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WW 972: I'm A Tolkien Scholar - Phil Spencer & Sarah Bond Depart Xbox
02:27:57
Phil Spencer & Sarah Bond Depart Xbox
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- [00:00]
Leo Laporte
It's time for Windows Weekly. Paul Thurad and Richard Campbell are here. We're going to talk about the big changes that just happened at Xbox. Paul. Xbox. Paul says no cause for concern. In all likelihood, his new book just came out. We'll tell you what it is and how to get it. And then Richard has a local whiskey that sounds pretty sweet. All of that coming up next on Windows Whiskey. I Weekly. Podcasts you love from people you trust.
- [00:34]
Paul Thurrott
This is Twit.
- [00:41]
Leo Laporte
This is Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Episode 972 recorded Wednesday, February 25, 2026. I'm a Tolkien scholar. It's time for Windows Weekly. Hello, you winners and you dozers. You can doze through this if you want, but you won't want to because lookie, lookie, it's Paul Thurot from therot.com. he is in beautiful Mexico City. Hello, Paul. Are there any cars burning in your neighborhood? Any cartels?
- [01:11]
Paul Thurrott
I don't think there are any cars actually burning in the entire country. I'm not saying this is fake news, but I am saying I'm safer here than I am in the United States. And one more person reaches out to me.
- [01:21]
Leo Laporte
I know, I bet.
- [01:21]
Paul Thurrott
Tell me I got to come home immediately.
- [01:23]
Leo Laporte
I bet Richard Campbell is in war torn British Columbia. I'm sorry about the hockey thing.
- [01:32]
Richard Campbell
You know what was lucky Bounce. It happens. They played a good game and you
- [01:36]
Leo Laporte
guys, you know, you got a bronze. And curling, and that's the Matt, that's
- [01:39]
Paul Thurrott
the sport that really. At least the US Hockey team got a gold.
- [01:42]
Leo Laporte
Men got a gold. It was. The women got the bronze. Okay.
- [01:45]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [01:45]
Richard Campbell
Now Homan got the bronze and Jacobs got the gold.
- [01:49]
Leo Laporte
I think curling got a big boost in the Winter Olympics this year.
- [01:52]
Richard Campbell
It always does.
- [01:53]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [01:53]
Richard Campbell
I end up explaining curling a lot.
- [01:55]
Paul Thurrott
I'm reasonably sure curling doesn't occur other than the Olympics and I refuse to believe otherwise.
- [02:01]
Leo Laporte
We were at a pub bar having dinner and Lisa was looking over and of course they have. It's a sports pub, so they have all the TVs on. And it just happened to be that every single event was curling.
- [02:13]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [02:13]
Leo Laporte
And Lisa said, that's the dumbest looking sport I've ever seen. I said, well, if you understand it, it's really like chess on ice.
- [02:19]
Paul Thurrott
Well, to see FL flag football this summer, you'll see. We'll see.
- [02:27]
Leo Laporte
Helly Buck was a brick wall. Says Joe wasn't a lucky.
- [02:32]
Paul Thurrott
Don't even pretend this is interesting, guys.
- [02:35]
Leo Laporte
Hey, I do. Before we go too much farther I owe an apology. I know nobody who listens to Mac Break Weekly listens to Windows Weekly, but in case any of you do, there was a mix up on the factory floor yesterday. We have to reset our no accidents number that the would Something terrible happened with the feed and what I really think is terrible. And we're not sure how this happened. We think Apple somehow screwed up its caching. But everybody was trying to download the free version of Mac Break Weekly, which is almost everybody.
- [03:03]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [03:04]
Leo Laporte
Was getting a notice that it's not free anymore and I got a lot of panic.
- [03:08]
Paul Thurrott
Sounds like a Kevin thing to me. If you're going to investigate it, I would start there.
- [03:15]
Leo Laporte
I'm blaming Apple. And anyway, all of our shows, every show I'm on anyway is free. For downloads we encourage you to join the club and you get an ad free version of the show. But we have no plans to put anything behind a paywall and that was just a mistake. So if you did get that error, try again. I think it's been fixed and our apologies. And if you ever get it again, it's not us, it's Apple and we, we, we apologize.
- [03:49]
Paul Thurrott
Ironic that it was Mac Break Weekly.
- [03:51]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, isn't it?
- [03:52]
Richard Campbell
It is funny.
- [03:53]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Yeah.
- [03:56]
Leo Laporte
Boy, big news right after the show last week.
- [03:59]
Richard Campbell
Pretty close. Yeah. Well, it was really this weekend.
- [04:02]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, they waited till Friday. Friday night at 5:00pm, you know.
- [04:06]
Richard Campbell
Well, is it bad news taking up the garbage?
- [04:09]
Paul Thurrott
I, it's not good news. I mean, we'll see, right? I will say, I mean, look, I didn't predict this or anything, but I, I did bring up last week. Haven't heard from Phil Spencer in a while.
- [04:20]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, you did.
- [04:21]
Leo Laporte
In fact, a number of people gave you credit.
- [04:23]
Richard Campbell
Like last ad piece or last news piece was like October. It had been a while.
- [04:27]
Paul Thurrott
It's been a while.
- [04:28]
Leo Laporte
Like people saying Paul called it.
- [04:31]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I didn't call it. I, I just thought it was odd and I, I, I guess if press I would have said something to the tune of something's happening with Xbox and they've required him to be quiet, you know.
- [04:44]
Richard Campbell
And there was a bunch of rumors in July last year about Spencer and they said no.
- [04:49]
Paul Thurrott
Right. Right now I wasn't thinking retirement.
- [04:52]
Richard Campbell
No at all. Although he's 58, like, and he's been at Microsoft a long time. Like where are you going to go? Although to be clear, I have a number of friends who have retired out of Microsoft and it appeared somewhere else within a month.
- [05:06]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's the thing. So I hope he doesn't pull A Peter Moore and end up at Sega or whatever, you know, or some other company. But look, from my perspective, this is a real loss because Phil Spencer was a gamers. Gamer, but more important to me. Yep. But he was also so plain spoken and honest and to the point where it was problematic, I think for Microsoft. He didn't mind. In fact, he openly would discuss things that they were thinking about doing, they were planning on doing. He didn't want to disappoint anybody who was a gamer who cared about Xbox. And I do think he had a Panos, Panay and maybe even Terry Morrison type problem. Meaning there's this broader strategy above him that he has to fit into in his square peg into the circular hole that is Microsoft. And that constrains some of the things you can do. And we don't know the full story and maybe we never will, but one of the things we do know is that he wanted to release Xbox hardware that was portable hardware. And the senior leadership team or the board, I can't recall said no, it's too expensive, it's not going to make any sense financially. We're not doing that. And that's why we have the Xbox. Rog ally from who?
- [06:26]
Richard Campbell
Xbox hardware never made money. It was just a facilitation for selling games. Right. No console hardware makes money.
- [06:34]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So I mean, right. The goal is to cost reduce over time and try to make the hardware profitable. You know, at least in that slice of time. They've never done it. Microsoft, Sony has done it and Nintendo has done it, but it takes time. You know, you don't, you don't have not, you're not profitable.
- [06:53]
Richard Campbell
Sell millions of units.
- [06:55]
Paul Thurrott
Right. But they have a razor blade model. Right. The idea going in was always like, look, we're going to lose money in the hardware, but we're going to sell games and we're going to have that 30% fee from every game maker on each title and that's how we're going to make money, you know, and you make good hardware to sell good games and you know, the floats, all boats, et cetera. So yeah, it's never really worked, you know, that's the problem. The closest they ever came was the 360. That was kind of the shining high
- [07:22]
Richard Campbell
point red ring of death.
- [07:24]
Paul Thurrott
Right. Which is kind of amazing but also showed you how loyal Xbox fans were at that time.
- [07:29]
Richard Campbell
Anyway, Microsoft also did it right. Like I know people who got their 360 replaced three times.
- [07:36]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Including me, by the way. So across, I don't know the number Anymore, somewhere I've written this down. But across multiple dollars was the right number. No, I mean what I meant my number. Like I had multiple Xbox360 consoles and returned all of them at least once and some of them twice. And yeah, so they figured that one out eventually. But anyway, that was pre ex. That was pre Phil Spencer, by the way. Not that that means anything, but look, you're given hands a hand to play, so to speak. And he was given a hand to play. And I think he has or did the best he could do with the cards he was dealt. But you don't.
- [08:19]
Richard Campbell
I mean, no hardware strategy was Phil's strategy. We're going to outsource the hardware thing that Phil led. That. That's his deal.
- [08:30]
Paul Thurrott
Now the goofy thing is they may temporarily reverse on that. And I. Look, we've had this conversation many, many times. Ideally, Xbox as a console would be great. It would sell well. It would compete effectively against PlayStation especially. It doesn't. It hasn't for three generations. They lose money on the hardware and it's getting worse and worse and worse and worse. And I think this business would be fantastically successful if they didn't make hardware
- [09:02]
Richard Campbell
well, and that seems to the direction Phil was going in. So why is he out? Because there's also the rumor that. That he's forced out.
- [09:10]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, so the. Yeah, the re. Right. So the reason I mentioned Panos, Panay and Terry Myerson was that both of those people who ran Windows respectively, ran into the situation where the broader corporate strategies were constraining them too much. And we know that in Panos case, they had so many cuts to surface and cuts and cuts and cuts. And he was like, guys, this doesn't make sense. This business doesn't make sense the way you're forcing it to be so limited. And that was a big chunk of. Or the reason why he left. You know, in Terry's case, it might
- [09:46]
Richard Campbell
have been a showdown moment. It's like, you've made it no way for me to succeed. Why should I stay?
- [09:50]
Paul Thurrott
Right. Right. You're just setting me up for failure. You know, maybe in time we'll know the full stories of all these people we don't really know. So I can't imagine it was the handheld Xbox hardware. I'm sure that was a passion project for him or whatever. It was never going to save Xbox, so to speak. I do feel like there was and maybe still is some version of an Xbox console that is sort of like the switch where you can plug it in and use it on A TV or you can take it with you and that type of thing might make sense, but I don't know, it doesn't matter anymore, right? Because nobody knows.
- [10:27]
Richard Campbell
Right? You have to do it and find out. There's really no other way around this.
- [10:32]
Paul Thurrott
So what we have, what we're left with is he decided to retire, whatever that means. You know, we'll someday, maybe we'll find a little bit more. Find out a little bit more. His presumed successor, Sarah Bond, who also, by the way, gamer, you know, well liked in the industry, etc.
- [10:53]
Richard Campbell
And big on the whole, we don't make hardware anymore. Like, she was part of that narrative.
- [11:01]
Paul Thurrott
Left as soon as he was out. Like, and by the way, the day this happened, we got to see the memos or emails or whatever it was that Nadella sent out that the new person running Xbox, we'll talk about her in a moment, sent out that Phil Spencer sent out. Didn't hear anything from Sarah Bond, which was to me very telling and sad.
- [11:25]
Richard Campbell
She did later post get the job and when she didn't, she's like, what am I doing here? She is also, I mean, very much Phil's lieutenant. She was part of that plan. So if there is a new plan,
- [11:37]
Paul Thurrott
that's the thing you have to sort of imagine that that might be part of the deal, that she was maybe too closely aligned with Phil Spencer, that if I'm right, that, you know, requirements are coming down from on high. He was not interested in those requirements. I mean, she wouldn't be either and, but you know, she didn't get a send off, which I felt kind of bad about.
- [11:59]
Richard Campbell
She's going to land somewhere great. She's an extraordinary person and any gaming company would be delighted to have her.
- [12:07]
Paul Thurrott
True, absolutely.
- [12:09]
Richard Campbell
I think Sarah Bond got the shorts end of the stick here and probably didn't deserve it. And I'm not worried about her at all.
- [12:15]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. And she's young enough that she'll, I'm sure she'll pop up somewhere. I mean, I feel Spencer will at least advise some companies or do whatever, you know, we'll see, we'll, you know, we'll see what happens.
- [12:26]
Richard Campbell
But you'll see her appear somewhere important in gaming. It's time for her to go lead something, whatever it may be.
- [12:35]
Paul Thurrott
So yeah, this was announced very late on Friday, which is when you announce things that might materially impact your stock price and you don't want that to happen. So that's kind of how that happened. This guy by the way, Phil Spencer was at Microsoft for 38 years. He was at or running gaming. Microsoft Gaming for 12 years.
- [12:55]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [12:55]
Paul Thurrott
He didn't really hit my radar until the beginning of 2015. So this is 11 years ago when they did that consumer event for Windows 10 ahead of the launch, and he was one of the people that presented and he talked about the Xbox app on Windows and whatever. And, you know, this is where they shut off the HoloLens. I think there was a Surface Hub device of some kind, probably service hub. I don't remember what that was, but hololens was a big chunk of that, obviously. And that's where we heard about the Windows as a service stuff. And everything changed and Windows was going to be free as an update and blah, blah, blah, whatever. But I hadn't heard. I wasn't. I didn't know him. I still don't know him, but I didn't know who he was. I didn't know what to make of him. And he had that kind of vibe. And I. And because I think this is accurate, where he was drinking coffee in a cafe somewhere on the campus and they were like, Phil, you need to be on stage in five minutes. And he just ambled over and talked, you know, and that was his style. He was just a person. And that's what I liked about him. So this has, this has caused a lot of problems out in the world. Now, Xbox fans, if you weren't full of angst enough, you will be delighted to know that the woman now running Xbox, I'm sorry, running Microsoft Gaming, was a former executive of instacart. And her last two to four years or whatever it was at Microsoft, was spent working. And they made it sound like she ran it. I don't think she actually ran this business, but she was in Core AI, which is under the.
- [14:34]
Richard Campbell
With Jay.
- [14:35]
Paul Thurrott
Right. So he. She worked. Right. So she, she reported directly to him. He is in charge of. It's kind of a. Well, actually, what I was going to say, I think might be wrong. But it's consumer AI, right? Not. It's not Microsoft AI, which is the Suleyman copilot stuff. It's, I guess Core AI is the name of it. Right.
- [14:58]
Richard Campbell
But I. Yeah, he's above Core AI, is one of his groups. That. That's what Asha was running.
- [15:03]
Paul Thurrott
Okay, well, her name is Asha Sharma. She's young, doesn't appear to know anything about gaming, is not a gamer, and of course, what people are. Because she came out of Core AI, the fear is like, oh, Here we. Obviously, Satya Nadella is sending some message here that AI is so important that the person running Xbox has to have previously been deeply involved with AI we'll get to this in a moment. They claim otherwise, by the way, The thing. Well, there's a lot of things that are interesting. First of all, I just want to say I want to give this woman a chance. There has been a lot of hate dumped on her, which I feel is unfair.
- [15:49]
Richard Campbell
Jumped in the fire. And I don't even know that she knew she was.
- [15:53]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, she had to have some idea. But it's like when you have a kid, you can train or read as much as you want, but you don't really know until you do it. And yeah, this is a passionate community of extremely opinionated people and they are not happy with her. And maybe that's a little unfair.
- [16:09]
Richard Campbell
Before she had a chance at anything immediately. She's only been in Microsoft for two years. She came in as well and then was promoted to president of Core AI. Like, she's moved very quickly. She clearly manages up well.
- [16:21]
Paul Thurrott
Yes. So this could be complete BS in the sense that she just presents well and people like her and she's advanced, but she. Maybe she knows what she's doing, too. I mean, like I said, we got to give her a chance. I don't like the reaction I've seen to her. Although I too, am not, you know, you know, former Instacart. You know, you're like, what. What is. What is. What are you doing? You had. You had people in place that were already really good. The one thing that is the little asterisk to this is that her second in command is Matt Booty. He's been around for a long time. He's in. He's a gamer, gaming guy, whatever. And, you know, this is like if you have like an unqualified president, but the vice president has been around for a long time and he's got all the experience and maybe it's going to be okay. And, you know, we'. But yeah, this kind of came out of. Well, it felt like it came out of nowhere, so. So we will see. Now, there has been a bunch of reporting on this, of course, some good, some bad, some indifferent. But one of the stories that came out of this was that IGN had gotten hold of the information that this was happening and they had to come out early. Originally. They were meant to announce this a little bit later. I don't know what to say to that. Sarah Bond allegedly was behind this Xbox Everywhere strategy. And this Is, again, I don't actually agree with this, but there were a lot of criticism of the ads that were like, this is an Xbox, and this is an Xbox, and this is an Xbox. And people are like, what are you talking about? Consoles and Xbox? It's like, guys, this is the new. It's a new business. The. The point of this is you can play these games anywhere. Right? And I, again, given the cards they were dealt, given the situation out in the market, given the way the world has gone, there's a reason they bought Activision Blizzard. You don't spend $68 billion for no reason. It was to transform Xbox, or really Microsoft Gaming, but Xbox, into a game publisher. Right?
- [18:29]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [18:31]
Paul Thurrott
Way down at the end of the show, there's a nice report about video game sales from last year. And it's kind of interesting in a couple of ways how Xbox actually is still doing really well, which I think is going to surprise some people, if you haven't seen it already.
