo’s trademark candor and wit provide both sharp takes on industry developments (especially Copilot/AI hype and Xbox business realities) and a welcome dash of geek camaraderie through D&D and whiskey lore.

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Compiled by your friendly podcast summarizer—episode duration 2:47:21

Transcript

[A]

It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul and Richard are here. And so is week D. I finally get 25H2. We'll talk about all the things that didn't happen. We'll also talk about Australia suing Microsoft. Copilot. Copilot, Copilot. And the return of Halo campaign remastered. All that and more coming up next on Windows Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 956, recorded Wednesday, October 29, 2025. Blowing the Dust off Skype.

[B]

Sorry.

[A]

It's time for Windows Weekly, the show where we cover the latest news from Microsoft with two of the oldest people in the business.

[C]

I'm younger than him.

[A]

Yeah, no, I was including myself. That's Richard Campbell, the kid of the bunch. Hello, Richard Campbell. Run his radio at.net rocks Richard's in Utrecht.

[C]

Still in Utrecht for another day.

[A]

Okay. In beautiful Netherlands.

[B]

Is that tower out from under the tarp that it's been under for the past ten years or whatever?

[C]

I know it's been raining nonstop here.

[A]

Well, it's good to have a tarp. We have a tarp on our time of year.

[C]

Yeah. Still don't have walls, huh?

[A]

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mr. Paul birthday boy Thurat. Happy birthday, Paulie.

[C]

Happy birthday, buddy.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

You know, it's interesting. His hair is actually grayer today.

[C]

Yeah, look at that.

[B]

Every one of those gray hairs is me going, mark, Mark.

[A]

Mark is his son who is not around, is he? Unless they're visiting.

[B]

No, we'll see them over Thanksgiving.

[A]

Thanks. You know, there's nothing like a Mexican Thanksgiving.

[B]

Well, we'll be in Pennsylvania. Okay.

[C]

But you're bringing the tamales.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

Well, actually, I wasn't. I wasn't joking. The Mexican Thanksgivings here are incredible feasts. Amazing feasts. Richard, you've already had Canadian Thanksgiving.

[C]

Yes.

[A]

Which is maple syrup and poutine, I.

[C]

Believe is every time, no matter what.

[A]

Yeah. Happy birthday. Happy birthday. What? Do you want to share what year it is? You could keep it a secret if you're like, no, no.

[B]

I have to think about it. I actually don't know how old I am. I think I'm.

[C]

I think you're 59.

[B]

Dude. 59. I think I'm 10.

[A]

Almost exactly 10 years older than you. Next month I'll be 69. I. You know, I've completely missed 67. I didn't realize when I was 67 that I could have, you know, I had fun at elementary schools and junior high schools saying my age.

[B]

I don't. Oh, I see. This is the new thing. Sorry.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Which I'm old, so I don't. The meme thing is like, I'm not.

[A]

It used to be Skibidi toilet. Now it's 67. I don't. The kids today. I swear to God, I can't do math, Leo.

[B]

That's the problem.

[A]

Today's kids, I think they do it just to mess with us. Now, this is an auspicious birthday, not merely because it is the. The day of Paul's birth 59 years ago, but it is also the day of Microsoft's earnings.

[B]

Yeah. Which we may or may not get because Microsoft's infrastructure is down.

[A]

Oh, no. Is it running on aws?

[B]

No, it's running on Azure, which is down. So AWS was last week. This week. Maybe next week it will be Google Cloud. I don't know.

[A]

Oh, that's not good.

[B]

So we'll see what happens.

[A]

But you mean down down?

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Is there an Azure status page?

[B]

Try to go to Microsoft.com and you can see how down it is. It's not doing good.

[A]

What else gets shut down? Does teams get shut down then? I guess it does.

[B]

Yeah. A lot of Microsoft 365 is down. Richard.

[C]

I can't get into Loop. He's down.

[B]

So Richard and two other people noticed Loop was down.

[C]

Both of us are really angry about it.

[B]

Yep. In fact, they would be writing notes to each other right now. But they can't because it's down.

[A]

You have to sign in this kind of. I think that's a flaw. Right. Because now I can't sign in because Microsoft is down.

[B]

Well, this thing is. Hopefully is running on aws, so maybe it's okay.

[A]

Do you think there's a special Azure for. Okay. Everybody now knows my notes.

[C]

I had to quickly rewrite my whiskey notes because I couldn't get to Loop.

[A]

Oh, geez.

[C]

Yeah. Fired up one note and redid them.

[A]

Is there some reason you write those in loop?

[C]

Yeah. I hate myself.

[B]

Thank you. And I appreciate that because he saved me from saying it because whatever he said next. I was going to say that, but.

[A]

So this is also kind of a little double indemnity thing. I can't sign into Microsoft Authenticator because I haven't signed into Microsoft Authenticator on my phone. Yeah.

[B]

Which you can't sign into because Microsoft. Yeah, I know. Yeah. It's a virtuous cycle, Leo, as we say in the industry.

[A]

Oh, this is funny. I opened Microsoft Authenticator said sign in and now it says check Microsoft Authenticator.

[C]

But I am Microsoft Authenticator. I'm in mic, but I think they.

[B]

Mean on a different device.

[A]

But see, I don't have a Windows device.

[B]

You don't have like three phones with Microsoft Authenticator and a common one. Get with the times.

[A]

Slack at times, but at least my account's now back up to icloud. What?

[B]

See, this is why the cloud is nonsense and we're all going back on prem, he says, from 18 years ago.

[C]

Listen, I'm gonna go get a metal stick and a rock and I'm just gonna start writing in the stone because that thing seems to have the best battery life of the bunch.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

Well, that's what happens. You know, it happened last week when AWS is down and it'll happen again this week because of Azure is. People say, well, you see, I told you the cloud's no good. You can't rely on the cloud.

[B]

Oh, you get this. The chicken little comes out every time when there's any. Any problem. See, this is why I don't use the cloud. This is why. Really.

[A]

Oh, well, last week it was DNS, and I think Ars Technic wrote, it's always DNS.

[B]

It's also always human error. Right? Yeah.

[A]

Actually, it was interesting, the aws, when we had a nice long conversation about it on Sunday on Twitter, Richard, was there was a race condition. It was kind of an interesting, unusual bug where two processes were in a race and it was psychedelic.

[B]

It was supposed to be handled by the Colonel. What's going on? Yeah.

[C]

Now, the first one should have killed itself the moment it realized the second one came into instance, but it didn't.

[B]

It's because they're sentient now. And it's like, nope, not doing it.

[A]

Not gonna kill myself. I live.

[C]

It's not a thing.

[A]

I live.

[C]

So I guess we're doing quarterlies next week, is what you're saying, do you think?

[B]

I mean, it could come back. We. The show goes on for a while, you know, we'll see what happens.

[A]

That analyst call be interesting though, huh?

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It will be a little. Yeah, it's like.

[C]

Except they do it over teams. So is it gonna happen at all? Oh, wow.

[B]

They do it over teams.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

Not anymore they don't, I guess. All right, we'll see.

[A]

Do it over Google Me or if you really want to get Funny Face.

[B]

The best. Yeah, that would be the best bulletin.

[A]

From Microsoft to all analysts.

[B]

We're going to be. Is that a Google logo? I see.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Let's use Skype.

[C]

Oh, now Zoom account.

[A]

Yeah, Zoom, Skype.

[B]

Get Skype going again. How come there's so much spam in here?

[A]

Are you blowing on the Skype gears?

[B]

Blowing the dust off the Skype.

[A]

All right, well we'll look forward to those earnings. Is there anything particular we should be looking for?

[B]

The only thing I care about is how much they spent this quarter on AI infrastructure. And it's going to be between 25 and $28 billion is my guess, but we'll see. Yeah.

[C]

And probably, you know, it's going to be another 20, 25 billion in net and they are actually going to run out of cash in a couple of years at this rate. But it's going to take a couple of years.

[B]

Yeah. Well there's a big shell game occurring right now in big tech, which is like spending money no one has, but you're just round robining it around the industry. So it's, I guess as the valuation of every company goes up, we all made money. Yay. Which is what big tech is now, right? Just money managers.

[C]

Well, and to be clear, they started this with OpenAI in the first place. Like, hey, we're going to invest a billion dollars and you're going to buy Azure with it. So now we have an investment and income.

[A]

That's what Nvidia does. That's how Nvidia got to a $5 trillion.

[B]

Yeah, that's what they're all doing. OpenAI, that's their whole business plan now. AMD is doing it, Apple's doing it, intel did it, you know, everyone's doing it. We're just throwing out numbers.

[C]

Essentially the symbol of a bubble is once you start doing this, you know, you're at the bubble edge. Yeah.

[B]

The problem is these companies have more money than God. So you know, I was saying to my wife, like we'd call this a pyramid scheme, but a pyramid is a simple shape and this is in fact the multi, you know.

[A]

Well, the pyramid goes all the way down is the problem.

[B]

Yeah, it's the tip of the iceberg bottom.

[C]

Somebody asked me, so what's going to happen after the bubble? Person says, I'm betting GPUs will be cheaper.

[B]

Yep. We're all going to be playing Call of duty at 120 frames a second. It's going to be great.

[A]

Actually Nvidia is going all into, they have, they have a lot of stuff. They have the self driving vehicles. They're really pushing that now.

[B]

And of course that's like saying this Count Choculous, you know, candy bars, too, like. Okay, I guess they're in different things, but, like, I just. Whatever, you know.

[A]

Oh, man. All right, let's. We'll talk about the OpenAI deal, because that is a big story.

[B]

There's a lot going on this week, but let's. Let's.

[A]

I know people tune in for one thing and one thing only.

[B]

Yeah. Week D. Whiskey. Oh, I'm sorry, Not week T. Look, I know where we're at. It's fine. Yes. So yesterday was the Tuesday of week D in Microsoft's little schedule. And that means that we got preview Updates for Windows 11, by the way. Now, preview update is capital P, capital U. This is a fairly new development. Different type of preview update. Yeah, yeah. The other shift that's happened, and I noticed this in the Insider program as well, because in the Insider program, they have the dev and beta channels that are servicing 25 and 24H2, respectively, and the KB number for each of the updates sometime in the past couple months became the same number. Right. So they're literally sending the same update to both versions of the os. It's not even a different KB with the exact same contents. It is the exact same kb.

[A]

Oh, my God. I'm just. I have to interrupt. I'm very, very excited. Despite Azure being down, I have been offered 24H2.

[B]

I just saw this myself for the first time, organically, as we say.

[A]

Oh, yes. I'm not a.

[B]

Listen, so I'm glad you brought this up because your life is about to change, so I'd like to. I want to enumerate to the various ways in which your life is going to change.

[A]

Y.

[B]

The big one is that the number in the OS will be a five, not a four.

[A]

That's the big one.

[B]

Actually, that's the only one.

[A]

So that's it. Well, it's a really large download, so I would expect something to change.

[B]

That's. That's cute.

[A]

But why is it so big then?

[B]

I don't know. That's a good question. Actually, the. That's a good question because it should be a. You were on 24H2, right? This technically should just be. What do you call it?

[A]

Just a number change.

[B]

Enable Them package.

[A]

Yeah, I don't know. It's not that huge, but it's halfway down now, so it must be. I wish they would say it's going.

[B]

To take a long time. It will do a lot of preparing.

[A]

Yeah. All your files are wherever we put them.

[B]

Installing, then rebooting, thinking it will get there by the end of the show, you'll probably have it.

[A]

So that's good news though. Even though Azure's down the updates still.

[B]

Yeah, Windows update is probably running on ads aws, so that's good. Okay, so the preview update that just went out yesterday is the same kb, same cumulative update. Well, preview update for both systems, it's the same. The only difference between the two will be the build number. On the 25H2 side we'll start with 26,200 dot whatever and then on the 24 hill to side is 26,100 dot whatever. But the dot whatever is the one that's the same. It's 7019. So okay, if you have been paying attention or actually even if you haven't, you've just been kind of zoning out listening to show, doing some needlework or something, whatever.

[A]

Me.

[B]

No, I mean anyone like, you know, you would have heard about most of this stuff. But there's, there's. This is a big update. Copilot plus PCs, bunch of stuff coming to click to do. Oh thanks. Forgot this was the computer. I enabled the copilot.

[C]

There it is. It's there to help you.

[B]

Paul, the wake word. I'm going to disable that in the first ad, but turn that off. I know, I forgot it was there. Anyway, bunch of stuff to click to do. This follows many previous things that happened with click to do but a lot of stuff going on there including translation of on screen text. Right. Which is kind of a cool feature. A single improvement to File Explorer, although there are others for everyone. And this is the home view now which this is something I've not seen, but I guess if you I can't do it from here. When you mouse over a file, it will give you pop ups like. Well, like in other words, you're not clicking anything but a little. Kind of a live menu or toolbar will appear with options for things like Open file location S Copilot so you don't have to right click, you know, because that's too hard, I guess. Some voice access improvements. The big one being that delay, right where you can put a delay into when the voice command executes after you say something. And then the semantic search stuff has been improved across copilot plus PCs, but bigger still because it impacts more people. The new start menu is finally rolling out to everybody, which doesn't mean you're going to see it. So when Leo reboots we can look at his computer, see if he has the new start menu. But he doesn't, but it will happen eventually.

[C]

What would I be on the new start menu? Because I've got 25H2 here.

[B]

So the big thing is I got to think now because I've been on this for a little while, but you have pin and recommended sections and then at the top, right, this is, I mean in the existing. The previous start menu. And then to get to all apps, there was like a little box at the top, right. That said all or says something like that. Now that all view or all apps view is now in the main view. So you have pinned recommended and all and all is in category view by default. Which if you're familiar with the iPhone is a lot like the app library view with these.

[C]

Sounds like I still have the old menu.

[B]

Yeah, you can run a Viv tool command line to kind of force it if you are so inclined.

[C]

Don't care that much.

[B]

Yeah, it's not a big deal. The other little. Well, not. It's not a big change. But the other little change is there's a little phone icon up at the top, right. So you know, you get that phone link kind of sidebar thing sitting beside it.

[C]

Looks nice.

[B]

Yeah, you can toggle it on and off.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

Right from the start menu now.

[C]

So in the new one in the current.

[B]

Yeah, it's next to the. Next to the search bar and the current version you have to go into settings to turn it.

[C]

Right. I kind of like the phone floating there. I don't do anything with it, but it's nice that it's floating there.

[B]

Yeah, I've gotten used to it. You know like you get used to a wart or like a, you know.

[C]

Like a response to reminder that mark knee injury, your phone.

[B]

Yeah, I thought this was out a lot of. I read these things and I'm like this out here like a million years ago. But they've updated the icon for the battery. If you have a laptop or a tablet or whatever. And it will uses colors to indicate the health of the battery or where it's at, you know. So if it's charging in good health, it's green. If it's in battery saver, it's yellow. If it's really needs to be charged, it's red, that kind of thing. And you can actually see that on the lock screen as well, which is new. The battery display that is several changes to File Explorer. The big one eventually will be third party cloud storage provider integration. And that's with all the new search stuff and all that stuff too. So like that's that's actually going to be kind of interesting. So you'll be able to access files that are in the cloud, not synced locally, but it will still be able to find them. And not one drive. Whatever AI things you have will work against that.

[C]

Are you telling me File Explorer is going to understand my Google Drive and be able to search into that?

[B]

Yep.

[A]

That's cool.

[B]

Google has to make it happen. But yes, the answer is, oh, they will. Honestly, they've been pretty good about it. Like, and they Google Drive came to Windows and ARM pretty quick right after Snapdragon X happened. So I think they're going to do it. I think all the big guys will do that.

[A]

Good.

[B]

And if you sign into Windows with a work or school account, you've seen a recommended section in the File Explore, Home Display for probably the better part of the year, that's now available to people with MSA or Microsoft account as well. I disable all that stuff, but it's there. They're renaming a page. This is like literally since the beginning of Windows 10 is one of those things I've always been a little bit confused by. And I say that writing a book about Windows 10 and now 11 every year. And every year I update it. Every year I go through this part of it and I'm like, I don't quite understand this. I'm just looking at the system to see if they' so this one still has the old one. So Windows 11, like Windows 10 before it, if you go into Settings, Accounts has a section called Email and Accounts. And the original purpose of this you may remember and you may actually miss. This is the reason I call it. That is the email part. And this was the. It was really email calendar and contacts, meaning mail calendar and people, the apps. This was a way to add online accounts that would work with those apps. Right now we don't have those apps anymore. We have Outlook and Outlook has its own account integration. And this thing is still here. And I have no idea why. But the other half of it is this is the place where you can add a Microsoft account or a work or school account to the system. That isn't a sign in account, it's a way. In other words, you don't sign into the computer with it, but you're signing into the computer, however you're signing in. And you have these other accounts, I guess registered with the system, whatever. So when you, when you load an app like at the Microsoft Store or what else does this? All of the apps, I don't know Most of the apps do this where you have a little, you know, account widget there. You can choose which account to use. So maybe you sign it with a Microsoft account, but you want to sign into the store with your work or school account for whatever reason. So that it was called email and accounts was always. It was like, what? Like, what is this thing? And then of course, as they got rid of those apps, it was like, okay, this is a problem. So now they have renamed it or will be renaming it depending on where you are and things to dun, dun, dun your accounts. So it's clear these things, these things are hard to explain. It's kind of a. I don't know, every platform has this concept. It's. The UAS are a little different, but you sign in with some account, but you have other accounts and maybe they're, you know, like on an Android device you might sign in with a Gmail account, but sign into Google Music or YouTube Music or the Play Store or whatever it is with your workspace account or something like. It's very. It's common, certainly.

