Leo Laporte (2:29)

You know, that's why they gave it to him.

Paul Thurrott (2:31)

I think so. Man, his name is right at the.

Richard Campbell (2:35)

Tip of my Jetson ad.

Paul Thurrott (2:36)

Hoff Jets. Thank you.

Richard Campbell (2:37)

Well, Judson's the new commercial CEO because apparently this company needs multiple CEOs, right?

Paul Thurrott (2:43)

That's their new thing. Well, they run out you Know, at some point you have a thousand corporate vice presidents and then.

Richard Campbell (2:48)

Well, and then what was president presidents. President, executive vice presidents.

Paul Thurrott (2:53)

Yeah. You're running out of. We're. We're losing titles at the top. So everybody. CEO, we have lots.

Leo Laporte (2:58)

Is it because the modern corporation is so unmanageable that you have to have many people?

Richard Campbell (3:04)

No, no, I think no. It's got more to do with responsibility and promotion and the fact that there's really no particular rule around naming strategies, at least in North American companies.

Leo Laporte (3:15)

Oh, so CEO, what does that mean necessarily?

Richard Campbell (3:19)

Mean? Right. In the end, what is a board happy with?

Paul Thurrott (3:22)

Right. Also, you know, remember Sachandela explicitly ceded much of his job to Judson and others, actually. And I feel like in a different era he might have become, you know, chairman or, you know, some other. He is chairman, but I mean, just. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (3:41)

Which Tim Cook is apparently going to be soon.

Paul Thurrott (3:44)

So.

Richard Campbell (3:44)

Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (3:45)

It's like. And retire in Newfoundland as a grandmother.

Richard Campbell (3:51)

You know, it's crazy to think about, you know, Satch has done his 10 years. Like, I know there wasn't much more. Like it's been a decade.

Leo Laporte (3:58)

That's a long time.

Paul Thurrott (4:00)

I literally just talked myself into that comment today. I was talking to Brad, actually, but I said, I was like, you know, it's. It has been 10 years. Yeah, yeah, it's been 10 years.

Richard Campbell (4:08)

Yeah. And. And bomber was only 13. So this is not.

Paul Thurrott (4:14)

If you're Bummer. Was of course, right near the top for previous years as well.

Richard Campbell (4:19)

Well, you're exactly right. And had been. They were already. Even before the move in 2000, which I think the, the DOJ accelerated things. They were already moving towards Steve taking over. Like it wasn't. There was no search. There was one guy.

Paul Thurrott (4:31)

Right. Oh, yeah.

Richard Campbell (4:32)

Like it always been a plan. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (4:34)

You know, this happened at Apple with Tim Cook. When Jobs passed away, it happened at Mic. Well, with Bomber, which is. Are we going to pretend to look and we're not. Okay. You know, like Gates is like, he'll be my successor. Right. Everyone's like, yeah, right. You know, there's no. Yeah, sure.

Richard Campbell (4:50)

Oh, wait, I'm the chairman. Yeah, right.

Paul Thurrott (4:52)

Yeah, I, I approve. Let's move this along.

Leo Laporte (4:56)

Is that you think of a good process, though? I mean.

Richard Campbell (4:59)

No, no.

Leo Laporte (4:59)

Okay.

Paul Thurrott (5:00)

No, no, no. But it's. But there's now precedent.

Richard Campbell (5:04)

Well, it's also, you know, tech companies are notorious for crony boards. Right. They're just boards of old employees and so forth. That. And they just. They're big, major shareholders. Like the. In terms of representing a public company. They're very suspect, honestly.

Leo Laporte (5:19)

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (5:20)

Well, I know, I don't mean to be negative about Sachin Nadella, but I really enjoyed him not being there. Like, you know that sounds terrible but.

Leo Laporte (5:29)

Like he was a little prone to corporate. Robotic corporate.

Paul Thurrott (5:37)

I always, you know, we didn't get, we weren't too far into the Nadella era where I sort of observed at one point that he's best when he comes out and just does a quick little intro like hey, I'm still alive and then takes off, you know, or comes in at the end and just wraps it up with a five to seven minute whatever.

Richard Campbell (5:52)

Yep.

Paul Thurrott (5:53)

You know, a two to three hour ignite keynote is just brutal amount of time for my ears to deal with that. I just, I'm so.

Richard Campbell (6:00)

Yeah, but in those early days of stat, I felt like he wasn't in control of his own keynote. Like there was just an awful lot of corporate morass and a very divers first company and it made extraordinary difficult to reign that in. But he did. Right. Like they did eventually. Ray, that in there is sort of a formula now to a sachet keynote.

Paul Thurrott (6:18)

Oh my God. Yeah. I mean I, I know a little bit about that little transition only because I'm friends with the guy who was his speechwriter before he became CEO and he was booted out unceremoniously.

Richard Campbell (6:29)

Oh yeah.

Paul Thurrott (6:30)

Your services are no longer required, sir.

Richard Campbell (6:32)

There's a senior palace guard at Microsoft and you know, if you want to talk about a deep state in a corporation like there it is. It is a thing. And it's more powerful than the CEO in many respects. I have met Satya at a non structured function and the guy's articulate and smart and enjoyable. So everything about what happens on stage is about a script that he's been hammered on.

Paul Thurrott (6:58)

Oh my God. Yes.

Richard Campbell (6:59)

And whether he likes it or not has nothing to do with anything. And I'll tell you this, the same thing happened to Gates. Like you're no CEO at that company, has not been heavily managed in these things.

Paul Thurrott (7:11)

Well, Gates was raw for most of his life and probably needed it more than many. But. But yeah, I mean as. Look, once you become one of the world's most powerful companies or the world's.

Richard Campbell (7:21)

Most powerful company and you know how much you could move the stock.

Paul Thurrott (7:24)

We're not going on script. Yeah, we can't. You can't just blurt something out, you know.

Richard Campbell (7:28)

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (7:29)

Phil Spencer could do that apparently, but not you. So don't do that. Anyway. Yeah, so no, Sacha, that was the big thing for me. I made it enjoyable. I'm sorry, I keep going back to that, but I thought it was nicely done. Back in October, they did that consumer AI kind of copilot event with Mustafa Suleiman, which I also thought was really good. Like it's just more energy and a bunch of younger people on stage. Whatever. It's nice. I just want to call it real quick. This is technically an AI story, but I wouldn't talk about it otherwise. Google could have announced Gemini 3 any day. Yeah. They chose to announce one hour before Microsoft went on stage to introduced Ignite and all their AI advances. Google was like, hey, look at us. Also they did something they've never well done to this degree, which is they provided interviews and demonstrations for like mainstream big press, like, you know, New York Times, etc. Where they got a lot of good quotes from Sundar Pichai in some cases, who is like, AI bubble. Yeah, of course it is. I'm not nervous. What do you mean? Everything's going to be fine. You know, it's kind of some interesting stuff there, but. Oh, and here's Microsoft. What do you have? Oh, just more the same. Okay. You know, like it was like, they're.

Richard Campbell (8:46)

Not over the Bard incident and I respect that. Honestly, they, you know, you should have a memory of when you yanked your pants down and barely.

Paul Thurrott (8:56)

Right.

Leo Laporte (8:56)

Like Sam Altman's tweet can. Congrats To Google and Gemini 3 looks like a great model. And then Sundar's little. Thank you.

Paul Thurrott (9:04)

Jeez, give me a break. These guys have each other's hands on their throats. If they could, it's pretty funny.

Leo Laporte (9:11)

Enemies. They are.

Paul Thurrott (9:12)

Yeah. I mean, that's nice. But you remember Satya in a rare moment of kind of fiery competitiveness when they came out first in 2023 with at the time, Bing and Edge with, you know, AI capabilities that we now call copilot. He said infamously, I want to make Google dance. And I have to feel like if I was signed up, pshai, I think on Monday, Tuesday morning, I would have been like, who's dancing now, bitch? You know, but. But I'm not. I don't run a billion, trillion dollar company, Whatever.

Leo Laporte (9:45)

So I noticed that, by the way, Elon announced Grok 4.1 and it got so little coverage. It's like, yeah, so I wonder. I mean, I don't think Google was.

Paul Thurrott (9:57)

Like, I feel Nazi loving right wing needs are met today with the AI we have.

Leo Laporte (10:03)

We're good, thanks.

Paul Thurrott (10:04)

Yeah, I think we're good on that.

Leo Laporte (10:06)

Gemini 3 by the way, very good.

Paul Thurrott (10:08)

Very fast and very good for coding apparently, which I'm kind of excited about.

Leo Laporte (10:12)

So I have a question because Microsoft's been like all the companies advertising AI big time.

Paul Thurrott (10:17)

You could talk to your PC people talking about this, you could talk to.

Leo Laporte (10:20)

Your PC, but the voice that they use, it's like she's in a can. Ah, is that intention? Is copilot sound like that?

Paul Thurrott (10:28)

No, no, they have actually. If anything, I kind of wish they had more voices, but they in the same way in Windows, you know, we have the narration capabilities, they have high res HD models or not models, I'm sorry, voices or whatever. Copilot doesn't do that. They don't give you a choice of like low or high res or whatever. But they're mostly. They sound clear. I don't really like any of the voices. This is always the problem. Like you ever, you're like, Rich is in a hotel right now. He's probably not doing this tonight because he's been travel for like what, 17 months or something. But yeah, if this was his first night on the road and he's like, all right, I got to get up early tomorrow, I got a meeting or whatever it is. So you like go to your phone, you like ringtones, you like, you step through every single one of them and all of them you're like, oh. And then next thing like oh. And then you get to the bottom, you're like, oh, come on man. And then like, you got to pick one. You know, I feel like AI voices are like that. They're just like none of them are good, but it's like none of them.

Richard Campbell (11:20)

Are bad, you know, bad enough. You got to just what annoys you the least?

Paul Thurrott (11:24)

Someday we'll have the Darth Vader voice, which would be appropriate for Microsoft.

Richard Campbell (11:29)

All Yoda, all the time.

Paul Thurrott (11:30)

Yeah, everything all backwards speak. Keeping track of the Ignite announcements is not possible at all. But even restricting it just to the sort of stuff that we may or may not care about here is a little difficult. But I guess, I don't know, it's kind of high level this because I don't remember the exact timing, but I feel like a year ago at Ignite, Microsoft didn't start talking about agentic AI that had come before, but it was kind of a big thing then. It still is today, right? And then just from a sort of perspective standpoint in back in May at Build, they talked about things like Windows 11 getting native support for MCP, which is the, you know, more advanced version of AI connecting to backend apps in the case of Windows or services or whatever. And this is the show where they're actually. Well, now it's sort of available, you know, meaning in public preview. Yeah. So we're seeing progress. But the thing I, this was something I was. Every once in a while I, I bore my wife with this topic, my, my topics, because who cares? She certainly doesn't. But it is interesting that for all of the speed of AI and the chaos and the never ending release cycles and all this stuff that if you actually kind of step back and look at, just keep to Microsoft, you know, at high level, the first wave, if you will, of AI was really mostly about generative AI and getting AI into places where people might want it. Right. Word, Excel, PowerPoint in the office space or whatever. Windows, you know, we could debate that one and we will actually whatever. And then it doesn't end like generative AI obviously continues. Not like we go from wave to wave. But the now we have the second wave and the second wave is agenic AI. And I have to say, sitting here today, and this is, you know, at least a year in, but really, I mean, literally probably a year and a half, maybe even two years in, we're still at the point where we describe these things in exactly the same way. AI is going to work in the background to do things on your behalf. We use the same language every time. And I'm not saying no one on this planet has ever actually used AI that way yet, but I'm sort of saying that. And it is interesting that what do we know? Like, so we're two and a half years from the original AI announced from Microsoft. Right. Second wave agenic AI. This one's going to take a while. Right.

Richard Campbell (14:02)

Well, and they said we've been playing with this idea long before we stuck the AI label on it. It's asynchronous automation. Right.

Paul Thurrott (14:09)

Yeah.

Richard Campbell (14:10)

I want you to monitor flights going from Vancouver to Auckland. That's actually let me know when the price hits.

Paul Thurrott (14:15)

That's the best example. And that one's interesting because I've been using a service for that exact thing for years. That's not AI based, it's just, I don't know, polling prices somewhere. I don't know how it's doing it exactly, but. Yeah, but, but that's the, that's almost a canonical example. Sure. Yeah. Like you say something like, look, I want to buy this Sonos speaker. I'm not spending more than 150 bucks on it. Once it does hit that price will be like a Black Friday thing or whatever it is, just buy it. But the thing is, the difference between a price alert that you might do through Google flights or whatever it might be and literal agency AI is that we have to build an incredible foundation around every part of this for this to work. Because the end game here is not just doing the like finding it right and telling me. It's literally taking my credit card number and somehow buying this thing and then telling me it bought it. And look, we could, you know, I know there's still AI deniers, I'm not that person. But that there's a lot of trust in the chain here that needs to be established and earned and God help them, because you know it's going to happen. There'll be those horror stories. Some guy wakes up one day and there's like a thousand boxes of furbies in front of his house that AI just bought for him because they misunderstood his request or whatever it is. Like, you know, these things will happen.

Richard Campbell (15:40)

No, these are the jokes that we told about the old Amazon device that you shouldn't name because it makes people sad.

Leo Laporte (15:47)

You mean Alexa? Turn the heat up. Oh God, I'm sorry. Yeah, I couldn't resist.

Paul Thurrott (15:55)

Don't worry.

Richard Campbell (15:56)

And I would argue that on the developer side, you know, this switch from suggesting code in line with you working on your code versus I'm assigning this work item to you, this issue to, to a, to an agentic AI that's going to go develop it and submit it back as a request.

Paul Thurrott (16:15)

Yeah.

Richard Campbell (16:15)

I would argue the most agentic thing I've really seen.

Paul Thurrott (16:17)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (16:17)

If you, if you know what you're doing, it's mind boggling what the develop code can do.

Richard Campbell (16:22)

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (16:23)

The developer thing is the tip of the spear. This is where it's going to first. It's good, it's, you know, where we're gonna make the mistakes. But Richard will remember this certainly, because it always astonished me how often I could use GitHub Copilot in visual Studio and never hits any limit. I've never been warned. I've never heard anything about it. I guess it was last week, the net 10 release. They released the new version of Visual Studio which is wonderful. But this is. There's an almost kind of AI circle jerk thing that happens now with me all the time in this product, which is that I'm using the Windows app SDK which is not very well documented online. Like things like wpf which has been around forever and there's lots and Lots of information about their good advice, etc. And this thing can never fix my problems now. And because I'm using this environment, that's terrible. And so this. What. What happened? I'll. I've done it so many different ways, but the cycle goes like this. Listen, there are three places in this app where it could shut down. I need to interrupt that shutdown to make sure there's no document that needs to be saved first, whatever it is. I have this very specific request and it's like. It's like, okay, the problem is you need to defer the blah, blah, blah. And it's like the way you do it. And then it's like, this is the method. And it's like the method is like the window close. You're like, yep, that does not exist. And sure enough, there's a red squiggly under it. You're like, okay. And I'm like, so copilot. Actually, as it turns out, that doesn't exist. That's not okay. I see the problem. The problem is you added the close method to this, and that's incorrect. We'll just. The solution is. Take it out. I'm like, okay, so I still need this thing to work, and this is what it says to me. Sorry, you're out of your free AI credits for the month.

Richard Campbell (18:05)

Nice.

Paul Thurrott (18:06)

Come back. I'm like, no, you spent my AI credits. You were wrong repeatedly on the same thing. And now I don't get to do this anymore. So that's a new little wrinkle. You know, that was a fun thing. I'm not paying for it. I mean, maybe I shouldn't complain, but.

Leo Laporte (18:23)

Just, you know, loosen up the wallet, Mr. T. Come on.

Paul Thurrott (18:27)

Listen, if I thought throwing 100 bucks that this thing would solve this problem, I would do it, but I have no.

Leo Laporte (18:32)

I pay 20 to almost everybody. You know, I have the.

Richard Campbell (18:34)

You know.

Paul Thurrott (18:35)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (18:35)

Basic plan for everybody. And I. Claude does plenty for me. I mean, I spent a whole day cleaning up my.

Paul Thurrott (18:43)

It's been a while since I've experimented with other. I mean, you could do this in GitHub. You can actually choose the model. I mean, you could do that, but. But I couldn't do that because I used all my credits.

Leo Laporte (18:52)

Anyway, so Codex now this Google announced.

Paul Thurrott (18:55)

At the same time cursor has been gotten a bunch of updates. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (18:59)

And the anti gravity is the new.

Paul Thurrott (19:00)

One from which, by the way, did anyone else catch the. Does that remind. Does any gravity remind anyone of anything? A little bit. Because that looks a little bit like Ag. First time I started like, oh, Ag. I was like, oh, that's interesting.

Leo Laporte (19:15)

Somebody theorized that they just want to take over the Google searches for antitrust.

Paul Thurrott (19:20)

Nice. That's just as likely as my start typing anti. Yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (19:27)

Are you looking for anti Gravity?

Paul Thurrott (19:29)

Yeah, sure. Yeah. I need a developer editor. That's actually just Visual Studio code, but that's fine.

Leo Laporte (19:34)

I'm still for everything everybody else is doing. Claude, code still rings.

Paul Thurrott (19:38)

Yeah. I should go look at that again. Although I feel like. Like I am using cloud in.

Leo Laporte (19:45)

Well, it's cli. It's Command line. Right. So you really. I don't know if Windows is the right place to use it. It's more for a, you know, real computer.

Paul Thurrott (19:52)

Leo, I don't know if you know this, but Windows is multimodal when it comes to user interfaces.