- [18:45]
Richard Campbell
I think there's another side of this as well, which is that part of making that deal with Activision Blizzard was saying, we are going to publish all games everywhere, which is good for the game studio business, but kind of bad for Xbox. Like, you basically said, Xbox gets no exclusives.
- [19:02]
Paul Thurrott
Yes, but the. So the way that people get wrapped up in exclusives when it comes to video game consoles is kind of kind of freaks me out. The best games I play are not games that are limited to one piece of hardware ever, you know, like, ever. The best thing that ever happened to, like, a game like Call of Duty was letting me play first against PlayStation guys and then later also PC guys, because that dramatically expands the audience. That makes that everyone better, including the people who have an Xbox. So if you are gonna sell Xbox hardware, I guess one of the goals should be to optimize your own games so that they look as good as they can look on that console. I think one of the things that stalled in this generation was that they came out of the gate, I'm gonna say, a little bit behind PlayStation. Sony advanced the PlayStation with a. What do you call it? The plus model. What's the pro model? Whatever. You know, raising the bar a little bit yet again. That's something Microsoft had done in the past, did not do this generation. And one thing we saw kind of repeatedly, it didn't matter where the game came from, but most games basically ran and looked better on PlayStation than they did on Xbox. And I. That was not by design on Microsoft's part, other than the fact that they did at one point very clearly just kind of give up. You know, they did a mild refresh, remember, but they didn't advance the technology in any way. Right? No.
- [20:28]
Richard Campbell
And we've kind of been at a wall for a while, hardware wise. Like.
- [20:32]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [20:33]
Richard Campbell
One of the arguments has been we can't afford better hardware because we can't afford to use the hardware we have. It costs too much to make a game that presses the limits of the PS5 and the, and the One X.
- [20:45]
Paul Thurrott
And it's, it's a little bit worse than that too because in essence what they've done is made that wall higher by raising prices of the Xbox twice in the United States last year, by the way. And you know, again, a lot of what Microsoft is doing is not some warped strategy that anyone logical would look at and say this doesn't make any sense. It is a response to what's happening out in the world. Right. And so, you know, in many ways that's, that's been the problem. And that's what I mean by when I talk about, you know, your play, the hand you're dealt. A lot of it is just, you know, external forces and you know, yeah, maybe they made some mistakes here and there as well. But I mean, I think a big chunk.
- [21:22]
Richard Campbell
One of the arguments for having the core AI leader in there is that AI technology needs to be applied to game development. Game development costs for tier one games need to go down.
- [21:33]
Paul Thurrott
Yes.
- [21:33]
Richard Campbell
For there to be a window to a next generation set of consoles.
- [21:38]
Paul Thurrott
Interestingly, she went out of her way to claim that that's not what she's going to do. Right. Although again, she said AI slop. Right, exactly. I was going to say there's always an asterisk. And the asterisk is. She said AI slop. The thing that the three focuses that she said were great games. The return of Xbox. Interesting. And the future of play. Now that may sound. Look great games. Okay, we can throw that one in the trash. Everyone that makes games wants to make great games. The return of Xbox sounds like the return of the console. But they were talking about consoles. Right. Like even though Microsoft didn't come out the gate with the first Xbox branded portable gaming machine, they still intended to make one. That would be part of this family of things. We know they've been talking for the past two years about it. There's a next gen console is coming, so that's not actually new. The future of play. The hell can that be? I don't even know what that means. To me, the Future of play is what they're already doing, which is the Xbox Everywhere strategy that everyone seems to hate so much. The future of play is not limiting the play to that one device. Right. Which look, if you have an audience of tens of, you know, almost 100 million people, whatever it is, PlayStation or a Nintendo Switch. Yes. I mean limiting, so to speak, is not really limiting at that point because you have a built in audience, it's great. It's a nice virtuous cycle kind of a thing. You know, the Xbox doesn't get to benefit from that. And so taking the, you know, AAA games or franchises that they have internally and bringing them, if they're not already there, to other platforms actually does make sense. So yeah, we'll see. Apparently Sarah Bond was not very well liked internally. That explains maybe why she wouldn't be the next person that said she was really easy to work with if you were outside of Microsoft. So if you were a partner, a developer, a game publisher, whatever, they loved her.
- [23:49]
Richard Campbell
I gotta tell you, I hear this theme over and over again lately that the most important thing you can do as a senior person at Microsoft is have a great, great relationship with Satya. Like that has a very strong effect on your outcome. More than your performance as I work?
- [24:06]
Paul Thurrott
Nope. Any leader of anything, whether it's a country, a company, whatever, needs the friction of someone second guessing you and then needs to be able to admit when they're wrong. You know, when confronted by evidence that shows that the path you're on is incorrect, you need to have the self awareness or whatever you want to call it to reverse course. That's not flip flopping. It's not, you know, that's smart.
- [24:32]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. And so that's my concern here, is that it's starting to feel like if you don't say yes to Satya, you haven't a chance.
- [24:39]
Paul Thurrott
No. We can apply that logic to Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond, by the way. I mean, one of the complaints there was if you weren't on board with her Xbox Everywhere strategy, you were on the outs with her and those people didn't like that. And look it, I don't mean to say I champion, I sort of agree that this is the right path forward given again the way the market's gone. But I'm not the be all, end all of anything. So I hope that she was listening to criticism and then if the criticism was incorrect, she could answer that and if she was incorrect, she would change course, you know, if possible. Yeah, I don't know. I don't Know, I don't know her at all.
- [25:15]
Richard Campbell
To have a CEO of Xbox though, this is killing me. This. All these CEOs, like really, this is.
- [25:22]
Paul Thurrott
Look, I.
- [25:23]
Leo Laporte
So they're there to run an interference with Sacha.
- [25:25]
Paul Thurrott
No. So this is just the title thing. This is like at some point, I don't remember who it was, somebody. If you look at a product like Windows, which has had 7 to 10 different product versions over the years, however you want to count it, whatever it is small, right? You could look at a browser like Firefox just came out, I think with version 148, you know, and it's like version numbers don't mean anything, you know, anymore. Yeah, no, they do. They actually mean quite a bit. You're still in the old world. It's okay. It's okay that this thing is on a six or four week product strategy or product release cycle, whatever. It's a different kind of product. It's not Windows. Although Windows has to adjust too. Right? So if you kind of apply that thought to why do we have a CEO is the leader of a company, which is the traditional view of a company. It's like, yeah, no, I agree with you. Richard and I both have talked about this a lot. This notion that over time there is like a. There are too many people of one title. It's like, all right, we have to invite the new title. Like, we have too many. We have all these product managers and product managers. Project, they say product and program managers. So it's like, all right, now we have directors, now we have whatever. And then it's like senior vice president, vice president. And then it's like right now the
- [26:43]
Richard Campbell
chain at Microsoft is vp, then corporate Vice president, then president and then executive vice president. There you go.
- [26:51]
Paul Thurrott
But now we also have these CEOs. So we have a CEO of Microsoft AI. We have CEO of Microsoft Gaming, apparently Microsoft commercial. Yeah. When Phil Spencer came in, he used to just call himself the head of Xbox. You know, that's the way he talks. You know, he's like, I'm in charge of Xbox.
- [27:07]
Richard Campbell
You know, I'm responsible for Xbox.
- [27:09]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I'm the parent. I don't know if you are familiar at all with the history of Xbox. You may know that one of the characters who was part of the core group in the early days was Seamus Blackley, gigantic, redheaded, well, formally redheaded gentleman who is friends with all of the people that were in the industry 25 years ago still. And like a lot of people from the old days, there's a Woman who, I don't know her name, but she's an Xbox person I never heard of, but has been heavily critical of the Xbox under Phil Spencer because it's not like what it was, the vision they had, although I would point out that the vision they had failed, but whatever was incredibly critical of this woman, while also sort of admitting like, you know, the old way of thinking about things doesn't work. Which is sort of what I was just saying, right, that, you know, we live in a different world. Today. Microsoft's world is very much focused on AI. And like Richard said, it's not difficult to understand how generative AI could be used to improve games or at least to help develop games. Right. If you, you may disagree about it being an improvement, an overly simplistic version is the thing I always bring up, which is some kind of an open world game where there's like an infinite number of side quests that you could go on that maybe parts of are generated by AI as you go. The buildings, the land, the actual quest itself, the people you interact with, the conversations you have or whatever it might be. I mean, to me this just makes sense. I talk about Call of Duty and how all these levels and all these games are all the same. It's the same, it's the same, it's the same. But, you know, some of them work better than others. Some of them work really, really well. And I feel like one of the things AI is good at is taking existing content, putting it in a churner and, you know, spitting out something like it. And I gotta be honest, I mean, if you look at the, whatever, 16 multiplayer titles or maps rather that the most recent Call of Duty launch with, I mean, four of them are really good. Could we have eight more that are like those? You know, they don't have to be the same level, they don't have to be the same, they don't look the same, they don't have, you know, but maybe there's something there. But like I said, this woman Sharma has, you know, been very careful to separate herself from her past. You know, don't assume that just because now I'm doing this that I'm going to pull in all that, you know, the slop, as she said, which is a word Microsoft really doesn't like, which is kind of what makes that interesting that she said that. Anyway, Seamus Blackley's advice for this woman is twofold. One is that if she can't develop a passion for games, she should leave. And also that she needs to gain the Trust of the community. And that one I completely. Well, I guess I technically agree with both, although I feel like the first one's a little harsh. We don't know what her passion is, but gaining the trust of the community, that may be an impossible task. And I wonder, you know, it seems to me, you know, think about like Satya Nadella when he came in, right, he didn't actually bring in anything new from like ideas or business models or anything like that.
- [30:43]
Richard Campbell
He was the kinder, gentler Microsoft.
- [30:45]
Paul Thurrott
Right. Well, but that's. That happened that, that happened as he came in. But if you look at him like when he, when he just came in, right, you know, from the outside, what he was doing, what he did and then what he did do, I mean, really was stuff that all started on Steve Ballmer. And if you have watched or read any of the recent Steve Ballmer interviews, it's actually, it's very insightful. He basically came to understand that I couldn't push this stuff through the board myself because we had a history and they weren't going to listen to me and that what we needed was new blood. And so Satya was like this younger kind of breath of fresh air kind of a thing and helped, I think, revitalize the outside impression of Microsoft as a company. It wasn't this stodgy software maker, Office Windows Server from the past. It was, yeah, he had a much
- [31:39]
Richard Campbell
more New age vibe, but he at that time was president of Server and Tools, which included Azure. So he was a cloud guy with Guthrie as his architect.
- [31:49]
Paul Thurrott
No, I'm not disagreeing with you. I'm just, I'm just, I just mean from the perspective of Wall street or customers, investors, whatever.
- [31:57]
Richard Campbell
And part of this was, you know, Ballmer been the guy who said Linux is a cancer. And now Linux was a primary product on Azure.
- [32:04]
Paul Thurrott
Yep. Yeah, it makes it hard for you to go. Steve Ballmer could not appear at a open source convention and give a speech. Right. He just, it just wouldn't happen. He couldn't do it. The history was just bad. Even though the company had changed under him. And so maybe what we should be doing is looking at her in that light. Does she bring, is she a breath of fresh air? Is she younger? She may be dynamic and has new ideas that maybe, maybe again, I'm not, I'm not saying I don't know anything about her, but I feel like we need to give her that chance.
- [32:39]
Richard Campbell
I, I agree. She's in her 30s.
- [32:42]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Geez. I mean, I mean, I don't know what the demographics of gamers are.
- [32:46]
Richard Campbell
Something going for that she's, you know.
- [32:49]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. And we're going to find out if it's real. Well. Or, and, or we're going to find out if it's applicable to gaming. Maybe it's the better way to say it.
- [32:57]
Richard Campbell
Well, in some ways it's like we kind of need a new vision for gaming because the old one has been mired in the muck for a while. So.
- [33:04]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I just. But I want to be clear like, like Steve Ballmer. I think people might look at this and think, well, this was Phil Spencer's fault. And I'm like, I don't, I don't think so. I think we have Xbox today, we have Activision Blizzard today because he was able to push that stuff through. I feel like had someone else been running that business, it would have been spun off maybe, which I know some people want, or would have failed in some other way or would have failed sooner or whatever. However you want to say it. I feel like he. It's possible that he is a. I compared him earlier to Terry Meyerson and Pano Spine. Maybe the better comparison is Steve Ballmer. Right. I feel like we're going to find out more in the future but for now we have this thing. We have what we have. So this new Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma was interviewed by Windows Central, which she really went to the hard hitting place first, I guess. And she said all the right things. Right. She talked about the return to Xbox as a return to the spirit that the team was founded on, not the return to console, by the way. I think that's kind of interesting. She was a baby when this happened, but in her words she's heard the terms renegade, rebellion and fun and she's like, that's what I was thinking when I wrote that, you know, this year is going to be the 25th anniversary by the way, of the OG Xbox, you know, which was a PC by the way, just like all the modern players are.
- [34:39]
Richard Campbell
All of them.
- [34:40]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, all of them except for the 360. Right. Which oddly was the one that did great.
- [34:45]
Richard Campbell
But yeah, but it was also a bear to Write games for PlayStation done the same thing and they both came back with the gaming industry going, don't do that again.
- [34:55]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. And I don't think this is unique to 360, but I think it was exaggerated with 360 that the initial games that came out for it didn't necessarily take advantage of the hardware and that over time you could see that improve by that time that thing ended its run, it was a different thing altogether. It had really gotten a big boost in quality.
- [35:17]
Richard Campbell
Well, there were two problems. One is it took a long time to get the hardware ready. So the game developers were running on emulators for a long time. Yeah, right.
- [35:25]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [35:26]
Richard Campbell
Well, I mean, yeah, they got the hardware. A lot of their games didn't run properly and they tried to fix things. And if it takes a while to learn how to use that stuff.
- [35:34]
Paul Thurrott
Yes, PowerPC architecture is crazy. I mean, at the time that seemed like the future, I guess, but that
- [35:41]
Richard Campbell
was the VLSI era, the make your own chips era. Very much so. And then it went to no, the standard general purpose chips are fast enough, if not faster and cheaper to make.
- [35:54]
Paul Thurrott
Well, that's. Yeah, that's the beauty.
- [35:56]
Richard Campbell
We're kind of getting back to custom chips again.
- [35:58]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I mean, we're at the point now where mainstream PC microprocessors, which are really SoCs that have a GPU, MPU and a CPU are fantastic for.
- [36:09]
Richard Campbell
Well, they're deeply integrated, right?
- [36:11]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, they're fantastic.
- [36:12]
Richard Campbell
Plus we also have the TSMCs of the world, so making custom hardware has never been easier.
- [36:18]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, until China invades. We'll see what happens there. But yes, fair enough. So we'll see.
- [36:24]
Richard Campbell
The thing is, we're here, we are talking about new console hardware when you can't get anything made.
- [36:29]
Paul Thurrott
Right now, if you read this interview and you look for any hint about new console hardware, you almost will not find it. I mean, even that one, the one of the three goals which was return to Xbox, which I know for an Xbox fan who believes that consoles to be all in and all their ears perk right up. She's very careful to explain what she means by this. You know, we're going to make sure Xbox is a great place for developers and players. Yeah, that's what we've been doing all along. We want to invest in reducing the divide between different types of devices that they want to use with us. That's exactly what Xbox anywhere is everywhere. We're going to invest more in breaking down those barriers and helping developers build once and show up across different hardware experiences. That to me says Windows in the console. I don't think anything's changing there. It doesn't mean anything going on. It doesn't mean that nothing changes. It's just that I don't see the thing where she very explicitly says, sorry, this is like maybe the key point. This is her words. I believe Xbox starts with its fans and will grow from there. That's what I wanted to signal with the return to Xbox. In other words. I mean.
- [37:39]
Richard Campbell
Yes.
- [37:40]
Paul Thurrott
I mean you could say, well, their fans want a console.
- [37:42]
Richard Campbell
I'm telling you what you want to hear.
- [37:45]
Paul Thurrott
That's all that is. Yeah.
- [37:46]
Richard Campbell
Right. And now, now your, your bomber point is well set. Right. It's like, hey, the Spencer and Bond set them on this course.
- [37:55]
Paul Thurrott
Yep.
- [37:56]
Richard Campbell
But are almost obstacles delivering it. And so, yeah.
- [37:59]
Paul Thurrott
So look, the thing is like, will this woman have the same impact on this business that Sacha did on Microsoft more broadly? Does she have. Because you know, you got to remember this business, whatever it is, is, is not the enterprise, the cloud, slash, now, AI audience, you know, big business, whatever. These are people, these are a lot of men, a lot of now middle aged men probably they have their. They're kind of set in their ways with what they think Xbox is or should be. I don't know. I mean it's not her fault, but necessarily. We'll see. But in other words, if she follows through on what Phil and Sarah Bond would have done anyway, if that's all she does, does that help sell it somehow? Does that make it better for people? I don't see how it could. So I don't know. I'm worried for her. I mean, I'm more worried for Xbox. Not because I feel like she's unqualified necessarily, although we're going to find out. But I do feel like the Matt Booty thing is this fallback, the escape hatch. Right. So when she goes to get a job at the next food delivery service, upstart or whatever it is, we have this guy and this guy, unfortunately, or seriously, for better or worse, it's always
- [39:29]
Leo Laporte
a parade at your place, isn't it?