[C]

I deal with multiple M365 tenants all the time like that.

[B]

Yeah. And actually the most typical use for this probably in Windows is someone who does sign into the system with a worker school account because they have to, but they have a personal Microsoft account and maybe they want to use that against, you know, whatever it is they.

[C]

Need to copy their work stuff over to their personal OneDrive and violate company policy, but they want to do it anyway.

[B]

Yeah, there's a UI for that, you know, so it's fun. Administrative protection, this feature we've been talking about for a long time was supposed to be in the initial release 25H2. They kind of held back on that. It's there now. It is not enabled by default and probably won't be for a long time. It's still considered a preview, but you can go enable it in Windows Security, the app, if you want to. Your workplace can enable it for you as well. If you're that. That kind of sign in and then a bunch of disquality updates. But really it's. Yeah, this has been a big year overall. This is a big month. So there you go. If you want to experience the pain early, you can go download that now. If you're a seeker, as we used to say. Otherwise you'll get it the first Tuesday in November, which is probably, what, the 8th or something. Or what is it?

[A]

It's. Think of it as a birthday gift.

[B]

The second fall, second Tuesday So little. Yeah.

[A]

A little gift in the mail from Mike.

[B]

I can't tell you. I pretty much every. Every weekday Tuesday and every patch Tuesday, I'm like, la da da, da, da. I don't know. I'm not paying attention. And then Laura will be like, the guy writes, my news is like, hey, it's. They released a bunch of updates. And I'm like, oh, right, that was today. If only I had some technology that would remind me of this on a regular basis. I just always forget. I don't know. Anyway, that happened. So there's a big one. Biggest one probably being the Start menu. By the way, Start menu is pretty good. Okay.

[C]

When it shows up.

[B]

When it shows up. Yeah. I should point out. Right? So every feature I just mentioned, literally, and the few I didn't also feature flagged.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

These are controlled feature releases. Controlled is a hilarious word because it's literally random. But you'll get them at some point or another. I'd asked Rafael the other day, because this has been driving me insane. The thing I talk about here a lot, which is I have several computers here. They're all basically on the same version. They all have different mixes of features. And I'm like, I really just.

[C]

No one has them all, literally.

[B]

And I just want them all on every computer because I'm, you know, I'm writing a book and I need to write. You know, we talk about.

[C]

Still such a you problem, Paul, though. This is not.

[B]

I know, I know, but you would think they would have a. There's got to be a master switch, right? There is not.

[C]

Admittedly, I'm up to three with the laptop and the two workstations, but. But, yeah, not the same.

[B]

It's not good. I don't like it. I don't know, maybe it's adhd, but I think it's because I'm writing a book. But whatever. Whatever. The answer. I don't know.

[A]

You're always writing a book. That's no excuse.

[B]

Well, okay, but the book I'm writing about, the thing I'm writing about for the book is this thing that we're talking about.

[A]

Okay, well, that's different.

[B]

Can I just have the master key? I just want, you know, I won't give me everything.

[C]

Keep it all.

[A]

Master key.

[B]

There's no master key. At least there isn't. That anyone has discovered. So, like Raphael is behind Vive Tool and you can enable these flags, but actually you won't get you. There's no way to turn it all on. You can't just Be like, I just want this on all the time. Like, nope, I'm sorry.

[A]

I want it on all the time. Speaking of on all the time, how's Azure doing?

[B]

It's off all the time.

[A]

I'm just the moment. Anyway, I can't check because my, you know, I can't check because I log in, so.

[B]

No, it's still off. I'm just. Right now. Originally I was trying to go to the Microsoft investor website so I could leave that up so I could check it, you know, for the.

[A]

It's going to be fun, but it won't come up.

[B]

So now I'm just [e-mail] and it's not coming up.

[A]

No, that's a good way to tell. Sure.

[C]

You can go to Azure status.

[A]

Well, that's what I was trying to do, but they want me to log in.

[B]

What does Azure status say?

[C]

Azure status says there's a front door connectivity issue, which is the thing that'll hit absolutely everything every.

[A]

Because it's the front door.

[C]

Because it's front door.

[A]

Unless you go in the back door.

[B]

It's in a red box too.

[C]

We do not have an EPA for full mitigation.

[A]

Probably. God, that's. It's just gotta hurt. All right, well, you know what? This would be a good time to take a break. Okay. While we wait for Azure to return. This could be a long time to.

[B]

Send you a photo of this thing.

[A]

I'll. I'm gonna keep trying to log in, but it is, it feels like a catch 22 that I can't log in because I'm not logged in on my phone authenticator and my phone authenticator says. Great. Log in through your phone authenticator. Like, I don't, I don't know. Can I log in on my Xbox?

[B]

Sorry.

[A]

Okay, never mind. We will shut the front door in just a little bit. But first, a word from our sponsor, Framer. If you're still jumping between tools just to update your website, I mean that. Isn't that how it has to be? No. No, it doesn't. Framer unifies design, CMS and publishing on a single canvas. So there's no handoff, there's no hassle. Everything you need to design and publish in one place. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production ready websites. And it's now redefining how we design for the web. With the recent launch of Design Pages, a free canvas based design tool, Framer's more than just a site builder. It's a true all in one design platform. From Social Assets to campaign, visuals to vectors and icons, all the way to a live site. Framers, where ideas go live, start to finish. Framer is a free full feature design tool. Think unlimited projects, unlimited pages, unlimited collaborators, and all the essentials. Vectors, 3D transforms, gradients, wireframes. Everything you need to design. Totally free. I know, I know you don't believe me. It's true. Check it out. Framer.com design framers. Your entire workflow in one place. No figma imports. You don't have to. It's all there. No messy HTML. It's faster, it's cleaner, it's more efficient. Design more than websites. Framer lets you do it all. You can create social assets, you can create campaign visuals, icons, site resources. And you don't have to leave the tool. It's all there. No switching back and forth. Framer stands above the others because it's not just a site builder. Framer is a true design tool that also publishes professional production ready sites ready to design, iterate and publish all in one tool. Start creating for [e-mail] design and use the code www.for a free month of Framer Pro. That's framer.com design and use the promo code www.framer.com design promo code www. Rules and restrictions may apply. Thank you Framer for supporting Windows Weekly. And Paul has dropped the when you said red box for some reason I thought like it was a red computer. It's actually a blood red announcement box. That's blood red.

[B]

My browser was in dark mode, so it might be a little lighter. Usually man, that's dark. Yeah, it's blood red.

[A]

Starting at approximately 1600 UTC, which is this morning at 9am a couple hours ago, customers in Microsoft Services leveraging Azure front door aft may have just also the right wing party in Germany I think may have experienced latencies, timeouts and errors. We've confirmed that an inadvertent configuration change. There you go. Human error was a trigger event for this. It was inadvertent. We didn't mean to bring it. Yeah, yeah, it's inadvertent.

[B]

We were just trying to fix the crowdstrike thing. I don't know.

[C]

They also said they were reverting and it'd be a half an hour and that was two hours ago and they still say no.

[A]

DTA customers, you might want to consider supplementing failover strategies using Azure Traffic Manager to redirect traffic from Azure front door to your origin servers.

[B]

Maybe Microsoft should have done the same thing because then their site could come up Good advice.

[A]

Maybe there's more than just a broken front door. Maybe the front door is locked, but there's no one home.

[B]

I feel like it's a hurricane went through or tornado and the only thing left is the door. You know, it's like a frame of a house and there's nothing else. I don't know what's going on.

[A]

He's Louise.

[B]

That's not good. Not.

[A]

Well, not good. That would.

[C]

Well, buddy, what do you think?

[B]

What do I think? Well, I think we're going to move on. I think. And then we're going to come back to this, because I don't know what's going to happen in the insider program. A couple of things. We got a Devon beta build the other day. This was the thing I was talking about. Just like with the public preview update, the kb, the cumulative update number, whatever, is the same for both. It's, you know, 25, 24H2. So new feature coming to. Well, just to Windows 11, I guess. It's just copy and search. This is not a feature of, like, click to do or whatever. But you can now click. Well, not when this comes. If you have this, it's another one I don't have yet. But if you click the search box in the taskbar and there's something in the clipboard, there'll be a little. They're calling it a gleam. It's just an icon. Like a little paste icon will appear. And what that means is if you paste the contents of the clipboard into the taskbar using that little icon, it will actually use that as the search term.

[C]

Okay. Something I do all the time. Right. Is the copies of the clipboard. Fire it into a search box. So, sure.

[B]

Yeah. And how are you doing it? What advanced magic are you performing to make that work? A Control V. Yeah, Control V, exactly. You memorize the key. A keyboard shortcut that has existed for 50 years and it works fine. But apparently what they decided is that we're so stupid, they need a gleam. They need a gleam.

[A]

I like the word gleam. Is that new? Is that.

[B]

I literally put it in quotes when I wrote it because I was like, gleam. Really? That's where we're going. It's like Apple using Plateau. You know, it's like, okay, was this something you guys were saying? And I just never noticed. It's an icon.

[A]

It's just an icon, so how would I know? I'm done updating to 25H2, by the way.

[B]

I didn't even know you had it.

[A]

The new humble brag is. Oh, you're just getting 25H2. I got it last spring.

[B]

That's amazing.

[A]

There's somebody in YouTube dissing me. A lot of people didn't get it. It's not just me, man. So what's the new Start menu?

[B]

Yeah, click that. Yeah, that's not the new Start menu.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, like the one I got.

[A]

But the good news is here's a phone I don't own anymore, so I'm glad it's connected to that.

[B]

Okay. I mean, you can fix that. Yeah, no, I know that at least is fixable.

[A]

I'll manage the phone by.

[B]

There's no way to. Well, I don't have too much experience with this, honestly, lately, because most of my machines have kind of moved along. But what I've been hearing and what I have seen just on a few machines is you install this and nothing changes. Like, you just. You look like, okay, the number goes from 25. It happens over time. I mean, you can verify that you have 25H2 if you want, but now.

[C]

You'Re really getting to the point, which is that all those features were downloaded. They're just not turned on until they decide to turn it on.

[B]

The problem with that is, like I said, there's a utility called Vive Tool. You can Google it, it's on GitHub, but downloading it won't do anything. You need to know the exact codes to type in and turn things on. If you want to turn on the new Start menu, I think it's like four separate codes you have to type in.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

The problem is a lot of this stuff is like a cloud trigger. Right? And so you can enable certain features and say, all right, like I've done, I put the code in. It's supposed to work. I don't see it. It's right, because Microsoft hasn't sent the code from the cloud, which, by the way, they can't because they're closed down. I'm just going to keep mentioning that.

[C]

Job them, while you can.

[B]

Listen, whenever this comes back, Microsoft's going to come out and they're going to make a kajillion dollars and they're going to explain why the shell game they're now playing makes any sense whatsoever. And it's all going to be based on this magic of AI that all runs on this infrastructure, which I will once again point out, is not online. So, whatever. But I think I'm not a cloud denier. I'm not an AI denier, but neither one of those things is Working if use Microsoft. Okay, Sorry. Okay. Sometime the past week we got a new insider build, like I said, so copy and search. We did some voice typing improvements. Actually, that's the thing that's happening right now in the preview update. There's a new utility called Proactive Memory Diagnostics. This is kind of interesting. Yeah, I like to see this kind of thing. So, in fact, I should point out, for all of the joking around, the children that are running Windows today and their inability to do any real computer science, they're adding things to Windows that are actually fundamentally useful. Right. Like Quick Machine Recovery is an example. This type of thing you'll never know exists. But if you reboot and drivers prevent the computer from booting properly, whatever it is, this thing will run offline, so to speak. It's actually connecting online, but meaning outside of Windows. And it will fix the problem if it can. And, you know, it's kind of a pro. It's. Well, it's reactive technically. But I mean, they're, you know, Microsoft sees this enough, they're like, all right, we can fix these problems. So this is a similar feature in the sense that you will never know it's there. But if you have memory issues that have caused a blue screen, for example, which we don't call that anymore either, and your computer reboots after the blue screen, this thing will pop up and say, hey, we can do a memory scan and we'll reboot and do a memory scan. We'll see if we can figure out what this thing is. Because a lot of stuff has to happen when Windows isn't running. And then once it does that, it will be registered with Microsoft this problem happened. And if they mitigate it somehow or fix it, they'll let you know, right? And then you'll get that fix, meaning you'll probably get like a driver download or something. But whatever it might be. So it's just a good reliability feature that, like an airbag in a car, hopefully you will never see, you know. You know it's there, but.

[C]

And when you do, it's going to hurt a little and you're going to be covered in dust. And then you're going to. It could have cost you a few hundred dollars to get it put it back.

[B]

You're going to be like, that was terrible. Actually, that was terrible. That was better than what could have happened if it wasn't there. So that's good. And some other things, but that's kind of the big stuff in those bill. Or that actually that build that one Build and then we're going to talk about copilot about 17 times today. But which copilot?

[C]

There's so many.

[B]

Yeah, right. That's gonna. That's part of this problem. Absolutely. I'm gonna do something right now that I don't. Just forgive me. Hey, copilot.

[C]

Why? Why?

[B]

Hey, buddy. Does it come up when you tell me what. Let me just click on this thing and see. I don't have it. All right. So I don't have it on this computer. So the way copilot vision works is you bring up copilot somehow, and I did that by speaking to it, and I'm going to turn him off. You'll see a little pair of glasses. That's the icon or the gleam for copilot vision. And that's the way you interact with either the entire screen or particular app on your computer. And it is completely voice based.

[C]

Right.

[B]

So if you're someone that actually prefers to interact with this stuff using, you know, text typing, this is kind of that weird outlier where this particular feature literally only works with voice. And so at the recent Copilot event, they announced they were bringing text to this. So this is now available in preview. So if you're in the inside of programming channel, you can now or will soon be able to download a new version of the Copilot app that adds the ability to use that feature vision with text instead of voice. Right. You can toggle it on and off on the fly. So that could be good just because that's the way you prefer to do that thing. Or it might just be, maybe you do use voice normally, but maybe you're in a public cafe or something. You don't want to chat with your computer. You can type now, so it makes sense. I feel like every feature should work either way. So. So that's happening. Okay.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Okay. This isn't related to anything, but I wasn't really sure where to put it. So intel announced their earnings last week or.

[C]

Well, they must be good news.

[B]

So. Yeah, you would think it is good news, actually. Right. And this is the thing.

[C]

They got that fab up in Arizona. It's a big deal.

[B]

Yeah. And what's it doing exactly? Do you know?

[C]

Making Panther Lake processors.

[B]

Okay, maybe I would use the term assembling because most of those processors are made by tsmc. But you know what? Let's not quibble over the details. For the first time in almost two years, intel actually posted a profit. Wow. So it's good. And because of that, you saw or you might have seen a bunch of stories about how maybe the rebound is occurring until maybe they bounce off the bottom and they're coming back. Okay, the thing is, that's not what happened. So first of all, they've simplified the business. They used to have multiple business units. They're down to two. They've gotten rid of some things like they're selling off parts of businesses and so forth. They pulled. What was it called, the security. I think it was a security business that they sold. Oh, altera. They sold 51% of ownership in that. So that's not in their earnings anymore. They eliminated their network and Edge group. So what they're left with is client computing, which is PC chips and data center, which is obvious. Intel Foundry is reported as a separate business. If you know anything about money, if you know anything about finances, if you are into big tech, you will have seen ginormous numbers thrown around between companies such as Microsoft, OpenAI, Nvidia, AMD, Google, Anthropic. I'm probably missing some Oracle, Amazon, whatever. This is money that no one actually has. But it's like, I will gladly take a hamburger today for whatever money tomorrow. And then the hamburger makes its way around the business and comes back to the first company after touching seven different hands on the way. And in Intel's case, Intel is the simplest example of this. They received $5.7 billion of the $8.9 billion investment that the U.S. government made. This is money.

[A]

The Chips act money.

[B]

Well, that's what it should have been, but they never got that money. No. So the current administration re engineered this deal to make it look like it was some kind of an investment and that's where the profit came from. So they actually lost $1.6 billion.

[A]

How much did the federal government make?

[B]

We the people, I have bad news for you on that.

[A]

It's going to pay back, isn't it? It's going to pay itself back.

[B]

Intel Foundry is going great though. So Intel Foundry has one major customer and that customer is named Intel. And intel driving so much business at Intel Foundry that their revenues declined 2%.

[A]

Are you just trying to rain on Intel's parade?

[B]

No, I'm trying to provide a realistic view of what's happening with this company. Because I saw multiple stories that were like, they're back, baby. And it's like, oh, revenue.

[A]

I don't think they're back.

[B]

Look, maybe Panther Lake will be everything they say it is, but the truth is if there are five major components of that chip, which is really like a I don't know what they call like a chiplet design or whatever. Three of them are coming from tsmc. Like Intel's just putting this thing together and you know, we'll see that Arizona plant that is potentially right now building, building, assembling whatever they're doing. I'm sure machines are moving and people are walking around in bunny suits. Whatever it is is not building anything. Intel is selling today, that's for sure. So I don't know what to say about this. I will say, well, actually here's what I can say. The client computing group revenues in that business, which is probably what is the actual total here. Yeah, it's over half. Like two thirds. We'll say 2/3 of the revenue. That is up 5%. Right. Stronger than expected demand for PC chips, most likely tied to the Windows 10, end of life, et cetera. That's good. Data center, not good. Declined 1%. Foundry, you know, less said the better. Maybe they'll get a major customer that isn't Intel. I don't know. Anything could happen.