Leo Laporte (19:58)

I'm sorry, I couldn't resist.

Richard Campbell (20:00)

I got my powershell right here. I used.

Paul Thurrott (20:02)

No, we're gonna. This is gonna go.

Richard Campbell (20:05)

But.

Leo Laporte (20:06)

Because it's command line. But it's. I just. Boy, I'm just. To me, when people say, oh, AI is hyped, or, AI is not going anywhere or it's not useful, or blah, blah, blah. Yeah, these chatbots are dopey. I agree. And who cares if it can make music or make images or make video? That's a nice demo. But, boy, it can write code like nobody's business.

Paul Thurrott (20:26)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (20:26)

And that's. But you have to know what you're doing.

Richard Campbell (20:30)

Code is correct. It's a separate, entirely separate issue.

Paul Thurrott (20:32)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (20:32)

In my experience, you have to know what you're doing. You have to use the plan. You have to. You can't just say.

Paul Thurrott (20:38)

Well, you also listen, if you're using TypeScript or JavaScript, if you're using anything like a C Sharp type thing, knows that that stuff is so well documented. And there's so much example code. There's so many examples on Stack overflow or wherever else of people helping other people solve problems, like, you're going to be all set for the rest of your life.

Leo Laporte (20:59)

Well, and that's true, by the way, believe it or not, for Common Lisp and Emacs.

Paul Thurrott (21:03)

Yeah. But they've been around for 100 years. Yeah, they've been the same for a long time. You know, it's good. That's good. The thing I'm using is terrible and it's never going to work, and I'm. I hate myself. Okay, so anyway, so what are you.

Leo Laporte (21:16)

What are you trying to. Is it. Is it your. Your notepad?

Paul Thurrott (21:20)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (21:22)

I'VE rewritten, have a lot of dot net code.

Paul Thurrott (21:25)

Yeah, look, this is the whole conversation here. I mean it's, there's all this stuff that was possible in WPF that's not possible. And what is that basically? And by not possible I don't mean it's more difficult. I mean it's just not possible in some cases. And there are like helper functions in WPF for things like parsing where the text cursor is in a text box, where they do not exist in wpf. And so WPF has been open source. I can see the source code for those methods. I can go take a look at it and I can try to figure it out. But you know, who has the time anyway? I hate this environment so much and it's perfect for me. So.

Leo Laporte (22:01)

You know, common lisp and emacs are waiting for you, Paul.

Paul Thurrott (22:04)

They've been here for 50 years. It's kind of a gooey app.

Richard Campbell (22:07)

But yeah, if you're going to have fear loathing about software, should at least be old school software.

Paul Thurrott (22:12)

Well, yeah, yeah.

Leo Laporte (22:14)

If you search X for Gemini 3 one shot, you're just going to get example after example of kind of amazing stuff. Not that I recommend.

Paul Thurrott (22:26)

In the announcement they had like here's a eight bit video game. We just created like a single sentence prompt. You're like, this is, it's pretty good.

Leo Laporte (22:33)

I think we're, we're in uncharted territories making things up as we go along. Wait a minute, that sounds familiar. As most of AI does. It's not original.

Paul Thurrott (22:43)

It's perfect.

Richard Campbell (22:45)

I've been talking to a bunch of different shops that are, that are having failing AI apps. A bunch of them. And it reminds me of mobile development in 2009 where everybody was making a mobile app and they were.

Paul Thurrott (22:58)

All the tools were not there yet. The tools were terrible, the plans were.

Richard Campbell (23:02)

Terrible, the app ideas were terrible, everything was terrible.

Paul Thurrott (23:06)

This is I is maybe a bigger. This is something that maybe needs to get more attention. But you know, you've seen the Simpsons episode where he builds a grill and he holds it up, he holds up that. You don't realize it at the time, but he's holding a picture of the box, just oh, it's beautiful. And then he blows the box and his is tangled mess. He's like, why doesn't mine look like that? And that's what AI roll out in enterprise.

Leo Laporte (23:25)

So many times I've done that.

Paul Thurrott (23:27)

Yeah, there you go. Perfect.

Leo Laporte (23:29)

Most humiliating experience of the year. I. My wife ordered a wine rack that came in pieces.

Paul Thurrott (23:37)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (23:38)

And I assembled it and I was trying really hard to assemble before she came home. I wanted to surprise her and she came home. It's got a listing like this, right?

Paul Thurrott (23:47)

Like I put it together.

Leo Laporte (23:50)

Just like Homer Simpson.

Paul Thurrott (23:51)

I would even put this on the.

Leo Laporte (23:53)

Shelf, you know, we're calling Joe Joe. My brother in law comes over with his impact screwdriver and his leg.

Paul Thurrott (24:00)

Short work of it.

Leo Laporte (24:02)

It's rock solid, square poses for a.

Paul Thurrott (24:05)

Calendar and then takes off. Pretty much, yeah. Nice.

Leo Laporte (24:07)

The brother in law built it. He's the one, by the way I give the Irish whiskey to. He earned another red breast.

Richard Campbell (24:16)

So I got an Irish tree today. You're not going to give him because I don't really like him.

Leo Laporte (24:21)

Okay, thank you.

Paul Thurrott (24:22)

Anyway, whether you're a person or a company, I think you see all these success stories. You're like, okay, we're going to do this thing.

Richard Campbell (24:28)

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (24:28)

And then you have the Homer Simpson experience where you're like, I don't.

Leo Laporte (24:31)

It doesn't work that way for me.

Richard Campbell (24:33)

Turns out they take certain levels of skill.

Paul Thurrott (24:36)

Yeah.

Richard Campbell (24:36)

And we are, you know, now we're doing that very famous thing we do where we're rebuilding the platform while rebuilding the tools, while rebuilding the, the development methodology while redefining the application.

Leo Laporte (24:47)

Well, and it's not, it's so different from any way you've done it before. You know, I mean, it's, it's like having, I think people have often said it's like having an intern or a junior dev working for you. So you got to really be clear what you want and you can't do it without knowing how to code. I think, I think you have to be able to look at the code.

Richard Campbell (25:06)

And see what it is you have to monitor.

Paul Thurrott (25:07)

Well, you absolutely do. Because even if you don't explain it clearly, like if the thing it puts out is not right in some way, like this code I was describing, you need to understand why it's, you know, maybe how you can get to fixing it. So, yes, I mean, I agree with that.

Leo Laporte (25:23)

There are lots, though of blogs online if people go out and read. And we had Harper read on a few times. He's very good with Claude. Here's a post from Check Eagle, Nick Ratcliffe, who talks about. And this is exactly the problem, he says, Claude really wants to write code. More than anything, it wants to write code. You have to stop it and say, no, do not write code yet.

Paul Thurrott (25:49)

Oh, I could break cloud of this little habit. I'll just show it some Windows app SDK. And it will never want to write code again.

Leo Laporte (25:55)

Yeah, just. You have to break. You have to say no, no, no. Before you write any code, we have to plan it.

Paul Thurrott (26:02)

So this is like the girls just want to have fun, but Claude just.

Leo Laporte (26:05)

Wants to write code. And I thought that was a. Kind of a good insight too. I think if you're really interested in this, there's a lot of developers are great. They're. They're sharing their experiences.

Paul Thurrott (26:17)

Developers are the worst. Leo. I don't know.

Leo Laporte (26:19)

Okay.

Paul Thurrott (26:19)

They're horrible. No, I'm just kidding. I don't know where that came from.

Leo Laporte (26:24)

No, but there. But I think there's a. Definitely a community of sharing of how you do this better and.

Paul Thurrott (26:29)

Well, it's because every one of them needs help with something.

Leo Laporte (26:31)

Right.

Paul Thurrott (26:32)

So you're all interacting and get. Yes, of course.

Leo Laporte (26:35)

Really true.

Richard Campbell (26:35)

We do come from a culture of hobbyists that shared and.

Paul Thurrott (26:39)

Yeah, do it yourselfers, etc.

Richard Campbell (26:41)

Exactly.

Leo Laporte (26:41)

Thank goodness. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (26:45)

I don't know what to do with this ignite stuff. It's like so just a bunch of announcements. Right. So Microsoft partnering with Anthropic. So the circle is now complete. Every AI company is now connected to every AI company.

Richard Campbell (26:54)

I guess so we all go down together.

Leo Laporte (26:57)

Is that because they're all in the same lifeboat?

Paul Thurrott (26:59)

My cynical rationale for this, because I really feel that this agreement we're seeing in this small slice of the industry where everything has to be standardized and we're all doing the same thing is literally tied to jamming this down our throats while we're not going to be regulated and making it happen as quickly as possible.

Leo Laporte (27:16)

And historically, isn't this the case that in the early days of like the Internet, people agreed on standards because it was early and we all had to help each other. But as soon as that early stage went by, then it was like dog eat dog, like Amazon's going to beat everybody else. There's, you know, CS is going to they. But in the early days of any of this technology, people understand.

Paul Thurrott (27:40)

Yeah, but it's AI is so big and it's so accelerated that we're seeing it happen in real time. It has never happened before. Like it's just so big. Yeah. Yep. So, yeah, I mean I listen in the past there would think about like smart home technology, right. We have like matter now finally, which is starting to get there, Zigbee, all these different standards. Right. And then we have the major platforms, you know, from Apple, Google, Amazon and even Samsung or whatever, and you go buy like a smart light from like Ikea. And it's like, does this work with the Apple thing? No, but it works at Google. But it might work with Amazon if you have this hub. Whatever. And so we're finally sort of getting there. Although, by the way, you can't buy an Amazon speaker and use it in a Google home or buy an Apple speaker and you know, whatever. Like there's still that stuff. They're still terrible. But as far as like there being standards that took a long time and then it took longer still to get them. Right.

Richard Campbell (28:31)

Right.

Paul Thurrott (28:31)

I think matter today is finally getting there.

Richard Campbell (28:35)

Yeah. Now we fix this with Home Assistant.

Paul Thurrott (28:37)

But this is happening in the reverse order and much faster with weird. It's. It's. I don't really think this has ever happened. Not like this.

Richard Campbell (28:45)

It's just, just a lot of quite shocking.

Leo Laporte (28:47)

A lot of people use Ollama as their open source coding tool. And all of a sudden people are complaining about Llama being Ollama being shittified because they're now moving to the cloud and they have a paid cloud model that's fairly expensive sellouts. And people are saying, wait, what?

Paul Thurrott (29:06)

Who's whipping the Llama's ass now?

Leo Laporte (29:08)

It's not open. This is. And of course they're based on Llama cpp. So a lot of people are just saying, you know, just, you don't, you don't need Olama anymore. But this is what happens. People need to make money because this is an expensive hobby.

Richard Campbell (29:22)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (29:23)

Can I take a break and we'll go on. There's lots more for McKnight and I know lots more AI stuff, but we're half an hour in now and I don't want to, I don't want to let this get away from us. We got to get to the.

Paul Thurrott (29:33)

Oh, it's getting away from us.

Richard Campbell (29:35)

I mean, let's be honest, there's a.

Leo Laporte (29:37)

Lot of ignite news. A lot. All right, well, let me just. A little short break. This episode of Windows Weekly brought to you by Vention. And it's kind of timely because it's our good friends. I talked to Glenn from Vention few maybe a couple of months ago now and was so impressed with what Vention is doing. Because if you're trying to incorporate AI into your team, you probably experienced it. It often makes the job harder, more difficult, like we were just talking about. But Vention is here to help. They have 20 years. First of all, they're engineers first, they're developers. 20 years of global engineering expertise. So they come to this. You Know they're not, oh, hey, we got to get in the hot new thing, they are here for you. But they, they realize now this was a pain point for businesses. So they're building AI enabled engineering teams with the focus though on making software development faster, cleaner and calmer because they understand that's really what you need. Clients typically see at least a 15% boost in efficiency. And we're not talking through hype, but real engineering discipline, the stuff, you know, that got us here in the first place. The other thing that Avention does, which I really, I think for a lot of people want to recommend, is their AI workshops. They're not just a lecture, they are an interactive workshop that helps your team find practical, safe ways to use AI across delivery, across Q and A. It's, it's a great way to start with Vention and meet them and test their expertise and get your team kind of all on the same page thinking about how to use AI properly. With Vention, whether you're a cto, a tech lead, a product owner, you're not going to have to spend weeks figuring out tools, architectures or models. They know they've done all the work. They help you assess your AI readiness. Vention will help you clarify your goals. And like we were saying before, planning is really the most important part of this whole thing. They'll help you with this and then they'll outline the steps to get you there without the headaches because they have the experience, they've been there, they know and you know. So that's the workshop. If you do need help on the engineering front, meet them, do the workshop first. Because then once you get these guys really know what they're talking about. And if you then need help on the engineering front, they've, they've got teams ready to jump in. They could either be your development partner, they can be a consulting partner, you get to choose how you enter Interact. This is the best step to take after your proof of concept. You know, you, I mean how many of you've probably been in this situation, you've built this incredible prototype, this mvp kind of maybe you've been using lovable, you've been, you've been vibe coding it thing runs in tests. But now what's next? Do you ship it? Do you open a dozen AI specific roles just to keep moving. I got a suggestion. Bring in a partner who has already done this across industries. Someone who can expand your idea into a full scale product without disrupting your systems or getting in the way of your team. Because Vention is all about partnering. Vention is real people with real expertise and real results. They're here for you. Learn more@ventionteams.com see how your team can build smarter, faster with a lot more peace of mind. Or get started today with the AI workshop at ventionteams.com twit v e n t I o n teams.com twit I wanted to get the Vention mention in because this is that pain point. Everybody's saying, well this looks good, but how do we make it real? All Right. Still more AI news from Ignite. Was it all, all AI all the time?

Paul Thurrott (33:31)

Yes. Well, not 100% but 99 point something.

Richard Campbell (33:35)

I mean it has been for the past two years, right?

Paul Thurrott (33:37)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (33:37)

But also people are starting. I've been seeing a number of memes of people saying Microsoft's turning Windows into, you know.

Paul Thurrott (33:44)

Yeah, we're going to get to that. Okay, we're definitely hitting on.

Leo Laporte (33:47)

Save that. Okay, what else?

Paul Thurrott (33:49)

So if you think back to two and a half years ago, Microsoft did their kind of push. At some point they transitioned to the Copilot name, which we all agreed was perfect. I believe the first paid product they announced was what we now call Microsoft 365 copilot. So this is this add on subscription for businesses. If you have some level of the normal Microsoft 365 subscription, you can add this to it.

Richard Campbell (34:16)

But it's 20 bucks ahead.

Paul Thurrott (34:17)

Yeah, yeah, 30 bucks a pop over on the maybe 20ish or more maybe you know you're spending on the other one.

Richard Campbell (34:23)

Started at 20 became 30.

Paul Thurrott (34:24)

But yeah, so things have shifted a little bit since then. And I'm going to take this for the good sign that I believe it is. But as, and this is part of the announcements from the show, but you can get now Copilot Chat inside of the Microsoft 365 apps for free. It's kind of a light version of Copilot that is only grounded in web data. It doesn't work with your own stuff. The management is not particularly there in any way. But you can do that. You can add. They announced also agents for the the major Microsoft 365 apps, you know, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc. But they now have a new offering that's called Microsoft 365 Copilot Business. So there's Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat Copilot, which is the 30 buck per month one and now for 21 per month. If you have a business that has fewer than 300 users they're actually lowering the cost. And this will work actually exactly the same way as the, the big copilot, you know, the expensive one, it's just, you know, limited to small businesses. So, you know, you still have to have Microsoft 365 subscription, but it works with Business Basic, which I think is the. It's probably the cheapest one you can get that has the apps. I think I can't. Or maybe I'm thinking of Business Standard. But it does go down to Business Basic. You don't have to have really, you know, expensive360.365 subscription as well. So that's, that's kind of a nice step forward. Agents, I mentioned we have so many agents now that we need a service to manage those agents. And you will not be surprised to discover that that service is called Agent365. Of course it is.

Richard Campbell (36:07)

As in I have 365 agents, but I don't know what any of them.

Paul Thurrott (36:10)

Yeah, Exactly. It's like 365 agents and not a single task has come back completed. You know, like what's going on here? And then on the Windows 11 front, a couple things. You know, Mike, like I think I mentioned passing, but in May at Build they mentioned that MCP would be available or is coming to Windows as kind of a native feature. This is what's needed for AI agents to. I think of it as program. Programically, programmatically, sorry, interact with apps. But it's the interface where the agent can interact with apps or services. Right. In Windows is now available in public preview, by the way. Two years ago at Bill or a year and a Half ago at Build 2024, Microsoft announced something called the Windows Copilot runtime. This past build, I believe it was called the Windows AI Foundry, I think. And now it's the Microsoft Foundry because we're going to keep changing it. I believe I think I got that one right.

Richard Campbell (37:15)

What's upon upon it was Windows Azure and then it became Microsoft Azure.

Paul Thurrott (37:18)

Yes. And that shows you how fast AI moves because they've changed the name of this thing like three times in 18 months. But that's fine. The more, I don't know, controversial, but this kind of heads into the conversation. We're going to have a little while about Windows 11. But Microsoft and I would say Pavan Davalori specifically have been talking about transitioning Windows into an agenic os. Right. So unfortunately in the language people are using, sometimes it's a little too marketing. It's like, you know, like the use of Medi will say things like, we've completely rewritten Windows from the ground up. No, you haven't.

Richard Campbell (37:56)

Why would you say that? And then I'm sure the engineers didn't say that, I expect. Nope.

Paul Thurrott (38:00)

But you know that I. So some audience. That sounds good. And to people who know how things work, it sounds like you're lying. You know, it's like, no, you didn't. Like, you know you didn't.

Richard Campbell (38:10)

But you know you didn't.