- [39:31]
Paul Thurrott
Well, not always, but for some reason during this podcast. Sorry, the. I don't know how to say this, it sounds almost racist and I apologize. But unfortunately, or whatever, just matter of circumstance, I think for a lot of Xbox gamers, the guys. And it's got it is guys who feel the most strongly about consoles and whatever nonsense that we all care about see themselves in the mirror. When they look at this guy Mad Booty. They do not see themselves in her.
- [40:04]
Leo Laporte
That's what Gamergate was all about.
- [40:06]
Paul Thurrott
Yep, it sure was. No, it's just. I know. I don't think we're ever going to escape it. I. This is the. This is what I mean, it's sad, it's unfortunate, it's not fair, it's not right.
- [40:14]
Leo Laporte
It also ruins the culture. I'll be honest for everybody.
- [40:17]
Paul Thurrott
100%.
- [40:18]
Leo Laporte
Those guys.
- [40:19]
Paul Thurrott
100%. So I. My knee jerk reaction to Seamus Blackley, for example, or anyone. There was a guy on Twitter I lost my mind on who was talking about how she's Indian and that's why she was. Stop, please, dear God, it's DEI man. Yeah, it's like, what are you talking? Are you mental? Like this is letting the worst of the worst have their moment in the sun and they don't deserve that moment. And she deserves a chance. And we'll see. And look, if she fails or she does something I disagree with, I will be critical of that. But it's not because she's a woman. It's not because she came out of AI. It's not because she's Indian or whatever she is, because I don't care about that. I do care about Xbox and the business and I want it to survive and thrive and I hope that this gets us there. And I, I don't see anything. Well, I like Phil Spencer, but what I see is like the negativity like that Pavan Davalori got when he was like, we're going to talk about AI and copilot it ignite. Because of course we are. We're Microsoft. That's what we do. And the world lost their mind on this guy. And that was unfair.
- [41:32]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, it was unfair, but it was also not reading the room. The lash back against AI is large,
- [41:39]
Paul Thurrott
I guess, but I mean, it was a fairly innocuous tweet and it just.
- [41:44]
Leo Laporte
What she said actually makes sense and we're not going to fill it with slop just because we can. And there is a. I think it's clear there's a role for AI.
- [41:51]
Paul Thurrott
It's the right thing to say. Yeah, right.
- [41:54]
Leo Laporte
You know, our 23 year old son, who's a serious gamer, is adamant. I don't want to play games with AI in it. You know, I think that that is a commonly held point of view. I don't think it's gonna wear age.
- [42:09]
Paul Thurrott
Well, no, and I understand why. I mean, you better than anybody. I think because you're, you're deeply invested in AI and using it and you see it. I think you would agree that people are going to have, or have already had in some cases, a moment where they're like, oh, oh. Actually that's. Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Right? You know what I mean?
- [42:30]
Leo Laporte
The thing I always bring up is in Skyrim, when you meet an NPC who says, I used to be a warrior like you, but then I Got an arrow through the knee. And the 500th time you hear that, you wish some AI would come in and write some new block for.
- [42:45]
Paul Thurrott
That's what I mean. It could be like that. It could be in that wheelhouse
- [42:52]
Richard Campbell
and
- [42:52]
Leo Laporte
there will be awful uses of AI
- [42:55]
Paul Thurrott
I said this really early on. AI will win awards for writing, for making music, for making videos. It will win awards for video games. And this whole AI has such a. And again, I'm not an idiot about it. I don't mean everything. AI is awesome. It never makes any mistakes. It's is fantastic. Whatever. I don't mean that. But it's. It has a bad rap. And if, you know, I look at some things that people say about AI and I think if you replace the term AI with spell check or just technology, we wouldn't be having this conversation. But people hear AI and they stop listening, they lose their minds.
- [43:37]
Leo Laporte
This is the world. Get ready. I mean, we're going to see this big split. The schism in the world between haters and lovers of AI and there's really very little middle ground, unfortunately.
- [43:50]
Paul Thurrott
But this is the. This is basically politics.
- [43:54]
Leo Laporte
It's.
- [43:54]
Paul Thurrott
We have to make the people who disagree with us look like non humans.
- [43:58]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's what's happened, hasn't it?
- [44:00]
Paul Thurrott
And that makes them. Then we don't even have to pay attention anymore. We're not going to debate anything. We're not going to find middle ground. We're not going to arrive at some consensus. We're just going to say, no, you're an idiot and you have no. You have nothing of value to offer. I've stopped listening to you and I. That makes me not. It's not. Sad is not the word. It's. That's horrific.
- [44:22]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [44:24]
Paul Thurrott
It's a very bad outcome. It's the worst possible outcome.
- [44:27]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Let's take a little break. What do you say? And we will continue on. We did the Xbox segment first. That's a. That's a good thing.
- [44:40]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I did. We have. Yeah, we just.
- [44:42]
Leo Laporte
There's a story and there's brown liquor and all sorts of good stuff ahead. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Mr. Richard Campbell. Richard and I are heading to Florida next week. Micah will be in filling in for me. Richard and I are going to Zero Trust World, which is Threat Locker, one of our sponsor, Threat Lockers. Big security conference. Should be a lot of fun. Steve Gibson and I are going to do a presentation there and Richard will be. We. We got him a. You know, all These conferences now have podcast centers. Right. Booths. So we got him a little. I don't know what it'll be like, a little podcast booth.
- [45:19]
Richard Campbell
It's more of a lounge, but it'll do.
- [45:21]
Leo Laporte
It'll do.
- [45:21]
Richard Campbell
I've seen the layout of.
- [45:22]
Leo Laporte
Oh, you've seen it. Okay.
- [45:24]
Richard Campbell
While I'm there too.
- [45:25]
Leo Laporte
I will not be able to be there. I have to go do things. But I will be back two weeks hence. And Micah loves doing this show.
- [45:35]
Paul Thurrott
Good. Well, we love Micah.
- [45:37]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, he's great.
- [45:38]
Paul Thurrott
So that's Micah. Who doesn't love Micah?
- [45:40]
Leo Laporte
Who does wrong with you?
- [45:41]
Paul Thurrott
That's a way to judge somebody, you know, you don't like Micah, something wrong with you, man.
- [45:44]
Leo Laporte
They should put him in charge of Xbox.
- [45:46]
Paul Thurrott
That's right. Yeah, yeah. We're not. What do you mean? We're not doing shooters anymore. He is. He's at point.
- [45:55]
Leo Laporte
Some probably would be the negative. He's a very kind gentleman.
- [45:58]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, he's a little too gentle, you know? No, I want to kill something, by the way.
- [46:01]
Leo Laporte
That's the argument for Asha is let's get a woman in there. It can only help video games to add some diversity, different points of view. I think there are a lot of people like me who are, you know, I like a good first person shooter. Shooter once in a while, but I'd like to see more gaming styles out there.
- [46:21]
Paul Thurrott
Of course. I mean, this is the thing. Like, this is what people are upset about. Some feature in Windows 11. It's like, I don't want that in there. It's like. But you don't mind that it's in there for other people, right? Like, if you can, if you can turn it off or ignore it, you don't want to eradicate it for everybody. Right. You just don't want to see it yourself. And they're like, no, I want to get rid of it entirely. Like, yeah, you're the problem. Then it's you. It's you.
- [46:42]
Leo Laporte
It's all about me. Yep. Our show today, brought to you by our sponsor, Bit Warden. Love these guys. The trusted leader in passwords, pass keys and secrets management. You know, Steve Gibson yesterday did a. A whole segment on security now about that ETH Zurich finding. It was related to Bitwarden, Dashlane and LastPass. They said we had to use these three because these are the only ones that had open source client side software so that we could in fact test this. And what they tested is what happens if a malicious actor gets control of the vault.
- [47:21]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [47:22]
Leo Laporte
And in all three cases, there were Bad things a malicious actor could do. I loved Bitwarden's response and I just wanted to mention this because I know you probably saw this and maybe you just read the headline and thought, oh no. Bitward's response is thank you to Eth Zurich. This is why we're open source. This is why we have people audit our code. It helps us get better. Their response was not defensive. It was not, oh no, you guys are, you know, making it up. It was, we're gonna fix this. It is. And Steve's point during the show was it is not a hair on fire situation. This is not something anybody needs to really worry about. But this is why I love Bit Warden and why I think open source is so important. For stuff like this, for anything that uses crypto, people have to be able to look at it, they have to be able to bang on it, they have to be able to find flaws so they can be fixed. Bitwarden is consistently ranked number one in user satisfaction by G2 and software reviews. They've got 10 million users. They take that user base very seriously. They want to give you the best product. They're in 180 countries by the way, and this is probably, maybe surprising, but it's not just for individuals. 50,000 businesses use Bitwarden and that's one of the things Bitwarden really takes seriously is their commitment to you to make the best possible product, whether you're protecting one account or thousands. Bit Warden keeps you secure all year long, consistent updates. I'll give you an example. They just added to the enterprise a feature that every enterprise needs. Bit Warden's Access intelligence. It lets organizations detect weak, reused or exposed credentials and immediately guide remediation. Getting your users to replace risky passwords with strong unique ones, which closes a major security gap. Credentials are one of the top causes of breaches. Bitwarden's access intelligence helps your business make sure that those bad passwords are visible, prioritized and corrected before exploitation can occur. And incidentally, Bitwarden builds very much a very similar feature into the personal versions of Bitwarden as well. So that if you as a user have a bad password, who doesn't, right? Or a reused password, Bitwarden will let you know and help you fix it. Bitwarden also cares a lot about individual users. For instance, they just created Bitwarden Lite. I love this. A lightweight, self hosted version of Bitwarden's password manager. It's built for home labs, personal projects, any environment that wants a quick setup with minimal overhead. So you can host your own vault, which is great and it's very easy to do. Bitwarden supports direct import from by the way, a lot of people have, you know, get into password managers by using their browser. Not necessarily the best, not only in terms of security but in terms of convenience because it's on, you know, one machine, maybe it syncs to another. But is it on your phone? Is it everywhere? Bitwarden is so Bit Warden supports direct import from the browser Chrome Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi into the encrypted vault without that separate plain text export. So that simplifies migration but also reduces the exposure associated with that manual export. You got to make sure you delete the in the clear password dump that you just put there on the hard drive. You don't have to do that. It just goes straight from the browser into Bitwarden. G2 Winter 2025 reported Bitwarden continues to hold strong as number one in every enterprise category. And that wasn't just for the last quarter. That was for the last six straight quarters. People love it. Bitwarden setup is easy. It imports from most password management solutions. So the move the migration is simple. Took Steve Gibson and me minutes to do it when we did it a few years ago and I've never looked back. Bit Warden's open source code is regular. This is important. Again, regularly audited by third party experts. Bitwarden welcomes that publishes the results of those reports. You can look at it too. It's right there. GPL licensed on GitHub. Bitwarden meets SoC2 type 2 GDPR HIPAA CCPA standards. It's ISO 270012002 certified. Bottom line, get started today with Bitwarden's free trial of a teams or enterprise plan for your business or as an individual, free for life forever across all devices, all for free as an individual user@bitwarden.com twit that's bitwarden.com twit bitwarden.com twit it's the best bitwarden.com twit we thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. Oh, Paul left and came back. So now you've rotated. So I'm going to rotate you back.
- [52:04]
Paul Thurrott
I'm comfortable with it and I know that our viewers will also handle this in a mature fashion.
- [52:10]
Leo Laporte
No they won't. No, they won't.
- [52:12]
Richard Campbell
What happened?
- [52:13]
Paul Thurrott
Paul?
- [52:16]
Leo Laporte
Let's. I guess we should talk about Windows. What you what you got?
- [52:20]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. Interesting week. The first one is the Wall Street Journal had a Report about Nvidia entering the PC market again with a new system on a chip design and they completely screwed everything up. They have no idea what they're talking about. Nice.
- [52:36]
Richard Campbell
It's like they described it wrong. Just a bad article.
- [52:39]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, you can tell when people don't know what they're writing about. So there are two different things happening. Nvidia invested, I think it was $5 billion in intel, probably to please the US government. They certainly have nothing to offer Nvidia. But one of the things that intel is going to do is make. Which they don't even need to do. I don't know why they're doing this, but they're going to integrate an Nvidia GPU into one of their processor SoCs in the future. Right. So today if you think about like Intel Core Ultra CPUs of the Panther Lake generation, they have really nice. Actually the GPU is awesome. But you know, cpu, gpu, NPU on board, on the die. So imagine that. But with an Nvidia gpu, which would be a step up for sure. But okay.
- [53:26]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. It's just that they run hotter and they're bigger. Like one of the things about those integrated chips is that they're really, really efficient. Right. They may not be the fastest things, but they are capable of sitting in a die and not overheating it.
- [53:39]
Paul Thurrott
I don't have this in front of me, but the computer I'm using now is whatever. It's an Intel Core Ultra 7 something. It does have a dedicated Nvidia GPU. 16 inch screenshot. I love. I do have a Panther Lake laptop. It's a 14 inch screen, so maybe they're not directly.
- [53:59]
Richard Campbell
And they use the X E3. Right.
- [54:01]
Paul Thurrott
That's the one with the nice. Yeah, the. Really. The nice one. I will. They're not 100% indistinguishable. The Nvidia one's a little bit better, but honestly they're close enough where it's like, oh my God. This is actually really interesting. I haven't written about this yet, but I got in a. It's a Lenovo ThinkPad P series portable workstation. 16 inch screen. This thing is like an inch thick. I haven't seen a laptop this thick in possibly 15 years or more. I don't. It's been a long time, but this thing has. I already forgot the name of it. It's whatever. The latest RTX Broadwell gen. It's a high number. It's like I didn't even know this existed. This is not Designed to play video games. Right. This is a workstation. But you know, I put Call of Duty on it. I got to tell you, I keep having this experience where you play games and you start seeing things you've never seen in the game you play every single day and you're like, what is happening? Like, I fell down on the ground in the game on purpose and there's grass in front of me and there are bees buzzing around and I'm like, I have never seen bees in this game. What is happening? Like there's like a whole new, like, you know, it's like your eyes were improved or something. Like it's, it's, it's the next level. Like it's amazing. It makes. It looks basically as good as like battle. What do you call Battlefield 6 looks like it's really good. So there are levels of these things. Right, but. So that's intel and Nvidia. Right. And that partnership, you know, we'll see what happens. But, but we also know that Nvidia has been trying to get into the market for ARM based SoCs. And we've heard reports now, and the CEO of Nvidia confirmed this on stage one day late last year. They are working with MediaTek. MediaTek is a company that put out a Copilot Plus PC level ARM based SoC last year for Chromebook plus machines. Right. Which if you put Windows on that thing, if you could, it would be a Copilot plus PC. Like it has the powerful and tops
- [56:04]
Richard Campbell
that kind of thing. They're doing highly integrated SOC as well. Yep.
- [56:08]
Paul Thurrott
So the Wall Street Journal report is commingling these things. These are two different things. Now I'm going to read between the lines a little bit because I know that the intel thing is not happening anytime soon. But according to this publication, Dell, Lenovo and others will begin selling Windows 11 PCs based on this new Nvidia MediaTek chip. This is happening in the first half of the year. So soon it's a return to the consumer market, which they don't, I don't think they explained in the article, but they were the chip behind Windows RT. Right. When Microsoft was developing Windows 8 and RT side by side, which is the same system essentially. Right. They looked at using ti, Qualcomm and Nvidia. And I want to say one more that I'm forgetting. I don't know, Sam, I don't remember the other one. I think there was one more. They went to market with Nvidia and they chose Nvidia because of the graphics, Windows RT And Surface RT obviously failed, but it wasn't. I wouldn't say it was Nvidia's fault. Right. I mean, a big chunk of this was Microsoft, but a big part of it too is just the state of ARM at the time. There was no way for the ARM chips of that day to emulate x886 code. So that wasn't on the table. Well, it wasn't possible. They just didn't do it. But you have to think that they looked at this. I mean, it's such an obvious capability, but they weren't capable of that at the time. Now that's not the case anymore, obviously.
- [57:31]
Richard Campbell
That line's been passed a while ago now.
- [57:32]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course, thanks to the success of Snapdragon X and the Prism emulator that Microsoft has, the platform is just elevated dramatically. And to me, it's actually the best route to go. But the Wall Street Journal doesn't know that, apparently. They don't mention that. They do say that this new partnership that they have will result in hardware that runs Windows but can compete more directly with the latest MacBook model. So it's like, okay. I mean, that's what Snapchat does matter. Okay, whatever. Competition's good, that's fine. I'm glad to see it. I'm curious. Mobile World Congress is any day now, right? It's sometime in March. That seems like the obvious time to announce anything. So when they talk about computers coming out in the first half of the year, I have to believe that MediaTek, Nvidia, Microsoft will announce something maybe at Mobile World Congress. I've not heard that. I don't know that for a fact.
- [58:25]
Richard Campbell
It's the first week of March, same time that we're at.
- [58:28]
Leo Laporte
Okay, I hope they support Linux too, because that would be nice.