[C]

But looking for one is the question.

[B]

No, they're definitely looking. I mean, this is the. I think. I mean, to me this is the future of the company. I don't see how this thing survives without it. But right now, not much. Okay, should I move on or. We kind of did ads at a different spot.

[C]

We did that ad already. Yeah. So we're good.

[A]

I moved it up so you wouldn't have to.

[B]

Well, good. In other good news, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which is their obviously antitrust regulatory body, is suing Microsoft for misleading approximately 2.7 million Australians with AI related price hikes associated with Microsoft. 365 consumer subscriptions. So this is back when they had just the two. Right. So they had. Still have. But personal and family. Now they have the premium version.

[A]

They had this problem in the EU where they were forcing copilot on people. Right. That the price increase was.

[B]

I mean, I sort of resent that accusation because people love copilot and I don't know. I don't know what you mean by forcing, but yeah, I mean. Yeah, so what they. There were a couple of things that happened here. One was that, remember they originally you couldn't get any of this stuff unless you paid for a separate copilot Pro or Plus. I think it was pro subscription. Right. It was 20 bucks per month per person.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

And then they had a price increase and then what they did was they added some copilot capabilities with limits to the person who was the account holder. So for the family subscription, like it was me, my wife, my kids, my father in law, whoever else is in the family, they don't get any of that stuff. They can't do it. And now they don't even have copilot Pro or Plus whatever it was called. They have Microsoft 365 Premium which adds all that stuff back in. So they raised the price, they sort of forcing people to pay more so one of them could get these copilot features but without really telling anyone. There's also these classic plans which are the old plans without the price increase, without the Copilot stuff. And they didn't really advertise that too much. And Microsoft sent out emails, was like, oh, things are changing, your costs are going up, whatever. And it's like they didn't have to. Instead of making it kind of like an opt in thing, they could have made new plans and said you can upgrade and look at all these benefits and maybe people do it. But they took the old plans and they changed it and they made the price higher.

[C]

Right. And it's like, guys, so this is negative option billing again. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you listen, you won't cost you more if you don't act. It will, Richard.

[B]

It's like riding a bike. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, you know, it's, it's a proven, it's a proven business model. So. Yeah.

[C]

Anyway.

[B]

Okay, what's that?

[C]

This is not legal in Canada. You can't do this in Canada.

[B]

There's a lot of securities and exchange type stuff that isn't legal either. But they're doing that all the time. So this is something I'm going to start harping on a lot more. I don't know what has happened to these companies, but they used to sell these products that we either wanted or didn't want and now they just move money around. I don't know what they're doing. It's very strange.

[C]

You once had a functional sec. I haven't seen it for a while.

[B]

That's the thing. That's exactly right. Not 100% sure of this, but like 99 point whatever percent. The regulations have not changed. What has changed is like no one's answering the phone at the SEC anymore. Certainly not giving any oversight or enforcement to anything. And this is not a problem with the current administration. This has been, this has been true for a long time. Decade plus. Yeah, long time.

[C]

I mean one would argue that since reporting has turned into this disguising your revenue sources thing The SEC should have been all over this. The whole point of reporting is to tell your shareholders, are you actually making money?

[B]

Yeah. We could drag Mary Jo in here right now. She'd be very unhappy about that, but she would tell you, I've been harping on this for approximately 15 years, and I'm positive that. And Microsoft did not invent this. It's just that I watched this company the closest. Apple has done the same thing. So when you see something like Apple. Yeah, they all do it. And they all do it. When I say all, I mean outside of our industry, I'm sure. But again, I'm kind of focused on this area, so. So in 2018, I think it was Apple stopped reporting how many units they were selling of all their devices up until that point. Every quarter, you get this really transparent report of exactly what they did. You could calculate the average selling price of the iPhone to give a kind of a rough idea of how the business was doing in addition to just sheer numbers. Right. And again, without looking at the chart, I'm going to guess that that Apple had explosive growth for some period of time with the iPhone, because every quarter, every two quarters, it would come to a new country, it would come to a new wireless carrier. They would have now more models. They expanded that as much as they could. And like anything else in life, Azure did this with growth, too. You hit some limit, and now it just doesn't look as good. And the way Wall street is orchestrated or way it works is it's all based on speculation and the way things look, even though what they have is this awesome, healthy business that is sustainable forever, not good enough. So they got rid of. They just stopped reporting that number right now. They were not the first. I mean, Microsoft has been doing this for a long time. And this is going to come up again later. But just real quick, I'll just say my theory is that, like I said, regulations didn't change. They would get a little less transparent and see how it went. Nothing happened, happened. And they're like, all right, let's try it again over here. Oh, let's try it over again over here. And now they just don't. They don't say anything about anything like, yeah, you can't. You can't follow the money, you know, no. And I think that's the point.

[C]

That's the goal.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, you can't follow the money. It's especially important today because of OpenAI, because of AI in general. And it's. You know, I always use this example because it's one that maybe makes sense to people in our area, which is in the 1980s Apple was pushing the Mac which was losing money, not selling, didn't go anywhere close to where it was supposed to be. And they were making all their money on the Apple ii but they were not marketing the Apple ii. You don't market the old thing that no one cares about even though it's going great. And that's what sustained that business through the 80s. Microsoft has done that, did that in the cloud era before it became anything where it was really Windows Server and Microsoft 365 and Windows that were driving all the revenues. Investors don't want to hear about these old fashioned products. They want to hear about the new stuff. Between the size of the businesses now and the amount of money we're talking about, the speculation which I think has existed for a long time. This is part of Wall street, whatever is just explosive now. It's like this is unprecedented. Was a hundred billion dollar deal at least one that OpenAI did. This is a company that's not. I don't think they even have a billion in cash. I don't know what is this anyway? I'm sorry, I'm not a financial guy but this stuff drives me crazy. Freaking weird. Okay, I'll get off my high house for 10 seconds because we are coming back to that. I promise. If you have a Microsoft 365 commercial account, something you get through work or school or whatever organization you might have seen, they have these, what they're calling companion apps which are these little small kind of cute minimal apps for people. Files and Calendar were the first three that they came up with. So these have been available for, I don't know, several months. I would think at this point we don't have them on the consumer side we probably will. But now they have Copilot integration, of course. Because Copilot is the cancer that will spread to everything that we use. And what that means is those companion apps can be grounded. I love the language of AI creeps into our everyday lives in your work data. Right. And whatever that means. Well what it means is you'll have a what is essentially a chat interface built into these apps where you can ask questions about.

[C]

And I give you that so that it's now available to my copilot. So now when you talk about someone, if it's in people, it can access that information.

[B]

That's right. That's right.

[C]

This is an interesting tactic actually. I'll add features to apps that you maybe only occasionally Use, because then it also gives me access to that data for everything else I want to do.

[B]

I feel like a better approach, and I'm not a designer, would be to have one app, but I'm just going to call it, I don't know, Copilot. That would access that data wherever it was. Right. But I. This might be a people problem. Meaning users don't think that way. Maybe they see this new thing they're not familiar with.

[C]

It's a workaround for not asking for permission. Right.

[B]

Yeah. Yeah.

[C]

You think about if you built a master copilot and you need access to all the data, the permissionless is going to be.

[B]

Oh, my God, yes. Right. It'd be like setting up an Android phone for the first time. You're like, what about instead I'm going to take.

[C]

Take every data source and have a copilot to it? Which implies permissions anyway. So you never get that big dialogue.

[B]

Yep.

[C]

That might be a cynical way to look at that, Paul. I don't know that you would agree with such a thing.

[B]

I would say it's an accurate way to look at it. And it's. No, but. Yeah, no, I mean, yes. Right. You already really. Your organization has already okayed this and by the way. Well, actually, I was going to say they would have to okay this too. I assume they would have to, actually.

[C]

Well, that wouldn't be. You know, the way you do this as an admin is that these apps just don't appear unless you pre give permissions for them.

[B]

Right. Well, I mean, until this happened, a lot of people might have had kind of a sanguine. You know, look at this. Like, who cares if they have a stupid people app? But now it's like, wait, I'm sorry, copilot's in there. No, no, get rid of that right now. So, yeah, I mean, hopefully they're making educated decisions about that.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And then we have the story we talked about up top, which is that Microsoft is down. Let me check again. I think it's probably. It's been a while. I'm sure they're back. Oh, my God. They came up. Wait, I think it's coming up. Oh, my God.

[A]

Oh, my God. The red door is open.

[B]

I was joking and I got smacked in the face for it.

[C]

All right, I'm going to try and open loop. Let's be excited.

[A]

Look at the status.

[B]

So it's coming up slowly.

[C]

Yeah. Status based. Still says connectivity issue.

[B]

Well, this is the first time I've seen. Yep, yep. Okay. So they probably did what they had.

[A]

Recommended to others, which is go directly to your.

[B]

I'm sure Microsoft's running on Azure or on AWS right now. That's how you're doing it. Yeah. So the. Anyway, their earnings are not available yet, but the investor site is available.

[C]

So can you imagine Loops loop is still failing.

[A]

So they're going crazy right now. Oh, yeah, of course.

[B]

This is big. This is a big problem there.

[A]

Listen, there is a worst day it could happen.

[C]

There's a teams call going right now. That is very.

[A]

There's a FaceTime call. It's a Zoom call.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. All right.

[A]

Well, Paul drinks from his golden chalice, by the way.

[B]

Paul. Yes, sir.

[A]

It was so much fun having you on Friday at our Dungeons and Dragons game.

[B]

Something.

[C]

You guys had a great time.

[B]

I asked Mick Micah how I could employ the Leroy Jenkins gambit and he told me I'd have to do that one offline.

[C]

But.

[A]

I've never played D and D. But I really enjoyed it. I really had a good time and I think our audience enjoyed it. The club enjoyed it. So we're going to do it again. Mike has sent out.

[B]

Yeah, we got to finish the. We never finished.

[A]

We only got halfway through the corn campaign or whatever.

[B]

Yeah, we did kick the living daylights out of a. Like a wheelbarrow and then.

[A]

And a plow. We killed the plow.

[B]

That's pretty much it. We didn't do too good against the living things, but now the insert.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

You are a bunch of fierce warriors now, aren't you?

[A]

Yeah, fierce.

[B]

I don't know. Honestly, it was like the. The moment where you're standing there and the monster appears and you're like, you guys got my back, right? Guys? Guys. You know, like singing a song.

[A]

Because I'm a bard and I have no.

[B]

In the distance you can hear scampering.

[A]

You know, the weakest armor available is what I have.

[B]

And I thought I was looking pretty good, but every time I did anything, I got destroyed.

[A]

Yeah, your dice rolling skills, you got to work on those, buddy.

[B]

Yeah, I don't have what was. Click a button.

[A]

It was really.

[B]

It was really a lot. I do like how it's been come the D and D stuff, they've done a good job of kind of embracing technology and I. That stuff is actually really good. So if you do that at all, like, that's changed a lot.

[A]

That's really. I've been asking around and I asked Mike and I said, do you.

[B]

Play.

[A]

Online or you play in person? Because I think it'd be More fun to play in person. But he said online has a lot to go for it anyway, if you're in the club. The first adventure with Paul Thurop playing Helm Hammers Bland.

[B]

Hammer Bland. If you're a Tolkien fan, you'll understand Helm, Hammer Bland. The humor of that.

[A]

We also had from the untitled link show Jonathan Bennett as Professor Zachariah Kingsley Paris.

[B]

Basically just playing himself as well.

[A]

Yeah, he was. It was so funny. He had his pipe and everything. Kathera Long swallowed. Which really begs. That was dirty name. But that's okay. I won't. Yeah, I won't. And she was. She was great. And we had Jacob Ward on. He was Harkins.

[C]

What is that?

[A]

Smash?

[B]

He's the guy. He plays with his 12 year old daughter.

[A]

He said, yeah, isn't that cute?

[B]

That's really cool.

[A]

And I was the bard Sagbotom the cheerful. So we had a wonderful time. And of course Micah was in there too.

[B]

The first round was Leo singing some song and then it was like, Helm, what are you going to do? I'm like, I'm going to take out my broadsword and kill the Bard.

[A]

Really?

[C]

I don't blame you.

[A]

I don't blame you. I was just trying to get into it. Anyway, we're going to do that again as soon as we set a date. If you're not on the club, I invite you to join the club because we'd be. We'd love to have you for these adventures and all the other things the club does.

[B]

Mike is really good at this too, by the way. He's.

[A]

Oh, Mike is the best.

[B]

Yeah, he's really good at.

[A]

Mike is the best Club Twit. He was our dungeon master, is how we kind of monetize the whole operation. And we'd love to have you be in it. All you have to do is go to Twitter TV club TWiT and you'll be in the Discord. You'll get ad free versions of all the shows. And now through Christmas Day, we are offering a coupon. I think it's 10% off the yearly subscription, which is nice. It means you get a couple of months for free. 1.2 months to be precise. For free if you go right now. Also good for gifting. If you have a geek in your life. Twitter TV Club Twit. We would love to have you. Let's take a little break as if we hadn't already, so that I can talk about our sponsor. And we will continue with Windows Weekly in just a moment. It was so Much fun. Anyway, thank you, Paul, for doing that. And you're going to come back, right?

[B]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

We can't do it without Helm, Hammer, Bland.

[B]

I'm pretty sure you guys would be okay without me, but I'm going to do it anyway.

[A]

Yeah, we got to make room for Richard, too. I mean, we. And I want to get some club members in there, too. We just. I don't know how big the parties can be, but we should add. Anyway, I want to talk about a new sponsor and actually it's sitting right behind me here. This is so cool. This is my aura frame. You probably know aura frames. They've been around for a while. Wire cutters regular pick for the best digital frames, but they have a new one that is super cool. Wouldn't it be nice if you could actually change the photos hanging on your wall like, you know, like a gallery every day? Well, now you can. This is Aura, Inc. And look at, look at. I'm going to pass my hand over and around. There are no cords, actually. There's so much thought that went into this. You can hang it on the wall in portrait or landscape mode. They have a really nice magnetic stand that works in portrait or landscape mode. It's really easy to attach. Very strong. Look how thin it is. So the whole idea is this is going to hang flat on your wall like an actual, you know, photo. But the difference is because there's no cord, people won't know the difference. This is Ink. Meet Ink, Aura's first ever cordless color e paper frame. Featuring a sleek 0.6-inch profile and a softly lit 13.3-inch display, Ink feels like a print. It functions like a digital frame and perhaps most importantly, lives completely untethered by cords. With a rechargeable battery that lasts up to three months on a single charge, unlimited storage, and the ability to invite others to add photos via the Aura Frames app. It's the cordless wall hanging frame you've been waiting for. I love aura. Because there's no subscription, you can send a link to others. They can add photos. They can text or email photos or just upload them in the app. It makes it super simple to put some of your favorite pictures up on the wall. And because it's so thin, it hangs flat, nobody's going to actually know that this is a digital frame. A breakthrough in e paper technology, Ink transforms millions of tiny ink capsules into your favorite photos, rendering them in kind of vintage tones. It's really. Here's another one. I'll just show you. That's me and Lisa with my new sun hat. What's nice is this is kind of the intersection of form and function with some serious innovation. The graphite inspired bezel, the paper textured matte, the glossy front make it look like a piece of decor. It doesn't look like a digital device. In fact, if you're looking to get rid of some of the. The digital buzz in your life, this is a great way to do it. Again, unlimited free photos. You just download the app, you connect to the WI fi. It was very easy to set up. It's a wonderful gift. My mom has one in the, in the old age home because we put all the old family photos in there and it's. And she loves. It's so great. She loves it. Aura Inc. Is a perfect gift for anyone who appreciates innovative design and cutting technology but doesn't want another screen in their life. And you know, I charged this when I got it weeks ago and I haven't had to charge it since. By the way, it works great with black and white images because I have a lot of those. They look stunning in there because a beautiful grayscale. They look great with watercolor photos as well. I have. One of the things I like to do is take photos and use AI to turn them into watercolors. I should show you one. They look fantastic. The class that Aura adds with the app. The app is so good. It makes it so easy to control and to add images, to upload images, to add information about the images. It's just spectacular. I've been having so much fun. Sleek, subtle and stunning. Ink blends the warmth of a printed photo with the versatility of an e paper frame. No chords, no fuss, just your memories beautifully displayed wherever you want them. Head to auraframes.com Inc. To see for yourself. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. That's auraframes.com/inc. Oh, here's. Here's the kitty cat. This is a black and white, I think of the kitty cat. Aura frames.com Inc. Highly recommended. Very happy. We've got one in the bedroom, one in the living room hanging on the wall, one on the bedroom on the bedside table. And my mom has one. They're all over aura frames auraframes.com/inc. I even put a picture of sag bottom the cheerful in here. Are you laughing? Are you laughing at sag bottom?

[B]

It was a good look.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. I, I think I'm gonna upgrade my look next time.

[B]

And really at one point you look Like a character from Fallout, you know.

[C]

You had like I did. I got a little.

[A]

I was a little confused, frankly.

[B]

I got a little. I'm not playing Travelers.