Paul Thurrott (38:11)

You didn't. So anyway, we're gonna have AI agents in Windows. Of course. I mean, of course we are, right? And I guess they did a. I missed it. I. The time was actually my time. I thought it was a. I thought it was on a. Like the actual time of the place, you know where they are in San Francisco. And it wasn't. So I missed it. I'll watch it on recap. But there is a session at buildup was at 11am my time this morning. So it's look past but where they actually showed this off apparently. So I'm kind of eager to look at this, but if you are following Windows 11 and how it's evolving, you know that that little search box thing down there is going to turn into. Well, depending on who you are, you might already have this. It's turning into like the kind of new copilot interaction point. So depending on what you type in there, it's either going to launch copilot or launch the search. You know, if you're looking for a file or doing a web search, whatever it might be. But they're talking about AI agents kind of living in the taskbar, which is freaking people out.

Richard Campbell (39:12)

I just think there's enough rage about anything called AI at this particular moment that the folks living in the bubble and Havana is one of them, just stepped in it. It's like, hey, we're all tired of this.

Paul Thurrott (39:26)

So you're right. I'm going to suggest that there are two bubbles and the other bubble is the like you and I who are middle aged or above, been around for a while, seen it all. We see this for the nonsense. And you get the people in this audience who are like, nobody wants to talk to the computer. Nobody. Or nobody asks for this crap, Nobody. Or you know, blah, blah, blah, whatever. And then look, you can. There's an easy sort of digression or sidestep you can make around this by saying something like, you know, I wouldn't mind if you did this. If you just made Windows reliable and secure and everything worked and there Weren't ads everywhere and like all that stuff and you're like, that's cute, but that's not happening. But those two things should both happen, right? Or could both happen. You know, I had someone reach out to me. Well, many, many people did have about this topic, but one guy said something like, oh, I'm sure this is what all Windows users are clamoring for or something. And I'm like, like, well, I mean I appreciate the fact that this thing is 40 years old. They're still trying to, they're trying to modernize it. If it doesn't make this transition, it's probably not coming along for the ride. Like that's how they see it. And we can sort of argue and debate the, the marketing of AI and the efficacy of what they have and blah, blah, blah, whatever. I mean I'm, I'm interested in seeing what this looks like really. But this thing is either going to advance, progress, evolve, however you want to say it, or it isn't. And they have decided it is. And so I don't know, I just, the, the problem I have is like people get very specific, you know, like keep your hands off my notepad kind of a thing. It's like somehow Notepad was perfect in 1996 and we should never touch it. And I'll tell you, I use notepad every day.

Leo Laporte (41:15)

Mary Joe Foley by nature.

Paul Thurrott (41:18)

Well, yeah, I mean, yes, but also, but there's a lot of people like her people her age. People my. Our age. That's what I mean. Like this audience. It's like, it's weird to me that we as professionals, somehow when we were at our peak forum, that's when all software was perfect and now we don't touch it anymore. And it's like, I don't know, like when you were 27 years old you'd be excited by this. But all I can say to those two apps in particular Paint Notepad, is those are actually demonstrably better than they've ever been. Those apps are fantastic. So it can work. It doesn't mean I go in and co create with pain every day. I don't ever actually. But it doesn't bother me that it's there. I mean, geez, like have a little empathy, you know.

Richard Campbell (42:01)

We're gonna get your Paint MVP with that attitude.

Paul Thurrott (42:03)

Paul. Yes, I'm shooting for it, but.

Leo Laporte (42:08)

No.

Paul Thurrott (42:08)

So yeah, so before Ignite there were a couple things that kind of just got into onto my nerves a little bit sort of in this space. One is Dave Plummer, who I Like former Microsoft engineer. Everyone knows that because he talks about.

Richard Campbell (42:25)

Watch his stuff.

Paul Thurrott (42:26)

I watch. I watch every video he makes. Yep. And he made a video about how Windows sucks. And so.

Richard Campbell (42:34)

Clickbait.

Paul Thurrott (42:35)

Yep. And it was 20 minutes of nothing. It was nothing. And my problem with it was not him. I like him. He's smart. Whatever I like is I'm interested in him. But he's not helping anyone. There's. He doesn't have any advice for anybody. He doesn't have any ideas about how you could do things. It's. If I were running Microsoft, I would put a power user switch in so everyone could turn off all the crap. It's like, yeah, that's cute. Yeah, that's not happening. So that's stupid. But how about actually, buddy. No, I mean, it's just like. But at worst, that's just noise, right? Yeah, it's not helpful. It's whatever. You might be interested in the topic. So you listen and you're wrong.

Richard Campbell (43:12)

At best, it's just noise. The reality is that it stops people from actually making things better, which you can do.

Paul Thurrott (43:19)

No, it's like, I just wish Microsoft. You listen to Dave and it's like, yo, guys, stop. I've been talking about this for years, for crying out loud. Like, decades. I have created, like, a Windows 11 and certification checklist, and these are the things. And every time I evaluate any software that fixes some of these problems, I see how well it does against the checklist. And, you know, we'll talk about that again, actually, at the end of the show. But I am trying to solve the problem, like, for people, like, actually solve it. Right. Like, the world is the way it is. Like, how can we fix it? I have some ideas there, but whatever. So there's that. Not a big deal. Like, I wouldn't have probably written about that, but, you know, Davon Pavan Davalori, rather about a week ago, 10 days ago, just innocuous little promotional thing I'm going to be at.

Richard Campbell (44:00)

Really his first message since he has reunified Windows and kind of taken the space over. It's like, all right, but we understand for you. Go ahead. Come step out in the minefield, boys. Let's go.

Paul Thurrott (44:10)

I don't think he wrote it. I don't. I think he has handlers. I think some marketing person wrote it. So all it was was, I'm going to be at Ignite and I'm going to appear in this session. But it repeated the one and a half sentences of we're turning into a, you know, Windows into an agency os. Come along for the, you know, come see what we're doing and scare people. I have to say, this guy was. Well, who saw. Who, who, who saw him tweet anything? Who is this guy? Nobody knows who he is. He runs Windows. I know who he is.

Leo Laporte (44:40)

But he's the boss, right?

Richard Campbell (44:41)

Yeah, but he's a new boss.

Paul Thurrott (44:43)

First of all, I don't know him personally or anything like that, but what I've seen him seems like a well spoken, nice guy, smart, you know, obviously he works for this big company and they have whatever strategic aims they have and all this kind of stuff, but I like that he's an engineer and we'll see. You know, I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, but the sheer weight of crap that fell on this guy, personal attacks, threats, a lot of people's apparently speaking for the planet, you know, like guys who don't know anything about anything or like nobody wants this. Nobody, nobody asked for this. And it's like, yeah, that's what they said to Steve Jobs. He made an iPhone. Look, I'm not saying that what they're doing right now here exactly, or what they're going to do in long term I, is any good. I have no idea. But the, the reaction to this is the same reaction that I see on a smaller scale because I don't run Windows. But, but in my own, like anytime there's anything like, you know, well, the little announcement about, you know, we're going to be talking to our computers in addition to touch and type and pen and all the other ways we can interact with computers. Nobody wants to talk to computers. Like, okay, maybe you don't want to talk to your computer. Yeah, but I actually talk to things all the time. And honestly I feel like I can babble out instructions to something a lot better than I could and type exact prompts and things. Like, I actually think the talking to your computer thing is going to be a thing. I'm sorry, but like, I know that.

Richard Campbell (46:05)

Won'T be the only thing, but it is a thing.

Paul Thurrott (46:08)

It will be a thing. So look, we'll see. But the, the sheer amount of hate and terribleness that this guy received from us, us, I mean, literally me and people like me. It made me so sad. There is no call for that. And I look until he proves otherwise and we find out he is a terrible person and he is evil and he's been doing things from the inside to undermine Windows or something, which by the way has happened, then we can have A discussion about that stuff, but attacking the sky and really technical people who apparently speak for the masses. When your needs and wants are 1% of 1% of what people do with Windows. Like I. You do not speak for us. Like I. It freaked me out how awful this was. So the only thing I just. To conclude this, I don't want to go on too long because I could literally go hours on this topic. Those. A lot of threats. This. This is why I'm leaving Windows. This is why I already left Windows. This is why I, you know, whatever. Leave, then. Leave. We're better off without you. I. You. You are just noise. You are just noise. If you have something constructive you'd like to say about this, if you've actually. You don't even know what it is yet, so you can't even say anything quite yet. But it's just. It makes me really sad that we've gotten this change of verse, this myopic, this insular, this. Everything was great. Pick your time frame. And it. Because it wasn't. It was never great. There were always problems.

Richard Campbell (47:48)

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (47:49)

So we'll see. Will this be Windows 8 again? I don't know. You don't know either? You know, we'll see. But I. The way people attacked him, you know.

Richard Campbell (47:59)

But let's be clear. You know how you get a Windows 8? By not talking to anybody about what you're doing, by not showing anyone what you're doing. The fact that this guy came out with this is what we're planning on doing and effectively elicited feedback. But he is a better.

Paul Thurrott (48:16)

But let me. Okay, so let me just put that in context, because the. The initial tweet that he made was nothing. It was just an anonymous. There was not a single new word of anything in it. It was one and a half sentences I'm gonna be able to ignite. Here's my session. He did reply to one guy in that thread. That was a huge mistake. Rookie error. And it was thoughtful. It was. It was pretty long. He offered to have this interaction with him. It's like, if you want to be constructive and help, we're listening. We actually do care about this kind of feedback. And he just. 1.5 million views later, just more crap. There wasn't. No one. No one replied to that with, oh, well, that's. That's very professional of you. Thank you for, you know, thank you for jumping in. You know, there were people who do what I do that wrote headlines and stories about how terrible he is and how terrible that response was. And that response, I challenge you to go read it is actually polite, thoughtful and respectful. I again, I don't know him, I'm not his friend or anything like that. But I don't understand the sheer vitriol over this stuff is. Yes, to Richard's point. I think the first thing I think you said on this topic, Richard, was this AI fatigue occurring here. There's been a lot of hype and in our space, I would say, whether it's it or just personal computing and we're using our Windows machine, whatever. Yeah, there's all this certification. I can't say that I'm using it day to day for anything really, anywhere. When is the hype gonna match or when is the reality gonna match the hype? I don't know. Fair, but and true. And, but, but we're gonna go after this guy like this. I mean really. And, and it's like, listen, I hope you pay attention all these responses in here because it's all negative. It's like, of course it's Twitter. Twitter is a Nazi. A Nazi hellscape. Of course it's all negative. Everyone there is terrible. No one, no one is ever going to show up there and defend this guy. It's not a conversation, it's bullying and.

Leo Laporte (50:13)

It'S, this is social media. That's the thing. Isn't that the real issue?

Paul Thurrott (50:17)

It's awful.

Leo Laporte (50:18)

Also, it's the worst I've given up on social media. It's always the worst. You know, and the link made on YouTube that you just talked about earlier, this is kind of all side effects of this.

Paul Thurrott (50:30)

The thing is I don't mind a guy like Dave Plummer making videos and doing his shtick. And I, and I don't, it's. I like, I just, I like it. I like a lot of his videos, his interviews, Raymond Chen and Dave Cutler, among some of the most interesting conversations I've ever heard and have re listened to both of those, by the way. That's, that's a minor issue. You know, this is, this is, this was like a triggering thing for me because I see this everywhere in my space when anything is announced. Like we need a term for this, right? Like imagine micro. I'll just make something up. Microsoft improved Outlook with the new Outlook, which everyone hates. The new Outlook now supports whatever it is. Well, what are they gonna do?

Leo Laporte (51:17)

It's always like this knee jerk reaction is, is being amplified by social media. I think it's, you're giving it outsize weight. It's just a bunch of people on Twitter who the hell cares?

Paul Thurrott (51:27)

The problem is it's my people on Twitter. No, I mean that these are guys who are right in that little Venn diagram of Windows enthusiast developer IT and they apparently follow this guy on social media for some reason to crap on him. Was that your point? Because if that's what you're doing social.

Leo Laporte (51:49)

Media, it shouldn't be. I agree. But this is what we've, this is what we've wrought.

Paul Thurrott (51:54)

And I know, I don't like this is the crap of the world getting into MySpace. Not MySpace, the service that meta killed the, the my community. I don't like to see people like me behaving this badly. It's terrible, it's awful. I hate it. Like I, it really freaks me out.

Leo Laporte (52:16)

This is what these social networks encourages. Quick knee jerk hot takes.

Paul Thurrott (52:22)

Look, I don't want to be like Apple. I don't want to be a sycophant. I don't want everything they do to be amazing. Every time they see they nailed it, you know, and then it's only after the fact where like they change something and now they're like oh yeah, this was crappy for 5 years but now you know, like they got it right again, you know? And you're like okay, so I guess they're magic or something. They're like a unicorn, sparkles everywhere. It's nice. But I, but I also don't. We don't have to just knee jerk hate everything that Microsoft does, right? Can we just evaluate this objectively? You know, could there be some thought, could there be some experience to your opinion or something in this space? Anything.

Leo Laporte (52:58)

Don't you think the vast majority of users are more level headed that.

Paul Thurrott (53:03)

Yeah, I do. That's. That was kind of my point. These people represent less than 1% of the world, you know? Exactly.

Leo Laporte (53:10)

So don't. They're also, they're just, you know, they're just.

Paul Thurrott (53:14)

Look, this is not the type of thing I would normally focus on but I, the thing is I see this is the feedback he got is the feedback I get. I didn't write the product right. When I defend Microsoft requiring a Microsoft account for individuals in sign into Windows 11. When I defend recall because I look, not because I want it, because I never use it myself, but I evaluate the thing. I'm like, this thing is secure, it's well done, it's well designed. There are people who might benefit from it. There are people who hate that stuff so much, they don't just don't want to use it, they don't Even acknowledge you can just turn it off. They don't want anyone to have it. They just want to ruin it for everybody. And I'm sorry, but that's just not. That's not good feedback. That's not. Your head is in the wrong place. It's just terrible. I. Look agents in the taskbar. I don't want anything in this. I don't want to see the taskbar. But I. I'm not going to write a vitriolic personal attack on the guy that runs Windows because we're putting some stupid feature in Windows like. Right.

Leo Laporte (54:19)

It's premature. We don't know what's going to happen.

Richard Campbell (54:21)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (54:22)

And you know what? There's plenty of time to abandon Windows. And yes, there's no hurry.

Paul Thurrott (54:29)

Just take Leo. I would just counter that with this. Plenty of time to fix Windows. Us too. And that's what I'm here. That's what I do.

Richard Campbell (54:33)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (54:34)

No, keep using it till it doesn't serve you like anything.

Richard Campbell (54:37)

Right. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (54:38)

Right.

Richard Campbell (54:38)

And by the way, maybe he will start working on some of these issues that people have, you know?

Leo Laporte (54:43)

Well, that. In that. So in that respect, it is good for people to have a feedback mechanism.

Paul Thurrott (54:47)

They just.

Leo Laporte (54:48)

As long as you don't overweight the product.

Paul Thurrott (54:50)

It's like, what?

Leo Laporte (54:52)

I don't know.

Richard Campbell (54:52)

Right.

Leo Laporte (54:52)

But I think you can overweight the stuff that really incentivizes hot takes. And I include YouTube.

Richard Campbell (54:59)

I hope that that toxic spew that came out of that tweet doesn't put it off from putting anything else.

Leo Laporte (55:04)

Right, right.

Paul Thurrott (55:06)

It makes me never want to leave and look at Twitter again, you know?

Richard Campbell (55:09)

Yeah. This is true for Twitter for quite a while now.

Paul Thurrott (55:13)

Fair enough. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (55:14)

I mean, sure, it was the same reaction. Maybe that's a real issue just on.

Richard Campbell (55:18)

Don't post that on Twitter.

Paul Thurrott (55:20)

Oh, I, I didn't. I. It. It blew up because of what happened on Twitter. I have no idea. Honestly.

Leo Laporte (55:27)

People are close to me often say, oh my God, I posted something on Twitter and I can't believe all the hate I got. And I said, what are you posting on Twitter for? What's wrong with you?

Paul Thurrott (55:37)

Well, it is the outlet for hate. I mean, it's what you're gonna get.

Leo Laporte (55:40)

No matter what you say.

Paul Thurrott (55:41)

Basically. Yeah. So look, there's a grass is always greener effect going on here. It's like this already said, like, Linux is right here. It's like, yeah, great, my mother will have no problem running Linux or even me. I know my way around a computer a little bit. You know, I had to do something that. I brought a MacBook Air. I've never even touched it. Basically, I just opened it the other day to just install like the latest beta update or whatever, and I'm tooling around with it for a few minutes. It didn't take me 30 seconds to be like, yeah, no, I hate the Mac so much. Like, I just hate it. And I, I just, I like, yeah, I know it's there, you know, whatever. But no, I'd rather fix the thing. I like, yeah, that's fair. You know, whatever.

Leo Laporte (56:24)

I do worry that Microsoft might be going down a road that.

Richard Campbell (56:30)

I don't disagree. But you know what was worse? Not going anywhere.

Paul Thurrott (56:33)

Not going anywhere.

Leo Laporte (56:34)

Right.

Paul Thurrott (56:34)

You got to remember, this is a company that missed various waves. Right. Or lost, you know, in mobile, whatever. So that's true. The fact that, look, I will say this. Maybe this is the more, I don't know, positive whatever way to frame this is. I had a sort of a crisis of faith when Microsoft was all in on just cloud computing. That was the whole point. That was the Satya Nadella thing. And there's nothing wrong with that. Obviously, the company exploded in value. It's, you know, humongous. But making Windows make sense in that world, that was too much. It was just. It's how we got Windows as a service.