- [58:32]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that I don't know. I do know on the Qualcomm side that they talk about that a lot. I mean, there's, you know, there's a big push there for that. That said, running Linux on those machines is actually incredibly difficult. In my experience, it is.
- [58:47]
Leo Laporte
No, you're right. But I would imagine traditionally been really good with Linux, but Nvidia less so, so.
- [58:55]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, that's interesting. Okay. Yeah, yeah. X2, I would think. Same time frame. I mean, we're expecting first half of the year, et cetera, et cetera. So we'll see what that looks like. I just say I'm upset by how the person that wrote this has no idea what they're talking about, obviously. But I. But they clearly something is about to happen. So that's why that report appeared. So that's good news. So if you've been waiting for this, you've been wondering when's that reported? Exclusive contract, you know, between Qualcomm and Microsoft going to run out? I think it just did. So it looks like we're going to finally get this. So we'll see what that looks like. We're not going to see that from the Wall Street Journal report, but we'll see it soon.
- [59:39]
Leo Laporte
Who was the author? Just so we know who to not read.
- [59:42]
Paul Thurrott
No, I don't. Look, this is, I, I don't know. And, and please, if someone's gonna throw it in the discord, it doesn't matter. It's. This is an esoteric niche part of our market. It's not, it's not, it's not to be unexpected that. Well, look, you.
- [59:57]
Leo Laporte
But that's why we have you, Paul, and that's why you guys exist.
- [60:00]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I mean, look, I. You're in. I know too much about this stuff, right? So these guys, they know that because they announced it. Intel and Nvidia have a partnership and they're going to work on this thing. That's a fact.
- [60:10]
Leo Laporte
Like this is happening and that's a scoop. I mean, that's good, right?
- [60:13]
Paul Thurrott
It's happening, right? So, and then, you know, there have been reports and the guy, like I said, Jason, whatever his name is, the guy from Nvidia basically confirmed this on stage one day, working with together on ARM based chips as well that will compete with Qualcomm and run, you know, Windows 11 on ARM, etc. So this has been. These things have been in the works, you know, so they're both happening. They're both separate, but they are both happening. I think the ARM one's going to happen first. Okay. All right, so it's weekday. Happy, happy week D everybody. My favorite. I assume by now we're all on board with that means, but last month, you may recall, they released the weekly Update for Windows 11 late. I think it was Thursday or Friday that week. This week it came out on Tuesday when it's supposed to. So that's good. So that suggests that the next Patch Tuesday update is on track. There's nothing new here. We've talked about this stuff multiple times. But this is a preview of the Patch Tuesday update we're going to get in two weeks. So this is things like Sysmon, the Mark Russinovich system internals tool, camera settings for pan and tilt. If you have that in your camera. The network speed test. That is not really in the taskbar, but that's what we're going to call it. Improvements to Quick Machine Recovery, which is the way it should have been from the beginning.
- [61:34]
Richard Campbell
RSAT for ARM's a big deal, dude. I mean, for a system that it is, anyway.
- [61:39]
Paul Thurrott
Yep, yep. Isn't that the one they said they were never going to make on ARM? I think.
- [61:44]
Richard Campbell
Well, it's RSAT, which is the more secure version of RCP, but yeah.
- [61:50]
Paul Thurrott
Okay. You can use webp images on the background. That's fun. Emoji 16.0, which I know all of us are super excited about. And this is just. I don't even know why this is listed, but it says BitLocker improvements. But it's really a fix. There was a problem with BitLocker that I've never experienced, despite the fact that, by the way, I do this every week. You enter your recovery key in that blue screen and then. Not blue screen of death. Like if the screen is blue and then you move on. Apparently, a lot of people were doing that and the device stopped responding. So they fixed that. Whatever. Not for the first time, but notably Windows 1126H1 was part of the patch or the weekd updates. Okay. So that impacts three or five people.
- [62:41]
Richard Campbell
Both guys.
- [62:41]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, both guys. Yeah. But that also hints at the fact that the Snapdragon X2 is imminent. That, you know, there are laptops sitting there waiting to go out into the world. So I think that's going to happen pretty quick.
- [62:51]
Richard Campbell
Want to one?
- [62:53]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, me too. So there's that then in the Insider program. I'm getting ready to give up, folks. Like, I'm trying. Right. This is a test of how much illogical behavior my brain can handle. And I got to tell you, it's overflowing at this point. Like, I can't deal with this anymore. God, I don't even explain this. So once, once upon a time, in a galaxy far, far away, we had this thing called the Windows Insider program. And you would. At the time, there were rings, but they became channels. But let's not worry about that too much.
- [63:32]
Richard Campbell
And then I miss Gabe.
- [63:34]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, we all miss Gabe. The. We miss the engineering part of it. You know, it's like, remember when this was about engineering? Yeah. I mean, it is, but just now, the engineering is ridiculously stupid. So we have whatever you want to call them, rings, channels, whatever. And typically these things target some version of Windows. But you get into these weird situations where you have two versions of Windows that are supported. They are. New features are being tested in different channels, but they're the same features. And then a release preview build will come out, which is the thing that comes up before the week, the update, which is the thing that comes out before patch Tuesday. And depending on which version of Windows you're testing in the release preview, because it could be one of two at any given time, you're going to get the same build, same features, but you have a different version of Windows. And if you don't understand what I just said, please just don't worry about it. It's ridiculous. It doesn't matter. We get into situations where Dev and Beta are testing exactly the same build and features for a long time and then they split. And now for the first time ever, they're both on different build streams of Windows, the same version of Windows. And you're like, what is it? Why on earth are you doing this? And the assumption is that they'll move on to the next version of Windows, which is 26H1. But now we know that's not happening. So the assumption is maybe they're going to move on to 26H2. We still nobody knows. And then we have Canary, right? Canary. The name Canary suggests that you will be the person testing the furthest out features first. Right? You're the Canary in the coal mine. That's the point. That's the name. That's why that name exists. You're going to hit it first. But if you enrolled a PC in Canary, you will have discovered that you were testing things last. And we'll get to that in a moment because there's a new Canary build, but whatever. Now, given everything I just said and I glossed over a lot of details because seriously, there's now two part. There's two different. They're not channels, they're sub channels. I don't know of the Canary channel. So last week they released an optional update that if you accepted it, if you went in and got it, you had to go get it. You won't just get it automatically. You are on a different build series. Just like Dev and Beta are at a different build series, but of the same version of Windows. But now within Canary, you can be on this different build series for 26H1, which is a system that will only ship for Snapdragon X2 based computers, but you today can test it on X86 computers for some reason. Okay, I don't know. I don't know what to tell you anymore. Like, it doesn't.
- [66:19]
Richard Campbell
You're not talking about the release preview at all. Like, it's. We thought. And maybe this is just you and me.
- [66:25]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [66:25]
Richard Campbell
Canary got it first. Then Dev.
- [66:27]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah.
- [66:28]
Richard Campbell
Then beta.
- [66:29]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [66:29]
Richard Campbell
Then Release candidate.
- [66:31]
Paul Thurrott
The reason you think that is because your brain works and you're logical and that makes sense, and that is the right way to test software. It doesn't matter what we call these things, it doesn't matter how many of them are there are. But you start the one that's the furthest out, get feedback. Maybe you change a little bit, maybe you don't. You bring it to the next one, the next one, and then eventually you release it to the public. That is not the way the system works. It literally is like just an explosion of nonsense.
- [66:59]
Richard Campbell
Well, way back when we talked about. I think there's a bunch of different teams here. And now it's becoming clearer. Like, the ARM folks are on a different stream, and maybe they need to be, because this is only the second one of these Snapchat processors.
- [67:13]
Paul Thurrott
The thing is, it is going to come together at some point, right? And that point will almost certainly be. Well, except it won't be. Right? So we talked about this. It's going to be 26H2, but also maybe Windows 12. You know what I mean? We don't know anyway, you know, like, some societies have or less societies, but some, like, you could go to a palm reader or something and they read like tea leaves in the bottom of a cup. This is like reading vomit, you know, it's like, oh, yeah, look at that. There's a new feature over there in the corner. Looks like some corn. And there's some more over there. It's just all over. It's gross.
- [67:51]
Richard Campbell
It's. I mean, you're in the Insiders to get an insight into what's coming for Windows, and at the moment, it's hard to tell.
- [67:58]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, no, it's. It's absolutely ridiculous. And then before they announced that little bit of stupidity, there were three Windows Insider builds last week. Canary Dev and Beta. Okay, Dev and Beta, despite being. Whatever they are, are the same. They're both 26H2, but different versions or something. I don't know.
- [68:21]
Leo Laporte
It's there.
- [68:22]
Paul Thurrott
I know, it's crazy.
- [68:23]
Richard Campbell
Canary Beta 1's the later version of the dev one.
- [68:26]
Paul Thurrott
And I certainly got even just talking about this, because I think if I should have, like, a constant blood pressure monitor, it would be like, abort, abort. Stop talking about this. Your brain is hurt. You're hurting yourself. So if you're in Canary, God, Love you and God help you. What you got in this build. This is before the split was a bunch of stuff we already have everywhere else, right? Cross device resume improvements.
- [68:51]
Richard Campbell
We talked about the similian for ARM for Snapdragon 2.
- [68:55]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I mean. But also x64. Because the only people in the insider program are. It's both.
- [69:01]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [69:01]
Paul Thurrott
I mean, even.
- [69:02]
Richard Campbell
Even though this Dragon 2 right now to be doing testing a Canary.
- [69:05]
Paul Thurrott
I know, I know. I. It's like I said, it makes me crazy. You know the Windows hello ESS stuff where you can have like an external fingerprint reader if one only existed.
- [69:15]
Richard Campbell
I ordered one.
- [69:16]
Paul Thurrott
Oh, you do. Look at the. Okay, great. That's great.
- [69:18]
Richard Campbell
So it's a USB little.
- [69:19]
Paul Thurrott
Please send me the. The.
- [69:22]
Richard Campbell
I don't know that it works. I just ordered one.
- [69:23]
Paul Thurrott
It's. Yeah, I'm dying to see this. Anyway, who cares, right? This is stuff we've already seen.
- [69:28]
Leo Laporte
Who cares if it works?
- [69:30]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I mean. No, no, I mean, who cares what's in Canary? It's all. There's nothing new. I don't have anything to tell you. This is. You could just rewind it to four weeks ago and we talked about all of it already. Who cares? The stuff that went into dev and beta, which again, different build paths or whatever, same features. Yeah, there's no end to the noise that can happen here. Oh, there it is. So that was two whales communicating with each other. I guess now they're chatting close to the ocean. Yeah, I know and I did. I didn't think so either.
- [70:07]
Leo Laporte
There is very good sushi though, in Mexico City. So there must be some seafood somewhere.
- [70:11]
Paul Thurrott
Well, it's the Paris of Mexico. I mean, they get everything here, right?
- [70:14]
Leo Laporte
There you go.
- [70:16]
Paul Thurrott
Anyway, there is improvements across context menus, settings and taskbar. I wouldn't describe any of these as major, but if you. I can't do this easily here, but if you were to right click on a file and open. Right. Actually, let me just look at that. Let me see what it looks like. Well, it already is in the right. I don't even know what they're talking about. Anyway, the open icon will have the right icon for the default app for that file type, which is exactly what I just saw when I tried it here. So I don't know what that's all about. And then. Whatever. None of this is major. Last week we talked about an update to the pain app, but only in the beta channel for some reason is now rolling out to the dev channel. Because of course it is. It should have happened last week. No one knows why. Who cares? I just. I'm losing my mind with the inside of four Kip. Stuff like, I. I can't.
- [71:08]
Leo Laporte
Is there. Why do they have three channels? Is it four?
- [71:11]
Paul Thurrott
Four, sorry. Or five, depending on how you look at it.
- [71:14]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [71:14]
Leo Laporte
Because there's Dragon channels and the.
- [71:17]
Paul Thurrott
Well, no, I mean, there's like Canary is split in half now, although that will eventually rectify itself. There's Dev and Beta, which used to be the same, but are different. And then if you're in the release preview program, you could be on 24 or 25H2, because those are both supported versions of Windows. Even though you get the same kb, the same what we used to call cumulative update.
- [71:38]
Leo Laporte
Are they doing, like, AB testing? Is that. I mean, what is.
- [71:40]
Paul Thurrott
You know what? See that too, again. I can. I can tell you what your problem is. You're smart.
- [71:46]
Richard Campbell
Logic, thinking again.
- [71:47]
Paul Thurrott
That makes sense.
- [71:49]
Richard Campbell
Gonna end in tears.
- [71:50]
Paul Thurrott
And of course you have to. You can't accept that. It's not something like that. It's not. There's no logic to it. There is nothing that makes sense in the Insider program. Nothing.
- [72:00]
Leo Laporte
I mean, is it different people? I mean, or is it all.
- [72:06]
Richard Campbell
That's. Well, that's been my thought.
- [72:07]
Paul Thurrott
That's.
- [72:08]
Richard Campbell
There's various teams.
- [72:09]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, there has been some with.
- [72:10]
Leo Laporte
Each team gets their own channel.
- [72:12]
Richard Campbell
I don't know if that.
- [72:13]
Paul Thurrott
Well, I don't know about that. I. I don't know.
- [72:18]
Richard Campbell
Keep looking for Leo, and it just doesn't seem to be any. My error.
- [72:23]
Paul Thurrott
I do feel like, you know, there was this complexity that occurred during the development of Longhorn where they couldn't build a product anymore. The system they had didn't scale past some number of product groups, all putting code into the system at the same time. Right. So before Longhorn, you know, I'll just make up numbers because I don't know what they are, but maybe there were 20 groups and that worked fine. But when they got to Longhorn, maybe it was 100, and it was like, nope, this is not working. And this is what caused Jim Alchen essentially, to come back to Bill Gates and say, look, this isn't going to work. We need to start over. This. We've. We need. We've bitten off too much. We need to scale this whole thing back. And, you know, Vista was the result. I'm oversimplifying, but I. I look at what is happening in the insider program and I'm like, we only have Windows 11 now. Like, how is it like this? But it is like this. It's It's.
- [73:17]
Richard Campbell
I just don't know the van's had his hands on this yet.
- [73:20]
Paul Thurrott
Like, I love that you keep giving this guy the.
- [73:23]
Richard Campbell
I really want to. Glad there's a boss, somebody called the.
- [73:28]
Paul Thurrott
I know, I know. He seems competent. He seems smart. He seems like he has logic in his brain. I'd like him to apply it to this program, you know, and just bring it back to what it was.
- [73:40]
Richard Campbell
But I don't even care if it's what it was, just consistent.
- [73:45]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, that's what I. But that is what it was. It used to be, like, logical and consistent. I don't. You know, obviously this thing expanded over time and changed and evolved, maybe devolved or however you want to say it, but it's gotten to the point now where it's like, I don't know that I can point to any single part of it and make sense of it. There's a beautiful story in here that's tied to Enterprises wanting to stay on whatever version of Windows and not upgrade. And Microsoft said, yeah, we can figure that out. We'll just make a new version of Windows and we'll have the same features in both, and you can stay in your stupid version that you think you want.
- [74:21]
Richard Campbell
That's what happened with.
- [74:22]
Paul Thurrott
With 24H20. It might have been 23H2.
- [74:27]
Richard Campbell
Well, I don't remember.
- [74:28]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, with Copilot, like, oh, you
- [74:30]
Richard Campbell
can stay on 23H2, but you're still getting patches for that, so we're just going to patch you to 24H2.
- [74:35]
Paul Thurrott
But the way it started, literally the. The beginning of this little form of insertification was Copilot was coming to Windows, and it was going to come in the. Then I guess it was 23H2. And enterprise was like, yeah, we're not installing that damn thing. We're going to wait till next year. And Microsoft's like, yeah, we don't want you to wait for a year. And they shipped the September cumulative update that year with every feature but one. That was going to be what 23H2 was.
- [75:01]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [75:02]
Paul Thurrott
And so 23H2 eventually came out, and it was a nothing burger. There was nothing there, but you already had it. And it was a way to force those people to get this thing they didn't want. And now that's that. Now that's the strategy. That's all they do. Now, this is the.
- [75:16]
Richard Campbell
Again, version numbers mean nothing.
- [75:18]
Paul Thurrott
Not a violent person, but God damn it. Okay.
- [75:22]
Richard Campbell
Surrounded by violent acts.
- [75:23]
Leo Laporte
I tell you, you want to go crazy with version Numbers just start trying to pay attention to what's going on in an AI. It's impossible.
- [75:31]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, it's going to make the browser thing look reasonable. It's crazy. Yep.
- [75:35]
Leo Laporte
Let's take a little break. We will talk about your new book. Yep, it's coming. And actually it's here.
- [75:42]
Paul Thurrott
It's here. It's not complete, but it's.