[A]

Steampunk.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[A]

So I think so when I'm waiting for the Halloween sales to end so that I can snap up some cheap costuming.

[B]

Nice.

[A]

Here's a. Here's. Let me see if I can. Here's the picture of. On the aura frame, sag bottom, the cheerful. Here you go.

[B]

Yeah, See that looks like a Hildebrand painting. It's good.

[A]

Isn't that nice?

[B]

Yeah, it's like Tom Bombadil or something.

[A]

Tom Bombadil, exactly. Or Helm Hammer. Bland. All right, I've lost track, as always, of where we are in the show. So pick it up. We're in the AI segment.

[B]

Yeah, a lot of stuff going on here.

[A]

Well, the big one is the new deal, right. With OpenAI and Microsoft.

[B]

Yeah. So OpenAI, what was the word they used? Recapitulated. No, recapitalized. Recapitulation. No, recapitalization meaning they've restructured the company. So the OpenAI foundation is the shell, sorry, parent company, which is nonprofit and then it controls a new for profit business called OpenAI.

[A]

That's confusing.

[B]

Well, OpenAI Group, Public Benefit Corporation, PBC.

[A]

It'S still a public benefit corporation. Well, that's good.

[B]

Yeah, in name only, I think we could say. But yeah, it's really a. It's a for profit business. So Microsoft now owns 27% of that.

[C]

Wow. I thought it was going to be a third.

[B]

Yeah, so it was a third, interestingly. But because they were recently revalued and Microsoft is now not hosting as much of their infrastructure.

[A]

Right.

[B]

They have those other deals. It went. Yeah, it's 20. It went down to 27%. But the 27 year is worth more than what the 33% was before their revaluation.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Yeah. We're talking about fake money here. Right. There's no money. I mean just 100%.

[C]

In theory, Microsoft put 13 billion into that company.

[B]

So here's a theory for you and maybe someone out there is a financial person and could maybe even make sense of this or make it serious. Microsoft owns 27% of this new for profit version of OpenAI. That stake is currently valued at about $135 billion, not excluding the amount of money that Microsoft has put into its data center build out that has not been paid for by OpenAI or anyone else. We know that they've invested Approximately what, like 11 or $13 billion 13.

[C]

One, then two, then 10.

[B]

Yeah. So theoretically, although I suspect that there's probably a clause in this agreement we don't know about where they couldn't do this. I guess Microsoft could sell some stake in this.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And make money.

[C]

Sure.

[B]

Like make real money.

[C]

So it's a super normal thing to at least take your investment back out. Selling out, in other words.

[B]

Yeah. They're safeguarded against like okay, we threw away that amount of money, but we could get that back.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And I'm pretty sure this is how you launder money. I think that's the term for this.

[C]

But it's not a lot of difference in that.

[B]

But not a money guy anyway. So I think from OpenAI's perspective, the big news is they've done this thing they've wanted to do, you know, for.

[C]

Yeah. Microsoft did not stand in their way too much.

[B]

Well, that's the thing. So like they, they've approved it, but now they have, they've actually gone public with this. So Microsoft's arrangement with OpenAI has been largely secret. Right. This is kind of. And it still is, but we now know more about it. Right. And so we. There were new limits on the time frame and. Well, I guess just on the time frame that Microsoft can use OpenAI's models and products. That right now is going through 2032. I don't remember the previous date, but it was sooner. I want to say 2027, 2028, something like that. But that includes post AGI models. Assuming that happens now, when. If they achieve AGI, that claim will actually be verified by a third party panel of experts. Just whoever that might be. Probably religious people. I would guess so. That's interesting. The revenue share agreement will remain in place until those experts have verified that it is AGI. Yada yada yada. Microsoft's IP rights exclude OpenAI's consumer hardware. This is the thing they're doing with Jony. I've. Right. Before technically Microsoft could have taken advantage of that, but now they're not part of that. Microsoft will. I'm sorry, OpenAI is now allowed to develop some. That's the language they use. Products with third parties. API based products will still be exclusively hosted on Microsoft Azure.

[C]

Okay. But they can sell them to whoever they want.

[B]

Yeah. Microsoft can independently pursue AGA on their own. They can do so with third parties. OpenAI does not have to be part of that. Which suggests maybe before they did, maybe in the early happy days of this relationship that was maybe the deal. There's a bunch of stuff in here. But just in the theory of no one has money that we're spending this money on, but OpenAI will purchase $250 billion worth of Azure services incrementally over some unstated time period. So whatever, 10 years maybe.

[C]

Yeah, they spend more than that on Azure right now.

[B]

Yep. Microsoft, this is the, this is a big one in some ways. Actually, Microsoft no longer has the right of first refusal to be OpenAI's compute provider.

[C]

Interesting that they gave that up. That surprises me.

[B]

Yeah. Again, we have to guess because no one's talking about this. Right. But I bet there's a couple things that go into that. One of them is Microsoft is increasingly moving toward having their own foundation models that are some worth. That are actually pretty good as well. But also. Yeah, they've had two or three years now and longer really, but two or three years where it's become kind of an acute problem where the cost of what OpenAI needs is astronomical. And I think Microsoft, I'm sure at some point was like, this is going to make sense. It's going to make sense. And now they're like, oh, this doesn't make any sense.

[C]

And it's not going to make sense.

[B]

Which is why they changed their deal earlier this year and I think why this has happened too, where it's like, you know what if you need some kind of crazy infrastructure that we just would not provide and you can get it from Amazon or Google or maybe Oracle.

[C]

Yeah, go hurt another company.

[B]

Do it somewhere. Yep. Yeah, please, because they're still going to share in the revenues and all that stuff. Whatever.

[C]

If it works out, we still get paid. And if it doesn't work out, you hurt someone else. Right. Well, I'm just thinking about this current configuration because I've always had it in my mind that when the bubble bursts, because clearly OpenAI. Is Netscape in this game? Like with the dot com boom, does Microsoft buy them? And now I'm wondering if they would bother. Like for what?

[B]

That's right. The more they can. So they have a long term deal to keep using their models and whatever they come up with, for the most part that exceeds even the AGI, which is kind of interesting. So we're talking about another what, seven years? Ish. They are developing competitive models. Look, they may not be there today, they may not be there in June next year, but. But you know, they're getting, they're going down that path.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So yeah, they're not that unique.

[C]

There's lots of them around. You can make more by the way don't make more.

[B]

Yeah, I haven't. This isn't fully formed in my brain. But you know, we know that Microsoft spent $88 billion to acquire Activision Blizzard, which is a company that has actual assets. You know, they sell things. There's a proven record there. I mean, it doesn't guarantee they have success.

[C]

They have a steady cash flow. Right.

[B]

They make audience size, they have hundreds of millions of customers that buy these games over and over again, etc. Etc. You know, Activision Blizzard at some point did their own math on this and looked at street cloud streaming services and said, yeah, we are never doing that. We saw we make so much money selling games directly to consumers. Absolutely no reason for that. So they had. There's a business there. And that to me is a very traditional. It's not really even an investment. You bought it. I mean, it's more than an investment, but whatever. An investment. And then you look at OpenAI and it's pure speculation. It's sort of a bet your company kind of a thing. I guess maybe more than a lot of the stuff they've used that phrase for in the past. But what are we talking about here? They make AI models. We know that. There's a chatbot. Okay, I mean, how much is the cursor AI editor worth? What are we talking about here?

[C]

They much. Pretty sure that's versus code. But I've always figured that Sam Altman sooner or later would have to declare AGI one way or the other just because he.

[B]

Or bankruptcy, that would be the thing you could declare. So like, I don't, I don't, I.

[C]

Just don't know how you have an independent body validate anything like that. Like, I don't even know what that means. I could see him doing.

[B]

I don't see how you can find an independent body who's going to independently. That even mean going to get the guys from Google DeepMind to come over and evaluate this thing. Like, I don't think they're going to do it. Like, who's an expert in this area that's not already tied to some giant company and hundreds of millions of dollars in stock? So, I don't know, we'll see. Anyway, look, a little bit more transparency here, which is important because as we'll.

[C]

Discuss in a moment, we'll call that progress.

[B]

Yeah, or progress.

[C]

Whatever makes you happy.

[B]

Progress. No, progress makes me happy. Anyway, the Wall Street Journal yesterday or the day before came out with this editorial and it's literally like, oh, Microsoft needs to be More transparent about where all the money's coming and where is. I'm like, really? Oh, look at you guys. The business paper is finally looking at the money. Like, that's interesting.

[C]

But didn't mention Apple or Alphabet or Amazon or like, any of these other entities that do the same dang thing.

[B]

This, like, Consumer Reports calling out Microsoft for Windows 10 going on, you know, like, I guess we're going to focus on Microsoft for some reason. Okay, fine.

[C]

I've been asking, like, good press, right?

[B]

Okay, I guess. I guess. Look, technically they kind of did it. Like a day later, they kind of came out. They were a little more transparent. But one of the issues that they raised, which is one of the issues I've raised, is we don't actually know how much money Microsoft has given this company. We don't know how much they've spent on other things they call out. This is a beautiful reporting here. I appreciate that. They were talking about Microsoft's most recent financial report at the time, which was July. I got to see if I can find this. I think it says, net comma, comma, other. But without a space between the two, which is basically other costs associated with OpenAI, there's no way to 100% know for sure. But it's like, let me see if I can just find this thing with the actual term because it's so beautiful.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

But if you're going to put an other on it, it better be under 1%.

[B]

It was $4.7 billion in July.

[C]

Oh, God.

[B]

Yeah. So.

[C]

I don't know. My other.

[B]

My guess is that why is my phone ringing when it's upside down? It doesn't matter. My guess is that we only know the tip of the iceberg on the spending that has occurred here and that.

[C]

We may never know.

[B]

Yeah. Well, if we do know, it's going to be because there's going to be some court case where people are going to jail or something, because there's something weird going on here.

[C]

But you have to wonder.

[B]

Yep. So anyway, listen, I. Like I said, I'm not clapping myself in the back, per se, but what I am doing is criticizing an entire industry that I feel is complicit in this whole thing that's going on. Because it's not just the SEC not regulating or even looking at whatever these companies are doing. Oh, my God. I sort of. I. Sorry. My mother's trying to call me because it's my birthday is what that is. I don't know why it's breaking through my little silent thing. But whatever. Yeah, that's.

[C]

That's nice of you.

[B]

Okay. With the one thing that hasn't changed. My mother.

[A]

You want to hear your mom sing, too?

[B]

My mother doesn't, like, seem to understand I have a job that occurs during the day.

[A]

So.

[B]

Anyway.

[C]

You still playing with those computers, Paulie? Is that what you're doing?

[B]

Yeah. Yeah. What's that other company? Are they doing okay, like Apple? Yeah, no, they're doing pretty good.

[A]

So, come on, pick it up. Pick it up. We want to hear.

[B]

We want.

[A]

Happy Birthday, Paulie. Come on. I can't do it.

[C]

I don't think your mother's that Jewish.

[B]

I'll give her. Well, she's Catholic. It's almost the same thing.

[A]

It's probably the same.

[C]

It's all guilt all the way down.

[B]

I get it. It's. It's. It's all. It's a religion based on guilt. Actually, it's not a bad definition. So. Yeah. So we get the ICC not regulating. I mentioned, you know, some time ago that while we were in Mexico, I think it was. Well, it was in July. Yeah. So the timing was right that I could actually listen to this conference call. And I had been reading the transcripts for the past many months, many quarters. And I pointed out how odd it was that Amy Hood would just basically keep interjecting. Like Satya would say something. And she didn't say it like this, really, but she'd be like, that's cute, Satya. Here's what's really happening. Like, treating him almost like a child. And I thought that was really weird. But the other thing I've noticed, for a long time, actually, but I didn't point out, because that one was so weird, was that at the end of the show. At the end of the show, it's like a show. At the end of the call, they do Q and A with these analysts. And so, of course, these guys are all from these big analyst houses. Those names all mean nothing to me. And the discussion is always exactly the same. It's unbelievable. There's like a huge round of Just Ask hissing. It's like, hey, guys. Sachin, Amy. Great quarter, by the way. Azure's really killing it. You guys are doing great. You're like, okay. Do you have a question? Yeah. Would you say that Azure is the greatest business of all time or just a really great business? It's like these total softball. Like, what the frick? What are you doing?

[C]

Are you at Mar a Lago? What is this about?

[A]

Modern way.

[B]

I think it's pathetic. This is the thing we talked about earlier. Microsoft again, other companies don't do, but Microsoft's the thing I really follow over time. Not reporting hard numbers is how I think of it. There's only one business in all of Microsoft that reports hard numbers still consistently and that's Microsoft 365. And my theory there. And they do it on both sides, by the way, consumer and commercial. And I think it's because that business is still killing it. They're still seeing serious growth.

[C]

Utterly dominant in this space. Yep.

[B]

There's two metrics that really matter and they give you the hard numbers for both, which are user base, which is either license size, sold, whatever it is, number of customers and revenues. Right now we don't profitability, we never get that stuff. But whatever. So that's the one. That's it. That's literally the only one. The Xbox. They stopped doing console sale numbers when the Xbox One tanked, whatever year that was. And now they talk about engagement and things that don't literally impact the bottom line in the slightest or at least not directly. Just like Apple not reporting the number of devices sold, that kind of thing. So you get. That happens. We've gotten to the point now where it's ludicrous. Surface used to give you the device sold, used to give you revenues and then they didn't. And then they put it inside of a little sub business that's like devices. So it's like Surface and I guess HoloLens. It's really surface, but they don't give you that number either. So you've got this business called More Personal Computing, which is most of their consumer stuff actually. I guess it's all of their consumer stuff which is Xbox and Microsoft gaming, Windows, consumer side and service devices, I guess. And then. Or part of it anyway. Right. Because part of that is also somewhere else. Whatever. And then for some reason search and search advertising.

[C]

Right.

[B]

So consumer base. I guess you go to msn.com because you're an idiot and you see Microsoft ads and they make some money and whatever. And I pretty sure there's only one of those things is making money and that's Windows and it's like subsidizing the rest of it. And you're never going to hear about that because no one wants to hear Windows, you know, when you're an investor. Windows is from the 1990s. That was a big deal back then. That's all we wanted to talk about that it was, you know, today it's the Apple II nobody wants to hear about.

[C]

You. You can prop up all of more personal devices by having the Windows number in there. Yep.

[B]

And they do. That's it. It's like, you know, when you look at Google or Alphabet's business, they have Google and then they have all these things they lose money on big bets, whatever they call it, stupid, whatever they are. And that's what more personal computing is. It's everything else. If you took Windows out of it, it would just be like, this is where we. This is the toilet we flush. Yeah. It's insane.

[C]

And we bear it under several billion dollars worth of Windows revenue.

[B]

Yeah. And look, I just said I pretty much just focus on Microsoft, but I also pretty much just focus on the consumer side. Right. Microsoft's commercial business is much bigger. It's probably at least twice as big. And there's no doubt.

[C]

M365. Right? Yeah. Kidding.

[B]

M365 at the time office. 365 at the time office was the money driving their investments in Azure at a time when that was a wag the dog, not a business not making money yet. And today I'm sure it's doing great. Like, obviously Azure is a good business, but it took them a long time to get there. And when they finally got there, the reason you knew they got there is because the growth slowed down dramatically. And that's where it hits this point where it's like, this is a solid, reliable, mature business with churning revenues. Yep. And Wall street is like, yeah, don't care about that anymore. We lost interest. You're not the new hunter.

[C]

Always made money under Ballmer, but the stock price never moved.

[B]

Right. So if you look at the article I have in the notes, which is where it says Wall Street Journal finally, blah, blah, blah, I think that's where. No, it's not. Okay, sorry. Actually, no, this comes later. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I have later in the Xbox segment, I'm going to put. I'm going to hit on this topic again because it goes to Xbox profitability. Anyone can look this up, though, and we'll look at it later. But you can look at the market cap chart for Microsoft over some period of time and what. You can overlay on that. What you'll see, I should say is like kind of a flat line and then it goes like up to space. Right. Where it goes up to space, where it starts to go up. I think a lot of people would say, oh, that's when Satya Nadella took over. Right. And it almost. But I can tell you where it exactly is, is when Amy Hood came on board. That's when Microsoft, for you guys this way. And the reason is she's cfo. She's the money handler. And in the same way that Tim Cook came into Apple when Steve Jobs was CEO, had come back and it's like, look, we got to save costs. We got to. These things are really expensive to make. And eventually landed on China. And they do everything in China and here we are today. I feel like Microsoft's success is not really because, hey, we made Azure and it sells a lot. Or we made Windows Server and it sells a lot. Or we made some, whatever it is, AI product. Copilot. No, I think a lot of it is just speculation. It's like latching on to whatever the next big thing is and playing that Wall street game and doing it really effectively because this company was, I think, what, the second one in history that hit 4 billion in market cap. 4 trillion. Sorry. So anyway, anyway, I'm sorry. I'm never going to stop beating this to death. This makes me crazy because I got to tell you, I got into this business, this world, whatever it is, because I care about tech. That's it. And what these companies are doing now. Yeah. They have tech products. It's like Google. Google's a tech company, is it? Right. No, they're an advertising.

[C]

They're in the business of stimulating speculation by investors. Yep.

[B]

Because once you have this much money.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Where's growth coming from? It's not. It's not going to be Windows Server 2.0. It's not going to be the next Windows. It's not going to be a phone. It's. You're making money with money.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And I don't know what that is. That's not my world. I don't care about that stuff. I just.