Richard Campbell (57:08)

It's how I think it's. I also feel like it needed to be shunted aside because it had been the focus of the company for so long that even getting a little love was problematic. You really needed to convince the folks that were there. It's like, listen, you're not the center of the company anymore.

Paul Thurrott (57:26)

Oh, everyone knew that in the company. That was part of the problem. The best guys were all on Azure by that point or whatever.

Richard Campbell (57:32)

Yeah. Although there's a ton of old school Windows folks that have stayed right there. Right. Like, that's also true.

Paul Thurrott (57:37)

Yeah, there are some.

Richard Campbell (57:39)

I feel like pavan's reunification of the teams and so forth is literally. They're pulling Windows out of Siberia. There's any chance to actually get it fixed. This.

Paul Thurrott (57:49)

I hope, I hope you're right. But this guy who is in charge of Windows and Surface is in charge of Siberia. So I don't know how much he.

Richard Campbell (57:59)

Was brought in to drag it out of Siberia.

Leo Laporte (58:00)

Right.

Paul Thurrott (58:01)

I mean, you could be right. But I guess my only point here is just that cloud computing was a tough match for Windows. You know, AI is not, you know, when you talk about things like orchestration and agents and background processes.

Richard Campbell (58:14)

Well, to be clear, tooling Right, Yep.

Paul Thurrott (58:17)

This is going to occur in the os. And like, I'm sorry, but like this, this actually whether what they do makes sense. Meaning the literal implementation. Well, that we will debate.

Richard Campbell (58:27)

Making good tools is different.

Paul Thurrott (58:28)

That's. But, but at least this is a place where this needs to be.

Richard Campbell (58:33)

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (58:34)

Yes. Yes. Right.

Richard Campbell (58:37)

So are we going to wait for Apple to make an agent take os?

Paul Thurrott (58:41)

I'm not going to be in this industry that long, so, no, I don't have it. It's just not. I mean, we'll see.

Richard Campbell (58:49)

I don't know if we're smart. They're going to watch what Microsoft does and not make the same mistakes that are about to happen.

Leo Laporte (58:56)

Which are.

Paul Thurrott (58:57)

I haven't seen south park in a while, but south park used to do a good like, like crowd rabble thing where like people just walk around and that's what this is like. It's like just a bunch of people who like maybe have one eye in retirement and still carrying around like a floppy disk with their favorite low level disc tool on it or something. And they're like, I don't want anything to change. It's like, yeah, we know, but things are changing and the audience out there is much bigger than people like you. You. So I don't know. I, I, and these guys, you know, we were young once. You know, we were excited by technology. That's why we're here. When did you lose it? You know, you hate the all, you hate all the new Star wars movies too, you jerk. Because you grew up, they were fun when you were a kid, but now they're, you know, terrible. I mean, what's wrong? Jesus.

Richard Campbell (59:45)

Those last few were not great.

Paul Thurrott (59:47)

They were awful actually. But yeah, objectively terrible. The last two especially. But.

Richard Campbell (59:54)

But really, really, I could just type into hyperspace and fix.

Paul Thurrott (59:57)

Really? Star Trek movies were great, so shut up. Anyway, okay, whatever. Forget the. That was a stupid example. Yeah, Disney go screw itself. Anyway. Yes. So, yeah, so we beat up on Pavel and devaluri. Unfairly. So there's that.

Richard Campbell (60:14)

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (60:17)

What else do we have? So there have been two sets of Window, what do you call Windows Insider program releases. And by sets, I mean like literally multiple builds. Actually, yesterday was like a surprisingly huge day. You might have thought that with Ignite unrolling here, they're going to take a little break, but no, if you have any PC in any Insider channel on at all, you can check for app updates for Copilot. You'll get an early like Copilot Labs version of something called Copilot Actions. Right. And this is something I believe is in Copilot on the web already. And the version that's in Windows, of course, is there to interact with the apps on your system. So if you think about how maybe the agent in Settings works, where you ask your questions and it gives you a UI to fix it, it will do that for apps. And this is a borderline agentic capability. I mean, it's not. You're not sending enough to do something, but it's. It's going to start interacting with more and more apps. This is that programmable apps thing. I don't know what else to call it, feature. So that's something we can start looking at soon. There was a Canary build that had nothing in it. So we can skip right over that, back to normal for Canary 26H1, but with nothing. So that's nice. And then they released two release preview builds, 124H2, 125H2, same exact features, which is a preview of what we're going to get on Patch Tuesday in December there. I had suggested maybe we're going to get a light month next month, and that is not the case. So interesting look at that.

Richard Campbell (61:53)

Where December is normally pretty light.

Paul Thurrott (61:56)

Yeah, it might be because this stuff was coming in advance, you know, was coming already. And it might. A lot of it actually is tied to some of the stuff they're talking about at Ignite. So next Tuesday as we record this is week D Tuesday, so we'll probably get a preview update at that point as well. So this is. There's a bunch of stuff in here that actually I think people will like. For example, Windows Studio Effects requires a Copilot PC or a PC with an mpu, which is a Copilot plus PC. Today it only works on the single main camera usually, but now it's going to work on external cameras. So if you have secondary cameras, USB webcams, etc. It should work there, I guess it never has. And then we talked about external fingerprint readers supporting Windows hello Enhanced sign in security.

Leo Laporte (62:44)

Right.

Paul Thurrott (62:44)

Which is never possible. It's the first time ever they've allowed a device to enter the chain after the fact. To this day, if you do that, you can do it. I mean, if you have a Windows hello ESS based PC, you can add an external webcam like with a IR sensor or a fingerprint reader. But now you get dropped down to Windows low, you're not doing ESS anymore. And this will apparently not break that chain somehow. I'm not sure how they're doing that, but that's neat. Agents and settings improvements. This is just more of the same there. But again it's a cool feature. If you have a Copilot PC you can search for something you can do plain natural language. It will give you an interface in many cases right there in the dropdown where you can do the thing you're trying to do. Instead of click here to go to some page and then at some point in Windows 11 it was like click here, go to some page and then the thing that would be the option you wanted would be like highlighted with that black rectangle. Just do it right in the drop down. So honestly useful right click to do improvements. We talked about these last week in the probably in the context of Devin beta channel. I don't remember but streamlining that menu because you know our menus in Windows 11 are growing into nightmares. Just a bunch of stuff. The best this is me being the old guy. Drag Tray. So Drag Tray is this thing I finally seen. So this one has been in Windows for a little while, but I'd never seen it. And if you're familiar with the way Snap works today, if you grab a window in windows 11 and you haven't changed the configuration and you start moving it, you get the little bar comes down from the top. I hate that so much. I hate it with a burning passion. I don't mind that other people get to use it by the way, but I want to be able to turn it off. And you can, so that's nice. Then they added this thing called Drag Tray. I'm just going to see if I can make it come up on this computer. No, I got rid of it actually. No, I can't get rid of it. I must not have it on this one yet. The way this thing works is you drag a file around and the little thing comes down and it's basically another interface for share. You get some of the same high level options you could do nearby. Share, share with an app, share with the contact, whatever. I don't like it, I don't want it. I'm not going to crap on Pavan Davaluri but. But they are putting an option in there. You can turn it off. There you go. That should have been there from day one, but whatever, no one really has it yet. So it's fine, it's fine, everything's fine. But Quick Machine Recovery, a couple of improvements there, including one which I was kind of curious about because the original line on Quick Machine Recovery was your computer reboots because something happened. It was like a driver issue. So it goes into the Windows recovery environment. It looks up to Windows Update in the knowledge base, sees if there's a. If other people having this problem, maybe there's a fix. If there is a fix, you get the fix. Your computer comes up, everything's good. If there isn't a fix, it just keeps checking for a fix. So. Oh no. Reboots, checks for fix. Reboots, checks for a fix. So I was like, that doesn't seem like a good solution.

Richard Campbell (65:47)

We're going to stay like this until somebody finally deploys a fix.

Paul Thurrott (65:50)

It couldn't be long. So that's not going to happen anymore. It's going to check for a fix once. Once. And then if you are just using Windows later, there isn't. You'll get it through Windows Update. Like that's the right approach. I think so anyway, a bunch of stuff. There's more than what I just said, but whatever, that's. That those are most of the big things. So that is. That's interesting. Like I said, more than I expected for December, but okay, more than I.

Leo Laporte (66:17)

Expected and less than I deserved.

Paul Thurrott (66:19)

Exactly.

Leo Laporte (66:20)

Yes.

Paul Thurrott (66:22)

Well, wait, no, wait.

Richard Campbell (66:23)

What?

Paul Thurrott (66:24)

I gotta parse that a little bit.

Leo Laporte (66:25)

By the way.

Paul Thurrott (66:26)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (66:26)

You were excellent as helm hammers Bland on Monday.

Richard Campbell (66:32)

I'd love this.

Leo Laporte (66:32)

The first dice skills are.

Paul Thurrott (66:35)

I have this like giant fighter guy with two swords and he's all. And then I step on a rake and I'm dead, you know, like in two seconds. Like, it's like this. It's like the scene in like the second Deadpool movie where that awesome superhero comes. Like it's Brad Pitt or whatever. He gets lands in the lines. He's like, you know. Anyway, this one I did better though. I was.

Leo Laporte (66:56)

It was a lot of fun. We finally got out of the corn maze and succeeded. I hope we do more of it. It was a lot of fun.

Paul Thurrott (67:03)

I feel like it's funny. Like if you. If you've ever played D and D. Like we did the smallest thing imaginable.

Richard Campbell (67:10)

Oh yeah.

Paul Thurrott (67:11)

Six hours. Yeah, literally six hours.

Leo Laporte (67:15)

Maybe because I was screwing around too.

Paul Thurrott (67:16)

Much, but there were definitely a lot of sound effects.

Leo Laporte (67:20)

I stopped after a while. I realized I was annoying people, so I stopped. I thought that was my job as the bard, to kind of keep things light and lively, but apparently not even.

Paul Thurrott (67:29)

In the wake of Google Bard, you somehow thought it was okay to name a bard.

Leo Laporte (67:35)

If you are a club member. It's available on the Twit plus feed. We played actually six Hours. You're right. Two three hour sessions.

Paul Thurrott (67:41)

I mean, I guess the second one might have been a little shorter, but the first one was solid three hours.

Leo Laporte (67:45)

It was pretty close. Micah Sargent, our Dungeon Master Paul as Helm Hammer's Bland.

Paul Thurrott (67:51)

Which.

Leo Laporte (67:52)

What is that from? That's from Halo. Where is that?

Paul Thurrott (67:54)

No, Helm Hammerhand is the name of the historical figure in the Lord of the Rings who is the inspiration for Helm's Deep.

Leo Laporte (68:03)

Hammer Bland, not so much.

Paul Thurrott (68:05)

I was trying to have a little fun with it.

Leo Laporte (68:08)

And Paris Martineau is Kathera Longswallop. I was there. Jacob Ward was there from our untitled Linux show. Jonathan Bennett as the professor. He was very professorial too, but yeah, he was. Yeah, he had a pipe. He'd always saying things like, well, I wondered if you roll a 7 natural if you, I mean, you would always say things.

Paul Thurrott (68:29)

Or like Mike would be like, oh, it's too bad. You're like, you took a lot of damage. He's like, not so fast. Yeah, I actually like, I've cast the.

Leo Laporte (68:38)

Pretty good reflector spell without your knowledge. Yeah, a lot of fun it is on the trip. Plus feed. We're gonna probably do more things like that. That. Looking forward to it. Let's pause for a moment and then we'll get to the big AI segment.

Richard Campbell (68:58)

It's.

Paul Thurrott (68:58)

It's in. In Mexico, we would call it a segmentita segment. It is. It's a little poquito segment.

Leo Laporte (69:07)

Little segment. I want to just tell you all that I had an excellent night's sleep last night.

Paul Thurrott (69:15)

Night.

Leo Laporte (69:16)

And I can credit it fully to my wonderful Helix Sleep mattress. This episode of Windows Weekly, brought to you by Helix Sleep. Now, I know you're entering summertime down there, Richard, in Australia, down under, up here in the Northern hemisphere, it's getting pretty chilly. We're not going to go past 54 degrees today. It's cool nights. But the beauty of the Helix Sleep is whether you're on a, you know, in a hot, hot night or a cool, cool night night, the mattress makes a big difference. I loved our Helix Sleep. We had it all summer and I was sleeping cool all night. No night sweats at all. But in the winter, you know, you might think about this. You're probably spending more time indoors. You're probably even spending more time on your mattress. And I'm not just talking sleeping, I'm talking curling up with a good book or your favorite kitty cat. Rosie loves the Helix. Give her scritches, maybe watching a little Netflix and chill. If you've had your mattress for More than six years. You need a new one. We found out, I was doing some research that our mattress, eight year old mattress, it was time to replace it. Six to ten years max. Because, you know, after a while, as your mattress ages, it starts to sag a little bit. The other thing I used to wake up and say there was an earthquake. And Lisa said, no, it's just the cat jumping on the bed. No motion transfer anymore. Don't settle for a mattress made overseas with low quality, kind of questionable materials and then packed in a box and shipped on a container ship. And you get it, you open the box and ah, it smells like container ship. Your Helix mattress. No, no. It's assembled from the finest materials, packaged and shipped right from Arizona. In fact, they assemble it when you order it. So it's just in time, within days of placing your order and it's fresh. You open up the box and it smells like the desert. Smells like Arizona. It smells wonderful. You could take the Helix sleep quiz. We did this where it asks you, what kind of sleeper are you? What mattress do you look for? It matches you with the perfect mattress. We're stomach sleepers. So we got our preferences met. I stomach and then slide and found the perfect mattress. They recommended actually a really nice topper. I can't remember what they call it, but you'll see it on the Helix Sleep website that we put on top and that really, I love that. And by the way, there's evidence that a good mattress like your Helix sleep will improve your sleep. They did a Wesper sleep study. Helix measured the sleep performance of participants after switching from their old mattress to a nice new Helix mattress. 82% of the participants in the study saw an increase in their deep sleep cycle. That's the most important one, the one that clears the garbage out of your brain. Participants on average achieve 25 more minutes of deep sleep per night. I would say that's about what I'm getting. 24. It's almost doubled my deep sleep. Participants on average achieve 39 more minutes of overall sleep per night. Yeah, I have to say, I don't have an alarm. I don't have to set an alarm. So I sleep as long as I need. And sometimes, you know, I'd say, I'm going to sleep in on my Helix sleep. It is that nice. Time and time again, Helix sleep is just read the reviews. The most awarded mattress brand Wired tested 100 plus bed in a box mattresses recently. What was their number one pick? I was very gratified to see the one we Bought the Helix Midnight Luxe hybrid as the best mattress you can buy online. Wired said that Forbes tested 90 beds. They've tested 90 beds so far this year to find the very best mattress for every sleep type. They also recommend as their top pick the Helix Midnight Lux. It's a great mattress and I pick it. It's the mattress I sleep on. I love it. Go to helixsleep.com windows 27% off site wide during the Black Friday sale. Best ofWeb that's helixsleep.com Windows for 27% off for the Black Friday sale. Best of Web now This offer ends December 1st, so make sure you enter our show name in the post purchase survey. That way they know we sent you. And if you're listening after the sale ends, still check them out. Helixsleep.com Windows cannot recommend it more highly. A good night's sleep is everything for me anyway if it is for you. If you care about your sleep. Helixsleep.com Windows and now. We haven't talked enough about AI.

Paul Thurrott (73:59)

I disagree.

Leo Laporte (74:01)

Just a couple more.

Paul Thurrott (74:04)

Yeah. OpenAI announced chat GPT 5.1 recently. Actually they announced a. What's it called? Excuse the white screen here, but something called GPT 5.1 Codex Max today.

Leo Laporte (74:16)

Codex, which is their coding tool.

Paul Thurrott (74:18)

Yeah. So this one is actually trained to operate on Windows first time apparently.

Richard Campbell (74:25)

Nice.

Paul Thurrott (74:25)

So I guess it's. There will be agents will have agent Mode on Windows, etc. So this is the thing that can, you know, read and write files. It's you know, so nice to see Microsoft's biggest partner friendly supporting Windows. Try not to be freaked out by these people. But, but, yeah, but when they did GPT5, it was the, it was the news like it was on cnn, you know, like it was big.

Richard Campbell (74:51)

Well, it was also wildly loud.

Paul Thurrott (74:53)

Late.

Richard Campbell (74:53)

Right. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (74:55)

It was sycophantic and weird and people were freaking out and then they're like, all right, we're going to scale that back. And then they scale it back and people like whoa, whoa, whoa. We like this the weird feely thing that it was, you know, like people. So people have all these different expectations.

Richard Campbell (75:08)

But it really did create the sense of we've peaked.

Paul Thurrott (75:12)

Yeah.

Richard Campbell (75:14)

Five landed soft.

Paul Thurrott (75:15)

Yeah. Like, yeah, I won. Ended it. Landed in a, I don't know, like the door closed behind it.

Richard Campbell (75:22)

Nobody noticed. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Thurrott (75:23)

Nobody even noticed.

Leo Laporte (75:24)

It's so weird that they all announced at the same time. I don't, you know, I don't get it. Well, of the three Gemini, three is probably the big story.

Richard Campbell (75:32)

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (75:32)

It seems to be the Gemini 3 was seeded to the media in a way I have never seen. So, you know, when I go through my tech feed in the morning, There were like eight entries for Gemini three, four or five of which were tech beam things that had 21 links each. And it was like, what the. Like, what is this?

Leo Laporte (75:51)

Yeah, they gave it to the influencers early.