- [75:44]
Leo Laporte
I decided lots more to come. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Thurat and Richard Campbell. Our show today brought to you by Zscaler, the world's largest cloud security platform. I mean, if you listen to any of our shows, it's become pretty clear that any business has to take a look at AI in the business. I don't care if it's Xbox or what. The potential rewards of AI are just too great to ignore. But so are the risks, especially with exfiltration of sensitive data attacks against enterprise managed AI. And then of course, there's also the issue that generative AI increases opportunities for threat actors. It means they can easily and quickly create phishing lures, write malicious code, automate data extraction. I just saw a new attack today where the bad guy uses AI to create a very effective malware attack. It's. It's rough out there, isn't it? That's why you need. Yes, Zscaler. There were 1.3 million instances of Social Security numbers leaked to AI applications last year. Chat, GPT and Microsoft Copilot together saw nearly 3.2 million data violations. So it's coming from inside the house, it's coming from outside the house. It's clearly time to rethink your organization's safe use of public and private AI. But you should probably ask people who've done that. For instance, Siva, the director of Security and Infrastructure at Zuora, just here's what he says about using Zscaler to prevent AI attacks.
- [77:26]
Paul Thurrott
Watch.
- [77:27]
Leo Laporte
With Zscaler, being in line in a
- [77:29]
Paul Thurrott
security protection strategy helps us monitor all the traffic. So even if a bad actor were
- [77:35]
Leo Laporte
to use AI because we have tight
- [77:38]
Paul Thurrott
security framework around our endpoint, helps us proactively prevent that activity from happening. AI is tremendous in terms of its opportunities, but it also brings in challenges.
- [77:47]
Leo Laporte
We're confident that Zscaler is going to help us ensure that we're not slowed
- [77:50]
Paul Thurrott
down by security challenges, but continue to take advantage of all the advancements.
- [77:57]
Leo Laporte
With Zscaler Zero Trust plus AI, you can safely adopt generative AI and private AI to boost productivity across the business. Their Zero Trust architecture plus AI helps you reduce the risks of AI related Data loss protects against AI attacks to guarantee greater productivity and compliance too. Learn more@zscaler.com security that's zscaler.com security we thank them so much for their support of Windows Weekly. Paul's latest book is much needed. The Initiatify Windows.
- [78:38]
Paul Thurrott
Maybe I just said this to my wife, but the other day I said to somebody, I was like, you know, this book is good because it's going to be short. It's about 100 pages now. It might be 150 at most when I'm done. So, you know, compared to 11, 1200 pages for the Windows 11 field guide. Like, you know, reigning it in, like I like that. And then I think other people are going to look at it and be like, wait, I need to read a hundred page book to figure out how to de shittify Windows. Like, what? Why is it so long? You know? And it's like, I can't. Yeah, I don't know. It's got a lot of screenshots, I guess. I don't know. Anyway, yeah, as I think people know, I've been working on this. So I've been publishing chapters to the site. I decided this morning I was going to wait until I have two more chapters I wanted to get in there. One about security and one about just fixing annoyances across the system, apps and experiences. And I was going to wait till the security chapter was done and I was like, yeah, I'm just going to put it out there. So it is available. You know, LeanPub supports this publishing format where you know, the book is not complete yet. Right. And you can buy it and then you get the updates and yeah, you can fix it as you go. I made a fun little googly eyed piece of poop image for the, for the COVID which I'm particularly proud of. So anyway, just trying to, just trying to keep it, you know, whatever. So it's cheap, it's only, it's 4.99 if you want to buy it, if you don't, don't worry about it. But there you go. And so I just, I don't know, the other day, I guess maybe Monday, I think it was Monday, I probably published the chapter about Copilot and AI. And right now, even though there are thousands probably of utilities that do things like clean, debloat, disentify, whatever, however you want to say it, Windows 11, there is no one good tool that does this for AI. There are many tools that do part of it right and Wind Bloat, which is the one I like the Most for just general DE and suretifying does that as well. And so they do a pretty good job. But if you really want to get in there and remove all of the AI stuff in Windows 11, there's nothing that does it in an automated fashion. I don't actually think that's a good idea anyway, honestly, because I feel like you may maybe the. I don't know, the AI features in Notepad are offensive to you for some reason. You can turn that off pretty easily in the app. Right? You can't, by the way, turn off any of the AI features in the Photos app, which is kind of interesting. You can turn off some, but not all of the AI editing features in Paint, which by the way will differ depending on whether or not you have a copilot PC or a non copilot plus PC. That's curious. And so I don't know, maybe someday we'll have. This is an area I suspect I'll be updating as we go. But for now I basically describe how you can disable, turn off or whatever, every one of those things. So there's that and then sort. Yeah, well, no, definitely tied to this. The reason I wrote this is because I've spent a lot of time my entire adult life testing alternatives to Windows. Right. Going back to the floppy disk based versions of Linux in the 1990s when Apple brought Steve Jobs back and they announced OS X, bought an Ibook so I could test that. And I've had. I think I've owned more Macs in the past 25 years than most Mac fans. You know, I've owned so many Macs, I've tried every version of Linux imaginable. I've tried a few I hadn't tried in recent days. There's a Microsoft engineer who makes one called. What's it called? Anduin os, which is kind of interesting. Things like Debian.
- [82:31]
Leo Laporte
Is that another reference to the Lord of the Rings? Anduin, Isn't that. It sounds like it is, yeah.
- [82:36]
Paul Thurrott
Like. No. Well, Anduin might be. Is that the name of the river? Because the. The sword Eragon's sword was Anderil.
- [82:44]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, yeah. Ander.
- [82:45]
Leo Laporte
Yeah.
- [82:46]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [82:46]
Leo Laporte
It's the river that crossed most of Middle Earth.
- [82:48]
Paul Thurrott
The rivers. Anduin. Yeah. I'm a Tolkien scholar.
- [82:53]
Leo Laporte
Yes, you are.
- [82:55]
Paul Thurrott
So I'm trying to do a like a focus each month. So my February focus was and is this book. But I don't know if it's going to be March or April probably, but I'm going to go into a lot of these things. There are some really interesting. You can do things like Chrome OS Flex. If you can find a laptop that actually works with it, you can run Linux. Right. And so you get this, like, full desktop version of Chrome plus thing, you know, whatever Linux apps you might want to run, which is actually very interesting. So I just kind of. I just wrote a big thing about the stuff I've done so far in that area. But there'll be a month, I don't know, sometime in the first half of this year where I kind of focus on that stuff. But if anyone has any recommendations about whatever alternative. I mean, obviously Mac OS X or Mac os, which is. I hate. But whatever. It's out there and it is a thing. Or even the iPad can be a good laptop now, various versions of Linux, whatever. But anyway, okay. Daba. Dabadoo Related to Windows Semi. Last week we had Lenovo's earnings. They warned about RAM prices extending through the end of the year. HP reported their earnings and they extended that warning into 2027. Yay. So they had a good quarter, actually 6.9% gain on revenues to 14.4 billion. Over 10 billion of which came from their PC business. The rest of it, the 4.2 billion that remains, came from printing. Not surprisingly, printing is not doing great. Well, it's generating 4 billion themselves.
- [84:29]
Richard Campbell
For that. They've made everybody hate printing in every way.
- [84:32]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. And HP is one of the. When Cory Doctorow talks about certification, he actually mentions the HP Printer, Inc. Scandalous. Sure. Which is this. You know, they force you to use their ink. It's like, guys. And this is why the DMCA and reverse engineering is such a huge problem right now. Because you should be able to. As a consumer, you own the printer. You should be able to put squirt water into there if that's what you want. But they don't let you do that. So whatever.
- [84:58]
Richard Campbell
There was a malware that would force your printer head to stroke over a point of paper so small it actually set fire to the paper.
- [85:05]
Paul Thurrott
That's awesome. That is awesome.
- [85:09]
Richard Campbell
Wow.
- [85:10]
Paul Thurrott
Which is what should. Well, you know, like we were promised the paperless office in the 1970s. You know I told you guys the story about the printer here, right? Like the. Did I tell you the story? We. I needed to print a return label for Amazon here. Amazon here works exactly like us. You get next day, same day, whatever. It's great. But when you return, there's fewer options and there's. I don't even remember the name of the store. It's not very close to here, the closest one. But I had to print a label. I couldn't go there and just give them like a barcode or something or QR code. I had to print it, put it on the box. So we don't have a printer, obviously. I have a. There's an older American guy in the building we're friends with. I figured he must have a printer, and he does not. And he said. And he told me what I already knew, which is that there are all these businesses. I mean, I swear to God, within a two block radius in any direction, there are eight to ten printing stores, like Popularias. And they don't just do printing, but they do all kinds of paper stuff, right? Because paper is humongous here because we live in the 1970s again. And so we went to the closest one and I brought it on a USB key. I had it on my phone. And the USB key, no problem. Put it in the computer. Do I want black and white in color? It went black and white. It's two pages. There's the thing you put in the box. The thing you put in. Right. You don't have the drill. And then I asked him, I said, quanto cuesta? Which is the. How much does it cost? And he said, dos pesos. Oh, Jesus. And I was like, it's like a nickel.
- [86:33]
Richard Campbell
I'm like, you don't have a 2 peso coin?
- [86:37]
Paul Thurrott
I was like, I don't. I asked him to repeat it. There's no way I heard that correctly. It's 10 cents. And I looked at my wife and I was like, do we have dos pesos? So she got out here, a little change purse, like an old lady. She's going in there, she's looking around, she pulls out this coin. It was like this big. I gave it to the guy, and he went into his drawer and he handed me three even smaller coins back.
- [87:00]
Richard Campbell
Because it was.
- [87:01]
Paul Thurrott
And I was like, I should have gotten color. I don't know. What. What is it? So here's the thing.
- [87:05]
Richard Campbell
How much.
- [87:06]
Paul Thurrott
How much printing would I have to do? Where it would make sense to own a printer here?
- [87:09]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, that's why there's no way. I like, even the page is ridiculous.
- [87:15]
Paul Thurrott
Look, I mean, maybe you could get a good printer for 150 bucks maybe, right? Like, how much would I have to print? And the thing is, it's the only time I've had to print here in four years. I. If the thing sat here and didn't print, I'd have to replace the ink. I would never catch up.
- [87:30]
Richard Campbell
You'd have to buy a printer each time you wanted to do that.
- [87:32]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, exactly. It's like dose, dose pesos. I'm like, I don't even. Do they make money that small? They do, they do.
- [87:38]
Richard Campbell
Anyway, it was the ups, the place where I have to drop off my Amazon returns, which is a UPS Restore has a printer.
- [87:45]
Paul Thurrott
There you go.
- [87:45]
Leo Laporte
Because they know, they probably have a fax machine too.
- [87:49]
Paul Thurrott
I'm just like in the United States a lot of times with Amazon, I could just go to Whole Foods and they scan a QR code on my phone and we're done. You know, they just, they don't. I don't even need the box. They just do all that stuff for you. So I look, I could bring something to Kohl's and I, I assume I printed some labels and I guess I must have, but I don't. Doesn't happen a lot. It certainly doesn't happen a lot here. I don't know. Anyway, that's one of the many humorous things about Mexico. Okay. And then speaking of humorous or ironic or hypocritical, I don't know, I just want to remind everyone that Tim Cook infamously said you could converge a toaster and a refrigerator, but that's probably not going to be very pleasing to the user. He was referring to Surface and this, this combat combining of tablet and PC into one device. At that time I said, you know what else you could combine is a toaster and an oven. And that could be very useful. Turns out those sell pretty well. He later referred to Surface in different times that year as compromised, confusing and deluded. So I wrote diluted like a fox because now Apple's doing it. Apple later this year will Release touchscreen based MacBook Pro models for the first time. So it took them, let's see, Surface RT and Windows RT came out in what, 2012. So 14 years later, diluted has become genius. So we'll see what the other thing that. This is not the same. I know. I'm surprised nobody called me on this, but according to Mark Ehrman, the guy from Bloomberg now who reported on this, the macOS software will be dynamic, meaning that you can switch between an interface that's optimized for touch and one that's optimized for point and click, which is what? Two modes, which was one of the primary complaints about Windows 8, right? There were two modes. There was like desktop and touch. They're not going to do it that way, obviously, but I guess if you go to touch a control on the screen, it will kind of expand or something. Who cares? I don't know. Anyway, I often wondered why they didn't do touch on Mac, if only for developers, because to develop for all those touch devices that Apple does make, like the iPad, iPhone, whatever, it was one
- [90:10]
Richard Campbell
of the most compelling reasons to do.
- [90:11]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that would be the reason. Yeah, you'd want to touch the thing like that, you know, that makes the emulator work better. To me, I don't know, but I don't think that's why they're doing it. I, I'm going to guess people ask for it, I don't know.
- [90:24]
Richard Campbell
Customer demand.
- [90:25]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I guess so. I mean, Steve Jobs referred to this, that multi touch laptop as ergonomically terrible. But of course this, the, the new Apple, today's Apple made something called Liquid Glass, which is just terrible, ergonomic or otherwise. I don't know.
- [90:44]
Leo Laporte
No relation to aeroglass. Right.
- [90:47]
Paul Thurrott
Well, well, I mean, funny you say that because a lot of people have actually compared it to that. Right. One of the things that was weird to me as a Windows guy at that time, when this was when Windows Vista came out, Longhorn and into Vista, was where we got aeroglass was they had at that time, Remember, this was late, late 202006 when that came out. So five years of experience with transparent and translucent effects in Mac OS X at the time. Right. If you think back to the first version of Mac OS X, the first couple of versions, one of the things that was wrong with it was you could see like what was behind a menu would bleed into the menu and it made it look muddy. Right. So they fixed that over time. It took a couple years, but if you go back and look at screenshots of the first, you'll see it. Like it's weird. Like if there's text underneath a menu that's displaying over something in an app, it bleeds through and looks terrible.
- [91:41]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, Microsoft made exactly that same problem with Liquid Glass.
- [91:45]
Paul Thurrott
Right. So Microsoft. Right. Microsoft made that same mistake with Vista and they fixed it over time. I mean like the, the glass that was in seven was an improvement over the glass that was in Vista. And then they got rid of it. Nate. But whatever. And yeah, so now we have Liquid Glass and it's like you have these weird glass, I don't know, whatever they are dynamic glass controls that expand as you touch them for some reason and then it blocks content. It's like, didn't you, you made this mistake before. Like, what are you doing? But I don't know. Different, different generation different people, I guess. I don't know. I don't have too, too much on the AI front, but I'm just going to blow through this quick because I don't think people care too, too much. Gemini 3.1 Pro came this week. I think this is a response to stuff that Anthropic especially, but Anthropic and OpenAI are doing. And this is just, you know, another week, so another leapfrog and blah, blah, blah.
- [92:43]
Richard Campbell
Gemini 3 is really quite good.
- [92:46]
Paul Thurrott
Yep. And that was big, big News. And then Gemini 3:1 Pro is like, like nothing, you know, Like, I think we're just getting used to it, you know, it's just like. Oh, yeah, it's really. It's awesome.
- [92:55]
Richard Campbell
Just expecting greatness now, is that.
- [92:57]
Paul Thurrott
Yep, that's where we're at. And it's everywhere. So if you have the Gemini app, notebook, lm, whatever, you know, it's everywhere. If you're a developer, enterprise, consumer, you're going to see it everywhere and you're not going to notice. Who cares? Late last year, Mozilla replaced their CEO. The new CEO said, we're going to put an AI kill switch in Firefox that has just been released. I'm sad that it's not called the AI kill switch, by the way, but there is a switch. You can block all AI enhancements with one click, which is pretty good, I was gonna say.
- [93:27]
Richard Campbell
So what does it do? Like all AI dies but just like, does not appear in the browser.
- [93:32]
Paul Thurrott
So here's what they did. Right. This reminds me of, you know, anyone who. Anyone. So anyone on. On earth. I guess I was gonna say anyone who has used a mobile device and has been on a plane may have noticed. And Windows does this too. You can put the device in airplane mode and then you can enable, like WI Fi or enable Bluetooth or both. Right. And you're still in airplane mode. But that thing has come on. This is the thing Microsoft never did with S Mode. Remember? Like, let's have S Mode, but we'll have an exception for Chrome or something.
- [93:59]
Richard Campbell
Right.
- [94:01]
Paul Thurrott
The. The little insight there is that the next time you're in airplane mode, and I believe this is true of all these platforms, like mobile and on Windows and Mac, maybe, I don't know the Mac, but it will remember what you did last time. So the next time that you go into airplane mode, it will leave on WI Fi, if that's what you have, if that's how you had it configured. Because maybe you're going to connect to the WI Fi in The plane. Right, that makes sense. So the way this thing works is you can block all AI enhancements, which should say AI kill Switch, but whatever. And then there's a selection of the AI features that's in the browser and you can go in and say, well, actually, I want translations to work. So you're still blocking all AI, but translations in this case. Now, someday in the future, Firefox may release some other AI innovation or feature, whatever. That thing will be off by default. But the thing you've said you want on will remain on. So that's, to me, is like the right way to do it. Like this, you know, that's good. It seems good. I don't think we're ever going to see anything like this in Chrome or Edge, you know.
- [95:04]
Richard Campbell
Pretty sure.
- [95:05]
Paul Thurrott
I'm pretty sure, yeah. Just knowing, you know, the strategy there. And then Duck AI is DuckDuckGo's private AI chatbot. It's actually pretty good, by the way. You could use it to create images as of, I don't know, a month or two ago. And then just this past week, they added the ability where you can upload an image and then edit it using generative AI. So you can. The obvious use case is here's a photo of you or you and your wife or something or whatever it is. And say, like, make this a watercolor or make this an anime or make, you know, whatever the style is you're looking for. And I, I tested it with, you know, it's. You know, it's actually pretty good. So this is completely private. It's. It's free. I mean, you obviously run into limits if you use it too too much.