[C]

Not sustainable is what it is.

[B]

Yes, that is true. Okay, I'll temporarily get off the soapbox. I'm going to get back on it. But it's been a couple of round.

[C]

Trips so far today, but. Okay.

[B]

Yeah, I got another one. No, it's not going to end well. Everything comes to an end. But this box, shiny.

[C]

We're going to need it.

[B]

Keep it handy. I'm going to get right back on it. Late last week, Microsoft had a virtual event for Copilot, essentially meaning that the consumer copilot, you know, Richard jokingly, but really said earlier, like, what copilot do you mean? That's a good question. Right. Like, what is copilot? I mean, it's kind of. I'm almost losing track of it myself. This is so much of it. But I think to a Windows user, Copilot is that thing you don't want in the taskbar that comes up when you hit the key you don't want on your keyboard and you can talk to it now, which you also don't want. It's a triple threat.

[C]

It comes up as a copilot window.

[B]

Right. So office.com being the same basic interface, that is the gateway. Well, the Microsoft 365 copilot app now, which used to be the Office app back in the day. Right. Or if you get that app on mobile, same thing. Because this is.

[C]

I mean the good news is the admin icon's still there and it still looks like the admin client. I'm waiting for you to click on the admin client and seeing an admin.

[B]

And a little Michael guy is going to come up and he's like, hey, it looks like you're trying to administer your domain. Do you want some help? Yeah, boy, I could use some more license. Yeah, exactly. Just click here, buddy. It's painless. Anyway, so they had a consumer event. This is a. Honestly, I don't know why they even do this this way. Because they. Since this they've announced new things. I mean they keep announcing. This is like more and more and more.

[C]

So why was this event necessary when you. I know, to quote a whole other line couldn't. This has been an email.

[B]

Yeah, right. It's a good question. So the one thing. So I will say this, you could look this up. It might be worth looking at. There is a. Well, there's a series of videos, but they have a video of the event and this is Mustafa Suleiman hosting the event. And this is a guy, he's British, right? Yeah, I guess he's of. What's the term I'm looking for? Arabic, I guess background or Middle Eastern. But he has an English accent. He grew up in London.

[C]

Right, Right.

[B]

So international flair, kind of cool. He comes off as more human than anyone at Microsoft I've seen in quite a while. It's worth watching just for that. In fact, the thing that ruins what I just said is he. And they describe this as a transition to making copilot into more of. Of human centered AI. So maybe there was some purposeful marketing, something. Something going on there. But he made a video of himself going back home to London to his neighborhood and just talking to people in the street basically or local shop owners and showing them stuff in copilot and kind of blowing them Away each time, you know, which. Look, yes, Manufactured to some degree. Whatever. You can be cynical about it. I certainly am. But it. I thought it came off pretty well.

[C]

Nice. This sounds like it was Suleiman's event. He didn't want to wait for igniter. He built. He made his own thing because he's supposed to be consumer AI. So. Okay.

[B]

And I. Look, no one. No one should do this, but if you don't value your time, you can do what I did, which was I watched it, and I watched it again, and then I went back and I watched the original. At the time, Remember, they weren't calling it Copilot, although they did use the term copilot small C a couple times when they first announced what we now call copilot, which at the time was like Bing AI and Microsoft Edge, which collectively were your kind of AI at the time, whatever that was. So February 2023. Two.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Three.

[C]

That was Sydney, right? Project Sydney incorporating that.

[B]

I don't remember. I'm sorry. But I just rewatched that. And I got to tell you, that was not time well spent.

[C]

That was a successful one compared to Google's bard demonstration, like, the next day.

[B]

That got chewed up. I have very specific memories of this event because I think the first actual demo, although they were canned to save time and all that stuff, but Yusuf Mehdi was going to Mexico City for a. I think a cousin's wedding or someone's wedding, and he did it to use Copilot or what they weren't calling it Copilot. Use the AI thing. And bing at the time, whatever it was, to make an itinerary for Mexico City. And I was like, oh, that's okay. That's really interesting to me because I know this place really well, and that's something I've been doing ever since. Like, I do this test against AI myself all the time. It's interesting, right? This is a terrible event. It's terrible. Everyone comes off as stiff and wooden and terrible. Yusuf Mehdi actually comes off the best. He comes up pretty good. Satya Nadella. Terrible speaker. He's awful. The people that followed use of many are terrible. The whole thing was terrible. This event, though, this was well done. They did a good job at this.

[C]

Interesting.

[B]

And it's a bunch of stuff I don't care about, but it was well done.

[C]

So beautifully executed.

[B]

Yes, yes. Terribleness. But, you know, elegant. There's a micro character, which is a little take on Microsoft, which is a little blobby thing which people are correctly comparing to Clippy.

[C]

Yeah. Why would you just do the clip? Everybody's expecting the clip.

[B]

Like, come on, you know, he's coming back, you know, inevitably. You can do. You can have groups now, so you can have group chats with copilot with up to 32 people. I don't know why anyone would need that many people, but whatever. Upgrades to memory, their connectors. This is the thing we've talked about where they. You connect to backend services. These are consumer services, so OneDrive, Outlook, et cetera, of course, but also Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Contacts, Gmail. Right. This is not there yet, but proactive actions are coming. Actions are something they're working on across, you know, Copeland, across the different. Across the cloud, local, whatever.

[C]

And what makes them proactive?

[B]

Well, you've been using this deep research feature. You're. You're obviously let it, you know, heading to some goal and it will actually come up and say, hey, hey, you've been asking about this thing. We think this might help, you know, that kind of thing. Okay, we'll see how that works.

[C]

I mean, to me, it's sort of anticipatory, but okay.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then copilot for health, because we all want, you know, we were all desperate for big tech to get its tendrils as deep as they can into our health records. And it's not that, thank God, but it's. They're partnering with known good sources of information like Harvard Health, which is similar to what. What Google is doing through NotebookLM. If you think about it, you know, we're gonna kind of. It's. It's. It's kind of funny if you think about it. Human beings curating good sources of information for use by AI because we can't trust AI to do it. Clearly, AI is like, we'll just take it all. Who cares?

[C]

No, and I'm seeing this theme throughout many of these items, right? That this is. They're finding ways to convince you to select quality data for them.

[B]

Yeah, right. Yeah. It's like the paperless office. First start with a ream of paper. Wait, what?

[C]

Yeah, yeah. How do you make a small fortune on AI? We'll start with a large fortune. It'll be easy.

[B]

Yeah. Copilot mode and Edge it got an update. I guess it's. Oops, I said the Z word. My mistake. Sorry, I forgot to turn it off. This was available in preview. It's something you can turn on. It works the same way. For now, they're making a big point of you can switch this thing on or off at any point you want. But the big deal here will be those actions, which is the agentic stuff, which is not available quite yet. But at the point of this is your browser will be able to perform actions on your behalf, which is that phrase we keep repeating like that makes any sense whatsoever. But I guess the idea is you could ask it to make reservations or help you clean your email inbox, whatever, you know, just cool. I will see. And then they talked about some copilot on Windows Updates which had already occurred. So that was the previous. I think we probably talked about that a week or two ago. This is the. Hey, I'm not going to say the word wake word stuff and yada yada yada. So all the Copilot vision, et cetera, is there. This stuff is us only right now for the most part. We'll be rolling out to the uk, Canada, other markets very soon. They're calling it the Fall Update, but I don't even know why they bothered because like I said, they've already updated this stuff since then. It's very strange, but there's a long list of stuff. And like everything else Microsoft does these days, it didn't all just drop on the same day. We're going to see it over time. If you are a Microsoft 365 copilot user, and this means the business side, the commercial side, if you're in the Frontier program, which is something you opt into as an organization where you might allow some group of users or groups of users to access new features early. There are two of those that are landing this week. One is I think, available immediately. The other one will be available I think by the end of the week. But App Builder is a way to create custom apps using Copilot without a database backend. You can ground this thing in your Microsoft 365 data. So you've got like documents, presentations, whatever it is, email, all that stuff.

[C]

It's another way to do no code. Okay.

[B]

Yep. Yet another way is how I would have said that. And it will.

[C]

Excuse me, I wonder if this is a competitive team. Is not Charles LaManna and the power Platform guys somebody else?

[B]

Although. Well, Charles LaManna is the guy who introduced us, by the way.

[C]

Interesting. Okay.

[B]

Yep. So maybe interestingly just a rebrand of Power Platform. Yeah. So yes, there's is this in here? I think this. Yeah. So if you're familiar with this stuff and Richard is, and to a degree I'm actually not, there's a tool called Copilot Studio which was originally you'll see the parallels with history here immediately once I get through this, which was billed as this easy way to build at the time it was bots I think in the beginning, but now they agents and whatever AI apps. There's a lightweight version of Copilot Studio that's now just built into Microsoft 365 copilot that will help people with these tasks. So the other one's for workflows. Yeah, we're just doing the same thing again. It's like, okay, so the thing we said was easy before, it was not easy. So now we're going to do something called Visual Studio Lighthouse or your Power Platform or Power Apps or whatever. And it's not easy enough. Okay. All right, so now we're going to do. They keep trying to make it easier.

[C]

They keep rethinking this and it sounds like because Power Platform was around before the AI stuff took off and they put a module off the side of Power platform AI. So maybe this is a rethink, of course to be AI first.

[B]

In fact, I might have the branding wrong here. I might be mixing products up a little bit. But I think Copilot Studio started as something that was making bots for Cortana in the beginning and actually wasn't called.

[C]

It was called Bots Studio then.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, I think so. I think that's correct. But yeah, so look, this is fine. There's one aspect to this where you could say, well, everyone else is doing it. So. So creating apps, apps with an AI chatbot is a thing. We know that. Look, Microsoft 365 dominates in productivity. They do have all of your data in different silos. They have including email calendar tasks, including team chats and meetings and recordings of meetings, et cetera, et cetera. It makes sense that look, before we were calling any of this AI, they had the Microsoft graph and, and they were work. You know, they saw the problem, they were trying to solve this for a long time. And this thing will actually generate Microsoft list based data back end if that's what's needed for the app. Right. Because it's just, it's. Everyone gets it. It's just part of Microsoft 365. So this is them leveraging the vast kind of feature set they have across that product. So to me this, it's fine. It makes sense. Sure. So I should also point out too, the workflow thing and App Builder are technically agents. So you interact with an agent, sometimes it will come back immediately. You'll say, I need this thing. And we'll say, okay, here you go. And sometimes it'll say, I'm going to run off and do this thing. I'm going to come back with some questions. And so you might get the results a little bit later. Speaking of results, let me check the Microsoft website again. Not yet upcoming.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Okay, so there's that. I feel like I missed the forest for the trees on this next one. I think there's a lot more going on here and I bet Richard knows a lot more about this. But GitHub has their big universe event this week, right?

[A]

This week Christina Warren's there. She's back at GitHub.

[B]

Yeah, that's right. So I bet I'm only hitting a little bit of this. But if you are familiar with GitHub and accessing GitHub through Visual Studio code especially you know that there is an AI interface, there's a GitHub agent, et cetera, as we're starting to see in Microsoft 365. They're opening this up to other outside like third party agents and AI models. Right. And that's kind of interesting. And so you as a company or as an individual or individual developer, whatever it is.

[A]

Mom. Son.

[B]

I noticed. Sorry. She's really, really.

[A]

Happy birthday.

[B]

Birthday. But a birthday emergency.

[A]

I remember the day you were born.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. And usually that's accompanied by like this is how much you ruined my life.

[A]

So we used to torture our kids at that. Let me tell the birth story.

[B]

Nice.

[C]

By the way, there's now an ETA of four hours on. On the Azure status.

[A]

What? That's crazy.

[B]

That's weird. I mean to me the site's coming up pretty normally right now.

[A]

Yeah. Because they back ended it. They went around the front door.

[B]

Oh, they probably just turned it all into static HTML. I don't know. Anyway, so GitHub is redoing their interface and so I was just looking, I didn't really see anything. But they're redoing their interface to this stuff. So in mostly Visual Studio code and Agent HQ is their name for this kind of native AI, sorry, native AI agent capability that will be cross AI or cross platform, however you want to say it. So Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Cognition, Xai and other companies are all coming on board. So I think there's a lot more going on with GitHub than what I just said. But that's what I got out of it from day one and today I think it's day two. So there's probably more. I don't know.

[C]

Yeah. And to be Clear. The normal dev tools, Visual Studio, so forth have gone multi model as well. So yes, they're just following suit.

[B]

Yep.

[A]

I just wish I had Christina Warren's Miko Crocs because she's so great. This is her day.

[B]

Those are actually. Those are just Windows XP Crocs that she hand painted over. You know, she's updated. That looks a lot like. That looks a lot like Bliss.

[A]

It does look like Bliss.

[C]

Does look like.

[A]

It does. It does. Christina's all ready for GitHub universe. She's looking good. I like those Crocs.

[B]

So there's that. And I'm trying not to do too much on the third party stuff because I know AI, could we just go on forever? But I just wanted. Yeah, literally, I mean, could probably do it every day.

[A]

I, you know, it's funny, I put the rundown together for intelligent machines. There's 400 stories or something and I can never get to any fraction of them.

[B]

I don't know what this, this is like we're going to hide what we're doing by using a fire hose. And buried in all that water is the one thing that we really don't want you to know about. So. So there's no way everyone can pay attention.

[C]

That seems to be some administration's approaches as well. So.

[B]

Yep. So Grammarly has been on a buying spree. I think sometime last year they got some new valuation they got to spend. They've been buying up AI companies Coda and then Superhuman and so they've rebranded as Superhuman because they're not just doing Grammar. I guess I will say they never did Grammar correctly, which should be alarming to anyone who pays them or doesn't pay them.

[A]

You used to love them.

[B]

I did. But like a lot of things, it was better and then it wasn't.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, it certified.

[B]

Yeah. And I really, I look at it, I still go back and look sometimes and I'm like, no, it's so freaking annoying. And it also is just a constant upsell. It's like, oh, you could be getting much more. It's.

[A]

That's what happened, right?

[B]

You get this document, it could be in the website, it could be an app, doesn't matter. And you turn Grammarly onto it and you get all these orange and red and whatever squiggles and you're like, oh geez, what is this? And then you go through the list, you're like, no, no, that's wrong. Nope, nope. And then it's like, you want more high quality improvements like this? You should pay Us. I'm like, you know what? Here's an idea. If you could figure out it's apostrophe s or not apostrophe s, we can talk. But as far as I can tell, the game I play with Grammarly is they make the suggestion, and I'm like, all right, they must know what they're talking about. I make it. And then they're like, oh, we get another fix on the same thing, and they want it to go back to the way it was. And then we just play that game all day long. And it's like, what am I doing?

[C]

You should be paying for the product because you keep using it so much.

[B]

Look, here's the compliment I will give Grammarly. They have made me think more for myself, you know, and now I don't need them. So I don't know. Superhuman.

[A]

I mean, they're pivoting, basically.

[B]

They.

[A]

I think they.

[C]

Well, I mean, let's. You know, I've been through this game a few times. So what. You know what part of insertification is. You've gotten to a place where your investors are now looking for more growth, and you get a lot of pressure put on you. They want to do. They're not exiting yet, but they want to do a partial sale to recoup some cool costs, that kind of thing. And. And every company gets squirrely at that point.

[B]

So I don't know if. Leo, it's funny, between the two of you, you just came across something that's been hot in my mind lately, which is. I don't know if you did this on purpose, Leo, but this.

[C]

The.

[B]

The notion of pivoting is something that Cory Doctorow of And certification Fame has turned, has given, has defined. He says, when you always look for the word pivot, if they. If anyone says pivot, that means we failed. We're panicking. We have to do something completely different. Yep. And let's make it look like we just decided to do this because it's gon better. And meta being the big example. It's like we're going to pivot to the metaverse. We're going to pivot so hard, we're going to rename the company. Yeah, exactly. That's how, you know, they failed.

[A]

There are some pivots that I think have worked. I mean, the most famous is Stuart Butterfield's pivot. After Flickr, he was going to create a multiplayer game, and then he turned it into Slack. That was a pretty good pivot. Right? So, I mean, there are.

[C]

Nobody remembers that you Pivoted when you, when you win, when it works.

[A]

And then nobody says pivot, they just say, oh yeah.

[B]

Was the game called Dick Punch? Because I don't, I don't. What's the game exactly?

[A]

I.

[B]

It's like who wins this game? How do you win Dick Punch? Or I'm sorry, Slack, like whatever it.

[A]

Was called, it was an MMORPG as I remember, but I don't remember the details.

[B]

I love the thought that anyone could be making a game and turn it into like a chat based productivity tool.

[A]

Isn't that funny?

[B]

That's insane.

[A]

Here's a Medium article on it. How Slack went from an unsuccessful video game to a $26 billion. That is a company.

[B]

That's amazing.

[A]

That's a famous pivot. But you know, it's funny, I could think of a few.

[B]

Well, but you could use. Look, Apple Pivoted, if you will, to device like non computers like devices.

[A]

Yeah, but that's not as much of a pivot.

[B]

Okay. I mean Microsoft pivoted to the cloud and then to AI. That's sort of a pivot.

[A]

Pivot usually means you're completely abandoning the first plan and going plan B. Yeah.

[B]

I think Meta is maybe the best example because it's so ridiculous. Like you. Would you. You wait. What does this have to do with what you do?