Paul Thurrott (75:54)

Yeah, well, in mainstream press too. I mean, it was really interesting. Like it was a. It was a different thing, so.

Richard Campbell (76:01)

Well, because Google has mishandled Gemini announcements before.

Leo Laporte (76:04)

They sure have, yes.

Richard Campbell (76:06)

But the A team showed up and says, we're going to make this one land.

Paul Thurrott (76:12)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (76:12)

Have you used it? Have you guys played with it at all?

Paul Thurrott (76:14)

No, it just happened yesterday. I haven't had. I can't even. I can't catch up with my normal stuff. I gotta. I really need to spend time on this. I. Not yet. But, you know, we all know they hit a home run with that Nano Banana thing, which is, you know, whatever the name is, ridiculous. But they also very quietly updated. Yeah, it's amazing. So as you. Because, you know, they send me news releases and things and it's kind of interesting that I don't know that there was ever an actual announcement, but Nano Banana was originally just image to video, but now it's also like image generation. So it's also for just images, you know, and it's like, wait, it's because people like, wait a minute, I thought this thing was video. And it's like, yeah, it is, but I guess it's also does image.

Leo Laporte (77:03)

So this. I asked it yesterday for a little lisp information and it did something really. This was the slow thinking version. It did something interesting. This is all the thinking stuff. And it talked about its process, like everything that it was doing. A lot of it before it even answered the question. It's like, I mean, it was just so. And then it's final review of the answer, final output generation, and then finally the answer, which was book length and very complete and quite good. This is a. This was a simple one sentence prompt and it's got code examples. It's absolutely accurate. It's. It quotes the source.

Paul Thurrott (77:46)

I'm sorry, how did you describe the. What's the. It's this. The thinking.

Leo Laporte (77:51)

This is the thinking model and a custom gem I had used before because.

Paul Thurrott (77:55)

I feel like this is. In other words, you actually wanted something.

Leo Laporte (77:58)

Well, you can turn it off.

Paul Thurrott (77:59)

You can. That's what I mean. But like some people are like, I just want the answer. What are you doing?

Leo Laporte (78:02)

But yeah, in fact, it's very fast. If you use the fast model, it is ex, I mean, extremely quick. Okay, but I just wanted to try the thinking, right? And it really. And you don't have to watch it think, but I, I, that's reassuring, I think, because then you see what it's doing and yeah, you understand what's happening.

Paul Thurrott (78:23)

If there is a single thing missing in the AI tool chain, for lack of a better term, it's literally trust.

Leo Laporte (78:31)

Right?

Paul Thurrott (78:32)

It's anything that can establish that and not in a fake way. Right. In other words, it's trustworthy or it makes you trust a little bit more because you feel like something's happening here that's reasonable or whatever. But obviously the answer has to be correct too, right? I mean, so you use it over time and you're like, okay, actually this is another one of those kind of human condition things. I was just asking my wife if there was a term for this. I do this for health related things sometimes or just with everything.

Leo Laporte (79:01)

I do that all the time.

Paul Thurrott (79:02)

Yeah, well, I mean, if something's wrong, you complain about it every single day. And then in my case, what will happen is three days later she'll be like, hey, whatever it was, was bothering you, is everything fine? I'm like, oh yeah, didn't even notice. It's been fine for three days. It's been fine for I don't even know how long. But I wonder if AI, like everyone has these examples of AI hallucinating and the stupid responses and all the bad things that happen, but at some point you just start using it as a tool, which it is. And when it, when it can be trusted and does actually work all the time, it just becomes part of the, you know, just part of what you do every day. Right. You don't even think about it.

Leo Laporte (79:42)

It's found me the best ironing board.

Paul Thurrott (79:45)

This is an excellent use of 20 bucks a month, Leo. You're doing great.

Leo Laporte (79:51)

The sad thing is it's not just 20 bucks a month on Gemini. Also on perplexity, on OpenAI.

Paul Thurrott (79:58)

Come on, man, it's my job. You need to know what you're doing.

Leo Laporte (80:02)

Anthropic. And I use them all and try to use them in a variety of ways. Image generation's amazing with Google because of Nano Banana.

Paul Thurrott (80:13)

That one's nice because you can see it and people can evaluate and say, this is a good picture.

Leo Laporte (80:18)

Right?

Paul Thurrott (80:19)

Isn't, you know, when it gets into the weeds on something esoteric or technical, like the thing you're doing with the lisp or whatever. An average person would just look at that and say, well, it seems comprehensive, you know, Like, I don't know.

Richard Campbell (80:33)

Like, I don't know, add a lot of words.

Leo Laporte (80:35)

That's why you search for your name. When you're. You're trying a new search engine, you search for something you already know.

Paul Thurrott (80:40)

Right.

Leo Laporte (80:41)

And then see how it does. This is. I used, by the way, for our D and D adventure. I used it to generate an image of myself as a bard playing bagpipe.

Paul Thurrott (80:50)

This is like a.

Leo Laporte (80:51)

It's really good.

Paul Thurrott (80:52)

A brother's Hilda brand style or like Bard's tale imagery style image. You can really. You can see how it got here in a way.

Richard Campbell (81:01)

Oh, yeah.

Leo Laporte (81:01)

I mean, it's not original.

Paul Thurrott (81:02)

No, but. Well, but it. But that doesn't want it, right? But that is what you wanted.

Leo Laporte (81:07)

Like, exactly what I wanted.

Paul Thurrott (81:09)

I think it's good.

Leo Laporte (81:09)

And I didn't. You know, I merely wrote. I want. Create a. Create a picture of me as a.

Richard Campbell (81:16)

This is.

Leo Laporte (81:17)

Okay. I'm embarrassed. I'll show it to you, though. I took a picture of myself and I said, use this picture. Create a bag playing bard with a floppy hat and Old Tavern using this image. And that's all I told it. And it did it.

Richard Campbell (81:33)

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (81:34)

No, it's just.

Leo Laporte (81:35)

It's just great.

Paul Thurrott (81:36)

To this day, the best image I ever created was that Halo thing that looked like was the Last Supper because it was crazy patriotic and religious imagery all over it. I did not ask for that. Like, it just. It was like, we're gonna be really creative this time. Like, it was. I was like, that is. It's still, to me, like. Is like, yikes. Because I. I've been very specific, and it ignores some of the specific requests I've made. You know, does that with code, too. It doesn't. Like, I need. I wanted an image of three hands shaking hands somehow, and it just wouldn't. It couldn't do it. It was like, you can have four, you can have two. It doesn't say that. It just gives you images, you know, but it never did it.

Leo Laporte (82:19)

The thing is, you could do images, you could do music, you could do searches. Like, for the best ironing board, you could do coding. And I think each of these models excels at some things and not so much at other things. There's no kind of perfect model. I'm very impressed with Gemini 3 in. You know, the.

Paul Thurrott (82:35)

It's also a slice in time. Right? So you. There's no perfect model. Or you could say, like, today, at the time of this recording, this is the best for whatever. And then next week you'll be like, well actually this week it's something else because things, you know, it's evolving so fast.

Leo Laporte (82:49)

Yeah, yeah, it's. It is really kind of mind boggling.

Paul Thurrott (82:54)

It's unbelievable.

Leo Laporte (82:55)

Yeah, it really is interesting.

Paul Thurrott (82:56)

I've never, I've never seen anything like this.

Leo Laporte (82:58)

You know what? I just wish there was more AI in browsers.

Paul Thurrott (83:01)

Thank you. So, same same because. Right, because that's the thing I use to browse like e commerce sites and I absolutely want that thing having access to all my financial data. So I appreciate that Mozilla as an organization is trying to turn things around right now. They're listening to feedback and things like. That's good. I have some fundamental disagreements with strategy here, but whatever. I was very intrigued by this idea though. This is kind of interesting. So if you think about whatever it means for an AI web browser, an agenic browser, whatever that is, to me, when AI, if AI is successful in a browser, it's not a browser anymore. It's just doing the thing for you. Right. But there are these people who, you know, I want it to be a brow, I want it to browse, I want it to read, I use it to read, I find things, I read, whatever and okay, fair enough. So Vivaldi obviously is on one end of this extreme. They're not putting any AI in their browser ever. Their deal is, if you want it, the chatbots are out there, help yourself, do whatever you want. And then there are the companies like Microsoft and Google who have existing browsers. They're all in on AI. Obviously they're going to ruin these things with AI. And then there are new companies like, you know, the browser company or whatever, or smaller companies like Opera Making Neon, et cetera. So Mozilla is in kind of a tough spot, right? Their usage is falling, et cetera, et cetera. They have a very opinionated user base. People are still on Mozilla and Firefox are paying attention, you know what I'm saying? Like they're not like there because they're lazy. Like they, they've like, no, this is, I align with this thing for whatever reason. So they announced a different way to do AI in a browser, which I thought was interesting. And I'm going to predict right now we'll never see the light of day because its users hate it so much. This will never happen. But.

Richard Campbell (84:57)

Well, you talk about the lash back on pavan, the lash back on Firefox.

Paul Thurrott (85:01)

Was, I know it's Crazy. And that's an even. It's a small audience, relatively speaking. Right? I mean, even more technical, even more opinionated about the world. Because like I said, they're just.

Richard Campbell (85:12)

You don't, you don't run Firefox by accident.

Paul Thurrott (85:15)

Exactly. So what they've done, what they're. What they've announced they haven't done it. But, but they want AI to be like a browser mode. Like, in other words, there's normal mode, whatever that's called when you're just browsing the web, but there's like an in private mode or whatever, and it's however effective that is, we can talk about that. But their idea is we're going to have a mode called AI Window that will be like in private, that is separate from your other browsing stuff. You can't get into your stuff. And when you want AI to do something, you. You launch a window in that mode, you do your AI stuff and then it's plug up, you know, it's gonna be pluggable. You can put whatever AI is in it and, and then you close that thing and you're back to browsing. And there's no way I doing anything in the back. You know, there's nothing happening. It's just, it's its own little. It's like a little time slice or whatever. And I'm, you know, I'm not saying this is the right approach. I don't mean it like that. Honestly, I'm surprised Apple didn't come up with something like this, but it's. It seems like a pretty good idea, which is why it's going to fail terribly. It's just nice. There's no way it's going to work.

Richard Campbell (86:18)

There's no way. This is not a burn the ships model here. This is a dipping the toe model.

Paul Thurrott (86:24)

Yeah. It's like you can, you can see how different companies align, you know, with how they do AI and. Or not, you know, in Vivaldi's case or whatever. And then like this came out and I was like, huh. You know, I mean, I give them credit for thinking differently. I guess that's like I said, I'm not saying it's correct, but. Interesting.

Richard Campbell (86:47)

But they also can't do nothing, right? Like.

Paul Thurrott (86:50)

Yeah, well, that's the thing. And I think a lot of their audience would like them to do nothing. You could argue that, like the Vivaldi approach, which is literally do nothing but. But announce that we're doing nothing, you know, and that will endear them to a certain audience. We'll see how big it is. I mean.

Richard Campbell (87:08)

Yeah, Both guys will be thrilled.

Paul Thurrott (87:09)

Yep. They love it. We. Private is in fact, the only thing I don't like about it is I know there's another guy, you know. You know, I just want to be on my own here. I don't really need this stuff. Whatever. I had some guy tell me literally on social media that like, I don't know if it was Windows or a browser, but he said this thing did everything I wanted it to do in 1998 and it hasn't improved the lick sense. And I'm like, dude, like lie. Yeah, okay.

Richard Campbell (87:36)

Don't have a smartphone.

Paul Thurrott (87:39)

I mean, come on, man. But anyway, so good for, you know, Missouri.

Richard Campbell (87:43)

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (87:45)

Just as we were starting the.

Richard Campbell (87:46)

And welcome to the AI Firestorm. As a consequence.

Paul Thurrott (87:49)

Right. It's. I think it's important that everything AI related have some giant controversy around it. You know, like everything is like, oh my God, the world's ending. It's like chickens running around.

Richard Campbell (88:00)

No, it's just a lot of pent up rage out there. And I.

Paul Thurrott (88:03)

It's unbelievable. Yeah.

Richard Campbell (88:04)

And, and, and it's often misdirected rage, but it is rage. But it's easy to be the best kind of rage. Anything called AI.

Paul Thurrott (88:10)

Yeah, it's like a road rage thing where like, you know, the guy almost kills you and you're standing there waiting for the police show up. You're like, what was that all about? He's like, oh, my wife pissed me off. Really?

Richard Campbell (88:18)

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (88:19)

Okay. And you saw me and thought, you know, this is my chance, I'll take it out on you. All right. That's all I have for AI So.

Leo Laporte (88:30)

Wow.

Paul Thurrott (88:31)

I promise it was, it was a snippet.

Leo Laporte (88:33)

It's a light AI show today.

Paul Thurrott (88:35)

Segmentita sue.

Leo Laporte (88:37)

How about we talk about. I know it's a little early, but.

Paul Thurrott (88:40)

Yeah, we have a lot. I have this. This. There's a lot.

Leo Laporte (88:43)

Okay.

Paul Thurrott (88:43)

In fact, this is going to bleed into the back of the book there. But as we were starting the show, I got an email from Qualcomm and they have announced a new. They're calling it a control panel, but it's for Snapdragon X Gaming. And what it really is is a new set of Adreno drivers that will hopefully enable more games to work on Snapdragon X. And they're specifically talking X&X2. Yeah, sorry, X2. Elite and X2. Because that's only Elite. Elite. And what's the other one? Extreme or something. Whatever they're calling it. So I haven't had a chance to even look at this, but I am. This is interesting.

Richard Campbell (89:22)

I thought people but we don't have X2s yet. Right there announced.

Paul Thurrott (89:25)

No, that's not happening till next year sometime.

Richard Campbell (89:30)

As soon as I'm on the bandwagon for that one, I can get my hands on one. That's my new laptop.

Paul Thurrott (89:36)

So tied to this there's some platform changes coming and some are here and some are coming. This is like AVX2 emulation has been released in Windows. This is going to open up more apps, but games really to run under Prism, the emulator. Remember they had announced Fortnite and Easy Anti Cheat and that stuff. Stuff. This is part of this. I don't know that it's out yet, but it probably isn't. I'm trying. I'm looking at the announcement. I don't think it's out yet. But they're bringing the Easy Anti Cheat to Windows and ARM Fortnite. Obviously that was solved. Yeah, I mean I'm just saying I think this is how this gets delivered. Like it's part of the driver set that you get here because there's new graphics drivers. It's not the whole thing but hopefully this control panel, just based on the screenshot I see here is the thing the Xbox app should be which is when you run that thing on a Windows unarmed device, it should only show you the stuff that's going to work. Right? Because you could. Right now like I'm running this on the laptop I'm using right now is the lowest end Snapdragon X processor you can buy. It is the lowliest of those processors. It's awesome. But not going to play games on this thing. Right. But I could install call of duty 250 gigabytes or whatever size that thing is. Take two days to download it and then I could try to run it. It will not run, but the Xbox app will let me do that. Which is stupid. Right. And so I'm hoping that this thing, the way this works is it actually just shows you the stuff that's going to work. Right. Because that's what we need. We need like a curated view of what's there there. So we'll see. You might have heard because I would have talked about it that there is a full screen. Well there is a full screen experience in the Xbox ally gaming handhelds. Right. So the currently that's Asus. There was a recent Windows Insider build where you could get it on the MSI Claw. It is coming to the Legion. Go to which is the Lenovo, which is the one with the biggest screen. You know, the same as the other ones though, you know, integrated controllers. Right. And there is lots of information online about how you can kind of just install this in any computer you want. Right. And so if you have a gaming PC, whether it's a laptop or a desktop computer, do not do this. There's no, I mean, other than maybe you want to see it. But yeah, it's actually really good.

Richard Campbell (92:03)

I want to see this on my 5080. Man, this would be hilarious.

Paul Thurrott (92:06)

Well, I mean.

Richard Campbell (92:07)

And I haven't seen my 5080 in two months.

Paul Thurrott (92:10)

It's the thing that's cool about it is you can access everything that it shows you with the controller. And what that means is so for example, from the full screen experience you can bring up the game bar and you get these additional options you don't get in Windows normally for things like settings and so forth. You can run the Settings app and the Settings app is fully navigable or selectable. The items with a controller. Like it actually works like it's full screen app. You know, know, whatever.

Leo Laporte (92:38)

I don't know.

Paul Thurrott (92:39)

Let me. I'm not. Let me. I'm just looking at this right up ahead because I'll talk about this in a little while again, I guess I didn't have it yet. So when I wrote this article, I had just installed it. What I have noticed. Yeah, let me see what this thing says. Yeah. No, so at the time I hadn't seen it. So this thing actually just doing this bumps the frame rate in playing Call of Duty still. So Black Ops 6 by I'm going to call it anywhere from 5 to 15 frames per second. Same settings otherwise, like it's actually makes a difference. Like it's. It's nice and it works well. So there's a goofy kind of. I did an episode of Hands on Windows that's not going to be out yet, but that where I kind of showed this thing off and everything runs full screen. So it's kind of. It's weird because if you think of the. You can type if you're connected to a keyboard. You know, Windows key +C will bring up File Explorer like it does in any PC. But you can't. You can't like recite like you can't go up and restore the window to not be full screen. It won't. It just doesn't do anything. And if you do a really long file copy, the file copy dialog appears up in the top left corner of the screen. But the rest of the screen is blank and you can't. It will not show over anything else. Like it. It just sits there and does its file copy. You can switch away from it, but you can't. You know, it's a full screen experience. So, like, unlike Windows 8, which was also a full screen experience, this is good. And it's doing things behind the scenes. Right. It's cutting down on background processes, et cetera, et cetera. But it's really, I own the whole.