- [95:50]
Richard Campbell
You just pay for it if you want to use it more.
- [95:52]
Paul Thurrott
Yep. Yeah. And, you know, if you want something that's anonymous, but it's not local AI, it's using cloud AI or whatever I think it's using. I think the underlying. I believe it's OpenAI. It's using. I think so. But whatever it is, it's. I was like, okay, this is actually, you know, and this is that little AI, little tech thing. Like, I. It. It's getting to the point where that stuff is, you know, actually pretty good.
- [96:18]
Richard Campbell
Just works.
- [96:18]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So it's there. It's there if you want it.
- [96:21]
Richard Campbell
That's interesting.
- [96:22]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [96:24]
Leo Laporte
Well, well, well. Indeed, indeed, indeed. Would you like to do an Xbox segment?
- [96:31]
Paul Thurrott
I would, and I would like it to be all good news. What do we got coming?
- [96:35]
Leo Laporte
Any minute now. You're watching Windows Weekly with Paul Trombone Thurat And I don't know what I'm going to call you. Richard Campbell. Richard Auga Campbell.
- [96:50]
Paul Thurrott
Yes, that's what he is. The old fashioned Hornet.
- [96:55]
Leo Laporte
Ah, Richard Glissando Campbell.
- [96:57]
Paul Thurrott
I thought that was happening in my room. I'm surrounded by AI.
- [97:04]
Leo Laporte
This is Windows Weekly. We're glad you're here, all you winners and dozers. We're especially glad for our club members. We appreciate your support.
- [97:12]
Paul Thurrott
Dripping in gold, that's cool. Dripping in Velveeta's supremely creamy golden cheesiness. That's respect. Elevate your drip with Velveeta's range of outrageously delicious dips and dishes. Shells, cheese melty blocks and heat. Eat and eat queso that go all in on indulgence.
- [97:30]
Richard Campbell
Flex on your fam with a creamy
- [97:33]
Paul Thurrott
cheesy masterpiece and go all in on what you love with Velveeta. Respect the drip and satisfy your cravings. Bring home the drip with Velveeta.
- [97:42]
Leo Laporte
Now on we go with. Let me think. Oh, the Xbox segment.
- [97:48]
Richard Campbell
Paul, can you do this?
- [97:50]
Paul Thurrott
There was a little change at the top. We did a little bit at the beginning of the story, at the beginning of the podcast rather. Nothing to worry about. I, you know everything Xbox going gangbusters. But the first two stories I have in here actually related. So the February update for Xbox is out. If you have an Xbox game pass ultimate subscription, you can now stream games from your console. This could be Xbox series S X or S or Xbox One X and S. Interestingly elsewhere to where whatever endpoint it could be like your Fire TV, stick a PC whatever at 1440p.
- [98:32]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, it was limited to 1440. The X was the 2160.
- [98:38]
Paul Thurrott
I'm not going to remember that anymore. I mean I believe the way they marketed X was it could sort of do 4K. Just kidding. It can display 4K still images. We're just kidding. But you know, I mean obviously these things have improved over time but I don't remember anymore what they. I don't know. I do remember liking the Xbox One X quite a bit. A bit. Also the Xbox One S. But anyway there's that they've added some like new sounds to if you have a rog Xbox ally which is a non event and then the second story I had in the cause I had that there originally. If you are in the Xbox Insider program and you have the Xbox app on your PC and you play a game, the Xbox app will appear after the game's over and give you like a game recap which in my experience is completely Pointless. But it is there. I have seen it. I see it.
- [99:31]
Richard Campbell
Play the game again.
- [99:32]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I wish there was a. Can I. I can't bring it up on this thing. Yeah, no, it's like an AI thing. It's like, oh, yeah, you did pretty good. Like you had like 25 points in that game, you know, had positive KD. Like, you know, keep it up, buddy, you're doing great.
- [99:47]
Richard Campbell
By 12 year olds four times.
- [99:48]
Paul Thurrott
Exactly. And one of the times it was just lag. It's not even your fault. Yeah, no, it's just. It's pointless. But now that's. I guess it's out. So that was available in two insiders now I think it's just coming to everybody. So there is that. Okay. Actually, I guess the sounds are for everyone on Windows, so that's not just the rag Xbox. Ally. There's some little minor improvements in there actually. So. Removable storage, formatting support, advanced shader delivery indicator. Come on, man. And then some other small improvements. No big deal. And then the recap thing, which again, ridiculous. But whatever. You can turn it off if you don't want it. And you will turn it off, I guarantee it. I'm not sure I even know who this company is that I've ever heard of them, but there's a company called Sensor Tower, which is an analyst firm, and they took a look at 2025 video game sales and there's some really interesting data in here. And this is across mobile, PC and console. They often commingle PC and console, which is incredible to me, but okay, I mean, fair enough. PC gaming had a record year across units sold. Premium game revenue, premium game growth and units. No, I said that. And Steam. Steam revenues were $11.7 billion, up 13% year over year. To put that in perspective, Apple App Store game revenue was over $50 billion. And Google Play Store game revenue was over, was almost exactly $30 billion. There were 225,000 games released last year. That means an average of 617 new games every day. Think about that. I know.
- [101:35]
Richard Campbell
It's almost like podcasts.
- [101:38]
Paul Thurrott
Yep, we're calling those shows now, by the way. I don't know if you heard.
- [101:42]
Leo Laporte
Please don't call them pods. I hear more and more people calling them pods. Is that just me?
- [101:47]
Paul Thurrott
No, the worst usage of that term is people who make podcasts. If I could reach through the Internet and punch them. That makes me crazy. It's right up there.
- [101:57]
Leo Laporte
New crowd. The bros. The bros. Today on the pod.
- [102:02]
Paul Thurrott
Jason, we got some guys together to make a Pod. You're like, oh, I will murder.
- [102:07]
Leo Laporte
Okay, I'm glad.
- [102:08]
Paul Thurrott
That makes it bugs me.
- [102:10]
Leo Laporte
We're old school. We call them podcasts.
- [102:13]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. We call them what? They're called shows. This is the logic thing again. Like it has a name. Idiot. Anyway, I'm sorry.
- [102:19]
Leo Laporte
Show would be preferable to pod.
- [102:22]
Paul Thurrott
That's true. Right, right. It's like we need a new term for video podcast. No, we don't. It's a video podcast. Done.
- [102:29]
Leo Laporte
Show.
- [102:30]
Paul Thurrott
She's done.
- [102:31]
Leo Laporte
This is why I never liked the word podcast, because it implies how it's delivered. It's just a show. You get it on the Internet. Might be video, might be audio.
- [102:41]
Paul Thurrott
I think the confusion. Yeah. A lot of. A lot of people.
- [102:44]
Leo Laporte
Not a podcast.
- [102:45]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah. So if you have a video podcast, you could. It could be just be on YouTube, you know? So to you, it's like a video. Like. Yeah, yeah, whatever.
- [102:54]
Leo Laporte
But you don't call it an audio.
- [102:56]
Paul Thurrott
No, you don't. You don't. You also. You know this. You don't call it an odd.
- [103:00]
Leo Laporte
It's an odd. Today on the odd.
- [103:02]
Paul Thurrott
Paul. Are we. So it's like when you see a sign, it's on a giant space, and they truncate the term. Do you have enough space?
- [103:11]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [103:11]
Paul Thurrott
Spell it out.
- [103:13]
Leo Laporte
You know, it's like, I'm too.
- [103:15]
Richard Campbell
I'm.
- [103:16]
Leo Laporte
Things are moving too fast for me.
- [103:17]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, I'm too. I'm too cool.
- [103:19]
Leo Laporte
I don't have enough time to say podcast.
- [103:21]
Paul Thurrott
That's right.
- [103:22]
Leo Laporte
I say the pie.
- [103:23]
Paul Thurrott
That's why we say the whole thing. We're slow moving. We're old. You know,
- [103:27]
Leo Laporte
we got.
- [103:29]
Richard Campbell
I wonder how they counted these game towers. What happened?
- [103:32]
Leo Laporte
25,000.
- [103:34]
Paul Thurrott
Wow. This is the. These numbers. When I say these numbers, it's going to be hard to conceptualize.
- [103:40]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [103:40]
Paul Thurrott
Because they're all over the map. So, for example, I mentioned that steam was 11.7 billion in revenues, and that is one third or a little bit over one third of what Google Play Store game revenues were. It's a little over one fifth of what Apple App Store game revenues were. However, 20 or 52.2 billion game downloads on mobile overall. Of those, 42 billion were on Android. So there were far more on Android, but Apple made far more money. Not. Well, not Quite double, but 7.8 billion on iPhone. Of those. No, I'm sorry, not of those. 52.2 billion on mobile, or 50 billion. We'll call it 2 billion on PCs and consoles combined to 1 25th. What?
- [104:30]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [104:31]
Paul Thurrott
Okay. This is where things get interesting. To me and to anyone who cares about Xbox. Of those 2 billion downloads across PC and console, 546 million were on Xbox. 626 million were on PlayStation. Those aren't that far off.
- [104:49]
Richard Campbell
No, that's.
- [104:50]
Paul Thurrott
You would not expect that. Right? I mean, you would might think it would be half or less, but it's not. It's like whatever that is, 80% or 2 or 75%, something like that. 857 million run PC. So PC is bigger, but not bigger than the two combined and you know, maybe half again as big as the right way to say that, if that makes sense. There's a lot of other. I've wrote a bunch of this stuff
- [105:15]
Richard Campbell
but like, you know, what is this? 7 billion smartphones in use in the world today.
- [105:20]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [105:20]
Richard Campbell
And there are 52 billion games, mobile games downloaded last year.
- [105:25]
Paul Thurrott
Right.
- [105:26]
Richard Campbell
So what is that, six, seven games per person?
- [105:29]
Paul Thurrott
I'd like to know what the hell you people are doing on your phones. Because I. To me a phone is. Well, phone calls and texts, which both are irritating. Other forms of messaging, photos, you know, take pictures. I post them to social media. So that's on there. I think that might be it. Let me, let me look at my phone. What else do I have on here? Is there anything? Well, email. Okay, I got email there. Maps. Yeah, Maps are good. Uber. Right. Which I only have on my phone when I'm here. A browser. Because you know, you might want to read something. Google Translate. Because I'm in Mexico. Yeah, it's about it. Weather. Weather is fun. I like looking at the weather. Anyway, you guys are apparently downloading six games every month. I don't know, that's like. I guess you're. I. I don't know, whatever you're doing, it's fine. I. Fine you do you be you. It's okay. Last year was the first time that in app purchases and games exceeded in app purchases in apps by revenue. That's almost $86 billion just in app purchases and games across the board. Battlefield 6 was the best selling game last year. The top three games, by the way, all made by EA. The other two were versions of EA Sports FC, which is the, you know, soccer, as we would call it. United Football. Right.
- [106:52]
Leo Laporte
Football club.
- [106:53]
Paul Thurrott
Football club, Yep. But Fortnite is the top game by size of player base on both PC and console.
- [107:00]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, but you've already got Fortnite.
- [107:02]
Paul Thurrott
Yep, but. But the activity is still humongous. Right. And I have to say, having played it recently, it's actually pretty good.
- [107:08]
Leo Laporte
It's A fun game. Yeah.
- [107:10]
Paul Thurrott
Here's the thing though. What do you think number two is? This is number two of most played games on PC console. What would you guess number two would be?
- [107:18]
Leo Laporte
Call of Duty.
- [107:20]
Paul Thurrott
Call of Duty is number five.
- [107:21]
Leo Laporte
Oh, what's bigger than Call of Duty in the world?
- [107:25]
Paul Thurrott
Surprised nobody guessed. Gta. That's number four. Minecraft is number three. But you know what number two is? This is. Sit down. This is crazy. Counter Strike 2.
- [107:34]
Leo Laporte
Ah, that's interesting.
- [107:36]
Richard Campbell
Three year old game.
- [107:37]
Paul Thurrott
What? Counter Strike 2 is Half Life Engine 2.
- [107:41]
Richard Campbell
Like what does that include?
- [107:44]
Leo Laporte
Like the mods like TF2 and stuff like that.
- [107:47]
Paul Thurrott
It doesn't.
- [107:47]
Richard Campbell
That.
- [107:48]
Paul Thurrott
I don't know. I'm sorry.
- [107:49]
Leo Laporte
Probably not.
- [107:50]
Richard Campbell
I don't know.
- [107:51]
Paul Thurrott
Top shooters on PC and console by monthly average users. Fortnite. Counter Strike 2. Right. Call of Duty PUBG and Battlefield 6, top shooters by downloads though this resets things in a very strange way. Marvel Rivals, which I wouldn't play on your computer. Battlefield 6, Delta Force, which is a remake. Arc Raiders, which is new. Yeah. And I was gonna say it's a remake. It's not a remake. I'm sorry, it's new. And then Call of Duty. So there's a lot of data here. Obviously there's more. I mean they, they go in. There's a lot in there about like the way that mobile games are monetized and I, you know, whatever advertising and I don't really care about that stuff. But the thing that, the one thing that sticks out to me is the, the PC console game downloads numbers. 546 million on Xbox. 626 on PlayStation. Those are close. Those are way closer than I would have thought. I'm fascinated.
- [108:54]
Richard Campbell
I want to dig into those numbers. Is this where the games acquisition that Microsoft's done so that if you have game pass, you're getting new games, you're getting caught.
- [109:04]
Paul Thurrott
Exactly. And the other thing that's not clear there is. Well no, it may be is clear. I don't know. They say on PC, I don't know if on PC they mean broadly on PC across, you know, Steam, Epic games and then by the way also Xbox on PC. Right. Or if Xbox, if that number includes the PC part of Xbox. It's not clear. I went and searched through it to find out if. To see if I could find that out and I couldn't. It's not really there.
- [109:31]
Richard Campbell
Yeah.
- [109:32]
Paul Thurrott
But you know, 10 cent number one
- [109:34]
Richard Campbell
game generational thing here. Like one of the reasons I think Marvel Rivals Rebels does so well is that kids You've got a generation of kids who grew up with mcu and they all want to play Iron Man. Right.
- [109:44]
Paul Thurrott
Speaking of mcu, I might highlight the MCU as the first actual version of AI Slop. And you people are all idiots. All right, so just throwing it out there. Let's make the same movie over and over again. How many alien threats to the planet Earth can we have? I don't know. How many MCU movies are there? Because literally. Yeah. Anyway, interesting stuff, I think.
- [110:09]
Richard Campbell
Crazy. Yeah. I'm wondering about those numbers, especially when you talk about EA numbers, because they're private now. They don't have to report their numbers.
- [110:16]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, well, they're about to be private, so that's happening later this year. So they just released their financial report, you know, one of the last ones.
- [110:25]
Richard Campbell
Last time.
- [110:26]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, that's going to disappear. But, you know, whatever anyone thinks of the little investment group that's buying this company or why they would spend so much money on ea, actually, they're doing pretty good. And of course, they have those evergreen franchises in sports. Right. With all the.
- [110:41]
Richard Campbell
Which you're gonna need because you paid a lot to buy all that stock back. That's a lot of money.
- [110:45]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, yeah. Interesting.
- [110:48]
Leo Laporte
Stay tuned, kids, because coming up in just a little bit, right after Windows Weekly, if you're watching live, we're gonna have Jeff Atwood, who created Stack Exchange.
- [110:58]
Paul Thurrott
You're not gonna talk about the Samsung thing instead because it's super interesting and completely new and different and. Oh, God, what was I saying? Anyway, that's great.
- [111:10]
Richard Campbell
It's a great guy. Ask about Yo Yos. He's big into Yo Yos.
- [111:14]
Leo Laporte
Oh, I'll ask about Yo Yos.
- [111:15]
Paul Thurrott
I didn't know that.
- [111:16]
Richard Campbell
He's got. He gets. He goes all in on stuff, man.
- [111:19]
Leo Laporte
He also started Discourse, which does our forum software Twitter community, and he has a new initiative, Rural Basic Income initiative, that I think is really cool. He's pledged to give away half of his fortune. And we'll have a lot of fun talking about AI with the guy who basically was the first victim of AI with Stack Exchange.
- [111:43]
Richard Campbell
Right?
- [111:43]
Paul Thurrott
He was. Thank God AI is so popular with developers. Oh, wait, damn it.