[A]

So the game was called Game Never Ending and in fact it never finished.

[C]

Nice.

[A]

So it was kind of appropriate. They ran out of money.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And so then they started saying, well, what else can we do? And that's when they came up with Slack, which is hysterical.

[B]

Yeah. The normal answer to that would be a different game.

[A]

I mean, look, actually it was video game, then Flickr. I apologize. Oh, really?

[B]

Flicker. Oh, yeah. Oh, and then he sold Flickr or something or. Yeah.

[A]

To Yahoo.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And now it's Smug. Mug owns it. And thank goodness, because Yahoo is not a good steward for anything. Oh, then the game was called Glitch. Glitch, perfect.

[B]

They should just call it Blue Screen.

[A]

So they actually tried, tried two different times to be a video game company.

[B]

And both times pivoted to something.

[A]

To something. So first it was Game Never Ending to Flickr and then it was Glitch to Slack.

[B]

So you said Pivot. He said insertification. I'm like, you guys, you're in my head because that's, you know, Curry Doctorow is like a meme and theme and term generation machine. I love Corey.

[A]

Yeah. You loved Inside Ification, the new book. Right?

[C]

Right.

[B]

Yeah. So here's the problem. I'm trying to review it and I'm writing a book and I, I, it's like, I just need to talk about the book. Yeah. But yeah, it's, it's pointless.

[A]

And I, Yeah, he's so eloquent and I know it's so.

[B]

No, he's on like so the right.

[A]

Phrase that I, I almost don't want to say anything.

[B]

Just my problem with him is that like I used to go on these like tour things. Like he'd go and speak at events and I used to go with Mark Manasse. And Mark Manasse in our industry was this guy who knew more about Windows Server than anyone else. But he also had this, this unique onstage Persona. He was like amazing at giving presentations, but he was always that. He was, it was not an act. It was like the way he just was that thing all the time. I'd be in a cafe with him and you know, stopping for lunch somewhere on the road and be like, dude, you can turn it down. It's just me, like I heard this story on stage. Like you don't, you know, like. But that was his whole thing. And Cory Doctorow has a little bit of that. Like I've watched way too many video interviews of him and so you hear the same. Yeah, it's like watching a stand up comedian. You're gonna hear the same.

[A]

He's got a shtick.

[B]

Yeah, he has a shtick.

[C]

He's the same seven minutes every time.

[B]

But it's. Yes. And it's super effective. I mean I understand it and it's just not the way I can be. But like I, there's some. He latches onto things that are very. It's really good when you can summarize a complex thought succinctly and ideally humorously, you know, and he's, he's really good at it. He's just really good at it. It's just not my, not the way I am. But, but good for him, you know. Anyway, sometime in 2032 I'll finish that review and I'll get that out there.

[C]

But.

[A]

Well, we, whenever we have him on our shows and we try to get him on as often as we possibly can. I just sit back.

[B]

I watched. One of the interviews I watched was you and him. I don't know if I mentioned that I, but yeah, no, that was, I watched.

[A]

Just amazing. Just amazing.

[B]

He's excellent.

[A]

Let us take a little break. The Xbox segment is imminent. We're done with the AI so you can breathe easy. Actually, we're not quite done. You're never done with the AI. You know, actually coming up we've got a great guest on Intelligent Machines, the founder of Hume Hume AI. He's an expert in human emotions and he's trying to come up with ethical AI. It's really an interesting. I cannot wait to talk to him. So that's coming up in just about an hour on Intelligent Machines. Meanwhile, let's talk about our sponsor for this segment of of Windows Weekly, Vention. It's like invention without the in, just Vention. And actually it's a company that's going to help you with AI. AI of course is supposed to make things easier, but let's face it, for most teams it makes the job harder. How many times have you sat at the prompt going now what? This is where Vention's 20 plus years of global engineering expertise comes in. They build AI enabled engineering teams that make software development faster, cleaner and calmer. That clients of Vention typically see at least a 15% boost in efficiency. And this isn't, we're not talking through hype, but actual real engineering discipline. The other thing Vention does, and this I really want to recommend to anybody who, you know, like me, is trying to understand what's happening, what's going, what's happening. They have really great fun AI workshops designed to help your team find practical, safe ways to use AI across delivery and qa. It's a great way to start with Vention and to test their expertise. Whether you're a cto, a tech lead or a product owner, you don't have to spend weeks figuring out tools and architectures or models. Vention's been there, they've done that. So they can help you assess your AI readiness. They can clarify your goals, really help you go through that process. They'll even help you outline the steps to get you there and without the headaches. And then of course, you know, that's the workshop. But if you need help on the engineering front, their teams are ready to jump in. As your development or consulting partner. It is literally the most reliable step that you can take. After your proof of concept, it's got a Vention. Let's say you've built a promising prototype on lovable, right? Hey, you love it, it's working, it's doing it runs well in tests. But now what do you open a dozen AI specific roles just to keep moving. Do you bring in a partner who's done this across industries? Oh, maybe that's an idea. Someone who can expand your idea into a full scale product without disrupting your systems or slowing down your team. That's Vention. Vention is real people, real expertise and real results. Learn [e-mail] and see how your team can build smarter, faster and with a lot more peace of mind. Or get started with your AI workshop today at ventionteams.com TWIT that's V E N-T-I-O-N teams.com TWIT. I had a great conversation with the Vention team and I was super impressed with them. They can really help you focus on what's next for you. Vention teams, we thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. Now let's get Xboxed.

[B]

Let's get.

[A]

Let's get. Let's get.

[B]

Yeah. A lot of Xbox news this week and you know, most of it, as you would imagine, is super positive. So there was a report in Bloomberg which was co authored or co written by Dina Bass, who's amazing and has awesome sources and is reliable and thus this, this is a fact, and that is that Amy Hood has required Xbox, Microsoft Gaming to implement a 30% profit margin target.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

Now here's the problem. Xbox has never come anywhere close to having such a profit margin and most video game businesses haven't either. In fact, I later looked this up and Activision Blizzard technically achieve this at some point. But they only sell software, right?

[C]

Right. So does that count? The online games? Like you want to talk to cash cows.

[B]

It's the whole thing. Just overall, I mean, I'm sure it breaks down in ways that we don't understand quite yet, but I, but I.

[C]

Saw this pressure on them to need to do that.

[B]

Yeah. And this is, I mentioned the chart, the market cap thing. Right. And you can see, you know, Microsoft's Microsoft stock price, I should say in 2013, 2014 was lower than it was in 2000. And then since then it's taken off like a rocket sled. Right. And so like I said, a lot of people would look at that and be like, oh, like that's the Satya Nadella era. And it's like that's the Amy Hood era, actually.

[C]

Right.

[B]

So, yeah, anyway, this is, I think this is, you know, when we look at Xbox and we have concerns, we see problems, we're worried, we don't quite understand what they're doing. This is it. Right. This came from on high. I mean, the helpful thing to remember here is that everyone, including Satya Nadella, you know, at some point answers to someone else. Right. You know, if you're the CEO of A company like Satya, you are, you know, you, you have a board of directors, you have shareholders and investors that you technically answer to. I mean, not maybe on a day by day basis, like what do you drive to work kind of thing, but you answer to somebody. So Phil Spencer runs the Xbox business, but he's part of the slt. But he answers to Satya. He answers to the board. And we know from. Well, we know, we've heard anyway, it's a rumor, I guess, but Microsoft wanted to put out an Xbox branded gaming handheld this year and the board said no.

[C]

Yeah, because there's no margin in it.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

So this is the argument, get out of the hardware business because you'll never make margin on that.

[B]

I feel like I've been saying that for a while. I feel like I'm saying that. Yeah, no, I mean if you, if you lopped off the hardware a bit, this is a solid business. It's called Activision Blizzard, by the way. Well, Activision Blizzard plus Bethesda plus, you know, the, the handful of things Microsoft already had that are like Gears, flight Sim, Halo, etc. But, but that's a solid business, which Activision improved over many years. Right. So, yeah, this is absolutely an example of this insertification thing we keep talking about because we're going to make the experience worse for everybody just to make the bottom line better. There's no doubt that Microsoft today, not Microsoft, sorry, the gaming part of Microsoft could be profitable. The problem is maybe it's like 12% profitable. The profit margin is 12%, in other words. In fact, that's what it was, by the way, in 2022. But that's not a big enough number.

[A]

Big enough for who? The stock market? Microsoft? Big enough for me.

[B]

Yeah, same. So when you think about big tech, big. Right. Richard will appreciate this. He's heard this one. At some point at Microsoft, this happens. This is 15 years ago, more a long time ago. If you came to whoever, whatever, leadership and said, I have an idea, this is going to be the next big business. This is amazing. Like, all right, talk to us. They spell it out like, all right, is this thing going to make a billion bucks? No, no, it's not that big. Like, then we're not doing it.

[C]

That was Bomber's line. Don't bring me anything without a billion dollar business.

[B]

Yep, we're not doing it. So now Microsoft is not exponentially bigger, but much, much bigger. And this is just unreasonable. So the only way you can get to this number is by cutting things, getting rid of stuff you're not going to take chances anymore. You're not going to spend lots of money on big budget games.

[C]

I guess that sounds like an accountant's thinking, you can't make money so you have to save money until there's nothing left to save.

[B]

I did my own little original reporting, by the way. This was going down at the time, but in the last year as a standalone company, Activision Blizzard had an operating margin. It's not exactly the same as profit margin. It's kind of like. But it's the same. It's roughly the same, we'll say of 38%. Roughly.

[C]

Wow.

[B]

So, you know, purely software. Right. The year before that it was 44.5%. So it's possible if you're a software company. So it almost seems like, in other words, when Microsoft announces that Xbox Game Pass ultimate is now going to double in price to $30 a month, which is a number that no one should ever see and be like, yep, it's worth it to me. I'm doing it. You kind of get the feeling that the point of it is they don't want you to do it. They're literally making it so expensive. No one does it it because it's better for them. If you subscribe to Game Pass PC or the whatever the mid tier ones are for some reason those work out better. Because the Day One stuff, right?

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So I feel like this thing is the same thing. Like in other words, you go to.

[C]

Number where if they could really get that many people some of that level, then the Day one stuff would make sense.

[B]

So the guys, Phil Spencer and that team very clearly want to make hardware. Right? They want to. And in fact, we're going to talk about this. They talk about it a lot. Satya Nadella has talked about it.

[C]

Sure.

[B]

But they're not making money on this business, right? No, they never have.

[C]

And by the way, no, video game consoles have never ever been a profitable business. All the way back to Intellivision.

[B]

Yeah. Right. So yeah, this is like a razor, razor blade model, whatever you want to call it.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

You have. You lose money in the hardware, the.

[C]

Money'S in the game.

[B]

The goal over time is you cost reduce the console so that you lose less. If you're lucky, by the end of the run the last couple years, you might actually make a little profit on what you're selling at the time. But overall, yes, you're not going to make money.

[C]

You'll never net out because there's so much cleanup and optimization to get to the hardware it's not working.

[B]

Yeah, but you don't kind of worry about it because, well, ideally you're selling so much software, it's like you've made.

[C]

Well, that's the nature of the gaming business. The reason the gaming business has so many fails failures is they're so very profitable, they can afford it.

[B]

Yeah. So I cited a number that was what I say, 12%. So I think it was fiscal year 2022. The Xbox business had a profit margin of 12%. Now this is not exact because it was a slightly different year, but Activision, I think it was the following year had a profit margin. When I say 44.5%, that's the difference between a couple things because this is profit margin. It's not like a profit number. Obviously Activision Blizzard is selling more games and making more money on games. That's not what I mean. But as far as the actual profit, that's the difference between selling hardware and not selling hardware.

[C]

Sure, but you're talking about the hardware is losing money. You've got a $400 device, you're selling it essentially break even. And then you've got $80 gains. You're selling at. At, at 30 to 40% Mar. And so for every. You're only going to match each console for every 10 games you sell, which means the consoles dominate, you're going to drive your margins down. And by the way, thinking you're she's going to be happier because you're going to jump. You're going to dump the total dollar flow down a. A bunch, but at a higher margin.

[B]

My such accountant thinking, right, 100%. Yeah, though this is what I mean. Big tech in general, Microsoft specifically has gone from selling software and services to being a money manipulation machine. That's because they have so much of it. This is how the world works for them. So I look at this directive to Xbox as a business the same way I look at them doubling the price of Xbox game pass ultimate, which is. Here you go, going to pay it. And as a consumer I say, no, no, no, no, no. I may choose to go to a lower tier or I may just give it up because I'm tired of this crap. But I am not paying that. And I think she did this to Xbox. And they were like, all right, thing is, we still want to make hardware, so we're gonna do layoffs, we're gonna close studios, we're gonna get rid of projects that have been developing forever and never went anywhere. We're gonna try to save money in other ways. And the one thing we've been talking about without having this information for a couple years now is if they just got rid of the hardware which diehard Xbox fans do not want, they would be profitable. And I think what's going to happen. So the next story, just to jump out a little bit is Sarah Bond, president of Xbox was interviewed a couple times tied to the Xbox Ally, the Rog stuff, the gaming handheld. And she has mentioned that there's. Because people ask because they make consoles, is this the future? And they're like, no, no, we're still going to make a console. And she came out and said the next console they make will be very premium, kind of redundant and a curated experience.

[C]

Sure.

[B]

And very premium to me. Sounds a lot like Xbox Game Pass ultimate, which is very premium. Too expensive. And the goal is like, it's like.

[C]

We'Re going to have one. You want 30% margin on a piece of hardware like that. It's a $1,200 machine.

[B]

Yeah, I'm thinking, yeah, I'm thinking at least a thousand bucks. So that will turn off a lot of people, it will cause a lot of complaints. The diehards will buy it, you know, because whatever, we love Xbox, but they're not going to sell a lot. And you know, this is something Frank Shaw had said to me when they Microsoft announced the Surface Duo and also the Neo, which never came up. But I asked him about the viability of this because it didn't make sense to me. And he said, let me ask you a rhetorical question. I'm like, okay. He said, if we had a very small business but it was profitable, would that be okay? And I, yeah, of course. He says, all right, well that's what we're shooting for.

[C]

And I'm like, right, okay. And you got it. You know, people bought the PS5 Pro, but I know folks who bought it immediately because there's exactly a group of folks that are just not price sensitive to that. They do not care.

[B]

That's right. They just, they're die hard fans. They're going to always have the best of the best. And that's the thing we haven't got with Xbox in this gen, at least not yet. Is a new like a midstream rev, like the Pro. Like we don't, you know, we didn't get it this time. It's the first time actually.

[C]

Well, and if you've been running on the current model, you're looking at how the heck do we do that for 499? And you, you can't Right.

[B]

That's right. I mean, this year, look, using the existing hardware, they've raised prices in the US Twice this year. And look, it's easy to be cynical. I fall into this trap very easily. You can look at that, be like, oh, it's like you're begging me not to buy it. And it's like, actually they kind of are. If you knew how much this thing really costs, you know, you'd never spend that money. Well, now you know, because this is. We have to sell it at. Just to probably break even. Right. So anyway, this was, this was alarming to me, but. But at least it explains because I, I've seen a lot of people say, well, oh, we got to get rid of Phil Spencer. You know, this guy's a jerk. And it's like, nah, it's not him. Yeah, you listen to him talk. He loves games. He wants, you know, what he wants is what all gamers should want.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

So, okay, anyway, so since then, Phil Spencer, also a rumor now, and then later, Satya Nadell have all commented on this next gen console that Microsoft's allegedly making. Right? Or is making. I'm sorry. You know, and Phil Spencer implied very heavily, as we've been saying, this will be. It's going to be Windows, like the Xbox. Ally.

[C]

It's always been Windows.

[B]

It's always been Windows, but. But more explicitly Windows, in other words. And this is a. This is. Again, this freaks people out. But you got to bear with me for a second. When you move Xbox, the console, to Windows, right? Even if it's a modified version of Windows, if you're going to maintain this backward compatibility thing, which to me is one of the biggest selling points of this Xbox as a platform, that tells me that I, as a Windows user, literally on a PC, on a laptop or whatever, will be able to run previous generation Xbox games. And I'm sorry, but, like, that's awesome. Like, I really want that. And right now, Xbox is like a silo. The other thing about an Xbox, by the way, and this is super important, it's locked into one room in your house. You can only play the game there. You know, like opening this thing up so you can play it on a laptop, if you're on a trip or someone else, whatever it is, to me is humongous. And so, yes, I mean, they were driven here by necessity, et cetera, et cetera.

[C]

But it's just not a bad play. It really isn't.

[B]

Yeah, it makes sense. Look, we're in a. We're. We're transitioning into this right now. So yes, Windows is not going to run as efficiently on a portable gaming device as Linux with SteamOS or whatever. 100%. But the goal is to get it better.

[C]

Doesn't matter. We've had too much compute all along. You know there's another side to this Paul, which is what we Learned in the 360 when we did custom Asics for everything was that the developers hated working on it. It took forever to make games. The whole point about making Xbox run Windows kernel is so that I can use my Windows machine to make the game and push it to the Xbox. I don't have to have that Xbox in the loop all the time. I can work from the PC.

[B]

You just touched on something I've not written yet. But when you think about a Rog Xbox ally or the. It's not right here I guess but the legion go that I have have. These are running lightweight CPUs typically in AMD in both cases which is ideal but not as good as the stuff we see on the PC. You know, less RAM than a typical game PC would have slower storage, tiny screen, whatever. Yeah. So Windows not optimal for this kind of situation. It's not like a netbook, but it's kind of low end for Windows. Right. That Xbox console that these guys are talking about, sort of. You have to think this is going to be a little beefier.