Richard Campbell (94:10)

Screen, therefore I should own the majority of the process.

Paul Thurrott (94:11)

Yeah. Trying to get it a little closer to being a device still computer, obviously, but.

Richard Campbell (94:18)

Because if you throttle those other processes of compute resources and memory, they have. Have less resources to crash your system with. Right.

Paul Thurrott (94:25)

Yeah. There's a. There are still dialogues that can appear.

Richard Campbell (94:31)

Right.

Paul Thurrott (94:31)

And this is the old media center problem where you'd be sitting there with the controller and it would be like. And.

Richard Campbell (94:36)

Yeah, yeah, with an okay button on it. And it's not okay. But you have to agree.

Paul Thurrott (94:41)

You're like in the middle. You're like, going down, like playing Call of Duty. You're looking down the site, you're running down a hallway, and then suddenly it's like, boop, you better plug in. You're about to run out of battery. You're like, you know. You know, you get destroyed right there. And you're like, thanks, thanks, Microsoft. We're still working on that, but it's getting there. And then this just happened, too. I haven't looked at this too, too closely, but Epic Games announced that. Or Microsoft and. Or Epic Games announced that Fortnite is coming to the Xbox on the PC. Now, obviously, you can run Fortnite on a PC, but when you. It will support Xbox play anywhere. So you can move between the same. Not a multiplayer game, obviously, but you. Your progress and all that stuff will work between, you know, the PC version of the game console version of the game. Gaming handles whatever you're using. Right. So that's cool. Yeah. And there was another. I don't have it in the notes, but for. They also announced that Fortnite is going to support Unity and they're going to bring Unity technology. Like, it's like Fortnite is. Fortnite's going to turn into like a platform of some kind. Like, oh, no, I know. Wait till they add Agents and Windows.

Richard Campbell (95:55)

Well, it's also a reminder that Fortnite was originally like a building game. The whole, you know, grand shooter thing came later.

Paul Thurrott (96:02)

That's right.

Richard Campbell (96:03)

So in some ways it'd be going back to their roots, that they provided extensibility models like that.

Paul Thurrott (96:07)

Right? Yeah, yeah. I'm just interesting.

Richard Campbell (96:12)

You can build a village and be teabagged in it.

Leo Laporte (96:14)

It's excellent.

Paul Thurrott (96:17)

Listen, we all want to teabag our neighbors. I'm just saying it's okay as long.

Leo Laporte (96:23)

As it's not done in anger. That's my feeling.

Richard Campbell (96:25)

You want a joyful teabag? Yeah. Okay.

Paul Thurrott (96:27)

I feel like it's always going to be a little anger, but come on. It's okay. It's. It comes from a good place. No, it doesn't.

Richard Campbell (96:33)

Oh, my God.

Paul Thurrott (96:35)

It is. What is the date? Must be the 19th. Yeah. So we're at the second half of the month, so another round of games for Game Pass.

Richard Campbell (96:44)

I'm in the future, so.

Paul Thurrott (96:45)

Yep. Right, right. You're already in December, so you probably have other new games. I don't know. I don't. None of these speak to me personally, but there's a bunch of them and I don't. I don't know. I'm just. I'll just go back to Call of Duty. It doesn't matter. So anyway, that's happening. This feels a little late, late in the year for me and I actually linked to the wrong article in the notes. Sorry. But Microsoft announced, or Xbox announced Xbox being part of Microsoft, that they're going to have a partner Preview event on November 20th. So that's tomorrow as we record this. And there this is. They do several days a year now. Remember you used to have E3 and it was like the big thing, but you might have. If something was big enough, they'd have a special event. But now we have many, many virtual events throughout the year where they show off new games. And so this is specifically for third party. So not Microsoft Studio games, IO Interactive, Tencent, thq, or among the developers who will be showing off games that are coming soon to Xbox consoles. Xbox on PC, Xbox Game Pass, etc. Etc. Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. That's good. And then I just wanted to, because I did say this last week. I'm not usually very good at predicting things, but as soon as I saw the Steam machine thing, the new one, I was like, oh, man. Everyone dumped on Xbox for, you know, planning to turn Xbox into the PC. Now these guys, they're just. They've already been doing it, but it's a PC and it's like, it's a console that's a PC and people like, yep, yep, take my money.

Richard Campbell (98:22)

And it's like, dude, it's the Gabe Cube, right?

Paul Thurrott (98:25)

Come on, man. Like come on.

Leo Laporte (98:27)

Somebody asked me and I didn't have a good answer. Maybe you guys would. How this differs from the original Steam machine and why is it better? Because the original Steam machine didn't.

Paul Thurrott (98:36)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (98:36)

Didn't really take off. Right.

Paul Thurrott (98:38)

Yep. I. Well, first of all it's many, it's years later, so. But the big thing that's changed in the PC space, this is something I've brought up a bunch of times because it's astonishing to me is that you can buy a mainstream laptop, right? It could have an intel chip in it, it could have an amd. AMD would be better, but whatever. And you can play modern 3D shooters, AAA titles at high frame rates, native resolutions, really good. Like it's just using integrated graphics. I mean obviously if you add Nvidia graphics, even better. It will be louder, you know, thicker, heavier, whatever. But it will be better. Absolutely. But it's astonishing to me how well games just work on mainstream hardware. So I think that might be tied to this. Right. So when you look at this thing, this. It's weird, it says it's described as a semi custom amd Zen 4 CPU. Zen 4 is not the latest generation, that's the previous generation, but that is. This is probably very close to the Z2 chips that are in these gaming handhelds and it's probably closer to that. Like I bet it doesn't have an NPU to speak of or anything like that. Like it's. It. This one is. It's slightly custom but these things are always slightly custom. It seems like a console type thing like Sony and Xbox do this right. With AMD as well. But this is a, it's a PC. Right. Let's be super clear. That's. This thing is a PC and I think it's just because the PC space has evolved enough where this is just, you know, better than it was.

Leo Laporte (100:08)

You're not going to like this one answer which is that it is Linux. 8 years ago There just wasn't much support for gaming.

Paul Thurrott (100:19)

Oh but they've done that work.

Leo Laporte (100:20)

But they've done the compatibility layer and now pretty much everything runs on it.

Paul Thurrott (100:25)

Yeah. So I've only. When I get home from here I'm going to have a much broader selection of computers to play with. I install so constrained. I only have eight here, Richard. I don't know why only.

Leo Laporte (100:38)

How many hands do you have?

Paul Thurrott (100:39)

Have. Yeah, I don't.

Leo Laporte (100:41)

Brains.

Paul Thurrott (100:41)

Well, I, I don't have much in the way of good dedicated graphics anywhere here. I have A like kind of two gens ago. Whatever. Nothing great. So the games I played in Linux through Steam on that laptop were not great like it did. It wasn't great. I suspect that this. Because it's Steam and they're working with AMD on this and they have their emulator, their. This will be fine tuned for that. And it's so much better than it.

Leo Laporte (101:09)

Was because it's just going to be every. You know, this makes it really.

Paul Thurrott (101:12)

You got to remember like I can't speak to the Linux side of this but in Windows it wasn't that long ago where you've got the Windows desktop, maybe you have some apps running. Whatever it is, you launch a game, it changes the resolution of screen. You see all the windows kind of contract and screw around whatever. You play the game and then you get out and if you're lucky nothing crashed and then your Windows are all scrunched up on the corner or whatever it is. It was kind of a crappy, annoying. Yeah. Yeah. So that they've actually kind of. This has been fixed. Like this is. It's pretty much pretty seamless. I mean, you know, moving in and out of games like it's, it's evolved as a platform. So I, the Linux side I can't speak to too, too much but I'm sure you know that has as well. So they are in a better place.

Leo Laporte (101:55)

It's going to do 4K ray tracing at 60 frames per second.

Richard Campbell (101:58)

So that's. Wow. That seems unlikely.

Paul Thurrott (102:00)

That seems. I don't even.

Richard Campbell (102:02)

And with only eight gigs of vram.

Paul Thurrott (102:04)

Like I don't care.

Richard Campbell (102:06)

I don't know how you get all it in there.

Leo Laporte (102:07)

Well and as somebody said in our Discord chat, in the club chat. Oh Burke said it. The price is the key. I mean we don't know what the price is.

Richard Campbell (102:15)

Well, and that's where I think the 8 gigs of vram, 16 gigs of ram tells you which by the way.

Paul Thurrott (102:20)

Trying to keep control to our industry, my industry failing us again because they're terrible. And it's like Steam is doing what Microsoft wants to do, but they're doing it now. And it's like no they're not. We don't even know what the price of this thing is. Is.

Richard Campbell (102:34)

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (102:34)

And like I. This thing is as much vaporware as anything right now.

Richard Campbell (102:39)

And historically Gabe, toys are not cheap.

Paul Thurrott (102:42)

Right, so we'll see. I mean, look, I'm, I am absolutely interested in this thing. I'm not dumping on it but the, the, the past that they get on this is astonishing to me. Whereas every little thing that dribbles up from Xbox is like, screw you guys. You. You kill an Xbox. And it's like, guys like, come on.

Richard Campbell (102:59)

Yeah. Steam is beloved. There's no. Valve is a beloved company. There's no two ways about.

Paul Thurrott (103:03)

Yeah. Which is bizarre to me because I've used their software and it's terrible. So I don't know, like, you know, I've actually used Steam. Terrible.

Leo Laporte (103:10)

I agree.

Paul Thurrott (103:11)

It's like it's a freaking. In front of everything.

Leo Laporte (103:14)

The reason it succeeds is very easy to. The store is great. It's easy to buy a game and then all your games are there and it's easy.

Paul Thurrott (103:20)

And that works on Xbox, the Xbox app on Windows as well, by the way. And that if anything is even easier. It's a much better process for keeping games up to date and whatever. Not that it's perfect, but I mentioned the call of duty 180 gigabyte update that was actually, you know, just the same game.

Leo Laporte (103:39)

There's no reason to think Call of Duty would be available on the Steam machine.

Paul Thurrott (103:42)

No, because of the anti cheat thing, by the way. Right. Which is not. That to me is the. Yeah, that's the thing. That's the river those guys have to cross. They need to figure that out.

Richard Campbell (103:52)

Well, and the real question is how long before there's a Gabe cube that's armed. Right, Right.

Paul Thurrott (104:00)

Will that Gabe cube in fact be a Microsoft Xbox cube? You know, we'll see.

Leo Laporte (104:04)

Or Maybe this makes SteamOS credible and there are many players making SteamOS based cubes.

Paul Thurrott (104:13)

Right. Why not? I mean actually that was kind of the plan. I thought that was the plan.

Leo Laporte (104:18)

I think it was eight years ago.

Paul Thurrott (104:19)

I think so too.

Leo Laporte (104:21)

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (104:21)

I think that's a great idea by the way. And we'll know that this has worked with when Microsoft and or Sony both announce they're bringing titles to this platform.

Leo Laporte (104:30)

Right, Right.

Paul Thurrott (104:31)

So we'll see. I have no problem with that. I mean I.

Leo Laporte (104:34)

That just makes me happy because that means there's more stuff I can run on my Linux box.

Richard Campbell (104:39)

That's it.

Paul Thurrott (104:39)

Well, but fundamentally, right. It's. This is where this is open. Not winning but succeeding and it's. This is what you want. Right. Even if you're not a Linux guy. This is good.

Leo Laporte (104:54)

Right?

Paul Thurrott (104:55)

Like this should. This. This will make everything better.

Leo Laporte (104:58)

Right.

Paul Thurrott (104:58)

So it's good news.

Leo Laporte (105:01)

All right. Get ready for the back of the book that is just around the corner. Before we do that, let me say hello to our sponsor for this segment of Windows Weekly good folks at Framer. This is a lifesaver for anybody who is working on websites or design in general. If you're still jumping from one tool to another just to update your website, you're going to love Framer. It unifies design, CMS and publishing on a single canvas. So no more handoffs, you know, transfer of files, no hassle. Everything you need to design and publish is all there. It's in one place. Framer already built the fastest way to publish beautiful production ready websites. And it's now redefining how you design for the web. With the recent launch of Design Pages, a free canvas based design tool, Framer is now more than 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, Framer is where ideas go live, start to finish. Kramer is a free full feature design tool. Can I I maybe say free again? Because it doesn't. This sounds like this should cost you money. No, it's a free full feature design tool. Unlimited projects free, unlimited pages free, unlimited collaborators free. And all the essentials. Vectors, 3D transforms, gradients, wireframes. Everything you need to design. Totally free.

Paul Thurrott (106:38)

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Paul Thurrott (108:06)

This one will be a little repetitive. I apologize, but I've spent a bunch of time with this on this trip and for people that are concerned about those things they don't like about Windows 11 and instead of bullying the guy who runs Windows, you could actually fix the problem. Tiny 11 builder has proven to be an incredible solution. I wasted two weeks of my life not just doing this, but I tried to customize the power script shell that the guy made to create this minimal Windows 11 install, and that was a huge mistake. The process of it's a command line thing where you take a standard Windows 11 ISO and transform it into a new ISO, which you can then optionally put onto a USB stick with the computer install it. It. That process takes 20 to 30 minutes. The process of installing windows to 20, 30 minutes. And then when it comes up and it's not what you wanted, you got to start all over again. So that wasn't great.

Leo Laporte (109:04)

Pulled it Pornell. This is. You did this?

Paul Thurrott (109:06)

Oh yeah. Multiple times. So how many times can I punch myself? It's like how many licks does it take to get to the middle of a Tootsie Roll pop? It's like 1, 2, 3. You know, that was me. So it took a while. I finally figured out. Then I looked at, I looked at his documentation and he literally has a to do list. And one of the items on the to do list is make this thing customizable. So it's finely tuned. What I was trying to do was reinstall like have it include some of the apps I actually do use. What I learned was that even adding one of them will make Edge and OneDrive appear magically for some reason, which is what I was trying to avoid. One of the things I was trying to avoid. So the answer to those of you who say, well, I maybe I want to use Microsoft Paint because that's one of the apps it takes out. I want to use the Xbox app and all of the Xbox stuff that goes around that, right? Or I think Terminal might be one of the apps. Whatever they are, you can just install them from the store. It's not a big deal. In fact, you can add them to the Winget script. You might have to bulk install apps. So actually there's no reason to do what I did. This is how I spend my time. At the time of this article, I had installed reinstall windows on a second computer. I've actually now just this morning installed it on A third. So three of the eight computers I have right now have these kind of minimal installs of Windows 11, which is not going to help me past Friday because we're going home soon, but I'm going to go do the same to a bunch of computers when I get back. So this is one of those things I need to monitor over time to make sure it doesn't revert, whatever. But this is still a great solution. So now that this is, it's not behind me, I'm going to do more of this, but I'm going to start looking more at tools that will just do this to an existing Windows 11 install. Like, you know, win install is one of those things. Chris Titus has a utility, et cetera. So I'll be looking at all that stuff soon as well. But this one really does. This is really good.

Richard Campbell (111:01)

Well, I appreciate you putting your money where your mouth is there, dude. Like you're putting your time into actually making Windows 11 suck less.

Paul Thurrott (111:07)

Yeah, I mean, my wife hears me swearing at myself in the other room and she wonders what's wrong. But. But it's been going great.

Richard Campbell (111:14)

That's been, that's been decades of that. I'm not going to think she's like.

Paul Thurrott (111:18)

You might, you might actually have Tourette's. So. Yeah. So today, finally, I've been this one. I meant to do this as long ago as a week ago, but I published my review of the Lenovo Legion Go to. So this is the biggest of the handheld gaming PCs we have now. It will be getting that full screen experience sometime next year, hopefully soon, because it's awesome. I had a lot of reliability issues with this thing, but honestly, they've calmed down over the past couple weeks. I'm thinking Microsoft and or Lenovo have gotten on top of some of the stuff. There was one serious problem I had that is common to all of these machines like the Xbox Rog Allies all have the same problem. So some of it is solved. But I'm trying to imagine what the market is for this. Exactly.

Richard Campbell (112:06)

Because this is.

Paul Thurrott (112:07)

It's a computer, it has a small screen. Well, it's essentially a tablet. Right. With a little kickstand in the back. The controllers are kind of connected to.

Richard Campbell (112:14)

The side, but they detach.

Paul Thurrott (112:17)

They detach. You can use one with a little base as kind of a high resolution mouse for like a first person shooter mode. Do not recommend that. Very bulky, but. Plus you also need a keyboard. But here's the thing. This thing actually works really, really well. It's much better with that Full screen experience like that actually puts it over the top because. Because it's that thing where Windows gets in the way a little bit. You know, not a little bit, a lot maybe. There's a couple of things I really, really like about this, but from a performance perspective and maybe graphics quality perspective, this is better than any of those mainstream laptops I was just talking about. You could get a laptop with dedicated graphics, then we could have a different conversation. But it's, you know, 1920 by 1200 Soled Multi Touch, 144Hz, variable refresh rate.

Richard Campbell (113:07)

And with an 8 inch screen on it.

Paul Thurrott (113:09)

Yeah, it's 8.8 inches. Yeah, like 7ish. You know, they're in there.

Richard Campbell (113:14)

The thing is, was that statue to Devil's old line that any windows box under 9 inch screen, the window slices is free.