- [111:49]
Leo Laporte
That's coming up in just a little bit. I want to do a little shout out to our Club Twit members who make this show and everything we do possible nowadays. Club Twit is, I think, more than it was 25% of our operating expenses. I think it's more like a third of our operating expenses come from our club members. And while that, you know, some may say, well, that's not, you know, wouldn't you want to come from advertisers? Actually, frankly, I'd love it if we're 100% from club members. I love that idea. It's, it's your way of voting, right, of saying, hey, we, we support what you're doing. We want to hear more of it. If you like the programmin you hear on Twitt, whether it's Windows Weekly or any of our other shows, if you'd like to get ad free versions of those shows, including this plug, I, you know, we will always offer most of our content for free. I don't like paywalls. We stream everything we do live. We make it all available on audio. I think video is held back for some shows, but I really, we want you to have the shows for free. But I also would love it if you would think it's worth enough to pay 10 bucks a month for the ad free versions of the shows. And to get in the club Twit Discord, which is a great hangout. And talk with us to get access to the special programming we put out in the club. Coming up tomorrow, Johnny jets back to Talk Travel. We, we just did Micah's crafting workshop. That was a lot of fun. I mean we just do a lot of stuff in the club. It's a social group as much as anything else. So if you like the programming, you want to be part of the social scene, you don't have to, but you could Twit TV Club Twit. We would love to have you please join the club. It really makes a big difference to, to what we do on Twitter. Now what we're going to do on the tweet is the very famous back of the book. Starting off with Paul Thurat and his. Oh, let me put you in the middle again. His tip of the week. Paulie
- [113:52]
Paul Thurrott
Experience. A membership that backs what you're building with American Express Business Platinum. Enjoy complimentary access to the American Express Global Lounge collection and a welcome offer of 200,000 points after you spend $20,000 on purchases on the card within your first three months of membership. American Express Business Platinum. There's nothing like it. Terms apply. Learn more@americanexpress.com Business Platinum
- [114:22]
Leo Laporte
Marvel Television's Wonder
- [114:23]
Richard Campbell
man, an eight episode series now streaming on Disney plus a superhero remake.
- [114:28]
Paul Thurrott
Not exactly what we'd expect from an Oscar winning director. Action. Simon Williams audition for Wonder Man. I'm gonna need you to sign this. Assuming you don't have superpower
- [114:41]
Leo Laporte
I never work again. If anyone found out, my lips are sealed.
- [114:46]
Paul Thurrott
Marvel Television's Wonder man all eight episodes
- [114:49]
Leo Laporte
now streaming only on Disney plus.
- [114:52]
Paul Thurrott
Whether you bond over streaming binge worthy
- [114:54]
Richard Campbell
videos, watching sports recaps, video gaming, or
- [114:57]
Paul Thurrott
by unplugging altogether, the 2026 Lincoln Nautilus
- [115:01]
Richard Campbell
Hybrid helps keep you connected throughout your journey. Learn more@lincoln.com available in connectivity features and
- [115:07]
Paul Thurrott
functionality vary by model, package pricing, trials
- [115:10]
Richard Campbell
and term lengths vary by model.
- [115:12]
Paul Thurrott
Video streaming and games are only available while parked. I don't know, I guess these are. I don't know, I guess what I
- [115:22]
Leo Laporte
really have Tip of the Week.
- [115:24]
Paul Thurrott
No, you're correct. What I wrote was an epic. I do have. I do know that was I screwed it up. I do have a tip request. This is something. This has been driving me crazy. I know a little bit about Windows, you know, and I know a little bit about how it works and yada yada yada. There's been a problem that has been getting bigger and bigger for me that I feel should be a solvable problem. And it is not. Unless I maybe I'm missing something really obvious, I don't know. But touchpads are getting bigger and bigger on laptops, right? The one that's on you can't see the laptop, but there's a this is a a normally size 16 inch ThinkPad P series kind of portable workstation. The touchpad is the size of a Volkswagen Bug. And I have big hands. So clicking, you know, single clicking to me should be easy. I always configure a touchpad to support only two finger right click. And that means I turn off the option that's in the Settings app to do a one finger right click over in the corner or on the side of it over there. It doesn't matter who makes the laptop. It could be Lenovo, HP or whatever. It does not matter. But what I'm seeing more and more of is I click toward the middle of the thing and I get a right click. And I believe I raised this issue sometime last year where if you bring up an interface that doesn't support a right click, for example a context menu menu, it should never register right click on that thing because it doesn't support it. But you can right click in there and it will make the menu disappear and you don't do it. You never go anywhere. And my argument to that would be like, well, if you're going to register the click, register it as a click. So what I'm asking for, and I'm kind of hoping There's a third party utility that does this. I don't understand why this doesn't work on any laptop I've ever used. I want to be able to single click anywhere on this touchpad by touching the touchpad. Right? In other words, I don't want to be on the left half of it, although I could be. I want to be anywhere on it. I've disabled one finger right click. Why can't I one finger single click reliably anywhere on this touchpad? I don't know. I know it sounds like the stupidest thing that's making me insane. So if you're out there and you have an answer for this, something that actually works, dear God, please help me, because this is making me. It makes me insane. It makes me insane. Epic. So Microsoft is in the process of updating OneDrive on the Mac. And this is harkening back to the late 1990s. Remember Microsoft's Mac apps back in the 90s were these kind of weird like pseudo code apps where it was really the Windows app. But they recompiled it on the Mac so it kind of looked like Windows, but, you know, everyone hated it. And then they finally went native. But someday soon, if you're an insider, you'll get it now. But someday soon you will get this update. If you have OneDrive on the Mac, the dialogs and the controls and everything look and feel like Mac os. They're actually using native Mac controls. What were you using before? Like, that doesn't make any sense to me. There's a. I don't know, they gave it a name. But the Mac, as people probably know, has like a persistent menu bar at the top. So you get like a little Status icon for OneDrive and when you click that, you get kind of a little menu of choices, which is very similar to when you click the OneDrive icon in Windows. They have named that the Activity center for some reason, but whatever, it's just a little menu. It looks like it will look like liquid Glass if you have macOS 26 and higher. So yeah, okay. And then Microsoft and Google just released new versions of their kind of, you know, flagship desktop web browsers, both of which have new features. The Microsoft stuff is not particularly interesting, but summarize and explain actions in for PDFs and an improved PDF read aloud experience on the Chrome side. This feature, I feel like this is in browsers already. I know this is in Brave, but they finally added a split view feature and this is where you can have two different web page views. In one tab. So you don't have to, you know, snap Windows side by side or whatever. They just put them side by side. I mean, obviously you'd probably want to have a pretty big screen for this, but whatever. I. I think Edge has had this for a long time too. And then some good PDF stuff. Highlight text, add notes directly in PDFs right from the app, which, you know, we're getting to the point where we can say goodbye to Acrobat, finally. And then you can also save PDFs directly to Google Drive instead of saving them to the local computer.
- [120:27]
Leo Laporte
Hallelujah.
- [120:29]
Paul Thurrott
But seriously, Touchpad, help me. I don't know what's going on. I don't know why I can't figure this out. It's making me crazy. I scream at my computer every day now. Not for the normal reasons.
- [120:44]
Richard Campbell
These are new screens.
- [120:45]
Paul Thurrott
These are the Abby normal reasons.
- [120:47]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I scream, you scream. We all scream.
- [120:51]
Paul Thurrott
Any help, please help me. Help me.
- [120:56]
Leo Laporte
Okay, I'm confused. It was your tip and your Apple.
- [120:59]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah, sorry. The tip was. I need you to give me a tip. And then I have some app pics. Yes.
- [121:06]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Okay, that's good. That means it's time for Richard Campbell and run as radio.
- [121:13]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. I've had Steve Buchanan back on the show to talk about software as a service on multiple clouds, but not what you're thinking. Not. I want redundancy between the clouds because sometimes they go down. That's not what was happening here at all. Steve works on a particular product called Jamf, and the product was originally built on aws and that's great for a certain number of customers, but there are a bunch of customers who wanted access to the product through Azure. And so he is leading the group that's re implementing it in Azure, trying to have a common code base and a common configuration, like trying to make it as manageable as possible. And so this was really a conversation about what's in common while not actually trying to do fail over any of that kind of craziness. And so it was. They kind of going cloud agnostic about. It was mostly containers. Kubernetes is everywhere. But what's your deployment pipeline? Because they're going to be different. How does your identity system work? What's your instrumentation telemetry look like? And so that is really. We got to the meat and potatoes of what does it take to actually do a common dashboard for looking across all of your customers while running on more than one cloud, as well as making it as manageable as possible. So when a build Happens it's going to appear in all of the different versions.
- [122:37]
Leo Laporte
Very nice.
- [122:38]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, that's great. Very happy with it.
- [122:41]
Leo Laporte
Now the moment many of us have been waiting for. Time to drink. Oh yeah.
- [122:49]
Richard Campbell
Well, look, I've been home. So last week we've been doing Canadian whiskies and last week we did Lot 40, which JP wiser, which actually Hiram Walker, like talk about the oldest school of old school Canadian whiskies. So this week I thought I'd go completely other way and go totally craft whiskey. Now, there's always been some small distillers, but it used to be really, really difficult to be a small distiller. You had to get big to survive. And so the entry point got harder and harder and harder. But craft distilling really starts in the 2000s, the modern version of it. Anyway, it really started in California. It was a guy named Bill Owens who founds this thing called the American Distilling Institute. And it was about, mostly about training new distillers, creating classes and curriculum and so forth for doing that. But it spawned up the west coast. Both Oregon and Washington had more permissive rules for small producers. And so Oregon had always been pretty hands off with distillers in general. But they did have rules for if you're small, you don't, you can, it's pretty easy. So if you're like less than 25,000 liters a year and you only sold no more than a handle, a 1.75 liter to any given person and you could do tastings up to a couple of ounces, that's about it. They've changed those laws since then. But Washington State in 2008 did this full on craft distiller licensing program where as long as you're producing less than 150,000 gallons a year, which to be clear, you know, places like Brown Fornum, like Jack, produce more than that a day, you could do, have a tasting room and do on site sales and so forth. And by the way, it worked. Within five years, by 2013, there were more than 60 craft distilleries in Washington. Like in, in the. It's happened elsewhere in the US since, but Washington State really led the ball on that. California, which originated the idea, didn't go around to passing craft distillery laws until 2015. But next door to Washington in British Columbia, same thing happened. So seeing the explosion of crafts distilleries in Washington put a lot of pressure on and so they came up with the same kind of craft distilling rules in 2013. And we talked about this, the context of Okanagan distillers with their great whiskey, which I had a chance to try because they tried to drove that right at the very beginning. And so if we've talked about this a little bit before, but in British Columbia you can get a craft distilling license if you only use BC products. So grain, fruit, whatever produce you use in fermentation, you do all the fermentation and distillation yourself in B.C. no additives, no preservatives, no artificial flavors, no neutral green spirits. You can qualify to basically be tax exempt from the, what they call the excise tax, which in B.C. is 124%. So it costs you 10 bucks to make a bottle of whiskey. You pay an additional 1250 to the government to be allowed to sell it. So starting your break even then at a 2250 bottle. But if you're under 50,000 liters, there's no tax at all at 2100 and 24% goes away. And then as you go up to 100,000 liters, it's graduated. So you pay a little bit more, a little more. And after 100,000 liters you no longer considered a craft distiller. You pay the full excise taxes. And you can't direct sell. I mean it's one of the measures of mainstream distilleries is they only sell through third party, right through retailers. And again, most commercial producers in Canada are making more than 100,000 liters in a day because they're all so very, very large. But this craft distilling was for small production, typically under 50,000 liters. And you are allowed to sell direct. You can sell through licensees. You can go to private liquor stores and you can have a tasting room where you're allowed to serve, but you're not really a bar and can sell some bottles. And so this story falls on is about a whiskey called, that comes from a distillery called the Sons of Vancouver. So very, very local. And the founders are James Lester and Richard Clouse. Now these two met in Fort St. John, which is in the central east side of British Columbia, really close to Alberta on the Peace River. This is oil patch country. So they both work the oil patch, made a lot of money because oil patch is oil patch. But you know, weren't loving what they were doing. James been the one who really studied process control as part of his apprenticeship. So he knew about flow systems and things. And they decided to bail out of the oil patch and sort of took a, took a few months off went to Mexico and partied. James went down to Australia, Richard went to Colombia. They all both bartended on the side and did some home brewing and things like that. And after a while we're kind of headed back home again. James started working at a distillery in Seattle. I don't know exactly which one, couldn't find that out, but this is in that period of the craft, craft brew distilling exploding in Washington state. And so he got really keen to do that in B.C. and when those rules came into play, it became possible he got on board right in 2013 as the first set of laws passed. But in some of the interviews that I've read of his, he did take some whiskey making classes down in Washington state as well, and he thought they were kind of a waste of time. One of his quotes was, I spent four days in a classroom with 20 other people staring at PowerPoint side slides and still wasn't equipped to open a distillery. But he tried, he got into it. He found some used dairy equipment, a thousand liter stainless steel pasteurizer which works basically as a mash tub, and a little 700 liter column still. And he started making whiskey in 30 liter barrels, so very small barrels, which is typical for small production. So James and Richard, with their experience in bartending, they very much came up with a vision of the kind of alcohol they liked to, to work with when they were bartending. And he said right off the bat that they had three main cocktails in mind. The dirty martini, which is just good vodka chilled down with a little bit of olive. The Caesar, which is a Canadian classic of the spicy version of the Bloody Mary with clamato juice and the amaretto source. And an amaretto sour is a classic sour. So it's a whiskey and the liqueur, although it's typically more, you know, when you think about a margarita, which is, is tequila with a little bit of liqueur, the Amaretto sour is the other way around. There's more liqueur than there is bourbon in it, but also a little bit of egg white and some, and some citrus, so forth. Amaretto is an interesting liqueur. The name literally means little amaro. And the Italians, of course, make amar amaros. They're all their. Every town's got their own unique version. The origin story of amaretto goes back to 1525 in the town of Serrano in Italy, where a woman steeped apricot pits in brandy. Now why apricot Prince? Well, certain drupes and apricot kernels, bitter almonds, peach Stones, all of them have benzo, Benzala, benzaldehyde, which has a very distinctive flavor to it.
- [130:17]
Leo Laporte
That's got to be good for you.
- [130:19]
Richard Campbell
And, you know, all out.
- [130:20]
Leo Laporte
I won't drink anything with the bends in.
- [130:22]
Richard Campbell
It seems like benzaldehyde. Yeah, it's a natural occurring thing. Right. But I would also point out that apricot kernels, until you treat them a little bit, also have cyanide. So. Yeah, don't drink that. Yeah, yeah. So. And it actually comes up a bit sweeter, although they tend to add sweeteners to it and it's a little relatively low 21 to 28%.
- [130:41]
Leo Laporte
I love amaretto, actually.
- [130:42]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, amaretto's pretty special. And at the time I always thought
- [130:46]
Leo Laporte
it was almond flavor, not apricot flavor.
- [130:49]
Richard Campbell
It tastes like almond, but doesn't typically have almond in it. Also. Some do. I didn't know the version of amaretto that the Sons of Vancouver started making because of course they immediately made whiskey when they got started. Right. I mean, as you always do. But it takes time, you know, minimum three years to even call it whiskey. And you've got to still. So you get to work and the first thing of course you make is vodka because it's the easiest. And then you're trying to make other things. And they fell on this idea of making an amaretto. They called it number 82amaretto, where they take apricot pits, vanilla bean and orange peels. They steep it in the vodka they've made and then after it's matured a bit, they add a little bit of demerarado sugar and a bit of BlackBerry honey, which is very British Columbia, to get the flavor profile they want.
- [131:29]
Leo Laporte
This is really good.
- [131:31]
Richard Campbell
It's also a hit at 26%. It was the first sort of craft made amaretto in North America. Full.
- [131:39]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, I've always had amaretto di Serrano, the Italian version.
- [131:42]
Richard Campbell
Well, di Serrano is an amaretto from Serrano Serrano, right? Yeah, the original. Original. Right. But so they also made a chili vodka that was. Was a hit as well. Very much the product you want for the Caesar. So they got the Amara, they've got the. The Martini, the Caesar and the Amaretto Sour nailed. So this is their money maker while they're trying to stay afloat. Although in 2014, talk about being craft. They do an Indiegogo Fundraise to raise $10,000 to build out the tasting room to make it a nice place to go. And they basically offer gift cards and private tours and used barrels and things. Like that as the perk for contributing. And they raised it successfully, 10,000 bucks. And that while they're laying up their whiskey, they've got this tasting room and they're making cocktails and things in there. And in selling their amaretto and so forth does very well. They do another Kickstarter a couple of years earlier in 2016 to raise another $15,000 to get a bigger mash ton. So the little thousand liter one that they had, that was actually an old pasteurizer, they now got brought a proper 8,000 liter mash ton. Because they were selling well. They started barrel aging their amaretto too. Also. James started a course, he'd been training, teaching, he'd been writing class, making notes about his experiences, starting making a distillery, frustrated with the classes that he had taken and so started setting up curriculum to, to teach whiskey making as well. And so in 2017 it all came together. He started with a group called the Distillery School. They did a one what clay class on distilling. They did a lot of interviewing before he started. They specifically said, no long lectures or PowerPoint. You're all hands on, you're going to make whiskey at it. And in fact, one of their new partners, a lady by the name of Jenna Diablo, took that class. She had intended to start a distillery in Manitoba and ultimately by 22 becomes a partner in Sons of Vancouver. Also in 2017 there was a competition, the Diageo Reserve World Class Cocktail Competition. It was in Mexico and the winner was a lady named Caitlin Stewart. And her winning cocktail was called Spilt Milk. And it featured Sons of Vancouver Amaretto. And it just sent that amarello flying off the shelves like those guys carried the ball for several years on the back of their craft amaretto, including by 2018 they had these barrel aged versions of of amaretto to add a more character to it. Then they, of course you hit the pandemic and in 2020 they shut down production and start making hand sanitizer, which is the thing you did if you had a still back then and that quickly, you know, don't need to do that anymore. In 2021 they do another Indiegogo, this time trying to raise $20,000, although they raised $40,000 because they're ready to release their very first whiskey. So they laid up their first bottles back in 2013, 2014, their first barrels. And these are little barrels so they age quickly and they reduce their release. The first whiskey they called right here and win gold at the Canadian Artisan spirit competition in 21. So on the Back of all of that excitement, they go, okay, we're ready to buy bigger barrels. We want to lay up a bunch of more barrels. We need some money. They succeed in raising that money, the perks, the pledges you would get if you contributed to this fundraiser was to get bottles of their new whiskey, which they had already tentatively named cigarettes on a leather jacket.