[C]

It's going to be a beast.

[B]

Yeah. And the games that don't run as well on a handheld in Windows as compared to Linux is. Yeah, it's a real problem. I think it's something we're going to get on top of but probably will not be a problem for this Xbox console thing because it's going to be a gaming PC, you know. Yeah, it's going to be pretty good. You know, probably. I don't know what it is but.

[C]

Yeah, the challenge will always be battery life and weight.

[B]

Yeah. Well, two hours. Two hours of battery life is pretty good. If it's 1989 and you don't know any better. I don't know but like it's. Yeah, it's not great.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And then the Windows central published a story saying that when you think about Xbox as a PC essentially or Windows, you know, one of the big. Well, I don't know if it's a big thing. Well, one of the things that differentiates like a console from Windows like which is kind of an open platform of sorts is that you actually have to pay for multiplayer. Right. So when Xbox Live came out in 2002, there were two tiers, silver and gold. Gold had a couple of things, but one of them was multiplayer capability and matchmaking, which, you know, if you game on a PC, you're like, what? You're charging for something that we just get for free sort of on the PC. But the thing you need to understand about that is that, first of all, it was 23 years ago. They were hosting the infrastructure for it. They were centralizing it. The way most PC multiplayer games worked at the time was that people threw up servers that you would connect to and see what games were available and you would play. And it was just individuals out in the world doing that. Microsoft was like, look, we're going for this curated experience. It's going to be. Everyone on Xbox is going to be able to do well, you have to pay for it, but, you know, 50 bucks a year, we'll pay for the costs and we're going to do it ourselves and we'll do the matchmaking stuff, which came up out of Halo 2, I think it was, or Halo. We're going to do that. Right, okay. So you can, you know, like, I can sort of excuse it away. But I will say, you know, here in 2025, we're like, I don't know, guys, like, charging for that is like, it's kind of weird. So apparently that might be going away. So probably touch. Probably based on the fact that this is going to be Windows, because if it is Windows, one of those things you're going to be able to do is get on an Xbox console in the future and access Steam or your epic game collection or whatever it is. And the multiplayer games that they're hosting are out wherever they are. Like, they're, you know, they may not even hit the Microsoft infrastructure. So maybe there's no need for this anymore. I don't know. But there's that. And then Satya Nadella weighed in on this, which is, like, crazy, and this is incorrect, but what he said was the biggest gaming business is the Windows business. I think he meant maybe at Microsoft. I don't know. Mobile gaming is much bigger than Windows, but fair enough. I mean, okay, but what a quote. He says, we want to be a fantastic publisher, right? So this is Microsoft as a game publisher versus Microsoft as a hardware maker, like a console maker, and taking a similar approach to what we did with Office.

[C]

What?

[B]

What did they do with Office? Like, what? Like, what are you talking about?

[C]

Brian Valentine's old Office line. We feel that Office should have its fair share of the Market. And the fair share of the market is 100%.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. The good old days. Yeah, but so, but he said Microsoft will be every. This is, this was kind of the Sacha Nadella tagline, I guess. You know, we're going to meet our customers where they are. Right. First. One of the first things he did that anyone noticed was put Office out on the iPhone and the iPad or whatever it was at the time.

[C]

And then to understand those both those apps had already existed for two years. Are being held off market.

[B]

Yeah. Being held back. Yep. Yeah. But if you apply that to gaming, which I've done, you know, I've made this case before myself, which is, is this is a quote now. He says we will be everywhere on every platform, whether it's consoles, PC, mobile, cloud gaming or tv. And that's what a game publisher does. You don't want to limit your available market to the 50 million ish people that bought like one console. You want it to go everywhere. Right, of course.

[C]

Yeah, sure.

[B]

So anyway, all in there. Lot of. No, directly like, you know. Yes, it's Windows. Yes. But a lot of implication in there is that Windows. Okay, I gotta wrap this up. I'm sorry. Take a long time here. I'm trying not to kill those.

[A]

I'm having fun.

[B]

Sort of. As expected, Microsoft this past week announced what they're calling, it's a good name, by the way, Halo Campaign Evolved. So if you are a Halo fan or you have a long memory, you know that the first game was not actually called Halo. It was called Combat Evolved, which kind of a goofy name by the way. And that name is both.

[C]

It had colon, right? It was Halo.

[B]

It had a colon. Yep. It was a colon. Yeah, I left the colon out of my little. Right up here. But Halo Campaign Evolve will be a remastered remade version of the original single player campaign using the Unreal engine, which they've already said they're going to use, which by the way makes it a lot easier to bring that thing cross platform. So it's going to be everywhere. It's going to be on game pass, cloud gaming, PC, Xbox Series X and S, and the PlayStation 5, of course.

[C]

Awesome.

[B]

It will enable four player cooperative campaign play, but no multiplayer. Right. And that's the thing. So the original Halo did have multiplayer. It wasn't really until Halo 2 that that kind of thing took off. Like the first game was pretty. It was really about the single player campaign. And back then, remember, we used to do the split screen thing. You could play on the same Xbox and play Together, multiplayer or single. So it's going to do like cross play. So you could have a friend playing on a PlayStation and someone on a PC, someone on an Xbox, all playing the same campaign together. So that's cool. We don't know when it's coming. It's next year sometime. They haven't said exactly when. But interestingly, the night before that this news broke. There was rumors that they were a report of some kind that Microsoft was working on two versions of this Halo. Halo thing. One was this thing that we got and the other one was a massive multiplayer kind of a. You might look at like a war zone type thing where the point of it is just multiplayer. And I bet that's still coming too. I bet we're going to get like this Halo, like the Halo of the future, if you will. The Halo we move forward with is going to be that thing I always wanted for Call of Duty, which is just like a multiplayer environment where you bring in all the maps, all the weapons, all the loadouts, all the rideable vehicle, whatever it is, like all the stuff and let people make playlists and, you know, just do the thing they want to do, which is just shoot aliens and shoot each other, whatever, you know. So, yeah, Anyway, people hear PlayStation 5 and they lose their minds, which is too bad because they're also releasing the other. The other Worlds. Outer World, Sorry 2 is available today. Also an Unreal Engine game and also available across Series X and s. Xbox on PC, meaning PC Xbox ally gamehelds, which is PC Battle.net Steam, PlayStation 5, of course.

[C]

Nice. Okay. Outer World's a good game.

[B]

Yeah. I've never played it, but it looks cool. Kind of a weird. I got an outrage from Amazon the other day about Luna, which is their game streaming service, which for that kind of thing is pretty good actually. Right. And they called it a relaunch. Like they're relaunching Luna. And I was like, oh, that's not. Or is it a pivot?

[A]

It might be a pivot.

[B]

I think it is a pivot. So. Well, it's a small. Maybe it's just like a half turn to the left.

[A]

I don't know.

[B]

So to the right.

[A]

All I know is Snoop Dogg is involved and that's all I care about.

[B]

And that's how I thought we were.

[C]

Doing the time warp. For sure.

[B]

Let's do the time warp. So Luna, like stadia, before it, like any of these service, you know, they. They struggled to get like the big AAA games. You know, there's. There's Stuff in there. I mean. But you know, differentiating Luna is kind of tough because, you know, it's, it's whatever, it's cloud streaming service. So a couple of days after this happened yesterday, there was the news. Well, first we had the rumor and then the news of Amazon laying off a lot of people. So they're laying, think it's 14,000 people immediately, they're. Yeah, well, it's going to be supposedly 30 overall. So there's going to be more in January after the holidays. And apparently a big part of it was their gaming stuff. And so it looks like they are pivoting, if you will, to become, to focus more on casual gaming, which, you know, maybe for the Amazon audience might make some more sense. So I think there's going to be less of a push for these big aaa, you know, Blockbuster games and instead.

[A]

It'S Snoop Dogg in the courtroom.

[C]

Yeah, I can't imagine what the charge was.

[A]

No, no, he's the judge, it looks like.

[B]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[C]

Oh, great.

[B]

I think he's going to be on the technical committee that will determine if AGI has occurred. I think he's good.

[A]

I can see that it's courtroom chaos. Is Snoop Dogg. I'm thinking he's a judge because he has a gavel in his hand. Oh, man, I don't, you know, nothing's. Nothing isn't better with a little Snoop Dogg.

[B]

By the way, Microsoft earnings have occurred. Ah.

[C]

Oh, and my loop is back up too.

[A]

All right, do you want to pause and.

[B]

Yeah, no, you know what? Because we're going to cover this next week. Let me just, let me just blow through this real quick.

[C]

Do the ad break.

[B]

During the ad break, I'm going to see if I can get the.

[A]

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. If we're going to pause for an ad break and then. Okay, that's what I meant.

[B]

All right.

[A]

You didn't understand my.

[B]

No, I did. I don't want to worry.

[A]

We'll be right back with more of Microsoft earnings right after this word from Cashfly. Cash Fly is our content delivery network, our CDN. For over 20 years, CashFly has held a track record for high performing ultra reliable content Delivery serving over 5,000 companies in over 80 countries. And I know that, that because we're one of those companies. In fact, Cash Fly saved our bacon. We were, I thought, naively. Oh, a podcast. I just put it up on the website. People download it, we're done. Until the website crashed pretty quickly. I was trying all sorts of things bittorrent aol. I was, I mean that's how long ago this was. Matt Levine from Cash Flight came to the rescue. He said we can help and we're still a very happy Cashfly customer. We've been using Cashfly I think for 15 years now. We love their lag free video loading, their hyper fast downloads, the friction free site interactions. And we're not alone. Join companies like Adobe, like Microsoft. Cash Fly's not down. I'm just a thought, just a little thought. Microsoft LG, the NFL. Many more rely on CashFly. Most CDN providers in effect hold you back with Cash Fly. No, no, the sky's the limit. You get a tailored this at least this happened for us and I think it happened for you too. You get a tailored solution, performance obsessed partners, your CDN becomes your competitive advantage. And when as a company we are downloading petabytes literally of data every single month, podcasts, audio and video and man, you know, we were audio at first and then we went and we said Cashfly, we're going to start doing video too. Those are bigger files. And they said yeah, no problem, easy peasy. Cashfly's proof is in the petabytes events stream smoothly to millions of concurrent users worldwide with less than a second latency. Gaming companies love cash fly. Online games start 70% faster. They scale instantly and play without lagging. Software downloads flawlessly during the release patches during updates. HD video plays on demand with ultra fast sub second start on every device. That's important to us. When you go to our website and you press play on that video, it's got to start like that because I know you're not going to stick around two seconds later if it's not playing, you leave. Right? I know, I'm the same way. Podcasts reach global audiences at record speed at any scale. Cash Fly is scaled with us beautifully. Cashfly delivers rich media content up to 158% faster than other major CDNs and allows you to shield your site content in their cloud, ensuring a 100% cash hit ratio. And what we loved about Cash Fly, we were, you know, we were neophytes in this whole thing. We're novices, we were just beginning. We didn't know what our bandwidth is going to look like from moment to moment. So they were really good with us. You'll never pay for service overlap again. You'll get flexible month to month billing as long as you need it and then discounts for fixed terms once you're happy. The point is you design your own contract. When you switch to Cash Fly. That's what we did. Cashfly. It's like gaining an extension to your team. Ask our engineer Patrick. When your entire business model depends on delivering massive content, you don't want to go it alone. You can count on personalized help anytime, from a tenured expert who gets IT Engineer to Engineer 24. 7. Everyone at TWiT loves Cash Fly. You learn how you can get your first month [e-mail] twit. You've heard me say it time and time again. Bandwidth for Windows Weekly is provided by cachefly@c a c h e-flashly.com Twitch it Thank you, Cash Fly. They're the best. Now I have given Paul a moment to prepare. If you just use Chat GPT, you.

[C]

Can have this in instant.

[B]

But okay, look, I, I, I'm not saying I refuse. I just saying I don't ever think of it.

[A]

So say hey, co pilot and see what happens.

[B]

So. These numbers are unbelievable. It took me less time to find them than I thought. So just bottom line, net income, which is profit. $30.8 billion. No, sorry, 27.7 billion.

[A]

Please remember that $9 billion a month.

[B]

On revenues of 77.7 billion. Net income. Profits were up 12% year over year. Revenue was up 18% year over year. Okay. However, you may recall that Microsoft several times in the past year said that the course of their previous fiscal year they would spend $80 billion on capex related to AI infrastructure build out. They spent something. It was more than that because the first quarter of that year was 20 and then it went 22.6, 21.4, 24.2. Roughly 89, $90 billion for the year. Amazon, sometime in the past, maybe the last earnings report said that they would spend $120 billion in their fiscal year on the same type of cost. And we speculated, Richard, what was the number you thought the spending would be this past quarter? Do you remember? You said 30, I think.

[C]

Yeah, I said 30.

[B]

30 billion. I said it was, I guessed it was going to be between 25 and 28 billion. It was 35 billion.

[C]

30 because they're working on Stargate, right? Right.

[B]

So are they. I were, I thought that was.

[C]

You're talking about Oracle, right?

[B]

No, I'm talking about Microsoft.

[C]

Oh, Microsoft. No, do the star. Star. So you say they did 30 billion this quarter.

[B]

5 billion 30. 34.9 billion. Here's the thing, just like, oh, it's up 74% year over year to support customer demand, really for our cloud and AI. Offerings, customers being like OpenAI, I guess. Right. So nearly half of that are short lived assets, GPU, CPUs, et cetera. The other roughly half is longer term assets that they believe will amortize. Is that the return over 15 years or beyond? So I don't know.

[C]

Yes, that'll be generators, battery, longer term financial leases.

[B]

I don't know, whatever.

[C]

Where the short term is four years. Right. The hardware, they typically do squeeze four years out.

[B]

Yeah. And I don't, I don't know if this number falls into that category. I, it seems like it's outside of it, but it says cash paid for property and equipment that's tied to capex. $19.4 billion up 30% year over year.

[C]

They bought a lot of land, man.

[B]

Yikes.

[C]

A lot of land.

[B]

So you know, when the bubble bursts.

[C]

This is what's left behind.

[B]

Yeah. So one of the arguments we were able to make over a period of four, maybe six quarters, I don't remember, was that if you looked at Microsoft profits in a given quarter, you could say, you know, I mean they, they're basically paying for this with cash. I mean it's not how it works really. But. And you can't say that now they're.

[C]

But they have, they still have cash reserves. Right?

[B]

Of course. Okay. But now you're, you're, you're, you're taking out a savings, essentially. I mean, you know, 27.7 billion is a big number, but 34.9 is a bigger number. And you know, and this is that question about transparency also a question of.

[C]

How much longer can you do this. Like there's a, you're already seeing the pushback for the municipalities. You're already seeing pressure for all of these things. Like while you can buy, you should buy because it will end.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And doesn't matter what you run in those data centers. Right. It may be right now it's all GPU chips for AI, but it could be in 365 next year, like it doesn't matter. This land grab puts these companies at a position so far ahead of anyone else there will never be another cloud provider.

[B]

And that's the point, you know, when Deep Seek came out with what they can't, you know, with their stuff earlier this year, they kind of undercut, you know, what these big companies were trying to do by saying, look, you don't need to spend this much money. But Microsoft's argument, OpenAI's argument, Google, Amazon is like, no, no, no, you have to have, you have to spend this infrastructure you have to do this because that makes it exclusive to their little club. And it's. Boy, it's crazy. It's really crazy.

[C]

It is.

[B]

And then just top line like productivity and business processes. Microsoft 365, 33 billion in revenues, up 17% year over year. Intelligent Cloud, which is Azure, basically 31 billion. 1 billion in revenues, up 28% year over year. And then the tortoise coming up in the back as always. More personal computing 13.8 billion, up only 4%. And I always just like one of those things that sticks in my brain. You could go back and look this up. But at some point 10 years ago, ish, whatever. The three top level business units of Microsoft were all at roughly 11 billion. So they've all grown. But more personal computing is more like up some reasonable amount, like normal amount, I guess.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

But the cloud based stuff essentially, you know, Microsoft 365, Azure, that stuff explosive. You know, they're almost not three times, but they're over twice as big as the consumer business. So. Interesting.

[C]

Okay.

[B]

All right, man, I'm sucking all the air out of the room. Richard, I'm sorry.

[A]

No, no, we needed to know this. This is it.