Paul Thurrott (113:22)

Yeah, I think it was 8 inch. I think that might. Maybe that's a good point. Yeah, I don't know if that's, maybe that's changed but when he said that Windows Phone was still a thing. So it's kind of hard to say if that's still the. They've changed the deal. I did play a variety of games on this, but I obviously I spent the most time in black ops 6 in my case and some 7 at the end, but I'm not going to count that. But the, the, the. There's a lot to configure here. There's a really nice like quick settings panel you can pop up with a button from the side where you can configure. I mean everything. It's really nice. But it has its own thermal modes that are in addition to the power management mode. So you can kind of really screw around with it. But even with both unbalanced and it on battery. Right, because that's the third variable here because you get more performance when it's on battery, when it's on power. Sorry. This thing is like the frame rate in Call of Duty is better than what I get on most, most laptops. Like meaning it's I'm going to say 55 to 75 frames per second. You know, most of the graphics settings on, you know, normal to high, somewhere in there, like in the middle, you know. But it looks great.

Richard Campbell (114:35)

You can't see this at this point. Right.

Paul Thurrott (114:37)

It's hard. Yeah. Right. Well, you can't. You can see a 1 pixel sniper in the distance, you know, and it's like what is that flash? You know, you're dead. But yeah, it's. I have old eyes and it's tough for me a little bit.

Richard Campbell (114:47)

Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (114:48)

Actually, I got used to the screen for whatever. That's what worth. I have seen over 100 frames per second on this thing.

Richard Campbell (114:53)

Wow.

Paul Thurrott (114:53)

And that's with everything again, not that.

Richard Campbell (114:55)

You can actually see that. You just saw the number, but I.

Paul Thurrott (114:58)

Can'T see it at all. But I'm telling you, it's up. It's up in the corner and it's like, holy. Well, no, that's not fair. So if you. I don't remember the names, the modes anymore, but if you put it on like, you know, whatever the, the most friendly to the battery thing is, and then you do the thermal mode to like quiet, whatever. Now we're talking like 20, 25 frames a second. I can see that that is a horrible experience. Right. But just the normal. It's, you know, I'm surprised by how good this is.

Richard Campbell (115:27)

Like, Yeah. I mean, on one hand I'm delighted. On the other hand, I'm not surprised because Lenovo guys, they, their hardware team is just a bit unleashed. They're allowed to make stuff. They really are.

Paul Thurrott (115:40)

This. It's too bad they couldn't have gotten this full screen experience from day one because they. This, honestly, it transforms the device because the PC ness of this thing is obvious. You get like, it's a desktop with a taskbar. There's a little Mylar touchpad on one of the controllers. You can actually move, you know, because you need it. Like, you're going to be interacting with dialogues and stuff.

Richard Campbell (115:58)

Right.

Paul Thurrott (116:00)

But once you get the full screen thing going, which, you know, I didn't factor into the review per se, other than say, it's going to get way better, like, it really does make a difference. And it's neat in the way that, like, if you're playing a game and the option might say in the menu, quit to desktop. Desktop. It quits to the full screen experience. Right. It quits to the Xbox app. Right. Which. That's the front end. It actually works really, really well. Like, it's, it's very nicely done. So, yeah, the speakers are good. The performance is unbelievable. The connectivity is good. It's, you know, it's USB 4, so you get 40 gigabits per second, but one port.

Richard Campbell (116:38)

Plug it into a big screen.

Paul Thurrott (116:40)

Yes, you can do that. I didn't test it that way. I tried it one time, just. Okay, that works. It's fine. You can do that. Look, I ran the battery down a bunch of times just to kind of test that. I mostly played with it on power But I spent a lot of time going between the different settings. I also just started using an Xbox controller instead of the built in ones at some point just to get over that little hump. But I'm surprised. I wasn't sure what to expect here. I really wanted to see the Xbox thing, so that was kind of cool. But that, the performance and just the. The whole experience thing mostly. I do have a picture of that thing I was talking about in the review. Richard. The battery is running a lot of the dialog pops of the. And you're like, are you serious? I don't know how obvious it is from the picture because it's blocked, but I'm laying on the floor with a gun. I'm trying to. There's a guy you can't see because he's behind the dialogue. Hilarious. And I got killed one second after this screenshot was taken.

Richard Campbell (117:38)

Of course he did.

Paul Thurrott (117:39)

It was unbelievable. So like the Lenovo Legion. No, it's called Lenovo Space is like their version of the Xbox app. So it's like you can have all your games in one place. Yeah, that's cute. That is not useful other than installing firmware updates and things like that. But the slide out quick settings thing, they have multiple tabs. That is awesome. Like it's awesome. And now with the full screen experience, everything just works with the controller. Like everything. It's really good. So. So I can, you know, it's expensive, it's hard to find. That's the other problem.

Richard Campbell (118:13)

Yeah, but. And it is pricey, right?

Paul Thurrott (118:15)

Like. Yep.

Leo Laporte (118:16)

How much?

Paul Thurrott (118:17)

Well, it starts at 1100 bucks, but the one I have, which is 32 gigs of RAM and 2 terabytes of storage, which by the way, you're definitely going to want, right? Is 1350.

Leo Laporte (118:28)

That's a PC.

Paul Thurrott (118:29)

Yeah, it is a PC because it is a PC. You can swap out the SSD. So if you get the lower end one want to get a bigger M2, you can do that. It's kind of fun. It's kind of. I didn't look, I've seen a picture. I didn't. I didn't do it myself. But the six screws you can take off the back panel. But the, the ssd, they come in different like widths, like lengths or whatever. And the one that's in there is one of the short ones. I don't remember the name for that, but you can. There's room for the bigger one. So if you.

Leo Laporte (118:54)

There are bigger ssd, that's an easy upgrade. It sounds.

Paul Thurrott (118:56)

Yeah, it's Very simple. Yeah, just all you need is a screwdriver, so it's good.

Leo Laporte (119:01)

So you like playing on it? Would you choose it over your Xbox?

Paul Thurrott (119:05)

I have. So that's the thing. So I have been gaming on laptops. Look, the truth is I'm like 58 years old. I could kind of use a bigger screen. But the. I got really used to it and when, when that huge update occurred that I complained about last week, I installed it on whatever the couple of laptops are. I have that game on as well. And I did play on one of the big. It's like a 16 inch screen and I actually found it kind of difficult to play on the screen because it was. I had to. But like pushed it back. I was like, oh my God, close. Yeah, I got used to it and I did not expect that. I, I feel like.

Leo Laporte (119:38)

So the advantage obviously is this is portable. I mean it's not super portable, but it's.

Paul Thurrott (119:44)

Well, if you think that two to three hours of battery life is portable, I guess it is.

Leo Laporte (119:48)

So. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (119:49)

So three times as thick as a typical laptop. It's, you know, but it's. I don't know, I.

Richard Campbell (119:55)

It's the big handheld. Like, you know, for those who are into handheld, this is the.

Paul Thurrott (120:00)

And that, that's the thing. When you think about handheld gaming. You think Switch, right? And switches all these cute little games and it's cute. And then you think about PC gaming and it's like some guy in his basement with some giant like wraparound screen and free GPUs or whatever and whatever. He's running, you know, flight simulator at a thousand frames a second or something. And so what's the market for this? It's like I like the idea of the switch, but I want to play that game, you know, and I want to do it on a controller. That's the other thing, by the way. Right. So when you think about PC gaming, gaming. I play on a controller. I came out of Xbox, right. So I am used to the controller. I prefer the controller. I like it. I'm not going to go back to keyboard mouse. I just can't do that anymore. So now we have a PC where you're going to use a controller. You're just going to use a controller. I mean, you could add a keyboard, but geez, I mean, why would you do that? So what's that cross section look like? I bet it's pretty small, but. But I have to say I. Something about this thing I really, really like and I had these reliability issues and normally I'd be like, nope, that's the end of this. But this hasn't happened in a while. This is that thing I was talking about earlier where in the first few weeks I'd be in the middle of a game and it would just freeze or one time, or more than one time actually, it rebooted. Like just the computer started booting again. I'm like, I'm just in the middle of a game and you notice that. But I haven't seen that now in like weeks. I mean, it's been a while. So maybe, I don't know, some combination of Microsoft and Lenovo updates, I don't know. But it's gotten better.

Leo Laporte (121:31)

Yeah.

Richard Campbell (121:32)

Just in driver updates, I bet. Yeah.

Paul Thurrott (121:34)

Yeah, I think, Yeah, I think that's a big, big part of it.

Leo Laporte (121:39)

Well, read all about it@thorat.com in fact, both of the last two stories are all there on Thorat.com Become a premium member in that way, you get all the goodness, all the nuggety internals. Yes. You know, as long as you're joining Thorat.com can I invite you, Can I entice you to join Club Twit? As I mentioned, we do a lot of fun things in Club Twit. When you join, you get ad free versions of all the shows. Hello, Richard. You also get. I'm going to just, if you don't mind, just take you out of this particular shot. You also get. So it's just me and the people, the club members. First of all, a big thank you to members. You make it possible for us to do so much. 25% of our operating income comes from Club Twitt members. Now, if you are a Club Twit member, you wouldn't be seeing this unless you're watching live because we don't put the plugs in or the ads. You get ad free versions of all the shows. You get access to, to the wonderful Club Twit Discord, which, you know, to my mind might be the best benefit. It's a, it's an amazing place to hang out with some really smart, interesting people and talk about not just the shows but all the things, you know, geeks are interested in. There's also the special program and we do like our Dungeons and Dragons game on Monday. Chris Markworth's photo guide, Stacy's Book Club. Coming up later today, Micah's Crafting Corner. And Scott Wilkinson is going to do. He does this every month, a chat with the Discord. Ask your home theater questions. So we've got two events Coming up today. So if you're not a member, do me a favor. Twit TV Club Twit. There is right now a 10% off coupon for the holidays. It ends Christmas Day, but. But if you want to give it to yourself or to a family member or fellow geek as a gift, this would be a good time to do that. There's a two week free trial. There's family plans and enterprise plans as well. Annual or monthly Twit TV Club Twit, please. We would love to have you in the club.

Paul Thurrott (123:53)

Hey, audiobook lovers. This week on the podcast I'm sitting down with musicians, producer and walking encyclopedia Questlove. We're talking about Mark Ronson's memoir Night how to be a DJ in 90s New York City. All right, like we talked about before, Mark Ronson found sanctuary in the DJ booth. What's a tool or piece of equipment in the studio or on stage that gives you the most control? So I have two microphones on stage. We have the microphone that you hear as the audience.

Richard Campbell (124:21)

Then we a have the second microphone.

Paul Thurrott (124:24)

In which we communicate with each other.

Richard Campbell (124:26)

I feel like that second microphone kind of saved all of our friendships. No band likes each other after 20.

Paul Thurrott (124:33)

Years or 25 years. The Beatles broke up in seven and.

Richard Campbell (124:37)

A half years and we're going on 35.

Paul Thurrott (124:41)

Listen to earsay the Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Leo Laporte (124:55)

Now I put that right before Richard's whiskey segment because I figured that's going to keep people tuned in. But first let's find out what's coming up on Runners radio Run.

Richard Campbell (125:09)

This is the last of the binary shows. This is 1011 or in binary binary 11. Oh, because after this now I was.

Leo Laporte (125:19)

Wondering why you called them the binary shows.

Richard Campbell (125:22)

Yeah, because I had a chain of numbers that were just ones and zeros. So next time this is going to happen is like two years from now when we get to 1100. Oh Lord. Oh, how did that happen? And this was one of the shows I recorded on the road. In fact, a Tecorama nutrek with Deepthi Chalupati who is one of the engineers working on site reliability engineering agents in Azure SRE engineering. So really one of the experts in the space. And we had an amazing conversation. And so what were we talking about? I mean, we were talking about real agentic behavior where now I can have tools that are monitoring telemetry and logs and events and so forth round the clock and at the minimum being able to Package up a ticket. So we've got a major. An error that's occurred in a log that crosses the threshold of this should be something we respond to. And instead of waiting for us to respond to it, this agent's already in action, doing the initial diagnostics, maybe pulling additional information so that by the time a person looks at it, it's got the initial set of data you would have fetched anyway. So you're able to respond a little faster. But you can go further than that to recognize, hey, this might actually be a coding error of some kind. This represents an error in the application. And now these agents can be exploring into the code and maybe making recommendations, even producing tickets onto the coding side of things. Over to the dev to say this occurred in production. Here's the events that occurred, here's the possible issues, here's a breakdown of potential fixes. Again, leveraging these tools to speed recovery, to be able to keep folks moving forward and to spend less time on diagnostics, which if you ever go and do analysis of errors in production, you realize the vast majority of it is diagnostics. The action to repair is usually pretty short short once we actually understand the problem. And so these SRE agents are tools that Microsoft uses internally and now they're being made available to us as well. Operating our own applications, being able to oversee a lot of different levels, and we focus on most of the disaster recovery aspects of it. But telemetry monitoring as a whole was something I think we just often don't have time to do as administrators. Like I was always a big fan of when a new major version of an app pushes. And this is back in the era of that was every six months. I was very big on watching logs for the new features being used. A, they were the things most likely to tip the system over for increasing utilization and B, it was always good to report on utilization. Just how much was the new feature being used and so forth like that was beneficial to everybody. The fact that we could have agentic tools now doing that routinely and possibly even going so far as to recommend, hey, here's a problem that's going to occur, we're going to run out of resources because this utilization is pretty high or that the. This is obviously a feature that's frustrating people because you're seeing these same cycles of problems happening over and over again doesn't raise to the threshold of a crisis. But you could get into more preventative work with these tools just because they're able to monitor at a deeper level and deep. They knew this stuff cold like she was deeply is making the product come true and somebody you want to connect with if you're starting to use these things and struggling with. So check it out on the, on the site and by all means have a listen. It's good show. Very happy to have chatted with her.

Leo Laporte (128:44)

Nice. Now, let's talk whiskey.

Richard Campbell (128:48)

Most popular Irish whiskey in the world, friends. What is it?

Leo Laporte (128:52)

Jameson.

Richard Campbell (128:53)

And by a mile. Like not even close, right? Jameson is the only Irish whiskey that bats at the degree of Johnny Walker and Jack Daniels and Jim Beam. Like it's big, but big. And it's very inexpensive, right? I mean it's part of a very large mass produced out of the New Middleton distillery. That last distillery when, when, when the Irish system was on its knees in the, in the late 60s 70s, you know, this was the, the major distillery and you can buy a bottle of regular Jameson for 20 bucks, right? And, and by the way, absolutely nothing wrong with the Jameson. If I'm in the mood for an Irish, that's the one I can find on the shelf of virtually any bar anywhere at any time time. And that is not the Jameson I had the other night at a particular whiskey party I may have referred to a few times.

Leo Laporte (129:43)

Not nobody would just bring Jameson, you know, 12. They have to bring something special, right?

Richard Campbell (129:49)

And Even in Jameson, 12 is fairly unusual, like just right. These are blended whiskies. Why do they have an age declaration?

Leo Laporte (129:54)

Why do they have an age?

Richard Campbell (129:55)

This is so strange. Obviously a few things we. We've talked about the original Jameson before. One of the most relevant thing being John Jameson was originally a Scot who moved to Dublin and was making whiskey in the late 1700s. It was his son that took over in the 1800s as the taxation systems and so forth came into play. I was reminded going back through the old notes about that about in 1832 when Aeneas coffee makes the coffee coffee still the continuous distillation still that it was actually the Irish that didn't like it, right? Because you have the incumbent distillers, they're all doing pot distillation in many cases triple distillation. And so they don't want to be interfered with by this newfangled device that uses steam heat and continuous distills and so forth. And it's the Scots that jump all over it and start using that. And that's when you get those famous stories like Dalmore got these big gin pot stills because the gin producers are all switching to column stills because column stills get to 90 plus percent alcohol very easily and that makes better gin. It was less expensive to run, you could make more of it and so forth. And so it was the Scots that were decing the value of whiskey. And so the Irish added the E to whiskey to distinguish themselves from the cheap Scottish whiskey that didn't have an E. Now, obviously, things change in these days column stills are ever including at the new Middleton distillery. Jameson has made with Newton with this, right? It's that. That's not a big change in that sense. And again, I'll remind you, the Irish whiskey industry all but collapsed in the 1960s till there was only from hundreds of distilleries living 32 left. Just the up in North Africa, sorry, up in North Ireland, the Bushmills distillery and the Jameson distillery, which then was rebuilt in the 1970s to become the new Middleton distillery. And they bought up all the brands, right? This is where Reds the spots live. This is where Telemore do live. Everything sort of went there. But the most important thing with the new Middleton distillery was it wasn't designed to make only one whiskey. It was designed to be able to switch between different productions.

Paul Thurrott (132:16)

Productions.

Richard Campbell (132:17)

So they had all these different recipes and approaches to making whiskey and there was this one distillery that could make them all, so it could keep the industry alive. And that, needless to say, things have expanded and changed. And there's a bunch of other distilleries again. Kilbeggin is now around and Cooley, Economara and so forth. The standardization of Irish whiskey, really, while there have been multiple revisions on it, the last sort of main one now is the 2016 version, which is you must be distilled and matured in Ireland. That includes the Republic of Ireland as well as North Ireland and mat mashes of malted and unmalted cereals and grains. So they don't care what it is. Can be barley, can be wheat, can be oats, like whatever you want does not have to be malted. And you can use diastase of malt as well as natural enzymes, different ways to do digestion to be able to produce more sugars. Fermented by yeast, you can distill up to as high as 94.8, which is incredibly high. But generally speaking, Irish whiskeys are distilled to higher levels. One of the, when you think about what's an Irish whiskey, you talk about this lightness and the smoothness and so forth. And part of that is that they tend to distill higher, which does pull some of those harsher flavors out of it. Of Course, it has the value of about 40% as a finished product to be a spirit that's consistent all over the world, for better or worse. There are generally three varieties of Irish whiskey to recognize. There's the single pot still very traditional. There's single malts and single grains, plus all of the blended variations. And if you're going to use an age statement and most Irish whiskies do not, it has to be the youngest thing in the the bottle. Traditionally e in the name whiskey, but not a requirement. So I think they're over that old rage from back in there. And so Today there's about 40, 50 distilleries in Ireland. They're, they're doing very well. And Jameson of course is the most famous blended whiskey in the traditional Jameson is 50% barley malt from pot stills, 50% column still of which 40% is malted and 60% is unmalted. If you remember back in the other times we've talked about Irish, there was a period where the English were taxing them for malt. So they started using unmalted to avoid taxes and then found that it tasted good. And so they still do that to this day. Normally, Jameson whiskey is aged in bourbon casks, specifically Wild Turkey, but they also occasionally have sherry casks as well. And that is then. And the regular product is four to seven years old. And that is not what I drank that day. I had a. I had a taste of Jameson's rarest vintage reserve from 2007 and I've included a link to the Reg Jameson site because this is nowhere to be found on the website anymore.