- [135:22]
Leo Laporte
They're so hip.
- [135:23]
Richard Campbell
Something very hip.
- [135:25]
Leo Laporte
Very Vancouver of them.
- [135:27]
Richard Campbell
Yes. And then in 20, by the end of 21, because right here, done so well, they did their second release, which they called Marshmallows over a campfire. This was 98% Rye, Asian American oak and ex Amerato casks. You have to wonder where'd they get the amaretto casks from?
- [135:48]
Leo Laporte
Oh, interesting. Waste not, want not.
- [135:50]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. They had taken these old barrel whiskey barrels that they'd aged their amaretto in and made a special barrel aged amaretto and then used them again to make this special edition which is sold out immediately. But they only made 190 bottles. Right. This is still very small operation when you talk about you have to stay under 50,000 liters. They're not even close to these kinds of quantities. So in 22, they release a new whiskey. It's 100% rye aged American oak and bourbon finished in Caribbean rum casks. And the name, this is release number three. Palm trees and a tropical breeze.
- [136:29]
Leo Laporte
Okay. They're good at marketing. Are they good at making Question.
- [136:34]
Richard Campbell
By the way, they also make an excellent Whiskey because in 23 they win Canadian whiskey of the year.
- [136:42]
Leo Laporte
Oh, wow.
- [136:42]
Richard Campbell
Craft distillery had ever won that prize. Wow.
- [136:45]
Leo Laporte
Tiny little place, all rye.
- [136:48]
Richard Campbell
They won the barrel finished. They won. And they made 178 bottles of this that were gone in two minutes.
- [136:57]
Leo Laporte
Oh, yeah, for sure.
- [136:59]
Richard Campbell
So time for another Indiegogo. In May 23, they do another Indiegogo. This time to increase production across the board, they raise $100,000. So from 10,000 to 20,000 now $100,000. They also release a new liqueur. They call and guess what this is quadruple sec.
- [137:24]
Leo Laporte
Now I know triple sec.
- [137:26]
Richard Campbell
Yes.
- [137:26]
Leo Laporte
I use that in my margaritas and other mixed drinks. What is quadruple sec?
- [137:32]
Richard Campbell
It is like triple sec, only better.
- [137:35]
Leo Laporte
One better.
- [137:36]
Richard Campbell
But you see the pattern here where they're starting to get whiskey. They can only. They've only made small batches taking years to reduce. Only that earlier fundraise where they laid up to 20 barrels. Are they starting to get some quantity there? And that's probably going to do. That's likely. The whiskey that I had they're bootstrapping because now in, last year was the year that they finally said, okay, 90% of our production is now, is now whiskey. Because that was the intent all along. They just had to build up the quantities. And by the way, the whiskey names keep coming.
- [138:08]
Leo Laporte
I just like their front page, which says the whiskey you want your good friends to drink when you're dead.
- [138:15]
Richard Campbell
Yes, that's this bottle here. Literally says it on the label. There are other bottles though, the special editions, there's the homemade upside down apricot cake amaretto cask whiskey.
- [138:29]
Leo Laporte
I'm buying it.
- [138:30]
Richard Campbell
Rolling hills in the morning mist, Islay, palm trees in a tropical storm.
- [138:35]
Leo Laporte
But so they still, so they, they, they only make whiskey or they still make amaretto. Make the amaretto.
- [138:43]
Richard Campbell
Right, they're making them. All right.
- [138:44]
Leo Laporte
Okay, good.
- [138:45]
Richard Campbell
Their primary thing that they're running right now on their existing still and so forth is whiskey. And their whiskey making process is interesting. So they have that big mash tonight and the mash is where you normally extract the sugars out of. Right. And then in a big production, you would then drain that sugary water out into a fermenting barrel. Right. A big open thing where you'd put the yeast in and it would ferment. They don't do that. They do everything in the same container. So they leave that mash at the bottom while they're doing their fermentation on top and they do a long fermentation. A, they're using champagne yeast instead of regular brewer's yeast. So they're kind of away from the beer, gives it a little different flavor. But they do like a seven or eight day fermentation until the yeast is really done before they then run it twice through their column still, which gets it up into the high, into the high 70s, cut it with water down to 60% before they put it in a barrel. So they long fermentation and a low barreling. Now they're using small barrels so they age a little more rapidly, but they're starting to use the bigger barrels. And most of them today are now ex bourbon barrels. So those would be 200 liter barrels and new American oak probably made the same size along with these odd ducks that they do with the rum and, and they've even got a, a sherry casking and so forth. So they've done a bunch of interesting things here. But this particular whiskey is sort of the first commercial scale whiskey they made back that, that kick that Indiegogo they did where they laid up the 20 barrels. That's this Stuff. This is the wheated rye Whiskey. So it's 75% rye and 25% wheat, which begs the question, that's an interesting mash bill. Like how did they break this down into sugar? So they're almost certainly. They don't talk about it anywhere, but they're almost certainly using some kind of custom enzyme to do the breakdown.
- [140:38]
Leo Laporte
Ah, interesting.
- [140:39]
Richard Campbell
And then they're doing that very long fermentation again. This was years ago and now it's coming up. It's on the box back here. It says three to five years. And the fermentation app is on grain, which is to say they, like I described, they're combining the mashtom of the fermentation into a single stage. And right on the back there, hope you can see that is the whiskey your friends will try when you're dead. So three to five year old, not that older whiskey. This one last year whiskey. Rye whiskey of the year. No heat, real easy on the nose, and lots of really caramelly kind of rich flavors. This is such nice whiskey to drink. My goodness.
- [141:28]
Leo Laporte
This is the whiskey you want to give your kids?
- [141:31]
Richard Campbell
Well, I don't know about that. It's still an adult whiskey in the sense of it's alcoholic. It warms up going down. It's 50%. Five zero.
- [141:43]
Paul Thurrott
Wow.
- [141:44]
Richard Campbell
Okay, that is.
- [141:45]
Leo Laporte
That's 100 proof.
- [141:47]
Richard Campbell
That's 100 proof. Yeah, you. And the problem is you wouldn't know it till you're a couple of drinks in.
- [141:53]
Leo Laporte
Oh, it's dangerous is what you're saying.
- [141:55]
Richard Campbell
It comes at you. But boy, for their first production whiskey, they have nailed it. Just, you know, all of these other whiskeys, they're small batches, like 100, 200 bottles. That's it. And if you. And if you're in the club, you can get one, they go really quick. I bet this is the one you can actually find in stores. Unfortunately, they are only stores in British Columbia. They have not gone to other provinces and they have not gone in other nations at all. You need to. If you want one of these, you need to come to Vancouver. I got this in my local liquor store. So, you know, wow.
- [142:31]
Leo Laporte
You know, I'm actually quite tempted that that would be worth a trip to Vancouver for, I have to say.
- [142:37]
Richard Campbell
So the story is awesome. The whiskey is lovely. Like, this is what you wanted when you thought about little craft whiskey distillers.
- [142:45]
Leo Laporte
Good for them. What a great.
- [142:47]
Richard Campbell
And they're still under 50,000 liters. So they're still tax exempt and so forth. Like what it's it's such a small operation. It's like three people doing this.
- [142:57]
Leo Laporte
So in November, they're going to release their next barrel aged amaretto. I might get on the list for that. I love amaretto.
- [143:03]
Richard Campbell
Now I know what to get you for Christmas.
- [143:06]
Leo Laporte
That would be a wonderful, wonderful Christmas gift.
- [143:08]
Richard Campbell
Not that I could ship it. I'm just gonna have to bring it down.
- [143:11]
Leo Laporte
So even the, even everything else, you can only get it in bc. You can't.
- [143:15]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, they've just not done. They've not produced sufficient quantities. When you're making 100 and less than 200 bottles of something, it's gonna sell here. Why would you spend any money trying to move it anywhere else?
- [143:27]
Leo Laporte
They make their version of Midori, a melon liqueur. They make blue curacao. Yeah, I don't even know what Falernum is.
- [143:36]
Richard Campbell
These are all, all on you. And this is the bartender background, right? These are.
- [143:40]
Leo Laporte
Yeah, you can see it, right? These are all, these are all things you put in mixes.
- [143:43]
Richard Campbell
What's happened to these guys is they've become very hip with high end bartenders for all of these specialties. So they've been adding these products because that's what the bartenders are asking them for. It's like, I need a better version of. And that's what they're doing.
- [143:57]
Leo Laporte
Their London Dry gin will punch you in the face with juniper. On juniper. On juniper. It's intended to be enjoyed after mixing by proper juniper heads. Please proceed with caution and for the love of God, use good tonic.
- [144:15]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, no kidding.
- [144:17]
Leo Laporte
Now I really want to go up to Vancouver. I might come back with a box. Wow, that's great.
- [144:25]
Richard Campbell
You see the model here, right? Of you get that little rig, you lay up your whiskey.
- [144:29]
Leo Laporte
They, they, they bootstrapped it.
- [144:31]
Richard Campbell
They've been bootstrapping with no money. Bit by bit by bit. A lot of personal labor to build out stuff and to keep aging that whiskey until it gets to a place that's good and then do a batch. And meantime you've got these cocktail mixers, these liqueurs and things and vodkas to have some cash flow.
- [144:49]
Leo Laporte
That's so smart.
- [144:51]
Richard Campbell
Very clever model. They've really done a great job.
- [144:55]
Leo Laporte
Wow, that's, that's really neat. And I love it that they're the local guys for you. That's great.
- [145:00]
Richard Campbell
Yeah, they're super local. To me, it was a great find. I'm sure these stories exist elsewhere. British Columbia has more craft distillers per capita than anywhere else in Canada. We have almost as Many as Ontario with a third the population.
- [145:14]
Paul Thurrott
Yeah.
- [145:14]
Richard Campbell
And it's because we got these new rules in place first. So, you know, other parts of the country are catching up. But in the meantime, these guys and many others like them, there's 60 of them. You've only heard me talk about four or five guys like Bare Face. And you know, there's some very cool whiskeys being made in B.C. and this was just another awesome find. And not out in the woods. They're in North Vancouver. They're in a very nice area of town, actually. Although apparently it's behind the Canadian Tire, so.
- [145:42]
Leo Laporte
Okay, everything's behind a Canadian Tire.
- [145:45]
Paul Thurrott
That's awesome.
- [145:47]
Richard Campbell
I mean, it could have been by a Tim Hortons, but it's almost the same thing.
- [145:52]
Leo Laporte
Really awesome. Really great stuff as usual. What a fun show. Thank you. Paul Thurat. You'll find him@therot.com don't forget to become a premium member, support his work and get great extra content. Of course, the books@leanpub.com now, three of them. Field guide to Windows 11 with Windows 10 built right in the windows everywhere. A history of Windows through its programming frameworks and his newest De and shittify windows. 100 pages of goodness for only 5.99 or something.
- [146:25]
Paul Thurrott
4.99.
- [146:26]
Leo Laporte
4.99. Cheap at any price. No, cheap at. Never mind.
- [146:32]
Paul Thurrott
Yep, it's cheap. Wait, cheap. What are we doing?
- [146:37]
Leo Laporte
It's. It's a good book. You must read. Mr. Richard Campbell is@runasradio.com and Dotnet Rocks is there as well. The show he does with Carl Franklin. And we are going to head out to Orlando, Florida where you're going to get a few net rocks recorded and do Windows.
- [146:54]
Richard Campbell
Doing a run as.
- [146:56]
Leo Laporte
I'm sorry, run as rather.
- [146:57]
Richard Campbell
Yeah. And I have a particular Floridian whiskey in mind I'm hoping I can find while I'm there, you know, maybe my
- [147:03]
Leo Laporte
homework and I might. Might help you out with that if you need some help. Let's see what else. We do this show every Wednesday, 11am Pacific, 2pm Eastern. That's 1800 UTC. Next week again, I won't be here, Mike. I'll be filling in with Richard and Paul after the fact, you can get on demand versions of the show you can watch. I didn't mention where you can watch us in the club to a Discord. YouTube, X.com, twitch, Facebook, LinkedIn and Kickstarter on demand versions of the show always available at our website, Twitter, TV, WW. You can also get it at YouTube. There's a video there at YouTube, and that's a good way to share clips after the fact. You can also subscribe in your favorite podcast client. You'll get it the minute it's available. Simple enough. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Richard. Have a wonderful week. Stay away from the car fires and the cartel bloodbath that is not going on.
- [148:05]
Paul Thurrott
I was having a terrific eggs Benedict when all my American friends started telling me I needed to flee the country. And I was like, yeah, I don't think you understand what it's like here now.
- [148:14]
Leo Laporte
You guys were in pv, and I know, Richard, you like to go to PV every year.
- [148:19]
Paul Thurrott
By the way, we have two friends in PV right now, and they were there during this and they said you wouldn't know anything happened. So I'm not sure what these news
- [148:27]
Leo Laporte
reports are about, but cartel propaganda, it's like they turn it.
- [148:31]
Paul Thurrott
I don't know what it is, but they're like, we just go to clubs every night. We sit on the beach. There's no cops, there's no fires, there's no cars. There's no nothing. Like, I don't know. So. I don't know. I don't know.
- [148:41]
Leo Laporte
So this is a tale as old as time. I guess news really likes to blow things.
- [148:47]
Richard Campbell
And also that riots are more local than you think.
- [148:49]
Leo Laporte
Yeah. Yeah, that's true.
- [148:51]
Paul Thurrott
One block, I had a riot when I couldn't get salmon on my eggs Benedict. Am I right? I don't know.
- [148:58]
Leo Laporte
Well, I'm glad you're safe and sound, and I will see you both in a couple of weeks on Windows Weekly. I'll see you, Richard, next week.
- [149:07]
Paul Thurrott
Have a good time in Florida.
- [149:08]
Richard Campbell
Lots of fun.
- [149:09]
Leo Laporte
Thanks, everybody. See you next time. Hi there. Leo Laporte here. I just wanted to let you know about some of the other shows we do on this network you probably already know about. This Week on Tech. Every Sunday, I bring together some of the top journalists in the tech field to talk about the tech stories. It's a wonderful chance for you to keep up on what's going on with tech, plus be entertained by some very bright and fun minds. I hope you'll tune in every Sunday for this Week in Tech. Just go to your favorite podcast client and subscribe. This Week in Tech from the Twit Network.
- [149:42]
Richard Campbell
Thank you.
- [149:53]
Paul Thurrott
I think a lot of us are
- [149:54]
Leo Laporte
asking the same question right now. What does America stand for?
- [149:58]
Richard Campbell
And where is it going?
- [150:00]
Paul Thurrott
I'm Adam Smith, and on the new
- [150:02]
Richard Campbell
series of the Last Best Hope, I'm
- [150:04]
Paul Thurrott
talking with Hillary Clinton asking whether federalism
- [150:07]
Leo Laporte
can save us Democracy and returning to
- [150:10]
Richard Campbell
the ideas at the heart of the Declaration of Independence, if you want to
- [150:15]
Paul Thurrott
understand the moment we're living in, follow
- [150:18]
Richard Campbell
the last Best hope and listen now. Havlas Espanol Spritu Dzoich if you used
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Paul Thurrott
Babbel, you would Babbel's Conversation Based techniques teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language
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Richard Campbell
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Paul Thurrott
Babbel is like having having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babel today. Get up to 55 off your Babel subscription right now at babel.com Spotify spelled B-A B-B-E-L.com Spotify rules and restrictions may apply.
- [150:51]
Leo Laporte
How old were you when you realized
- [150:53]
Paul Thurrott
you were the son of a president?
- [150:54]
Leo Laporte
I don't think anyone's ever asked me that before.
- [150:56]
Paul Thurrott
FX's love story John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette I didn't think I
- [151:01]
Leo Laporte
could love someone like this until you.
- [151:03]
Paul Thurrott
From executive producer Ryan Murray.
- [151:05]
Richard Campbell
It's not a question of if I
- [151:06]
Paul Thurrott
want to spend the rest of my life with you, it's if I'm cut
- [151:10]
Leo Laporte
out to be Mrs. JFK Jr. FX's
- [151:13]
Paul Thurrott
love story John F. Kennedy Jr. And Carolyn Bessette. Watch now on FX, Hulu and Hulu on Disney plus for bundle subscribers.