[B]

So I just want, I'm just going to quick. I just don't want to, I don't want to waste too much time here. There's these really extreme views of AI on either side. I was surprised to discover the. It was one of the co authors of the book that was. It's called AI Snake Oil which makes it sound like a really critical analysis of AI. It's really not that it's really about like actually a lot of AI is really useful and a lot of it is in that generative AI space which is basically productivity and creativity. Think that stuff's fantastic. They were basically making the case that we call AI things that are new and different and don't fall into an easy slot. But once AI kind of moves into the background like all technology does and becomes just part of our lives, it's just normal. And it's kind of a nice centrist view. Like I wrote a thing about this, I thought this was very interesting. I've been looking for this kind of of way to make sense of this because it's crazy and these guys do a pretty good job. So they followed this up. So this was an academic paper written by a PhD candidate at the time and a professor, turned into a book and now they've created a substack called I think it's just called AI is Normal or something like that. And it's the follow up to this and this is how they're. It will probably be a book someday but trying to come up with a bit because AI Snake Oil sounds like it's like super like a little, you know, critical, right? It's like this is like this is nonsense. It's like no, that's not what they're saying. Some of it's nonsense. But there's actually very useful just like you know, spell checking is useful, whatever. So anyway, it's worth looking up and there's some good videos where they give talks and things. So. And then on the app pick side I've been using or I used one time I used a tiny 11 builder with Windows 11 version 25H2 to create a. A kind of minimal install of Windows 11 and then see if I could keep it de and certified. Right. I don't care about small size. Like the point of this utility I believe is so you can run Windows 11 on like a low end hardware device that doesn't have a lot of RAM or storage. Okay, that's fine. But what I'm looking for is a version of Windows that doesn't harp on me to enable backup or just do it in the background automatically and blah blah, blah. So does this achieve that? And I've been doing it for about using it for about a week now. I split my time between this and one other computer basically every day now. And it's so far like, you know, I need more than a week, but so far so good. You'll need a couple of things like MsEdge redirect will get. There's no browser installed, so you use winget to install Brave or Chrome or whatever. And then Ms. Edge Redirect is a free utility you can get. So when you click on like a widget story or a link in search or whatever, it will actually go to your browser, not Edge Edge, which is not there. And then you can use PowerToys to turn off the copilot key because every time you hit that thing when there's no copilot settings launches and says hey, how do you want to configure the key? And it's like I want to configure it to do nothing. So that's not a choice. But you can do that with PowerToys. I'm sorry, PowerToys has a utility called Keyboard Manager which is fantastic. So these are all free tools. You know, you obviously need to own Windows, but. But I installed it on real hardware. I'm Waiting for that little fu moment where it's like, oh, copilot's there. Suddenly it just appeared, like, oh, sorry. I said copilot. Like a specter coming up from the bottom of your computer. Oh, did you want me? You know, like. No, No, I do not want you. Sorry, sorry, sorry. It's still listening to me. Thank God. Anyway, I'm gonna turn this thing off.

[A]

It's so funny to hear you struggling with this. This. Oh, my God.

[B]

Leave it on here. Like, this is my demo computer. Like, I want it to be normal, and it's like, I hate it so much. Okay, there you go. So look, if you want to know more about both those things, I wrote about both of them, so there's more information there. Okay, Sorry.

[C]

All right. Okay.

[A]

I'm exhausted. Let us. You know what would be fun? Let's talk about Rena's radio.

[C]

I just saw Grant Fritchie today at the conference, actually, and about a couple weeks ago, we had a chance. Chance to sit down and talk. Grant's one of the luminaries in the SQL Server database space in general, works for Redgate. And we talk specifically about the AI tooling that exists for database professionals. So this is. Represents a range of tools. Obviously query optimization is a good one, but actually doing database analytics, understanding the behavior of the database, sort of the underpinning stuff, they go really good at going through the checklists and helping you get through that. There's a bunch of different tools in the space and so he. There's a long list of links on the show if you want to take a look at it. He talked about just using regular, you know, chat, GPT and perplexity to bounce ideas off of. But getting into the dedicated tools that were integrated into things like SSMS and the other database tools, really impressive. So we thought it was time to just go visit for the dba. It's like, you should probably take a look here. This is a productivity boost for any dba. Taking care of a bunch of different databases and not being able to focus on one thing all the time.

[B]

Time.

[C]

You know, we. We end up being these, you know, semi experts in so many things. It's useful to have a tool that focuses it.

[A]

Nice.

[C]

Yeah.

[A]

Run as episode 1008.

[C]

Yeah, here we are.

[A]

Come. Just came out today. Now, at least today it wouldn't be a Windows Weekly if we couldn't have some Dutch whiskey.

[C]

Well, it's not Dutch whiskey. It's what's happened. Last week when I was in Stavanger, I got a chance to go to my friend Nile's place. Place. And Nile is a serious whiskey aficionado and I think I've talked about this before but when you're, when you've got a significant whiskey collection, you categorize it right. There's, there's the regular run of the will Misky you have in the front for, you know that anybody can drink. And if you haven't had whiskey before, this is fine and so on. If you like whiskey and you'd like. And I wanted to give you something better. And I have a second tier but it's also a third tier.

[A]

That third tier is for my stuff.

[C]

Yeah. So Nile had been hanging on these bottles for a few years hoping that I would be in town. And that's last week. And so we had an evening and we tried a number of very unusual whiskeys.

[A]

I'm thinking with a name like Niall, he might be Irish.

[C]

He's rather Irish but married to a Norwegian, lives in Stavanger working in the, working in tech for the oil industry. So you know, that's how that works. And so the whiskey we're going to talk about is the Red Breast Dreamcast PX edition. So I have mentioned Red Breast before in the, in the past. That's actually, that was the whiskey I referred to when we talked about Irish whiskey in general. I haven't gone deeply into Red Breast. The brand itself.

[A]

I like Red Breast a lot actually.

[C]

It's a lovely whiskey.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Because it'll amuse you to find that this well known Irish whiskey starts out in London. So in 1857 W&A Ghibli founds a company in London that are wine importers and distillers, mostly wine at the time. Although within 20 years or so by 1874 whiskey becomes the primary product. They have 30,000 gallons in bond. So they're buying casks of whiskey, almost exclusively Irish whiskey and storing it in their own warehouses in London and then distributing it that way. At that time they called it Ghibli's Castle Whiskey from the most celebrated Dublin distilleries. And that celebrated Dublin distillery was, was Jameson. Now what was interesting about this is that they were buying Jameson, they were providing the casks to Jameson. So because Ghibli was in the wine business, they also had access to tada sherry casks, real sherry casks. And so they would ship their empty cherry casks to Jameson. Jameson would fill them directly from the still and ship them back to Ghibli. And Ghibli would do their own Aging in sherry casks. So they, these Grand Castle brands were all sherry aged whiskeys. The first time we hear the term red breast is actually in 1912 on a particular set of bottling of Jameson 12. And the red breast is named after the Robin red breast because the, the senior director of Ghibli at the time was a bird watcher and so that was one of his favorite birds. And that's why that name even comes up now. After 1912 we're talking about World War I, which is hard on whiskey. And then we get into Prohibition and all those conflicts, then World War II. And as we talked about originally in Irish whiskey, by 1966 there are only two operations operating distilleries left in Ireland. Whiskey industry has almost completely failed. And Jameson and Cork distillers merged together to form the Irish Distillers Organization. And they sort of round up the remaining brands. They also realize they have to stop selling cast. So they basically warn Ghibli, we're not going to sell casks anymore. But Ghibli negotiates and they're able to keep getting casks until the early 1970s. In that time they start building the new distillery that is going to consolidate operations which we now know as the New Middleton Distillery, which opens in 1975 and at the time is one of the largest distilleries in the entire world and very modernized because they had many brands to take care of. Inside of this organization they built a distilling system designed to be able to switch recipes quickly. It had both column and pot stills, a large amount of washbacks and so forth. So many different runs could be running simultaneously and they could utilize it all at once. That has been scaled up since 75 and today the last major upgrade was in 2014. So right now the new Middleton Distillery has 11 column stills. You know, the average distillery has that has column still all have two. They have 11. They have seven pot stills. Those seven pot stills also the largest pot stills in the world at 80,000 liters each. So the current configuration of New Middleton distillery today produces 64 million liters liters of whiskey a year. It's because it's designed to be able to switch quickly between the various products though. But that was 75 of the initial version with just two stills and much smaller scale. They just, they kept growing because this model worked really well for them. But by 1985, Ghibli's is now run out of the old barrels and they are basically forced to sell the brand to Irish distillers.

[A]

So because they ran out of barrels, they had to sell. That's wild.

[C]

Well, they ran out of barrels, barrels that because Irish distillers wouldn't sell them any more casks.

[A]

Wow.

[C]

So they basically cut them off. So they didn't have a product. Then say, hey, well now that you can't make, you don't have any whiskey.

[A]

Whiskey in London we can buy the brand.

[C]

So that's when Red Breast actually becomes an Irish brand owned by Irish distillers. And they'll sit on it for a few years, but they'll relaunch Red Breast 12 in 1991. Now they, their approach has stayed the same, which is to say it's a mixture of both malt and untin malted barley. And we talked about this before. The Irish started using unmalted barley when they were being taxed on malt and then realized they like the flavor of. But they combined the two. Then those two barleys are processed entirely independently. They are ground differently and they're fermented differently. The malt ferments faster, typically only takes about 60 hours. The unmalted takes about 100 hours. Malted barley makes about a 10% wort, where the unmalted makes about a 15% wort. So and then that wort goes through column stills only and comes out at about 94% alcohol. And remember, the limit for Irish whiskeys can't be above 95, which is much higher than any other whiskey. But it's part of the smoothness you're used to with Irish whiskey. And the malted barley, which has now been made into wort is triple pot still. That's a classic Irish thing to run it through the still three times. That makes sense for a pot still because again, they're going to get to very high numbers. 85% out of a pot still if you go do three passes with it. And as is normal in New Middleton, they do buy used barrels, they buy bourbon barrels and sherry barrels as normal. But they don't remake them the way the Scots do. So they leave them as is, let them dry out a bit, make sure they're not in good shape, and then they will fill them and store them. And of course, the New Milton Distillery stores an astronomical number of barrels being one of the largest distilleries in the world. Now that's the 12 that's rerun. But in 2005 they started, they released a red breast 15. And the next year, one Irish whiskey of the year with it. The, The Red Breast 15 is an extraordinary whiskey. It's not the one we're going to talk about. Then there's a 21 and 2013. And then they do an experiment with aging only in sherry they call Mano Alam, which they only make 2,000 bottles of. Those are incredible collectors items. That one except stunningly difficult to come by. They realize that's such a hit that they go to a new sherry finishing using a very high end sherry called from Bodega Lusta. They called the Red breast Lusta in 2016. And now we get to the fun part. In 2018 they begin this thing they call the Dreamcast line. And my best guess is that they found very old barrel of red breast in storage and started making some extremely old editions. The first edition of the Dreamcast because there are seven of them is a 32 year old and they only made 816 bottles of it. They sold them at €500 each and they sold out in minutes. So then the following year in 2019 they did the the Pedro Jimenez or the PX20. The one that I got to taste. There were 924 bottles sold out in 14 minutes at €380 a bottle. 2020 a Ruby port with 912 bottles. 21 a 29 year old Oloroso finish, 924 bottles and 22 a 30 year old double cast. So split between two different types of sherry. 17, 700 bottles in 23, the 27 year old port to port where they split the edition in both a Ruby port and a tawny port. 870 bottles at 580 Euro euros. And the Lionel one last year, the Dream 38 Zenith, like the original aged in bourbon and Olorosa share 822 bottles at a thousand euros a piece. You had to enter a lottery. The opportunity.

[A]

But worsted I bet it looks.

[C]

So these are the retail prices of these whiskeys. Today at auction they go for more than €5,000.

[A]

Wow.

[C]

So I got to taste the the PX, the Pedro Yemen S20. Nile had picked up two at retail price on the day that they were released. So he had been holding on to them since 2019.

[A]

That's so generous.

[C]

And by the way, just to make it worse, they're 500 mil bottles.

[A]

Oh, they're little.

[C]

They're not even full size. But that's why there's so many bottles. So you figure each one of these represents maybe two barrels or three barrels of very old whiskey that they then combine, do a finishing step in it in a sherry cask and then have Been bottling. Look, I've drank a lot of whiskey. This was one of the finest drinks I've ever had in my life. I was absolutely staggered.

[A]

As it should be for that price.

[C]

For that money you would hope. But again, at €380, it's. It's expensive but not extraordinary. And it's only a 20. It was the youngest of all of the editions. But they call them dreamcasts for a reason. They're just astonishing. And I don't expect to ever try one ever again. I'm okay with that. I have a memory now sitting with my friend who've been waiting to try this. And did we. Did we sit down and finish that bottle? Why yes, yes.

[A]

Well, 500 milliliters. It doesn't go that far, but it's not that far. Wow.

[C]

Still plenty. We had a lovely dinner. At dinner got to spend time with his family and then we went up to his study and we tried these great whiskeys. So it was a phenomenal experience. And it's what you hope for when you have your friends who also.

[A]

And there won't be any more. Right.

[B]

This is it.

[C]

It will not be anymore. It looks like these. You know what it takes 20 years to make a 20 year old whiskey. So they're not going to come along anytime soon. But.

[A]

Wow.

[C]

Yeah. This sounds like a very special one. Oh by the way, you own. You had to be a member of their club club to even get a chance to bid on the right to buy one.

[B]

Wow.

[C]

Which you can sign up to be a member. It's easy to do. And they're largely. There's no information about them anymore because they gone. The. The web page for the Zenith is still up because that was that Those were gone in May. But yeah. Really cool play by Red Breast to provide very special whiskey.

[A]

I like just regular old red breast to be honest.

[C]

12 all day long. Fresh and yeah. And the 15 is one of those ones where it's twice as much and worth every penny. Like the 15 is very, very good. But the 12 all day long. Like just a great whiskey.

[A]

I'll have to find some.

[C]

Yeah, yeah.

[A]

Because I gave my. My bottle of the 12 to my brother in law. My mistake, you know. And that's.

[C]

The 12's not hard to come by. Right? Like.

[A]

Yeah, that's right. They sold it down at our local. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

[C]

You can get another one. That's fine. If you can find the 15, get the 15.

[A]

I'll look for the 15.

[B]

15.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

Yeah. If you love the 12, you'll be really impressed by the 15. But if you ever, ever run across a dream cask, have a taste. If you can get a taste of it, you should get a taste of it.

[A]

I don't have friends this like yours. That's the difference.

[C]

Yeah, I'm very fortunate.

[A]

Richard's leaving Utrecht and we'll be heading where next?

[C]

Home for two days and then flying to New Zealand with the grandbaby. So the next show should be at the farm.

[A]

At the farm in beautiful New Zealand. Nice. Well, thank you so much. Richard Campbell [e-mail] and that's where you'll find Run His Radio and of course.net rocks the show he does with Carl Franklin. Mr. Paul Thurat. When do you go home?

[B]

Just before Thanksgiving.

[A]

Okay. So you can stay for another month or almost. Yeah. Paul thurat [e-mail] no matter where he is in the world. He hangs his hat and his typewriter, his old royaltywriter.com. it's an amazing workflow. He types it first. You hand it off.

[B]

They hand it off to a human editor. They read it.

[A]

They redline it.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

Then you scan it. If you're not a member of Thorat.com's premium membership, you really ought to. It's great stuff. Lots of great stuff there. Both free and behind the premium wall. His [e-mail] including the Field Guide to Windows 11Amust have. And if I would just read it, I wouldn't have so many questions for Paul every week. And so would you. And of course, Windows Everywhere, a tour through the history of Windows through its programming frameworks. Every Wednesday we gather here for your benefit to talk about everything. Microsoft, we record the show 11:00am Pacific, 2:00pm Eastern Time next week. Because finally the United States of America is going to Standard Time.

[B]

I can't wait.

[A]

Well, you don't change.

[B]

Yeah. Here they don't change. But.

[A]

So that means we're going to fall back.

[B]

You're going to be on a normal time. So it'll be a bear.

[C]

They fell back last week. Week. Right, right. Last week.

[B]

It'll be later. It'll be like an hour later, which is honestly way better. So.

[A]

Yeah, so actually, and that's why I always give UTC because UTC never changes.

[B]

We change.

[A]

So in 11 o' clock will be.

[B]

It turns out, you know, everyone wants the time change never to happen, which is a good idea, except everyone has to do it because if, well, if you're the only one that does it, it doesn't matter. Like at least if you, you're, you know.

[A]

And there's a disagreement between, well, should it be summertime or standard time?

[B]

And I think we can all agree summertime's better. But no, I don't.

[A]

Yeah, it's only better because it's in the summer.

[B]

Yes. It turns out it doesn't.

[A]

Winter ain't so hot.

[B]

Turn December to June, you know.

[A]

Sorry. Oh, right. That's what cracks me up. People say, oh, I just. We should stay in summertime. Yeah, we should stay in summer. But that isn't going to happen. Yeah, it'll be dark by 5:30 around here. Starting boy.

[C]

Yep.

[A]

So just, you know, note that if you are somewhere where they don't move the clocks, you can watch us live. Of course in your, in the club, you can watch in the Discord. But there's Also for everyone, YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, LinkedIn, X.com and Kick6, seven places you can, you can watch us live after the fact on demand versions at the website Twitter, TV, WW for Windows weekly. There's a YouTube channel dedicated to Windows Weekly. Great place to clip little pieces. And of course we have already clipped all the whiskey segments. Not all of, not the most recent ones, but all of all of the previous ones. And you can also get that the easy way. You could go to YouTube.com and see the playlist. But Richard has a wonderful custom domain for it. Was it something from my closet dot com?

[C]

Something weird from my closet dot com?

[A]

Something weird from my closet dot com.

[B]

Sounds like it's a ghost website or something like totally don't watch this alone.

[A]

Oh, I forgot to mention the most important best way to get it. Subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you get it automatically. We want you to be here every single week for Windows Weekly. Thank you, Paul.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

Thank you, Richard. Thanks to all of you winners and dozers. We'll see you next time on Windows Weekly. Bye. Bye.

[B]

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But agents make mistakes. Just one rogue agent can do big.

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R U B R-I K.com Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out.

[C]

Out.

[A]

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