Leo Laporte (134:59)

Another one of those whiskies. We can't get the.

Richard Campbell (135:03)

So what actually happened? It took me a while to figure out like, where did this whiskey come from? It's a total odd duck. There's been a couple of these vintage editions. There was one even in the 90s, but it always comes down to the same old thing, which is they found some old barrels. And by old barrels, I mean 20 plus year old barrels. Wow. Stashed away in a back corner. Okay. And so this specifically is what they call these four Jameson masters. So first and foremost, master still a Barry Crockett. He had likely laid the these barrels up in the 80s and he located them again. Remember this is 2007. So Crockett, who made these things and now 20 plus years on, they run across them like, oh yeah, okay, Billy Layton, who's the master blender? That guy. So you have a master blender when you're making Blends. Brendan Monks, who is the master of maturation or what we never really call a barrel man. So these are the folks who go around, inspect barrel barrels and test their state and so forth. And then David Quinn, who is sort of the former master distillery these days, is called the master of whiskey science and has been in charge of quality control at the New Middleton distillery since the early 80s. So these four sort of collaborated on this. Billy Layton, who is the master blender, sort of leads with this. And here's the important part. What's distinguished about Jameson? Now this rarest vintage, right? Normal Jameson 8 in Wild Turkey barrels Bourbon. These were port matured. He found he had a set of old port barrels that he laid out these whiskeys on and let them sit for 20 something years. Now they did bring in some mature regular grain whiskey that had been aging in Wild Turkey barrels as well to combine all these things. But I couldn't get a solid number on actually how many bottles are made. I think it's about 3,000. I do have a note that only a thousand bottles made it to North America. So this was probably a dozen casks all told that were involved in this production and at the time sold for $400. Now regular Jameson, 20 bucks a Jameson 18, which by the way, amazing drink, not that easy to find if you can find it at $160. So $400 for a bottle of Jameson is crazy. But admittedly this was a very rare edition. It is not $400 anymore.

Paul Thurrott (137:34)

No.

Richard Campbell (137:34)

Last auction I could find for it, 36.50.

Paul Thurrott (137:39)

Wow.

Leo Laporte (137:41)

Is this it? Because Kevin found this 2007 rarest finish.

Richard Campbell (137:45)

That's the one. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (137:46)

So it is in stock at Whiskey Exchange.

Richard Campbell (137:49)

Somebody says they have one for twelve hundred pounds. Pounds.

Paul Thurrott (137:52)

Yeah.

Richard Campbell (137:52)

And that's a pretty good price when you're. When your last auction I could find was over 3,000.

Leo Laporte (137:56)

You have to be in the UK.

Richard Campbell (137:57)

To get it, but probably, well for free, standard delivery. But if you're going to spend, you could probably fly to the UK to get it.

Leo Laporte (138:04)

Be worth it.

Richard Campbell (138:05)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (138:06)

Would it be worth it?

Richard Campbell (138:09)

It's beautiful. I mean it's just a. I would argue because I'm not a big fan of 20 plus year old whiskeys for the most part. They're very expensive and often they have very strong flavors in them. This is a blended whiskey. The one thing you should do with really old whiskey is blend it.

Leo Laporte (138:26)

Yeah.

Richard Campbell (138:27)

Because you could take those edges off. Right. The fact that these masters collaborated over this thing and tried to make it drink a little Approachable, it shows. It's a very special drink. It's very unusual and a perfect addition in that particular party that we were at just 46%. Like there's nothing extreme here.

Leo Laporte (138:49)

This is not a cask.

Richard Campbell (138:50)

Like anytime you'd spend this kind of money, it'd be a one off cask. And that's not what this is. It's a, literally a special edition made by a group of experts for folks who are wanting to have something.

Leo Laporte (139:01)

Connoisseurs.

Paul Thurrott (139:02)

Special.

Richard Campbell (139:02)

Yeah, connoisseurs. And it looks almost 20 years old in the bottle at this point. Not that it, that ages it in any ways, but it's been a long time. You don't get to make this whatever you want. Want. Right. Like you, you don't have the barrels. These barrels clearly were somewhat lost and they found them and thought, okay, let's do something with this. And we're able to pull off something astonishing. And I promised last week that I was going to stop talking about this party, but I had to do this one last week.

Leo Laporte (139:29)

So when somebody pulls this bottle out, is it like 8 year olds at a soccer game? Like, everybody clusters around trying to have a sip of it. I mean, how many people were at this party?

Richard Campbell (139:42)

Four.

Leo Laporte (139:43)

Oh, okay. But look, that makes it a little easier enough for everybody.

Richard Campbell (139:49)

I don't have, I don't have 20 friends that would actually know what they were drinking. Yeah, right.

Leo Laporte (139:54)

Yeah, yeah. You don't want to waste it on people.

Richard Campbell (139:58)

And I never think that way. Like, I have pulled some unusual whiskey out on Paul and he gets upset when I do that too. Right. So here, try this. There's only 3,000 bottles of this in the world. World. It's like, wait, what are you doing?

Paul Thurrott (140:10)

It's like, what are you doing to me, man? Like, what if I like this?

Leo Laporte (140:12)

Now see, I would be more afraid of what if I don't like it?

Richard Campbell (140:16)

What, what am I going to do.

Leo Laporte (140:18)

If I don't like it? I can't admit it.

Paul Thurrott (140:21)

Yeah.

Richard Campbell (140:21)

So yeah, it, it and it. You know, that particular Nile's party, he'd been sitting on those bottles for years from when I could get to his bottles.

Paul Thurrott (140:31)

Oh.

Leo Laporte (140:31)

And like it was.

Richard Campbell (140:33)

He wanted me to try those things. His friend John had come over as well. Everybody brought something to the party.

Leo Laporte (140:38)

That's somebody who really likes you, Richard.

Richard Campbell (140:41)

Well, and, and we enjoy. We've bought unusual things together over the years. We've been in various whiskey bars over the years digging, you know, and you got to get to know the bartender well enough to convince him to pull out the rares like that. You're qualified and I'm pretty good at that part. Like there's anything Niall likes about hangry with me. It's like it. It takes me less time to get the bartender to get under the counter and drag out the single counter asks than most people. Because I know. I know what?

Leo Laporte (141:09)

Paint a picture for us. So there's four people at this party.

Richard Campbell (141:12)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (141:13)

What is it like, so somebody.

Paul Thurrott (141:15)

It's like. Is this like an Eyes Wide Shut scenario? What are we talking about? Yeah.

Leo Laporte (141:18)

You wear masks? Are you wearing robes?

Paul Thurrott (141:20)

Do you.

Leo Laporte (141:21)

Does somebody like. Does. Do people, like, hide their bottle until it's their turn?

Richard Campbell (141:26)

No, we all just walked up. But you gave up. He was upstairs in his lobby and just put them all down on the table.

Leo Laporte (141:32)

Okay. And then how many. How many different bottles were there?

Richard Campbell (141:35)

Oh, there was a bunch. We couldn't even open most of them. Right, okay. Because also you respect the whiskey like.

Leo Laporte (141:41)

Three, four drinks in.

Paul Thurrott (141:44)

I know.

Richard Campbell (141:44)

Stop.

Paul Thurrott (141:44)

Yeah, stop going to the exact.

Richard Campbell (141:46)

I'm not drinking your thousand dollar bottle of whiskey. Four drinks and. Are you crazy? Like, what are you doing?

Leo Laporte (141:50)

Yeah. Right.

Richard Campbell (141:50)

So. Yeah. And we'd already had a nice dinner as well. Like, we. You know, I would have liked to do that all night. I was talking and I did have a show the next morning that I was keynoting, so I didn't want to get too wrecked. And so you just. And you just want to taste them because they're beautiful. Right. They're all pretty special.

Leo Laporte (142:09)

It sounds like a very, very special event.

Richard Campbell (142:12)

Yeah, it was. It was a lot of fun. I get it. You get a few of those a year if you're lucky.

Paul Thurrott (142:17)

Yeah. You know.

Richard Campbell (142:18)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (142:18)

Yeah.

Richard Campbell (142:18)

And the same thing I like. And folks who've been around when we've gone to the right bar and I know I've got know the bartender or gotten to know the bar tender. We've gone into his collection. You know, we can do that at a bar too, once in a while. We'll spend a lot of money, but we'll also have an extraordinary drink.

Leo Laporte (142:37)

Very exciting.

Richard Campbell (142:38)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (142:39)

Very cool.

Richard Campbell (142:40)

I'm in Australia, so I promise an Australian next week when I'm. We'll be up in. We'll be up in. In the Gold coast by. By next Wednesday. So we'll. We'll try and do something else.

Leo Laporte (142:51)

Something special from Richard's closet.

Richard Campbell (142:53)

That's it. Yeah. I haven't seen my closet in a couple of months, so. No.

Leo Laporte (142:59)

We do put all of those together into a whiskey playlist on our YouTube channel, YouTube.com TWIT and then go to the Windows Weekly channel and you can watch Windows Whiskey with Richard Campbell.

Richard Campbell (143:15)

Oh, yeah. Something weird from my closet.com is working today for some reason. I don't know why.

Leo Laporte (143:20)

Well, it wasn't behind Cloudflare.

Paul Thurrott (143:21)

I guess Cloudflare came back.

Leo Laporte (143:24)

Something weird from my closet.com will take.

Richard Campbell (143:27)

You to the YouTube playlist of what is now 107.

Leo Laporte (143:33)

Good Lord.

Richard Campbell (143:34)

Kev's been busy. He's been working like there's more at it. Yeah, look, we're, we're already. That's the. We're up to Compass box. Vel, which is just not that long ago. That's from. From the early fall, so.

Leo Laporte (143:45)

Wow.

Richard Campbell (143:46)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (143:46)

Yeah, we've, we've been busy. Kevin's been busy collating all of these. And you know, you see there's a whole bunch of. The first few are on the whiskey creation process. So you learn about.

Richard Campbell (143:59)

You want to hear two and a half hours of me talking about how Irish or Scottish whiskey is made? There you go.

Leo Laporte (144:04)

That's the first thing. Oh, I could talk for two and a half hours. This is fantastic. What a resource. This is incredible. Thank you, Kevin, for all the work you do do putting this together. Something weird from my closet.com or just, you know, go to YouTube.com twit and you'll find a link to Windows Weekly.

Richard Campbell (144:26)

I got a nice note from a distillery from the American Distillery in Washington State that they heard my clip on there. They heard the piece from off of YouTube talking about the whiskey and they liked the way I distributed, described it.

Leo Laporte (144:41)

Good. I have a feeling this is going to be your entree into whiskey nirvana. Things are going to start arriving at your house.

Paul Thurrott (144:51)

Spokesperson unbidden.

Leo Laporte (144:55)

Really great. Thank you, Richard Campbell. Runasradio.com Episode 1011 is up now, which ironically is binary 11. So is that right? Is 1, 2. Yeah. Binary 11. Nerd.

Richard Campbell (145:11)

Nerd.

Leo Laporte (145:12)

Also, you'll find@runnersradio.com Carl Franklin and Richard Dew.net rocks if you're a.net fan. I see that Darren Okey now has to work in. Net. He's enjoying it. So that might be something for you to listen to, Darren in Our Club, Paul Thurrott.com that's, of course the place he hangs his hat and files lots of stories. T H U R R O W His books are@leanpub.com including the Field Guide to Windows 11 and Windows Everywhere. We get together every Wednesday, Raicha 11am Pacific 2pm Eastern. That would be 1900 UTC. You can watch us do it live if you wish. If you are a glutton for punishment, you can watch live. We stream it on YouTube, YouTube, Twitch, X.com, facebook, LinkedIn and Kik. Or of course, in the club Club Twits Discord after the fact. On demand versions of the show available at TWiT TV WW. There's audio there and video. The video also makes its way to YouTube, which is nice to have for sharing clips with fellow nerds, fellow winners and dozers. And then of course, the best way to get it, subscribe in your favorite podcast client. That way you'll get an automatic. Magically every, Every Wednesday. You know, we're, we'll, we're done a little early, which is great. In a half an hour, Jimmy Wales will join us for Intelligent Machines, creator of Wikipedia. His new book, the Seven Laws. Anybody not like anybody, you know or anything.

Paul Thurrott (146:49)

That's amazing.

Leo Laporte (146:50)

I'm excited about. I've interviewed him before. He's kind of a legend. We all of him a great company. Kind of, yeah, kind of. We all owe him a great debt of gratitude. His new book, Seven Rules of Trust, talks about what it took to make Wikipedia. And interestingly, it's not us reading Wikipedia. To trust Wikipedia, the hardest thing to do is to get the volunteers to trust one another. It's about getting communities to trust one another.

Richard Campbell (147:17)

And that's when I responsible for the real form of Encyclopedia Galactica. Right.

Paul Thurrott (147:22)

Maybe he can help the Windows community.

Leo Laporte (147:25)

Yeah, well, that's what he's saying is we're in a crisis of trust in this modern age and maybe we can work on it.

Paul Thurrott (147:33)

Yeah, exactly. It's the exact wrong time for AI to be happening. And which explains why it's happening, you know. Yeah.

Leo Laporte (147:40)

Talk about talking about losing trust.

Paul Thurrott (147:41)

Worst. Depending on who you are, the worst or best possible timing for this.

Leo Laporte (147:45)

Wikipedia is 93 times bigger than Encyclopedia Britannica.

Richard Campbell (147:50)

Yeah.

Leo Laporte (147:52)

That'S a lot. 11 billion page views, you know, entries.

Paul Thurrott (147:58)

For random people and, you know, like, it's, it's almost too complete, but yeah, it's awesome.

Leo Laporte (148:04)

Well, he has an anecdote in here about when his baby was born. Before he started Wikipedia, she had a medical crisis and there was no easy way for her to find out more information so that he could make. That he and his wife could make the decision about what treatment. Treatment. Right. And he said, now you can go. If you, you know, if you had that problem, you go to Wikipedia and there's multiple articles on it. Reliable articles on it. It really has changed the information landscape for the better. Yeah. So that's coming up. We will be back next Wednesday with Paul and Richard. I hope you will be back too because, well, frankly, there'd be no point in us just sitting around talking unless there's some whiskey.

Richard Campbell (148:43)

I mean, we do it anyway. But yeah, that's true.

Paul Thurrott (148:46)

Next week is like. Thanks. Thanksgiving Eve. Right.

Leo Laporte (148:48)

The day before Thanksgiving. And you should all be thankful that Paul and Richard are going to truss up their bird and then join us on the show.

Richard Campbell (148:57)

To be clear, I'll be on the beach in Cool.

Paul Thurrott (148:59)

And to be clear, my wife actually does all that work. Thank God.

Leo Laporte (149:02)

But do they do. They don't do Thanksgiving in. In Australia. It would be silly.

Richard Campbell (149:07)

They do in Canada, but they do it in October like civilized people.

Leo Laporte (149:09)

Right. You've already had your things.

Richard Campbell (149:11)

That's it.

Paul Thurrott (149:12)

That's why you can travel in the sense that. That Mexico is eager to absorb any tradition from any place, anytime. They all. They. It's not like an official like state sanction.

Leo Laporte (149:21)

People do it.

Paul Thurrott (149:22)

Oh yeah, we know multiple people.

Leo Laporte (149:24)

That's great.

Paul Thurrott (149:24)

Are doing Thanksgiving.

Leo Laporte (149:25)

Well, we stole their Halloween, so I think it's fair that, you know, I.

Paul Thurrott (149:29)

Don'T think what we stole is nothing like what they do is. So we were the palest imitation. That's a good point. Like what they do. But yeah, there's oranges involved and you know.

Leo Laporte (149:38)

Yeah. All right, Paul, Richard, have a wonderful day. Enjoy Sydney, Enjoy Roma Norte. And we'll see you right back here day before Thanksgiving next week on Windows Weekly. Take care. Actually, when you said. When your wife said you might have Tourette's, I wish I had said. You mean Thorot syndrome.

Paul Thurrott (150:08)

Yeah, exactly.

Leo Laporte (150:09)

Right. If I'd only said that we would have a show title right now. But I didn't.

Paul Thurrott (150:12)

It's a pretty close spelling, that's all I'm saying.

Leo Laporte (150:15)

The rot syndrome. How many times can I punch myself? We all want to teabag our neighbors. There's a. No, we don't. There's a lot of pen up rage out there. I don't like it. I don't want it. You're just noise. We're better off without you. Oh, my alarm's going off.

Richard Campbell (150:34)

That's nice. Good timing. Wait till the end of the recording.

Leo Laporte (150:37)

Yeah, I better handle this.

Paul Thurrott (150:38)

Your classes are ready.

Leo Laporte (150:39)

I'll find it you to title.

Richard Campbell (150:41)

All right.

Paul Thurrott (150:42)

Bye.

Richard Campbell (150:43)

I'll see you.